Based Camp - September 01, 2023Religion As It Relates to Genetics
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Summary
In this episode, we discuss the concept of evolutionary vortexes and their role in shaping our understanding of the world. We discuss the role of the vortexes in shaping the world, and the role they play in the evolution of the human species.
Transcript
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So a great example of this that I'd always cite is when I talk to people and I'm like,
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You talk to a Florida, you're like, what do you think of Cubans?
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There's the typical Cuban sociological profile.
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And that's not the profile of Cubans more broadly.
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That's the profile of the Cubans that were differentially sorted into trying to escape
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a communist dictatorship and move to the United States.
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You know, to an extent within any immigrant population, depending on how the wording worked,
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you're often going to get a very specific sociological profile that may not be the dominant sociological
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So, Malcolm, you know how someone in our family once called me a vortex of failure?
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They're like, Simone is a vortex of failure, Malcolm, and she is pulling you down.
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Well, there are other types of vortexes that I think you find very interesting, and I've
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failed to understand why they're so interesting.
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So can you please explain your concept of evolutionary vortexes with this old vortex of failure?
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Well, so this is a very interesting thing for us.
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So a lot of people know that we don't believe that there are persistent, meaningful genetic
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differences between things that we in our society view as things like ethnic groups and stuff
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And a lot of people see the concept of racism or race supremacy as being pretty freaking
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dumb because, I don't know, given up evolutionary-
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It's dumb because small groups, family groups, religious groups, local environmental groups,
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it's not because we don't believe that genetic differences don't exist between populations.
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We just believe that they change way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way faster
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than this like, you know, 100,000 year difference that defines ethnic groups.
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So a great example of this is like San Francisco, right?
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When you look at San Francisco, you had this environment where during the gold rush, you basically
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had a siren call to people from a diversity of ethnic and cultural backgrounds that said,
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that anybody who uniquely is drawn to high-risk, high-reward economic opportunities move to
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When people would die for these opportunities, I mean, the Donner Party, et cetera, right?
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And then is it a surprise that, you know, a century later, Silicon Valley starts there,
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which was really driven because the venture capital industry started there, where you had
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high-risk, high-reward opportunities explode as like a way to generate wealth and ruin people
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Because there was the first event that caused a genetic predilection within that environment,
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that then made it more likely that the second event would happen, which then further condensed
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that genetic predilection by again sending out this signal all over the world for people
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To the extent where you see things like really high rates of things like, because then what
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was the other thing that was really being selected for by that cultural vortex?
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It was high knowledge of like engineering and math.
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And this is why you had such high rates of autism in Silicon Valley, some of the highest rates
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And that is wild, but you also see this on a cultural level.
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So our cultures essentially co-evolve with us and they alter our brains so that if you
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think of humans as like the biological firmware and cultures as this set of software that's
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co-evolving on top of them, they co-evolve together synergistically.
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So an example of this could be, we have a secular friend who's from the Quaker tradition
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and she feels like she regularly hears voices talking to her to an extent, right?
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Well, she, she essentially like, she talks with God.
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Like she, she searches for the truth from within, right?
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She talks, well, she's talking with, so, so auditory hallucinations are actually much more
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common than people think about a quarter of the population experiences them at some point
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But Quaker culture would massively reward an individual for having auditory hallucinations.
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Whereas other cultural groups like the Calvinist cultural group, which lived alongside them
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geographically, massively would punish auditory hallucinations.
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So everyone from the Calvinist cultural group who experienced them would have gone to the
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Quaker cultural group and people in the Quaker cultural group who didn't experience them
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might think God wasn't talking to them or like they, they didn't get why people were doing
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this in their cultural group and they would leave at a higher rate.
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And so you're going to end up with more auditory hallucinations within people who come from
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Now this gets really interesting because what it means is that not all software packages,
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not all cultures are going to fit well on all individuals, all biologies.
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So one of the places where I've heard this, where it was really most meaningful to me is,
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you know, I was talking with somebody who was like involved, I think was like the JN community
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in the San Francisco area and they were talking about how high the suicide rate was among people
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of a broadly European ethnic background who converted to JNism.
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And I, and I suspect you'd likely see this more broadly.
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If you look at Europeans who convert to not like the fake American form of Buddhism, but
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like real Buddhism, I'd imagine you're going to see a pretty high suicide rate.
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You, if a, a, a cultural group has co-evolved with a cultural software for thousands of years,
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you can't just plug it on top of another cultural group and expect them to work together really
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And this is why when we say our goal is genuinely people are like, are you trying to recruit
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people into your weird secular Calvinist thing?
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I'm like, no, I do not think most people would really thrive in an environment where it is
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constantly reinforced how sinful happiness, music, fun is right.
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And again, this is something that people don't get.
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So people can say, oh, then why do you do things that are sinful?
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Why do you do things like, you know, drink alcohol, for example, right?
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And, and the, the, the, the real key to sort of Calvinism as a, as a cultural understanding
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You know, we are completely morally destitute and it's through recognizing that destitution,
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And so it is very important to be able to say, yes, I will still sin because I am man.
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I am like, my soul is a maggot covered loaf of barely edible sailor bread.
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But at the very least, what I shouldn't do is try to glorify my sin.
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Try to act like my engagement with self-masturbatory behaviors, whether it is exercise for the point
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of physical vanity or music or drinking or anything, pretend that that is a positive
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Now, this cultural group is something that most people, I just don't think would like
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really mentally thrive in engaging with, whereas you and me, we really mentally thrive when
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And this is also why I'm broadly against people who preach like stoicism more broadly.
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I do not think stoicism works for the average person.
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And I think that pretend cause causes people to spiral and become, you know, drug addicts
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Like it's, it's not a good thing and that it's more important to look to your ancestral,
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the way that your, your ancestral traditions work and try to reform them for a modern environment
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to be strong for a modern environment without going into these cool sounding, like manly sounding
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Well, because again, you're, you're like evolved mental landscape probably isn't designed to
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And it's, it's why in the, the pro natalist movement, we are not about trying to convert
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Cause I don't think our way of thinking is compatible with most human biologies, but this
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leads to another really interesting thing, which is when a cultural software group is really,
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really, really, really, really, really good against defending against a specific type.
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Of mindset or sociological profile, it can lead to that sociological profile existing within
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populations under that cultural group at much higher rates than they do in other populations.
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If a culture is really good against defending against a specific type of thing or preventing
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that thing for leading the individual to spiral out of control or not breed, for some reason,
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you will see that thing at higher rates within that cultural group.
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So if you're talking about Calvinists, traditionally, one thing that's always known about Calvinists
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They have like really high happiness set points and unusually energetic to the extent where like
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some of the quotes, if you look at Albion Seed, you know, that the Calvinists invented the rocking chair
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just so that they would never have to stop moving or that people would mark when they go to these territories
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that people would run everywhere they were going.
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And this is something I actually did in high school.
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I remember wondering why anyone ever walked when they were alone,
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when you could always run up to a place and get it done faster and more efficiently.
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And a normal cultural group is actually likely going to select against like this level of happiness
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because people who like are overly happy may just be content with their lives or may not breed
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This is also probably why Calvinist groups drink as much as they do.
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One of the, so where I'm from in Texas, there's a saying, which is that, what is it?
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Protestants deny the Pope and Baptists deny knowing each other at the liquor store.
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And when they say Baptist here, they're talking about primitive Baptist, which is the type of Baptist,
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which is most common where I'm from, which is a Calvinist group.
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And it's because they had this cultural software that was like good at preventing people from drinking to an extent.
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But, but when people began to like, when it began to soften, when the rule stopped,
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people who had this intrinsic drive to drink at this high a level in most other cultural groups
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were just removed from the gene pool because they drank themselves to death.
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Whereas in this cultural group, there was enough of a protectant pressure on that that didn't happen.
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And so you get really high rates of alcoholism was in Calvinist populations.
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So the things that a culture tells you not to do, you will begin to see as a vice was in that culture,
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So let's talk about a few of these because they're really interesting to me.
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So probably the, the, the biggest one that we've mentioned before,
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but I just can't mention enough because it's so glaringly obvious to anyone who could see it,
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is Catholicism as a cultural group is really, really good at guarding against familial nepotism.
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By that, what I mean is because the Catholic group is one, a hierarchical cultural group,
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you know, I, you have this priest caste, right?
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Which, which is this almost like governing body.
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And because priests aren't allowed to have wives, what that did is it created,
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you could say like an ethically sourced eunuch.
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And we do mention in a lot of videos, actually, this is why,
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this is how the Catholic cultural group handled a same-sex attraction and,
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And you can look up the Wikipedia article on this.
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why a lot of people in the Catholic clergy are actually just same-sex attracted people
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And it, it sourced them into these positions of power,
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but also you get heterosexual people who don't choose to have a partner
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you're creating an environment in which these people don't have kids.
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So you don't have intergenerational nepotism, right?
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And historically was in many of these, these Catholic cultural groups,
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So they never really needed to guard against what is called amoral familial nepotism.
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pretty much everywhere in the world where a Catholic group is dominant,
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you know, whether you're talking about Italy or most countries in South America or,
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you have extremely high rates of amoral familial nepotism.
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And by that, what I mean is individuals promoting members of their own family
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over more competent individuals who aren't in their family.
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And so if you're not from a group who understands amoral familial nepotism,
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that can seem really unethical to you to promote your brother,
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just because they're your brother, instead of because they're competent.
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Whereas to a cultural group that doesn't have protections against amoral familial nepotism,
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cultural protections, they're going to be like,
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it would almost be immoral to not promote your brother.
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Of course, you're going to promote family first.
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And this is something that their culture had gotten so good at protecting against
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that the secular cultures that sort of evolved underneath it,
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as well as sociological profiles that evolved underneath it,
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I think from the perspective of other cultures, it would be a vice,
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In Jewish culture, a great example is it's a sophicism or sophistry and mysticism.
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So we've said that Kabbalism, for Jewish mysticism,
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is sort of like a fly trap for people with a sociological profile
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that is susceptible to mystical thinking, or who's really good at mystical thinking.
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So if you watch our video on how garden gnomes are destroying academia,
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we talk about this, how some individuals can have a really, really high level
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of verbal intelligence, but a really low level of general intelligence
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And these individuals can be incredibly dangerous to any group that they're in
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because people will, you know, when somebody is like really good at engineering,
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but not good at anything else, nobody thinks they're like good at other things.
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But if somebody is really good at sophistry, but not good at anything else,
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it's very easy to misjudge that and believe that they are broadly competent
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and begin to take advice from them and then begin to fail as a cultural group.
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But the Jewish cultural group, it has this really great defense mechanism
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which is sort of like a fly trap for these people.
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They get engaged in it and they go really deep in it,
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but in a way that can't be that damaging to the broader society or cultural group.
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What it means, and if you look at studies on this, this is a great thing.
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We might do a video on this because we write a lot on it
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is that this belief that Jewish groups are like much higher IQ than other groups,
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they just have much higher verbal intelligence than other groups.
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Whereas other groups would select against that.
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So you always have some sort of parody of verbal intelligence
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you're able to look at how a culture essentially creates a certain type of person.
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what could cultural entrepreneurs be working into their cultures,
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specific advantages in more what we're interested in, right?
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the technology and the governing societies of the future.
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So there's two broad answers to this question, right?
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One is let's assume genetic technologies didn't exist.
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And the most important takeaway of genetic technologies don't exist
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is the thing that your culture is best at protecting against
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is going to be the thing that was in the biology of people under your culture
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sort of spirals out of control as a predilection.
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if Calvinist culture is uniquely good at protecting against hedonism,
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then extremely high rates of happiness are going to appear
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They're extremely high energy and giddiness rates, right?
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And so be aware of that because sometimes people can be like,
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We want to do a very good job of building a culture
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you end up with really high rates of amoral familialism,
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just, I guess, naturally form underneath that culture.
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However, I think that this trend is not relevant into the future.
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because we can begin to intentionally through polygenic screening,
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select individuals for specific sociological profiles, right?
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The cultural groups that engage with this technology,
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but they're the only ones who are going to matter in the future.
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a family or cultural group that engages within this within 75 years,
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the general population is probably going to decrease in IQ
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you're probably going to increase in IQ by 2.5 standard deviations.
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So you're just going to be like astronomically higher IQ and other things that you're...
00:18:40.940
Yeah, but also like probably healthier and happier.
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Also healthier, lower rates of cancer, lower rates of all sorts of stuff.
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And then when you begin to get to human CRISPR,
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you get into a whole other thing where like you can move really quickly.
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But then, so within the cultural groups that are making these selections,
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you're just going to see really high rates of things.
00:19:00.640
I value happiness, I am going to select for happiness.
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Or I value creativity, I am going to select for creativity.
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Much more so than cultural practices affected the human genome in the past.
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Because cultural choices and values and status signals are going to impact the human genome.
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And so cultural groups that really care about things like generic attractiveness,
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I mean, they might get huge in the near future, right?
00:19:27.880
But they're likely going to be less and less economically relevant.
00:19:36.600
Well, I want to know why you thought this wasn't an interesting topic.
00:19:39.760
Because you're like, Malcolm, this seems like a really boring topic.
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I guess maybe because we talk about it so much to me, it's obvious.
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If you create through your culture, your own set of evolutionary bottlenecks,
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of course, you're going to shape who you create.
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You know, if we all live in a desert environment,
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maybe we're going to deal better with heat and, you know, hydration.
00:20:03.000
And by the way, what she's saying is something you see.
00:20:05.620
So like people who live in really high, like mountain environments,
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They tend to be smaller and have larger, longer capacity.
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Of course, if you create a culture that has evolutionary pressures,
00:20:22.080
It's just, okay, well, thank you for letting me know
00:20:24.060
that studies show that when you drop something,
00:20:27.580
You understand no one else is talking about this, right?
00:20:32.500
and this is, this is something that's interesting,
00:20:34.640
which is that culture is a highly underrated tool.
00:20:39.780
I mean, I would say that China understands this
00:20:42.120
and the fact that it's like trying to outlaw certain cultures.
00:20:49.160
how China has tried to outlaw like hyper feminine males.
00:21:01.640
and also a male who shows a huge amount of devotion to his nation, right?
00:21:08.040
It's like a virgin man trying to unhook a broad
00:21:15.740
but at least I respect that China is one of the very few nations
00:21:20.240
that appears to understand the importance and impact.
00:21:25.640
but I think that's more just a product of it being a more religious nation.
00:21:37.480
Offering to either baptize or become the godfather
00:21:48.480
is if you look at the two groups in the world today,
00:22:00.640
which is like this scientific racism community,
00:22:03.500
which is like all the difference that matters is,
00:22:07.040
is like black versus white versus native American versus Hispanic.
00:22:11.260
And, and because everyone's so ideological motivated,
00:22:16.540
which is the groups that matter are your cultural groups
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usually regardless of their, their ethnic background,
00:22:29.040
you know, they are people who migrated to the U S once
00:22:41.120
they, they represent a multiple migration mindset,
00:22:48.120
So, so even little things like that can really impact a person.
00:22:52.640
Yeah. No, I mean, I, and I would also argue even now,
00:23:00.500
resourceful people because people don't usually move to Texas
00:23:03.040
because they're like, Oh yeah, this is my easy way out.
00:23:05.360
Right. They move there because there are job opportunities
00:23:08.980
Yeah. Well, this is something we saw in Dallas, right.
00:23:16.540
because you wanted to be part of the next big thing.
00:23:23.700
it was because of job opportunities and cost of living,
00:23:26.600
which is selecting for a very specific sociological profile.
00:23:32.800
This is interesting insofar as people are not really aware
00:23:38.860
of how powerful culture is as a long-term mechanism
00:23:44.520
of power and influence. However, it's just so freaking obvious
00:23:55.280
No. Well, so, I mean, I think if genetic technology
00:23:58.300
wasn't beginning to bubble up now, which it is,
00:24:00.480
which sort of changes everything about how, how this, this works.
00:24:08.960
much bigger than any potential little ethnic differences
00:24:14.260
differences in people living in different cities
00:24:23.780
that you are getting it around the world today.
00:24:27.200
And I think this is often happening in countries.
00:24:44.620
and the conservative regions becoming more conservative,
00:24:46.940
you know, there's been great, like, twin studies on this.
00:24:53.860
Yeah, it's not that high, but it is highly heritable.
00:24:57.000
So you're beginning to actually get this sort of concentrated
00:25:02.200
like yourself living in San Francisco, you leave.
00:25:08.500
So I think that you are seeing an incredibly high level
00:25:21.080
you will have, like, the Detroit or Dallas or Miami
00:25:23.260
or San Francisco, like, genetic sociological profile.
00:25:28.880
unless they're just, like, religiously oblivious to it,
00:25:39.140
I guess the other reason is, one, it's super obvious.
00:26:02.760
Well, it matters in terms of how you look at it.
00:26:04.080
So a great example of this that I'd always cite
00:26:13.700
there's the typical Cuban sociological profile.
00:26:21.700
And it's not the profile of Cubans more broadly.
00:26:35.980
this is what you see with the Taiwanese sociological,
00:26:58.780
they did something really weirdly foresightful,
00:27:02.400
which is they tried to take all of the high trained,
00:27:10.160
Well, so it's like, well, Cuban immigrants then,
00:27:17.580
Like Taiwan is Cuban Floridians are Cuban people
00:27:27.840
Or what's also interesting is American Chinese immigrants
00:27:41.700
that may not be the dominant sociological profile
00:27:50.140
Well, I mean, maybe this video will make a difference.
00:27:55.060
actually do something with cultural technology,
00:28:07.480
Let's see if this vortex of failure continues to fail.
00:28:47.340
has had a big impact on individuals living under them.
00:28:52.260
but this is really more for another conversation,
00:28:59.900
have caused these to crash and burn sometimes and not.
00:29:14.500
And so I think a lot of good cultural entrepreneurship
00:29:19.220
of what we're going to be facing in the future.
00:29:22.400
So a great example of what she's talking about here
00:29:25.260
Mormons used to be a really successful cultural,
00:29:39.520
And so I think anyone doing good culture crafting now
00:29:50.500
it really doesn't matter what pressures you create
00:29:54.220
they're not factoring in what reality is going to be.
00:30:03.900
And this is something that people often miss about us.
00:30:05.840
They're like, you guys seem to think exactly the same,
00:30:09.700
And it's just almost like a racist thing to say.
00:30:20.820
And they're like, you guys look like weirdly similar.
00:30:28.160
No, we're just from the same ethno-cultural group.