Based Camp - We Created Demons for Our Children

00:00:00.000 I would say that, and this is where we'll get to one of the other demons, one of the

00:00:03.820 easiest paths to temptation, and one of the easiest ways a person can fall off the righteous

00:00:08.540 path is to not recognize that as a human, they are wretched and they are flawed and

00:00:15.360 that that is okay.

00:00:18.120 All humans sin.

00:00:20.620 What is critical is that you do not glorify the sin.

00:00:26.320 Sin is a part of life, but there is a huge difference between saying, I am engaging in

00:00:32.440 this sin, I recognize it as sin, I recognize it as something I should have some shame for,

00:00:38.620 but I also recognize that I am human and thus a sinner, right?

00:00:42.060 But if you use it and say, no, actually the sports are a good thing.

00:00:45.180 I am a good person for being good at sports.

00:00:48.520 I am a good person for in whatever particular aspect of flanesshedom that I engage in.

00:00:54.780 That is where true evil comes from.

00:00:57.460 But true evil can also come from a human that thinks they can totally avoid sin.

00:01:02.580 Every group I know of believes that humans can completely avoid sin.

00:01:07.460 The humans in their group that quote unquote come closest to that are typically efficacious

00:01:13.140 individuals in society because avoiding sin means avoiding action.

00:01:18.580 Would you like to know more?

00:01:20.020 You said that we were going to talk about demons today.

00:01:22.180 I was so sure that you were going to like make this salacious episode about like skeletons

00:01:28.860 in our closet or something, you know, like your childhood demons.

00:01:31.880 Because so many people online are like, these are two deeply damaged people.

00:01:36.600 You know, they-

00:01:36.940 Do they say that about us?

00:01:38.020 Do they say that we are deeply-

00:01:38.860 We haven't dealt with our trauma and this is why we want to have children or why we're

00:01:43.720 weird?

00:01:43.860 No, I love this.

00:01:44.940 I mean, you want to talk about a sign of brainwashing or a brainwashed individual.

00:01:48.820 It's when somebody disagrees with them or has a different world perspective than them.

00:01:54.020 So they're damaged.

00:01:55.060 Their first reaction is what horrible thing happened to them in their past that made them

00:02:01.500 see the world differently than me.

00:02:03.760 And what they need to do, and there's actually a class of people who do this.

00:02:07.460 They don't even say like, you know, you should read the research or you should go out there

00:02:12.300 and learn about this topic.

00:02:13.900 They're like, you need to go to therapy.

00:02:16.060 Yes.

00:02:16.560 Then you will think like me.

00:02:18.700 Exactly.

00:02:19.900 It's like, I think it's a constant trope that people are exposed to in media.

00:02:23.120 Like villains, of course, were raised in terribly abused environments.

00:02:27.280 Like, you know, that, that Dr. Evil bit where he's like, you know, he talks about this like

00:02:32.060 terrible childhood and how he was beaten and all these things.

00:02:35.660 Well, I mean, I think that the, you know, if you talk about, we talk about the, the super 1.00

00:02:38.860 virus, right?

00:02:39.740 The cult and the way that it maintains its membership or recruits new members is through

00:02:46.840 using psychologists.

00:02:47.720 And we have talked about this in, in the video psychology has become a cult.

00:02:51.320 I think this is somebody who originally trained in psychology.

00:02:53.280 The way that psychology is practiced now is not the way it was practiced even a decade

00:02:58.960 ago in terms of what's considered acceptable and what's not.

00:03:02.520 And, and, and, you know, as, as to what you're saying here, it makes a lot of sense.

00:03:07.720 If you see this not as being in like one cultural group versus another cultural group, but see

00:03:13.060 it as being in a cult.

00:03:14.320 Well, yeah, of course a cult would tell you what you need to go to your cult, cult appointed

00:03:19.420 mind cleaner. 1.00

00:03:21.820 They'll, they'll clean your, your brains dirty.

00:03:24.700 And there's these people you can pay to clean it. 0.98

00:03:27.780 They'll wash it for you.

00:03:29.680 If, if you will.

00:03:31.180 And then once you have a clean brain, you can have clean thoughts.

00:03:35.740 On rewatching this during editing, I realized the joke may not be clear here.

00:03:40.020 I am making a joke about brainwashing.

00:03:42.260 I don't think there's a precedent for that though.

00:03:43.980 Like even in the media tropes where like the evil person has gone to therapy and worked

00:03:47.820 on themselves, like they're never really fixed.

00:03:49.600 So it's just kind of this excuse to write someone off permanently that they're damaged,

00:03:53.900 they're traumatized.

00:03:55.260 And, you know, though they should go to therapy and whatnot, no amount of it will actually.

00:03:58.760 I mean, I saw so much of this was Trump when he was elected.

00:04:01.940 Did people say he was traumatized in his youth?

00:04:04.380 Yeah.

00:04:04.600 All of these articles come out.

00:04:06.100 Something about his dad, right?

00:04:07.440 That he was like, how is he traumatized?

00:04:09.720 How is he?

00:04:10.600 You know, they, they, they just cannot fathom that someone could honestly just disagree with

00:04:15.740 their perspective.

00:04:17.660 They must be emotionally stunted.

00:04:20.580 Now, well, let's be clear.

00:04:21.840 Other, other cultural groups have some similar things to this.

00:04:26.020 Like there are some.

00:04:27.260 Oh yeah, like maybe you're possessed by a demon, for example.

00:04:29.540 Yeah, some extreme Christians that like literally think everyone who disagrees with them is possessed

00:04:33.120 by a demon.

00:04:33.880 So there's that. 0.96

00:04:34.700 But I, I would say that those are like the most extreme, absolutely wackadoo of Christians. 1.00

00:04:40.040 And yet this is a mainstream position among the, those indoctrinated into the virus.

00:04:46.280 Actually, Scientology do the same thing.

00:04:48.080 It's your thetans, right?

00:04:48.960 Your thetans that are attached to you, which cause you to have negative thoughts and stuff

00:04:53.580 like that.

00:04:54.100 And you need to go to their, well, their version of like psychologists, these people who

00:04:58.660 you tell your backstory to, and then they help you get your thetans off of you so that 0.99

00:05:04.120 you can think clearly because of you.

00:05:06.840 Oh, they even have something like, oh, what's it called?

00:05:09.140 But I know that also like, they don't even want mothers to scream during childbirth because

00:05:14.040 they think that might traumatize the child, which is, I guess it goes to show you can

00:05:18.360 make up all these excuses of like, whether or not the person remembers or not, here's

00:05:22.620 why they're messed up.

00:05:23.500 Like their mother screamed when they were born or something, right?

00:05:25.760 So the term that you use, by the way, is clear.

00:05:27.880 Clear, right.

00:05:28.660 And that's why that documentary was called Going Clear.

00:05:31.060 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:05:31.540 So once they have cleared your brain, cleaned it, washed it, if you will, whichever group, 0.78

00:05:39.480 no, but it's just a common practice.

00:05:40.880 And it makes sense that it's a common practice because it's an incredibly effective practice.

00:05:44.320 Yeah.

00:05:44.620 Well, and other people, I think just say like, well, it's because you haven't accepted

00:05:47.340 Jesus Christ as your savior, or basically you haven't converted to this religion and that's

00:05:51.220 why you're evil or. 0.89

00:05:52.960 But, but I would say, hold on, is that this practice, this way of relating to people who

00:05:58.700 see the world differently from you is not usually a practice had within healthy cultural groups.

00:06:04.440 If we look within the healthy Christian cultural groups or, or Jewish Orthodox groups, or, you

00:06:10.560 know, even in a historic context, they typically do not see their enemies in like a, oh, if you

00:06:15.460 just go see like our, whatever their iteration of a psychologist was, you'll eventually be able

00:06:19.680 to see things the way I do, but where this is relevant to today's topic of conversation

00:06:24.240 is one thing that I do think that most successful cultural traditions have, and that ours, as

00:06:29.960 we had originally constructed it, you know, we've built a little religion for our family,

00:06:35.300 holidays and belief systems and metaphysical structure for the universe that we'd pass on

00:06:40.100 to our kids does not have, which is demons, like some sort of like genuinely malevolent force.

00:06:46.660 And so we started thinking about how we could, because one thing I really want with everything

00:06:51.980 in this religion, as I pass it to my kids, is that it is not falsifiable by any sort of

00:06:59.560 science as it exists right now.

00:07:01.660 And where it is falsifiable by science, it can be updated.

00:07:05.020 Like it is meant to work.

00:07:06.540 Why we call it a secular religious structure is it is meant to be our best understanding

00:07:12.600 from a secular perspective of how the world actually works.

00:07:16.200 So it's kind of like hard science fiction, where hard science fiction is expected to be

00:07:19.860 logically, internally consistent with any invented science.

00:07:22.860 And it's all supposed to respect any science that already exists.

00:07:26.300 Like don't get a planet's orbit wrong.

00:07:28.180 Don't get the physics of this wrong, et cetera.

00:07:30.400 So for, to start, for people who aren't familiar with the broad strokes of our ideological belief

00:07:35.600 system, it's that in a hundred thousand years from today, a million years from today, if

00:07:40.900 our descendants are still around, that they would be closer to the way we would conceive

00:07:46.920 of a deity today or a God today than the way we would conceive of another human.

00:07:52.180 And as such, you know, who's to say they relate to time the same way we do, and they might be

00:07:57.280 guiding their manifestation, which is why we call it, you know, the inevitable God, the

00:08:02.640 self-manifesting God, through rewarding individuals who do things that increase the quality or lead

00:08:11.240 to a flourishing future human civilization and punish humans who act indulgently or indolently

00:08:19.280 or selfishly or on vanity or on self-narratives.

00:08:24.460 And so, for example, you know, one of the things that we tell our kids is that these, and these

00:08:31.800 these beings that influence the past, they don't necessarily come in like angels or something

00:08:35.200 like that.

00:08:35.560 They may be just manipulating things at the smallest, most quantum level in a way that

00:08:39.960 has like a butterfly effect that then ends up having large repercussions in even potentially

00:08:45.420 like human evolution.

00:08:46.700 So an example I can give here is one of the ways in which they have sort of encoded in our

00:08:54.600 own biology punishment for indolence is that all hedonistic pursuits, pursuits where an individual

00:09:03.300 is pursuing happiness or vanity or their perception in other people's eyes for its own sake, you

00:09:12.760 know, just sort of masturbating these emotional subsets, that these pleasures turn to ash on one's 0.95

00:09:19.400 tongue. What I mean by that is the pleasure that you experience for going out and chasing pleasure, like 0.87

00:09:28.480 going out, just sleeping with tons of people, going out, just, you know, eating really, really fancy food

00:09:34.960 every day, drinking whatever you want.

00:09:37.560 All of these begin to feel like they lose any happiness that they give you pretty quickly.

00:09:43.320 Yeah.

00:09:43.920 And they begin to feel gross and they make you feel gross as a human being.

00:09:50.220 Now, maybe not all of you-

00:09:50.340 What we love about this is that for kids, this is really, really easy to point out.

00:09:55.860 So like, let's say that your kid is really into a sports star or a movie star and you, like, it's,

00:10:00.820 it's pretty easy on most famous people to dig up, you know, here are the ways that people like

00:10:05.700 them or people on their same trajectories or even just them are actually pretty miserable.

00:10:10.360 People who especially pursue fame just for hedonism do end up like extra miserable.

00:10:15.640 And it's like hedonism on steroids.

00:10:17.380 Like, it's one thing to just pursue a life that's kind of comfortable where you have hobbies

00:10:22.140 and you have your job and you retire early or whatever, and there's van life and all

00:10:25.840 that.

00:10:26.100 But like, when you were like going all the way, like, no, I'm going to get all the attention,

00:10:29.660 all the fame, all the money, all the mansions, all the cars, all the women, all the men,

00:10:32.680 whatever, the misery seems to pile on like in proportion to the amount of hedonism pursued.

00:10:39.360 And it's so cool.

00:10:40.960 Yeah, it is really interesting.

00:10:42.700 And I want to highlight our word, which you said a little differently, which is if you look

00:10:47.860 at people who dedicated their lives to personal aggrandizement or personal vanity, whether

00:10:54.600 those are sports stars who were doing it for personal reasons.

00:10:58.460 So there's sort of two categories of like sports stars and movie stars.

00:11:01.000 Some of them, you can see they go into it, but then they are genuinely trying to make the

00:11:05.540 world a better place rather than sort of make themselves look like the good guy or personally

00:11:10.940 aggrandize themselves.

00:11:11.940 And you see very different life outcomes from these two groups.

00:11:14.860 When you see the sports stars who are in it for the fame and the movie stars who are in

00:11:20.060 it for the fame and the sex and the drugs or the musicians who are in it for that stuff,

00:11:24.760 their lives often are the lives that I would least want to trade mine for.

00:11:29.360 They have such a deep sense of genuine despair that you can see in almost all of their actions

00:11:38.040 that it is almost heartbreaking.

00:11:40.380 Almost heartbreaking, but you know that this is a self-working system.

00:11:45.200 But what's very interesting is when we look at the people who have the most genuine and

00:11:49.340 persistent happiness, these are the most mission-driven people.

00:11:52.260 These are the people that have sacrificed their lives for their faith.

00:11:57.000 And that faith can be a secular faith or a religious faith, but sacrificing your life

00:12:02.520 for your faith.

00:12:02.960 Now, some people are like, but isn't that what these, you know, Hollywood stars that

00:12:06.720 are pushing every single progressive talking point are?

00:12:09.240 And I'd be like, no, it's the Hollywood stars that are sticking to the progressive talking

00:12:13.000 points from 20 years ago that have radically changed because they have radically changed.

00:12:17.460 Like what is an acceptable progressive talking point changes a lot faster than I think a lot

00:12:21.380 of progressives are willing to admit themselves.

00:12:23.660 And so you see different levels.

00:12:25.240 I can think of an example here.

00:12:27.440 J.K.

00:12:27.900 Rowling, for example, she seems to be a genuinely happy person who is still pushing the progressive

00:12:34.800 talking points that were famous when she was a kid.

00:12:38.160 Yeah, at great cost.

00:12:40.280 At great cost.

00:12:41.280 Yeah.

00:12:41.480 No, I think she was wrong to believe those, but I think it leads to the level of integrity.

00:12:46.840 And logical consistency.

00:12:47.680 Yeah, integrity and logical consistency that you don't see in the Hollywood stars, like

00:12:52.300 a perfect example of this would be like Harry and Meghan.

00:12:54.520 Like whenever anything switches, whenever the winds blow in a particular way, they're

00:13:01.220 on the new train because what they care about is being seen as good guys, not the causes

00:13:05.780 themselves.

00:13:06.600 What they care about is the brand.

00:13:08.780 He's right.

00:13:09.660 Trying to make ourselves into a brand just turned us into products.

00:13:12.820 We don't need to be a brand, do we?

00:13:14.520 Yes, I'm sure you agree, darling.

00:13:18.740 We can be the people we talked about being, with no more worries about how we look or the

00:13:23.360 image we project to people.

00:13:24.900 What matters is what we have on the inside.

00:13:32.540 Hello?

00:13:32.980 So this is a brilliant little thing that has an aspect of religiosity to it, you know,

00:13:42.040 in me telling my kids about this, like this idea of happiness turning to ash in one's

00:13:47.500 mouth, that this being the way that we are designed, but it also has a level of truth

00:13:52.620 to it and something I can point to.

00:13:54.360 But it's also a lesson I want my kids to learn because I think it's a very important

00:13:58.040 lesson that takes a lot of people too long to learn.

00:14:02.420 I hate Jim Carrey's politics and everything like that, but I do love the one quote that

00:14:06.480 he has.

00:14:06.960 And I think he's an example of a deeply unhappy person who achieved everything and then just

00:14:11.460 tried to go, like never really thought about why he was doing stuff.

00:14:14.080 But it's, I hope that everyone, you know, has the blessings to achieve everything they

00:14:18.760 ever wanted to achieve in life so that they can know that it wasn't what they wanted.

00:14:23.160 Which is, no, I mean, it's, it's, it's, that's the type of stuff you want to achieve.

00:14:29.340 I am two-time Golden Globe winner, Jim Carrey.

00:14:32.760 And when I dream, I don't just dream any old dream.

00:14:35.160 No, sir.

00:14:35.740 I dream about being three-time Golden Globe winning actor, Jim Carrey, because then I

00:14:41.460 would be enough.

00:14:42.300 It would finally be true.

00:14:43.680 And I could stop this, this terrible search.

00:14:47.580 You want to see a genuinely happy person.

00:14:49.960 And this is why I'll often play clips of him like on other Base Camp episodes.

00:14:55.380 Steve Irwin.

00:14:56.860 What good is a fast car, a flash house, and a gold plate, a dunny to me?

00:15:00.540 Absolutely no good at all.

00:15:01.940 I've been put on this planet to protect wildlife and wilderness areas, which in essence is going

00:15:07.680 to help humanity.

00:15:08.780 I want to save the world.

00:15:10.460 And you know, money, money's great.

00:15:12.240 I can't get enough money.

00:15:13.600 And you know what I'm going to do with it?

00:15:14.800 I'm going to buy wilderness areas with it.

00:15:16.520 Every single cent I get goes straight into conservation.

00:15:20.460 And guess what, Charles?

00:15:21.300 I don't give a rip whose money it is, mate.

00:15:23.240 I'll use it and I'll spend it on buying land.

00:15:26.400 Like, watch anything with him in it.

00:15:28.860 The way he relates to his family.

00:15:30.800 The way, like, just genuinely, like, pure good-hearted happiness.

00:15:37.000 Is there anything in this world that would want to make me give away what I'm doing now?

00:15:44.580 Yes.

00:15:46.140 Yes, there is.

00:15:48.040 When my children can take the football that I call wildlife conservation and run it up.

00:15:56.440 When they're ready to run up our mission, I will gladly step aside.

00:16:02.860 And I guarantee you it'll be the proudest moment of my life.

00:16:05.780 And my job will be done like my mom and my dad.

00:16:09.420 Then and only then will I know that I have achieved my ultimate goal.

00:16:14.480 And that is really interesting that you can see this when somebody who has dedicated themselves to a higher calling.

00:16:21.460 And that's what I talk about.

00:16:22.140 Like, he definitely had a secular higher calling.

00:16:24.160 Like, his higher calling was preserving the environment, right?

00:16:27.420 And it doesn't have to be, like, a higher calling that we approve of.

00:16:29.960 Like, when I was trying to think when we first talked about this of celebrities who are super, super famous and successful, but also they seem really happy.

00:16:36.980 I thought of Bill Murray and, like, probably his objective function is not something that we would choose for ourselves.

00:16:43.120 But he clearly, he's very consistent in his action and, like, both publicly and privately.

00:16:47.380 And he, you know, seems really happy.

00:16:50.160 Karen Michael drove more than 300 miles from her home outside Chicago to the ballpark in Cleveland.

00:16:56.180 Karen didn't have a ticket for the game, but she went anyway on the zillion to one chance she could buy one at the stadium.

00:17:02.720 I was at the will call window hoping that somebody didn't pick up their tickets and I would be able to rebuy them.

00:17:11.300 And they don't do that.

00:17:13.020 Murray was passing by and saw Karen being turned away heartbroken.

00:17:17.240 And he turned around, gave me the ticket, shuffled me in the door.

00:17:21.420 I was ecstatic to even be going into the game, let alone actually sitting with him.

00:17:27.040 Roker also showed this goofy video of Murray playing hairdresser with another fan.

00:17:31.860 And he just starts styling her hair.

00:17:34.900 Well, and it doesn't seem to me that this is ever about fame or hedonism for him.

00:17:38.840 No, he just, he's just a cool guy.

00:17:42.060 But anyway, so back to the talking point, demons, right?

00:17:46.340 So what is a demon within this context?

00:17:49.820 Like, where can I borrow themes around what demons look like?

00:17:55.380 And Simone, you had a really interesting idea.

00:17:57.320 Yeah, can I share my, my, my idea of demons, what I think they are actually in our metaphysical

00:18:02.160 metaphysical world is so we have the future police, which are essentially like our religions

00:18:06.980 equivalent of angels, because we often say, you know, when something happens, and you don't

00:18:11.780 know why, or it seems bad at the time, we're like, listen, the future police made this happen

00:18:16.080 because it was supposed to happen.

00:18:17.240 And if we are on a righteous path, essentially, it is going to be for the best.

00:18:22.500 And we found in our lives that whenever something seemingly terrible happens, it actually is for

00:18:26.380 the best.

00:18:26.900 And we thank the future police for that.

00:18:28.860 So they are, in that sense to us, a guardian angel.

00:18:31.360 But I think that they can equally be demons, and that the same future police that are nudging

00:18:36.600 your life in a positive direction can be the same demons that nudge your life in a terrible

00:18:42.500 direction toward death, toward ruin, toward obsolescence, because you are not, to use

00:18:48.400 a Calvinist term among the elect, and a sign that demons are punishing you, that the future

00:18:54.100 police are punishing rather than rewarding you, is that you are pursuing a life of hedonism.

00:18:59.500 And so you are going to be increasingly punished by them, made obsolete, made miserable, made,

00:19:04.520 you know, have your life cut short, et cetera.

00:19:06.640 And I think it's the most per our worldview, logically consistent view.

00:19:10.760 And it's also simple and elegant, because the same people who reward can also punish

00:19:14.300 more like the Krampus version of Santa Claus.

00:19:17.640 Well, so, you know, I like this idea of the same entity that is rewarding, or group of entities

00:19:27.580 that is rewarding actions that increase the potential flourishing of the human race, do

00:19:32.860 lay tests and trials for us intentionally.

00:19:36.640 They would need to remove the non-meaningful people.

00:19:41.340 They would need to take out the ones who might cause damage, right?

00:19:44.020 Who might not create the future that needs to happen.

00:19:47.040 Yes.

00:19:47.320 Well, to abandon those that succumb to the temptation and the tests that they have laid

00:19:51.240 out to them.

00:19:51.700 Not just abandon, but cull, but neutralize.

00:19:54.420 Yeah.

00:19:54.740 Well, and I think if you see historically, you know, one of the things we did when we were

00:19:58.620 looking at raising our kids is going through historic figures that ended up moving human

00:20:02.100 civilization on a direction that we think was better.

00:20:04.740 And we're like, what do they have in common?

00:20:06.360 Like, if we're thinking about raising our kids to be great people, like we do believe

00:20:09.940 in the great people theory of history.

00:20:11.220 And I do want my kids to be great people.

00:20:13.740 I do want to become one myself in great person history, right?

00:20:17.080 That'd be amazing if that happens.

00:20:19.160 But one of the things that you just see consistently is in their youth, they underwent some form of

00:20:26.020 enormous trial or some form of enormous undeserved hardship often.

00:20:31.200 Not always undeserved.

00:20:32.080 But no, you just see this over and over and over again.

00:20:35.740 You know, you saw it in the recent Elon Musk book, whether it's Caesar and the Pirates,

00:20:40.760 whether it's, you know, there's always stuff like this, right?

00:20:43.560 And I love this as a mechanism because if the future police were guiding all of these

00:20:51.700 individuals as well, they had to put them through these trials so that they could know

00:20:56.820 and they had to give them the temptations so that they could ensure that they deserved

00:21:02.700 their blessings and their guidance to, you know, the future that must come to pass.

00:21:08.260 But this is also very different than most religion structure of demons.

00:21:12.480 One interesting way that some religious or cultural views don't do demons but still do

00:21:18.260 chaotic forces, which I would say is probably closer to future police, is with the tricksters 0.97

00:21:23.280 that you'll see like in many Native American traditions.

00:21:26.660 Yeah, but I just don't know if we believe in tricksters.

00:21:30.540 Yeah, but I think tricksters are interesting in that, you know, to your point that like,

00:21:34.780 oh, you know, all these religions have demons. 1.00

00:21:36.320 I wouldn't say that demons are universal or that everyone...

00:21:38.780 No, no, no.

00:21:39.220 But what I think is pretty odd for a religious structure is a religious structure that believes

00:21:44.180 that both the entities acting negatively in your life and the entities acting positively in

00:21:49.440 your life are the same entity.

00:21:51.600 Oh, I don't know.

00:21:52.160 The Greek and Roman gods seems to be that, right? 0.96

00:21:54.880 Sometimes they would be complete dicks to you and sometimes they would be pretty cool. 0.96

00:21:58.200 I'd say it's closer to like the Christian God where the negative things that befall someone 0.99

00:22:02.660 are often God as well as the positive things.

00:22:04.520 He was sometimes really mean.

00:22:06.760 Well, I mean, this isn't true of all iterations of Christianity, but it is definitely true of some.

00:22:11.120 But he often doesn't, or at least in the iterations that I'm familiar with, use angels to perform

00:22:17.540 the negative acts.

00:22:18.740 He instead uses the angels to sort of give demons or devils permission to, the devil permission

00:22:24.440 to perform negative acts.

00:22:25.940 It is often literature around the Bible.

00:22:29.440 The actual Bible itself often goes very rarely into this sort of stuff.

00:22:33.320 So it's not...

00:22:34.080 Yeah, I don't recall anything about angels or demons in the Bible.

00:22:37.000 I just recall, for example, Satan, like, goading God into making Job's life miserable.

00:22:44.600 I'm not even tempting, just being like, you really think Job thinks you're doing great.

00:22:48.940 But anyway, so back to demons and our structure, right?

00:22:53.940 Yes.

00:22:54.520 So another thing that I really like, and it's funny, we, in our book, we called, we said

00:23:01.420 one of the names for the deity that we call God, as we call it, is the Omniscion, you

00:23:07.000 child, basically.

00:23:07.840 The Inevitable God.

00:23:08.660 But obviously, or the Inevitable God that we tied from the...

00:23:12.020 Obviously, we took some inspiration from the Warhammer universe from that, just because

00:23:15.420 I love it.

00:23:15.980 It's fun, right?

00:23:16.940 Good lore.

00:23:17.740 One of the best lores, actually.

00:23:19.500 But I was also sort of thinking of it in terms of a lore structure, and I really like its

00:23:24.400 lore structure around the types or sort of the domains of demons.

00:23:30.640 It was the four core domains of demons.

00:23:35.100 And what I like about this is in terms of teaching my children how to resist the core

00:23:42.280 temptations and the faces that the enemy...

00:23:47.160 You know, when these future police are acting adversarial to you, when they are testing you,

00:23:55.300 they do that through enemy agents, through empowering individuals, real humans often, or

00:24:01.920 social movements or events in your life that you can call the enemy, to test you, to pull

00:24:08.900 you off the path of righteousness.

00:24:10.600 And that the enemy, what I like about the Warhammer framing here is you can use the four

00:24:17.300 chaos gods as the faces that the enemy uses and the avatar the enemy uses to pull you from

00:24:26.040 your path, right?

00:24:27.880 And it will do this with fallen individuals.

00:24:30.080 It'll take somebody who's already fallen, often succumb to some form of ideological virus,

00:24:34.760 and then utilize, puppet that individual, often as part of the virus's reproductive cycle,

00:24:41.460 to try to peel you off from the path of righteousness.

00:24:44.920 So if I'm going to go through the four deities in the Warhammer universe and sort of see how

00:24:49.000 I see them represented here, which is interesting, because I just find them much more compelling

00:24:53.640 than more traditional deities I'm familiar with from other demons, I'm familiar with from

00:24:59.100 other religious structures.

00:25:00.140 The reason why I think that they're more compelling is because they were sort of come to a priori

00:25:05.780 from an authorial standpoint, instead of being, so historically, if you look at like Christianity,

00:25:11.700 what Christianity would often do is frame the gods of neighboring religions as demons or

00:25:19.060 as Satan.

00:25:20.580 You know, like Moloch, right, was a neighboring religion during early Judaism, right?

00:25:25.900 So, and words for demon and stuff like that, or Baal was a neighboring deity, right?

00:25:33.200 Which means that they would often take a lot of the iconography from that instead of coming

00:25:36.540 up with the iconography a priori.

00:25:38.320 Now, of course, if you're taking this from our weird religious perspective, we would say

00:25:42.420 that these are not actual a priori, but these are visions of the way that you might be tested

00:25:49.200 that are easy for a child to conceive of, right?

00:25:52.080 So the four core deities born by four core human sources of temptation or fear or negative

00:25:59.600 emotions.

00:26:00.340 The first, we would say, is Nurgle, which in the universe is sort of the deity of pestilence, 1.00

00:26:07.020 which is born by humans' fear of death and desire to keep living through anything.

00:26:14.100 And the gifts that it gives to people who follow it most are the alleviation of pain associated

00:26:20.480 with death and stuff like that, like diseases, et cetera.

00:26:25.600 Simone, what group would be most associated with a paralyzing fear of death leading them

00:26:31.640 to stagnation?

00:26:33.600 Our longtime enemy, the life extensionists. 0.68

00:26:37.320 Yes.

00:26:38.420 They're the Nurgleite community. 1.00

00:26:40.760 Well, I mean, I like that because I think it's really true.

00:26:44.560 It can be seen as a positive ideology.

00:26:48.280 And there's so many ways to cover up the intrinsic stagnation embodied within perpetual life and

00:26:56.600 the intrinsic dehumanization of short-year identities and everything like that.

00:27:00.600 Whereas I think seeing it through this eye can make it a lot easier to understand the true...

00:27:08.760 And what I also love is the correlation between stagnation and pestilence.

00:27:15.580 That it is in stagnant pools that parasites breed most fervently that then take down great beasts.

00:27:24.000 Uh-huh.

00:27:24.760 I see.

00:27:25.480 Then second, you could say the most common would be Slaanesh.

00:27:29.460 And what I like about Slaanesh is Slaanesh is all forms of hedonism, right? 0.99

00:27:35.080 Not just sexual hedonism, but personal vanity, a strive for perfection.

00:27:40.680 So someone would be a servant of Slaanesh or a tempter of Slaanesh, whether they are a gem bro who is indolently working on their body to the exclusion of potentially efficacious action in reality.

00:27:56.460 Or somebody who just spends all day having sex or on OnlyFans or eating food constantly like a glutton.

00:28:04.740 And what I really like about this demonic framing is it helps remind people how little of a difference there is between pursuits of personal vanity and the pursuit of being validated by your community.

00:28:24.320 Which can be a really driving ideology for a lot of people, right?

00:28:29.300 It's very easy to convince somebody that this is a thing of value because they're like, I am striving for human perfection, right?

00:28:36.600 But it is human perfection that serves no greater purpose other than the glorification of the self.

00:28:44.440 And this really came up with a family member of mine where he was annoyed at me.

00:28:51.100 So a lot of my family, people might be surprised to know this, are like very deep south, good old boy type people.

00:28:58.320 You know, Texas groups.

00:28:59.380 And this is somebody who married into the family.

00:29:00.720 So not directly related to me, but you know, it's the type of people my family often marry that I said that sports was a sin.

00:29:07.860 And he was like, no, sports is not a sin.

00:29:10.140 Sports is great.

00:29:11.060 Sports is tradition.

00:29:12.560 And I'm like, yeah, but how does it make the world a better place?

00:29:15.920 What?

00:29:16.240 And I go, and they're like, well, you can't just say sports is a sin because from your framework.

00:29:19.760 I'm like, there is no logically consistent framework.

00:29:21.940 I stand all logically consistent frameworks that lead to a better future for humanity and that are pluralistic, right?

00:29:29.120 That are okay with people different from them existing.

00:29:31.600 And none of them that I am aware of have like a logically consistent way.

00:29:35.520 I can think of no iteration of Christianity that's like really a well thought through iteration where God's like, oh yeah, you get into heaven because you did really well on that one play because you had all of those fans because you helped carry your team to victory.

00:29:48.920 And to be clear, this is not to say that any engagement in sports is seen as a bad thing by us.

00:29:53.900 It's sports as a, like an inherent good that you disagree with.

00:29:58.940 Yeah, well, and as a life pursuit that I disagree with.

00:30:01.940 Right.

00:30:02.380 So I would say that, and this is where we'll get to one of the other demons, one of the easiest paths to temptation, one of the easiest ways a person can fall off the righteous path is to not recognize that as a human, they are wretched and they are flawed and they are failed.

00:30:19.420 And that, that is okay.

00:30:22.620 All humans sin.

00:30:24.660 What is critical is that you do not glorify the sin.

00:30:32.160 What I mean by this is every human does some things that are just for sin, whether it's sports, whether it's working out a little bit more than they have to, whether it's drinking, a sin that I engage in, right?

00:30:45.040 Whether it's, you know, indulgent spending on things that they don't really need, right?

00:30:50.400 My sin.

00:30:50.620 Yeah, sin is a, is a, is a part of life, but there is a huge difference between saying I am engaging in this sin.

00:30:58.880 I recognize it as sin.

00:31:00.500 I recognize it is something I should have some shame for, but I also recognize that I am human and thus a sinner, right?

00:31:07.800 But if you use it and say, no, actually the sports are a good thing.

00:31:10.900 I am a good person for being good at sports.

00:31:13.900 I am a good person for, in whatever particular aspect of slaneshedom that I engage in, that is where true evil comes from. 0.99

00:31:23.060 But true evil can also come from a human that thinks they can totally avoid sin.

00:31:28.920 Every group I know of believes that humans can completely avoid sin.

00:31:33.660 The humans in their group that quote unquote come closest to that are typically least efficacious individuals in society.

00:31:41.120 Because avoiding sin means avoiding action.

00:31:45.320 Yeah.

00:31:46.020 So, yeah.

00:31:46.420 So, sorry.

00:31:47.180 I think you cut out for a second.

00:31:48.580 You were saying that those who believe you can completely avoid sin and who try to do so also do the least of anything because they're most likely to just not do anything.

00:31:56.740 Yes.

00:31:57.540 So, there is just as much sin in believing that sin is virtue as there is sin in believing that it is capable that you as a human, a current iteration of humanity, can escape sin.

00:32:13.200 So, but anyway, so that's one path there.

00:32:16.700 It's a slaneshedom.

00:32:17.680 And what I really like about slaneshedom as a framing device is that it frames all of these various types of hedonistic and self-validation temptations alongside each other and as equally evil because I believe they hurt people in the same way.

00:32:32.140 Yeah.

00:32:32.440 But they're very different than something like the life extensionist, like the desire to not die.

00:32:36.720 This is usually an ideological, not like in the moment desire.

00:32:40.400 Next demon or life path would be Khorne, the demon of war. 1.00

00:32:46.120 How do we spell this?

00:32:47.220 Or aggression.

00:32:48.640 Well, and Simone knows when world conflicts erupt, I'm often like, well, Simone, should I go there?

00:32:53.820 Should I be trying to do something about this?

00:32:56.060 And she's like, no, Malcolm, this really isn't the best use.

00:32:58.820 But I feel a really strong desire to get involved when I see.

00:33:03.220 And my family, I remember one of the things that my grandfather told me before I was passing who had, you know, served in World War II is that you are going to have like a really strong desire to engage in wars that you see as righteous.

00:33:17.740 But just remember that it is always best to try to avoid the conflict because you, as somebody who hasn't been to war, don't know how bad it really is and that you can't imagine how bad it really is.

00:33:30.100 And so I think that this desire for my team versus their team, where it leads to death and setback, is sort of Khorne's failure. 0.99

00:33:45.440 Which is also very different from the Slaneshi camp of failures, from Life Extensionist camp of failures.

00:33:50.380 And the final one, which is the most interesting one to me, is Ezechian failure. 0.97

00:33:56.800 This would be the god of change, right?

00:34:00.180 The chaos demon of change.

00:34:02.620 And that within the setting, you know, this is the demon that empowers sorcerers and stuff like that.

00:34:09.160 Like anyone with any sort of magical power or intellectuals or academics.

00:34:12.560 But it is change just for the sake of change, not change for the sake of improving the human condition or improving human flourishing.

00:34:22.980 So who does this? Because generally humans hate change.

00:34:25.780 I would say that the core avatar of this right now would be the people who are just completely unhinged about AI and the people who call other people things like carbon fascists.

00:34:38.100 I call other people carbon fascists, so I'm subject to this.

00:34:42.240 Yes, you are. This is definitely the temptation that we are the most susceptible to.

00:34:48.700 No, I mean, it's true, Simone.

00:34:51.080 The idea of individuals...

00:34:53.520 Now, I do believe that humans will need to change in the future.

00:34:56.760 And I think that the drive to not change is a Nurgle-like change. 1.00

00:35:02.300 Nurgle and Zeech are core.

00:35:05.020 They hate each other a lot.

00:35:06.360 They're two ends of a toxic spectrum.

00:35:07.980 Yeah, there are two sides of a toxic spectrum where there is complete stagnation, but then there is change only for the sake of change.

00:35:17.840 And that where I think you can corely define an individual that has succumbed to Zeechianism versus an individual that hasn't is, do they want some iteration of humanity to survive? 0.93

00:35:32.480 Are they okay with humanity being wholly and completely replaced?

00:35:36.280 Or are they indifferent to humanity being wholly and completely replaced in the pursuit of whatever other thing that they're trying to achieve?

00:35:43.840 Often knowledge work or creating, you know, the perfect AI or something like that.

00:35:47.740 I would argue that this is a force that in our world right now is the weakest of the four demonic forces.

00:35:54.380 And therefore, you know, we tend towards it a little bit, but only to sort of even out the great game, you could call it, between these four forces and the different people who will wear these forces and be puppeted by these forces in trying to seduce you off the path of righteousness, which is towards a pluralistic human empire.

00:36:17.260 Hmm. Interesting.

00:36:20.780 We're the descendants of humans because, you know, of course, any entity that's around for hundreds of thousands of years is going to speciate to some extent.

00:36:28.880 And so we want a human zoo, right?

00:36:32.160 The collection, I mean, especially when humans get to other planets or are on floating, you know, ship structures that take thousands of years to get between.

00:36:41.620 You know, you're just intermigrant and indelibly lead to speciation, unless you have some sort of like genetic protection act on, which is culling humans that deviate too much, which you could do, but it would require this sort of, ironically, a polygenic risk or IVF selection of the type that we do, but selects towards reversion to the mean. 0.99

00:37:06.860 Huh. I want to go out on a limb and say, you know, probably more Warhammer lore than most people who own at least one Warhammer figurine.

00:37:20.140 And you are not among those people, by the way.

00:37:22.420 Oh, you say that? And then some people are going to be criticizing my knowledge of the lore in this video, being like, you got this wrong or you got this wrong.

00:37:29.220 For someone who doesn't own a single figurine, I think you said that.

00:37:33.280 So I really love lore research, okay? It's one of my deepest hobbies where I will just go deep, deep, deep into the lore of a fictional universe.

00:37:45.380 The two best fictional universes for lore, I think, are the Old World of Darkness.

00:37:52.160 Is this a vampire thing that you're talking about?

00:37:53.880 It's a vampire, the Masquerade, but the original Vampire, the Masquerade, not the new one.

00:37:58.520 They really destroyed it when they made... 0.94

00:38:00.700 You nerd.

00:38:02.700 Well, I think that the... 0.55

00:38:04.940 Anyway, yeah.

00:38:05.980 So I think they destroyed it with the new World of Darkness.

00:38:08.520 I don't like the new...

00:38:10.340 Like, was Malkavians being a disease instead of a distinct clan?

00:38:14.200 How dare? 1.00

00:38:14.760 It's so stupid. 1.00

00:38:16.080 How dare you? 1.00

00:38:17.120 Sorry, Simone, this bothers me.

00:38:18.940 This bothers me.

00:38:20.120 I know, and I'm not above this level of nerddom.

00:38:22.640 And Gehenna, like, is too underway at this point, was in the new World of Darkness.

00:38:27.740 So anyway, but then with the Warhammer lore, the reason I always liked it, and one of the reasons I like it,

00:38:33.040 I do think it's the logical conclusion, just to, like, go on a tangent here that is not tied to the topic of this video,

00:38:40.080 of a lot of hippie mindsets.

00:38:42.360 So a lot of hippies, they'll come to me and they'll say things like,

00:38:46.840 I remember this growing up, right?

00:38:48.060 Like, well, what if deities are created by humans believing in them, right?

00:38:53.760 And then those deities really come to exist.

00:38:57.060 And you mentioned a book...

00:38:58.140 It's a very neat human American gods kind of view.

00:39:01.100 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:39:02.040 Well, Warhammer says, okay, this is true, and that is the worst of all possible worlds.

00:39:06.820 Because if that was true, then it is the most simple emotions, like the fear of death, or pleasure for pleasure's sake, or, you know, etc.,

00:39:14.700 that would manifest the most of these deities.

00:39:18.800 And as soon as these deities could act on the world, then they would have a manifest interest

00:39:23.940 in increasing the emotion that leads to their creation.

00:39:27.800 So, like, the god associated with fearing death would also try to spread pestilence and diseases,

00:39:32.840 because that causes more people to fear death, which causes its power to grow.

00:39:37.760 Right.

00:39:38.180 And that this leads to horror beyond horror, horror beyond comprehension.

00:39:44.160 And then you get a vast interstellar human empire,

00:39:47.240 and you need to, like, monitor everyone's emotions and live in this extremely,

00:39:52.780 even more than us, puritanical perspective,

00:39:55.600 where you sort of have to beat emotions out of individuals, because...

00:39:59.460 You must create some terrifying god.

00:40:02.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:40:02.680 But it's interesting that our world perspective is not that dissimilar from that.

00:40:07.520 I mean, as we say, all positive and negative emotions are sin,

00:40:11.100 in that they are intrinsically indulgent.

00:40:13.360 And that's the righteous path for humanity,

00:40:16.200 is one in which we learn and master emotional self-control,

00:40:21.840 rather than to allow our emotions to control us,

00:40:27.000 as I think is the calling card of many soft cultural traditions.

00:40:32.560 Yeah. 0.84

00:40:34.280 Anyway, I love you, and I love that you're okay with me being a stinking nerd.

00:40:39.060 I wouldn't have it any other way, Malcolm.

00:40:41.500 You're the best.

00:40:42.840 You are the best.

00:40:43.800 You are the best.

00:40:44.600 And I loved the thesis you came up with of the demons and the gods being two faces of the same entities,

00:40:50.520 because it rings so true for me.

00:40:52.080 It rings so plausible for me.

00:40:53.320 It requires the smallest additional stuff,

00:40:55.580 but it also allows us to prime our kids and to frame for our kids,

00:40:59.760 the people who come to them with these temptations,

00:41:03.580 that this is a test.

00:41:05.640 And these individuals are just human puppets of failed human creatures that are testing them.

00:41:12.500 Yes, it's going to be fun.

00:41:14.640 Can't wait to try it out.

00:41:16.000 Love you.

00:41:16.900 Yeah, can't wait to try terrifying our kids.

Based Camp - November 30, 2023

We Created Demons for Our Children

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