We Created Demons for Our Children
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Summary
In this episode, we're talking about demons, and how to deal with them, and the ways that demons can be brought into your life. We also talk about trauma and how it can be used as a tool for manipulation and brainwashing.
Transcript
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I would say that, and this is where we'll get to one of the other demons, one of the
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easiest paths to temptation, and one of the easiest ways a person can fall off the righteous
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path is to not recognize that as a human, they are wretched and they are flawed and
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What is critical is that you do not glorify the sin.
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Sin is a part of life, but there is a huge difference between saying, I am engaging in
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this sin, I recognize it as sin, I recognize it as something I should have some shame for,
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but I also recognize that I am human and thus a sinner, right?
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But if you use it and say, no, actually the sports are a good thing.
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I am a good person for in whatever particular aspect of flanesshedom that I engage in.
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But true evil can also come from a human that thinks they can totally avoid sin.
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Every group I know of believes that humans can completely avoid sin.
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The humans in their group that quote unquote come closest to that are typically efficacious
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individuals in society because avoiding sin means avoiding action.
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You said that we were going to talk about demons today.
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I was so sure that you were going to like make this salacious episode about like skeletons
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in our closet or something, you know, like your childhood demons.
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Because so many people online are like, these are two deeply damaged people.
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We haven't dealt with our trauma and this is why we want to have children or why we're
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I mean, you want to talk about a sign of brainwashing or a brainwashed individual.
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It's when somebody disagrees with them or has a different world perspective than them.
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Their first reaction is what horrible thing happened to them in their past that made them
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And what they need to do, and there's actually a class of people who do this.
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They don't even say like, you know, you should read the research or you should go out there
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It's like, I think it's a constant trope that people are exposed to in media.
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Like villains, of course, were raised in terribly abused environments.
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Like, you know, that, that Dr. Evil bit where he's like, you know, he talks about this like
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terrible childhood and how he was beaten and all these things.
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Well, I mean, I think that the, you know, if you talk about, we talk about the, the super
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The cult and the way that it maintains its membership or recruits new members is through
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And we have talked about this in, in the video psychology has become a cult.
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I think this is somebody who originally trained in psychology.
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The way that psychology is practiced now is not the way it was practiced even a decade
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ago in terms of what's considered acceptable and what's not.
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And, and, and, you know, as, as to what you're saying here, it makes a lot of sense.
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If you see this not as being in like one cultural group versus another cultural group, but see
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Well, yeah, of course a cult would tell you what you need to go to your cult, cult appointed
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They'll, they'll clean your, your brains dirty.
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And there's these people you can pay to clean it.
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And then once you have a clean brain, you can have clean thoughts.
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On rewatching this during editing, I realized the joke may not be clear here.
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I don't think there's a precedent for that though.
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Like even in the media tropes where like the evil person has gone to therapy and worked
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on themselves, like they're never really fixed.
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So it's just kind of this excuse to write someone off permanently that they're damaged,
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And, you know, though they should go to therapy and whatnot, no amount of it will actually.
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I mean, I saw so much of this was Trump when he was elected.
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Did people say he was traumatized in his youth?
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You know, they, they, they just cannot fathom that someone could honestly just disagree with
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Other, other cultural groups have some similar things to this.
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Oh yeah, like maybe you're possessed by a demon, for example.
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Yeah, some extreme Christians that like literally think everyone who disagrees with them is possessed
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But I, I would say that those are like the most extreme, absolutely wackadoo of Christians.
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And yet this is a mainstream position among the, those indoctrinated into the virus.
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Your thetans that are attached to you, which cause you to have negative thoughts and stuff
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And you need to go to their, well, their version of like psychologists, these people who
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you tell your backstory to, and then they help you get your thetans off of you so that
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Oh, they even have something like, oh, what's it called?
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But I know that also like, they don't even want mothers to scream during childbirth because
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they think that might traumatize the child, which is, I guess it goes to show you can
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make up all these excuses of like, whether or not the person remembers or not, here's
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Like their mother screamed when they were born or something, right?
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So the term that you use, by the way, is clear.
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And that's why that documentary was called Going Clear.
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So once they have cleared your brain, cleaned it, washed it, if you will, whichever group,
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And it makes sense that it's a common practice because it's an incredibly effective practice.
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Well, and other people, I think just say like, well, it's because you haven't accepted
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Jesus Christ as your savior, or basically you haven't converted to this religion and that's
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But, but I would say, hold on, is that this practice, this way of relating to people who
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see the world differently from you is not usually a practice had within healthy cultural groups.
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If we look within the healthy Christian cultural groups or, or Jewish Orthodox groups, or, you
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know, even in a historic context, they typically do not see their enemies in like a, oh, if you
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just go see like our, whatever their iteration of a psychologist was, you'll eventually be able
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to see things the way I do, but where this is relevant to today's topic of conversation
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is one thing that I do think that most successful cultural traditions have, and that ours, as
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we had originally constructed it, you know, we've built a little religion for our family,
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holidays and belief systems and metaphysical structure for the universe that we'd pass on
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to our kids does not have, which is demons, like some sort of like genuinely malevolent force.
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And so we started thinking about how we could, because one thing I really want with everything
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in this religion, as I pass it to my kids, is that it is not falsifiable by any sort of
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And where it is falsifiable by science, it can be updated.
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Why we call it a secular religious structure is it is meant to be our best understanding
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from a secular perspective of how the world actually works.
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So it's kind of like hard science fiction, where hard science fiction is expected to be
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logically, internally consistent with any invented science.
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And it's all supposed to respect any science that already exists.
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Don't get the physics of this wrong, et cetera.
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So for, to start, for people who aren't familiar with the broad strokes of our ideological belief
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system, it's that in a hundred thousand years from today, a million years from today, if
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our descendants are still around, that they would be closer to the way we would conceive
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of a deity today or a God today than the way we would conceive of another human.
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And as such, you know, who's to say they relate to time the same way we do, and they might be
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guiding their manifestation, which is why we call it, you know, the inevitable God, the
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self-manifesting God, through rewarding individuals who do things that increase the quality or lead
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to a flourishing future human civilization and punish humans who act indulgently or indolently
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or selfishly or on vanity or on self-narratives.
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And so, for example, you know, one of the things that we tell our kids is that these, and these
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these beings that influence the past, they don't necessarily come in like angels or something
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They may be just manipulating things at the smallest, most quantum level in a way that
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has like a butterfly effect that then ends up having large repercussions in even potentially
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So an example I can give here is one of the ways in which they have sort of encoded in our
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own biology punishment for indolence is that all hedonistic pursuits, pursuits where an individual
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is pursuing happiness or vanity or their perception in other people's eyes for its own sake, you
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know, just sort of masturbating these emotional subsets, that these pleasures turn to ash on one's
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tongue. What I mean by that is the pleasure that you experience for going out and chasing pleasure, like
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going out, just sleeping with tons of people, going out, just, you know, eating really, really fancy food
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All of these begin to feel like they lose any happiness that they give you pretty quickly.
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And they begin to feel gross and they make you feel gross as a human being.
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What we love about this is that for kids, this is really, really easy to point out.
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So like, let's say that your kid is really into a sports star or a movie star and you, like, it's,
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it's pretty easy on most famous people to dig up, you know, here are the ways that people like
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them or people on their same trajectories or even just them are actually pretty miserable.
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People who especially pursue fame just for hedonism do end up like extra miserable.
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Like, it's one thing to just pursue a life that's kind of comfortable where you have hobbies
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and you have your job and you retire early or whatever, and there's van life and all
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But like, when you were like going all the way, like, no, I'm going to get all the attention,
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all the fame, all the money, all the mansions, all the cars, all the women, all the men,
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whatever, the misery seems to pile on like in proportion to the amount of hedonism pursued.
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And I want to highlight our word, which you said a little differently, which is if you look
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at people who dedicated their lives to personal aggrandizement or personal vanity, whether
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those are sports stars who were doing it for personal reasons.
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So there's sort of two categories of like sports stars and movie stars.
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Some of them, you can see they go into it, but then they are genuinely trying to make the
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world a better place rather than sort of make themselves look like the good guy or personally
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And you see very different life outcomes from these two groups.
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When you see the sports stars who are in it for the fame and the movie stars who are in
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it for the fame and the sex and the drugs or the musicians who are in it for that stuff,
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their lives often are the lives that I would least want to trade mine for.
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They have such a deep sense of genuine despair that you can see in almost all of their actions
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Almost heartbreaking, but you know that this is a self-working system.
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But what's very interesting is when we look at the people who have the most genuine and
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persistent happiness, these are the most mission-driven people.
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These are the people that have sacrificed their lives for their faith.
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And that faith can be a secular faith or a religious faith, but sacrificing your life
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Now, some people are like, but isn't that what these, you know, Hollywood stars that
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are pushing every single progressive talking point are?
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And I'd be like, no, it's the Hollywood stars that are sticking to the progressive talking
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points from 20 years ago that have radically changed because they have radically changed.
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Like what is an acceptable progressive talking point changes a lot faster than I think a lot
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of progressives are willing to admit themselves.
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Rowling, for example, she seems to be a genuinely happy person who is still pushing the progressive
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talking points that were famous when she was a kid.
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No, I think she was wrong to believe those, but I think it leads to the level of integrity.
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Yeah, integrity and logical consistency that you don't see in the Hollywood stars, like
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a perfect example of this would be like Harry and Meghan.
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Like whenever anything switches, whenever the winds blow in a particular way, they're
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on the new train because what they care about is being seen as good guys, not the causes
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Trying to make ourselves into a brand just turned us into products.
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We can be the people we talked about being, with no more worries about how we look or the
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So this is a brilliant little thing that has an aspect of religiosity to it, you know,
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in me telling my kids about this, like this idea of happiness turning to ash in one's
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mouth, that this being the way that we are designed, but it also has a level of truth
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But it's also a lesson I want my kids to learn because I think it's a very important
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lesson that takes a lot of people too long to learn.
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I hate Jim Carrey's politics and everything like that, but I do love the one quote that
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And I think he's an example of a deeply unhappy person who achieved everything and then just
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tried to go, like never really thought about why he was doing stuff.
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But it's, I hope that everyone, you know, has the blessings to achieve everything they
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ever wanted to achieve in life so that they can know that it wasn't what they wanted.
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Which is, no, I mean, it's, it's, it's, that's the type of stuff you want to achieve.
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And when I dream, I don't just dream any old dream.
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I dream about being three-time Golden Globe winning actor, Jim Carrey, because then I
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And this is why I'll often play clips of him like on other Base Camp episodes.
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What good is a fast car, a flash house, and a gold plate, a dunny to me?
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I've been put on this planet to protect wildlife and wilderness areas, which in essence is going
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Every single cent I get goes straight into conservation.
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The way, like, just genuinely, like, pure good-hearted happiness.
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Is there anything in this world that would want to make me give away what I'm doing now?
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When my children can take the football that I call wildlife conservation and run it up.
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When they're ready to run up our mission, I will gladly step aside.
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And I guarantee you it'll be the proudest moment of my life.
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And my job will be done like my mom and my dad.
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Then and only then will I know that I have achieved my ultimate goal.
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And that is really interesting that you can see this when somebody who has dedicated themselves to a higher calling.
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Like, he definitely had a secular higher calling.
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Like, his higher calling was preserving the environment, right?
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And it doesn't have to be, like, a higher calling that we approve of.
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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.
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I thought of Bill Murray and, like, probably his objective function is not something that we would choose for ourselves.
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But he clearly, he's very consistent in his action and, like, both publicly and privately.
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Karen Michael drove more than 300 miles from her home outside Chicago to the ballpark in Cleveland.
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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.
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I was at the will call window hoping that somebody didn't pick up their tickets and I would be able to rebuy them.
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Murray was passing by and saw Karen being turned away heartbroken.
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And he turned around, gave me the ticket, shuffled me in the door.
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I was ecstatic to even be going into the game, let alone actually sitting with him.
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Roker also showed this goofy video of Murray playing hairdresser with another fan.
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Well, and it doesn't seem to me that this is ever about fame or hedonism for him.
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But anyway, so back to the talking point, demons, right?
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Like, where can I borrow themes around what demons look like?
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Yeah, can I share my, my, my idea of demons, what I think they are actually in our metaphysical
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metaphysical world is so we have the future police, which are essentially like our religions
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equivalent of angels, because we often say, you know, when something happens, and you don't
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know why, or it seems bad at the time, we're like, listen, the future police made this happen
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And if we are on a righteous path, essentially, it is going to be for the best.
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And we found in our lives that whenever something seemingly terrible happens, it actually is for
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So they are, in that sense to us, a guardian angel.
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But I think that they can equally be demons, and that the same future police that are nudging
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your life in a positive direction can be the same demons that nudge your life in a terrible
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direction toward death, toward ruin, toward obsolescence, because you are not, to use
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a Calvinist term among the elect, and a sign that demons are punishing you, that the future
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police are punishing rather than rewarding you, is that you are pursuing a life of hedonism.
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And so you are going to be increasingly punished by them, made obsolete, made miserable, made,
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And I think it's the most per our worldview, logically consistent view.
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And it's also simple and elegant, because the same people who reward can also punish
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Well, so, you know, I like this idea of the same entity that is rewarding, or group of entities
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that is rewarding actions that increase the potential flourishing of the human race, do
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They would need to remove the non-meaningful people.
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They would need to take out the ones who might cause damage, right?
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Who might not create the future that needs to happen.
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Well, to abandon those that succumb to the temptation and the tests that they have laid
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Well, and I think if you see historically, you know, one of the things we did when we were
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looking at raising our kids is going through historic figures that ended up moving human
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civilization on a direction that we think was better.
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Like, if we're thinking about raising our kids to be great people, like we do believe
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I do want to become one myself in great person history, right?
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But one of the things that you just see consistently is in their youth, they underwent some form of
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enormous trial or some form of enormous undeserved hardship often.
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But no, you just see this over and over and over again.
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You know, you saw it in the recent Elon Musk book, whether it's Caesar and the Pirates,
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whether it's, you know, there's always stuff like this, right?
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And I love this as a mechanism because if the future police were guiding all of these
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individuals as well, they had to put them through these trials so that they could know
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and they had to give them the temptations so that they could ensure that they deserved
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their blessings and their guidance to, you know, the future that must come to pass.
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But this is also very different than most religion structure of demons.
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One interesting way that some religious or cultural views don't do demons but still do
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chaotic forces, which I would say is probably closer to future police, is with the tricksters
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that you'll see like in many Native American traditions.
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Yeah, but I just don't know if we believe in tricksters.
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Yeah, but I think tricksters are interesting in that, you know, to your point that like,
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oh, you know, all these religions have demons.
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I wouldn't say that demons are universal or that everyone...
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But what I think is pretty odd for a religious structure is a religious structure that believes
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that both the entities acting negatively in your life and the entities acting positively in
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The Greek and Roman gods seems to be that, right?
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Sometimes they would be complete dicks to you and sometimes they would be pretty cool.
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I'd say it's closer to like the Christian God where the negative things that befall someone
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Well, I mean, this isn't true of all iterations of Christianity, but it is definitely true of some.
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But he often doesn't, or at least in the iterations that I'm familiar with, use angels to perform
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He instead uses the angels to sort of give demons or devils permission to, the devil permission
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The actual Bible itself often goes very rarely into this sort of stuff.
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Yeah, I don't recall anything about angels or demons in the Bible.
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I just recall, for example, Satan, like, goading God into making Job's life miserable.
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I'm not even tempting, just being like, you really think Job thinks you're doing great.
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But anyway, so back to demons and our structure, right?
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So another thing that I really like, and it's funny, we, in our book, we called, we said
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one of the names for the deity that we call God, as we call it, is the Omniscion, you
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But obviously, or the Inevitable God that we tied from the...
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Obviously, we took some inspiration from the Warhammer universe from that, just because
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But I was also sort of thinking of it in terms of a lore structure, and I really like its
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lore structure around the types or sort of the domains of demons.
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And what I like about this is in terms of teaching my children how to resist the core
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You know, when these future police are acting adversarial to you, when they are testing you,
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they do that through enemy agents, through empowering individuals, real humans often, or
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social movements or events in your life that you can call the enemy, to test you, to pull
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And that the enemy, what I like about the Warhammer framing here is you can use the four
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chaos gods as the faces that the enemy uses and the avatar the enemy uses to pull you from
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It'll take somebody who's already fallen, often succumb to some form of ideological virus,
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and then utilize, puppet that individual, often as part of the virus's reproductive cycle,
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to try to peel you off from the path of righteousness.
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So if I'm going to go through the four deities in the Warhammer universe and sort of see how
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I see them represented here, which is interesting, because I just find them much more compelling
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than more traditional deities I'm familiar with from other demons, I'm familiar with from
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The reason why I think that they're more compelling is because they were sort of come to a priori
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from an authorial standpoint, instead of being, so historically, if you look at like Christianity,
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what Christianity would often do is frame the gods of neighboring religions as demons or
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You know, like Moloch, right, was a neighboring religion during early Judaism, right?
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So, and words for demon and stuff like that, or Baal was a neighboring deity, right?
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Which means that they would often take a lot of the iconography from that instead of coming
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Now, of course, if you're taking this from our weird religious perspective, we would say
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that these are not actual a priori, but these are visions of the way that you might be tested
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that are easy for a child to conceive of, right?
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So the four core deities born by four core human sources of temptation or fear or negative
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The first, we would say, is Nurgle, which in the universe is sort of the deity of pestilence,
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which is born by humans' fear of death and desire to keep living through anything.
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And the gifts that it gives to people who follow it most are the alleviation of pain associated
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with death and stuff like that, like diseases, et cetera.
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Simone, what group would be most associated with a paralyzing fear of death leading them
00:26:33.600
Our longtime enemy, the life extensionists.
0.68
00:26:40.760
Well, I mean, I like that because I think it's really true.
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.
00:27:25.480
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.
00:28:59.380
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.
00:29:12.560
And I'm like, yeah, but how does it make the world a better place?
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.
00:30:02.380
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.
00:30:24.660
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?
00:30:50.620
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.
00:31:00.500
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.
00:31:13.900
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.
00:31:48.580
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.
00:31:57.540
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.
00:32:17.680
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.
00:32:32.440
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
00:32:48.640
Well, and Simone knows when world conflicts erupt, I'm often like, well, Simone, should I go there?
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
00:34:02.620
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.
00:34:53.520
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
00:35:07.980
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.
00:36:20.780
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.
00:36:32.160
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
00:38:05.980
So I think they destroyed it with the new World of Darkness.
00:38:10.340
Like, was Malkavians being a disease instead of a distinct clan?
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,
00:38:42.360
So a lot of hippies, they'll come to me and they'll say things like,
00:38:48.060
Like, well, what if deities are created by humans believing in them, right?
00:38:58.140
It's a very neat human American gods kind of view.
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.,
00:39:18.800
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.
00:39:38.180
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,
00:39:55.600
where you sort of have to beat emotions out of individuals, because...
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,
00:40:16.200
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.
00:40:34.280
Anyway, I love you, and I love that you're okay with me being a stinking nerd.
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,
00:40:55.580
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,
00:41:05.640
And these individuals are just human puppets of failed human creatures that are testing them.