Why is Americana culture so resistant to the urban monoculture? And why is it more resistant than Jewish culture? Simone and Simone discuss why, and how you can protect your culture from the monocultural world.
00:00:00.000Hello, Simone. I'm excited to be here with you today. Today, we are going to be discussing how you can better protect your culture, especially if you have a conservative or religious culture or in any way distinct culture from the urban monoculture.
00:00:16.200And I wanted to do it within the context of, oh, why is Americana culture so resistant to the urban monoculture? And it really hit me today because it is more resistant than other cultures. Like America's fertility rate is like 1.66 now, whereas even like developing countries like Colombia, I was on a McKinsey call. And on that call, this is McKinsey's take, it had a fertility rate of 1.02.
00:00:42.440You know, I was talking with some Italian reporters recently and they were like at 1.2 something. And I was like, this is just terrible. And you see this all over the world. So why is Americana culture alongside Jewish culture so resistant? And I will be pointing out that they are resistant almost in exactly opposite ways.
00:01:01.380Like they both built a resistance. Like they both built a resistance, but that, well, there is one area in which it's alive. It is both fundamentally based on a pride in being different from the urban monoculture.
00:01:13.860Hmm. But for Jews, this pride is in being Jewish. In Americana culture, this pride is in upsetting the urban monoculture, basically upsetting anybody who tells you what to do or who to be. That is the core of it. And I see it, you know, represented in things like truck nuts.
00:01:34.600And where this was handed, no, it is like, what's more like Trump or like real red sanders?
00:01:40.160Let me explain this because I hadn't, I didn't see them until my adulthood. Truck nuts for those who are uninitiated. Literally a pair of balls that people hang from the trailer hitch of their trucks. Proceed.
00:01:53.540And it hit me when I had a T the principal from Octavian school was talking to me and he's always getting in trouble at school because he does things that he's not allowed to do, like make poop jokes, make fart jokes, make guns with his hand, you know, and the school is just apoplectic about all of this.
00:02:14.320But all of this stuff is very much Americana, you know, Appalachian culture. Like that's the cultural region my family's from. I'm not going to shame my kid for doing this stuff.
00:02:23.600So I explained to him the same way a Jewish family might, this type of behavior is for home and out in the world, you can't do this type of behavior.
00:02:31.920But what's really important about what I'm doing here is so many cultures, when they realize that they can't do something at school, when they can't do something out in the world, they make bans against it at home to make lives easier for their kids out in the world.
00:02:48.380But they maintain bans at home that they expect to also carry out into the world, i.e. maybe a ban on being slutty or a ban on same-sex marriages or something like that, right?
00:03:00.820Don't, don't, don't. It's all about sacrificing.
00:03:03.220Don't, don't, don't, don't. Because they're okay with adding don'ts, but they're not okay with taking away, gaining permissions that are unique to their culture.
00:03:15.520Yeah, they're inadvertently taking away amenities. So my kids, because of this, they're learning a number of very important things.
00:03:22.720They're learning, one, that the outside world is different from the Collins family.
00:03:27.400There are things and behaviors allowed in the Collins family that aren't allowed in the outside world, but two, they're immediately having, with the very first ways where they see the outside world is different than our family's culture, see it as more restrictive, more authoritarian, and more controlling.
00:03:47.760So they understand when they abandon my family's culture or like cultural groups that are adjacent to my family, they lose freedoms rather than gain freedoms.
00:04:03.040And this is core to the way Americana culture has fared so well against the urban monoculture.
00:04:12.020It highlights throughout it, the additional freedoms that you have by being a part of that culture that they do not have.
00:04:19.520And here I wanted to read a piece that I thought really did a good job of explaining this and better explaining why Mormonism is in a state of collapse doesn't have this feature, whereas the Americana culture is doing so well.
00:04:34.980And it aligns with a really great study that we'll be going over later that was done by one of our fans that showed that being a Trump voter boosts fertility rates as much as being a Mormon in Utah.
00:04:48.300So if you are a non-Mormon Trump voter in Utah, you will have a slightly higher fertility rate than a non-Trump voting Mormon.
00:04:56.520And Mormons are increasingly non-Trump voting.
00:04:59.060So we'll go over that in a different video.
00:05:01.640Yeah, I would put it so there there's this relationship researching slash coaching group called the Gottman Institute, which we largely hate.
00:05:10.260There's one good point they have, which is a really good predictor of whether a relationship stays together is if the majority of the couple's interactions are positive versus negative.
00:05:20.660And I think that kind of goes with pretty much anything.
00:05:23.360It's not necessarily a married couple thing.
00:05:26.200If the majority of your interactions with a religion or a friend or a school or an employer are negative and about no and no, and you messed this up and you can't do this and you shouldn't do that.
00:05:38.420And you, how, how dare you instead of, oh, guess what?
00:06:04.600And then the benefits seem to start easing away.
00:06:09.020But this is, this is what's fascinating to, to your point there is what we are doing with our family.
00:06:14.740And what Americana culture does is it engineers a situation where my kids have additional negative events when they're in urban monocultural environments.
00:06:27.960So they develop an intrinsically negative view of the urban monoculture from a young age.
00:06:34.060When they go to school, it's teachers saying, no, you can't make poo jokes.
00:07:00.360You know, that's why they dress weird.
00:07:02.040That's why they look weird, act weird, everything like that.
00:07:04.440Where weird is judged by distance from the urban monoculture.
00:07:06.960An Orthodox Jew is going to have far more negative daily experiences interacting with the urban monoculture because of how they differentiate themselves than they will within the Jewish community.
00:07:17.520People are like, why do you give your kids weird names?
00:07:31.320You think you're like normal, like intellectual online person who is exploring like how to make cultures thrive or could be a good potential mate is going to be like, oh, Indian, like your name is industry.
00:07:49.920You know, whereas the negative experiences they have within the urban monoculture are positive.
00:07:56.260And you might say, oh, why would you engineer negative experiences for your children where they're told no or they're told whatever, right?
00:08:03.340And I'm like, because in the long term, it helps them.
00:08:09.020Not capitulating to the urban monoculture is great for your mental health.
00:08:13.140Capitulating to the urban monoculture is terrible for your mental health, as any of the studies will show you.
00:08:17.480Whatever you want, whenever you want, and constantly seeking affirmation and being affirmed for whatever you want to believe about yourself.
00:08:23.520Well, while simultaneously pedestalizing anything negative you feel and making it a thing when otherwise it might have just been an ephemeral negative thing.
00:08:32.420Yeah, yeah, surprise, surprise, this hypersensitizes you to negative stimuli and then causes you to have these anxiety and depression spirals.
00:08:37.920But I want to get into a paper here that I found really fascinating, unless you had any final words.
00:08:44.040This is by Catgirl Kulak, absolutely amazing writer, talked with them before, really respect this person as an intellectual.
00:08:50.660And they wrote a piece titled, American Conservatism and Fertility Cult Your, on immunity in the cultural swamp.
00:08:59.920And they have a map here that shows fertility rates around the world.
00:09:02.580And you can see like, everywhere is crashing.
00:09:05.100And I'll put up one that I use as a more detailed modern one by McKenzie, which I found really good.
00:09:09.820Which shows that America is actually doing fairly well.
00:09:14.420The only subcultures that have managed to achieve above replacement fertility at average incomes above 5 to 10K, and this is true, are Jewish conservatives and American conservatives.
00:09:25.820There are some other like weird groups in like Kazakhstan or something, maybe.
00:09:30.700But I don't think that they have particularly high incomes.
00:09:33.000So the only groups in the world that I know of that are like large cultural groups are Jewish conservatives and American conservatives.
00:09:39.880And American conservatives do have above replacement fertility.
00:09:42.440Everyone else, Muslims, Hindus, Orthodox, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, secular Euros, Irish Catholics, everyone of them sees birth rates collapse below replacement when they become wealthy at 5 to 10K GDP per capital.
00:10:00.6405 to 10K per year is not that wealthy.
00:10:02.800Even Africans and South Americans see birth rate collapse as soon as they become middle to upper income.
00:10:09.280What makes these two exceptions so unique?
00:10:11.300Many notice Israel is above replacement and immediately think, conspiratorially, the people behind the media, financial, globalism, progressivism, is making it harder to live, are somehow immune to anti-familiar poison.
00:11:22.040The urban monoculture may hate them, but it doesn't hold the special type of hatred it holds for rural, white, traditional Americana Americans.
00:11:34.460The much despised white man, the loathsome Americana, the rubes, the flyover kulaks.
00:11:43.820No conservative slash Israel aligned Jews and white American conservatives aren't the only two groups above replacement rate because of a conspiracy.
00:11:51.780They're the only two above replacement rate because they're the only ones with adaptive immunity to global homogenized urban progressivism mind virus.
00:11:58.920All cultures around the world, as they've developed, partially due to American empire, partially due to the logic of globalization, have adapted the same Anglo-inspired monoculture more or less.
00:12:11.120Equality between sex, dual income household, urbanization, contraceptions, extreme educational investment during traditional marriage years, not getting married until financially established, which now only happens in your 30s when you're already well past prime child years.
00:12:28.000Even Iran has been, has not been immune to this.
00:12:32.220Despite the heroic and divinely guided effort of Supreme Leader Kamali, they're now below replacement.
00:12:39.820And I'll note here before, they're well below replacement for over a decade.
00:12:43.180And I'll note here on the style of Catgirl Kulak's writing here, it really follows this Americana irreverent style where it's intentionally written in a way
00:12:53.940where it couldn't receive commendations from your traditional intellectual who wants to look better than other people.
00:13:02.120You know, he'll make jokes about Jewish people.
00:13:04.500He'll make jokes about like the Americana.
00:13:06.560He'll make, he'll write in a way that is grammatically more fun.
00:13:09.900And so when he has to choose between writing in a fun way and writing in a way that is, I guess I'd say like status seeking, he chooses the fun way.
00:13:19.000You also see this with people like Bronze Age Pervert who have risen within the New Right.
00:13:23.180And that's because the New Right and the New Right intellectuals fundamentally recognize this.
00:13:28.480It is through showing that we are not interested in signaling to the traditional intellectual class that we can validate our authenticity among this new community.
00:13:44.920The only peoples who are immune to this cultural virus are those that have been exposed to it since its inception, i.e. the conservative cultures who've been resisting Anglo monoculture for a hundred years.
00:13:55.180Conservative Jews fought to resist modernizing liberal monoculture as conservative Christians and the Amish.
00:14:02.180Notably, Mormons would have once been on this list as well, but their fertility has fallen off a cliff in the last five to ten years.
00:14:08.500And I can actually identify the culprit for why their fertility finally fell off a cliff.
00:14:17.840Mormonism is a culture that is always on the outside of mainstream American life, but always wanted to be at the center.
00:14:23.360Mormonism historically suffered great persecution and persecution at the hands of the American state and culture, but always aspired to be the quintessential American religion.
00:14:34.400All of their founding events, revelations, religious mythology were set within America, and they always saw their face as something that should be Americana.
00:14:43.220Even the Mormon earnest salesman, proselytizer, teetotaler, hardworking, go-getter, huckster attitude is quintessentially American, and he's absolutely right about this.
00:14:54.080And tragically, they tried to make America love them back.
00:14:58.080They remind Mormonism acts polygamy, they act racial theological commitments, no more racially barring from the clergy, bans on interracial marriage, or theological claim that faithful blacks would become white after death.
00:15:11.520And faithfully, they sought out religious protection slash recognition, and then sought to work within the U.S. government.
00:15:19.620After being a persecuted and excluded religious group, Mormons became amongst the core recruits for U.S. security, state, and bureaucratic jobs.
00:15:26.840And this is true, they're overwhelmingly represented in the U.S. government.
00:15:29.780Having little problem with drug testing or polygraphs, Mormons were quickly becoming what Cossacks had become to the Russian czar.
00:15:37.560To the Soviet state, after the czar, a core ethnicity of regime-aligned enforcers, they had requested 180 years for respectability, their proper place as the most American of American religious groups.
00:15:51.400And then Trump appeared, the embodiment of the rejection of all respectability.
00:15:56.500The man who rallied the rage of the Americana folk cultures, the man who would have challenged the state and regime openly, the polar opposite of Mormon-cultivated niceness in Bergoi's decency, and their ties to conservative culture, and more importantly, their remaining exclusion of mainstream culture frayed and broke.
00:16:16.460I saw this in the Mormons I knew, the ex-Mormons I knew.
00:16:20.140Their horror, their restrained outrage, the indecency of the man.
00:16:24.460Famously, in 2016, the Never Trump campaign ran an independent presidential candidate in the state of Utah, Evan McMullen, who was a Mormon retired, or maybe retired, CIA officer, undergrad at Brigham Young University, then went to Wharton business graduate.
00:16:41.520Exactly the type of man Mormons believe should be president, respectable, experienced, proper, loyal to the American state, and proudly confused if you ask about the distinction between church and state, the nation and the country, or whether these loyalties might conflict.
00:16:56.360Actually, this is a really good point that distinguishes the type of Christianity that is dying out versus the type that is going strong in America, is the individuals, and I've seen this in some of the conservatives I've been talking to recently who have no kids,
00:17:11.360The types of people who are like, oh, America should get rid of the separation of church and state, these are the types of Christians that are dying out.
00:17:20.760Whereas the types of conservatives and Christians who would immediately recoil in horror at the concept of combining the church and the state are the ones who are doing strong, because they are the ones who are intrinsically suspicious of imbuing the church with that kind of power, making it immediately untrustworthy.
00:17:42.460You know, the church has value because it's something that we can explore ourselves, if it was just something we were told, this is what's true, this is what's not true, we the bureaucrats have made this decision, then that's a church without any value.
00:17:55.740Or at least this is a perspective that is maintaining strength against the urban monoculture, because it is a perspective that holds a suspicion of authority, and suspicion of authority makes it very hard to force the dominant cultural value system onto an individual.
00:18:12.460And of course, the Atlantic and other left-wing magazines loved him, just like they loved all never-Trumpers.
00:18:20.380Even respectable Republican figure Evan McMullin thinks Trump is the death of the Republic.
00:18:26.900And of course, once your culture and face drips into that vortex of progressive liberal urban monoculture, it's all over.
00:18:35.000I imagine Mormon girls gasping in shock at how not-respectable Trump's grab-her-by-the-pussy take was, and slowly drifting ever outwards towards progressivism, buying contraceptive, and deciding to do just one more degree, or just get that much more established, or pursue an urban career just that much further, recoiling in horror at the improper aggression which was Roe v. Wade overturned.
00:18:59.000Or the vulgarity of conservative politics, as she veers further and further, and Mormon birth rates decline further below replacement.
00:19:08.440It's tragic. Mormon spent over 180 years wishing America and American state would love them back, not understanding that the second the affection was reciprocated, it would be their doom.
00:19:18.160Like a praying mantis finally winning the heart of a red, white, and blue female.
00:19:22.680They wanted to be quintessentially American people, was quintessentially American religion, and pursued civic duty and cultural acceptance with the earnestness to make a Roman city father proud.
00:19:33.960Not understanding that if there was one thing that was quintessentially American, indeed core to its irrepressible folk culture, it was hatred of the government.
00:19:45.140And an inherent suspicion of its major civil institutions.
00:19:49.220And I would go further, it's hatred of the cultural norm.
00:19:52.640Hatred of anyone telling you what to do.
00:19:55.140And this is fundamentally what individuals like Matt Walsh will never understand about the standard American conservative.
00:20:01.000When he makes fun of things like anime, when he makes fun of things like gooners, when he makes fun of things like video game players.
00:20:10.100If he's out there doing this, hey, I have the back of what's respectable and normal, and you guys are weirdos.
00:20:18.660America has always been about the weirdos.
00:20:23.000That is fundamentally, it is us pissing you off that certifies our validity as Americans.
00:20:29.740Because I don't give a, what you think about me.
00:20:36.980And that's how people know, and other Americans who were raised within the Appalachian American folk culture know, the one that's maintained a high fertility day, know that I'm legit or based or whatever word you want to say.
00:20:50.720Whereas you are fundamentally a cuck-servative.
00:20:53.780You may signal more to what you think of as standard conservative values, but you sold out the one thing that makes us quintessentially American, which is respect for the person who bucks the system and fights against authority.
00:21:09.740And that's also what Mormons didn't contain.
00:21:12.040And this is why individuals like Matt Walsh are part of the group of conservatives that are going to be outbred and washed out with the urban monoculture.
00:21:23.380In the same way that like pus leaves a wound after all the antigen terms.
00:21:30.040Now mainline Latter-day Saints is going the way of American Presbyterianism without even the whiskey to hold on to.
00:21:36.780And he has a graph here showing them disappear.
00:21:38.540Conservative Jews and particularly Orthodox Jews persist because their culture has existed in the urban cultural cores of the most advanced countries and adapted themselves to maximally alienate the faithful from that culture.
00:21:50.260The obsessive rituals, the bizarre maximally garish haircuts of a style reminiscence of Mongolian warlords and punk rockers that ensures one cannot switch clothes and choose to blend in for an afternoon or a trip on the town.
00:22:05.760The intense ritualization of male-slash-female interaction.
00:22:10.260Everything exists to break the possibility of true cultural interface with the surrounding culture.
00:22:16.380Of course, if one looks at fully secular Jews, inevitably urban, outside Israel, they fall below replacement immediately.
00:22:22.160Often their kids and grandkids even lose knowledge of their culture, being surprised they're quote-unquote Jewish.
00:22:28.340Only adopting the identity like so many post-Soviet Jews, many only meet the vaguest definition when they see economic opportunity in Israel.
00:22:37.500This Orthodox Jewish purposeful alienation, this embracement of cultural alienation, the cringe of a genuine cultural gap, a gap that can only be surmounted by betrayal, that is what maintains a culture.
00:22:50.920And he is absolutely right about this.
00:22:53.820You have to be cringe to have vitalism.
00:22:58.260And truck nuts are like, I love this as a symbol of traditional Americana.
00:23:05.400It is not this, this part of American culture.
00:23:08.080This new right was always there below with the foot on them of the theocratic aristocratic right that many of these individuals like Matt Walsh represent that wanted to impose their culture on other people, silently outbreeding them in the background.
00:23:27.560It's that aristocratic right was dying and dying and dying every generation, losing more of its kids to the urban monoculture because they didn't know how to fight it.
00:23:37.500It desperately wanted to fit in, even if it wasn't with the urban monoculture, maybe it was with their conception of what a conservative is without understanding that rebellion is the core of fighting the urban monoculture.
00:23:53.220Because my kids, like when they go to school, the core thing they need to drop, the core thing the urban monoculture has to get them to drop, to be allowed to fit in with it, is not to be a rebel, to not speak their mind, to not curse when they feel like cursing, to not like Trump's wear, to not be vulgar when they feel like being vulgar.
00:24:12.400The urban monoculture cannot handle, like when I tell my kids why the school doesn't let them play with their hands like gun, I'm like, oh, well, they're not like our family.
00:24:21.380They're so stupid, they think that you could shoot somebody with your handgun.
00:24:25.320They think that this could hurt somebody, but you know the difference between this and a real gun.
00:24:29.460And we laugh at that as a family because it's so funny to us how stupid you need to be to think a handgun could hurt somebody or a chicken nugget that was shaped like a gun.
00:24:40.020One kid got like detention for that at one school.
00:24:42.820I think that this really helps understand the part of American culture that is going to go extinct was this old aristocratic branch of the conservative party that briefly held sway in America.
00:24:55.380And many people, because they grew up during that time period, thought to be real American conservatism.
00:25:01.580This was a branch that said, oh, well, if you are different, you're weird.
00:25:08.680It shamed people from deviation from what it saw as respectable, acceptable cultural norms.
00:25:16.960Whereas the iteration of the Americana culture that is doing well fertility-wise and is doing well at keeping their kids within the culture is the branch that always saw any degree of rebellion against social norms as validating of an individual.
00:25:34.620And so it made no sense to say, oh, this individual is weird or this individual is deviant.
00:25:40.240And this is, you know, the culture that, for example, J.D. Vance comes from.
00:25:44.400When you look at J.D. Vance as a kid, what are his hobbies?
00:25:47.120There's things like Magic the Gathering, right?
00:25:49.160And I remember this from my social groups that I hung out with in rural Texas growing up is nerdy hobbies like Magic the Gathering.
00:25:57.640That's actually where I got into Magic the Gathering.
00:25:59.840Those were the communities that were often most into them.
00:26:02.980Those were the communities where if I wanted to jump into, you know, whatever sci-fi I was watching those days, whether it was Stargate SG-1 or Farscape, that those kids would be the most likely to be up to date on those shows.
00:26:15.980Whereas I wouldn't expect that if I was talking was like the city Catholic conservatives.
00:26:20.980J.D. Vance, he is the type of person who, if he was growing up today, would be an anime nerd.
00:26:25.940The hobbies, which are seen as othering, are the hobbies that this category of conservative is drawn to.
00:26:35.000Consider something like the MLP fandom.
00:26:37.400That's the My Little Pony fandom getting its start on 4chan, which is a conservative bastion.
00:26:43.880It was specifically a way to attack the normative culture within 4chan because, okay, now we've normalized to this attack everything culture.
00:26:54.540Well, let's choose something garishly wholesome to be the new sign of rebellion.
00:27:00.900And that happened for a generation and then washed out.
00:27:03.820But that was what was going on with that.
00:27:05.660And I think, in part, that's why things like comics and anime and video games have always been the purview of conservatives, as we see right now in the video game fights online.
00:27:18.920The people who are repelled by, oh, this is weird, this is nerdy, you shouldn't do it.
00:27:25.340If you can use that strategy to edit someone's behavior, then the urban monoculture is going to have an easy time editing your behavior.
00:27:34.000So if you raise your kids being afraid of defying cultural norms, you know, like a Matt Walsh might in terms of like, oh, anime's bad, video game's bad, urban monoculture is going to be able to take the same strategy that you use to control your kids' actions, behaviors, and norms and use it to peel them out of your culture.
00:27:55.840And this is what American white conservatives have uniquely developed.
00:27:59.620Indeed, the progressive liberal monoculture works hard to integrate the traditions of almost every other culture and every other cultures, not having interacted with Anglo-progressive liberals, don't identify them as a threat.
00:28:12.820Or at least don't identify them with outgroup hatred.
00:28:16.820It's a wonder Irish Republican Catholics and Ulster loyalist prots can still somehow hate each other and be more worried about whether they're the Irish Republic or the United Kingdom when both are in identical drifts towards low fertility, low gross, Euro decline, but not the American conservatives.
00:28:34.320Indeed, American conservatism uniquely has always been the outgroup of secular progressivism and has always seen itself that way.
00:28:41.940It has sought out to create new ideas of cringe, country music culture, redneck, rock culture, of figures like kid rock or just the surface, backyards wrestling, megachurches, evangelism, and even truck nuts.
00:28:56.620And when I wrote to this teacher, I was like, just tell the kids that like at home, they act one way and at school, they act another, like you would with any conservative.
00:29:03.000I'm just like, you know, we're from the Appalachian, the greater Appalachian cultural group.
00:29:06.900And of course, I know when she reads that, when she reads writer Appalachian cultural group, she's reading hillbilly, like mud pirate, you know, like whatever, like cannibals living in the woods.
00:29:20.160The derision is what allows my kids to see themselves as different and where they can understand the benefits of my culture versus the urban monoculture.
00:29:29.200In a world where the urban liberal internationalist respects all people's sexualities, religions, and nationalities, the Americana rural culture has worked incredibly hard to make itself intolerable, anti-respectable.
00:30:29.700It's pretty popular, but it's not that popular.
00:30:31.400It's not certainly not paying our bills, but it prevents us from raising another round, right?
00:30:35.560It helped that the heart of the globalist culture comprised of their direct, immediate international political enemies.
00:30:42.180That they have the animus to differentiate themselves, but the wider cultural ethos cannot be ignored.
00:30:48.480There's no reason the second American culture couldn't have been equally antinatalist in its effects.
00:30:54.080Instead, American conservatism exhibits culturally the adaptive traits one observes in the group of parasite and disease-heavy corners of the world.
00:31:02.680Just as the natives of various jungles exhibit unique resistances and immunities to many of the diseases and parasites found there,
00:31:09.600often allowing them to survive uninvaded until the 19th to 20th century, so too do American conservatives.
00:31:16.180Natives of the disease-laden American cultural jungle exhibit a unique immunity to its most devastating mimetic disease.
00:31:22.840If you're a member of European or East Asian or Persian culture trying to improve your birth rates,
00:31:28.320one could do worse than start trying to import the Americana folk culture that global urbanites despise.
00:31:36.080How does saying, thank God I'm a country boy fair, if you haven't watched country music recently, you should, because it's great.
00:31:42.680And I love one of the top comments on this, where somebody said,
00:31:45.400I doubt any other governments will import American redneck conservatism because they can't abide by the core belief that each individual holds.
00:31:52.840You are not the boss of me. And that is so true.
00:31:56.500And it doesn't matter who you are, a group of people who hold that belief make poor serfs to be ruled over, but a productive businessman.
00:32:05.480Now, I will note here that this group fundamentally is at odds with what Mormons have because they have the central church hierarchy.
00:32:13.700So there's always, you know, you're never supposed to say, well, who are you to tell me this?
00:32:17.900You know, and the same way we treat religion.
00:32:19.160Yeah, the Mormon church is super, super hierarchical.
00:32:22.260And I think that's another element that you haven't really thoroughly discussed here, which is sort of the fundamental structure of the predominant religion of these different groups, that Judaism is not a monolithic thing.
00:32:36.140Like there are all these sub-communities and all these different sort of rabbis and different groups.
00:32:41.620It is not a centrally ruled hierarchy.
00:32:44.500In fact, it's very much, as we've discussed in other episodes, a huge meritocracy where if you are smarter, if you are cleverer, if you can learn the sort of the knowledge and the memes better, and you can debate better, you can get to the top of the hierarchy.
00:33:01.340There is no, like, you've got to work your way up, or this isn't your place.
00:33:05.020Actually, if you point out other people are wrong, and you can back that up with argument, that elevates it.
00:33:11.260Yeah, you are celebrated for being anti-establishment.
00:33:14.540You're celebrated for questioning the status quo.
00:33:16.740And the similar thing exists for the backwoods people who are this combination of Calvinist, which, you know, in itself is a religion that's quite anti-establishment, at least vis-a-vis the Catholic Church, but also, like, these warring clans from Ireland and Scotland, which were also very independent and very sort of competitive with these blood feuds.
00:33:39.760So, you have to have this lack of centralized hierarchy, whereas I think it's very difficult to be a Mormon and to pull a ring, because you just can't.
00:33:50.840Even when you're, like, a really high-status person, like Mitt Romney, you're just given more and more responsibilities.
00:33:57.240You're given more and more work by the hierarchy of the church.
00:34:00.660And, in fact, you lower your status was in Mormonism by, I was talking to the Mormon recently, and they were talking about the cultural taboo they have against what they call deep theology.
00:34:08.960Which is, like, getting into, like, the real nitty-gritty, deep stuff of, like, continued human—I forget the word here.
00:34:18.680A great example of this is the concept of eternal progression.
00:34:22.360I have literally had two different Mormons tell me on opposite sides of this issue, one arguing that no, humans don't eventually become gods, and the other arguing that humans do actually become gods.
00:34:35.520And both of them told me that no other Mormons actually had the opposite belief, and that it was actually a super-fringed belief.
00:34:42.280And they both 100% believed this, had gone on missions where they were around other Mormons the entire time, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
00:34:49.000Just in case you're wondering, like, what the actual breakdown of who believes what in the Mormon community, I decided to ask Claude to see if I could get a straight answer on this.
00:35:27.400And then, unaware of the doctrine's historical importance, perhaps 10-15%, more common among new converts, are those in international areas with less exposure to Mormon theological history.
00:35:37.160And I find this really fascinating, like, such a major part of—this isn't, like, a small thing.
00:35:44.080Like, Mormons will be like, oh, you know, we don't focus on the mysteries, like, it's not important to debate, you know, I can maybe understand all of that.
00:35:52.460But this is, like, the core thing of what happens to you after you die.
00:35:57.580There could be such diversity of beliefs about this, and yet Mormons would not perceive this diversity of beliefs.
00:36:06.480Two really interesting quotes from a Mormon fan of the show that I was talking to about this that I'd read here.
00:36:14.080And this helps understand where Mormons draw the delineation about the type of stuff you're not allowed to talk about.
00:36:19.620Mormons are very anti-mysticism in general and don't like strange ideas.
00:36:23.460The difference between Jews and normal Anglos was coming up with cool new theories and interesting ideas is like the same distance as normal Anglos was LDS, as in ideas relating to the non-material world are taboo.
00:36:38.940Any idea that can't be explained by science is taboo.
00:36:42.000That may come from a strong materialist bias within Mormonism.
00:36:46.560Materialistic philosophical forms of Mormonism heavily suppress and like to pretend that non-materialist forms of Mormonism thought do not exist.
00:36:54.740And this really helped me when I read that to understand the things you're not allowed to talk about or not encouraged to talk about was in Mormonism.
00:37:04.540I'm like, if you're on like a Mormon mission with someone, like what are they talking about if not philosophy or debating the doctrine?
00:37:12.440Because like if I was stuck, given my culture, on a mission with someone and it was focused around being religious, a core thing I would be doing is debating religious philosophy.
00:37:24.200And apparently that's like specifically called out as something you're not supposed to do was in Mormon mission documents.
00:37:32.060So they just never talk about these things with each other and thus do not realize their own internal diversity of beliefs.
00:37:39.900And another thing that he wrote that I thought helps understand why it's considered so heretical for me to point out that there is this diversity of Mormon beliefs to Mormons is,
00:37:50.540So finally, to answer your questions about how Mormons make decisions, they make decisions in unity.
00:37:56.300Opposition, revulsion, and dissension are taboo.
00:37:59.740You don't disagree directly to someone's face.
00:38:02.440Decisions literally don't get made until everyone is on board.
00:38:05.860Being unanimous is highly prized in Mormon culture.
00:38:08.780Open internal debate and disagreement is frowned upon.
00:38:12.340And this made me realize that the way that Mormon culture survives, basically, is through the illusion of uniformity and conformity of beliefs.
00:38:24.280It is important to Mormon identity the belief that there is conformity and uniformity of beliefs, even though that's not true.
00:38:34.260And the way that those two things are able to exist in conjunction with each other is Mormons just don't talk about the things where there isn't easy and hard proof, whether that is scientific proof or scriptural proof.
00:38:50.640And that allows them to exist with this illusion in their heads.
00:38:56.200But because they don't talk about those things, those things actually drift much further apart from each other than they would within a normal religious tradition where they do talk about these things.
00:39:07.480I.e., even if there's disagreement within mainstream Protestantism, because we're regularly talking about what happens after death and stuff like that, we understand where that disagreement is and how vast those disagreements are.
00:39:20.080But in Mormonism, because there isn't the same discussion or picking at these particular scabs, people are unaware of where they are.
00:39:28.440And note here, I asked in AI if there was any other religious tradition in the world it could think of that had a similar sort of taboo against investigating deeper theology of something.
00:39:40.660Mormonism is totally unique in world history for this.
00:39:43.560And I would also note that this is totally unique to modern Mormonism.
00:39:47.360Mormonism used to almost be the exact opposite of this, I'd say pre-1960s, where it had a lot more philosophical, metaphysical, and theological investigation and theorizing than other Christian denominations.
00:40:02.520But I think out of fear of being seen as weird or individuals within the community who maybe went too far, this taboo began to develop fairly recently but spread very quickly.
00:40:12.960And this leads to one of the strengths of Mormonism is Mormons believe a huge diversity of things, but they are all, like when I talk to them, absolutely convinced that whatever their personal beliefs are, are actually really, really common in Mormonism.
00:40:28.440And that the other Mormons who have the diversity of beliefs are more, like, out there weirdos.
00:40:34.060When, if you're like me, because I'm really into theology and I immediately start questioning people about their weirdest and deepest beliefs, if they actually asked lots of other Mormons about, like, their deep theology, they would see there's actually a huge diversity of thought about, like, basic metaphysical things in Mormonism.
00:40:49.800Like, the nature of the soul, what happens after death, everything like that.
00:40:53.500And I think that if you look at Mormon history, this wasn't the case.
00:40:58.160So, in Mormon history, people would actually rise all the way to profit by having, like, really interesting theological ideas.
00:41:17.320I know, I know, but it was just Brigham Young and Joseph Smith as far as I was aware as an outsider.
00:41:22.200Oh, no, a lot of the early thinkers, like, when I study Mormonism, I'm typically looking at that, like, the Brigham Young and just after Brigham Young generation, that's where it's most theologically interesting to me.
00:41:30.300But those are the ideas that have been most abandoned by the modern Mormon church in terms of, like, what they publicly will tell new members, what they do outside of their own internal study.
00:41:39.740Because it's seen as, like, deep theology or, like, the weirder stuff, the stuff that really differentiates them from other Christians.
00:41:44.860And I think that that is, if the church wants to survive, it needs to return to deep thought debate being common within Mormonism.
00:41:59.820Because we have exited the era where, you know, Mormons went from this population that was so afraid of being seen as, like, a weird cult.
00:42:07.180And even when old people, when they attack Mormonism, they still say that.
00:42:10.100Young people don't see it as a weird cult, like, unless they're, like, really out of touch with mainstream culture.
00:42:14.760They either see it as normal, like, normie to the point of being boring, like, not being particularly adventurous, maybe being a bit like that.
00:42:49.020I actually say, like, when I go to old Mormon theology, when I look at old Mormon theologists, they're as good as, like, modern rabbis for theology.
00:44:17.320Yeah, and they'd build some real, that's why their theologies were so interesting.
00:44:21.180But now, if you're, like, I have a bunch of people arguing online about this, because the original texts have weight, but can sometimes be overridden by a more modern prophet, it's harder to choose, like, who wins a fight other than, like, by.
00:44:35.200And so they're really forced into this ethnic-based religion.
00:44:39.620I suspect we'll see a path through this, but it is going to be difficult for them.
00:44:44.240Um, they're going to need to cave on one of these things.
00:44:48.660Either they have to become anti-authority, or they have to become more willing to engage with the sharper, more interesting parts of their theology, or they, and at least accept the amount of diversity within their own believers.
00:45:01.360Or, they need to, like, Mormons get as mad when I point that out as Jews do when I point out how much Jew and Judaism has changed over time.
00:45:08.840I'm sure a Jew will, like, confidently claim, second temple Jews were exactly theologically like modern Jews, except the temple.
00:45:16.680Modern Mormons will be like, every Mormon believes almost the same thing, and anyone who doesn't is a no-truth god.
00:45:21.620Um, but the final point here I was going to make was, yes, it was that these two other groups also do things that intentionally other themselves.
00:45:30.980You, I, classic Americano, even Trump does things that intentionally other himself.
00:45:37.380Well, no, no, no, I don't think it's, so it's not about intentionally, that's not how they look at it.
00:45:42.720They look at, I'm going to show people how awesome I am.
00:46:18.960And this culture you're talking about isn't talking about, how do I not fit in?
00:46:23.740Because how do I not look like these stooges?
00:46:25.480Yes, but the point I was about to make was that, yes, you're right about the instinct that drives dressing in a way that intentionally causes you to look out of place in culture, create conflicts with that culture.
00:46:39.940That's how Americana culture motivates it, but there's other ways to motivate that.
00:46:43.740Jews motivate it through a completely different pathway.
00:46:46.680Just they have a bunch of traditions around how they dress and act that are out of line with mainstream culture and give them weird looks within mainstream culture.
00:47:32.680It's like a huge and bad capitulation because it allows them to look more normal.
00:47:38.760Well, women were already really heavily bending the rules because the rules were like, for example, if you were working out and, you know, it was, it could be really difficult to work out wearing garments.
00:47:49.400They're kind of heavier and sweaty, you could wear just normal workout clothes, but then basically like Mormon, Mormon wives and influencers were kind of like always in between a workout, you know, just about to go work out.
00:48:02.460So that's why they were all wearing like athleisure.
00:48:04.520But also there's huge amounts of plastic surgery in Utah.
00:48:08.200Like there's definitely this desire to fit in and homogenize.
00:48:11.820And that is just the death knell of, of the religion.
00:48:15.460So have pride in how you're different and F the urban monoculture.
00:48:22.120And when your kids are sent home from school for making finger guns, be like, I'm sorry, that's my culture.
00:48:27.860Like anyone from a conservative culture, whether they're a conservative Muslim or a conservative Jew, I hope you can respect that we will have certain rules at home.
00:48:34.220They might be different from the rules you have at school, but it is my job to protect my family's heritage.
00:48:39.720You just got to teach your kid to code switch.
00:53:13.200I was watching this YouTube video about an eco-village that had basically a covered street with very close townhouses.
00:53:24.040So, the townhouses that faced each other were connected under a covered street, and it just was all sort of this one big, kind of like a mall.
00:53:31.200You know how, like, there are shops to each other across from a mall.
00:53:52.900And this woman who's touring it is being led around by this old woman who, like, queerly is up in everyone's business and just thinks this place is the best.
00:53:59.680And, like, people are walking by, and she's like, hi, Brian, and, you know, they're sort of, like, trying to walk by.
00:54:05.760And she's probably like, Brian, you left the vegetables out last night, and they were, you know, oh, God, it just seems so miserable to me.
00:54:13.680To be there, but yet you kept watching it.
00:54:16.860I want to know about all different ways of living.