In this episode, we talk about what it's like to be a woman in a male-dominated world, and the weirdest thing that happens when you run for office. We also talk about why the Pragmatist Foundation logo is different from the rest of the world's, and why it's a good thing.
00:11:17.760But I want to, so what defines mysticism today, like what's left of mysticism, are the ways of viewing the world and the ways of seeing the world that do not infer a predictive or competitive advantage for the individual?
00:11:38.960Yeah, it's like, it's, it's like adding an additional explanation for things or additional heuristics for making decisions that are not backed up by science or results.
00:11:50.220And yet they provide comfort or a feeling of control.
00:11:53.680Sometimes in places or ways where there just is no control.
00:11:57.100And I think, and maybe this is taking things too off, but like, we would probably even throw like personality assessments, like the Myers-Briggs and like blood types and horoscopes into this category as well.
00:12:12.560Well, I would strongly throw horoscopes into this category.
00:12:16.800You know, if we are, if we're out there burning witches, that includes people who believe in horoscopes.
00:12:21.560But also, I was just listening to, there's a really fun podcast called The Studies Show, where they sort of do a meta-analysis of a subject.
00:12:29.920They did personality tests recently, and they, going through the research, actually found that even like the Myers-Briggs, which is used extensively, is really not the robust people think it is, especially when you port it across cultures or apply it to different cultures.
00:12:42.900Like there are some cultures that just only pick up on like two of the things and really the bigger like personality modulators or things like intelligence.
00:12:52.880So even, yeah, even the Myers-Briggs, you know, is, I would say is, is one of those mysticism-esque things that people fob off as science.
00:13:01.960But that has, it falls into that category of this thing that people really like to use to explain things or predict things that doesn't actually track with like very predictive or solid results.
00:13:15.940So this is actually really interesting because the Myers-Briggs is a good way of showing how we determine when something is witchcraft versus not witchcraft.
00:13:22.560How we determine if it's mysticism versus not mysticism, right?
00:13:49.560Myers-Briggs, if it is disproven in the data, which I think the preponderance of data shows that it's just not particularly useful, it edges on mysticism, but it isn't full mysticism in that it still does have some level of efficacy.
00:14:03.100It is only mysticism insofar as people overuse it and that it appeals to earlier mystical frameworks.
00:14:11.140Whereas zodiac signs, if you look, Spencer Greenberg ran a giant study on zodiac signs recently to see if they had any predictive capacity and they have zero predictive capacity.
00:14:21.320And OKCupid did a big study on this as well.
00:14:24.160And then people, of course, go, oh, well, what you actually need is not the sun, the moon, not the moon.
00:14:29.000No, what they're saying is they're like, oh, well, Spencer's just a classic Capricorn.
00:15:10.460And we'll talk about how it's corrupting of the mind because it really affects these people's ability to hold like coherent, logical thoughts after they engage with it too long.
00:15:19.640And in that way, these earlier analogies of like, you know, you touch the chaos and it corrupts you were not incorrect.
00:15:28.260They just were explaining it like you'd explain it to a child.
00:15:31.100Well, they were explaining it in their own terms, which is that the terms of a mystic.
00:15:35.740Before we move forward, I just want to point out one more thing in that this goes both ways.
00:15:39.320There are many practices that are or in the past have been mystical that are now shown to be fairly scientifically robust in causing certain meaningful effects.
00:15:53.220Now, of course, there's wide variation in the effectiveness of these because every every like practitioner of these has a slightly different formula and process.
00:16:00.160And obviously, some formulas are more effective than others, but these can very significantly affect people's like life outlooks, depression levels, et cetera.
00:16:07.160Like they're they're very meaningful and they're very like effective psychedelics that people are administering.
00:16:12.980And yet that was, you know, seen as like kind of witchcraft, kind of like in this like shaman.
00:16:16.860So like the aesthetics of it don't matter.
00:16:19.880Same with like a lot of like herbal remedies.
00:16:22.340You know, a lot of people who are seen as witches were just like basically providing effective pharmaceuticals to people in their lives.
00:16:29.120Right. And so very important in this is that it is not the aesthetics.
00:16:34.560It's whether or not it has been tested.
00:16:36.700There was not like a previous period where people had tested these ayahuasca ceremonies and determined that they did not have efficaciousness.
00:16:43.760They just assumed that they didn't because of the aesthetics around them, which we are very against doing.
00:16:49.060Actually, this brings me to a great example of what modern mysticism is.
00:16:52.800Modern mysticism is to science what herbal remedies are to medicine.
00:16:56.840If you look historically, a lot of medicine we use today was originally herbal remedies.
00:18:10.160So why is mysticism so dangerous if you want to become a space-faring civilization?
00:18:14.880It is because space-faring civilizations need to have portions of their populations that live on space-faring ships.
00:18:22.920These are ships that are going to function on the edge of science.
00:18:27.340Whether it is their life support systems, the cutting edge of science, or their, you know, faster-than-light propulsion drives, or their, you know, near-speed-of-light propulsion drives.
00:18:38.120All mystical frameworks are fundamentally alternate hypotheses without evidence or predictive capacity for how physics works.
00:18:49.000That is what mysticism fundamentally is.
00:18:51.440Whether you are talking about ghosts, or you are talking about the zodiac signs, or you are talking about, God forbid, I mean, we take a very anti-mystical framework, so anti-mystical that many religious traditions,
00:19:06.180now keep in mind, this is only within our tradition that we treat this so harshly, the human soul.
00:19:09.940All of these are alternate hypotheses about how reality works, and belief in alternate physical planes and stuff like that behind reality, and as such, are forms of mysticism.
00:19:22.060And they are mundane in our world today, outside of how they affect a person's ability to think clearly, which we'll talk about in a second.
00:19:31.380They are not mundane if they are allowed to spread on a spaceship where you need a life support system, and you can immediately disintegrate and be exposed to space if somebody's like, well, radiation has healing properties.
00:19:44.860Or somebody's like, oh, I don't believe that this is how our warp drive should work.
00:19:50.260And in those capacities, it's literally life or death to not allow these heretical beliefs to spread.
00:19:57.000And they need to be prosecuted within these communities.
00:20:01.560And people can be like, how does this correlate with your views around religious pluralism, right?
00:20:09.940So we still believe in religious pluralism, but remember, we believe in the concept of a tesseract god.
00:20:16.500And the tesseract god concept means that there are multiple holistically true revelations of god in the world today.
00:20:24.240Some iterations of Islam, some iterations of Christianity, some iterations of Judaism.
00:20:29.720None of those, we think, are iterations that lead heavily into the mystical arts.
00:20:34.160We think that most of the true iterations see the mystical arts as what they are, which is dangerous.
00:20:40.760And not things that any individual or any individual who is aligned with the forces of good should be meddling with or should be engaging with.
00:20:50.160But let's talk about why historically this happened and why it's such a problem.
00:20:54.560And you'll see this if you engage with mystical communities.
00:20:57.660You know, we had one of our viewers who's trying to create something similar to what we're doing.
00:21:01.520But he's like, yeah, but I want it to be like mystical and like incorporate mystical arts from various communities.
00:21:06.720And he's like, but the problem is, whenever I talk to people, they're either like mystical arts are stupid or they're like, yeah, man, like I like your vibes around this idea.
00:21:15.060And it's like, well, why is he getting that response?
00:21:18.160It's because he's engaging with a community that is defined upon the untestability of its ideas other than in an aesthetic sense.
00:21:25.680So they define which ideas they accept and which ideas they reject based on how those ideas aesthetically make them feel.
00:21:34.380Now, you begin to structure your logic in the way you engage with the world around aesthetic sensibility.
00:21:41.760And you are now debating and communicating with other people, using that as your metric for true versus untrue things.
00:21:50.540You can begin to see how now your brain is no longer learning the true metric of truth, which is for us, this gives you some level of predictability over future events.
00:22:00.800Like if I know about the world, that thing is true if it helps me predict future events.
00:22:05.840Like my knowledge of fire is accurate if it predicts what fire does.
00:22:09.480When you are no longer, when your fire now for you is something that has nothing to do with prediction, it's completely mystical in nature.
00:22:16.980And it has some sort of like, you know, a lot of the times mystical arts tap into super soft culture, which we've talked about in our books and stuff like that.
00:22:24.160It has some sort of like personal identifying thing.
00:22:28.880And by fetishes, I don't mean sexual fetishes.
00:22:31.380I mean like religious fetishes, like some sort of item that provides an individual with power.
00:22:38.240And this is another thing that's really a problem with mysticism, is it appeals to individual vanity almost as much as hedonism does.
00:22:46.660Hedonism appeals to individual vanity in that it allows an individual to just engage with whatever their brain is telling them to engage with at like the lower level.
00:22:54.580But then I mean, personal vanity isn't even necessarily the right word.
00:22:58.580It's it's a cheat code or excuse to to not think, to not act, to not do the hard thing.
00:23:07.280And I think that's that's also a big reason why many very established religions reject witchcraft or mysticism, because while they have their own internal cheat codes for like hand waving of like, oh, this thing is logically inconsistent.
00:23:21.320But here's the reason why no one else is allowed to do that, because if other people start to do that, then they can defend all the other rules and the important rules.
00:23:29.380So I think, you know, this is an important thing.
00:23:32.640Yeah, I think you're absolutely right.
00:23:33.880Well, you know, there's some mystical arts that clearly show some form of effect.
00:23:42.680And I'm like, well, yeah, I mean, of course they show some kind of effect.
00:23:47.260If you study science, you would know that doing something because like I'm really into the study of cults and how cults recruit and how psychology works and stuff like that.
00:23:55.760If you are doing a repeated rhythmic dance that can activate the same part of your brains as hallucinogens.
00:24:01.540This is especially true of your spinning, which is going to create a form of dizziness and other forms of neural damage, which will create feelings of grandeur.
00:24:10.680And it's particularly true of anything you do to the absence of sleeping enough and eating enough.
00:24:18.920It's going to it's going to alter your consciousness.
00:24:21.780But it also makes people incredibly susceptible to ideas.
00:24:24.240And as we have pointed out in other episodes, the human brain did not evolve in any context where it was rewarded for recognizing profundity is profundity.
00:24:35.800So it is very easy to hijack the parts of the brain associated with profundity using things like twirling for hours on end that we can understand as psychologists and neuroscience how that makes people extremely susceptible to really any idea you want to insert into them after doing that or dancing or anything like that.
00:24:54.220And that that doesn't just because something is effective at brainwashing people doesn't mean it's an effective source and sourcing for truth in the world.
00:25:03.720And this is why it is important to educate yourself.
00:25:06.800This is why a person who lives in the words of one would read a person who lives by their conscience, but who does not take the time to educate that conscience is living in sin.
00:25:18.480Because it doesn't matter if your conscience is prone to sin, if your conscience is prone to corruption.
00:25:23.340And let's talk about what we mean by like corruption, right?
00:25:26.880I actually really like like when we're explaining this to our kids, because as we said, every religion needs an adult way of understanding things like the the way that leans towards more like a rational understanding, but also why God wants to engage.
00:25:38.620Then you need like the cartoon kid version.
00:25:41.860I'm just going to take again the Warhammer version.
00:25:44.700You know, you engage with the mystical arts and you open yourself to possession by demons.
00:25:49.460And this but I'll be clearer about it and truer about it.
00:25:53.360This possession doesn't look like a full on like Catholic possession or something like that.
00:25:58.180It looks like a corruption of the mind.
00:26:01.480You have opened your mind to a world that is not a world of logic and consequences, but a world of aesthetics and wishy thinking, which is one of the most dangerous mystical.
00:26:13.240And I think the core of super soft cultures to people who don't know wishy thinking.
00:26:17.040It's from an IT crowd episode, but it's something you see across mystical traditions, which is the idea that human intentionality can increase the probability of events in the future.
00:26:26.520The secret is the best example of this, but it basically means if you want something to happen badly enough, it can affect real world probabilities.
00:31:29.720But they come with some external costs that is preventing them from being used to gain power within society.
00:31:35.380In which case that also historically would have led to most religions,
00:31:38.800even from a cultural evolution standpoint, to end up shaming them.
00:31:41.300And there is no reason for you to investigate them outside of a defense against the dark arts thing.
00:31:47.100And this is where I, you know, Simone, you know me, I love studying ghosts, cryptids, multiple lives, everything like that.
00:31:54.540I study every story, every story of the weird, every story of the weird.
00:31:57.440It's fun stuff. I mean, there's a reason why people are into this stuff. It's fun.
00:32:01.040And even within our school system, we have a whole branch of the tree called Dangerous Ideas
00:32:07.480that basically goes into every single one of these branches of conspiracy theories and mysticism and stuff like that
00:32:15.320and allows people to go as deep as they want to go within these ideas in terms of personal education.
00:32:22.060But I think the best way to dispel many of these ideas is, and I think that this is one of the problems with the existing school system and existing religions,
00:32:30.780is they say don't engage with these ideas. Don't learn about these things.
00:32:33.260Because if you learn about these things, you might be tempted to engage with them, right?
00:32:40.180Whereas I actually think that if you just put them out there for people.
00:32:43.600Now, if you toggle the Christian toggle in our skill tree, all of these get deleted.
00:32:47.620None of your students will see them, so you don't need to worry about this.
00:32:49.680But for those of us who have our perspective, which is the way to prevent student education from something is to educate them on it.
00:32:55.340When students actually learn about the Zodiac system, how it was developed, what the mechanism of action is behind the system.
00:33:01.720I think most of the students or most of, for example, my kids that I would want to keep within our cultural tradition would immediately see how stupid it is.
00:33:08.180Yeah. And you have to put that in contrast with how people typically encounter this,
00:33:12.160which is typically a trusted friend or a family member talks about these things with immense confidence as though they are so true and so predictive and so right.
00:33:25.000That if you respect that person or you're in a social situation where you're afraid of social rejection, you are going to accept it without vetting it at all.
00:33:35.320Which is why I think a lot of people come to believe in things like the Zodiac is, you know, like someone that they like or care about or a good friend or a family member is like, oh, well, I mean, as you can tell, like, because you're a Sagittarius, this, this, this, this.
00:33:47.340And so, you know, and then they just, you know, when you're in a social situation, you're not in your, I'm sitting in an armchair, like primed to think critically mindset.
00:33:57.600Well, yeah. And it feels like forbidden information and forbidden information is uniquely tempting.
00:34:02.260You can fight forbidden information by denying access to it, which doesn't work in the age of the internet.
00:34:06.780Or in our cultural tradition, you prevent forbidden information by making it not forbidden and making it not uniquely tempting because it offers nothing.
00:34:15.380And the way that you, like, if you, if they're taught about this stuff alongside these famous psychologist experiments, I don't know if you guys are familiar about this, but there's these famous studies in psychology where they would present people randomly with explanations that had come from something like a Zodiac test.
00:34:32.720But they were doing them actually for like psychological personality tests, right?
00:34:35.560But they were written in the way that like Zodiac writers write their tests.
00:34:38.340And something like 90% of people, when they would read the explanation that was assigned to them at random, they'd be like, wow, that's a great explanation of my personality and who I am.
00:34:48.340And like, because many people, people with weaker minds and the type of people who maybe wouldn't want within our culture as readily, they have a very weak sense of self.
00:35:00.340And so when an external projection of who they are is assigned to them, especially in their like teenage years, when they're trying to figure out who they are, they really want somebody to just basically tell them.
00:35:09.640And they want that thing to be assigned some form of authority.
00:35:13.120And that's what a lot of these do is they, you know.
00:35:17.340Well, I mean, did I, did I tell you that when I was in high school, I was the anonymous horoscopes writer for my school's newspaper?
00:35:26.420I just was, you know, like, oh, this, you know, this week you worked really hard and, you know, people didn't recognize how hard you worked or, you know, you, you, you know, you take things out on yourself a lot.
00:35:43.500It is incredibly obvious, but people love it because it often involves hearing what you want to hear about yourself and, or hearing what you want to hear about other people or giving you an excuse as to why you're not compatible with someone.
00:35:57.780So as long as you do that, then it's, it's so easy to get by with it.
00:36:02.580And, you know, similar things happen with psychics and like the con men that you talked about who like conned the government for a while into thinking that, you know, people actually did have psychic abilities is you can do a lot by just reading someone really quickly, looking at their face, the way they dress, the way they hold themselves, the way they smell.
00:36:19.700All these tiny little cues can tell you a lot of things.
00:36:21.580So like it's, it is incredibly easy to fleece people over.
00:36:25.060And a lot of, again, what mysticism is and what witchcraft is, is providing an easy button for thinking, providing a don't make me think, give me an excuse to not work hard and just make me feel good thing.
00:36:39.260Which we associate with, obviously, the worst elements of culture, any culture or any practice that allows you to just say, oh, I'm going to give myself a break or, oh, I don't have to think about this or, oh, it's not my fault.
00:36:51.840It's because of my blood type slash horoscope slash, you know, someone put a curse on me.
00:36:56.700That makes it inherently evil and bad and it will create bad outcomes, weak cultures, poor birth rates, bad mental and economic outcomes, etc.
00:37:05.120One of the things that was so powerful is you're like, it's the ultimate form of externalizing.
00:37:09.320Because you are externalizing your self-control to something outside you, but then believe that you have influence over it in a way that you actually don't have influence over it.
00:37:30.780I would say that we would be okay with living next to cultures that practice forms of mysticism, but we would not be okay with living next to them in a way where they could influence our ability to live.
00:37:43.240So, for example, if we were going on a spaceship or something like that, or we were colonizing another planet, I think we would take very harsh rules against this and harsh rules against it in the raising of our own kids.
00:37:53.900I do think that we're not morally against using mysticism to subdue others, however.
00:37:58.720And I think this is also something that, like, people have leveraged to subdue other groups for a very long time.
00:38:06.700And that's the thing, this is a really good example of also how, like, mysticism can make people incredibly vulnerable to outside incursions.
00:38:13.580Because those people can be like, oh, yes, I am the thing that was prophesied to come, and that's why you should listen to me.
00:38:20.960Or, yes, this thing, oh, like in Asimov's Foundation series, the one culture after the decline of intergalactic civilization after the empire falls that maintains basically, like, the Wikipedia and understanding of all technology and history, just sort of tricks the other cultures that have now become, you know, backwards barbarians into believing that all of their science and technology is, like, religious power.
00:38:48.400And they're a religious order. So they're using people's tendency to fall to mysticism as their means of gaining and maintaining power.
00:38:59.740Yes, so like sexuality, mysticism is something that should be studied to understand how to manipulate the weak-minded, but also understand that in your study, you are learning how to guard yourself against those who would use this power against you.
00:39:16.040Right, but I'd also argue, well, and psychum, you know, psychum being, like, psychological nonsense that we often, you know, preach against.
00:39:24.940Psychic hokum, yeah. Well, I know what I'm talking about is, like, modern-day psychology movements that are used to manipulate people.
00:39:30.460So the interesting question here is, if mysticism is so dangerous, and if so many religious traditions have converged on the teaching, don't engage with mystical stuff, it is not good for you,
00:39:43.400why does it intergenerationally persist as a teaching within some of the most successful cultures in human history,
00:39:52.040with obviously the probably big example within the Abrahamic traditions being the Kabbalistic teachings in Judaism?
00:39:59.580And, you know, if you look at other Jewish writings, it even says a third of your time should be dedicated to Kabbalists, one-third, Mishnah, one-third, I can't remember, but anyway, yeah, one-third.
00:40:10.060So it's not even, like, an off-topic side quest, as some people try to frame it.
00:40:15.020Yes, you should wait until you're married and you're mentally mature, but it does say a lot of your time should be dedicated to it.
00:40:20.320So why does something like this stay around?
00:40:22.300The first and most important reason is that it is very good for lighting a religious fervor in low-IQ, low-education populations.
00:40:33.580So if you have, like, a bunch of peasants or something like that, you're gonna have a very hard time getting them really excited and dogmatic about just Abrahamic teachings in and of themselves.
00:40:46.940You usually need some form of mysticism.
00:40:50.640This is where Catholics use a lot of, like, saint worship and where the Orthodox use a lot of relic worship, which is, from my perspective, clearly idolatry.
00:41:00.060But why would you engage with something that the Bible tells you not to if you're within one of the Abrahamic traditions?
00:41:05.020Well, because it is very, very good at getting peasants excited who otherwise don't feel like they have a lot of power or control over their lives.
00:41:15.120This allows them to feel that power or control and also close to the divine.
00:41:20.120The problem is what aspect of the divine are they actually touching?
00:41:23.180Is it, you know, the agents of providence or is it the basilisk?
00:41:26.480Or I guess in normal Christian phrasing, is it God or is it demons?
00:41:30.020Then the second reason I think that this is so effective and intergenerationally persistent is that it mirrors humans' pre-evolved super soft culture.
00:41:42.040This is something we talk about in the Pragmatist's Guide to Crafting Religions.
00:41:44.800But we think that when man removes all tradition and all science from his mind, most humans converge on a very similar set of beliefs about the world.
00:41:56.760And these beliefs come from what was probably the most common human religious system in the pre-agricultural period that just humans co-evolved with for a very, very, very long time.
00:42:09.560But that as soon as humans started to live in settlements and started to get advanced technology was no longer efficacious for humans.
00:42:16.500And so it was suppressed and out-competed by religious systems, which out-competed other groups merely from how they helped those groups' fitness, i.e. how many surviving children they had.
00:42:31.800And they didn't have enough time to fully integrate with those individuals' neurology.
00:42:36.960So when you remove that, a lot of people reconverge on this old sort of mystical tradition, which has lost its efficaciousness.
00:42:44.020I'd also note that mysticism will always be with us because it is part of that pre-evolved iteration of humanity.
00:42:51.500It is part of that ape-like side of us that is always going to bubble up in the background and that will always re-emerge within any religious community.
00:43:03.020Even if we went on to spaceships and we burned every book that ever talked about the mystical, our great-great-great-great-grandchildren would one day rediscover a mystical tradition that looks very similar to the forms of mysticism that are around today.
00:43:17.900Because it is sort of a genetic scar deep within us.
00:43:22.940First, it's definitely not that it works.
00:43:25.080If it works, as we've said, we would see the majority of people in power in our society utilizing these sorts of teachings.
00:43:31.500If it was actually helping people gain power or out-compete other people.
00:43:35.620Now, here I should note, even though it can't help a person gain real power in the world, or gain a real edge in the world,
00:43:43.460it can make a person feel as if they have real power.
00:43:47.220And from a religious standpoint, that can be almost as useful when you are dealing with a population that doesn't feel like they have power over their own lives.
00:43:56.720And that means it can be a very useful conversion mechanism.
00:44:00.680Of course, within our belief system, we would say that those sorts of emotions are the very last emotions any human should be masturbating.
00:44:07.960Because masturbating those emotional subsets increases the strength of those emotional subsets,
00:44:13.460and will move you more and more towards the most perverse type of external locus of control,
00:44:19.520one you mistakenly believe that you actually have power over, even when you don't.
00:44:24.860And then when things go wrong, you know, you don't take responsibility for them.
00:44:28.320It's the mystical workings of the universe that cause them to go wrong, not yourself, not your own responsibility.
00:44:33.560So it's a uniquely toxic form of feeling like you have power.
00:44:38.700The final thing that I think is useful about these traditions,
00:44:44.100if they sort of are cordoned off within a wider system,
00:44:47.680is that they can be used as a sophist trap or an idiot trap.
00:44:51.220So this means if an individual is incredibly good in terms of verbal intelligence,
00:44:56.940but otherwise not particularly high IQ,
00:45:01.240and could otherwise prove a danger to the wider community,
00:45:04.740this can be very, very useful for preventing them from causing too much damage,
00:45:10.980because it can sort of begin to eat up all of the time of people who otherwise might have become a con artist,