Based Camp - February 02, 2024


Witches & Space Travel： There is a Reason We Have Prohibitions Against Witchcraft

Topics
mysticism space star ordering
Hosted by
Malcolm Collins Simone Collins
Mentioned
Simone Malcolm Spencer Greenberg Zodiac Beth Gar-Gar Shaggy Dangerous Ideas Myers-Briggs Capricorn Warhammer Kabbalah Larry Maude
France & China New (Game Over) Fertility Data What Do Ultra-Wealthy Apocalypse Bunkers Have To Do With Tunnel Jews？

Episode Stats


Length

59 minutes

Words per minute

175.04

Word count

10,381

Sentence count

561

Harmful content

Misogyny

8

sentences flagged

Toxicity

47

sentences flagged

Hate speech

23

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

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.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Well, I mean, did I tell you that when I was in high school, I was the anonymous horoscopes
00:00:03.860 writer for my school's newspaper?
00:00:05.920 No, tell me what.
00:00:07.360 People loved it.
00:00:08.040 So why is mysticism so dangerous if you want to become a space-fearing civilization?
00:00:12.020 It is because all mystical frameworks are fundamentally alternate hypotheses without
00:00:19.660 evidence or predictive capacity for how physics works.
00:00:24.140 They are mundane in our world today outside of how they affect a person's ability to think
00:00:29.700 clearly.
00:00:30.220 They are not mundane if they are allowed to spread on a spaceship where you need a life
00:00:35.760 support system and you can immediately disintegrate if somebody's like, well, radiation has healing
00:00:41.860 properties or somebody's like, oh, I don't believe that this is how our warp drive should
00:00:47.000 work.
00:00:47.800 And in those capacities, it's literally life or death to not allow these heretical beliefs 0.91
00:00:53.500 to spread.
00:00:54.560 Yeah.
00:00:54.700 Would you like to know more?
00:00:55.760 You look like a newscaster and I look like some kind of witch from the Middle Ages.
00:01:03.320 I thought I'd mix it up a lot.
00:01:05.220 People are really surprised by our logo.
00:01:07.080 They think this is a new thing for us.
00:01:08.520 I've had this for half a decade at this point.
00:01:12.460 Maybe almost.
00:01:13.820 No, not a full decade.
00:01:14.820 But yeah, we've been using it as our family logo for a long time.
00:01:18.760 No, our family logo is our monogram.
00:01:21.040 This is the logo of the Pragmatist Foundation.
00:01:23.300 Put that up.
00:01:23.860 The Pragmatist Foundation has been around since 2016 and the gear has been a main part of that.
00:01:29.640 And the Pragmatist Foundation is what technically owns and operates this podcast.
00:01:34.800 So.
00:01:34.980 Yeah.
00:01:35.360 Well, and the baby, when we had Octavian, our first kid, his blankie has the Pragmatist
00:01:40.500 Foundation logo on it.
00:01:41.960 But all of our books had the Pragmatist Foundation logo on it.
00:01:44.280 And somebody was like, well, why this number of teeth in it?
00:01:48.020 And the answer was, actually, it's a superimposed, you can think of it as a superimposed Latin
00:01:53.560 cross and St. Andrew's cross is why it has this number of teeth in it for the religious 1.00
00:01:58.460 element.
00:01:59.140 But also, you know, we go over in the piece I posted a text as to why we decided to do
00:02:04.200 the logo change we'd been meaning to for ages.
00:02:07.080 Might do a dedicated episode about it, actually.
00:02:09.500 That would be interesting as to why we chose the gear as our logo here.
00:02:12.980 But recently something happened.
00:02:15.000 So Simone went to accept the Republican Party's sort of nomination, not nomination, but endorsement
00:02:22.440 of her candidacy for the state house.
00:02:25.300 From the Republican Committee of our county in Pennsylvania.
00:02:29.900 You said, this is the first time in my entire life, you're like, I'm here 30 years old.
00:02:35.540 And for the first time in my life, I experienced real gender discrimination.
00:02:40.120 It was amazing.
00:02:41.200 The best possible thing.
00:02:43.960 Yeah.
00:02:44.220 So as we were walking around, she was obviously the candidate.
00:02:49.560 You know, she was on stage as a candidate and everything like that. 0.99
00:02:52.400 But for whatever reason, there was a specific category of idiot who had a lot of advice to 1.00
00:02:59.240 give about running for office, but would only talk to me. 1.00
00:03:03.920 And so all the interesting people, I was like this weird force field of idiocy around Simone 0.97
00:03:09.320 at the event. 0.97
00:03:10.140 I know, like normally the misogyny you'd think would like benefit Malcolm, right?
00:03:13.300 That like people would just like see me and be like, okay, and then like be like, okay,
00:03:16.940 I'm going to talk with the man.
00:03:18.180 But it was only the, it sounds bad. 0.98
00:03:22.960 It was only the dumbest people and clearly like the least important and least impactful 0.96
00:03:28.500 people that just completely ignored me and only spoke with Malcolm, which was hilarious 0.98
00:03:34.080 and amazing.
00:03:34.980 And, you know, they would say things like, oh, what did that one guy say?
00:03:38.380 He's like, well, I'm going to ask.
00:03:40.340 He looked to me for a second.
00:03:41.880 This is before he really ignored me.
00:03:44.000 He looked to me and he said, well, this is normally something I've always asked guys,
00:03:47.240 but now I ask women too, what do you do for work? 0.80
00:03:50.800 And I'm like, I run a chain of companies in a private equity firm.
00:03:55.780 Thank you, sir.
00:03:56.760 Like only between like 1956 and 1965, because apparently like, I mean, there's been no other
00:04:05.120 time where women don't work. 1.00
00:04:06.400 I don't understand like this whole housewife thing. 1.00
00:04:09.620 What even I don't.
00:04:11.920 And he was, he was another person running for office too.
00:04:14.880 Oh boy.
00:04:15.780 Oh, anyway, so hold on, but we got to get to the topic at hand, which is suffer, not
00:04:20.720 a witch to live. 0.73
00:04:22.940 And no, so a lot of people, you know, they hear about our beliefs and they are sometimes
00:04:28.700 surprised by the elements of traditional cultures that we maintain with extremely fierce fidelity,
00:04:37.080 even fiercer fidelity than most of the current conservative religious communities.
00:04:43.280 And our beliefs around witchcraft and sorcery fall into this extremist faction of things.
00:04:52.540 When you look around the world and you see all successful cultural groups that is successful
00:04:59.740 in terms of their spread or not all, but almost all like a huge convergent belief system is the
00:05:05.880 belief that witchcraft, sorcery, and mysticism are evil.
00:05:10.580 This is something you see across traditions.
00:05:13.780 And so that means there is some reason for it.
00:05:16.620 That reason could either be that it is actually evil or it has some negative consequences on
00:05:23.340 the traditions that allow its practice at high levels.
00:05:26.960 But another thing that's really interesting is they often frame it as being evil in the same
00:05:33.200 way.
00:05:33.660 So it's usually not just that it is broadly evil.
00:05:38.660 It is.
00:05:39.400 And someone, you were telling me that you had experienced this was like your own parents
00:05:42.420 were even into this stuff and told you stuff like this.
00:05:44.920 Yeah.
00:05:45.040 My, my parents were always like either, like my mother was really interested in sort of
00:05:49.640 like training as a shaman in her final years.
00:05:52.360 My, my dad had attended like these sort of psychic seminars.
00:05:58.380 And as a kid, you know, you always want to hear about ghost stories or anything crazy.
00:06:01.940 Right.
00:06:02.260 So I always asked him about it and he's like, man, you have to be really careful.
00:06:05.980 Cause you know, like when you open yourself up to this stuff, like you, you become a conduit,
00:06:09.800 you know, you let them, they can come in through you essentially.
00:06:13.440 And yeah, it's interesting that like, even people who are into it, even people who like
00:06:17.860 want to harness that or access or tap into that world are like, no, it's dangerous.
00:06:22.520 It's dangerous. 0.94
00:06:23.340 You were telling me that it fucks with your head, the, the, the certain amount of it after 1.00
00:06:28.220 a while, it just fucks with your head. 0.99
00:06:29.820 That's why I'm usually kind of like almost autistic is I'm just being constantly. 0.97
00:06:33.540 Why?
00:06:33.920 Because lower entities will come in and violate your free will. 1.00
00:06:37.700 They know all your bullshit. 1.00
00:06:39.480 They see right through you. 1.00
00:06:41.000 They will not manipulate your free will unless you ask them in.
00:06:44.220 I have.
00:06:45.320 Dude, do not say that. 0.99
00:06:47.740 I'm going to get killed. 0.82
00:06:48.920 I've a hundred percent communicated with something.
00:06:51.060 I'm not judging anybody.
00:06:52.000 I'm just saying, be careful.
00:06:53.540 The question is whether that something was actually in my imagination or in my mind or
00:06:57.540 that something was something that takes place in another dimension.
00:07:00.480 Once you open that gate, it's all bad.
00:07:02.960 Why is it all bad?
00:07:04.380 Why, why can't you experience that interdimensional being and learn something from it and be a better
00:07:11.100 person when you come out of it?
00:07:12.020 Because every time it gets control, it starts murdering everybody.
00:07:15.860 They wind up killing everybody.
00:07:17.240 In every case.
00:07:18.020 And it always starts beautiful.
00:07:19.140 It always starts great.
00:07:20.120 Problem is some of it makes sense.
00:07:21.600 That that's where the psychosis comes in.
00:07:23.340 Whoa.
00:07:24.160 It's going to create a giant societal crisis where most of the people are already going
00:07:27.740 to get killed because an evil force wants conflict.
00:07:29.940 So I'm saying no, no, no.
00:07:31.740 It's all chaos.
00:07:32.760 Stop it.
00:07:33.620 This is the nature of the beast.
00:07:35.420 Yeah.
00:07:35.720 Yeah.
00:07:35.940 And then you see this within Christian communities.
00:07:37.840 You know, you engage with a Ouija board or something like that.
00:07:40.220 And that is the pathway for demons to enter your spirit and corrupt your mind.
00:07:44.980 Or you look at, you know, Jewish teachings around like the Kabbalah.
00:07:48.660 Like there is a Jewish mysticism branch, but you are often taught you do not engage with
00:07:53.880 this until you are very well trained in other areas.
00:07:57.740 Like it is not child's play.
00:07:59.480 It is meant to be taken very seriously and systemically.
00:08:03.420 And in some cases, almost like a training of a defense against the dark arts rather than,
00:08:08.740 you know, practicing for the sake of practicing for individual power.
00:08:12.700 And this then comes to our broader framework around this.
00:08:16.360 One, why has this been historically shamed?
00:08:19.300 So there's like three categories here.
00:08:20.860 Like, is there a reason this is a bad thing to believe?
00:08:24.320 Two, if we are creating an iteration of a tradition that we mean to take humanity to the stars,
00:08:29.960 does it make sense to have really fierce prohibitions against this?
00:08:35.300 Three, what really is mysticism?
00:08:37.340 Like what's the core of it and why is it so appealing to people?
00:08:41.400 And how can we identify it and stamp it out?
00:08:45.220 So first, let's sort of talk about like what mysticism really is.
00:08:48.860 Because if you go historically, like if I go to ancient Athens or something like that, right?
00:08:55.400 Mysticism would include what today we would call astronomy.
00:08:58.580 And physics and philosophy.
00:09:03.160 And when mysticism included all of these other fields, it was generally not shamed by the traditions around it.
00:09:11.540 But as society evolved, those things that could be proven true and could be engaged with
00:09:20.320 became split out of mysticism and became the sciences.
00:09:24.380 And mysticism is sort of the residue that's left when you take out all of the provable, material, studiable aspects of these traditions.
00:09:38.560 And it's not that people don't try.
00:09:40.500 Like there are whole university departments that have been created around like trying to,
00:09:45.020 like this was big in the 80s, like mind reading and stuff like that.
00:09:48.380 Departments, they're actually made fun of in Ghostbusters.
00:09:51.420 If anyone has seen Ghostbusters, one of the characters works in one of these departments.
00:09:56.200 And it's something you can easily measure.
00:09:57.940 Like somebody claims to be psychic.
00:09:59.140 Okay, we have one person holding cards.
00:10:01.100 How often can the other person guess the cards that this person is holding and looking at?
00:10:05.080 Square.
00:10:06.340 Good guess.
00:10:07.280 But wrong.
00:10:07.920 Is it a star?
00:10:13.620 It is a star.
00:10:15.160 Very good.
00:10:15.980 That's great.
00:10:17.020 Like this is very measurable stuff.
00:10:19.160 Well, it turns out that these departments didn't really produce anything particularly interesting.
00:10:23.340 And so most of them were shut down.
00:10:24.900 If they had, that would have become a science and it would have split out of mysticism because
00:10:29.640 they would have been like, well, are you talking about the science, the measurable kind or the mystic kind?
00:10:32.480 It's funny, where it was quote unquote proven was in like government, like farseeing programs and stuff like that. 0.98
00:10:39.280 So the government had some programs tied to mysticism, a giant bureaucracy, idiotic bureaucracy that bureaucracies always are. 0.94
00:10:46.540 And it decided that a lot of this stuff was true at first. 0.98
00:10:49.500 The movie Men Who Stare at Goats is about this.
00:10:52.680 But over time, it was realized that, no, this was just con men who were easily screwing with bureaucracies. 1.00
00:10:59.880 And bureaucracies are incredibly stupid, especially government bureaucracies. 1.00
00:11:04.860 This is Larry's spirit guide, Maude. 1.00
00:11:08.620 I'm looking into the cupboard now and I see a tin mug.
00:11:15.080 No, wait a minute.
00:11:15.840 You said A, not K.
00:11:17.220 He said A.
00:11:17.760 But 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?
00:11:38.960 Yeah, 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.
00:11:50.220 And yet they provide comfort or a feeling of control.
00:11:53.680 Sometimes in places or ways where there just is no control.
00:11:57.100 And 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.
00:12:12.560 Well, I would strongly throw horoscopes into this category.
00:12:15.700 Yeah.
00:12:16.800 You know, if we are, if we're out there burning witches, that includes people who believe in horoscopes.
00:12:21.560 But 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.
00:12:29.920 They 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.
00:12:42.900 Like 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.
00:12:52.880 So 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.
00:13:01.960 But 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.
00:13:15.940 So 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.
00:13:22.560 How we determine if it's mysticism versus not mysticism, right?
00:13:25.840 Yeah.
00:13:25.980 Um, it's not the aesthetics.
00:13:27.720 We don't need like a wand or, or.
00:13:31.700 Because some mysticism at one time was science, but has since been proven non-useful.
00:13:38.920 So within our framework, for example, phrenology would be considered a form of mysticism.
00:13:45.560 Totally.
00:13:45.940 Homeopathy would be considered a form of mysticism.
00:13:48.840 100%.
00:13:49.560 Myers-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.
00:14:03.100 It is only mysticism insofar as people overuse it and that it appeals to earlier mystical frameworks.
00:14:11.140 Whereas 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.
00:14:21.320 And OKCupid did a big study on this as well.
00:14:24.160 And then people, of course, go, oh, well, what you actually need is not the sun, the moon, not the moon.
00:14:29.000 No, what they're saying is they're like, oh, well, Spencer's just a classic Capricorn.
00:14:33.600 Yeah, right, right.
00:14:34.400 No, no, but then they're like, oh, no, but you actually need to do it in this ultra-specialized way that like...
00:14:38.600 Yeah, like you're just going by their sun sign.
00:14:41.060 It's obviously you have to look at like where Mars is as well, blah, blah, blah.
00:14:44.820 And then it's like, OK, so then if somebody did a test using all of that, like and it had a reasonable sample size, like 100 people,
00:14:52.080 would you then look at that test and have your beliefs overturned if it didn't show that it was predictive?
00:14:57.000 And these people would be like, no, not really.
00:15:00.060 So they believe something.
00:15:02.020 And this is where mysticism becomes really important for two reasons.
00:15:05.960 You view it from a completely secular framework.
00:15:08.580 One is it's corrupting of the mind.
00:15:10.460 And 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.
00:15:19.640 And in that way, these earlier analogies of like, you know, you touch the chaos and it corrupts you were not incorrect.
00:15:28.260 They just were explaining it like you'd explain it to a child.
00:15:31.100 Well, they were explaining it in their own terms, which is that the terms of a mystic.
00:15:35.740 Before we move forward, I just want to point out one more thing in that this goes both ways.
00:15:39.320 There 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.
00:15:51.100 Consider ayahuasca ceremonies.
00:15:53.220 Now, 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.
00:16:00.160 And obviously, some formulas are more effective than others, but these can very significantly affect people's like life outlooks, depression levels, et cetera.
00:16:07.160 Like they're they're very meaningful and they're very like effective psychedelics that people are administering.
00:16:12.980 And yet that was, you know, seen as like kind of witchcraft, kind of like in this like shaman.
00:16:16.860 So like the aesthetics of it don't matter.
00:16:18.640 We don't care about that.
00:16:19.880 Same with like a lot of like herbal remedies.
00:16:22.340 You know, a lot of people who are seen as witches were just like basically providing effective pharmaceuticals to people in their lives.
00:16:29.120 Right. And so very important in this is that it is not the aesthetics.
00:16:34.560 It's whether or not it has been tested.
00:16:36.700 There was not like a previous period where people had tested these ayahuasca ceremonies and determined that they did not have efficaciousness.
00:16:43.760 They just assumed that they didn't because of the aesthetics around them, which we are very against doing.
00:16:49.060 Actually, this brings me to a great example of what modern mysticism is.
00:16:52.800 Modern mysticism is to science what herbal remedies are to medicine.
00:16:56.840 If you look historically, a lot of medicine we use today was originally herbal remedies.
00:17:03.560 Aspirin.
00:17:03.960 But then, like aspirin, like, oh, you chew on bark of an aspirin tree, right?
00:17:07.480 Like, like, aspen tree, I guess.
00:17:10.120 And that creates some, you know, effect that lowers inflammation and lowers pain in an individual.
00:17:16.440 Well, this was tested and it worked.
00:17:21.840 And then the companies then said, OK, well, can we create this without all the impurities that you're getting when you're chewing on bark?
00:17:27.940 Can we make this healthier?
00:17:29.140 Can we make this more?
00:17:30.340 And that's the way science has engaged a lot of the earlier mystical practices.
00:17:34.480 Yeah.
00:17:34.760 And it has tried to distill them.
00:17:36.580 Now, keep in mind, modern science has become corrupted.
00:17:39.540 We are the first to say that academia has become corrupted by the virus.
00:17:43.600 But that doesn't mean that we are, as we often say, like, we believe in an academic reformation.
00:17:49.400 We do not have a problem with the scientific method.
00:17:52.520 What we have is a problem with the centralized bureaucratic institutions that have become the guardians of that method.
00:17:58.320 When the Protestants split from the Catholic Church, they didn't have a problem with God.
00:18:02.620 They had a problem with the corruption of the central bureaucracy.
00:18:05.860 And this is the same way we relate to things like mysticism.
00:18:08.280 But I need to go further here.
00:18:10.160 So why is mysticism so dangerous if you want to become a space-faring civilization?
00:18:14.880 It is because space-faring civilizations need to have portions of their populations that live on space-faring ships.
00:18:22.920 These are ships that are going to function on the edge of science.
00:18:27.340 Whether 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.
00:18:38.120 All mystical frameworks are fundamentally alternate hypotheses without evidence or predictive capacity for how physics works.
00:18:49.000 That is what mysticism fundamentally is.
00:18:51.440 Whether 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,
00:19:06.180 now keep in mind, this is only within our tradition that we treat this so harshly, the human soul.
00:19:09.940 All 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.
00:19:22.060 And 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.
00:19:31.380 They 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.
00:19:44.860 Or somebody's like, oh, I don't believe that this is how our warp drive should work.
00:19:50.260 And in those capacities, it's literally life or death to not allow these heretical beliefs to spread.
00:19:57.000 And they need to be prosecuted within these communities.
00:20:01.560 And people can be like, how does this correlate with your views around religious pluralism, right?
00:20:08.840 Which is really interesting.
00:20:09.940 So we still believe in religious pluralism, but remember, we believe in the concept of a tesseract god.
00:20:16.500 And the tesseract god concept means that there are multiple holistically true revelations of god in the world today.
00:20:24.240 Some iterations of Islam, some iterations of Christianity, some iterations of Judaism. 0.53
00:20:29.720 None of those, we think, are iterations that lead heavily into the mystical arts.
00:20:34.160 We think that most of the true iterations see the mystical arts as what they are, which is dangerous.
00:20:40.760 And 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.
00:20:50.160 But let's talk about why historically this happened and why it's such a problem.
00:20:54.560 And you'll see this if you engage with mystical communities.
00:20:57.660 You know, we had one of our viewers who's trying to create something similar to what we're doing.
00:21:01.520 But he's like, yeah, but I want it to be like mystical and like incorporate mystical arts from various communities.
00:21:06.720 And 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.
00:21:15.060 And it's like, well, why is he getting that response? 0.90
00:21:18.160 It's because he's engaging with a community that is defined upon the untestability of its ideas other than in an aesthetic sense.
00:21:25.680 So they define which ideas they accept and which ideas they reject based on how those ideas aesthetically make them feel.
00:21:34.380 Now, you begin to structure your logic in the way you engage with the world around aesthetic sensibility.
00:21:41.760 And you are now debating and communicating with other people, using that as your metric for true versus untrue things.
00:21:50.540 You 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.
00:22:00.800 Like if I know about the world, that thing is true if it helps me predict future events.
00:22:05.840 Like my knowledge of fire is accurate if it predicts what fire does.
00:22:09.480 When 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.
00:22:16.980 And 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.
00:22:24.160 It has some sort of like personal identifying thing.
00:22:26.820 It may have some product of fetishes.
00:22:28.880 And by fetishes, I don't mean sexual fetishes.
00:22:31.380 I mean like religious fetishes, like some sort of item that provides an individual with power.
00:22:38.240 And this is another thing that's really a problem with mysticism, is it appeals to individual vanity almost as much as hedonism does.
00:22:46.660 Hedonism 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.
00:22:54.580 But then I mean, personal vanity isn't even necessarily the right word.
00:22:58.580 It's it's a cheat code or excuse to to not think, to not act, to not do the hard thing.
00:23:05.360 Yeah.
00:23:06.640 Yeah.
00:23:07.280 And 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.
00:23:21.320 But 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.
00:23:29.380 So I think, you know, this is an important thing.
00:23:32.640 Yeah, I think you're absolutely right.
00:23:33.880 Well, you know, there's some mystical arts that clearly show some form of effect.
00:23:38.520 Right.
00:23:38.880 You know, like, oh, the whirling dervishes or something like that.
00:23:41.620 Right.
00:23:42.680 And I'm like, well, yeah, I mean, of course they show some kind of effect.
00:23:47.260 If 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.
00:23:55.760 If you are doing a repeated rhythmic dance that can activate the same part of your brains as hallucinogens.
00:24:01.540 This 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.
00:24:10.680 And it's particularly true of anything you do to the absence of sleeping enough and eating enough.
00:24:16.720 Like these are.
00:24:17.260 It's similar to like drug intake.
00:24:18.920 It's going to it's going to alter your consciousness.
00:24:21.780 But it also makes people incredibly susceptible to ideas.
00:24:24.240 And 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.
00:24:35.800 So 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.
00:24:54.220 And 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.
00:25:03.720 And this is why it is important to educate yourself.
00:25:06.800 This 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.
00:25:18.480 Because it doesn't matter if your conscience is prone to sin, if your conscience is prone to corruption.
00:25:23.340 And let's talk about what we mean by like corruption, right?
00:25:26.880 I 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.
00:25:38.620 Then you need like the cartoon kid version.
00:25:40.900 The cartoon kid version.
00:25:41.860 I'm just going to take again the Warhammer version.
00:25:44.700 You know, you engage with the mystical arts and you open yourself to possession by demons.
00:25:49.460 And this but I'll be clearer about it and truer about it.
00:25:53.360 This possession doesn't look like a full on like Catholic possession or something like that.
00:25:58.180 It looks like a corruption of the mind.
00:26:01.480 You 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.
00:26:13.240 And I think the core of super soft cultures to people who don't know wishy thinking.
00:26:17.040 It'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.
00:26:26.520 The 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.
00:26:34.060 Base.
00:26:35.280 What is it?
00:26:36.980 The simple answer is we don't know.
00:26:39.860 Or at least we didn't know until now.
00:26:43.000 And I'm not a scientist, but I do have a better understanding of what space is than any scientist living today.
00:26:50.220 Where did I gain these insights?
00:26:52.220 From this man.
00:26:53.340 Beth Gar-Gar Shaggy. 1.00
00:26:54.960 The founder of Spaceology.
00:26:57.060 When it comes to space, he's the man with his head screwed on tight.
00:27:00.920 This is what he told me.
00:27:02.200 Space is invisible mind dust and stars are but wishes.
00:27:05.640 I mean, think about that.
00:27:09.280 That means every star you can see in the night sky is a wish that has come true.
00:27:14.800 And they've come true because of something he calls space star ordering.
00:27:19.900 Space star ordering is based on the twin scientific principles of star maths and wishy thinking.
00:27:27.100 No.
00:27:27.660 If that doesn't convince you, well then, maybe you just don't deserve to get what you want.
00:27:33.300 You're a skeptic, Jen.
00:27:34.480 You should be more like these.
00:27:35.780 They can't get enough of my space star ordering story.
00:27:38.640 How did the cosmos grant you a helicopter?
00:27:41.460 Well, I visualized the thing I wanted.
00:27:44.060 In my case, it was a helicopter.
00:27:46.220 I drew a picture of the helicopter on a piece of paper.
00:27:49.340 A couple of days later, bought myself a helicopter.
00:27:52.240 Explain that one if you can.
00:27:53.700 And now you see what we mean when we talk about this being an alternate hypothesis for how the physical laws exist.
00:27:59.600 But an individual who gets invested in this will have a very easy time in terms of confirmation bias and stuff like that.
00:28:07.780 These beliefs persist intergenerationally among some communities because of their effectiveness at hijacking the human brain.
00:28:15.300 Is there a way to prevent this from happening to a person's brain when they engage with mystical arts?
00:28:21.580 Previously, I would have said no, but I have some disconfirming evidence recently which has made me rethink this particular topic.
00:28:30.200 Specifically, historically speaking, everyone I ever knew who engaged with Kabbalah or Kabbalistic texts,
00:28:39.460 this is the Jewish mystical texts, was so bad at structuring their thoughts afterwards,
00:28:45.700 Simone and I even had an internal phrase to describe these individuals called Kabbalah-brained.
00:28:51.760 Yet, recently, actually, a fan of the show who I've been engaging with is an expert on these texts,
00:28:57.340 and he seems to be able to structure his thoughts very logically and be a very otherwise smart and lucid individual.
00:29:03.760 Why is this the case?
00:29:05.540 Because what I suspect happened is he actually engaged with the texts following Jewish custom,
00:29:11.020 which is, you know, you don't engage with them until you are very well-structured in logic
00:29:16.060 and other forms of engaging with ideas before you approach the texts,
00:29:22.080 and they are written about as something that should be seen as potentially dangerous within Jewish customs
00:29:28.160 and that should be approached with an extreme amount of caution,
00:29:31.440 and that when he went into them, he went into them with that understanding
00:29:36.640 and not that understanding being, because one of the really dangerous things is
00:29:40.380 people misunderstand when somebody says, approach this with caution, it could have damaged you.
00:29:46.780 Some people hear that and they think, oh, that must mean it's a super powerful thing
00:29:50.340 or it's a super forbidden and cool thing, which I think is something that draws a lot of people to mysticism,
00:29:56.040 when what is actually meant to that is, no, not this is a place of unique power,
00:30:00.060 but this could actually just mess you up if you do not approach it with an ordered mind.
00:30:05.600 The fact that I only know one person who hasn't been severely affected by engaging with these types of thoughts
00:30:11.360 to me still says it's probably better to make a blanket ban on it.
00:30:16.400 However, I will say that it appears that there are ways to engage with it
00:30:20.080 that doesn't totally destroy your ability at higher order logic.
00:30:23.000 I just haven't seen evidence that they provide enough enduring value to a community
00:30:28.060 to be worth the risk that is included with keeping them top of mind within a community's traditions
00:30:35.480 outside of a sort of defense against the dark arts studying guide.
00:30:40.100 But as we point out for our kids,
00:30:42.280 if these mystical arts worked,
00:30:46.540 people in power in the world today,
00:30:48.760 like when I look at the top like 100 most powerful people in the world today,
00:30:51.980 they would be really into them.
00:30:54.720 And yet people who are into the mystical arts disproportionately are from lower socioeconomic groups
00:31:00.280 and lower political power groups and lower social power groups.
00:31:04.600 And then the question is why?
00:31:06.720 So there's two answers here.
00:31:07.640 Either mysticism is just complete hokum and a waste of time.
00:31:10.320 And so individuals who have dedicated their time to it and not to matters of materialism
00:31:15.100 have allowed their minds to be corrupted and have wasted time that they could have spent learning things
00:31:20.060 and thus are less industrial and economically productive and less human in our perspective.
00:31:27.400 Or they do work.
00:31:29.720 But they come with some external costs that is preventing them from being used to gain power within society.
00:31:35.380 In which case that also historically would have led to most religions,
00:31:38.800 even from a cultural evolution standpoint, to end up shaming them.
00:31:41.300 And there is no reason for you to investigate them outside of a defense against the dark arts thing.
00:31:47.100 And this is where I, you know, Simone, you know me, I love studying ghosts, cryptids, multiple lives, everything like that.
00:31:54.540 I study every story, every story of the weird, every story of the weird.
00:31:57.440 It's fun stuff. I mean, there's a reason why people are into this stuff. It's fun.
00:32:01.040 And even within our school system, we have a whole branch of the tree called Dangerous Ideas
00:32:07.480 that basically goes into every single one of these branches of conspiracy theories and mysticism and stuff like that
00:32:15.320 and allows people to go as deep as they want to go within these ideas in terms of personal education.
00:32:22.060 But 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, 0.97
00:32:30.780 is they say don't engage with these ideas. Don't learn about these things.
00:32:33.260 Because if you learn about these things, you might be tempted to engage with them, right?
00:32:40.180 Whereas I actually think that if you just put them out there for people.
00:32:43.600 Now, if you toggle the Christian toggle in our skill tree, all of these get deleted.
00:32:47.620 None of your students will see them, so you don't need to worry about this.
00:32:49.680 But for those of us who have our perspective, which is the way to prevent student education from something is to educate them on it.
00:32:55.340 When students actually learn about the Zodiac system, how it was developed, what the mechanism of action is behind the system. 0.99
00:33:01.720 I 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. 0.99
00:33:08.180 Yeah. And you have to put that in contrast with how people typically encounter this, 0.99
00:33:12.160 which 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.
00:33:25.000 That 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.
00:33:35.320 Which 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.
00:33:47.340 And 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.
00:33:57.600 Well, yeah. And it feels like forbidden information and forbidden information is uniquely tempting.
00:34:02.260 You can fight forbidden information by denying access to it, which doesn't work in the age of the internet.
00:34:06.780 Or in our cultural tradition, you prevent forbidden information by making it not forbidden and making it not uniquely tempting because it offers nothing.
00:34:15.380 And 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.
00:34:32.720 But they were doing them actually for like psychological personality tests, right?
00:34:35.560 But they were written in the way that like Zodiac writers write their tests.
00:34:38.340 And 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.
00:34:48.340 And 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.
00:35:00.340 And 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.
00:35:09.640 And they want that thing to be assigned some form of authority.
00:35:13.120 And that's what a lot of these do is they, you know.
00:35:17.340 Well, 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?
00:35:23.380 No, tell me more.
00:35:24.740 People loved it.
00:35:25.380 And I did exactly that.
00:35:26.420 I 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.
00:35:37.560 And you probably should take it.
00:35:39.280 It's just like so generic.
00:35:41.060 Everyone goes through it.
00:35:42.160 Everyone feels these things.
00:35:43.500 It 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.
00:35:57.780 So as long as you do that, then it's, it's so easy to get by with it.
00:36:02.580 And, 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.
00:36:19.700 All these tiny little cues can tell you a lot of things.
00:36:21.580 So like it's, it is incredibly easy to fleece people over.
00:36:25.060 And 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.
00:36:39.260 Which 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.
00:36:51.840 It's because of my blood type slash horoscope slash, you know, someone put a curse on me.
00:36:56.700 That makes it inherently evil and bad and it will create bad outcomes, weak cultures, poor birth rates, bad mental and economic outcomes, etc. 0.78
00:37:05.120 One of the things that was so powerful is you're like, it's the ultimate form of externalizing.
00:37:09.020 Yeah.
00:37:09.320 Because 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.
00:37:18.940 Yeah.
00:37:19.580 Yeah, it allows you to blame everything on something else, feel like you're in control, but ultimately not be in control.
00:37:25.960 Yeah.
00:37:26.320 And so then I think, like, what would our cultural rules be about this?
00:37:29.600 Like, how against us are we?
00:37:30.780 I 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.
00:37:43.240 So, 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.
00:37:53.900 I do think that we're not morally against using mysticism to subdue others, however.
00:37:58.720 And I think this is also something that, like, people have leveraged to subdue other groups for a very long time.
00:38:06.700 And that's the thing, this is a really good example of also how, like, mysticism can make people incredibly vulnerable to outside incursions.
00:38:13.580 Because 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.
00:38:20.960 Or, 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. 0.75
00:38:48.400 And they're a religious order. So they're using people's tendency to fall to mysticism as their means of gaining and maintaining power.
00:38:59.740 Yes, 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.
00:39:12.960 No, mysticism is like sexuality, fun.
00:39:16.040 Right, but I'd also argue, well, and psychum, you know, psychum being, like, psychological nonsense that we often, you know, preach against.
00:39:23.340 Oh, psychic hokum?
00:39:24.940 Psychic hokum, yeah. Well, I know what I'm talking about is, like, modern-day psychology movements that are used to manipulate people.
00:39:30.460 So 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,
00:39:43.400 why does it intergenerationally persist as a teaching within some of the most successful cultures in human history,
00:39:52.040 with obviously the probably big example within the Abrahamic traditions being the Kabbalistic teachings in Judaism?
00:39:59.580 And, 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.
00:40:10.060 So it's not even, like, an off-topic side quest, as some people try to frame it.
00:40:15.020 Yes, 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.
00:40:20.320 So why does something like this stay around?
00:40:22.300 The first and most important reason is that it is very good for lighting a religious fervor in low-IQ, low-education populations.
00:40:33.580 So 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.
00:40:46.940 You usually need some form of mysticism.
00:40:50.640 This 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. 0.51
00:41:00.060 But why would you engage with something that the Bible tells you not to if you're within one of the Abrahamic traditions?
00:41:05.020 Well, 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.
00:41:15.120 This allows them to feel that power or control and also close to the divine.
00:41:20.120 The problem is what aspect of the divine are they actually touching?
00:41:23.180 Is it, you know, the agents of providence or is it the basilisk?
00:41:26.480 Or I guess in normal Christian phrasing, is it God or is it demons?
00:41:30.020 Then the second reason I think that this is so effective and intergenerationally persistent is that it mirrors humans' pre-evolved super soft culture.
00:41:42.040 This is something we talk about in the Pragmatist's Guide to Crafting Religions. 0.86
00:41:44.800 But 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.
00:41:56.760 And 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.
00:42:09.560 But that as soon as humans started to live in settlements and started to get advanced technology was no longer efficacious for humans.
00:42:16.500 And 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.
00:42:31.800 And they didn't have enough time to fully integrate with those individuals' neurology.
00:42:36.960 So when you remove that, a lot of people reconverge on this old sort of mystical tradition, which has lost its efficaciousness.
00:42:44.020 I'd also note that mysticism will always be with us because it is part of that pre-evolved iteration of humanity.
00:42:51.500 It 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. 0.83
00:43:03.020 Even 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.
00:43:17.900 Because it is sort of a genetic scar deep within us.
00:43:22.940 First, it's definitely not that it works.
00:43:25.080 If it works, as we've said, we would see the majority of people in power in our society utilizing these sorts of teachings.
00:43:31.500 If it was actually helping people gain power or out-compete other people.
00:43:35.620 Now, 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,
00:43:43.460 it can make a person feel as if they have real power.
00:43:47.220 And 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.
00:43:56.720 And that means it can be a very useful conversion mechanism. 0.83
00:44:00.680 Of course, within our belief system, we would say that those sorts of emotions are the very last emotions any human should be masturbating. 0.83
00:44:07.960 Because masturbating those emotional subsets increases the strength of those emotional subsets, 0.70
00:44:13.460 and will move you more and more towards the most perverse type of external locus of control, 0.78
00:44:19.520 one you mistakenly believe that you actually have power over, even when you don't.
00:44:24.860 And then when things go wrong, you know, you don't take responsibility for them.
00:44:28.320 It's the mystical workings of the universe that cause them to go wrong, not yourself, not your own responsibility.
00:44:33.560 So it's a uniquely toxic form of feeling like you have power.
00:44:38.700 The final thing that I think is useful about these traditions,
00:44:44.100 if they sort of are cordoned off within a wider system, 0.99
00:44:47.680 is that they can be used as a sophist trap or an idiot trap. 0.98
00:44:51.220 So this means if an individual is incredibly good in terms of verbal intelligence, 0.99
00:44:56.940 but otherwise not particularly high IQ,
00:45:01.240 and could otherwise prove a danger to the wider community,
00:45:04.740 this can be very, very useful for preventing them from causing too much damage,
00:45:10.980 because it can sort of begin to eat up all of the time of people who otherwise might have become a con artist,
00:45:17.460 or something like that.
00:45:18.480 Or a preacher, but a preacher of idle things that don't actually move people towards their goals,
00:45:25.800 but instead is just like enriching his own pockets.
00:45:28.920 And this is something that I have noticed, and I don't know exactly what causes it,
00:45:32.980 maybe people can pontificate in the comments,
00:45:35.220 but people with really high verbal intelligence, but fairly low general intelligence,
00:45:40.700 seem to become over distracted and obsessed with mysticism and mystical arts,
00:45:45.960 when contrasted with other groups in the general population.
00:45:50.000 Which is what makes it such an effective, like, sticky trap for rats for those types of individuals,
00:45:55.700 which can be very dangerous if left as free agents in a society.
00:46:00.260 It is for this reason that I actually am not particularly against Kabbalistic teachings within Jewish communities.
00:46:08.360 If you read our book, The Pragmatist's Guide to Crafting Religion,
00:46:10.900 one section that we go really deep into is the myth of higher IQ within Jewish communities, 0.64
00:46:17.800 which is just that.
00:46:19.700 It's not very well supported by at least rigorously collected data,
00:46:24.220 but what is incredibly well supported is an unusually high verbal intelligence in Jewish communities.
00:46:32.040 And what mysticism may have done, in the same way that we talk within Catholicism,
00:46:36.620 because within Catholicism, they had this system that prevented nepotism from becoming a problem in their communities
00:46:43.400 by ensuring that people within the bureaucratic positions of power within their communities couldn't have wives. 0.76
00:46:49.600 And so it meant that the genetic precursors associated with amoral familialism,
00:46:56.000 i.e. promoting family members over members of the general public,
00:46:59.440 ended up becoming more ingrained in Catholic communities than in other communities.
00:47:03.860 Because Catholicism had traditions that were so good at defending against it, 0.73
00:47:08.200 there was not an additional genetic cost towards individuals over-engaging in the amoral familialism.
00:47:16.340 This is why within Catholic countries you have so much more corruption than in other countries. 0.94
00:47:20.680 Well, I think something very similar happened within the Jewish community,
00:47:23.640 because it had such a good defense interculturally against extremely high verbal intelligence individuals
00:47:31.920 becoming a problem for the community.
00:47:34.220 It allowed verbal intelligence to concentrate at a genetic level within their communities
00:47:40.480 that would have been very deleterious to other communities,
00:47:44.200 and removing Kabbalistic teachings or practices from a Jewish community
00:47:50.380 would cause these free radicals to spill out into the community and begin to cause a lot of damage.
00:47:55.080 So weirdly, this is one of those areas where I would just give Jews a pass, 1.00
00:47:58.700 not because I think that their mystical teachings are accurate
00:48:02.000 or give them any sort of an edge through the teachings themselves,
00:48:06.240 but because I think that they confer benefits uniquely to their community
00:48:10.680 and have been vetted for a very, very long period of cultural evolution
00:48:15.300 for doing just the right amount of good for the community
00:48:19.520 without becoming an overt obsession for too large a population
00:48:24.380 or swaying too large a population towards inefficacious traditions
00:48:28.480 or alternate belief systems about physical reality.
00:48:32.280 Wait, but if Jews were able to use mysticism 1.00
00:48:35.500 to get a higher verbal intelligence within their population,
00:48:39.720 why would I not encourage other populations to use a similar tactic?
00:48:43.640 The answer is fairly straightforward.
00:48:47.540 We now have genetic technology,
00:48:49.400 and you don't need to inject your tradition with something efficacious-less
00:48:54.820 outside of the way it impacts the genetic selection effects of your culture
00:48:59.580 into a culture anymore.
00:49:01.060 So there just isn't a need for this to get the advantages
00:49:04.840 that the Jewish population was able to glean
00:49:07.780 from this unique cultural technology.
00:49:10.260 But the final trait of mysticism, which is really important to note,
00:49:15.220 is if you look in our relationship and sexuality,
00:49:18.020 like the pragmatist-guided relationships, the pragmatist-guided sexuality,
00:49:20.000 if you look at our other videos on the topic of how love works
00:49:22.860 and how some religious systems utilize love to trick people into seeing,
00:49:27.560 mysticism doesn't just hijack people's brains
00:49:30.040 by tricking them into seeing the profound
00:49:32.800 where the profound doesn't actually exist,
00:49:35.060 like manic dancing.
00:49:36.160 Obviously, that's not an actual profound experience.
00:49:39.020 But it's very good at tricking them into feeling love.
00:49:43.380 And love can be filled whenever you're thinking about a concept
00:49:46.820 that holds a lot of basically like mental volume in your mind.
00:49:51.460 But one way you can trick a concept into holding a lot of mental volume in your mind
00:49:55.300 is by holding a concept that is itself illogical
00:49:58.420 and therefore constantly expands.
00:50:00.940 One way that some Christians do this is like the concept of the Trinity,
00:50:03.580 three separate things but that are also one thing
00:50:06.180 and then meditate on that.
00:50:07.800 Because that is intrinsically a paradox,
00:50:11.380 it fills up a lot of your mind.
00:50:13.700 And then when you see that thing as protective and loving,
00:50:16.280 it makes you feel this feeling of love,
00:50:18.360 which makes you feel that there's some truth behind it.
00:50:20.920 Mysticism does that all the time.
00:50:23.380 And for that reason,
00:50:25.180 it is also uniquely tempting to people
00:50:28.160 who cannot find true love in the world
00:50:31.540 because they are acting in ways that are selfish or self-aggrandizing,
00:50:36.520 which mysticism enables
00:50:37.880 because it tells you that you have powers
00:50:40.320 or importance that you don't have.
00:50:43.540 And this is why I think the truly ordered mind
00:50:46.120 and the truly dogmatic in a good way mind,
00:50:49.260 mind that is following the righteous path,
00:50:51.640 is ordered enough to not succumb to forms of mysticism
00:50:57.120 that inflate its ego
00:50:59.360 so much so as to believe that it is in any way like the divine.
00:51:03.900 And this is where we probably have
00:51:05.560 one of our more controversial takes on mysticism
00:51:07.300 is that I believe that the belief in the soul
00:51:09.360 is a form of mysticism
00:51:10.920 because it is to elevate the human
00:51:13.460 to the level of the divine
00:51:15.100 and believe that humanity touches the divine
00:51:17.780 where we do not.
00:51:18.980 Doesn't that veer though somewhat from our definition of mysticism
00:51:23.540 in that like it's, it doesn't,
00:51:26.300 the soul kind of doesn't,
00:51:27.760 it's not relevant to this definition
00:51:29.160 because it's, it can't be predictive or not.
00:51:31.160 Like we can't test it.
00:51:33.100 So this is any feeling of the soul
00:51:36.260 that is not a predictive claim,
00:51:38.420 I will accept, okay?
00:51:39.700 I will say, okay, that's great.
00:51:41.100 But a lot of people use the soul to explain
00:51:44.160 or as a mechanism for explaining
00:51:46.720 extra physical or extra materialist action
00:51:50.540 with the world.
00:51:51.440 Like his soul is so powerful or his, you know,
00:51:54.180 and that is why it is so,
00:51:55.760 and it's a very tempting concept
00:51:57.500 because it allows people to believe in things
00:52:00.060 like life after death and stuff like that,
00:52:03.040 which is a form of mysticism in my perspective.
00:52:06.240 But again, this is,
00:52:07.060 this is an area where we would probably be
00:52:09.060 a bit more flexible.
00:52:10.160 If somebody believes it for a mystical tradition,
00:52:12.340 which is actually an old Abrahamic revelation,
00:52:14.620 I would be willing to say,
00:52:16.720 okay, you can come to space with us.
00:52:18.800 Like we can cut some slack here
00:52:20.060 so long as you're not using it
00:52:21.120 to inform your decisions about physics
00:52:22.940 or inform your decisions
00:52:24.720 about the powers that you have.
00:52:26.840 And so long as you do not use
00:52:28.480 what I guess I'd call soul magic,
00:52:30.500 like trying to engage this extra planal realm
00:52:33.100 in terms of impacting our existing realm.
00:52:36.900 That is where I would,
00:52:38.020 I would draw the one line,
00:52:39.180 but I would say for members of our family,
00:52:40.700 we would see it as a form of mysticism,
00:52:43.900 self-masturbation,
00:52:44.920 and an offense to God
00:52:46.760 in that you are claiming to be
00:52:49.340 of the same kind of thing that he is
00:52:52.360 in which humans are not from our understanding.
00:52:56.780 Okay.
00:52:57.660 Yeah, that broadly checks out.
00:53:00.080 I was thinking more about when delineating
00:53:01.900 whether witchcraft is okay
00:53:03.940 when done in the name of Abrahamic traditions.
00:53:07.420 And I think looking at the various forms of it,
00:53:10.020 practice under the guise of Catholicism
00:53:12.860 are a good example.
00:53:15.280 So one that I would say
00:53:16.480 is solidly within the realm of okay
00:53:19.200 is exorcisms,
00:53:21.300 because that is specifically invoking
00:53:24.200 extra planal powers
00:53:25.560 for the sole purpose
00:53:27.300 and only purpose
00:53:28.600 of directly combating
00:53:30.140 the perceived extra planal powers of others.
00:53:33.500 On the other side,
00:53:34.640 when you look at things like
00:53:35.840 saint worship and relic worship,
00:53:37.860 I see that as being
00:53:39.900 a really muddy middle ground,
00:53:42.240 probably bordering on just blatant witchcraft. 0.99
00:53:45.540 And to understand why
00:53:47.080 stuff like saint worship gets so dangerous
00:53:49.380 is then you'll get things like
00:53:51.920 the big Catholic cult right now 0.96
00:53:54.100 in Latin America
00:53:54.940 worshiping Santa Muerte.
00:53:57.360 They're basically worshiping
00:53:59.040 an unnamed,
00:54:00.320 like not canonized,
00:54:02.140 saint of the dead,
00:54:03.160 which is a skeleton
00:54:04.880 that they worship
00:54:06.660 alongside biblical figures
00:54:08.880 and represents death.
00:54:11.220 To me,
00:54:11.700 this is just
00:54:12.300 very obviously
00:54:13.540 probably the truest form
00:54:14.980 of actual Satanism
00:54:16.260 being practiced
00:54:16.920 in the world today,
00:54:18.020 and yet it is practiced
00:54:19.260 under the guise
00:54:20.360 of Catholicism.
00:54:21.700 I think the way 0.82
00:54:22.900 that evil religions 1.00
00:54:24.540 seep into the world
00:54:27.300 is not those individuals
00:54:29.440 who are,
00:54:30.020 like the individuals
00:54:30.540 who call themselves Satanists,
00:54:31.940 who are really just having a laugh
00:54:33.680 and trolling people,
00:54:35.900 but under the guise
00:54:37.880 of established religions
00:54:40.040 like Christianity 1.00
00:54:41.040 because these people
00:54:42.440 actually believe
00:54:43.620 and have fervor
00:54:45.380 for these entities
00:54:47.000 they're worshiping
00:54:47.980 and these entities
00:54:49.120 are just like
00:54:50.040 sometimes comically
00:54:51.700 and obviously
00:54:52.580 not just normal witchcraft,
00:54:55.400 but malicious witchcraft.
00:54:56.980 One of the reasons
00:54:57.860 Santa Muerte
00:54:58.540 has drawn such a following,
00:55:00.480 you look at like
00:55:01.260 interviews with her followers
00:55:02.400 is there's like
00:55:02.980 well, you know,
00:55:04.060 I can't pray to God
00:55:05.220 or Jesus
00:55:05.780 to hurt someone
00:55:06.720 or for something petty
00:55:07.880 because they would
00:55:08.880 judge me negatively,
00:55:10.240 but Santa Muerte,
00:55:11.380 you know,
00:55:11.620 she's a deity
00:55:12.620 of the people,
00:55:13.680 so when I want
00:55:14.560 to hurt somebody
00:55:15.320 or when I want
00:55:16.020 something selfish
00:55:16.740 or when I want
00:55:17.600 like a love spell,
00:55:18.740 I can pray to her.
00:55:20.120 And it's like,
00:55:20.500 okay, so like
00:55:21.220 very obviously
00:55:22.280 you're praying to the devil.
00:55:23.780 The devil doesn't come out
00:55:24.680 and be like,
00:55:25.140 hey, I'm evil.
00:55:26.000 It is evil
00:55:26.840 in how it is
00:55:28.100 attracting you
00:55:29.020 and what you are
00:55:29.940 using it for
00:55:30.780 and I think
00:55:31.600 that Santa Muerte
00:55:33.160 does show
00:55:34.040 why we counsel
00:55:36.000 so much caution
00:55:37.200 even when the witchcraft 0.68
00:55:39.080 is being done
00:55:39.760 under the name
00:55:40.480 of the Judeo-Christian
00:55:41.420 tree of religions
00:55:42.300 and I think
00:55:43.260 the easy branch here
00:55:45.420 is are you invoking
00:55:47.240 extraplanal realms
00:55:48.500 only to combat
00:55:50.600 other extraplanal entities
00:55:52.160 or are you invoking them
00:55:53.940 for some form
00:55:55.080 of control
00:55:55.900 or self-benefit?
00:55:57.100 If it is the latter
00:55:58.340 then it is just witchcraft
00:55:59.780 whatever you claim
00:56:01.620 inspired it.
00:56:02.760 I also think
00:56:03.420 that this helps
00:56:04.420 explain to Catholics
00:56:06.100 who are a little confused
00:56:07.560 why other Christians 1.00
00:56:08.580 take idolatry
00:56:09.660 so seriously
00:56:10.420 I mean,
00:56:11.200 other than that
00:56:11.900 it's the first commandment
00:56:12.980 and I don't understand
00:56:13.820 how people ignore that
00:56:14.880 but when you do things
00:56:17.040 like begin to worship
00:56:18.520 other entities
00:56:19.840 as gatekeepers
00:56:21.480 to God
00:56:22.420 or as
00:56:23.780 some sort of intermediary
00:56:25.460 in your worship
00:56:26.180 of God directly
00:56:27.280 it can very easily
00:56:29.140 spin out
00:56:29.800 into just
00:56:30.360 worshipping
00:56:31.040 what are essentially
00:56:31.860 demons
00:56:32.340 even from a secular
00:56:33.960 perspective.
00:56:37.580 Anyway,
00:56:38.340 I love you to Destimone
00:56:39.480 this has been a fun episode.
00:56:41.100 I love you too.
00:56:42.220 I love talking
00:56:42.760 about these things.
00:56:45.740 Never thought though
00:56:46.800 from my childhood
00:56:47.520 that we would be like 0.98
00:56:48.600 burn the witches 1.00
00:56:49.500 no witches burn. 0.93
00:56:51.720 I don't think
00:56:52.840 I mean,
00:56:53.540 I think that it's
00:56:54.300 probably worth
00:56:55.000 recycling them
00:56:55.780 into some sort
00:56:56.680 of food stuff
00:56:57.420 or something like that.
00:56:58.180 I mean,
00:56:58.300 if you're on
00:56:58.740 an interplanetary journey
00:57:00.340 you really don't
00:57:00.980 Don't burn the witches 0.97
00:57:01.920 soylent the witches 0.96
00:57:03.500 right?
00:57:04.500 Soylent the witches
00:57:04.880 yeah,
00:57:05.280 turn them into
00:57:06.360 corpse starch
00:57:07.820 but just be aware
00:57:09.260 that they are
00:57:10.020 a danger
00:57:10.640 and it can be
00:57:11.660 thought of
00:57:12.120 as chaos
00:57:12.900 corruption
00:57:13.460 basically
00:57:14.060 and that it
00:57:15.100 will spread
00:57:15.840 if not stuff out
00:57:16.840 at the earliest stages
00:57:18.360 within communities
00:57:20.000 that rely on things
00:57:21.460 like a rigid
00:57:22.480 understanding
00:57:23.080 of physics
00:57:24.140 to maintain
00:57:25.280 their lifestyle
00:57:26.760 which just isn't
00:57:27.420 a thing today
00:57:28.100 in the world
00:57:28.580 but it will become one.
00:57:30.300 But I really do think
00:57:31.020 that the cure
00:57:31.620 is so simple
00:57:32.880 and it has to do
00:57:33.640 with how you learn
00:57:34.240 about it.
00:57:34.820 If you learn about it
00:57:35.860 from in a logical
00:57:37.800 educational format
00:57:39.600 where you're
00:57:40.260 understanding
00:57:41.400 the framework of it
00:57:42.460 its origins
00:57:43.140 and its efficacy
00:57:44.160 you will learn
00:57:45.520 the right way
00:57:46.340 you'll learn
00:57:47.140 in a way
00:57:47.500 that you're not
00:57:48.040 that doesn't
00:57:48.740 corrupt you
00:57:49.140 if you learn
00:57:49.640 it in a social
00:57:50.420 environment
00:57:50.920 where someone
00:57:51.520 that you trust
00:57:52.120 or trying to gain
00:57:53.180 social credit with
00:57:54.180 presents it to you
00:57:55.200 as though it's reality
00:57:56.020 and you respect them 1.00
00:57:57.080 you're so screwed 1.00
00:57:58.460 you're incredibly screwed. 1.00
00:58:00.540 Yeah well 1.00
00:58:00.780 and I should note here
00:58:02.260 that from this
00:58:03.160 understanding of physics
00:58:04.060 beliefs around genetics
00:58:05.580 that are
00:58:06.900 not based on science
00:58:08.780 but based on
00:58:10.240 you know
00:58:11.040 as we call it
00:58:11.520 justicalism
00:58:12.140 like humans
00:58:12.800 don't have genes
00:58:13.620 or human genes
00:58:14.340 do not influence
00:58:15.180 their personality
00:58:16.620 or
00:58:17.180 etc
00:58:18.400 like
00:58:18.980 the way that
00:58:20.040 they interact
00:58:20.560 with the world
00:58:21.140 like human genes
00:58:23.580 stop right here
00:58:24.460 no genes
00:58:25.280 go above this part
00:58:26.180 or influence
00:58:26.680 anything that happens
00:58:27.460 up here
00:58:27.860 that's a form
00:58:28.960 of extreme
00:58:29.600 and very dangerous
00:58:30.720 mysticism
00:58:31.340 because it is
00:58:32.000 outright science denial
00:58:33.180 and it is
00:58:34.820 science denial
00:58:35.500 in favor of
00:58:36.860 a hypothetical
00:58:38.080 alternate framework
00:58:39.100 for the physical
00:58:40.340 reality of our universe
00:58:41.440 and a very dangerous
00:58:42.680 one because communities
00:58:44.040 that engage with that
00:58:44.860 intergenerationally
00:58:45.920 now that all humans
00:58:47.140 basically live
00:58:48.100 because you know
00:58:48.680 half of humans
00:58:49.140 used to die
00:58:49.740 are going to have
00:58:50.960 an accumulated
00:58:51.680 genetic load
00:58:52.520 that will lead to
00:58:53.820 them becoming
00:58:54.720 dangerous mutants
00:58:56.040 and when I say
00:58:56.820 dangerous mutants
00:58:57.360 I mean mostly
00:58:57.860 dangerous to themselves
00:58:58.820 they're going to
00:58:59.580 basically be big 0.99
00:59:00.580 balls of cancer 0.91
00:59:01.340 but you'll also
00:59:02.800 likely see
00:59:03.440 negative psychological
00:59:04.740 effects
00:59:05.380 not discordant
00:59:06.980 with the
00:59:07.620 jolly heretic 0.99
00:59:08.740 spiteful mutant
00:59:09.680 theory
00:59:10.180 ah yes
00:59:11.200 the classic
00:59:12.180 anyway
00:59:12.680 I love you to death
00:59:13.720 Simone
00:59:14.060 I love you too
00:59:14.820 Malcolm
00:59:15.140 okay