just fascinating to watch cults
organically form within online spaces, or if you want to use a word other than
cults self replicating mimetic clusters was negative psychological effects. When the deconvert from religious systems,
they don't realize that all they did was stop believing in God, but they were still raised with those values. So they assume that what
their, their morality is, is. just their morality when in fact
they spent their entire lives being raised either within their church
co
mmunity or in a community very colored by their church community. And then they don't realize that if
they raise their children in an absence of that, they assume that they're just
going to come to the same conclusions that they have, but no, they're not
being raised in that religious way. This is a natural human inclination
to develop some model that they personally aspire to. And when you don't have something like
a religious framework that has a level of authority for you, you can begin. I th
inking, okay, well then who am I? And if you don't know who you are,
then you're like the most important part of me is a man or a woman Would you like to know more? Hello, Simone. I am so excited about our episode today. This is a really interesting one
because recently I have been going down a rabbit hole of the different
ways people go crazy on the internet. It's so depressing. It's so depressing. I can't, how can you manage this? Oh, well, you know, I grew
up loving cults, right? The, the, an
d it was something that I
studied in, in like a lot of detail. I was very interested in how groups of
people could come to believe things about the world that obviously weren't true,
but that these things could have huge sort of psychological effects on them. Huge physiological effects on them because
you know, , the power of suggestion is incredibly strong and as I've gotten
older, I have become less interested in, Intentionally created malevolent cults
because, you know, you can learn a lot ab
out those and they're interesting, but
more related in if all of these techniques can be utilized by a specific individual
with malevolent or even positive means. Like, I tried to take some of these
techniques and use them on myself to. Actually improve mental health like
if they can be used to control an individual, then if you have the full
rule book in front of you, can you use them to control yourself to an extent? Yeah. And can these techniques then accidentally
get picked up by mimetic clu
sters and create sort of organically formed. Cults, and this is something we've
talked about in a few of our episodes, like, you know, and psychology become a
cult has the in which we argue that the modern practice of psychology today is
actually more similar in structure to. What people called Scientology
in the eighties and what called clinical psychology in the eighties
techniques and stuff like that. And I don't think there
was any malevolent intent. I think that just techniques that
were di
d a better job building dependency ended up competing. The ones that didn't, or was in, like,
is a trans movement, hiding a call, you know, that episode where we talk
about that, which is to say that if you create a, a group of people where was in
large portions of society, you cannot. in any way question them. Then it creates, and this is also, I
think, what happened with psychology. Like it was like, Oh, how dare you
question that person for seeing a psychologist because you created this
group
that you couldn't question. Just from the medically speaking,
it's very likely that toxic memes that build dependency will begin to
cluster and create sort of organically formed cults within these contexts. Well, this all gets very interesting. So you're like, why do
I find it fascinating? Why do I study these people
who have lost themselves? Yeah. Despite how depressing and one is, it just fascinating to watch cults
organically form within online spaces, or if you want to use a word other than
cults self replicating mimetic clusters was negative psychological effects. Oh, so that's why they call them cults. Right. Yeah. Oh, actually. Yeah. Okay. Okay. And to think about it from a utility
perspective in regards to our kids, how do we protect our kids from
the internet driving them crazy? Yes. And this becomes, I just
don't want them on really. So, so the first thing I want to
note here is it's something that I've been reflecting on a lot recently is
Historically, if you are a religiou
s person, like, like the, the lowest
IQ, or at least what I would have thought historically, like the
lowest IQ religious attack on Atheist communities was if you don't have
God, then you don't have morality. Right? And then the atheist community would flip
back and say, Oh, well, if you're only doing what's right, like if you're not
out there murdering people just because you're afraid of punishments after death
or for rewards after death, then you don't actually have morality at all. Then I ha
ve meaningful morality
because I'm not killing people because I'm a good person, right? You. And this sounded really well
and good, I think, for the first generation of atheists. The problem is the society is
becoming so secular now that I think what I'm beginning to see is
a lot of even growing up secular. You know, I was raised
atheist in an atheist family. Growing up secular I didn't fully
appreciate how many of the moral subsets I assumed were just sort of convergent
and obvious moral system
s are not convergent and obvious moral systems. Well, but here's the thing is,
I think if they were, we would not need culture and religion. If all that stuff came naturally to
us, we wouldn't need this additional software running on top of our
hardware, as you point out in the pragmatist guide to crafting religion. So yeah, so there's two illusions
which create the belief that they are convergent and obvious systems. One is, is that they are,
there are convergent. Cultural strategies that lead
to
success when you're talking about competition between communities. That could sound very complicated,
but I'll expand on this concept a bit. If you look at the successful
cultural slash religious books, we would call the pragmatist kind
of crafting religion cultivars. These are sort of mimetic clusters,
which positively augment the fitness of the individuals who hold them. I eat a number of surviving
offspring that they have. And that that is how they
compete with other clusters. And that the
y have
outcompeted other clusters. There's obviously going to be some
level of convergent evolution among those, meaning that those clusters
that have done well, look similar. Cross culturally, you know, whether
or not you're talking about Islam or Christianity or Buddhism or you know,
Confucianism, like you'll see some level of convergence across these. And it's because similar moral
frameworks tend to out compete the moral frameworks of their neighbors in
terms of the individuals that hold the
m. However, this doesn't actually
tell us anything about a true Human convergent set of morality. If you look at the diversity
of religious practices, like if you study religious practices in
an anthropological context, i. e. the religious practices that exist
Among uncontacted tribes or among human groups that like just show what humans
come to when humans are stranded on an island and coming up with a moral
and religious system on their own. Or early, you know, there was huge
diversity of thes
e in Africa, huge diversity or some diversity in India. And we can study these early contact
writings and see what this diversity actually looked like, or, or again,
look at the uncontacted people today. You do not see this common morality. If someone's not in your group,
it's typically okay to kill them. You know, infanticide is really common. Grape is really common. A lot of things that we just
think of like, Oh, this is like normal human morality. You don't see in those. And in fact, you can
even see
remnants of this in early biblical scripture before it got a chance
to reach this convergent state. Where you will see things like claims
of infanticide being a good thing. Like when you conquer a settlement,
you know, smash the babies on rocks. Right? Like, this is something that we see
captured like this early, almost sort of like pre Christian mindset. A pre Christian, pre Judeo, pre, pre
Abrahamic mindset captured in very early Abrahamic texts that may have been, you
know, pollution
from nearby cultural groups, or it may have even been a
practice in the group that led to it. And I actually would argue that it is,
because this form of infanticide is pretty common in things like gorillas
which we, you know, may be related to, and in chimpanzees, after they kill
the males in a tribe and take over a group of women to get them ovulating
again, they'll kill the infants, so there's probably some sort of, like Pre
coded genetic reason for doing this. The point I'm making here is t
hat just
because a lot of the successful cultures do something doesn't mean that all humans
who like sit down and think about it are going to come to that same conclusion. The, the second issue is, is that the
further we got from religious society, what, what I think we're realizing. And so when you talk to me about
this, was that a lot of people. When the deconvert from religious systems,
they don't realize that all they did was stop believing in God, but they were still raised with those value
s. So they assume that what
their, their morality is, is. just their morality when in fact
they spent their entire lives being raised either within their church
community or in a community very colored by their church community. And then they don't realize that if
they raise their children in an absence of that, they assume that they're just
going to come to the same conclusions that they have, but no, they're not
being raised in that religious way. Not at all. Like a great example of this is, i
s
the turn the other cheek mentality from Christian communities. This is specifically something that
I think It was one of the early teachings that philosophically helped
Christianity outcompete some of its competitors at the time, and that is
not found in many other traditions or many non convergent traditions. So, if you go in an anthropological
context, and you're looking at, like, island tribes and stuff like that. This idea of turn the other cheek
is not a natural human idea. It is, it is a
ctually very rare that it
appears, but when it does appear in the communities that appears within tend to
outcompete the communities that don't. Wait, why does, why, wait, hold
on, why do you think turning the other cheek is more evolutionarily competitive? Because it lowers unnecessary
conflict between communities. Oh yes, you're not getting these blood
flutes, blood flutes, blood feuds and wars that can kill a lot of people in the end. And yeah, when you talk about this, blood
feuds are unique
ly uncommon in all of the Christian descendant communities. Find blood feuds in most
other cultures in the world. Which is, which is, it shows that it
is effective at achieving like what the cultural technology is meant to do. How interesting. Okay. So we're continuing to go down
just the framing rabbit hole. And we're already 11 minutes in. I gotta get out of just framing here. But I'm framing that we are now seeing
in a place where I've been just having a blast learning about this, is a YouTub
er
called Turkey Tom who goes into sort of how various people interact Has sort
of been driven crazy by the internet. I mean, he would see it as just how
have these people gone crazy, but he's doing it by documenting from often
when they started as sort of sane, more normal internet people, the communities
they were engaging with and how those communities sort of broke them. And what's really interesting
was people for me is looking at like, what's their objective. Purpose or their objective val
ue system. And, and this we call an intrinsic,
an objective function in the book, the pragmatist guide to life which is to
say, what is like the core intrinsic good that you are searching for in life? Like what's the thing that's
driving your decisions in life? And Within religious systems, these
are often spelled out pretty strongly. When people first leave religious systems,
within like gen one of leaving the religious system, and within many smooth
brains, but, but, but once you still sort of
like broad utilitarianism works here. Now people like just distribute happiness
at a, a, a, it's sort of as much as you can reduce suffering as much as
you can on like a societal basis. The reason why I think that this ends
up getting elevated in this sort of. first post system. It's a very easy to understand
moral framework, even if it's not a very logical moral framework. Like there isn't a good reason for it. The things that make us happy and make
us feel bad, if you're approaching it from a
secular mindset, are just
the things that our ancestors who experienced had more surviving offspring. So they're not like And also in the absence of abundance. So that still didn't work. Yeah. And when they get elevated in societies
where, you If on, if the average person on society is a hedonist and you needed
to sort of democratize hedonism, where hedonism is like their core, most
animal level coding, I just do things that make me happy when I say happy. I don't mean necessarily pleasure. I m
ean, that fulfill the broad
range of positive emotional subsets that humans can experience. The society is going to
agree on sort of a detente. This will be our moral framework
to fit this most animalistic human individual moral framework. Like, what do I want for my life? I just want to feel good. And in one of the Turkey Tom videos,
you can see an individual who completely succumbs to hedonism. As a moral framework and this is on
the Clown Gooning or something one, just type in like Clown Goon
ing,
Turkey Tom, and it'll come up. And it shows how when you strive primarily
for personal hedonism, which is what ended up happening to this generation, because
I think a generation of, Utilitarians raises a generation of hedonists. The botched, ruined people. Well, because utilitarianism is,
is bad at conveying why you should sacrifice to people outside of people
with like intense self control. And since a lot of people don't have
that and they really are just doing what they're doing, or at
least a
good chunk of society is just doing what they're doing out of fear of
some sort of like, reparations in the afterlife or something like that. Then yeah because I think the
thing I'd say is, you know how dumb the average person is? Do you know how little self
control the average person has? Well, 50 percent have less self control
and less intelligence than that. So you've got to keep in mind
at a society level when you move away from these things, what's
going to be the consequences. And
for this individual you know,
it's, it's all sorts of PDA file stuff. It's all sorts of just, and, and I
think, In a quest for hedonism, something that people missed in a quest for
hedonism is there's two other factors to hedonism that are outside of just I
want to feel, by the way, do you have any thoughts here before I go further? No, no, go ahead. I agree with what you're saying. There's two other core factors to hedonism
outside of just like, I want to feel good like, like emotional context
that
really drive human behavioral patterns. The first is. Self narrative. This is the narrative you craft
about who you are as a person. And feeling comfortable with this sense
of self or identity of self, like self affirmation, I guess I'd call this. And I think that the perversion of
the self affirmation narrative is where the gender cults come from. So by this, I would mean some
iterations of the trans movement but also things like the Tate, like, like
some iterations of like red pillism, yo
u know, I don't want to say that all
like Tate followers fall into this. There's definitely different factions,
but there's some faction that is just like trying to masculine, like, like,
like completely embody a masculine archetype, which to me is just as much a,
a showcase of like gender dysphoria and uncomfortableness with, with your gender. And a belief that gender
alignment is the core moral purpose of an individual's life. Well, yeah, in other words, they're showing the
same level of despe
ration or fervor with A specific gender archetype signaling
that many trans people show, right? Else, which is more interesting to
me which is that yes, but they are placing it on a moral pedestal. It is driving major
life decisions for them. I E how gender ideal and
fitting a gender ideal. begins to develop what would in a
historic context a morality would fit. Like when I am judging between like,
should I do X or should I do Y in a historic context, you would go
to your religion or some sort o
f philosophically derived moral framework. I mean, here's how you describe it
in the pragmatist guide to life. Once you establish your objective
function, the thing or things that you want to maximize in your life. This is different. Yeah, continue. Then your responsibility is to
build a, a model of yourself that maximizes those things. And I think people subtly do that
when they are religious and when they have moral frameworks because they
ask things like, what would Jesus do? Or what would a
good Christian
do in this situation? And it does influence. But when your internal model is not
of a good Christian or some kind of personal personality that would optimize
your objective function, the things you want to maximize most in your life,
it could just be, I'm a manly man. And then, yes, like you say, Oh, what would Jesus do? What would a man do? Or what would a woman, how would, how would a really
manly man react to this situation? Which I think, I mean, you can
see a lot with both ge
nders too, like a woman. No, no, no, there is a spiral in the
woman side of this and we'll do a whole separate video about this where women
have started shaming country girls for being like for like building houses
and like noodling catfish, which is like catching the catfish with their
hands, you know, and being masculine. And I am not here for that. I am a, I am a tomboy appreciator. And I, I, that is one thing that is the
greatest threat and that we need to talk about this, that the, the tomb
oy drought
that the trans community is causing. You're very concerned about this. I was about tomboys don't take away my tomboys, get your
hands off my tomboys. Simone, is the term tomboy or tomgirl? Tomboy. Tomboy? Yeah, okay. Oh, by the way, for people
who aren't from the U. S. and may not know this, this is a girl
who otherwise has masculine hobbies and doesn't take no, doesn't Wait, it is tomboy, right? A tomboy. is a girl or young woman who has masculine
traits such as wearing androgynous c
lothing or participating in activities
typically associated with boys or men. Tomboys may also enjoy things some
people think are more suited to boys such as playing physical sports. God forbid women play physical sports. But anyway, the point I was making here is that This
is a natural human inclination to develop some model that they personally aspire to. And when you don't have something like
a religious framework that has a level of authority for you, you can begin. I thinking, okay, well th
en who am I? And if you don't know who you are, then
you're like the most important part of me is a man or a woman, or it could
be, I kind of identify with foxes. I guess I'm a fox now. Well, and you, you weren't against this
in the pragmatist guide to life. I don't know if you remember, but you
argue that the worst and most dangerous type of, of thing to optimize around
objective function, which many people come to by default is an identity. It is a very dangerous losing game. So like you said,
and, and, you know, when I'm talking
about the failure of like, like falling apart of religious communities, I
need to point out, I am not just calling out secular life here. Oh, no, totally. Many individuals who still
call themselves Christians. Yeah. They're like, I still believe in God. But, you know, I just
don't go to church anymore. I was watching a video recently,
and the most common reason that Christians stop going to church now
if you believe it, is that they moved. It's not that thei
r theology has changed,
it's just it became inconvenient. Oh my gosh. These religions evolved as packages,
not just, it wasn't just a belief in God in a moral system, it was also going
to church and everything like that. And so when you begin to make these
sorts of modifications unintentionally, but because it was what was easy in
your religious system and you raise kids without all of the historic, you know,
no, no, I do not think the historic traditions on their own can survive,
but I think th
at there's another type of tradition which is the historic
traditions are at least stronger than this wishy washy iteration, right? Where it's like, I still
really believe in God. I just don't do all of the other rituals
that came along with this and the other things that came along with this. And it's like, well, it turned out
that this had a purpose and that's why your kid now identifies as a fox. But no, it matters because you got to ask,
why is this happening to young people? How do you crea
te a system
that protects against this? And I want to say here, I
have nothing against furries. As a community, like, if you want to get
off on that, if you want to treat this as a hobby, like, that is all well and cool. And I support you, but there is a
portion of the community where this has become a moral system and a religion. Or like a religion, like
it, it combines with their. Cosmological view of reality. And to call this anything other than,
I guess, a cult, like an organically evolved c
ult out of people who
liked pictures of humans as animals. Yeah. Like what else you call this, right? Like that's what it is. It's a, it's an organically
evolved cult, which is fascinating. So that's one area, but you
see this across the board. If you only see this in the left,
then you don't see it in the right. You do not see the girls who primarily
identify with like trad wives. Like, am I being a good person? How good of a trad wife am I being? Like, that is not a useful
moral framework, rig
ht? Like, that has no higher philosophical
authority to it nor any sort of old authority to it, and it will lead to
toxicity in relationships, even though they are choosing an old model, or the
guys who are like the ultra red pillars who are like, I define myself as male,
and I Like my actions and the choices I make and the hobbies I undertake is what
are male hobbies, but there's the final one, which is of, of like the core human
internal drives, which is another area that can pull our kids off
the path. And this is the most
dangerous to children. And the Turkey Tom video that goes into
this is on the guy just look up like. Turkey Tom and Ember. And just to be clear, Turkey Tom is a
YouTuber who covers things like this. Yeah. So this, he, he did a video
on in the murder spree that this guy ended up going on. So maybe Turkey Tom, Ember, murder,
because he ended up killing three people. And this was an individual who
was driven crazy, basically. Because he decided to base his entire
mor
al framework on affirmation. Not ideal. Typically affirmation was an
online spaces and stuff like that. And a lot of people can be like, that's a
crazy thing to build your identity around. It's like, come on, if you can just
emulate your teenage self affirmation from the world, especially within
online spaces where affirmation. Is intrinsically elevated. So let me explain what I mean by this. Within an online community, the people
you hear from more, are intrinsically the people who are affirmed
by others more. Because that's how pretty
much all the algorithms work. I mean, it makes perfect sense. People tend to be, we, we like AI
respond to reinforcement learning. So when you get reinforced for
something, obviously you're going to move in that direction. And that's why when I met you,
you found me walking around in red fishnet stockings and weird clothing
and acting a certain way, because that's what got the most affirmation. Yeah, whether it was positive
or negative, because some peo
ple can't easily distinguish between the two. Oh, I had no, yeah, I mean, people would
never take me seriously, professionally, dressed the way that I was dressed. I was dressed like a clown, but I
never thought about that, because, as you say, in the absence of having
really thought through and owned your values and your purpose in life, you're
gonna go by default, and the human mind, is pretty socially sensitive
in most cases, at least on average. So, especially when you're young. So there's b
een some studies of teenagers
that show things like teenagers have like four or five X's of reaction to
like emotional state, like emotional faces in terms of like disgust and
stuff like that of their peers. Like if their friends show disgust towards
them, they're going to react to that much more intensely than an adult would. And so when people are building their
identities, when people are most common to leave a religion is 15 to 21. This is also when they have this
amped up sense of affirmati
on matters. And we're in an online world today where
affirmation literally does matter into how likely you are to hear someone. So if you throw kids into this
environment without a strong counter signal, No, duh, they're going crazy. Like, no, duh, it's all breaking down. No, duh, mental health is exploding. I might find the clip that I posted
in another video where one person was like, Well, mental health
is exploding because there's not enough psychologists for people. And it's like, bro, do y
ou think
that, like, people a hundred years ago had psychologists? Like, the psychologists are exploding
with the mental health crisis. There is another thing going on here. , so then this brings me
to a couple of questions. How do we protect against this? And the first place I look to
see how do you protect against something like this is how do people
historically protect against this? And this is where the idea of Jesus
is actually a really sophisticated psychological technique in that it is a
being which matters more than all other beings you interact with that affirms you. When you live up to a specific moral
threshold, but that who still always loves you, no matter what, when
you think about it, it's a really fascinating piece of social technology. And I point out here that this
iteration of Jesus that I'm describing here, while it has been co evolved
by many different Christian sects, if you study early Christian writings. This was not the iteration of Jesus
discussed in early Ch
ristian writings. This is a co evolved way of viewing
Jesus that has happened in the past, I want to say 500 years to a thousand
years but it's not, this is a, a very It was a technology that was allowed
by the concept of Jesus, but was not intrinsic to the early ways that Jesus was worshipped. Yeah, it's not incongruous with
anything in the Bible, but it's also not something that was explicitly stated. Yeah, the idea of, like, the personal
relationship with Jesus, the idea that he loves you no
matter what and that
he, Yeah, so it's implied by a few lines that Jesus will always forgive you, but
then taking that and turning that into Jesus loves you no matter what and he is
just waiting to forgive you and he has this, but then applying to all of that,
this moral framework associated with Jesus, that's an incredibly sophisticated
way to prevent a kid from going crazy, right? Because even if the rest of
society is rejecting them. If they have a very strong moral
framework, religious frame
work, they know that, well, they're doing what Jesus
would have approved of and that Jesus always loves them, but also that they
could do certain things to make Jesus love them even more by asking themselves,
well, okay, what would Jesus do? Well, He would definitely
approve of it if I did this, because this is what he would do. Technique, right? Like that's really powerful there. Right. Which is the, what would Jesus
do is the, like, what type of person should I strive to be? And then they're l
ike, well, Jesus was
a good person who I should aspire to be. Therefore, what would Jesus do? And I can then act upon that. Like that. Yeah. So instead of essentially of creating an
internal model, like a character sheet for yourself, that's based on your
morals and values and objective function. In this case, people are just creating
an internal model based on an already completely fully formed character. Which is, I need to be clear, this is, I'm not saying this
stuff isn't in the bible, but I
'm saying if you study early Christian communities
and early Christian worship, concepts like what would Jesus do is a modern,
co evolved perception of religion, of Jesus, that is not an apparent thing
from early Christian communities. Early Christian communities. We're that would actually probably
be considered a form of heresy was in most early religious
communities for an individual to act as if they could emulate Jesus. It would be seen as demeaning
to the idea of Jesus, where it was in a mo
dern context. It's actually a pretty sophisticated. Psychological technique and other
iterations of the Christian tradition, specifically the Orthodox and the
Catholic traditions have evolved some other techniques that are
I think even advanced upon this which is the concept of the saints. So, you know, I may brag on the
concept of saints sometimes, but you've got to think about the
utility of the concept of saints. How so? is the, the core failure of the,
what would Jesus do as the person you c
an embody of a good life? Like, okay, I want to be like a
good person is that Jesus lived in a very specific social context. That was very different from our own. Everybody trying to model themselves
after the same person is not super useful when you have a huge diversity
of roles in society and ways that a person can be good within society. Yeah, so you can look instead to this female saint who
is more like you or this male saint who is more like you or this urban or
rural saint or whatever it
might be. Yeah, like if you're a doctor, like,
oh, go to the doctor saint, right? Like this is a model for what is the
way you should self identify, right? And think about what
should, what should he do? And so in a way you can almost think that
gender has become a form of sainthood to portions of society right now on
both the far left and the far right. Oh, right. What would a hyper feminine female do? Or what would a trad wife do? Or what would a super
masculine young man do? That kind of thin
g. Yeah, but then you take us
in our arrogance, right? Like, we're looking to protect our kids. We do, at least from our
perspective, I know how intrinsically rebellious I was as a kid. If I was raised in one of these
traditional systems, I would have just rebelled just like my ancestors did. Not going to work for my kids. I can already see the rebellion
in their eyes, you know, that appears that, that, that one. So let's talk about the flaw in
all of these old systems to me, at least, is there
to me, not morally
aligned with a true moral core. They are morally aligned with in aggregate
what allowed some cultures to outcompete other cultures which I think is true. Like, like evolutionary pressure
did shape them from my perspective, cultural evolutionary pressure. They are morally aligned with my ancestral
traditions, which I appreciate, and we have tried to capture for our kids. But that means that they had
the capability of picking up tons of baggage that may not be
relevant within fu
ture context. And a lot of their moral subset either can
come across looking like arbitrary rules, or when they don't come across looking
like arbitrary rules, they come across as. Too vague, like just be a good person,
just be loving and then you get like God is love and all of that mystic nonsense,
which is like ultra toxic in terms of like justifying an individual doing
whatever they want and self affirmation. So, I said, well, and people who are
familiar with our concept of the future police
, like when we tell our kids, like
somebody has punished them and we do this sort of permeates their life and
we'll talk about this in another video. It's like all the toys they get, all of
the punishments they get, we're like, we're asking, why is this happening? Why are you being punished? And we're like, well, the future
police, like, we have to, you know, do what they want, right? So we are constantly framing for them. It is future people that define the
morality of their actions, right? Do
their actions make the future
of society a better place? But what's really interesting is how
this has appeared as they are kids. Right, because when they are mean to
like their sibling, you might say, well, how do you frame that in terms of
the future of society is a big place. And we frame that as. They live in a society where most people
are just going to let society fall apart. It is their personal responsibility
to save the direction our civilization is going. And as such, they have a uniqu
e
role to play in human history. Every one of our kids and that when they
treat their siblings bad, I say, these are the only people that are really there
to support you at the end of the day. You know, family is family, right? And this is something I was
growing up being, being taught. And that every one of you
was born for something. Important. So like when you go out there and you
impede the development of your, your siblings, not only will this come back to
haunt you in the future and be som
ething you regret, but you are impeding the
development of this team, which is going to matter so much in human history. Now, obviously explaining this
to an adult, that sounds very complicated, more just to a kid. It's, you have a very important
role to play in history. And we don't, I mean, that's, that's the natural
conclusion that they'll come to when they think about it more. Really all we're talking about is
the future police, but the future police are the descendants of their
descendants,
you know, thousands of not millions of years in the future. So they get it and they already care
a lot about future generations just because of that, just because of the
nature of who these, Arbiters of gift giving and gift taking away are right. But the point is, then the important
thing is that good religious concepts are good moral concepts are not like
a list of things you have to memorize, like the constitution or the 10
commandments, their seed crystals. Which okay. So when, when you're m
aking
chocolate, for example. And you want to get a good crystalline
structure, you take a piece of like, you'll use a certain type of chocolate
that has a really great crystalline structure as your seed crystal. You'll put it in your melted chocolate
get it to the right temperature. And then that seed crystal
will help the rest of the chocolate just lock into space. It's not like the, into that
same crystalline structure. So it's not as though each piece
of chocolate has to be taught how to beh
ave the right way. It is that a concept is so powerful. That it can just help
everything else lock into place. And I think that, for example, what
would Jesus do is great for that. And that's what we're trying to riff
with, which with the future police. Right. Yeah, yeah. But the problem is that what would
Jesus do is then you have to say, well, then what would Jesus do? Right. And there's societal conceptions of Jesus. There's biblical conceptions of Jesus. And then there's, I think, wishy
thin
king conceptions of Jesus, i. e. Jesus is love. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There are too many people
corrupting the concept of Jesus. You can go to the biblical interpretation,
but the problem with the biblical interpretation is it can just
become a list of traits, right? Which Yeah, well, and it's hard to even know the context
in which he was making his decisions. We're probably missing
a lot in translation. Yeah, a great example of that that I
always go to that was really shaking for me is when I went
to Israel and I went
to see the type of accommodation That Jesus would have been like, like the
people lived in around the time of Jesus. And what all of them looked like was
sort of dugouts in sort of the wall of like a hill where it was like a, a
single room almost that was a house. And then in the center
you would have a wall. And on one side. You would have all of the animals,
you know, your chickens, your goats and stuff like that. And on the other side, you would have
the entire family tha
t would sleep. And these were large families, you
know, it'd be like 12 people or something like that, all sleeping,
basically laid out next to each other, mostly just to stay out of the rain. Like these were not
sophisticated dwellings. People do not understand how early this
was and how you know, uncivilized sort of the rural areas or the small towns in
these regions where Jesus was born were. And so, you know, if you read
it in a modern context, you'll be like, Oh, that's so horrible. They pu
t him in the manger. They put him with the animals. Like that must have been
such a horrible thing to do. Or like they must've had
like nowhere else to sleep. But as soon as I saw one of these houses,
I was like, oh, of course, that's where you would put travelers, you know, the
family is all sleeping on the other side. You may not want to put them with
the animals, but like, are you putting them in the pile of like
cousins and everything like that? They're strangers. They could like come up and
murder
everyone or something like that, right? Like, Maybe not everyone would put them
in the animal section, but it certainly wouldn't be an absurd thing to do. It's the only other part of the house
other than the room where people sleep. That's true. And it just recontextualized
that, like, I hadn't understood what was happening in that story. Right. Unique condition of poverty, or like
a uniquely weird or cruel thing to do. Well, then how many other elements of Jesus life are
we totally not
understanding correctly? So, yeah. Anyway so, that is What I'm thinking
of for our kids in terms of like how we create this moral seed for them to
fight against what's going on within the online context, but I would encourage
other people to come up with other moral seeds or maybe other moral lists
or other moral just like be aware. Because when I see these people who
lose everything, what happens is that they, they are growing up in either
secular families or families that are like tangentially
religious these days. And your argument, basically, if
I were to sum everything up is, even if you think that you're
atheistic, Or whatever it may be. Super soft cultural framework works one. You may be discounting how morally
brainwashed you already are based on an upbringing you brought in which you were
non consensually given a religious moral framework without yourself knowing, but
also in order to combat this, people have to have a strong internal self
model that is optimizing around somet
hing other than a, a, a vein archetype
or laziness or just feeling good. And you, you can't just hope that they're
going to build that archetype themselves. They need to have something
that gets them there. Is that your, the gist of your argument? Yes, but the core point I'd like
want to end on, because I think this is really, really important. Okay. Is. A lot of people are going out there
thinking that if they just raise their kids without a strong cultural framework,
whether that's a religious
or secular one, like, like they're taking a wishy
or washy perspective on religion than their parents did, like God is love or
something like that, or a more secular perspective than the past, that their
kids will convergently come to the same value systems that they will. And that their kids childhoods are
broadly the same as their childhoods. Is not the case. If you do not raise your kids with some
value system that is hard, logically sought through and reinforced through
traditions and frami
ngs, those kids are going to get sucked into one of
these organically formed cults that have bubbled up within online spaces
in both the left and the right. I would go so far as to say most humans
today who are growing up are being sucked into radical and dangerous. Online cults. And when you begin to frame them
this way, when you begin to see that some of these movements are not just
self help movements, but they are defining an entire world framework
for viewing your own actions for viewing re
ality and for viewing what
is moral and what is immoral and how an individual should make decisions. Then you are seeing that they are
through not, not even a set of maliciousness, but just because no
other, internally consistent system that kids could really cling to was
provided that kids grab onto this. You know, kids these days are like,
you know, they're, they're after a shipwreck and they're holding on to the
boards of an old religious tradition often or a secular tradition that came
with
like a little bit of what their parents have passed down to them. And then the storm comes and
the board's pushed away and they're grabbing at anything. And they will grab at the systems
because the systems have, of course, organically evolved to fit this market
niche of kids grabbing at anything. And the more malevolent often, or
more psychologically harmful 1 of these systems is, the more it will be
focused at preventing deconversion. Once somebody converts. So you cannot wait. Until you see t
he warning signs for
your kids, you know, you need to go into parenthood thinking about all of this. And parents are so worried about
the stupid stuff, you know, well, our gendered bathrooms which
it's just been done, but it's not like if parents did half the effort
on like breastfeeding or screen time and. Like, Oh, is my kid like looking at, I
don't know, porn or something like that stuff matters so little compared to
the cultural groups that are building your kids, moral frameworks, which is
what you are not thinking about word. Anyway, I love you to death Simone. This has been a. Entertaining conversation. And I guess we will be
test pilots for our kids. And even though we're putting the track
series on hold, I think that this is pretty much as good as a track as you're
going to get, I mean, I like this more than a lot of the tracks that we did. And I, this to me, I know it won't
do well because I found this to be a uniquely meaningful episode to me. So whenever you feel like you,
you really got something out of the conversation, then you Or the idea, this was like riffing on a
conversation that we had this morning. So a lot of these ideas came from
Simone and I just, you know, when I talk with you, it helps me build these. So I really appreciate that Simone. Oh, thanks Malcolm. I enjoyed our walk today, getting
deals at the dollar store. Oh yes. We, we do our regular post holiday
cleanup of Everything that's on sale. Yeah. There's nothing like a 50 percent
off deal at a
dollar store. 50 percent off deals at the dollar store. Yeah. So you know how we're cheap. All right. Love you. Gorgeous. Love you. Yeah. Sorry. It's the WhatsApp thread with my
dad where I told him how Torsten rubs the rocks along his face. And my dad says he might
be onto something there. There's thousands of years of
perceived technology involved with crystals and stone types
of healing or no being healing. But, Is our whole anti mystic thing just
a rebellion against our parents? He's already
, yeah, we're, we're
anti mystics because our parents are like, Oh yeah, well, no, that's
the, you know, legitimate healing. And our son is going to be an anti. He's a mystic, a pro mystic. He's a, he's a pro mystic. He's already into the stones. More rubbing crystals kind,
rubbing crystals on his face. He does it in such a manic
way, where he's like, Ha ha! I think that's, I mean, honestly,
if you're going to be a crystal person, you should do it. The way that first all the way with it. Yeah. O
kay.
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