Economic argument: slavery hinders innovation

In this provocative episode of Based Camp, Malcolm and Simone Collins dive deep into a taboo topic: slavery—both historical and modern. Is slavery “good” at a civilizational level? They explore why more people are enslaved today than at any point in human history (~50 million in forced labor or marriage), critique selective outrage over past vs. present slavery, and examine cultural attitudes toward wartime rape/slavery across groups (Puritans, Quakers, Backwoods/Appalachian Scots-Irish, Cavaliers, Spanish Catholics, Vikings, Muslims, Japanese, etc.).

Key discussions include:

* Genetic and cultural legacies of “rape slaves” vs. conquest without integration.

* Why certain Protestant subgroups showed remarkable restraint (no recorded cases of raping Native captives).

* How slavery economically stifled innovation (Rome, the American South).

* Maps showing slavery’s concentration in Cavalier regions and its overlap with modern socioeconomic struggles.

* Why reflexive disgust toward status-signaling and a preference for strong partners may have given some groups a long-term edge.

They argue that, even setting aside morality, sex slavery and post-conquest integration often backfire genetically and culturally—while loving your own people and culture drives lasting success. A data-heavy, counterintuitive take that challenges both left- and right-wing sacred cows. Not for the faint of heart.

Episode Transcript

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Hello, Simone Collins. I’m excited to be here with you today. Today we are gonna be talking about a concept that was way more interesting than I expected it to be as I started to dive into it. Okay. Is slavery good?

What, and what brought up this concept is like, obviously this is not a topic we were allowed to talk about growing up, or we’ve been allowed to talk about more broadly as a society. No. And so, then Tucker Carlson and, but the left has been hugely glazing recently places like Qatar. Oh. And I’m like, well, Qatar’s a slave state, right?

Like, so if, if he can talk about how great Qatar cities are, at least the faction of the right that like, doesn’t like this weird Tucker faction. They think slave slave states are awesome now. And the left thinks slave states are awesome now because, you know, a, a, a across the, middle East. This is just something that we see.

Fun fact, by the way, in Gaza the neighborhood where blacks are kept is called [00:01:00] slaves or like slave neighborhood.

Speaker 11: But more specifically, ‘cause I wanted to check this just to make sure that’s right. Yeah. It’s called The Neighborhood of the Slaves is where black people live in Gaza, , because having slaves is so common there. , And there were around 11,000, Afro Palestinians are around 1% of the population of Gaza was black.

Uh, and, and brought there to be slaves.

Malcolm Collins: So yeah, I mean, this is common in the, in the the, there’s

Simone Collins (2): a black meadow in Gaza.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. In the area. Well, they, they bring them in and use them as slaves basically. So, remember that the, when they were doing the mass genocide in Darfur, there was like, what was it?

10 exercise of the deaths in Gaza that this genocide was of Muslims against blacks, and they called them slaves. That was, no,

Simone Collins (2): not, not exactly. It’s more just that they were kind of synonymous. It’s just that like.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, just

Simone Collins (2): the one used [00:02:00] for a black person, sort of, it was, what’s the word for when something’s like Kleenex, you know, or bandaid where like, you know, it becomes genericized of like, well they’re, they’re the same thing.

And then, so then

Malcolm Collins: I’m, I’m, I am sure that American Blacks would believe you, you used the n word analogy for that. You’re like, it’s just syn synonymous.

Speaker 2: Category is people who annoy you. Audience, keep quiet, please.

Speaker 4: Uh, well, oh, 10 seconds, Mr. Marsh. I know it, but I don’t think I should say it.

Speaker 2: Oh, ooh. Oh, naggers. Of course. Naggers. Right? Uh, can we cut to, uh, can we cut to a.

Simone Collins (2): It’s more just that they were kind of synonymous.

Malcolm Collins: Like, yes, it was used in that context, but we use it in different contexts all the time now.

Simone Collins (2): Well, if, if you live in a society where the only ever time you see someone who is, you know, we’ll say, who is [00:03:00] purple hair is a slave, you’re just gonna be like, well, you know, I need to get a purple haired person, you know, around the plantation or whatever.

Malcolm Collins: Tucker went further, by the way. I just don’t buy your argument at all. They, they mean it as a slur. They mean it as this is how we see you because it, it is common in those regions. But and by the way, fun fact, more slaves on earth today than there ever have been in human history.

Simone Collins (2): That’s, no, I, I knew that and it really frustrates me when people are like, oh, we practice slavery in the past.

We’re so humiliated. It’s like, yeah, no, if you care, stop worrying about reparations. Maybe stop slavery today. There’s stuff you can do today. Because there are,

Malcolm Collins: yeah. That’s what gets me when a woke person complains about being enslaved. It’s like you only get to complain about being enslaved if you’re going to do something about the slavery that exists today.

Simone Collins (2): Yeah. ‘

Malcolm Collins: cause my ancestors did something about your ancestors, slavery. So what are you doing for the existing Oh, nothing. So, so

Simone Collins (2): you’re no better than all the, the white people whose descendants are now. Implicated in [00:04:00] reparations requirements or white guilt or whatever it is

Malcolm Collins: putting out in this episode is, is, is actually probably more that if we’re talking about who did more harm to who owe the, the southerners, the reparations.

And we’ll get into some data on that. But to get it even spicy, no, I know from a moral perspective, but if we’re just talking about economically they were a net hindrance to the region.

Simone Collins (2): Oh, no, no, no. Yeah, yeah. I I, gosh, I feel like I was reading to this just recently, so we’re talking about how oh yeah, no well, one of the people who is talks with, with the pod a lot was talking about how slavery ultimately held back technological advancement in the south.

And how when you have

Malcolm Collins: not just the south, you see it hold back wherever it’s practice and we’ll go into why. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s the reason why Rome didn’t have an industrial revolution because they had a massive slave population. If they didn’t have that, they probably would’ve had an industrial revolution.

Yeah. Of looking at the technology that they had access to. They had access to many of the early tools of the Industrial Revolution. They just had no reason [00:05:00] to use them because they had constant slave populations.

Simone Collins (2): Yeah. Yeah. The general argument being that when you have an excess of human labor, you, you tend to get lazy and not actually technologically,

Malcolm Collins: but this stuff isn’t the most interesting stuff.

And I wanna start with the most interesting stuff because the most interesting stuff actually comes from Tucker’s second comment. Wow. Which was when he went on about how we were demanding, I total surrender of Iran and oh, Iran knows what total surrender means. It means that they have to give up their daughters and wives to be griped.

And he didn’t think that Americans wanted to go out there and do that. And. First of all, we had total surrender from Germany and Japan during World War ii. And like that was not a big problem. So like, how did, how did Tucker not know? Like that’s a, something that’s really, at least if you have a decent, like, basic level American education, you’d be aware of.

But it got me thinking, okay, Tucker, you’re trying to normalize grape in war scenarios again, right? Like bringing it up. Is it a good idea? Like, are grape [00:06:00] slaves a good idea? Right? I, I, I’m talking about at a civilizational level. Uhhuh, we know that different groups practice it at different rates.

Okay. It’s, it’s very explicitly allowed in the Koran. You are I, I love it when I first asked in AI this, okay, it said, no, the Koran doesn’t allow for the grape of the, the, the, the grape of ca of, of women after area surrenders. It goes, it only allows you to have sexual relations with your slaves, and you can take as many women slave as you want after you capture a region.

And I’m like, that’s great. That’s grape. Okay. If you are having sex with somebody who doesn’t have the ability to turn you down, because as the Krantz says, if they are yours, if they are your property because they’re your property that is grape in every sense of the word. Okay?

Simone Collins (2): Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And we know that for Jews in, in, in the, the Bible, that the, that has a, you know.

[00:07:00] Rules for this. You have you, you are not allowed to do this. You have to marry them first in like a ceremony and have like a grieving thing and they need to be taken as a legal wife. But I mean, they don’t have much choice in the matter. And we do know that Jews practice practices en mass to the extent where 50% of the ancestral Jewish DNA is Canaanite.

Oh my. So like there was heavy mixing of the populations. This is also where a lot of the you know, where, where, you know, in the temple they had, statues of other gods when you have the Josiah reforms. Yeah. Meaning that, like the, the other Gods practices had heavily integrated with Jewish practices because of this intermedian process.

And then they started being told not to intermarry. And that’s where Judaism became more of a, like mono ethic thing. But this became bigger after the temple. If you’re more interested in a four hour deep dive on this, you can see our topic, the question that breaks Judaism or our topic of when did Jews become [00:08:00] monogamous?

But Jews had had those rules. And then with Christians you’re, you’re you know, love your enemies, stuff like that. It’s, it’s, it’s pretty taken that you should not be taking slaves after a conflict and griping them. But the problem is right, is you can say. Okay. This is what’s in their legal text.

Okay. Like for example, in Jewish legal text, still technically they could take wives from a conquered region, but Jews haven’t done that in thousands of years. Right, right. So what about Christians? Different Christian populations? ‘cause there’s different Christian cultural groups. And so I started to look into this and with, in some Christian cultural groups, it is genuinely astonishing, the extent to which they did not do this.

Mm-hmm. To give you an example, there is not a single recorded case in all of American history of a puritan of a Quaker or of someone of the backwards [00:09:00] tradition griping a Native American captive.

Simone Collins: Oh really?

Malcolm Collins: Not

Simone Collins: even backwards.

Malcolm Collins: Even backwards.

Simone Collins: Oh,

Malcolm Collins: maybe

Simone Collins (2): that’s because they don’t, like, they would never document it.

‘cause I mean, how many

Malcolm Collins: they, well, yeah, so you can make this argument, but the problem with the argument is we have tons and tons and tons of written Puritan and Quaker complaints about all of the things that they hated about the backwoods people. Oh.

Simone Collins (2): Oh.

Malcolm Collins: And never in a single one of these complaints, they know these complaints could even be made up.

Simone Collins (2): Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Is an accusation of griping a captive native.

Simone Collins (2): Hmm.

Malcolm Collins: Or really anyone else. Now I will note that they do complain that the backwoods people often married into native families. And this is where it gets really, really

Simone Collins (2): wasn’t, they have like traditions of like, maybe it was playful and, and like kind of a pantomime, but like carrying off women.

You know, like stealing them

Malcolm Collins: of, [00:10:00] although it was, it was panter,

Simone Collins (2): like their cute way,

Malcolm Collins: no legal, no blood feuds we are aware of from anything that was seen as a genuine grape. Mm-hmm. And no accusations of it by surrounding populations that hated them. Now, and, and the reason why it’s particularly notable when you’re talking about like the Puritans and the Quakers is the Puritans and the Quakers, like the Puritans especially, were fastidious about documenting sexual crimes.

We know of, for example, in Puritan settlements. One person did say something to a Native American woman that was seen as inappropriate, and so he was whipped. Oh. We do know of one other servant who was not a Puritan, who attempted to rape a Native American woman and was severely punished. But hold on.

This is where this gets interesting, and especially in regards to the backwards, because I wanna, I wanna focus on that. ‘cause it’s, it comes off as like, weird. Why aren’t they doing this when you go, okay. What about other Christian populations? What about the, the Cavaliers, right? Yeah. It appears the Cavaliers griped pretty regularly.

[00:11:00] In fact, that

Simone Collins (2): seems

Malcolm Collins: in the Cavalier Society grave was considered a misdemeanor or less than a misdemeanor. Oh. This is a southern society. If you’re talking about the us. And a lot of people think of like. All of the Confederate states as like Cavalier and, and they were not. We’ll be going over some maps soon and you’ll see that in the greater Appalachian region or the Bawi region, slavery just wasn’t really practiced at all.

Mm-hmm. It’s like a huge wall against slavery. And we’ll go into why that may be as well, right. Why, why did this group never practice it and what was the economic effect of them never practicing it? But what about. Catholics, uhoh, uhoh. I always hate having to go into this ‘cause this is one of those things where I didn’t go into this, like wanting to do a, why are Catholics always so persistent?

I don’t

Simone Collins (2): know, man. It’s just every episode.

Speaker 17: You know, like literally in this case, I even was just looking for counter examples because I wanted to break things up and I couldn’t find them. Uh, this is just a problem with history. It’s, um, history makes [00:12:00] them look bad. I.

Malcolm Collins: But Simone, you must even know from your history the Spanish particularly were basically grape machines. I mean, when they were colonizers, they, every, i, every island they went to, every colony. There was not an unap captive. I’m actually not even aware of a single Spanish expedition.

That didn’t have significant griping going on. Mm-hmm.

Speaker 18: So I decided to look into this. Was there any Spanish expedition that didn’t? Grape natives. , And there is one actually, , the AAR nun Decca incident, , in which the ship crashed and the, , people on the ship over eight years had to live among native tribes. And they, in this incident. I guess when their lives depended on, it didn’t grape them.

, Other than that, , we have no incidents like, like [00:13:00] no incidents of this happening. It’s, it’s really, which is shocking because you see no incidents of it happening when it’s the other way around.

Malcolm Collins: Which is very, very significant. Okay. And then you can be like, okay, what about other Catholic populations? Like what about Quebec? What about Louisiana? Right. This is interesting. It appears these populations were probably at around the level of Cavaliers, like it happened.

And it happened frequently enough that the Jesuits were constantly complaining about it. Mm-hmm. But it, it didn’t appear to be truly systemic. It was something that bad apples did. It was not something that the captain and all the boys did that was very Spanish. In Spanish. It was just everybody like, like, we’re, we’re gonna go out.

And and, and this had massive effects on these various populations. This is part of the reason why. You know, when American Catholics like complain about, because I’ve always been very confused about like, [00:14:00] Catholics, like Nick Fuentes complaining about Catholic immigrants from Latin America. Because I’m like, but they’re Catholic immigrants, right?

And he is like, well, they’re genetically different from me. And I’m like, I mean, that’s mostly because of all the griping that the Catholics did, right? Like that’s where a lot of that Native American blood came from. There, there were some consensual arrangements within that that, you know, led to the, the, the mixed blood in these settlements.

But it seems like at least in the early days, the vast majority was great. And this is where it gets really interesting because the backwards people. Did frequently marry into native populations. But it was almost never the population, or not, almost never, as far as we know, there’s no historical counts of it being the populations that they conquered.

When they conquered a settlement, they completely wiped them out. That was, that seemed to have been always the goal. So that’s not even like particularly more moral. They just and also interesting, you might not know this but it was also very rare for Native Americans of that region to great captives as [00:15:00] well.

This is, this is not true of Native Americans of the West. Oh, native Americans. The Western, you mean like in

Simone Collins (2): South America? It was on

Malcolm Collins: unusual? No, no, no. Northeastern America. The, the Native Americans that were a budding where the backwards people were and where the puritans were, did not grape their captives frequently.

Simone Collins: Really?

Malcolm Collins: And they’re, well, we have a lot of accounts from captives who are later freed. And they document just it didn’t happen to them. This is notable that like Native Americans didn’t do this in many cases, whereas you know, the, the Spanish almost always did, right? Mm-hmm. So, so you’re seeing like even a higher level of morality there.

But what are the consequences of this? Right? And why might you have prohibitions against this? Why might you have cultural prohibitions against this? And why did the backwards people not do this when they apparently didn’t have any prohibitions against wiping out Native American settlements? The core answer to that, just so we don’t make it a big confusing question is [00:16:00] you can find it by looking at the reports we do another episode where we contrast the different American cultural subgroups.

Historically speaking love letters about like why they liked their wife or why they chose their wife sweet. Or why their wife was awesome.

Simone Collins (2): Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And they, they would say very different things about them. In the Cavalier it was mostly she’s pretty and or she’s very effeminate or feminine or

Simone Collins (2): she’s have a good fam a lot of it can Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Or she’s well, right. She’s

Simone Collins (2): connected from a, a good family, whatever.

Malcolm Collins: The Puritan tradition. It was almost always, she has great intellectual discussions with me. Like she’s a, she’s a very good conversationalist. I really like, you know, the book, she’s read the thing that was what the Puritans really cared about.

And if you go to the backwoods it’s always like, she’s very good with a, with a rifle. She can defend the house, well, she can do chores really well. She you know, it was very much like how robust she was, how [00:17:00] much of a like marshal spirit is really what they cared about. And so, if you are a culture that when you’re looking for, I want.

A strong mate, and you just killed all of this person’s family, their brothers, their fathers, the rest of their clan you’re, you’re not gonna wanna marry into that, right? You’re not gonna want to raise their kids, especially if you’re from a tradition that was pretty strictly monogamous and in the region.

And also they were. They had a different relation to religion and, and, and they were Presbyterian mostly than the other groups of the, of the region, but they were still very religious. And and it guided sort of their moral choices and sometimes more important than their moral choices. Their hierarchy was in the surrounding community.

Like people would’ve looked down on them for something like this if it got out. And within cultures that care about that sort of honor you’re not going to break those sorts of taboos even if you don’t have the, the religious [00:18:00] morality. Right. And this also explains why they were totally okay with marrying the tribes that they fought alongside.

They’re like, oh, you know, you fight with us, you are strong. Like we’ll marry into this. All right, so to continue here the core downside with oh, and, and by the way, people are wondering if, great slaves are still common in Islamic countries in, in terms of enslaved populations. They are very common.

It’s a huge problem in Qatar, in the uua e even though these people aren’t like by what the Quran would say, technically, slaves they still get griped very frequently. It’s a, it’s a big problem. So yeah. Oh, also, if you’re wondering Mormons not a single known case of a Mormon raping a native captive and they did have native captains on, on occasion, so

Simone Collins (2): Oh, they did?

Oh,

Malcolm Collins: yeah, yeah, yeah. Other, other population that that did not grape. So it’s. This, this makes it even more stark about like the Spanish doing this constantly and the French doing this occasionally. [00:19:00] Because apparently a lot of people can get by like without doing it. It’s not like an inevitability.

Simone Collins (2): Even if there’s active Yeah. Animosity. Or even if they are, for example, like early Mormons expending into what might be territory inhabited by. Native Americans already indigenous people, whatever we’re calling them now. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

Malcolm Collins: Well, and I think, I mean obviously I might be biased because I’m partially from the backwoods tradition myself but I think the backwoods idea around this is actually fundamentally pretty good.

Which is to say. If you were able to conquer a territory, you probably don’t want to marry the women of that territory because they are then genetically conquering your own people. And we actually see this repeatedly of other groups that were very violent and expansionist. So examples here are, well, one Muslims, two Vikings.

Vikings is a, is a better example. Muslims actually got more genetic spread, but [00:20:00] Vikings actually had an almost negligible genetic spread in the regions that they conquered and used SMEC slaves. It.

Simone Collins (2): So who didn’t do that though was Alexandra, the grade. He had this policy of getting his top leadership to marry in whatever regions, and he picked up wives and.

The various regions they conquered, like Roxanne, for example. Yeah. My understanding

Malcolm Collins: is that the Greek genetic influence in those regions was wiped out pretty quickly,

Simone Collins (2): partially diluted. It instantly. They also just didn’t seem to like stop to actually really set up an entrench in many of the places where they, you know, alleged.

Well,

Malcolm Collins: I mean, this, this shows you know, if you’re, if you’re playing like the genetics game, right? And, and having your genetics within a region helps your culture thrive, grow within that region. Because usually the two are sort of, co I’m gonna say comorbid, but like, they, they have a. I, I forget what it’s called, like a beneficial cycle with each other.

Like the, the, [00:21:00] the, the genes and the culture often have predilections together that make them work more easily together. So, so an example of this could be you could develop as Simone that knows that I have, for example, who knows if this is from my ancestors, but I have a pretty strong disgust reaction towards women that I see as beneath me.

And I just never really slept around, was women I saw as beneath me, even when I did sleep around a lot. Because I saw it as and this is partially why I, I don’t sleep as women who have high body counts, but it’s not just that, it’s like more generally, like she knew this was a problem with her and her degree that she talks about, where I was like, it’s pretty gross that you don’t have like,

Simone Collins (2): an active turnoff related to college degree.

And it wasn’t even like, I didn’t have one. It was that. It was the wrong college.

Malcolm Collins: Well, yeah. You were Vale Victorian even. And I was like, ah, I guess that makes up for it. But you know, you do have to go to Cambridge if we’re getting

Simone Collins (2): married enough. Not enough. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: I don’t wanna keep dealing with this.

Speaker 5: It’s interesting that at a subconscious level, my brain, rather than [00:22:00] recognizing elite colleges as like an elitist thing, the way they would typically be recognized, I saw it as just a sign of fitness at competing, was in the existing societal structure, at least the one that existed when I was growing up.

I doubt my kids will feel that way because it’s no longer relevant in terms of your ability to, , amass power, whether that power is capital, followers, et cetera. But it was then.

Malcolm Collins: But no, it is, it is like an active disgust pathway that I have.

Right.

Simone Collins (2): Yeah, it is interesting. Yeah. That like what one cultural group might be like, oh yeah, absolutely. Like I’d hit that and other people being like, Ew, no. Why would I, I would not even think about it like that. Yeah. About that.

Malcolm Collins: I actually started to think about it in the case of like Tucker Carlson offer, right.

This is who actually got me thinking about it. And I was

Simone Collins (2): like, oh, like what American troops would want to like,

Malcolm Collins: yeah. Like would I actually in that way. I mean, there’s a lot of Intels in the US that would be like, yeah, sign me up. I [00:23:00] will, I I will go to Iran. I will take one for the Team America. But I, I think a, a fairly large percent of the American male population would just be like, I’m not

Simone Collins (2): really interested.

That’s why would I do that? Yeah, yeah,

Malcolm Collins: yeah. Like, doesn’t seem like my thing. And, and note again we don’t see this in all populations populations that are famous for griping captives are, for example, the Japanese Japanese famously griped about anyone they could capture constantly and consistently.

And in fact, they did it even more than the Catholics. So, you know, hey, at least the Catholics aren’t as bad as the Japanese.

Simone Collins (2): Yay,

Malcolm Collins: yay did.

Simone Collins (2): I mean,

Malcolm Collins: I might ask ai.

Simone Collins (2): I mean, are are we talking numerically, are we talking in forms of violence? I’m talking in terms of

Malcolm Collins: frequency. Like they have a captive, what’s the probability?

Uhhuh?

Speaker 6: Alright, checked it out and the answer is not even close. This [00:24:00] Japanese are way more likely to rape than Catholics, even if you narrow that Catholic population to only Spanish colonizers when measured on a per soldier, per captive, per opportunity basis, apparently not even close. Casual grape was considered a routine reward for soldiers in the Japanese army.

But wait, but wasn’t that true of the Spanish colonizers? Uh, they say the main reason is because it varied by region. If there was like a monastery in that region, they would stop them. Okay, well not stop them, but complain about it loudly. I.

Simone Collins (2): Yeah, like if, if you’re a woman and you are taken captive by type A, type B, type C, you know, Catholic Spaniard, Japanese military ban Protestant.

Yeah. Backwoods person. Quaker Quakers, like none, [00:25:00] no Quakers.

Malcolm Collins: I, I like, I, I was going through this with AI to try to find like any kind AI’s great for that. I can be like any historical example, can you find one concretely recorded historical

Simone Collins (2): example? Pretty imagine they, they wouldn’t even know where to go.

Because if you asked a Quaker woman, you know, like she, let’s say that there’s something wrong with like, you know, her, her chest, she’d be like, oh, my stomach hurts. If she had, you know. Problems in her, you know, intimate areas. She’d say, my stomach hurts. You know, like, well, the

Malcolm Collins: Quakers had the big problem where the pirates kept rating them and they wouldn’t do anything about it.

And it was a big debate in Philadelphia of like, whether we should do anything about the pirates that keep killing and raping our population. And they were like, I don’t, I don’t know, like the, the, they, it would be violent to stop them. You, you could, I, when I say woke culture came from Quaker culture, like, it really, like the, the similarities are astonishing.

Mm-hmm. But that is Read the Pragmatist Guide, the Crafting Religion, or we might do another episode on that that make for a good [00:26:00] episode. But the advantages of this, so I’ve talked about other cultures that quickly exploded out onto a population out of nowhere starting was very small, starting numbers.

Okay. And most of the American groups represent one of these populations. The starting Quaker population in America was small. The starting puritan population in America was small. The starting cavalier population in America was small. Like if we’re talking about like the actual immigrants over but the starting aver population that the backwards came from, which were, gangs and of, of Ulster Scots in a, in a lawless territory of Scotland they were maybe, as I pointed out in the past maybe 3000 fighting age men in total that exploded into one of the dominant American cultures and one of the largest cultures on Earth that really only compares in terms of its explosive conquering of a region to again, like the Vikings or the Muslims or something like that.

But the Vikings didn’t have a lasting genetic impact except in one region. Where did the Vikings have a lasting genetic impact?

Simone Collins (2): Ooh, [00:27:00] don’t tell me that. That’s not where they came from. I wanna say the Midwest,

Malcolm Collins: it would, no, it was the only region where they didn’t have anyone to grape. Not in

Simone Collins (2): the

Malcolm Collins: United States.

Simone Collins (2): Oh, like ice Iceland or something? Iceland

Malcolm Collins: in Greenland. Okay.

Simone Collins (2): Okay, okay, okay. Okay. Just like new land to settle. Interesting. Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: because they didn’t have, well, they, they conquered other territories really extensively to the point where there’s tons of towns named after them in England. Sure. There’s tons of, you know, but they just did not have much of a genetic impact.

Speaker 7: It appears to be between four and 6%, um, except in the or Canadian, Shetlands Islands, this very high island at the very top of Scotland where they had permanent settlements. And there it’s, uh, 23 to 28%.

Malcolm Collins: To have a genetic impact, you have to be way more systemic about it and set up colonies and have a native population die off, which really requires a Spanish level amount of this. And in Spanish territories about that they did become the dominant genetic ancestor in the [00:28:00] regions. And they have around I, I think like across Latin America, it’s about 25% Native American blood.

Left. But a lot of now, now you can say, well, yeah, but how is that working for them in those regions? Like, are these regions economically successful? Did the cultures meld well? Did they meld harmoniously in a way that led to technologically productive capacity and not endless civil wars and fights?

Hmm.

You

Malcolm Collins: can argue maybe that’s a, a, a, a poor integration of the cultures that led to that. Maybe it’s just Catholic culture more broadly. ‘cause we’ve talked in other episodes that Catholics have military coups at a way higher rate than than Protestants do. But if you contrast it with the backwards people, which did genetically integrate to an extent now to a way lower extent, I, I’d estimate their level of genetic integration is.

2.5%, unless you’re getting to specific subpopulations like the, I forget what they’re called, but they like heavily integrated with the Native American population and they’ve [00:29:00] become pretty genetically successful in some parts of the Appalachian territories. And they have a, a, a name. So they integrated with free slaves and Native Americans, and they have a, a different and unique culture that, that has been pretty successful and is still surviving.

Mm-hmm. But all of these groups they never had, like after the initial rebellions of the colonial period they didn’t really have any discordance. Nor was there a huge differentiation in society between like the people of this culture with some native blood and the people without some native blood, to the extent that like.

It’s not even well documented who is partially native for most of these regions. Mm-hmm. Which I think would sur surprise, you know, people from the, the Spanish areas where you did keep heavy track of this because it determined your social standing in society.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: So basically it led to more success, it led to more cultural success.

So it’s, it’s generally not, and it led to more cultural genetic [00:30:00] success. So,

Simone Collins (2): last you mean like a lasting, genetically detectable impact in an area?

Malcolm Collins: Right. Like, like the backwards people still make up the genetically dominant group in the regions that they conquered in, in the early colonial days.

Whereas if you look at the, so

Simone Collins (2): basically an, an argument against, especially SE X. Slavery is an argument for segregation.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, I mean, and this happened with the the, was the, was the Arabs to an extent as well, like Muslims held huge amounts of territory that have almost no Arab DNA left in them.

Wow. Because they practice this system.

Simone Collins (2): Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And Jews, as I said, ended up melding was their greatest enemy because they practice this system for a period and, and, and, and don’t anymore. Partially likely as like a, a cultural evolutionary adaptation to the negative effects of that. Now let’s talk about the economics of any, any thoughts before [00:31:00] I go further?

There are,

Simone Collins (2): yeah. I’m, I’m, I’m trying to figure out, I, I wish I could just go back in time and like, I don’t know, like it’s, it’s mid battle. There is a, a viking. I thought they did come on rape and pillage. That’s like a viking thing, isn’t it? You know?

Speaker 8: You Should be really proud of your wife, at least.

I mean, Freyja dove into that pillaging 100%. Even took part in quite a lot of the

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-10: Gripping.

Speaker 9: .

Huh? Freyja forced all kinds of monks to let her write and stuff. I didn’t really expect that. I was totally blown away when I suddenly saw her on top of this monk, moaning and groaning. Seriously, !

Speaker 10: Of course, I mean, that’s what you do when you pillage.

Malcolm Collins: Right, right. And so the point I’m making mm-hmm.

Is rape and pillage doesn’t actually leave a genetic footprint. Even be king of a territory and have a bunch of wives. Doesn’t leave a genetic [00:32:00] footprint.

Simone Collins (2): Alexander

Malcolm Collins: actually, why doesn’t it leave a genetic footprint? It’s an interesting point here. Mm-hmm. Why was it that the Scotch Irish left a genetic footprint mm-hmm.

And continued to grow to today because

Simone Collins (2): they were ghettoized and the Jews were ghettoized.

Malcolm Collins: It’s well because they allowed themselves to be ghettoized. So when

Simone Collins (2): again, I guess it’s kind of a two-way street. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: When the Vikings took territory they liked culturally being rich, showing off their wealth, having lots of spouses, having lots of nice things when they, when they created persistent colonies within a territory.

Mm-hmm. And their main social steam was still back in the scando areas. Right. Like all of their wealth in these territories was often to show off back home in those territories. Right? Mm-hmm. Well, what this meant is if you couldn’t have wealth and lots of wives and everything like that, which most of a population cannot do, and you were [00:33:00] a Viking you didn’t stay in these territories, you’d go back home with whatever you could get. Because keep in mind these societies were mostly futile functional slaves. And then a, a leading class that was naming things, that was creating the language. I mean, like the English language is like half you know, from, from these, these conquering groups, right?

Mm-hmm. One to 2% may even be overstating. It may be like 0.2% of the population is actually Norman, because you, you just didn’t have enough resources to maintain an elite class that was more than that. Mm-hmm. But what made the, and this was also true of the Muslims as they spread out using this system but what made the backwards tradition really different is because they had so much hatred and a reflexive discuss towards anyone that signaled status.

There just wasn’t a huge reason to ever accumulate. And I, when I mean status, I mean status in terms of culture or wealth or anything like that, they just didn’t have a reason to accumulate these things. And because they didn’t have a reason to accumulate these things, they never really cared [00:34:00] about being poor or you know, being from what the outsiders saw them as is uncivilized which allowed them to just.

Keep having kids. It was never a concern for them. It was like, well, of course I’m gonna keep having kids in many ways when people look down on the American redneck as being this you know, uneducated, whatever. Right? And the American redneck is like, well, screw you. I don’t care that you look down on me for that stuff.

That is the cultural response that has allowed them to thrive at least genetically speaking to the extent they have from this small starting population of maybe 3000 people.

Simone Collins (2): Hmm.

Malcolm Collins: Where, where other groups did not. I,

Simone Collins (2): I think a lot of this also, now that I think about this in the context of Tism as we talk about it coming from a place of cultural pride in liking your people and your group I think maybe part of the, the issue of.

Taking on [00:35:00] either conquered wives, even if it’s consensual or smec slaves is it shows a lack of pride of your own culture and people, and instead just kind of this nihilistic selfishness or hedonism. Exactly. And not like a love of your people and your upbringing and your culture. So it may also be a sign of.

A lack of good cultural upbringing, a lack of your childhood, like love for your childhood and your family and your people and your future. And maybe that’s also kind of where it’s coming from is, is these are people who’ve become separated from that. I could see it making sense in the context of, for example, members of the Japanese military who are just like, you know, experiencing an early version of that Asian burnout of just like, I hate everything.

I just, you know, like, I just wanna feel good. And, and maybe Spaniard colonists just kind of being like, [00:36:00] I’ve been on a ship for a long, like, you know, who knows what church services were like on this ship. You’ve, you’ve been separated from your family, you’ve been separated from your culture. Yeah.

Like it would make sense that a Renaissance era, European colonist from pretty much anywhere would get a little worry if, like, I. You know, you’ve been so unmoored from a community for that long. I mean, what do you, they’re basically like, well, this is very

Malcolm Collins: interesting about what you’re saying. So, where you see this pattern of often not a huge genetic or, or less of a genetic footprint that you would think in highly grapey behavior is when the men are mostly interested in a status game somewhere else.

So Well, and

Simone Collins (2): when they, they appear to be unmoored from any other community that

Malcolm Collins: the Spanish and KIS to doors really cared about status and maybe setting up a family back home in Spain, like that was often the goal. You go to the us you go on your you know, grape adventure, but the goal is always to get [00:37:00] back to Spain and to be even a higher status within Spanish society.

Sure. It was the same with the Vikings often it was not the same with the, the backwards tradition people or the Puritan people, for example. Mm-hmm. They, they did not care, like the, the, the backwards people did not care at all what any of the Scots Irish who stayed in Ireland or the ulcer Scots thought of them.

They didn’t even seem to have persistent communication with them after they left. They were just completely irrelevant to their lives after that point. So it’s how status is measured. And so this is one of those things I talk about borrowing things from other cultures, and in some emphasis I’m like, this is something good we can borrow from Jewish culture.

This is one of the strongest pieces of cultural technology that this culture has, which is a reflexive disgust of status signaling. And another is, is looking for strength in partners like wives. Instead of looking for traditional femininity in

wives,

Simone Collins (2): I think you need to look at the underlying factors that lead to interest in status signaling versus.

Discussed. And I think the underlying things [00:38:00] are status signaling becomes, it, it gets out of control when you have a lack of genuine morality or cultural values. It, it’s what, it’s what fills the void. So what creates the void is the question you need to be asked.

Malcolm Collins: It’s the lack of cultural values. Yeah.

Well, no, no reflexive anger and discuss towards status signaling is very, it was, was very important in making this work. Like you need to know that if you try to show off how big your house is or you know, how, how many jewels you have or how many that people, or you know, that you went to the latest opera you know that people are going to roll their eyes at you to not attempt to do that stuff.

Otherwise you end up picking it up from the cultures around you. That is what the urban monoculture used to lure out so many people, and that’s one of the reasons why this group has been more resistant to it. And so when a lot of people point to the poverty of these regions, it’s like a bad thing.

It’s like, no, that’s largely why they survived. Not caring about the poverty of their regions [00:39:00] and not caring about particularly enriching themselves. It, which also leads to lower rates of military defections, which we talk about in other, so that that’s why they have fewer coups. But I wanna go to talking about the economics of slavery now.

Okay. And what slavery does economically to a region. Mm-hmm. So I wanna put some graphs on screen here which may really shock people if you haven’t seen this.

One is to see where slavery was actually practiced in the United States which is in a smaller region than most people think.

It was really just in the, the, region that had the what was it called? Tradition, the

Simone Collins (2): cavalier,

Malcolm Collins: cavalier tradition. And, and you can see the greater Appalachian territory essentially carving through it with very little slavery.

Simone Collins (2): And I think it just, it’s helpful to put into context why is that, is why that is the case.

The cavalier culture in the United States was the, the earliest colonists to win. There were often the second sons of wealthy. English landed [00:40:00] gentry. This is a country where the eldest son would inherit the estate in England, leaving second sons, for example, to either while he needed to maybe join the clergy or join the military, or goodness knows, maybe you’d go to the colonies, you’d go in, you know, a later period to India to serve, you know, in the British Imperial Empire there.

But what happened with many second Sons is they would go to this particular part of the colonies. They’d get a plantation, and because they weren’t going there with any community with any ideological drive like it was with the Puritans. With the Puritans, it was like Silicon Valley group houses just.

Malcolm Collins: No, no.

They, they had a goal. Their goal was the traditions of the nobility of Europe.

Simone Collins (2): Yeah. Well, it was basically to have my own estate. It’s just that I have to start fresh. And so they had to buy their labor and that’s why they bought the slaves. They weren’t coming. Well, it was about

Malcolm Collins: traditional status signaling without a religious framework really guiding it

Simone Collins (2): well without the, like, equivalent of SFS already living on their family grounds.

You know, they kind of [00:41:00] needed to figure that out. Yeah, it was, it was, did some indentured servitude and they did some slavery.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And if you look at maps here, so if we look at single parents, cancer deaths, mobility, disability rates, vision, disability rates, cognitive disability rates, difficult with independent living, life expectancy, obesity rates, health insurance, availability, heart disease rates, stroke death rates, cancer deaths, diabetes, smoking, mental distress, household income, credit score, debt, delinquency, distressed communities upwards, mobility, income inequality, food insecurity, workers making minimum wage or less unemployment.

Incarceration rate. Homicide rate, high school diploma, teenage birth rates, excessive drinking, adult mobility, social capital index, broadband, internet, religion. And then we put that against slavery. You see very high overlap. Mm-hmm. Now, the

first thing that people are going to say in response to this is they’re gonna be like, okay, well now show me a map of US black population by percentage.

Right? And it’s like, okay, I’ll give [00:42:00] you that, that is a heavy overlap and I’ll put that map on screen here. But there’s been a lot of studies that have looked at the white population of these regions in isolation, and they appear to have been economically massively underserved.

Simone Collins (2): Hmm.

Malcolm Collins: Like, they, they do like, while we’re less than white population than other regions.

Now of course part of that could be cavalier culture just doesn’t lead to innovation. Doesn’t lead to, to the development of industry which is certainly part of that at the same rate as other American cultural groups. But, why, why in, in, in, in Rome, it, it didn’t really develop. Why do you get these enormous lack of economic development during periods in which you have slaves?

And this is actually kinda surprising. I mean, like, you have free labor, right? Like presumably that should be like a huge advantage, right? To a region to not have to pay your labor force.

You, you, you don’t see why that would be a big advantage, Simone?

Simone Collins (2): Well, I mean [00:43:00] with, when you just pay for your labor, you don’t have to house it, you don’t have to feed it, you don’t have to, you know, you just, you just pay them.

And based on market forces, you can, you know, raise or lower your, that is,

Simone Collins: that is true

Simone Collins (2): to a large extent. And this is something that often it’s, you have to think of, like if we’re looking at this completely divorced from morality or anything having slaves just kind of like having, an expensive automated factory like you have to consider depreciation and upkeep and like replacing you know, assets that have run through their lifetime, et cetera.

And, and to, to me that, that seems like a a yeah. So

Malcolm Collins: this is an interesting point that Simone makes here which is worth diving into a little bit. Now it is difficult from parsing history books to know what percent of northern factory workers lived worse lives than the average slave, and what percent of slaves led worse lives than the average factory owner.

Now, you [00:44:00] could say in absolute terms, being. Technically free, and we’ll talk about how free these factory workers really were is always better than being enslaved. And I’d be like, that’s just like objectively not true. There are many instances where I would rather be a slave than like starving to death or something like that, right?

Like, if I had to watch my children starve to death, would I rather be a slave and see them sold off? Yeah. Any day of the week. Like, I don’t, I don’t even know how you could like. Joke about that. Right. And, and so, but it’s hard to, because there’s so much bias from the, the people who want to like do slavery apologetics to do slavery, apologetics for the people who want to you know, overdramatize how bad work things work for northern factory workers, which a lot of people love dramatizing that as well.

But what can be said for sure is some factory workers had a life that almost any human would choose some [00:45:00] slave lives over the lives of those factory workers.

Simone Collins (2): Well, I mean, just to consider the, the incentives of the employer slash slaveholder a slaveholder is probably not gonna do things that they know are going to have very high mortality risks for you, or like.

The risk of your arm being chopped off or something because they’ve paid for you upfront. You were, you were a, a non-trivial upfront cost. Or if you weren’t, like, let’s say you were born into their family or their estate you could be, if in good conditions, sold for a good price. This is not the same with an employee.

Like if, if they lose their arm, oh, I’m sorry, we have to fire you. I mean, this was before labor regulations. You know, this,

Malcolm Collins: this was very frequent for northern faculty workers. What

Simone Collins (2): she said. Yeah, like there’s a dozen more where you came from. Like I don’t have to worry about fixing up my equipment to make it safer.

‘cause there’s a lot of people who want this job.

Malcolm Collins: Many northern factory workers starved to death. It was very regular for them to starve to death for their children, to starve to death for there to be 12 applications, for any position for [00:46:00] children to be sent into the machinery because they were considered disposable and they could get into smaller places.

Simone Collins (2): Yeah. They could,

Rule hands

Malcolm Collins: children to be ground up and then later serve to people in food stuffings because you know, they just don’t care. They didn’t care about food regulations. You know, this stuff. Talk about in like the jungle and stuff like that. Like the, the, the, the worst of the worst like, okay, I’m, I’m trying to think of it.

A, a truly cruel grapey beaty slave owner versus the worst of the worst of the northern factory barons selling children as food products. I

Simone Collins (2): mean, it’s, they’re both equally abominations of, of humans. Like they’re both,

Malcolm Collins: I mean, it’s apples to oranges, but they’re both abominations of

Simone Collins (2): the highest. Yeah. I’m just, I’m, I’m purely looking at the cold incentives here.

And, and I’m also looking at it like, not just from the perspective of like, what if I were a slave, but also like, what if I were just a heartless, Amal plantation operation owner of some sort that wants, like to produce units? Yeah, I mean, I, I think there’s, this is also why many of [00:47:00] them favored indentured servitude because with indentured servitude, you basically had free labor.

You could conveniently work, and we’ve talked about this before, but

Malcolm Collins: in, in some of the early indentured servitude records we have in the American colonies, only one in seven lived. So when people talk about like how easy indentured Servit had it, and the reason it was so low was because of the economic incentive.

If they died, you didn’t have to pay them. And so you basically were doing everything in your power to get them killed. And there

Simone Collins (2): wasn’t, anyway, yeah, there was, there was no maybe you paid for passage, possibly, but there was basically no upfront cost, whereas there was with slaves, so. Basically Yeah.

You were like, oh, yeah. Yeah. It was like, buy now, pay later. And then you just declare bankruptcy. Ooh,

Malcolm Collins: no, I, I also wanna note something when I talk about how bad some of the factories were in the north.

Simone Collins (2): Mm.

Malcolm Collins: And how bad some of the plantations were in the South. We also need to be very transparent about this, is that many factories in the work were run by.

Weirdo [00:48:00] religious puritans and stuff like that, who had ideas that were very utopian, that they tried to make things good. They tried to create like these perfect Christian environments for their workers, and often very strange utopian town setups and stuff like this that you can still visit today. There were many plantations where people were, you know, Christian and like really believed it and wanted to try to, like, they thought they were creating the best life they could for their slaves, given their economic conditions.

But and I, and I think that that’s, that’s something that needs to be noted because we live in a society where, where those things always get ignored, but they existed. Yeah. Yeah. And they probably existed about at the same rates as the worst of the worst populations that, that, that you have because, you know, most humans just aren’t that evil.

Simone Collins (2): Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And we, we are in, in, in, in, in this conversation talking about the, like sociopathic edge cases, genuinely horrible [00:49:00] people. Yeah. And yeah, I mean, there, there’s always gonna be a couple in every generation.

Malcolm Collins: As to why slavery does this, it means that the wealthy in that society basically don’t invest in innovation.

And so even if innovation exists, like in Rome, we know of lots of like technical sketches of designs that could have been used to create the beginnings of an industrial revolution for like moving water uphill and stuff like this and like early engine type designs. But there was just never a reason to experiment with this stuff if you had slaves, right?

So why, why try it? Why roll it out? Why expand on this stuff if you’re not doing the labor yourself? And this is why you had so much. Explosive innovation within the regions. Specifically like the, the predominantly Protestant, northern regions of the United States and in places like Scotland where you had these you know, more Calvinist groups that were very obsessed with doing everything themselves.

And if you’re a population that’s obsessed with doing [00:50:00] everything yourselves, then you innovate. And the video that really got me about like why this causes such rapid cost reduction compared to outsourcing something to slaves

Simone Collins (2): mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: Is, consider base capitalism, right? So you have factory workers and you are paying each factory worker for x many things that they produce, right?

Mm-hmm. Like x many units. That’s, that’s fundamentally what you care about as a capitalist, right? You, you take your cut and then you give them, you know, whatever you can, right? Well now one factory worker finds a way. To increase the production rate of the factory by, let’s say 20%. Now this is the economic equivalent to amortizing that 20% increase in that amount of product for that factory’s lifecycle.

So if you’ve got 130 people there, now that person has done the job of or let’s say a hundred people to make the math easier for me of 20 people over the course of an entire year, but amortized indefinitely into the [00:51:00] future. And so you pay them a lot more because now you want them to do other types of innovations like that, that increase efficiency.

Mm-hmm.

And as soon as you get this giant economic motivation for efficiency increases, which you don’t have for slaves and was in a culture that has that mindset then the people who become specialists at this have a good reason to really double down on what they were doing. Which is like what my family did historically.

We did a lot of development, like I’ve told you for like oil and stuff like this is, is it’s trying to make these processes more efficient. And that leads to these giant jumps in efficiency. And, and you get jumped in efficiency that are so large that one person can do the work of, you know, 25 slaves.

And once you have one person being able to do the work of 25 slaves, then slavery becomes economically unviable, which is actually basically already happening at the end of, the, the southern slavery period is that economics, even if they hadn’t had the Civil War, likely would have largely ended the practice [00:52:00] within a couple generations.

Simone Collins: Hmm.

Malcolm Collins: Now thoughts Simone, more broadly, basically. Oh, and the most interesting thing about all of this is even in the countries and cultures that don’t care about slavery. Mm-hmm. With ai, there’s basically no reason to have slaves at all anymore. Like as soon as we get AI humanoid robots they are generally going to be cheaper than slaves.

No. To do,

Simone Collins (2): sadly. No,

Malcolm Collins: you don’t think so.

Simone Collins (2): Not with things like s smacks slavery. No, no.

Malcolm Collins: I guess, yeah, some people want the real

Simone Collins (2): thing. Well, it’s, yeah, I mean, for a lot of people it’s about power for a lot of people. There are a lot of places in which life is still very cheap in which they just sort of end up with people on their hands, and it is, you know, fairly inexpensive for them to just, you know, buy and sell it and abuse it and dispose of it when they’re done.

And it’s tragic and horrible, and I need to create a world in which that [00:53:00] cannot happen and will never happen again. It keeps me up at night, but I, I have no doubt that that is gonna continue in, in the age of AI to, to be like, oh, just get them a sex bot. No, that’s not, that’s just not how it’s gonna work.

For some people that will work, but I mean, if it’s a physical piece of, of machinery, like merely the, the material costs, the upkeep, the electricity, the subscription service for the, the AI to do it. Like, are you kidding? Like some displaced young ladies, way less expensive than that. Just, just logistically speaking by, by many orders of magnitude, I don’t think you understand just how like, technically inexpensive human life is when you know where to get it.

And that is heartbreaking but true and that’s not going to change.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I’m, I’m sorry, I’m, I’m trying to find a, a, a counter example of this. So I was looking up Dutch traitors and at least none of the Dutch traitors associated with New Netherlands. So this, it would’ve been a, another [00:54:00] Protestant group have any specific examples of sexual violence against Native Americans,

Speaker 13: So there was an incident in Taiwan I was able to find, which is the only incident, . Apparently ever in human history of a large group of Protestants griping people, this’s within 1652, the W Laan Rebellion, where the Dutch East India company asked for Taiwanese women to be handed over for sex. ,

Also side note of you don’t know your history. The Dutch are kind of b******s.

Speaker 13: Outside of this, you could maybe argue that Captain Cook’s Expedition did this, , who was in English.

Individual, from the Church of England, except he mostly was trying to restrain his people. And the big complaint he had is that they were trading, , nails and parts of the ship for sexual access to women, which is more like prostitution and slavery. Quite different than what the kasad were doing.

So this does appear to be , a real [00:55:00] and durable pattern of something. Totally unique to the Catholic, , expeditionary forces.

Simone Collins (2): right?

But there are many cultural groups that, for hundreds of years seem to be very interested in exploiting the, the bodies of vulnerable people that are both within their culture and not. They just don’t value human life. Basically, the,

Malcolm Collins: the point of this episode is when you conquer a region, do the good Christian thing and eradicate the native population, or you’re going to have problems over the long term.

Simone Collins (2): That’s, that’s,

Malcolm Collins: I’m joking. This is a joke by the way, for anyone who wants to like, take this out of context or something. That’s a joke. In, in fact, the culture that I have lauded most in this episode would say what you should do is eradicate the weak and intermarry with the strong. And that’s the goal when conquering a territory.

Well, I [00:56:00] mean, that’s. Fundamentally the law of humanity for the longest period, you can say, oh, that’s a horrible thing to do. But if you do not do this in the future, then you and your descendants will be weak and you will be conquered by the strong or at

Simone Collins (2): least at the end. It comes down to strong culture and strong communities.

If you wanna have a lasting impact in an area if you love your life and your people and your culture, you, you will find ways to spread it and flourish and do great things. And if you don’t, you’re gonna fizzle out. You have to have something more than nihilism to have a lasting impact as a group.

And yeah

Malcolm Collins: can you believe that we, when was the daring take that sex? Slavery is probably not a good thing. Civilizationally speaking.

Simone Collins (2): Yeah, but the, the argument’s slightly different than, like, it’s a humanitarian [00:57:00] crisis and it’s against it’s bad morality.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. I’m, I’m not, I’m not like it’s a humanitarian.

I don’t care about the humanitarian consequences. I’m just saying for your own people, it’s not good. Which is interesting. Like even if you don’t care about the humanitarian nature of it, it’s just a bad idea.

Simone Collins (2): You’re, you’re cooking yourself is what you’re saying.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. You’re cooking yourself.

Simone Collins (2): Mm-hmm. Yeah.

There you go. God, that’s bleak. All of this is bleak. But I mean, you’re right. I, I wanna focus more on the, like, this is more about not, not so much about all these people who ultimately don’t matter and didn’t matter and won’t matter because they choose this pathway. They devalue human life like this.

They hate their own people enough like this. Mm-hmm. To do such horrible things, but rather just how wonderful it is that the people who ultimately win are the people. Who love who they are, love their families, love their communities, love their cultures, and just want to support it. [00:58:00]

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Also, there’s another interesting point to all of this which is that many Catholics will say, well, most of the Catholics today don’t like listen to the rules of the religion.

Right? And they bemoan that. And there’s this implication that this wasn’t the case historically. That historically most of the Catholics actually did follow the rules of their religion. And as we can see from these cases, from the, the Spanish colonizers that wasn’t true for huge swaths of Catholic territory.

Many of the people like it, it just wasn’t as good at being top of mind as a cultural value set as something like Puritanism was or the, the the presbyterianism of the backwards people

Simone Collins (2): without doing any research or, or. Really understanding it very well. From an outsider’s perspective, what seems to be the problem to me is when I think about conquistadors and early Spanish missionaries, they were [00:59:00] not, they were very different from a Catholic Spanish community.

I grew up taking field trips to, for example, Californian Spanish missions. These, these were, these were monasteries or they were fortifications, they, they were not Spanish communities.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, oh, this, this explains it in part, oh my God,

Simone Collins (2): that they weren’t replicating the entire civilization. They were just sending out these reavers essentially that didn’t even represent it.

Malcolm Collins: So, no, no, no, no, no. So, the, the most religiously called people in Catholic culture, even back then would’ve been. Wouldn’t have been part of a conquistador group. They would’ve been e even if they were adventure minded, they would’ve been part of a missionary group. They would’ve set up a missionary fort.

They wouldn’t have been among the conquistadors to give them side-eye when they decided to grape captives. But in a puritan expeditionary force,

Simone Collins (2): hmm,

Malcolm Collins: you would [01:00:00] have among them, some of the most religiously devout people. And often it was the most religiously devout people that were elevated to positions of command.

So it would’ve been the person who, as a boy felt particularly called to God in a Spanish Catholic society at the time, might have ended up as a, as a missionary in one of these areas, but they wouldn’t have been doing the active combat. They wouldn’t have been doing the active you know, going out and, and, and attempting to conquer these territories.

Whereas if you are a backwards person or a Puritan person, and you are particularly called to religious callings you are, you’re dramatically more likely to be the local general, for example, or to be the, the, what would’ve been the equivalent of the actual lead conquistador, which makes it you religiously minded to keep your troops in line.

So it’s like, where do these cultures sort, the people who have enough of an inner calling to impose cultural values,

Simone Collins (2): that’s a factor. The, the argument [01:01:00] I was making more is, is when you look at the migratory patterns of these different groups, the ones who lasted and the ones who didn’t, the ones that lasted came over as families, including the Scott’s Irish, because they were all collectively kicked out.

Clans were kicked out, families were kicked out together. And they lasted

Malcolm Collins: many, many Spanish came over as families and still grape.

Simone Collins (2): Not to my knowledge. Not to my knowledge. The great Alexander the greats men came as men. No

Malcolm Collins: Spanish. Simone.

Simone Collins (2): I know. Just Spanish too. And I’m saying, and, and the Spanish came as men and the Vikings, no, no.

What? You’re not listening.

Malcolm Collins: You’re not listening. Yeah. We have many records

Simone Collins (2): mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: Of Spanish who did bring their families. Okay.

Simone Collins (2): I don’t remember reading of any of them.

Malcolm Collins: There’s, this is how, this is why it’s over 50% Spanish, DNA, if you’re talking about most of Latin America, because they came over. In huge numbers with their families.

If you, for example, good example. I guess I just didn’t learn that part of history of this just in case you’re wondering like what this [01:02:00] society looked like. Mm-hmm. A really good movie you should watch is Mask of Zorro.

Speaker 11: They want to destroy America. Give me the courage strength to wear the mask a little longer, . the world isn’t big enough to hide from me.

Malcolm Collins: So if you, of

Simone Collins (2): delightful. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Come on. Picture Mask of Zuro Society. So in Mask of Zoro Society you had a, yeah, there’s

Simone Collins (2): the Spanish Elite.

Okay.

Malcolm Collins: Fair. You had a Spanish Elite. Okay. So this Spanish elite that had families still regularly griped natives in their populations.

Simone Collins (2): Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: This is well recorded. Even when they brought over their families, even when they had their wives as another option, we still have records of them griping native populations.

Simone Collins (2): Hmm.

Malcolm Collins: You can’t just say it was because they were single now what? You could, yeah. That’s

Simone Collins (2): way post conquistador, but sure. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: What you could say is that the conquistador period where they [01:03:00] didn’t often have their own women set a precedent that then was later carried out once they brought over their own families.

Simone Collins (2): Mm.

Malcolm Collins: But that doesn’t always work either because a lot of the puritan and backward settlements, they would often come over as just the men first and then bring over the women. And they didn’t set this up as a great culture.

Simone Collins: Oh, no. Yeah.

Simone Collins (2): My, my like ing movies or those Did you d did you ever see like, there there was this one movie with like a, about a Spanish conquistador who’s like blonde and like blue eyed and crazed looking going deep into the jungle and am I like, it really stuck with me.

It was very striking. Are you taking No, no, that’s, no, no. That was like Mayan times. No, this is like. Small tribes in like the Amazon region, this like blonde crazed looking man in a little helmet. Okay. Yeah. I, I’ll try to find it. ‘cause [01:04:00] you didn’t see that, that’s like my anchoring thing of like what a con keystar is like, and it’s weird, but I think it’s also not inaccurate.

Anyway. Yeah. Wow. That, and I

Malcolm Collins: will use AI to try to find counterfactuals to this trend.

Simone Collins (2): Yeah. Please. I, I am curious

and this is where I found that one Dutch example from Taiwan, uh, that it’s a counter example, but other than that, I was able to find nothing.

Simone Collins (2): because I’m, I’m still leaning into what, what is, what is the force spreading? Is it a bunch of families who love each other and their culture and just wanna go live it somewhere, be them?

They’re being kicked outta someone. No, I, I, I. Or is it a bunch of guys going out?

Malcolm Collins: Accidentally came to the right answer. The core thing that leads to so much immorality within the Catholic groups is they take the people who care the most about what the Bible says the most about what their face says and the most about morality and cloister them from society,

Simone Collins (2): isolate them in monasteries, whereas not, not helpful.

Not helpful. The

Malcolm Collins: puritans [01:05:00] in the backwards took those people and often elevated them to positions of leadership, of secular society.

Simone Collins (2): Yeah. Yeah. They were not in operational roles sufficiently. I mean, to be fair though, I, I would say that the, the monks did have a lot of influence and tried to get out there and do a lot of stuff.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, they did have influence. They were constantly complaining that people were doing this stuff.

Simone Collins (2): Yeah. So, I don’t know. I don’t know. It’s complicated. I’m very, very curious to see what people think of the comments. So we’ll see.

Malcolm Collins: Love you to death.

Simone Collins (2): I love you too. Steak tonight, by the way.

Malcolm Collins: Wonderful.

Simone Collins (2): Mm.

Simone Collins: Okay,

Simone Collins (2): there we go. You need to adjust your camera a little bit, and I know you’re still trying to get your mic connected, you know, whatever, whatever. You’re on your own with the comments today. ‘cause it’s all about mass effect. Like, maybe, it seemed to me at least [01:06:00] when I checked in on comments, three people con commented on the broader subject matter of us versus them and the rest were all just massive packed comments and, and, and references to your other video game references like this and that.

I can’t, I still can’t hear you though.

Malcolm Collins: I hope a detailed and nerdy mass effect comments, not just general one.

Simone Collins: 100%. Yes.

Malcolm Collins: Were they very, like, well, they, they’re in, in this way and I saw a lot of them and they’re just wrong. Like,

Simone Collins (2): well, yeah, you, you just didn’t know that you had to cure the genophage if you wanted to reach the like, final optimal state.

And then other people were like, no, that’s not true. You can play through blah, blah, blah, blah. Now these things are like, well, I didn’t want to, you have to think about, you know, in terms of the larger war, you needed to have an ally to fight the something somethings. And I’m like, I don’t

Malcolm Collins: The Reapers Simone?

Yes, the

Simone Collins (2): Reapers. I’m

Malcolm Collins: so sorry. In actuality the a, a a species like people are just bad at math. A war like speaking [01:07:00] seed, like the Rogan having a thousand children per year per woman, that would mean a completed TFR of like around seven because they start breeding at 20 of well over seven thou, 700,000.

Do you have any idea? The compounding effects of a TFR of 700,000. You keep in mind, you know, like in the US we have a TFR of 1.6. If you had a completed TFR of 700,000, the entire universe would be wiped out. We’re talking like within two lifetimes. You, you are literally creating a threat dramatically larger than the Reapers.

Like there was a way to handle the reapers. There is no way to handle a Rogan fertility explosion. Mm-hmm. Other than another genophage, but who’s to know that’ll work again. Right. Now that they found a way to cure it, once

Simone Collins (2): one person pointed out that there, you could, you could think of [01:08:00] the Genophage problem as a Rocos Basilisk problem, where like, well eventually they’ll find a cure though, and then they’re going to.

Punish whoever didn’t help them find the cure.

Malcolm Collins: No. You could just eradicate them, which is what they were doing to themselves.

Simone Collins (2): Uhhuh

Malcolm Collins: like this, the, the universe doesn’t need the rogan. They are a species that is mean to their own people. Mm-hmm. Right. Like the main reason they wanted to go back to this really high birth rate is it involved childhood rituals that had a really high death rate.

And so they called the ones who were born after it. Mm-hmm. The the, the phage lucky as like an insult because they didn’t have to go through this death trial. And so you’re re recreating even for the Rogan in extremely brutal society, like you are, you are actively making things worse for the Rogan as well.

By curing it, people were like, oh, well the cure genophage wouldn’t go back to same fertility. Fertility. It would only be like half that. And it’s like, okay, so a TFR around 350,000. Okay.

Simone Collins (2): Okay. [01:09:00]

Malcolm Collins: I’m just doing sketch math in my head. 350,000 compounding year. Like generation over generation. No, no,

Simone Collins (2): it’s

Malcolm Collins: still is,

Simone Collins (2): it’s still the, it’s still not, yeah, you’re not solving the problem with that. It’s true.

Malcolm Collins: It’s, it’s bad. Really, really quickly.

There was no, no sane person ever saves the Rogan in any timeline, no matter how much of a threat the Reapers seemed like.

Simone Collins (2): Yeah, yeah.

Malcolm Collins: True.

Simone Collins: That it’s, it’s, yeah, I

Malcolm Collins: agree. Well, I Sorry to subject you to that nerdiness Simone.

Simone Collins (2): Well, no, I, I, I don’t mind the nerdiness. I just haven’t played mass effect, so. It’s just me and Eric CRE in the comments being like, well, I don’t get it, but I’m sure this has been philosophically rich for you.

He like commented twice and they’re just like, I don’t see the point, and I’m like. Who

Malcolm Collins: doesn’t see the point.

Simone Collins (2): He’s just not, he, he, I don’t think he ever played video games. I’ve never really played video games. Like I don’t

Malcolm Collins: see the, oh, well there is a big point to the, the, the, the point is that [01:10:00] 96% of people chose this option because they had a No

Simone Collins (2): no.

Yeah. We’re talking about the, like, the meta picture of like, what’s the point of, of video games. And I, I, I do think that some, and we were just talking last night about like, we can’t wait for our kids to start playing civ and the other sort of civilization thing.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, well, the point of video games is to masturbate specific instincts.

War instincts, fighting instincts. If you do not like, as, as we’ve talked about with regular masturbation, it dramatically reduces the rates of grape within a society and stuff like that. If you remove video games from a society, men do not regularly exercise these pathways that’s going to change their day-to-day behavior, the way they perceive reality, the way they perceive the world.

And society is already becoming significantly less violent to the extent where I was shocked to learn, like when our Steven EU debate that he’d never fought someone in his entire life, like had a physical fight. I

Simone Collins (2): forgot about that. That was interesting.

Malcolm Collins: And I was like, that’s bizarre, right? Like, but like that’s [01:11:00] gotta do something to a male’s brain to have never fought someone in their entire life.

Simone Collins (2): I know.

Malcolm Collins: Anyway the cultural differences, I say. All right, so I’ll get into the episode.

Speaker 14: . Colleagues, no good. 20 21, 22, 23. That’s the point. 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29 30. Okay. Octavia, five seconds. Take one. 2, 3, 4, 5. Now suck it off your head. Tighten weight. 1, 2, 3, 2, 4, 5. Go. Go. Everyone can go now.[01:12:00]

Speaker 16: You better

run. Oh my God. A good, good job

color.

Toast. Go, go, go, go. Toast you way ahead. He’s up ahead.

Speaker 14: Andy’s trying to get down, sweetheart.

Speaker 16: Pink. Your favorite color

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