The Failure of the American Culture

In this thought-provoking discussion, Malcolm and Simone explore whether it's possible to craft an enduring secular religion or culture. They analyze why previous attempts failed and the need for cohesion beyond scientific truth. Malcolm argues adapting beliefs while avoiding dogma is key. Simone stresses traditions that create belonging. They agree combining strong community with fluid science may succeed where others faltered.

Malcolm: [00:00:00] And this has happened throughout histories where people essentially deify the secular understanding of the world at the time. And then, our understanding of the world moves forwards, it begins to look ridiculous, and it gets thrown out.

Malcolm: This is why only the most conservative in terms of sticking was the original way of viewing the text, or the original way of practicing a religion. Typically those are the iterations that survive, rather than the ones that try to adapt. But, then there's the other problem, which was the other thing that some groups did, is they say, Well, we will just outsource our metaphysical understanding of the universe.

Malcolm: To the scientists, the scientific institutions. But after the scientific institutions became infected with this, a progressive memetic virus it began to care less and less about truth.

Malcolm: It basically became a tool for just infecting and injecting other cultures with this progressive memetic virus.

Malcolm: The problem is, is the internet exists now. Engaging with technology is intrinsically [00:01:00] caustic to systems that try to tell people about a metaphysical framework for reality that's

Simone: wrong

Malcolm: I think that many of these older systems that can only compete by telling people not to engage with technology, which I think is going to be an increasingly successful strategy.

Malcolm: Yeah, they'll continue existing in the future, but they won't have economic power. Because technology is critical to massive economic power and military power to an extent. So even if you're a smaller cultural group, if you're the cultural group that is engaging readily with AI in a way that isn't decreasing fertility rates you are going to just dramatically outcompete cultural groups that have been able to keep their fertility rates high.

Malcolm: By disengaging from the internet, disengaging from AI, disengaging from cell phones, disengaging from genetic research.

Simone: Okay, but Malcolm, I still think you're totally missing the beat here.

Would you like to know more?

Simone: Hello, Malcolm. I am keen to talk with you today about , maybe one of the stupidest [00:02:00] projects we've ever taken on in our lives, because we are trying to do something that it doesn't seem anyone has really successfully done

Malcolm: ever yet. Well, one of my pushbacks is going to be, I think you're wrong there. Okay.

Malcolm: But what

Simone: we're gonna talk about

Malcolm: is Yes, and we're gonna talk about to save society, one of our thesis is you need to create an intergenerationally durable culture. That is resistant to the current technological environment that we live in, you know, whether it's online dating or modernity or the medic viruses that exist online and the initial pushback.

Malcolm: We often get from conservative groups is why don't you just adapt one of the existing conservative traditions that has been able to do this historically? And our answer is twofold. The first is that I don't think I've seen any other than maybe Judaism that seems durably resistant [00:03:00] to the current social and technological environment that doesn't have quickly falling fertility rates.

Malcolm: But even they, the, parts of Judaism that have the highest fertility rate still are often the most technophobic forms of it. So they are the least engaged with industry and technology. Which is not something I want for my family or their descendants. I mean, many people would say, you can't have these two things together, right?

Malcolm: No, I just think no one has intentionally created a culture that can work alongside this. But then the question becomes, historically... Well, why haven't intentionally created, and when we call a culture secular, what I mean is it has broadly concurrent views with the scientific community about how sort of metaphysics in the world exists.

Malcolm: It believes in evolution and particle physics and the Big Bang and all of that, and it updates those beliefs as new discoveries happen. So first this idea that no one has done this before, I think, is wrong. [00:04:00] I think, in many ways, you could think of the Catholic Church as one. The Catholic Church had a system for recognizing scientific discoveries, even when they were initially declared to go against biblical doctrine, you know, whether it's the earth isn't the center of the universe anymore.

Malcolm: It took them. A really long time to recognize them longer than it probably should have and it slowed down the advancement of these types of scientific inquiries through generally offering no reward mechanism for, , updating these heuristics, but he did have the ability

Malcolm: to eventually incorporate these scientific discoveries, I mean, you could, you could even

Simone: argue actually that the slowness of adoption was a feature, not a bug, because if you are having a culture adapt with the times or adapt with science, it's important that you not. Jump on every latest potential discovery or trend, right?

Simone: I mean, that could be really damaging.

Malcolm: I'm sure. Yeah [00:05:00] But to be a culture that has any level of adaption to this If you are a traditional religious group, you typically have to be a centralized and hierarchical religious group So, for example, both Catholics and Mormons would be able to incorporate new discoveries into their religion pretty easily if they wanted to.

Malcolm: And in many ways, you know, they benefit from being conservative in how they do this, but they could. Whereas most Protestant traditions, because they're decentralized, Most Islamic traditions, because they're decentralized, and most Jewish traditions, because they're decentralized. If they are of the, stricter iterations of those, they're not going to be able to, because they are basing their tradition on older texts.

Malcolm: Or they're, they're not always going to be able to. Now, there are some cultural groups that are more accelerationist within these decentralized cultural groups. Okay? Classically Calvinist, or what? I mean, if you read Puritan Spotting, which Scott Alexander wrote, , which is about Calvinist stereotypes and this is the older form of [00:06:00] Calvinist, not this newer cosplay, I'm theologically Calvinist, but not cultural Calvinist, you know, he'll say things like, oh, yeah, plus one point if they're an atheist, deist, or freethinker, you know.

Malcolm: Plus three points if they wrote a book about their heterodox religious views. Plus three points if they invented a new religion. Plus three points if they invented a new Christian heresy. Plus three points if they're obsessed with religious tolerance. Plus three points if they wrote a list of virtues.

Malcolm: Plus three points if they had plans to anesthetize the eschaton. That's trying to create a utopian Okay, okay, okay, okay, we get it. Okay, no, but the point I'm being is this is a cultural group that you and I are part of, and a lot of what we do can look really weird to outsiders when it really is just We're basically cultural stereotypes of our group.

Malcolm: Um, But the point being is these cultural groups have historically failed. They disappeared. You know, Calvinists went from being around 50% of the American, at least the American white population at the time of the founding of the country to now being like [00:07:00] 0. 5% to 0. 2% of the American population. And your

Simone: argument broadly is that Calvinists were really, really big about each person has to find truth on their own and they have to.

Simone: Really ardently search for it too. So as soon as people did search for truth that came into conflict with say the Bible, like they're out, right?

Malcolm: Well, yes, and that's the problem with this, right, is if you force this sort of independent truth thinking and engagement with science, but then you also have this background doctrine, which, to some extent, this is in disagreement with.

Malcolm: You're going to get conflict. This is why, you know, if you look at like the Calvinist founders of America, many of them would do things like try to update their Bible or edit it to be more in line with the science. And that works for a generation, but then people stop obeying the stricter rules, which are really important in terms of intergenerational cultural transfer.

Malcolm: And keep in mind, science is 2 things, right? 1 science [00:08:00] is this broad institution, which is controlled by the progressive urban monoculture and will blatantly lie about things, just falsify data just do whatever it needs to to enforce its cultural hegemony on other groups.

Malcolm: And the other science is the scientific method, like the ability of having a hypothesis, going out and testing that hypothesis in the world something you can do yourself. And these are two different things. And what we're talking about is just this broad idea that you have predictive knowledge, right?

Malcolm: You can predict, oh, there's planets out in space, and I can go visit them, and those might not be in text, but I can, you know, that's what I'm talking about when I'm talking about updating my science. So, historically, I think one of the reasons why one of these groups never really survived is because As science moved, our metaphysical understanding of major parts of what it means to be human and reality more broadly was shifting to an extent that any religion or culture that was [00:09:00] created to align with a current scientific understanding was going to be crushed by time.

Malcolm: Hmm. So here you could think of , Belief about the humors in regards to what was the doctor who did that? Oh,

Simone: Hippocrates?

Malcolm: Yeah.

Malcolm: Oh yeah, it was Hippocrates.

Simone: Oh my god, I'm not crazy!

Malcolm: You got it right. Yeah, so it was Hippocrates who, who, you know, developed this humors system. Which was essentially building into theology and metaphysical understanding of the world, current science, which then led that science to advance incredibly slowly.

Malcolm: Because it became a metaphysical truth instead of a scientific truth. So it was negative there. And then as soon as people... Accepted that humors don't exist in the way that they said they existed. Basically, you had to throw out that entire system and it was now useless and a lot of the surrounding culture that had evolved alongside it ended up getting thrown out.

Malcolm: And so a lot of times when people will look at a group you know, you've mentioned this in a few [00:10:00] times in the past Judaism, and you've described this system within the Haredi groups of debate to determine one's status within the hierarchy and debate that requires intense knowledge of the text is an IQ shredder because it

Simone: is, it is, it is debate of an unchanging text.

Simone: And I think that that's, that's really big. And I think people have argued to us that if you don't have that. Unchanging base and you're working on a moving foundation. You are going to have a culture that crumbles. What's your refutation of that? No, it's

Malcolm: not. That's the point I was making. I was making that exact point, which is historically when you abandoned these, these systems that evolved for a reason, you know, like the reform Jewish movement.

Malcolm: You just get completely taken over by this progressive urban monoculture very easily. You lose a lot of your resistances to that. But even groups that historically did what was best given scientific information at the time. So I think a great example of this is Christian scientists. So [00:11:00] today when people look at Christian scientists, they see them as oh, they're the people who like don't touch modern medicine and don't engage with like blood transfusions and stuff like that. Exactly. Like, They're a very backwards group, is the way that people think of them. But, what most people don't know, is when the movement was founded they had higher survival rates than people who were going to doctors at the time.

Malcolm: Right,

Simone: because doctors would do things like, you know, covering you with leeches and... Oh, well, worse than that they were running postmortems on. dead patients with diseases and then without washing their hands, delivering babies and then killing mothers and babies doing so. I mean, it made sense how at the time not going to a hospital left you better off, right?

Malcolm: Yeah. Yeah. So, that's an example of building modern like currently existing scientific knowledge into a movement and then having that movement fall apart. And this has happened throughout histories where people essentially deify the secular understanding of the world at the time. [00:12:00] And then, , our understanding of the world moves forwards, it begins to look ridiculous, and it gets thrown out.

Malcolm: This is why only the most conservative in terms of sticking was the original way of viewing the text, or the original way of practicing a religion. Typically those are the iterations that survive, rather than the ones that try to adapt. But, then there's the other problem, which was the other thing that some groups did, is they say, Well, we will just outsource our metaphysical understanding of the universe.

Malcolm: To the scientists, the scientific institutions. And I think that worked for a while. And, and this is where I'll get to an instance where people did this before and it was successful, which I think was the American experiment. But after the scientific institutions became infected with this, a progressive memetic virus it began to care less and less about truth.

Malcolm: And we, we will do another video on how academia basically broke and fell apart as a, as a mechanism for determining what's true. But it [00:13:00] basically became a tool for just infecting and injecting other cultures with this progressive memetic virus. So. And anyone who's looking at science today I think broadly can see, you know, we had Spencer Greenberg on the podcast when you're dealing with a 50% replicability crisis within studies, they are not really investigating truth anymore.

Malcolm: They're just enforcing ideological conformity. And there was a great study that was done that showed that the replication crisis was actually specifically tied to only studies that pushed either progressive agenda Or a neutral agenda, but when a study was released that supported a conservative position , the replicability crisis was actually really low.

Malcolm: And so basically what it is, is it's just the way that this mimetic virus is able to insert ideological conformity into what it's trying to broadcast with the academic system. So let's get back to where I think this has been done successfully before. Yeah. That's the American experiment. [00:14:00] America was.

Malcolm: Created by Christians, mostly Calvinists, well over 50% Calvinists. There were other people involved. And this is by the Heritage Foundation. So a conservative foundation that is not a Calvinist foundation says, yes, America with 50% Calvinists, if you're talking about the population of America when it was founded.

Malcolm: So it was created as this sort of cultural experiment, and it worked really well for a while, but it had some major flaws, and it was secular. It was a genuinely secular, super government Governing institution that allowed for pluralistic groups. If you look at the colonies, when they came together, yes, they may have been dominated by the Calvinist cultural group, but there were, you know, the Quakers and the Catholics and the many other cultural groups at the time, the Cavaliers, the, the backwoods people.

Simone: And when you say work really well, what do you

Malcolm: mean? Well, so it stitched multiple cultural groups together in a way that instead of leading to conflict [00:15:00] between those groups, made all of the groups stronger. Hmm. And I think it showed that that was possible.

Simone: It showed that a pluralistic, largely secular, or not necessarily secular society.

Malcolm: Well, so it did it in a very interesting way. It said, we're going to have this secular super governing institution, the federal government, most of the states were not secular, but it said is you Catholic state, Maryland you can create. A, you know, you can build Catholic rules into the way you're doing things.

Malcolm: You Calvinist state, you can build Calvinist rules into the way you're doing things. You Cavalier state, you know, Pennsylvania, you Quaker state, you, you do things in, in, in your way. Right. It actually, that's a misunderstanding. Quakers were always the majority. Pennsylvania should be thought of as more of an Anabaptist state than a Quaker state, but the Anabaptists never really strove for political power.

Malcolm: So they didn't hold the actual offices. So we misunderstand many of the political movements in Pennsylvania as being Quaker driven instead of Anabaptist driven when they're actually more Anabaptist [00:16:00] driven. That's a whole different conversation. The point being is for a system like this to work, I think what you need is sub governing institutions, which are culturally dominated.

Malcolm: Basically, you need , a cultural representatives and historically in America, many of these people were geographically locked. Most of the people who thought this way moved to this city. Most of the people who thought this way moved to this city. And then they would elect a representative. And I think that that was a fairly good system that showed 1 way you can have a multicultural system work.

Malcolm: But it broke down over time. And this is where I want to get to something else, which is to say, you know, Simone, you and I see ourselves very much as contiguous with our ancestors and contiguous with our descendants, you know, getting to try things again. And so when people look at us, they're like, you guys are insane for trying to start a country, yet we have had many ancestors, , who have tried to do this in the past.[00:17:00]

Malcolm: If I go way back I don't really consider myself that contiguous with, you know, I could get someone like Robert the Bruce or Charlemagne, who I'm a direct descendant of both of those, but pretty much every Scottish person of descent I know from the southern United States is a descendant of Robert the Bruce.

Malcolm: Seriously. But if you look more recently, I mean, Simone, through two different pathways, you are a descendant of George Washington. And not George Washington himself, but his siblings because he didn't have any kids himself, but as close as a living descendant of your generation can be to him so you are a descendant of two of his siblings.

Malcolm: And he was one of the people who tried to start a new country, and I think it was a fairly successful experiment. You look at, at, at my groups, the, the two more recent ancestors would be Oliver Cromwell who I learned from. He tried to create a... Calvinist many people would see as dictatorial state.

Malcolm: But it wasn't exactly a dictatorial state. He really wanted to leave monarchy and create a democracy. But every time he would the people he would put [00:18:00] in power would start bickering with each other. And he lacked the moral constitution to allow that to happen, and so then he'd come back in and take over as like a fascist dictator for a while, and then he'd try to set up an elected government system, and they'd start fighting with each other, whereas someone like George Washington, your ancestor, had much more patience with people.

Malcolm: And he saw the two factions that succeeded him fighting bitterly and they, various people asked him, come back into power, come back into power. And he didn't. And I think what we see in the difference between these two characters is you, you've got to expect any system you create to be dominated by infighting in the early days.

Malcolm: And, and, and have the decency to step back. I think the other thing I learned from Oliver Cromwell is, yes, I think the, the sort of Calvinist tradition and the secular Calvinist tradition that we're a part of is the correct way to structure your life. But I cannot force that on other people, and if I do, that will lead [00:19:00] to atrocities.

Malcolm: You know, he's particularly known for his atrocities against Catholic groups in Ireland, who he didn't understand why they didn't just agree with him. His way of living life was better than their way of living life. And I think that part of that knowledge might be why I am so pro pluralism in a way that other people aren't.

Malcolm: , a different iteration of me from the past had a chance to try to enforce my cultural views on everyone else. And it failed. It was bad, and it led to atrocities. Now I look at a more recent iteration of my family that tried to start a new country the Free State of Jones. 15 of the 50 founding members of the Free State of Jones, there's a movie about it if you want to see it, I guess you could just watch the trailer were...

Malcolm: Either siblings of my ancestors, or kids of siblings of my ancestors. So that's a lot. That's just basically my cultural, very recent cultural experience. Okay,

Simone: but none of them have created anything that lasted. And I think, I have, I've, I have a feeling that something that's missing from all of these failed experiments, quite frankly.

Simone: I [00:20:00] mean, I know you, you know, America worked for a while, but... You know, I wouldn't say that there's any cohesive culture that has, has survived, you know, I mean, there's, there's like general trends and stuff.

Malcolm: Americana, what are you talking about? The American cultural export is now the world's dominant culture.

Malcolm: In fact, the super

Simone: virus evolved in America. Various American subcultures have inspired other, other cultural... Movements, but I wouldn't say that there's any sort of cohesive worldview or mindset. And I think this is one reason why we're seeing a

Malcolm: super virus is an American. We may hate it because it's self

Simone: extinguishing.

Simone: It's not, it's not going to be intergenerationally durable. I think my intuition is that if you have a secular culture or religion, you need to have something. That is unchanging or a set of values that is cohesive, a set of traditions that is cohesive because there does need to be something consistent for a group to cling to or hope to or say, this is what makes us different because if you don't have something that says this is what makes us who we are, it's going to fall apart.[00:21:00]

Simone: And I think that even happened with the colonies and with the early Americas is, well, a lot of people I think would like to argue Oh, this is America. There's a lot of disagreement over what that is. And there are plenty of arguments about Oh, America is this and America is that. But there is, there is no sort of standard agreement and there is no.

Simone: Cohesive sense of community. Like it's very different if you go to a nation like Japan and people will actually say things like, Oh, well, we Japanese do this. We Japanese do that. And so people might be like, well, this is America and we do things this way. And they might all like consistently talk really loudly.

Simone: And wear shorts and stuff. And, and I don't know,

Malcolm: you set up the problem. You set up the problem, which is to say. No one has durably accomplished this before, but I think America as a cultural institution came the closest to doing this. Now the question is, how do you, we set up the way that various groups fail by saying, oh, just trust science or whatever.

Malcolm: What you need to do. Is you need a mechanism for [00:22:00] determining what's true that is strongly culturally adhere to, but that is not based on a static text, basically, so the criteria for authenticity we lay out in the pragmatist guide to crafting religion could be an example of one of these, where it is, a a Clearly differentiated from what is quote unquote science today.

Malcolm: We believe a lot of things that the scientific community doesn't believe. Right? We doubt a lot of what the scientific community says, but it is a different cultural institution for accessing truth. But a cultural institution that doesn't say truth is X. It says this is how

Simone: you determine truth. I'm, I'm cool with that.

Simone: And I like that, but I think you're totally missing the beat here, which is that the standards of truth are not what make a culture special. What makes a culture special is a sense of belonging, a sense of Pride, a sense of identity. I mean, that's what makes [00:23:00] kids want to raise their children in that culture.

Simone: You honestly think that people of a certain culture are going to raise their kids with a certain standard of truth. And those kids are going to be like, Oh yeah, it's that standard of truth. That really makes

Malcolm: me want to have kids. You have to create cultural pride and cultural identity, which are two things that we work really

Simone: hard to do with our kids.

Simone: You need a lifestyle, you need a psychology, you need. Tradition and you need a sense of belonging and pride, right?

Malcolm: But the point being, okay, is historically, right? There are cultures that have came very close to being true. I would say secular religions. I'd actually argue that early Judaism very much was a secular religion.

Malcolm: It was a cultural system, a system of laws. For how humans interact with each other and how humans interact with their government and this I'm talking about pre Second Temple Judaism, you know, when the temple and the state and the, it was all one thing. It was a religion and a state and a, a, and it adapted to current at the [00:24:00] time.

Malcolm: Understandings of reality. The problem is, is it encoded some of those and said, this is what you must believe in the future. As if somebody was creating a religion today. And I told my kids axiomatically evolution is something we believe in. The big bang is something we believe in. Our current understanding of physics is something we believe in.

Malcolm: Instead of saying no, here is a system for how you should investigate reality. And this is what's true. And this is how, and I think another thing that you mentioned here. Culturally and psychologically, we are very different from the mainstream population, and we engage disproportionately with people of our cultural and psychological systems.

Malcolm: Now, fortunately, I think our psychological systems are fairly intuitive to people of a specific sociological, disposition, and we've been able to build up a network of families with that sociological disposition to the extent that I am very confident that our kids will be able to find wives within that community and husbands within that community and that they will be able to feel this is who I [00:25:00] am.

Malcolm: And this is how I'm different than the world at large. But that does require intentionally othering them to an extent through the , ways that they're named through the ways that we, we raise them through the holidays. We raise them with through the ways we tell them to engage with concepts like, you know, trauma, sadness, et cetera.

Malcolm: These are sinful from our cultural perspective, which is considered pretty weird and distasteful by society's value system. So through creating these strong differentiators, but very carefully, not encoding science accidentally, like modern understandings of the world into the core belief system, we can create something that other existing. religious cultural traditions can't do. So yes, historically, always going back to the old texts allowed for more intergenerational fidelity of information transfer, cultural transfer, and allowed these cultures to outcompete other cultures that were more open to [00:26:00] adapting.

Malcolm: The problem is, is the internet exists now. And the problem is, is that certain scientific facts are really, really hard to ignore, whether it's, you know, the earth revolves around the sun and there's planets and there's not like a dome over us with holes poked in it or evolution or dinosaurs or, you know, stuff like that.

Malcolm: These are becoming increasingly hard to. Teach your kids these things aren't true and still have those kids stay with your tradition. They are basically big holes that allow any sort of engagement with the outside world or the internet to begin to stab your tradition.

Simone: Okay, but Malcolm, I still think you're totally missing the beat here.

Simone: You've spent the vast majority of this entire conversation obsessing over standards of truth, and I get that this is, we're talking about secular religions, but what you're totally missing here is, I think, even in super faith heavy religions, What they [00:27:00] actually believe about that faith is kind of like on the side.

Simone: Look at the LDS church. I mean, I'm sure that there are some people who are deep in the doctrine, but really this is a lifestyle religion and people are in it. They stay in it. They raise their families in it and they have their own kids and raise them in it. Because the lifestyle is great. They feel really good.

Simone: They've good mental health. They're thriving professionally. And I think that what you're missing here is what the, the, the true key. And like, you're missing is

Malcolm: the levels of deconversion within the

Simone: LDS church. But then that's the problem, right? Because we're talking about a. Secular religion. So I think the point is have strong criterias for truth.

Simone: Don't be married to any particular scientific doctrine. That's a simple fix. And the rest of it is, and the reason why no other secular experiment has really succeeded is that they all had standards of truth. They all had broad concepts, but they didn't have Othering, like you were pointing out, they didn't have cultural traditions.

Simone: They didn't have a sense of pride and cohesion. They didn't have a cohesive community. And so they, there was no culture. It wasn't a culture. It was a [00:28:00] series of scientific philosophies. You are

Malcolm: absolutely right. And that is how we will outcompete previous secular experiments. Yeah. I guess the difference between our conversation here is, is you wanted to highlight, and I think you highlighted it very eloquently.

Malcolm: Why we will out compete previous secular traditions. And I was trying to highlight the advantage that we have over current religious traditions. Religious,

Simone: yeah, yeah.

Malcolm: Which is to say that if you leave these vulnerabilities in your system to you they might be trivial. You might be like, oh, secular things don't have these vulnerabilities.

Malcolm: But most of the future like most secular traditions are going to die out in the near future. Because they're not able to motivate reproductive capacity. So I personally, like when I'm looking at the future, I'm not asking, how are we going to compete with or outcompete secular society? Cause most of secular society is going to die.

Malcolm: I'm asking, how do we compete? The religious frameworks. How do we outcompete the religious frameworks? [00:29:00] And if we are able to do that, if we are able to have rapid technological advancement, right, and technological engagement from our descendants, if, as many people say, engaging with technology and intrinsically causes birth, rates to crash.

Malcolm: That's what they tell us, right? I don't think that's true. Engaging with technology is intrinsically caustic to systems that try to tell people about a metaphysical framework for reality that's

Simone: wrong. Well, I think the problem that we're seeing too is, is engaging with technology is highly correlated.

Simone: With the lifestyle of someone who doesn't have a religious tradition. And so people just assume, oh well, it is therefore causational. That engaging with technology causes you to lose your faith. Whereas really, we just, this is actually on easy mode. No one has tried. to combine secularism with a strong cohesive culture before.

Simone: It just hasn't happened yet. Which actually makes things really exciting because basically, if you want to create a new secular dynasty, you know, [00:30:00]

Malcolm: was a very specific caveat, which I've mentioned. And I don't think that you realize how important this caveat is. All right. Play it up again. Use different words.

Malcolm: Current scientific dogma into their beliefs about the metaphysical nature of reality. And they do not outsource how they search for truth to the quote unquote experts or scientific community. So, because there have been previous attempts that have done that. You, I think that you might not have read it.

Malcolm: Many Victorian like weird family experiments as I have, but there have been a few attempts to do that. And they've fallen apart. But they haven't done all of these things together, which I think is where the power of this comes from. When people have done these sort of secular experiments before, they focus on one concept like evolution.

Malcolm: And they've tried to build the entire religious system around the concept of evolution, and that just leads to everything falling apart. What you need is a system to be based around [00:31:00] a differential from mainstream scientific consensus, system for determining what is true, but that is able to quickly adapt and do so in a Non hierarchical fashion because again like to some extent Catholics and Mormons have figured this out But they're just very slow to adapt because of the hierarchical organization and they slow down technological progress within these institutions and they're hurt through technological engagement, you know a catholic who uses cell phones Is going to have way less kids than a Catholic who doesn't.

Malcolm: I mean, you could just look, even if they're conservative, I'm sure you can just look at the data on this and you'll see this. Whereas if you create a cultural institution that tells people what they're meant to optimize for, and adapt using current information on the world, you might be able to have , a cultural group that does not like cell phone use.

Malcolm: AI use is not going to decrease the number of offspring people have, and this is [00:32:00] really important when you consider that the difficulty level that our kids are going to experience in terms of cultural temptations is going to be higher than our generation's difficulty level. They are going to have to be able to engage with AIs that can be the perfect girlfriend or husband, right?

Malcolm: In a world where it is likely even harder to build sustainable relationships. So what motivates them to do that? What motivates them to breed in that environment? I think that many of these older systems that can only compete by telling people not to engage with technology, which I think is going to be an increasingly successful strategy.

Malcolm: Yeah, they'll continue existing in the future, but they won't have economic power. Because I think technology is critical to massive economic power and military power to an extent. So engaging with these systems, even if you're a smaller cultural group, if you're the cultural group that is engaging readily with AI in a way that isn't decreasing fertility rates you are going to [00:33:00] just dramatically outcompete cultural groups that have been able to keep their fertility rates high.

Malcolm: By disengaging from the internet, disengaging from AI, disengaging from cell phones, disengaging from genetic research.

Simone: So obligatory shout out. We're creating essentially a show us yours and we'll show you ours. Index of different cultural experiments in which various families of cultural entrepreneurs basically share.

Simone: their metrics, You know, like how many members do you have what's your birth rate what, you know, is your income rate, you know, like what level of security do you have, etc. Educational outcome. Like a lot of different measures mental health, etc. Because over generations, we want a lot of these independent cultures, religious and secular.

Simone: That are trying to endure into the future to be able to compare notes and cultural technologies, meaning that if one culture notices like, Oh, this culture over here, like really great birth rates, amazing mental health, a lot of security and stability. Like they seem to be killing it. Hey, what are some [00:34:00] traditions we can learn from here?

Simone: You know, that we might adopt like for, for our own people.

Malcolm: It allows a mimetic lateral gene transfer or mimetic horizontal gene transfer, whichever example you want

Simone: to use. Yeah, so I mean, we don't think that we necessarily have the answers, but we also think that this experiment is something that should be the run.

Simone: Obviously, we will not know what cultural technologies will end up working in the long run. Only our descendants will know. But if you're interested in joining us in this experiment, please email us through our foundation. We will add you. To our growing essentially list of people who are entering this.

Simone: And then as it grows, and as we get off the ground and get started, we'll start sending out these initial reports and surveys. So everyone can report on where they are and what they're doing.

Malcolm: Well, I mean, so the index, the point of it, that's what this institution is called. It really only has two rules for people who join or cultural groups that join, which is you, you get your kids.

Malcolm: Until they decide to get married. And, and [00:35:00] when they're married, they get to choose what culture they create for their family and for their kids. Basically that means up to 18 years of age, right? So the first 18 years of a person's life are your chance to culturally pitch them, but you cannot mandate that they stay in your culture.

Malcolm: If they don't agree that the culture they were raised in was a good culture, they get to choose to leave. And this is... You know, a lot of people, sometimes they'll ask us questions when we have this sort of radical you own your kids to an extent as a culture. They're like, yeah, but what if a culture abuses their kids?

Malcolm: Or what if a culture disfigures their kids or something? It's yeah, well then their kids will leave that culture at disproportionate rates. You know, historically, kids weren't able to do that. But today, yeah, especially within an institution like the index. And the other thing is that you record this information and you allow your kids to record, you know, how they did as an adult.

Malcolm: And you can have all your kids say, Oh yeah, that thing my family did really messed me up. We're not going to do that with our kids. Let's look for different cultural practices within the index system that we can adapt. And when I'm talking about lateral or horizontal gene transfer, so people know what that is, that's like in A bacteria where a [00:36:00] bacteria might exchange genes with another bacteria that end up being useful to both bacteria without needing to actually breed with them.

Malcolm: , a lot of people can be like, this is a weird system to build is we allow for some intercultural practices that require.

Malcolm: Economies of scale. So examples of this would be things like marriage markets which require economies of scale to work. Or, you know, dating markets, stuff like that, right? Or educational systems. You know, we're developing our educational system, but in a way that won't ideologically indoctrinate kids.

Malcolm: Everyone who's part of the index would gain value from a system like that. So there is. Value in everyone who's part of the index, whatever we're culturally they're experimenting with to engage with us. And it raises our kids within this mindset and this knowledge that, you know, when they have kids, when they start a family, they get to choose to massively adapt whatever systems we raise them with.

Malcolm: Which leads their culture to be very accelerationist, but [00:37:00] again, you know, if you, if you look at Puritan spotting, traditionally Calvinist cultures have done that. So it's, it's, it's again, it's weird. It may sound weird to people, but it's not that weird from the perspective of our cultural tradition.

Malcolm: We're just adding a few additional rules to see if we can stop this death spiral our culture has been in basically ever since America was founded.

Simone: Yep. Well, I hope that our culture does well. I think it's pretty fun. For a culture that doesn't believe in happiness or fun. Not that it's a selling point, but yeah, we have a lot of fun and I love you so much, Malcolm.

Simone: I love you too,

Malcolm: Simone. Have a spectacular day. I am so excited to have dinner with you. I'm so excited. You're going to make burgers for the family and they're going to be delicious and the kids are going to enjoy them. And then we're going to go play with their chicks in the bar. And we are. So excited that we get to cosplay a, a trad lifestyle.

Simone: Cosplay it. Yeah.

Malcolm: You cosplay. Well, that's the thing. You cos, what's the difference [00:38:00] between living something and cosplaying it? Yeah. We're just, it's like this weird kink where we're like 24, seven trad cosplayers. We're, we're, we're, we're

Simone: cosplaying this. I really, yeah. What is the difference between cosplaying and reality?

Malcolm: It's just, we're pretending we're doing it. Ironically. Yeah.

Simone: That's a thing people do a lot these days. All right. Well, let's get

Malcolm: to it. Judge me for not doing it perfectly, but yeah, I mean, we live in a farm, we have chickens and lots of kids and a weird religion and it's, yeah. Actually not far from where your, your ancestor, George Washington, fought the battle right next to the He didn't

Simone: fight a battle.

Simone: He just spent a really shitty winter there. Oh, really shitty. Let's be honest

Malcolm: here. Yeah, bad, bad history there. You're right.

Simone: I love you, Malcolm. See you

Malcolm: downstairs. You too.

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