Based Camp: How Religions Rank Competence (Jews vs Catholics)

AI generated summary: In this enlightening conversation, Malcolm and Simone explore the mechanisms of hierarchy and status within the Catholic and Jewish communities, and how intelligence and merit play significant roles in these systems. They examine the differences and similarities between the two, explaining how each system sorts for intelligence and their potential for abuse. They also delve into the topic of martyrdom and victimhood, discussing how these statuses are viewed differently within both communities. Watch till the end as they touch on the impacts of nepotism and how Catholic tradition has historically navigated this issue.Puritan Spotting: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/03/12/puritan-spotting/

Simone: [00:00:00] Hello, gorgeous.

Malcolm: Hello, Simone. This is an episode I was so excited to record. Because what we had done an episode on how our mainstream society and how the virus or the urban monoculture, how it sorts the intellectual hierarchy of status. And we had people say, that's a really interesting topic.

Malcolm: I'd love you to go deeper on this, this concept. And what really got me excited is some conversations we had had afterwards with people from different cultural traditions, because different cultural traditions. Do this status sorting quite differentially between them, and I think that's a really interesting thing to dig into because it allows you to hypothesize on the pros and cons of these different methods for determining this.

Simone: So in other words, what we're going to explore is the ways in which different cultures sort for leaders [00:01:00] and how that could affect their success, their vulnerability to mimetic viruses, their overall long term potential and all sorts of other factors.

Malcolm: Correct? Yeah. Yeah.

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm: And I think the first place you see this is in where you get long tail results, like where certain cultures seem to perform.

Malcolm: Unusually well or unusually poorly. So an example that I often mention, which I think is a very interesting and telling example, is that when you're talking about the conservative intellectual movement, like, if you look around at most, almost all of the mainstream conservative intellectuals today, like, I'd say, like, 95% of the well known ones, they are typically from Jewish backgrounds or Catholic backgrounds.

Malcolm: They are very few from Protestant backgrounds. And yet the majority of conservatives in the United States are from Protestant backgrounds. And so this is very interesting. And it's, what's causing this? Why, why do we see this phenomenon? And part of [00:02:00] it has to do with how the Jewish and Catholic groups sort their internal power hierarchies, which are one of the things we always say is so if you're talking about really progressive Jews are really progressive Catholics, they all just buy into this mainstream urban culture.

Malcolm: So there isn't as much difference in how their power hierarchies work. But when you're talking about very conservative iterations of each of these, there's actually a really enormous difference. So do you want to jump into, we were talking with a Haraiti rabbi friend recently around how he said his culture was sorted for internal intellectual hierarchy.

Simone: Yeah, I think what we found was really striking about it is it did not sort based on credentials or time. It was sorted based on demonstrable knowledge that was easily verifiable. So if you came in to a group of people and you were able to refer to and quote a text really eloquently, but also accurately, [00:03:00] then you were able to do so better than the other people in the room, you would climb above in the hierarchy.

Simone: And it was really easy to verify the eloquence and accuracy with which someone quoted and therefore understood a certain text because you could just quickly look it up.

Malcolm: Right? Yeah. And so it allowed for this really interesting phenomenon where when you were meeting with another person, like another Jewish man in one of these communities, you could say, what are you studying right now?

Malcolm: And from the texts they said they were studying, you could know approximately how advanced that they were in their general knowledge of this field. And then you could test them on that by saying. Oh, well, page 56 or whatever. What do you think of this? Right?

Malcolm: And they need to know how this quote was sourcing other material, how it interlinked to other material. And it's a quick way for you to determine where they are in the hierarchy relative to you.

Simone: So almost like, let's say, let's take the religion out of this and let's pretend that this is a totally different community.

Simone: Like it's a Twilight fan fiction community. [00:04:00] So, if, if you were trying to gauge using the same general system and framework, you would ask, Oh, like, well, have you read this fan fiction? Well, what did you think about when? The werewolf like hooked up with the, Confederate vampire in this particular, alliance to destroy this weird faction.

Simone: And then if, if they didn't really know how to comment on it eloquently, you would understand, well, they haven't gone that deep into the canon. They haven't gone that deep into the lore. Therefore I am above them in the status hierarchy. And they would understand that they are below me because they haven't read that book yet.

Simone: Or they didn't, they said that they did, but they don't really know the lore that well. They didn't really take it in.

Malcolm: Yeah, and a really interesting phenomenon you can get with this and a really interesting advantage to this system is it allows for different subgroups within the wider ultra orthodox Jewish community to focus on different texts.

Malcolm: So some groups might believe that one text is like a more important thing for a learned person to know than another group and because of the way this power hierarchy structure works. [00:05:00] These groups will begin to interact with each other less and less because , there isn't a cross communication between their power hierarchies a lot.

Malcolm: Like the way that they have dedicated their time doesn't cross to status within another community. Yeah. It's almost

Simone: like 50 shades of gray fan fiction community branching off from Twilight fan fiction community. And at first they were the same base, but then they veered in so many different connect directions that they could no longer really.

Simone: Be interchangeable in terms of merit. So one leader from one advanced version of that group couldn't immediately go over and own the other

Malcolm: group. But what this allows for cultural evolution wise is it allows for the, the texts that end up being more important in terms of like resisting the social virus right now.

Malcolm: Those communities will naturally out compete the ones that are following groups of texts that are less strong at doing that, or texts that are more useful at, say, making the group uniquely good [00:06:00] at surviving and competing in a really highly technological age. Those groups will naturally out compete the other groups.

Malcolm: And one of the very interesting things about Judaism that quite differentiates it from many other traditions, is most Jewish groups can reintegrate with most other Orthodox Jewish groups after they have split from each other. And why this is the case is actually fairly memetically complicated. And we go into detail in the pragmatist guide to crafting religion.

Malcolm: And it's not totally germane to this conversation, but it's something worth noting here because what it allows for is the less successful groups, the groups that are studying texts, it turns out to be less. Competitive in current environments can then reintegrate even when they don't do as well. They just reintegrate as lower status because they don't know as much about the text that other people are following.

Malcolm: But where this gets really interesting. With a Catholic comparison here, because we're going to get to that system next, is it allows for a Jewish individual, and this happens with rabbis in ultra orthodox communities, where a rabbi [00:07:00] might be giving a speech to a group, and if a younger individual essentially shuts them down, like they show they know more than the rabbi, Then that's over.

Malcolm: Like people just walk out of the room. It's done. They have lost status. And, and, and that's a really interesting phenomenon because that really contrasts with the Catholic system. So one, I hope broadly you can see how this Jewish system would encourage people who are intellectually inclined to move into philosophical pursuits.

Malcolm: And, and that's why you will often see them in the political space disproportionately, because if you are intelligent and in a conservative Jewish community, you are rewarded pretty dramatically for pursuing philosophical pursuits. . Mm hmm, mm hmm. So this is really interesting in how it contrasts with the Catholic community. So the Catholic community also really rewards people who are uniquely intellectual or uniquely [00:08:00] intelligent from engaging disproportionately with philosophy and theology.

Malcolm: But the status of individuals within the Catholic community, like how smart they are, isn't determined using one of these organic systems that you see within the Jewish community. Instead, it's determined by a central bureaucracy, which then determines, okay, who below me in this bureaucracy, who below me in the hierarchy, am I seeing is high, like, high quality in terms of their intellect?

Malcolm: And then let's raise them higher within the hierarchy. So within a Catholic sermon, you would never have somebody who is being preached to show the person up and then say, okay, now I'm the, I'm the preacher. Now I'm the, the high status individual now, because these are two different systems for sorting for intelligence in the Jewish system.

Malcolm: It's actually the audience that's sorting for intelligence. Whereas in the Catholic system, it's the broadly agreed upon, more intelligent people, who have been certified by the central bureaucracy, [00:09:00] who are sorting for intelligence. Which creates it's a really good system. It, it, like, it's, it's not.

Malcolm: It can sound like it's an easily abusable system, but it's actually really good at sorting for genuine intelligence and preventing weird little culty buds. One of the problems with the Jewish system is because you can get like one group focused on this book, and one group focused on this book, and one group focused on this book, is you can get esoteric cult like buds almost forming.

Malcolm: that become quite different from what most people would think of as mainstream Judaism, whereas within the Catholicism, you have this centralizing force. And Catholicism is not the only culture that, that, that operates this way. You also see this within, like, for example, the Mormon community uses a somewhat simpler status sorting mechanism.

Simone: What I think is interesting here when I'm thinking about these scenarios, the scenario in which someone stands up and is like, hold on. And the conditions in which that person is actually given space or given [00:10:00] respect. In contrast with other groups. So, with some Jewish groups, and I would say some, not all, I would say more Orthodox Jewish groups.

Simone: If you stand up and you're like, hold on, you are given a platform and you are given status if you are able to back up your statement with true demonstrated knowledge. In, in the Catholic system, as you describe it, if you stand up and you say, hold on, well, first off, like you probably shouldn't do that because you should respect your authority more that you should be scouted based on your merit and based on that, then you're given the right.

Simone: So you have to be scouted and you have to show your merit by basically participating in the system but more through a back channel kind of way. And then I think about in contrast, a lot of other cultures, both secular and religion. In which people who stand up and say, hold on, are given respect, not because they show their merit genuinely through their actual argument in the moment and knowledge in the moment, but literally because of their status and often because of their victimhood status, which I think is really interesting.

Simone: So,[00:11:00] in, in these, in these Catholic and Jewish examples that you're present presenting. A victim or someone who has been disadvantaged in some way is going to have zero privilege and perhaps many disadvantages because they don't have the knowledge. They don't have the ability to show people up.

Simone: So they're not given a, they're systematically continue to be disadvantaged. Whereas in these other groups, they're given a lot of voice, but is that voice. helpful to those groups. And I think that's the sort of really controversial question. Like, should we be giving voices to people who have victim status?

Simone: Because are they even capable or in a position of doing good for the organization and the people on the whole or not? I don't know. What

Malcolm: you just mentioned is actually one of the dangers of the Catholic system. It's the Catholic tradition has long lauded People who undergo suffering on behalf of the church, but some people have confused that with victimhood status, which are actually two different things to suffer for your faith is very different than to give somebody status just because they suffer [00:12:00] broadly.

Simone: I feel like martyrdom or, or, or other forms of sacrifice actually have to come from a position of privilege because you have to have something that you're giving up. And if you don't have anything that you give up, then you can't, you literally can't make that sacrifice. So literally like the ultimate victims.

Simone: Can't even be a martyr or a sacrificer in the Catholic system.

Malcolm: Well, and I think that the iterations of the Catholic tradition, which make this differentiation are going to be the ones that survive this period. Another really interesting thing about the Catholic system for sorting hierarchy. Is its biggest flaw.

Malcolm: Its biggest flaw is that it doesn't allow for quick cultural evolution. So you look at the Jewish system and we talked about this blood budding dynamic system within the Catholic system or the very closely related Mormon system. The people in power. Are almost always going to be older individuals, very much older individuals.

Malcolm: They're going to be from previous generations and they're going to be hugely incentivized to largely keep things the same. [00:13:00] Now, unlike Mormons, Catholics are one of the longest surviving continuous cultural traditions. So the question is, how did they survive this? Because that's a very. Interesting problem to have, and they survived it through this really beautiful mechanism.

Malcolm: Which is essentially creating new deviant subcultures within the central Catholic organization, and that is what the religious orders are. The religious orders allow for sort of an internal incubator within the Catholic Church, where a group has a slightly different culture than the mainstream church, a slightly different way of doing things in the mainstream church, and is often more fervent and lives in a very different lifestyle than the mainstream church, which brings in the sort of rebellious, pushing, Cultural limits type people.

Malcolm: And what's really fascinating is most of these orders, as they get older, they then become more opulent, more hedonistic and they become [00:14:00] less cool and they fall apart. And then you've got the other, the new order. But what these orders allow the Catholic tradition to do is It's almost like taking stem cells from like a younger tradition.

Malcolm: They can take the individuals who have honed themselves within these orders and then re inject them into the top of the Catholic hierarchy in a way that keeps the tradition acting much younger than it actually is and much more dynamic than should be possible, given the hierarchical system.

Simone: Which is.

Simone: It sounds almost like a skunk works or like innovation or VC branch of a business that's trying to stay fresh where they will spin off businesses and maybe those businesses ultimately will be strategically useful to exactly what it's

Malcolm: like a skunk works but like having multiple skunk works departments that are competing against each other.

Malcolm: Yeah, which is ideal. Yeah. Which is ideal and a really fascinating cultural solution. Another big problem that you're going to have with the Catholic system is, okay, you've got this [00:15:00] system, you're going to end up with nepotism is going to be a major problem. Because people are going to be disproportionately motivated to promote their kids.

Malcolm: I mean, that happens in any system like this. So how does Catholic tradition deal with that? Another really interesting solution, which likely has I think more probably long term negative consequences and positive consequences, which is to say that if you're entering the central hierarchy, you can't have kids.

Malcolm: Now this had some really interesting effects. One, if you look and you can look at the Wikipedia article on this, it's, it's really fascinating. I think it's something like 40% of Catholic. Clergy is same sex attracted. And this is one of those things that I talk about when I say that becoming gay is just the progressive solution to being same sex attractive, different religious traditions have come up with different solutions to this historically.

Malcolm: And many ways it was understood if you were like really intellectually gifted and same sex attractive, and you were born in a Catholic culture, you would go into the priesthood. It's almost like a. Ethically sourced eunuch. Now of course there's [00:16:00] many downsides to this cultural solution that I think we've seen fall out from the many downsides of this cultural solution.

Malcolm: But it is a very interesting cultural solution. Actually one of the biggest downsides to it is one that people don't think of, which is , where the Catholic tradition is dominant. These regions didn't need to evolve culturally as many protections against nepotism, specifically family based nepotism, because they would have people in the church often running governmental organizations historically.

Malcolm: As these regions secularized because they didn't have as much protection against familial nepotism, you see familial nepotism way, way, way, way, way, way, way higher in these regions. So if you look at majority Catholic regions politics in those regions typically have way more familial nepotism than regions that were historically Protestant, which I think is a really interesting outcome from this.

Simone: That is. Yeah. Well, , what could [00:17:00] Protestantism do or shift about its culture? Like, let's say that you're part of a Protestant faction and you're like, well, I would like my. group to have more influence in business, culture, politics, media, whatever. How would you change it's meritocratic or whatever?

Simone: It's hierarchical

Malcolm: sorting. Yeah. So this is really fascinating. So the Protestant tradition should also not be thought of as a monolith. No, definitely. I, I'm going to contrast two Protestant tradition solutions to this Calvinist solution. and the Quaker solution. So , now we've got to go back to how these two cultures understand truth, which we've talked about in other videos. To Quakers, truth is something that comes from within. That's why, in their meetings, in one form of their meeting you will have people just stand up when they feel internally moved because truth is this internal emotional thing that bubbles up within you.

Malcolm: Within the Calvinist tradition Even having a preacher was in more strict Calvinist [00:18:00] face standing in front of the room. If you read things out of order that could incept people with your way of looking at the text, if you read things with an inflection that could incept the way people are looking at the text, if you add any commentary, if you do a play, all of that is highly sinful.

Malcolm: It's supposed to be just completely logically. Self determined in the moment like I E I need to study my natural environment. I need to study the Bible and that is where I can determine truth. Now, both of these lead to very different types of status hierarchies within the Calvinist tradition.

Malcolm: And you saw this from our cultural perspective in the video on. Like, how do we determine who we view intellectually? We're both from a Calvinist tradition, and the Calvinist tradition historically views a person's ability to compete in real world environments like their ability to Actually, like, do well in, in, in the world as a sign of their competence.

Malcolm: And that is why often when you have leaders in Calvinist churches [00:19:00] they're often people who have been successful in other endeavors before they moved into that movement. And in addition, it's, it's, it's pretty common. Within Calvinist churches to have church leaders historically now the new Calvinist church is a different species in the old Calvinist church that's wearing it almost like cosplay.

Malcolm: It was historically common for them to have jobs outside of running the church because that is how you showed like that you were a competent individual. But also that your loyalties weren't divided. You weren't reliant on the church for money because that's another thing that could corrupt you.

Malcolm: The Calvinist tradition is very focused on all of the things that can corrupt a source of truth and this leads to many negative externalities. The biggest negative externality is that they distrust everything. And if you look at a lot of the traditions today, like QAnon and stuff like this, these definitely evolved out of the Calvinist tradition.

Malcolm: This, everything's a conspiracy, only trust yourself. I can provide you with some clues, like look here and here. But at the end of the day. Truth can only come from you [00:20:00] logically looking at the world. The Quaker tradition did something very different. And we'll argue in other longer videos that, that you can guess what evolved out of Quaker tradition.

Malcolm: But they have always, if you read the LBMC did a very good sort of analysis of early Quaker tradition. Their internal hierarchy was based on virtue signaling. From even the early Quaker tradition showing that you were a good person through what you were saying was the way within these, these settings where like you had God speak through you, so you would stand up when you felt moved to say something, well, how do you show your status vis a vis other things, people, you show things that seem more Christly, and what that meant within the Quaker tradition began to deviate more and more.

Malcolm: Today we know how virtue signaling goes wrong, but historically they would have said, well, we don't judge people by how smart they are. We judge people by the quality of their character. That's how we sort our internal hierarchy. And that actually sounds really smart and enlightened. It just leads to negative [00:21:00] externalities after it's been allowed to like run on its own for a really long period of time.

Simone: Well, because in the end, charisma is. Is not always right. It's not always correlated with with output or outcome or ability to build things. Right. And also there's the, the, the sort of inverse correlation between people who are willing to sit around and politic and signal and people who are willing to sit in.

Simone: Churn and build, right? And, and so when you have a system that sorts more for the signaling and the politicking, you're sorting for leaders who are good at signaling and politicking rather than building. And that's one of the reasons why we're so obsessed with slash interested in this topic is we think constantly about, well, how, how do we put people at the top who are genuinely most able to build things?

Simone: In a way that's really meaningful without necessarily sorting for people who are good at politicking. Although you need a little bit of that, because any leader also has to be able to lead other people and [00:22:00] convince them to do things. And so politicking is important.

Malcolm: Well, so another Calvinist thing that was used to sort internal hierarchical structures that had nothing to do with a person's competence but led to a lot of stereotypes about Calvinists, was the level of personal suffering that you were willing to undergo to achieve something.

Malcolm: So Calvinists would often try to show off to other Calvinists how austere their lifestyles were, or how intense their daily suffering was. And this is why in, in, in many Calvinist stereotypes, you see them being visibly disfigured, like they would show off more than other people, their, their physical disfigurement.

Malcolm: Or ailments, like walking with a cane or something like that. So you look at Calvinist stereotypes throughout media, like Scrooge is a great Calvinist stereotype, right? He's a guy who's hoarding his wealth, like he's very wealthy, like that's always a traditional Calvinist stereotype, is they're very wealthy because that's how they determine their, their position within their local status hierarchy.

Malcolm: But he didn't spend his wealth, even within his daily life, they talk about in the story. That he [00:23:00] would eat gruel, that he had no servants who worked for him, that he wouldn't heat the house which is something that even Simone and I do, so he wasn't, like, saving money to spend it on himself which I think a lot of people read the story today to know.

Malcolm: Actually, Scrooge is a very interesting story. It's a, it's a corrective rape fantasy about Calvinist moral values. Because Scrooge was accurate. Giving the money to Tiny Tim's family was not the most effective use of charitable funds. And it was, it was quite indulgent based on his sort of personal community to, to do that.

Malcolm: That's just not the way a good Calvinist would do that. And a lot of people today, because they're not familiar with the Calvinist stereotypes, they read the story and they think Scrooge is a Jewish stereotype. He was from Scotland, like that's a classic Calvinist stereotype. He, he said bah humbug to Christian, again, thinking holidays, obscuring holidays is another classic Calvinist stereotype.

Malcolm: Being tall and gaunt is another classic Calvinist stereotype. Thinking you're morally superior to people is another classic Calvinist stereotype. But having your own [00:24:00] moral framework and not engaging with the world's moral framework is another classic Calvinist stereotype. And what's really interesting, even though Calvinists aren't that common in the world today, you still see this stereotype in media all the time.

Malcolm: What are some other things you see? Typically they wear red and black. They often wear vests or Scottish attire. They're often physically disfigured in some way. And they are often seen as obsessed with pain to some extent. So, Scrooge, again, Scrooge McDuck, Donald Scrooge is a classic Calvinist stereotype.

Malcolm: Silco from Arcane is a pretty good depiction of a Calvinist stereotype.

Simone: I just find it really funny that Ebenezer Scrooge is like this, this, this caricature argument against effective altruism, you're saying? It's kind of true. Well, it

Malcolm: kind of is. What's another one I'm thinking of? Vader and Anakin to an extent, because another, the flip side to the Calvinist stereotype is they're either seen as being very Like uncaring or sort of like manic like, like businessy manic and, and, and house is full of investments.

Malcolm: That's another Calvinist stereotype is the [00:25:00] invention thing and having houses strewn with inventions that I know even some of my ancestors, when you go to their house, we would talk about like all the little inventions they had everywhere because that was a way that you showed how your intelligence had real world applicability.

Malcolm: To visitors to where you live which was, was really interesting and a good list of these is actually found on a Puritan spotting by a star site codex. He did a thing on these, these Calvinist stereotypes, and I'll include a link to that.

The one interesting part of the Calvinist stereotype that he did not touch on in Puritan spotting was the stereotype that if they have a. , so, or family. They are almost always featured. As working together, like the way that they emotionally relate to other people is through their work. And, when people look at someone mind's relationship, it can look really unusual in that we run our companies together and stuff, but that was actually traditionally the way things were done within the Calvinist tradition.

And it's [00:26:00] something that you will see throughout Calvinist archetypes.

Malcolm: Now, some people might say, Oh, like George Lucas didn't say that this was the stereotype he was going for, but he also didn't say that Jewish was the stereotype he was going for with Watto or racist.

Malcolm: Just general racist was the stereotype he was going for with George R. Binks. He seemed to. Whole culturally evoked sets of things that seem to go together in his mind without realizing that these cultural sets came from like imprinted stereotypes because these cultural groups existed in the world around him or had existed and therefore had imprinted themselves onto media, even though now Calvinists are mostly extinct as a cultural group. But anyway, something that you had mentioned about the way these different cultures differentiate from each other that I found really fascinating.

Malcolm: . Yeah, talk about the IQ shredder concept.

Simone: Yeah, I mean, you and I were talking at first about how we were like, wait, this meritocratic sorting system in Orthodox Jewish communities is Super awesome. Like the fact that there is a provable way to, [00:27:00] to demonstrate your merit.

Simone: Like, Oh my gosh, these are exactly the sorts of people I would want to have ruling my culture. And then we realized, Oh, but wait, like these are, these are people who are going in and spending all their time in deep, deep, deep esoteric religious study. And per our cultural background, we're like. Oh no, like we want them to like build spaceships that take us to Mars that we want them to get off a soft planet.

Simone: We want them to solve like all diseases and they're reading these. So we, we did find it really interesting where like, this is a significant deviation from our culture and that our culture is like, okay, take these people. And like, have them solve the world's problems. But I guess per the moral framework of many of these very Orthodox Jewish communities, I mean, the biggest problems are delving into these deep religious texts.

Simone: And, and the solution isn't necessarily to like, go off planet because there's a lot of other important religious stuff that's going [00:28:00] on that they need to work

Malcolm: But there is a downside to what you're saying, right? And there's a reason that their culture doesn't do that. So that is essentially what Reform Judaism did. Is they said, we'll still sort our status hierarchy by how intelligent a person is. Right. But we'll outsource that to a form of intelligence sorting that has more real world applicability, specifically the degrees that people were getting.

Malcolm: This is why you have the stereotype in traditional Jewish families of, go be a doctor, go to this fancy university because, and I also think it's why you saw Jewish families over represented in Ivy league schools, partially because. There is more cultural reward for Jews going into Ivy League schools than there are, for example, for a person of a Protestant background.

Malcolm: In fact, I would be quite shamed within a lot of Protestant cultural circles for mentioning the fancy schools that we went to. ... It's just seen really negatively, like, like as, as if you actually weren't able to achieve things in the real world. Now, this [00:29:00] outsourcing worked for a while.

Malcolm: The problem is, is it left a giant gaping back door for the virus to get through, which is as soon as the virus took over the institutions, it specifically was sorted into positions of power , was in the Reform Jewish movement. And... It allowed the movement to be really quickly and aggressively corrupted by the virus as happened to all cultural traditions that sorted for intelligence.

Malcolm: By degrees. We also saw this within the Unitarian Universalist movement, which which did something similar. And what was really interesting to me is this more orthodox approach to Jewish intelligence. They now actively, like, look down on the university system in part because they see how efficacious list has gotten and that they feel like the cultural winners here.

Malcolm: Like we followed the old way of doing things that may not have looked like. Why are you doing things this way? It may have seemed less efficacious, but in the long run, it's [00:30:00] keeping their fertility rates up and it's keeping their cultural identity strong in a way that you're not seeing as much in the, in the reform community, which is becoming just like holiday traditions and, and a few other differential things, but not so much a, a genuinely different, like moral framework than society writ large which I think is really interesting.

Malcolm: So there are negatives but you're, you're trading one thing for another thing. We have to remember as much as we talk about like the Calvin, the Calvinist went extinct. Basically they used to be the time of the signing around the declaration, at least among white Americans, they were well over 50% of the population.

Malcolm: And now they're like 0. 5% of the population. So it is a failed system. It may have done a good job of sorting for competence. That's why you got the, the, the stereotype of the. Wealthy Calvinist, but I think where it really failed people who wanted to stay in the tradition.

Malcolm: Well,

Simone: I also, I would, and there are, of course, are many exceptions here, but the stereotype of the wealthy Calvinist is also not the stereotype of a very [00:31:00] pronatalist Calvinist.

Malcolm: They, yeah, because I mean, you don't want to have fun. I mean, the classic, who wants to marry somebody who thinks that dancing is, is, is sinful, and Christmas is sinful, and, and having too much fun is sinful, which is funny, which those are all things that you and I, music is sinful.

Malcolm: Famously, like Geneva banned me after becoming a predominantly Calvinist band all music that had words for like a hundred year period or something because they didn't want people to have too much fun. That would be very Corrupting which is funny that that's still very much in our sort of secular tradition.

Malcolm: So one of the questions we have for ourselves is, can we create an iteration of this tradition, which, which is able to both resist the virus and motivate high fertility rates? But I mean, the jury's really out betting odds would be against us, but this whole, the reason we're having this conversation is I think it's really important for people to note that there are actually.

Malcolm: Like systemically, the way they sort their internal hierarchy, the way they see the world, there are really [00:32:00] big differences in the way different cultures approach things. And those differences lead to different long tail consequences. The, the Catholic system for, for sorting IQ is likely why the last Supreme court seven of the.

Malcolm: nine justices had a Catholic upbringing. One had one Protestant, one Catholic parent. So you might not count them. And the other two. Came from Jewish backgrounds. Not a single one came from a Protestant background. That is wild when you consider the demographics of this country.

Malcolm: Right. But it makes a lot of sense when you look at how these cultures sort for status. You simply aren't going to get up. Even I growing up, remembered the shame that my parents told me I would be looked at within the family if I became something as. Low status as a lawyer. Whereas in many other cultures, a lawyer would be seen as a very high status profession.

Malcolm: And this has to do with how these cultures relate to truth within the Calvinist tradition. The lawyer is. The steward of the bureaucracy, what [00:33:00] could be lower status than engaging with the bureaucracy? You, you've become mentally addled, you, you, you become nepotistically polluted, but it's very interesting.

Malcolm: And I think that. Through understanding these genuine differences within our different cultures and through better clarifying them and understanding the advantages and disadvantages that each have, we can better appreciate why we are all better off of being in a genuinely culturally diverse environment.

Malcolm: Yeah. Because one of the things that I've always found really laughable about progressivism is they claim to want diversity and then you're like, Oh yeah, diversity is great because different groups are better at different things. That's the point of diversity. Being different is the point of diversity.

Malcolm: If it's superficial, if you are going to pretend that all diversity is actually just completely superficial and doesn't really affect how different groups perform at different things, then You've created this, this mockery of diversity [00:34:00] and and worse when you can't explain why different groups are doing better at different things, then the only explanation you conceivably have is they're cheating.

Malcolm: They, they've rigged the system in their favor there, and that creates animosity between groups. And that creates, I think, really interesting phenomenons where groups begin to tear each other down or try to frame other groups is doing better. And you get this whole system, which, it is really bad for groups that actually lead to better outcomes like, Jewish groups and Catholic groups, which I think disproportionately do really well in bureaucracies and academic

Simone: settings.

Simone: But I think it's also really important to think about these dynamics because it doesn't matter if you're looking at a friend group somewhere or a secular group or a fan community or a religious group, or even a family looking at how they sort for the people that they put in positions of leadership.

Simone: will enable you to kind of understand where that group is going to go and what it will be able to do. [00:35:00] So all, all groups will produce something, but what it will be able to produce, whether that is like, really esoteric, creative, amazing things, or, real world, or we'll say larger society, agency, all sorts of things that, that depends on how meritocratic sorting works.

Simone: So look closely at that and you'll be able to discover a ton of other things much more quickly than by analyzing a lot of other elements of the group that would take more time.

Malcolm: Yeah, it's a really fun way to think about things, but also think about what you're doing for your own family, I think to a lot of people of this generation, they grew up without a culture because they didn't know what their culture was.

Malcolm: And when they move back to cultures and they're trying to choose which one they adopt Or trying to recreate some iteration of what their family's historic culture was. They, they often think it's just the theology. When there's a whole worldview that, that worked alongside this theology, and a whole way of sorting yourself culturally.

Malcolm: that led to these cultural [00:36:00] differences and you can make a much more informed decision as you recreate your family culture in, in, in the light of a virus that has eroded and erased so many family traditions.

Simone: Yeah, absolutely. No, it was fun talking about this with you. I know we've been talking about it for days

Malcolm: now.

Malcolm: Yeah. You've, you've helped all of these ideas. I might talk more, but a lot of these are just me parroting the ideas that Simone is telling me in

Simone: private. I'm more like, I just ask you dumb questions, but that's our tradition. And I absolutely love

Malcolm: it. Yeah, that's our true. Oh, that's the way our gender dynamics work.

Malcolm: Yeah.

Simone: I ask really dumb questions cause I'm like so confused and he gives really smart answers and they're like so sexy. And I'm So I'm like hot for it, but that's how

Malcolm: you incept me with your worldview. It's your womanly ways,

Simone: my, yeah, my feminine, my, my sexuality for wherever it is this is a pleasure.

Simone: I'm looking forward to our next conversation. Cause we've got [00:37:00] a good one coming up. Yeah. All right. Love you, Malcolm. Love you too.

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