Why Don't Jews Own Guns?

We discuss the surprising history behind Jewish gun ownership rates, including how repeated pogroms selected for urban Jews who fled rather than fought back. We explain why an urban, intellectual tradition doesn't encourage individual gun ownership, and how Israel is exerting new evolutionary pressures.

Simone Collins: [00:00:00] So... Jews and guns.

Malcolm Collins: Yes. So if our book, The Pragmatist's Guide to Religion, used one of those cheeky titles where somebody, you know, like, why don't zebras get cancer or something like that? You know, where it's like one interesting thing that the book like goes too deeply into it would be, why don't Jews own guns?

And, and the, this is a uniquely like, like vexing question. So I'm not going to go into the stats. If you want to go into all the stats and the citation. You can go look at the book, but if I was to expect that, like, like if you look at Jewish history, there are two things that I would expect of every Jew, never live in a city, always have a gun.

Simone Collins: Everyone has a gun.

Malcolm Collins: And this is very interesting to me because if you look at our cultural. Background like our cult of art. You want to call it that it tells us to do both of those things. It tells us, you know, do arms training when you were a young kid, always have, you have a gun behind you. We have a gun in almost every room of our house.

I [00:01:00] decided to add a little screenshot here. Of Simone standing desk where she works or within arm's reach is an AR 15 and right behind her in that shot is a Remington.

And right where I'm laying down to record this right now, where I edit the videos next to my bed is a Walter CCP pestle. there's almost nowhere in our house where we spend a significant amount of time where there is not a firearm was in arms reach.

Malcolm Collins: You know, and if you look at modern times, this is a uniquely interesting question, like even in Israel gun ownership rates are Thank you. Very low, weirdly, weirdly low. I mean, like people in

Simone Collins: the army, they're trained in, in gun use, you know? Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Like they should be one of the most gun literate and, and, and thus gun having people, I would suspect that in any population, if you look in Israel and we keep, you know, I read these horrifying stories of what happened when Hamas first attacked, and I keep wondering.

Why didn't this old lady have an AR 15 on her wall? Like what was, why wouldn't she have that? She lived right next to [00:02:00] Gaza. That it's not like they didn't know that this attack may happen. Well, and when

Simone Collins: you think about this attack, if, if these, if people in all of these areas and I don't know what the concealed carry laws are in Israel, you know, like, but for example, if the, if the people of this festival.

If, you know, 25 percent of them had concealed carry, this would have played out very different if, you know, everyone had weapons in their house, if they lived in a kibbutz, especially if it was a kibbutz close to the border, like, this would have played out very differently, you know, the story, these terrifying stories of, you know, two kids alone at home, you know, their mom in another place on the phone with them as their home is being, I mean, if they had guns, again, this, this could have played

Malcolm Collins: out super differently.

And I'm saying here, you know, there are like progressive jews, they look at what happened. And they're like, Oh my God, I, I, I, I never expected the, the, the people of Gaza to do this. And everyone else is like, what are you talking about? They're like, Muslims going around and beheading people? That's so out of character.

What? And then, and then of course everyone else is like. What are [00:03:00] you, what are you talking about? Everybody knew this could happen. Everybody, and they're like, no, no, no. It must have been something we did. I, I can't see any other reason this could have happened. And, and worse, and I mean, we're talking about this and we're not going to do a full episode on, on this particular topic, but I have just been so ashamed even with how little I think of progressives in the U.

S., how they have treated these horrifying massacres. I saw a top. post on Reddit arguing that the, the, the massacre of the babies was their heads being cut off was a fake stunt perpetrated. This is on front page of Reddit, or at least my front page perpetrated by the Israeli government.

Simone Collins: God, I wish that were true.

I like, I genuinely wish that were

Malcolm Collins: true.

It gets worse, Lloyd. My parakeet, Petey. Huh? He's dead.

Oh. Oh, man. I'm sorry, Harry. [00:04:00] What happened? His head fell off. His head fell off?

Yeah, he was pretty old.

Malcolm Collins: I saw. You know, classes in Harvard right now, you know, we've heard about them being from from our contacts who are at school. They're right now being canceled. So all of the students, these are grad students, by the way, can go out and protest the bus that is protesting that horrifying letter that said that Hamas has 0 percent blame for this.

The state of Israel has 100 percent blame for this. It's horrifying. And if you look at the things leading up to the people like, oh, Israel was so horrible to the people of Gaza, the very reason why it's Israel didn't expect to be attacked right now was because they had been so quickly and, and, and, and hugely loosening sanctions on Gaza and increasing work visas to the people of Gaza because they were trying to do this deal with Saudi Arabia.

They had been really focused recently on [00:05:00] increasing quality of life there. And so when they saw really huge troop movements in the area that were really obvious, they were like, Oh the one these movements are so obvious that it must be something else like it can't possibly be that they're about to attack us because they wouldn't make it this obvious, especially given, you know, the way the people would react, given all of the, the, the looser sanctions and stuff like this.

Remember, we need... And you will make it through! This isn't random, Ramite. Someone made a mistake. That's it. We're empty, ma'am.

Big goddamn mistake.

Malcolm Collins: And I think that this is where this mindset where it's like. Oh, they're attacking us because they're mad at us. It's like, no, they're attacking you because it's [00:06:00] like theologically mandated that you cease existing in this area. It doesn't matter what you do for them. They still have to kill you if they follow this cultural tradition.

And I should be clear, not all Islamic cultural traditions feel that way.

I mean, there's a reason why. Other Islamic countries have refused. To take. Palestinian refugees throughout this attack, , there's a reason why. , other Arab countries have refused to, accept Palestine as a state under their control. Because it is a radically different islamic culture than other islamic

cultures

 also with another quick side note here, I want to dispel. A misconception that has been going around a lot. That Hamas was only supported by a minority of Gazans, or it was like, It's not a mainstream organization was in Gaza over 50% of the population in Gaza support. , hammas to put this in context, only 37% of Germans supported Hitler's rise to power.

I think it's important for people to ask themselves. Why are people pretending [00:07:00] like Hamas is this weird splinter organization? controlling the people of Gaza. And forcing them to do things they don't want to, but we don't pretend that that was the case of the Nazis. And the Germans during world war II. And all of this. Oh, they were in an open air prison, , they were being abused and that's why they did. It sounds very similar to talk about the Nazis were, oh, the treaty of Versailles was so abusive to them. You know, look at the hyperinflation. They were experiencing, look at the absolute poverty.

So many people in Germany were experiencing. Leading up to the rise of the nazi party

 I also want to be clear. I am not saying that innocent people are not suffering. There are. Many many innocent people suffering in Gaza right now. But when we look at this in the context of other wars, we are weirdly treating this. very, very differently than we would say. Think of the people of the Southern United States during general Sherman's total war campaign, which was [00:08:00] absolutely horrifying in the number of civilian casualties. Or the bombing of Dresden during world war II. Which famously killed more civilians than the atomic bombs did in Japan. The atomic bombs killed around 120,000 Japanese. , While the firebombing of dresden killed her on 135,000 germans

Malcolm Collins: And one of the themes of this episode is going to be the, the actual key to answering the question of why do Jews own guns in such low numbers comes from understanding. That Jews are not a monolithic entity and that there are many very different subcultural groups within the Jewish tradition, diaspora tradition, diaspora tradition, history, whatever word you want to use.

And some of them have actually been incredibly militaristic just not the ones that survived, but before I give anything away something that is worth noting here, because we made a tweet to this and we can't do a whole episode on it, but it actually is a very important concept to discuss, is why progressives hate Jews so much. Right. Because it

Simone Collins: seems so [00:09:00] weird, right?

Malcolm Collins: It doesn't seem weird to me, it seems like the natural result of progressive philosophy, but I think a lot of people don't think their philosophy through, they're just like, Oh, progressives are the nice ones,

Simone Collins: right? And progressives, like anyone who's slightly different from the norm, whoever has had a history of being persecuted.

So obviously Jews, plus many Jews are super progressive. So like, there's all these reasons why I assume Reform Jews are super progressive. I know, I know, but like to the average nobody who knows nothing. Like those are those are the Jews because those are the Jews you

Malcolm Collins: see. Okay. Yeah. And I think that this is actually one of the, the, this is a totally different tangent.

But I think the, the seeing Jews as a, a universalized entity rather than progressive versus Orthodox Jews, you know, in the US, we don't confuse, you know, Universalist Christians was like, I guess I'd call them real Christians like, like Catholics and stuff, but we conflate the actions of reform Jews, which are used to justify anti [00:10:00] Semitism with Orthodox Jewish communities.

I think to a great

Simone Collins: extent, that's because you don't encounter Orthodox Jews. Like you may see them, but you, you've never talked to one. Like they're not hanging out with you. And they're also not talking like normally. There's like a couple on YouTube who are like, this is what it's like to buy a wig, or like, this is what an Orthodox Jewish party is like, but like, no one's really talking to you about like their day to day, so it's, and

Malcolm Collins: you just don't know.

Okay, before, this is maybe a whole other video that we might do on, on, on this and, and anti Semitism. Why? Why? Do progressives hate Jews? Why? And why is their philosophy always going to end up hating Jews?

Yes. The reason why is because the progressive philosophy is based on a core assumption, which is that all differences between success of groups, of groups of people, whether they're cultural or ethnic or anything, groups, because a systemic discrimination and disenfranchisement combined with outright oppression.

Simone Collins: Okay. So in other [00:11:00] words, if there is a difference, if some group is different, it's because they've been treated unfairly by some

Malcolm Collins: other facets of society. Because we're different.

That's where the value and diversity comes from. To a progressive, diversity has value only in that it increases the number of victims that they have available for them to convert. Not because they really believe that anyone's different. And, and this is, you don't believe that anyone's really different.

If you do believe that all differences between groups are caused by systemic discrimination and oppression, if there's a group out there... i. e. Jews, that is both wealthier than other groups on average, more successful, and like academia, you know, you look at the number of politicians who have Jewish ancestry, or you look at the number of famous intellectuals that have Jewish ancestry, or you look at the number of Nobel Prize winners that have Jewish ancestry, they always out compete, they are a very successful cultural

Simone Collins: group.

Right, it's clear the Jews are doing

Malcolm Collins: well. Right, and so you see this cultural group. [00:12:00] And then you also see that this is a cultural group that claims that it was historically oppressed and that it even still faces oppression. Of course, those two facts are unreconcilable. And this is why, in progressive circles, it is so offensive to even point out that Jews are successful, and that they do disproportionately outcompete other groups, both economically, academically, bureaucratically.

And, and it's because what's the logical assumption there? Well, they must be lying about their oppression. They, they, one, and you increasingly see this within progressive circles. They must be lying about how actually oppressed they are, one. And two, they must not be participating in the oppression of other groups.

They must be the architects of all oppression.

Simone Collins: Right. Because if you're successful, you're successful. Because of some zero sum game that you've played unfairly, right? Yes,

Malcolm Collins: yes. Whereas conservatives would look at those things and they'd be like, Oh these are things we might be able to learn from. Now, of [00:13:00] course, there's some conservative groups that are just like ethno nationalists and just really only care about their own group.

Competing, which is, you know, they're not going to be long for this world, given the world that we're entering, but you know, obviously they'll be anti Semitic, but they'll be anti pretty much all other groups that they don't identify as their own. Yeah, equal

Simone Collins: opportunity hatred. That's, you know,

Malcolm Collins: fine.

Well, they might have a unique hatred for Jewish people because they are out competing them. And people often hate people more when they're out competing them. But there is a path towards acceptance within the conservative movement. There is not a path towards acceptance within the progressive movement so long as they hold on to this ideology that all differences between groups are due to oppression and discrimination.

And so it makes a lot of sense that we see these, these cultural power centers in the U. S. have responded so bizarrely from my perspective to all of this, and I think in a way that has, has really broken the trust of a lot of people who formerly didn't realize how crazy and how [00:14:00] hateful these groups were in terms of their, the, you know, like the Harvard letters signed by 31 student organizations saying Israel was 100 percent at fault for this.

And, and the, the classes are still being canceled so that they can go double down on their support for that. So with that all out of the way, you know, we're sort of giving the, the cultural context right now as to why we're talking about this. Why would gun ownership rates be so low in Jewish communities?

Well, first you have to look at the history here. Judaism underwent something very unique after the second temple period, which can almost be thought of as sort of like a Cambrian explosion or a what's the word in biology

Oh, radiation. So in radiation, if you look at the Cambrian, like some of my favorite periods in history, you can look at like the Cambrian explosion or the Triassic. If you look at the dinosaurs of the Triassic or all the animals of the Triassic, because a lot of them weren't dinosaurs yet.

A lot of them looked really weird. If you look at the Cambrian Explosion, the animals that came out of the Cambrian [00:15:00] Explosion, a lot of them looked really weird. These are called radiation events. They typically happen after a mass extinction event. So, what it means is a lot of the ecological niches that used to be held by specialists get wiped out, and groups that weren't really built for those ecological niches quickly evolved to fill them.

Well, that can happen with a cultural group as well. When the Second Temple Period happened, when the Jewish people were dispersed all over the world they began to fill lots of very unusual cultural niches if you look at the Jewish people historically. So before that, Jews were really sort of one cultural group.

You know, they were a people, a government, and everything like that. But after that, you had... Like if we're talking about like weird Jewish cultural niches one, you know, to this topic was a, a mercenary cultural group that specifically specialized almost in being like the

10,000.

Malcolm Collins: from like [00:16:00] the the Greek period where it was Jews that you knew that you would hire when you wanted specific functions fulfilled within your military.

And, and they basically lived on, on like mercenary Jews. Yeah, like, like, like professional unmoored mercenaries. They could even, like, move between forces, like, Okay, this king wants to hire us now. That's super

Simone Collins: cool, yeah, okay. What happened to them? Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: So what

Simone Collins: happened to all of these groups? I guess they weren't, I mean, if you're a militaristic group, you're probably not reproducing at a really high rate, is that the problem?

No, that

Malcolm Collins: wasn't the problem. Exactly. Actually what happened to them is actually just a useful thing. This is a specialization that has repeatedly evolved throughout human history for different cultural groups. As I mentioned, the Greeks did this for a period where you would actually get Greeks in different parts of the world because their phalanx was such a powerful like military pattern.

Yeah. Hired them to perform this, this specialized function. And you see different groups. Sort of evolved this cultural specialization and they never last that long. It's too specialized whenever. Okay. So again, we're going to go to great extinction periods, [00:17:00] great extinction period. And you're talking about biology.

The groups that die out are the groups that are the most specialized. This is why the dinosaurs died out, but the like crocodiles and alligators did. They were much more generalist. So groups that survive are the groups that are more generalist. And this is true of cultures as well. When you're going through major societal change, the ultra specialized cultures are the ones that are most likely to die out, and the generalist cultures are the ones that are most likely to survive.

Okay? Okay. Okay. Sure. In a group is pro gun, One of the things that is most associated with that is a rural cultural specialization.

And you typically see a cluster of behavior patterns that are associated with that. One is being pro gun, another is being pro dogs. And when a group is intergenerationally [00:18:00] in cities in, and they really become city specialists you will get Usually a hatred of dogs or a dislike of dogs or prohibitions against dogs, and you will see them use guns less.

Simone Collins: Now why is that? Why use guns less? Is that just because, like,

Malcolm Collins: the... We're gonna get to why. Okay. There's a very specific reason. Actually, you can give a hypothesis.

Simone Collins: My hypothesis is that the, that cities have their own protective systems and are more closely governed and therefore the administrators of the city don't like when people have their own justice system.

Malcolm Collins: That's, that's partially true, but it's more than that. So when you think about cultural groups that are city specialized, right? The two that really jump out to me are the Jewish cultural group today. And with another cultural group that is. Anti dog and often doesn't have guns as high a rate as other cultural groups, which is some muslim specializations.

Yeah, and many people think of muslims because early muslims were not. Early muslims were entirely a martial specialization almost. But they conquered a lot of [00:19:00] regions, became very erudite, very intellectual. And some factions lost those traditions and became more of city specialists.

Now when I mentioned the dog thing, a lot of modern Jews who just aren't that familiar with recent Jewish history, do not know that Jews have historically. And if you want to go into all the citations in this, you can look at the pragmatist guide to crafting religion. Cause we go really deep on this, but I think a famous quote here, this is from a quote from the guy who wrote fiddler on the roof, you know, famous Jew into Jewish culture.

If a Jew has a dog, either that dog is no dog or that man is no Jew. You know, that, that's how extreme it was. So if you look historically, this was something that a lot of Jewish people knew about Jewish culture. But recently, if you look at the more like reform Jews and stuff like that, where Jewish culture is degrading faster, a lot of them have forgot these traditions.

Simone Collins: We've also spoken with rabbis who are like well known rabbis and are like. Wait, what? And then they like look into it and they're like, holy s**t. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's really interesting.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah. So, so what's interesting about both of these traditions is they are [00:20:00] not encoded into Jewish theological texts.

These are completely cultural preferences, right? And so, so again, that makes it weird that these cultural preferences that are not theologically encoded because there have been Jews in certain periods of history where both gun and dog ownership was really common or, or other type of weapon like martial specialization.

And in which living in rural areas was common. So the pogroms, like when I'm like, I would expect all Jews to have a gun. The thing that immediately went to me is pogroms, right? Like they repeatedly get genocided. Like Nazis were not the first time this happened. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So like they have a strong cultural memory.

memory of people coming in and killing them. This was, so let's go over what a pogrom was. So occasionally European monarchs would just be like, okay, we're going to kill all the Jews, or we got to get all the Jews out. Or just like, I hate Jews. Probably the Jews again. They were just a really easy group to scapegoat as, as were any group [00:21:00] that were a minority population was a significantly different culture than the mainstream population.

Another example there would be the Romani the, the offensive term would be Gypsies, but it's a term that more people would know, so, but anyway so when these pogroms happened, after this sort of radiation event in, in Jewish cultural history, there were lots of different Jewish cultural specializations.

There were some Jews that had rural specialization, there were some Jews that had martial specializations, there were some Jews that had urban based specializations. The difference is, is that the rural specialized Jews, if they say, hey, we need you all out of here, All your property, all your wealth, everything your family has is in the land.

If you leave, you need to then go, like, kill other people to get them off the land to take their land. That's the only way you're going to be able to feed your family again. And that's

Simone Collins: also, like, the odds of that actually working are...

Malcolm Collins: Are astronomically low, yeah. [00:22:00] If you... Don't try. Yeah, yeah, yeah, so you... You actually sort of have to stay and defend your territory, or you have to get really good at hiding that you're Jewish.

You would have to become a crypto Jew. Sorry, people might not know what I'm referencing here, but there actually is a rural, specialized Jewish population called the crypto Jews, which were rural, specialized Jews, mostly from the Spanish area. Which settled a lot in Mexico, so there's a lot in the Americas that they mostly lost their cultural traditions.

It's more like a cultural memory now, but they were called the crypto Jews because they hid that they were Jewish during the programs of crypto, you know, meaning like, coded hidden, right?

Of the rural specialized Jewish populations, that was the only group that... These were the ones who got really good at hiding it, but even then they didn't transfer it very well intergenerationally. Whereas if you have an urban specialization even though it's easier to target [00:23:00] you, it's also easier to leap.

You have a skill typically like, jewel making or shoe making or something like that and often typically a skill because you would have been discriminated against by the local guilds that there aren't a lot of guilds around or the guilds around are more. You know, open to so that you can then pick up, go to another city, take most of your wealth with you, like any, anything that you've accumulated and, and set up in another city.

And this was actually core to this Jewish group thriving as much as they did, because every time one of these programs would happen. They'd all leave one city or one geographic region and then they'd go and settle in a bunch of other cities, but they would have extended family networks in these cities because there was a similar cultural group that this just, just kept happening to.

And so it was very easy for them to assimilate into these communities because they already had networks in these communities that had a history of needing to take in this type of refugee. And so it allowed [00:24:00] for. There to be kin networks, where you would be as a Jewish person, much more closely related to Jewish people in the other major cities than you would be related, than, like, me as a British person be related to an average, you know, guild specialist in something in, in France or in Germany, whereas the Jewish people in London would have fairly close relatives in Berlin and Paris.

Now, this is really important for one specific specialization, which is banking. If you were going to, to, so, so a lot of people think the only reason Jews became specialists in banking during this period was because they didn't have prohibitions against usury in their religious traditions, whereas Christians and Muslims did, so that they were able to become bankers, but that, while that was a reason, it probably wasn't the core reason.

The core reason was actually the close family networks, which were created by urban specialization combined with regular pogroms. But this, we still haven't gotten to why no guns yet, right? [00:25:00] Like, it seems like you would want to defend yourself during one of these pogroms. Actually, not really, when you think about it.

So, suppose they come in and they're like, okay, it's the Jews fault that like, we're not getting water, or like, like there's not enough rain or something, or, or there's too much corruption in government. They'll find something and they'll blame the Jews. People still do it today. And they would go in and they would do like lynchings often.

But they would get it out of their system. It was rare for them to kill like more than 20 percent of a population. And then the rest would would leave, right? If they had guns, if they fought back. They would kill a hundred percent of the

Simone Collins: population. Okay. I get it. So the other reason why they weren't armed is basically if they were and they didn't totally nail it living in a city, then they'd be screwed.

But then I guess the problem now is you've got all these Jewish groups living in kibbutzim, living in settlements. So

Malcolm Collins: Israel and modern warfare changes everything.

Simone Collins: And it should change traditions, right? Do you think it's going to change

Malcolm Collins: after this? It [00:26:00] may, but it induces evolutionary pressures, but Jews actually have such an advantage in modern warfare due to other cultural traditions.

That they may not

Simone Collins: rely, but still, I feel like It's totally irrelevant. So let's talk about If you had a friend or relative who was kidnapped, who lost someone, who had someone killed, Even if you, you, you just like know someone's like third hand. I feel like I would arm my whole household at that point, like

Malcolm Collins: line.

So that is your cultural tradition that's telling you to do this?

Simone Collins: No, but we already owned our house. No one's ever even,

Malcolm Collins: you know, pogrom Jews have undergone, you know? Mm-Hmm. They've undergone, you think every time a pogrom happened in medieval Europe, this hadn't hap they, everyone there didn't know somebody else.

At least within two generations,

Simone Collins: but they were living, they were living in, we'll say enemy territory, you know, they were surrounded

Malcolm Collins: by the optimization function has changed with Israel right now. There is no retreat, you know, now there is

Simone Collins: territory. They don't have to get along with some other security force.

And, you know, like the the point being.

Malcolm Collins: Israel changes everything, but it hasn't had time to exert [00:27:00] evolutionary pressure. The reason it hasn't had time, and we're talking about cultural evolutionary pressure, the reason it hasn't had time to exert cultural evolutionary pressure is something very specific, which is, it turns out that the other Jews.

So, so if you talk about Marshall specialized cultures, our culture is a Marshall specialized culture. You as a kid were taught how to use firearms, bows and arrows. When did you, I remember Simone was like, my family wasn't like that big into bows and arrows. You were like, yeah, like, I remember there was like a year when we weren't allowed to use them.

Cause like somebody got shot.

Simone Collins: No, no, no. No, there was just like the always told at Christmas family story of how, like one of my uncles shot my aunt in the eye accidentally. And your

Malcolm Collins: family still use them. Well, yeah. But do you understand how insane that sounds to other cultural backgrounds? She didn't lose her eye.

A child shot another child in the eye was a bow and arrow, and then the next, the next generation is like, yeah, let's keep doing that bow and arrow training. Because it's, if [00:28:00] you look at my family, I

Simone Collins: wouldn't, I wouldn't call our culture Marshall because it's more of the Scots ruffian. You know, because martial implies like, you know, joining a larger organized force.

This is more like

Malcolm Collins: rebellion. All martial cultures are specialized this way. And this is the point I'm about to get to. Martial culture. So you look at the training that Simone and I received as kids. Me, from like an erudite, I'd say fairly upper class family. got training that as an adult, I realized when I talked to people from other cultural groups, they're like, that's like paramilitary training.

Like, why were they teaching little kids how to use a bunch of weapons? Like, that seems very odd. Why were they, why was it so normal for you guys to have to Doesn't that

Simone Collins: seem weird to you when like Now, a majority of parents are tracking their children's locations on their phone. Are they not also going to teach them how to defend themselves to use?

I

Malcolm Collins: don't think like that. No. So consider like me, for example, like, a core tradition in my family was learning how to you know, take apart fireworks, build them into bigger fireworks so that you could blow stuff [00:29:00] up.

actually very similar to Simona's family. This might be part of the way the tradition has been to be passed down. I remember when my family showed me one of, our family, friends, he came over and he had a hand. He only had one finger on it and it was very mangled and he had got it by blowing up his hand while playing with fireworks.

And he was a kid and they were like, okay, just keep in mind. You could blow off your hand and here are the fireworks. And then they let me go play alone with my brother. , you know, we were probably like, I don't know, seven and eight. , in the woods with fireworks. And, and so I think that there, there might even be a tradition of talking about or showing injuries related to the weapons right before they give them to you as like a way of like, don't. Kill yourself, but, , they also let you play on supervise with them, which I think is another thing that would be very surprising to groups that are not for martial traditions. but for groups from Marshall traditions, they would think of this as just completely the most normal childish things. They would just be like this. He just normal childhood fun. What are you even talking about? There is nothing weird about you playing with weapons at the kid. And [00:30:00] actually, if you even look at like my family history, so I look at movies made about. My family or groups that my family was involved with and they always involve child soldiers they always involved armed children

. Girls, you know how to shoot one of these? It's quite normal you got there. Last time I checked the gun, don't care who's pulling the trigger. Boys, listen to me. I'll fire first. I want you two to start with the officers and work your way down. Can you tell the difference? Yes, father. Yes, father. Good. Samuel, after your first shot, I want you to reload for your brother Nathan.

Malcolm Collins: Like, And I can see a lot of people being like, why would you focus on teaching your kids how to use explosives?

Why would you focus on, on making sure your kids know all these skills but if you look at all of these various things, there are within our culture, which is a very martial culture. You, when you were courting me, you showed me your knife collection, right? Pink knives. So I knew you were [00:31:00] feminine, but you were signaling something to me.

Right? Like you were like, yes, I am from a martial culture. I use weapons. I have a collection of weapons. Here are my weapons. Can I defend the family enough? And then in martial cultures, like when you talk about the most extreme martial cultures, there's typically an extreme within martial cultures. The most extreme martial cultures, women are also engaged in the martial applications, right?

Middling martial cultures. Women are not engaged in it. Men are engaged in it. And then the anti martial cultures, neither the men or the women are expected to learn weapons. But in the most extreme martial cultures, women typically, and these are typically the cultures that live in the most rural, most sort of, dangerous areas.

Well, so what's

Simone Collins: so weird though, is that both men and women participate in the Israeli defense force. Both men

Malcolm Collins: and women haven't gotten to this yet. Okay. Okay.

Simone Collins: I guess no spoilers.

Malcolm Collins: Fine. Okay. So if you look at martial cultures, where do they typically come from? And these were the cultures that did really well in the old West and the US.

Simone Collins: In rural areas. The Scots Irish were in like

Malcolm Collins: the back country. They were rural areas, but rural areas without persistently [00:32:00] stable governing structures. Oh, yes. That, that so like, you know, Scottish Irish territory, stuff like that, like where our post war ancestors come from. Hmm. Or, or Nordic background, right?

Yes. You know. This is really interesting. Okay. So, so you see that, which is very different than the environments where the Jewish culture was specialized. Right.

Simone Collins: High, high societal concentration, because I mean, if you are making your money off banking, you need like civilization, like fully functioning.

Malcolm Collins: Exactly. But martial cultures have a huge. Downside to them when it comes to modern warfare, they are specifically specialized at home self defense. So you look at like the skills that we have, these skills are survivalist skills and these skills are protect your house skills, but they often are much more tribal, much less truck thing of command structures.

So if you look at Simone and I, we have an almost intrinsic disdain, like our entire cultural background, of bureaucracies, of government, [00:33:00] of hierarchy these things are very, very bad if you're going to be very, very good in a modern military context. They are very good for society to break down, but when you look at modern military actions, they require bureaucracy.

They require top down coordination, they require taking orders, they require this sort of complex organizational structure, which mirrored city life. And this is what you see in the Yom Kippur War, and I think this is what we're going to see in this war as well, that a lot of people are like, Oh, this is going to be really grueling for the Israeli Defense Forces, everything like that.

You look at the Yom Kippur War, they were attacked. So when we think of Israel now, we think of a force that is militarily more complex than its neighbors. When the Yom Kippur War happened you know, they were attacked by surprise, and they actually were, had less military equipment than their neighbors, and the military equipment they had was, was significantly less sophisticated than their neighbors.

They were being attacked by better funded groups, with more troops, with more everything, and they smoked [00:34:00] their... But it was insane. The level to which they crushed the people who are attacking them given that they should have been on the back foot underarmed, under technologied it was because their forces were much more internally coherent, whereas the forces that were attacking them, Came from much more rural cultural traditions.

So these were more rural Islamic cultural traditions that had lacked internal cohesion and we're much more sort of like war bands. I'm going to get my own thing. And the military orders culturally that they were able to follow were similar to probably the sophistication of the orders that our culture could follow.

Like, I'm not saying this as an insult to their culture. I'm saying that their culture is like my culture.

Simone Collins: It's actually, if you look at these sort of parallels with All of these, like, militia groups that you see in the U. S., they're, they're far more likely to be associated with our culture and to have that same level of, like, decentralization.

So when you look at January 6th, I mean, they were just always [00:35:00] going to be way too disorganized to actually take over the U. S. government, and I still hold that. Like, I don't think we're ever going to see a very organized rebellion. Because of the nature of our militaristic tendencies culturally, however, you cannot, you cannot like take these people by storm.

You cannot force them to do things like, you know, you, you attack their ground and you're on your back foot. Right. So like it's this tension

Malcolm Collins: is very hard to hold, but they are not good at taking over governments and running them. Yeah. So you

Simone Collins: couldn't invade their land. But yeah. They are not going to

Malcolm Collins: take over.

Yeah, so it's just a different specialization. And this is why, despite having a culture that encourages gun ownership at much lower rates than other cultures, at much lower rates than I think would be sane Israel as in Jews as a cultural group are so militaristically competent. Also technology is a huge part of military power, a group that specializes in urban knowledge.

Work is, of [00:36:00] course, going to be more technologically competent in terms of and this is none of this is like a genetic thing or anything like that. We're talking just about cultural specializations here and you can actually see these cultural specializations. One of the things that we joke about in our book.

As I wrap up here, as you go to Israel they, the, the, the Jewish groups that survived, most of them, now there were like the, the mountain Jews of Dagestan, for example, which were a militaristic Jewish group that survived up until the time of the state of Israel and then moved into Israel, you know, so there were a few Jewish populations that survived that were very different cultural groups that were militaristic, but or were of these factions but most of them were urban specialists.

Is there a place called

Simone Collins: Zagastan? Because that sounds like something you made up from like Team America

Malcolm Collins: World Police. It's a, it's a thing. The mountain. Hold on. I'm just Googling it. Make sure I'm not speaking.

Yeah, the mountain Jews of Dagestan. Okay. All right. I really like weird cultures instead. Yeah, no, love it. They were obviously you hear about them in the, in the mountains of, of, of [00:37:00] Dagestan, right? Like obviously they're a rural defensive area. It would make sense to develop a cultural specialization around defending territory.

Like, yeah. most mountain people do. So, so, what was really interesting and almost kind of humorous is if you go to Israel because of this cultural group, it had recently been so recently urban specialized. And if you look at like the U. S., it's something like 98 percent of Jews live in like an urban center.

I don't remember exactly, but it's like a really high percentage. You go and you look at, at the settlements when they do move into these rural areas and I'll, I'll put some, some screenshots of these, they look bizarre. They look like little miniature recreations of cities. Okay. is very odd looking.

This is a very similar to Korea. The dominant Korean cultural group is an urban specialized cultural group. And if you look at some rural Korean places, you'll see like these little clusters of skyscrapers in like the middle of nowhere. It's a very odd thing to see, but it's a different urban [00:38:00] cultural group taking advantage of, of rural areas.

So very, very, very fascinating. I, and I think then the question from all of this. Is well, should Jewish culture change like that's that's what you were asking. And I don't know, like, I guess we'll see.

I don't think that there is enough cultural evolutionary pressure. There is just not enough incursions that kill enough people for the Jewish cultural goods because there are many cultural groups of Jews within Israel.

Like after the state of Israel was formed, you began to see. This, this new blossoming and speciation of it. Like we talked about a radiation event that is almost as big as the one that happened after this, because you're, you're moving a culture that was specialized for one type of cultural niche into an environment where they need to fill all cultural niches.

So you're going to have a huge amount of cultural radiation. But there isn't enough pressure to have some groups survive over other groups. But you could say, okay, but what if I was intentionally designing, like, a Jewish [00:39:00] cultural group that was meant to survive in the future? I would say that I and you are too culturally biased.

Like, we have lots of Jewish friends. With our Jewish friends in the U.

Simone Collins: S. Although to me, maybe, this is the bias speaking, but like, They already have the gun training. They already have gun safety training. Like, why not just buy the freaking gun? And just have it. Just have it. Just have like, Meh, I

Malcolm Collins: mean. And you've got, you wanted, recently she demanded that we also, Every time you get pregnant, you get more guns.

It's a very

Simone Collins: interesting thing. No, I asked for my bow and arrow. I didn't ask for another gun. You asked

Malcolm Collins: for another weapon? You said that you thought you could ready it quicker than a gun. Well, yeah,

Simone Collins: if they're hanging right there. Like, it's just, you know, you don't have to unlock, you don't have to get the bolts, you're just like, you're good to go, especially if it's strung on the wall.

I, I,

Malcolm Collins: I understand what you're saying, but I think it's very interesting that every time we've had a new, like, for people who aren't from a martial culture, one of the things, and I think that this would be the antithesis of somebody from a non martial culture, the way they would answer, every [00:40:00] time we've gone through a big gun or weapon buying spree or shipping spree, it's been when you were pregnant.

Um, When you first got pregnant, It's nesting. Dex got pregnant um,

My family said we should get guns, more guns, they said you got pregnant again. You're like, I need better weapons. Then we got the

Simone Collins: AR 15. Yeah. But no, no. Okay. So here's the thing.

Another really interesting thing is how people from Marshall cultures relate to self-defense. I mean, I just mean interesting from the perspective of somebody who's not from a martial culture and hearing all this, , because some people who aren't from marshal cultures, like pretend they're from marshal cultures, because they think it makes them look more manually like Andrew Tate, for example.

Right. What's his whole sword thing. And yeah, we keep swords in the house, the swords. Our toys is Simone does make me keep, I guess you would call it a video game culture, a Maley weapon by my bed, but it is not a sword. It is a sledgehammer because she says it would be easier to wield. , if our house was invaded on short notice, and I think that she's right, I mean, it's about practicality versus impracticality and it's something that Marshall [00:41:00] cultures often really value. To the extent where, , you know, when my cousins found out that her family trained in throwing axes, they made fun of them for the in practicality. For the weapon, they were like, this is efeete. Like it's, it's, it's feminine too. Really believe you could use something like a sword in self-defense better than a sledgehammer. Or throwing acts better than a gun. Also interesting side note here. If I've noticed that marshal cultures that were active recently, often looking down upon, or just don't actively laud as much physical strength and laud, and much more knowledge of guns, improvise, weaponry, stuff like that. Whereas martial cultures that were more active in their martial phage. Much further pack in history are much more interested in being physically strong and tough. So an example of your being like our martial culture, which is active very recently during the, the. The old west during the civil war. , It versus Marshall cultures in Europe, which are in much more interested in like, okay, I've got to be tough and stuff like that. And it's just [00:42:00] because of the type of weapon that was used during these two periods. , whereas, you know, in the old west, you know, being tough and strong, just wasn't as important. As improvised weapon, brilliant gun skills whereas if you're looking at like late medieval europe being tough and strong actually

mattered

Simone Collins: They, they've already gone like 90 they just don't own the guns.

Malcolm Collins: Where are the guns? The risk of a child killing themselves is higher than the risk of somebody being killed during

Simone Collins: an attack.

Not if it's properly locked and stored, that's the thing, is, is you keep your ammo separate, you lock your gun. Like, and you know, I mean, these kids, keep in mind. You know, a lot of these kids living in Cuba, they're doing way more, way earlier than kids here. They're way less infantilized than they are in our culture.

So I don't even think that's the thing. I mean, like if families that infantilize their children to an immense extent here will still have guns in their houses, then like.

Malcolm Collins: That is no excuse. Your cultural bias. But the point I was making earlier is that when we meet with our Jewish friends, and you can attest with this, because again, we have a lot of cultures, you know, Jewish friends, like our cultures [00:43:00] have historically have gotten along very well because they're both symbiotic cultures.

And we talk about this in the book, which means that typically they're going to get along really well. Like our parting advice is, please move out of the city. Please get guns. You are not safe. But that's just sort of the way our culture always feels. You're never safe if you're inner city and unarmed.

And, and I think you're never safe if you're outside of city. And unarmed a bias. I think it's a bias because clearly they're doing better than us right now. I'm, I'm just saying like, they

Simone Collins: didn't do better when people raided their houses and, and killed and tortured and, and kidnapped people. No, they did not do better.

You can't.

Malcolm Collins: Simone, on the whole, and this is how cultural evolution works, it's not about the individual. In these previous pogroms, if you live in a martial society, you often live in a blood honor society. So that means if somebody comes and they kill, 10 percent of your population. They come in, they kill even a few people in your population.

You then have like a blood oath against them, and you are going to [00:44:00] kill every one of them for multiple generations, and you are going to go out and make their life a living hell as much as you can and as intergenerationally as you can. Jews couldn't afford to do that given the frequency of pogroms. Hmm.

And even today, suppose they did that. Suppose they reacted to this the way you would have reacted to this. And I know the way people of our cultural group would react to this. It would have been, I don't want to say it. What? Fire and fury. I would say that their response has been very measure, very humane compared to what my cultural group would demand and historically has done in these sorts of environments, you know, and I don't think it's like ethical or right.

I'm just saying it's what feels right, you know, because that's the way culture is. Culture doesn't tell you what's right. It tells you what you feel you're going to do. And that's very much what you were talking about here. And so the point being is it may be that what feels right for you [00:45:00] isn't intergenerationally what's going to lead a culture to out compete other cultures.

You are

Simone Collins: absolutely right. You were

Malcolm Collins: absolutely right. Anyway nuanced topic that I hope people don't take too harshly because it could be seen as offensive just saying, ah, different cultures are different. You know, this is

Simone Collins: something that I think we've already crossed that bridge. We've rung that bell.

Malcolm Collins: Jews are unique as a cultural group although they're not totally unique as a cultural group. There's been different urban specialized cultures which have sort of co evolved into similar sort of cultural ecological niches. Jews are just really interesting right now because now they have their own country and we get to see how that works.

Yeah,

Simone Collins: long term outlook,

Malcolm Collins: good. I mean, long term outlook, I'm very bullish on Israel and the Jewish people. They're, they're like, people are like, why are you so obsessed with Jews? I'm like, we're, we're obsessed with winners, have the thesis that different cultural groups are different and that wealth seems to across cultural groups [00:46:00] make people infertile.

Oh, except for this one cultural group that is somehow not entirely immune to this, but dramatically more immune to this than any other cultural group in the world. Wealth does not lower their fertility rate as much as anyone else. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they are a very technophilic cultural group compared with other cultural groups with, with similar fertility rates.

Why would that not fascinate us? Yeah. Why would we not be like, Oh, there's something here that we need to learn from and we need to study this. Anyway. Come on people. Get with it. Get with it. There's, there's something that they're obviously doing right from a pronatalist perspective. Yeah. You don't have to like

Simone Collins: them.

You know, you gotta

Malcolm Collins: respect. Yeah. But the Amish don't have you know, international

Simone Collins: relevance or influence. Yeah. The Amish aren't also known for producing some of the most influential, you know, spin off people in the world either, so.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah if the Mormons had maintained a high fertility rate, we'd be just as focused on them, but they didn't.

Their, their culture was unable to compete with the virus and it crashed.

Simone Collins: There are still many [00:47:00] impactful and powerful Mormons in the United States especially, so, you

Malcolm Collins: know. No, there are. That's the point I'm making. They can produce really competent, like their culture leads to a lot of competence, but it was unable to motivate high fertility in the face of prosperity.

It

Simone Collins: appears to be, it appears to be going through the faltering.

Malcolm Collins: But I expect some Mormon cultural groups are going to survive and then explode afterwards. And I do think that Yeah,

Simone Collins: I mean, the Desnats are already showing basically, like the fact that Desnats are becoming this sort of trending

Malcolm Collins: thing. I think the Desnet is the successful iteration of the Mormon culture.

Well, because

Simone Collins: it's, it's, it's basically where people, so then this is where, Desnet is short for desert nationalists. This is a group of Mormons that are essentially saying. No, we're going to keep this religion hard while the religion in the mainstream sense as the institution is softening. So as this, as this, as the Mormon culture becomes soft, which ultimately means it will die out, there is this faction that is saying, okay, well we're staying hard, so screw you.

And also we're going to like police you and shame you for going

Malcolm Collins: soft. And the [00:48:00] transhumanists might also do well. The Mormon transhumanists would just be better.

Simone Collins: Yeah, well, because they seem to also be going in a hard direction. So anyway, like there's hope for them. But this video is running long. Let's, let's wrap it up soon.

I love you.

Malcolm Collins: Bye bye.

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