Based Camp: Traditionalism Is Not the Answer

<p>Written by an AI for SEO from transcript. This is meant to be consumed as a podcast:</p><p>In this eye-opening video, we explore the two prevalent factions within the conservative movement - the traditionalists and those advocating for adaptation. We debate whether it is possible or even wise to revert to the 'way things used to be', especially in light of major issues like infertility and technological advancements. Using the lens of history, we discuss how traditionalist groups have fared during civilization collapse and how some groups have found strength in adapting rather than resisting change. Tune in for a thought-provoking discussion about survival, adaptation, and the tension between clinging to the past and embracing the future.</p><p>(Bad) Transcript: </p><p>within the conservative movement there are two factions. There's the traditionalist faction, which is to say let's just go back to the way things used to be. And then there's the other faction that says, you know, this progressive super virus has screwed everything up yet. We need to, we need to learn from tradition.</p><p>We need to harvest truths from tradition, which can help us through this situation, while also understanding that people who blindly clinging to traditionalism are likely going to be as swept away by the sands of time as the extremist progressive mind virus zombies. </p><p>So what I'm getting is basically you can't turn back time.</p><p>You remove technology? Not really. I mean, if you, you can try, but there will always be some groups that continue to use it and they will outcompete you, right? So there, there is no option to go back to full pure Traditionalism really with some exceptions I suppose. Like you could go Amish and find a niche that kind of works for you, that's symbiotic with society as it progresses.   </p><p>one of these social changes that we're dealing with is humans are becoming increasingly infertile and you can't outrun infertility with. Just having sex more often? Not anymore, not at the levels to which you, you're looking at a 50% reduction in sperm count over the past 50 years.</p><p> Over, over that, you know, a 30% reduction in testosterone rates in what, the last 20 years or something? Eventually, if the trends can trend you, which everything seems to indicate that they are continuing, humans will become increasingly and increasingly infertile. And the more you hold to IVF bad, you know, because with IVF you're losing access to some embryos. The more. You as a cultural unit are going to struggle against the cultural units that are aggressively using I V F one to not only combat this fertility collapse, but also to expand their own fertility windows.   </p><p>that's the, that's the </p><p>core trap of traditionalism is that it is more effective, the more extreme you go with it.</p><p>Okay. And effectiveness increases linearly with how extreme you take it. So you are always. So like if you talk with like a Catholic traditionalist, right? Like they're actually not that much of a traditionalist. If they were more of a traditionalist, if they moved more like on the Amish side of the spectrum, if they disengaged with technology completely, if they went off the grid, they would see a rise in mental health.</p><p>If they would see a rise, infertility rates, they would see a rise in all of the things that show vitality within their culture. </p><p>.   </p><p>why can't.</p><p>Traditionalist group end up being the group that survives, right? Yes. And, and the answer is, is because the effectiveness of traditionalism is linearly correlated with how traditionalists you become with groups like the Amish being the most effective forms of traditionalism. The problem is, is it technology?</p><p>Uh, uh, Quease you with many advantages, whether they are health advantages or just the advantage of one group having automatic weapons and the other group not having automatic weapons being able to produce, or one group having automated drones and the other group trying to fight those drones with automated weapons.</p><p>You, you cannot fight a group that technologically leans in. If you're a group that technologically leans out, you, you can, you can. Maybe like passively fight them for a bit, but at the end of the day, you always lose. </p><p>   Would you like to know more? </p><p> Hello, Malcolm. Hello, </p><p>Simone. It's wonderful to be here with you today. </p><p>Are you speaking more softly because you are afraid Wake the approaching civilizational collapse. </p><p>Well, we did, we did have a podcast on that recently and we're going to be talking about it again today. Yeah, so today we are going to talk about the way people react to civilizational collapse.</p><p>And fortunately because we've seen civilizational collapses before, we, we know how it always, it turns out like the different ways that people react to it.</p><p>So naturally civilizational collapse typically looks the same because Civilizational peaks looks the same. , throughout history, whenever you had a group that was more urban and educated, they were almost always in universally seen as more a feat. And uh, sorry for people who dunno what that means, sort of feminine.</p><p>A you saw this in the way that the, the Romans saw the Greeks, but even if you go further back than that, you can see the way that the people around some of the first cities saw the people in the first cities as very iffy. Maybe the only notable exception of this I can think of is the Assyrians.</p><p>But, but we don't even know what their rural population thought of them. So it, it could just be an overreaction. Like these could have been, it'd be really funny. The, as Syrians are just seen as like wildly effe and yet we see them as like these over bloody people because they were like a guy having a midlife crisis.</p><p>Like drawing all this bloody stuff on the, the wall like, or like a teenager, like, mom, I'm so tougher. This is so harsh. I guess you could argue that some of the meso American civilizations, like the Mayans might be an exception too. But anyway, generally speaking, and this creates, I think, an illusion for people.</p><p>That is one of the big problems, I think in how conservative movements today see civilizational collapse is they, correctly see that leading up to a collapse. You get higher rates of Often L G B T acceptance, you get higher rates of female participation in the workforce. You get higher rates of many things that today are associated with generic progressivism.</p><p>Of course, the the counterfactual here is what is a collapse. It's a decline from a peak of civilization. So all of those things are also things that you see more of at the peak of the civilization than at any of the troughs of a civilization. So it is hard to say that they caused the collapse.</p><p>However you know, there, there does seem to be some evidence, right? You, you know, you keep seeing this pattern of these things right before the collapse. So they, they may be correlator. Right. So civilizations regularly go through this cycle where they become more accepting, they become more innovative, and they become more urban.</p><p>And as a result of that, social institutions change and it changes the way parents are interacting with their children. And it changes the way society interacts with other people. And you begin to see social institutions collapse. This is just like a historic thing. We've seen this multiple times. You saw this was the height of Athens to the fall of Athens.</p><p>You saw this was the end of the Renaissance. You saw this was the end of Rome. When these collapses happen there is one natural reaction to them, which is we need to go back to the old ways. And then there's another reaction to it, which is, well, let's look at the, the social changes that we've had recently.</p><p>And accelerate them to see what comes next. And we'll use Rome. </p><p>Yeah. Hold on though, because I don't think that's true. What gives you reason to believe that there actually has been some attempt at continued adaptation in these civilizational collapse scenarios? </p><p>Yeah, so continued adaptation.</p><p>Let's talk about the most classic example the fall of the Roman Empire. So you had two groups. You had one group that was experimenting with new social technologies and that represented a accelerationist or a a, a, if you're talking about social experimentation, an accelerationist view.</p><p>And this group was this new religious movement that had recently taken the world by storm. It was the Christians and then you had the traditionalists who were the pagans and wanted to go back to the old ways of doing things. And the group that survived was the iterations of the Christian Church.</p><p>That became harder line. Stricter, but not in a traditionalist context, but rather a social invention context. If you're looking for other examples of this, during the Norman Conquest there were a number of families in the ruling cast that wanted to flee. So they fled to Byzantium and they said, okay, we're going to Maintain our old ways, our old social system, and then other nobles were like, no, let's try to integrate with this new Norman group.</p><p>Those were the nobles that ended up winning. The ones that were like, okay, let's try to do things a new way. Let's try to work within this new system and adapt it to our means. It was the same with the fall of Rome, with the fall of Rome, the Western Roman Empire. Let's be specific here. The groups that survived were the.</p><p>Christian organizations, but the Christian organizations that took intentionality in terms of changing and updating their practices. You know, this is when you had a lot of these councils happening. This is when you had a lot of what today are heresies being codified because there was this idea that.</p><p>Yes, we are new and yes, we are agre an aggressive social technology movement. However that doesn't mean we're Lucy goosey and, and so. During a collapse, you can three, three large groups form. One is the traditionalists, the other is the people who just go balls to the walls with hedonism in the moment.</p><p>And hedonism can take many forms they can take, and this is one of the things that we make, make clear in other podcasts, the highest form of hedonism is indulging in a personal narrative of suffering in victimhood. Because that's what people want to be more than anything because it removes any responsibility from them, you know, that is the luxury of a victim narrative.</p><p>And then the final group is the Accelerationist group. </p><p>So would you argue that in the scenario of the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, the Christians, the more hard line Christians were the adapting to the future facet and that. Okay. </p><p>Maybe </p><p>quote unquote, their iterations of hardline Christianity weren't like something that had existed before.</p><p>They, they were aggressively experimenting with new ways of doing things and, and new ways of structuring the church and, yeah. </p><p>So what you're saying then is to a certain extent, civilizational collapse can be averted, but it will still look like civilizational collapse because that, which existed before and which was not working obviously.</p><p>Does cease to exist and something fairly violently different is going to take its place. Right? </p><p>Yeah. Well, I mean it's, it's about do you accept that the world is changing or do you say we can recreate. Or, or, or recapture what civilization was before, like the Romans that turned to the old pagan ways during periods of collapsing.</p><p>And this was actually a big thing. So there was a big flourishing of, of, of cults during that time period. And when I say cults, I don't mean cults in the modern derogative sense of the word cults. I mean like mystery cults and stuff like that. If you're a scholar, you'll know what I'm talking about. D does it matter if the audience knows?</p><p>No, it doesn't matter. What matters is, is, is basically people were participating in old pagan rituals at larger and larger levels, actually, and, and this was happening in the same areas that Christianity was spreading during those time periods. So Christianity would spread a lot in the military during those time periods.</p><p>And the primary competitor. To Christianity was these spreading mystery cults that you also had within the military during this time period. So, so these groups were directly competing and often in similar source of environments. So if we look today, can we say, are there groups today that are responding to what I think of as, as the beginnings of, of a civilizational collapse cycle?</p><p>And we are seeing the cycle. You know, this cycle has happened many times before. And when we say like the goal of our organization, they go, what's the real goal of the perinatal list? It's to ensure that the next civilization doesn't undergo that cycle again, that we create a permanent renaissance.</p><p>But anyway. Mm, </p><p>okay. Hold on, hold on. So what you're saying is actually an important thing to distinguish here, because what you're saying is we do want today's civilization to collapse, but we want these, we don't want it to </p><p>collapse. It's inevitable. </p><p>We expect it to, to collapse. It is inevitable. But we would like the culture that springs out of the ashes of this collapsed civilization to not experience a subsequent collapse.</p><p>Correct. </p><p>Yeah. We, we've seen this cycle happen over and over again. You want </p><p>the cycle. You want the cycle to stop. So the, I think the other important thing to talk about here though, is that most people would still see that as their doomsday scenario because, I think people are very attached to how things are, like West Roman Empire no longer existing equal equals bad situation.</p><p>She, we also see this in a discussion of, you know, how we talk a lot about selecting embryos for polygenic risk scores. We talk about CRISPR babies, we talk about, you know, with technology over time, we're selecting very aggressively for certain that could shift certain populations, you know, very significantly on, along certain measures that are valued by different groups.</p><p>And people respond to that often by saying like, oh, this would be a really bad thing. It could, you know, You know, some sort of speciation event. It could, it could trigger the end of the human race and, and our response to that as well, you know, if, if it's better, if it's the next step, if it's something superior, that's a good thing.</p><p>But I think most people see that as a bad thing. So they wouldn't even see a, a very adaptive response to civilizational collab. Worth it because all they care about is, is my current civilization going to disappear? If so, okay, well then I'm gonna mope about it. Not well most, where can we </p><p>go? Most civilizations, most iterations of, of humans, most, you know, they, they, they view anything that's not their current system as not civilization.</p><p>Right. They'll say, if it's not my current people, if it's not this current civilizational structure, it's not civilization. And it's the same way with how they see people. If, if they're different in any way from me, then they're not really people. That is, I mean, that, that's literally the position that a lot of our detractors take, where they're like, well, if you're doing any sort of gene selection or something like that, it could lead to something that's different from us and therefore not deserving of, of, of human rights or like a fundamental threat.</p><p>And I, you know, that's really d. That's just the way people have always been. They're always afraid of the different. What's fortunate is those people usually get quashed in history, like they're not really relevant. People who are afraid of change just aren't relevant in this great cycle. They may have the foresight to see a collapse coming.</p><p>But their solutions are pointless to the extent that they're not really worth us, concerning ourselves with, and we can see this playing out in the world today. So you look at one of the countries, like if we're talking about fertility collapse, As a sign of like, things just aren't working.</p><p>You know, one of the places where you see this the most is in South Korea, right? In, in  South Korea is defined by conservatism. In fact, that is what is instigating , the fertility collapse in South Korea is the world is changing. Women are going into the workplace. And then these women who have gone into the workplace and who now have to get educated so that their economy can like barely compete with a world economy where everyone else has, , doubled the number of workers the, through putting women into the workplace.</p><p>Well, they're still expected to serve a traditional woman's role in the family. They're still expected to do basically all of the housework, all of the cleaning, all of the childcare. And because of that, They're not having kids. And then in addition to that, you have this really strict model of what a family is, you know, with a two parent household.</p><p>And in Korea it is, it is really, really difficult up until recently to have a kid if you're not in a two parent household. So what, what does this mean? This is a huge group of people that just aren't having kids. And Yes, like statistically right now in the US it is true throughout the world you are better off if you're from a two-parent household.</p><p>Absolutely. As a kid. Is that to say that through social experimentation, we can't come to social technologies that create alternatives to that, that are equally efficacious or more efficacious maybe.  It's, it's difficult to say. So one of the statistics here that suggests this for me is that if you look at single male parents versus single female parents, single male parents just do astronomically better.</p><p>Like the kids end up just doing way, way, way, way better. , almost to the extent that they're not really doing that much worse than two parent families. And so the question is why is this happening? My. Guess is it what you're really seeing there is single male parents? It's usually the woman died.</p><p>Or it's much more likely that the woman died or disappeared due to some exogenous factor. Whereas single female factors, it's much more likely a, a divorce because women win custody much more often. This is just due to custody rates. I'm not saying it's like any other rate. It's, it's if the, the, the other spouse is still alive, well the woman's probably gonna win custody except in like an extreme, extreme case scenario.</p><p>So what you're filtering out is people who have failed relationships, right? And of course those people are going to be worse at being parents. So what this says to me is it's more the type of people who opt into single parenthood who, who are statistically doing worse.</p><p>It's not that single parenthood intrinsically does worse at raising kids. If you were. Able to experiment with it. Now, of course, we're not experimenting with it, so whatever. But then other things in South Korea, you know, it's, there's a lot of you know, any, any sort of non-standard social structure like gay families and stuff like that.</p><p>They're not having kids in South Korea because there's this, again, conservatism against that. So, I think with conservatism, what you see is we have dropped many traditions that are very important to maintaining social cohesion. And in, you know, we do identify and are, and are largely conservative.</p><p>However, I think that  within the conservative movement there are two factions. There's the traditionalist faction, which is to say let's just go back to the way things used to be. And then there's the other faction that says, you know, this progressive super virus has screwed everything up yet. We need to, we need to learn from tradition.</p><p>We need to harvest truths from tradition, which can help us through this situation, while also understanding that people who blindly clinging to traditionalism are likely going to be as swept away by the sands of time as the extremist progressive mind virus zombies. </p><p>So what I'm getting is basically you can't turn back time.</p><p>You remove technology? Not really. I mean, if you, you can try, but there will always be some groups that continue to use it and they will outcompete you, right? So there, there is no option to go back to full pure Traditionalism really with some exceptions I suppose. Like you could go Amish and find a niche that kind of works for you, that's symbiotic with society as it progresses.</p><p>But that's a limited. Limited choice.  </p><p>Yep. Well, and I can explain what I mean by this. It might make more sense. Right. So, A specific example today. So you have a lot of ca, the Catholic Integralist was in the Conservative party and, and, and Catholic intellectuals did, than the conservative party. And a lot of them would say, well, we need to go back to you know, no, no contraception no abortions, no.</p><p>Which by the way, we're, we're fairly against abortions. But anyway, so no contraception, no abortions. They wanna go back to the, the, the way things used to be. And, and that's how we can get fertility rates up. And yet we have seen countries that have imposed these. You know, you can look at Malta, for example, some of the strictest anti-abortion laws in, in the eu.</p><p>And yet they're fertility rates like 1.2. When Romania banned it was Romania, right? The Bann abortions border six, whatever. Yeah. Anyway Yeah, so fertility rates went up for a very short period, but then they came crashing back down again to the same fertility rates as everywhere else in the region.</p><p>It, it, it's just not effective. And, and, and this is where it becomes scary because humans,  one of these social changes that we're dealing with is humans are becoming increasingly infertile and you can't outrun infertility with. Just having sex more often? Not anymore, not at the levels to which you, you're looking at a 50% reduction in sperm count over the past 50 years.</p><p> Over, over that, you know, a 30% reduction in testosterone rates in what, the last 20 years or something? Literally the feminization, the biological feminization of men in our society from endocrine disruptors which we, we can see in experiments like the links of I don't know the, the, the word here that's not gonna get this video in trouble.</p><p>But the point being is that even in like seven and eight year olds, you know, you see more feminine play in in, in males who were gestated in mothers who had a lot of deep endocrine disruptors, literal feminization. So you can't just rely on these old systems to keep your fertility rates high.</p><p> Eventually, if the trends can trend you, which everything seems to indicate that they are continuing, humans will become increasingly and increasingly infertile. And the more you hold to IVF bad, you know, because with IVF you're losing access to some embryos. The more. You as a cultural unit are going to struggle against the cultural units that are aggressively using I V F one to not only combat this fertility collapse, but also to expand their own fertility windows.</p><p>So you can look at a family like ours, right? And we're likely, I mean, we we're, how many kids we need to have seven, 12, and. I mean, as many as possible until they take out your uterus. Right? Because everyone is done with a c-section, again, through technology. And so the, the, the, but that's something that we wouldn't be able to do.</p><p>I mean, we'd be ending the natural end of our fertility life cycle in the near future. If we were relying completely on biological reproduction, but because we're able to use you know, scientific assisted reproduction, we are able to expand that window dramatically and expand the number of human lives that will get to be lived because we, you know, pushed with that technology.</p><p>I, I, the, the, the analogy we always use with sort of the God saying is people are like, well, isn't this, isn't this playing God? And, and we say, well, you know, If, if God has a coop hit my kid, you know, I'm gonna do everything in my power to, and I think God wants me to do everything in my power to try to pull the coop off my kid and get my kid to a hospital.</p><p>If God has a semi-truck hit my kid, God probably wanted that kid dead when God gives us a scientific technology. To tackle these sorts of problems. My assumption is he's not stupid. He knows we have access to this technology and he gave us access to this technology for a reason. He allowed it to be invented for a reason.</p><p>And that reason is the expectation that like trying to lift the CO off my kid and resu resuscitate them and bring them to a hospital is he expects us to engage with it. I mean, I respect cultures that take another angle to this, but I do worry for them. Because I, I, I do not see how they continue to survive in a changing biological and social environment.</p><p>When would you say Traditionalism does work? Like I am thinking about Mennonites in general. They manage to hold a fairly traditionalist view. I don't think it was necessarily in reaction to. Si predictions of civilizational collapse, but still. Well, when, when do you think, how do you think it's done?</p><p>Well, </p><p>the traditionalism strictly out beats the urban monoculture. It always does. Historically and today the traditionalist groups. You know, you go back to Roman times, these groups that were going back to the pagan ways and to these, these mystery cults. They were psychologically, at least this is my read from the text, fertility rates, everything outcompeting, these sort of urban hedonist groups, right?</p><p>But they were themselves being outcompeted by the Christians. So, the answer is traditionalism is strictly better. And, and you can see it. You just see it whenever you're looking at the data. There. There's a reason why conservatives, since Pew started collecting data, have been happier than progressives, right?</p><p>The, the progressive monoculture, the, the sort of mind virus that, that dominates our urban centers in the world right now. Is astronomically worse than traditional approaches. And we admire people who have the competency and the, the clarity to see this and, and return to traditionalism.</p><p>But we do worry that that strategy typically doesn't work out in the long run. </p><p>And I feel like you answered my </p><p>question. Wh what's the question? Where does it work? What's the, </p><p>if you want to take a traditionalist approach to. You don't care about being represented in this new version, this new cycle.</p><p>What's the best way to tackle Traditionalism? </p><p>I mean, full on. I mean, the Amish groups have the highest fertility rates. They, they probably have the highest rates of, you know, mental health, I would guess if you did. Good. So to </p><p>fully isolate air gap and disintegrate, like either build your own city state, Isolate yourself within communities.</p><p>Do not, do not engage in business with outsiders. Do not use their technology. Do not use their social networks. Do not socialize with them in general, just full on air gapping is the best way. Well,  that's the, that's the </p><p>core trap of traditionalism is that it is more effective, the more extreme you go with it.</p><p>Okay. And effectiveness increases linearly with how extreme you take it. So you are always. So like if you talk with like a Catholic traditionalist, right? Like they're actually not that much of a traditionalist. If they were more of a traditionalist, if they moved more like on the Amish side of the spectrum, if they disengaged with technology completely, if they went off the grid, they would see a rise in mental health.</p><p>If they would see a rise, infertility rates, they would see a rise in all of the things that show vitality within their culture. And okay, so </p><p>what I, what I'm getting though, which I think is actually interesting, is that if you go full on traditionalist in the way that you. Can only really show dedication to traditionalism, like truly be traditional to leave modern civilization.</p><p>You're almost doing the same thing. That those who innovate even further and lean into new social technology are doing, and that you are becoming something that isn't the civilization, meaning that maybe their guess is as good as yours as to what works.  Like, let's say that humans are moving in a technologically terminal direction, you know, could be, let's use AGI as an example, right?</p><p>There's a, a scenario in which the technophilic people who totally get on board with agi. Are completely screwed over by it. And the people who go full on Ludite and totally go offline and hide in little, you know, enclaves hidden perhaps from agi I, or like somehow manage to lean in it and avoid it like in some sort of, there's </p><p>agi, everyone dies in an evil a g I scenario.</p><p>Okay, well let's then maybe use non AGI thing, but like, let's say that there's some kind of just unhealthy social or technological innovation. A completely air wrapped traditionalist group could be as roughly innovative and capable creating the next cycle as one that leans into the change. No. You don't think </p><p>so?</p><p>No. Because the technology social innovations, they are forced multipliers to your efforts. </p><p>Would you say that's always the case? I would say that innovations in dating markets have been. Very well adaptive for humans innovations in like food processing, </p><p>progressive innovations in dating markets.</p><p>Again, you need to look at other groups. See, this is the problem when people think about accelerationist cultures versus non accelerationist cultures, okay? Is they look at them from the progressive of progressive cultures versus what they think of as conservative cultures. And that is not the thing.</p><p>There are accelerationist conservative cultures and traditionalist conservative cultures. So an example of an accelerationist conservative culture is the Mormon. Things like dating wards. That's a very new invention. That is a new social technology. The, the Mormon community is actually incredibly accelerationist in terms of their adaptions of completely new social technologies.</p><p>So yeah, I mean this, this idea that. And their solutions, I think, are better than any type of dating solution that's ever existed in history. I, I think dating wards, for example, are a better solution. You mean singles words? Single </p><p>singles Wards, </p><p>l d s Church. Singles wards are, are a better solution to dating than, than literally anything.</p><p>Like theoretical solution that anyone has ever tried before at like the cultural level. And yet people would hear about singles wars and they'd be like, oh, that must be a cultural thing that Mormons have been doing forever. But they're not, and this is where things get really interesting to me. Sorry, what was the point you were making?</p><p>The wider point I was making was that there are many social technologies that may just be terminal, but people who lean into them may just.</p><p>Not five because I get, you know, inherently unhealthy because they keep, you know, there's, there's no adaptation for the processed foods and you know, just a certain portion of the population is going to end up obese and quite unhealthy when exposed to that </p><p>environment. Right? So if your were argument is certain, you know, things that this urban culture are spitting out are just not working like dating markets, there are many solutions to that.</p><p>One is more traditional dating markets, but there's a hundred other solutions to that. And any of those solutions are going to be labeled as conservative extremist solutions that that's just true because they, they deviate from the urban monoculture and therefore, They are conservative extremists. And this is how we find ourselves on the same team, often as the traditionalists.</p><p>Because from the perspective of the urban monoculture if you try something different, if you fight against them, if you try to develop new dating practices or anything like that, then you're just an extremist. And I think to to the point that you were, one of the points you were making earlier you said, well,  why can't.</p><p>Traditionalist group end up being the group that survives, right? Yes. And, and the answer is, is because the effectiveness of traditionalism is linearly correlated with how traditionalists you become with groups like the Amish being the most effective forms of traditionalism. The problem is, is it technology?</p><p>Uh, uh, Quease you with many advantages, whether they are health advantages or just the advantage of one group having automatic weapons and the other group not having automatic weapons being able to produce, or one group having automated drones and the other group trying to fight those drones with automated weapons.</p><p>You, you cannot fight a group that technologically leans in. If you're a group that technologically leans out, you, you can, you can. Maybe like passively fight them for a bit, but at the end of the day, you always lose. And, and this is true with genetic technology as well, you know, if one group is doing selection for stuff like iq, within just a few generations, there'll be multiple standard deviations.</p><p>Higher than the other group.  And, you know, you could argue, well, IQ isn't really measured. Whatever. You, you really think that a group that is like three standard deviations below another group in IQ is going to be able to compete with them. If they try to wipe them out or something, it's just not gonna happen.</p><p>And, and that's, that's the, the, the truth of it is that it's the groups that embrace social change while also realizing that the. Mechanisms of social change that are, are being grabbed onto by this sort of urban monoculture, this mind virus are just simply not functioning. And so I think that we, we need to recognize that the traditionalists are our allies to an extent for now.</p><p>And, and they may be our allies in the long term, so long as they can adapt to mindsets that aren't. Just like progressivism and disguise and waiting to wipe us out the moment they gain power. But the, but the great thing is, is that if we continue to technologically progress while they're not technologically progressing, it doesn't matter.</p><p>Hmm. Yeah, that makes sense. So, I mean, in the end, traditionalism isn't, it doesn't run contr what you're saying to accelerationism. I mean, a traditional as to. I think what many traditionalists really are going for is they would rather see a future that supports and they see a crumbling of their values.</p><p>Not so much that they're afraid of new technologies. And I think what really changed my mind from this conversation was your highlighting the Church of Latter Day Saints singles words as new innovation and that being a form of accelerationism because it, it shows that you can have. Traditional values and and adopt new technology to them, and which I think is in the end what traditionalists are.</p><p>Well, I mean, </p><p>no, they don't want that. They don't want that. </p><p>You mean they just wanna go? I mean, they just wanna go back to, do you think there's a faction of traditionalists that kind of just like traditions that support their values and they'd be willing to change them in the face of new conditions. So it's kind of weird me that that wouldn't be the case to just keep doing something.</p><p>Well then they're not traditionalists. Well, I mean that they are accelerationist, that's what we are like. So you look at, like, for example the types of, one of the things we're building out right now for our family and like a collection of family groups that we're a part of is, quote unquote a new London season, right?</p><p>Where people get together who are looking to marry in a single location. For a one weekend a year. And there are a number of parties hosted that have specific rules that make it easy to find a partner and specific types of like social shaming and stuff like that, that make it easy to find a partner.</p><p>I. All of this is a very conservative thing to do. It's a very accelerationist thing to do. It is heavily inspired by something that happened traditionally, the London season, that's where it gets its name. However, to say that it's a recreation of the London season, it's just comical. It's, it's, it's, it's cosplay at best.</p><p>But. Well, it's better than costly because what it is, is it's an innovation. It's saying, okay, this is one way an older group used to solve this problem. Can we through internet, through flights, through other technologies that enable new approaches and social technologies that we build, create an iteration of that that is more efficient than any that have existed before.</p><p>And, and those people are accelerationist, all accelerationist base their ideas on tradition because you're certainly not gonna get good ideas. From these progressive groups. You know, and you know me when I'm looking for like holidays we do for our family. When I'm looking for social institutions, when I'm looking for the way that we build our school system, you know, I am looking into the history of the Catholic church.</p><p>I am looking into the history of the of, of the Mormon church. I am looking into old traditionalist movements because that's where the interesting social technologies that can be tweaked and innovated upon come from. Being an accelerationist means you have an intense reverence for both studying the traditions and engaging with the traditions, while also believing they can be improved upon.</p><p>The thing that differentiates the traditionalists from the accelerationist is the traditionalists do not believe they can be approved upon. </p><p>Do you think that's true? I mean, do you think that most people see accelerationism that way? Because I feel like.</p><p>Accelerationism is anti traditionalist. Just throw it all out. I, I've not heard of, of some this hybrid, well, not that progressive that you're </p><p>describing. I mean, progressivism isn't accelerationism. Progressivism is like a weird deviant virus. Like, it, it isn't. It, it is, it is not related ideologically to accelerationism.</p><p>It's just not accelerationism. I, I'd say if you're looking for one of the pure forms of accelerationism, that's Mormonism, Mormonism is sort of a, a pure Calvinist ideology is, is often considered a very accelerationist ideology. Ideologies that are acceleration are often very strict. And, and they do not look like.</p><p>Another example of an acceleration of ideology would likely be the, the H variety the, the, the, the Jewish community. So they do a lot of things that, to somebody who's not really that familiar with history, look historic because they deviate from cultural norms and they deviate from cultural norms in a way that apes some historic things, but really most of their practices are quite new.</p><p>And most of their most successful practices are quite new. And so yeah, that's, that's my point. </p><p>Yeah. Okay. You're giving me a more nuanced picture. What? I mean, I, I previously viewed Traditionalism and accelerationism very differently, so I appreciate your clarifying your views on these things. Well thanks for that</p> <br /><br />This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&#38;utm_campaign=CTA_2">basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe</a>