Understanding the Complexities of Sin and Honor in Culture

Join Malcolm and Simone Collins as they dive deep into the fascinating world of America's forgotten cultural groups, focusing on the Puritans and their lasting impact on modern American society. This eye-opening discussion explores:

* The surprising truth about Puritan culture and its evolution

* How Puritan values merged with Backwoods culture to survive

* The unexpected connection between Puritan ethics and modern parenting styles

* Why certain cultural groups thrived while others faded away

* The impact of Catholic immigration on America's cultural landscape

* Insights into raising children with a "clan-based" mentality

* How historical cultural differences still influence modern American society

Whether you're a history buff, a parent looking for unique perspectives, or just curious about America's cultural roots, this video offers valuable insights into the forces that shaped our nation.​

[00:00:00]

Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone! I am

excited to be here with you today. This will be our second episode going over some of the concepts, what we think they got right, and what we think they got wrong of the book.

Simone Collins: American Nations by Colin Woodard, which was inspired by one of our favorite books of all time, Albion Seed by David Hackett Fisher.

Malcolm Collins: And this divides America into a 11 cultural groups. And I will put a map on screen here so you can see it. And in the last episode we did on this, which you can check out one of the core things I think he got wrong is he thought that the Puritan cultural group in the Northeastern United States ended up being the core mountain head.

Of current Yankee culture or the northeastern coastal culture in the United States, where we argue this is fundamentally wrongheaded that that culture actually stems from Catholicism which for a long time made up the majority population in these regions after the immigration waves started so [00:01:00] even though.

Just to briefly cover some concepts from the last one that a lot of people are unfamiliar with Catholics at the time of America's founding were an incredibly small part of the colonies. They were like 1. 5%. Even in the quote unquote Catholic colony. They were a very small minority around 10%. That was Maryland.

So they just were not a big cultural force in America. Until the Irish, Italian, and now Hispanic immigration waves, which led to the Catholic population becoming the predominant cultural wellspring of three of the American cultural groups, specifically. In the last episode, we focused a lot on how they were the wellspring of the

Yankee cultural group, but they are also the wellspring of the El Norte cultural group, which is the Hispanic cultural group in the, in the center.

And the far left cultural group that is on the west coast. And if I put a map here of American by relig America's districts by primary religious affiliation, you will see there is a huge overlap with all the blue strongholds and where the Catholics were [00:02:00] settling. So now we want to go, or at least these specific blue strongholds, i.

e. Yankeedom and Far Leftem the, the far west coast of the United States. Now what we want to do is go into a question this brings up. And it's a very interesting question if you've read LBNC, is, okay, these are the four cultures that form the foundation of America.

Where did they go? Right?

Where did the Quakers go? Where did the Puritans go? Where did the Where did the Cavaliers go? Because the Backwoods people, which I'm descended from, the greater We know where they

Simone Collins: are. They're right where you think they are.

Malcolm Collins: We will, in this episode, talk about this culture. And it's background, but I think a lot of people are a bit mystified about what happened to the three other, it's kind of cool in American history, by the way, if you, if you like study it, it's like the lost tribes, it's like, well, they're really unique founding groups in the country.

Where did they go? How did they end up actually influencing the cultures that came [00:03:00] downstream of them? And a big answer here is. They mostly died out.

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: However it was the, the, well, a separate episode on how the Quakers died out, because that's a very interesting story in and of itself. But today we're going to talk about the Puritans what they broadly stood for, how one group of the Puritans, or I'd say the Calvinist settlers in early America because there were two big groups here, which I think is really undersold.

The Backwoods people, the Backwoods group, the greater Appalachian group was heavily related to the Puritan group. They were also a Calvinist group. They generally got along with the Puritan group and they ended up, I actually, here's a great example of how well they got along with the Puritan group. So there was something called the Paxton boys uprising.

And in it because the Quakers always trying to bureaucratically control everything, we're giving their districts like half the vote that the, that the Quaker districts had the, the more central [00:04:00] urban districts had and they also had created a situation in which the Indians were constantly attacking and killing these people.

And they were like we don't really care, I guess, is the thing. I mean, talk about other, there's so much of like American lore, which is just like myth stories. So it was actually around this, the time of the Paxton Boys, like leading up to this, that the famous giving Indians smallpox infected blankets thing came from.

And people are like, oh, oh, that's so horrible. How could anyone have done that? And it's like, you know, they had just. Killed over 2, 000 settlers and were besieging a settlement and that was the context Excuse me They had been butchering children like what like they were trying to save a settlement that was under siege This is like a Alamo situation here people like, is it bad, like by modern warfare standards?

Yeah. If you are behind the walls of a city and you know, a group just butchered like the [00:05:00] two cities next to you and killed all the women and children. And you've got your family there. Are you not going to try everything you can think of to try to protect yourself? Because you have sent requests to the local Pennsylvania government, but it's run by Quakers and Quakers are pacifists.

Simone Collins: I mean, yeah, I kind of have like. With all things in life right now a f**k around and find out attitude. Like, I mean, also you siege a town, they're going to, they're going to try some stuff, like maybe they didn't expect biological warfare. Does that mean it's unfair? I don't know.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. This is actually a really interesting thing about the backwoods people.

So we're going to talk about where they came from, but also a really interesting thing about them culturally, because they had a relationship with the Indians that was both incredibly. more brutal than any of the other founding American cultural groups. Yeah, I

Simone Collins: think many American cultural groups saw them as equal to the Native American, the indigenous populations, because they were equally brutal in some of [00:06:00] their behaviors vis a vis other groups.

Malcolm Collins: Well, so, so we'll get to that. But first it's just like, let's talk about where they came from more broadly. Mm-Hmm. . So they were the second wave of immigrants into the United States. So you can really say the first wave of people who felt like European immigrants in America.

Simone Collins: I don't know. I think the second wave of immigrants was more the Cavaliers, followed by the Quakers, then followed by the Scots Irish.

So not great. I need

Malcolm Collins: I need to clarify what I mean by second wave. What I mean is they were the first wave of distinctly culturally different white Europeaners coming to already white European settled parts of America. Yes. The Cavaliers came as a separate wave, but they were mostly setting up. They were settling in

Simone Collins: indigenous lands with in totally foreign territory, not competing with existing UK based groups, right?

Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: For like when the Quakers came and set up Philadelphia, it wasn't like there was a big existing group. Settlement there when the, you know, the came and the [00:07:00] Puritans came and set up Massachusetts, there wasn't a big existing settlement there. When the backwards people came or what became the greater Appalachian culture?

All of the stuff on the coastline was pretty much already settled.

Simone Collins: Mm-Hmm. .

Malcolm Collins: And unlike the later Irish and Italian immigrant waves, the Catholic immigrant waves these people were much more discriminated against than any other. A really white population group that entered America, to the extent that they almost were unable to settle in any already settled region.

Now this was due to two reasons. There wasn't yet this idea that America was like this mixing pot yet. It was like, who are these brutal savages? Because that's what they were seen as by the existing population. They were mostly Irish and Scottish clan people, I guess is what I call them. They had been through centuries of clan warfare.

They were an incredibly honor based people in an honor based culture. But they were also I won't say lawless. They believed in [00:08:00] law, but you know, they'd have blood feuds. They'd have the law was the law. Well, there's,

Simone Collins: there's honor based. Law and then there's civil law and they were on a more honor code based system where when you have a feud, it is settled by your people through a blood feud or through vigilante justice, rather than you going to a centralized authority and saying, Oh mommy, they did something bad.

Punish them. They didn't come to

Malcolm Collins: us. Toasty did it. Yeah. No, they, they kept coming and setting up. What were the names of the regulators? So they set up a separate governments ruled by something called the regulators which roving vigilante groups, but let's talk about how, how this all ended up happening as well, because this is important before we get to what ended up happening to the Puritans.

So, these people came over. Nobody wanted them in their cities. They were seen as incredibly, like, crying full people. And they kind of

Simone Collins: were.

Malcolm Collins: And loose

Simone Collins: women. The women had higher skirts, low bust lines. They all acted in a very informal [00:09:00] way. They just felt culturally extremely different.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, they were, they were very, well, they were a clan based low class group.

They were the first group that like really was not in any way intellectual or upper class. They were fleeing regional violence. And they were feeling regional violence from people like themselves. And so they got into these cities and, and in part because the cities can immediately be like, Oh, just go to the land outside the cities.

Go to the, the frontier, which at the time was the Appalachian mountains and the area right before the Appalachian mountains, like just outside of all of the settled areas,

Simone Collins: which is poetically quite appropriate because the Appalachian mountains are actually the same mountain range as the Scottish Highlands.

Just yeah, before they got split up into different continents

Malcolm Collins: and these people this, this actually worked out really good for everyone to begin with. So the reason it worked out so good is there were a lot of really dangerous Indian groups and you had these like pansy, like. Quakers, right? Who [00:10:00] refused to fight at all.

They would actually have like pirates just like plunder their settlements and they do nothing about it. And yeah. So Ben Franklin, who was a Puritan based in Philadelphia would be like, I could explain to our enemies that like, we do not retaliate for this.

And they wouldn't even come attack because they wouldn't believe that anyone would act like this. It is so insane that you're refusing to do anything. So anyway and then you have the Puritans who were hard people but they, well, they didn't have as much problem with the Indians for a couple reasons.

One is, is they were very hardy people, like they were willing to defend themselves and they were very prickly, but also they would intentionally settle the least productive lands the most stony fields and everything like that, because they believed that you know, the harder you made your life.

The more favor God was giving you that like God gave you favor through intentionally choosing To give yourself hardship. So the

Simone Collins: Puritans keep in mind, settled in the Northeast of the United States at a time when it was much colder, it had [00:11:00] much harsher winters than it does today. So right now the South, for example, where the Cavaliers and future Southerner groups settled is pretty much climatically the same now as it used to be, but New England was very different and very harsh.

It wasn't just the soil.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And so, so these people were pushed out because the Quakers, if they had a boundary of these angry Klan people the Indians couldn't get through them, you know, the Indians ended up fighting the Klan people and the Klan people would fight the Indians. Now, it caused problems.

And this is one of the things where the Quakers, the Quakers are just so slimy. I will never get away from this lie that Quakers were like anti slavery when we know from Quaker wills that 43 percent of Quakers owned slaves. They just were vocally anti slavery. They had higher slave ownership rights than aristocratic southerners during the slave owning period.

They they, they were very woke. It was like, we'll say something's bad, but then, you know, our actions will cause more damage. So they're like, oh, we will always treat the Indians nice, and we will always pay for their land. Unlike [00:12:00] those Puritans who like do, you know, sort of cheaty deals with them, but then how did they actually treat the Indians?

Well, they took these warlike clan people, they put them all around the Indian land and then they used them for protection and they kept killing the Indians and the Indians kept killing them. So ultimately if you look at the Indian tribes that were in the Quaker areas, they actually ended up dying out at higher rates than the Indian tribes in the Puritan areas.

Because, again, it's, it's, yeah, technically they're pro Indian, except they settled these, like, bloodthirsty My Ancestors people next to them.

Simone Collins: Lord Almighty.

Malcolm Collins: Okay, so, so, now we've got to get into how these people ended up relating to the Indians and why it was so different from any of the other early American groups.

And it really shows, in our show, I say I'm a pluralist, right? People here, Malcolm's a pluralist, like a dyed in the wool pluralist of the, the old Appalachian variety, and what they think I'm saying is I'm an equalist. You know, that I believe that, that all cultural practices are equal and all people are equal.

And [00:13:00] I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You'll understand when you understand how the Blackwoods people related to the union. So the Quakers would be like, I respect the Native Americans human dignity, right? Like, but they didn't. take time to understand or know or live with the Indians. They like superficially, academically respected the Indians, but they didn't actually like engage with the Indians.

The Backwoods people they were very known and actually very hated from the other people. They would frequently marry Indians. They would adopt Indian style of dresses. They would They

Simone Collins: did want some Children of mixed backwoods and indigenous pairings become significant leaders within Native American

Malcolm Collins: communities?

Yeah, they did. Well, and, and within backwoods communities. And some of the backwoods people would actually just go and move in and convert to the Indian communities and ways of life. They weren't that

Simone Collins: terribly different. It's not as though many, for example, Scottish settlements were [00:14:00] that different from many indigenous American settlements.

They could, they lived in, in rougher ways. They were

Malcolm Collins: clan based people in that they were similar, but they were culturally quite different.

Simone Collins: Oh, culturally very different. But sometimes I feel like lifestyle and culture,

Malcolm Collins: how different they were, because I can see this idea of. Oh, they were these, these backwards savages living off the land.

The Indians were backwards savages living off the land. Look, I'm not saying that, but I'm saying that there's this perception of all this, this, it's such a like, oh, they must've been similar culturally. No, they were not at all similar culturally. Not culturally. Than they were to the Quakers or the Quakers were to the Indians.

The only way, the only one dimension, they were similar to the Indians. was that they were from a clan based system that had different clans similar to the Indians and these clans fought each other. But because of that, when they came into these Indian [00:15:00] areas, they saw the Indians. As with genuine human dignity as a separate clan that was in a clan based conflict with them But this also meant that they would regularly go butcher indian towns in a way that the puritans and the quakers Never ever would.

So in a way They would they respected the end they wanted to learn from them. They wanted to learn from their culture They would intermarry with them when they made sense. They would join their communities when they liked those specific communities but they also treated them As a full equal in terms of clan competition.

And for them, that meant regularly go in and raid their settlements. I mean, they raid other clan settlements. Why not raid the Indian?

Simone Collins: We're only treating them with the same respect that we treat our own. Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: but go in and take

Simone Collins: their, but when you're back, that's a little different, isn't it?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, because they were admittedly.

They weren't as brutal as the most brutal Indians, but they were close in terms [00:16:00] of the the areas that they came from and in those areas they were often the most brutal of the parts of Scotland in Ireland, for example. But keep in mind this group again was not the Catholics from Ireland. This was the the Protestants in Ireland who were the Irish who were part of this community.

Anyway, so, so, and, and this was actually the group. So the Scotch Irish, these are the Scots who were moved to Ireland. They were brought there by earlier English to rule over the parts of it, like, like to try to be like enforcers. Not really rule over, because they were more like, Enforcers or brutes for the English population because they wanted a particularly sort of bloodthirsty I guess you could say people to move there.

And so, that's what I mean when I say I mean pluralism I mean pluralism so that on equal terms the strong can defeat the weak. They can learn from them they can they they they can learn what like of the people who are different from the us What can we learn from them? What can we? And then we take that stuff and we use it to do better ourselves.

[00:17:00] Now, I do not believe that we should be in a system like they were, where the strong against the weak is the people who literally kill the other people should win. I think we're civilizationally beyond that point. But what I mean is, I think we should be able to economically cross culturally compete against other groups without putting training wheels on some groups, either from an ethical perspective, i.

e. you can't compete with those people because they're in a weaker position than you or something like that, or through, you know, affirmative action or through anything like that. We should all be able to compete. And, and it's so interesting to me that this all compete attitude. In a way, assigns more human dignity to the other than the attitude of, well, these, these you know, oh, poor little whatever minority, we need to give them all sorts of special stuff because goodness knows they can't work on their own culture, they can't fix anything themselves.

And I also believe this free competition mindset, I hold it because I believe it [00:18:00] helps even the groups that are in harder positions. So you can see this and I'll put on screen here, some graphs of black Americans and Hispanic Americans who were in Democrat controlled districts versus Republican controlled districts intergenerationally.

Had closer to white income levels and closer to white IQ. So they were intergenerationally improving and getting close to a point where they were equal with the existing white population. Whereas in the Democrat areas, they were not improving because of course you're not going to improve when you're putting training wheels on everything.

Right? Like the goal is, is, is individual cultural improvement.

Simone Collins: Well, the goal is to give people. Resources that empower them. It's the whole teach Amanda fish thing rather than disempowering them. And there's been systematic infantilization and disempowerment taking place in progressive communities.

Malcolm Collins: Absolutely. Did you have anything else you wanted to say about this community before I move further?

Simone Collins: No, let's go for it.

Malcolm Collins: So with this [00:19:00] community, we can get to a. They were really, as we've already said, looked down upon by the Quakers extremely because that was a group that they were engaging with most.

And the, the German settlers who were like the Quaker society. So we're going to talk a little bit about the society that became the Midland cultural group, which I'll show on the map here. They were mostly formed. Of three groups. Okay. You had some of these backwoods people. You had some of the German settlers who were mostly like really industrious farmers and just wanted to be left alone and didn't really want any position of governments.

And then you had the elite class, which was the Quakers. They basically ran well, everything. They ran all of the major businesses. They ran all the slave operations and they ran most of the political offices.

And They used these positions to essentially oppress the two other groups, the Backwoods people, who they removed the ability to get votes from, they didn't really protect them and the, the German [00:20:00] settlers, but the German settlers didn't really care, they, in part, are the group that we now know of as the Amish but they didn't all become Amish, this was one part of this faction, but it's still the most culturally preserved of this original faction And so, you had this system where because the Germans didn't focus on anything other than education tied to, you know, efficiency of their farm labor, and because the backwoods people really saw learning as a fairly pointless thing to do.

It wasn't part of their culture. They, they, they didn't believe in higher education in the way any of the other cultures did. So they couldn't run these types of jobs. They also didn't believe in capital accumulation. So I want to talk about this really quickly because this is important. Why didn't they believe in capital accumulation?

Because the, the other Calvinist groups all heavily believed in capital accumulation. Well, because they, so let's talk about how like the Puritan in their view of capital accumulation created modern capitalism. So they believed that God showed his favor to people by how successful you were specifically for them because they lived, you know, in the [00:21:00] business world, right?

But if you spend any of that money on yourself, like aggrandizing yourself in the eyes of other people on art, on, on flashy things then you were showing that you, you had sort of failed the test that God had given you and that test was success. And Scrooge is very much a character who represents this old Calvinist Puritan mindset.

Well, keep in mind what success meant. Okay, so they, they agreed with the Puritans on that. God gives you success if he likes you. But they were in this clan based system, right? That was like, yeah, but if you ever accumulated too much capital, your neighbors would just come and steal it. You know, if you got a bunch of cows and your neighbors would come and steal those cows, there was no point in ever having stuff.

And this is something that is really noticed in I read in a previous episode about my ancestors and the people used to like their parents episode. And. In that episode one of the things that my ancestor was noting about his dad is he had so many [00:22:00] opportunities to make money through investment and stuff like that, but he just seemed allergic to even attempting to make money.

And he was like, why was that? And it was because he came from this clan based system. These people who, when the South was revolting, they started counter revolutions to try to, you know, because they were against slavery. And we'll talk about why they were against slavery because most of the backwoods people were And they were like, okay, we'll, we'll do our own thing here, but they'd already gone through this a few times, you know, go fight with your neighbors, create breakaway states.

This is where, you know, 15 of his brothers or siblings are one of the 50 founding members of the Free State of Jones.

 You, me, all of us. We're all out there dying so they can stay rich. Tax collectors coming around here, taking everything. Girls, you know how to shoot one of these? No man oughta tell another man what he's gotta live for, or what he's got to die for.

Malcolm Collins: So, you know, heavy, heavy relation to, to that sort of movement. So anyway where was I

Simone Collins: capital

Malcolm Collins: accumulation. Capital accumulation, [00:23:00] yes.

So these people didn't have the same relation to capital accumulation that the Puritans did. It was more like status accumulation was what mattered more than traditional capital accumulation, like you would have in a Puritan setting. It was clan honor accumulation. Yes. So it was honor culture. You needed to accumulate honor for the sake of accumulating honor.

But, but also this

Simone Collins: honor was the currency in which this community dealt. There wasn't really so much capital. There wasn't really so much of an economy. There wasn't really so much of an external governing mechanism. Honor was the judicial system, the economy the social capital, the respect and the negotiating power.

So it did matter.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, well, this is the cure. I should be clear that they actually had a currency and it was a hard alcohol and whiskeys. That's what they used as a currency in their districts. Yeah. Just to give you an idea of the type of people they were. But they also related to morality quite differently than the

Simone Collins: speaking, which though, just random thing [00:24:00] it has been.

It's been mentioned in a couple of videos I've been listening to about Mormon culture that a lot of Mormons in their emergency supplies save like large jugs of vodka as a currency for like a, an apocalyptic event. So alcohol is currency. It actually makes me want to buy more vodka. Because it's not a bad idea.

Malcolm Collins: It's good frontier medicine. We're alcohol is currency, people. So, so, and keep in mind, we'll get to their counter governments in a second because they're actually important. But I should also hear, talk about their ethical system because it was a little different than the Puritan ethical system.

So they were both Calvinists, you know, they believed in predestination. They believed that you know, Pretty much everything is a sin. Dancing is a sin, music is a sin, sports, oh that's definitely a sin you know, extramarital sex is a sin anything you do for the pure sake of happiness, like personal happiness, is broadly a sin.[00:25:00]

And so they, they, the Puritans were like, Oh, well, then we need to not do any of those things. At all. Like, I know we'll break the rule sometimes, but broadly we should try not to do any of those things. Which is very different from the, the, the, than Catholics came in and the Catholics had this deontological set where there's some sins and some not sins.

Like sports isn't as high of a sin as say like extramarital sex or you know, music or something like that. Like they, they, they have the, this is a category of sin, this is a category of not sin.

for nerds, wondering about the biblical logic behind each of these interpretations.

For one interpretation, The one where sexual sins are an ultra big deal and other sins aren't really that important. you could look at quotes like. From Corinthians flee for your sexual immorality. All other sins, a person commits are outside the body, but whoever sins sexually sins against their own body in quote, the problem here is that this is very clearly in context. Speaking of prostitution and only prostitution. As the [00:26:00] paragraph immediately proceeding this line is all about prostitution and why specifically prostitution is bad. Which, and we will go over this in a future one of our tract episodes, I would argue is considered a unique form of sin because it has the chance of bringing an unwanted child into the world. And the sin is the potential of creating that child, and that's what it means to sin against the body. , By that, what we mean here is in this part, it talks of two people becoming one body when they have sex. But obviously two people don't literally become one body when they have sex, except in so far as one person gets pregnant and then they literally do become one body.

In the form of the child and one spirit in the form of the child.

if you look at the lines immediately above it. Whereas, alternatively, you can look at lines like.

Whether, therefore you eat or drink or whatever you do all to the glory of God. Or, and he died for all, all those who live should no longer live for themselves, but for him who [00:27:00] died for them and was raised again, Or, and whatsoever you do do it heartily as to the Lord and not unto men. Or, but if you have doubts about whether or not you should eat something, you are sending Abe, you go ahead and do it for you are not following your convictions.

If you do anything you believe is not right, you are sinning. So in all of these quotes, the basic gist is, is anything that you are not doing for the glory of God is a sin. So if you can't reasonably argue that what you just did, you did for the glory of God. You committed a form of sin.

Malcolm Collins: It's not that everything that you're not doing for God is a sin. Where these two groups broadly believe that.

But the, the backwoods people They related to this very differently. They're like, Oh yeah, all of those things are sin. But like. I'm still human, bro. Like I will try to do good in the moment when it makes sense and aligns with my honor code. But I know that I may as well, like, as long as I'm going to be here and it is not a time when I otherwise could be dedicating myself [00:28:00] fully and meaningfully to God.

Like they didn't do the constant Bible study and everything like that. They're like, let's party tonight, you know? And they were known by the other people as constantly partying. But also engaging with low culture because of they saw, you know, hanging out and partying with the bros as an equal sin, you know, having some drinks and doing a jig.

And I remember this about my ancestors. There was a time when the confederacy had captured a number of these anti confederacy rebels and he He, he came into the confederate camp and he brought a bunch of booze with him and he got them all drunk and played the fiddle so transfixingly and apparently did a traditional Scottish like jig thing so amazingly that they were able to have another guy sneak around and free all of the prisoners while the confederate guards were distracted by my great great great.

Grandfather. I love [00:29:00] this because it's so like a, a trickster god sort of a thing to do from like an old fable or something like that, but that was the type of people they were, you know, it was, we've got to do what's right, we've got to do what fits our honor, but you know, sometimes a jig can be a part of that, sometimes drinking can be a part of that, you know.

So they can play a role in an honorable life. Now what this means is because they didn't distinguish between different types of sin, they would actually see the higher culture forms of sin as a higher form of a sin than the lower culture forms of a sin, because there you are mixing, and I've mentioned this in previous episode, One sin, which is just the general sin of doing something not for God, but with the sin of pride.

And, and, you know, like you would get from an art museum or something like that, but then you're also, in addition to that, doing something that's just like objectively stupid, because now if you're engaging with high culture, you likely have something that's worth stealing to other people.

So again, don't engage with that stuff, right?

You know, so there was a number of reasons that they felt this way, but anyway. In, in the [00:30:00] Midlands area where the, where the Quakers controlled everything they were they, they were, they didn't run any of the businesses. They didn't run any of the politics, but in the areas that they fully controlled, it was a different situation.

In the areas that they fully controlled, you could get some like local sort of. gang leaders who would end up ruling a district due to like how many siblings they had and how much honor they had was in their culture. But you wouldn't get tons of lawyers and teachers and doctors and competent politicians.

And so where did they get those people from? Well, it's the story of the Paxton boys. They had come. They were besieging Philadelphia. So this rural immigrant group, like I'm not even kidding. What immigrant group in the United States is literally besieging with guns and having murdered people in a major U.

S. city? These people were like a don't mess with me sort of thing. So the guy who ended up bailing Philadelphia out because the Quakers had their heads up their butts [00:31:00] and couldn't handle anything, was, Puritan Ben Franklin.

 So, he ended up being able to make a negotiation with them that ended up saving the Quakers of Pennsylvania. They couldn't defend themselves well either because they'd never really done the military stuff. And I should note that these people actually went to war with a number of the other settlements.

It wasn't just the Quakers. They also went to war with with the Tidewater peoples these were the peoples who were the sons of the cavaliers to the south like around the sort of dc area and stuff like that so they would regularly go to war against the other colonists when they the other colonists would abuse them too much.

So the puritans actually worked very well with them. Like these two cultures went together while The Quakers were sort of oil and water with them. These people who didn't believe in war, these people who were from a fundamentally different religious framework. The Puritans were basically their religious framework.

They just expressed it differently. They didn't want Like to take stuff, right? Like I didn't like showing off their wealth so they could live in these communities [00:32:00] safely,

Here. I'd also note. If you remember earlier, I said that the Puritans would intentionally build settlements in areas where it was hard to farm. Either that were colder or that had lots of rocks in the field because they liked. Intentionally opting into hardship, thinking that it sort of purified their soul. They felt very comfortable moving into regions that anyone else would say were dangerous or that you shouldn't move into this region, you know? Uh, Quaker might say, well, we should move out there because these people might kill us. Whereas a Puritan would say. These people might kill us.

Therefore, we should move out there.

. They, they were hardworking.

Malcolm Collins: They like to put themselves in hard environments, which won them honor points among these people. They just got along very well.

And so a number of the Puritans ended up migrating into these communities and forming this sort of like, learned elite roles like the, the lawyers, the doctors, the entrepreneurs and stuff like that within these [00:33:00] communities enough so that they could get a bit of a society.

And here we should talk about what these societies ended up looking like. They built these societies they, they had a few different breakaway states at points, but the main one was the, I'll call it the regulator state. So they had like a local marshal role that was called a regulator. And this individual would apply clan like justice.

Well, actually, it was called lynching named after a guy named Lynch

For more color here. The term Lynch mob. I came after , a man with the name, Charles Lynch, a Virginia planter and justice of the peace during the American revolution, Charles Lynch headed in irregular court that punished loyalists and his actions gave rights to the term Lynch's law, which referred to the extra judicial punishment of individuals without formal legal proceedings.

Although there is a claim that William Lynch, another Virginia planter of the same era with associated with the term.

Malcolm Collins: and it was a system of justice where when one person would do something bad, you would go into their community and you would lynch them. That was what the, the regulators did to police their [00:34:00] communities and they were needed to police their communities because the local governments were not policing their communities.

And they actually ended up when the 13 colonies were sending all their delegates down, they elected their own delegate to go down as a separate. You call this sort of shadow country because nobody else recognized them as a non ruled over part of the United States, but they genuinely were Basically separate colony was a separate legal system.

Okay. So for clarification here, the regulator movement had been put down before this event happened. This was sort of a successor government to them. , that was much less formal than the full regulator movement government was. And for anyone looking for more information on this stuff, this is all covered in American nations. So just go read that book. The core thing that I'm discussing here that differs from what's accounted in American nations.

Is the integration of the Puritan culture into the Backwoods culture, which he doesn't go that deep into.

Malcolm Collins: So any thoughts on this before I go into what what happened to the the puritans who didn't [00:35:00] meld with this culture?

Simone Collins: No, keep it going

Malcolm Collins: Okay, so the Puritans who melded with this culture, I'll talk a little about what happened to them and their ethical system. They began to adopt more of the ethical system that this culture had in its relationship to sin.

So they stayed really, really obsessed with education, but they became a lot less obsessed with and, and, and technical correctness and consequentialism and everything like that. But And the elect and all that, but they became a lot less obsessed was you have to follow every rule. Perfectly. It was more of like they, they began to, I guess, sort of understand.

I would guess. I call it the party lifestyle of these people and the everything to an extreme lifestyle of these people inform this sort of, I guess you could say, like, Braveheart like cultural class. Like you see in the Braveheart movie where they're like, well we need some people in this clan based system to be extremely educated and know tons of languages and be obsessed with education and that was sort of the role that they filled.

And you actually see this from My Ancestors. If you've ever read about the Free State of Jones [00:36:00] movement

One of the 15 of my ancestors who was involved and had the most senior position within the movement with Jasper Collins. He's actually the reason why we know about the movement to begin with, because he wrote the primary book on the movement Also is. It's a quick addition here. Cause I ain't forgot this, but I was just double checking this information that Jasper named his first son. Ulysses Sherman Collins. You got to understand in the antebellum south naming your first son, you Lissy Sherman college today. It would be like naming your kid. Hitler Mao Collins..

Malcolm Collins: but he's the guy in the movie who's always doing stuff like trying to write a constitution for them, and trying to write a set of laws, and trying to write philosophical treaties for them.

Now obviously, a lot of the people in this were related to my family but that was like the the patriarch of that local region, who is Jasper Collins, was who it was because that was what they did with these people. They would help them in their rebellions, and they'd be like, hey, guys, guys, guys, I got a a legal system that we can use, and I got these, like, religious arguments for why we're doing this, and I got this you could think of them as the helpful [00:37:00] nerd um, These communities um, they, they were never like leader, leader, but they were the leader's guy who helped the leader actually get s**t done.

And they were okay with that because to take the leadership position in a way would be a sign of sin because that would just show you wanted power for yourself. And so it worked very, very well with these two cultures work together.

Even today, I've noted that people from the Puritan cultural class work really well with the Backwoods people. And I think that this often surprises people from coastal cities where they're like, oh, the Backwoods people would see nothing in common with you. They'd hate all of your. Weird views. And I think that this shows a misunderstanding of the way the Backwood culture works now, or the way it worked historically.

Remember the Backwoods people were the first ones to pick up like Indian ways of doing things and stuff like that. They don't have a lot of prejudice against people of different cultural practices or really see things as quote unquote weird. They're more just concerned about being able [00:38:00] to get by and live their life and support their family. , , and then their wider network. And not being looked down upon. issues about like cultural purity and stuff like that, or not really important to them. , Except when it feels to them that another cultural clan is encroaching on their territory. and then to the Puritans, there's never really been a high amount of classic judgment of people outside the Puritan network within Puritan groups.

So I think, you know, some people hear like, oh, you never get along with like an average American Malcolm. Somebody said this after one of our other videos. And I'm like, you know, that like the people who care for our kids every day, , and who we're in business with? Like the core people were in business with. Are, you know, face tattoos and, , run a landscaping company, right?

Like the. We get along very well with average Americans and average Americans at least have this Appalachian cultural group get along very well with us because we're just not very judgemental people. And I've actually [00:39:00] noticed they get along uniquely well from us in the Pennsylvania area. When I contrast it with, , Texas. And I think the core reason is that in Pennsylvania, the upper class, people in Pennsylvania really looked down on middle-class Pennsylvania and like lower middle-class Pennsylvania. And, , in Texas Where I grew up. that just wasn't the case. , like George Bush, for example, clearly didn't look down on middle-class Americans. , in the same way, I see people in like the main line do.

Malcolm Collins: But then the Puritan Puritans, well, why did the Puritan Purims didn't die out?

And they mostly died out in the 1800s. And there are three reasons why they died out. Do you have any thoughts before I want to go further? Okay, reason number one, and by far, far, far, the biggest reason. The Catholic immigrant ways. They were mostly just displaced by the Catholics.

And would I say displaced? I mean, displaced, not like killed or replaced specifically. They migrated out to either [00:40:00] the Backwoods regions or the west, or, you know, Mormon territory. Uh, there were a lot of places that they migrated to around the frontier areas, but they mostly just kept moving to wherever was one of the hardest places to live in America, because that was part of their culture was to seek out. Intentional hardship and not.

Have any aspersion that they may be.

Benefiting from any form of nepotism or family reputation. , and my family has actually done this for a few generations where almost everyone in my family has started their first company in another country. Like you consider me, , I got my first big job in Korea and then the first company that we ran was in Peru. , and now I feel comfortable working in the U S because, you know, I've sort of proven that.

, my success wasn't due to any form of nepotism, but that's a really important thing was in this Puritan cultural group. But it also meant that it was very natural for them to be displeased. What I mean by that is it didn't require much of a [00:41:00] push or much of a culture change to get them to leave their previous cultural strongholds like Boston.

Malcolm Collins: I mean, if you look in like, it's recently in 2009, for example, the Puritan stronghold was Boston.

Yet in 2009, over 50 percent of Massachusetts was still Catholic. Like, That's wild. Like how much do you think was Puritan descended? Very small. Yeah. A lot of Americans, 13 percent or so were descendants from the Mayflower, but they didn't keep their culture intact. So the independent Puritan cultural clusters just mostly died or became narrower and narrower and focused and more and more like out there.

Cultish region regions like this is where you had like the Kelloggs and stuff like that where they would have these insane diets And everything like that.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And what were the puritans actually, bemarked by because I think a lot of people Misunderstand the puritans because the quakers basically historically went and whitewashed history and pretended The puritans were the quakers and the quakers were the puritans because they weren't puritans were incredibly pro sex they were so pro sex that in albion seed it even talks [00:42:00] about this You Their writings were not des censored until the 20th century.

They, they, they just were extremely strict about when you could have sex and when you couldn't have sex, weren't they? Yeah. They were sex positive within marriage. We'll say Within marriage, yeah. But they were also like 100% about everything. Like, they would never go anywhere without running. They would, you know, they would, the, the seller, the people would come in and be like, they were always rocking in their rock rocking chair.

They were like full of energy about life and about everything, just. 120 percent about absolutely everything in every conceivable way.

Simone Collins: Very intense people. Yes.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, they were, they were very intense people. They were also very about sort of intellectual stoicism and a performative intellectual stoicism.

And this performative intellectual stoicism is another thing that ended up killing them. They had an internal cultural hierarchy that was in part based on being able to show you were more humble than your neighbor. And this in a [00:43:00] way creates a form of inverse humility where they would do these ridiculous, I'll put on a skit here, With some people doing this so you can see like what it ended up looking like, but it was ridiculous.

It was ridiculous. I'm more humble than you. I'm more humble than you. I'm more humble than you. Oh, look at how crazy humble this thing I just did was

Those who court when the sun descends court the devil's design for certain? Ah, yes. I could not agree more. How dare you express enjoyment? My deepest apologies.

Your shoes are quite sensible. They are for sizes too small. The pain purifies my predilection for pleasure. Your alliteration sounds dangerously like poetry. My apologies. Strike me, silence!

Now, obviously this is a comedy sketch and not reality. But I think it shows why you cannot have a whole community dedicated to a.

Dominance hierarchy. Around humility. Because when the entire dominant hierarchy is based around humility and austerity, , people just go haywire. But if you mix these [00:44:00] people with another group that isn't dedicated to a dominance hierarchy around humility and austerity, then they, they don't have the same feedback cycle.

They can just be like, oh, well, you know, I'm a more humble than the average person in my community. , and they don't spiral out of control and go extinct. Like obviously if you grow up in a culture like this, you're probably not going to want to continue it when there are other options around you.

Which is why the Puritans in the more mono Puritan communities like you had in new England, mostly when extinct. Also, it's important to note here that when the Catholic immigrants came into new England, they did not mix with the Puritan communities much, , in the same way that the periods in communities mixed with like the Backwoods people and stuff like that. , these communities were much more oil and water.

And so there wasn't the ability, like if you were a, a town. That was half Catholic and half Puritan. And you are a Puritan 98% of your interactions would be with other Puritans. , whereas if you were a town that was, you know, half [00:45:00] Puritan, half backwater. About 50% of your interactions would be, was backwater people.

50% would be with Puritans. There wasn't the same amount of antipathy between these two cultural groups. Or,

Cultural isolation.

Malcolm Collins: And a lot of people are like, when they look at the modern cultural groups and they go, who's the descendants of the Puritans who has like, A performative cultural stoicism and is really pro education.

You're looking at like the Jordan Petersons of today. That's the descendant culture of the Puritans. The Wokas are the descendant culture of Quakers. We'll get into that in a different video. But there are some still like cultural descendants. of these Puritans, but mostly they went extinct. And another thing that was really unique about the Puritan communities was the way their religious worship was set up, where they set up like five churches in a town and then whichever one was like the most charismatic is the one that everyone would go to.

It was sort of like early social media, like everyone would choose like which version, but it meant that you would get, this is what we had with The Great Awakening just like these incredibly Religiously zealotic people [00:46:00] in terms of like everything about their life was basically like an influencer based culture of, of religious charisma and extreme austerity and humility.

Now what you can tell Maybe

Simone Collins: oppressive virtue signaling to a certain extent.

Malcolm Collins: Yes. Is this then led to, now, we should talk about how the Puritans virtue signals, because it's very different from the way the Quakers, the Quakers would virtue signal with like big displays, like if they were anti animal cruelty, they'd like throw themselves on the dog track and like roll around and yell about stuff, very like modern woke people do, right?

With Puritans, it wasn't like that at all. It was all like, You weren't even really supposed to show necessarily how humble you were being, because that could be seen as not being humble enough. It was very, it was in your culture and very was in your towns. You just didn't want bad things happening that was in your towns.

You didn't care about what the people outside your towns, or outside your culture would.

Where was I going, was this how, how they died out. Yes, so the second thing that led to them dying out was the, This zealotry just, [00:47:00] as secularization began, it didn't do a good job of intergenerationally passing to the next generation. It was a very not cool thing for kids. This can be all well and good for a, you know, a few groups of like zealotic adults, but if you're a kid growing up in one of these cultures and the adult's like, well, you should just be ultra religion because it's like the coolest thing ever.

A lot of kids are like, yeah, but there's like, easier ways I can do this, right? So that was one reason it really died out, and then when it really died out in the 1800s was, was the rise of the evangelical movement.

Simone Collins: That

Malcolm Collins: did a very good job of converting out of these communities.

Well, because it was

Simone Collins: still very religiously, extra. It was still very high energy, but it was better, I think, at spreading. Puritanism didn't spread very well. It

Malcolm Collins: didn't have as many rules. It was just like a simpler message. It was, it was a related message which could sell to these people, but it didn't have all of the rules.

And so the Puritans would join these [00:48:00] communities, often keep the rules for one generation, but then their kids would grow up without them, and they'd be like, look, this performative austerity, like, I don't see the point, no one else in my church congregation is doing it, and so they'd drop it. And so that ended up dropping the, the, that part of the Puritan movement.

Another thing to remember about the Puritan movement was the city on a hill mindset. Which is we are all going to create a completely new way of creating society and it will lead to a utopia.

Very similar to how the kibbutz movement died. , this played into the Puritan movement. So for people who don't know how the kibbutz movement died, uh kibbutzes where these sort of like communist Jewish communes in Israel. , and the thing that killed them with actually how successful they ended up being, they, many of them turned out to be enormously wealthy in terms of the amount of revenue that they were generating to the point where when you got one or two generations in. , the kids were like, well, I mean, I could just leave with all of this money and then just join a normal conservative Jewish [00:49:00] sect. , and. That happened with many of the Puritan communities is that they did in a way, achieve the city on the hill dream, which was an enormous amount of wealth, but people who still lived dedicated to austerity, that's what the Scrooge stereotype with about you. As I pointed out the screws didn't spend his wealth on himself.

He didn't spend it on things like charity that could be used to Sidney virtue to other people. He just hoarded it. , but this doesn't end up looking like a city on a hill to outsiders, , or to an individual's own kids after a few generations. They're like, wait, wait, wait, wait. So when does the utopia come? , and so that also led a lot of people to leave. But this did not affect the Backwoods Puritan groups as much because they dropped the.

Practice of wealth accumulation altogether and focus much more on honor accumulation and information accumulation in terms of intergenerational education. , for an example of what I mean by that. If you look at my ancestors,

Every single one of my grandparents, both men [00:50:00] and women had a college degree, which is pretty rare for people of that generation.

Malcolm Collins: Another thing that really ended up killing the Puritan movement was, and this is another thing that is. hugely forgotten about the Puritan movement is they were very, very, very pro like science. Like it was a very, remember I talked about like the, the multiple churches, like fighting for members and, and somebody can be like that, that would lead to very interesting religious stuff.

Well, the scientific revolution was happening in this period. And a lot of the Puritans, these are the people who would try to like, Harmonize their bibles with what was scientifically known at the time.

 They were a mix. of religious extremism, but also pro science extremism, or at least some sub factions of them were. This is something that's hugely forgotten about them. In terms of, , the modern stereotype of the Puritan, they can almost be thought of is antithetical to Amish, where they tried to adapt all of the latest technologies and all of the [00:51:00] latest scientific perspectives. In, in the most extreme forms possible.

Actually, , I remember a story about one of my ancestors from this group who lived not far from us here in Pennsylvania. And he built his house so that when you would ride the carriage up to it, there was a plate underneath the front of it and the platelet to a weight system that would automatically open the doors.

And apparently his entire house was full of automated gadgets. Like this.

Malcolm Collins: They would, they would, and this is captured in the Puritan spotting checklist that Scott Alexander did. Plus one for A weird classical name, plus three if they have one of these names themselves extra points if they have an invention, max plus three at least one, plus three points for one eccentric invention Plus one point if they created anything they gave a classical name to plus three points if they have achievements in multiple unrelated fields.

And that was really important in, in this Puritan culture is academic perfection in multiple fields. Plus [00:52:00] one atheist, deist, or theist. Free thinker which is interesting that you would associate that was Puritan, but it really was associated with these communities. They combined sort of an atheism with a religiosity, as you could say, obviously, we're culturally descendant of this plus one anti Catholic, plus three wrote a book about their heterodox religious views, plus three invented a new religion, plus three invented a new Christian heresy, plus three obsessed with religious tolerance, plus one went to Harvard, Yale or MIT plus one practiced law.

Plus three in college society with a classical name. Plus one wrote a really weird book . You can get three points for that. Plus three for founded their own school. Again, very similar to us. Plus three wrote a list of values. Plus three had plans to emancipatize the eschaton. Plus three if they were a social reformer.

Plus three if they raged a crusade on an abstract concept. Plus three if they had ideas that were utopian yet racist. Plus three if they were inspired by the by the wisdom of the Far East, plus three if they were an abolitionist, plus one if they fought for African American rights in some way, plus three if they were famous for philanthropy, plus three for prohibition, plus [00:53:00] three for rabidly anti war, yet rabidly supported every specific war that happened.

And I, I feel personally attacked by that last one. We're all like, yeah, I'm against war more broadly, but this war just has to be fought. But so, so their, their flirtation with science led them to even before the wave of Jews who deconverted due to secularization have a huge deconversion wave due to secularization.

When science began to become. Completely incompatible because in these early waves of like the early waves of Darwinism and stuff like that, it wasn't yet completely incompatible. They were trying to find ways to make it more compatible with the older interpretations of the Bible and they just couldn't.

And that ended up pushing away a lot of their kids as well. Because they, they, the education aspect and the search for truth aspect, which was a huge part of their culture ended up mattering more to them than the tradition and the religious aspect. So, thoughts, Simone, because you haven't talked much in this episode.

Simone Collins: Is it so terrible for me to [00:54:00] love the sound of your voice? I am your wife after all. And there's not much for you to say.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I, I, and I've always found it so absolutely bizarre, this idea that Yankee culture came from Puritan culture.

When. Part of it kind of did, I guess I would say. There are pockets of the old Puritan culture still in New England, and I think you see this in things like the Free State Movement. But definitely not in the governments we have in places like Massachusetts and stuff like that, which are really heavily Catholic influenced.

And even the Free State Movement is still, like, you know, the state is still heavily sort of catholic descendant influenced. Oh, also we can talk about why the Catholics didn't end up moving to the backwoods areas because I can also

Simone Collins: just add just as a general to add context. I'll be in seed was written to talk about how for foundational waves of immigration from England to the United States had.

A still lasting impact on our country and its culture. And I think what drove the creation of the book [00:55:00] American nations was that it's not enough to say that just four groups had this impact. And I think the broader point that you're making here is that pretty much every cultural group. that spends a non trivial amount of time in an area with a certain critical mass, is going to have a permanent and lasting effect on the culture and governance.

I wouldn't

Malcolm Collins: agree with that at all. No, really? Okay. No, I, I'm arguing that some specific cultures had a huge lasting impact. For example, the Asian immigration ways really didn't impact culture that much. Anywhere that they landed, they, they didn't integrate with the mainstream society as much and as such, their culture didn't really change the cultural tones of those areas.

So no, and I wouldn't argue that at all. I'm just arguing I said critical

Simone Collins: mass. I didn't say all of them.

Malcolm Collins: Well, no, but it's not based on numbers. It's based on the time of, of period they came there, what organizations they were interacting with. Like the key reason why the Catholics ended up affecting the regions they [00:56:00] were in so much.

So much was their propensity towards engaging with local bureaucracies. And that is why they ended up affecting things so heavily,

Simone Collins: way more heavily. We're looking at people building their intergenerationally durable cultures, and they want to build one that as humans go off planet, form new colonies on new planets and on spaceships, they want to be the ones that actually set the tone.

What should they be designing or what should they be looking at? Basically, you're saying you should be there. at the foundation, at the creation of governance structures, what other factors make a culture have this impact?

Malcolm Collins: Why? And this is actually a core thing. Why did the Catholics wipe out the Puritans, but they didn't wipe out the backwoods people in terms of their cultural footprint?

And the answer is because the backwoods people were in regions, the Catholics could not safely live. So the, the Puritans, you know, once you would clear it, all the stones off these initial fields that were hard to work and everything like that and [00:57:00] turn these areas into prosperous areas was big local governments and everything like that.

And the Catholic immigration waves came in they had a, and they were really good at bureaucracies that we talked about in our other video on this. They really integrated with the local bureaucracy. They had an easy time like settling and not moving into these areas. If you told them to move to these backwood areas they'd be like, what do you mean we're like the, the, the Indian, you know, clan people war is going on.

Why would I move there? That's incredibly dangerous. I'm not going to put my family at that kind of risk. These, the, the, the reason why they didn't move into these areas was because they were incredibly dangerous to live in. And that is something that helps preserve your culture. What fundamentally protected their culture, while all of the three other founding cultures, the Cavaliers, the Quakers, and the Puritans, all died out, is because they settled in regions that nobody else wanted to be in.

And because of that they never got wiped out. And this is what I would take away from the Backwoods [00:58:00] people. There is a huge cultural value In attempting to settle cultural niches where other people don't want to live, or people without your value system are going to not want to live. You know, for them, it was in part because they were settling on poorer land, but it was in part they, because they were settling on, they themselves created the hazard of those regions.

It was incredibly dangerous to move to those regions if you weren't from one of their cultures. And even if you were from one of their cultures, it was kind of dangerous to live in their regions. That was part of their culture.

I've tried to keep this PG. , mostly, , but when I say dangerous, you shouldn't misunderstand this as. Random violence. , for example, if you move to one of these regions and you had. A daughter and you could not protect your homestead. , Declan's around would just come and take her. That was a common thing that happened in regions. , and if you couldn't support a blood feud to get her [00:59:00] back, then you couldn't really exercise your rights. So we are talking about a form of violence. And, clan mentality. That goes beyond what you might be thinking If your reference point is modern day gang warfare, instead of.

Oh, the neighbors over there. Have a nice property. Should we take it? Well, they're newcomers. If they don't have any friends in the region and their property, isn't really heavily defended. So yeah, we can probably kill them., that mentality, very, very Savage. , and I, I also say this because people are like, oh, Malcolm, you're so biased against groups that you aren't descended from. So I need to make sure to present my own group. As honestly as possible. , because that was very different from the other American groups.

Malcolm Collins: but also this is the final thought I wanted to have before we wrap things up here is I think people when they see you and I raising our kids as, as, as most people who really came from these backwoods, you know, you came from like old woodland sheriff family, [01:00:00] basically.

You know, Did they expect our kids, like this large family we're having, to be like these large Mormon families? Or something like that. You know, they see all these orderly little kids line up. And that's not what they're going to see. Like if you saw a video of our kids in our house, as you've put it, like the closest thing, because a lot of a person's disposition is heritable.

I'm going to play a quick diatribe by Octavian , it's pretty obvious he didn't pick these ideas up from anything that Simone and I are saying And I think it's also pretty obvious that he didn't pick up these ideas from children's media.. So this is probably just a baked in genetic code. That's within both of us that sort of playing out on loop. At his young age.

Let the lobsters go Octavian. What just happened Octavian? Did you see them swim away? Yeah. You see, now they're all going home to their families. I hope I can catch all the families in those buckets. I love you. I just want the lobsters to die and the families too. [01:01:00] Wait, you want the lobsters and their families to die? You see? Yeah. Wait, so you let them go so that they could go to their families and then we could find their families to catch them?

Yeah. Okay? Let's get all, let's get all the lobsters to dry

oh, that's how you feel? Sometimes, if you're a lot bigger than something, it doesn't matter that it hurt you. You just have to say it's not as smart as you, so it's okay.

And then what are you going to do if you catch the family and the kids?

And then, and then they're friends too? Yeah. I just, I just want to have fun. Well, if I don't, I'm going to destroy all the lobsters. Not fish. I'm going to die to lobsters. Oh, so you don't want to hurt the fish? [01:02:00] No. I'm not going to let them do that. I don't hate fish. Has a lobster ever hurt you? Yes. I don't think so.

No? Nope? A lobster hurt an A2108. Oh, giving me some timelines here. I was going by myself. With, with your car. I just So you were driving my car one day, and a lobster attacked you. Yeah. And, uh, it hurt me when I was using the phone. I called the computer, but they didn't know I was using the phone. And then I did knock out a herd.

By lobsters. And then I decided to kill two lobsters. A pangow! Wait, what kills lobsters? Pangow! It kills lobsters.

This is actually a really fascinating diatribe to sort of break down because I think it gives a good eye into the way [01:03:00] these types of people thought about things. If you note, he divides the world into things that might hurt him in things that might not hurt him. Fish are in the category that won't hurt him.

Lobsters are in the category that might hurt him. He hates the things that might hurt him and they must die and their kids must die. And their families and friends must die. Okay. And then also when I try to be like, well, but I don't think any of them have hurt use specifically. He fabricates evidence.

Obviously he wasn't driving my car by himself. So I'm pretty sure it lobster did not attack him while he was in the car. , driving it by himself without me there. , and , I think that this is probably fairly common in the Backwood regions. At these times, they categorize different groups.

They were interacting with as the type of people that might hurt them and the type of people that might not hurt them and their good guy that they might not hurt them. And they must kill them. But there everyone they've ever met, if they're the type of person who might hurt them.

Malcolm Collins: So in part, this is just a heritable part of our kids, but in part it's because of how [01:04:00] we raise our kids. The way that these people historically raise their kids in the way that I was taught to raise my kids is our goal is to stoke the fire of ambition in life. Within them as much as possible you know, teach them about honor.

You know, you, you, you see this in the song. He's he's mine which I'll play some clips up here,

 He had them by the collar, said he caught them shootin beer bottles down in a holler And I said, is that right? He said, they won't speak when spoken to. And I said, He's mine,

Malcolm Collins: but in it he's, he comes from this cultural group as well as the country song where he's proud of his kid for violating rules. And pushing boundaries. The kid still gets punished, right? Like the kid gets taught, you know, you're shooting bottles down in a hauler and then he brings over and he's like, he's mine.

Like, he's so proud that his kid was the one who broke the rules. It doesn't mean the kid doesn't get punished. Our kids still get punished, but we're proud of them for breaking rules. And that's part of why we do the punishment in the way we do. Right. And you know, later in the song, the reason why it's showing why do you have this?

[01:05:00] When he whooped up on that boy Way bigger for taking that cheap shot On their little Kicker and they threw him out. You should have heard me shout.

I yelled, he's

I also knew that this is where this cultural group is quite different than like say the Andrew take cultural group. Because something that was always made very clear to me growing up and is repeated in this song. Is the honor comes from the fact that he is both standing up to the system, but also challenging and winning against somebody who is larger and stronger than he is that there isn't any honor in just being stronger than someone and beating up or fighting somebody who is weaker than you

the second point is the song also here in the next line, I'm going to show makes a point of why do you do this? Why do you encourage rebellion even when it's against you? And it's because you can't turn rebellion on and off. If you have this rebellious stand up to authority mindset. You need to always encourage it.

You can't hope that the kids just able to [01:06:00] turn it on and off whenever they feel like it. You can't turn it off like electricity.

Malcolm Collins: Because then when the authority and everyone else is saying you shouldn't do something and you know, a big kid's picking on a little kid, you know, he's going to be the first to stand up for that little kid because he understands like this cultural consequentialism. And I've actually seen this from you, Simone, and a few things you do in terms of raising our kids.

Recently our kids told stole and your lesson to him was He got punished because he got caught and you made that very clear to him.

Or instance of this happening recently was she told Octavian to stay in bed. Or he wouldn't get, I don't know, some treat or something like that. And then she could see on the cameras that he was running all around, but when she came downstairs, he was back in bed and he asked her Ms. JVs. He's like, I've been staying in bed, right.

You didn't see me out of bed and she's like, no, I didn't see out of bed. So she gave him the treat. As she said me, if he grows up thinking that people don't lie in society, doesn't lie. , and that's not the way that he relates to the world. When, when they think [01:07:00] they can get away with it, he's going to get absolutely gooned on by society.

, a actually we have some friends who have this rule of never, ever lying to their children and she's like, oh my God, those kids are gonna end up. Being so taken advantage of when they hit the real world. But this isn't necessarily true, it is a cultural hypothesis. And this is the thing about the way different cultures relate to their kids. She would see. Learning to never ever deceive authority or learning that authority will never deceive.

You ends up putting the kid in a weaker position.

Whereas other people are like, no, the relationship between a kid and their parents are sacred and they don't understand that this is a cultural take, not an absolute is take.

Malcolm Collins: That is such a backwards, like ethical style for a kid. It, it, or my mom, you know, when I told on a kid at school and she goes, you know, why, why'd you do that?

Like, that's what a pussy would do. I was like, well, the kid was, you know, picking on another kid. And she goes, that's what your fists are for. Like I'm supposed to, I was like, well, I'll get in trouble. And she'd be like, good. Like, that's a sign of honor. Or what was another case? Well, so our kids will get in [01:08:00] fights over toys.

And Simone will go up to them and, and, and tell the big one, you need to wait until he gets bored of the toy and then snatch it from him and put it somewhere where he can't see it. You have to be sneaky. I said, hey, it's good. And he goes, oh. He's like, I want the thing that my little brother has. And Simone's like, what do you need to be?

And he goes, oh, I need to be sneaky. And so then he'll like go get another toy and like pretend. Sneaky and smart, he says. It's so sweet. And then the kid and

Simone Collins: then the younger sibling will get tired of playing with the toy, discard it somewhere and Octavian will come up to me with that toy and be like, can you put this in my bed for me?

Which is, but

Malcolm Collins: yeah, but not only that. So the, so you've got these like Mormon families where all these kids like follow the rules and everything like that. And then this one depiction of a Mormon family, I think is much more similar to like my childhood and much more similar to this back country style, which is a one from stranger things.

And I'm going to see if I can, I can find this where it's just like a complete loud house and be able to see my kids in the video. They know that like. Recreationally, he'll, like, climb behind me here and start kicking me in the face [01:09:00] or try to climb on top of me while I'm doing something and punch at me or, and their favorite thing is being, like, punched and thrown,

Dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum

Malcolm Collins: and this is also why, like, I don't, like, I thought the bot thing was so weird because I'm like, I hurt my kid.

So much more than that in things that are recreational for them in terms of like kid roughhousing.

Simone Collins: You don't hurt, you don't injure them. You just rough house with them.

Malcolm Collins: Well, yeah, I mean, but we do a lot of like punching and stuff. Yeah, there's a

Simone Collins: lot more rough and tumble going on in terms of fun, but that's, I mean, that is how pain works, right?

You know, if you're being whipped by, [01:10:00] a school teacher, none, and you're not very thrilled about it. And then yet, then you're being whipped by a partner and like a BDSM scenario, the same exact impact on your body using the same exact tool can feel very different depending on the context. So,

Malcolm Collins: well, it's, it's also a context of, and this is another interesting thing that we do as parenting, which I think is really different from the other influencer families.

Is, is we have like strict rules against ever punishing our kids for being too high energy or too happy. And I think that a, a lot of parents, like they can be like, I don't do that. But think about it. I've seen a lot of parents do this. A kid's just being too loud or running around too much and the parent's like, can you just calm down?

And I remember growing up, like never do that to a kid. Never get a kid to calm down because our goal in parents is to throw wood on that fire of excitement for life and engaging with the world. And, and so while we do punish them, we don't punish them ever for being too excited to engage [01:11:00] with the world.

And so I think it's going to lead to if we ever do get a reality show on us or, you know, Cameras in the house. People are going to be like, wow, these are very different from other influencer kids. These kids are wild actually reminds me I'll post the pictures. Well, I don't know if I can because the kids are in their underwear in the pictures.

But there were these scary pictures last night where Simone said goodnight to the baby in the crib and then through a camera

Simone Collins: that we have mounted there.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, and then what happens, Simone?

Simone Collins: Well, then all the kids get immediately extremely hyper, everyone crawls into our infant's crib, and everyone just, they start grabbing the camera, staring at it, and laughing maniacally, and it, Looks terrifying.

Malcolm Collins: They're all like a huge match in the baby cage

Simone Collins: match. And of course it's a night vision camera. So the way that the contrast comes out, they look fricking terrifying. Like with like black eyed monsters, it's nightmare fuel savages.

Malcolm Collins: This [01:12:00] actually reminds you of this really funny thing of like, Somebody from a non clan based culture entering a clan based culture.

So one of our family members who my kids aren't related to because it's, it's, it's through a marriage is a bit older than them, like four years, five years older than them. And was attempting to sort of watch over them during parts of the family reunion. And the, the kids and he's, he's not from one of these clan based cultures.

He's, he's actually from a Catholic. family, historically. And the kids just absolutely gooned on him. I felt so bad for the kid because this little like five and four year old were picking on him relentlessly. And in the way a five or four year old would like, you know, he'd be walking towards it, like jump him from behind and knock him over and then start jumping on him.

Or he was supposed to like watch them and he'd like. run after one and then the other one would run away and then he'd get exhausted and so they just try to like tackle him down and because there's two [01:13:00] of them they could get away with it and I just he was so beleaguered after this because I think that he was just like just just follow the rules guys don't run away guys please stop oh no And I was like, Oh God, but you know, I'm proud of them for their energy and like, not, not ever letting up about anything.

They weren't like genuinely mean. Like I think he had, he was sort of at his wits end, but I don't think he felt like genuinely picked on, picked on, but it was very clearly like a cultural clash in a way that You know, it's him versus a little clan of, of children. And one was clearly just having fun.

Toying was the person who was supposed to be watching over them. And I felt just so bad. But I also was like, I'm glad that my kids have so much fighting spirit to them. Can't keep them

Simone Collins: down.

Malcolm Collins: Any other anecdotes from our parent raising that you wanted to share? [01:14:00]

Simone Collins: Well, we were just discussing last night, another backcountry tradition is they sort of coined the term little s***s for children.

I remember growing up in the Bay Area, hearing that phrase or term and thinking, how could you call a child a little s**t? And then I met our children like, Oh my

Malcolm Collins: God, that's what my parents called me growing up with. Yeah. Yeah, it is a

Simone Collins: technical term. They are, they are so little s***s. But not all children are little s**t.

Oh my God, especially

Malcolm Collins: the littlest one. She now that she's developing a personality absolutely loves. He was people. She loves to

Simone Collins: make eye contact while openly defying you. So if you say something like, please don't drop your food on the floor, she'll pick up the messiest group of food. She possibly can smile and just throw it onto the floor.

Perfect eye contact and I think she's probably on the spectrum. She doesn't usually make eye contact. She just makes it when she really wants to [01:15:00] piss you off. She

Malcolm Collins: wants to watch you get angry at something she's doing. I love thinking about we have that Jordan Peterson parenting video where like, you know, the way he did he parents will write it wouldn't work with our kids.

I'll tell you that like this whole I'll just sit in the room with the kid until they break their

Simone Collins: spirit. Yeah. I'm

Malcolm Collins: like, okay, one, my kids would take that as a personal challenge. And two, what are they going to do? They're going to like grab the spaghetti, put it on their head or like toss it at you.

Like there, there, there's always a way to have creative opposition to any rule. People can be like, well, I just sit there and then make them do it again. And there's a point where like, they know that they've caused more pain for you than you've caused for them. And then they're like, fine. Okay. I won this dominance battle.

I'm out. But like you keep what you don't want to create those situations with kids of this cultural background of, I will out willpower you. That's not going to end. Well, it's just no God. No. [01:16:00] Yeah, you've just got to teach them a good enough honor code and good enough rules before they have the physical will to totally resist you.

That's basically the timeline you're working with. I actually remember this because I think that's

Simone Collins: the difference also between. Being consequentialist versus deontological, we want our children to come to their own conclusions on what's right, even if it's not exactly what we would have thought to be correct.

We want them to make that on judgment for themselves, and we want them to do what's right, not things the way that we want them to be, whereas I think a lot of parents don't really care that their children develop their own internal morality or find make their own decisions. They just want them to follow specific rules and behave in certain ways.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, you're absolutely right about that. Yeah. It's not about the end state. It's about the Well, and when you see a lot of parents, I'd say a lot of cultures and it is right for those cultures to act in a way that is in alignment with their cultural values. I mean, keep in mind, they co evolved with a set of cultural values.

[01:17:00] They're going to behaviorally and their kids behaviorally are going to relate to punishment techniques and everything like that. Different from other kids. Like, I don't know if you're Normal non backwards. Children's are genuinely as rowdy as our kids are. I mean, probably our cultural practices help increase that I mentioned in another episode, which is probably worth mentioning briefly here is the incident of my mom where I got in trouble with one of the teachers and she's like, well, I mean, Did you, were you doing what you thought was right?

And I was like, yeah. And she goes, well, you know, in the adult world, everybody thinks teachers are like underpaid losers, so don't worry about it. She's an elementary school teacher. Just do what you think is right yourself. But again, that's that very honor code based culture. Like do what you believe is right.

Ignore the teachers. Which was yeah, definitely part of that backwards upbringing. And, and that had soaked into this puritan culture, which ended up with this. You know, complete Puritan backwoods mix of a culture.

I guess I didn't mention this explicitly here, but I thought I [01:18:00] had the core, core reason, the Backwoods Puritan mix of a culture survived. Was that it changed its ethical system Rez in the Puritan ethical system, everything was a sin. And you were supposed to avoid basically everything in the Backwoods ethical system. Everything was a sin. And you didn't really put thins within a hierarchy.

It was just whatever you needed to do to achieve your consequentialist outcome, where the consequentialist outcome was, what you thought God's broader vision was for you or broader goals for you where. , and it was just much easier to follow this. Well, honestly, more consequentialist and less deontological ethical system.

Malcolm Collins: Absolutely love you, Simone. I had a joy talking to you today. I'm sorry I kept you so long.

And yeah, I'll go get the kids.

Simone Collins: I love you, Malcolm.

Malcolm Collins: I love you too. I really do.

Simone Collins: I know you do. You show it every single day. You're just the best. And then did [01:19:00] you get the chickens?

Yeah, I got the chickens. I handled the professor. I've got it all sorted. You handle

Malcolm Collins: just everything. I'll never get over this. Oh, you always tell the reporters I handle so much.

Simone Collins: You do. You are

Malcolm Collins: the star. Who took

Simone Collins: Toasty to get his blood work today, Malcolm?

Malcolm Collins: Oh, yeah, but, you know. Who woke up and dressed the kids today,

Simone Collins: Malcolm?

Malcolm Collins: I forgot about those things. I guess I never log things in my ledger if I'm doing them. I only like, mentally log things. I keep a

Simone Collins: ledger, and I keep it 50 50.

Malcolm Collins: You don't keep it 50 50. You do everything. I see it. Don't worry. Don't worry. You are the absolute best wife anyone could want. Actually, I wonder, and this is something that we should meditate on, I kind of want to think about this, this backward culture, when I think about it in regards to the way our kids act and the way we parent, that's one thing, it's really interesting, but also in the way that our relationship is structured and like our love for each other works

Simone Collins: is

Malcolm Collins: very different, like it's based on mutual respect rather than like a set of rules about our duties.

Simone Collins: [01:20:00] Consequentialist and not gentological.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, yeah, true. Because yeah, damn, do I respect you Simone and everything you do. You are such a workhorse

Simone Collins: because we're fighting for the same thing and not just tallying things up.

Malcolm Collins: , did you steal something? This, when you, when we were on vacation, did you steal something?

Octavian: No.

Malcolm Collins: But you did do it, and you got caught doing it.

Octavian: Huh. Well, police did not see me. Huh.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, the police didn't see you, but now you're on camera. So the police know that you stole something.

Well, they should,,

Octavian: but

Malcolm Collins: the police are going to come arrest you now. No. Well, how do you explain to them? Why did you, why did you break the rules?

Octavian: What's your idea? If I have somebody sunglasses [01:21:00] that the, then the police will not know I am me. Okay. How

Malcolm Collins: about this? You can wear daddy's glasses. Okay, do you think you're safe now? Are you safe from the police?

Octavian: Yeah. They're

Malcolm Collins: not gonna catch you? So are

Octavian: I need this to be clean, okay? Daddy

Malcolm Collins: doesn't know how to clean. Mommy mostly cleans.

Octavian: This to Mommy while I talk to the police? What are you going

Malcolm Collins: to tell the police when they ask, why did you steal?

Okay, you can do this by yourself? Okay.

Octavian: At ceiling

so that ceiling is un applicable to me to not get under rest because I just don't wanna be rest because I just, so to not get under arrest. I just take something from the people and I put it on and then [01:22:00] you will not know I cannot get under arrest. So you cannot know I cannot get under arrest because that's a sticky thing.

I'm just trying to run away. It's so sticky so you can't I'm just so sick, you guys. And you know what happens next? You are gonna p And you know what happens if you are arrest me? I'm gonna arrest you, boys. So that is being not nice. Well, if you see a bad guy at someone's home, you do not have stripes like a bad guy, so I cannot be arrested.

And that is a headlock. [01:23:00] So, dad, the same way broadcast. I'm broadcasting, you are, I don't have stripes like the bad guy. So, I'm saying, oh, if you cause the stripes, Like a bad guy, which breaks on, and that's out of stew, you gotta rest up, okay? Oh, if you don't, you are getting under arrest, please.

And that is out. The talking is out. Oh, just one thing I'm gonna tell you. I miss bad guys. A red, bad guy that do bad things, okay? Not kids that have stripes like it. Bad guy.

 Byebye police

What would you do with the bad people when you take over? Um, bop them. You bop them? Yeah. Um, would you, how, uh, [01:24:00] Gum. Yeah. Hey, you. I want it. I put this on. No, no, no, no. Gum, gum. Um, yeah. So you like being alive? What about the anti natalists who think you never should have been born? I mean, they, they, Torsten, there's people who say that you shouldn't exist.

Are they bad people? You're going to bump them? Oh, well, I don't know if that's legal, but when you're, when you're emperor, you can make it legal. Are you having fun with the microphone?

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