How Online Echo Chambers Can Turn into Cults & How to Protect Kids

In this thought-provoking episode, Malcolm and Simone Collins dive deep into the dangers of online echo chambers and how they can morph into cult-like environments. They explore the consequences of growing up in a secular society without strong moral frameworks and discuss how this leaves young people vulnerable to being sucked into radical online communities. Malcolm and Simone also examine the role of religion in providing moral guidance and the challenges of raising children with strong values in today's digital age. Join them as they share insights on protecting kids from internet radicalization and the importance of instilling a robust moral compass.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] just fascinating to watch cults organically form within online spaces, or if you want to use a word other than cults self replicating mimetic clusters was negative psychological effects. When the deconvert from religious systems, they don't realize that all they did was stop believing in God, but they

Simone Collins: were still raised with those values. So they assume that what their, their morality is, is. just their morality when in fact they spent their entire lives being raised either within their church community or in a community very colored by their church community.

And then they don't realize that if they raise their children in an absence of that, they assume that they're just going to come to the same conclusions that they have, but no, they're not being raised in that religious way.

Malcolm Collins: This is a natural human inclination to develop some model that they personally aspire to. And when you don't have something like a religious framework that has a level of authority for you, you can [00:01:00] begin. I thinking, okay, well then who am I? And if you don't know who you are, then you're like the most important part of me is a man or a woman

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone. I am so excited about our episode today.

This is a really interesting one because recently I have been going down a rabbit hole of the different ways people go crazy on the internet.

Simone Collins: It's so depressing. It's so depressing. I can't, how can you manage this?

Malcolm Collins: Oh, well, you know, I grew up loving cults, right? The, the, and it was something that I studied in, in like a lot of detail.

I was very interested in how groups of people could come to believe things about the world that obviously weren't true, but that these things could have huge sort of psychological effects on them. Huge physiological effects on them because you know, , the power of suggestion is incredibly strong and as I've gotten older, I have become less interested in, Intentionally created malevolent [00:02:00] cults because, you know, you can learn a lot about those and they're interesting, but more related in if all of these techniques can be utilized by a specific individual with malevolent or even positive means.

Like, I tried to take some of these techniques and use them on myself to. Actually improve mental health like if they can be used to control an individual, then if you have the full rule book in front of you, can you use them to control yourself to an extent? Yeah. And can these techniques then accidentally get picked up by mimetic clusters and create sort of organically formed.

Cults, and this is something we've talked about in a few of our episodes, like, you know, and psychology become a cult has the in which we argue that the modern practice of psychology today is actually more similar in structure to. What people called Scientology in the eighties and what called clinical psychology [00:03:00] in the eighties techniques and stuff like that.

And I don't think there was any malevolent intent. I think that just techniques that were did a better job building dependency ended up competing. The ones that didn't, or was in, like, is a trans movement, hiding a call, you know, that episode where we talk about that, which is to say that if you create a, a group of people where was in large portions of society, you cannot.

in any way question them. Then it creates, and this is also, I think, what happened with psychology. Like it was like, Oh, how dare you question that person for seeing a psychologist because you created this group that you couldn't question. Just from the medically speaking, it's very likely that toxic memes that build dependency will begin to cluster and create sort of organically formed cults within these contexts.

Well, this all gets very interesting. So you're like, why do I find it fascinating? Why do I study these people who have lost themselves? Yeah.

Simone Collins: Despite how depressing and one is,

Malcolm Collins: it just fascinating to watch cults organically form within online spaces, or if you want to use a word other than [00:04:00] cults self replicating mimetic clusters was negative psychological effects.

Oh, so that's why they

Simone Collins: call them cults.

Malcolm Collins: Right. Yeah. Oh, actually. Yeah. Okay. Okay. And to think about it from a utility perspective in regards to our kids, how do we protect our kids from the internet driving them crazy?

Simone Collins: Yes. And this becomes, I just don't want them on really.

Malcolm Collins: So, so the first thing I want to note here is it's something that I've been reflecting on a lot recently is Historically, if you are a religious person, like, like the, the lowest IQ, or at least what I would have thought historically, like the lowest IQ religious attack on Atheist communities was if you don't have God, then you don't have morality.

Right? And then the atheist community would flip back and say, Oh, well, if you're only doing what's right, like if you're not out there murdering [00:05:00] people just because you're afraid of punishments after death or for rewards after death, then you don't actually have morality at all. Then I have meaningful morality because I'm not killing people because I'm a good person, right?

You. And this sounded really well and good, I think, for the first generation of atheists. The problem is the society is becoming so secular now that I think what I'm beginning to see is a lot of even growing up secular. You know, I was raised atheist in an atheist family. Growing up secular I didn't fully appreciate how many of the moral subsets I assumed were just sort of convergent and obvious moral systems are not convergent and obvious moral systems.

Simone Collins: Well, but here's the thing is, I think if they were, we would not need culture and religion. If all that stuff came naturally to us, we wouldn't need this additional software running on top of our hardware, as you point out in the pragmatist guide to [00:06:00] crafting religion.

Malcolm Collins: So yeah, so there's two illusions which create the belief that they are convergent and obvious systems.

One is, is that they are, there are convergent. Cultural strategies that lead to success when you're talking about competition between communities. That could sound very complicated, but I'll expand on this concept a bit.

If you look at the successful cultural slash religious books, we would call the pragmatist kind of crafting religion cultivars. These are sort of mimetic clusters, which positively augment the fitness of the individuals who hold them. I eat a number of surviving offspring that they have. And that that is how they compete with other clusters.

And that they have outcompeted other clusters. There's obviously going to be some level of convergent evolution among those, meaning that those clusters that have done well, look similar. Cross culturally, you know, whether or not you're talking about Islam or Christianity or Buddhism or you know, Confucianism, like you'll see some [00:07:00] level of convergence across these.

And it's because similar moral frameworks tend to out compete the moral frameworks of their neighbors in terms of the individuals that hold them. However, this doesn't actually tell us anything about a true Human convergent set of morality. If you look at the diversity of religious practices, like if you study religious practices in an anthropological context, i.

e. the religious practices that exist Among uncontacted tribes or among human groups that like just show what humans come to when humans are stranded on an island and coming up with a moral and religious system on their own. Or early, you know, there was huge diversity of these in Africa, huge diversity or some diversity in India.

And we can study these early contact writings and see what this diversity actually looked like, or, or again, look at the uncontacted people today. You do not see this common morality. If someone's not in your group, it's typically okay to kill them. You know, infanticide is really common. Grape is really common.

A lot of things that we just think [00:08:00] of like, Oh, this is like normal human morality. You don't see in those. And in fact, you can even see remnants of this in early biblical scripture before it got a chance to reach this convergent state. Where you will see things like claims of infanticide being a good thing.

Like when you conquer a settlement, you know, smash the babies on rocks. Right? Like, this is something that we see captured like this early, almost sort of like pre Christian mindset. A pre Christian, pre Judeo, pre, pre Abrahamic mindset captured in very early Abrahamic texts that may have been, you know, pollution from nearby cultural groups, or it may have even been a practice in the group that led to it.

And I actually would argue that it is, because this form of infanticide is pretty common in things like gorillas which we, you know, may be related to, and in chimpanzees, after they kill the males in a tribe and take over a group of women to get them ovulating again, they'll kill the infants, so there's probably some sort of, like Pre coded genetic reason for doing this.

The point I'm making here [00:09:00] is that just because a lot of the successful cultures do something doesn't mean that all humans who like sit down and think about it are going to come to that same conclusion. The, the second issue is, is that the further we got from religious society, what, what I think we're realizing.

And so when you talk to me about this, was that a lot of people. When the deconvert from religious systems, they don't realize that all they did was stop believing in God, but they

Simone Collins: were still raised with those values. So they assume that what their, their morality is, is. just their morality when in fact they spent their entire lives being raised either within their church community or in a community very colored by their church community.

And then they don't realize that if they raise their children in an absence of that, they assume that they're just going to come to the same conclusions that they have, but no, they're not being raised in that religious way.

Malcolm Collins: Not at all. Like a great example of this is, is the turn the other cheek mentality from Christian communities.

This is specifically something that I think It was one of the early teachings that philosophically [00:10:00] helped Christianity outcompete some of its competitors at the time, and that is not found in many other traditions or many non convergent traditions. So, if you go in an anthropological context, and you're looking at, like, island tribes and stuff like that.

This idea of turn the other cheek is not a natural human idea. It is, it is actually very rare that it appears, but when it does appear in the communities that appears within tend to outcompete the communities that don't.

Simone Collins: Wait, why does, why, wait, hold on, why do you think turning the other cheek is more evolutionarily

Malcolm Collins: competitive?

Because it lowers unnecessary conflict between communities.

Simone Collins: Oh yes, you're not getting these blood flutes, blood flutes, blood feuds and wars that can kill a lot of people in the end. And

Malcolm Collins: yeah, when you talk about this, blood feuds are uniquely uncommon in all of the Christian descendant communities. Find blood feuds in most other cultures in the world.

Which is, which is, it shows that it is effective at achieving like what the cultural technology is meant to do.

Simone Collins: How interesting. [00:11:00] Okay.

Malcolm Collins: So we're continuing to go down just the framing rabbit hole. And we're already 11 minutes in. I gotta get out of just framing here. But I'm framing that we are now seeing in a place where I've been just having a blast learning about this, is a YouTuber called Turkey Tom who goes into sort of how various people interact Has sort of been driven crazy by the internet.

I mean, he would see it as just how have these people gone crazy, but he's doing it by documenting from often when they started as sort of sane, more normal internet people, the communities they were engaging with and how those communities sort of broke them. And what's really interesting was people for me is looking at like, what's their objective.

Purpose or their objective value system. And, and this we call an intrinsic, an objective function in the book, the pragmatist guide to life which is to say, what is like the core intrinsic good that you are searching for in life? Like what's the thing that's driving your decisions in life? [00:12:00] And Within religious systems, these are often spelled out pretty strongly.

When people first leave religious systems, within like gen one of leaving the religious system, and within many smooth brains, but, but, but once you still sort of like broad utilitarianism works here. Now people like just distribute happiness at a, a, a, it's sort of as much as you can reduce suffering as much as you can on like a societal basis.

The reason why I think that this ends up getting elevated in this sort of. first post system. It's a very easy to understand moral framework, even if it's not a very logical moral framework. Like there isn't a good reason for it. The things that make us happy and make us feel bad, if you're approaching it from a secular mindset, are just the things that our ancestors who experienced had more surviving offspring.

So they're not like

Simone Collins: And also in the absence of abundance. So that still didn't work.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And when they get elevated in societies where, you If on, if the average person on society is a hedonist and you needed to sort of democratize hedonism, where hedonism is like their core, most animal [00:13:00] level coding, I just do things that make me happy when I say happy.

I don't mean necessarily pleasure. I mean, that fulfill the broad range of positive emotional subsets that humans can experience. The society is going to agree on sort of a detente. This will be our moral framework to fit this most animalistic human individual moral framework. Like, what do I want for my life?

I just want to feel good. And in one of the Turkey Tom videos, you can see an individual who completely succumbs to hedonism. As a moral framework and this is on the Clown Gooning or something one, just type in like Clown Gooning, Turkey Tom, and it'll come up. And it shows how when you strive primarily for personal hedonism, which is what ended up happening to this generation, because I think a generation of, Utilitarians raises a generation of hedonists.

Simone Collins: The botched, ruined people.

Malcolm Collins: Well, because utilitarianism is, is bad at [00:14:00] conveying why you should sacrifice to people outside of people with like intense self control. And since a lot of people don't have that and they really are just doing what they're doing, or at least a good chunk of society is just doing what they're doing out of fear of some sort of like, reparations in the afterlife or something like that.

Then yeah because I think the thing I'd say is, you know how dumb the average person is? Do you know how little self control the average person has? Well, 50 percent have less self control and less intelligence than that. So you've got to keep in mind at a society level when you move away from these things, what's going to be the consequences.

And for this individual you know, it's, it's all sorts of PDA file stuff. It's all sorts of just, and, and I think, In a quest for hedonism, something that people missed in a quest for hedonism is there's two other factors to hedonism that are outside of just I want to feel, by the way, do you have any thoughts here before I go further?

Simone Collins: No, no, go ahead. I agree with what you're saying.

Malcolm Collins: There's two other core factors to hedonism outside of just like, I want to feel good like, like emotional context that really drive [00:15:00] human behavioral patterns. The first is. Self narrative. This is the narrative you craft about who you are as a person.

And feeling comfortable with this sense of self or identity of self, like self affirmation, I guess I'd call this. And I think that the perversion of the self affirmation narrative is where the gender cults come from. So by this, I would mean some iterations of the trans movement but also things like the Tate, like, like some iterations of like red pillism, you know, I don't want to say that all like Tate followers fall into this.

There's definitely different factions, but there's some faction that is just like trying to masculine, like, like, like completely embody a masculine archetype, which to me is just as much a, a showcase of like gender dysphoria and uncomfortableness with, with your gender. And a belief that gender alignment is the core moral purpose of an individual's life.

Well, [00:16:00] yeah,

Simone Collins: in other words, they're showing the same level of desperation or fervor with A specific gender archetype signaling that many trans people show, right?

Malcolm Collins: Else, which is more interesting to me which is that yes, but they are placing it on a moral pedestal. It is driving major life decisions for them.

I E how gender ideal and fitting a gender ideal. begins to develop what would in a historic context a morality would fit. Like when I am judging between like, should I do X or should I do Y in a historic context, you would go to your religion or some sort of philosophically derived moral framework. I

Simone Collins: mean, here's how you describe it in the pragmatist guide to life.

Once you establish your objective function, the thing or things that you want to maximize in your life. This is different. Yeah, continue. Then your responsibility is to build a, a model [00:17:00] of yourself that maximizes those things. And I think people subtly do that when they are religious and when they have moral frameworks because they ask things like, what would Jesus do?

Or what would a good Christian do in this situation? And it does influence. But when your internal model is not of a good Christian or some kind of personal personality that would optimize your objective function, the things you want to maximize most in your life, it could just be, I'm a manly man.

And then, yes, like you say, Oh,

Malcolm Collins: what would Jesus do? What would a man do? Or what would a

Simone Collins: woman, how would, how would a really manly man react to this situation? Which I think, I mean, you can see a lot with both genders too,

Malcolm Collins: like a woman. No, no, no, there is a spiral in the woman side of this and we'll do a whole separate video about this where women have started shaming country girls for being like for like building houses and like noodling catfish, which is like catching the catfish with their hands, you know, and being masculine.

And I am not here for that. I am a, I am a [00:18:00] tomboy appreciator. And I, I, that is one thing that is the greatest threat and that we need to talk about this, that the, the tomboy drought that the trans community is causing. You're very concerned about this. I was about tomboys don't take

Simone Collins: away my tomboys, get your hands off my tomboys.

Malcolm Collins: Simone, is the term tomboy or tomgirl? Tomboy. Tomboy? Yeah, okay. Oh, by the way, for people who aren't from the U. S. and may not know this, this is a girl who otherwise has masculine hobbies and doesn't take no, doesn't Wait,

Simone Collins: it is tomboy, right? A tomboy. is a girl or young woman who has masculine traits such as wearing androgynous clothing or participating in activities typically associated with boys or men. Tomboys may also enjoy things some people think are more suited to boys such as playing physical sports. God forbid women play physical sports.

But anyway,

Malcolm Collins: the point I was making here is that This is a natural human inclination to develop some model that they personally [00:19:00] aspire to. And when you don't have something like a religious framework that has a level of authority for you, you can begin. I thinking, okay, well then who am I? And if you don't know who you are, then you're like the most important part of me is a man or a woman, or it could be, I kind of identify with foxes.

I guess I'm a fox now. Well,

Simone Collins: and you, you weren't against this in the pragmatist guide to life. I don't know if you remember, but you argue that the worst and most dangerous type of, of thing to optimize around objective function, which many people come to by default is an identity. It is a very dangerous losing game.

So like you said,

Malcolm Collins: and, and, you know, when I'm talking about the failure of like, like falling apart of religious communities, I need to point out, I am not just calling out secular life here. Oh, no, totally. Many individuals who still call themselves Christians. Yeah. They're like, I still believe in God.

But, you know, I just don't go to church anymore. I was watching a video recently, and the most common reason that Christians stop going to church now [00:20:00] if you believe it, is that they moved. It's not that their theology has changed, it's just it became inconvenient. Oh my gosh. These religions evolved as packages, not just, it wasn't just a belief in God in a moral system, it was also going to church and everything like that.

And so when you begin to make these sorts of modifications unintentionally, but because it was what was easy in your religious system and you raise kids without all of the historic, you know, no, no, I do not think the historic traditions on their own can survive, but I think that there's another type of tradition which is the historic traditions are at least stronger than this wishy washy iteration, right?

Where it's like, I still really believe in God. I just don't do all of the other rituals that came along with this and the other things that came along with this. And it's like, well, it turned out that this had a purpose and that's why your kid now identifies as a fox. But no, it matters because you got to ask, why is this happening to young people?

How do you create a system that protects against this? And I want to say here, I have nothing against [00:21:00] furries. As a community, like, if you want to get off on that, if you want to treat this as a hobby, like, that is all well and cool. And I support you, but there is a portion of the community where this has become a moral system and a religion.

Or like a religion, like it, it combines with their. Cosmological view of reality. And to call this anything other than, I guess, a cult, like an organically evolved cult out of people who liked pictures of humans as animals. Yeah. Like what else you call this, right? Like that's what it is. It's a, it's an organically evolved cult, which is fascinating.

So that's one area, but you see this across the board. If you only see this in the left, then you don't see it in the right. You do not see the girls who primarily identify with like trad wives. Like, am I being a good person? How good of a trad wife am I being? Like, that is not a useful moral framework, right?

Like, that has no higher philosophical authority to it nor any sort of old authority to it, and it will lead to toxicity in relationships, even though they are choosing an old model, [00:22:00] or the guys who are like the ultra red pillars who are like, I define myself as male, and I Like my actions and the choices I make and the hobbies I undertake is what are male hobbies, but there's the final one, which is of, of like the core human internal drives, which is another area that can pull our kids off the path.

And this is the most dangerous to children. And the Turkey Tom video that goes into this is on the guy just look up like. Turkey Tom and Ember.

Simone Collins: And just to be clear, Turkey Tom is a YouTuber who covers things like this.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So this, he, he did a video on in the murder spree that this guy ended up going on.

So maybe Turkey Tom, Ember, murder, because he ended up killing three people. And this was an individual who was driven crazy, basically. Because he decided to base his entire moral framework on affirmation. Not ideal. Typically affirmation was an online spaces and stuff like that. And a lot of people can be like, that's a [00:23:00] crazy thing to build your identity around.

It's like, come on, if you can just emulate your teenage self affirmation from the world, especially within online spaces where affirmation. Is intrinsically elevated. So let me explain what I mean by this. Within an online community, the people you hear from more, are intrinsically the people who are affirmed by others more.

Because that's how pretty much all the algorithms work. I mean, it makes

Simone Collins: perfect sense. People tend to be, we, we like AI respond to reinforcement learning. So when you get reinforced for something, obviously you're going to move in that direction.

And that's why when I met you, you found me walking around in red fishnet stockings and weird clothing and acting a certain way, because that's what got the most affirmation.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, whether it was positive or negative, because some people can't easily distinguish

Simone Collins: between the two. Oh, I had no, yeah, I mean, people would never take me [00:24:00] seriously, professionally, dressed the way that I was dressed.

I was dressed like a clown, but I never thought about that, because, as you say, in the absence of having really thought through and owned your values and your purpose in life, you're gonna go by default, and the human mind, is pretty socially sensitive in most cases, at least on average. So, especially

Malcolm Collins: when you're young.

So there's been some studies of teenagers that show things like teenagers have like four or five X's of reaction to like emotional state, like emotional faces in terms of like disgust and stuff like that of their peers. Like if their friends show disgust towards them, they're going to react to that much more intensely than an adult would.

And so when people are building their identities, when people are most common to leave a religion is 15 to 21. This is also when they have this amped up sense of affirmation matters. And we're in an online world today where affirmation literally does matter into how likely you are to hear someone.

So if you throw kids into this environment without a strong counter signal, [00:25:00] No, duh, they're going crazy. Like, no, duh, it's all breaking down. No, duh, mental health is exploding. I might find the clip that I posted in another video where one person was like, Well, mental health is exploding because there's not enough psychologists for people.

And it's like, bro, do you think that, like, people a hundred years ago had psychologists? Like, the psychologists are exploding with the mental health crisis. There is another thing going on here. , so then this brings me to a couple of questions. How do we protect against this? And the first place I look to see how do you protect against something like this is how do people historically protect against this?

And this is where the idea of Jesus is actually a really sophisticated psychological technique in that it is a being which matters more than all other beings you interact with that affirms you. When you live up to a specific moral threshold, but that who still always loves you, no matter what, when you think about it, it's a really [00:26:00] fascinating piece of social technology.

And I point out here that this iteration of Jesus that I'm describing here, while it has been co evolved by many different Christian sects, if you study early Christian writings. This was not the iteration of Jesus discussed in early Christian writings. This is a co evolved way of viewing Jesus that has happened in the past, I want to say 500 years to a thousand years but it's not, this is a, a very It was a technology that was allowed by the concept of Jesus, but was not intrinsic to the early ways that Jesus was

Simone Collins: worshipped.

Yeah, it's not incongruous with anything in the Bible, but it's also not something that was explicitly stated.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, the idea of, like, the personal relationship with Jesus, the idea that he loves you no matter what and that he, Yeah, so it's implied by a few lines that Jesus will always forgive you, but then taking that and turning that into Jesus loves you no matter what and he is just waiting to forgive you and he has this, but then [00:27:00] applying to all of that, this moral framework associated with Jesus, that's an incredibly sophisticated way to prevent a kid from going crazy,

Simone Collins: right?

Because even if the rest of society is rejecting them. If they have a very strong moral framework, religious framework, they know that, well, they're doing what Jesus would have approved of and that Jesus always loves them, but also that they could do certain things to make Jesus love them even more by asking themselves, well, okay, what would Jesus do?

Well, He would definitely approve of it if I did this, because this is what he would do.

Malcolm Collins: Technique, right? Like that's really powerful there. Right. Which is the, what would Jesus do is the, like, what type of person should I strive to be? And then they're like, well, Jesus was a good person who I should aspire to be.

Therefore, what would Jesus do? And I can then act upon that. Like that. Yeah. So

Simone Collins: instead of essentially of creating an internal model, like a character sheet for yourself, that's based on your morals and values and objective function. In this case, people are just creating an [00:28:00] internal model based on an already completely fully formed character.

Which is, I need to

Malcolm Collins: be clear, this is, I'm not saying this stuff isn't in the bible, but I'm saying if you study early Christian communities and early Christian worship, concepts like what would Jesus do is a modern, co evolved perception of religion, of Jesus, that is not an apparent thing from early Christian communities.

Early Christian communities. We're that would actually probably be considered a form of heresy was in most early religious communities for an individual to act as if they could emulate Jesus. It would be seen as demeaning to the idea of Jesus, where it was in a modern context. It's actually a pretty sophisticated.

Psychological technique and other iterations of the Christian tradition, specifically the Orthodox and the Catholic traditions have evolved some other techniques that are I think even advanced upon this which is the concept of the saints. So, you know, I may brag on the concept of saints [00:29:00] sometimes, but you've got to think about the utility of the concept of saints.

How so? is the, the core failure of the, what would Jesus do as the person you can embody of a good life? Like, okay, I want to be like a good person is that Jesus lived in a very specific social context. That was very different from our own. Everybody trying to model themselves after the same person is not super useful when you have a huge diversity of roles in society and ways that a person can be good within society.

Yeah, so you can

Simone Collins: look instead to this female saint who is more like you or this male saint who is more like you or this urban or rural saint or whatever it might be.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, like if you're a doctor, like, oh, go to the doctor saint, right? Like this is a model for what is the way you should self identify, right?

And think about what should, what should he do? And so in a way you can almost think that gender has become a form of sainthood to portions of society right now on both the far left and the far right. Oh,

Simone Collins: right. What would a hyper feminine [00:30:00] female do? Or what would a trad wife do? Or what would a super masculine young man do?

That kind of thing.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, but then you take us in our arrogance, right? Like, we're looking to protect our kids. We do, at least from our perspective, I know how intrinsically rebellious I was as a kid. If I was raised in one of these traditional systems, I would have just rebelled just like my ancestors did.

Not going to work for my kids. I can already see the rebellion in their eyes, you know, that appears that, that, that one. So let's talk about the flaw in all of these old systems to me, at least, is there to me, not morally aligned with a true moral core. They are morally aligned with in aggregate what allowed some cultures to outcompete other cultures which I think is true.

Like, like evolutionary pressure did shape them from my perspective, cultural evolutionary pressure. They are morally aligned with my ancestral traditions, which I appreciate, and we have tried to capture for our kids. But that means that they had the capability of picking up tons of baggage that may not be relevant within [00:31:00] future context.

And a lot of their moral subset either can come across looking like arbitrary rules, or when they don't come across looking like arbitrary rules, they come across as. Too vague, like just be a good person, just be loving and then you get like God is love and all of that mystic nonsense, which is like ultra toxic in terms of like justifying an individual doing whatever they want and self affirmation.

So, I said, well, and people who are familiar with our concept of the future police, like when we tell our kids, like somebody has punished them and we do this sort of permeates their life and we'll talk about this in another video. It's like all the toys they get, all of the punishments they get, we're like, we're asking, why is this happening?

Why are you being punished? And we're like, well, the future police, like, we have to, you know, do what they want, right? So we are constantly framing for them. It is future people that define the morality of their actions, right? Do their actions make the future of society a better place? But what's really interesting [00:32:00] is how this has appeared as they are kids.

Right, because when they are mean to like their sibling, you might say, well, how do you frame that in terms of the future of society is a big place. And we frame that as. They live in a society where most people are just going to let society fall apart. It is their personal responsibility to save the direction our civilization is going.

And as such, they have a unique role to play in human history. Every one of our kids and that when they treat their siblings bad, I say, these are the only people that are really there to support you at the end of the day. You know, family is family, right? And this is something I was growing up being, being taught.

And that every one of you was born for something. Important. So like when you go out there and you impede the development of your, your siblings, not only will this come back to haunt you in the future and be something you regret, but you are impeding the development of this team, which is going to matter so much in human history.

Now, obviously explaining this to an adult, that sounds very complicated, more just to a [00:33:00] kid. It's, you have a very important role to play in history. And we don't, I mean,

Simone Collins: that's, that's the natural conclusion that they'll come to when they think about it more. Really all we're talking about is the future police, but the future police are the descendants of their descendants, you know, thousands of not millions of years in the future.

So they get it and they already care a lot about future generations just because of that, just because of the nature of who these, Arbiters of gift giving and gift taking away are right. But the point is, then the important thing is that good religious concepts are good moral concepts are not like a list of things you have to memorize, like the constitution or the 10 commandments, their seed crystals.

Which okay. So when, when you're making chocolate, for example. And you want to get a good crystalline structure, you take a piece of like, you'll use a certain type of chocolate that has a really great crystalline [00:34:00] structure as your seed crystal. You'll put it in your melted chocolate get it to the right temperature.

And then that seed crystal will help the rest of the chocolate just lock into space. It's not like the, into that same crystalline structure. So it's not as though each piece of chocolate has to be taught how to behave the right way. It is that a concept is so powerful. That it can just help everything else lock into place.

And I think that, for example, what would Jesus do is great for that. And that's what we're trying to riff with, which with the future police. Right.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, yeah. But the problem is that what would Jesus do is then you have to say, well, then what would Jesus do? Right. And there's societal conceptions of Jesus.

There's biblical conceptions of Jesus. And then there's, I think, wishy thinking conceptions of Jesus, i. e. Jesus is love.

Simone Collins: Yeah, yeah, yeah. There are too many people corrupting the concept of Jesus. You can

Malcolm Collins: go to the biblical interpretation, but the problem with the biblical interpretation is it can just become a list of traits, right?

Which Yeah, well,

Simone Collins: and it's hard to even know the context in which he was making his decisions. We're probably [00:35:00] missing a lot in translation.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, a great example of that that I always go to that was really shaking for me is when I went to Israel and I went to see the type of accommodation That Jesus would have been like, like the people lived in around the time of Jesus.

And what all of them looked like was sort of dugouts in sort of the wall of like a hill where it was like a, a single room almost that was a house. And then in the center you would have a wall. And on one side. You would have all of the animals, you know, your chickens, your goats and stuff like that.

And on the other side, you would have the entire family that would sleep. And these were large families, you know, it'd be like 12 people or something like that, all sleeping, basically laid out next to each other, mostly just to stay out of the rain. Like these were not sophisticated dwellings. People do not understand how early this was and how you know, uncivilized sort of the rural areas or the small towns in these regions where Jesus was born were.

And so, you know, if you read it in a modern context, you'll be like, Oh, that's so [00:36:00] horrible. They put him in the manger. They put him with the animals. Like that must have been such a horrible thing to do. Or like they must've had like nowhere else to sleep. But as soon as I saw one of these houses, I was like, oh, of course, that's where you would put travelers, you know, the family is all sleeping on the other side.

You may not want to put them with the animals, but like, are you putting them in the pile of like cousins and everything like that? They're strangers. They could like come up and murder everyone or something like that, right? Like, Maybe not everyone would put them in the animal section, but it certainly wouldn't be an absurd thing to do.

It's the only other part of the house other than the room where people sleep. That's true. And it just recontextualized that, like, I hadn't understood what was happening in that story. Right. Unique condition of poverty, or like a uniquely weird or cruel thing to do. Well, then how

Simone Collins: many other elements of Jesus life are we totally not understanding correctly?

So,

Malcolm Collins: yeah. Anyway so, that [00:37:00] is What I'm thinking of for our kids in terms of like how we create this moral seed for them to fight against what's going on within the online context, but I would encourage other people to come up with other moral seeds or maybe other moral lists or other moral just like be aware.

Because when I see these people who lose everything, what happens is that they, they are growing up in either secular families or families that are like tangentially religious these days.

Simone Collins: And your argument, basically, if I were to sum everything up is, even if you think that you're atheistic, Or whatever it may be.

Super soft cultural framework works one. You may be discounting how morally brainwashed you already are based on an upbringing you brought in which you were non consensually given a religious moral framework without yourself knowing, but also in order to combat this, people have to have a strong internal self model that is optimizing around something other than [00:38:00] a, a, a vein archetype or laziness or just feeling good.

And you, you can't just hope that they're going to build that archetype themselves. They need to have something that gets them there. Is that your, the gist of your argument?

Malcolm Collins: Yes, but the core point I'd like want to end on, because I think this is really, really important. Okay. Is. A lot of people are going out there thinking that if they just raise their kids without a strong cultural framework, whether that's a religious or secular one, like, like they're taking a wishy or washy perspective on religion than their parents did, like God is love or something like that, or a more secular perspective than the past, that their kids will convergently come to the same value systems that they will.

And that their kids childhoods are broadly the same as their childhoods. Is not the case. If you do not raise your kids with some value system that is hard, logically sought through [00:39:00] and reinforced through traditions and framings, those kids are going to get sucked into one of these organically formed cults that have bubbled up within online spaces in both the left and the right.

I would go so far as to say most humans today who are growing up are being sucked into radical and dangerous. Online cults. And when you begin to frame them this way, when you begin to see that some of these movements are not just self help movements, but they are defining an entire world framework for viewing your own actions for viewing reality and for viewing what is moral and what is immoral and how an individual should make decisions.

Then you are seeing that they are through not, not even a set of maliciousness, but just because no other, internally consistent system that kids could really cling to was provided that kids grab onto this. You know, kids these days are like, you know, they're, they're after a shipwreck and they're holding on to the boards of an old religious [00:40:00] tradition often or a secular tradition that came with like a little bit of what their parents have passed down to them.

And then the storm comes and the board's pushed away and they're grabbing at anything. And they will grab at the systems because the systems have, of course, organically evolved to fit this market niche of kids grabbing at anything. And the more malevolent often, or more psychologically harmful 1 of these systems is, the more it will be focused at preventing deconversion.

Once somebody converts. So you cannot wait. Until you see the warning signs for your kids, you know, you need to go into parenthood thinking about all of this. And parents are so worried about the stupid stuff, you know, well,

Simone Collins: our gendered bathrooms which it's just been done, but it's

Malcolm Collins: not like if parents did half the effort on like breastfeeding or screen time and.

Like, Oh, is my kid like looking at, I don't know, porn or something like that stuff matters so little compared to the [00:41:00] cultural groups that are building your kids, moral frameworks, which is what you are not thinking about word. Anyway, I love you to death Simone. This has been a. Entertaining conversation.

And I guess we will be test pilots for our kids. And even though we're putting the track series on hold, I think that this is pretty much as good as a track as you're going to get, I mean, I like this more than a lot of the tracks that we did. And I, this to me, I know it won't do well because I found this to be a uniquely meaningful episode to me.

Simone Collins: So whenever you feel like you, you really got something out of the conversation, then you Or

Malcolm Collins: the idea, this was like riffing on a conversation that we had this morning. So a lot of these ideas came from Simone and I just, you know, when I talk with you, it helps me build these. So I really appreciate that Simone.

Simone Collins: Oh, thanks Malcolm. I enjoyed our walk today, getting deals at the dollar store.

Malcolm Collins: Oh yes. We, we do our regular post holiday cleanup of Everything that's on sale.

Simone Collins: Yeah. There's nothing like a 50 percent off deal at a dollar store. [00:42:00]

Malcolm Collins: 50 percent off deals at the dollar store.

Simone Collins: Yeah. So you know how we're cheap.

All right. Love you. Gorgeous. Love you.

Yeah. Sorry. It's the WhatsApp thread with my dad where I told him how Torsten rubs the rocks along his face. And my dad says he might be onto something there. There's thousands of years of perceived technology involved with crystals and stone types of healing or no being healing.

But,

Malcolm Collins: Is our whole anti mystic thing just a rebellion against our parents?

Simone Collins: He's already, yeah, we're, we're anti mystics because our parents are like, Oh yeah, well, no, that's the, you know, legitimate healing. And our son is going to be an anti. He's a mystic, a

Malcolm Collins: pro mystic. He's a, he's a pro

Simone Collins: mystic.

Malcolm Collins: He's already into the stones.

More rubbing crystals kind, rubbing crystals on his face.

Simone Collins: He does it in such a manic way, where he's like, Ha ha! I think that's, I mean, honestly, if you're going to be a crystal person, you should do it. The way that first [00:43:00] all the way with

Malcolm Collins: it. Yeah. Okay.

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