This was written by an AI, not me: In this video, we delve into a nuanced understanding of conservatism, progressivism, traditionalism, and accelerationism. The goal is to dissect these ideologies and identify their manifestations within various societal structures and cultures. As part of this exploration, we respond to a viewer's question about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, colloquially known as Mormonism. Through our personal experiences and observations, we share insights into Mormon culture and its place on the axes of conservatism-progressivism and traditionalism-accelerationism. We also discuss the impact of societal norms, changing technology, and progressive threats on these cultures and religious communities. This conversation aims to provide an enriching perspective on how societal cultures evolve and adapt in the face of constant change. Whether you're interested in the sociopolitical landscape, religious studies, or an engaging discussion about social norms and cultural evolution, this video will give you plenty to think about. Watch till the end for a deeper understanding of societal cultures, the importance of adaptability, and a fresh perspective on Mormonism. Transcript from AI:I will describe this graph . It has two a axis. Okay. This a axis is progressive to conservative. Mm-hmm. Okay.

Progressive means more like the dominant urban monoculture. Conservative means more deviant from the dominant culture. Okay. Then the other axi is traditionalist versus acceleration. Okay. It's easy to confuse these two axes and think that accelerationist means progressive and traditionalist means conservative.

Yeah. And these are two completely unrelated things, and in fact, Generally the most accelerationist cultures are also the most conservative cultures and the most conservative cultures are often the most accelerationist cultures because they need to protect themselves from the dominant societal culture.

That's goal is to stamp out any anyone who's doing their own thing, any signs of true diversity within society. This progressive monoculture will eventually inject itself into the central church. It will eventually eat the central church.

This virus is incredibly good at corrupting everything, especially large bureaucracies. The larger and more entrenched the bureaucracy is the more susceptible it is, and it is a miracle that the central church hasn't been eaten yet, but it will be

  📍  Hello, gorgeous. How are you doing today?

Absolutely spectacular. So this video is in relation to a user comment who is something like, I'm a Mormon. What do you guys think of Mormons? Um, Now keep it, we know enough about Mormons to know that the church deemed that term offensive. Was it like eight years ago?

What did they

call it? One of the council? Yeah. But members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints doesn't exactly roll off the tone. Yeah. You're not

allowed to use l d s either.

And you know, my friends who, so for, for context, from soup to nuts. I've been adjacent to Mormon communities.

In preschool. I went to a Mormon preschool, it was called Class A Tiny World, and I loved it. And everyone was Mormon except for like me and a few other kids. And then I. Went to college, their

parents pulled her out cuz she started asking them about Bible stuff and they freaked out cuz they're like extremist progressives.

Well, no,

that's, that's just when they started sending me school, that's when they started sending me to Dharma school. They didn't take me outta that daycare because it was the best ever because Mormons are the best ever. And then I went to, College and pretty much only had Mormon friends because my roommate out of freshman year was Mormon.

I tend to avoid people and only like befriend people that I work with. So I just had work colleagues and then my like recreational friends were Mormons and members of the local singles award. And I loved it and I loved Mormons, but also like even within community, they refer to themselves internally, like as like.

They'd be like, are you a mo? Like, like they don't even say Mormon. So how can we be at fault for not calling, you know, people, members of the church, of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saint when they're all like, are you an ex mo? Are you a mo? Like, you know,

come on guys. Well, and you also did, you didn't drink when I met you and stuff like that.

No.

Well, I mean, when all of your friends and morons. Yeah.

Why would you buy, I, I told her on the first date, I go, this isn't gonna work unless you drink. So I ordered her uh, uh, uh, uh, what, what a cocktail. I was like, That

was your loss, Malcolm. You paid through the nose for that Cocktails in San Francisco.

I mean, god knows now you can probably buy, like, you know, for the price, you'd get a cocktail. You could have gotten a car like 10 years ago. Um, But yeah, so I. We we're gonna call them Mormons, because that's, that's just what people do.

It's actually a very interesting community and a very interesting culture that we really highlighted in the last video.

So I think one of the things that we admire about. Mormonism as a cultural tradition is it is such an accelerationist cultural tradition. And I think that this is where society, we see things. As, as Simone often mistakenly does on a spectrum of conservatism to progressivism. But conservatism to progressivism is really just a spectrum of how much do you bend the need to whatever the prevailing social norms are of your society, which right now is the mind virus.

So that is one axis of a spectrum. And, and, and Mormons do not bend the knee very much. So they are on the far conservative side of that spectrum. But then the other axis of the spectrum is traditionalist versus accelerationist. And the traditionalist versus accelerationist is How much do you, and how aggressively do you adapt your traditions and change your traditions to try to compete with a changing environment, changing technology and to react to what often are the progressive threats to more conservative movements.

So what you will often find, Is that the most accelerationist movements are often some of the most conservative movements because they are the movement's most aggressively under threat from the, progressive hive mind that wants to attack anyone , in any culture that deviates from it and deviates from its sort of approved ideas, morality, and way of doing things.

So, Mormons are very accelerationist in that respect. What, what would you say your general read of Mormons is? And I can, I can give you mine as well.

So, as an outsider, my T L D R is Mormons among modern. US based religious communities have the best lifestyle. It's like they're kind of like the Disney of Lifestyles.

You know? You can really get into it. It's very appealing. It's very warm and friendly and family friendly, and you may not agree with all of it. Like you may, you may be of Disney family and not like the prices they charge or not like the way that they run their corporation or think that they killed Star Wars, but you still just.

It's a great place to go on vacations. Your kids love it. You know, you like the, a lot of the movies, so you just become a Disney family, and I think a lot of people. Stay with the church or even join the church because of the lifestyle. And they don't necessarily buy into the religious doctrine though. I, I do think that many more people are leaving the church now because both the religious doctrine isn't holding up.

I think really that well in the age of the internet. And also because especially like women I know read a lot of the. Well, I hear a lot of sort of the stances on women and their positions and it just, it's really hard to both become educated and to be ambitious and to be, to be down with the way the church says women need to be or should be.

Right. So

this is really fascinating to me. A a and I think the Disney analogy is pretty apt because I can look at Disney and be like, well, there still are aspects of Disney products that I am able to engage with, but I can also see the direction things are going and the size of their bureaucracy is just so large and so unchangeable that I know that where Disney is going is a place I cannot follow.

Mm-hmm. Um, And is going it towards collapse basically. And I, and I, and I. I think that the Merman Church is very far from that, but I do think it's heading in a negative direction. And that is very worrying to me. So when we talk about religious traditions, we talk about them as sort of cultural units, like collections of memes that often co-evolve with individuals.

And they can create a culture which can be very strong after somebody leaves the church. And so this is something where when I look at, , a secular Jew who is no longer theologically Jewish, but now a secular Jew, I can still see a lot of their cultural practices and a lot about them.

Mormons. This is something that you see it really strongly when a person deconvert from Mormonism and becomes secular, especially if they don't, if they aren't just like a reaction against the church, they are. Yes, some of the like, mentally healthiest people I know or, and some of the, the best people I know in terms of cultural fit with our cultural traditions.

And they also are unusually successful. So you see them just absolutely dominate in terms of online spaces. A lot of top influencers or eczemas. So, and, and this leads to I think one of, if we're going to be critical of, of, of Mormonism. One of the things I would say, which is the most critical, is that unfortunately the theology, and I think this is what you meant in terms of the age of the internet, it's really hard to believe.

It's like trans people don't have an advantage at sports, hard to believe. And because of this, some level of psychological sectioning is, prevalent within many of the more educated Mormons I know.

Which leads them to become susceptible to things that other communities aren't as susceptible

to. Right. Like I've heard that in, in Mormon communities, MLMs are pervasive, for example. Well,

MLMs is is a big one here. So yeah. Mormon communities are incredibly susceptible to certain types of mental viruses.

MLMs being one of the most damaging to the Mormon community. Because, so to, to. Work within the church. So much has to be sectioned off. In terms of like, these are things we don't question that sometimes things fall into that preserve that shouldn't be on the preserve. MLM type ideology being injected into it being one of these things.

And so this isn't an intrinsic thing with Mormonism, but it is, it is tied to the level of intentional suspension of disbelief that I think is needed to believe some of the things in the Book of Mormon. Especially some of the historic things that we just have so much evidence that you can easily just like look at and it's just not, it, it, it, it is not like, Modern progressive history that's at odds with it.

It's like the histories that all other conservative groups agree on, you know, whether you're talking about like conservative Catholics or conservative Protestants, or conservative, you know, many, many other conservative groups, they all agree on this history as well. And it is just like strictly at odds with.

The Book of Mormon, and you can do apologetics and you can look into it, but I, I, as somebody who's, who's, who's not a member of the church, I can say that it's clear that this sort of preserve of things we don't question within the Mormon tradition is much bigger than the other conservative Christian denominations.

Well, I think you and I both really enjoy watching video interviews with people who have deconverted, either from the mainstream church or from more Yeah. We'll say aggressive factions, you know, splinter groups that are not, that the main church doesn't endorse. And the, one of the really common threads that seems to show up again and again is they really, really, really want to believe.

And every, every time someone like a church elder gives them advice or coaching on how to address it, it's just, So insulting. Like, it, it, you know, it, it just really doesn't work. They're, they're, they're not good resources. And then, you know, this sort of forces people to look things up online where they just find damning like reams of damning information.

And I, I, I really wonder what's going on with internal church governance there, because they have to be looking at their rates of attrition. They have to be looking

at which are high. So something to note about the Mormon community, if it looks like they've fallen below repopulation rate and they have really high attrition rate.

Continue.

Mm-hmm. So like what, you know, and, and the other thing is you pointed out that, that the l d s church has adapted in the past, you know, and they are accelerationist in many ways. They, they are, they're happy to develop new social technologies. They've changed, for example, their stances on race in the past.

So why aren't they adapting more now?

This is the answer. It's because the central church now is more bureaucratic and larger. Mm-hmm. And there is more inertia. So it's a very interesting mix where you have a naturally accelerationist cultural group mm-hmm. Paired with a hierarchical theological structure like, like a structure that determines what the theology is.

Which is the, the governing structure, and that determines what the rules are. And so this, this is where I think the Mormon Church is going and the iterations of the Mormon church that'll be successful. I think the ones that follow the central church are going to be the ones that eventually die out.

Just

because, well, what worries me about that though, is pretty much the only ones that for my knowledge, don't follow the central church. Don't do it because they're polygamist for some reason.

It's because they're poly? No, there's, there's other groups that,

non-pro splinter groups. Okay. So

there's within the, so this is an interesting thing within the Mormon intellectual sphere where I come close to it there is talk of different ways of relating to things, different ways of relating to monument, like monumental building and stuff like that. Different ways of saying, Can we still technically be under the central church?

Mm-hmm. But like, change things within our community and like these distinct ways. So you're beginning to see this branch out happening, but it's not happening as an open revolt? Yes. The, the ous Mormons are inactive revolt against the central church. Mm-hmm. I don't expect it to be that disharmonious.

I expect it to be. Some groups increasingly do things that are. Additional rules maybe that sort of change the nature of things or different interpretations of teachings that make them more resistant to information online, but that makes them more and more deviate from what people consider like a traditional mainstream, like Central Church, Mormon.

And I think that many of these groups will be more conservative. And when I say conservative, I mean that in the acceleration as fashion. What I mean is they will be more differentiated. From the sort of mainstream progressive value set, which is dominant in urban centers throughout our society, that the central church's beliefs and teachings will be closer to that than these splinter groups.

What I find interesting in what you're describing is that if what you're saying is true, and there are a broad range of different splinter groups, not all just like sort of polygamous cults, but also just. Different groups and communities that are still trying to tap into the network effects of the L d S church, which I think are, it's one of the strongest selling points.

Yeah. While also maintaining, we'll say more sustainable philosophies. So why I think that's interesting is I think one of the primary selling points of this Disney Mormon lifestyle, right, is that one. It has one of the best modern solutions to dating markets that we've seen. Right. It's, there are several different,

and again, we've mentioned this in another video, we know somebody who converted to Mormonism just to find a husband and did.

Right. And so, I mean, between singles words, between people knowing to go to BYU to find a partner, because people converging upon this university are far more likely to be looking to marry someone

as a practice, but continue.

And then between that and other conferences that are held among single young Mormons that we've only just been told about, thanks to helpful YouTube commentors, that's like incredibly valuable.

But if the church splinters into a bunch of different factions and it's no longer unified, then you're not gonna get that. And you really need the network. This is like a, it's, it's a key marketplace problem. So I worry about that because I really want. I want someone to prove that you can have functioning relationship markets in the modern world without coercion.

You know, all this is opt-in, you know, people aren't mm-hmm. Forced. There may be some social pressure, but you know, whatever. And, and yet, like do you think it's possible you're seeing that?

Yeah. I, I, I, I do think it's possible and I think we're seeing that already in the church. Hmm. And that you are seeing these differentiations, you are seeing these groups within the church that are saying I think there are, are pretty different ways we could do things and they aren't being fully kicked out yet.

Now it admittedly they aren't like going up in. Telling their church elders this stuff. So part of it is it's, it's working because they at least what I've seen, there's this understanding that, oh, well, within our community, most of the young people know about these problems and things will change when we get older and we have more power.

But it may not happen and you may just see a reaction. I mean, especially with life extension technologies and people living longer to the other thing that you were talking about, which I actually think is really interesting to go into. So this guy was talking about dating markets at byu, or girl, I guess actually people may be surprised to hear this, the majority of our audience is female.

It's like 53% female or something. So anyway, they were saying you go to BYU and it is not uncommon within your first three weeks to like find a partner and, and, and get engaged. Because people, especially women, go to by u with the intention of finding a spouse and the cultural norm there is that you should find your spouse before you graduate college.

That is what you are in college for. Whereas the cultural norm among. The, you know, progressive urban monoculture is that you really shouldn't start looking for husband until after college which is just clearly stupid. Like, or even

if you've met the person that you want to marry, like maybe wait until your thirties to get married, which was how I came into our relationship.

You remember? Well, yeah, that's what you thought was normal when you came to me and I was like, no, we're not doing that. You're like, no, but we have to wait. It's too fast. And I was like, no, no, no, no, no. Like you're already in old May. You're what? You're outta college. Gross. Uh, We gotta, we gotta lock this down and start pumping out kids.

You weren't interested in kids at that time. You know, we, we, we felt still, I think both of us were in that cultural mindset that we needed to have kids, which is another thing that the l d s church really gets. Right. You know, it doesn't, one, I think it has a much more supportive community for people who want to have kids young.

And it also encourages people to have kids young. I mean, I, I'm not crazy about the fact that like, it, I think there's more pressure to be a stay at home mom even if you don't want to be, which is, I'm not crazy, but I think people should only do that if they're stoked for it. But it's awesome that people are having kids a lot younger.

And you know, when, when we see you, like when we're out and about and we're traveling and we see, you know, a family of four kids and you know, parents who are having fun with the kids and playing with them and looking healthy and young and happy and not stressed, it's very clear that they started having kids in their early twenties.

You know? And like I look at them and I feel so jealous. You know what?

So. I think something that you pointed out that's really interesting, so people have read the Pragmatist Guided to Crafting Religion. One of the things that we're building is something called the Index, which is essentially a pluralistic religious community that allows for a central organization to create the kind of network effects.

That you see in other religious communities where people who are part of this religious community can do things like dating markets and stuff like that and get those benefits while still having very different belief systems. So long as those belief systems are conservative and by conservative what I mean is differential from this urban monoculture.

And so like we would happily welcome in EXOS and stuff like that, or even iterations of Mormonism that want to break from the mainstream church to try to rebuild a network effect, I think. One thing you pointed out that's very interesting is, is so many of the benefits of Mormonism right now come from this large network effect, which is facilitated by the central church and

one pathway that could be a really successful long-term pathway is higher degree of pluralism and social experimentation among different Mormons. Secs still operating under the central church. I think that that is one path the face could go down. That will lead to enormous success.

So sort of like if Well, similar to the index, if the LDS church sort of WordPress sized, right?

Like there's like a platform and everything works through WordPress, but it's all like plugins and add-ons and things like that,

right? Well, and I think one thing that's important for people who are listening to this, to to, to make sure that they're not making this mistake is when we say, when we're talking about these groups that are socially experimenting, they are socially experimenting.

In conservative ways, in ways that would lead to Progressive, say, oh my God, how could you do that? Well say, is, is

conservative the right? I mean, wouldn't you say in in values and doctrine aligned ways, or at least values aligned ways? What do you mean culturally aligned ways?

I don't understand the point.

No. I mean, I, I don't know if that means, it's like inherently conservative. I just think it's inherently

No, but it, it, we're going back to the, the graph that I described earlier, and  I will describe this graph again. It has two a axis. Okay. This a axis is progressive to conservative. Mm-hmm. Okay.

Progressive means more like the dominant urban monoculture. Conservative means more deviant from the dominant culture. Okay. Then the other axi is traditionalist versus acceleration. Okay. It's easy to confuse these two axes and think that accelerationist means progressive and traditionalist means conservative.

Yeah. And these are two completely unrelated things, and in fact, Generally the most accelerationist cultures are also the most conservative cultures and the most conservative cultures are often the most accelerationist cultures because they need to protect themselves from the dominant societal culture.

That's goal is to stamp out any anyone who's doing their own thing, any signs of true diversity within society. Fair. Okay. And, and I think that this progressive monoculture will eventually inject itself into the central church. It will eventually eat the central church.

This virus is incredibly good at corrupting everything, especially large bureaucracies. The larger and more entrenched the bureaucracy is the more susceptible it is, and it is a miracle that the central church hasn't been eaten yet, but it will be.  All

right, so we're done discussing that. I think another thing that I really want to talk about with the l d s church and that I love and I think is such a smart innovation, is there, I don't, what do we wanna say?

Like, fashion ways, their dress ways. Okay. So I, I feel like if we're gonna talk, use an analogy everyone's talking about the quiet luxury style now, you know, where like you dress in a very high luxury way, but only in a way that. Other people who are very wealthy will recognize, right, because it's all very subtle.

It's about having really high quality materials, et cetera. What I love about Mormon traditions are undressing is that you have to know what to look for in order to tell, but you can fairly easily tell. Especially if there's like, it's a couple or, you know, you spend a lot of ti like a couple of days with someone over a period of time.

If someone is in the l d s church, at least if they're like adhering to this element of that culture because of their garments and because of, you know, some other sort of just cultural trends. And I think that that's really cool because, you know, on one de end of the spectrum with fashion among like cultures or religions, you've got, you know, super, super.

Like karate juices. You've got Amish where it's like, whoa, you're wearing a costume. You know, it like looks super, like obvious, and like you're turning heads and people are looking around at you. Whereas here you have the great luxury,

it's cultural cohesion. It creates, you know, a sense of belonging to a community, an ability to identify members of your community.

Continue. Yeah. So I'm, what,

what I like with warm and dress is that you, you can, you can tell quite often and this is like to a lesser extent, names like not everyone has like, stereotypical like Mormon names, but there are like Mormon names and I like that there are these subtle signalers that I think add like a booster effect.

You know, like imagine that someone had like a kind of obscure like Star Wars tattoo or I'm gonna, I'm gonna

with you on this. I actually think that you think it's too subtle, a softened failure of the church to, you think they

should dress more extremely. Yes.

Oh, she's, why? Okay. When you grow up and you are othered by the urban monoculture, when it tells you you're different and you're weird, and this is something we intentionally do as our kids, give them weird names, weird ways of dressing, stuff like that.

Like our family does things where we are intentionally and really specifically othered by society. Like society is like, oh, you guys are weird. You guys are different. You are a different thing. And through that, Our, our kids and me growing up specifically, who also was this way to an extent realize I'm different.

I'm, I'm not, whatever this mainstream cultural thing is. And in a society where that mainstream cultural thing has obviously failed, where like rates of depression are really high, rates of suicide are really high, you know, like that's a great thing to be like, yeah, I'm different. They're like, aren't you worried?

Your kids will be bullied? It's like, mm-hmm. Oh, oh. They'll be rejected from the mainstream culture. Like, okay. That's the point. That's the idea. That's a feature, not a bug. Yeah. Yeah. That they, that they will develop an identity and a cultural identity that is, Deviant from that. Now with, with Mormonism, I think their beliefs are differentiated enough that they do separate.

Well, I think what you're missing here though is that yes, I understand your point, and I think being othered and weirded is great, and I think that Mormons definitely do enough things to make them other and weirded, you know, in a way, in different ways. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that they're different. They realize.

I think what you're missing though is that there's a secret club thing. That makes people feel really good when they see like the secret handshake or the secret wink, or like the secret tattoo that someone has. Mm-hmm. You know, we're like, only they know. So what you're missing here is, yeah, it's great to have that othering effect.

I totally agree with you. That's great. But, but what you're missing is that there's this totally separate phenomenon when you get an in joke and that in is

very powerful. You've convinced me, Delta, you've convinced me. I think

you changed. That rarely happens. Oh, the satisfaction. It does, it doesn't

rarely happen.

You convinced me all the time. Uh,

Not always. You're, you're the smart one in this relationship. So I,

I, I love the, but again, you know, we talk about willful suspension of disbelief, right. That's what she needs to do to constantly believe that I'm the, the smart one with all the ideas. Constant, constant suspension, a disbelief.

Nice try. Um, No, I,

I love it. Yeah. So I, I guess what I'd say is, is Mormonism, I mean, would you, or do you have any other points you wanted to talk on about this?

Y yeah, I, I do actually. So it's the, the only culture I know of, like if it's a religious culture, so what we would call a Ulva, where it's a mixture of culture and, and, and religion that includes, A very practical level of safety, practicality and survivalism.

You know that it's encouraged to have six months worth of food supply that, you know, you should have a, an emergency plan, you should rotate through that food supply and, you know, cook what's about to expire. And it's sort the fact that that's done. You know, yes, there are, there are doomsday preppers in the us.

Like that's a total thing. It's a total subculture, but, That's more like an iden, like a fan community to me than like a cohesive culture. You know, there isn't like a, there are, there are correlator factors and correlator values among doomsday preppers, but n know where does it come close to what you see with the l d s church and I, I also really admire that.

And it's not just, you know, imparting use useful practices to people in the church. You know, like temples also have resources for disasters. You know, like this is a. This is a culture that wants to create civilizational level resilience. If like, s**t hits the fan. That's really cool. And I think that's underrated when people think about religious or cultural innovation.

You know, they, they think about maybe dating markets maybe better aligning with values, but especially in an age in which people are losing essential life skills like crazy. I think it's, it's a notable. Point that that's something that's encouraged within. So one thing,

yeah. That I'd add to this, which I think is something a lot of people dunno.

It is. One thing I really like that, that Mormonism does is it is something that we've actually taken for our own kids, is I believe that intense hardship is really needed at certain parts of a kid's life. And that they need to experience what these things feel like, what starvation feels like, what , really having to figure out your own stuff.

Cause that's something I went through as a kid, you know, and I think. If we raise our kids without any of that, I think it creates a lot of negative psychological effects. So, one practice that exists was in Mormonism is they will do the Mormon trail or the the thing that their ancestors did like with

the covered wagons and all that fun stuff.

So this is something they'll do in the late teen years where they will try to recreate. This trail that their ancestors went on, , through the desert pulling these, these carts, whizz low water supplies, whizz low food supplies and really experience this extreme hardship that almost no one in society today gets the opportunity to experience.

And I think that this has, And I think we'll see that it has permanent changes in the way a person's brain works as they get older if they experience one of these extreme, extreme hardship moments during specific developmental milestones. And so I think that this is very beneficial and I really admire that element of their culture.

I actually go so far to say that I think they should lean into it more. I think it should be longer. I think it should be more recurring during a person's childhood. So if you look at like, what we're trying to build for, for our kids and our community, one of the things we've looked at building is, is There's some land up in Northern Canada where we're looking at essentially creating a station where the kids have to learn to survive.

And, and now of course, the whole thing will be wired with cameras and stuff like that so we can make sure they don't end up killing themselves, or a bear doesn't like come onto the territory and, and end up creating problems. But I, I think this sorts of extreme survivalism. And having to figure it out on your own and, and experiencing that is, is really important culturally, especially if you're moving into a civilization where many of the luxuries that we've come to expect today, maybe our kids shouldn't expect as being as common during their adult life.

And what we also haven't talked about in terms of hardship is missions, you know, which, you know, yeah. Few women go on, but like a lot of men do. I mean, I think one of the super underrated aspects of that, of a, of a mission isn't, I mean, one, I guess it can get, it can get you to double down on your culture, but I feel like these days a mission is, Equally liable to make you leave your culture?

Is that a No, I,

I think missions are a primary failure point of Mormonism, but we can get to that. Continue with what you were gonna say.

So. Well, but they have an upside, I think they could be redesigned and, and one thing that I think makes them uniquely interesting is they make. Especially Mormon men, uniquely attractive in certain facets of the job market.

, I totally understand the point you're making here, Simone.

Yeah. Which is, you know, especially in sales positions, Mormons are just incredible. Because when you need to sell something, That to a non-Mormon sounds pretty ridiculous, and you need to constantly deal with that rejection. That's one of the biggest parts of being a good salesperson and developing those techniques and that resistance to rejection.

But more importantly, sales isn't just an important job for sales. Sales is an important job for raising money. Sales is an important job for doing a, a job application or a university application. There's a a saying at at Stanford and Harvard Business School. Most of the students fall into the three msms, which is Mormons.

Military or children of millionaires. Mm.

Wait, children of millionaires, why would they have an advantage? Cause nepo

babies, you could say that they're nepo babies. You could say it's family culture, whatever. But it is true that those three groups are and and millionaires today, you'd probably say billionaires or, or you know, quarter billionaires or whatever.

They would

perform. Way worse. I get Mormon, I get military, but no. Anyway, that's interesting.

It was definitely something you see is, is kids from wealthy families are disproportionately represented at top business schools. Mormons are disproportionately represented and so are people from the military.

Mm-hmm. It's just a classic thing in top business schools. So you, you do see the advantage of this. Now let's talk about why I think mission trips are a failure. In today's environment almost always when I meet a Mormon who has deconverted, the Deconversion started on their mission trip. Mm-hmm. Um, And almost always they were incredibly fervent believers before the deconversion started.

Hmm. If you have a practice within your cultural tradition that is causing disproportionately the most fervent believers to deconvert, then that's something you need to work on. It, it, it is really interesting to contrast with Rums Springer. So both the Mission Trip and Rums Springer serve similar functions, which is to say during the portion of a person's life where they are in this rebellious teen phase they are coming into their own as an adult and they are likely to deconvert.

One organization essentially says, okay, let's put you on constant supervision of another member of our, our cultural group and separate you from friends and family and You know, all of the things that might cause deconversion and then put you in an environment where you're constantly through sunk cost fallacy, reaffirming your belief system.

Like, theoretically, it sounds like a good idea. The problem is, is that the human brain just doesn't really work that way. Now, you could say that mission trips are about conversions. If you actually look at the numbers and in the pragmatic sky crafting relation, we go through this. Mission trips are not really good at converting people.

When people convert to Mormonism, it's, it's through other mechanisms. Often like they, they ha they boast high conversion rates. But if you look at the number. Who stay in the church like if you're just looking at baptisms. Yeah. Mission trips seem really effective. If you look at actual growth in those regions of, of the Mormon tradition.

They're not very effective. They're, they're mostly about from a cultural evolution perspective, keeping members. But the problem is you look at the exact opposite of all of those things I just mentioned, which is Amish Rum Springer, right? It's like during the period where you're most likely to deconvert, we say yeah, if you want to, you can just like, leave the community and do whatever you want for a period.

But no, I mean, there, there are consequences to it, but mostly just go do what you want. And to people who are in one of these communities where there is a high social support network, where there is high end group, what actually ends up happening is Amish Rums Springer. So a lot of people assume that ROMs Springer is like kids leave, they go out, they have a bunch of sex, they do a bunch of drugs, not really.

Uh, Actually what happens is they're told you can do whatever you want. And this knowledge that they can do whatever they're, they want leads them to instead be like, okay, why don't I go get a buggy? Like, that'll be my big crazy thing that I'll do. But otherwise I'm mo basically not going to do anything that rebellious because why?

Like when you can all of a sudden do whatever you want, what you realize, especially when you start engaging in it, is how hollow, you know, if again, we define the world as progressive versus conservative here. How hollow all of these things that this urban monoculture is offering are mm-hmm. How hollow all the partying is, how hollow all the sex is, how hollow all the drugs are.

You can't engage with these things, but if through engaging in them, you lose the community support you lose, all of a sudden you're like, no, screw that. To the extent where I think a lot of progressives are like, oh, but what if they're, they're gay and they have to live out their whole lives, you know, as, as living the straight lifestyle.

You can read about Amish people who like, and this is the thing about conservative cultures, like progressive cultures act like they pretend like gay people don't exist. They don't pretend like gay people don't exist. They just have different. Social constructs for how to deal with it when a person is born with a predominant same sex attraction within Amish communities, and you can read blogs of this, they know, they're like, look, I am predominantly same sex attracted.

I know this is an aspect of my life. I will never be able to fully participate in. But I have engaged with that within the progressive world. And I have lived an Amish person growing up. And I can tell you the Amish lifestyle is better. Even if I am forced to marry someone, I don't find sexually attractive.

Because, , I can build a caring relationship for them. I can raise kids. It's the part of my life that will never be as fully fulfilled as it is the other people in my community. But that doesn't mean that the only solution to having been born, same sex attracted. Is just complete engagement with progressive culture, complete engagement with with, with their ways of solving this.

The one thing I do wonder is Actually how there's an interplay between this and the, the belief that the person that you marry, you're like perma, married to, you know, after you die, you will be united again and you will spend all of eternity together. Oh yeah. This is great. Yeah. What I think is interesting about that is the reframing of marriage like that.

I mean, I don't think that people are picturing like s I mean, maybe they are, but like, I don't think they're picturing like super hot sex, like, As they're you know, off in the afterlife or whatever comes next, you know, building new worlds and everything, right? Like being like Gods and, and so I wonder if perhaps a lot of it just takes the hedonism and the sexual Like focus out of marriage and instead Yeah.

So let

refocuses it. That's a really healthy one, I think. Mm-hmm. Which is to say that when a Mormon it's funny, within progressive culture would be seen as unhealthy. They believe that when you get married you are with this person forever, like after death Forever. Forever, forever. Mm-hmm. And a pasture physical coporal existence.

The, the, the vast minority of your time with this person, will sex be an option? And. One that means you don't really, like, fights are not an option. You have to figure

out how to work this out. Well, fights, fights are an option. I think what's different is that no, no

fights are an option, but, but long term systemic disagreements like you can have conflict, but the goal is to work it out because eventually,

well, because it's not about you anymore.

It's about you as a team, as a united unit, as you together forever. And I think you're gonna look at conflict very differently when it's what a, what do I want? What makes me happy? Versus like, how are we going to fix this for us? Yeah. And I think that it's a really interesting framing, and I think it would change the way, like if I lived in a culture like I'm.

I'm attracted to dudes. Kind of, kind of all attracted to you, Malcolm, but like, if someone, if I like grew up in a culture where they're like, Simone, you have to marry a woman. Like, you know, my focus would be on finding a woman who I was ideologically aligned with and like, you know, we got along and like we were ready to take on the future in the world together.

And we knew that we worked well together, you know, and like it wouldn't be about the sex and that's okay. You know, and I think that, that for many, many cultural groups, that does sound. Very, very wrong. Right? Like how, yeah. Like

how can you have a life without enjoying sex? Yeah, right.

Like God, although like, here's the thing, right?

It's like, so Mormons are getting married, Mormons having kids, et cetera, and then you like, look at these plummeting sex rates of the predominantly atheistic culture, right? And so it's like, well, you know, but who's really getting, you know, getting sex now anyway, right?

Who's sexually satisfied now anyway? Although, I guess maybe like, Gay male communities are doing all right. Oh yeah. They're doing okay. I don't know. And I don't know how

the church deals with one cultural solution and we, we don't try to like, we can try to give a honest take about different cultures.

But we always say that every cultural solution is up to them. Yeah. And, and all we want to do is see as many in a diverse cultural tradition surviving into the future. To the thing you were saying earlier.

One thing that we praise Mormonism on in our books is. It has the best afterlife from our perspective, the best conception of an afterlife. The idea that, one, you're spending your afterlife with your spouse, like I can't imagine not spending my afterlife with you if you love

your spouse. Yeah, same.

You also get a meaningful project to work on with them.

Where you're like, oh, it's a big, meaningful project. Because yeah, I mean, just an afterlife in bliss or complacency, like, I really wouldn't like that. I, I like the idea of continuing to work with you after I die. Mm-hmm. Not just being around you and blissing out or something. Or being around people we like or something.

I like the idea of having a, a project. But to that extent, when you talk about the combined identity, it is very similar to our own theology in that way. Whereas we believe that when a person gets married, they meaningfully become the same entity. They stop being two genders, they stop being two different things.

They are one. Thing and a goal of marriage is to an extent the dissolution of the self. And that the way we live forever is through our kids and through our family culture. And they really are a combination of the two of us. And that being the case when we think about how we live far into the future.

It is as a combined entity, and we do like that similarity we see as a Mormon tradition, even if the two things are very differentiated. Another big similarity we have as a Mormon tradition is we are a highly derived and highly accelerationist iteration. Of the Christian tradition. Mm-hmm. Where many would call us non-Christians, many would call Mormons, non-Christians.

Like, yeah, we believe in a God, but like lots of caveats if you, if you're going to try to call that a, a traditional Christian God. And it's the same as the Mormon tradition. Do we think of ourselves as Christians? Yes. Do Mormons think of themselves as Christians? Yes. But from the, the boundaries on Christianity that many other groups place, I think both of us fall pretty squarely outside of that.

And that's just another, , differentiation there where we, we do have a lot in common with

Mormons. So the final thing I really admire, just as like a final note, is, yeah. I really appreciate it when new cultures or religions and, you know, like the LDS church is relatively new. Take mainstream holidays and just.

Punch them up or make them better. And for me, like, man, you know, Mormon Christmas is one of the best flavors of Christmas. Like they take it, they make it a big deal. It's just amazing and wonderful. And I really miss Mormon Christmases. And so, I don't know, there's just so many things about the LDS church that are great.

I hope what you're saying about the fracturing. Like subunit working in this, in this, this collaborating marketplace comes to pass. Or, or

one sliver of it will be so successful that it won't matter that it doesn't have the market effects. Yeah, it will maybe expelled from the central church.

But it will be expelled in a way that allows it to be even more innovative than it is right now. Yeah. And will come up with interesting solutions. And if you are from affection of, of, of the Mormon culture like that, please write the Pragma sky to crafting religion. Like, it's like a playbook on how to adapt and better fight the progressive mind virus.

Because eventually it will take your church just like it does everyone else.

Yeah. Well, Mormons, we love you. You're amazing. Don't disappear, thrive and succeed. We are not one of you, but we deeply admire you. So yeah, we'd love to hear what you think of our hot takes. And Malcolm, though, sadly, we will not probably be spending eternity together aside from through our children.

Yay. At least we can have future conversations like this. So thanks for this and I love you a lot.

I love you too, and I, I do wish we, we got to live literally together forever, but I think in every meaningful context we do get to, like, who I am today changes. See our video on determinism. I'm gonna even link to it on, on, on.

Oh no. Life Extensionism. That might be the one where we talk about this. You know what, I'll lead to both of them because we talk about it in one of us.

Good. All right. We'll see you soon. Have

a good one.

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