We discuss how in the secular religious lore and belief system we are constructing for our family, we conceive of "demons" or chaotic forces as being different manifestations of the "Future Police" - the same forces that guide things towards good outcomes. Just as angels can punish, so too can the Future Police act as demons, laying trials, temptations, and hardship intended to test people and peel them from the righteous path. We explore how this connects to concepts like sin, stagnation, change, the great game, and relate it to entities from Warhammer lore.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] I would say that, and this is where we'll get to one of the other demons, one of the easiest paths to temptation, one of the easiest ways a person can fall off the righteous path is to not recognize that as a human, they are wretched and they are flawed

and that, that is okay. All humans sin. But it's critical. Is that you do not glorify the sin.. Sin is a, is a, is a part of life, but there is a huge difference between saying I am engaging in this sin. I recognize it as sin. I recognize it as something I should have some shame for but I also recognize that I am human and thus a sinner.

Right? But if you use it and say, no, actually the sports are a good thing. I am a good person for being good at sports. I am a good person for, in whatever particular aspect of slaneshidom that I engage in. That is where true evil comes from. But true evil can also come from a [00:01:00] human that thinks they can totally avoid sin.

Every group I know of. believes that humans can completely avoid sin, the humans in their group that quote unquote come closest to that are typically the most efficacious individuals in society. Because avoiding sin means avoiding action.

Would you like to know more?

Simone Collins: When you said that we were going to talk about demons today, I was so sure that you were going to, like, make this fallacious episode about, like, skeletons in our closet or something, you know, like your childhood demons, because so many people online are like, these are two deeply damaged people. You know, they say

Malcolm Collins: that about us.

Do they think that we are

Simone Collins: dealing with our trauma and this is why we want to have children or why were we, I

Malcolm Collins: love this. I mean, you want to talk about a sign of brainwashing or a brainwashed individual it's when somebody disagrees with them or has a different world perspective than their damage, their first reaction.

Is what horrible thing happened to them in [00:02:00] their past that made them see the world differently than me and that what they need to do. And there's actually a class of people who do this. They don't even say like, you know, you should read the research or you should go out there and learn about this topic.

They're like, you need to go to. therapy. Yes. Then you will think like me.

Simone Collins: Exactly. It's like, I think it's a constant trope that people are exposed to in media. Like villains, of course, were raised in terribly abused environments. Like, you know, that, that Dr. Evil bit where he's like, you know, he talks about this like terrible childhood and how he was beaten and all these

Malcolm Collins: things.

Well, I mean, I think that the, you know, if you talk about, we talk about the, the super virus, right? The and the way that it maintains its membership or recruits new members is through using psychologists. And we have talked about this in, in the video, psychology has become a cult. I think this is somebody who originally trained in psychology.

The way that psychology is practiced now is not the way it was practiced. even a decade ago in [00:03:00] terms of what's considered acceptable and what's not. And, and, and, you know, as, as to what you're saying here it makes a lot of sense. If you see this not as being in like one cultural group versus another cultural group, but see it as being in a cult.

Well, yeah, of course a cult would tell you what you need to go to your cult. Cult appointed mind cleaner, they'll, they'll clean your, your brain's dirty and there's these people you can pay to clean it.

They'll wash it for you if, if you will, and then once you have a clean brain, you can have

Simone Collins: clean thoughts.

Oh, I'm rewatching this during editing, I realized the joke may not be clear here. I am making a joke about brainwashing.

Simone Collins: I don't think there's a precedent for that though, like even in the media tropes where like the evil person has gone to therapy and worked on themselves, like they're never really fixed. So it's just kind of this excuse to write someone off permanently. that they're damaged, they're traumatized, and you know, though they should go to therapy and whatnot, no amount

Malcolm Collins: of it will actually.

I mean, I saw so much [00:04:00] of this was Trump you know, when he was elected. Did people say he

Simone Collins: was traumatized in his youth?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, all of these articles. Oh,

Simone Collins: they did something about his dad, right? That he was.

Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: yeah. How is he traumatized? How is he, you know, they, they just cannot fathom that someone could honestly just disagree with their perception.

Simone Collins: They must be emotionally stunted.

Malcolm Collins: Now, let's be clear. Other, other cultural groups have some similar things to this. Like there are some Oh

Simone Collins: yeah, like maybe you're possessed by a demon,

Malcolm Collins: for example. Yeah, some extreme Christians that like literally think everyone who disagrees with them is possessed by a demon.

So there's that. But, but I, I would say that those are like the most extreme, absolutely wackadoo of Christians. And yet this is a mainstream position among the, the, those indoctrinated into the virus. Actually Scientology do the same thing. It's your thetans, right? Your thetans that are attached to you, which cause you to have negative thoughts and stuff like that.

And you need to go to their. Well, their version of like psychologists, these people who you tell your backstory [00:05:00] to, and then they help you get your thetans off of you. so That you can think clearly because of you. Oh, they even have something like Oh, what's it called?

Simone Collins: But there, I know that also like. They don't even want mothers to scream during childbirth cause they think that might traumatize the child, which is, you know, I guess it goes to show you can make up all these excuses of like, whether or not the person remembers or not, here's why they're messed up.

Like their mother screamed when they were born

Malcolm Collins: or something. Right. So the term that you use, by the way, is clear. Clear.

Simone Collins: Right. And that's why that documentary was called going

Malcolm Collins: clear. Yeah. So once they have cleared your brain, cleaned it. washed it, if you will, of whichever group. No, but it's just a common practice.

And it makes sense that it's a common practice because it's an incredibly effective practice.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Well, and other people I think just say like, well, it's because you haven't accepted Jesus Christ as your savior, or basically you haven't converged to this religion and that's why you're evil or.

Malcolm Collins: But, but I would say, hold on.

Is it this practice, this way of, Relating to people who see the world differently from [00:06:00] you is not usually a practice had within healthy cultural groups. If we look within the healthy Christian cultural groups or Jewish orthodox groups, or you know, even in a historic context, they typically did not see their enemies in like a, Oh, if you just go see like our, whatever their iteration of a psychologist was, you'll eventually be able to see things the way I do, but where this is relevant to today's topic of conversation is one thing that I do think that most successful cultural traditions have and that ours, as we had originally constructed it, you know, we've built a little religion for our family.

holidays and belief systems and metaphysical structure for the universe that we pass on to our kids does not have, which is demons, like some sort of like genuinely malevolent force. And so we started thinking about how we could, because one thing I really want with everything in this religion, as I pass it to my kids, is that it is not falsifiable by any sort of [00:07:00] Science as it exists right now, and where it is falsifiable by science, it can be updated.

Like, it is meant to work. Why we call it a secular religious structure is it is meant to be our best understanding from a secular perspective of how the world actually works. So it's kind of

Simone Collins: like hard science fiction, where hard science fiction is expected to be logically internally consistent with any invented science.

And it's all supposed to respect any science that already exists. Like don't get a planet's orbit wrong. Don't get the physics of this wrong, et cetera.

Malcolm Collins: So for, to start for people who aren't familiar with the broad strokes of our ideological belief system, it's that in. 100, 000 years from today, a million years from today, if our descendants are still around that they would be closer to the way we would conceive of a deity today or a god today than the way we would conceive of another human.

And as such, you know, who's to say they relate to time the same way we do and they might be guiding their [00:08:00] manifestation which is why we call it, you know, the inevitable God, the self manifesting God through. rewarding individuals who do things that increase the quality or lead to a flourishing future human civilization and punish humans who act indulgently or indolently or selfishly or on vanity or on self narratives.

And so for example, you know, one of the things that we tell our kids is that. These, and these, these beings that influence the past, they don't necessarily come in like angels or something like that. They may be just manipulating things at the smallest, most quantum level in a way that has like a butterfly effect that then ends up having large repercussions in even potentially like human evolution.

So an example I can give here is one of the ways in which they have sort of encoded in our own biology punishment for indolence is that all, [00:09:00] Hedonistic pursuits, pursuits where an individual is pursuing happiness or vanity or their perception in other people's eyes for its own sake, you know, just sort of masturbating these emotional subsets that these pleasures turn to ash on one's tongue.

What I mean by that is the pleasure that you experience. For going out and chasing pleasure, like going out, just sleeping with tons of people going out, just you know, eating really, really fancy food every day drinking whenever you want all of these begin to feel. Like they lose any happiness that they give you pretty quickly and they begin to feel gross and they Make you feel gross as a human being now

Simone Collins: For kids, this is really really easy To point out.

So like, let's say that your kid is really into a sports star or a movie star. [00:10:00] And you like, it's, it's pretty easy on most famous people to dig up, you know, here are the ways that people like them or people on their same trajectories, or even just them are actually pretty miserable. People who especially pursue fame just for hedonism do end up like extra miserable and it's like hedonism on steroids.

Like it's one thing to just pursue a life that's kind of comfortable where you have hobbies and you have your job and you retire early or whatever. And there's van life and all that. But like when you were like going all the way, like, no, I'm going to get all the attention, all the fame, all the money, all the mansions, all the cars, all the women, all the men, whatever.

The, the, the misery seems to pile on like in proportion to the amount of hedonism pursued. And it's so

Malcolm Collins: cool. Yeah, it is really interesting. And I want to highlight a word which you said a little differently, which is, if you look at people who dedicated their lives to personal aggrandizement or personal vanity, whether those are Sports stars who were doing it for personal reasons.

So there's sort of two categories of like [00:11:00] sports stars and movie stars. Some of them, you can see they go into it, but then they, they are genuinely trying to make the world a better place rather than sort of make themselves look like the good guy or personally grandize themselves. And you see very different life outcomes from these two groups.

When you see the, the sports stars who are in it for the fame and the movie stars who are in it for the fame and the sex and the drugs or the musicians who are in it for that stuff. Their lives often are the lives that I would least want to trade mine for. They, they have such a deep sense of genuine despair that you can see in almost all of their actions that it is almost heartbreaking.

Almost heartbreaking, but you know that this is a self working system. But what's very interesting is when we look at the people who have the most genuine and persistent happiness, these are the most mission driven people. These are the people that have sacrificed their lives for their faith, and that faith can be a...

secular faith or a [00:12:00] religious faith but sacrificing your life for your faith. Now, some people are like, but isn't that what these, you know, Hollywood stars that are pushing every single progressive talking point are? And I'd be like, no, it's the Hollywood stars that are sticking to the progressive talking points from 20 years ago that have radically changed.

Because they have radically changed. Like what is an acceptable progressive talking point changes a lot faster than I think a lot of progressives are willing to admit themselves. And so you see different levels. I can think of an example here. J. K. Rowling, for example, she seems to be a genuinely happy person who is still pushing the progressive talking points that were famous when she was a kid.

Yeah, at

Simone Collins: great cost. At great

Malcolm Collins: cost. No, I think she was wrong to believe those,

but I think it leads to a level of integrity. And logical consistency. Yeah, integrity and logical consistency that you don't see in the Hollywood stars, like, a perfect example of this would be like Harry and Meghan, like, whenever anything switches, whenever the winds blow in a [00:13:00] particular way, they're on the new train, because what they care about is being seen as good guys, not the causes themselves, what they care about is the

brand,

He's right. Trying to make ourselves into a brand just turned us into products. We don't need to be a brand, do we? Yes, I'm sure you agree, darling. We can be the people we talked about being, with no more worries about how we look or the image we project to people.

What matters is what we have on the inside.

Hello?

Malcolm Collins: So

This is a brilliant little thing that has an aspect of religiosity to it, you know, in, in me telling my kids about this, like this idea of happiness turning to ash in one's mouth, that this being the way that we are designed, but it also has a level of truth to it and something I can point to, but it's also a lesson I want my kids to learn because I think it's a very that takes a lot of [00:14:00] people too long to learn.

I, I hate Jim Carrey's politics and everything like that, but I do love the one quote that he has. And I think he's an example of a deeply unhappy person who achieved everything and then just tried to go, like, never really thought about why he was doing stuff,

but it's, I hope that everyone you know, has the, the blessings to achieve everything they ever wanted to achieve in life so that they can know that.

It wasn't what they wanted which is, no, I mean, it's, it's, if that's the type of stuff you want to achieve,

I am two time Golden Globe winner Jim Carrey. And when I dream, I don't just dream any old dream.

No, sir. I dream about being three time Golden Globe winning actor Jim Carrey,

because then I would be enough.

It would finally be true. And I could stop this terrible search.

Malcolm Collins: you want to see a genuinely happy person, and this is why I'll often play clips of him, like, on other Basecamp episodes Steve Irwin,

What good is a fast car, a flash house, and a gold plate of [00:15:00] dunny to me? Absolutely no good at all. I've been put on this planet to protect wildlife and wilderness areas. Which in essence is gonna help humanity.

I want to save the world. And you know money? Money's great. I can't get enough money. And you know what I'm going to do with it? I'm going to buy wilderness areas with it. Every single cent I get goes straight into conservation. And guess what, Charles? I don't give a rip whose money it is, mate. I'll use it and I'll spend it on buying land.

Malcolm Collins: Like, watch

Anything with him in it, the way he relates to his family, the way, like, Just genuinely, like, pure, good hearted happiness.

 There anything in this world that would want to make me give away what I'm doing now? Yes. Yes there is. When my children can the football that I call wildlife conservation and run it up. When they're ready to run up our mission, [00:16:00] I'll gladly step aside. And I guarantee you it'll be the proudest moment of my life.

And my job will be done like my mum and my dad. Then, and only then, will I know that I have achieved my ultimate goal.

Malcolm Collins: And that is really interesting that you can see this when somebody who has dedicated themselves to a higher calling. And that's what I talk about. Like, he definitely had a secular higher calling. Like, his higher calling was preserving the environment, right? But And it

Simone Collins: doesn't have to be, like, a higher calling that we approve of.

Like, when I was trying to think When we first talked about this of celebrities who are super, super famous and successful, but also they seem really happy. I thought of Bill Murray and like, probably his objective function is not something that we would choose for ourselves. But he clearly he's very consistent in his action.

And like both publicly and privately, and he, you know, seems really happy.

 Karen Michael drove more than 300 miles from her home outside Chicago to the ballpark in Cleveland. Karen didn't have a ticket for the game, but she went anyway on the [00:17:00] zillion to one chance she could buy one at the stadium. I was at the will call window hoping that somebody didn't pick up their tickets and I would be able to rebuy them and they don't do that.

Murray was passing by and saw Karen being turned away, heartbroken. And he turned around, gave me the ticket, shuffled me in the door. I was ecstatic to even be going into the game, let alone actually sitting with him. Roker also showed this goofy video of Murray playing hairdresser with another fan. And he just starts styling her hair.

Simone Collins: So. Well, and it

Malcolm Collins: doesn't seem to me that this was ever about fame or hedonism for him. No, he just,

Simone Collins: he's just a cool guy.

Malcolm Collins: But anyway, so back to the talking point, demons, right?

So what is a demon within this context? Like, where can I borrow? Themes around what demons look like and Simone, you had a really interesting idea. Yeah.

Simone Collins: Can I share my, my, my idea of [00:18:00] demons? What I think they are actually in our metaphysical metaphysical world. Is so we have the future police, which are essentially like our religions equivalent of angels, because we often say, you know, when something happens and you don't know why, or it seems bad at the time we're like, listen, the future police.

made this happen because it was supposed to happen. And if we are on a righteous path, essentially, it is going to be for the best. And we found in our lives that whenever something seemingly terrible happens, it actually is for the best. And we thank the future police for that. So they are in that sense to us, a guardian angel, but I think that they can equally be demons.

And that the same future police that are nudging your life in a positive direction can be the same. Demons that nudge your life in a terrible direction, toward death, toward ruin, toward obsolescence, because you are not, to use a Calvinist term, Among the elect and a sign that demons are punishing you that the future police are punishing rather than rewarding you is that you are pursuing a life of hedonism.

And so you [00:19:00] are going to be increasingly punished by them made obsolete, made miserable made, you know, have your life cut short, et cetera. And I think it's the most. Per our worldview, logically consistent view, and it's also simple and elegant, because the same people who reward can also punish more like a Krampus version of Santa Claus.

Malcolm Collins: Well, so, so, you know, I, I like this idea of The same entity that is rewarding, or group of entities that is rewarding actions that increase the potential flourishing of the human race do lay tests and trials for us intentionally. They do lay temptations. They would

Simone Collins: need to remove the non meaningful people.

They would need to take out the ones who might cause damage, right? Who might not create the future that is, that needs

Malcolm Collins: to happen. Yes, well, to abandon those that succumb to the temptation and the tests that they have laid out to them. Not just abandon, but

Simone Collins: cull, but

Malcolm Collins: neutralize. Yeah, well, and I think if you see.

Historically, you know, one of the things we did when we were looking at raising our kids is [00:20:00] going through historic figures that ended up moving human civilization on a direction that we think was better. And we're like, what do they have in common? Like, if we're thinking about raising our kids to be great people, like we do believe in the great people theory of history.

And I do want my kids to be great people. I do want to become one myself in great person history. Right. That'd be amazing if that happens. But One of the things that you just see consistently is, in their youth, they underwent some form of enormous trial. Or some form of enormous undeserved hardship, often.

Not always undeserved but, no, you just see this over and over and over again, you know? You saw it in the recent Elon Musk book, whether it's Caesar and the Pirates, whether it's You know, there's, there's always stuff like this, right? And I love this as a, as a a mechanism because if the future police were guiding all of these individuals as well, they had to put them through these trials so that they could know when they had to give them the temptations so that [00:21:00] they could ensure.

They deserved their, their blessings and their, their guidance to, you know, the future that must come to pass. But this is also very different than most religion structure of demons.

Simone Collins: One, one interesting way that some religious or cultural views. don't do demons, but still do chaotic forces, which I would say is probably closer to future police is with the tricksters that you'll see like in many Native American traditions.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, but I just don't know if we believe in tricksters.

Simone Collins: Yeah, but I think tricks, tricksters are interesting in that, you know, to, to your point that like, oh, you know, all these religions have demons. I wouldn't say that demons are universal or that

Malcolm Collins: everyone. No, no, no. But what I think is. It's pretty odd for a religious structure is a religious structure that believes that both the entities acting negatively in your life and the entities acting positively in your life are the same entity.

Simone Collins: Oh, I didn't know the Greek and Roman gods seems to be that right. Sometimes they would be complete dicks to you and sometimes they would be.

Malcolm Collins: I'd say it's closer to like the Christian [00:22:00] God where the negative things that befall someone are often God as well as the positive things. He was sometimes really mean.

Well, I mean, this isn't true of all iterations of Christianity, but it is definitely true of some. But he often doesn't, or at least in the iterations that I'm familiar with, use angels to perform the negative acts. He instead uses the angels to sort of give demons or devils permission to, the devil permission to perform negative acts.

Hmm. Is often. There were two around the Bible. The actual Bible itself often goes very rarely into this sort of stuff. So it's not, I don't

Simone Collins: recall anything about angels or demons in the Bible. I just recall for example, Satan, like goading God into making jobs life miserable. I'm not even tempting. Just being like, you really think job things are doing

Malcolm Collins: great.

But anyway, so, so, so back to dean, right. Yes. So. Another thing that I really like and it's funny, we, we in our [00:23:00] book we called, we said one of the names for, for, for the, the deity that we call God as we call it is the Omniscience, you know, the, the all child basically. The inevitable God. But obviously, or the inevitable God that we tied from the Obviously we took some inspiration from the Warhammer universe from that just because I love it.

It's fun, right? Good lore one of the best lores actually. But I was also sort of thinking of it in terms of a lore structure, and I really like its lore structure around the Types or sort of the domains of demons with the four core domains of demons. And what I like about this is in terms of teaching my Children how to resist the core temptations and the faces that the.

Enemy, you know, when, when these, these future police are acting adversarial to you when they are testing you, they do that through enemy agents, through empowering [00:24:00] individuals, real humans often or social movements or events in your life that you can call the enemy. To test you, to pull you off the path of righteousness.

And that the enemy, I, the, what I like about the Warhammer framing here is you can use the four chaos gods as the faces that the enemy uses and the avatar the enemy uses to pull you from your path, right? And, and it will do this with fallen individuals. It'll take somebody who's already fallen, often succumbed to some form of ideological virus.

And then use, utilize, puppet that individual often as part of the virus's reproductive cycle to try to peel you off from the path of righteousness. So if I'm going to go through the four deities in the Warhammer universe and sort of see how I see them represented here. Which is interesting, because I just find them much more compelling than, than more traditional deities I'm familiar with from other demons I'm familiar with from other religious [00:25:00] structures.

The reason why I think that they're more compelling is because they were sort of come to a priori from an authorial standpoint instead of being So historically, if you look at like Christianity, what Christianity would often do is frame the gods of neighboring religions as demons or as Satan.

You know, like

Moloch, right, was a neighboring religion during early Judaism, right? So, and, and words for demon and stuff like that, or ball was a, a, a neighboring deity, right? Which means that they would often take a lot of the iconography from that instead of coming up with the iconography a priori.

Now, of course, if you're taking this from our weird religious perspective, we would say that these are not actual a priori, but these are visions of the way that you might be tested that are easy for a child to conceive of, right? So the, the four core. Deities born by four core human sources of temptation or fear or negative [00:26:00] emotions.

The first we would say is Nurgle which in, in the universe is, is sort of the deity of, of pestilence, which is born by human's fear of death and desire to keep living through anything. And the gifts that it gives to people who follow it most are, are the alleviation of, of pain associated. with death and stuff like that, like diseases, et cetera.

Simone, what group would be most associated with a paralyzing fear of death leading them to stagnation? Our

Simone Collins: longtime enemy, the life extensionists.

Malcolm Collins: Yes. They're, they're the, the Nergalite community. Well, I mean, I, I like that because I think it's, it's really true. It can be seen as a positive ideology, and there's so many ways to cover up the intrinsic stagnation embodied within perpetual life and the intrinsic dehumanization of shorter lived entities and everything like [00:27:00] that whereas I think seeing it Through this eye can make it a lot easier to understand the, the, the true, and what I also love is the correlation between stagnation and pestilence, um, that it is in stagnant pools that parasites breed most fervently that then take down great beasts.

Huh. I see. Then second, you could say the most common would be Slaanesh. And what I like about Slaanesh is Slaanesh is all forms of hedonism, right? Not just sexual hedonism, but personal vanity, a strive for perfection. So someone would be a servant of Slaanesh or a tempter of Slaanesh, whether they are a Jimbro who is indolently working on their body, To the exclusion of particular, potentially efficacious action in reality or somebody who just spends all day [00:28:00] having sex or on only fans or eating food constantly like a glutton.

And what I really like about this demonic framing is it helps remind people how little of a difference there is. between pursuits of personal vanity and, and the pursuit of being validated by your community, which can be a really driving ideology for a lot of people, right? It's very easy to convince somebody that this is a thing of value because they're like, I am striving for human perfection, right?

But it is human perfection. That serves no greater purpose other than the glorification of the self. aNd this really came up with a family member of mine where he was annoyed at me. So a lot of my family, people might be surprised to know this, are like very deep south, good old boy type people.

You know, Texas groups. And this is somebody who [00:29:00] married into the family, so not, not directly related to me. But, you know, it's the type of people my family often marry. That I said that sports was a sin. And he was like, no, sports is not a sin. Sports is great. Sports is tradition. And I'm like, yeah, but how does it make the world a better place?

What I go and they're like, well, you can't just say sports is a sin because from your framework, I'm like, there is no logically consistent framework. I stand all logically consistent frameworks. That lead to a better future for humanity and that are pluralistic, right? That are okay with people different from them existing.

And none of them that I am aware of have like a logically consistent way. I can think of no iteration of Christianity that's like really a well thought through iteration. Where God's like, oh yeah, you get into heaven because you did really well on that one play. Because you had all of those fans.

Because you helped carry your team to

Simone Collins: victory. And to be clear. This is not to say that any engagement in sports is seen as a bad thing by us. It's, it's sports as a, like an inherent good that you disagree with.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, well, and, and as a [00:30:00] life pursuit that I disagree with. Right. So I, I would say that, and this is where we'll get to one of the other demons, one of the easiest paths to temptation, one of the easiest ways a person can fall off the righteous path is to not recognize that as a human, they are wretched and they are flawed and they are failed.

And that, that is okay. All humans sin. But it's critical. Is that you do not glorify the sin. What I mean by this is Every human does some things that are just for them. Whether it's sports, whether it's working out a little bit more than they have to, Whether it's drinking, a sin that I engage in, right?

Whether it's you know, indulgence. Spending on things that they don't really need, right? My sin. Yeah. Sin is a, is a, is a part of life, but there is a huge difference between saying I am engaging in this sin. I recognize it [00:31:00] as sin. I recognize it as something I should have some shame for but I also recognize that I am human and thus a sinner.

Right? But if you use it and say, no, actually the sports are a good thing. I am a good person for being good at sports. I am a good person for, in whatever particular aspect of slaneshidom that I engage in. That is where true evil comes from. But true evil can also come from a human that thinks they can totally avoid sin.

Every group I know of. believes that humans can completely avoid sin, the humans in their group that quote unquote come closest to that are typically the most efficacious individuals in society. Because avoiding sin means avoiding action.

Simone Collins: Yeah. So yeah, so sorry, I think you cut out for a second. You were saying that those who believe you can completely avoid sin and who tried to do so also do the least of anything because they're most likely to just not do anything.

Malcolm Collins: Yes. So there is, there is just as much sin [00:32:00] in believing that sin is virtue as there is sin in. Believing that it is, it is capable that you as a human, a current iteration of humanity can escapes it. So, but anyway, so that's, that's one path of there. It's a Sloan Eshedom. And what I really like about Sloan Eshedom as a framing device is that it frames all of these various.

types of hedonistic and self validation temptations alongside each other, and as equally evil because I believe they hurt people in the same way but they're very different than something like the life extensionists, like the desire to not die. This is usually an ideological, not like in the moment desire.

 NExt demon or, or life paths would be Korn. The demon of war. How do we spell this? Or, or aggression. Well, and Simone knows when world conflicts erupt, I'm often like, well, Simone, should I go there? Should I be trying to do something about this? And she's like, no, Malcolm, this really isn't the best use.

But I feel a [00:33:00] really strong desire to get involved when I see... And, and my family, I remember, one of the things that my grandfather told me before I was passing, who had, you know, served in World War II is that you are going to have like a really strong desire to engage in wars that you see as righteous.

But just remember that it is always best to try to avoid the conflict. Because you, as somebody who hasn't been to war, don't know how bad it really is. And that you can't imagine how bad it really is. And so I think that this desire. For my team versus their team, where it leads to death and setback, is sort of Cornite failure.

Which is also very different from the Slaaneshi Kappa failures, from Life Extensionist Kappa failures. And the final one... Which is the most interesting one to me is, is, is Ezechian failure. This would be the, the god of, of change, [00:34:00] right? The chaos demon of, of change. And that within the setting, you know, this is the demon that empowers sorcerers and stuff like that.

Like anyone with any sort of magical power, or intellectuals, or academics. But it, it is change just for the sake of change, not change for the sake of improving the human condition. So who does this? Because generally humans hate change. I would say that the core avatar of this right now would be the people who are just completely unhinged about AI and that the people who call other people's things like carbon fascists, that literally

Simone Collins: I call other people carbon fascists, so I'm, I'm subject to

Malcolm Collins: this.

Yes, you are. This is definitely the temptation that we are the most susceptible to. No, I mean It's true, Simone. The idea of individuals... Now, I do believe that humans will need to change in the future, and I think that the, the drive to not change [00:35:00] is, is, is a Nergalite change. Nergal and Tzeentch are core...

They, they hate each other a lot. There are two ends of a toxic spectrum. They, yeah, there are two sides of a toxic spectrum where there is complete stagnation but then there is change only for the sake of, of change. And that where I think you can corally define an individual that is.

succumb to zechinism versus an individual that hasn't, is do they want some iteration of humanity to survive, or are they okay with humanity being wholly and completely replaced, or are they indifferent to humanity being wholly and completely replaced in the pursuit of whatever other thing that they're trying to achieve, often knowledge work or creating, you know, the perfect AI or something like that.

I, I would argue that this is a force that in our world right now is the weakest of the four demonic forces and therefore, you know, we tend towards it a little bit, but only, only to sort of even [00:36:00] out the great game, you could call it, between these, these four forces and the different people who will wear these forces and be puppeted by these forces in trying to seduce you off the path of righteousness, which is towards a pluralistic human Empire.

Hmm. Interesting. We're the descendants of humans, because you know, of course, any entity that's around for hundreds of thousands of years is going to speciate to some extent. And so we want a, a human zoo, right, a, a, a, the collection, I mean, especially when humans get to other planets or are on floating, you know, ship structures that take thousands of years to get between you know, you're just intermigrating.

It will indelibly lead to speciation, unless you have some sort of like genetic protection act on, which is culling humans that deviate too much, which you could do, but it would require this sort of ironically, a [00:37:00] polygenic risk or IVF selection of the type that we do, but selects towards reversion to the mean.

Simone Collins: I want to go out on a limb and say, you. know probably more Warhammer lore than most people who own At least one Warhammer figurine, and you are not among those people,

Malcolm Collins: by the way. Oh, you say that, and then some people are going to be criticizing my knowledge of the lore in this video, being like, you got this wrong, or you got this wrong.

For someone

Simone Collins: who doesn't own a single figurine, I think

Malcolm Collins: it's okay. So I really love lore research, okay? It's one of my deepest hobbies, where I will just go Hours. Deep, deep into the lore of a fictional universe. The two best fictional universes for lore I think, are the Old World of Darkness,

Simone Collins: Is this a vampire

Malcolm Collins: thing that the Vampire of the Masquerade.

But the original Vampire of the Masquerade, not the new one. They really destroyed it [00:38:00] when they made, like, the new one. Well, I, I, I think that the, the anyway. Yeah. So, I, I think they destroyed it with the new World of Darkness. I don't like, like, the new... Like, was Malkavians being a disease instead of a distinct clan?

How dare? It's so stupid. How dare you? Sorry, Simone, this bothers me. This bothers me.

Simone Collins: I'm, I know, and I'm not above this, this level of

Malcolm Collins: nerddom. And Gehenna, like, is, is too underway at this point, was in the new world of darkness. So anyway but then it was, was the Warhammer with Laura. The reason I always liked it.

And one of the reasons I like it, do you think it's the logical conclusion just to like go on a tangent here that is not tied to the topic of this video of a lot of hippie mindsets? So a lot of hippies, they'll come to me. And they'll say things like, I remember this growing up, right? Like, well, what if deities are created by humans believing in them, right?

And then those deities really come to exist. And you, you mentioned to a book, a

Simone Collins: very American [00:39:00] gods kind of

Malcolm Collins: view. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, Warhammer says, okay, this is true, and that is the worst of all possible worlds, because if that was true, then it is the most simple emotions, like the fear of death, or pleasure for pleasure's sake, or, you know, et cetera, that would...

Manifest the most of these deities, and as soon as these deities could act on the world, then they would have a manifest interest in increasing the emotion that leads to their creation. So like the god associated with fearing death would also... Try to spread pestilence in diseases because that causes more people to fear death, which causes its power to grow.

anD that this leads to horror beyond horror, horror beyond comprehension. And then you get a vast interstellar human empire. And you need to, like, monitor everyone's emotions and live in this extremely, even more than us puritanical perspective where you sort of have to beat emotions out of individuals because You must [00:40:00] create

Simone Collins: some terrifying

Malcolm Collins: god.

Yeah, yeah, but it's interesting that our world perspective is not that dissimilar from that I mean as we say all positive and negative emotions are sin in that they are intrinsically indulgent and that's the righteous path for humanity is one in which we learn and master emotional self control rather than to allow our emotions to control us, as I think is the calling card of many soft cultural traditions.

Anyway, I love you and I love that you're okay with me being a stinking nerd.

Simone Collins: I wouldn't have it any other way, Malcolm, you're the

Malcolm Collins: best. You are the best. You are the best. And I loved the thesis you came up with of the demons and the gods being two faces of the same entities because it rings so true for me, it rings so plausible for me, it requires the smallest additional stuff, but it also allows us to prime our kids and to frame for our kids, the [00:41:00] people who come to them with these temptations, that this is a test and these individuals are just.

human puppets of failed human creatures that are testing them.

Simone Collins: Yes, it's going to be fun. Can't wait to try

Malcolm Collins: it out. Love you. Can't wait to try terrifying our kids.

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