1/3 Cults Become A World Religion | Crazy Stats To Save Your People — episode transcript
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1/3 Cults Become A World Religion | Crazy Stats To Save Your People — episode transcript
Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone. I’m e- extra excited to be here with you today. This is probably gonna be one of my favorite episodes to do, one of the most interesting that I have researched, because I conducted a lot of original research for this episode and found something really, really fascinating.
So if we’re just going to jump to the punch, if you just go into the academic literature and say, of new religions, cults, whatever you wanna call them, what percent of them survive? They’ll say one in 1,000 or one in 100,000, right?
Octavian: Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: Yes. But if you actually look at those studies, what they’re generally looking at is, like, somebody got mad at their local pastor and started, like, a small schism or something like that.
Simone Collins: Mm.
Malcolm Collins: If instead you narrow it down to only books with a unique... Or not books, but, like, ways of seeing things with a unique metaphysical framing and a full written corpus this would be, techno-puritanism would be an example, like, Mormonism would be an example, Scientology would be an example. The Nation of Islam would be an example.
When you narrow it down to that, if you look at ones founded around the world from the 1700s till today, over a third of them end up surviving at least 100 years, and at some point having over 100,000 members.
Simone Collins: That’s... N-
uh.
Malcolm Collins: no. Now, if we narrow down the list further, so I’m gonna put two more coffee outs on here that are gonna make it even crazier.
Simone Collins: Okay.
Malcolm Collins: Take out all of the ones that are I’m gonna say, like, humanist. Like, techno-puritanism would not fall into this by any measure of the, But, but you know what I’m talking about. Those weird humanist religions that were founded in, like, the 1920s and then became a craze for a bit.
If you take those out and you take out any that do not have an explicitly pro-natalist framing, right? Like, it- Oh ... they, they grow through conversion rather than kids.
Simone Collins: Mm.
Malcolm Collins: You now get a 93% survival rate, and over a 53% rate of becoming a major world religion. And-
Simone Collins: Does this include, like, all the weird...
Like, would it include NXIVM? Would it include the one with the, the woman who died after taking tons of colloidal silver that HBO did a documentary about?
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, so it would not include her, and we’ll go over what it excludes explicitly. Okay. So first you have to have a unique metaphysical framework with a written corpus.
Oh. She didn’t have a wr- written corpus. She didn’t have, like- Mm.
Simone Collins: So cult of personality, basically, do not-
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, cults of personality, off the table. Okay. Anything that’s clearly just schizophrenic ramblings. This would be like Cubism or whatever- Yeah. A
Simone Collins: man-
Malcolm Collins: The world is a cube and there are two sides to a cube.
Cube-based logic. Yes. It, so it cuts out that, it cuts out cults of personality and it cuts out mild schisms. So like if you’re like a, you, you largely believe what the organization would believe, but you have some minor quibbles but you’ve written a lot on those minor quibbles, it cuts those out.
Simone Collins: Hmm ...
Malcolm Collins: but like that’s a very weird thing that the growth of new religious movements is dependent on their authorship and not on some of, of like, like the the, the core... What, what’s the word I’m looking for here? The core bottleneck happens before the point of authorship. Mm. And when I did this, I did a secondary thing that was very interesting.
So note here when I say I’m cutting out schizophrenic ramblings, I am not cutting out, in this list, one of the things we looked at was silliness. And you’ll actually find that silliness correlates with survivorship.
Simone Collins: Huh ...
Malcolm Collins: so what I mean
Simone Collins: by this is- So if the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster had managed to put together some coherent biblical, or not, like a religious text or something, a worldview, it could have actually done quite well.
Malcolm Collins: Unlikely because it falls into the one category where they always die.
Simone Collins: Oh, it’s not pronatalist.
Malcolm Collins: No. Anything that, that’s explicitly atheistic, as I said, like any of those humanist projects- Oh, yes. Okay, okay ... or anything like that, every single one of them has died. Hmm. Now, note there have been a number of times where people have intentionally engineered religious systems.
Every single one of those became a major world religion. Hmm. So we’ll get into this. It’s crazy. I put together a companion doc. In the last companion doc that I gave you guys, I said, “Don’t go to it because that’s like way too AIE,” or like, you know, it’s... I fixed that. I fixed that in the last one. I fixed that in this one.
Now if you’re ever doing research using Fable or something like that, you know, to do like deep research, ‘cause it does deep research, but it’s terrible at writing- Yeah ... you can use the RFAB API, which will go back over it and check it for how AI it looks, and then rewrite it until it doesn’t look that way anymore.
And so now if you go to this companion doc, it reads like a human wrote it which is just a fantastic product to have. And also because it’s checking using an AI checking engine- Ah ... like if you were doing homework with this or something-
Oh,
God ... a detection system wouldn’t catch it. I’m just saying that’s...
I, I like to design tools. I like to design tools. What, what am I doing? I needed this for my research, all right? But I also went over during what periods, like if you look at different countries and cultures during what periods did you have more surviving religious systems? Founder motivations, how did those impact the religion?
E.g. did it appear to be started as a scam? Just to get it out there right now, religions that were like provably founded as scams, one they-- it doesn’t seem to affect their survivorship rate. If anything, they appear to have a slightly higher survivorship rate. And two we, because there have been so many of them we can go over what happens when it comes out that they were likely a scam, how followers react.
It’s very predictable. So that’s not really a big risk to a religion. We’ll go over, being a sex cult is a big risk to a religion, though. Religion- Oh, that
Simone Collins: is comforting.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, that are, that are focused on, Well, often because they’re v- explicitly anti-natalist. That’s, that’s- Oh, yeah ... often part of being a sex cult.
Mm-hmm. Now somebody could say, “Malcolm, this is survivorship bias, right?” You know, you’re only seeing the ones that eventually survived. To which I would have a counter to you, which is to say we know of throughout history the beliefs of many intelligent, eccentric people. Those are the types of people most likely to form one of these.
We just don’t find in the historical record a lot of unique frameworks within these individuals that would, that would fit this category. In fact we can even we, in the, in the document if you go through it, it has a whole section where we check for this to see if this is just survivorship bias.
It does not appear to be survivorship bias. Mm-hmm. It appears that this is a genuine and very, very strange phenomenon. So we’re gonna get to it, and hopefully as we get to it and as we go through this, we can learn a lot more about what kinds of movements survive and what kinds of movements die.
And where this is relevant to listeners, whether you be from a traditional religious background or a non-traditional religious background right now every group on Earth right now is dying from fertility collapse except for Orthodox Jews. We’ll, we’ll, we’ll cut them out. And even they have issues right now, right?
Mm-hmm. A- and, and, and like the Amish, but the Amish don’t have technology, so it’s not super relevant in terms of, like, future geopolitical control. Now, a, it, it’s true whether you’re a, a traditional Catholic or a Baptist or a like Pentecostals are doing okay, but it’s mostly from conversions. But the point here being it’s pretty much anyone watching this realizes they need to do some cultural experimentation and entrepreneurship with their family, right?
Like, how do I take the traditions I inherited and make them more robust?
Hmm.
And that we can see what works and didn’t work with random cults or other new religious movements allows us to say, “Ah, this technology seems to work. This technology doesn’t seem to work.” And then take the ones that we want.
One just, just jumps out at me, but I didn’t think of it when I was putting this together. One thing that may be leading to this is in The Pragmatist’s Guide to Crafting Religion, we talk about the concept of a soft religion versus a hard religion. Mm-hmm. A hard religion has unique othering effects to it that make you very different from the mainstream population be it in the way you dress, in the way you talk, in the way you name yourselves, in the things you do.
A soft religion doesn’t. A soft religion’s just like, “Ah, we’ll make it work.” So like, if we’re talking about like a, a harder form of Catholicism or something like that, you know, you may wear a veil, and you may y- make sure that you make every one of the specific mass events. You may go on pilgrimages for all your vacations.
A harder form of Islam, you make sure that you pray, you know, the five times a day. You have the pray space. You do everything. You, you do your stuff. Now, harder religions typically have higher fertility rates, higher fidelity, and they lose their children at a lower rate than, than softer religions.
When you, when you make the religion too easy, it, it doesn’t work as well. Yeah. Which has been one of the big problems I think with modern Mormonism, as I’ve talked about before. I think one of the reasons it’s doing so poorly is because the center church thinks that they can win by becoming softer, which makes them more acceptable to the average person.
Actually, Catholicism probably has a similar phenomenon. I mean, we can view it as infiltration, but if we, if we don’t view it as infiltration, and we say, “No, they’re just rational but disconnected dumb actors,” what we may have is a disconnected leadership that’s just like, “Well, the masses say they don’t like our policy on X, or they don’t like this sort of a mass.
You know, like, let’s not do it that way anymore, right? Like, let’s do it more like everyone else and say that we’re super accepting.” And this un- unfortunately causes way lower fertility rates whenever a group does this. And now one of the things that we noted when we first put this out is that when a religion is first founded, it generally is way, way, way harder.
And over time, it becomes softer until it undergoes a revival, it, which then it gets harder, and then it just degrades over time again. One of the reasons why new religions may have such an advantage to them is because they start really, really hard
Simone Collins: Yeah, so basically they just... Anyone, any religion will have the advantage of hardness, and yeah, it doesn’t kind of matter.
If it, if it’s new Even if you’re ridiculous, i- if it’s a hard religion, you’re still giving people an, a, an advantage Well,
Malcolm Collins: this
Simone Collins: would
Malcolm Collins: also explain why the totally secular humanist religions did not succeed
Simone Collins: Oh. Oh.
Malcolm Collins: Because- Not
Simone Collins: hard enough?
Malcolm Collins: They’re typically almost designed intentionally anti-hard
Simone Collins: Wait, weren’t the Shakers, like, celibate?
Isn’t that hard for
Malcolm Collins: people? They were not a humanist... They were a Quaker group. They were extremely religious.
Simone Collins: Oh, okay, okay, okay.
Malcolm Collins: The comb- we’ll, we’ll probably talk about it in a weekend episode, ‘cause I do wanna do a weekend episode where we go over all the rationalist religions Mm-hmm Um, or if fans want it enough, they can tell us to do it.
But I, I, I find them interesting. Our, in our last two paid weekend episodes, if you guys wanna do those, like Substack or Patreon or whatever we went over the silly religions and we went over the intentionally designed religions
Octavian: Delightful
Malcolm Collins: And for people who are unaware of the intentionally designed ones that succeeded one of them that shares you could say a lot with techno-puritanism, is a guy came out there, he was a spiritualist, and he’s like, “Let’s...”
Well, actually, he was an anti-spiritualist. His job was detecting spiritualist frauds, right? Like, you know, during that time when they were really common, when, like, Houdini did this as well. And then he decided to go do a bunch of blind tests with spiritual mediums to interview tons of them and then find out what things they said that seemed to agree across large populations of mediums Mm-hmm Um, especially looking for, like, really specific things, and he developed a methodology for this.
And now this has become a major world religion. It’s pretty big in Brazil, for example the religion that grew out of this. But, but that’s what I mean when I say that some of these are, like, rational in the way that techno-puritan is rational, but they try to design around something. The other one that has a lot in common with techno-puritanism is one of the larger Hindu groups.
And basically one guy was just like, “We’re just gonna follow the Vedas. We’re gonna follow them as strictly as we can, and we’re gonna ignore all other writing, eh, eh, eh, where it contradicts the Vedas or could be seen as contradicting the Vedas. And we’ll create a school around this.” And that ended up doing really, really well.
So we, we, we can, we can get into those, but I’ll just start going through the stats right now. There is no way we’re gonna get to all of this in this. A- one of the cool things in this, if you wanna go to the attached companion piece for this, is I list every one of these religions whether it survived, how long it survived, its core teachings, how it ended up dying off if it died off, with a Wikipedia link.
So if you are a nerd for different religious frameworks and everything like this, this is a, a great opportunity for you to go and learn about those. All right So the first thing I’m gonna put on screen here we have grades here. , You have established equals 50,000 to one million. Major is more than one million. And then persistent- That’s fair ... but small is self-reproducing at around 50K. And dead is extinct. Okay? 50K is a lot. So of the 57 religious movements- Yeah ... we could find with a corpus during this period what’s really interesting is 11 became major world religions.
Ooh. 13 became medium-sized world religions. This is 50 to one million people. Fif- 50,000 to one million people. Okay. And 13 stayed persistent and small, and 20 died out. Now, what’s fascinating about-
Simone Collins: Dude, that’s better than entrepreneurship odds, and that’s what most people consider doing, which is-
Malcolm Collins: Right?
Simone Collins: Right, yeah.
Malcolm Collins: Just start a cult, guys.
Simone Collins: Yeah, actually. The, the odds are looking a lot better than pretty much any investment prospect I’ve looked at. That, that is insane.
Malcolm Collins: No, but what- what’s more insane about this, and I’ll put this graph on screen here, is what you’re typically used to seeing with something like this is a long tail, right?
Like, one or two became major world movements. You know, like six became medium-sized, and like 23 became small size. But that’s not what you have. You have 11 became major world movements, 13 hit medium, 13 stayed at small. This also helps argue against the idea that we’re missing a bunch of, like, small things that people founded at home.
Mm. And, and, and never grew. Because even in the data where it would definitely be part of the historic record, we’re getting really, really weird data. Like even that one point should be really weird. Why is it that almost as many religions that are founded that become small yet persistent end up becoming large?
Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.
Malcolm Collins: And note the one-third number I gave you of religions with a corpus became at least medium-sized, that did not include the small ones. So that meant that if you at any point in the past since the 1700s, founded a religious movement anywhere in the world, ‘cause we looked all over the world- Mm-hmm
um, there was a one-third chance that it would be 50,000 to one million members.
Simone Collins: That’s so crazy. Man, people have been making bad life choices with their whole, “I’m gonna start a business” thing.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah.
Simone Collins: My goodness.
Malcolm Collins: And this, this result has been stable throughout the entire period that we looked at. Now for the engineered religions, ‘cause people are like, “Oh, what about like designing a religious system the same way that like techno-puritanism could be seen as doing?”
Yeah. I’m not coming out here saying “I’ve received a prophecy from someone.” I’m not coming out here- No ... with any of that. Mm-hmm. These actually have a really high success rate. So long as they have a real spiritual significance to them. Mm. Mm-hmm. And this is where with techno-puritanism it’s very important that we lay out and always cling to the position very seriously in terms of how we frame this to our kids, how we frame...
God is a very, very real entity. Yeah. He is not a metaphorical entity. He is not a supernatural entity from our perspective either. He is a very real entity. The basilisk is a real entity, not a metaphor. Mm-hmm. When you go for that stuff, it doesn’t seem to work out. So, with the Aryans Samja Dhanji claimed no revelation at all.
He pointed out an authority already every- everyone already granted the Vedas and held them as infallible, and he said he was just restoring them. Very similar to sort of what we’re doing- Mm ... with our project. Mm.
So this was founded in 1875 and has around eight million members today
Malcolm Collins: But then he used the Vedas to argue against a bunch of traditional Hindi concepts. Specifically he was...
He said that, “Actually, when you go back and look at the Vedas, it says that you shouldn’t have child marriages, and you shouldn’t have a caste system.” Right. “And women should be treated as equals.” Huh. And, you know, like, a bunch of what people might think of as somewhat modern ideas, he reinterpreted an old text as having.
If you go to Won Buddhism so Stanzey claimed in attainment, not enlightenment. So he didn’t have like a call from the outside or anything like that. He didn’t have a private vision. He’s just like, “This is the best way to do this.” With the Kardec, that was the spiritualist movement I mentioned- Mm-hmm
um, which ended up being the basis of that religion in Brazil that now has like, I wanna say like a dozen major temples, and they all dress like birds. And they it was really weird. We, we go over it in our silliest religions videos.
Simone Collins: And you’re not talking about the Brazilian one, or the-
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, the Brazilian one.
Simone Collins: That came- They don’t dress like birds. They dress like princesses with colorful veils, and super brained evil villains if you’re a dude, with the, the evil villain cape, the high collar. So funny. Yeah. Good. Yeah. They need better costume construction though. Everyone needs to learn from the Catholic Church.
That is couture. It is so good. The construction is beautiful. The garments are incredibly expen- anyway, let’s keep going. Sorry. Mm.
Malcolm Collins: Well, I have, I had to scroll through my giant list here that you guys can go through.
Simone Collins: Yeah, no, you really should check out the webpage. We’re gonna link to it in the show notes.
It’s... There’s just a lot of cool jumping off points there, and the big... It, it’s just you have to really let it sink in that s- when people intentionally create cohesive religions with a strong metaphysical mooring point, they’re powerful. It’s really crazy, and we didn’t know this when we were like, “Well, let’s build a hard religion for our family,” ‘cause it appears to be that hard religions correlate with human flourishing.
We’ll just make something that is in, in, in accordance with science and our understanding of physics and history. And then, then we like fall for it. We had no idea that like it actually had a shot of doing well. Now we’re like, “Oh my gosh. Just looking at the stats, this could go well.”
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah. No, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s genuinely surprising, and at the end of this we’ll get to the mystery of why so few are written or why so few are started.
And- Mm-hmm ... because the... if that’s the, if that’s the, the real w- I don’t know what you’d call it, the shelling point or whatever, the, the bottleneck of this entire process, why? That seems like a bizarre bottleneck.
Simone Collins: I think it’s kind of hard for people to think that hard Let’s be honest with them But you don’t
Malcolm Collins: need to think that hard.
Ah. Keep in mind with, like, Nation of Islam, you have, like, the whole- ... Yankub thing, okay?
Simone Collins: Yeah. With Scientology- Look, he put thought into that, okay? It was his best scam yet. And, you know, look, I was shocked and awed when I, I read that. I couldn’t have come up with a story like that. Though it does kind of sound like our kids’ stories, come to think of it.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. It, it literally, any AI could come up with a better story than that.
Simone Collins: Mm-hmm. Oh, yeah. I was gonna say any six-year-old probably could too. Yeah. Anyway, never mind. I, I recant. Carry on.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Also note here that in the statistics here, we cut out a number that n- some people today would consider unique religions.
Uh-huh. Because they were just too close to the birth religion, and it would end up boosting our stats because we would’ve thrown them out had they failed. So examples would be things like Seven Day Adventism, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Ariya Samja. They’re, they’re listed in the list, just worth a note, noting here.
Simone Collins: Wait, so you did include them or you excluded them?
Malcolm Collins: I excluded them from the statistics because if they had failed, they wouldn’t have been in the statistics.
Simone Collins: Oh.
Malcolm Collins: Now, remember how I said if it has those three things, it has a 93% chance of success?
Simone Collins: Yeah. That’s because- Prenatalism, actual spiritual worldview, and hardness?
Malcolm Collins: N- well, I’ll, I’ll describe them here. So one, you need a written corpus, okay? Okay.
Simone Collins: Oh, written corpus.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Go ahead ... or a spoken corpus or a recorded corpus. G- Any- Mm ... any of those work. Mm. But just, like, a series of beliefs about reality
Simone Collins: that isn’t- No, it needs to be, like, canon. There has to be, like, the, the-
Malcolm Collins: Yeah.
It, it can’t just be- ... church’s lore ... whatever the founder happens to believe that day. Yeah, you- Which is the way a lot of cults
Simone Collins: work ... need actual lore. Okay. Yeah, fair enough. Okay. With,
Malcolm Collins: with a lot of cults, it’s like, “Oh, the founder had a new revelation today- ... and so now we all wear yellow hats.”
Simone Collins: It’s all different.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. So, so consistent lore book. Got it. Check. One. Okay, great. And then prenatalism. You know, you gotta have kids.
Malcolm Collins: Next is you need something supernatural at stake.
Simone Collins: Oh, supernatural.
Can you just argue that technically paganism- Actually, do people want us to do an episode
Malcolm Collins: on where we do go over the non-supernatural ones and why every single one of them failed?
Simone Collins: Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Oh, okay. So I guess you have to say how you define supernatural because everything that we say is in accordance with our understanding of science and physics and history. But you say the supernatural part is that we believe that the age- agents of providence and basilisk, AKA the future police, Go back in time to our, where we are in the timeline and to being Well,
Malcolm Collins: I’ll, I’ll, I’ll word it a different way, ‘cause I think supernatural is the wrong word here.
Simone Collins: Yeah, what would be a better word?
Malcolm Collins: You need something beyond a normal materialist understanding of reality.
Simone Collins: Right, you need something beyond our, our current technology
Malcolm Collins: basically. So to word, so to point it this way, if we, if we talk about the one religion I was talking about, that, that spiritualist movement that got really big in Brazil- Oh, yeah
They would say that the spirit world and ghosts are not supernatural in the same way we would say they’re not supernatural. They’re like, “It’s a real and studiable phenomenon.” Yeah. “That’s what we’re doing here. We’re studying a real and studiable phenomenon.” In the same way that when we say we believe that God is shaping history, right, like through altering things maybe at like a subquantum level or something like that- Mm-hmm
I might be using scientific words there, but that is a belief that falls outside of any normal scientific corpus.
Simone Collins: Right. We couldn’t replicate it with our current technology.
Malcolm Collins: Yes, or that humanity will be raised again. Well, good humans, or not all, not even just good hu- Certain humans who are in the book of life will be raised again in a future body on Earth in another way as predicted in the Bible.
When we say something like that we can use science terms to describe it. But to a science person, we would be talking about something s- that is beyond the scientific world as a normal person accepts or understands.
Simone Collins: Well, and it’s certainly beyond current scientific and technological capacity, yes.
Malcolm Collins: Yes.
But whenever somebody was like, “No, what I’m gonna do is just focus on, like, current scientific understanding-” Mm, mm,
Simone Collins: mm, mm,
Malcolm Collins: mm ... th- those always have died in human history.
Simone Collins: Okay, so you always need to have magic, which we define as science people just don’t understand or technology people just don’t understand yet.
Malcolm Collins: Well, look at Scientology, okay? Yeah. Scientology believes thetans are real, measurable things that you measure with a thetan meter. They believe-
Simone Collins: An E-Meter. Sorry, an E-Meter,
Malcolm Collins: right? Yeah, an E-Meter. They believe that, like, there is a real evil entity on a spaceship way out there, Mr. Xeno way out there in outer space that’s gonna come and, and, and zap us all.
They believe every part of every process they do is science. Mm-hmm. They would argue nothing done within Scientology is supernatural. But to you or me or any objective observer, they’d say Come on, man. That’s not like what everyone else agrees science means. And so like as a techno-puritan I can say that I believe that all of our stuff is actual real science.
But I can also stand as an objective third party observer and be like, “Come on, man.” But it turns out that those religions actually do really well historically. The ones that don’t do really well are the ones where they’re like, “No, no, no, no. I don’t wanna say the embarrassing part. I don’t wanna do the embarrassing thing.”
The other type of religious movement that always dies always dies are the anti-natalist ones. And this is fairly common to form explicitly anti-natalist religious movements. They, they, they actually make up a big chunk of the religious movements. They are typically anti-natalist for one of three reasons.
One reason is like the Shakers, right? They think they wanna be like as holy as possible- Mm-hmm ... as sanctified as possible. Sex is an unholy thing, therefore we don’t have sex, therefore we don’t have babies. And then they go extinct. Or in the Silliness Weekend episode one of them was a Florida communist cult.
They appeared to do it for like feminist reasons ‘cause like, you know, women being in a relationship is degrading or something. I don’t understand fully. Yeah. And then the final reason is, is it’s clearly just a sex cult. Mm-hmm. And somebody’s using it to get sexual access to lots of women, and they don’t wanna deal with kids.
And those cults
Simone Collins: often
Malcolm Collins: You heard a voice whispering, and he thinks there’s a murderer in the house.
Simone Collins: Yeah. Can you tell him that Stacy and the kids are heading to the creek and he’ll be- Stacy
Malcolm Collins: and the kids are heading to the creek. Go with them and you’ll be safe.
Okay, so let’s go through the various statistics here. First religions that had a major corpus but were completely humanist, secular, in like a traditional secular format. Okay. I put- Would
Simone Collins: you include, by the way, Alcoholics Anonymous in this or not?
Malcolm Collins: I did not include- I mean- ... Alcoholics Anonymous, but I probably should have.
Simone Collins: Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: Because it does have like a written corpus.
Simone Collins: Yeah, and they do... I mean, they have weekly convenings. You’re supposed to believe in a higher power. I mean, they’re definitely a cult. They’ve killed millions of people. Yeah. So, I mean...
Malcolm Collins: See our other e- episodes on that. Like, naltrexone clearly works, and they’ve banned it in the United States for the thing that it’s good at.
Simone Collins: Yeah, like Alcoholics Anonymous- ... specifically is responsible. Like, that is the reason why we don’t have naltrexone as a widespread intervention for alcoholism, which kills. So-
Malcolm Collins: And it works 86% of the time.
Simone Collins: Yeah. So death cult. Anyway, still I think it should probably be in here if we’re being honest.
Malcolm Collins: Okay, so note here of the 13 that were founded as this humanist, secular variety, technically 8% survived.
So I, I, I’m gonna change this- Yeah ... a little bit. One sort of limped along. It was Felix Adler’s New York Society for Ethical Culture, founded in 1876. The deed not creed. It had Sunday meetings, social reforms, and a famous school, Fieldston. No God, no afterlife, no cosmic stakes. It is 150 years old- Hmm
and cleared about 6,000 members.
Octavian: So- That’s pretty small.
Malcolm Collins: Very, very small.
Today they have around 135 members
Malcolm Collins: So- Yeah ... not really, you know. Of the ones that had a corpus and something supernatural, right? Like they weren’t in this other category-
Simone Collins: Yeah ...
Malcolm Collins: 65% survive. 65,
Simone Collins: that is crazy.
Malcolm Collins: Of the ones that had both of those and were not anti-natalist- Mm-hmm
um, or were not primarily about converting other people and were focused on, like, the family and stuff like this that gets you down to 15. 14 of those survived, so 93%. And 53% of those became a major world religion. This is cleared the one million mark.
Simone Collins: Wow.
So- Is the LDS Church one of those?
Malcolm Collins: Yes, the LDS Church is one of those.
Simone Collins: Okay.
Malcolm Collins: Hmm. They, they would, they would very explicitly be one of those. Yeah ... I mean, well, I could go through-
Simone Collins: Just
Malcolm Collins: check.
Simone Collins: Yeah, yeah, just check.
Malcolm Collins: You had Mormonism. I have Seonism, Tenrikyo, Chán Bud- ... A lot of these are in other countries.
Simone Collins: Okay.
Malcolm Collins: Of the ones that you’d be aware of, the Unification Church.
Simone Collins: Okay.
Malcolm Collins: Won Buddhism, the Children of God, TFI. And yeah. Hmm. A lot of those are East Asian. Now we get into how they die. By the way, any thoughts so far, Simone?
Simone Collins: No, this is just fascinating and kind of blowing my mind. It’s like these sleeper, sleeper successes. I even remember being taken when visiting with a family in Japan when I was a teenager to some new church, and I wonder if this is one of those religions.
‘Cause it was not Shinto and it was not Buddhism, and I’m like, “What is this?”
Malcolm Collins: Japan and Korea have a lot of them.
Simone Collins: Yeah. So I must have been taken to one of them, and I like... Wow, I was, yeah, I, I was kind of shocked by how big the complex was. It was very large buildings. They, they had a lot of money. So I, it’s all starting to come together in my head like, “Oh my God.”
Like, I, it, it’s like Muggles and magic. I couldn’t see it at the time. I couldn’t recognize it. Although, whoa, hold on. I went to a Mormon preschool. All my friends in college were Mormons. So- Yeah, come on,
Malcolm Collins: Simone ...
Simone Collins: behold the power. Yes, never mind. Ooh, wow, so cool.
Malcolm Collins: Okay, so when AI was ranking why religions die- Uh-huh
because almost all the religions that had a very traditional view of science, right? Here, and I don’t like to use the word supernatural ‘cause I have pointed out the spiritualists, the Scientologists, they say everything they’re doing is science as well. Yeah. We say everything we’re doing is science as well.
Here I mean a, a, a very sort of traditional normie take on science. Yeah. That’s listed as the number one reason religions die. That is, that is given as the death region for 12 of the religions. Mm. Which I think is interesting, and it shows that as techno-puritanism grows to never be captured by the desire to overly take that approach, to, to strip out the science magic that we believe in, right?
Yeah. Like, real entities really influencing time that that is actually happening, right? Because if you, you know, really c- creating real potential miracles because the moment you strip that out, it dies. Next no fertility engine. That’s 11 of the ones that died. Decapitation or no succession, that’s 10, and we’ll go over all the different ways that succession, like the different succession ways you can set something up and what that says about whether you will survive.
Simone Collins: Well, what does decapitation mean? Like, a s- the state actually tried to conservatively take it out or something?
Malcolm Collins: No. The next one is state suppression. That’s seven. Oh. So- So then what does decapitation- ... decapitation is like the leader died early on in the movement or- So like, we would be rated as that if you and I died in a car accident tomorrow and nobody picked this up.
That’d be decapitation event. Scandal or founder crime, seven. Now note here for these, the way we’ve set it up, we’re not really at risk for the decapitation one. We’re not really at risk for the fertility one. We’re not really at risk for state suppression. We’re not really at risk for scandal or founder crime.
We’re not... Because like all of the bad stuff we do, like make money on, on AI erotic material and stuff like that, we’re like, “Yeah, whatever.” Like I have... We’re, we’re very open about that and why we
Simone Collins: do that. Well, and I think most of the scandal has to do with when you’re asking other adherents of the religion to do things or give things up for you.
Malcolm, can you go down and tell them to go to the Greek?
Thank you, Malcolm. They weren’t hearing whatever I said, so appreciate that a lot. You are amazing.
Malcolm Collins: But yeah we’ll go into that. I, I don’t really have a hard stance on this yet. I might even cut this out, I don’t know, because I need to read more and, and, and study more on this.
Simone Collins: Yeah.
I mean, I, I’m really for the investment in your family part.
You know, I think a sort of, like, bonus, like, ah, yeah, like, I made such a big windfall, who cares if I give a little bit of it to an institution that helped me thrive? Like, that seems reasonable, too. But yeah, the... I guess I’ll have to learn more about what, what is said in the Old Testament as well, ‘cause it’s
To, to try to work out what a m- a modern equivalent would be.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, and then what, what does that go to? Because I also, I haven’t enshrined this in any tract yet, but we had a tract that never aired saying that you should never within the tradition, take money for preaching- Oh, yeah ... or for teaching.
And so I, I still lean towards that perspective. I think that’s a good one to have, and it can cause a lot of negative externalities if you remove it. But you also need a central body. What we’re gonna come to at the end of this is you do need a central body with, like, some amount of money to operate institutional get-togethers and stuff like that.
Yeah. Because if you don’t do that, you always die out.
Octavian: Mm.
Malcolm Collins: And we absolutely need to make our marriage market work. We need to make our summer camp for kids and, like, our war- wider ideological sphere work. So we have to find a way to operate those things.
Simone Collins: Yeah, that’s fair.
Malcolm Collins: Fortunately, if RFAB keeps growing the way it’s been growing, maybe we just have so much money it doesn’t matter.
Simone Collins: That’s kind of- that’s the dream. The dream is to never have to ask anyone for anything, to just-
Malcolm Collins: yeah ...
Simone Collins: put value you have in excess.
Malcolm Collins: And the w- what we’re going to do with RFAB that I’m really excited about, if it keeps growing the way it’s growing, is whenever somebody gets a, a sponsorship removed for, like, being mildly right-wing, we want to give a sort of, like, insurance sponsorship that we can give to people when this happens.
I love that. Also to help grow the brand. You’re muted, by the way.
Am I? You really can’t hear me? I, I ca- I can hear you now.
Simone Collins: Oh, that’s weird. Okay.
Malcolm Collins: What were you saying?
Simone Collins: I, I just like the, the wording insurance sponsorship. I mean, be careful what you say, ‘cause some channels are like, “Okay, well that’s $100,000 a month, and can you imagine?” Like- Well,
Malcolm Collins: we need to find a way to make it not- Sustainable
impossible to handle, right?
Simone Collins: Yeah, yeah.
Malcolm Collins: The next one is a corpus without machinery. That would be another high failure risk for us. That’s- Mm-hmm ... we don’t have the marriage market, we don’t have the camps, because we don’t have churches, so we’d need some other thing that keeps the community together.
Yes. And I’ve always envisioned those as the most important things. Like, the marriage market would come with the season, like a thing where people of marrying age all get together once a year and get to know each other in addition to the online environments. And that would also help prevent people from leaving at the time when people would be most likely to leave, which is during your teen years when you’re rebellious, and it’s like, “Bro, you wanna go on Tinder?
Like really? That’s where you wanna find a wife?”
Simone Collins: Really,
Malcolm Collins: that’ll... mm-hmm Instead of our community that’s been, like, training their daughters and sons to be, like, sane and respectful. Next is a political or military capture. This is, they become part of a state apparatus, and when that state apparatus dies, they die as well.
Simone Collins: Hmm. Fair enough. Yeah. Bad strategy to be dependent in that way
Malcolm Collins: So now let’s look at succession architecture.
Simone Collins: Okay.
Malcolm Collins: All right? What are the good ones? What are the bad ones?
Simone Collins: Yeah, which actually matters so much. I mean, when people talk about the LDS church, it’s all about Brigham Young. You know, he’s, he’s the guy
Malcolm Collins: who made it happen.
Yeah, so a, a non-transferable profit office this almost always leads to an extinction event, but not always. So, like, we still have the Falun Gong around. Mm ... but of other ones like Happy Science Farrakhan’s NOI Raelism they’re all dead. Hereditary dynasty these typically split and decay over time.
And they lead to very weak religious systems. For an understanding of what I mean by this, probably the most egregious example of the hereditary dynasty is Islam. Islam should be- Oh ... much more centralized than it is, But because the Sunni, yeah, it’s split ... much stronger than it is. But because they attempted to make it hereditary in a few different ways, it basically meant that it just became warring factions that don’t even have ideologies that are that particularly different from each other.
It’s just they care about which hereditary line was kept which is why it’s really bad generally to create a strict hereditary dynasty. Now this isn’t to say you can’t have a transferable hereditary dynasty, which has worked very well on multiple occasions. This is where a founder sa- like, appoints it to their kid and then their kid appoints it to a kid.
Does
Simone Collins: that happen that much?
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. A, a, a famous case of this happening that did very well is the Baha’i. So the Baha’i was, the founder appointed- Well, and
Simone Collins: did the Church of Islam too, or the, the Nation of Islam,
Malcolm Collins: yes. But that ended up destroying it ‘cause it was appointed to his kid, and then his kid converted it all to just Islam.
But the Baha’i it was founder to son, son to grandson, grandson to council. And, and it worked that way because it didn’t have to stay hereditary. It was just hereditary while it was convenient.
Simone Collins: Okay. Huh. I mean, that’s reasonable. You should be flexible. If you have a really inflexible succession plan and then something breaks, you’re kind of screwed.
Flexible good for the most part, I think. Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: Hmm. Dynasty plus constitution, hereditary figurehead wrapped in a bureaucratic institutions that actually run things, often a bridge mechanism after the first death. This has worked very well and has a near perfect survival rate. Designated living successor these typically survive and they sometimes split and localize.
Like it’s not, it’s not the best, but it’s okay. The one that has the near perfect is the elected collegiate officers. These have a very- The other one...
Simone Collins: Oh.
Malcolm Collins: A council or electorate fills the office. The authority is legitim- legitimated by writing, not by blood or designation. For people who are wondering the answer that we chose in techno-puritanism, it’s none of these.
It’s the index system. You can read up on it. Basically the church is kept as a series of individual families or clans which have a unique set of beliefs and their own treasuries. Yeah. And then they vote on the center family/clan that has the central figure- Yeah ... who is not a prophet, they are an administrative lead.
And that it’s meant to be easy to split from and rejoin if your group thinks that it has become corrupt in some way.
Simone Collins: Mm-hmm
Malcolm Collins: Without the splitting group being the heretic group.
Simone Collins: Yeah. ‘
Malcolm Collins: Cause that’s not really the way it works. The splitting group wouldn’t be necessarily the, in the wrong group given the way the, the text is written.
If, if a group wanted to split, it is proof that the central group might be doing something wrong.
Simone Collins: Yes.
Malcolm Collins: Like, it would be more a a, a, a negative on the central group than on the splitting group. The splitting group just wouldn’t get the resources that had been accumulated by the central group.
Simone Collins: Mm-hmm
Malcolm Collins: Constitutional self-termination happens.
The founding rules accidentally or deliberately forbid replacement. This happened with the Catholic Apostolic Church. Only its original apostles could ordain. The last apostle died in 1901. Oh. So the last priest died in 1971.
Simone Collins: Well, that was really poorly planned. Are you serious?
Malcolm Collins: You, can you ask AI why they did that?
Why did the Catholic Apostolic Church not plan for the, the founding group dying?
Simone Collins: Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: And then text as a s- s- successor. These ones typically do pretty well, but they don’t have a lot of centralized control.
Simone Collins: Hmm.
Malcolm Collins: Now earlier I mentioned the survival ship bias test, and here what we do is we have a number-
Simone Collins: Oh, Malcolm, they just thought that Christ would return before the 12 restored apostles died.
So they were like, “Don’t worry. He’s, he’s coming.”
Malcolm Collins: Very poor planning, guys. Poor
Simone Collins: planning. Because I’m
Malcolm Collins: pretty sure the Bible says that no one will know the time or the,
Simone Collins: Well, did you look at this? Did you look at apocalypticism? ‘Cause I know the Seventh Day Adventists managed to stick around pretty well.
Malcolm Collins: I am, I am very disappointed in the number of Christian groups that become apocalyptic when the Bible is very clear that you should not be apocalyptic.
Simone Collins: I don’t know. Jesus was like, “No, but really, like in our lifetime. I’m super serious about this.” I- No,
Malcolm Collins: I understand that- ... soon ...
there are
ways that historic Jesus scholars interpret him as saying those things.
But- that’s not really the way it comes across in the text as the text was eventually captured, which is what we think is divinely inspired. So-
Simone Collins: Oh, by Peter.
Malcolm Collins: No, the text- I’ve never
Simone Collins: met him ...
Malcolm Collins: the text as it’s actually captured says no one will know the time or the space.
Simone Collins: Okay.
Malcolm Collins: All
Simone Collins: right.
Malcolm Collins: So- Okay. Or place.
Yeah, definitely. So, what, what that means is if somebody comes to you and they say, “I know,” they’re saying something that is explicitly anti-biblical and, like, a, a, a very easy reading of it.
Simone Collins: Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: Fair enough. But yeah. So w- in the survivorship bias test, this is the part of the, the survey you can read if you want.
Probably uninteresting, but we go over the... We do capture a, when famous people have weird beliefs. It just doesn’t happen that often. So what were the founders actually doing? Was it a probable con or scam event at founding? Was it an apparent genuine vision? Was it a desire for a better world?
Was it a commercial venture? Was it love of the practice? Or was it mixed or ambiguous? And the answer here is the best category with one of the highest survivorship rates is probable scam.
Simone Collins: Probable scam. What?
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So I actually think, before I go further, this in part explains why the authorship part is so rare.
So for a person to sit down and say “I have...” Like, suppose you’re motivated by, like, genuinely wanting a better world, right? You sit down and you say... which has a really good rate as well, by the way. Genuinely wanting a better world has a pretty good rate as well. Love of the practice has a medium rate.
This is where, like, wiccanism comes from. Mm. And, and theosophy and stuff like that, a lot of the, the new age stuff. They just appear to really love doing this stuff. It’s not like they had a vision. It’s not like they thought this religion’s gonna make the world a better place. They’re like, “I like casting spells and looking at crystals, so I’m gonna do it.”
The, w- the apparent genuine vision also does pretty well. So let’s, let’s go into this. Why, why? Like, let’s get to the mystery here, ‘cause I actually think that this, in part, solves the mystery. So I am a smart, lucid, sane adult, okay?
Simone Collins: Okay.
Malcolm Collins: Not a crazy, schizo rambling or something like this.
Simone Collins: No.
Malcolm Collins: What are the things that could motivate me to sit down and say, “I’m gonna draft an entirely new metaphysical system”? Well-
Simone Collins: ... Yeah, look, you, you did it ‘cause you wanted your kids to thrive. Right. And I, I think most sane people would never wanna sit down and write a religion.
Malcolm Collins: Well, that’s the problem, is-
Simone Collins: Yeah
Malcolm Collins: the, the number one motivation for most sane adults to do this is they want to exploit people for sex- No ... or they want to scam people for money. Mm-hmm ... and that is why so many of-
Simone Collins: Or they’re just schizophrenic, like the Brazilian lady who kept seeing ghosts by the roadside.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, but fortunately for her, her...
didn’t come off as schizophrenic ramblings ‘cause she had a Catholic friend who tried to organize all her thoughts into a corpus- I
Simone Collins: think that’s
Malcolm Collins: nice ... which then created a religion which people started following.
Simone Collins: Yeah, every schizophrenic needs their token Catholic friend.
Malcolm Collins: But this is, this is actually part of it, Simone- Yeah
that you’re, you’re getting to here. Mm-hmm. The apparent genuine visions often fail because if it’s not a real vision from God, right, it means the person is a little off their rocker.
Octavian: Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: All right? So, and it also means that the religion is being guided from a first principle’s perspective- Mm-hmm ... that isn’t thinking about the long-term consequences of the stuff they’re thinking.
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. It’s not through logic. Like- Well, they can
Simone Collins: write themselves into a corner because
Malcolm Collins: they’re never gonna apply- The Catholic, Catholic Apostolic Church that you were talking about, right?
Simone Collins: Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: Like that, a genuine vision says, “Jesus is about to come back.” Okay, Jesus is about to come back. Uh-huh. We don’t need to think, you know, that many years into the future.
Yeah.
Simone Collins: Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: And then you accidentally write yourself into a corner there.
Simone Collins: Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: So- Not
Simone Collins: perfect. Not ideal ...
Malcolm Collins: the the, the, if you get it through a vision it leads you to craziness. But if you don’t have a vision, well what are your, your options here? To try to create one of those completely secular things, which always fail, right?
Because they just don’t have the fervor. Or to lie, right? Now, or, or to look at old texts, which we’ll get to in a second. But if you take the lying route you can go into it and design it in a way that is meant to be self-replicating, meant to capture people’s attention. With the big ones here being, uh
well, we probably shouldn’t say one of them even though it’s very obvious to everyone who’s not part of this religion. I, okay, I’ll tell you how I got AI to decide which religions were founded by con artists and which ones weren’t.
Simone Collins: How?
Malcolm Collins: Did they, without attribution, rip off another religious system- Oh
that their followers were unlikely to be familiar with? Oh, no And the reason why that was such a tell for me- God ... is because if you believed that you were actually getting messages from God you would then just say- Rip off
Simone Collins: the Freemasons. No ... “
Malcolm Collins: We’re just gonna do X ‘cause the Freemasons do it that way.”
Right? E- and, and you, you wouldn’t, you wouldn’t lie about that. You would just be like- No ... “Oh, yeah, b- because of the, you know, they, they do it a different way and so whatever,” right? Yeah ... but it’s the act of concealing where the inspiration for what you’re doing came from that to me signals dishonest intent.
Note here I still think these guys come from some sort of genuine, like ... I do think God was at work in all of that, but I can- Yeah ... think God was at work in all of that and there was some shady dealings going on at the same time. Correct. But like, yeah, like the Yakub guy did that a lot too, right?
Yeah. Like, he was like stealing from other, like, male and religions and stuff like that and, like ... Anyway, The other thing that you could do is say, “Okay, I wanna make the world a better place. I do not want to claim special revelation,” right? Because then that would be a lie, and I don’t wanna go at my project of making the world a better place through a lie.
Mm-hmm. I do not want to claim that everything just works the way that old farty scientists say it works. So then what are your options? You really only have three, and they really tie your hands.
Okay ...
option number one is to come up with a system for how you determine what is true. This is what that one spiritualist guy did that I think was very sophisticated and interesting as a religious founding movement.
Mm-hmm. To just be like, “I will interview all of the different spiritualists,” and, and people have written other books since his death that use the same method, “to try to find eerie coincidences, and I will say that that is some sort of genuine spiritual connection.”
Simone Collins: Feels
Malcolm Collins: very
Simone Collins: earnest, yes.
Malcolm Collins: Yes. And what did he come up believing?
By the way, if everybody who hears this, you know, our audience, they’re like, “Oh, he probably came up with a bunch of satanic, evil stuff.” It was there is only one god. You should believe that one god. There is some form of an afterlife. And that the one god is good and wants you to be good, too.
So, like- Maybe his message aren’t that bad. You know? Like, maybe, maybe you don’t get as clear of a picture by talking to a bunch of spiritual mediums, but you don’t get a bunch of wrong answers either. The, the other option is the option that we went with, which another group has also gone with.
The group that decided to just go back to the Vedas and reinterpret them, but in a way that went against a lot of normal Hindi ways of living at the time period when it was becoming popular. And that is to just be like no, let’s say all of the Bible stuff is actually true. We’re just not understanding it right, so let’s go through it again sort of line by line, text by text, in a historic context, and try to map it to stuff.”
This allows for you to not lie about anything, still have a, a text that you can point to but it’s not your text and build from there. Mm. The problem is is so few people think to do that. Like, it’s just not an obvious thing to think to do, which is why so few people have done it, and so many more people have done the scam option, right?
Which is why so many of... I, I think why new religious movements get the the negative connotation of a cult or scam often, because so many of them just are. The vast majority are. That’s the main reason, like, a sane adult would do this. Secondly, if you’re a sane adult, it’s a crazy thing to do.
Simone Collins: Yes.
Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: And I think people don’t realize how crazy a thing it is to do. When people can just be like, “Well, go back to one of the traditional ones,” and I’m like, “The traditional ones all look like they’re failing, and I think they’re wrong.” Like I, I’ve, I can’t convince myself of it. I’m not gonna be able to convince my kids of it.
Simone Collins: Yeah, it’s like trying to get into a movie when you can’t suspend disbelief because the, you know, the acting is so bad, or the direction is so poor, or the effects are awful. Like, you, you... Yeah. You can’t just... I mean, I guess a lot of people do. A lot of people do choose to adhere to religions fully not believing them because they understand the community matters.
The problem is that they don’t really have faith, and then when family members or their children encounter genuine crises of faith, they can’t defend the faith. And if those people don’t like the community, then they don’t stick to the community or they don’t try to reform the church from within when it needs reform because they don’t believe in it enough to fight for it and try to, to shape its future.
So you have to have that true belief if you wanna be A genuine adherent. I mean, I’m sure all the members of the LDS church who don’t actually believe in it but tithe are nominally contributing to the religion because tithing is very significant. This is 10% of your fore ta- before tax income. But-
Malcolm Collins: Which I see as quite predatory.
Simone Collins: It’s insane. Yeah, I’ve heard some horrible stories that, yeah, like, you know, really, really sick family members and they’re still like, “So are you gonna write your check now?” It just, like, w- really poorly done. You... They’re... No, absolutely not. But-
Malcolm Collins: Yeah ...
Simone Collins: I think the church even really doesn’t benefit, I mean, especially the LDS church now that it just has that much money.
It, it has insane, ridiculous, preposterous, doesn’t make sense anymore levels of money. What they really need is faithful adherence more than anything else. Because what we’re seeing now is parents raising their children in the church, sending them to Mormon schools, living in Mormon communities taking them to church every Sunday, and then those kids go off to college and are like, “You know what?
I’m not a Mormon anymore. I’m not, I’m not a member of the church.” ‘Cause they, they just, the faith wasn’t there. It’s, it’s-
Malcolm Collins: Yeah So the next category that we’re gonna go to here is silliness versus sophistication. Yeah. And some religions I think it can be both sophisticated and silly, which is why we put these on two different metrics.
An example of sophisticated and silly would be Mormonism, for an example. I think Mormonism’s a pretty silly religion in, in parts of its founding mythos and stuff like this. And, and the category I use for silly is when you tell somebody who’s not of that religion their religion’s founding story, are they likely to actually LOL.
Speaker 2: I have the golden plates here in this hat. I need to have them somewhere dark so I can read the spiritual light. Oh, okay, write this down.
Christ appeared before the Nephites. And that’s how the Book of Mormon was written, dum, dum. Martin, how do you know he isn’t just making stuff up and pretending he’s translating off golden plates? Lucy Harris, smart, smart, smart. .
Speaker 3: I’m gonna hide these pages. If Joseph Smith really is translating off of golden plates, then he’ll be able to do it again.
Speaker: Lucy Harris, smart, smart, smart. Martin Harris, dumb. So-
Speaker 2: We must now translate from the Plate of Nephi, so it will be the same basic story, but written a little differently.
Speaker: Wow. If God got angry with you, then you must be telling the truth
Malcolm Collins: Yeah ... and what we found is that silliness is pretty protective to a religion. Mm. Now, the best thing you can be is sophisticated and dignified. This has a 47% chance of becoming a major world religion.
Simone Collins: Okay, what, what is an example of a sophisticated and dignified new religion?
Malcolm Collins: Baha’i would be an example of that.
Simone Collins: Mm. Okay.
Malcolm Collins: Kardashianism, the, the spiritualist one that we talked about would be an example of that.
Simone Collins: Okay.
Malcolm Collins: But I don’t really like that style. That ain’t my style. I like to have a little bit of silliness in things. Where silliness is very protective is because it causes members to be shunned by out groups, and it forces them to further identify with a, “No, I really believe this.”
You know, like, we may not believe in the future police in a literal context, but it is part of the family lore, right? Mm-hmm. Like, the kids talk about the future police all the time. They get id- attacked by Krampus’, right? Like, a Krampus is a major part of their... They believe that they are possessed by the devil, right?
Like, or w- that they call the basilisk when, whenever they get in a mood where they’re doing bad things, ‘cause that’s what we tell them. We go, “Well, you... It... Has the basilisk taken you over?” And they’re like, “Yep, the basilisk has taken me over.” And, and then one time Totes was like, “Octavian, you have to slap me.
You have to slap out the basilisk.” But like, they’re learning how to contextualize their negative and tantrum-like emotional states as something separate that’s not really who they are, and that is their opposition, the traditional meaning of Satan that’s corrupting their heart, right? Mm-hmm. Like, a lot of these things that we do are objectively pretty silly.
The, the Future Day where we take all their toys and we leave, like, silly foam and stuff and say it’s future debris like, it’s a silly thing to do, okay? And a bunch of little, like, party favor-type toys as future debris, which they go crazy for, by the way.
Simone Collins: Oh, they love it so much. No, they, they don’t...
The annoying thing is they have yet to ever miss the toys that have suddenly disappeared, and they only get super excited about the debris
Malcolm Collins: Which is the best part, yeah
Simone Collins: I know. That’s funny. The toys have
Malcolm Collins: disappeared, but now there’s little party favors on the floor, so
Simone Collins: whatever. Like, oh my God, yeah. Kids don’t care that much about toys.
Like, they just... I don’t know. Whatever.
Malcolm Collins: We, we, we built them a life where, like, it doesn’t... The group that always fails is low sophistication. Mm. Or almost always. It has survived. Like, the Nation of Islam kinda survived, and Valdese and Amer kinda survived. When did
Simone Collins: the Nation of Islam really just become a, a, a group of primarily Black Americans who just shifted to actual Islam?
But they, they have, like, a different origin story and different cohort?
Malcolm Collins: The Nation of Islam?
Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.
Malcolm Collins: Well, yeah. Now
Simone Collins: they’re just- ‘Cause they dropped the Yakub stuff, right? Didn’t the successor, the son- Yeah, they dropped it all ... of the founder was like let’s just make it, like, actual Islam, okay?” Yeah. And then they did, right?
Yeah. Right? Okay.
Malcolm Collins: Who knows? What if techno-puritanism does that for, like, just mainline
Simone Collins: Protestantism? What, and they’re like, “Ah, let’s just make this mainline,” what? Calvinist Christianity?
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, that’s probably where they’d go- Oh, that’s- ... if they were gonna drop it for something. Very, very sad if that happens.
Yeah. But for the sophisticated, very silli- silly category, these are religions that have q- quite a sophisticated belief system but are very silly you’ll see a lot of heavy hitters. You get Mormonism, Falun Gong- Yeah ... Scientology- ... Theosophy, Salema, Uranida, Brahma Karas, Krishla- Hmm ... which is a major world religion.
Oh, no, sorry, not Krishla. It’s, it’s Brahma Karamares, which is a major world religion. Okay.
And then a few, I think these are dead ones. Uship, Aaran, and Haris. But you also get, But yeah it, I found that to be pretty interesting. And it’s why in the, in the corpus here we have a little anime cat girl future police because you know, you gotta have that imagery everywhere that we do with our stuff.
It’s why we put, like, jokes into the text and everything like that, like, even in our track series. And- We have a chart here of coherence across religious institutions.
Simone Collins: Wow.
Malcolm Collins: We have one here on sex, like did they try to create a sex cult, which usually doesn’t work out very well. A- and note here like the worst thing you can do as a cult is be super anti-sex.
Anti-sex always kills things, right? Like, do not, do not go the super prude direction. Because they usually end up becoming Well, when you go anti-sex, like when you start worshiping a fear of human sexuality, you begin to admire members of your community who live celibate lifestyles. Mm. This is something we’re seeing in like the Opus Dei.
Like, I think the Opus Dei are really cool, but a third of them are celibate because they’re from a part of Catholicism that has a degree of worship around a fear of human sexuality or a hatred of human sexuality or arousal patterns, which means that it’s cool to never engage in it, which is really bad for a religious system and, and, and generally this argues you shouldn’t incorporate.
Simone Collins: Well, I heard, and it’s not exactly with celibacy, but I heard that a genuine problem with SSPX is purity spirals that could just ruin the religion, which is not good. So- Yeah ... it has, it has its issues. N- not... They wouldn’t even, of course, be counted among these new religions because it’s just an offshoot of Catholicism.
But I think anything whether it be around celibacy or anything else, a religion that’s subject to purity spirals is so dangerous. I mean, we saw what happened with irrationalism and effective altruism when purity- Yeah ... spirals started taking over the community. That’s not really addressed in that, but it, it is something that I’ve been thinking about a lot recently.
Malcolm Collins: A, a very interesting one here is what does the religion descend from? What religious group is it-
Ooh ...
successor and how did that affect it? Where this is really interesting is for a number of major world religions, you have very high success rates. Ones that are descended from Christianity have very high success rates.
Yeah. The highest success rates are actually Hindu. The next highest are Shinto, after religion and Hindu. And then you also have very high ones for Buddhists. Where you get extremely low is Islam.
Simone Collins: Oh. Wow. Yeah, I guess the only way they got new recruits for Islam is by making up some ridiculous story about selective breeding and-
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, also-
God figuring out
Simone Collins: how it worked ...
Malcolm Collins: spiritualist movements, very low. There’s only been really one big success story, the one that we’ve mentioned a few times here. One success. Then within new thought you have sort of middling success. And then if you go pure UFO this is like Heaven’s Gate, Scientology- Oh
Raëlismo, Urantia. Okay. You don’t get a lot of mass scale, but you get a lot of decently kind of working things. So sci- sci-fi seems to work. And then designed and naturalist zero. Zero in 250 years. Except for the one that’s like kind of petering along. The final thing that we’re gonna go over here is what does this say to us?
What does this mean that we need to do? And this was the one that basically said, look, Malcolm, ‘cause, you know, I’m running AI on this, I’m like, “What’s our probability here of a religion like us?” We’re already at the stage where... And this is what gets me when we have other people watch us, ‘cause I was watching one guy watch our thing.
He goes, “Well, they don’t even know if this is g- gonna become a, a religion. They don’t even know if they’re still gonna be living in X many years.” You know, it’s such a far off thing, and it’s like we at the stage we’re at right now have probably an 85% chance of still being a religion in 100 years. If we look- That’s crazy
at historical trends and correlates.
Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.
Malcolm Collins: That’s where we are right now. And, and probably being at around 100,000 members.
Simone Collins: Isn’t it gonna be so cool if someone plays this video 85 years later, whether we’re right or long, wrong, and are like, “Oh, look at that.”
Malcolm Collins: Look at that. Well,
Simone Collins: and like I-
Malcolm Collins: Hi. This is you
I, I... Hi. I ran the correlations here. You probably talked to AIs based on us. We’ve got enough data out there
Simone Collins: on that. Oh, yeah, we’ll be super dead. Hi, we’re Gh- Ghosts.
Malcolm Collins: I’m sure it doesn’t make that many mistakes. And, and just so you guys know, in, in the far future, was I satisfied with my life? Super satisfied.
Not a lot you could do for me. Not a lot you could do to make it better. Maybe- Yeah. Imagine being more perfect ... make sure this kid takes, okay?
Simone Collins: Yeah, we really hope this kid takes. Y- yeah. Also, by the way, for all of you who’ve given us hornet tips, thank you so much. We’re working on it. We had
Malcolm Collins: five hornets in my room right
Simone Collins: before this.
Well, yeah, but we’ve received some excellent advice. The, the core thing that we’re working toward here with everything, all the support, both financial and informational you’ve given, is all the interventions cannot really be enacted until we find the nest. We’re still working on it, friends. Okay.
Malcolm Collins: AI’s like, “Put a piece of meat outside, and then watch a hornet go to it and fly back to the nest and triangulate the position.”
Simone Collins: I’m like, “I can do that.” Yeah, that’s... A bunch of people said that, too, and it’s like, you know- That sounds great. Have you ever watched an insect outside and just tracked it for longer than, like, 15 seconds? Outside. ‘Cause I haven’t. I have
Malcolm Collins: not tried.
Simone Collins: I mean, I can keep track of a mosquito inside for more than, like, you know, 10 seconds, and then I’ll catch it again in a little bit, but that’s inside a closed small room, you know?
We’ve tri- look, we’ll try, ri- but no, we’ve received some really helpful insights, but y- yeah, we’re, mm. Thank you.
Malcolm Collins: Thank
Simone Collins: you. Yeah, actually hornets, Malcolm, someone pointed out these are what bald, bald-headed hornets. Which is great.
Malcolm Collins: Wonderful.
Simone Collins: Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I love you caught one on-screen once. Yeah. You got fi- right when we were sitting down to film, there was five right next to my filming chair.
That Simone took out for us.
Octavian: Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: But anyway where are we with all of this? If RFab, play RFab, it’s fantastic. Tons of adventures you can play. It’s been improved a lot recently. I suggest turning the memory feature on for narrative engines. I’m gonna do that with the defaults moving forwards because it’s, we’ve finally gotten to a part where, like, the lore book and memory writing is really good for storytelling.
And it improves the narrative engine quite a bit, allowing it to, like, remember places and contexts. So I’ll do that right after we record. ‘Cause I finally feel like that’s working, or at least if it’s not working, if we put it on the default models, we’ll begin to get complaints about it, and we can work on it.
But the point here I’m making and where this all comes down to is the AI was like, “If you fail, there is one glaring reason you’re going to fail.”
Simone Collins: Okay.
Malcolm Collins: It is that... And I thought it was gonna be that we were too, like, secular, and it’s like, no. Like, from an outside framing, you guys don’t look secular at all.
Simone Collins: Oh,
Malcolm Collins: okay. Like, you may consider yourself secular in the same way a Scientologist does, but nobody else is gonna think technopuritanism is secular.
Simone Collins: Well, come on. Scientology was written by a literal sci-fi writer who then was just like, “And this one time it’s real, I promise.” Come on. Come on. Anyway, just don’t think that’s fair The carry on, sorry.
What was the thing that’s actually gonna kill Technopuritanism? Very soon.
Malcolm Collins: Wasps,
Simone Collins: Another one?
Malcolm Collins: Well, I hear something tapping on the glass.
Simone Collins: Well, if there is one, you just tell me and I’ll come in and kill it.
Malcolm Collins: It’s fine. See how tough my wife is? This is-
Simone Collins: No, it just, I, I handle the, the killing and the, the dead bodies, and Malcolm handles everything else.
Malcolm Collins: Okay, so the thing that’s gonna kill it is we don’t actually put together the marriage market, we don’t actually- Yeah ... put together the summer camp for kids and we don’t actually put together the online communities for younger people to interact and find spouses. Yeah, I
Simone Collins: have all the, look, families for years now have been telling us when they wanna opt into that.
I have a decent collection. I haven’t checked count recently, but I have a decent collection of parents who have one or more children close to our children’s ages. So, like, the age range at present is basically from, like- Z- negative one to 14 basically. And once we get, you know, like, couple years in, maybe a little more money, we can start to organize things.
But we’re gonna do it.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. One of the things that we wanna do is like a season. Mm-hmm. So if anyone has like, w- one of the ways we can get around raising money is if anybody has like a large property they want to show off and use to gain status the idea is, is like once every couple years have all of the younger people come together for like a series of events or something like that- Mm-hmm
, Where they can get to know each other. And then we also want to put together a summer camp, so if anyone has a property where we can do that or an idea of where would be a good place to do that. W- if we can’t use a member’s property, what we’ll do is we will, And keep in mind, there’s not that many of us, so like renting out an entire summer camp for this at this stage might be overkill.
But like- Yeah ... rent out an off-season summer camp and d- do something at one of them. What I, I’m, I’m not sure yet but I’m beginning to realize that I may be too fastidious if, if we actually are as fastidious as we had planned in being and never, ever, ever taking any money, then we won’t have the institutional bureaucracy to operate the events that are needed to keep things feeling like a community rather than people in a podcast talking about something.
Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, fair enough, that those things like do cost money. Camp counselors, people to organize and execute events. I mean, I think it would, it, it can very sustainably and easily start off as groups of families choosing to travel to the same like resort at the same time. ‘Cause with resorts are built-in infrastructure.
They have the swimming pools. They have the like archery ranges- Yeah ... or whatever. And there are lots of those in the world that we could turn to. Or even like a cruise at the same time, because they have a lot of that infrastructure as well and, and you could just kind of like raid an area and take it over.
So that’s, I, it, you know. I think it’s gonna start with, with people taking concurrent vacations to places with existing infrastructure, which just requires self-funding, because then you have to pay to stay at a resort, which is not inexpensive, especially if you have a large family. I know what, there’s that the, the, the huge Catholic meetup that happens every year though.
That looks like it’s camping. And then isn’t there the, the h- hu- huge libertarian one that’s also camping?
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I would not do camping.
Simone Collins: Yeah, so that’s that’s, I find
Malcolm Collins: those to be very miserable ...
Simone Collins: Malcolm doesn’t wanna do a camping one. So yeah, I guess- ... until we have some kind of big tithing base or, like, donor base, members are gonna have to self-fund their participation in the season, I guess.
That’s just what it’s gonna be.
Malcolm Collins: But that’s okay ... we’ll, we’ll figure that out. That’s something that we need to look more in on, think about more, and understand that my desire to be, like, super lean while it has some benefits, could be what ends up killing the tradition.
Simone Collins: And we have to consider, just for reference, what the London season was.
It, it was for a network of geographically, I mean, relatively speaking, right? But geographically dispersed families who needed a contrived mechanism to get their children to, to mix and marry. We’re talking about the landed gentry in, in the UK who were raising their, their children on country estates, who didn’t see other people unless they were visiting as, as, you know, hunting party guests or something.
So they, they realized the, how important it was to, to get everyone to mix. So instead of just husbands going into London for the parliamentary season, if they were in the House of Lords, the, they decided to host a circuit of parties and bring their entire families to London with them. And then they would host, take home- turns hosting parties- During the London season, basically during Parliament or the parliamentary season, after debuting their, their children who are basically open to being married th- their daughters specifically to the queen.
So you had this sort of- I, I, I- So like-
Malcolm Collins: And I
Simone Collins: think
Malcolm Collins: out here... Well, I mean, that’s why I’m saying we would take inspiration from that to
Simone Collins: try- The point I’m making is that was an institution for disparate families. That was, however, also an institution where those disparate families, at non-trivial expense personally both traveled to be in one area and hosted through their own largesse.
Well, yeah, because it was
Malcolm Collins: about showing off, which could be a way that you do it. That’s why I’m saying, like, if anyone has a property or something like that, we could do it in that mechanism. , It’s not just the one family who’s hosting everything.
So when you fly to the one person’s event, other families will host various events that happen during that season.
You’re not flying from one location to another. Oh,
Simone Collins: in that same area?
Malcolm Collins: In that same venue, event, whatever. The idea being is that the person who’s operating the property isn’t putting on the cost for the individual events. Oh. Those are put on by different families as a way to sort of show their, one, dedication, and two- Mm-hmm
the status of their family relative to other families in the community. The secondary thing to consider about this- This would work if
Simone Collins: it were, like, a place like Cape Cod or something, like a nice vacation area, I guess.
Malcolm Collins: Well, right. You might have multiple families doing it that way, but I think an easier way to do it is likely a rural property, and then you have multiple families host different things.
But outside of that, because then the families can host each thing their way and show off their own family-
Simone Collins: You can’t even host something your way when you don’t have your own space or when you don’t get to choose. , You’re hamstrung
Malcolm Collins: Are you out of your mind? Always. You go to a wedding venue and every wedding is different done that person’s way, but it’s at the same venue as 20 other weddings that week, Simone.
The venue doesn’t control the style of the event. You can do an event or a get-together or a party in one of a billion different ways with a billion different flavors. They show off- I...
Simone Collins: Okay, we’re gonna have to have a whole debate episode on how we think this would work most efficaciously,
Malcolm Collins: we will have a weekend debate episode right after this one on this topic.
The core thing she wanted to add, and I don’t know why she didn’t just say it, was that she thinks it would work better, and I agree, if only the young people who are dating went and not the full families, and that they were the ones who put on the mini events within the location, which I also agree with
Malcolm Collins: But before we get into that, the second thing is if you look at all of this and your takeaway is, but why are all the techno-puritan stuff, why is the marriage market, why is the kid get-together stuff- Mm
why is the season event, why is it all about getting people married and mating and reproducing?
Simone Collins: Yeah. Why is how much we’re,
Malcolm Collins: yes. Yeah. Right? And the answer is, is because that is the key framing within our entire life cycle story, everything like that, and it used to not be weird. Mm. I like reading old European romance books, right?
This was everything. All the adults are doing is talking with the other families, trying to find their kids a good marriage match, and then the kids get married, and then all they’re trying to do is find their kids a good marriage match. That’s like one of li- ... That should be, right now it’s like college is like the big thing in life, or like, you know, your first job.
No, it’s who you marry, right? And so building out a network to help with that and also help our kids with nepotism, that’s really advantageous to helping the movement grow and stay cohesive, especially for kids, but also frame life in a sane way to the next generation again.
Simone Collins: Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: All right.
Simone Collins: Yeah. Fair.
Malcolm Collins: Love you, and now we will have our argument for people who wanna be on Patreon or Substack subscribers.
And it’s great to see you guys, and it was kinda crazy for me when I did this, this study ‘cause I was like, “Whoa, we’ve actually passed- Existential ... a lot of the big hurdles already.”
Simone Collins: Yeah. I am
Malcolm Collins: so impressed. And our corpus, by the way, is 50% larger than the Mormon corpus
Simone Collins: What do you mean corp- oh, you mean the, the, like written texts Of
Malcolm Collins: all of the techno puritan tracts and writings is 50% larger So it’s longer
Simone Collins: than the-
Malcolm Collins: All
Simone Collins: the Mormon ones
the Book of Mormon and all the other stuff.
Malcolm Collins: That’s- Yeah, the Pearl of Great Price and the, the whatever. Yeah
Simone Collins: The expensive pearl. That’s so cool. Sorry,
Malcolm Collins: sorry to put you guys through all of this with these insane tracts.
Simone Collins: I really like them. I think this is so cool. I, I, I would not have even thought to look at this, and I’m so impressed by what you did.
It’s just super cool, and you should really check out the page if you find this stuff interesting because you can go... You can click through to the Wikipedia pages of these religions if you’re like, “I’ve never heard of that. What on Earth?” And then you can see the little logos, ‘cause every religion has to have a logo, and I don’t know.
I really like it. I think it’s, it’s super cool. And, yeah.
Malcolm Collins: And I wanna be honest, I love our gear logo.
Simone Collins: I mean, would you, would you encourage therefore people to build their own religions? Or like what is... I mean, what is the point you’re... Are you trying to say like, “Yeah, actually you should do this,” or are you just trying to say, “F
Malcolm Collins: the-” Actually, somebody should probably create a Wikipedia for techno puritanism.
If you’re like a Wikipedia editor we’re probably at a stage where that makes sense.
Simone Collins: Oh, where we have our page with our logo. Yes, but-
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, with our little logo and our weird beliefs.
Simone Collins: In, in The Practical Guide to Crafting Religion, you prompt people to either make their inherited religion or chosen religion- Capable of withstanding the additional and new and different pressures of modernity, or to make a new religion that will work in our context and reconcile all the differences that, that they have with their otherwise chosen religion.
Do you still hold that they should do that? Or do you think now that it’s actually better to try to create a wholly new religion if you’re able to meet the criteria that you’ve, you’ve discovered? Or do you think- Well, I
Malcolm Collins: mean, I think, i- all of the traditional religions are dying to an extent where I think creating a version of them that does well is gonna look like a new religion.
So- Mm ... a version of Catholicism I’ve said could do really well. It’s something that takes ideas from the Opus Dei about dedicating your life to something- Mm ... but dedicate your life to the next generation,
Simone Collins: Yeah. Yes ... your
Malcolm Collins: kids.
Simone Collins: None of this whole s- the celibate Opus Dei nonsense. Mm-mm.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. But if you, if you do that, I mean, the Opus Dei are unique enough that most other groups would call them a new religion.
Mm ...
especially if you combine the beginning with, like, a bunch of writings. Now, if you’re a you know, a traditional Christian or a traditional, you know, Baptist or something, I, I do think you need some, some reinterpretation to protect against many of the bad things that have happened within the Protestant community.
The number of scams that have been run out of, you know, Pentecostal churches, the number of bad theology that has seeped in I think th- that takes an amount of hardening and y- sort of Puritanism that’s, that’s going to look and feel very different than what you’re gonna find in a church today, in any church you go to today.
And I’ve... One of the things that we keep hearing is people go to church, and they’re just like, “It doesn’t feel right. Like, every church I go to feels hollow now.” And that will be the focus of our next tract is what, what, what does the Bible actually say about churches? And a lot of people, well, frankly, they mistranslate the word gathering as church when everywhere it happens it’s not a church.
And it... And, and, and through that they don’t notice that whenever it’s talking about an actual church church, it’s usually not in a positive context, which was interesting to me. I, I, like it was actually, like, rereading it more critically and I was like, “Oh, is that why they became corrupt so quickly?”
But anyway, fun talk. And and, and not just not in a, a positive context with a ton of warnings attached. But I love you, Simone. Mm-hmm. And have a spectacular day.
Octavian: You too.
Simone Collins: You just had no idea who it was and you were just like, “I guess that’s normal.”
Malcolm Collins: Somebody running around, open doors. It sounded like they were having fun.
Simone Collins: Yeah. Obviously. I, do realize that after you have a certain number of kids, you can no longer expect any privacy in your house. Like, everyone will just come and go as they see fit.
Okay So that’s fine
Malcolm Collins: Okay-ish
Speaker 4: What is so funny?
Can I have my brush back?
What if I gave you this instead? This is actually for babies. Yeah. Isn’t that so much better? Oh,
my God. Oh, my God, it’s gonna make you throw up. No. Bonk, bonk. Oh. Bonk, bonk. Bonk, bonk. Oh, no. I love your texts. I love you so much. Oh.
Okay, is this really what you want? Oh, for the love... That, really? Really?