Relativism & Justice-Motivated Belief Systems
Having delineated how logical systems we respect search for truth, we should, nevertheless, highlight that not all minds work so logically. A sizable portion of people make judgments using criteria not optimized around determining the truth of a thing.
One of our favorite examples of this comes in the form of Karl Pilkington, probably our favorite “comedian” (or wise sage, depending on how you look at him). If you have listened to enough of his content, it becomes clear one element that makes his thought process so unusual—and thus funny—is that when deciding what is true between multiple possibilities, Pilkington often chooses the most interesting and narratively engaging potentiality.
Pilkington’s approach to interpreting scenarios is not unheard of—we know at least one person who does the same—but this method is nevertheless rare. If a person who thinks like this hears “a monkey went into space on a rocket,” they will imagine a monkey flying a spaceship then try to work backward as to how that might be possible (maybe he was trained to push buttons using bananas) instead of a monkey being put in a cage and shot into the sky. This form of deciding what is true is too disorganized to lead to a cohesive religious structure—though other forms are.
Much to our great distress, many people determine truth by choosing the most just, fair, or politically correct explanation available. We’ll call these people the “justicles.” If a justicle were tasked with deciding whether men and women, on average, have different sociological profiles, they would ask themselves whether or not it would be “just” if such were true—rather than considering evidence, experts, common sense, or religious texts. The justicle would then try to twist evidence, expert opinions, and religious texts to justify their chosen belief and try to convert people who use different standards of evidence to their way of thinking.
While we disagree with those who slavishly follow religious dogma or expert consensus, we at least acknowledge the logical consistency in their actions (if the Bible is the ultimate source of truth, it would be illogical, immoral, and intellectually dishonest to be swayed by other sources). Justicles’ choice to defer to political correctness, fairness, or justice has more to do with intellectual and emotional laziness than anything else.
Justicles seem to care more about whether a chain of logic makes them feel like a “good guy” than whether it is true or likely to make the world a better place. More repulsively, their thought process makes them astronomically more likely to worsen the on-the-ground situation of suffering people by perpetuating inaccurate models that prevent organizations and people from addressing real and pressing problems. Justicles are the “nice guys” of philosophy—thinking if they perform some perfunctory “nice” rituals, reality will reward them with moral points while not worrying about reality’s consent.
Abrahamic Justicle Cultivars
Don’t just take our word for it that justicle logic masks immoral behavior beneath performative protests about the injustices of the world—just look at the formal religious systems in the Abrahamic tradition that are most susceptible to justicle logic: The Unitarian Universalists (their core truth is relativism) and the Hicksite Quakers (whose belief that the highest order of truth comes from personal emotional experience has rendered them susceptible to justicle logic—though note that Orthodox Quakers who believe the Bible takes precedence over personal emotional experience are fairly immune to justiclesm).
In the case of the Unitarian Universalists, we can see the total moral depravity of even their central governing organization through its abuse of Jonathan Holdeen’s legacy (we include an excerpt from The Pragmatist’s Guide to Governance titled “The Immortality of a Vision”on this incident on page 729 of the Appendix—it is so deeply upsetting we may go so far as to suggest you don’t read it if you are just looking for a light reading experience today). To summarize what happened, a guy worked slavishly his whole life living in squalor while saving millions of dollars to enact a plan to make the world a better place—his plan was to have his money grow in perpetuity until it could pay the taxes of all citizens of the state of Pennsylvania (among several other things). He left his wealth under the stewardship of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Boston and asked his daughter, Stella, to work to grow it. After Holdeen passed away, the church decided they wanted all the money—and they wanted it immediately—arguing that if the fund grew too large, it would destabilize the economy (while presenting additional, similarly unhinged lines of reasoning). The church then spent decades suing Holdeen’s daughter for full control of the money (even though she was handily beating the stock market with it).
They eventually wore Stella and everyone else down, ultimately taking full control of Holdeen’s hard-won wealth to spend however they wanted.[[125]](#_ftn125) Long story short, when the church’s governing body had a choice between helping millions of people if they could just not be evil and avoid the temptation of riches and immediate gratification, they demonstrated that such was far too much to ask. The pettiness and moral thoughtlessness of the choice is genuinely astounding.
That said, most of us have witnessed our government doing something we think is evil and felt powerless to stop it. All we can say about Unitarian Universalism is that it failed to prevent the corruption of at least one of its governing bodies. When trying to learn which cultivars have been uniquely bad at embodying their claimed moral positions, we need to look at the population level, but there has never been a historical period during which the Unitarian Universalists made up such a large percent of a local population at an important point in world history that we are able to get detailed population-level data … and that is where the Quakers come in.
Note: While it may seem we are biased here, we will be the first to admit that the Unitarian Universalist church was largely a creation of the decaying Calvinist culture from which we hail—read up on the work of William Ellery Channing or the creation of Universalism for more detail.
What about Quakers? Weren’t Quakers morally ahead of their time and super nice? Weren’t they leaders of the abolition movement or something? This is certainly the version of Quakers we learned about in school, so we were shocked upon our review of the stats (and maybe more than a little bitter because we felt misled).
Around 42% of Maryland Quakers in early America owned slaves[[126]](#_ftn126) (this sample was taken from Maryland wills between 1669 and 1750). Among Quaker leaders in Philadelphia, 70% owned slaves (this sample was taken from the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting from 1681 to 1705).[[127]](#_ftn127) Even if we go with the lower number, this is still the highest rate of slave ownership of any cultivar in the colonies (not on a number-of-slaves-owned basis, but on a precent-of-the-population-owning-slaves basis)—a rate way higher than that of the Anglican-descended Southern culture at the time of the Civil War (around 20% of households and 5% of individuals[[128]](#_ftn128)).
Contrast this with Puritan communities, which, while less attested, seemed to have slave ownership rates between 0.5% and 2%.[[129]](#_ftn129) Suffice it to say, the tale of the whaleship Essex tells us what happens to BIPOCs who put themselves in the same boat as Quakers—or any justicle of today for the matter, despite their incessant self-framing as “the good guys” (Hint: The moment things went bad, the Essex’s Quaker sailors ate their BIPOC compatriots first, then claimed this uncanny skew was the product of random lot draws).
Those who have only heard the cartoon version of Quaker history may find our claims shocking. Perhaps you’re thinking: “Maybe Quakers owned slaves at a high rate, but maybe they worked really hard to end slavery.”
Who? Search for famous Quaker abolitionists, and you get names like Elias Hicks, a Quaker who urged boycotts, and Benjamin Lay, who theatrically flung blood on people and made a big scene about how opposed he was to slavery. As you read more about such figures, you will find that none of these activists actually did anything other than complain and help with some parts of the underground railroad.
Contrast this with just a quick look at Calvinist abolitionists, and you get names of people like John Brown of Harpers Ferry and Bleeding Kansas—or Newton Knight[[130]](#_ftn130) working with Malcolm’s own ancestors of the Free State of Jones. We have heard that Quakers may have played more of an important role in abolition in the U.K., but in the U.S. at least, their performance was … well, overwhelmingly performative rather than results-oriented.
Now, perhaps you’re thinking: “Come on, guys. That is really harsh. Wasn’t Pennsylvania the first state to ban slavery?”
While some pro-Quaker historians will frame such as fact, an assertion that Pennsylvania was the first state to ban slavery intentionally misrepresents what happened. Vermont (a majority Congregationalist Calvinist state) banned slavery at its founding in 1770, then built that ban into the state’s constitution in 1777 (these bans immediately freed slaves above a certain age). Pennsylvania did not even put a high duty on slavery until 1773, and when they did ultimately ban slavery in 1780, they nevertheless allowed slave owners to keep their slaves—just banning the purchasing of new slaves.
Contrast this with the Puritans in Massachusetts, who freed all slaves upon banning slavery three years later in 1783 (the same year that the American Revolution officially ended and the Treaty of Paris was signed). So sure, the Quakers did ban slavery first, but only if you discount Vermont because it had not yet joined the union and only if you count a partial ban on slavery. Even within Pennsylvania, Quaker communities did not spearhead the anti-slavery movement—they just happened to be the group with the most power. In reality, the state’s first anti-slavery protests were led by Mennonites, and the first local slavery bans were enacted within the Mennonite communities.
As a local historian of the protests said:
“Mennonites never had slaves and would not even buy something if they thought it came through the labor of a slave. They viewed slavery as a ‘Quaker thing,’ and just walked away to live apart.”[[131]](#_ftn131)
So, while the Quakers were eventually against slavery, they were—so far as we can tell at least—the least anti-slavery of the anti-slavery groups.
“Oh—for goodness sake,” you might be thinking. “At least Quakers were nice to the Native Americans—I read that in a book somewhere!”
This also appears to be a manipulation of history but not quite as bad as the one around Quakers and slavery. Quakers indeed had better relations with the local Native American communities, but this seems to have as much or more to do with those communities than the Quakers.
To quote David Hackett Fischer’s book Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America:
“Another feature of the Delaware Valley … the natives were friendly, and very different from the more militant tribes of the lower Chesapeake and upper New England … William Penn’s Indian policy would have been a disastrous failure in Massachusetts or Virginia, just as it later failed in western Pennsylvania.”
So, it would seem that Quakers were merely granted a convenient opportunity to be nice to local Native American populations, and history sort of smudged the facts over time. But why trust the storytellers? Let’s look at more concrete numbers to determine whether Quakers treated local Native Americans with more kindness than their Puritan counterparts.
There are currently 10,500 Delaware Indians (Lenni Lenape) left (falling from a population of 15,000).[[132]](#_ftn132) [[133]](#_ftn133) Contrast that with the Abenaki, with whom the Puritans interacted, who have a population of 9,775 today (falling from a post-smallpox population of 10,000 in 1620)[[134]](#_ftn134). If Quakers did treat the Delaware Indians differently, then they found some other way to undermine them, as the Indian populations with Quaker neighbors don’t seem to have survived any better than the other groups.
Note: We admit these Native American population numbers are not great evidence. That said, we feel that if Quakers had been as nice as history paints them, there should be dramatic differences in current group populations.
“What about women?” you might be wondering. “Were Quakers not greater advocates of gender equality?”
While it is true that Quakers touted gender equality, going so far as to have a saying: “In souls there is no sex,” Quaker population stats don’t imply they acted on this belief where it mattered. For example, Quaker women were twice as likely as men to be illiterate at the height of their influence (20% to 40% between 1699-1706—only slightly off from the “super-sexist” Calvinist difference of 16% to 50% in 1760)[[135]](#_ftn135) [[136]](#_ftn136) It seems like the only way Quakers were actually more in favor of gender equality manifested in the burden of proselytization placed on women, often resulting in Quaker women being beaten and even hanged for their efforts.
On any issue of morality, Quakers will enthusiastically extoll their virtues through history books. However, if you actually turn to sources that deal in hard numbers, we see Quakers had very little motivation to act on their moral compass (and when they did, they only did so with great compromise). For making this point, we know we will get heat from those trying to defend the myth of the virtuous—rather than virtue signaling—colonial Quaker. Still, if we are to build new cultures, we must understand how to enforce moral behavior. If the Quaker system was bad at doing so, we would make the world an objectively worse place by allowing the myth to perpetuate.
To understand why justicles are apparently so unmotivated to take concrete actions that enact their values in the world (instead of merely signaling a desire for those values to be enacted), we can investigate why Quakers were against slavery. Quakers wrote extensively about their distaste for slavery, so we know their logic. To Quakers, slavery violated the “golden rule” (and that term “golden rule” is everywhere in their anti-slavery material). Essentially, because Quakers would not personally like the feeling of being slaves, slavery was bad. They somehow managed to take a topic like slavery and make it about their own feelings.
Because Quaker’s opposition to slavery is based on personal feelings (recall that a major Quaker standard of evidence is gained through personal introspection and investigation of one’s emotions), it is easy to see how they might compromise on this principle if owning slaves made them feel better. Quakers’ reasoning behind anti-slavery sentiment stands in stark contrast to Calvinists’ distaste for slavery, which emerged from a general dislike of any institution that removes individual agency. In other words, whereas Quakers disavowed slavery because it made people feel bad, Calvinists opposed slavery because it represented the immutable evil of removing human agency.
A justicle mindset leads to immoral action because, at its core, this philosophy is based on the aesthetic of thinking good—not on doing good. Justicles gain status within their social circles by loudly protesting the injustices of the world rather than by making actual sacrifices to make the world a better place through their direct actions.
Let’s be clear: Quakers are not bad people (while a culture writ large may have problems, that doesn’t mean every individual within it exhibits those same problems). That said, Quaker culture appears to be bad at motivating adherents to translate their values into concrete action. This kind of thing is important to notice if you are thinking about how to design a better cultivar.
The Metaphysical Frameworks of Justicles
While we singled out Abrahamic religions that have most profoundly influenced modern justicle culture, we only did so because it is easier to find hard stats on their immoral actions. Abrahamic religions haven’t necessarily produced the largest justicle groups. Most people motivated by justicle logic either fall into Super Soft Cultures or cultures that are so soft they have lost most of their unique identity.
When justicles don’t follow a formal cultivar, they almost always adhere to one of two metaphysical / religious frameworks for the world, the most boring of these systems being relativism. In this chain of logic, a person asks themselves: “Which religion is true?” and realizing that it would be unjust if millions of people lived and died for nothing or suffered eternal torment for believing the wrong thing, they answer: “All religions and cultures must be true in their own way.” They create a world framework in which truth shifts depending on the perspective of the truth seeker because it feels unjust to believe that people from other cultural backgrounds are wrong.
Our take on relativism is best expressed by Charles James Napier’s candid response to Hindu priests who complained to him about the prohibition of the Sati religious funeral practice of burning unwilling widows alive on their husband’s funeral pyres, insisting that Napier must “respect their culture:”
“Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs.”
Even a cursory look at real-world scenarios quickly demonstrates that a relativist mindset produces more injustice in the world, not less. This does not faze relativists, as people don’t adopt relativist positions because they want to make the world a better place; they do so because they want to believe they are making the world a better place.
In contrast to humdrum relativism, the other metaphysical framework utilized by justicles is far more engaging. It entails wondering: “Which religion is true?” and deciding: “It would be immoral if some religions were not true,” just as with relativism. However, instead of using relativism to resolve this injustice, one concludes that one’s very belief in a religion makes it true.
Like one of those Christmas movies in which Santa Claus is powered by believers’ faith, adherents to this faith-based framework believe that the individual heavens and deities of all different faiths are created by those who believe in them. While there is neither a logical reason nor justification motivated by tradition to lend credibility to this belief, there is a “moral” reason to hold it, as at a cursory glance, reality would be more “just” if it were true.
Here’s where this faith-based metaphysical framework gets really fun: Its reasoning is only comforting at a cursory glance. Anyone who thinks this metaphysical framework through to its logical conclusion will see that it is likely one of the bleakest realities we could conceivably live in. While many fiction universes, like “American Gods,” use this framing, the best possible outcome it might produce (in terms of logical constancy) is the Warhammer 40K universe.
If collective human beliefs became manifested as real beings with cosmic power capable of influencing humans, in turn, then our most basic beliefs and fears would be represented as the most powerful among these entities, given that they enjoy disproportionately more conscious human attention. Being more powerful than the other entities, these terrifying deities would have differentially more influence on the reality we inhabit and would use that influence to amplify thoughts and obsessions that grant them power. This would eventually lead to a snowballing of power, allowing these deities to acquire even more dedicated followers. Among their followers, these deities would be motivated to maximize whatever emotional subset fuels them (lust, laziness, fear of death, fear of pain, etc.) to levels far higher than any sane human would want.
The closest thing to a “good guy” you could have in such a reality is someone who doesn’t have a soul and thus does not create these entities (such as the Warhammer Universe’s T’au Empire), or a vast empire focused on emotionally suppressing its people, so they don’t fuel these entities (such as Warhammer’s Empire of Man). Yep: Hilariously, even if this hippy-dippy metaphysical framing of reality were true, the best cultivar for dealing with it would involve some form of emotional suppression. Essentially such a reality—one in which humans can manifest cosmic entities which themselves can influence humans—always leads to a reverberating volume increase (similar to holding a microphone too close to a speaker).
The Origins of the Supervirus
Note: We found many of our sources for this section in David Hackett Fischer’s book Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America, which we heartily recommend to anyone who enjoyed this book.
As man spread across the world, he brought dogs with him. Early humans who settled in the Americas were no different. Their trailblazing canine companions genetically drifted from old-world breeds, making American varieties fascinatingly unique. Sadly, when the Europeans came, they killed them … almost all of them. The only survivors were Malamutes and a few related arctic breeds (while people claim that breeds like the Peruvian Hairless dog, the Xoloitzcuintli, and Chihuahua are pre-Columbian/1492, DNA studies show that they are less than 4% pre-Colombian in their genetic makeup). But … we wouldn’t be telling you this story if the ending were so clear-cut.
Dogs can catch a form of transmissible cancer called canine transmissible venereal tumor (CTVT).[[137]](#_ftn137) A long time ago, a single dog developed a tumor with this very unique ability, and all dogs today that have CTVT carry an iteration of that original dog’s tumor. So when a dog gets a CTVT tumor, they literally have the living cells of a completely different dog growing inside them. When genetic testing was performed on CTVT, it was found to come from—and literally be—a pre-Colombian breed of dog, making this extinct species of dog also the most prolific single “dog” alive today. While that pre-Columbian dog died of this cancer, they did so in a way that functionally granted them everlasting life through the DNA within that cancer and the tumors it produces.
From what we can gather, the supervirus—the parasitoid we discussed at the beginning of this book—first evolved within Quaker culture (and, more specifically, the Hicksite branch). By decimating Hicksite birth rates, the supervirus has long since relegated everything culturally unique about Hicksite Quakers to the dustbin of history. That said, its tumors—the tumors that now wear the skins of the countless victims through which it acts—is almost entirely Hicksite on a DNA level. Along with that long-dead pre-Columbian dog, Hicksite Quaker culture is at once functionally extinct and the single most important culture in the world today. (As a reminder, Hicksite Quakers hold personal emotional states as their highest standard of evidence, while Orthodox Quakers believe it to be important but subordinate to the Bible.)
Some cultural commentators draw connections between the parasitoidal supervirus and Puritan ideals, suggesting the virus has Puritan origins. Given what you have thus far read about Puritan and the other Calvinist cultures, it should be immediately clear how utterly buffoonish this idea is. If we were going to be as uncharitable as possible, we would say Puritan culture is superficially one based on a veneer of intellectualism, performative stoicism, an inward focus, aspirations of self-perfection, ruthless capitalism, independent research, and uninterested disgust toward outsiders. Therefore, ironically, cultural movements often framed as being in direct opposition to the supervirus, such as the Red Pill and Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW), followers of Jordan Peterson, and other pseudo-intellectual, stoic-aspiring, right-wing self-improvement junkies represent cultural viruses derived from the Puritan strain of American thought.
It appears this misconception comes from a tendency to frame moralizing, shaming, and shunning as punishments for apostasy as uniquely Puritan. This is silly, as this pattern of behavior exists across virtually all hard cultures throughout history (including many that still thrive today).
The various pop-cultural viruses with which our species currently contends feature clear signs of the cultures from which they evolved—even if most people don’t identify these cultivars as being viral secular descendants of earlier cultures. Consider the Rationalist and Effective Altruism movements, which (by our estimation at least) are clearly derived from Jewish culture. Not only are a huge chunk of the Rationalist and Effective Altruism movements’ founding members (and many of their current prominent members) ancestrally Jewish (despite Jews representing a vanishingly small part of the population), but the communities’ constant debating of moral ontology, the habit of throwing ideas at the wall and masochistically offering financial rewards to get people to argue against them, and intense trust in institutions to develop metrics to effectively distribute capital,[[138]](#_ftn138) could not be more Jewish.
Rationalist and Effective Altruist cultures even maintained the Jewish superpower of being able to split apart and recombine with minimal conflict. While groups like Rationalists, Effective Altruists, and Dark Effective Altruists may posture as though they disagree with each other, they also enthusiastically jump at opportunities to engage in debate with members of other factions (something that can’t be said for the various viral descendants of Quaker or Calvinist culture).
Awareness of the origins of the supervirus is important as it yields a better understanding of its nuances, why it exists, and actions it may take in the future—it will also help explain why we subjected you to a Quaker history lesson. The supervirus does not just have “some features” of Quaker culture; it is quite literally a secular iteration of the Quaker culture’s Hicksite interpretation, from its core outlooks on reality to its governance practices and pet projects.
**This is why Colonial Quaker culture presents such a prophetic view of today’s dominant pop culture morality—not because it was really ahead of its time, but because it ended up becoming the dominant pop culture.**
Let’s start with the concept of call-out culture. While Puritans would seek out and punish community members who violated their rules, it was rare for them to target individuals outside their communities. Puritans were interested in creating the perfect world within their settlements and did not really care much about what people outside their settlements were doing—unless it involved the degradation of human will (e.g., slavery). On the other hand, you will see numerous Colonial-era cases of Quakers publicly shaming non-Quakers to goad them into changing their ways. In colonial Quaker culture, an individual could raise their status within their own culture by “calling out” those of different cultures (though such behavior is less common in modern Quaker culture).
Quaker priorities—and how Quakers demonstrated those priorities—have strong parallels to those held by the virus. For example, Quakers condemned exhibitions of animals at places like zoos as “hurtful to their (the animals’) feelings,” with Elizabeth Drinker reporting, “… it looked so sorrowful, I pity’d the poor thing, and wished it in its own country.”[[139]](#_ftn139) Or consider the way some Quakers chose to protest, with Squire Wharton spastically jumping into a bull-baiting ring (a sport that pit dogs against bulls) at huge personal risk, freeing the bull and subsequently calling out people in the crowd by name.[[140]](#_ftn140)
Hatred of gun ownership and distaste toward the prosecution of criminals represents another Quaker value that has effectively migrated to modern culture, with William Penn proudly reporting: “Not one soldier, nor arm borne, or militia man seen, since I was first at Pennsylvania.”[[141]](#_ftn141) When, at one point, a gang of pirates stole a ship in Philadelphia and started devastating the Delaware Valley coastline, Quaker leaders quarreled among themselves over how they could suppress crime without violence, allowing countless homes and businesses to be “plundered” while they took their time soul-searching over whether it was acceptable to sully themselves through the use of arms.
People often confuse Puritan and Quaker norms around sex, assuming that it was the Puritans who were insanely prudish whereas in actuality, Puritans were so comfortable talking about sex, and apt to do so with graphic frequency, that Puritan writing often needed heavy editing to be published up to the mid-twentieth century.[[142]](#_ftn142) (Though it should be acknowledged that Puritans were only in favor of sex within marriage.)
Quakers, in contrast, were so uncomfortable discussing sex that it was common in Quaker culture to be against sex altogether, even within marriage (this group eventually split off into the Shaker movement). One French traveler was shocked to find that even when Quaker women consulted their physicians, they tended to describe everything from their necks to waists as their “stomachs” and everything from their waists to feet as their “ankles.”[[143]](#_ftn143) (This snobbery also partially led to the collapse of Quakerism, with many people never marrying and as many as 16% of Quaker women in the colonial period being single by the age of 50.)[[144]](#_ftn144)
This prudish anti-sex angle has manifested in many branches of the supervirus, even though it stands massively at odds with the logical ideologies of those groups most likely to become infected. This is why infected progressive groups that one would expect to be pro-sex given their stated ideologies can sometimes appear bizarrely prudish (with the modern sex negative moment, the anti-kink movement, and the gender critical movement (such as TERFs) all having thought leaders within them that emerged from radical feminist groups) and why groups like the Red Pill and MGTOW—or even the Pragmatist Guide book series—with Calvinist roots seem weirdly sex-obsessed but in a clinical and experimental way. Consider that the only living people mentioned in this book so far who grew up in Calvinist-derived cultivars—this book’s authors and Aella—are both known for highly analytical sex research, with one of our books being The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality.
Even the Hicksite Quaker approach to internal governance is almost perfectly aligned with governance practices that spontaneously arise in nodal networks featuring late-stage supervirus infections. Consider the similarities between the conduct of an Unprogrammed Quaker meeting house and the method of governance utilized by Occupy Wall Street. In an Unprogrammed Quaker meeting house, attendants will sit quietly until moved by God to stand up and start speaking. In an Occupy Wall Street convening, there would be no set leader but people would stand up and start to speak when so moved, and their audience, so as not to interrupt them, would react using a complicated set of hand signals. Outside of the hand signals, Occupy Wall Street meetings were strikingly similar to Unprogrammed Quaker meetings. Perhaps had colonial Quakers heard of the innovation of hand signal interaction, they would have enthusiastically adopted it, seeing as Quakers were well known for being obsessively bureaucratic and building in complex social procedures to ensure everyone got a voice at any moment. Heck, we have quotes from William Penn complaining about his fellow Quakers getting so “governementish” that it was hard to get anything done.
Here we should also point out that Colonial-era Quakers were not particularly less rule-oriented than Puritans, with David Hackett Fischer pointing out in Albion’s Seed that “Penn’s laws against sin were more rigorous in some respects than those of Puritans.” Quakers just happened to be more obscure and bureaucratic with the rules. For Puritans, rules had a goal, whereas to Quakers, rules were an interactive social language one must successfully navigate to signal social status. This can be seen in things like traditional Quaker weddings having 16 stages (to make even a slight mistake at any of these intricate stages was a huge social faux pas and could leave you permanently cut off from old friends).
Another interesting similarity between the supervirus and the Hicksite Quakers can be seen in how they spread within organizations. Both start by preaching the harmonious collaboration of a diversity of viewpoints until they reach a certain population threshold within an organization, at which point they aggressively and systematically purge the organization of anyone not willing to slavishly submit to their ideology. For example, when Hicksite factions would grow in Orthodox Quaker churches, they would lay low until they felt they had enough backing to make their move, then change the locks on the meeting house doors and ban anyone who did not submit to their new way of thinking from entry.[[145]](#_ftn145)
Another interesting parallel can be seen in colonial-era Quaker and modern supervirus cultivar relationships with “disadvantaged” groups. While Quakers presented themselves as uplifting and empowering underrepresented groups, they ultimately took and held power just for and among themselves. Quakers largely immigrated to the USA (mostly Pennsylvania) as either working-class or middle-class groups[[146]](#_ftn146) but rose in power quickly by creating a tightly-knit oligarchy in the towns they occupied. In the case of Philadelphia, this was the Philadelphia’s Corporation. These individuals were highly interrelated, with no less than 85% related to one another.[[147]](#_ftn147) Despite their working-class background and quick rise to power, Quakers had a reputation for being spiteful, with Bishop Sheldon describing Quakers in 1669 as “very mean, the best scarce worth the title of Yeomen.”[[148]](#_ftn148) [[149]](#_ftn149) The truth seems to be that Quakers were nice so long as you slavishly submitted yourself to their social agenda and never uplifted one of your own people over a “friend.”
This behavior can be illustrated by a political alliance formed between Quakers and German Protestant immigrants (Anabaptists mostly) in which the Germans would vote Quakers into office, but never the other way around,[[150]](#_ftn150) with one Rufus Jones writing that “We hear nothing of any men of prominence in these early days except Friends” (Quakers).[[151]](#_ftn151) Through this arrangement, Quakers dominated their local legislatures. To understand just how lopsided this arrangement was, consider that Lancaster County was so German by the mid-eighteenth century that only 100 Quakers lived there—and yet just seven Quaker families kept the local government firmly in their grip.[[152]](#_ftn152)
We actually suspect there is a case to be made that the only reason the Quakers even turned against slavery was to appease these Anabaptist constituencies who had always been fervently against slavery. We say this because Quakers did not turn against slavery until they started needing broad support from Anabaptist majorities to maintain political dominance in their regions.
While Quakers cultivated the public image of a culture that regards outsiders as equals, they very clearly looked down on them, using terms like “mongrel marriages” to describe marriage to a non-Quaker.[[153]](#_ftn153) It was not uncommon for Quakers to be kicked out of the community for marrying non-Quakers (a behavior that increased as they consolidated power[[154]](#_ftn154)).
What is interesting is why Quakers felt this way. Distaste for so-called mongrel marriages was not about purity but because Quakers thought it was impossible for anyone who was not a “true believer” to experience love and have a happy marriage. As Quakers held that marriage should only be for love rather than material gain or lust, marriage to a non-Quaker—someone axiomatically incapable of love—was perverse. It is fascinating to see such viewpoints mirrored in today’s supervirus. Those infected often posit how the immune couldn’t possibly have healthy relationships or marriages, wringing their hands over tradwives with kids who look happy, impotently projecting that they must really hate their lives.
This hypocrisy can also be seen in colonial-era Quakers (not to mention those infected by the modern-era supervirus) who wanted to be known for seeing everyone equally despite really looking down on those in poor, rural environments. When the Scotch-Irish arrived in the colonies, one Quaker writer referred to them as “the scum of two nations.”[[155]](#_ftn155) This holds many similarities to how today’s heavily infected “coastal elite” groups look down on poor rural “deplorables,” despite presumably viewing the poor “without bias” and wanting to uplift them.
Don’t worry; they didn’t reserve their derision for just the poor and rural individuals. Antisemitism was also strong in the early Quaker community, just as it is among those with a deep infection of the virus. Hannah Sanson (from a prominent Quaker merchant faction) had this to say of Jews in 1756: “This people, once the chosen people, [have become] the scum of the earth!”[[156]](#_ftn156) Laws were passed in the Quaker-dominated settlements (Pennsylvania) that systematically disenfranchised Jews, like the law in 1794 preventing work on the Sabbath, meaning Jews could only work five days a week (with Abraham Wolff being convicted under this law despite keeping his own sabbath).[[157]](#_ftn157) The Jewish community at the time was well aware of how disproportionately cruel the Quakers were to them and saw them as distinctly different from other Christians (to the point of not seeing them as Christian at all), with prominent Jewish broker Haym Salomon saying, “It was neither the Jews nor the Christians who founded the practice, but Quakers—Quakers worse than heathens, pagans, or idolators.”[[158]](#_ftn158) [[159]](#_ftn159)
A final interesting area of overlap manifests in both groups’ tendencies to regard youth with an unique level of reverence. Given that the virus has become the dominant culture in our society, it does not seem particularly weird to us that adults turn to a child-turned-moral-authority like Greta Thunberg for wisdom on the subject of government policy. As a small sample of two people who don’t hail from today’s dominant culture, we can report it is really, really, really weird for adults to take tactical and moral advice from a child.
As Fischer writes in Albion’s Seed:
“People of other faiths were startled to observe Quaker children giving moral and religious instruction to their elders. We have on account of a ten-year-old child who interrupted a gathering of adults to deliver a spontaneous speech on salvation. The adults listened respectfully, and after the child was done speaking, a grandmother offered a prayer, and said, ‘Oh Lord! That this young branch should be a teacher unto us old ones.’
Another … at the age of ten regularly reprimanded adults in his own family—condemning their swearing, breaking up card parties, preaching to them about salvation.”[[160]](#_ftn160)
To wrap things up, Quaker culture was not prophetic of future values. Rather, today’s supervirus is derived from Quaker Culture. To suggest that Quaker culture was prophetic is akin to suggesting that the ethnic makeup of the early settlers was weirdly prophetic of the ethnic makeup of the later U.S. population. It’s like … yeah, they killed everyone else.
Evidence that the virus grew out of Hicksite Quaker culture (as opposed to emerging from convergent evolution) can be seen in everything from vestigial value sets (many of which run counter to modern progressive values) to the supervirus’s weird governance system, the prudish nature with which the virus treats sexuality, the theatrical ways the infected engage in protest, and their common use of children to preach moral values.
Why didn’t the more virtuous Quakers call out their purely performative colleagues? They did—however, systems for de-platforming people had already begun to evolve in Quaker culture centuries ago. When George Keith began to speak out against the Quaker community for not living up to its values, the same Quakers who in England had demanded the right to free expression started demanding restraints on the types of things that could be published, causing many printers in Quaker territory to be arrested for publishing “unlicensed books” and having their press and types seized.[[161]](#_ftn161) By 1693, Keith, along with others who spoke against the Quakers for their hypocrisy, were forced to leave. In Quaker culture, you were allowed to call out outsiders for things like slavery and you were even allowed to shame specific Quakers, but the one thing you were not allowed to do was point out that Quaker culture as a whole did not at all live up to its espoused values and was fundamentally hypocritical.
If you are still dubious of our claim that the supervirus has Quaker origins, think about the virus’s initial point of spread: The American secondary school system. The United States school system was both heavily influenced by Quaker culture and disproportionately run by Quakers in its early days. Had the virus evolved independently, it would more likely have initially spread through activist movements instead of an entrenched bureaucracy.
Why did the parasitoid supervirus evolve within Quaker culture? Why did Quaker culture produce the most virulent of all the memetic viral packages when similar secular viruses have evolved out of all of America’s major cultural movements?
While the traditional branch of Quakers were not justicles, the evolution of the justicle branch of the Quaker faith was what allowed the supervirus to develop. This worldview allowed the supervirus to appeal to entire nodal networks at once instead of individual nodes (for example, the Red Pill and Jordan Peterson followers focus heavily on how they will help individuals rather than society as a whole). The justicle worldview allows an individual to believe that if everyone in their group structures their thoughts and language in a certain way, society will become better—all else equal. This motivates individuals to spend more time converting people than spending the time and effort required to literally build a society that structurally embodies their values.
For clarification: If you have two groups and one of those groups spends 100% of adherents’ contributed time and effort converting others while the other spends 50% of adherents’ contributed time converting others and 50% trying to improve the world, the group not interested in actually making a difference will outcompete the other, evolutionarily speaking. However, very few cultures are able to convince people they are “good” despite investing so little in the actual realization of their values.
An absence of success metrics is a feature that equipped Quaker culture to produce the ultimate supervirus. **The way Quaker culture can shamelessly claim to be abolitionist while simultaneously counting America’s most prolific slave owners among its members—by being aesthetically abolitionist—presents a critical social technology needed by the supervirus.**
It doesn’t matter whether the supervirus actually uses significant resources to help BIPOCs, LGBT people, the poor, the disenfranchised, the environment, or women—it aesthetically cares about those issues and from the perspective of an infected person, aesthetically caring is morally equivalent to actually doing something. (This is why there was so little public complaint on the far left about the BLM Foundation money being spent on things like a $6M mansion for its board members.)[[162]](#_ftn162) The parasitoidal virus convinces its victims that by buying into it, they will intrinsically serve the best interests of those groups. Without this technology, people would quickly notice the harm this virus inflicts on infected goal-driven organizations and pull back before they could die and release the spores grown within them into the social ecosystem. People at Occupy Wall Street would stand up and say: “This obsessive infighting and bizarre method of making decisions is clearly inefficient and will make achieving our goals impossible.”
As scary as the parasitoid supervirus can be, we must understand it because it represents the single most sophisticated and robust cultivar ever evolved. While we fastidiously avoid the use of supervirus-evolved social technologies within our own House’s culture, we suspect someone smarter than us might be able to find a way to use some of these social technologies in a beneficial durable culture.
Finally, we need to be clear that just because something evil evolved out of Quaker culture does not mean Quaker culture itself is evil. We are the first to admit that Unitarian Universalism evolved out of Calvinism and clearly we see Calvinist culture as morally good.