Techno-Puritanism / The Pragmatist’s Guide Book Series by Simone Collins and Malcolm Collins Full Text for LLMs and AI

TPG 17.3 · 2,612 words · 12 min read · Ecological Niches and Convergent Evolution

Gun Ownership and Responsibility of Protection

A city-dwelling culture whose members attempt to protect themselves with guns will become a target for surrounding communities and be seen as a “public menace” more generally. When you live in extremely dense areas with heavy state control and abundant government services, you also need to harbor a certain level of pro-sociality and trust in your fellow man in order to thrive.

In the same breath, it makes sense that many cultivars and individuals would not trust the state. From our perspective, a certain level of suspension of logic—a mass delusion if you will—is needed if one is to trust any large bureaucracy to be either efficient with its resources or just in its action. Those distrustful of large bureaucracies naturally sort themselves into more rural environments, where their beliefs would likely be compounded. For example, once in a rural environment, a culture is unlikely to have much state support in the event of a targeted attack, making self-defense capability something of a necessity.

Individuals from these cultures who were unable to protect their land were likely to have that land seized, either by the state (which historically did this a lot to rural populations deemed incapable of militarily enforcing their property rights) or other groups with mal intent (it was often not worth a state’s time to correct for land theft so long as the occupying residents paid their taxes). This even happened in the United States up until about a century ago. Such history puts the stereotype of the ruralite pointing a shotgun at outsiders into context.

Groups suspicious of large bureaucracies were generally against things like taxes, as historically states directed most resources they collected toward urban centers and were largely parasitic on rural communities. Governments, after all, were often more concerned about keeping those closer to home and in positions of power happy in order to stay stable. People in the countryside have historically only warranted state attention insofar as they threatened rebellion. On that note: Many of these groups regularly incited rebellions, which themselves piled on more anti-bureaucratic selective pressures. It is little surprise that surviving iterations of these rural cultivars developed not just extreme suspicion of large bureaucracies, but also mandates around self-armament, sovereignty, and self-sufficiency.

Again, we will present the predominant modern Jewish cultivar as an extreme example of an urban-specialized culture. Jewish gun ownership is the lowest of any religious group in the United States according to a 2005 American Jewish Committee study[[171]](#_ftn171) (only 13% compared to 41% of white evangelicals and 31% of Americans). Even in Israel, which given its history and the way it relates to its neighbors would have every reason to be bullish on citizen armament, is very hesitant about gun ownership among its Jewish population, turning down 80% of applications for gun licenses annually (compare that to well under 1% in the U.S.). So, while you will see guns all over Israel, they are overwhelmingly being wielded directly in service to the state, with only 4% of guns issued in the country not being of military issue.[[172]](#_ftn172) (And again, we really need to distinguish the predominant modern Jewish cultivar from historical predominant Jewish cultivars, as the Jewish cultivar dominant throughout the Roman period was clearly extremely rebellious, martial, focused on self-protection, against authority, and distrustful of the state.)

Contrast urban Jewish culture with your gentle authors’ cultural background, which presents the other extreme. In our inherited culture, it would be seen as a tremendous moral failing and a sign you did not “really love your children” if every adult member of the family was not comfortable using a firearm (both the mother and the father). When we had our first kid, both sides of our family offered to send us money to buy (more) guns, additional firearm training, and membership at the gun club across the street from our house.

This was seen as a normal evolution of our responsibilities upon having our first child: We advanced from being responsible for protecting only ourselves to being responsible for protecting a household. To someone from an urban specialist cultivar, the idea of giving your children more guns because they now have kids in the house probably sounds completely insane. (Note: We are fairly sure this rural tradition is not tied to our Calvinist religious ancestry but rather our Scottish/Irish backwoods ethnic ancestry—these were the types of people who migrated to the U.S. at the first chance they got, then kept moving West every time civilization caught up with them.)

As kids, we were expected to learn both wilderness survival techniques (how to navigate in the woods, purify water, grow food, hunt, identify poisonous plants, etc.) and how to use basic weapons. My (Malcolm’s) family only focused on the most practical weapons (guns, bows and arrows, and explosives).[[173]](#_ftn173) Simone’s family additionally trained in more “ornamental” forms of self-defense. Her father, for example is a black belt in Aikido (she was actually born in Japan while he was there training in depth with a grandmaster), her sister’s family likes to throw hatchets in their backyard, and when we first started dating, Simone proudly showed me her collection of pink knives. (Actually, one of my cousins made a joke when learning that Simone’s family had a penchant for things like hatchet throwing, which they saw as indulgent, and thus effete—a good example of how even similar cultures can have differences.)[[174]](#_ftn174)

It is funny how I (Malcolm) expect readers to either react to the above comments with: “OMG, your families are insane extremists” or “Well duh, all families raise their kids that way—how is that experience in any way remarkable?” (The latter was Simone’s reaction when I tried to explain to her why we can’t give knives to our students as gifts.) In writing this book, however, we spoke with a lot of people about their childhoods only to realize that shared, mass-media-created narratives around childhood do not reflect the day-to-day childhood experiences of most Americans.

Note: If our assertions about rural armament in the U.S. feel too anecdotal to you, consider that in the U.S., among adults who live in rural areas, 46% say they own a gun, compared with 28% of adults who live in the suburbs and 19% in urban areas. Of those, 75% of those in rural areas say they own more than one gun, compared with 48% of urban gun owners.[[175]](#_ftn175)

From the perspective of rural cultures, a choice to live outside of cities is primarily seen as a defensive tactic. While our extended family members primarily live in cities, even most members of modest means have parcels of land in the countryside (ranches or farms) where they take their kids and grandkids to learn to grow food and develop wilderness survival skills. Many people we know who hail from rural specialist cultivars but live in cities will actually buy their first farm, ranch, or lake house before buying their first house in the city—as if it were a sort of umbilical cord that lets them survive in an urban environment.

What’s particularly funny is how, in a society with no real day-to-day threats, people justify self-defense expenditures around fictional pop culture threats like zombies. Yes: This is something you will regularly hear if you hang out with quirky prepper communities. It’s as though people know they are building these skills to protect their families and because they can’t think of any real reason to be investing so much effort in doing so, they come up with a tongue-in-cheek reason that pulls from their evoked set of societal collapse scenarios.

Someone from another culture may hear this and imagine kids performing rigid paramilitary training drills in the woods. Within most rural, large-bureaucracy-suspicious cultures, survival training is rarely framed this way—rather, it is framed as “playing in the woods,” “playing with a bow and arrow,” or “remixing fireworks and blowing up toys.” Neither Simone nor I grew up thinking we were being trained in weapons use and survival, nor did our parents see what they were doing in that light.

When I first started writing this book, I mentioned this section to Simone and she was like: “Come on Malcolm, you are reaching—everyone does that. It’s not like it’s unsafe; my aunt only got shot in the face with an arrow, like, once.” Then she thought about what she said and was like … “Oh weird—I guess that does sound off.” When I brought this up with my dad he was like: “Come on, we even had my childhood friend who blew all the fingers off his hand playing with fireworks talk to you about how dangerous they are,” to which I replied, “yes, that was a prelude to your giving us fireworks to play with.” (Now that I am an adult looking back on it, it was super dangerous for my parents to keep the fireworks box next to the toy box.)

Our society has such a specific and hostile view toward the paramilitary training of children that it is very hard to recontextualize what we think of as normal childhood games and happy, wholesome memories of playing with friends and family as weapons and survival training. This mental masking shows how very specific cultural mandates, like: “Make sure all kids know how to use weapons and survive off the land,” can pass between generations while the implications of the purpose of those mandates can be forgotten. It is also fascinating how stark and ubiquitous this difference is, with essentially everyone we know from a rural culture being taught skills like hunting, fishing, weapons training, basic explosives training, swimming, horseback riding, basic mechanical maintenance, etc. while the culturally urban people we know were typically only taught around half those things.

People from rural cultivars also heavily modify potential mates’ desirability by their self-sufficiency. A woman who can fix a car or clean a fish will have much higher levels of desirability in one of these cultures—and a man who can’t may very well be off the table as a partner. Women from these cultures often develop “feminine” ways to signal their rugged abilities, hence Simone showing me her pink knife collection on an early date. (A funny song about this that happened to be on in the background while I wrote this section is “Shut Up and Fish” by Maddie & Tae.) As a final note for readers who didn’t grow up around rural cultures: Having at least one dad threaten you with violence if you hurt the daughter you are dating is very common and not just a trope from movies. Such threats are not seen as mean, boundary-crossing, or even particularly adversarial—it’s more just the respectful thing to do.

We can logically admire the philosophy of “not fighting back” and “trusting the system” seen in urban specialized cultures and still not be able to practice this wisdom, both due to our own sociological profiles and our cultural biases. To “trust the system” is a strategy that requires an enormous amount of restraint—restraint that we know we (and our likely descendants) lack. Our kids will have multiple great uncles and direct ancestors who attempted to start their own countries through armed rebellion: George Washington (uncle), Jasper Collins (uncle), Robert the Bruce (direct), Warren Collins (direct), Charlemagne (direct), Oliver Cromwell (direct),[[176]](#_ftn176) etc. We are stacking the cards against our own children if we give them a culture that doesn’t expect them to take a shot at founding a breakaway state.

As a side note: It is remarkable just how genetically ingrained these instincts can be. We can see it in our kids, even as toddlers. We learned pretty quickly that the joy they get from rebelling against authority is greater than the inconvenience of any authority-delivered consequence. Worse, if one of our kids sees another get punished for something and they don’t see a logical justification for it, they will gleefully do it themselves. For example, if we place one kid on a time-out for climbing on the kitchen table, we will inevitably come back to a room with a table covered in giggling children. We once found a childhood report card my mom kept in which we were referred to as “demons” and now I get what our beleaguered teachers meant.

The anti-authoritarian streak we and our children have inherited, both culturally and genetically, explains in part why we want to cultivate a diverse and healthy cultural ecosystem. Authority-trusting, urban-specialized cultures play just as important a role in society as their authority-suspicious rural cousins. A country made up of nothing but Collinses would be a pretty shitty place to live. The healthiest societies will have both urban and rural cultivars with both groups engaging in constant cultural interchange.

While we are incorporating anti-authoritarian traditions into our House’s intentionally designed cultivar, we will make some edits. We disagree with our ancestors on the assumption that the most common environment will always be “nature” and that traditional “prepping” is always the best strategy. We think Mormon culture shows a perfect example of this kind of short-sightedness. Much of the way the Mormon population decided to protect their families was specifically aimed to avoid annihilation in the event of a nuclear apocalypse (large, underground bunkers beneath Mormon temples, mandates to have emergency supplies of foodstuffs on hand, and special cultural rituals for regularly rotating out emergency food supplies)—a scenario that is far from the top threat to the LDS Church today. (Fun side note: Simone’s grandfather worked on building the Mormon temple in Oakland and apparently it has a massive underground bunker—much bigger than what has been publicly disclosed.)

We will leave it to our descendants’ best judgment to determine which level of prepping and self-sufficiency is best for their particular times and environments. The message we will instead emphasize is that one must always be prepared to be hunted, because an ethical person in an unethical world always is at that risk. This may entail knowing how to live in the woods, but it also might mean keeping a big chunk of your wealth in cryptocurrency, having the ability to live in the sewers beneath a planet-wide megacity, or knowing how to fix the life support system on your spaceship. Our House’s cultivar will ensure its members never rely on the generosity of a bureaucracy to feed themselves, protect themselves, or breathe.

As if to reinforce everything I initially wrote in this chapter, two days after I completed it, Simone—who at the time was in her third trimester with another child—came to me and said “our house is not defended well enough” so:

It is weird to me that this “arming up” instinct seems to be triggered by pregnancy. I would think it was just the hormones if not for the unprompted gifts of additional weapons we keep getting from our families every other time she gets pregnant.

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