Urban vs Rural Approaches to Charity
One of the most distinct differences between urban and rural cultivars is the level of trust they place in institutions. Urban cultivars express a much higher level of trust in all types of institutions. This divide is widened when a culture also uses expert consensus as its primary criterion for truth, as is the case with both the Catholic and Orthodox Christian families of cultivars.
This is seen most clearly in terms of rural cultivars living with an ever-present fear of government crackdown or societal collapse. We are constantly shocked to find even our most sober-minded family members allude to personal backup plans addressing government crackdown and apocalyptic scenarios—for example, in the midst of a recent baby formula shortage, we learned that Malcolm’s fairly vanilla brother kept a year’s worth of food and supplies in storage, a Geiger counter, and water purification kits.
One study in the EU showed, “people in rural areas have lower political trust than urban or peri-urban residents, with this difference clear for six different forms of political institutions, including politicians, political parties, and national”[[177]](#_ftn177) Another study in the EU showed that anti-globalist voting was much higher in rural areas.[[178]](#_ftn178)
That rural cultivars distrust governments is straightforward—but people from urban cultivars can be taken off guard when they realize how deeply these groups distrust any large bureaucracy, including charities, higher academia, and the broader education system. Earlier in this book, we claimed that it was obvious that the Effective Altruism movement is a secular offshoot of a Jewish cultivar, and we pointed to Effective Altruists’ trust in institutions to distribute capital as evidence for this. Generally, when someone from an urban cultivar makes a ton of money and wants to make the world a better place, they will give that money to institutions of “experts” to distribute on their behalf.
This is radically different from the manner in which institution-distrusting cultivars try to make the world a better place. These groups often personally build out and run programs to see their goals for the world executed and attempt to make these institutions self-sustaining and cash positive. This can be seen in the way we distribute our money (e.g., We founded, initially funded, and run things like CollinsInstitute.org and Pronatalist.org) but also in contrasting billionaires like Mark Zuckerburg and Elon Musk. Whereas both through the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and directly, Zuckerberg gives his money to institutions designed to improve people’s lives, Musk works to personally see his visions for the future realized by starting or gaining control of for-profit entities subsequently run under his direction, ranging from Tesla (addressing global warming), to Ad Astra (addressing education), Twitter (addressing freedom of speech), and SpaceX (making humans an interstellar species).
To people from rural cultivars, any institution that is run by someone who hasn’t proven they were competent enough to make the money in the first place is liable to become corrupted. We have personally encountered several large non-profits that have effectively devolved into giant virtue signaling machines. Those working at these nonprofits who focus on efficacious action always have less time to put into internal politics than Machiavellian colleagues who only care about moving up, leading these organizations’ most competent players to be consistently outcompeted and edged out. (Having worked alongside several large nonprofits, which commonly succumb to this sad fate, we can say with some confidence that you could easily get 600X per dollar spent by putting funds into a smaller nonprofit or a scrappy, impact-driven startup.)
Even the Pragmatist’s Guide series is largely a product of our distrust of the academic bureaucracy’s ability to soberly and fairly tackle topics like sexuality, relationships, government, religion, and life philosophy. An intense distrust of institutions will likely serve cultivars well as the education system gets better and better at infecting kids with the cultural supervirus and exorcising them of the unique aspects of their inherited cultures.
That said, a healthy cultural ecosystem can’t function without people who trust systems. This can be seen statistically in long-tail cultural outcomes: Remember how we pointed out that seven of nine sitting Supreme Court Justices were raised at least partially Catholic? Well, the other two were raised Jewish, making them 18.5X times more represented than one would expect given their percentage of the population. The Supreme Court has no members descended from (only) Protestant cultivars. Ultimately, cultivars that trust institutions are also better at running those institutions (in the few societal domains in which they are absolutely necessary—we definitely wish there were fewer).
Multicultural ecosystems aren’t only optimal at the long tail of the distribution. To use the COVID-19 pandemic as an example, a healthy cultural ecosystem needs both people arguing that COVID vaccines are in the best interest of the common good and people pointing out that vaccine advocates are in a position in which, even if they were to discover a vaccine was dangerous, they could not broadcast information about vaccine risks without damaging their careers due to a poorly designed incentive system.
A monocultural ecosystem is extremely fragile. China’s Zero COVID policy (involving two years of draconian lockdowns) presents an excellent case in point. While initial COVID lockdown mandates were objectively beneficial (with even libertarian analysts admitting as much),[[179]](#_ftn179) they also long overstayed their utility. The USA benefited both from having authority-friendly lockdown advocates, who initially ensured they were imposed, and anti-authority lockdown critics, who eventually ensured they were lifted. China lacked this second, anti-authority group (having either killed them all or forced them to emigrate to Taiwan or join China’s international diaspora). As a result, government lockdown mandates kept getting more extreme and their illogicality spiraled. People are able to rise within China’s monocultural hierarchy by being slightly more extreme than those above them; there are rarely negative consequences for interpreting an order “too thoroughly.” This leads to horrific results, like people being welded into their apartments, having barbed wire put around them, and even starving to death—all for nothing.[[180]](#_ftn180)
Unhampered by pushback, China’s government officials have started using anti-COVID apps to do outrageous things like empty people’s bank accounts and lock them in place when they head out to protest by flagging them as having COVID. This should not be surprising coming from a monocultural nation featuring low hostility toward bureaucracy and institutions. Recall from the chapter on Catholic vs Protestant standards of evidence that countries with more trust in expert consensus feature higher rates of corruption.[[181]](#_ftn181)
The cultural supervirus has a similar view toward authority and a similar system whereby adherents climb in the social hierarchy. Unlike the healthy level of trust in institutions we see in Catholic, Orthodox Christian, and Jewish cultivars—one that can work alongside other cultures—the cultural supervirus mandates cultural conformity in the institutions it infects. Just like in China, not only is there no way to challenge the authority of the supervirus, but there is no reward for challenging its authority if you are later proven to be right. Anyone who cares about truth or freedom should be very scared of the cultural supervirus.
Side Story 1: One of our good friends ran a research lab at a top university that studied the effectiveness of masks at preventing COVID spread. She bemoaned how insane it was that their findings clearly demonstrated that the masks most people wore were ineffective, but that they couldn’t highlight this major takeaway in research abstracts or interviews with the press because a huge chunk of their funding came from the NHS (the U.K.’s healthcare system), which had levied the very mask mandates their research demonstrated to be ineffective.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the cultural supervirus demonstrated it didn’t care about anything it had previously claimed to support. It didn’t care about how much pollution it generated (in the form of 1.6 billion masks now in the ocean, making up 7% of the great garbage plastic patch).[[182]](#_ftn182) It didn’t care about unnecessary developmental delays caused in children whose parents lacked the resources to pull them out of daycares with mask mandates.[[183]](#_ftn183) It didn’t even care that public school shutdowns fueled an increase in inequality and disproportionately hurt BIPOC groups.[[184]](#_ftn184) Instead, the supervirus used the pandemic to conduct a witch hunt, identifying everyone who worked to address the actual cause (minimize harm during the pandemic) without paying homage to the virus’s mission (consolidating power and spreading) and enthusiastically excising them from positions of power and influence.
Now that we understand school closures went on for too long[[185]](#_ftn185) [[186]](#_ftn186) and were primarily prolonged by teachers unions and not scientific data, does the virus apologize to people like Jennifer Sey,[[187]](#_ftn187) who was forced to step down from her job for calling out mask mandates for children and arguing that school closures set disenfranchised kids back years while giving rich kids who could stay in their private schools a huge advantage?[[188]](#_ftn188) No; of course not—no one is ever rewarded for speaking truth to power in an infected institution. The supervirus only rewards people who tear down those who are “off message.” The point of the virus is not to govern effectively, but to weed out individuals who might dissent.
During the COVID outbreak the priests of Bel have left their footprints clearly in the ash—the only question now is do you have the courage to update your perception of the world.
Side Story 2: One of our editors pointed us to the works of Curtis Yarvin, saying he had some ideas similar to ours (for example, that the virus evolved out of Quaker culture). Going through his work is very interesting, as he seems to be as lucid as us about the way culture works but approaches fixes from a Jewish cultural perspective, trusting authority / centralization of power. This explains why, despite working with the same information and having the same level of lucidity, he supports a monarchy while we support the Index model (a decentralized self-sufficient network of cultural alliances).