Relation to Pleasure and the Arts
Having reached this point in the book, you can probably guess our view of the arts. Calvinist culture is famously anti-art, with Calvinist Geneva famously banning all music except for psalm singing for almost a century.[[29]](#_ftn29) What may surprise you is that Calvinism isn’t the only culture that raises individuals who almost never participate in the arts. Not only do almost none of even culturally progressive Anabaptists participate in the arts, but neither do Mormons (with the only examples we can think of being Christina Aguilera and Jewel, though each renounced their faith and culture). In addition, many extremist Islamist cultivars have an active aversion to arts and will hunt down and destroy forms of art after taking control of a region (as ISIS did).[[30]](#_ftn30)
Similarly, some cultures are wildly over-represented in the arts, with the two most disproportionately represented being German Jews (as opposed to Russian/Polish Jews, which is the branch from which Simone hails and is overrepresented in textile management) and Scientologists. This is fascinating, as presumably people from most soft cultures want to be famous in the arts. Why, then, do German Jews and Scientologists, two cultures that make up virtually none of the U.S. population (2.4% and <0.1%), so generously outcompete them?
Let’s start by focusing on the question of why Jews are disproportionately represented in the media. A common answer is that when Jews first immigrated to the United States, many employers would not hire them. This drove Jews to start their own businesses more often, which boosted their odds of dominating growing industries that were just emerging as they first immigrated to an area. For German Jews, who moved disproportionately to the West, this supposedly led to disproportionate leadership in the entertainment and production industry.
This is a great “just-so story,” but two pieces of evidence make us doubt its accuracy:
- Other immigrant groups that faced discrimination (the Irish and Italians, for example) did not end up running companies at an unusual rate but instead went into organized crime, law enforcement, legal professions, and local politics.
- Even today, Jews enter uncorrelated areas of the arts at disproportionate rates—even in industries that don’t have a history of Jewish representation in positions of corporate power. For example, an article in a 1978 Times magazine claimed that 80% of all stand-up comedians in the U.S. were Jewish.[[31]](#_ftn31) This is a field largely unconnected to the movie studios of 1900s LA and still had Jews appearing at a rate 3,333% higher than you would expect. We don’t buy that this is a result of where the group first settled.
We heard an interesting answer that could also address an even bigger question of why more observant Jewish sects have a higher birth rate than many of their similarly strict Christian counterparts. While both Calvinists and Hasidic Jews have reputations for being strict, Hasidic Jews have thrived while Calvinists (as they existed in colonial American times) are almost extinct.
When answering the question not just of higher Jewish growth rates but also of higher Jewish representation in arts and media, one could argue that all branches of Judaism have one thing most observant Christian counterparts lack: A genuine mandate on celebration and having fun. Look up footage of a “Hasidic Jew party” and you will find video after video of behavior that does not mirror anything seen in the Anabaptist or Calvinist traditions. In contrast, most Anabaptist and Calvinist parties are oriented around group labor, such as barn raising. Could it also be that having “fun” for fun’s sake now and then makes life less bleak and increases birth rates? Could it be that differing cultural approaches to fun and celebration created a cultural vortex in which people who liked having fun joined Jewish families at disproportionate rates, magnifying this cultural practice and increasing the probability of members being more successful entertainers?
Side bar: A lot of people seem to assume that all humans see the world in approximately the same way regardless of their culture or sociological profile. They say, “Of course all people love a party!” This just isn’t true and it’s something you only really hear from people who have very limited experience with genuinely unique cultures. While we are objectively able to look at a Hasidic party and see that people are having “fun,” laughing, and … ugh … platonically touching each other—our appreciation of the event is solely anthropological. Everything about actually participating in something like that would be mortifying to us. What if someone tried to talk to us, get us to sing, or (retch!) touched us!? No thank you, we would rather participate in a barn raising any day of the week. A productive day working with friends interspersed with breaks for homemade snacks—that sounds satisfying.
Ok, what about other cultures in the U.S. that are disproportionately represented in the arts? In the case of Scientology, one could argue adherents are important in the media because their members focus on recruiting high-level people in the entertainment world—which is true. However, as a culture, Scientologists also encourage partying more than other hard cultures we frequently reference. In addition, many famous scientologists in the media joined the church before getting famous.
Given our cultural backgrounds, we find it difficult to come to terms with this, but the success of several party-friendly cultures strongly implies that cultures will benefit from some level of emphasis on celebrations, parties, fun, and creative pursuits. That said, we hope this theory offers food for thought not just to us, but to others: When intentionally designing or reinforcing your own cultivar, you may want to give “fun” more attention than you would otherwise.
At this point, you are probably wondering why a culture would ever evolve an antagonistic attitude toward the arts, parties, and “fun.” In general, “less fun” cultures tend to not believe that subjective emotional states have differential value. In other words, these cultures typically hold that happiness and sadness are not states that hold any inherent value and if anything, working through negative emotions helps build you into a stronger person while indulging in positive emotions can tempt you toward non-efficacious action.
Even from a secular perspective, this seems obviously true to us: The emotional states we experience only exist because our ancestors who felt them had more surviving kids. Emotions were an accident of the environmental pressures faced by our ancestors and today, in a new environment in which access to things like leisure, sugar, and social validation are abundantly available (and furthermore utilized by organizations that hijack our emotions in pursuit of profit), indulging in positive emotions only serves to hinder our efficiency.
The lion’s share of the evidence seems to suggest the Jewish perspective is right and humans will be more efficient if you encourage them to party now and then. However, even if we adopt fun, arts, and celebration as an aspect of our House’s culture, we will nevertheless make sure our kids never forget that “fun” should always serve a purpose, be it an emotional reset, cultural retention strategy, or cultural draw. Holidays that mandate fun should be extremely temporally locked and if anything, serve as a reminder of how hollow positive emotions can be when they are pursued for their own sake.
Side Note: I, Malcolm, was recently going over a list of the most popular sports in the world by country and was surprised by how few there were. Sports with top-ranked status in more than one country were football, baseball, basketball, ice hockey, and cricket. Those that were the favorite of one country were American football (U.S.), Australian football (Australia), Gaelic football (Ireland), wrestling (Mongolia), archery (Bhutan), and, depending on the list you use, table tennis (China).
Notice anything weird about this list? Outside of three small countries (Bhutan, Mongolia, and Ireland) and arguably China, the favorite sport of every country in the world was invented in a Protestant majority environment. If you also remove Australia from consideration, the sport of choice in every country in the world was either invented by the English or Americans.
This phenomenon cannot really be explained by colonialism alone given (1) how other local arts have captured the public consciousness around the world and (2) that no sport was invented by a Catholic majority culture despite the significant role in played in colonization efforts). What makes this whole thing uniquely weird is how little Protestant culture celebrates leisure pursuits. Despite this, Protestant culture seems to be superpowered at inventing competitive sports. If I were to guess at what might be going on, I’d posit that the Protestant connection is a red herring and this is more of an artifact of uniquely high levels of competitiveness pervasive in the United States and United Kingdom.
The Pleasure Pod Filter
One of the classic arguments against those who claim to want to maximize positive emotional states is the “brain in a vat” thought experiment. In this thought experiment a person is asked:
“If you had the choice to enter a pod that could perfectly maximize your ideal emotional state (e.g., not just bliss but also fulfillment, oneness, and contentment), would you live out the rest of your life in that pod? What if this pleasure pod could also simulate your perfect life so seamlessly it would be indistinguishable from the real world; would you choose a life in the pod then? What if it could also connect you to other people, so even in this perfect, blissed-out world you could still engage with others?”
This is not just a thought experiment anymore. Rather, it’s a near-future question many people and cultivars will need to address. By the time of our great grandchildren, it is quite possible that every human will have to decide whether they want to be put in a pod that gives them this perfect virtual life. This option is only likely to last for a couple generations.
Mass access to such technology will act as one of the biggest genetic and cultural bottlenecks through which our species will ever pass. Any culture or sociological profile that can’t give people a concrete reason to live beyond their emotional experience or the emotional experience of others (e.g., general utilitarianism) will be aggressively deleted from the timeline. While those in pods will maximize their enjoyment and the enjoyment of others, they are neither likely to have kids (at least not anywhere near repopulation rate) nor participate actively in humanity’s advancement. With that, the predominant moral sets in secular society (those focused around hedonism, nihilism, and utilitarianism) are going to be wiped off the game board.
If you doubt that these pleasure pods will be inexpensive enough for mass use, think again. Anyone with a utilitarian mindset would have a motivation to lock themselves in one and donate the rest of their money to making them accessible to others. Given that most people have utilitarian moral sets, the pleasure pod industry will end up with a lot of dedicated capital.
Sure, evil capitalists will try to profit from early versions of this tech, but given their intrinsically fixed maintenance costs, inevitably one philanthropist will make them generally accessible. Generous, utilitarian hedonist philanthropists aside, we know our own cultivar well enough to know we would sponsor mass access to pleasure pods just to swiftly and ethically delete those susceptible to utilitarian or hedonistic fulfillment before they cause any more damage.
So where do you stand on this issue? Would you mind if your cultivar and descendants were wiped out through free access to pleasure pods? What if it wasn’t a binary decision? What if it started like a game that you could jump into sometimes while still maintaining a traditional job and family with which you spent most of your waking hours? What if, over time, people could start making money inside this game, and mainstream media and society started shaming those who didn’t shift to life full time inside the game because the carbon footprints and general damage caused by people moving around in the physical world hurt the environment? What if this has already started? If you didn’t have to work, how much time each day would you spend on social media Skinner boxes and video games?
Creating a culture that can resist this technology doesn’t just entail resistance to utilitarian thinking; it also requires resistance to strong and pervasive social pressure. Humanity will be a very different species after the pleasure pod filter fully sieves through the living population—an event that may have already begun.