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Based Camp: How Religions Rank Competence (Jews vs Catholics)
AI generated summary: In this enlightening conversation, Malcolm and Simone explore the mechanisms of hierarchy and status within the Catholic and Jewish communities, and how intelligence and merit play significant roles in these systems. They examine the differences and similarities between the two, explaining how each system sorts for intelligence and their potential for abuse. They also delve into the topic of martyrdom and victimhood, discussing how these statuses are viewed differently within both communities. Watch till the end as they touch on the impacts of nepotism and how Catholic tradition has historically navigated this issue.Puritan Spotting: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/03/12/puritan-spotting/
Simone: [00:00:00] Hello, gorgeous.
Malcolm: Hello, Simone. This is an episode I was so excited to record. Because what we had done an episode on how our mainstream society and how the virus or the urban monoculture, how it sorts the intellectual hierarchy of status. And we had people say, that's a really interesting topic.
Malcolm: I'd love you to go deeper on this, this concept. And what really got me excited is some conversations we had had afterwards with people from different cultural traditions, because different cultural traditions. Do this status sorting quite differentially between them, and I think that's a really interesting thing to dig into because it allows you to hypothesize on the pros and cons of these different methods for determining this.
Simone: So in other words, what we're going to explore is the ways in which different cultures sort for leaders [00:01:00] and how that could affect their success, their vulnerability to mimetic viruses, their overall long term potential and all sorts of other factors.
Malcolm: Correct? Yeah. Yeah.
Would you like to know more?
Malcolm: And I think the first place you see this is in where you get long tail results, like where certain cultures seem to perform.
Malcolm: Unusually well or unusually poorly. So an example that I often mention, which I think is a very interesting and telling example, is that when you're talking about the conservative intellectual movement, like, if you look around at most, almost all of the mainstream conservative intellectuals today, like, I'd say, like, 95% of the well known ones, they are typically from Jewish backgrounds or Catholic backgrounds.
Malcolm: They are very few from Protestant backgrounds. And yet the majority of conservatives in the United States are from Protestant backgrounds. And so this is very interesting. And it's, what's causing this? Why, why do we see this phenomenon? And part of [00:02:00] it has to do with how the Jewish and Catholic groups sort their internal power hierarchies, which are one of the things we always say is so if you're talking about really progressive Jews are really progressive Catholics, they all just buy into this mainstream urban culture.
Malcolm: So there isn't as much difference in how their power hierarchies work. But when you're talking about very conservative iterations of each of these, there's actually a really enormous difference. So do you want to jump into, we were talking with a Haraiti rabbi friend recently around how he said his culture was sorted for internal intellectual hierarchy.
Simone: Yeah, I think what we found was really striking about it is it did not sort based on credentials or time. It was sorted based on demonstrable knowledge that was easily verifiable. So if you came in to a group of people and you were able to refer to and quote a text really eloquently, but also accurately, [00:03:00] then you were able to do so better than the other people in the room, you would climb above in the hierarchy.
Simone: And i
Published on 2 years, 5 months ago