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The People's Front of Judea, Cultural Speciation, and Catholicism
We explore the phenomenon of cultural speciation - when cultures fragment into distinct new cultures. We discuss why groups feel most hostility towards similar groups, the role of cultural isolation, threats to young movements, Catholic orders as cultural "stem cells", and more.
Malcolm: [00:00:00] Are you saying
Simone: that you're saying that Catholicism is a nepo baby?
Malcolm: Catholicism is a nepo baby.
Malcolm: It's a nepo baby of the Roman empire.
Simone: I mean,
Malcolm: we. So, I mean, there's many reasons why Constantine may have chosen. I mean, obviously, there's a reason he gave, but a lot of historians think that what was actually going on there is he really liked the Catholic Church as an alternate administrative unit that already had centers set up throughout the Roman Empire, which allowed him to To implement many reforms.
Malcolm: Administration
Simone: in a
Malcolm: box. Yeah, it was like an administration in a box that allowed him to compete with the deep state
Would you like to know more?
Malcolm: Hello, Simone. How's it
Simone: going? Very good, Malcolm. I thought today we might talk a little bit about your theories on cultural speciation. In other words, how cultures split off into new entirely separate cultures.
Malcolm: Yeah, so this is really important for us to talk about because we talk about the evolution of cultures a lot on this channel. [00:01:00] Yeah. The idea that cultures can be thought of as an evolving software sitting on top of our genetically prescribed sociological predilections, which is our hardware.
Malcolm: And so, So what's really cool about cultural speciation events is one. We can see them in real time all around us. And two, by studying them and by looking at them, we can get a better understanding of why people, one, do something that appears very weird in the moment, and, and two, the long term consequences of this action and why it's important to like the development of human societies and why we might even be genetically coded and why we To do this action that can seem really weird because it leads to faster cultural evolution, right?
Malcolm: Right. So this is, we're going to talk about what we call the Judean people's front problem. And this is from the Monty Python movie, the life of Brian, because it's a great example of this. There's this [00:02:00] little group of four people who are the Judean people's front. And this was about like the anti Roman.
Malcolm: Jewish groups that were really common in Rome around the time of Jesus because this was just a thing in Rome. You want, actually, if you want to see more about this, you can watch this show, Rome. That's what it's called, right? The, the serial. Yeah. That was an APL. Oh, it's so good. It's so good.
Simone: So,
Malcolm: So I'll just do the skit because I'd like to put it here or I'll, you know, we'll have a link to it, but we'll get copyright strike if we do it.
Malcolm: But essentially there's, there's like a small group of people in the, in the Coliseum. Another guy comes up to them. He's trying to join their group. He's Oh, I'd really to join the Judean people's front. And they're like, are you sure you want to join? And they, they're like, you got to really hate the Romans to join us.
Malcolm: And he's Oh yeah, I really hate the Romans. And then they're like, the only thing we hate more than the. Romans is the people's front of Judea and then the guy goes, I thought we were the people's front of Judea.
Malcolm: And they go, no, we're the Judean people'
Published on 2 years, 3 months ago