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 it was really easy to verify the eloquence and accuracy with which someone quoted and therefore understood a certain text because you could just quickly look it up.

Malcolm: Right? Yeah. And so it allowed for this really interesting phenomenon where when you were meeting with another person, like another Jewish man in one of these communities, you could say, what are you studying right now?

Malcolm: And from the texts they said they were studying, you could know approximately how advanced that they were in their general knowledge of this field. And then you could test them on that by saying. Oh, well, page 56 or whatever. What do you think of this? Right?

Malcolm: And they need to know how this quote was sourcing other material, how it interlinked to other material. And it's a quick way for you to determine where they are in the hierarchy relative to you.

Simone: So almost like, let's say, let's take the religion out of this and let's pretend that this is a totally different community.

Simone: Like it's a Twilight fan fiction community. [00:04:00] So, if, if you were trying to gauge using the same general system and framework, you would ask, Oh, like, well, have you read this fan fiction? Well, what did you think about when? The werewolf like hooked up with the, Confederate vampire in this particular, alliance to destroy this weird faction.

Simone: And then if, if they didn't really know how to comment on it eloquently, you would understand, well, they haven't gone that deep into the canon. They haven't gone that deep into the lore. Therefore I am above them in the status hierarchy. And they would understand that they are below me because they haven't read that book yet.

Simone: Or they didn't, they said that they did, but they don't really know the lore that well. They didn't really take it in.

Malcolm: Yeah, and a really interesting phenomenon you can get with this and a really interesting advantage to this system is it allows for different subgroups within the wider ultra orthodox Jewish community to focus on different texts.

Malcolm: So some groups might believe that one text is like a more important thing for a learned person to know than another group and because of the way this power hierarchy structure works. [00:05:00] These groups will begin to interact with each other less and less because , there isn't a cross communication between their power hierarchies a lot.

Malcolm: Like the way that they have dedicated their time doesn't cross to status within another community. Yeah. It's almost

Simone: like 50 shades of gray fan fiction community branching off from Twilight fan fiction community. And at first they were the same base, but then they veered in so many different connect directions that they could no longer really.

Simone: Be interchangeable in terms of merit. So one leader from one advanced version of that group couldn't immediately go over and own the other

Malcolm: group. But what this allows for cultural evolution wise is it allows for the, the texts that end up being more important in terms of like resisting the social virus right now.

Malcolm: Those communities will naturally out compete the ones that are following groups of texts that are less strong at doing that, or texts that are more useful at, say, making the group uniquely good [00:06:00] at surviving and competing in a really highly technological age. Those groups will naturally out compete the other groups.

Malcolm: And one of the very interesting things about Judaism that quite differentiates it from many other traditions, is most Jewish groups can reintegrate with most other Orthodox Jewish groups after they