Surviving Mouse Utopia | With Rudyard Lynch of What if Alt Hist

In this thought-provoking episode, Malcolm and Simone sit down with Rudyard Lynch, the brilliant mind behind the "What About His" YouTube channel. At just 22 years old, Rudyard has already amassed millions of followers with his insightful commentary on society, religion, and the future of humanity.

The conversation delves into the chilling parallels between the Mouse Utopia experiment and our modern world, exploring how nihilism and anti-natalism threaten the vitality of our civilization. Rudyard shares his perspective on the erosion of art, culture, and genuine human connection in an increasingly cold and impersonal society.

Malcolm and Rudyard discuss the role of religion and mysticism in combating the nihilistic cult that has taken hold of the Western world. They explore the CIA's investigation into the spirit world and the potential for a new, adaptive form of spirituality to emerge as a counterweight to the forces of decay.

Simone highlights the importance of building hidden communities of like-minded individuals to preserve the values of vitality, creativity, and meaning in the face of an increasingly hostile mainstream culture. The trio also touches on the need for a diverse range of historical role models to inspire the next generation of leaders and thinkers.

Join Malcolm, Simone, and Rudyard for a fascinating exploration of the challenges facing our society and the potential paths forward in this age of spiritual and cultural upheaval.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] If you have ever interacted often with, extremist religious types, like Amish people, I was going to say that.

Like, they seem to be more alive than most people that I've met too. Like, you just meet and you're like, whoa! Or like, you'll get this from like really conservative Mormons as well. To the extent where like, it sometimes like throws people off a little. Like, wow, you seem like genuinely happy. I, I don't know if that, that's off putting.

And people will say it is off putting because they find these groups vitality. Condemnation of themselves, but when you meet somebody in a cult like an extractive cult You'll see that they seem kind of dead like they've got these fake smiles But they're not really have any level of vitality to them.

And I think that what we have seen is our society has been taken over by one of these anti vitality nihilistic cults. And now the dangerous part, which really excited me in your video, and you're addressing this as an issue, is those of us who still have a level of vitality, [00:01:00] that are still happy with our lives, still excited about the future, are existentially threatening to the cult.

Because we cause pain, we cause harm. I mean, violence is emotional harm within leftist mindset, you know? What happens next? What happened in Mouse Utopia?

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: It is so wonderful. Simone and I today have Rubiard with us. He's the guy who runs the What About His channel. Anyone who hasn't seen that channel, you know it has millions of subscribers. It is amazing. I think one of the best channels now, I mean, you're like 21, man, like I am jealous, but not jealous in a way where like, sometimes I look at someone and I'm like, their videos are like, not as good as mine.

Like, how are they so big? I was going through your video recently, one on the mouse utopia experiments. And I think we've talked on this in the past and I was like, wow, this is much better than anything I could have created on this subject. And I And I really love you as a thinker, like, we talk regularly I, I find really aligned with your thinking on [00:02:00] most things, and it's funny, a lot of people know, you know, we are in, well, I'll, I'll get to this later, but what I wanted to focus on was the Nihilist mice in the Mouse Utopia experiment, and that's it.

one to defend against them and their relation to the left. So I'm going to go into this video assuming the audience broadly knows about the Math Utopia experiment. Mice, given anything they want ended up coalescing into urban like clusters and then doing a lot of behavior that looks a lot like our society today.

And then their fertility rate collapsed and their society died. But what was really interesting, and I'll let you lay out this behavior, is this When mice tried to continue to live the old ways, they were victimized. So I'd like you to talk about this, why you think this happened and the correlates you see to society today, and then we can discuss how we might defend against it.

Rudyard Lynch WhatIfAltHist: First of all, thank you so much for having me. And I'm glad to be here. And the way I'll answer your question is that I do a lot of thinking not part of [00:03:00] what a faultist that operates in the back and I gradually filter that into what a faultist and one of the conclusions I've come to is that the soul does exist and the reason I believe that and this will lead to what you're saying because only through understanding the essence of the soul are you capable of seeing how nihilism can take root.

And I came to the conclusion the soul exists partly due to projection where if you're projecting. Your inner care flaws upon the external world. That means there is a part of your mind that is aware of what your inner flaws are. And if you look over history animals do things that are not rational or in their self interest.

And the way I like to see mouse utopia is that you can have multiple tiers of causation for the exact same event. For example, the fall of Rome, you can find about five different. Thing is that resulted in that caused the fall of Rome, and it's almost a Rorschach test for which variables you choose to tease out and are most important.

And with mouse utopia, you can see it starting upon [00:04:00] multiple levels of causation, one being you could look at an ecosystem perspective, or the ecosystem needs to Needs to reset because if one form of life expands exponentially large, it will hurt the entire ecosystem. But when you look at the nihilism for the mouse utopia, there are multiple levels of causation.

One level of causation is that once you are in a pre established wealthy society, there is no incentive to cooperate. So the incentive is to free ride. And that results in negative nihilism because. The end point of free riding is saying that the the non free riders are bad. So nihilism is a way of preventing other people from stopping you from free riding so that you can basically do whatever you want.

The problem though, is you hit tragedy, the common situations where if everyone's trying to stop trying to free ride, there's nothing to free ride off. And. [00:05:00] I also think that past a certain point, people get resentful. If you've reached a certain point in nihilism, you, people, we're emotional. You get resentful against the people who are not like you.

And so it becomes this recursive thing where you hate the reminder that you're doing something wrong. And with the mouse utopia experiment, something that I find very interesting is the thing that kills the other mice. Is not the mice not having kids. It's the nihilist mice killing those who do have kids.

Malcolm Collins: Before you go further, I want to, I want to highlight these ideas you've had because I think they are so powerful and they're really, really like not things to just So within all social animals, whether it's human or mice or anything like that you're going to get some level of self consciousness, it appears.

And this is one of the things that surprised you when you're first looking at the experiment, is how similar the mice were to humans in many ways, when we think of them as being such simple animals. To the extent where if I'm a human and I am living off the state,