Witches & Space Travel: There is a Reason We Have Prohibitions Against Witchcraft

Malcolm and Simone explain how and why mysticism and witchcraft corrupt rational thinking, even though they can emotionally comfort people lacking perceived control. Practices like horoscopes hijack brains by providing alternate physical "truths" without logic or evidence. This is fine on Earth but would endanger space exploration, where physics understanding is essential. Allowing some controlled traditional mysticism can act as an "idiot trap" though, concentrating dangers.

Simone Collins: [00:00:00] well, I mean, did I, did I tell you that when I was in high school, I was the anonymous horoscopes writer for my school's newspaper.

Malcolm Collins: No,

Simone Collins: people loved it.

Malcolm Collins: So why is mysticism so dangerous if you want to become a space fearing civilization? It is because

all mystical frameworks are fundamentally Alternate hypotheses without evidence or predictive capacity for how physics works. They are mundane in our world today, outside of how they affect a person's ability to think clearly,

they are not mundane if they are allowed to spread. on a spaceship where you need a life support system and you can immediately disintegrate if somebody's like, well, radiation has healing properties, or somebody's like, Oh, I don't believe that this is how our warp drive should work.

And in those capacities, it's literally life or death to not allow these heretical beliefs to spread

Would you like to know more?

Simone Collins: You look like a newscaster, and I look like some kind of [00:01:00] witch from the, like, Middle Ages.

Malcolm Collins: I thought I'd mix it up a lot. People are really surprised by our logo. Like, they think this is a new thing for us. I've had this for half a decade at this point. Maybe Almost, no, not a full decade, but yeah, we've been using it as our family logo for a long time.

Well,

Simone Collins: it's the logo of, no, our family logo is our monogram. This is the logo of the Pragmatist Foundation. Put that up. The Pragmatist Foundation has been around since 2016. And the gear has been a main part of that. And the Pragmatist Foundation is what technically owns and operates. This podcast. So,

Malcolm Collins: yeah, well, and the, the, the baby when we had Octavian, our first kid, his blankie has the pragmatist foundation logo on it.

And all of our books had the pragmatist foundation logo on it. And somebody was like, well, why this number of teeth in it? And the answer was. Actually it's a, it's a superimposed, you can think of it as a superimposed Latin cross and St. Andrew's cross. Is why it has this number of teeth in it for the, the religious element.

But also, you [00:02:00] know, we, we go over in the, the, the piece I posted a text as to why we decided to do the logo change. We'd been meaning to for ages. Might do a dedicated episode about it, actually. That would be interesting as to why we chose the gear as our logo here. But recently something happened.

So, Simone went to accept the Republican Party's sort of nomination, not nomination, but endorsement of her candidacy for the state house.

Simone Collins: From the Republican committee of our county in Pennsylvania.

Malcolm Collins: You said this is the first time in my entire life, you're like I'm here, 30 what years old and for the.

First time in my life I experienced real gender discrimination. It was amazing. I've never experienced it before. The That's possible thing. Yeah. So, so I, as we were walking around she was obviously the candidate, you know, she was on stage as a candidate and everything like that. But for whatever reason, there was a specific category of idiot.

Who had a lot of advice to give about [00:03:00] running for office, but would only talk to me. And so all the interesting people, I was like this weird force field of idiocy around Simone at the event. I know. Like

Simone Collins: normally the misogyny you'd think would like benefit Malcolm, right? That like people would just like see me and be like, okay.

And then like, be like, okay, I'm going to talk with the man. But it was only. The, it sounds bad. It was only the dumbest people and clearly like the least important and least impactful people that just completely ignored me and only spoke with Malcolm, which was hilarious and amazing. And, you know, they would say things like What did that one guy say?

He's like, well, I'm going to ask, he looked to me for a second. This is before he really ignored me. He looked at me and he said, well, this is normally something I've always asked guys, but now I ask women too, what do you do for work?

Malcolm Collins: And I'm like, I run a chain of companies in a private equity firm.

Simone Collins: Thank you, sir. Only between like. [00:04:00] 1956 and 1965, because apparently, like, I mean, there's been no other time where women don't work. I don't understand, like, this whole housewife thing. What even? I, I

Malcolm Collins: don't. And he was, he was another person running for office too. Oh, boy. It was anyway. So hold on. But we got to get to the topic at hand, which is not for not a witch to live.

And so a lot of people, you know, they hear about our beliefs and they are sometimes surprised by the elements of traditional cultures that we maintain. With extremely fierce fidelity, even fiercer fidelity than most of the current conservative religious communities and our beliefs around witchcraft and sorcery fall into this extremist faction of things. When you look around the world and you see all successful cultural groups that is successful in [00:05:00] terms of their spread or not all, but almost all like a huge convergent belief system is the belief that Witchcraft, sorcery, and mysticism are evil. This is something you see across traditions.

And so that means there is some reason for it. That reason can either be that it is actually evil, or it has some negative consequences. On the traditions that allow its practice at high levels. But another thing that's really interesting is they often frame it as being evil in the same way. So it's usually not just that it is broadly evil.

It is, and Simone, you were telling me that you had experienced this, was like your own parents were even into this stuff and told you stuff like this.

Simone Collins: Yeah, my, my parents were always like either, like my mother was really interested in sort of like training as a shaman and her. Final years, my, my dad had attended like these sort of psychic seminars.

And as a kid, you know, you always want to [00:06:00] hear about ghost stories or anything crazy. Right. So I always asked him about it and he's like, man, you have to be really careful because you know, like when you open yourself up to this stuff, like you, you become a conduit, you know, you let them, they can come in through you essentially.

And yeah, it's interesting that like, even people who are into it, even people who like want to harness that or access or tap into that world are like, no, it's dangerous. It's dangerous.

you were telling me that it f***s with your head. The certain amount of it after a while, it just f***s with your head. That's why I'm usually kind of like almost autistic is I'm just being constantly.

Why? Because lower entities will come in and violate your free will. They know. All your b******t, they see right through you. They will not manipulate your free will unless you ask them in. I have dude, do not say that I'm gonna get killed. I've a hundred percent communicated with something. I'm not judging