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 fucks with your head. The certain amount of it after a while, it just fucks 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 bullshit, 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 anybody.
I'm just saying, okay, be careful. The question is whether that something was actually in my imagination or in my mind, or that something was something that takes place in another [00:07:00] dimension. Once you open that gate, it's all bad. They have, so why is it all bad? Why? Why can't you experience that interdimensional?
being and learn something from it, and be a better person when you come out of it. Because, because every time it gets control, it starts murdering everybody. They wind up killing everybody later. In every case. And it always starts beautiful. It always starts great. Problem is, some of it makes sense. That's where the psychosis comes in.
Whoa. It's going to create a giant societal crisis where most of the people are already going to get killed. Because an evil force wants conflict. So I'm saying no, no, no. It's all chaos. Stop it. This is the nature of the beast.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah. And then you see this within Christian communities, you know, you engage with a Ouija board or something like that.
And that is the pathway for demons to enter your spirit and corrupt your mind. Or you look at. You know, Jewish teachings around like the Kabbalah, like there is a Jewish mysticism branch, but you are often taught you do not engage with this until you are very well trained in other areas. Like it is not child's play.
It is meant [00:08:00] to be taken very seriously in systemically and in some cases, almost like a training of a defense against the dark arts rather than you know, practicing for the sake of practicing for individual power. And. This then comes to our broader framework around this. One, why has this been historically shamed?
So there's like three categories here. Like, is there a reason this is a bad thing to believe? Two, if we are creating an iteration of a tradition that we mean to take humanity to the stars does it make sense to have really fierce prohibitions against this? Three, what really is mysticism? Like what's the core of it and why is it so appealing to people?
And how can we identify it and stamp it out? So first let's sort of talk about like what mysticism really is, because if you go historically, like if I go to ancient Athens or something like that, right, mysticism would include what today we would call astronomy and [00:09:00] physics and. And when mysticism included all of these other fields it was generally not shamed by the traditions around it, but as society evolved those things that could be proven true and could be engaged with became split out of mysticism and became the sciences and mysticism Is sort of the residue that's left when you take out.
All of the provable, material, studyable aspects of these traditions. And it's not that people don't try. Like, there are whole university departments that have been created around, like, trying to, like, this was big in the 80s like, mind reading and stuff like that. departments. They're actually made fun of in Ghostbusters.
That if anyone has seen Ghostbusters, one of the characters works in one of these departments. Like, and, and it's something you can easily measure. Like, somebody claims to be psychic. Okay, we have one [00:10:00] person holding cards. How often can the other person guess the cards that this person is holding and looking at?
Square. Good guess, but wrong. Is it a star? It is a star. Very good, that's great.
Malcolm Collins: Like, this is very measurable stuff. Well, it turns out that these departments didn't really produce anything particularly interesting. And so most of them were shut down. If they That would have become a science and it would have split out of mysticism because they would have been like, well, are you talking about the science, the measurable kind or the mystic kind?
It's funny where it was quote unquote proven within like government, like far seeing programs and stuff like that. So the government had some programs tied to mysticism, a giant bureaucracy. Idiotic bureaucracy that bureaucracies always are and it decided that a lot of this stuff was true at first the movie men who stare at goats is is about this.
But over time it was realized that no This was just con men who were easily screwing with bureaucracies [00:11:00] and bureaucracies are incredibly stupid especially government bureaucracies
This is Larry's spirit guide, Maude. I'm looking into the cupboard now. And I see A tin Mug.
No, wait a minute. You said A, not K. He said A.
Malcolm Collins: But I I want to So what defines mysticism today? Like, like what's left of mysticism? Are the, the ways of viewing the world and the ways of seeing the world that do not infer a predictive or competitive advantage for the individual?
Simone Collins: Yeah, it's like, it's, it's like adding an additional explanation for things or additional heuristics for making decisions that are not backed up by science results and yet they provide comfort or a feeling of control sometimes in places or ways where there just is no control. And I think maybe this is taking things [00:12:00] too off, but like we would probably even throw like personality assessments like the Myers Briggs and like blood types and horoscopes.
Into this category as well,
Malcolm Collins: I would strongly throw horoscopes into this category. Yeah. You know, if, if we are, if we're out there burning witches, that includes people who believe in horoscopes.
Simone Collins: And I was just listening to, there's a really fun podcast called the studies show where they sort of do a meta analysis of a subject.
They did personality tests recently, and they going through the research actually found that even like the Myers Briggs, which is used extensively is really not the robust people think it is, especially when you port it across cultures or apply it to different cultures. Like, there are some cultures that just only pick up on like.
Two of the things and really the bigger like personality modulators or things like intelligence. So even yeah, even the Myers Briggs, you know, is, I would say is, is one of those mysticism ask things [00:13:00] that people fob off as science. But that has, it's falls into that category of this thing that people really like to use to explain things or predict things that doesn't actually track with like very predictive or solid
Malcolm Collins: results.
So this is actually really interesting because the Myers Briggs is a good way of showing how we determine when something is witchcraft versus not witchcraft, how we determine if it's mysticism versus not mysticism, right?
Simone Collins: Yeah, it's not the aesthetics. We don't need like. A wand or,
Malcolm Collins: or because some mysticism at one time was science, but has since been proven non useful.
So within our framework, for example, phrenology would be considered a form of mysticism. Totally. Homeopathy would be considered a form of mysticism. 100%. And Myers Briggs. If it is disproven in the data, which I think the preponderance of data shows that it's just not particularly useful, it edges on mysticism, but it [00:14:00] isn't full mysticism in that it still does have some level of efficacy, it is only mysticism in so far as people overuse it, and that it appeals to earlier mystical frameworks whereas Zodiac signs, if you look Spencer Greenberg ran a giant study on Zodiac signs recently to see if they had any predictive capacity and they have zero predictive capacity.
And okay, Cupid did a big study on this as well. And then people of course go, Oh, well, what you actually need is not the sun. No, no,
Simone Collins: no, no, no, no, no, no. What they're saying is they're like, Oh, well, Spencer's just a classic Capricorn.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Right. Right. No, no. But then they're like, Oh no, but you actually need to do it in this ultra specialized
Simone Collins: way that like, Yeah, like you're, you're, you're just going by their sun sign.
It's obviously you have to look at like where Mars is as well. Blah, blah, blah.
Malcolm Collins: And then it's like, okay. So then if somebody did a test using all of that, like, and it had a reasonable sample size, like a hundred people. Would you then look at that test and have your beliefs overturned if it didn't show that it was predicted?
And these people would be like, No, not really. [00:15:00] So, so, they believe something, and, and this is where mysticism becomes really important for two reasons. You view it from a completely secular framework. One is, is it's corrupting of the mind. And we'll talk about how it's corrupting of the mind, because it really affects these people's ability to hold Like coherent, logical thoughts after they engage with it too long.
And in that way, these earlier analogies of like, you know, you touch the chaos and it corrupts you. Mm, were not incorrect. They just, yeah, were explaining it like you'd explain it to a child. And like
Simone Collins: I say, well they were explaining it in their own terms, which is that the, the terms of a mystic. Before we move forward, I just wanna point out one more thing in that this goes both ways.
There are many practices that are, or in the past have been mystical. that are now shown to be fairly scientifically robust in causing certain meaningful effects. Consider ayahuasca ceremonies. Now, of course, there's wide variation in the effectiveness of these because every every like practitioner of these has a slightly different formula and [00:16:00] process.
And obviously some formulas are more effective than others, but these can very significantly affect people's like life outlooks depression levels, et cetera. Like they're, they're very meaningful. And they're very like effective psychedelics that people are administering. And yet that was, you know, seen as like kind of witchcraft, kind of like in this like shaman.
So like the aesthetics of it don't matter. We don't care about that. Same with like a lot of like herbal remedies. You know, a lot of people who are seen as witches were just like basically providing. effective pharmaceuticals to people in their lives.
Malcolm Collins: Right. And then, so very important in this is that it is not the aesthetics.
It's whether or not it has been tested. There was not like a previous period where people had tested these ayahuasca ceremonies and determined that they did not have efficaciousness. They just assumed that they didn't because of the aesthetics around them, which we are very against doing. Actually, this brings me to a great example of what modern mysticism is.
Modern mysticism is. to science, what herbal remedies are to medicine. If you look historically, a lot of [00:17:00] medicine we use today was originally herbal remedies, aspirin, aspirin, like, Oh, you chew on bark of an aspirin tree, right? Like, like it's aspirin tree, I guess it's, yeah. And that creates some, you know, effect that lowers inflammation and lowers pain in an individual.
Um, Well, this was tested and it worked and then the, the companies then said, okay, well, can we create this without all the impurities that you're getting when you're chewing on bark? Can we make this healthier? Can we make this more? And that's the way science has engaged a lot of the earlier mystical practices.
Yeah. And that it has tried to distill them. Now, keep in mind, modern science has become corrupted. We are the first to say that academia has become corrupted by the virus. But that doesn't mean that we are as we often say, like we believe in an academic reformation. We do not have a problem with the scientific method.
What we have is a problem with the centralized bureaucratic institutions that have become the guardians of that method. When the Protestants [00:18:00] split from the Catholic church, they didn't have a problem with God. They had a problem with the corruption of the central bureaucracy. And this is the same way we relate to things like mysticism, but I need to go further here.
So, so why is mysticism so dangerous if you want to become a space fearing civilization? It is because space fearing civilizations need to have portions of their populations that live on Space faring ships. These are ships that are going to function on the edge of science, whether it is their life support systems the cutting edge of science or they're, you know, faster than light propulsion drives or they're, you know, near speed of light propulsion drives.
All mystical frameworks are fundamentally Alternate hypotheses without evidence or predictive capacity for how physics works. That is what mysticism fundamentally is. Whether you are talking about ghosts, or you are talking about the zodiac signs, or you are talking about, [00:19:00] God forbid, I mean, we take a very anti mystical framework, so anti mystical that many religious traditions, now keep in mind, this is only within our tradition that we treat this so harshly.
The human soul. All of these are alternate hypotheses about how reality works and, and belief in alternate physical planes and stuff like that behind reality, and as such, are forms of mysticism. And they are mundane in our world today, outside of how they affect a person's ability to think clearly, which we'll talk about in a second.
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 and be exposed to space 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. And they need to be. [00:20:00] Prosecuted within these communities and people can be like, how does this? correlate with your views around religious pluralism, right? Which is really interesting. So we still believe in religious pluralism, but remember we believe in the concept of a Tesseract God.
And the Tesseract God concept means that there are multiple holistically true revelations of God in the world today. Some iterations of Islam, some iterations of Christianity, some iterations of Judaism. None of those, we think, are iterations that lead heavily into the mystical arts. We think that most of the true iterations see the mystical arts as what they are, which is dangerous.
And not things that any individual, or any individual who is aligned with the forces of good, Should be meddling with or should be engaging with, but let's talk about why this, the historically this happened and why it's such a problem. And you'll see this if you engage with mystical communities.
You know, we had a one of our viewers who's trying to create [00:21:00] something similar to what we're doing, but he's like, yeah, but I want it to be like mystical and like incorporate mystical arts from various communities. And he's like, but the problem is whenever I talk to people, they're either like mystical arts are stupid or they're like, yeah, man, like, I like your vibes around this idea.
And it's like, well, why is he getting that response? It's because he's engaging with a community that is defined about the untestability of its ideas other than in an aesthetic sense. So they define which ideas they accept and which ideas they reject based on how those ideas aesthetically make them feel.
You begin to structure your logic and the way you engage with the world around aesthetic sensibilities and you are now debating and communicating with other people using that as your metric for true versus untrue things. You can begin to see how now your brain is no longer learning the true metric of truth, which is for us.
This gives you some level of predictability over [00:22:00] future events. Like if I know about the world, that thing is true. If it helps me predict future events, like, my knowledge of fire is accurate. If it predicts what fire does when you are no longer, when your fire now for you is something that has nothing to do with prediction, it's completely mystical in nature.
And it has some sort of like, you know, a lot of the times mystical arts tap into super soft culture, which we've talked about in our books and stuff like that. It has some sort of, like, personal identifying thing. It may have some product of fetishes, and by fetishes I don't mean sexual fetishes, I mean, like, religious fetishes, like, some sort of item that provides an individual with power.
Um, and, and this is another thing that's really a problem with mysticism, is it appeals to individual vanity almost as much as hedonism does. Hedonism appeals to individual vanity in that it allows an individual to just engage with whatever their brain is telling them to engage with at like the lower level.
But
Simone Collins: then there's I mean, personal vanity isn't even necessarily the right word. It's, it's a, a [00:23:00] cheat code or excuse to, to not think, to not act, to not do the hard thing. Yeah, yep. And I think that's, that's also a big reason why many very established religions reject witchcraft or mysticism because while they have their own internal cheat codes for like hand waving of like, oh, this thing is logically inconsistent, but here's the reason why.
No one else is allowed to do that because if other people start to do that, then they get to bend all the other rules and the important roles. So I think, you know, this is an important thing.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. Well, you know, there's some mystical arts that clearly show some form of effect, right? You know, like, oh, the whirling dervishes or something like that. Right. And I'm like, well, yeah, I mean, of course they show some kind of effect. If you study science, you would know that doing something because like, I'm really into the study of cults and how cults recruit and how.
Psychology works and stuff like that. If you are doing a repeated rhythmic dance that can activate the same [00:24:00] part of your brains as hallucinogens, this is especially true of your spinning, which is going to create a form of dizziness and other forms of neural damage, which will create feelings of, of grandeur.
And it's, it's, it's particularly true of anything you do to the absence of sleeping enough and eating enough. Like these, I mean, it's similar
Simone Collins: to like drug intake. It's going to, it's going to alter your consciousness. But it
Malcolm Collins: also makes people incredibly susceptible to ideas. And as we have pointed out in in other episodes, the human brain did not evolve in any context where it was rewarded for recognizing profundity as profundity.
So it is very easy to hijack the parts of the brain associated with profundity using things like. twirling for hours on end that we can understand as psychologists and neuroscience, how that makes people extremely susceptible to really any idea you want to insert into them after doing that or dancing or anything like that.
And that, that doesn't just because something is effective at brainwashing people doesn't [00:25:00] mean it's an effective source and sourcing for truth in the world. And this is why it is important to educate yourself. This is why A person who lives, as in the words of Wynwood Reid, a person who lives by their conscience, but who does not take the time to educate that conscience, is living in sin.
Because it doesn't matter if your conscience is prone to sin, if your conscience is prone to corruption. And let's talk about what we mean by, like, corruption, right? I actually really like, like, when we're explaining this to our kids, because as we said, every religion needs an adult way of understanding things, like the The way that leans towards more like a rational understanding, but also why God
Simone Collins: then you need like the cartoon kid
Malcolm Collins: version, the cartoon kid version.
I'm just going to take again, the Warhammer version. The war, you know, that you engage with the mystical arts and you open yourself to possession by demons. And, and, and, and this, this, but I'll be clearer about it and true about it. This possession doesn't look like a full on like Catholic possession or something like that.
It looks. [00:26:00] Like a corruption of the mind, you have opened your mind to a world that is not a world of logic and consequences, but a world of aesthetics and wishy thinking, which is one of the most dangerous mystical. And I think the core of super soft cultures to people who don't know what she thinking.
It's from an I. T. crowd episode, but it's something you see across mystical traditions, which is the idea that it's not. Human intentionality can increase the probability of events in the future. The secret is the best example of this, but it basically means if you want something to happen badly enough, it can affect real world probabilities.
Space. What is it? The simple answer is, we don't know. Or at least we didn't know until now. I'm not a scientist. But I do have a better understanding of what space is than any scientist living today. Where did I gain these insights? From this man.
Beth Gaga Shaggy. The founder of spaceology. , when it comes to space, he's the man with his head screwed [00:27:00] on tight. This is what he told me . Space is invisible mining dust. I mean, think about that.
That means every star you can see in the night sky is a wish that has come true. And they've come true because of something he calls Space Star Ordering. Space Star Ordering is based on the twin scientific principles of Star Maths and Wishy Thinking.
No. If that doesn't convince you, well then, maybe you just don't deserve to get what you want.
You're a sceptic, Jen. You should be more like these. They can't get enough of my space star ordering story. How did the cosmos grant you a helicopter? Well, I visualized the thing I wanted. In my case, it was a helicopter.
I drew a picture of the helicopter on a piece of paper. Couple of days later, bought myself a helicopter.
Explain that one if you can.
Malcolm Collins: And now you see what we mean when we talk about this being an alternate hypothesis for how the physical laws exist. [00:28:00] But an individual who gets invested in this will have a very easy time. In terms of confirmation bias and stuff like that, these beliefs persist intergenerationally among some communities because of their effectiveness at hijacking the human brain.
Is there a way to prevent this from happening to a person's brain when they engage with mystical arts. Previously, I would have said no, but I have some disconfirming evidence recently, which has made me rethink this particular topic specifically. Historically speaking everyone I ever knew. Who engaged with Kabbalah or cabalistic texts. This is the Jewish mystical texts. Was so bad at structuring their thoughts afterwards, Simona and I even had an internal phrase to describe these individuals called Kabbalah brained. , yet recently, actually a fan of the show who I've been engaging with is an expert on these texts.
And he seems to be able to structure his thoughts very [00:29:00] logically and be a very otherwise smart and lucid individual. Why is this the case? What I suspect happened is he actually engaged with the text following Jewish custom, which is, you know, you don't engage with them until you are very well-structured in logic and other forms of, , engaging with ideas before you approach the text.
And they are. Written about as something that should be seen as potentially dangerous within Jewish customs. , and that should be approached with an extreme amount of caution. And that when he went into them, he went into them. We as that understanding and not that understanding being because one of the really dangerous things is people misunderstanding.
When somebody says approach this with caution, it could have damage you, , some people hear that and they think, oh, that must mean it's a super powerful thing. Or it's a super forbidden and cool thing, which I think is something that draws a lot of people to mysticism. When, what is actually meant to that is no, not, this is a place of unique [00:30:00] power, but this could actually just mess you up.
If you do not approach it. Was an ordered mind. , The fact that I only know one person who hasn't been severely affected by engaging with these types of thoughts. To me still says it's probably better to make a blanket ban on it. However, I will say that it appears that there are ways to engage with it that doesn't totally destroy your ability at higher order logic. I just, haven't seen evidence that they provide.. Enough enduring value to a community to be worth. . The risk that is. Included with keeping them top of mind within a community's traditions, outside of a sort of defense against the dark arts studying guide.
Malcolm Collins: But as we point out for our kids, if these mystical arts worked, people in power in the world today, like when I look at the top, like 100 most powerful people in the world today. They would be really into them and yet people who are into the mystical arts disproportionately are from lower socioeconomic [00:31:00] groups and lower political power groups and lower social power groups.
And, and then the question is why? So there's 2 answers here. Either mysticism is just complete hokum and a waste of time. And so individuals who have dedicated their time to it. And not to matters of materialism have allowed their minds to be corrupted and have wasted time that they could have spent learning things and thus are less industrial and economically productive and less human in our perspective or.
They do work, but they come with some external costs that is preventing them from being used to gain power within society. In which case that also historically would have led to most religions, even from a cultural evolution standpoint, to end up shaming them. And there is no reason for you to investigate them outside of a defense against the dark arts thing.
And this is where I, you know, Simone, you know me, I love studying ghosts, cryptids, the, the Multiple lives, everything like that. I study every story, every story of the weird.
Simone Collins: Every one stuff. I mean, there's a reason why people are into this stuff. It's [00:32:00] fun.
Malcolm Collins: And I, and even within our school system, we have a whole branch of the tree called dangerous ideas.
That basically goes into every single one of these, these branches of conspiracy theories and mysticism and stuff like that. And allows people to go as deep as they want to go within these ideas in terms of personal education. But I think the best way to. spell many of these ideas is and I think that this is one of the problem with the existing school system is in, in existing religions is they say, don't engage with these ideas.
Don't learn about these things because if you learn about these things you might be tempted to engage with them, right? Whereas I actually think that if you just put them out there for people now, if you taggle the Christian. Taggle in our skill tree, all of these get deleted. None of your students will see them, so you don't need to worry about this.
But for those of us who have our perspective, which is the way to prevent student education for something is to educate them on it. When students actually learn about Zodiac system, how it was developed, what the [00:33:00] mechanism of action is behind the system. I think most of the students are most of, for example, my kids that I would want to keep within our cultural tradition would immediately see how stupid it
Simone Collins: is.
Put that in contrast with how people typically encounter this, which is typically a trusted friend or family member. Talks about these things with immense confidence as though they are so true and so predictive and so right. That if you respect that person or you're in a social situation where you're afraid of social rejection, you are going to accept it without vetting it at all, which is why I think a lot of people come to believe in things like the Zodiac is, you know, like someone.
That they like or care about or a good friend or a family member is like, Oh, well, I mean, as you can tell, like, because you're a Sagittarius, this, this, this, you know, and then they just, you know, when you're in a social situation, you're not in your, I'm sitting in an armchair. Like primed to think critically mindset.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And it feels like forbidden information and [00:34:00] forbidden information is uniquely tempting. You can fight forbidden information by denying access to it, which doesn't work in the age of the internet. Or in our cultural tradition, you prevent forbidden information by making it not forbidden and making it not uniquely tempting because it offers nothing.
And the way. That you like if you, if they're taught about this stuff alongside these famous psychologist experiments, I don't know if you guys are familiar about this, but there's these famous studies in psychology where they would present people randomly with explanations that had come from something like a Zodiac test.
But they were doing them actually for like psychological personality tests, right? But they were written in the way that like Zodiac. writers write their tests. It's something like 90 percent of people when they would read the explanation
that was assigned to them at random, they'd be like, wow, that's a great explanation of my personality and who I am.
And like, because many people, people with weaker minds and, and, and the type of people who maybe wouldn't want within our culture is as readily. They have a very weak sense of [00:35:00] self. And so when an external projection of who they are, it's assigned to them, especially in their like teenage years, when they're trying to figure out who they are they really want somebody to just basically tell them and they want that thing to be assigned some form of authority and that's what a lot of these do is they,
Simone Collins: 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. And I did exactly that. I just was, you know, like, Oh, this, you know. This week you worked really hard and, you know, people didn't recognize how hard you worked or, you know, you, you, you know, you take things out on yourself a lot and you probably should take it. We did just like so generic, everyone goes through it.
Everyone feels these things. It is incredibly obvious, but people love it because it often involves hearing what you want to hear about yourself. And or hearing what you want to hear about other people or giving you an excuse as to why you're not compatible with someone. So as long as you do that and[00:36:00] it's, it's so easy to get by with it and, you know, similar things happen with psychics and like the con men that you talked about who like con the government for a while into thinking that, you know, people actually did have psychic abilities is.
You can do a lot by just reading someone really quickly looking at their face, the way they dress, the way they hold themselves, the way they smell, all these tiny little cues can tell you a lot of things, so like, it's, it is incredibly easy to place people over and a lot of, again, what mysticism is, and what witchcraft is, is providing an easy button for thinking, providing a don't make me think, give me an excuse to not work hard and just make me feel good thing, which we associate with, obviously The worst elements of culture, any culture or any practice that allows you to just say, Oh, I'm going to give myself a break or, Oh, I don't have to think about this or, Oh, it's not my fault.
It's because of my blood type slash horoscope slash you know, someone put a curse on me that makes it inherently. evil and bad and it [00:37:00] will create bad outcomes, weak cultures, poor birth rates, bad mental and economic
Malcolm Collins: outcomes, et cetera. Something you said this morning that was so powerful is you're like, it's the ultimate form of externalizing.
Yeah. Because you are externalizing your self control to something outside you, but then believe that you have influence over it in a way that you actually don't have influence over it.
Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah, it allows you to blame everything on something else, feel like you're in control, but ultimately not be in
Malcolm Collins: control.
Yeah, and so then I think, like, what would our cultural rules be about this? Like, how against us are we? I would say that we would be okay with living next to cultures that practice forms of mysticism but we would not be okay with living next to them in a way where they Could influence our ability to live.
So, for example, if we were going on a spaceship or something like that, or we were colonizing another planet, I think we would take very harsh rules against this. And harsh rules against it in the raising of our own kids. I do think that
Simone Collins: we're not morally against using mysticism to subdue others, however.
And I think [00:38:00] this is also something that like people have leveraged to subdue other groups for a very long time. And that's the thing, this is a really good example of also how like mysticism can make people incredibly vulnerable to outside incursions. Because those people can be like, oh yes, I I am the thing that was prophesized to come and that's why you should listen to me or yes this thing.
Oh, like in Asimov's foundation series the, the one culture after the decline of, of intergalactic civilization after the empire falls that maintains basically like the Wikipedia and understanding of all technology and history just sort of tricks the other, yeah. Cultures that have now become, you know, backwards barbarians into believing that all of their science and technology is like religious power and they are a religious order.
So they're using people's tendency to fall to mysticism as their means of gaining and maintaining power.
Malcolm Collins: And yes. [00:39:00] So like sexuality, mysticism is something that should be studied to understand how to manipulate the weak-minded. Yeah. But also understand that in your study you are learning how to guard yourself against those who would use this power against you.
Oh, mysticism is
Simone Collins: like sexuality, fun, . Right. But I, I'd also
Malcolm Collins: argue, well, and Psyche, you know, psyche being like psychological nonsense that we often, you know, preach against. Oh, psychic. Psychic hokum. Yeah. Well, I know what I'm talking about is like modern day psychology movements that are used to manipulate people,
So the interesting question here is if mysticism is so dangerous and if so many religious traditions have converged on the teaching, don't engage with mystical stuff. It is not good for you. Why does it intergenerationally, persist? As a teaching was in some of the most successful cultures in human history. , with obviously the probably big example within the Abrahamic traditions being, the cobblistic teachings in Judaism. [00:40:00] And you know, if you look at other Jewish writings and even. That's a third of your time should be dedicated to Carlos. One-third. Michelle went third. I can't remember, but anyway, yeah, one third.
So it's not even like a Off topic side quest. As some people try to frame it. yes, you should wait until you're married and you're mentally mature, but it does say a lot of your time should be dedicated to it. So wind is something like this day around. The first and most important reason is that it is very good for lighting a religious fervor. In. Low IQ, low education populations. So if you have like a bunch of peasants or something like that, you're gonna have a very hard time getting them really excited and. Dogmatic about just Abrahamic teachings in and of themselves.
You usually need some form of mysticism. This is where Catholics use a lot of like St. Worship and where the Orthodox use a lot of Relic worship. Which is from my perspective, clearly idolatry.[00:41:00] , but why would you engage with something that the Bible tells you not to if you're within one of these Abrahamic traditions, but because it is very, very good at getting peasants excited. Who otherwise don't feel like they have a lot of power or control over their lives.
This allows them to feel that power or control. And also close to the divine. The problem is what aspect of the divine are they actually touching? Is it, you know, the agents of Providence or is it the Basler risk? Or I guess. In normal Christian phrasing. Is it God, or is it demons? Then the, the second reason I think that this is so effective in intergenerationally persistent. Is. That it. It mirrors humans pre evolved, super soft culture.
This is something we talk about in the pragmatists guide to crafting religions. But we think that when man removes all, , tradition and all science from his mind, most humans converge on a very similar set of beliefs about the world. And these beliefs come from what was [00:42:00] probably the most common human religious system in the pre agricultural period, , that just humans coevolved with for a very, very, very long time.
But that as soon as acumen started to live in settlements and started to get advanced technology was no longer efficacious for humans. And so, , it was suppressed and out competed by religious systems, which out competed other groups merely from how they helped. Those groups is a fitness. I E how many surviving children they had, and they didn't have enough time to fully integrate with those individuals neurology.
So when you remove that, a lot of people reconverge on this old sort of mystical tradition, which has lost its efficaciousness,
I'd also note that mysticism will always be with us because it is part of that pre evolved iteration of humanity. , it is part of that ape, like side of us that is always going to bubble up in the background.
And that will always [00:43:00] re-emerge within any religious community. Even if we, , went on to spaceships and we burned every book that ever talked about the mystical.
Our great, great, great, great grandchildren would one day rediscover a mystical tradition that looks very similar to the forms of mysticism that are around today because it is sort of a genetic scar deep within us.
First, and it's definitely not that it works. If it works.
As we've said, we would see the majority of people in power in our society utilizing these sorts of teachings. If it was actually helping people gain power or out-compete other people. No here. I should know, even though it can't help a person gain real power in the world. Uh, or Gainey real edge in the world. It can make a person feel as if they have real power and from a religious standpoint, that can be almost as useful when you are dealing with a population that doesn't feel like they have power over their own lives. And that means it can be a very useful conversion [00:44:00] mechanism. Of course within our belief system, we would say that those sorts of emotions or the very last emotions, any human should be masturbating because masturbating those emotional subsets. It increases the strength of those emotional subsets and we'll move you more and more towards the most perverse type of external locus of control.
When you mistakenly believe that you actually have power over, even when you don't. And then when, when things go wrong, you know, you don't. take responsibility for them. It's the mystical workings of the universe that caused them to go wrong. Not yourself, not your own responsibility. So it's, it's uniquely toxic form of feeling like you have power. The. Final thing that I think is, is useful about these traditions, if they sort of are cordoned off within a wider, , system, is that they can be used as a Sophos trap or an idiot trap. So this means if an individual is incredibly good in terms of verbal intelligence, but otherwise not [00:45:00] particularly high IQ and could otherwise prove a danger to the wider community. , this can be very, very useful for.
Preventing them from causing too much damage because it can sort of. Begin to eat up all of the time. Of people who otherwise might've become a con artist or something like that. Or a preacher, but a preacher of. Idle things that don't actually move people towards their goals, but instead is just like enriching his own pockets. And this is something that I have noticed, and I don't know exactly what causes it. Maybe people can pontificate in the comments, but people was really high verbal intelligence, but fairly low general intelligence seem to become over distracted and obsessed with mysticism and mystical arts. When contrasted with other groups in the general population. , which is what makes it such an effective, like sticky trap for rats, for those types of individuals, which can be very dangerous if left as free agents in a [00:46:00] society. It is for this reason that I actually am not particularly. Against Kabbalistic teachings within Jewish communities. If you read our book, the pragmatist guide to crafting religion. One section that we go really deep into is the myth of higher IQ within Jewish communities, which is just that it's not very well supported by at least rigorously collected data.
But what is incredibly well-supported is an unusually high verbal intelligence in Jewish communities. And what mysticism may have done in the same way that, , we talk within Catholicism because within Catholicism, they had this system that prevented nepotism. From becoming a problem in their communities by ensuring that people within the bureaucratic positions of power within their communities couldn't have wives.
And so it meant that the genetic precursors associated with, Amoral familiar realism E promoting family members over members of the general public. Ended up [00:47:00] becoming more ingrained in Catholic communities than in other communities. Because Catholicism had traditions that were so good at defending against it, there was not an additional, , Genetic costs towards individuals over engaging in the amoral familial ism. This is why within Catholic countries, you have so much more corruption than in other countries.
Well, I think something very similar happened within the Jewish community because it had such a good defense, , Interculturally against, , extremely high verbal intelligence individuals, , becoming a problem for the community. It allowed verbal intelligence to concentrate at a genetic level within their communities.
That would have been very deleterious to other communities. And removing cobblistic teachings or practices from a Jewish community would cause these free radicals to spill out into the community and begin to call it a lot of damage. So weirdly, this is one of those areas where I would just give Jews a pass. Not because I think that their [00:48:00] mystical teachings are accurate. Or, Give them any sort of an edge through the teachings themselves, but because I think that they confer benefits uniquely to their community.
And have been vetted for a very, very long period of cultural evolution for doing just the right amount of good for the community without. Becoming, , an overt obsession for too large, a population or swaying to larger population towards in efficacious traditions or alternate. Belief systems about physical reality. Wait, but if Jews were able to use mysticism to get a higher verbal intelligence within their population, why would I not encourage other populations to use this similar tactic? The answer is a fairly straight forward. We now have genetic technology and you don't need to. Inject your tradition with something. Efficacious LIS. Outside of the way it impacts the. Genetic selection effects of your culture. [00:49:00] Into a culture anymore.
So there just isn't a need for this to get the advantages that the Jewish population was able to glean from this unique cultural technology.
Malcolm Collins: But the final trait of mysticism, which is really important to note is if you look in our relationship and sexuality, like the pragmatist guided relationship, the pragmatist guided sexuality, if you look at our other videos on the topic of how love works and how some religious systems utilize love to trick people into seeing mysticism, doesn't just hijack people's brains by tricking them into seeing the profound where the profound doesn't actually exist. Like manic dancing, obviously that's not an actual profound experience. But it's very good at tricking them into feeling love. And love can be feeled whenever you're thinking about a concept that holds A lot of basically like a mental volume in your mind.
But one way you can trick a concept into holding a lot of mental volume in your mind is by holding a concept that is itself illogical. And therefore [00:50:00] constantly advance one way that some Christians do this is like the concept of the Trinity, three separate things, but that are also one thing. And then meditate on that because that is in it in.
intrinsically a paradox. It fills up a lot of your mind. And then when you see that thing as protective and loving, it makes you feel this feeling of love, which makes you feel that there's some truth behind it. Mysticism does that all the time. And for that reason, It is also uniquely tempting to people who cannot find true love in the world because they are acting in ways that are selfish or self aggrandizing which mysticism enables because it tells you that you have powers or importance that you don't have.
And this is why I think the truly ordered mind and the truly dogmatic, like. dogmatic in a good way mind, mind that is following the righteous path, is ordered enough to not succumb to forms of mysticism that inflate its ego so [00:51:00] much so as to believe that it is in any way like the divine. And this is where we probably have one of our more controversial takes on mysticism is that I believe that the belief in the soul is a form of mysticism because it is to elevate the human to the level of the divine and believe that humanity touches the divine where we do not.
Simone Collins: Doesn't that veer though, somewhat from our definition of mysticism in that, like it's, it doesn't. The soul kind of doesn't, it's not relevant to this definition because it's, it can't be predictive or not. Like we can't test it.
Malcolm Collins: Any feeling of the soul that is not a predictive claim. I will accept. Okay. I will say, okay, that's great.
But a lot of people use the soul to explain or as a mechanism for explaining extra physical or extra materialist action with the world. Like his soul is so powerful or his, you know, And that is why it is so, it is a very tempting concept because it allows people to believe in [00:52:00] things like life after death and stuff like that, which is a form of mysticism in my perspective.
But again, this is, this is an area where we would probably be a bit more flexible. If somebody believes a form of mystical tradition, which is actually an old Abrahamic revelation I would be willing to say, okay you can come to space with us. Like we can cut some slack here so long as you're not using it to inform your decisions about physics or inform your decisions about the powers that you have.
And so long as you do not use what, what I guess I'd call soul magic, like trying to engage this extra planar realm in terms of. Impacting our existing realm. That is where I would, I would draw the one line, but I would say for members of our family, we would see it as a form of, of, of mysticism,
self masturbation, and an offense to God in that you are claiming to be of the same kind of thing that he is in which humans are not from our understanding.
Simone Collins: Hmm. Okay. Yeah. That, that broadly checks [00:53:00] out.
I was thinking we're about wind delineating, whether witchcraft is okay, when done in the name of. Abrahamic traditions. And I think looking at the various forms of it practice under the guise of Catholicism are a good example. So one that I would say is solidly within the realm of okay. Is exorcisms because that is specifically invoking extra Plano powers. For the sole purpose and only purpose of directly combating the perceived extra plane on powers of others. , on the other side, when you look at things like St. Worship and Relic wary worship, I see that as being a really muddy middle ground, probably bordering on just blatant witchcraft and to understand why stuff like St. Worship gets so dangerous. Is then you'll get things like, the big Catholic Colt right now in Latin America. , worshiping Santa Muerte, they're basically worshiping an [00:54:00] unnamed, like not canonized Saint of the dead, which is a skeleton.
, they worship alongside biblical figures. , and represents death to me, this is just very, obviously, probably the truest form of actual Satanism being practiced in the world today. And yet it is practice under the guise of Catholicism. I think the way that evil religions. Seep in to the world. Is not those individuals who are , like the individuals who call themselves Satan as, who are really just having a laugh, and trolling people.
But under the guise of. Established religions like Christianity, because these people actually believe in have fervor for these entities they're worshiping. And these entities are just like, Sometimes comically and obviously.
Not just normal witchcraft, but malicious witchcraft. One of the reasons Santa Muerte has drawn such a [00:55:00] following. , he look at like interviews with her followers, if there's like, well, you know, I can't pray to God or Jesus to hurt someone or for something petty because they would judge me negatively, but sent him where to, you know, she's a deity of the people.
So when I want to hurt somebody or when I want something selfish or when I want like a love spell, I can pray to her. And it's like, okay. So like very, obviously you're praying to the devil. The devil doesn't come out and be like, Hey, I'm evil. it is evil in how it is attracting you and what you are using it for.
And I think that Santa Muerte does show why we. Council so much caution. Even when the witchcraft is being done under the name of the Judeo-Christian tree of religions. And I think the easy branch here is are you invoking extra plane? All realms only to. Combat other extra Plano entities or are you invoking them for some form of control or self benefit?
If it is a ladder than it is just witchcraft, [00:56:00] whatever you claim inspired it. I also think that, , this helps explain to Catholics who are a little confused, why other Christians take idolatry? So seriously. I mean, other than that, it's the first commandment and I don't understand how people ignore that. But, , when you do things like begin to worship other entities as.
Gatekeepers to God or as.
Some sort of intermediary and your worship of God directly. It can very easily spin out into just worshiping what are essentially demons, even from a secular perspective.
Malcolm Collins: Anyway, I love you to death Simone. This has been a fun episode.
Simone Collins: I love you too. I love talking about these things. Never thought though, from my childhood, that we would be like, burn the witches! No,
Malcolm Collins: it's just bad. I, I don't think that, I mean, I think that it's probably worth recycling them into some sort of food stuff or something like that.
I mean, if you're on an interplanetary [00:57:00] journey, you don't
Simone Collins: burn the witches, soylent the witches, right?
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Turn them into starch. But just be aware that they are a danger and it can be thought of as. Chaos, corruption, basically and that it will spread if not stuff out at the earliest stages within communities that rely on things like a rigid understanding of physics to maintain their lifestyle, which just isn't a thing today in the world, but it will become one
Simone Collins: as we think that the cure is so simple and it has to do with how you learn about it.
If you learn about it from. In a, in a logical educational format where you're, you're understanding the framework of it, its origins and, and its efficacy. You will learn the right way. You'll, you'll learn in a way that you're not, that doesn't corrupt you. If you learn it in a social environment where someone that you trust or trying to gain social credit with presents it to you as though it's reality and you respect them, you're so screwed.
You're incredibly screwed. [00:58:00]
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, well, and I should note here that from this understanding of physics beliefs around genetics that are not based on science, but based on, you know, as we call it, justicalism, like humans don't have genes or human genes do not inflect, influence their personality or, or, et cetera, like, like the way that they interact with the world.
Um, like, like human genes stop right here. No genes go above this part or influence anything that happens up here. That's a form of extreme and very dangerous mysticism because it is outright science denial. And, and it is science denial in favor of a hypothetical alternate framework for the physical reality of our universe.
And a very dangerous one because intergenerationally. Now that all humans basically live because, you know, half of humans used to die are going to have an accumulated genetic load that will lead to them becoming dangerous mutants. When I say dangerous mutants, I mean mostly dangerous to themselves.
They're going to [00:59:00] basically be big balls of cancer but you'll also likely see negative psychological effects not discordant with the, Jolly Heretic Spiteful Mutant Theory. Ah,
Simone Collins: yes. The
Malcolm Collins: classic. Anyway, I love you to death, Simone.
Simone Collins: I love you too, Malcolm.
Witches & Space Travel: There is a Reason We Have Prohibitions Against Witchcraft