As for Cultivar vs Religion vs Family Cult, I assumed that the Collinses intention was for what is currently a Family Cult to grow into a Cultivar through a combination of organic reproduction above the baseline and intentionally designing the cult so that it is resistant to attrition. Was there something else they promised in a bait and switch that I missed?
I can see why this might be disappointing if you are looking for a Cultivar that can be spread through the current generation rapidly. I got the impression that the Collinses are warry of that kind of rapid growth since it may be prone to overextension and a resultant collapse.
Take this all with a grain of salt since I am getting my entire view of this through the lens of your review/analysis.
A religion is far more than a set of values you teach your kids. Adapting what you were taught as a kid to fit your basically-secular worldview and teaching that to your kids is what basically every secular family does. That's not a religion! Even if you invent Future Police and Omnimessiahs.
I am not sure if it comes across more specifically in the original text, but my first thought on the inverted ancestor worship was that "huh, that could work, as long as the 'target' is beyond the generations you will directly interact with."
Do the Collinses specify anything along those lines?
I would think this could potentially differentiate it from standard American youth worship, but I haven't noodled on it enough to pinpoint its specific failings.
They certainly aim at a target many centuries out. Later on there'll be a few notes on what that looks like, but in IRL practice it mostly comes down to putting a lot of focus on one's kids and grandkids. I don't think it's very interesting because hyperfocus on one's progeny is kinda the default in humans (excluding those who don't care about their kids at all). I think ancestor-veneration was an important part of many religions specifically because it's not natural and had to be trained/reinforced via culture.
I really loved this chapter, it felt like they had come to some of the same conclusions I came to. I also grew up in a very religious community, and have a lot of anger about people telling me they believed things that they didn't actually believe. However, this:
| Many of the people who are going back to some sort of belief are basically recreating their childhood religions but with a wrapper of plausibility.
I think is a fair description of what I'm doing, and the reason I'm doing it is that the relationship I had with god/the divine was more deep, meaningful and real than any relationship I've ever had with a human. It added an incredible depth and richness to my life that I dearly missed when I left my childhood faith.
I tend to think of mystical beliefs as being in the same class as drug, alcohol and other adult indulgences. Things that can be very dangerous if misused, but if used carefully and responsibly, they can be a very enriching part of a healthy life. I think you need to treat them as a different kind of belief, similar to the difference between 'believing' and 'believing in' as noted here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/duvzdffTzL3dWJcxn/believing-in-1
| Pretending to believe always has to resolve into actual belief (delusional) or atheism (where we already are).
I agree with you to a degree here, but it's a little more complicated I think. Sometimes I think you don't ever really completely 'settle' into a belief system, and whatever beliefs you go with will have to rely on faith to some degree. I tried atheism for several years, but the experiences of the divine that I had had were so real to me that I often felt like I was larping atheism. I figure if I'm going to be larping either way, I may as well lean into the belief system that's more personally enriching.
"Many of the people who are going back to some sort of belief are basically recreating their childhood religions but with a wrapper of plausibility. I don’t blame them for this. Quite a few freely admit that’s what they’re doing, and that this is good actually. Personally I don’t think these traditions will last, because they are essentially LARPing. LARPing is unstable. Pretending to believe always has to resolve into actual belief (delusional) or atheism (where we already are)."
Hegelianism may be a counter-example. Hegel's goal was to make a new religion that had all the social benefits of Christianity, but without the huge burden of textual corruption, contradictions, unnecessary elaborations and ornamentation, stupidity, taboos, bad advice, and immoral dogmas.
Hegelianism spawned Unitarianism, Marxism, and Nazism. Unitarianism took over the Ivy League around 1800, making Progressivism and the Social Justice movement descendants of both the Puritans and of Hegel. Modern art, a popular religion-substitute among artists and the extremely wealthy, was similarly descended jointly from Catholicism and Hegel. (Today's elite art is "conceptual", which is still Hegelian.)
Hegel got around the LARPing problem in several ways:
1. He invented a phenomenological epistemology which delegitimizes all objective sources of knowledge, so any appeal to physical evidence can be dismissed.
2. He wrote in such a convoluted, recursive, confused way that it's very hard to say what he meant, or whether there is a finite number of interpretations of what he wrote. (There are an infinite number of interpretations when the text has a subset of critical terms which are all defined in terms of each other and without any grounding reference to external reality.) The post-modern assertion that it is impossible for a text to refer to physical reality makes perfect sense to anyone who "believes" in Hegel.
3. He wrote so MUCH that his writings are effectively infinite--almost no one has read them all. (His collected writings contain about 6 times as many words as the Bible.)
4. He taught that contradictions aren't only not bad, they're good--we can progress only by detecting contradictions, and basically creating Ptolemaic epicycles to encompass the contradictory beliefs.
5. He taught that truth is temporary--what was true before is no longer true today, and what is true today will no longer be true in the future.
The combined effect is that it is impossible to disprove Hegelianism to a Hegelian. The meaning of the sacred Hegelian scriptures can't be pinned down, or even enumerated; empirical evidence is ruled out; and proof is impossible, since contradictions are not merely allowed, but demanded.
So Hegelians are /consciously/ LARPing. As best as I currently understand them, they believe all the world's a LARP, a word-and-action game, whose rules we jointly make up and agree on as we play. There is no non-LARPing alternative.
This has made Hegelianism impressively stable among rationalists.
You've posted a few times on Helegianism, and it always seems to point at something very interesting. But there's a vast inferential gulf which is preventing me from grokking much. I know it would be a project of many months, but I'd love for a Sequence-style inferential-gap-bridge to exist. Literally something that starts from the most basic "what is Christianity?" post and goes from there.
Man, I'd like that too. I'm not the right person to do it. I've read less than a hundred pages of Hegel's actual texts. My understanding of Hegel is based mostly on summaries of Hegel. But any time I check with a Hegelian, they tell me I'm wrong. I'm not convinced that there is much /to/ understand. Seemingly simple questions like "did Hegel believe in objective reality?" seem to be impossible to answer, and Hegel experts challenge even what is taught as the basics of Hegel. Like, he never said that dialectic consists of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. That's a formula later writers condensed some of his writings into, and some Hegelians will fight you over it.
One time I tried to figure out what Hegel meant by comparing two translations of the same text, and they were wildly different. They didn't even have the same chapter organization. I suspect that every "editor" of Hegel is actually constructing their own Hegel.
OK, but what about spending a few months writing a sequence that breaks down how Hegelianism is the forebearer of Unitarianism, Marxism, and Nazism? That sounds insanely interesting, but I need substance XD
As for Cultivar vs Religion vs Family Cult, I assumed that the Collinses intention was for what is currently a Family Cult to grow into a Cultivar through a combination of organic reproduction above the baseline and intentionally designing the cult so that it is resistant to attrition. Was there something else they promised in a bait and switch that I missed?
I can see why this might be disappointing if you are looking for a Cultivar that can be spread through the current generation rapidly. I got the impression that the Collinses are warry of that kind of rapid growth since it may be prone to overextension and a resultant collapse.
Take this all with a grain of salt since I am getting my entire view of this through the lens of your review/analysis.
A religion is far more than a set of values you teach your kids. Adapting what you were taught as a kid to fit your basically-secular worldview and teaching that to your kids is what basically every secular family does. That's not a religion! Even if you invent Future Police and Omnimessiahs.
I am not sure if it comes across more specifically in the original text, but my first thought on the inverted ancestor worship was that "huh, that could work, as long as the 'target' is beyond the generations you will directly interact with."
Do the Collinses specify anything along those lines?
I would think this could potentially differentiate it from standard American youth worship, but I haven't noodled on it enough to pinpoint its specific failings.
They certainly aim at a target many centuries out. Later on there'll be a few notes on what that looks like, but in IRL practice it mostly comes down to putting a lot of focus on one's kids and grandkids. I don't think it's very interesting because hyperfocus on one's progeny is kinda the default in humans (excluding those who don't care about their kids at all). I think ancestor-veneration was an important part of many religions specifically because it's not natural and had to be trained/reinforced via culture.
AI Narration:
https://open.substack.com/pub/askwhocastsai/p/pragmatists-guide-to-crafting-religion-e54?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
I really loved this chapter, it felt like they had come to some of the same conclusions I came to. I also grew up in a very religious community, and have a lot of anger about people telling me they believed things that they didn't actually believe. However, this:
| Many of the people who are going back to some sort of belief are basically recreating their childhood religions but with a wrapper of plausibility.
I think is a fair description of what I'm doing, and the reason I'm doing it is that the relationship I had with god/the divine was more deep, meaningful and real than any relationship I've ever had with a human. It added an incredible depth and richness to my life that I dearly missed when I left my childhood faith.
I tend to think of mystical beliefs as being in the same class as drug, alcohol and other adult indulgences. Things that can be very dangerous if misused, but if used carefully and responsibly, they can be a very enriching part of a healthy life. I think you need to treat them as a different kind of belief, similar to the difference between 'believing' and 'believing in' as noted here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/duvzdffTzL3dWJcxn/believing-in-1
| Pretending to believe always has to resolve into actual belief (delusional) or atheism (where we already are).
I agree with you to a degree here, but it's a little more complicated I think. Sometimes I think you don't ever really completely 'settle' into a belief system, and whatever beliefs you go with will have to rely on faith to some degree. I tried atheism for several years, but the experiences of the divine that I had had were so real to me that I often felt like I was larping atheism. I figure if I'm going to be larping either way, I may as well lean into the belief system that's more personally enriching.
"Many of the people who are going back to some sort of belief are basically recreating their childhood religions but with a wrapper of plausibility. I don’t blame them for this. Quite a few freely admit that’s what they’re doing, and that this is good actually. Personally I don’t think these traditions will last, because they are essentially LARPing. LARPing is unstable. Pretending to believe always has to resolve into actual belief (delusional) or atheism (where we already are)."
Hegelianism may be a counter-example. Hegel's goal was to make a new religion that had all the social benefits of Christianity, but without the huge burden of textual corruption, contradictions, unnecessary elaborations and ornamentation, stupidity, taboos, bad advice, and immoral dogmas.
Hegelianism spawned Unitarianism, Marxism, and Nazism. Unitarianism took over the Ivy League around 1800, making Progressivism and the Social Justice movement descendants of both the Puritans and of Hegel. Modern art, a popular religion-substitute among artists and the extremely wealthy, was similarly descended jointly from Catholicism and Hegel. (Today's elite art is "conceptual", which is still Hegelian.)
Hegel got around the LARPing problem in several ways:
1. He invented a phenomenological epistemology which delegitimizes all objective sources of knowledge, so any appeal to physical evidence can be dismissed.
2. He wrote in such a convoluted, recursive, confused way that it's very hard to say what he meant, or whether there is a finite number of interpretations of what he wrote. (There are an infinite number of interpretations when the text has a subset of critical terms which are all defined in terms of each other and without any grounding reference to external reality.) The post-modern assertion that it is impossible for a text to refer to physical reality makes perfect sense to anyone who "believes" in Hegel.
3. He wrote so MUCH that his writings are effectively infinite--almost no one has read them all. (His collected writings contain about 6 times as many words as the Bible.)
4. He taught that contradictions aren't only not bad, they're good--we can progress only by detecting contradictions, and basically creating Ptolemaic epicycles to encompass the contradictory beliefs.
5. He taught that truth is temporary--what was true before is no longer true today, and what is true today will no longer be true in the future.
The combined effect is that it is impossible to disprove Hegelianism to a Hegelian. The meaning of the sacred Hegelian scriptures can't be pinned down, or even enumerated; empirical evidence is ruled out; and proof is impossible, since contradictions are not merely allowed, but demanded.
So Hegelians are /consciously/ LARPing. As best as I currently understand them, they believe all the world's a LARP, a word-and-action game, whose rules we jointly make up and agree on as we play. There is no non-LARPing alternative.
This has made Hegelianism impressively stable among rationalists.
You've posted a few times on Helegianism, and it always seems to point at something very interesting. But there's a vast inferential gulf which is preventing me from grokking much. I know it would be a project of many months, but I'd love for a Sequence-style inferential-gap-bridge to exist. Literally something that starts from the most basic "what is Christianity?" post and goes from there.
Man, I'd like that too. I'm not the right person to do it. I've read less than a hundred pages of Hegel's actual texts. My understanding of Hegel is based mostly on summaries of Hegel. But any time I check with a Hegelian, they tell me I'm wrong. I'm not convinced that there is much /to/ understand. Seemingly simple questions like "did Hegel believe in objective reality?" seem to be impossible to answer, and Hegel experts challenge even what is taught as the basics of Hegel. Like, he never said that dialectic consists of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. That's a formula later writers condensed some of his writings into, and some Hegelians will fight you over it.
One time I tried to figure out what Hegel meant by comparing two translations of the same text, and they were wildly different. They didn't even have the same chapter organization. I suspect that every "editor" of Hegel is actually constructing their own Hegel.
OK, but what about spending a few months writing a sequence that breaks down how Hegelianism is the forebearer of Unitarianism, Marxism, and Nazism? That sounds insanely interesting, but I need substance XD