In this Based Camp episode, Simone and Malcolm Collins explore an expanded framework for personal morality and “modern sins” designed to maximize mental health, personal efficacy, and long-term human flourishing. Framed through a Christian and Techno-Puritan lens, they discuss how biblical morality has iteratively improved over time and why we need updated rules for today’s world.

Topics include: avoiding busywork and performative suffering, rejecting pride and status signaling, the dangers of inaction and moral absolutism, self-flagellation, empty words, corrupted mercy, and living with aplomb. They emphasize consequentialist ethics focused on future human (and post-human) flourishing through science, technology, and disciplined living.

A practical guide to building a better life, overcoming common traps, and aligning daily actions with higher purpose. Applicable to Christians, secular listeners, and anyone seeking a high-agency value system.

Techno-Puritan Sins, Summarized

Sin, per Techno-Puritanism, is any pattern of behavior—mental, emotional, or practical—that wastes your capacity or undermines long-term flourishing for yourself or humanity.

All Techno-Puritan sins are derived from a single principle:

* Maximize long-term human flourishing and effectiveness

* Minimize:

* Wasted effort

* Short-term thinking

* Self-indulgent or performative behavior

1. Acting from social expectation (performative living)

It is sinful to:

* Do things just because they’re expected (e.g., ceremonies, reunions).

* Especially when they don’t align with your goals or values.

Why? Obligation without purpose is wasted life energy.

2. Pride as social comparison (“proving others wrong”)

It is sinful to motivate yourself primarily by:

* Showing others you’re better than them.

* Seeking validation through superiority.

Why? External validation distorts decision-making. Seeking it may produce shallow or misaligned decisions.

3. Living to fit an image or archetype

It is sinful to:

* Make decisions to match a role (e.g., “ideal Christian,” “alpha male,” “tradwife”).

* Prioritize appearance of virtue over actual outcomes.

Why? Doing so drives one to “perform goodness” instead of doing good and leads to inefficient or even harmful choices.

4. Wasted effort / misaligned roles

It is sinful to do things that:

* Don’t actually help others

* Aren’t valued by those they’re meant to serve (e.g. Performing “ideal spouse” behaviors that your partner doesn’t need or want.)

Why? Effort without impact is morally wasteful.

5. Busywork (major emphasis)

It is sinful to:

* Spend time on on tasks that feel productive but aren’t meaningful (e.g. Working 12 hours but accomplishing less than 2 focused hours.)

* This Includes:

* Overwork without output

* Performative productivity

* Inefficient labor

Why it’s considered especially bad:

* Reduces overall effectiveness

* Crowds out meaningful work

* Worse than leisure because it gives no recovery or benefit

6. Pure indulgence without purpose

It is sinful to

* Do things solely for personal pleasure with no broader benefit (e.g. indulging in excess entertainment or sexual behavior detached from long-term outcomes)

Nuance:

* Some indulgence is tolerated if it supports long-term function (rest, motivation).

7. Performative suffering / overwork signaling

It is sinful to:

* Show off stress, exhaustion, or hardship as a badge of honor.

* This includes:

* Bragging about long hours

* Glorifying burnout

Why? Suffering is not inherently virtuous—only meaningful outcomes are.

8. Emotional indulgence (lack of “aplomb”)

It is sinful to adopt unproductive emotional states, such as:

* Self-pity

* Anger

* Excessive grief expression

* Cynicism or snark

Why?

* Emotions are (to a degree) controllable and reinforce themselves.

* Indulging in negative emotions:

* Harms others

* Weakens self-control

* Reduces effectiveness

* Conversely, maintaining calm, forward-moving resilience, especially in hardship, imparts strength to oneself and others

9. Self-deception about morality

It is sinful to convince yourself that:

* You’re being virtuous when you’re not

* Busywork or image-performance equals goodness

Why? Mislabeling behavior prevents improvement.

10. Failure to pursue meaningful contribution

It is sinful to not direct effort toward:

* Long-term human progress

* Knowledge, science, or societal development

Why? Immediate charity often distracts from long-term impact and can actively run counter to efforts that would maximize long-term human flourishing.

Episode Transcript

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Hello, Simone. I’m excited to be here with you today. Today we are going to be discussing personal re- morality as it relates to, one, this is going to focus on just general advice for living a good life. Hmm. And a good way to structure your life to overcome many of the challenges that people face.

So this would be applicable to people of Christian perspective, non-Christian perspective, techno-Puritan perspective. But I’m gonna be couching it within the framing of I’m talking to Christians here. Okay? And the reason I’m couching it in that is because when we look at something like the Bible, people often get hung up.

They’re like, “Wait, so I read all these parts about morality and, like, the seven deadly sins in the Bible and the Commandments, and then I read stuff like, ‘If a man sells his daughter as a slave, she is not to go free as male slaves do. If she does not please the master who selected her for himself, he must let her be redeemed.

He has no right to sell her to other foreigners because he has broken faith with [00:01:00] her. If he selects her for his sons, he must grant her the rights of a daughter. If he marries her to another woman, he must not deprive the first one of food, clothing, or marital rights. If he does not provide her with these things, she is to go free without any payment of money.’”

And people are like, “Wait, is that a bunch of rules about how to sell your daughter into slavery and then treat her afterwards?” You know, like, they do seem like nice rules about selling your daughter into slavery, but it would seem like it might have been better to just not do that, to just be like, if you’re thinking of selling your daughter into slavery, and, like, pretty clearly because it, it talks about potentially marrying her sex slavery is what we would call that today don’t do it.

And the way that Christians and Jews get around this is they go, “Well, iteratively, that was a more moral way of dealing with slavery than other common traditions of this period.” Hmm. And we have a whole episode where we go through that. And if you look at our last tract where we also went into morality at the societal level, we talk about the [00:02:00] many...

Like, you, you remember me going over them. It was a number of them, places in the Bible where God commands people to kill infants, and lots of infants. Like, the number of infants is very, very high, right?

Speaker 7: If you want to go through that, check out the episode, “Christianity Was Never a Religion of Peace” that we released, last week. It’s a great episode. , We cite all the verses where this happens, , and it’s a pretty frequent thing throughout the Old Testament

Malcolm Collins: And so people are like, “Okay, well,” he told people to do that because those societies were practicing child sacrifice.”

And I was like, “That’s not a very moral answer.” That’s like saying, “Oh, we rescued a bunch of children from Epstein’s island, so we killed them all?” Like, presumably if you’re saving the children who might be child sacrifice, right? Like, you don’t kill the... And note here the term used in some of these instances.

You can’t be like, “Oh, he’s only talking about toddlers who has absorbed the culture.” They use terms meaning, like, breastfeeding infant, like suckling infants, right? Like, [00:03:00] very young. So it’s like, okay What’s going on here, right? Was this just like iteratively more moral than what came before it? Do these types of things still hold?

And how does this hold at like a personal level? And what I’ll note here is what we see, if you take the stance that God said all of this because it was iteratively better than the way things used to be done before he laid those things out, then presumably it’s been a pretty long time since the New Testament was written.

More is expected of us or a more advanced understanding of morality is expected from us than what- Yeah ... was laid out in the New Testament

So what are those things? And that’s what we’re gonna go into today, is basically a new and expanded understanding of sins that will help you be like, “Hmm, if I just make a personal commitment to never do this list of [00:04:00] things, I will be both a much more mentally healthy person, I will be a much more efficacious person, and I will be able to do a lot more to push human civilization forwards.”

And note here when we talk about pushing human civilization forwards, obviously this is a wider, like, technopuri- puritan track series, but it’s, we try to make them more applicable to general Christians now as well. One of the fun things that you see in regards to us talking about the sons of man, which you also see all over the Bible.

You know, by the way, I didn’t make up the term the sons of man. That’s all over the Old Testament. Very weird way to talk about people. Why would you talk about people as the sons of man, right? Like, that’s a... W- why in

Simone Collins: the world- Yeah, why not just, you know, humans or people?

Malcolm Collins: Why not just man, right? Well, suppose that these rules were supposed to apply to not just the humans we have today, but when we become a space-faring species, when we take our manifest destiny among the stars, we’re going to need to use genetic technology.

You basically have to. You can’t easily have people live their entire lives in zero G without some [00:05:00] form of gene editing, and most other planets are gonna require some gene editing to live on. And how extensive that goes could be bigger than that. You’re gonna eventually have some humans that are AI integrations.

You’re gonna have some humans... we’re gonna have AI working alongside us. So we take the sons of man to mean all of the intelligences which are downstream of humanity be those AI intelligences, uplifted animals, human intelligences of the far future that are genetically modified and stuff like that, and that’s why it says the sons of man.

I like that fun little, like, weird prediction of the applicability that that would have to have, but it tracks with the way society looks like it’s going. So if we’re looking at that and we’re asking, okay, so if God’s sort of broader moral framework and at least how it’s expressed seems to shift over time how can we find out what he really wanted with those frameworks?

Like, what was the point of the frameworks as they were laid out? And it appears [00:06:00] fairly clear, because we can look at the effects that these frameworks had on individuals and society at large. Okay. Which is an increased amount of human flourishing, right? This is human technological, civilizational flourishing, right?

The reason why you would want to create more humane rules around the selling of your daughter into slavery

Speaker 3: I was on a stream with Leaflet and somebody was asking, “What are sins?” ‘Cause we were talking about them more broadly, and I was like, “When you boil it down, sins are just a list of things that will up your life.”

Some of them may seem like a good idea in the short term,. In the same way eating candy every morning for breakfast might.

Speaker 6: What’s going on? Maybe it’s all this stuff that you both eat. Oh, you get off that? No, honestly, it’s true. Okay. Moss, what did you have for breakfast this morning? Smarty Cereal. Oh my God. I didn’t even know Smarty made a [00:07:00] cereal. They don’t. It’s just smarties and a bowl with milk.

Speaker 3: But in the long term, you’re going to suffer from it. It’s basically a long list of... And we saw this in one of the recent episodes we did on, , you know, rampant consumerization of human sexuality leading to the normalization of things like abortion and this destroying people’s lives, right?

, The, the sin that they were committing, , ended up having this absolutely huge deleterious negative impact on them. The women who go out and w***e themselves when they’re younger, the effect that this is gonna happen when they hit the wall, and then nobody wants them anymore, and then, , you know, you see this with pride, lying.

, Look at what’s going on with the Bricks & Minifigs CEO right now, right? , There is no sin, there’s no, like, rule that we’re given that isn’t long term in our own best interest. Sins are just a really [00:08:00] long list of, “Don’t piss on the electric fence.” , And so if we are increasing the number of sins or expanding our understanding of sin, , it’s basically expanding this.

Good rules to live by, good things to look out for. And when I pointed this out on, on stream, some people were like, “Well, no, you know, sins need to be, like, this really difficult thing to deal with. This really, like...” And it’s like they are insofar that anything you do purely for your own self-interest is a sin.

, EG playing video games or something like that. , And e- and even those things can eventually have negative effects on you. , But in terms of the more, like, explicitly labeled sins, , for example, sleeping with another dude’s wife, right? Like, it may feel good in the moment, but not even... Y- you don’t even need to say, like, civilizationally this is a bad idea to normalize.

It’s just obviously gonna come back and cause you more pain in the, in the long term.

And I would also [00:09:00] note that this seems to be a core thing that differentiates Christianity from other Abrahamic traditions. Like, I don’t think there’s anything actually negative, at least within a modern context, , where like a Muslim can’t eat pork, right? Like, I don’t think pork actually has any negative externalities in a modern context.

Or where a Jew cannot mix, you know, linen and flax in a single outfit. but in Christianity, I am unaware of any Christian sins where I’m like, “This is just an obscure thing that was totally unique to a specific era.”

Malcolm Collins: Sorry, what, what does he want?

Simone Collins: He wants to tell the viewers what he learned.

Octavian Collins: Like Germs can go in your body and some- they’re, they’re like tiny little dots, they can multiply. Multiply. Wait.

Malcolm Collins: So germs

Octavian Collins: get into you- White blood cells kind of have like mouth thingies that eat the [00:10:00] like germs that are like the other things I was talking about recently, the green things.

Simone Collins: Smart. Smart

Malcolm Collins: so first, how do you determine , , and the fact that the way that God expresses his morality has changed over time shows that the intentionality of God on humanity through these systems as they have evolved is that is, it’s consequentialist in its framing, right?

Like it, it, it is based on some outcome, right?

Simone Collins: Well, and as you framed it in a different conversation when you discussed morality on the societal level, you argue that the New Testament was made for a point- At which human civilization had become much more globalized already, and you had different cultures interacting more, and you needed to begin to mask the brutality of Christianity to appear to be symbiotic so as to not become an existential threat to other cultures and obligate those cultures to completely [00:11:00] take out Christianity.

Malcolm Collins: Exactly. But it, but even, I mean, during the early period when they enter it ended the period where that was necessary. When they began to take over the, the Roman Empire they did not forget how brutal their religious teachings actually are. Mm. They just that, that only became sublimated later.

That only... I- in like the last 100 years, I wanna say, is really when the, all those parts of the Bible were forgotten. But to continue here. Except by some groups like the Quakers who, they annoy me, and the Anabaptists who I generally like. But anyway, to continue here. So what’s a good way to build your life in terms of like moral rules and everything like that?

So first, and you can see how to do this in The Pragmatist’s Guide to Life, is build an objective function. That is, think through whatever it is, whether it’s because God, you know, you’re coming at this from a Christian perspective or you’re coming at this from a completely secular perspective the collection of things that you think is of intrinsic good to maximize with your life.[00:12:00]

And then build a set of functions around that. By that what I mean is it might be like, well, within my life, maybe some of these things will be purely indulgent. I think I need X level of happiness, and once that’s satisfied, then I will put all of my effort into X or Y. You know, that’s the way functions are constructed.

Like 50% into doing this, 50% into doing this. Now if you’re a techno-puritan, you’re just gonna have one framing coming from what I was talking about here, which is what is God’s plan? God’s plan is continued human flourishing, so it’s probably some level of comfort. And then once you reach that level of comfort that’s needed for, you know, maximum personal efficacy and not distraction then focus on maximizing future human flourishing.

And this is often best done through scientific advancement, which we’re gonna get to in a bit, right? Which is to say, generally speaking there are many places where you could, for example give money to the poor, right? And over, in 100 years, [00:13:00] in 200 years, because God doesn’t love somebody in 200 years and I don’t care less about somebody in 200 years than I care about a human today which is going to help more aggregate people?

Almost always things that help the civilization continue developing are going to have a bigger impact. And, and note that’s not just technology. That’s things that help it economically develop. That’s things that help it develop in terms of its moral systems how it deals with outside or parasitic groups that are exploiting systems.

So we’ll get into all of that. And also note here this line I think highlights what I think is expected In terms of dedicating yourself to an extent to continued scientific progress. When we did our episode on Genesis not being incompatible with science one of the things we, we, we kept getting in the comments is, like, people forgot that, like, all of the early scientific advancements were made by people who were trying to understand God better.

Yeah. Right? Like, they, they... And, and even the Bible, like, goes into this. So, if you look at lines like, “ It is the glory of God [00:14:00] to conceal a matter. To search out a matter is the glory of kings.” Mm. Which is to say you, the best of you, the best of humanity your greatest endeavor is the search of knowledge of things that God has not made immediately obvious, right?

Mm. So when somebody’s like, “Oh, well, you know, God didn’t exactly and very cleanly lay out evolution in the Bible,” why didn’t he do that, right? Why, why wasn’t that done? It’s like, oh, it’s the glory of God to conceal a matter, and to search out a matter is the glory of kings. Which is to say that if you take a approach to everything that does not update post Jesus’ time perspective on our understanding of nature and the world, you’re literally acting in rebellion to what the Bible is telling you to do.

Simone Collins: Right.

Malcolm Collins: All right. So- If you’re just inventing a religion for, like, savages, telling them, like, “Don’t give yourself to lust, don’t give yourself to gluttony, don’t give yourself...” You know, like, seven deadly sins, stuff like that. Original Ten [00:15:00] Commandments. Very easy rules. But there are so many deleterious things that trap humans today at a significantly more socially and morally developed standpoint.

I think it’s worth laying out additional sins so that you can easily categorize these in your head. So let’s jump right into these.

Speaker 4: Note, , I think the majority of the additional sins I’m gonna be laying out are things that we are warned against at some point or another in the New Testament. , It’s just that the warnings are often not as explicit or salient in the way that the New Testament is often taught today.

, So if I give one of these out and you’re like, “Oh, actually, , this line here could be used to mean that,” yeah, I know

Malcolm Collins: And do try to keep track as we’re going, Simone, so you can add any that you think I miss here. Okay. ‘Cause we now have, like, actual people who follow our religion. I’m like, well, if we’re doing that, we should do more to help them live a good life,

Simone Collins: right?

Well, we need to make our... I mean, we’re gonna be following these rules, too. We’ve been discussing this all week, so we need to have our own internal... [00:16:00] Well, we need a list we can publish somewhere. Yeah. Well, this

Malcolm Collins: actually came up with me this week, where I was like, should I go to my high school reunion, or should I not go to my high school reunion?

And it would have been, like, a 24-hour car ride, right? And I was like, one, no, that is against my objective function. It is cleanly against my objective function. It is purely indulgent, but it’s not even an indulgence that will make me happy. And this here comes to the first sin of modernity, which is doing a thing because of societal expectation.

Simone Collins: Mm.

Malcolm Collins: You... Anytime you do a thing just because you think that it is what’s expected of you, like a graduation ceremony. How did the graduation ceremony actually help you, right? Or is it just a waste of time? Now, if you are doing it because your parents paid for you to go to college, and they’ll be proud, and that’s why you’re going, fine.

But if your parents aren’t showing up, why are you? Right? That is time that you could be [00:17:00] spending on doing something productive that moves yourself forward, educating yourself more, or moves human civilization forward. A second one here, which I’m really, this comes to the graduation thing. I wanna go to the graduation and I wanna show all these people, look at, look at me.

Look, look at how great I am these days, right? I’m doing so much better than you. I have a Wikipedia page. I have all these followers. A that, that makes me amazing, and look at you and your sad lives th- that aren’t doing anything, right? That-

Simone Collins: Which, and this, this is a big motivational factor for many people.

Malcolm Collins: It is. Is what, what the Bible was trying to warn us about was pride. But I think people have recontextualized it. People motivate themselves, and I motivated myself when I was younger in a big way by owning the people who thought they were better than me. And this is a unique, I think even genetically baked in problem with people of the backwards tradition.

Yeah. Is we just love, get deep satisfaction of owning people who think they’re better than us. And I’m not [00:18:00] saying you should never indulge in that satisfaction if you can use it to motivate efficacious and moral behavior. However I am saying that you shouldn’t do it if it’s leading you to do something which is purely indulgent.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: This is the same way where, like, feeling good during sex isn’t bad if you’re using it for procreation, obviously, right? ‘

Simone Collins: Cause that’s the point. That’s what is, it was evolved to motivate.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, but it can still pull you down a path of evil, right? If you approach it the wrong way. All right, so, tho- f- first two sins laid out there.

Next, living to maximize your image in somebody else’s eyes. I have noticed many people-

Simone Collins: You mean to look good to other people?

Malcolm Collins: No

Simone Collins: Maximize your image. What does that mean?

Malcolm Collins: They build their heuristics for making decisions. We have an episode where we talk about Honza, who is an example of somebody who does [00:19:00] this, where we notice that this m- male thought leading influencer in, like, the red pill-ish diaspora community was basically saying when he was making major life decisions, like, what decision is the more mannish decision to make?

What decision is the more masculine decision to make? He is optimizing his major life decisions around fitting some image that he thinks is the image that he needs to be living. Not towards- Mm-hmm ... the effect that that image will have on society, not towards the effect that image is gonna have on other people, not towards anything that’s efficacious, but entirely based on an image.

Simone Collins: Right. So, okay, the, the, the distinction here is, is that it’s, it’s about an archetype, fitting an archetype, and that being really not, not cool. Yeah. Don’t live your life to try to fit an archetype, like the sexy woman, the desirable man, the tough guy, the, the saintly caretaker, if that’s just what you’re trying to satisfy without understanding the moral [00:20:00] fundamentals, the, the values that you’re working to serve.

Malcolm Collins: Yes.

So, and, and where this can become really dangerous for people who otherwise would frame themselves as good Christians is they attempt to fit the image of a good Christian. They abandon actual morality for a social role in maximizing that social role

Simone Collins: Okay, yeah

Malcolm Collins: This can be a big problem for like trad wives,

like, if it’s the self-image of a tradwife, if it’s the self-image of a tradhusband, if it’s the self-image of a good Christian woman, for example. And people can say, why is that a bad thing to do if it’s a positive self-image? And it’s because attempting to maximize positive self-images is something that can lead to immorality.

So let’s- Well,

Simone Collins: I think what’s worse is, like, let’s say that your goal is to serve God, and then the way you think you can moor to that is by [00:21:00] invoking in your mind the image of the most holy, saintly person, and if I just sort of cosplay maximally well as that caricature, then presumably I- I’ve got my bases covered.

The problem is then you will think that you are actually doing morally good things, when instead you are just putting on the costume of someone who does morally good things and congratulating yourself for it and, and assuming that it’s all working out just fine when it’s really not.

Malcolm Collins: Exactly. And, and to, to, to give examples of how this can, for example, destroy a marriage.

If one person is, rather than being a good wife because they want to serve humanity and society by serving their children and their husband, for example they can say, “Well, these are the strict roles and things that a tradwife is supposed to do, and you as a husband are supposed to make all of these things doable for me,” right?

And so then the family ends up in a scenario where they may, for a child’s medical bills, require a second [00:22:00] income or something like that. Mm-hmm. And the woman doesn’t end up doing that, and it causes the man bitterness, and then they end up fighting with each other. The woman doesn’t under- Like, the, the, the things that she’s doing aren’t even really appreciated by the husband.

Like, the reason you’re supposed to do all these tradwifey things are because it is for the behalf of the husband, right? Like, they, presumably they like these things. What if they don’t even value these things, right, and they would prefer you did something else that is difficult for you to do? Now it’s just completely wasted effort.

And waste-

Simone Collins: Yeah, that’s a really good point. What a lot of tradwife influencers are things that, like, women want to do for themselves and that men don’t really care about.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And, and wasted effort is inherently sinful because every amount of effort that you waste is time you could have spent on something else.

Mm-hmm. Here I guess I’ll just go into the next sin which is busywork busywork is as sin as doing something that is [00:23:00] directly immoral without societal externalities. Hmm. So I, I guess e- examples here, right? I think anything you do that’s, like, personally indulgent and doesn’t move society forwards is sinful because we see from Romans, Okay, so

Simone Collins: that could just be, like, doing a spa day instead of working toward something you value.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Anything you don’t do for God or anything you cannot say to be doing for God is a sin, and if God’s goal is the long-term flourishing of humanity, anything that’s not contributing to that is sinful. Now, we are all sinners. You shouldn’t expect to live a sinf- sinless life.

Simone Collins: Sure.

Malcolm Collins: However, many people confuse themselves and lie to themselves by acting as if they are doing something less sinful by doing pointless busywork than by doing something like playing video games or masturbating,

Simone Collins: right?

Well, yeah, I think something uniquely common in the United States, where you see a lot of performative suffering and performative exhaustion, is people... And actually, this, I think, happens a lot in Asia too, where you see, like, the six-day workweeks and people who work extra long, and the norms [00:24:00] of you can’t leave your office in Japan until your boss leaves, and your boss stays way long that, well, if you’re suffering and if you’re not happy and it’s really not fun, then you’re working really hard and you’re doing good things, when really, like, okay, great, you’re miserable and you’ve just wasted a ton of time.

And why-

Malcolm Collins: Like,

Simone Collins: that

Malcolm Collins: is- Yeah, why busywork is strictly a higher form of sin than- Hmm ... pure indulgence

Simone Collins: than- Yeah, like you should have just played a video game for- Yeah ... three hours that day, spent one hour actually doing meaningful work instead of being so sleep deprived and stressed out that you could only do 15 minutes of actually productive work that day.

Malcolm Collins: Exactly,

Simone Collins: because it lowers- Even though you’re in an office for, like, 12 hours ...

Malcolm Collins: it lowers your overall efficiency, right? Yeah. Like, at least f- forms of indulgence can help you stay sane- Yeah ... feel rewarded, feel motivated. Busywork does not do that, right?

Simone Collins: That’s a really good point.

Malcolm Collins: A- and so it is a worse sin and more of a sin to call out in your partner, in yourself than other forms of, of [00:25:00] sin.

It is, it is truly a- This is

Simone Collins: for sure my biggest, like, I, I struggle with this. It’s

Malcolm Collins: your biggest sin by far. Yeah. It’s your only sin, really. I don’t see you d- sin in any other way than busywork.

Simone Collins: Well, I think it’s... And but this is where I need advice on this sin is I feel like often I lack the judgment in really understanding where I should be putting my time and focus.

I mean, that’s

Malcolm Collins: my- I think that you know perfectly well when you’re doing something that doesn’t actually need to be done as frequently as you’re doing it, but you do it as an indulgence in the same way that I play video games as an indulgence because you feel that you won’t be able to hear yourself think, as you say, if you don’t do it.

The question is, are you on, being honest with yourself about how much of that busywork you need to do to hear yourself think and how much of it is just performative?

Simone Collins: Hmm.

So- Well, I guess what we do is I check in with you a lot. I should check in with you more on, like, help me balance this out and sanity check this.

And probably having a third party. It could be a person, ideally, you know, like your spouse or something, but it could [00:26:00] also probably be an AI- ... if you’re operating independently.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah,

Simone Collins: busywork. Just evaluating it. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Which I, which I... And one of the things was, like, that’s not in the Bible. Like, the Bible, they didn’t have busywork at the time of Jesus.

It just wasn’t a sin that he needed to warn people about, right?

Speaker 10: So Simone’s gonna mention a passage that could be taken to mean this, which I love that there are passages, and then in addition to that passage, you could also take the parable of talents from Matthew’s to be about this, or you could take Luke 10:38-42, Martha and Mary, to mean this. , And this is just really cool.

But, but, but you do actually see this in parts of the Bible with

but Martha was distracted with much serving, and she went to him and said, “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to serve alone? To her then to help me.” But the Lord answered her, “Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled by many things, but one thing is necessary. Marsha has chosen the good portion, [00:27:00] which cannot be taken away from her.”

But again, even if this is a parable against busy work, it’s often not in a salient context when I’m in like a church. Have I-- And I used to go to church every week. , Did I ever come away thinking, “Busy work is a sin. Gotta make sure not to do that”?

Simone Collins: No, I think the... There was a passage you read when we talked about societal morality about not suffering publicly.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, not suffering performatively.

Simone Collins: That is an extreme vice in the United States. Again, like bragging about sleep deprivation.

Malcolm Collins: Well, this is, this is not in the busy work category of sin. This is in the I’d say- No ... a plum sin.

Simone Collins: No, because people brag about the hours. They go, “Oh, I work 60-hour weeks, blah,

Malcolm Collins: blah, blah.” Right, but this isn’t, this isn’t that. This sin is very different. So this is the aplum sin which means not acting with aplum is sinful.

I’m sorry,

Simone Collins: we’ve moved on to a new one.

Malcolm Collins: Yes. Okay, [00:28:00] yeah. So this covers a number of emotional states which are adopted for purely indulgent reasons- Mm-hmm ... and don’t actually help you.

Simone Collins: Oh, like acting exasperated or-

Malcolm Collins: Yes ... snarky. You are taking on a negative emotional state- Uh-huh ... which causes negative externalities for everyone around you.

Mm-hmm. It causes your children, your spouse, your coworkers to be less happy, to be less productive. It causes you to be less happy and less productive, when at the end of the day, emotions are generally a choice. You can choose how you contextualize. You know, you get fired from a job, for example. You can say, “Oh, woe is me,” right?

Or you can say, “Oh, well, this is exciting. Now I get to try to look for something new. Now I get a change of pace. Now I get a new challenge.” And people are like, “Well, what if something truly bad happens? Like, what if Simone died,” right? Then it is extra upon me to not act with sadness and with grief.

Because if I do [00:29:00] that, who suffers? Who suffers from that?

The people who are going to suffer the most are going to be my kids, and they just lost a mom Okay?

Simone Collins: Yeah That- Do they also want to have a, an absent, emotionally ruined, angry, grieving, sad, bereft father? Like, you don’t wanna lose two parents, you know?

Malcolm Collins: The, the implication of this sin is proportional to the severity of the loss that you have undergone.

Right. It’s the severity, the time when you need to act with the most aplomb. And note this isn’t generic happiness aplomb. Th- this is, you know, acting with plucky continued diligence and move forwardness like a happy soldier. Those are the times when it is the bleakest for you. Yeah. When can you least afford to have self-pity is when you just got fired and have a family to support.

Simone Collins: Exactly.

Malcolm Collins: When can you least afford to act [00:30:00] with these other forms of indulgence, it is when you most feel them, right? And so don’t wait until something really bad happens to adopt this. And I’ve, I’ve noted here, I’ve watched some Mormon influencers, and they complain that Mormons are told to do this, right?

That they’re

Simone Collins: told- Oh, yeah. El- Alyssa Grenfell explicitly goes on about how it’s really messed up that there’s sort of a limited amount of grieving that is considered socially acceptable within the LDS church. And like per, like traditions and the way that funerals go and memorial services. Yeah, and it’s really interesting to hear her talk about that when w- we would see that as such a s- like a huge, huge sign of the church’s good taste.

There are other moral rules- Right ... that we’ve been talking about internally that we’re like, “Man, this backfired.” Like, they, they completely did this the wrong way. Like setting certain standards, either contemporarily or historically, that just are being completely misconstrued or have been outsized to [00:31:00] out- sorry, outsourced to outside authorities.

Like saying, “Oh, we don’t watch rated R movies,” but then having this completely unassociated non-Mormon body determine what the R rating is based on. You know? This is,

Malcolm Collins: this is actually where this, this today’s sort of tract because we, we don’t number the tracts anymore. Mm-hmm. This is technically a techno-puritan tract, but it’s applicable to all Christians or people more broadly came from, which is we were talking about the words of wisdom, which is where, like, don’t do this stuff is laid out by Joseph Smith.

And some of this is useful, like the be happy thing. Other of it is just wasteful. Like, don’t drink hot liquids, like coffee and stuff like that. Like, at the time, they thought that it had, like, negative health effects, but we now know that it doesn’t. It actually has positive health effects, and it’s been very well studied.

So it’s like, oh, like, we should have a techno-puritan words of wisdom. We should have something where I try to go through and future-proof these, so I can try to-

Simone Collins: Well, yeah, I don’t, I don’t know if it was negative health effects. M- it might have been that it was recognized that caffeine was addictive, or that it was- Right

un- an unnecessary expense That didn’t yield, you know, caloric [00:32:00] benefit. But for whatever reason, now even if, like, caffeine is the thing to be avoided which from a health perspective doesn’t make sense because it’s, it’s broadly seen as having health benefits on the aggregate aside from being addictive, though it is quite addictive.

Now you have all these Mormons drinking heavily caffeinated, often dirty sodas, you know, very high in calories, not helpful calories and, and not drinking coffee, like a zero calorie m- you know, moderately healthy drink if you don’t put a ton of stuff in it. It, it’s clearly something that’s not being optimally construed as a word of wisdom.

Malcolm Collins: Absolutely, yeah. So we’re like, “Let’s, let’s build these, but try to make them better and future-proof.” So also you guys can warn me if I ever do something in a track and you’re like, “That could have really long-term negative ramifications.”

Simone Collins: Yeah, we wanna know ...

Malcolm Collins: if, if the community becomes, like, really big and fanatic, ‘cause I always try to think, “How is a fanatic gonna operate on this,” right?

Mm-hmm. Like, if, if [00:33:00] somebody goes down that pathway 200 years from now, right? And that’s also why the tracks take so long to produce, is because I need to go through, you know, everything I’m saying and think, “How could a fanatic twist this?” But the happiest thing I just see is... And for people who aren’t aware of this, they can be like, “Well, isn’t it, like, a part it’s, like, useful to grieve?

It’s useful to experience negative things. It’s useful to experience anger and sadness.” And it’s like, it’s strictly not. Mm. We know from studies that, like, if you punch a wall when you’re angry, you have a harder time in the future controlling your anger. If you, if let yourself cry, like just have a cry when you’re sad, you’re going to cry at lower thresholds in the future.

The reason for this is when you stop yourself from these forms of emotional indulgence is you are activating the inhibitory pathway in your prefrontal cortex, which gets stronger with each activation. If you have not frequently activated it, you are incredibly susceptible to intrusive thoughts and intrusive emotional states.

Mm-hmm. Which [00:34:00] puts you... Like, it’s just, this isn’t even just a for your family thing, it’s just worse for you. Because presumably being sad or being stressed or going over about how hard you’re working these days I probably... Would you say I work harder than anyone you know, or in terms of

Simone Collins: like- yeah.

You absolutely work harder than anyone I know. You wake up at 2:00 AM in the morning to start working, and you work through every moment of the day that I ever see you. Like-

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I mean, people could

Simone Collins: see- ... you might take an hour every day to chill, and I mean, th- this is also, like, it’s not that you have some kind of period where you’re unwinding while, like, making dinner, ‘cause I do that.

Like, you have almost zero wind-down time unless you’re, like, hauling out trash or hauling in groceries for the family. So- Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: So, but do you ever see me complain about how overworked I am or how

Simone Collins: stressed I am? No, never. Nev- Or- I’ve never heard you talk about being overworked.

Malcolm Collins: Whistle while you work, right?

I work with happiness. I work constantly and I work with happiness, and that’s an [00:35:00] easy thing to do. Because there is no moment in your entire life will you were- ever feel as good Is when you are s- suffering and sacrificing for a well-thought-through value system. Yeah. That is the greatest happiness that any human has access to, and the people who chase directly after hedonism- Mm

even when they have all of the resources they could ever want, as I’ve pointed out, they live the most tortured lives. Who are the people I have met who live the most tortured lives? They are the famous actors and actresses. Mm. You know, they’re, they, they have everything they want- For

Simone Collins: people who live pure lives of leisure it’s-

Malcolm Collins: All the fame-

very scary ... all the hedonism, all the sex, all the partners, all the respect, and yet they are mentally destroyed, and they often die of drug overdoses and stuff like that, and are seeing a thousand therapists, and are living states of mental terror. They are terrorized by their own mind because of this, because they went down a pathway that was not based on sacrificing through hard work and with a [00:36:00] plum for attempting to make the world better.

And when you see actors who clearly do live by that, you typically see them live very happy, fulfilled lives. Consider, like Mr. Rogers, for example. Like, he wasn’t like... He, he clearly had, like a moral value system, and he attempted- Yeah ... to push it through his show to advance human society. Mm. And you didn’t see him, like, get addicted to drugs and crash out in a, a parking lot somewhere, right?

We are rewarded for making these sacrifices and exhibiting this self-control, and you will be rewarded for fighting sin, even within this expanded category.

Speaker 5: So a lot of people, we did a video recently about people who did like gang bangs and the horror shows that their lives can descend into, and people wanted us to be like angrier or speak about them with more disgust. And it’s like this is-- Oh, it’s not something I’m drawn to. It’s not a sin that I’m tempted [00:37:00] by, thankfully.

, But in addition to that, like their lives compared to the lives that Simone and I and my kids live are literal hellscapes. Like I know some of these people and even my friends in this group, I know the mental torture they go through being like, “How am I gonna make this work?

How am I gonna have a family? How am I gonna...” And I want to help them, and I can offer them guidance, but there’s only so much I can do. And so I think, you know, when you see the end state of what happens to these people and what it’s like to be them, , it’s a lot harder to be-- to, to look at them with so much anger

When you accept that the additional rules that we live by are not arbitrary restrictions that make our lives harder and are just meant to make society a better place or something, but actively improve our own lives, it’s a lot harder to hate somebody for breaking those rules, for being a sinner.

Malcolm Collins: So next. Moral absolutism [00:38:00] is the next sin.

Simone Collins: Hmm.

Malcolm Collins: This is allowing primitive- ... or overtly extreme signs of acting moral to override what is actually moral, right?

This is where the Vatican says, “Oh, just bring in endless immigrants-” “... because the Bible said you should feed foreigners and you should feed the poor, and so we’re gonna maximize that line out of context. And through that, we’re gonna bring in endless foreigners and- ... who cares what long-term impact this is gonna have on the people we’re bringing into the country, right?

Who cares what long-term impact- ... this is gonna have on their family when the citizens get pissed off and they decide to deport them and they have kids in the country- ... and all the kids are separated from their parents, and that all could’ve been avoided if you just hadn’t brought them in in the first place.

Or you leave them in the country and they end up overtaxing the social safety net, and then pensioners don’t get their pensions, and people who relied on Social Security in the country don’t get their Social Security and they starve to [00:39:00] death like there are negative externalities from this. And this sort of moral absolutism you see whether it’s coming from the Vatican, because it’s often very indulgent, right?

It is, it is moral hedonism as we’ve defined it. It’s saying, “Oh, I’m the good guy here,” right? Like, “I’m doing the good thing,” without considering the consequences. It’s saying I have some deontological... This is why I always crash out about the deontologists, because what deontology really does is push the cost of your moral purity onto outsiders.

When you say, “I won’t ever kill,” and then an intruder breaks into your house and rapes one of your kids because you wouldn’t fight back. And this, like functionally really happened when there, like pirates happened in in, around Philadelphia, and the Quakers wouldn’t, wouldn’t send forces

Simone Collins: to deal with them.

Oh, yeah. A long, historically,

Malcolm Collins: yes. And people were terrorized and brutalized because a- at the cost of their moral purity, right? That is functionally evil, right? Because, a- and they [00:40:00] are as responsible or more responsible for those atrocities than the pirates themselves.

Speaker 12: And there, there are ways of approaching

non-consequentialist frameworks that prevent the extremes, like Thomism, which I’m not particularly against. It just feels like a weasel out for me. It feels like a way of framing morality where you don’t have to deal with the potential extremes of either consequentialist or non-consequentialist world perspectives.

And I guess that’s good in that it doesn’t have the extreme negatives, but I also feel like it doesn’t accept the full moral weight that is important to accept of a moral framing. It just uses a bunch of rules to carve off the extremes

And the rules feel arbitrary and non-morally weighty to me. I think any real and good moral system is going to push you to positions that a normal person would be mortified by because I, I think real moral [00:41:00] conviction looks like that. It looks like something where other people say, “Oh my God, like, why?

Why, why are you doing this?” And it’s like this, this, then this. , If something removes through whatever amount of thing any choice that goes against a person’s intuitions, , I, I think it’s removing moral complexity

And I think we can see in the Bible that God’s clearly not a Thomist when he punishes someone like Saul for not killing literally everyone and their animals of the enemy tribe. That’s not within the bounds of Thomas ethics. Yes, self-defense is, but something like that isn’t

Malcolm Collins: Because they said and note here people had asked on a call, so I should lay this out here.

There are times when a group having these beliefs, these moral absolutist beliefs, exerts a negative externality on society and times when they don’t. And the difference between the two is whether or not they are power hungry and why they are exerting the moral absolutism. Mm. So a good [00:42:00] differentiation here is Amish pacifism does not exert an externality on society because Amish don’t seek power for themselves.

They almost never hold elected office, and they often don’t even vote unless they’re actively being victimized as they have been in the most recent few election cycles. Whereas Mur- Quakers disproportionately historically held positions of power. And so they’re able to say even though it’s not Quakers who the police would be intervening on behalf of, “Oh, don’t, don’t go do that.”

And we see this not just from the Vatican, we see this from wokes all the time, you know, with this- Mm ... this, “Oh, I’m doing the more moral thing,” because on a surface level it looks more moral and I’m just maximizing these surface level rules. Or we can even see it on a when people go and spam racism or antisemitism in ways that isn’t like, this is where we need to be asking some serious questions about Israel, but where they’re trying to show off, right?

This is a very smoothed brain thing to do because these are groups that we’re going to have to work with in the future, right? Like [00:43:00] clearly if you look at their fertility rate, their level of influence you’re going to need to find a way to work with places like Israel and the Jews long-term, whatever cultural group you are.

And there is a big difference between just spamming something like, “Oh, I’d go to war with them in a second if I could.” The dumbest thing America could, could do, but some conservative influencers have actually said that. I’m like, “You idiot.” Like, d- think about the long-term implications of that. Yeah.

Simone Collins: Not smart ...

Malcolm Collins: yeah, it’s, it’s extremely stupid. And you could, oh, even if you what, purged... W- what’s your real end game? Even if you purged every Jew, right? Do you know what happens when you purge every Jew from a country, right? They go to other countries. And do you know what those other countries do with those now angry Jews?

They build atomic weapons. That’s what we did, okay? When we look at leaders historically, what they have said is, “Yes, the Jews might be an outside group. Yes, they might not always be aligned with us, but there are ways that I can utilize that community for my long-term benefit,” [00:44:00] which we saw with people like Oliver Cromwell bringing the Jews back to England to better fight the expansion of Romanism.

And I think that that shows, like, whe- how, how to think about this stuff without, even if you have an outside group, even if you have a group that has at times victimized you is worth considering. Okay, with all of that being true, what’s actually the best long-term path going forward for me to signal?

Octavian Collins: Hmm.

Malcolm Collins: Next, inaccurate. Inaction is a massive sin in the modern age, and very, very important to note. It’s when you say, “I will do,” and this is the most common form of it, “I will do X thing after I’ve accomplished Y thing,” when Y thing is not a necessary prerequisite for X thing. This is very different from traditional sloth.

Mm-hmm. Because when you think about traditional sloth, you’re not doing it because [00:45:00] you’re lazy. Inaction is something like saying, “Well, once I have the right body, like once I’m skinny enough and hot enough-

Simone Collins: Mm. Mm-hmm ...

Malcolm Collins: then I’m gonna start dating.”

Simone Collins: Or, once I’m certain that no one’s going to make fun of me if I do this, or that I’m 100% certain that I’m right.

Like, we’re not certain about anything. We’re, we’re just trying to move in the least incorrect direction possible, but we believe that it’s sinful to not move forward at all. Mm. Whereas a lot of people are like, “Well, if I’m not absolutely certain that I can move forward in the morally perfect way, I’m not going to move forward.”

And we think that that is, that is worse.

Malcolm Collins: That is that PA form of inaction, right?

Simone Collins: Yeah. You know, even if we’re moving forward in, like, a slightly wrong direction, in the end we’re gonna be closer to the morally good thing than you are if you’ve not moved at all.

Malcolm Collins: If you are like, “But I don’t have the information yet,” right?

Like if you’re in a state like the one that’s going... Come up with what test do you need to run to get that information?

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: [00:46:00] Not having enough information should never be a reason to not move forward anymore. If you’re a boss, you’ve had the employee who you come to them, you gave them a task, and they go, “Oh, sorry, I stopped like 20 minutes into the task when I realized I didn’t know how to do, like, stage two or something, or stage three.”

And you’re like, “What the f- is wrong with you,” right? Like genuinely I feel this way sometimes. I’m like, “You should have either immediately come to me when you stopped, right, and I would’ve told you what to do next, or figured it out.” But we are all- No,

Simone Collins: he’s talking about me. He’s, he’s just talking about me.

Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, you have done that a few times recently. Mm-hmm. I’m not... I actually wasn’t thinking of you, but it is

a-

Simone Collins: Yeah, you were. It’s okay ...

Malcolm Collins: massive because it, it’s something that you... I, I wasn’t. I was thinking of other employees. But you have done this a few times recently, and it’s a massive sin when done to yourself, because ultimately we’re all our own bosses.

And if you ever reach something and you’re just like, “I’m not sure,” then develop a heuristic for how you get to the next step when you’re not sure. It can be as simple as asking your favorite AI model.

Simone Collins: [00:47:00] Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Just go to your favorite AI model and say, or two out of three models. Go to Reality Fabricator that’s our AI site, and type in, “Hey, we have some that run, like, multiple models on a thing, X or Y, and it will run multiple models, and it’ll cross-check the answer for you for the best answer, right? Like, that’s a fun way to approach this, and you can do that, right? Like, we have the technology that you should never, ever be stuck on any question.

And this is where I’ve got annoyed at Simone when I, like, came back to her and I was like, “Okay, so where are you on X task?” And she’s like, “I got stuck at, like, stage three.” And I’m like, “Well, then go to an AI, right? Because I’m just gonna go to an AI when you kick this back to me, so why don’t you go to an AI, right?”

But oh well. This was on getting the RFAB component ready for Apple computers, which she had to do. Mm-hmm. And now it works, by the way, for Apple, for people who wanna use it for, like, coding on Apple and stuff.

Simone Collins: And to be fair, the, our third stage of doing this, I did finally get around to just doing that and not giving it back to you until it was done- [00:48:00] Yeah

no matter how many times it failed.

Malcolm Collins: But A- So ... but this is, and this is why I’m expanding the list of sins. This form of inaction is functionally as bad as sloth, and is more of a temptation for most people than sloth.

Simone Collins: Well, and, and again, like, it, I think the big theme that differentiates your sins is that you have this extra prejudice, justified, toward virtue signaling sins.

Well- Anything that, you know,

Malcolm Collins: people- The Bible had that in it. If you read the freaking New Testament like we did in the last chapter-

Simone Collins: Yeah ...

Malcolm Collins: Jesus was like, “Yeah, make sure when you’re giving money, you don’t do it in a way that is overly performative. Make sure when you’re fasting, you don’t fast in a way where other people can tell that you’re fasting.”

Mm-hmm. “Because that’s overly performative. Make sure when you’re praying, you don’t do it in a way that’s overly performative, because that’s really bad.” Like, this is made cl- this is in the spirit of what’s listed out there. It’s just not explicitly listed out so people have-

Simone Collins: Well, yeah, [00:49:00] I think it’s maybe people missed it because it’s not so explicit.

It’s more just like, “Hey, don’t be flashy when you do, when you engage in self-deprivation or, like, active acts of piety.” It doesn’t have an explicit proactive prohibition on general virtue signaling.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

Simone Collins: It’s just like, “Oh, when you do these things, be, be subtle about it.” Which of course, people miss that too, but this is a whole different level of stuff.

Malcolm Collins: Next sin, self-flagellation. This is when you are hard on yourself or allow yourself to experience negative emotions when in the past you acted either... It, there’s, there’s two types of self-flagellation, justified and unjustified self-flagellation. I think even justified self-flagellation is a sin, but we’ll get to how in a second, okay?

Mm. So if within any moment of your life you made a decision based on the information you had available [00:50:00] to you, and in a way that was directed towards long-term human flourishing or the good of the individual you were doing it for, like it could be how you’re raising your kids, how you’re treating your wife, anything like that, right?

And it leads to some negative outcome, right? To feel bad about that is enormously sinful, because it’s indulgence. It’s, it, it, now this is one of the hardest sins to avoid And just knowing that it is a sin, like just laying it out as a sin and talking about puritanism, I think will help people better categorize these emotions and compartmentalize these emotions so they do not overwhelm you, and the, the weighted emotion of them doesn’t overwhelm you.

But when, when is it actually justified to feel bad? When you acted in a way historically where you’ve had full access to information or with the information you had at the time, and you acted in a way that was not in accordance with that information or that was designed not [00:51:00] for long-term human flourishing, but for some personal benefit.

This is where, you know, you knew you probably shouldn’t have gotten that fancy car when finances were tight, but you really wanted to show off to people, so you got the car even though it had no functional utility to your family. And now your family’s suffering for that You have permission to take time to meditate on those past failings so you don’t do them in the future, but to not overindulge.

This should not be more than 10 minutes of emotion, okay? You need to move past this, and- Yeah ... since you have created a scenario for yourself, all you can do is move forwards. The only iteration of yourself that you can do good for are iterations of yourself that have yet to come to exist. And you are suffering or living a life of rewards for the actions of past iterations of yourself.

And this is how Simone [00:52:00] sees sort of actions. Like we’re a constantly changing and new person with every moment, with every second of the day, and you’re constantly paying it forward to the future you.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Well, and are you... Is, is this iteration of you that is acting right now, that you’re consciously experiencing going to be, going to go down in history as like a war criminal in your massive army of instances, or a hero that did something good, that moved you all in a good direction?

Yeah. You have a chance to be a hero. You have a chance to be, you know, a mutineer. What are you gonna do? And then

Malcolm Collins: the next one here is a fun one. The indulgence of sin. The indulgence- Whoa ... of sin is the sin of for no reason other than to test yourself or because you think you are honing yourself and making yourself stronger you needlessly expose yourself to temptation.

So an example of this would be... Now, this isn’t [00:53:00] normal, daily sorts of temptations. Like TV, erotic images, all of these things, they’re going to be all around you in modern society. You do have to be able to resist them to live a normal life, right? To not crash out. The people who crash out at the slightest exposure to one of these things, when people are like, “What if my kid sees X online?”

And I’m like, bro, if, if your kid loses it to like something that every kid is going to see within 10 minutes of opening the internet your kid’s probably in a pretty bad place in terms of how you structured their value system and the rules that you laid out for them. So, a- a good example of this for someone like myself could be you don’t have the same temptations that I have.

You don’t live with the same temptations that I live with. But naltrexone, an opioid agonist I take daily which prevents me from feeling my opioid pathways, which makes it much harder for addictive things to get their hooks into me. I could, if I wanted to, just be like... And, and some Christians are like this.

They’re like, “Oh, [00:54:00] don’t, you know, blunt yourself to the temptation,” right? Like, “That’s a bad thing.” And it’s like, why not? Like, when I have the technology to do this, I should do it. If a person knows that they heavily struggle with alcohol in a way that’s gonna cause them to die or something like that having a fully stocked liquor cabinet is not a moral necessity for them.

Yet in terms of the temptations that Christians expose themselves to, I have noticed some think it’s, like, cool or something to do this, right? It’s not cool. It leads to long-term negative consequences. The only types of exposure that you need to make sure you’re okay with is the types of exposure that you’re going to experience anyway.

And, and that can be tied to recreational sins that you’ve accepted. So an example of this can be, I believe playing video games is sinful in that it is an indulgence that doesn’t move human society forwards, but I [00:55:00] think I would, like, mentally break down if I didn’t have any recreational time.

So, and note I often play video games while I’m working. My normal way to play video games is while I have an episode running so that I’m editing it, right? You know, so I even try to do it, like, while I’m doing something else. Or when I watch anime, I’m often vibe coding, right? Like, I try to... But these are still sinful.

I could be more focused, for example.

Simone Collins: So I- That’s about balancing your efficacious pursuit of your values with whatever it is that keeps you happy and motivated and productive. And sometimes our long-term values when we pursue them are so abstracted and sort of built on delayed gratification that the bodies we’ve evolved to live in can’t really keep us motivated.

Like, we have to create mini games- Right ... to like, to trick our bodies into keep going.

Malcolm Collins: Video games are a sin that I’m like, I will take that sin because I know that it doesn’t like consume my entire life, right? Like video games and [00:56:00] anime do not consume my entire life and so I am able to engage with them in a way that I can’t engage with, for example, alcohol when I’m off naltrexone.

And I think many people can relate to pornography in this way. Some people can engage with pornography in a way that’s just totally like, oh, a once a week thing or something like that, right? Whereas other people it’s like, they see it and now it’s all they can think about, right? If you’re the type of person where you see it and now it’s all you can think about, maybe don’t put horny pictures of women all over your house, right?

Like, if you’re the type of person that struggles with gambling, maybe don’t live right next to a casino, right? , And as Luna’s pointed out, it’s gotten a lot harder with these online betting sites and stuff like that. I, I think of all of the sins of modern society, gambling is the worst. So be aware of that if you have it.

The reason why I think it’s the worst is it is one of the only sins that can destroy your life and the life of everyone around you in like 10 minutes. Very few sins even like a heroin addiction typically takes, I don’t know, six months or [00:57:00] something, right? Like, but gambling, that’s like just over.

Generational wealth can be gone. So it’s something that I think that people should never engage with. Gambling is one of those things where it’s one of the, the things where it’s like, “Okay, when I’m choosing the sins that I choose to indulge in, which one should I just not do?” Gambling is like the easiest one.

Okay?

Speaker 6: One I’d add here that actually came from a recent episode when, , I was talking to Simone and we were like, “Well, they didn’t even end up enjoying the gang bang that they went to.” And she goes, “Well, you know, maybe they went just to see if they would like going.” And I said, “But I don’t wanna know whether or not I like gang bangs.”

Like, I can tell as an outsider I don’t. I do not like seeing other men naked, , or having... It’s eh. But if, if I was genuinely uncertain, I still would not want to know because even if I was a completely indulgent person who just, you know, did things like gang bangs recreationally, they still take a lot of effort, carry a lot of risk, everything like that.

And so I think we should [00:58:00] also just outline as a sin going out and doing something just to see if you like it when

It would be a net negative to your life to find out you like that thing. , This includes things like skydiving, free climbing, gang bangs, , gambling is an easy one here. N- you know, never be like, “Oh, well, I went to gamble to see if I enjoyed it.” You know, “I tried heroin to see if I enjoyed it.” Just don’t do it

Malcolm Collins: Next, empty words. So empty words, the sin of empty words, is when a person is trying to engage, or you’re trying to engage, because sins, our own sins are the ones that matter the most. When you’re trying to engage somebody else in c- a conversation that doesn’t either entertain them or move their ideas forwards or share information with them, or develop your and their understanding of the world, morality, science, et cetera.

All [00:59:00] conversations and all words should have some purpose. Now, it could be to make them happy. It could be a joke or something like that. But when you come to somebody and you say something like, “Here are the things I did today,” and that’s not relevant to them, you have stolen a portion of their, their life.

You have fracturally murdered that person. Worse are empty words that are designed to try to bring another person down to your negative emotional state. This is like compounding, where you come to a person and you tell them about something negative that happened to you to try to pass on- Like venting,

Simone Collins: complaining, trauma dumping

Malcolm Collins: All of that is horrible, a horrible sin.

You are trying to offload your trauma, your pain to another person. You can say, “Well, what if you need to talk about a trauma to get over it?” It’s like, you don’t need to. If you just don’t contextualize it as traumatic, the studies have shown you won’t experience it as traumatic. We always talk about this study, but there’s a famous study where they looked over people’s [01:00:00] experiences of trauma in youth, and they correlated their stated experiences of trauma in youth correlated with their negative behavioral patterns as an adult, their m- mental stress as an adult, everything like that.

But when they went over the court records to see who really experienced trauma and who didn’t, completely dis-correlated from anything as an adult. People who experienced demonstrable trauma, like I would be someone like that. If you look at my childhood, it was horrifying. Like we’re actually talking with a, a, a team that’s like doing research on us, and I’m going through my childhood, and they were like, “Wait, that sounds horr- f- like why aren’t you more focused on that as a traumatic event?”

And I say, “Because how does that help me to be?” There would be a pure negative externality to everyone around me Next. And, and this is a big one, and I really encourage people to, one, look for it in themselves and look for it in their partners, right? If you, if you’re in a techno-puritan relationship, work on this, right?

Next, unnecessary status signaling. Easy, I [01:01:00] probably shouldn’t even need to say it but all status signaling is sinful, right? Except for when it is necessary for, like, a job or something like that. And be very careful you don’t use lies about what you say is necessary to indulge in status signaling that isn’t actually necessary.

You, for almost no job do you actually need anything other than a bare bones car, right? For example. And yet many people buy... And, and a used bare bones car. Will buy fancy things that they simply do not need. In the same category as status signaling is the sin of in-group signaling. This is signaling how punk you are, how goth you are, how whatever in-group you want to accept you.

Even how techno-puritan you are to other techno-puritans. It is when you engage in this signaling in a way that hurts your long-term goals and ability to affect society. So an example might be a face tattoo or something like that. Even if there was a techno-puritan [01:02:00] face tattoo you could get, it would be strictly sinful to get it because it would lower your efficaciousness in society

Speaker: I talked it over with Simone to think if there’s any sins that we’re missing here, and we came up with a few more. First is the sin of entitlement. This is to believe that you are owed anything by either other people or reality itself. Be that dignity, a good life, healthcare, being treated with respect.

No one is owed anything, and to believe you are is a grave sin. Second is the sin of indulgent nostalgia. This is allowing nostalgia to indulge rumoration rather than focusing on trying to recreate those sorts of experiences for the next generation in which case it can be good.

The final is rumination more broadly, just the sin of rumoration. This is overly [01:03:00] focusing or giving weight to any emotion that you are feeling that you didn’t choose to feel. This, like as Simone put it when we were walking this morning, she goes, “Today people will be like, ‘I’m sad. That means I should do something about it.

I should take pills or something,’ when really it’s just not particularly relevant how you feel. It’s usually not particularly relevant to what you need to accomplish or what you need to do

The final one I’d include here is one of the biggest potential sins, is risking a human’s life for happiness or a thrill or for some emotional subset. , This could be, you know, recreational sex is one thing that could cause a human life to come into existence, and then you feel put in a position where abortion makes sense to you.

But this also includes things like skydiving, bungee jumping, free climbing, anything where you are putting your own life at risk meaninglessly for just a thrill

Malcolm Collins: Next, corrupted [01:04:00] mercy.

And this is the biggest, and we can get to this another day because it goes long, this section. We’re gonna be talking about the Bible in a place where I’m just gonna say the Bible needs to be updated on this point. There are many places in the Bible where it explicitly says “Give food to the poor.

Yes, even foreigners. Yes, don’t let that trouble you.” And I think that that made sense morally as we talk about, like, things in the Bible, the Bible in the past said, “Sell your daughter. This is how you sell your daughter into sex slavery. This is how, you know, you treat your slaves. This is h- how- how you act when you conquer a people and have to slaughter all their infants,” right?

You know, all of those things, right? Those th- those parts of biblical morality have changed as society has changed,

Speaker 13: And this isn’t because the underlying morality of the Bible has changed. The goals of all of these have always been the same. The iterative change to human civilization they’ve made have always been the [01:05:00] same. , But it’s because humanity and the way that we live has changed, and that has changed the rules that are best to live by to live a virtuous life within the social norms of your era

Malcolm Collins: and I think that this is one area where we need to look at what’s in the Bible, and I’d actually say we... There’s no way around this. There’s no linguistic way around this. We just need to accept that in the time of Jesus and in the time of the Old Testaments, there was not enough charity in the world to the extent that people were suffering, and so the Bible had to signal boost charity.

But today, we live in a time where charity has reached such an extreme that it is leading to more aggregate suffering. Oh. And we will get to that next. Oh, that might actually make a whole other tract. We’ll do a whole other tract on that.

Simone Collins: Oh, that’s a good idea. Well, useful stuff. We need to write this down in,

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, he can try it for an hour now. Won’t that be fun?

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: I, I mean, remember, while the Bible tells you to be merciful, it also says, “Be merciful just as your father is merciful.” [01:06:00] And keep in mind that God did punish a guy by taking away his title as king because he didn’t kill literally everyone in a settlement, even though he did kill all the babies.

He did that part. Didn’t kill everyone. So, whatever is meant by mercy here is not the standard definition of mercy, and that’s worth meditating on as we go into this next section. Love ya, Simone.

Simone Collins: I love you, too

Speaker 16: What do you think? Look, a dinosaur. It’s a dinosaur. Are the kids going to survive? I don’t know. What is gonna happen, Indy?

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