The Pragmatist’s Guide to Crafting Religion, by Simone and Malcolm Collins

“It's not the end of the world at all," he said. "It's only the end for us. The world will go on just the same, only we shan't be in it. I dare say it will get along all right without us.”

― Nevil Shute, On the Beach

“Keep a little fire burning; however small, however hidden.”

― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

Preppers’ energy is admirable. To devote one’s days meticulously planning for a future where life likely wouldn’t be worth living is charming, in a way, if a little morbid. That’s how I felt reading Simone and Malcolm Collins’ tome The Pragmatist’s Guide to Crafting Religion: A playbook for sculpting cultures that overcome demographic collapse and facilitate long-term human flourishing. I was scared at the points where I agreed with their apocalyptic vision, warmed by the humanity of their industriousness in the face of catastrophe, but ultimately bemused by the futility of it all.

The Collinses convincingly fast-forward to the end point of the fertility decline debate; birth rates are plummeting around the world, we don’t really know why it’s happening, and we certainly don’t know how to fix it. Conventional natalism – government policies to make it easier for people to start families – are welcome but inadequate. Collapse is coming, and very few people have seriously grappled with the consequences. In the UK, where the fertility rate has fallen to 1.44, we can expect the native population to halve in two generations, even if the rate stabilises. “We don’t think anyone can stop what is coming,” they write.

Like the crypto bros trying to build a new civilisation outside of existing nation states, the Collinses want to start a new natalist culture capable of surviving the coming population collapse. For them, the question is: “How we can intentionally construct a culture/religion that will be ‘evolutionarily successful’ and spread?” They adopt a form of Darwinism, seeing cultural “fitness” as a culture's ability to survive and spread. Believing that culture originates from each family unit informed their creation of The Index, a network of families committed to creating a natalist culture. It’s unclear how many families have joined.

Although Simone and Malcom say they don’t wish to force their culture on others (and indeed that they would like cultural diversity in the brave new world they envisage), they certainly have views about what makes a good culture. The Collinses state that cultures generally start off “hard” (with strict rules), and eventually become “soft” (permissive), and at this point they often die out due to low birth rates. “Pop cultures,” are extreme versions of soft cultures, offering an “all sugar diet” of norms that feel good in the moment but undermine society in the long-term.

The most dangerous modern pop culture, according to the Collinses, is “the supervirus” (at this point you can probably tell that they have a slightly childlike obsession with ordering the world into categories of their own creation). The supervirus is closedminded and takes “offence,” “identifies ‘problematic’ individuals” and flags “language that makes [them] uncomfortable.” It tries to censor, ban and generally prevent open debate. It’s taken hold of academia. In short, the supervirus is what the Right calls woke, even if the Collinses don’t describe it as such. They think it’s hollowing out culture, destroying discourse, and ultimately, putting people off having children through unworkable hyper-individualism.

Predictably, they want their own family’s culture to be the antithesis of the supervirus. Can you guess what that would be? Secular Calvinism, obviously! In their eyes, Calvinism is rational, industrious and views “emotions as a product of evolution with no inherent value.” What follows is a slightly strange detour (and definitely not the only one, I’ll add, as I make a detour of my own. This book could have done with a more hands on editor!).

We get a short history of the supervirus, where they claim that “colonial Quaker culture presents such a prophetic view of today’s dominant pop culture morality – not because it was really ahead of its time, but because it ended up becoming the dominant pop culture.” The Collinses point to Occupy Wall Street which prioritised aesthetics over impact, and claim it was a direct descendant of lifestylist Quakers.

Having written a dissertation on Occupy, I can tell you that this is simply incorrect. Occupy drew from ideologies and movements the world over. I imagine learning that many of the organisers drew inspiration from the Spanish anarcho-syndicalists behind the Indignados Movement, for example, would complicate their theory.

Not that making a few errors in their grand theory of history necessarily undermines their central point of creating separatist natalist cultures, but it does reveal the biggest flaw in the book: what impact do they expect it to have? Beyond some poorly edited copy, occasionally meandering arguments, and a compulsion to weigh in on subjects outside their brief and expertise, it seems unlikely that this book could have recruited many to The Index, surely their end goal. The Collinses can’t stop at ‘we need new cultures to survive the demographic collapse’, which, although a fringe view, would have an audience. They feel compelled to give you ‘the world according to Simone and Malcolm,’ ironically, making that less likely.

If they read this, I imagine the Collinses would shrug. Never ones to back down from an online argument (or “flame war”, as they call them), they’re content to broadcast without much expectation of others listening. If you think that you and your family you can survive the apocalypse alone, maybe that makes sense. But for those of us who think that’s unrealistic (or pointless, given how bleak being the last ones standing would be), extreme separatism makes no sense. You’re prepping for a future that’s not worth living.

Since the book was published two years ago, the Collinses now talk less about “secular Calvinism” and more about techno-futurism as their core belief. Given the rise of that culture in Silicon Valley, and how it now looks set to influence the Trump administration, perhaps they could reach a bigger crowd. But I would warn against the hubris of technologists who think they could shelter themselves from a storm.