In this episode of Based Camp, Malcolm and Simone unpack a striking civilizational pattern: nearly every major cultural movement of the past 100 years—blues, rock, rap, punk, goth, grunge, techno, heavy metal, and more—along with most modern sports (soccer, basketball, baseball, rugby, American football, etc.), top video games, and key inventions originated in Protestant-majority countries or regions.

Catholic-majority areas dominate refinement and style (think Paris and Italy) and often excel at competing within existing frameworks, yet almost never invent the new forms themselves. Japan, Korea, and a few outliers like Poland provide the main exceptions.

They dig into why this pattern holds, using Ireland as a critical test case that points to a Protestant vs. Catholic cultural difference rather than a simple North/South European one. Topics include historical differences in innovation, scandal handling (IRA, Church), terrorism rates, treatment of captives, status-seeking vs. inventiveness, religious orders, and what Catholics (and others) can usefully reverse-engineer.

This is not about identity or conversion—it’s about treating culture as technology and stealing what works.

Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone. I’m excited to be here with you today. Today we are going to be pulling on one of those threads where my mind notices a pattern, and then I start pulling on it, and I’m like, “Oh my God, this pattern is so much more robust than I expected it would be, so much larger than I expected it would be,” and it kind of changes how I think about things at a civilizational level, and it’s something that we need to talk about.

[00:00:23] I began to think about, like, various cultural movements throughout the last 100 years. So what do... ‘ Blues, rock and roll, rap, punk, goth, grunge, mod, techno, cyberpunk, reggae, heavy metal house music, rave and acid music, new romantic, straight edge, and industrial music have in common.

[00:00:46] Here I’m gonna note other things that have this in common, okay?

[00:00:50] Simone Collins: Okay.

[00:00:51] Malcolm Collins: Okay. Of, of the music varieties that don’t have this one thing in common or cultural movements or stylistic movements,

[00:00:58] Simone Collins: Christmas classics

[00:01:02] Malcolm Collins: Unfortunately, that would also fit the pattern. But- Are

[00:01:05] Simone Collins: you sure?

[00:01:06] Malcolm Collins: Yeah. With the one potential alternative that I’ll get to in a second.

[00:01:10] Then you have the other what, what mu- what stylistic patterns don’t fit this pattern, okay, on Earth? The only popular ones on a, on an international stage are ones that come out of Japan, ones that come out of Korea or reggaeton maybe. Out of, out of the past 100 years, these are the only ones that don’t fit this pattern.

[00:01:32] Now we’re gonna go to the second thing that fits this pattern, okay? Because there’s actually a lot. Okay, the invention of various sports. So what do soccer, cricket, rugby, basketball, baseball, ice hockey, lacrosse with maybe a caveat, volleyball, American football, tennis, golf, field hockey, boxing, picket ball, pool/billiards, bowling-

[00:01:59] Simone Collins: Picket ball or pickleball?

[00:02:02] Malcolm Collins: Oh, oh, pool might actually not fit this pattern. It’s a bit mixed. Bowling pickleball is what I said here. And the only ones that don’t fit this pattern clearly are cycling and then a few that come out of Japan, sumo, judo, and taekwondo So this pattern is- I

[00:02:19] Simone Collins: think dressage would also fall into your criteria.

[00:02:23] Malcolm Collins: Yes. Yeah. This pattern is was this cultural thing invented in a Protestant majority country or region? Which is wild, and the reason it’s so wild is when you think of, like, let’s say style, right? Typically the cutting edge locations when it comes to style are Catholic majority areas. I, I typically think of, like, the leading sort of luxury style trend-setting areas as being Paris and Italy, right?

[00:02:54] Like, that that’s not just me, right? So-

[00:02:57] Simone Collins: Yeah ...

[00:02:58] Malcolm Collins: th- they haven’t invented a single stylistic movement except for maybe reggaeton which I don’t even know if people would consider that, like, a global phenomenon in the same way, like, rock and roll,

[00:03:08] Simone Collins: punk, goth. It’s, it’s pretty big. It’s very big. And then it’s

[00:03:12] Malcolm Collins: the same with sports, right?

[00:03:14] Like, it’s not like Catholic countries are bad at sports. In fact, they do very well within a lot of sports sectors. I mean, I, I, my understanding is that if you’re looking at the soccer for example on international stage like they clean it up. So why, why didn’t they invent it? And this is something worth exploring because when you notice a pattern this loud and this strong...

[00:03:37] And a, and a lot of people, and I get very frustrated with this because it’s just wrong, is they go, “Oh, this is really about northern versus southern European populations.” Of the northern European populations which is the one counterexample to this rule e.g. they have invented no major sports or major artistic traditions [00:04:00] in the past 100 years?

[00:04:02] Ireland. Oh. The, the one Catholic population in Northern Europe. Well, I’ve gotta point this out, because I think that people, like they, they, they put Ireland in this bucket that doesn’t represent what Ireland actually is culturally. Like culturally, it actually has a lot in common with Catholic countries that you don’t see in Protestant countries.

[00:04:23] An example of this would be terrorist rates. In Protestant countries it is vanishingly rare in history, and we’ll probably do a different video on this when you are mad at the state that you go out and kill random civilians. This is actually a normal thing in Catholic country throughout the past 100 years.

[00:04:39] Speaker 9: sorry, if you wanna dig in more yourself because I don’t wanna, like, litigate this here. , You’ve got Spain, , Colombia, Italy, Peru, the Philippines, Argentina, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Chile france, Portugal, Belgium. as just examples of places where you’ve had Catholic terrorist groups you do not have a single case, , except for maybe Northern Ireland in response to the Catholic terrorism

[00:05:10] Oh, or m- maybe the KKK of a Protestant majority terrorist group in the past hundred years

[00:05:16] Malcolm Collins: So you see that. An- another thing is although this one is a little less stable, but the, the graping of victims of war. Now, we’ve talked in previous videos that if you look at Protestant colonial areas like in the United States, the Puritans, the Cavaliers, the backwoods you see no record of graping of captives, and yet you see this constantly.

[00:05:34] Speaker: A note here, I don’t mean like barely any records. I mean there isn’t... And the Puritans were fastidious in their record keeping and everybody hated the backwoods people, so if they had ever done this, people accused them of every other sin under the sun. We would know about it, right? Like , it’s actually insane that there isn’t a single recorded instance across hundreds of years of American history of this happening

[00:05:59] Speaker 4: And note when I first learned this, this was quite shocking for me to find this out as like a trend in history because it certainly wasn’t taught to me in school. , People were like, “Well, it’s probably because the Catholic colonies, they were much less likely to come with their families.” , Which actually doesn’t work as a pattern because if you look at Protestant missions like Captain Cook’s mission where they didn’t travel with their family, , yes, they had sex with native populations, but they famously traded the ships and nails to do it.

[00:06:25] They engaged in, w- I don’t know if I’m allowed to say that word on a podcast. , W- al- alternatively, I at one point asked an AI, “Do we know of a single Catholic majority colonization effort or a major journey that did not involve the graping of natives?” , And it could only name one, and it was a shipwreck when they had to live with natives.

[00:06:45] , That’s how frequent it was. But what was interesting to me, because I wanted to see if Ireland was actually a counterexample and if this was really a Protestant versus Catholic thing or a, , a Northern European versus Southern European thing, and the Ireland example pretty concretely, , hits for me that no, it’s actually a Protestant versus Catholic difference.

[00:07:03] And so to try to understand where it’s from is really important in the same way that people see me constantly studying Jews, , because they seem to out-compete my people in a number of areas. So I’m like, “What can I steal from their culture to make my own culture stronger?” It’s not so I can become them.

[00:07:17] And to a Catholic watching this, I’m not saying b-become like a Protestant or become a Protestant. I’m saying try to find out exactly what causes this cultural difference so that you can steal that technology if you think that this difference is actually a bad thing, either in terms of the, , the productivity in terms of new subcultures and new, , technologies and stuff like that or in terms of, , moral fidelity around things like SA.

[00:07:40] Malcolm Collins: If we ...