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 a...