From the Mail Pile: Another Mormon Post Just Because
From the Mail Pile: Another Mormon Post Just Because
Make Las Vegas & Ancestry.com Mormon again?
Still another friend helpfully weighs in on the Mormons. It’s been that kind of week. And well, I’m here for it.
Fun fact. The Chinese nickname for the CIA is "The Mormons."
Interesting to see the critique you put from whomever up given the actual history of Las Vegas. It was the "Mormon mafia" that ran Vegas when Howard Hughes bought out the mob. Hughes famously rarely left his hotel room. He hired a group of Mormons to run his interests because they didn't drink or gamble - it worked. They built the modern version of the city and still run it behind the scenes. Unlike Hughes they were organized and knew how to transfer power to the next generation.
The reasons the Mormons kept the 100 billion fund a secret is because unlike other church groups they actually enforce tithing. Which is why it was funny when people thought John Huntsman Sr (then a member of The Seventy) leaked to Harry Reid (also a Mormon) that Romney didn't pay taxes.
Reid later admitted he just made it up, Worth noting the Huntsman and Romneys like a lot of the founding families of Mormonism in the West are related by blood. The Mormons in Utah are arguably an ethnic group as well as religious one given the genetic relationships. Unlike the Ashkenazi they haven't been interbreeding long enough to get the same genetic problems, though I'm not sure if plural marriage helps or hurts that dynamic. The Mormon obsession with genealogy should prove useful in the future, it's a well-developed trait.
There’s no intelligence community worth its salt that doesn’t take genealogy very seriously. I think this work more or less began in earnest when polymath Francis Galton wrote Hereditary Genius in 1869. The techniques may well have changed but the desire to process talent sure hasn’t. It’s only gotten more sophisticated. You might even see my friend (and Mormon) Austen Allred’s company Bloom Tech (formerly Lambda) as a part of this effort.
For what it’s worth I’m more or less of the view that we need to hand Ancestry.com back to the Mormons and strip it from the Chinese. With the sudden departure of YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki I wonder why can’t her sister (and 23andme.com CEO) Ann Wojcicki quit too? Like her old friend Elizabeth Holmes Ann Wojcicki has some explaining to do.
What's most interesting about Mormonism, to my mind, is how effective it is at maintaining its power given how thoroughly discredited its theology is. Joseph Smith has been thoroughly debunked for his many many frauds (this guy obliterates it point by point) to the point of a musical by the South Park guys making fun of it openly... and still it remains. Strong testament to the theory that religion has nothing to do with the accuracy of the dogmas and everything to do with serving human social needs.
Bottom Line: They're gonna make it.
Print the legend and tithe accordingly!
I confess that I, too, once belonged to a fringe group that believed some crazy things. We used to call that movement Trumpism and it had a strange figure who led it…
I’ve more or less come to the conclusion that the zanier the beliefs the closer the community. It even helps if you are (lightly) persecuted.
My friend goes on.
The more exotic and esoteric the closer the bind. I doubt anyone at the top even really believes the doctrines any more than Politburo members believed in Stalin's Diamat. Strange shibboleths are just the cost of doing business, and business is good!
If the business of America is business is Mormonism actually America’s best cultural export?
I’ve also more or less come to the conclusion that what people believe isn’t nearly as important as what they do.
Maybe it’s crazy to place any weight on beliefs at all. Maybe it’s far more practical to pay attention to who is related to who and how and who has the money and where does it go. And maybe when you get really practical about these things you invent genealogy, computer databases, and banking.
Maybe when you live out in the frontier you’re so practical that you can believe whatever you want because what matters most is your family and community.