My Heritage Cladogram

Recently I read the essay “How Dawkins Got Pwned” by Mencius Moldbug. Curtis Yarvin in his interviews repeatedly goes back to how his mother was a WASP and a very popular socialite in Nassau county, and his father was a Jew who worked in the State Department, and how his grandparents on his father’s side were members of the CPUSA. I think it a worthy exercise to do the same thing. Well, in his essay, Moldbug made a big point of tracing traditions into a cladogram. But I am not entirely sure where on the heritage cladogram I fall.

My mother is what I would describe as a fanatic Catholic. Her beliefs can be characterized in this one pivotal moment, when she was going to go to Rice University in Houston for undergrad when she encountered the infamous “Rice Purity Test” at orientation week and got freaked out by its unholy inclusions and so left Rice and at the last minute enrolled in Thomas More College in New Hampshire, a fanatical, fundamentalist, even extremist Catholic bastion “in the middle of nowhere”, as she described it. A New Hampshire commune, but Catholic. Remarkably, even a non-papist Catholic bastion, as some there did not recognize the Pope’s authority since the Vatican II council from 1960, which “Protestantized” the Catholic Church. One of several of these Catholic educational outposts in this country, where the only place they could fester their strain was out in the woods. There are a few other places like that that can be clearly clustered together. One includes Wyoming Catholic College, which I visited twice during high school, was established lately in 2006, and is located in the middle of nowhere in Lander, WY (read my characterization of it here). Another includes Franciscan University at Steubenville, Ohio, where an influential teacher I had got his undergrad and masters from. There are a few more colleges like this. The Catholic colleges can be placed on a continuum of how acceptable they are to go to for a fanatic Catholic. This subculture is just big enough to warrant profiling fully (I am seriously considering the idea that not every culture warrants it) - but it breaks scope here. These ones (perhaps a few more) differentiated themselves from the other Catholic colleges because the others were not Catholic enough. Thomas More College was a liberal arts college. They put a huge emphasis on reading the classics, and modeling the heritage of “Western Civilization” all the way from the ancients to modern day. My mom got a lot of books from her college, and I grew up surrounded by them, and got to read some of them. The titles of her books stopped at Camus, and scarcely included anything after the Romantic period. There was consistent emphasis on how their flavor of Catholicism was the correct and original branch that everything after deviated from, and everything before that was preluding. It was required to take either Latin or Ancient Greek. In the American history they learned, Maryland’s role as the only Catholic colony was over-emphasized. I think during grad school at Rice my mom took on a watered-down form of feminism, perhaps without her realizing it. But, she always continued to maintain that strain of Catholicism perpetually.

My father was born in Mexico. I think it is worth tracing back my paternal ancestry back a few generations more, actually. My great-grandfather was an official in the Mexican army and was responsible for telegram infrastructure and delivering telegrams in the city of Saltillo in Coahuila. My grandfather was a freelance electrical engineer who climbed from the national university of Mexico to UC Davis to UC Berkeley before dropping out and going back to Mexico. He was seized by idealism about how business in the US was conducted on trust, compared to corruption in Mexico, and wanted to go back to Mexico to tell everyone about it and change everything. In Mexico, he, somehow, found the unique role of being a freelance contractor for designing electric power grids. He would design the layouts for hotels, power stations, and car factories. My dad followed a similar path, in biochemistry. He got his undergrad degree from the national university in Mexico City, then went to Rice to get his PhD in biochemistry and biology. My dad’s opinion on education differed a bit from my mom’s. My dad said that American education was very inefficient, and that the universities should drop the gen-eds that make “well-rounded citizens” because they were a waste of time; that the universities should drop most non-technical majors; and should primarily be focused on technical education. He (and his father too) would incessantly point out inefficiencies and absurdities in the way everyone did things and everyone was doing everything wrong. There are countless memories I have of my dad saying things like that - but a standout on-topic one is, he said, when he got to Rice, he was astounded at the inefficiencies and the mass of bureaucracy. “American universities are supposed to be the best in the world! How the hell are they operating like this!” he said once. He clearly picked up a bunch of heuristics during his post-grad education that have guided his decision-making processes, to a very good effect. He tells me he used vi, a terminal editor, in the 90s.

So one, fanatic Catholicism, the other science the American way™. Now about my departure from Catholicism has been well documented by myself, so I won’t repeat myself here; but the teacher who went to Franciscan I mentioned earlier taught middle school, but spent plenty of time raving about things he learned in grad school, and was teaching some stuff well beyond middle school level. Importantly, he was initiated in the “heritage of Western Civilization” and the Catholic church’s critical role in it. Those fanatical Catholic universities placed an over-emphasized role of referencing back to the ancients, classics, dark ages, mediaeval, renaissance, because they had to create increasingly elaborate frameworks to justify their fanatical Catholic beliefs and traits like hiding in the woods. Anyways, at the ripe age of 13, i was handed these tools of thought, and by the age of 17 I had used these very tools to dismantle the Catholicism they were supposed to keep me in. It must be mentioned this conversation was in no small part because of Richard Dawkins, who the aforementioned Moldbug piece was about (partially about - Moldbug often doesn’t stay on topic).

The latent Catholicism I rejected provided the most solid framework I’ve been a part of despite its problems, and it was one I was born into. The Catholicism was the strongest mark at birth I had on me. Anything other is no where near as strong, and I would basically be a proselyte in. I am not clean-cut American, because my father was a Mexican born in Mexico, I am not a Mexican because I’ve never been there and I am loyal to the United States; I lived in Colorado for half my life, and I lived in Michigan the other half my life, making me a Coloradan pretty much only by birth, and not quite a Michigander. I am not Mexican, Coloradan, or Michigander. I have white American ancestry going back to the mid-19th century, and a small (small) amount going back to its colonial founding, but not very much. I am a mutant freak only the North American continent could produce. So I guess that makes me an American.

But I don’t fall cleanly into any other American cladogram tradition. Between the framing of the Constitution and the American Civil War, American thought was in heavy dialogue with European thought, with the seminal work characterizing America during this time period, Democracy in America, being written by a Frenchman. Most of the uniquely American strains of thought were dealing with issues unique to American governance, like nullification, abolitionism, and American common law. But the seeds for unique American thought were there with the Transcendentalists and the Hudson River School. Most of America was trying to come up with a cuisine that would differentiate itself from Europe, and eventually came up with putting ice in drinks. The rest of it was concerned with on-the-ground American things, like Protestant revivalisms and Southern pride. But I can’t cleanly trace myself to much of this.

I was listening to the “How To Climb A Tree” episode of The Fundamentalists podcast featuring North Irish philosopher Peter Rollins and American comedian Elliot Morgan. It’s a very good podcast, and one I’ve been listening to regularly since early 2022. I might do a digest piece about Peter Rollins. A good line section to quote from that episode at timestamp 5:43 with Morgan speaking about idea trees:

“I believe that human beings are primates, and primates have a tendency to swing from tree to tree. But, like, I’m not gonna swing over to a tree that has, like, […], Richard Dawkins or something. I might read a Richard Dawkins book, actually.”

Rollins continues:

“There is a sense in which it’s hard to swing to trees that are behind you. There’s [sic] thinkers that are more expansive, that once you’ve read them, other thinkers will have less to give… So, you know, someone like Dawkins, Dawkins’s New Atheism, for example, which is probably what we’re thinking about, people think about is, as a biologist he’s very very good, in terms of his religious writings, they’re fine, if you’re not trained in philosophy, then they’re interesting, and often teenagers will jump to a bit of Dawkins or something like that, but that is not his area of expertise. And so yes, when you read a thinker who has a deeper understanding of that subject, then you’re not gonna want to swing back to necessarily Dawkins. And I like Richard Dawkins, I would still listen to him.”

In this podcast Rollins mentions his main influences he had while getting his PhD from Queens University of Belfast at timestamp 11:25:

You have to start wherever you are, you can’t start where you’re not. And, in terms of my first major thinker that I was interested in, it was Heidegger, and then it was probably Marx, and then Deirdre, and then Hegel, then Lacan. […] So that’s the chronological, but in terms of my current, the trunk of the tree, is Hegel, and everything kind of branches out from there…

I haven’t read any of these, but Rollins frequently cites Freud and Jung, which I have read some of. Rollins made writings, videos, and podcasts about philosophy and theology, and was very influential to me immediately after exiting my latent Catholicism.

So, if I don’t cleanly fall anywhere on the idea tree through heritage, then to place myself on the tree, the most I can do is cite my primary influences. Richard Dawkins was a strong influence to me when I was a teenager, I found him in 2020 and read The Selfish Gene, and, like probably with many others, was the main catalyst that spurred me away from Christianity. After Dawkins I found Peter Rollins in 2022, who was a transition away from Catholicism into something that made sense.¹ Also in 2022 I found Hunter S. Thompson, who I have found to be a quintessential American to model, and read his Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. HST is the one figure I have a claim to be influenced by by geography, since HST lived out the last third of his life in Colorado. In high school that year I did a cursory familiarization with Freud, and later in college that year I read source material from Carl Jung’s The Red Book. Also that year I started reading Bertrand Russell’s autobiography, who like Dawkins was a precocious Englishman who abandoned Christianity as a teenager. I attempted to read Nietzsche in 2023, but found it a little dense. In 2024, I consumed more Dawkins and read his autobiography An Appetite for Wonder. I read Bronze Age Pervert’s Bronze Age Mindset, which I have mixed feelings on and found interesting, but I wouldn’t cite as a key influence. That year I started Eric S. Raymond, one of the most influential authors on computer programming, and read The Art of Unix Programming, and the following year I read his influential short essay The Cathedral and the Bazaar. In 2025, I found Curtis Yarvin, who I have a digest piece on. Curtis Yarvin cites Hunter S. Thompson as a key influence several times², and directly cites E.S.R’s The Cathedral³. This year I revisited and finished Bertrand Russell’s autobiography (digest). I also read Sigmund Freud’s Three Letters on Sexuality, which I regret to say is the only source Freud I have actually read. I read Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, a very mainstream-influential sci-fi book from the 90s. This year I read Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, a rare first-person primary source about America and quintessential documentation of American history from that century. I revisited HST and read Hell’s Angels, another rare first-person primary source of what America was like. This is not an exhaustive list of things I’ve read, it’s only key influences.

Some of these influences are a bit heterodox. Dawkins on religion is for teenagers, which Rollins notes, and I have since grown out of it (his biology work, however, is some of the best). Curtis Yarvin’s UR was not quite mainstream academically acceptable. HST is HST. The list of serious mainstream thinkers on this list at time of writing right now is admittedly shorter than I would like (I’m still learning, okay?).

The internet has been around for 30 years now, but I am not sure if we should let people talk about the internet even yet. All the same, the internet is where I’ve found most of these influences, some of them even have their main presence on the internet instead of traditional publications. I even use the internet like myself on this very blog. The technological influences I cited (I know, I’m missing Nick Land) have played a very big part in this.

A huge focus of mine is trying to understand my birth-country, and trying to navigate along the insider-outsider line I’m on. De Tocqueville was a foreigner writing about America. Curtis Yarvin was an insider-outsider who wrote about America, who like de Tocqueville critiqued (and even renounced) democracy (very sacred to Americans). HST was an insider who definitively was “in search of the American Dream” and gave the ultimate critique of it all. The latent anglophilia I have with Russell and Dawkins is partially there to understand America by understanding the tree it branched off of.

So we have post-Enlightenment, British empiricism, New Atheism, Reactionary politics, dissident right, psychoanalysis, cybernetics, Gonzo journalism, and drug culture. “One of God’s own prototypes. A high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production.”⁴ Something that could only be made in the U.S. of A.

So I guess I’m something along the lines of an angry young man who is interested in technology and politics.

Song: Daft Punk — Teachers