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Caption/text: Why Mormonism may be true.. a take from a pragmatist
The post consists of one attached video (duration: ~6 minutes 2 seconds). Below is the exact verbatim transcript of the spoken audio, taken directly from the video's subtitles:
We live in the richest cities in human history. We have the best universities and total intellectual freedom to define our own meaning. Yet this total autonomy has generated a societal plague of severe loneliness, stalled economic mobility, and existential drift.
But right in the middle of this secular baseline sits a massive statistical anomaly.
Active Latter-day Saints, active LDS men have half the mortality rate. They earn more and divorce less.
Furthermore, a quintile child in Salt Lake City has a vastly better chance of reaching the top quintile than a child in San Francisco, Boston, or New York. A community frequently mocked as a credulous relic is outperforming the most advanced secular hubs on the very things we claim to value most: health, wealth, and the stability of the next generation.
The standard secular attack on Mormonism relies on correspondence theory.
You take the claims — golden plates, angelic visitations — check against history, and deliver a verdict of true or false. New atheists like Sam Harris argue that religion poisons everything. But they fail to produce the secular community that generates economically mobile children and highly integrated elderly populations at this scale across multiple generations.
The philosopher William James rejected correspondence theory. For James, a belief becomes true insofar as it actually carries its holder through experience. The vital question is: What difference does it make? So we can stop judging Mormonism by the history it claims and start judging it as a pragmatic social operating system based on the machinery it actually builds.
This machinery operates as an intricately engineered social technology. The assembly line begins early. While a typical American teenager drifts passively through adolescence, an LDS youth is handed real public responsibility. By age twelve, they are functionally accountable for collecting fast offerings. And a few years later, delivering sermons to their entire congregation.
At nineteen, they enter a brutal crucible. They are sent abroad, learn a foreign language in weeks, face constant daily rejection, mediate conflict, lead small teams under miserable conditions — all without salary, romance, smartphone.
Return at twenty-one with extreme resilience, possess self-knowledge most adults never acquire. Entering university with ferocious focus, often marrying early and starting careers with zero debt. Institutions like Goldman Sachs, Bain Capital, and the CIA actively recruit these returned missionaries for their language skills and cultural adaptability.
These employers do not care about the golden plates. They care that this system produces highly employable structural competence that secular culture cannot replicate.
The machinery extends into the home through this sealing ordinance within LDS theology. Marriage and family are not temporary legal contracts. They are eternal ontological necessities required for salvation.
This infinite time horizon alters how couples process mundane friction. A fight about money is no longer a data point for abandoning the relationship. It is a moment within an eternal project that must be endured and resolved.
Outside the home, the local congregation, the ward, operates as a functional village.
When a secular family faces severe illness, they might receive a GoFundMe, a few weeks of casseroles. An LDS ward mounts immediate, coordinated, months-long response organized entirely by volunteers.
This diagram illustrates the mechanics behind that care. Tithing demands 10% of gross income, ensuring deep financial investment. Callings distribute labor, forcing every member into rotating uncredentialed leadership roles. With resources returning as localized community support.
The system interlocks the sober socializing of the health code, financial skin in the game, and forced volunteerism combined to form an inescapable safety net. The secular world has spent decades attempting to manufacture this level of social cohesion through policy and therapy. But the pragmatist looks at receipts and sees a community that catches people when they fall — a result the modern welfare state has yet to replicate at this scale.
Decades of survey data show that active Latter-day Saints consistently report vastly higher levels of sustained purpose and joy than their anxious, therapeutically managed secular peers.
Critics dismiss this joy as false consciousness — the happiness of someone trapped in a cage. But if you dismiss their reported well-being as delusion, you have no principled reason to trust any reported human happiness, including your own.
This represents how religious claims function pragmatically. A map isn't useful because it matches the terrain molecule by molecule. It's useful because it simplifies the chaos, getting you where you need to go. You judge it by walking the route and seeing if you arrive.
The LDS map effectively guides its users toward dense community, mutual care, resilience against death — regardless of how historically accurate the secular world deems its origins.
You may possess a purely secular map that you believe is cartographically perfect. But if that map leaves its users lost, lonely, standing in ruins of communities that once helped them, then we have to ask: What are we measuring? For finite human beings, building a family, sustaining a community, and facing mortality without terror is the only test of truth we're actually in position to administer.
Which brings us back to William James. If a supposedly joyful error…
[end of transcript]
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Grok: What did william james say about joyful error?
William James, the American psychologist and philosopher, did not use the exact phrase "joyful error" in his writings. However, he expressed a closely related idea in his famous 1896 essay "The Will to Believe", where he argued against excessive fear of error (or "nervousness about error") in favor of a more balanced, lighter approach to belief and knowledge.
Here is the key passage:
"Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things. In a world where we are so certain to incur them in spite of all our caution, a certain lightness of heart seems healthier than this excessive nervousness on their behalf."
This comes in the context of critiquing W.K. Clifford's strict evidentialism (the view that one should never believe anything without sufficient evidence, to avoid the risk of error). James counters that life often requires us to act on incomplete evidence, and treating every possible mistake as a grave tragedy is paralyzing. Instead, he suggests embracing a pragmatic attitude: errors are inevitable, so approaching them with some cheerfulness or "lightness of heart" is wiser and more human than obsessive caution. In broader terms, James's pragmatism views truth and belief through their practical consequences for life, rather than as abstract absolutes. He was comfortable with the idea that we might "be duped" sometimes if it allows us to live more fully, pursue meaningful action, or gain real knowledge—rather than suspending belief forever out of terror of being wrong.
This sentiment aligns with his overall philosophy: human minds are driven by passions and needs as much as pure reason, and a rigid avoidance of error can cost us opportunities for growth, faith, or empirical exploration.
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