Based Camp: Traditionalism Is Not the Answer
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Summary
In this episode, we discuss the current state of the conservative movement and the role of technology in society, and the potential impact it could have on the future of civilizational collapse. We also discuss the role technology can have in society and the impact it can have on society.
Transcript
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Within the conservative movement, there are two factions.
00:00:02.540
There's the traditionalist faction, which is to say, let's just go back to the way things
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And then there's the other faction that says, you know, this progressive super virus has
00:00:15.100
We need to harvest truths from tradition, which can help us through this situation,
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while also understanding that people who blindly cling to traditionalism are likely going to
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be as swept away by that sands of time as the extremist progressive mind virus zombies.
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So what I'm getting is, basically, you can't turn back time, remove technology, not really.
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I mean, if you can try, but there will always be some groups that continue to use it, and
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So there is no option to go back to full pure traditionalism, really, with some exceptions,
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Like, you could go Amish and find a niche that kind of works for you, that's symbiotic
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One of the social changes that we're dealing with is humans are becoming increasingly infertile.
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And you can't outrun infertility with just having sex more often.
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You're looking at a 50% reduction in sperm count over the past 50 years, over that.
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You know, a 30% reduction in testosterone rates in, what, the last 20 years or something.
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Eventually, if the trends can trend you, which everything seems to indicate that they are
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continuing, humans will become increasingly and increasingly infertile.
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And the more you hold to IVF bad, you know, because with IVF, you're losing access to some embryos,
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the more you as a cultural unit are going to struggle against the cultural units that are
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One, to not only combat this fertility collapse, but also to expand their own fertility windows.
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That's the core trap of traditionalism, is that it is more effective the more extreme
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And if effectiveness increases linearly with how extreme you take it.
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So, like, if you talk with, like, a Catholic traditionalist, right?
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Like, they're actually not that much of a traditionalist.
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If they were more of a traditionalist, if they moved more, like, on the Amish side of the
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spectrum, if they disengaged with technology completely, if they went off the grid,
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They would see a rise in all of the things that show vitality within their culture.
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Why can't a traditionalist group end up being the group that survives, right?
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And the answer is, is because the effectiveness of traditionalism is linearly correlated with
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how traditionalist you become, with groups like the Amish being the most effective forms
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The problem is, is that technology bequeaths you with many advantages, whether they are
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health advantages or just the advantage of one group having automatic weapons and the
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Or one group having automated drones and the other group trying to fight those drones with
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You cannot fight a group that technologically leans in if you're a group that technologically
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You can, you can maybe like passively fight them for a bit, but at the end of the day,
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Are you speaking more softly because you are afraid to wake the approaching civilizational
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Well, we did, we did have a podcast on that recently and we're going to be talking about
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So today we are going to talk about the way people react to civilizational collapse.
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And fortunately, because we've seen civilizational collapses before, we know how it always, it
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turns out, like the different ways that people react to it.
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So naturally, civilizational collapse typically looks the same because civilizational peaks look
00:04:09.740
Throughout history, whenever you had a group that was more urban and educated, they were
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almost always and universally seen as more effete.
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And sorry for people who don't know what that means, sort of feminine.
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You saw this in the way that the Romans saw the Greeks, but even if you go further back
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than that, you can see the way that the people around some of the first cities saw the people
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Maybe the only notable exception of this I can think of is the Assyrians.
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But we don't even know what their rural populations thought of them.
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Like these could have been, it'd be really funny.
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The Assyrians are just seen as like wildly effete.
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And yet we see them as like these overbloody people because they were like a guy having a
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Like drawing all this bloody stuff on the wall, like, or like a teenager, like mom, I'm so
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I guess you could argue that some of the Mesoamerican civilizations, like the Mayans might be an
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But anyway, generally speaking, and this creates, I think, an illusion for people that is one
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of the big problems, I think, in how conservative movements today see civilizational collapse is
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they correctly see that leading up to a collapse, you get higher rates of often LGBT acceptance.
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You get higher rates of female participation in the workforce.
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You get higher rates of many things that today are associated with generic progressivism.
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Of course, the counterfactual here is what is a collapse?
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So all of those things are also things that you see more of at the peak of a civilization
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So it is hard to say that they caused the collapse.
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However, you know, there does seem to be some evidence, right?
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You know, you keep seeing this pattern of these things right before the collapse.
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So civilizations regularly go through this cycle where they become more accepting, they become
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And as a result of that, social institutions change.
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And it changes the way parents are interacting with their children.
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It changes the way society interacts with other people.
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And you begin to see social institutions collapse.
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You saw this was the height of Athens to the fall of Athens.
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When these collapses happen, there is one natural reaction to them, which is we need to go back
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And then there's another reaction to it, which is, well, let's look at the social changes
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that we've had recently and accelerate them to see what comes next.
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Hold on, though, because I don't think that's true.
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What gives you reason to believe that there actually has been some attempt at continued
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adaptation in these civilizational collapse scenarios?
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Let's talk about the most classic example of the fall of the Roman Empire.
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You had one group that was experimenting with new social technologies and that represented
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accelerationist or if you're talking about social experimentation, an accelerationist view.
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And this group was this new religious movement that had recently taken the world by storm.
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And then you had the traditionalists who were the pagans and wanted to go back to the old
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And the group that survived was the iterations of the Christian church that became harder line,
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stricter, but not in a traditionalist context, but rather a social invention context.
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If you're looking for other examples of this during the Norman conquest, there were a number
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of families in the ruling caste that wanted to flee.
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So they fled to Byzantium and they said, okay, we're going to maintain our old ways, our old
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And then other nobles were like, no, let's try to integrate with this new Norman group.
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The ones that were like, okay, let's try to do things a new way.
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Let's try to work within this new system and adapt it to our means.
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With the fall of Rome, the Western Roman Empire, let's be specific here.
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The groups that survived were the Christian organizations, but the Christian organizations
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that took intentionality in terms of changing and updating their practices.
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You know, this is when you had a lot of these councils happening.
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This is when you had a lot of what today are heresies being codified because there was
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this idea that, yes, we are new and yes, we are an aggressive social technology movement.
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However, that doesn't mean we're loosey goosey.
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And so during a collapse, you can see three large groups form.
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The other is the people who just go balls to the walls with hedonism in the moment.
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They can take, and this is one of the things that we make clear in other podcasts, the highest
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form of hedonism is indulging in a personal narrative of suffering and victimhood because
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that's what people want to be more than anything, because it removes any responsibility from
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You know, that is the luxury of a victim narrative.
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And then the final group is the accelerationist group.
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So would you argue that in the scenario of the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, the
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Christians, the more hardline Christians, were the adapting to the future facet and that,
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Yes, their iterations of hardline Christianity weren't like something that had existed before.
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They were aggressively experimenting with new ways of doing things and new ways of structuring
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So what you're saying then is, to a certain extent, civilizational collapse can be averted,
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but it will still look like civilizational collapse because that which existed before and which was not
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working, obviously, does cease to exist and something fairly violently different is going to take its
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Yeah, well, I mean, it's about do you accept that the world is changing or do you say we can recreate
00:11:02.420
Like the Romans that turned to the old pagan ways during periods of collapsing.
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So there was a big flourishing of cults during that time period.
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And when I say cults, I don't mean cults in the modern derogative sense of the word cults.
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I mean, like mystery cults and stuff like that.
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If you're a scholar, you'll know what I'm talking about.
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What matters is basically people were participating in old pagan rituals at larger and larger levels.
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Actually, and this was happening in the same areas that Christianity was spreading during
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So Christianity would spread a lot in the military during those time periods.
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And the primary competitor to Christianity was these spreading mystery cults that you also had
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So these groups were directly competing and often in similar sorts of environments.
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So if we look today, can we say, are there groups today that are responding to what I think of
00:12:03.660
as the beginnings of a civilizational collapse cycle?
00:12:08.740
You know, this cycle has happened many times before.
00:12:10.500
And when we say like the goal of our organization, they go, what's the real goal of the perinatalist?
00:12:13.980
It's to ensure that the next civilization doesn't undergo that cycle again, that we create a
00:12:22.340
So what you're saying is actually an important thing to distinguish here, because what you're
00:12:25.720
saying is we do want today's civilization to collapse, but we want...
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But we would like the culture that springs out of the ashes of this collapsed civilization
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to not experience a subsequent collapse, correct?
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We've seen this cycle happen over and over again.
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So I think the other important thing to talk about here, though, is that most people would
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still see that as their doomsday scenario, because I think people are very attached to
00:13:07.540
Like West Roman Empire no longer existing equals bad situation.
00:13:14.800
We also see this in a discussion of, you know, we talk a lot about selecting embryos for
00:13:21.860
We talk about with technology over time, we're selecting very aggressively for certain
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in a way that it could shift certain populations, you know, very significantly along certain
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And people respond to that often by saying like, oh, this would be a really bad thing.
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It could, you know, some sort of speciation event.
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And our response to that is, well, you know, if it's better, if it's the next step, if it's
00:13:53.420
But I think most people see that as a bad thing.
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So they wouldn't even see a very adaptive response to civilizational collapse worth it,
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because all they care about is, is my current civilization going to disappear?
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If so, okay, well, then I'm going to mope about it.
00:14:09.500
Well, most civilizations, most iterations of humans, you know, they view anything that's
00:14:18.900
They'll say, if it's not my current people, if it's not this current civilizational structure,
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And it's the same way with how they see people.
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If they're different in any way from me, then they're not really people.
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That is, I mean, that's literally the position that a lot of our detractors take, where they're
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like, well, if you're doing any sort of gene selection or something like that, it could
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lead to something that's different from us, and therefore not deserving of human rights
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And I, you know, that's really, that's just the way people have always been.
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What's fortunate is those people usually get quashed in history.
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People who are afraid of change just aren't relevant in this great cycle.
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They may have the foresight to see a collapse coming, but their solutions are pointless
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to the extent that they're not really worth us concerning ourselves with.
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And we can see this playing out in the world today.
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So you look at one of the countries, like if we're talking about fertility collapse as a
00:15:18.420
sign of like things just aren't working, you know, one of the places where you see this
00:15:30.440
In fact, that is what is instigating the fertility collapse in South Korea, is the world is changing.
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And then these women who have gone into the workplace and who now have to get educated
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so that their economy can like barely compete with the world economy, where everyone else
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has doubled the number of workers through putting women into the workplace.
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Well, they're still expected to serve a traditional woman's role in the family.
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They're still expected to do basically all of the housework, all of the cleaning, all of
00:16:05.920
And then in addition to that, you have this really strict model of what a family is, you
00:16:10.640
And in Korea, it is really, really difficult up until recently to have a kid if you're not
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This is a huge group of people that just aren't having kids.
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And yes, like statistically right now in the U.S., it is true throughout the world.
00:16:26.780
You are better off if you're from a two-parent household.
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Is that to say that through social experimentation, we can't come to social technologies that create
00:16:35.340
alternatives to that, that are equally efficacious or more efficacious?
00:16:42.340
So one of the statistics here that suggests this for me is that if you look at single
00:16:47.340
male parents versus single female parents, single male parents just do astronomically better,
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like the kids end up just doing way, way, way, way better, almost to the extent that they're
00:16:57.500
not really doing that much worse than two-parent families.
00:17:02.240
My guess is that what you're really seeing there is single male parents, it's usually
00:17:08.640
the woman died, or it's much more likely that the woman died or disappeared due to some
00:17:13.920
exogenous factor, whereas single female factors, it's much more likely a divorce because women
00:17:24.640
It's if the other spouse is still alive, well, the woman's probably going to win custody,
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except in like an extreme, extreme case scenario.
00:17:32.160
So what you're filtering out is people who have failed relationships, right?
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And of course, those people are going to be worse at being parents.
00:17:38.640
So what this says to me is it's more the type of people who opt into single parenthood who
00:17:45.720
It's not that single parenthood intrinsically does worse at raising kids if you were able
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Now, of course, we're not experimenting with it, so whatever.
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But then other things in South Korea, you know, there's a lot of, you know, any sort
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of nonstandard social structure, like gay families and stuff like that.
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They're not having kids in South Korea because there's this, again, conservatism against that.
00:18:06.400
So I think with conservatism, what you see is we have dropped many traditions that are
00:18:15.320
And, you know, we do identify and are largely conservative.
00:18:19.380
However, I think that within the conservative movement, there are two factions.
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There's the traditionalist faction, which is to say, let's just go back to the way things
00:18:27.360
And then there's the other faction that says, you know, this progressive super virus has
00:18:32.680
Yet we need to we need to learn from tradition.
00:18:35.500
We need to harvest truths from tradition, which can help us through this situation while also
00:18:42.900
understanding that people who blindly cling to traditionalism are likely going to be as
00:18:47.220
swept away by that sands of time as the extremist progressive mind virus zombies.
00:18:53.060
So what I'm getting is basically you can't turn back time, remove technology, not really.
00:19:03.900
I mean, if you you can try, but there will always be some groups that continue to use it
00:19:09.620
So there there is no option to go back to full pure traditionalism, really, with some exceptions,
00:19:17.280
I suppose, like you could go Amish and find a niche that kind of works for you.
00:19:21.280
So that's symbiotic with society as it progresses.
00:19:34.100
So you have a lot of Catholic integralists within the Conservative Party and Catholic intellectuals
00:19:40.060
And a lot of them would say, well, we need to go back to, you know, no, no contraception,
00:19:45.200
no abortions, which, by the way, we're fairly against abortions.
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They want to go back to the way things used to be.
00:19:57.320
And yet we have seen countries that have imposed these.
00:20:00.600
You know, you can look at Malta, for example, some of the strictest anti-abortion laws in
00:20:04.820
the EU, and yet their fertility rates, like 1.2, when Romania banned, it was Romania, right,
00:20:14.580
So fertility rates went up for a very short period, but then they came crashing back down
00:20:19.120
again to the same fertility rates as everywhere else in the region.
00:20:23.620
And this is where it becomes scary, because humans, one of the social changes that we're
00:20:29.300
dealing with, is humans are becoming increasingly infertile.
00:20:33.020
And you can't outrun infertility with just having sex more often.
00:20:42.020
Not at the levels to which you're looking at a 50% reduction in sperm count over the past
00:20:46.900
Over that, you know, a 30% reduction in testosterone rates in, what, the last 20 years or something,
00:20:51.340
literally the feminization, the biological feminization of men in our society from endocrine
00:20:57.800
disruptors, which we can see in experiments, like the links of, I don't know the word here
00:21:04.660
But the point being is that even in like seven and eight-year-olds, you know, you see more
00:21:08.120
feminine play in males who were gestated and mothers who had a lot of these endocrine
00:21:15.260
So you can't just rely on these old systems to keep your fertility rates high.
00:21:20.120
Eventually, if the trends can trend you, which everything seems to indicate that they are
00:21:25.300
continuing, humans will become increasingly and increasingly infertile.
00:21:29.100
And the more you hold to IVF bad, you know, because with IVF you're losing access to some
00:21:35.000
embryos, the more you as a cultural unit are going to struggle against the cultural units that
00:21:42.920
are aggressively using IVF, one, to not only combat this fertility collapse, but also to
00:21:54.260
And we're likely, I mean, we were, how many kids we need to have?
00:22:03.620
Because everyone is done with the C-section again, through technology.
00:22:06.800
And so the, the, the, but that's something that we wouldn't be able to do.
00:22:10.500
I mean, we'd be ending the natural end of our fertility life cycle in the near future
00:22:14.880
if we were relying completely on biological reproduction.
00:22:18.060
But because we're able to use, you know, scientific assisted reproduction, we are able to expand
00:22:23.240
that window dramatically and expand the number of human lives that will get to be lived because
00:22:32.240
I, I, the, the, the analogy we always use with sort of the God thing is people are like,
00:22:38.840
And, and we say, well, you know, if, if God has a coop hit my kid, you know, I'm going
00:22:43.860
to do everything in my power to, and I think God wants me to do everything in my power to
00:22:48.560
try to pull the coop off my kid and get my kid to a hospital.
00:22:51.300
If God has a semi-truck hit my kid, God probably wanted that kid dead.
00:22:55.680
When God gives us the scientific technology to tackle these sorts of problems,
00:23:04.280
He knows we have access to this technology and he gave us access to this technology for
00:23:12.120
And that reason is the expectation that like trying to lift the coop off my kid and resuscitate
00:23:17.140
them and bring them to a hospital is he expects us to engage with it.
00:23:20.480
I mean, I respect cultures that take another angle to this, but I do worry for them because
00:23:25.860
I, I, I do not see how they continue to survive in a changing biological and social environment.
00:23:37.940
Like I am thinking about Mennonites in general, they managed to hold a fairly traditionalist
00:23:45.340
I don't think it was necessarily in reaction to predictions of civilizational collapse, but
00:23:51.900
still, when do you think, how do you think it's done well?
00:23:55.740
Traditionalism strictly outcompetes the urban monoculture.
00:24:02.020
And today the traditionalist groups, you know, you go back to Roman times, these groups that
00:24:07.220
were going back to the pagan ways and to these, these mystery cults, they were psychologically,
00:24:12.540
at least this is my read from the text, fertility rates, everything outcompeting these sort of
00:24:21.160
But they were themselves being outcompeted by the Christians.
00:24:25.260
So the answer is traditionalism is strictly better and you can see it.
00:24:31.280
You just see it whenever you're looking at the data.
00:24:33.540
There's a reason why conservatives since Pew started collecting data have been happier than
00:24:39.820
The, the progressive monoculture, the, the sort of mind virus that, that dominates our
00:24:46.400
urban centers in the world right now is astronomically worse than traditional approaches.
00:24:52.800
And we admire people who had the competency and the clarity to see this and, and return
00:24:59.000
to traditionalism, but we do worry that that strategy typically doesn't work out in the long
00:25:10.680
What's the, if you want to take a traditionalist approach to, you don't care about being represented
00:25:18.840
in this new version, this new cycle, what's the best way to tackle traditionalism?
00:25:28.020
I mean, the Amish groups have the highest fertility rates.
00:25:30.620
They probably have the highest rates of, you know, mental health.
00:25:32.960
So to fully isolate gap and disinterpreting, like either hold your own city state, isolate
00:25:42.560
Do not, do not engage in business with outsiders.
00:25:50.540
Just full on ear gapping is the best way to go.
00:25:54.020
That's the core trap of traditionalism is that it is more effective.
00:25:58.460
The more extreme you go with it and effectiveness increases linearly with how extreme you take
00:26:05.720
So you are always, so like, if you talk with like a Catholic traditionalist, right?
00:26:09.240
Like they're actually not that much of a traditionalist.
00:26:11.340
If they were more of a traditionalist, if they moved more like on the Amish side of the
00:26:14.760
spectrum, if they disengaged with technology completely, if they went off the grid, they
00:26:20.180
If they would see a rise in fertility rates, they would see a rise in all of the things that
00:26:25.740
Okay, so what I, what I'm getting though, which I think is actually interesting is that
00:26:30.280
if you go full on traditionalist in the way that you can only really show dedication to
00:26:35.240
traditionalism, like truly be traditionalist to leave modern civilization, you're almost
00:26:41.360
doing the same thing that those who innovate even further and lean into new social technology
00:26:47.340
are doing, and that you are becoming something that isn't the current civilization, meaning
00:26:52.320
that maybe their guess is as good as yours as to what works.
00:26:56.480
Like, let's say that humans are moving in a technologically terminal direction.
00:27:01.780
It could be, let's use AGI as an example, right?
00:27:05.220
There's a scenario in which the technophilic people who totally get on board with AGI are
00:27:12.580
And the people who go full on Luddite and totally go offline and hide in little, you
00:27:17.100
know, enclaves hidden perhaps from AGI or like somehow managed to lean in it and avoid
00:27:23.160
it, like in some sort of battle star galactica.
00:27:28.440
Okay, well, let's then maybe use a non-AGI thing.
00:27:30.820
But like, let's say that there's some kind of just unhealthy social or technological innovation.
00:27:35.660
A completely era apt traditionalist group could be as roughly innovative and capable creating
00:27:43.840
the next cycle as one that leans into the change.
00:27:49.640
Because technology, social innovations, they are force multipliers to your efforts.
00:27:58.540
I would say that innovations in dating markets have been very well adaptive for humans.
00:28:10.820
See, this is the problem when people think about accelerationist cultures versus non-accelerationist
00:28:15.040
cultures is they look at them from the progressive of progressive cultures versus what they think
00:28:22.860
There are accelerationist conservative cultures and traditionalist conservative cultures.
00:28:27.100
So an example of an accelerationist conservative culture is the Mormons.
00:28:30.200
Things like dating wards, that's a very new invention.
00:28:37.600
The Mormon community is actually incredibly accelerationist in terms of their adaptions of
00:28:45.520
So yeah, I mean, this idea that, and their solutions, I think are better than any type of
00:28:53.860
dating solution that's ever existed in history.
00:28:56.060
I think dating wards, for example, are a better solution-
00:29:04.100
Are a better solution to dating than literally any theoretical solution that anyone has ever
00:29:14.940
And yet people would hear about singles wards and they'd be like, oh, that must be a cultural
00:29:20.820
And this is where things get really interesting to me.
00:29:26.100
The wider point I was making was that there are many social technologies that may just
00:29:30.520
be terminal, but people who lean into them may just not live because they get inherently
00:29:36.720
unhealthy because there's no adaptation for the processed foods and just a certain portion
00:29:45.300
of the population is going to end up obese and quite unhealthy when exposed to that environment.
00:29:49.780
So if your argument is certain things that this urban culture is spitting out are just
00:29:54.780
not working, like dating markets, there are many solutions to that.
00:29:59.240
One is more traditional dating markets, but there's a hundred other solutions to that.
00:30:03.240
And any of those solutions are going to be labeled as conservative extremist solutions.
00:30:07.360
That's just true because they deviate from the urban monoculture and therefore they are
00:30:14.520
And this is how we find ourselves on the same team often as the traditionalists.
00:30:18.440
Because from the perspective of the urban monoculture, if you try something different, if you fight
00:30:24.020
against them, if you try to develop new dating practices or anything like that, then you're
00:30:29.140
And I think to the point that you were, one of the points you were making earlier, you
00:30:33.360
said, well, why can't traditionalist group end up being the group that survives?
00:30:37.660
And the answer is, is because the effectiveness of traditionalism is linearly correlated with
00:30:45.600
how traditionalist you become, with groups like the Amish being the most effective forms
00:30:51.380
The problem is, is that technology bequeaths you with many advantages, whether they are health
00:31:00.680
advantages or just the advantage of one group having automatic weapons and the other group
00:31:07.660
Being able to produce, or one group having automated drones and the other group trying
00:31:15.480
You cannot fight a group that technologically leans in if you're a group that technologically
00:31:21.620
You can maybe like passively fight them for a bit, but at the end of the day, you always
00:31:28.120
And this is true with genetic technology as well.
00:31:30.520
You know, if one group is doing selection for stuff like IQ, within just a few generations,
00:31:35.120
there'll be multiple standard deviations higher than the other group.
00:31:39.220
And you know, you could argue, well, IQ isn't really measured.
00:31:42.820
You really think that a group that is like three standard deviations below another group
00:31:48.380
in IQ is going to be able to compete with them if they try to wipe them out or something?
00:31:54.340
And that's the truth of it is that it's the groups that embrace social change while also
00:32:01.660
realizing that the mechanisms of social change that are being grabbed onto by this sort of
00:32:08.860
urban monoculture, this mind virus, are just simply not functioning.
00:32:12.880
And so I think that we need to recognize that the traditionalists are our allies to an extent
00:32:18.460
for now, and they may be our allies in the long term, so long as they can adapt to mindsets
00:32:24.340
that aren't just like progressivism in disguise and waiting to wipe us out the moment they
00:32:30.040
But the great thing is, is that if we continue to technologically progress while they're not
00:32:35.280
technologically progressing, it doesn't matter.
00:32:41.480
So, I mean, in the end, traditionalism isn't, it doesn't run contrary to what you're saying
00:32:48.560
I mean, a traditionalist who, I think what many traditionalists really are going for is
00:32:53.600
they would rather see a future that supports values and they see a crumbling of their values,
00:32:59.120
not so much that they're afraid of new technologies.
00:33:00.980
And I think what really changed my mind from this conversation was your highlighting the Church
00:33:06.560
of Latter-day Saints singles wards as new innovation.
00:33:10.920
And that being a form of accelerationism, because it shows that you can have traditional values
00:33:18.580
and adopt new technology to support them, which I think is, in the end, what traditionalists
00:33:31.340
I mean, I think there's a fraction of traditionalists that kind of just like traditions that support
00:33:36.660
their values and they'd be willing to change them in the face of new conditions.
00:33:40.400
So it's kind of weird to me that that wouldn't be the case, to just keep doing something.
00:33:50.240
So you look at like, for example, the types of, one of the things we're building out right
00:33:54.640
now for our family and like a collection of family groups that we're a part of is, quote
00:34:00.300
Where people get together who are looking to marry in a single location for one weekend
00:34:07.120
And there are a number of parties hosted that have specific rules that make it easy to find
00:34:11.600
a partner and specific types of like social shaming and stuff like that that make it easy
00:34:15.920
All of this is a very conservative thing to do.
00:34:21.380
It is heavily inspired by something that happened traditionally, the London season.
00:34:28.760
However, to say that it's a recreation of the London season, it's just comical.
00:34:33.460
It's cosplay at best, but it's better than cosplay because what it is, is it's an innovation.
00:34:40.260
It's saying, okay, this is one way an older group used to solve this problem.
00:34:45.420
Can we, through internet, through flights, through other technologies that enable new approaches
00:34:51.080
and social technologies that we build, create an iteration of that that is more efficient
00:35:02.960
All accelerationists base their ideas on tradition because you're certainly not going to get good
00:35:10.800
You know, and you know me, when I'm looking for like holidays we do for our family, when
00:35:14.620
I'm looking for social institutions, when I'm looking for the way that we build our school
00:35:19.740
system, you know, I am looking into the history of the Catholic church.
00:35:22.980
I am looking into the history of the Mormon church.
00:35:26.440
I am looking into old traditionalist movements because that's where the interesting social
00:35:32.620
technologies that can be tweaked and innovated upon come from.
00:35:36.820
Being an accelerationist means you have an intense reverence for both studying the traditions
00:35:42.760
and engaging with the traditions while also believing they can be improved upon.
00:35:47.580
The thing that differentiates the traditionalists from the accelerationists is the traditionalists
00:35:55.240
I mean, do you think that most people see accelerationism that way?
00:35:57.960
Because I feel like accelerationism is anti-traditionalist.
00:36:03.560
I've not heard of this hybrid that you're describing.
00:36:14.140
It is not related ideologically to accelerationism.
00:36:22.000
I'd say if you're looking for one of the pure forms of accelerationism, that's Mormonism.
00:36:29.260
Calvinist ideology is often considered a very accelerationist ideology.
00:36:33.540
Ideologies that are accelerationist are often very strict and they do not look like...
00:36:38.380
Another example of an accelerationist ideology would likely be the Haradi, the Jewish community.
00:36:45.120
So they do a lot of things that to somebody who's not really that familiar with history
00:36:48.960
look historic because they deviate from cultural norms
00:36:54.020
and they deviate from cultural norms in a way that apes some historic things.
00:36:58.400
But really, most of their practices are quite new.
00:37:01.180
And most of their most successful practices are quite new.
00:37:05.760
Yeah, okay, you're giving me a more nuanced picture of what...
00:37:10.620
I mean, I previously viewed traditionalism and accelerationism very differently.
00:37:15.000
So I appreciate your clarifying your views on these things.
00:37:23.860
And I'm looking forward to our next conversation.