Based Camp - Based Camp： Tradwives are a Progressive Conspiracy

00:00:00.000 this psyops campaign around trad wives. It's a fun aesthetic. And yes, it was a model that 0.53

00:00:07.020 was popular within certain classes of American society around the 1950s, but it was in the 1950s,

00:00:13.320 a fairly new, and it turns out short-lived social experiment. And that you're not actually going

00:00:20.120 back to any sort of a traditional model of family whenever you're atomizing the family.

00:00:25.780 Yeah. Well, and it's, it sounds to me like you're describing it also as the first step

00:00:31.920 in the atomization of everyone. Like first you separate out the corporate family into the nuclear

00:00:38.420 family, and then you just separate out the man and the woman. You just pick them off one by one. 0.52

00:00:43.340 We've gotten to a point where no one's even that incentivized to get married.

00:00:47.720 Would you like to know more? Hello, gorgeous.

00:00:50.600 Hello, Simone. It's wonderful to be here today. What are we talking about?

00:00:53.120 Trad wives. How would you define a trad wife?

00:00:57.360 A trad wife is a woman who attempts to emulate the 1950s ideal of a wife that we now see in sitcoms, 1.00

00:01:05.380 where you typically have a family dynamic in which a woman stays at home, takes care of the house in 0.99

00:01:13.580 terms of cleaning, in terms of gardening, everything like that, and child rearing. And the husband then 0.76

00:01:19.860 leaves the house to go to an office and be a breadwinner for the family.

00:01:25.320 This, of course, is a progressive scam. And let's talk about what I mean by it being a progressive

00:01:32.800 scam, because I think a lot of people can hear that. And they're like, no, this is definitely the

00:01:37.560 way things used to be. And they are right. For a specific, very constrained geographic group,

00:01:44.640 it was a common way of living. Specifically, upper middle class to upper class Americans

00:01:52.620 from the 1920s to the 1930s to the 1970s to maybe the 1980s. So you're really dealing with a half

00:02:03.740 century period where this was common. And really only in the Americas at any sort of large level.

00:02:10.260 And the reason, so first, let's talk about why this was even possible in America.

00:02:16.620 During the economic wealth that came with the War II period in America, specifically,

00:02:23.200 America was just in a uniquely wealthy state vis-a-vis the rest of the world,

00:02:27.620 because most of the developed world had just had all their infrastructure basically destroyed and

00:02:31.440 was rebuilding themselves up again. And America had done a number of things during that period that

00:02:36.060 put it in a really good economic position, which means you could afford to have families living off

00:02:42.360 of one person's salary, even though this was not the traditional way of doing things. The traditional

00:02:47.480 way, so before the 1920s, the common marriage style, especially if you go before the 1880s,

00:02:54.520 right? So if you expand this time window a little bit, it was something like 80% of Americans were in

00:02:59.220 what is called the corporate marriage structure, which is very-

00:03:03.060 Corporate family. Yeah. Corporate family, which is very different from a nuclear family. 0.59

00:03:06.680 So how would you describe a corporate family, Simone?

00:03:09.740 A corporate family is typically a husband, wife, their children, and an extended family and employee

00:03:16.200 network. So in terms of the archetype of the corporate family in modern media-

00:03:20.820 It runs a company.

00:03:21.860 Yeah. Well, it runs some kind of business. Like they're all maybe working on a farm or a brewery or

00:03:26.460 a garment manufacturing business. It's basically a cottage industry business, a from-home business.

00:03:33.060 Everyone works on collectively, meaning that the kids are helping out probably as soon as they're

00:03:37.160 old enough. There are aunts and uncles that are involved. In fact, the very house from which we

00:03:41.780 are filming this podcast in different rooms was for five generations occupied by what could be

00:03:46.680 described as a corporate family. And we've met the family, like the youngest generation of that

00:03:51.780 family that used to live here. And they described the various types of people who lived here. And it was

00:03:56.700 always multiple generations. There would be a grandmother and grandfather living in the house,

00:04:02.040 or just one surviving grandmother. There would be aunts, often maiden aunts, who would also be

00:04:06.400 watching kids. There would be kids. And there would be additional, the occasional additional farmhand

00:04:11.220 that would also live and work in this house. 1.00

00:04:13.500 And live with the family. So the employees of these types of businesses were incorporated into

00:04:18.400 the family structure to an event.

00:04:19.580 Well, they were still employees though. So I think a really interesting and unexpected

00:04:23.180 place where you can see this play out is with the Addams family. Lurch is their butler, is an

00:04:28.960 employee of the family, but he's still very much a part of the family. He's not clearly treated like

00:04:33.680 staff in the show. And you can see that very clearly.

00:04:37.620 Yeah. And I think that the reason why the Addams family chose to show that is because the family,

00:04:41.960 actually the house, the old Victorian style house that they were in was supposed to be considered

00:04:47.500 like terribly out of fashion at the time.

00:04:50.500 And out of date. Yeah. Just like the corporate family model.

00:04:53.660 During the time that the cartoon strip had come out, the original cartoon strip,

00:04:57.720 those Victorians, we now see them as spooky mansions, in part influenced largely by the Addams family,

00:05:02.920 but they were really just supposed to be like terribly out of touch with the current times.

00:05:07.940 To the extent that what was horrifying about them is that they did not bend the knee to current social

00:05:16.840 mores. Oh, you don't send your kids out to school? Oh, the husband doesn't go out and get a job? Oh, 0.80

00:05:22.440 you're not Susie Homemaker? 0.90

00:05:23.840 No, the husband works from home and helps raise the kids and has a loving relationship. Those things

00:05:28.720 within the Addams family were actually supposed to partially be what made them horrifying because they

00:05:34.080 so deviated from the social norms of the time. And I think that this is one of the disservices that

00:05:40.400 the current Addams family does with the family is what made the Munsters an interesting family is

00:05:45.600 they were supposed to- You mean the Addams family?

00:05:47.380 No, Munsters. Oh.

00:05:49.360 What made the Munsters an interesting family is that they were a family of monsters trying to live

00:05:56.340 like the average American family of the time. What made the Addams family horrifying is that they

00:06:02.700 were totally normal humans who lived so deviantly from traditional social values that it made them

00:06:12.060 monstrous and fit in among monsters. So what I think that shows you is how much society turned against

00:06:19.940 the model of the corporate family as soon as, in the 1920s, this is when it really became common,

00:06:24.560 which was wage labor. Wage labor where males could leave their houses and the ending of the 0.99

00:06:30.480 nuclear family happened when female wage labor started. So really it was a model that was created 0.87

00:06:35.120 with the advent of male wage labor with jobs that were prosperous and in a limited geographic region

00:06:42.020 where jobs prosperous to support an entire family on one salary existed. And then it ended with the

00:06:48.340 rise of female wage labor. But the reason I say it's a progressive conspiracy,

00:06:54.560 is because it was very socially forward thinking in its time period. The idea that a man would just

00:07:03.280 abandon his family like that was considered. And if you want to frame this in conservative

00:07:09.600 language, the first foot in the door with the people trying to destroy the traditional American 0.99

00:07:17.300 family happened when they got the men out of the house, when they left just the kids and the wife

00:07:26.920 alone, trying to handle this whole scenario without the guy there, that is when everything began to fall

00:07:32.960 apart. That is when the door was opened to the corrupting influences that led to the degradation of

00:07:39.960 the American family. I guess it's easier for outside forces, be it academia or the state or some other

00:07:48.260 influencer to start to own people's ideologies and lives when they become atomized, right?

00:07:53.580 Yeah. Well, they atomize the American family unit and this model was pushed by Hollywood,

00:07:59.140 by the elite. When you look and you say, didn't America used to be like this nuclear family? You're 0.70

00:08:05.100 pointing to leave it to beaver, right? Created by the Hollywood establishment. Where do you think

00:08:12.180 these things were coming from? Right? So even if you say it was in a conservative language, which we

00:08:17.380 are conservative, but I think sometimes our audience might not be as conservative as we are. It is in many

00:08:23.720 ways more nefarious than any sort of like dual earner model, which economically, there's just no realistic

00:08:31.700 way to support family without, for the vast majority of Americans, without a dual earner model. These

00:08:36.740 online influencers who are pushing like, oh, your average American can go back to this model of a

00:08:41.640 trad wife where you're surviving off of one income. I don't know where these people are living. You have 0.87

00:08:47.000 to be incredibly lucky to have that kind of an income. And even if you are that lucky, you are

00:08:53.940 severely limiting the number of kids you can have through doing that. One of the things that we say

00:08:59.020 that was really positive about COVID is it really unlocked work from home in a major context. Now

00:09:05.520 you're seeing some CEOs react negatively to this. I love it. They never tout out statistics. Like

00:09:10.780 we've actually run statistics at our companies. It's infinite. It's two X better to have somebody

00:09:15.300 working from home in terms of their- If they're an A player, if they are a B or C player, often they

00:09:20.340 become much worse. Right. But with work from home, we can have this model again, to some extent,

00:09:25.780 we can at least have the proliferation of it within the people who desire it from their family. Yes,

00:09:30.420 you might be taking a salary cut, but, you know, getting to spend all day working together

00:09:34.180 and on your various hustles. That is one thing about the gig economy. We talk about the gig economy

00:09:39.060 as if it's this totally new concept, but that's what cottage industries were. They were weird little

00:09:44.720 gig economies. They might not have been selling your tapestries and cakes on Etsy, but you were selling 0.90

00:09:51.760 them at the local market. And now we view these markets as like quaint places that traditionally

00:09:57.300 that was the Etsy and the Amazon store of our society. Well, but I think that's, what's really

00:10:01.980 encouraging. The pandemic was devastating and really hard for many people, but it also did,

00:10:07.360 I think, start to bring back the corporate family, bring back couples and families who worked

00:10:14.260 together and have become a little bit more sovereign as a result. And depending on how you look at it,

00:10:20.200 a lot of the way that it's framed in mainstream media is, oh my gosh, these people have to have

00:10:24.920 five jobs to scrape together. But also, oh my God, these people are not dependent on a sole source

00:10:32.520 of income at this point. If one of those shuts them down or something, they have other sources of

00:10:36.780 income. They are more able to raise kids at home. They're more able to have flexible schedules.

00:10:42.940 They are more able to begin building things that they actually own. Yes, people may start by like

00:10:48.720 working for Uber or delivering for HelloFresh or whatever it may be. But over time, we're seeing

00:10:53.960 more and more families create their own businesses, their own consultancies, their own design firms.

00:10:57.560 This is our social networks we're talking about. Yeah.

00:10:59.740 And we do live in sort of small town America. So we're not talking out our butts here. This is 0.82

00:11:04.280 definitely something we are seeing in our communities.

00:11:07.440 And this isn't even, so it's both people with like with only high school education and it's also people

00:11:12.120 with MBAs who are literally creating fix-it businesses because they're so lucrative.

00:11:16.280 So I think it's also really interesting in that this is very democratizing. Whereas when you look

00:11:21.780 at breadwinning type careers, that's also one of those things where there's like a lot of elitism,

00:11:27.460 a lot of classism, a lot of like education gatekeeping.

00:11:31.500 Because yeah, they had these systems where they would filter people based on their sort of class

00:11:35.840 status, which to an extent was signaled by the university you got your degree from. And now when

00:11:41.160 you are competing with people, my Stanford MBA doesn't mean a lot if I'm competing with somebody

00:11:45.980 who's just working on a company that they're building out of their home against me, right?

00:11:50.080 Because these home-based businesses succeed based on you having product market fit, you providing a

00:11:55.640 business, be it plumbing, fix-it, consultancy of some sort, whatever it might be, dog walking,

00:12:01.720 I don't care, that people want and need and it's a good service. You know, that does not depend

00:12:06.580 on your credentials. That depends on your ability to deliver and your ability to meet genuine demand.

00:12:12.400 And that's awesome. So it's really cool to see that we're moving away from atomization.

00:12:18.740 It's interesting that I think it's also part of what some might argue are like recessions or

00:12:24.140 civilizational decline, like all this stability that we thought that we had is disappearing.

00:12:29.560 But I think it's also really, people don't realize how unstable it is to have a stable job.

00:12:34.500 When you're your own boss, you can tell when things are getting bad, when you might need to

00:12:39.480 tighten your belt, and you can also have more control over how things go. Whereas when you're

00:12:44.820 working for a big company, you don't have control over how well or poorly it's run. And when you get

00:12:51.640 laid off, you often have no warning, there's no control, and all of your income depends on that

00:12:55.580 one business.

00:12:55.920 This is actually a really interesting thing that happened to us. So a lot of people could say,

00:13:00.500 well, it's really silly that both you and your husband have the same job, basically,

00:13:03.700 because we run the same job together.

00:13:05.060 Yeah, it's seen as very risky.

00:13:06.260 Going into the pandemic, we were running a chain of travel agencies, and we had to cut our own

00:13:09.760 salary to nothing for about a one and a half year period. And people could think that would be pretty

00:13:14.880 economically devastating to us. And it could have been, but I guess we just decided, okay, now we're

00:13:20.580 applying for new jobs. So we continue to run our existing company. And people were like, well,

00:13:25.340 we have like hundreds of employees at our company. And the last thing I would do is fire any employee to do

00:13:30.540 an economic downturn before cutting my own salary. And so we kept doing what we were doing in terms

00:13:35.860 of running the company for free, and then took on side hustles to try to pay for things and to

00:13:40.880 maintain our lifestyle. But that was something that we were able to do because we had already built a

00:13:46.760 cadence around working together. So yes, you are more economically vulnerable in a way in that you're

00:13:54.720 working together and your single source of income can fall off. But it does encourage you to build multiple

00:14:00.100 income streams in a way that it's because you're more efficient when you're working with somebody who you

00:14:05.300 really get along with, you can typically squeeze more work out of the two of you with less effort than you can

00:14:11.020 when you're like working on a group project with students you don't really like. And that was always my

00:14:15.320 experience of working in a traditional office. It always felt like working on a group project with people I didn't

00:14:20.260 really like. And so I was incredibly inefficient. But when I was working with people who were family

00:14:24.680 to me, and I think that is why in corporate families, employees get treated more like family

00:14:29.780 is because that is the way that you sort of see your larger corporate unit. So when you're working

00:14:35.060 with people who are like family to you, you can squeeze more productivity out of the same time,

00:14:40.340 which then leads you to take on additional jobs. And working out of the home also allows you to do that.

00:14:46.420 You look at us, we technically run multiple projects, right?

00:14:51.140 Exactly.

00:14:51.900 But anyway, this is a really long tangent to the point that this psyops campaign around trad wives,

00:14:59.300 it's a fun aesthetic. And yes, it was a model that was popular within certain classes of American

00:15:04.460 society around the 1950s. But it was in the 1950s, a fairly new, and it turns out short lived social

00:15:12.960 experiment. And that you're not actually going back to any sort of a traditional model of family

00:15:18.460 whenever you're atomizing the family.

00:15:23.060 Yeah. Well, and it sounds to me like you're describing it also as the first step in the

00:15:27.940 atomization of everyone. Like, first, you separate out the corporate family into the nuclear family. 0.84

00:15:34.940 And then you just separate out the man and the woman. 0.80

00:15:37.800 You just pick them off one by one.

00:15:38.900 We've gotten to a point where no one's even that incentivized to get married. Rates of sex are

00:15:45.000 plummeting. All sorts of things are shifting. And now we're seeing probably an unprecedented rate

00:15:50.760 of unpaired people with no kids.

00:15:53.580 That's definitely another podcast, right?

00:15:55.540 Yeah.

00:15:56.180 Why have relation markets failed?

00:15:58.240 I wonder if we do see like more close to some kind of civilizational collapse where

00:16:05.220 unemployment reaches 80%. Do you think that we might actually see

00:16:10.320 oddly a necessity-based return to corporate family-style marriages?

00:16:17.160 I think one of the reasons why people got married a long time ago wasn't because they were seeking

00:16:21.520 sexual or romantic partnership. It was because they needed financial security, that they needed

00:16:28.500 someone to work on a business with, to have that security, kind of like share resources.

00:16:34.920 And I wonder if we're just going to see more of that if we ever hit as a society rougher times,

00:16:41.320 like more people, maybe not even romantically involved in the beginning, but perhaps over time

00:16:46.500 as they sort of grow together and have aligned incentives, forming corporate families and

00:16:51.360 ultimately finding a lot of satisfaction there. Who knows what we could expect?

00:16:54.560 I hope that's the direction we're going. Because I love being in a relationship with

00:16:59.760 you and you. Am I thrilled with... I mean, I do want to proselytize this marriage structure

00:17:06.460 because I think it works very effectively for the other families we know who have adopted

00:17:10.940 it. And it is increasing. And so I think a lot of young people, when we talk to young

00:17:16.060 men, a lot of them feel like they just, they don't have a shot because it is a lot on a young

00:17:20.280 man to say, go out there and earn everything for family. And that's the only way-

00:17:23.660 It feels unfair. It would breed resentment. Here's the thing. When a couple doesn't work

00:17:26.980 together, the man who's busting his ass all day working is going to come home and see 0.98

00:17:33.180 that his wife was just home all day. I don't know, like cleaning a little bit. It seems really 0.99

00:17:39.060 easy. Right. And then the wife is, hold on. Like I've been vomited on by an infant. The like 1.00

00:17:45.500 this huge mess was made. I'm bored. I'm not intellectually stimulated. So like she's stressed out.

00:17:51.020 She's not happy. She's actually working pretty hard. And then she is not appreciating the hard

00:17:56.760 work that her husband's doing. He's off at the office. He's off doing fun business meetings.

00:18:00.800 It creates a lot of resentment on both sides because they don't under the, each partner

00:18:05.480 doesn't understand each other, doesn't appreciate the other's work and also feels underappreciated.

00:18:10.200 And that just is a super toxic dynamic.

00:18:12.620 I couldn't agree more. And I appreciate you, Simone.

00:18:15.460 Simone. I appreciate you too, Malcolm.

00:18:17.900 But I appreciate you because I know the work you're doing. It's exactly the work I do. Like

00:18:20.840 the only big division of labor we have is you take kids before like one and a half. I take kids after

00:18:26.020 one and a half.

00:18:27.180 And that's true. We actually, so I think, and this is not to say that corporate families

00:18:32.180 are these communes where everyone does exactly the same thing. It's different percentages.

00:18:36.920 We do very gender dimorphic things.

00:18:39.320 Right. Yeah. I handle outside the house.

00:18:41.140 You handle the gardening, you fix everything. I, I clean everything inside the house. I typically

00:18:48.060 do most of the group or family cooking. I put away the dishes, et cetera.

00:18:52.240 And there's times a day where I'm almost always looking after the kids. And there's times a day

00:18:54.920 where you're looking after the kids, but always when the kids before like one, you're looking

00:18:59.020 after them.

00:18:59.520 Yeah. I have the really little ones and you have the bigger ones. They sort of apprentice under

00:19:02.820 you and they sort of get carried around by me all the time. So yeah, I mean, I think

00:19:07.140 that there, that to say that a corporate family is not trad in many ways is incorrect because

00:19:14.400 there is still tons of gender dimorphism. There are still tons of like tradition, traditional

00:19:19.560 emphasize that you shouldn't do a corporate family just because it's trad.

00:19:25.060 Oh yeah. Well, you shouldn't do anything just because it's trad.

00:19:27.480 Yeah. Yeah. You can look to traditional things for different social models that at one point

00:19:32.400 worked and that may work again, but doing something just because of the way it used to be done

00:19:39.380 can be a really bad model for how to live your life. But also I think broadly, we can all

00:19:46.060 agree that like whatever society is doing right now, isn't working.

00:19:49.660 Yeah. I'm just saying it's not Star Trek, you know, like.

00:19:52.780 No, but what I mean is it's just not working. I didn't say it's not working. You can look

00:19:56.260 to the past for some ways to fix it, but you likely want to tweak them to fit within a modern

00:20:00.220 social context and within your personal, social, and economic context. I love you. We do need

00:20:05.460 to get to the next podcast and we're not going to squeeze it in.

00:20:07.960 I love you so much, Malcolm. Looking forward to talking again.

00:20:11.800 All right. Love you.

Based Camp - June 14, 2023

Based Camp： Tradwives are a Progressive Conspiracy

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript