In this episode of Kids Used to Like Their Parents, we re diving into the autobiography of one of Simone s ancestors and the things it has taught us about our modern society. We re talking about the horrors of being a teenage civilian in occupied Paris during World War II.
00:09:35.220So in occupied France, a lot – and because resources were really scarce, a lot of people in every local neighborhood decided to become informants to the Germans.
00:09:46.560And you could never really tell until you could who was an informant.
00:09:51.700So people were terrified to talk to each other.
00:09:53.960People were terrified to be honest about anything except with their closest family members.
00:10:14.400They would find rubber bands in it, bits of mouse.
00:10:16.800It was just completely gross and disgusting.
00:10:19.100They were given half a pound of butter every month as a family to cook with, theoretically, although they didn't always have enough coal to cook with.
00:10:27.880So, you know, my grandmother said that when people greeted each other, it was never, oh, how are you doing?
00:11:18.800Like, I don't know what modern people.
00:11:20.580One of the things that you mentioned that I thought was really interesting is you were talking about butchers having this high class in this society because they could, like, smuggle meat beyond what was allotted to people.
00:11:31.400The butcher of the regular butcher's house and the man would do all the cutting and the woman would manage the books and the selling of the meat.
00:11:39.380But this is just the way things were historically.
00:11:41.320There were not, like, women not working.
00:11:43.060And this was, yeah, this was, like, 1940s, you know, late 1940s.
00:11:48.160So this was right around Tradwise period.
00:12:04.200So it made me realize when, you know, she also described the ebullience in Paris and how happy and childlike everyone became when the Allied forces retook the city and how relieved and excited people were.
00:12:17.460But also how she felt in moments when she thought she was going to die, when bombings were taking place or when she slow-mo knew that a horse cart was about to fall completely on top of her and probably kill her.
00:12:33.460She felt a desperate desire to survive and have a family and have kids and in some way moderately contribute to the improvement of society, which is so interesting to me.
00:12:45.800And then, of course, everyone got this huge boost and motivation after the war ended to go and do something and build the world and have kids and have a family.
00:12:54.420And even families that suffered from infertility seems like there was a lot of adoption taking place as well.
00:12:59.320She keeps mentioning friends who had adopted kids.
00:13:02.180And it strikes me that there's maybe this craving for hard...
00:13:06.420I think there was one of these emotions, Simone, by the way?
00:13:09.720But also, I can imagine a lot of people fighting in the war were exposed to so many really dangerous chemicals that they became infertile.
00:13:18.300My grandfather got every color of cancer on the rainbow, and I think a lot of it had to do with the stuff he was exposed to in the Air Force.
00:13:24.460But I think there may be this deep, subtle craving in the generation that really got into teen dystopias because there's this desire to live this life of deprivation and desperation, but more importantly, striving to survive.
00:13:37.880Because given that opportunity, you do have motivation again.
00:14:33.300What's interesting is that these were often the roles, because many of the women who were under these societies, like the men weren't there.
00:15:13.680And I think people have to live with austerity because we know a lot of, so a big group that lives with austerity are the people who are trying to live forever, right?
00:15:21.660You know, they have these very strict diets, they're on all these vitamins, they can't, you know, eat at certain times, they have to work out in this very specific way.
00:15:46.660It's because they're not living with a meaningful purpose.
00:15:50.280Their purpose is a fear of, yeah, so it's actually one of the funny things that we tweeted recently where I was like, it's funny that, and you and I have talked about this, neither one of us has a particularly acute fear of death.
00:16:01.760Like, I really don't mind if anything I look forward to eventually die.
00:16:05.540It's the reward at the end of this thing.
00:16:07.620Yeah, once I finish all the tasks that I have.
00:16:09.820And keep in mind, we don't believe in a strict afterlife either.
00:17:52.260And then after that, of course, she had terrible indigestion, but she could not help but indulge in this imported fruit that was just so luxurious.
00:18:04.040And the level of luxury is so obscene in our society today.
00:18:11.340And when we talk about austerity, the important thing about austerity, like, if you want to return to this date,
00:18:16.120because I feel like when I read the happiness that I see these people had and the sense of purpose these people had,
00:18:22.220and I look at somebody like my wife, she obviously has this, right?
00:18:26.740Like, to me, and my interactions with her, it's something I don't see in society that much, but she obviously has this.
00:18:32.320I feel that I have it, too, and I just don't see it in other people that much.
00:18:36.360When people are like, why are you so excited every day?
00:18:59.500One is, you know, do you actually need to undergo something like this to hit one of these mindsets?
00:19:04.300Or can you structure a belief system and moral framework around this in terms of how we raise our kids?
00:19:09.840This is something we'll experiment with.
00:19:11.320We'll engage, and we'll have future videos around this, around some form of opt-in to austerity or deprivation for the kids,
00:19:19.200where the kids enter some state as a coming-of-age ritual that is designed to genuinely allow them to test themselves in one of these really hard ways,
00:19:29.860but take ownership of that test themselves with the understanding of, look at society right now.
00:19:35.500Like, these people never went through this.
00:19:37.340You do not want to end up like one of the zombies, right?
00:19:40.160That's the alternative, and the alternative is scary to kids because kids see it.
00:19:43.780They see the nihilism that's pervading our world and consuming our reality.
00:19:48.280Like, it reminds me of in the never-ending story, I don't know if you remember the nothing that's the villain in that,
00:19:55.680the thing that consumes all creativity and happiness and joy, which is what's happening, this nihilism of our society.
00:20:03.260People have begun to lose their hopes and forget their dreams.
00:22:05.380Or is it because you believe the world's at like a turning point and you have taken it upon yourself to try to ensure that you can preserve the safety of all future humans and the vitality of the human species?
00:22:18.000You know, for us, that's what's been, we're like, yeah, and if we don't do this, it all falls apart.
00:22:21.880And I'll be honest, it's not always hope that gets me up in the morning.
00:22:25.540Sometimes it's rage because I, you know, you'll see the horrible things that are, that the people do to babies and young children and the injustice that children and babies throughout the world face.
00:22:38.040And I will spend entire nights crying about it because I literally cannot help myself.
00:22:50.160Well, they believe that they can do something about all of this.
00:22:52.880I mean, one of the things that society has tried to do to individuals is to remove this internal locus of control, where young people today really grow up believing they can't do anything.
00:23:03.700And then many who do believe they can do something like it's like Greta Thornburg.
00:23:08.080I mean, our job is to demand solution, not to provide solutions.
00:23:14.940Like that helps you with social status within your community, but it's not a thing of utility.
00:23:18.500No, I think there are always going to be people like that in society.
00:23:21.640And this showed up in my grandmother's book because she kept talking about all these various people, neighbors and friends and colleagues who joined the resistance movement, who are putting everything at risk, completely everything at risk, because they believed in doing it.
00:23:35.160And then there were a bunch of other people who were just like, wow, this really sucks.
00:23:38.180I guess I'm going to go along with it.
00:23:39.580And then there were even a bunch of other people who were like, I'm going to become an informant.
00:24:30.860And then this can lead to weird solutions.
00:24:32.940Like for us, one of the weird solutions is like, why are you guys trying to build like your own cultural framework?
00:24:37.900Like, doesn't that seem more insane than just advocating that the government gave half a million dollars a year to every prospective like marginal baby?
00:24:46.400That was like, well, this could fix the problem.
00:24:51.280And I'm like, yes, this could fix the problem.
00:24:52.840And the same way when like Greta Thornburg is bitching about global warming, she comes up with theoretical policy solutions.
00:24:58.260But they're never going to actually pass.
00:25:00.520They can't actually solve the like, like nothing that she's saying that could realistically get into policy.
00:25:06.720Yeah, well, pro-natalist arguing that, you know, everyone should just get $500,000.
00:25:11.460It's like environmentalists or people fighting for sustainability saying everyone has to just stop eating meat right now.
00:25:22.720And so people are like, why have you done something as crazy as trying to create like this own culture for your family?
00:25:28.160And it's like, look, I'm not saying that what we're doing is likely to succeed, okay?
00:25:33.720But at least it's possible that it succeeds.
00:25:38.440Of the various things that I can wake up and actually fight for every day, raising my kids in a way that sustainably works and replicates is one of the things I can strive for.
00:25:50.560And it sounds crazy to other people because actually trying something and basing your solutions around what might actually work sounds crazy today.
00:26:01.660But I think another thing that you said that I want to meditate on here is if people actually had the full history of all of their ancestors, they would never be acting in the way that they're acting today.
00:26:13.440Yeah, no, and it's funny because I'd even read this book before as a teen and forgot so much of it.
00:26:20.680So much of what my grandmother was amazed by, you know, bananas and what she'd gone through and that she, you know, even as a young woman would brave complete like social rejection just to try to smuggle donuts back from a Red Cross dance.
00:26:49.720Yeah, so when they were fleeing, right as the Nazis were coming into Paris, she and her family were driving and being bombed and then one night they tried to take shelter in an abandoned village and she walked into a cafe because her family was asking her to find a place where they could get food.
00:27:08.140And she found a, what she thought was a French soldier slumped over on the, like the bar of the cafe or restaurant.
00:27:17.480And when she tapped him to ask him if anyone was there, he fell over and was clearly dead.
00:27:23.360And she, that was her first time seeing a casualty from the war.
00:27:27.860And she also never told her parents about that.
00:27:30.800She just went back to her parents and said, yeah, it's closed.
00:27:43.080Every time, I mean, this is, I'm sure, so common for people who lived through the air raids.
00:27:47.200Every time she heard a firetruck or alarm, she thought about those nights when she'd have to constantly, you know, wake up, put on clothes, go out to the metro, wait there forever, hope that your home doesn't get bombed.
00:28:01.620But I mean, it's, I don't even know if that's PTSD.
00:28:03.460And she certainly didn't frame it that way.
00:28:05.560She just, she mentions how later in her life, like the one time she ever had to wait in a really, really, really long around the block line.
00:28:13.840She was reminded of waiting in food lines in Paris, where every time she heard a siren, she was reminded of the air raids and it just kind of took her back there.
00:28:21.360But I think it also made her really grateful for what she had.
00:28:23.980And to your point, yeah, when we, when we think about everything that our ancestors went through and everything that they sacrificed to create a better world, because they did incrementally contribute to a better world.
00:28:35.700No matter how small it may have been, they did contribute.
00:28:38.600How can we complain about what we have?
00:28:40.300Like everyone doing their thing for their society and their cultural group and having pride in that society and cultural group, which now the progressives specifically work so hard to destroy is our pride.
00:28:51.700Our pride in being Americans, our pride in whatever ethnicity we're a part of, our pride in whatever religion or cultural tradition we come from.
00:29:00.680Which is part of, like, if you're a cult and you're trying to break someone psychologically down, that's what you target first, is their pride in who they are, to make them think that they're nothing so that then you can brainwash them.
00:29:13.740And it's a naturally evolved mechanism.
00:29:15.480It's not like this was maliciously chosen by the left, but just the leftist traditions that did this, ended up recruiting more people than the ones that didn't.
00:29:23.120And so now it's become the predominant strategy of the left within the educational system, within everything like that.
00:29:27.520But also what I really liked about this story of the dead person in the bar is somebody today online, they would say, this is my source of trauma.
00:29:36.740And then they would use this to, like, if this is just one event of many that she went through, and they'd use this to justify, well, I can't do this, or this is why I can't go into bars, or this is why I have to be a dick at parties, or this is why, you know, they use it to justify all of the things that they wanted to do to begin with.
00:29:54.080And then they begin to dwell on the trauma, and the trauma becomes a larger and larger part of their identity, until it eats all of who they are.
00:30:01.740And they are nothing but trauma-wearing human skin, because it is so easy to do that when you live for nothing but self-comfort and self-affirmation, which is what they're taught to them for, because their mind isn't meant to work that way.
00:30:16.160And we can see when reading these older stories that this wasn't the way things were.
00:30:22.400Like, this modern YouTuber who recently said, the reason we have such a psychological health problem, he says, there's not enough psychologists.
00:30:30.180It is that there are too many psychologists.
00:30:31.840It's that when something bad happens to you, you don't just get over it.
00:30:37.940But I also, I do think, you know, now that I'm thinking more about what you're saying in terms of how we raise our own kids and what we can do, I'm thinking about different people that she brings up in her stories and her recountings of the war, and how actually different people's backgrounds and how they were raised and the class in which they were raised, but also the hardship with which they were raised, didn't really change their outcomes during and after the war.
00:31:01.500For example, my grandfather, like Malcolm alluded to, was in a plane crash and then abandoned or, well, stranded in the wilderness in Oregon during late November, and he had to figure out a way to get his way out and survive.
00:31:17.160And another person also parachuted out of the plane and landed near him.
00:31:21.960First, because I think that this is important context.
00:31:32.680Both of them were suspended maybe 75 feet above the ground.
00:31:37.380My grandfather, instead of just sitting there and not getting his way somehow out, climbed up one of the ropes of his parachutes that was attached to the tree, pulled his parachute out the other side, and then used a rope to shimmy down the tree.
00:31:51.680And then he tried to direct the same, well, his companion, I guess, the other guy who parachuted and landed near him to do the same thing, and he refused to.
00:32:00.180He said he was just too scared and too shocked.
00:32:02.580But then when I think about the pre-war childhood that my grandfather had, I think, oh, wait, this was an opt-in lifestyle that he had that made him the kind of person who would just kind of tough through a situation like that and just climb up the freaking tree and get down, even though it was really scary.
00:32:21.120He lived in Oklahoma during the Dust Bowl, during the Great Depression.
00:32:24.580This was a period where most farmers in the area just had this massive exodus that many of us as United States-based students, former students, read about in The Grapes of Wrath, where they just all left because it was a desert.
00:32:53.820But these are people who chose the hard path intentionally.
00:32:56.100So that makes me think that there actually is hope that when you create a family that opts in to hardship, that chooses the hard path and lives lives of opt-in, to your point, deprivation, when real shit hits the fan, like you're in a plane crash and you need to survive in the wilderness, you're going to have what it takes to actually do what you need to do.
00:33:19.760And I think what's really interesting is we talk in one of our tracks about, like, the trial of the Lotus Eaters and stuff like that.
00:33:24.800And in a way, we sort of are in a mass massacre of our species right now, of the weak within our species, the people who succumb to hedonism.
00:33:33.140And I think we forgot how recently, you know, before our parents' generation in the Second World War, we underwent a massive selection event as a species.
00:33:42.380You know, the guy who stayed in the tree ended up freezing to death.
00:33:45.420Well, no, he ended up breaking his spine.
00:33:46.900He was freezing to death, and then he cut the ropes, and he died in some way.
00:33:50.260We don't know exactly how, but that's how they ended up finding him.
00:33:52.560And when the grandfather was walking away, I mean, just as the ultimate dick move, he could hear the guy calling, like, he changed his mind.
00:34:00.680And the grandfather barely made it out of this situation alive.
00:34:03.720If he had taken the guy, it's actually to his best interest that the guy didn't go, because he almost certainly would have died had he been taking an injured guy and trying to get to safety.
00:34:12.340Though, to be fair, my grandfather spent several hours trying to get the guy down, trying to convince him to climb up the rope.
00:34:17.380And then the guy was like, no, no, no, you should just go on without me and go get help and go rescue me.
00:34:22.420So this was what the guy asked for initially.
00:34:39.780And he had gangrene, and he still insisted on going back out and looking for the guy.
00:34:43.540But anyway, what was interesting about this is I think that we're sort of at this moment again, and everybody can ask themselves this.
00:34:50.120You know, in this age of plenty, the people who are like, I just don't want to have kids, or I want to justify this hedonistic lifestyle I've chosen for myself.
00:34:58.640They're the guy who's, like, hanging from the tree, and is like, you just have to go save me.
00:35:03.160You're just going to have to rescue me.
00:35:07.400Yeah, go save me, and I'll wait here hanging in the tree.
00:35:11.820And the people who survive, the people who make this work, they're the people who do the thing that seems crazy, climb up the line to their parachute, take it, turn it around.
00:35:23.440When she said she made it into a shimmy, she means, like, he made a thing that attached to one hand, threw it around the tree, attached to the other hand, and then used it like a tree climber's do to climb down the tree.
00:35:34.100Not like he made a rope from it or something.
00:35:36.600Like, he had to invent a device 75 feet off the ground in a tree to get out of the tree, and then he gave that.
00:35:44.720The other guy didn't even have to figure out how to escape.
00:35:46.920He told the guy how to escape, and the guy still couldn't do it, right?
00:35:50.720And that's sort of where we are in society.
00:35:52.460We have come up with some fucking crazy solution for our family.
00:35:58.100I think it will, and we're just out there to a lot of people, and they're like, yeah, why don't you guys just save civilization, and I'll just stay here playing video games and eating cheese puffs, or worse, you know, the guy at the end.
00:36:11.680When society realizes, oh, shit, like, they're actually going to get out of this, you know, why didn't you save me?
00:36:21.080Why didn't you tell me that this was how I needed to get out of this situation?
00:36:24.540And it's like, we told you everything.
00:36:26.460Like, you just hated us for it, and then yelled at us when we're walking away, and it's working, whatever we're doing.
00:36:33.120And that's the way it always works, and that's the way it will work again within this generation.
00:36:37.280It's just we went a generation without that, and because of that, people have become so weak.
00:36:42.940Well, but I think the important takeaway, too, is that we have to remember that it is often hardship that I think creates the kind of people who have that mind.
00:36:56.460And I think if you're raised soft, or if you fail to, as an adult who was raised soft, to find a way to make yourself hard, you're not going to have those resources when the time comes.
00:37:07.160And you can't just build those resources when the time comes.
00:37:09.640I get the impression that the, you know, the man in the tree who now is like our poor scapegoater metaphorical whipping post for all of this, he really didn't have it in him to do that.
00:37:21.100This is not something you can just suddenly become.
00:37:23.040You don't just suddenly become a resilient person who can handle hardship and who can push forward in life.
00:37:31.660I mean, I think many people who realize the existential threat of prenatalism and falling fertility rates and the disappearance of their cultural group, they know that they need to do something about it, but they just don't have it in them.
00:37:44.140Like, having it in you to actually go out and do what's necessary to move everything forward is a lot.
00:37:52.280And a lot of people are in that exact situation.
00:37:56.220I can only imagine, you know, so many people are scared like that in society right now.
00:38:00.780So many people want to adopt the nihilism of the cold and someone else will figure this out instead of just being like, no, no matter what, it's always up to you to figure this out on your own.
00:38:11.880And you are responsible for whether or not you and your group makes it out of this because we can't do it for you.
00:38:18.480We can only alert you to the consequences of staying in the tree, which is you're going to freeze to death.
00:38:44.740She was like, well, he was, you know, very nice for a farm boy, but, you know, or like she refused to marry this one guy because he was probably too dumb for her and also too bourgeois.
00:38:58.760She didn't want to marry someone who was middle class, which is funny because I think when she met my grandfather and heard that, you know, his family had a farm in Oklahoma, she assumed that that meant that he was a landowner, like in Europe, which means something very different from being an Okie with a farm.
00:39:20.120With a one-room farmhouse and an outhouse, post-depression in Oklahoma, rolling in it.
00:39:30.200But, yeah, those are my big takeaways so far.
00:39:33.600I am now going to get to the second part of the book, which is about her experience as a French war bride in the United States.
00:39:39.320So I can't wait to reread her experience.
00:39:42.540I mean, she was an immigrant in France.