Based Camp - Girls Crave Teen Dystopias Because They Don't Live in One： Suffering is a Privilege

00:00:00.000 I think there may be this deep, subtle craving in the generation that really got into teen

00:00:04.340 dystopias because there's this desire to live this life of deprivation and desperation,

00:00:09.600 but more importantly, striving to survive.

00:00:12.840 Because given that opportunity, you do have motivation again.

00:00:17.040 You do have a reason to believe.

00:00:19.360 And I feel like there's this desire for that.

00:00:22.380 When we think about everything that our ancestors went through and everything that they sacrificed

00:00:26.860 to create a better world, because they did incrementally contribute to a better world.

00:00:31.960 No matter how small it may have been, they did contribute.

00:00:34.800 How can we complain about what we have?

00:00:36.660 Like if you're a cult and you're trying to break someone psychologically down,

00:00:40.480 that's what you target first is their pride in who they are to make them think that they're nothing

00:00:45.520 so that then you can brainwash them.

00:00:47.320 And it's a naturally evolved mechanism.

00:00:49.080 It's not like this was maliciously chosen by the left, but just the leftist traditions that did this

00:00:53.040 ended up recruiting more people than the ones that didn't.

00:00:55.700 And so now it's become the predominant strategy of the left within the educational system,

00:01:00.300 within everything like that.

00:01:01.220 Would you like to know more?

00:01:02.760 Hello, Simone. 0.69

00:01:04.420 I am very excited for this one.

00:01:06.840 We did an episode called Kids Used to Like Their Parents.

00:01:10.320 And it actually did fairly well.

00:01:11.920 I strongly suggest people watch it.

00:01:13.340 It is on a diary or autobiography I found of one of my ancestors.

00:01:18.520 And today we are going to be diving into the autobiography of one of Simone's ancestors.

00:01:24.380 And the things that it has taught us about our modern society.

00:01:29.920 So Simone, take it away.

00:01:32.420 Yeah, I've read it before, but not since I was a teen.

00:01:36.020 My grandmother wrote a book, an autobiography, or at least a portion.

00:01:41.200 She read about a portion of her life in a book called Memoirs of a French War Bride,

00:01:45.340 which had a limited publication release and doesn't, it's difficult to get, but it's actually

00:01:53.640 quite interesting because what she does is recounts her experience as a late teen.

00:01:59.840 So we'll say 18 to early twenties living in occupied Paris during World War II.

00:02:04.940 And it really has made me think differently about everything from teen dystopias to dating

00:02:13.140 in a way that I quite like.

00:02:15.900 So I thought it might be fun to talk about.

00:02:18.440 But the first thing that really did strike me was just how bad it was for people, even in

00:02:30.780 just occupied areas of a nation.

00:02:32.980 You know, this wasn't, this wasn't people, you know, just dealing with a new regime suddenly

00:02:39.620 coming in and being kind of mean.

00:02:41.380 It was people fleeing Paris in cars, running out of gas, and then driving along on roads

00:02:48.720 that were constantly being bombed by planes.

00:02:51.040 So my grandmother and her two parents and her aunt fled Paris in an attempt to not die

00:02:58.700 when the Nazis came in.

00:03:00.080 And they didn't know what they were going to do, but nearly died quite a few times because

00:03:04.020 Italians and Germans would bomb the roads, major roads leading out from Paris, even though 1.00

00:03:10.100 this was civilian traffic, which is insane.

00:03:13.520 I had no idea that that was happening.

00:03:15.940 But imagine just trying to leave your city and lying in ditches by the side of the road

00:03:22.020 and having cars be bombed.

00:03:23.400 At one point, a horse cart flipped over on top of her and she would have died.

00:03:26.600 Had she not been in a depression under the road, they were machine gunning civilians running

00:03:31.960 into wheat fields from the road.

00:03:34.140 So I just had forgotten how, because we mostly read in high school about frontline experience,

00:03:40.520 where we look, we see movies about what soldiers were experiencing when fighting in the war.

00:03:45.140 I don't think we realized what it was quite like for civilians.

00:03:48.420 What I really like about this, what it reminds me, both writing my own ancestors' accounts

00:03:54.600 of the period right before this in history and your ancestors' accounts of this period

00:03:58.760 in history, is how history in the U.S., like secular U.S. education, has become so focused

00:04:06.320 on the sins of, basically the sins of the white man.

00:04:10.280 Like that is what the history is these days.

00:04:12.620 It's just over and over again that, and then some stuff tied to frontline battles, but

00:04:18.920 very little on the average lifestyle of the average person going through many of these

00:04:26.300 events, whether they were civilians or like, what was it actually like to just live as a

00:04:30.260 normal person in the Old West, right?

00:04:32.240 Like that's what I was reading was in my family's account, her family's account.

00:04:36.000 What was it actually like to be a teenage civilian in Paris during the occupation?

00:04:44.620 Yeah, like what was it like to dance?

00:04:46.180 What was it like to like try to date?

00:04:47.840 We'll talk about that, like dancing was a really interesting thing.

00:04:50.000 Yeah, so in occupied France, you could not convene with more than two people on the street,

00:04:57.500 basically.

00:04:58.000 So any sort of social gathering for college students, which is what she was throughout this

00:05:02.320 period, was completely out of the question.

00:05:05.200 But that didn't stop anyone.

00:05:07.120 So what they would do is pack themselves into a small Parisian apartment and dance with a 0.81

00:05:12.780 record playing very softly.

00:05:14.560 And someone would wait at the door.

00:05:15.880 And if anyone heard footsteps, they would all just immediately freeze, turn off the record

00:05:19.820 and wait.

00:05:20.980 And of course, all the windows are blacked out.

00:05:22.820 All of the windows are closed.

00:05:24.240 No one has air conditioning.

00:05:25.320 It's typically like dead of heat in the summer. 0.98

00:05:27.360 So these people are sweating like pigs.

00:05:30.300 I don't know why you would bother dancing at all, but they really, really wanted to.

00:05:33.980 And they would sometimes, when she spent some time in the countryside outside Paris, there

00:05:38.720 would be barn dances that were similar.

00:05:40.240 Someone would be waiting outside and looking to see if any Germans were on patrol.

00:05:45.080 So to think that people, it's funny now that like people cannot be bothered to date at all.

00:05:50.540 And yet here are these people in occupied Germany risking their lives just so they could

00:05:56.860 dance.

00:05:57.520 No, we can't.

00:05:59.320 Now we're going in a totally different direction of hikigomori.

00:06:02.940 You know, people are not leaving their apartments.

00:06:05.000 The internet has changed a lot in that respect.

00:06:07.580 But what I also realized about dancing during this period as a, we'll say, sexual signalings,

00:06:15.520 sexual display, and social compatibility tool is way underrated.

00:06:20.740 And I didn't quite think about that until this book.

00:06:24.660 Even after the war, my grandmother ended up marrying a lieutenant in the U.S. Air Force

00:06:31.020 that she met while he was on a five-day leave in Paris.

00:06:35.540 And that is because the Red Cross would host these dances for soldiers and for local French

00:06:42.200 women who spoke English just to kind of, I don't know, boost morale or something. 1.00

00:06:46.320 And she described, because she would go to these mostly to smuggle home donuts because

00:06:51.800 she was really hungry and she liked donuts and they had them there, but she would go.

00:06:57.120 And the dancing, she described it as being in this almost clinical way of how she would

00:07:03.200 use a dance to judge potential partners.

00:07:06.380 So it was how did they approach you?

00:07:08.040 Did they smile?

00:07:09.340 Were they stuttering when they tried to ask you for a dance?

00:07:12.220 Once you started dancing, did they get clingy and want to spend the whole time with you?

00:07:16.000 Did they grab you too forcefully?

00:07:17.880 Did they even know how to dance?

00:07:19.440 Did they have the social graces to dance really well?

00:07:22.160 How did they smell?

00:07:23.280 I mean, it's interesting to me because it is a really good way of judging personality

00:07:29.600 and sexual compatibility without doing anything untoward.

00:07:33.240 You know what I mean?

00:07:34.020 Yeah, yeah.

00:07:34.820 Well, and it's used so much across traditional cultures.

00:07:37.720 And it's interesting how much we have lost the traditional dance as a partner sourcing mechanism

00:07:43.260 because, you know, you're not getting that with something like twerking or something like that.

00:07:47.240 No, no, no.

00:07:47.380 Yeah, dancing in a club, I don't think is quite the same thing.

00:07:50.720 But traditional line dancing and Kaylee and stuff like that is definitely of this variety of dance.

00:07:56.620 But there was another thing that – so one thing I just want to – you know, as she goes over these stories

00:08:02.780 about what her grandparents went through, like her grandfather also went through this horrible thing

00:08:06.460 where he was lost in the woods during this period and everyone on his plane died.

00:08:11.260 And we might do a separate video about that that would be like our version of a Mr. Bolin video.

00:08:15.000 But I might pitch it to Mr. Bolin because it sounded so much like a Mr. Bolin story when I heard it.

00:08:18.700 But – and I tried to elevate this with my family history – is people look to their parents' generation

00:08:26.120 and say, look at how hard we have it in this generation.

00:08:31.180 Oh, yeah.

00:08:32.080 It is so laughable.

00:08:34.220 When World War II was just our grandparents ago.

00:08:39.680 Yeah.

00:08:40.660 When all around the world – imagine what it would be like.

00:08:43.940 Like people are like, yeah, but that's not in the world today.

00:08:45.700 Imagine what it would be like to be in Haiti today, to be growing up there, to be a young girl there, right?

00:08:50.380 Yeah, yeah.

00:08:51.200 All around the world today, people are experiencing these things.

00:08:54.920 You, in the developed world, do not have a hard life.

00:08:59.100 You just don't.

00:09:00.520 No matter how hard you think your life is, it is a joke easy compared to your ancestors.

00:09:06.360 Well, this is what made me think completely differently about teen dystopia fiction is –

00:09:11.900 I remember reading it when I was younger. 0.92

00:09:13.820 I still sometimes read it because it's fluffy and ridiculous. 0.89

00:09:17.540 But reading it, I get this feeling of, wow, like what a crazy sci-fi world. 0.96

00:09:22.360 Could you ever imagine something so horrible as this?

00:09:26.060 You know, people spying on you all the time and, you know, the horror of that or being deprived.

00:09:32.640 Talk about the spying that happened, right?

00:09:34.420 Yeah, yeah.

00:09:35.220 So 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.

00:09:46.560 And you could never really tell until you could who was an informant.

00:09:51.700 So people were terrified to talk to each other.

00:09:53.960 People were terrified to be honest about anything except with their closest family members.

00:09:59.120 Because the bread would have like –

00:10:01.540 Yeah, well, of course, yeah.

00:10:02.900 The food rationing was terrible.

00:10:04.680 And the bread that was left for the French people, because everything was being sent to Germany, was the worst leftover.

00:10:12.840 It was mixed in with sawdust.

00:10:14.400 They would find rubber bands in it, bits of mouse. 0.63

00:10:16.800 It was just completely gross and disgusting.

00:10:19.100 They 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.

00:10:27.880 So, you know, my grandmother said that when people greeted each other, it was never, oh, how are you doing?

00:10:32.040 How's the weather?

00:10:32.620 It was, do you have enough coal to make dinner tonight?

00:10:34.600 Did you actually get your food ration today?

00:10:36.380 Because you'd be waiting in line for hours.

00:10:37.920 You had to have a dedicated family member for it, essentially.

00:10:39.960 But they tried to preserve their half pound of butter by making it float in a bowl of cold water because they didn't have a refrigerator.

00:10:50.580 It was just so desperate and terrible.

00:10:53.240 And yet, despite all this, everyone continued to work.

00:10:57.760 My grandmother went and got a law degree and political science degree at one of the major Parisian universities.

00:11:04.900 Everyone still had to live their lives and they came out so much better.

00:11:11.380 And I realized.

00:11:12.220 Women not working as well in this context. 0.99

00:11:15.420 Yeah.

00:11:15.760 Yeah.

00:11:16.920 Bizarre.

00:11:17.320 All women had jobs back then. 1.00

00:11:18.800 Like, I don't know what modern people.

00:11:20.580 One 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.

00:11:29.680 Yeah.

00:11:29.920 Yeah.

00:11:30.160 They did really well, apparently.

00:11:31.400 The 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.

00:11:39.380 But this is just the way things were historically.

00:11:41.320 There were not, like, women not working.

00:11:43.060 And this was, yeah, this was, like, 1940s, you know, late 1940s.

00:11:48.160 So this was right around Tradwise period.

00:11:52.380 You know, her mom had a job. 1.00

00:11:53.820 She had a job.

00:11:54.740 The sister who was living with them had a job. 0.95

00:11:56.520 Oh, no, the mom didn't have a job. 1.00

00:11:57.520 The mom's job was waiting in food lines, but you needed that back then. 0.99

00:11:59.960 But anyway, get back to the context of this as a teen dystopia.

00:12:03.840 Yeah.

00:12:04.200 So 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.

00:12:17.460 But 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.

00:12:29.020 She didn't feel nihilism.

00:12:31.740 She didn't feel malaise.

00:12:33.460 She 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.

00:12:45.800 And 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.

00:12:54.420 And even families that suffered from infertility seems like there was a lot of adoption taking place as well.

00:12:59.320 She keeps mentioning friends who had adopted kids.

00:13:02.180 And it strikes me that there's maybe this craving for hard...

00:13:06.420 I think there was one of these emotions, Simone, by the way?

00:13:08.780 Yeah, like war orphans.

00:13:09.720 But also, I can imagine a lot of people fighting in the war were exposed to so many really dangerous chemicals that they became infertile.

00:13:18.300 My 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.

00:13:24.460 But 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.

00:13:37.880 Because given that opportunity, you do have motivation again.

00:13:42.440 You do have a reason to believe.

00:13:44.720 And I feel like there's this desire for that, although we would never choose it.

00:13:49.260 No one ever wants these terrible things to happen.

00:13:51.880 Well, no, no, no.

00:13:53.180 Individually, they don't want to.

00:13:54.320 But I think that they fantasize about it more than I think you would admit, both women and men.

00:13:59.340 And it's interesting that the way that each group fantasizes about dystopia, I think, is often somewhat different.

00:14:06.200 With men, it is apocalyptic dystopia, where they are rebuilding society, which you often have in these apocalypse narratives. 0.75

00:14:13.420 Like fallout zombie stuff.

00:14:15.740 Yeah.

00:14:16.460 Yeah.

00:14:16.840 Whereas with women, it's like French occupation, right? 1.00

00:14:20.220 It's society is ordered.

00:14:22.240 It's unfair.

00:14:23.240 People are stratified based on their birth.

00:14:25.800 You know.

00:14:26.300 It's more Handmaid's Tale. 0.73

00:14:28.160 It's more Hunger Games, et cetera.

00:14:31.580 But these are both pretty horrifying.

00:14:33.300 What'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.

00:14:39.340 They were out fighting.

00:14:40.080 They were actually living a separate apocalypse.

00:14:42.160 And we forget that people recently went through these things and that, in a way, it made them better people.

00:14:50.200 It really seems to us.

00:14:51.600 And that her parents' generation was the first generation to genuinely live in a post-scarcity environment.

00:14:56.300 And by that, what I mean is, you know, not starving to death as like a major risk of everyone's life.

00:15:02.660 That is what destroyed them to an extent.

00:15:04.760 And this isn't to say that you can get around, you can get around this in this generation.

00:15:08.780 There are solutions.

00:15:10.040 It's called living with austerity, you know.

00:15:12.760 For a reason, though.

00:15:13.680 And 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?

00:15:21.660 You 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.

00:15:29.080 That is a life of deprivation.

00:15:31.680 But I also don't see them as being terribly satisfied or content people in the same way that I get this feeling from post-war boomers. 0.80

00:15:41.600 Not boomers, post-war greatest generation members. 0.96

00:15:45.360 Do you get that same feeling?

00:15:46.660 It's because they're not living with a meaningful purpose.

00:15:50.280 Their 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.

00:16:01.760 Like, I really don't mind if anything I look forward to eventually die.

00:16:05.540 It's the reward at the end of this thing.

00:16:07.620 Yeah, once I finish all the tasks that I have.

00:16:09.820 And keep in mind, we don't believe in a strict afterlife either.

00:16:11.840 I just don't really fear death.

00:16:13.960 Yet I am desperately excited to be alive.

00:16:16.300 I love my life.

00:16:17.420 It's awesome.

00:16:18.080 It is, you know, the greatest life I could imagine for myself.

00:16:22.860 And yet when I look at the people who fear death the most, they often do not seem to enjoy life.

00:16:28.840 A fear of death is, to me, a hope of finding some meaning in the future because you haven't found it yet.

00:16:37.860 You haven't, once you know how great life can be because you are fighting for something that matters and that means something to you,

00:16:47.200 when you know that your actions, you know, if everything works out, end up having an impact on society,

00:16:52.300 that is like, you know, then you're like, okay, this is it.

00:16:56.200 Like, I've done the good thing.

00:16:57.380 I just need to complete the good thing. 0.95

00:16:59.280 Then I get to die, you know? 0.92

00:17:01.200 Yeah.

00:17:01.500 And one, another thing I think about too is, aside from just this choosing deprivation and having a purpose thing,

00:17:09.040 now there's so much abundance around us that we don't even realize that I think we're so distracted by it that we can't get focused on it.

00:17:18.420 Yeah, like, so my grandmother, after meeting my grandfather, but before they got married,

00:17:26.540 traveled from Paris to the United States to kind of decide on whether they were going to get married and get engaged.

00:17:31.960 And they did.

00:17:33.720 She, upon arriving in New York, really splurges, goes crazy, hog wild, and gets some milk and two bananas and ate them both, Malcolm.

00:17:47.100 She ate both bananas.

00:17:49.280 And this to her was an insane thing.

00:17:51.060 She ate two bananas.

00:17:52.260 And 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.

00:18:04.040 And the level of luxury is so obscene in our society today.

00:18:11.340 And when we talk about austerity, the important thing about austerity, like, if you want to return to this date,

00:18:16.120 because I feel like when I read the happiness that I see these people had and the sense of purpose these people had,

00:18:22.220 and I look at somebody like my wife, she obviously has this, right?

00:18:26.740 Like, to me, and my interactions with her, it's something I don't see in society that much, but she obviously has this.

00:18:32.320 I feel that I have it, too, and I just don't see it in other people that much.

00:18:36.360 When people are like, why are you so excited every day?

00:18:37.940 Why are you?

00:18:38.260 And I'm like, because everything matters.

00:18:39.600 So you did, though, personally, you did experience starvation and deep deprivation and having your life at risk.

00:18:48.560 True.

00:18:49.600 You did.

00:18:49.900 Which was fortunate for me.

00:18:51.140 And I imposed it on myself.

00:18:52.860 I literally starved myself, so I also know what it's like to obsess over food.

00:18:57.780 Well, so there's two questions.

00:18:59.500 One is, you know, do you actually need to undergo something like this to hit one of these mindsets?

00:19:04.300 Or can you structure a belief system and moral framework around this in terms of how we raise our kids?

00:19:09.840 This is something we'll experiment with.

00:19:11.320 We'll engage, and we'll have future videos around this, around some form of opt-in to austerity or deprivation for the kids,

00:19:19.200 where 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,

00:19:29.860 but take ownership of that test themselves with the understanding of, look at society right now.

00:19:35.500 Like, these people never went through this.

00:19:37.340 You do not want to end up like one of the zombies, right?

00:19:40.160 That's the alternative, and the alternative is scary to kids because kids see it.

00:19:43.780 They see the nihilism that's pervading our world and consuming our reality.

00:19:48.280 Like, it reminds me of in the never-ending story, I don't know if you remember the nothing that's the villain in that,

00:19:55.680 the thing that consumes all creativity and happiness and joy, which is what's happening, this nihilism of our society.

00:20:03.260 People have begun to lose their hopes and forget their dreams.

00:20:09.580 The nothing grows stronger.

00:20:12.840 It's the emptiness that's left.

00:20:14.700 It is like a despair destroying this world.

00:20:18.280 And I have been trying to help it.

00:20:23.640 But why?

00:20:25.340 Because people who have no hopes are easy to control.

00:20:32.480 And whoever has the control has the power.

00:20:38.540 Is really eating this for kids.

00:20:40.940 And I see it in Gen Alpha.

00:20:42.260 And I see it in Gen Z. 0.78

00:20:43.900 So create some defense around that.

00:20:45.820 But the way that you maintain that as an individual is individual austerity.

00:20:50.120 And austerity is not something that can be imposed upon you.

00:20:52.580 Austerity is always living with less than what you have.

00:20:54.880 So even if you're poor, that's not austerity.

00:20:56.540 Austerity is choosing to live with less than even you are making because you are living for something bigger than yourself.

00:21:02.260 And a portion of your resources are going to see that goal.

00:21:05.480 Yeah, austerity is not austerity if it's not a choice.

00:21:07.720 Although here's the thing though, reconcile this.

00:21:12.200 Our ancestors didn't choose the austerity.

00:21:15.380 I mean, my grandmother certainly didn't choose to have to live with this level of deprivation.

00:21:19.640 After the war, she did.

00:21:21.600 That's true.

00:21:22.360 She continued.

00:21:23.280 Up until the very end of their lives, they would pick up.

00:21:25.820 She died and she had all this money, it turns out, saved up because she chose to live for something bigger than herself.

00:21:32.660 Yeah.

00:21:33.060 And I think that that's the thing.

00:21:35.620 When you wake up in the morning and you open your eyes, and I think that this is the biggest thing.

00:21:40.240 When you determine, people are like, how do I find purpose?

00:21:43.140 When pragmatics guide to life is totally dedicated to this topic without trying to push people in any specific direction.

00:21:48.680 But when you open your eyes in the morning and you're forcing yourself to get out of bed, what's doing that for you?

00:21:54.360 Is it just that you're going to lose your job?

00:21:57.900 Then what you are living for, like your morality is just keeping your job, barely staying alive, right?

00:22:04.260 That's pretty depressing.

00:22:05.380 Or 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?

00:22:18.000 You know, for us, that's what's been, we're like, yeah, and if we don't do this, it all falls apart.

00:22:21.880 And I'll be honest, it's not always hope that gets me up in the morning.

00:22:25.540 Sometimes 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.

00:22:38.040 And I will spend entire nights crying about it because I literally cannot help myself.

00:22:42.900 I think it's hormonal.

00:22:44.540 But that rage is enough.

00:22:46.060 And I think a lot of people were fueled by rage back then.

00:22:49.120 Very, very angry.

00:22:50.160 Well, they believe that they can do something about all of this.

00:22:52.880 I 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.

00:23:03.700 And then many who do believe they can do something like it's like Greta Thornburg.

00:23:08.080 I mean, our job is to demand solution, not to provide solutions.

00:23:13.280 And it's like, okay, that's really great.

00:23:14.940 Like that helps you with social status within your community, but it's not a thing of utility.

00:23:18.500 No, I think there are always going to be people like that in society.

00:23:21.640 And 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.

00:23:35.160 And then there were a bunch of other people who were just like, wow, this really sucks.

00:23:38.180 I guess I'm going to go along with it.

00:23:39.580 And then there were even a bunch of other people who were like, I'm going to become an informant.

00:23:43.340 I'm going to help the Germans. 0.95

00:23:44.700 So I think it's not that we have a complete dearth of that.

00:23:50.260 I think that maybe there are just fewer moral frameworks enabling people to come to the conclusion that they can make a difference now.

00:23:58.100 Well, I think it's this framing of them genuinely believing that their lives are hard.

00:24:03.440 Like they genuinely believe this, many people today.

00:24:06.500 Or that by just bitching about something, they're genuinely trying to make the world a better place. 0.98

00:24:10.980 Like that's not the way it works.

00:24:12.760 And so many people see this with our advocacy, that it comes across as very weird to them.

00:24:16.800 Like we never point out a problem we don't try to solve.

00:24:19.720 Like at the moment we mentioned.

00:24:21.220 Oh, we complain about plenty of stuff we're not working on.

00:24:23.520 No, no, no.

00:24:24.000 We're like, okay, fertility problems is an issue. 0.87

00:24:25.680 Okay, maybe we should try matchmaking our friends and see if we can come up with a sustainable system.

00:24:28.860 Okay, that didn't work.

00:24:29.820 Let's look at the other thing.

00:24:30.860 And then this can lead to weird solutions.

00:24:32.940 Like for us, one of the weird solutions is like, why are you guys trying to build like your own cultural framework?

00:24:37.900 Like, 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?

00:24:46.400 That was like, well, this could fix the problem.

00:24:51.280 And I'm like, yes, this could fix the problem.

00:24:52.840 And the same way when like Greta Thornburg is bitching about global warming, she comes up with theoretical policy solutions. 1.00

00:24:58.260 But they're never going to actually pass.

00:25:00.520 They can't actually solve the like, like nothing that she's saying that could realistically get into policy.

00:25:06.720 Yeah, well, pro-natalist arguing that, you know, everyone should just get $500,000.

00:25:11.460 It's like environmentalists or people fighting for sustainability saying everyone has to just stop eating meat right now.

00:25:17.620 Yeah, yeah.

00:25:18.580 It could happen.

00:25:19.660 It could happen.

00:25:20.800 It's not going to happen.

00:25:22.720 And so people are like, why have you done something as crazy as trying to create like this own culture for your family?

00:25:28.160 And it's like, look, I'm not saying that what we're doing is likely to succeed, okay?

00:25:33.720 But at least it's possible that it succeeds.

00:25:38.440 Of 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.

00:25:50.560 And it sounds crazy to other people because actually trying something and basing your solutions around what might actually work sounds crazy today.

00:26:01.100 Yeah.

00:26:01.660 But 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.

00:26:13.440 Yeah, no, and it's funny because I'd even read this book before as a teen and forgot so much of it.

00:26:20.680 So 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.

00:26:41.240 For her parents.

00:26:42.000 For her parents.

00:26:43.300 Oh, another one that, let me say, she goes into a bar at one point because what were they looking for?

00:26:48.020 They were looking for food, I think?

00:26:49.720 Yeah, 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.

00:27:08.140 And she found a, what she thought was a French soldier slumped over on the, like the bar of the cafe or restaurant.

00:27:17.480 And when she tapped him to ask him if anyone was there, he fell over and was clearly dead.

00:27:23.360 And she, that was her first time seeing a casualty from the war.

00:27:27.860 And she also never told her parents about that.

00:27:30.800 She just went back to her parents and said, yeah, it's closed.

00:27:34.880 No one's there.

00:27:35.480 Did she also have PTSD-like symptoms from that or something you mentioned?

00:27:41.100 No, that's from the air raids.

00:27:43.080 Every time, I mean, this is, I'm sure, so common for people who lived through the air raids.

00:27:47.200 Every 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.

00:28:00.580 Terrifying.

00:28:01.620 But I mean, it's, I don't even know if that's PTSD.

00:28:03.460 And she certainly didn't frame it that way.

00:28:05.560 She 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.

00:28:13.840 She 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.

00:28:21.360 But I think it also made her really grateful for what she had.

00:28:23.980 And 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.

00:28:35.700 No matter how small it may have been, they did contribute.

00:28:38.600 How can we complain about what we have?

00:28:40.300 Like 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.

00:28:51.700 Our 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.

00:29:00.680 Which 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.

00:29:13.740 And it's a naturally evolved mechanism.

00:29:15.480 It'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.

00:29:23.120 And so now it's become the predominant strategy of the left within the educational system, within everything like that.

00:29:27.520 But 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.

00:29:36.740 And 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.

00:29:54.080 And 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.

00:30:01.740 And 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.

00:30:16.160 And we can see when reading these older stories that this wasn't the way things were.

00:30:22.400 Like, this modern YouTuber who recently said, the reason we have such a psychological health problem, he says, there's not enough psychologists.

00:30:28.420 It's like, no!

00:30:30.180 It is that there are too many psychologists.

00:30:31.840 It's that when something bad happens to you, you don't just get over it.

00:30:37.940 But 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.

00:31:01.500 For 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.

00:31:17.160 And another person also parachuted out of the plane and landed near him.

00:31:21.960 First, because I think that this is important context.

00:31:24.600 Say what?

00:31:24.900 Okay, anyway, he landed in a place in the wilderness near where another person landed.

00:31:30.640 Both of them were caught in trees.

00:31:32.680 Both of them were suspended maybe 75 feet above the ground.

00:31:37.380 My 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.

00:31:51.680 And 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.

00:32:00.180 He said he was just too scared and too shocked.

00:32:02.580 But 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.

00:32:19.460 Now, what was that childhood?

00:32:21.120 He lived in Oklahoma during the Dust Bowl, during the Great Depression.

00:32:24.580 This 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.

00:32:39.200 There was nothing.

00:32:39.780 There was no food.

00:32:40.440 Everyone was starving.

00:32:41.740 So they left.

00:32:42.340 My grandfather's family was like, no, we're cool.

00:32:45.520 We're just going to stay.

00:32:47.400 It's fine.

00:32:48.380 Everything's fine.

00:32:49.160 And they were in this one-room farmhouse with, like, an outhouse out back.

00:32:52.340 It was very austere.

00:32:53.820 But these are people who chose the hard path intentionally.

00:32:56.100 So 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.

00:33:19.220 Yeah.

00:33:19.760 And 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.

00:33:24.800 And 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.

00:33:33.140 And 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.

00:33:42.380 You know, the guy who stayed in the tree ended up freezing to death.

00:33:45.420 Well, no, he ended up breaking his spine.

00:33:46.900 He was freezing to death, and then he cut the ropes, and he died in some way.

00:33:50.260 We don't know exactly how, but that's how they ended up finding him. 0.52

00:33:52.560 And 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.

00:33:59.020 He's like, come back, like, help me.

00:34:00.680 And the grandfather barely made it out of this situation alive.

00:34:03.720 If 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.

00:34:12.340 Though, to be fair, my grandfather spent several hours trying to get the guy down, trying to convince him to climb up the rope.

00:34:17.380 And then the guy was like, no, no, no, you should just go on without me and go get help and go rescue me.

00:34:22.420 So this was what the guy asked for initially.

00:34:24.720 I just need you to save me.

00:34:26.140 Yeah.

00:34:26.540 And then he burns the screens into the grandfather's memory when he's far away.

00:34:31.140 He can't go back at this point.

00:34:32.180 It's snowy.

00:34:32.700 It's terrible.

00:34:33.440 Anyway, so, and we haven't gone through, like, everything he went through to get to civilization after that.

00:34:38.180 It was crazy.

00:34:39.780 And he had gangrene, and he still insisted on going back out and looking for the guy.

00:34:43.540 But anyway, what was interesting about this is I think that we're sort of at this moment again, and everybody can ask themselves this.

00:34:50.120 You 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.

00:34:58.640 They're the guy who's, like, hanging from the tree, and is like, you just have to go save me.

00:35:03.160 You're just going to have to rescue me.

00:35:04.500 That Cartman move.

00:35:06.440 You just have to save me.

00:35:07.400 Yeah, go save me, and I'll wait here hanging in the tree.

00:35:11.820 And 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.

00:35:23.440 When 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.

00:35:34.100 Not like he made a rope from it or something.

00:35:36.600 Like, 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.

00:35:44.720 The other guy didn't even have to figure out how to escape.

00:35:46.920 He told the guy how to escape, and the guy still couldn't do it, right?

00:35:50.720 And that's sort of where we are in society. 0.98

00:35:52.460 We have come up with some fucking crazy solution for our family. 0.99

00:35:56.720 It may work, right? 0.96

00:35:58.100 I 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.

00:36:11.680 When society realizes, oh, shit, like, they're actually going to get out of this, you know, why didn't you save me?

00:36:18.840 Why didn't you come and do it for me? 0.98

00:36:21.080 Why didn't you tell me that this was how I needed to get out of this situation?

00:36:24.540 And it's like, we told you everything.

00:36:26.460 Like, you just hated us for it, and then yelled at us when we're walking away, and it's working, whatever we're doing.

00:36:33.120 And that's the way it always works, and that's the way it will work again within this generation.

00:36:37.280 It's just we went a generation without that, and because of that, people have become so weak.

00:36:42.940 Well, 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.

00:36:56.460 And 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.

00:37:07.160 And you can't just build those resources when the time comes.

00:37:09.640 I 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.

00:37:21.100 This is not something you can just suddenly become.

00:37:23.040 You don't just suddenly become a resilient person who can handle hardship and who can push forward in life.

00:37:29.280 And that's why genetic selection events matter.

00:37:31.660 I 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.

00:37:44.140 Like, having it in you to actually go out and do what's necessary to move everything forward is a lot.

00:37:52.280 And a lot of people are in that exact situation.

00:37:54.300 And I mean, I feel for the guy.

00:37:56.220 I can only imagine, you know, so many people are scared like that in society right now.

00:38:00.780 So 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.

00:38:11.880 And you are responsible for whether or not you and your group makes it out of this because we can't do it for you.

00:38:18.480 We can only alert you to the consequences of staying in the tree, which is you're going to freeze to death.

00:38:25.160 Yeah.

00:38:26.280 Hold on.

00:38:26.820 Give me a second, because is there anything else that I'd learned from her experiences?

00:38:32.660 No.

00:38:33.200 She was hypergamous, though. 1.00

00:38:34.960 She definitely said no to a bunch of people. 1.00

00:38:39.440 No, I mean, she's like very classist as well. 1.00

00:38:43.700 Talked down about some of that. 0.97

00:38:44.740 She 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.

00:38:58.760 She 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.

00:39:20.120 With a one-room farmhouse and an outhouse, post-depression in Oklahoma, rolling in it.

00:39:30.200 But, yeah, those are my big takeaways so far.

00:39:33.600 I 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.

00:39:39.320 So I can't wait to reread her experience.

00:39:42.540 I mean, she was an immigrant in France.

00:39:44.280 She wasn't from there.

00:39:45.040 Okay, can you come up here?

00:39:47.900 I'll put on speaker.

00:39:49.320 I'll leave it.

Based Camp - May 09, 2024

Girls Crave Teen Dystopias Because They Don't Live in One： Suffering is a Privilege

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