Based Camp - The Hope Crisis： Suicide's Connection to Demographic Collapse

00:00:00.460 Hello, Simone. I'm excited to talk with you right now. Today, we are going to talk about

00:00:06.660 the hope crisis as it relates to declining fertility rates, but also society more broadly.

00:00:15.440 And this was brought to me again. It's something I regularly see in a recent article in The Atlantic

00:00:20.480 called The Real Reason People Aren't Having Kids. It's a need that government subsidies and better

00:00:26.360 family policy can't necessarily address. And this really reminds me of, we were talking with

00:00:34.500 redeemed Zoomer not too long ago. And he was saying, when you talk to boomers about all the sadness in

00:00:43.140 this young generation right now, they'll reflexively be like, oh, it's phones. And if you talk to the

00:00:49.240 media, because it's very urban monoculture, very distributed as much cash as possible,

00:00:52.940 is always all economic situations. Now, you look at something like, oh, it's phones. And this is

00:00:59.220 pretty quick to disprove. The studies on this show generally that it does make up a portion of the

00:01:04.440 decrease in mental health in youth, but less than half. And that's some more generous studies.

00:01:10.760 For example, Amy O'Brien, a lead author at Oxford University, did a study of 350,000 participants

00:01:18.360 across the US and the UK on teen mental health use and technology. And she found that a teenager's

00:01:25.820 technology use or a teenager's social media use can only predict less than 1% in the variation of

00:01:32.980 their well-being, which is so small that it's surpassed by, for example, whether a teenager wore

00:01:39.180 glasses in school. You can look at economic situations. They don't explain it at all. Like,

00:01:45.360 they have a correlation to well-being. But if you look at the way that Americans live today versus

00:01:50.780 the way we lived 100 years ago, it is very clear that people in 100 years ago lived in significantly

00:01:56.860 more poverty than people today. But the statistical evidence is even more damning than that. It turns

00:02:02.280 out that upper class teens actually have worse mental health than, well, any other group. A study by

00:02:09.900 Sonia Luther at Columbia University's Teachers College found that adolescents reared in suburban

00:02:16.500 homes with an average family income of $120,000 report higher rates of depression, anxiety, and

00:02:23.660 substance abuse than any other socioeconomic group of young Americans today. And so those can sort of

00:02:29.820 be thrown out. And then if you talk about fertility more broadly, even some of the answers that we throw

00:02:35.220 out don't really explain everything, right? So we're often like, well, if you had more pride in

00:02:43.360 your identity, you would have higher fertility rates. And yet, I mean, does not Russia and Ukraine have

00:02:51.100 pride in their identity, right? I mean, clearly they do to motivate these wars, and yet their fertility

00:02:57.060 rates are desperately low. Or I may say, well, you need a strong religious system, right? But does not Iran, 0.90

00:03:03.320 a literal theocracy, have a strong religious system and strong religious pervert in their country, 0.77

00:03:07.840 and yet their fertility rates are abysmal. So what is it that, you know, when everything else that we

00:03:16.580 want to blame this on is out the window? And I think that everyone kind of internally knows

00:03:22.700 the hope crisis is real, because we aren't just dealing with a fertility crisis. We are also dealing

00:03:30.980 with an unaliving oneself crisis. We went into not recently, fairly, we've talked about in a few

00:03:36.660 episodes recently, that by recent CDC statistics, if you look at high schoolers in the United States,

00:03:42.520 one in 10 considered unaliving themselves, no, sorry, tried to unalive themselves on any given year.

00:03:48.140 And one in four girls made a plan to unalive themselves at any given year. Like the rates are

00:03:53.900 catastrophically high.

00:03:55.360 It's like American high schools have become the happening. And everyone's acting like it's totally

00:04:01.220 normal. But if you look at the other countries that have fertility rate problems,

00:04:29.020 like South Korea, they also have a really high unaliving oneself problem within the useful

00:04:34.920 generation. And they look at countries that have actually pretty robust fertility rates, like Israel,

00:04:41.500 the unaliving oneself rate in Israel is actually on the fairly low side. Interestingly, in Israel,

00:04:48.620 while in places like the US, the unaliving rate is going up, it's been going down in Israel. So here

00:04:53.520 I'm going to pull up a heat map by unaliving oneself rate. And what you'll notice is remember, I was

00:04:59.920 like, oh, like, so here I am showing a map. Now, I do not think that this explains everything.

00:05:06.540 But it does explain a little bit. Okay, so I'm saying that this is not like a definite like this

00:05:13.980 is this is where this is coming from. But it's definitely a big part of it. And when I talk to

00:05:19.500 young people, when we're talking about the massive shift we've seen recently, and I do need to clarify

00:05:24.180 how massive this shift is, because a lot of people when they believe like the UN statistics on how

00:05:29.160 quickly fertility is going to fall, those statistics are so laughably wrong. To give you an idea of how

00:05:35.240 laughably wrong when the UN is like, oh, we'll have a steady, continuous decline in the United States

00:05:40.640 that will then level off. First of all, it's like, why is it going to level off? But the second and more

00:05:45.680 important, right now, if you look at the expected fertility rate of women in the actual fertility 0.98

00:05:52.940 rate of women, so if you ask women, you know, in their early 20s, how many kids they expect to have,

00:05:57.400 and then you look at how many kids they have, it's typically around, like, I think it's like 20%

00:06:02.620 lower, depending on what you're looking at, right? This study showed it to be 25% lower.

00:06:07.600 Now, if you today ask kids their expected fertility rate, you get something like over 50% of young

00:06:17.520 women saying they don't plan to have any kids at all. Sorry, it's worse than that. It's 57% of people 0.99

00:06:24.980 under the age of 50 was it being weighted towards the younger generation. This was not the case

00:06:31.160 historically. If you go to the previous generation, our generation, I think it was like 80% plan to have

00:06:36.320 kids. So what we can see from this is if this pattern holds, and I love it that a lot of the

00:06:42.400 data, they assume that now for this generation, the actual fertility rate is going to be above the

00:06:48.520 expected fertility rate. Well, for our generation and what we know from the past, the actual fertility

00:06:54.740 rate is almost always below the expected fertility rate, which means you're going to be seeing a

00:06:58.880 catastrophic crash here. But the thing is, is what is driving young women to decide that 0.57

00:07:06.300 they don't want to have kids. And when I talk to people, yes, there's some like urban monoculture

00:07:13.200 re like, oh, it's for the environment and stuff like that. But I really feel like this is a just

00:07:18.920 so story. I feel like the much bigger thing is, is they just don't have hope that the future is going

00:07:28.060 to be a place where they want humans living, or they want humans related to them to live. And you see

00:07:34.620 this very explicitly in the Korean fertility rate, when people talk to, you know, people in Korea,

00:07:42.180 because I've seen lots of these interviews, a lot of them are just like, yeah, but I don't want my

00:07:45.780 kid growing up in this environment. And when you have an environment where one in 10 kids is trying

00:07:50.380 to unalive themselves every year, like that obviously is a psychologically very damaging

00:07:54.900 environment. And to talk about the silliness of cash incentives, I'm gonna read a quote here from

00:07:59.120 the Atlantic piece, because I thought it was actually pretty good. Cash incentives and tax relief won't

00:08:03.360 persuade people to give up their lives. People will do that for God, for their families, or for

00:08:08.560 their future children. In other words, no amount of money or social support will inspire people to

00:08:13.660 have children, not unless there is some deeper certainty that doing so makes sense. And then the

00:08:19.700 God thing, another thing I'll put on the screen here, a breakdown of religiosity by demographic, i.e.

00:08:26.760 you know, millennials, Gen Z, zoomers, etc. And you'll see in Gen Alpha, it falls off a cliff,

00:08:31.960 which, and in Gen Z to an extent, which isn't captured in the mainstream demographics.

00:08:36.260 There's a lot of people who are like, oh, the younger generation is moving right, which I agree,

00:08:42.480 it is moving right. But it's not moving right towards the old religions. And this is a huge mistake

00:08:49.520 that a lot of religious people I know are making. They're like, oh, all the kids are turning back

00:08:53.000 to these old systems. And it's like, no, they're not. They are moving right in like a, okay,

00:08:59.340 the urban monoculture doesn't work. But they don't, the vast majority don't view you guys

00:09:05.180 particularly better than the urban monoculture. And the big problem that the small religious 1.00

00:09:11.460 renaissance that we're having right now has is that it's like almost all male. So the Gen Alpha 0.52

00:09:18.880 faction that is actually like, okay, I'm going to go ortho bro, I'm going to, you know, convert to

00:09:24.300 whatever. They're struggling because there's not an equivalent number of females making the same 1.00

00:09:28.900 switchover. And so they're not able to easily find partners. And this causes a pretty big problem

00:09:36.280 because then it solves nothing, even though they might be good fathers now, and they might be able

00:09:41.060 to motivate a high fertility rate. They don't have a partner to marry, so they don't end up having

00:09:45.740 kids. So I wonder what your thoughts are on this. How much do you think this is an epidemic of

00:09:53.720 hopelessness versus an epidemic of ennui? Because I get that the unaliving element of this implies that

00:10:02.820 it's more of a negative affectation aside from just a lack of feeling anything. But I also get the

00:10:07.840 impression that a lot of the low fertility stems not from deep unhappiness, though maybe there's a

00:10:15.540 lack of contentment that's pervasive, but rather a lack of meaning in general and a lack of desire

00:10:21.940 to do anything that's not necessarily actively miserable. I think you have a really good point

00:10:27.800 there. So I think the meaning crisis, as it's called, is a really good way to look at this. And

00:10:34.160 I think that you've laid this out. And this was actually the core point of our first book and our

00:10:38.440 shortest book, The Pragmatist's Guide to Life, is helping people develop a sense of meaning without

00:10:42.580 trying to push them in any one direction. Very different than the type of people we are today.

00:10:46.740 But one of the things I realized when I was writing that book is there just was no other tool like

00:10:53.280 that. And I think that that is part of what led to the meaning crisis. So it used to be, if you go back

00:10:57.660 to the 50s and the 60s in the United States, when you went to school, they would teach you what you

00:11:04.720 should live for. Now, it might be wrong, but they gave you a moral system. Then going into-

00:11:11.960 Well, they didn't just do that. They gave you a moral system. They told you how to live, how to

00:11:16.740 date, how to maintain your household, how to navigate in-laws, how to do all sorts of things.

00:11:21.220 We shared a culture that said, here's how to deal with life. And here's also what you do. And of course,

00:11:25.280 that includes getting a job, going to school.

00:11:28.800 No, I agree. But here, I'm just specifically in this point talking about the moral system.

00:11:32.260 That's all I'm talking about here. No, no, I'm talking about your ennui question and what I

00:11:36.440 think it comes from. And then in the 80s and 70s, they had like the satanic panic and stuff like

00:11:44.000 that. And what this caused was because there are different religious systems in the U.S.,

00:11:49.340 many of these conservative religious systems, yes, unfortunately, this problem started because

00:11:53.060 of conservative religious systems and not the progressives, began to say that schools couldn't

00:11:58.440 teach meaning. Because, you know, your Protestant evangelical might be afraid that the meaning

00:12:05.220 being taught was a little bit too Catholic. And the Catholic might think it was a little

00:12:10.140 too Protestant evangelical. And the Jew might have a problem with, you know, each of those. 0.66

00:12:14.700 And so schools were just like, well, we won't touch on questions like, why do I exist? What's the

00:12:21.780 purpose of my life? Why should I keep existing? Why does humanity have value? And then you go

00:12:29.980 forwards, you go forwards, and then it's the the atheists in the 90s who are like, oh, you can't

00:12:34.340 teach these systems. But then if you try to teach an atheist version, the Christians are like, oh, you 1.00

00:12:38.160 can't teach these systems. And during this whole time, intergenerationally meaning was still being

00:12:44.500 communicated to kids to some extent. But the system for that really broke down in the scaffolding and

00:12:50.100 the ways that we have to think about and address these questions completely broke down to the point

00:12:56.520 we're now in society when people are looking for meaning. And if you want to understand more on how

00:13:01.620 we think about this, you can look at our levels of thought video. They often look for it in an

00:13:06.020 aesthetic sense. So, you know, this is really what we did a video on. Oh, I'll put a title card here.

00:13:12.160 I forgot his name. But he was some like red pill influencer. And I remember before like major life

00:13:17.340 decisions, he'd be like, oh, what's the most masculine decision I can make in this moment?

00:13:21.900 Yeah. And to an extent, Andrew Tate does this as well with some of his philosophy.

00:13:25.860 An identity based objective function.

00:13:28.840 Well, it's not even I did. Yeah, it's like an aesthetic based objective function. It's,

00:13:33.920 it's what would somebody who is and you see this on certain parts of the left as well. I think parts

00:13:39.920 of the trans movement has gone in this direction, where they begin to make a major life decision

00:13:44.080 thinking, what decision would my gender identity make around this? But this isn't just a gender 0.98

00:13:49.780 thing, right? Like, you'll also see this in what kind of decision would a good person make in a

00:13:55.880 moment like this? Or what kind of decision would like a good crunchy hippie make in a moment like 0.62

00:14:00.700 this? And that these ethical systems have caught on at all shows how barren the landscape was and how

00:14:09.260 unsophisticated the world had become in terms of how we address questions of meaning.

00:14:16.260 And the first book I wrote, and I actually got it copyrighted. And I wrote it in high school,

00:14:20.860 never published it or anything. This title, Why Do Anything? Because that's when I had this

00:14:25.180 crisis, I was like, why should I do anything? Like, where is value in reality? When I mean,

00:14:33.900 like, why do anything? I mean, if I'm, you know, motivating going out of my house at the beginning of the

00:14:38.080 morning, or I'm, you know, choosing which college to get into, I need to be optimizing for something.

00:14:43.600 And I think a lot of people, they don't even think, what should I optimize for, right? Like,

00:14:48.200 they just think that that's not even a question that they're allowed to ask. Or when they answer

00:14:52.420 it, they answer it with very unsophisticated and unfulfilling answers, like, you know, my own

00:14:57.200 personal satisfaction, or maximizing positive emotions throughout a population, even though they're

00:15:03.220 just the things that led to our ancestors having the most surviving offspring, very

00:15:07.500 serendipitous thing to maximize. So, and I think most people know how faulty these logical systems

00:15:15.200 are. But they attempt to maximize them anyway, because they just don't have anything else. And

00:15:20.580 I think that when they, a lot of people, when they realize how silly it is, they're like, but those are

00:15:24.620 just the things that led to my ancestors having more babies, you know? And they don't have any good

00:15:29.060 alternatives. They don't have a framework for searching for alternatives. And then they hit this

00:15:32.400 ennui that you're talking about. And so now, if you're thinking about something like, okay,

00:15:36.480 should I have a child or not? Or should I go on living or not? And your life doesn't feel good,

00:15:42.680 right? Like you're experiencing en masse negative emotions. You're like, okay, well, because my life

00:15:48.520 is about how many positive emotions I can feel, and how many positive emotions I can give my children,

00:15:53.120 then it's clearly not worth living. What's really interesting about this is that the number of

00:16:01.060 positive emotions that somebody today should be feeling, when you look at the wealth they have

00:16:07.460 access to, when I say wealth, I mean all human knowledge at the touch of their fingers, not

00:16:12.600 really having to worry about starvation, not really having to worry about, you know, many of the things

00:16:17.500 that if you go 200 years ago, you know, you'd expect half your kids to die, right? But people back

00:16:23.440 then, it is clear from the writings, were much more mentally healthy, and were much more satisfied with

00:16:28.780 their lives, and likely experienced actually less unhappiness than someone today. So one,

00:16:33.960 they don't have a system that can motivate them continuing to live in the current unhappiness of

00:16:38.920 our culture. But two, they've adopted cultural systems that directly lead to this unhappiness.

00:16:47.360 And the cultural systems lead to this unhappiness for two reasons. One, the urban monoculture that we

00:16:52.820 talk about all the time, it sort of is completely built around removing in the moment negative

00:16:58.340 emotional stimuli. Think of trigger warnings and stuff like that, the Hays movement. But of course,

00:17:02.860 if you remove any in the moment negative emotional stimuli, you're going to become incredibly

00:17:07.620 sensitized to any negative stimuli, right? And then have these massive reactions to them,

00:17:13.320 because your body just isn't used to them and focuses on them as the core purpose of your

00:17:18.080 existence, like avoiding them as the core. So of course, you're going to quickly spiral out of

00:17:21.620 control the moment somebody like misgenders you, which should be like a non-issue for a human being,

00:17:26.260 right? But because you're so unused to negative emotional stimuli, you just have no system for

00:17:32.940 dealing with something like that. And it really does cause this spiral in deep unhappiness. But

00:17:37.920 then the second problem is just your sort of mental receptors and way of engaging with the world gets

00:17:43.820 totally fried. I often argue that the way that the urban monoculture teaches things like how we should

00:17:50.100 relate to pleasure and self-affirmament is like eating a bowl of sugar every morning instead of

00:17:56.340 cereal. Like just literally like sitting up to a table and pulling a bowl of sugar. Like this belief

00:18:01.700 that, well, you know, like even the idea, for example, we did an episode recently on PrEP, which is a drug

00:18:07.760 that you really only need to need if you are regularly going to orgies and sleeping with people who you

00:18:14.320 don't know well enough to know whether or not they have AIDS. Because if you're in a marriage and

00:18:18.820 you're on modern AIDS drugs, you will be something called U equals U, which means very low rates of

00:18:23.700 transmission. So it's like really like just an orgy drug. And the government, Obamacare mandated that 0.88

00:18:28.780 it's on all of our insurance plans and a ton of states in the United States like pay for it. And so you

00:18:33.500 look at something like that, like, like, like orgies are a human right in this government, which is kind

00:18:40.700 of wild. They're not considered like a lifestyle choice. They are considered like a literal human

00:18:45.520 right, because that's why the government has to fund it, right? Like if it was a lifestyle choice,

00:18:48.400 like having a nicer house or a nicer car or something like that, then the government would

00:18:52.080 be like, well, you know, obviously we don't, we're not going to upgrade you there. Or I want to take a

00:18:56.280 trip every year because it makes me feel better. It's like, so why is this different from those types

00:18:59.480 of things? It's different because it kind of is considered a human right to these groups.

00:19:03.620 These unemployed men have been having sex for several days. We're doing the only thing we can do. 0.96

00:19:08.260 We're trying to turn everyone gay so that there are no future humans present day America. Number 1.00

00:19:13.260 one. Yeah, America. We've entered this moment. We're going out and doing whatever makes you feel

00:19:18.880 good in the moment, whatever your basal emotions are telling you to do has increasingly become seen

00:19:24.740 as a human right in these groups. Well, at the same time being affirmed for whatever you want to

00:19:30.700 believe about yourself has also, I'll put on screen here because it was shared with me by one of our

00:19:35.120 fans. I just found it wild. Is there is a movement right now to try to normalize being a Therian and

00:19:43.160 to build surgical techniques to get people to align more with their, sorry, for people don't know,

00:19:49.840 furries are people who go to conferences for fun and have these fursonas, which are like these

00:19:54.820 pretend animal identities. Totally cool with that. Therians are people who think that they're actually 0.99

00:20:00.000 those animal identities in the same way that like a trans person thinks that they're actually a 0.85

00:20:04.680 different gender than the gender they were born. And, and I'm not saying that to diminish trans

00:20:09.380 people. I'm just saying that they literally would liken themselves to trans people. If you asked a 0.97

00:20:12.480 Therian in this, well, that's how far this has gone at this point that they're like, yeah, we need to

00:20:17.220 start developing surgeries. And, and this is how you could do a muscle graph to look more like a canine

00:20:22.800 and stuff. And I'll put those images on screen. Cause it's, it's really fascinating to me how thorough

00:20:26.960 they go on with this stuff. If you'd like to check out this organization yourself, you can go to

00:20:31.240 freedom of form.org and it is a nonprofit registered in the United States. Having registered nonprofits

00:20:38.700 before, I know that that means it is definitely not a joke because it's not easy to do. Also to

00:20:43.000 clarify our position on this stuff, it is not that we are, you know, anti Therian exactly. It's that we

00:20:50.660 are anti caring at all. The way your identity is perceived by other people. It just shouldn't be

00:21:00.100 important. You should have a higher purpose in life than affirming a specific identity. You want

00:21:06.360 to believe about yourself, likely some sort of consequentialist action on reality. For example,

00:21:13.260 saving a collapsing society, making humanity better, giving your kids a good life. And I,

00:21:19.960 and, and what we, what we are so against is the normalization of focusing first and foremost

00:21:28.340 within your life on how you are perceived by the world and how you perceive yourself. Because

00:21:35.880 neither of those things should matter at all, or like not more than like 0.5% of an individual's

00:21:44.160 mental effort. But when your entire life becomes about, people can be like, come on, mainstream,

00:21:49.500 culture is not obsessed with being able to affirm yourself, you know, with whatever you become,

00:21:55.500 being constantly affirmed for whoever you happen to be. And I'm like, then how common is the statement,

00:22:02.240 learn to love yourself, learn to be comfortable with yourself, learn to care for yourself. Whereas

00:22:10.820 within any traditional culture, they would have said, learn to become somebody worthy of loving,

00:22:15.380 you know, learn to become somebody that you can be proud of, you know, not learn, like manipulate

00:22:22.180 your own brain into affirming yourself, whatever. But these are like mainstream. These are like,

00:22:27.540 these are like, you go into like vanilla mom houses, right? And you'll see these on the walls.

00:22:32.900 What's your thoughts on this, Simone? Like, of course, to me, of course, this is going to lead to a

00:22:36.480 short circuiting of all these pathways and lead to constant depression and anxiety. And then because you

00:22:40.560 don't have any other moral system that can pull you out of this, you're also completely directionless.

00:22:45.740 Yeah. And I think this is pretty self, self explanatory and something we discuss a lot in our

00:22:52.240 materials and in our podcast as well. I am going to push back on your argument that

00:22:59.140 instructions on how to live and norms around what is done in life isn't relevant in a conversation about

00:23:07.780 meaning. And here's why people's explanation of meaning is often, and you've already alluded to

00:23:16.560 this earlier in our conversation, a just so story resulting from someone's lifestyle choices.

00:23:23.180 So you alluded to the person who that archetype of someone who says, I'm not having kids because

00:23:29.060 the environment is, is falling apart or, or humanity is in a terrible place right now, or

00:23:37.680 whatever, insert excuse. And I think that's a product of the way that they live and the culture

00:23:43.460 that they've surrounded themselves with. And if instead we were to give people the steps that lead

00:23:50.440 to a life of a different type of meaning, that they would come to a conclusion that gives them that

00:23:55.880 meaning. And that sometimes you have to surround people with the right set and costumes and co-stars

00:24:02.300 to have them as a character, have a hero's journey. That's meaningful. So in other words, I'm, I'm,

00:24:11.160 I'm adopting the dress for the job. You wish you had version of an objective function.

00:24:18.580 And I don't think that you're giving enough weight to the importance of showing people cultural norms

00:24:26.080 that lead to healthy outcomes. I can agree with this, but I think one of the dangers of this way

00:24:33.440 of thinking, and I was going to say reverse, there were two reasons is it's not just the urban

00:24:38.020 monocultures problem. Another problem is of the people who realize the, the disillusionment of the

00:24:46.800 urban monoculture, a number of them have turned to cargo cults. And we've talked about this in regards

00:24:52.380 to the trad wife phenomenon, but we should just remind you of what a cargo cult is for people who 0.99

00:24:57.740 might've forgotten. So in World War II, planes were active in the South Pacific and they would often

00:25:02.980 give food and supplies to the people of the region while they were operational in those areas.

00:25:08.900 After they left, the people sort of developed an almost religion around this time in the past when

00:25:14.340 there was more prosperity and they will build out of, you know, rocks and palm fronds and stuff like

00:25:19.420 that, um, runways for planes to land on and then build like fake radio sets and fake antenna and

00:25:26.000 talk into the fake radio sets to try to get the, the plan, do the, the words that they remember the

00:25:31.360 people saying the last time they saw them and dress up with like USA written on them and do marches.

00:25:37.280 And this is a cargo cult, right? And in a way the trad and light phenomenon, it is not, these people

00:25:43.820 didn't like look up how did wives actually behave normatively in the 1950s. What they did is 1.00

00:25:49.560 They're copying a caricature.

00:25:51.080 Yeah. They looked at, well, not just a caricature, they're cargoing, copying often ads and Hollywood

00:25:57.740 based media. It would be as ridiculous if a hundred years from now or something, somebody was trying to

00:26:05.420 live like a classic person from the, you know, 2024. And they based everything off of like ads,

00:26:14.680 right? Like Sears ads or something like that. Right? Like it's, it wasn't the way a huge portion

00:26:20.460 of the population was ever really living. And as such, it was never like an internally consistent

00:26:25.560 way of living. And if you're like, well, why was the media of the time motivated to manipulate

00:26:31.660 people to live a lifestyle that almost no one was actually living? Well, specifically it was

00:26:37.960 because this period of ads was right after World War II. During World War II, when all the men went

00:26:44.280 to war and the women started taking on lots of industrial jobs, women really began to normalize 1.00

00:26:50.460 to that. And so both government and big business, when the men came back to prevent a major economic

00:26:56.280 catastrophe, uh, needed to get these women out of the workplace that had just flooded it. 1.00

00:27:01.080 And so they created this image of, oh, you want to be a stay at home wife. That was the goal of all 1.00

00:27:07.600 of these ads. It was to counter a trend that was already happening. They were produced like this

00:27:15.520 specifically because this lifestyle was so rare. We've touched on this with trad wives. The bigger 1.00

00:27:21.100 problem for me is the religious cargo cults that I've been noticing popping up. Um, so you know, 1.00

00:27:27.680 earlier I talked about ortho bros and I think for a large portion of like the ortho bros, it's really

00:27:32.600 become a bit of a cargo cult about trying to ape the most religious looking of the Christian religions 1.00

00:27:39.720 in the most religious looking way. You know, they, a lot of people, when they return to one of the

00:27:46.600 traditional faith systems, what they do is they advertise, like they, they, they search among

00:27:52.840 them for the one they want by the one that aesthetically looks most to them, what their

00:27:58.240 sort of pop cultural memory of what a religion is supposed to look like. And so from modern 2024 pop

00:28:05.020 culture, you know, uh, orthodox Christians look more Christian or more like, you know, traditional-ish

00:28:11.440 than other Christians. They, they, they jumped to that, you know, without looking at the fertility 1.00

00:28:15.400 rates of that community without looking at the, which by the way are very, very low without

00:28:19.100 looking at, you know, okay, how many people who are joining this faith are actually getting

00:28:22.180 married or achieving any sort of outcome or anything like that. It's like, if I act out

00:28:26.720 this thing, I will get the benefits from this. When historically speaking, most forms of Christianity

00:28:33.440 that were in any way thriving and not in some sort of a dark age were what I call an active

00:28:39.460 theological conversation that people were actively and excitedly engaging in. You know, if you look

00:28:47.260 at, you know, what was happening in America during any of our great awakenings, that's what was

00:28:51.680 happening, right? We were constantly excited about what the newest religious ideas were, right? And I think

00:29:00.380 that they forget this in this cargo cult mindset that when these faiths, whether it's the orthodox

00:29:05.080 faith or the Catholic faith or one of the Protestant faiths or the Jewish faith has been in its moments

00:29:09.940 of most thriving, that's when it was in this active conversation about how it was going to progress

00:29:17.880 instead of what was right and what was wrong. And I don't mean this in a progressive sense of being

00:29:23.980 like, oh, these things don't change. I mentioned, you know, before when somebody says that, it's like, well,

00:29:28.360 I mean, do you consider that Catholics only started believing that life began that conception was Pope

00:29:33.200 Pius IX, you know, around 200 years ago. You look at like Thomas Aquinas or Augustus Pippa,

00:29:37.540 they didn't believe this. So if you hold to that Catholic belief, then you are okay with the church

00:29:41.860 continuing to evolve its beliefs. And should it not continue to evolve its beliefs from here?

00:29:47.420 If you are a Mormon, I mean, anyone who's actually like a Mormon and familiar with a Mormon faith must 0.99

00:29:51.760 know how quickly the active theological conversation used to move in Mormonism. And I think one of Mormonism's

00:29:58.420 core challenges right now is it moved from having a group of intelligent men in this active conversation

00:30:04.620 to being more and more just the current prophet, which removes the active conversation from the

00:30:11.020 table. But I think I see that coming back. But I think more broadly, we have to be wary of the cargo

00:30:16.940 cults of religion. Because when you do the cargo cults of religion and you think, I just act out X,

00:30:21.660 Y, and Z, like, you know, the old 1950s ads, and all of a sudden, the prosperity of the 1950s,

00:30:27.140 or the spiritual prosperity of the 1950s, will come back to me, you know, you'll be sorely

00:30:31.900 disappointed. And we've seen, there's been a lot of videos of, you know, trad wife to like despair

00:30:38.820 pipeline. And it makes a lot of sense, because they are entering these relationships, where now

00:30:45.600 divorce is common, and they're not fully considering this. And now the guys have five kids with him,

00:30:50.900 he got all the utility he wanted from them. They're old, they're not that attractive anymore.

00:30:54.260 He's made a lot of money. And he just divorces them and marries somebody younger. And they are

00:30:59.100 quite screwed. So like, how do you how do you protect against stuff like this? But anyway, 0.95

00:31:05.120 what are your thoughts? In general, I agree. But I just I think that giving those defaults to people

00:31:13.740 helps to get them there. You have to obviously you can't just give the costume and the set and the

00:31:19.320 surroundings and nothing else and assume that people are going to come to the right conclusion.

00:31:22.600 But it makes a huge freaking difference. And right now, I feel like people are concluding that

00:31:30.620 nothing matters, because they're set up, or either nothing matters, or literally, they're better off not

00:31:38.720 living, because they're set up in such a bad way, where how can they help but conclude that we have

00:31:45.540 people who think that they're never going to be able to own a house, they're never going to have

00:31:48.780 a meaningful career, they're in debt, they're in a desperate situation, they can't find a partner,

00:31:53.900 what else are they going to conclude? I think if we set people up for success, and if we gave them

00:31:58.800 better cultural defaults, that people would find more meaning more easily. Even right now, for example,

00:32:06.560 if we just gave people meaning, or if we just gave everyone the pragmatist guide to life and had

00:32:11.420 everyone truly and very carefully think for themselves what mattered, I think the problem

00:32:15.800 is that people would probably come to a very nihilistic and negative utilitarian conclusion

00:32:19.960 to a great extent, given where they have been placed, given the priors they've been given,

00:32:25.080 given the societal defaults that they're growing up with.

00:32:27.660 Yeah. Well, I mean, I guess that to me, this is why I think a lot of people wonder why we risk our

00:32:36.740 reputation on projects like technopuritanism. If you want to learn more, you can go to

00:32:41.120 technopuritan.com, or you can check out our track series on YouTube, which is sort of a religion

00:32:48.040 that we now believe, but we're also in the process of, not really a religion, it's more like a

00:32:53.080 Christian denomination, that we're in the process of fleshing out and building, and trying to determine

00:32:58.680 from going back to the original text, what do we think this part actually meant? What do we think

00:33:02.180 this part actually meant? And a lot of people can be like, why would you risk your reputations

00:33:06.340 on something like this, given all of the other important stuff that you're working on, like the

00:33:11.560 pronatalist advocacy? And the core answer is, is because I think that this is literally as core to

00:33:19.480 the pronatalist advocacy as anything can be, as core as the Collins Institute. If we can't find or engage

00:33:27.000 in an active theological conversation about how we find meaning in life, like our ancestors did,

00:33:33.200 we are pretty screwed, generationally speaking. And people are like, why can't you just go back to

00:33:41.360 one of the old traditions? And it's like the old traditions have shown more resistance

00:33:45.760 to the urban monoculture than other things. They have shown higher fertility rates,

00:33:53.000 but they're still losing. They're still losing, like, and losing hard. There's a reason why when you

00:34:00.580 look at the old religious systems, more of gen alpha is deconverting than gen Z and more of gen Z

00:34:05.380 is deconverting than millennials, right? Like you guys are on the losing side of a battle and you're

00:34:10.700 like, why don't you come join us? And it's like, Hey guys, why don't you come hang out at the Alamo?

00:34:16.000 Like, I know we're under siege, but you know, I think I got this. It's like, no, you are,

00:34:21.420 you are clearly in a bad situation right now, but I am encouraging you to maybe fortify differently or

00:34:28.460 get out of the Alamo because if the statistics continue in the way that they're moving right

00:34:33.760 now, you will be decimated by the time you get to the other side of this.

00:34:37.740 One piece of advice I may commit to the audience here is I get the impression that people from some

00:34:45.680 of these religious traditions think that they can instill confidence in the tradition from an outsider

00:34:52.420 by denying the problems that they're facing. And trust me, it really does the exact opposite.

00:35:01.300 The two faiths that are most common to do this are the Catholics and the Orthodox.

00:35:05.780 We're in this faith that don't really seem to have this problem at all. You're looking at groups like,

00:35:09.580 you know, Mormons and mainline Protestant groups. So like if I go to a Mormon and I'm like, wow,

00:35:14.580 you guys have a major deconversion problem right now. They're like, yeah, we do have a major

00:35:18.380 deconversion problem and here's how we might work on it. Or, you know, your fertility rates dropping

00:35:23.460 a lot. They're like, yeah, and here's some ideas I have for it. But often when I go to Catholic or

00:35:27.680 Orthodox groups about this, they'll be like, no, we don't. We don't have that problem. And I'm like,

00:35:32.560 well, I mean, here are the statistics. You do seem to have a massive fertility rate problem and

00:35:38.580 deconversion problem. And it's actually much bigger than the Mormon problem who are admitting this 0.88

00:35:44.520 problem. And they'll be like, ah, it's not a problem in our most devout groups. Don't worry about it.

00:35:48.380 And I'm like, well, I mean, even if that's true, you know, look at this statistic, look at this

00:35:53.820 statistic. The devoutness of your groups doesn't seem to correlate that highly with things like

00:36:00.080 their propensity to use plan B, even though that's a direct sin within the tradition.

00:36:04.400 Why aren't the more religious members using it at lower rates? Which we have a whole episode on.

00:36:08.960 You can check out our Catholic fertility rate episode. But I don't know. It is very interesting

00:36:13.460 to me how culturally different groups are and how they relate to problems. And I really fear this 1.00

00:36:19.080 denying that the problem exists strategy is going to be effective in a modern era at addressing it.

00:36:27.800 I guess that the assumption is like, I'm trying to figure out why these two groups, specifically the

00:36:33.460 hierarchical groups with large bureaucracies deny their problems at a much higher frequency than other

00:36:38.020 groups that I've seen. And I'm guessing it's because they have sort of a history of, well,

00:36:43.580 if there is really a major problem, then the upper echelons of the bureaucracy are going to recognize

00:36:48.900 it, come up with a solution and tell us what it is. And it's our job to just defend the bureaucracy's

00:36:56.620 honor. And we can best do that by denying that the problems exist, which is, which is why we're

00:37:02.340 working on this project and why we risk our reputation on this. But I think also a lot of people,

00:37:06.340 when they begin to engage in prenatalism, a lot of our ideas seem really stupid at first. 0.97

00:37:11.460 They're like, why don't they just do cash handouts? Why don't they just try to get cheaper housing? 0.96

00:37:14.380 Why don't they just do more generic religion? And then anybody who actually seriously engages

00:37:22.860 with the topic, and I've seen this evolution of people over time, where at first they think that

00:37:27.500 we're like crazy or extremists, and then they've been in the movement for like a year and they've

00:37:32.180 actually personally dove into all of the other stats and they're like, oh, I got, I get now why

00:37:38.540 you came to, you need to create an alternate education system and you need to build social

00:37:44.180 technologies of a religious variety to, that are either totally new or augmented versions of our

00:37:51.200 historic systems. Instead of just saying, well, we can go back to the way we used to do things

00:37:55.780 because it's clearly not working. And the cash handouts clearly aren't working. And the smaller

00:37:59.640 apartments clearly aren't working. And the, you know, I also think it's interesting. We

00:38:03.540 should do a different episode on this, but I'd also love to hear your sauce on this.

00:38:06.680 Why do you think as we become wealthier and wealthier as a society, when I say wealthier

00:38:11.700 and wealthier, people are like, no, look at how much this costs. Look at how much this costs.

00:38:15.080 And it's like, do you really think your life is harder than someone in the 1800s? Really?

00:38:20.180 Really? When we talk about that, why has society become so much less satisfied as it's gotten

00:38:26.000 so much wealthier? Do you think it's all downstream of the other things that we're talking about in this?

00:38:29.640 We only know the context in which we exist. We only can really compare our lives to where we stand

00:38:37.940 now. And we normalize to where we stand. So it's, I think it's not fair to expect someone to

00:38:47.580 consider their situation as though they had just stepped off the lifestyle of their ancestors,

00:38:58.360 if that makes sense. We're just not really wired to do that. We're wired to look at where we stand

00:39:04.740 vis-a-vis our peers, but not where we stand vis-a-vis our ancestors.

00:39:10.020 You know, that is where you get in social media, a bit of the downside, which is the peers that you

00:39:15.080 are being shown or the peers that the most other people are looking at.

00:39:18.180 Yeah. Instead of the average human, right? Which is kind of the peers that are near the top of our

00:39:23.840 society, which causes things like women to completely misjudge what the average male looks 0.52

00:39:28.200 like men to misjudge what the average female looks like people to misjudge, you know, what is real

00:39:33.780 expected wealth for them? What is real expected societal outcomes for them? So you might be right

00:39:39.260 there. I often have people like, be like, oh, you know, Simone is, is mid, but you guys really seem

00:39:46.840 to like each other. And I'm like, okay, dude, go to an airport, look around, see how long it takes

00:39:53.320 you before you find somebody who is over 30 and anywhere near Simone's level of attractiveness. 0.76

00:40:00.500 If you think she would know you're like, I think death initially in the top 1% of attractiveness

00:40:06.960 for your age range. Um, just if you guys, isn't he the best? No, because people don't judge by public

00:40:16.220 spaces. No, but that's, that's very true. It's in, and it is the top, not even 1%, but like 0.01% that

00:40:22.900 we're really primarily looking at on YouTube. And of course, not even that, but the top 0.01% with

00:40:30.300 a filter on with makeup, with the best possible camera angle, the best photo of 50. So it's not

00:40:38.000 great. This reminds me of a little experiment I ran with Simone once where you still didn't believe

00:40:42.640 me that I was like, no, that's just use. Like you pointed out a few people in an airport and you're

00:40:46.080 like, they were nearly as attractive as me. And I was like, Simone, that girl is like 17 or 18 years

00:40:53.980 old. And you're like, nah. So then later we were at a, an event where we had to go to like a,

00:40:59.240 a nightclub venue for like an industry event. So it had people of all different ages and everyone

00:41:04.620 going in there under age had to get an X on the back of their hand. Um, I said, look around the

00:41:09.080 room, Simone, and see anyone who you think is more attractive than you. I should point people out.

00:41:13.240 And then I'd walk around to an angle where I could see their hand and it was always an X. And I was

00:41:17.140 like, you misunderstand how much use. I mean, it is insane, especially in women, how much beauty is 1.00

00:41:24.900 not even beauty. It's just signs of youth. It's insane. It is completely insane.

00:41:30.280 It just is though often. And people completely missed this. And I am very defeatist about this

00:41:37.940 in an online environment because it causes people to make missed expectations, but also about their

00:41:41.580 life and trips. Like, okay, when you're, for example, judging how often you should take trips

00:41:46.200 online, people are going to disproportionately post when they're taking a trip because you always have

00:41:52.160 the trip album after the trip. That's where you have the camera. What are you going to take photos

00:41:55.300 of in your day-to-day life that you haven't already taken a photo of? So, and so people like create

00:42:00.520 these, these norms where like one of my cousins was like, well, you know, your kids won't be able

00:42:05.000 to go on trips because you're having so many of them. And it's like, yeah, but my ancestors didn't

00:42:09.140 go on trips, you know, like, and I'm denying a human the chance to live over that. And another thing

00:42:15.620 that they'll notice people like, no, like housing costs so much more these days. That's why. And I'm like,

00:42:20.520 well, you know, you could just choose to live with other people. And they're like, well, come on,

00:42:25.160 you can't raise kids in an environment like that. And I was like, remember the 1800s thing I noted

00:42:28.880 here, this house was in use during the 1800s, the ones that we live in. And it had like four or five

00:42:33.540 different families living in it back then. People used to live like sardines where I grew up

00:42:38.180 historically, which was with Dallas. You know, I hung out with a lot of recent Hispanic immigrants,

00:42:44.000 but they'd often have like three or four related families in very small houses.

00:42:52.640 This is a cultural expectation that you have created for yourself that doesn't really even

00:42:58.740 improve your quality of life that much. Sharing a house with other people really doesn't negatively

00:43:04.920 impact quality of life that much. I know that's a sin to say, but it really doesn't.

00:43:10.160 Well, even, and this is what really blows my mind about our lifestyle. If you're a severe introvert,

00:43:15.820 I thought I was genuinely worried that I would never get to be alone again,

00:43:21.740 that our kids would never leave us alone again. Many of our kids, not all, but many of them are

00:43:27.140 extreme introverts as well, who love being around their siblings, but also really love their alone

00:43:32.400 time, even alone time from us, which is just so awesome. So it can happen. Dreams can come true.

00:43:38.720 You marry a partner who handles that stuff for you.

00:43:42.800 Well, yeah, but also both of us, I think are pretty genetically introverted. And that means that

00:43:48.920 it should not have been a surprise to me that we would have children who tend to appreciate time

00:43:55.720 alone. Which is great. Appreciate time alone. I love the way you put it.

00:44:00.400 The finer things in life.

00:44:01.860 But no, I mean, there's always ways in the modern environment to, I mean, if you look at AI these

00:44:10.240 days, for example, you can live like any fantasy you want to live, right? With the chatbots and stuff

00:44:16.400 like that. You live in such an area of, I think, stimulational wealth that because you're making

00:44:26.240 these miscalculations about what should be normative for you and what you should expect before having

00:44:29.780 kids, you know, it's not happening. But yeah, this is why I think vitalism itself is like the vitalist

00:44:37.040 movement and the pronatalist movement these days are like one-to-one in terms of the people I see

00:44:41.640 cheering for them and stuff like that. Like Richard Ananya often talks about the vitalist movement,

00:44:45.720 but I'm like, yeah, you know, also pronatalist, right? So we got to rekindle that historic vitalism

00:44:54.360 and the vitalism, which motivates sacrifice in one's behaviors, but also the pleasure that can

00:45:02.840 come from sacrifice and austerity that I think as a culture, we have forgotten.

00:45:09.880 Yeah. Bring back vitalism and we'll get there.

00:45:15.240 I think we're on our way. I think we're on our way as a society. Anyway, I love you to Desimone.

00:45:19.320 I love you too. And what do you want for dinner?

00:45:24.260 Oh, um, you know, do we have anything in the fridge that's like defrosted? We should probably

00:45:29.280 start defrosting some lasagna and some of the curry that I made from the freezer. I slow cooked it.

00:45:37.600 Well, on Sunday, we only have one more night here after tonight. So just one thing then. Do you want

00:45:43.760 curry or do you want lasagna?

00:45:45.020 Where are we going?

00:45:46.780 We're going to the Hamptons.

00:45:47.840 It's not in my calendar.

00:45:52.980 Is it not? Nope. It's in your calendar.

00:45:57.580 Family drive to Hampton Bay's afternoon at the Hamptons.

00:46:01.620 Oh, you put it all in today.

00:46:03.000 Hampton's family time. No, this has been in here. Can I see history of creation?

00:46:08.160 It doesn't show history, but no, this has been here for a while.

00:46:11.660 Oh, it has? Uh-oh.

00:46:13.740 Someone just hasn't been paying attention.

00:46:15.720 Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay.

00:46:17.800 You just can't bother to know that we're going to the Hamptons.

00:46:22.740 Hamptons. Don't worry, guys. We're not paying for it ourselves. So can you then...

00:46:27.720 So, well, I can make you your curry with rice tonight. I can't.

00:46:36.060 No, why don't I finish off the soup and do some pasta with pesto?

00:46:39.740 Okay. Bow ties?

00:46:41.900 Bow ties.

00:46:42.940 Or macaroni thingies with little flavor twists. You notice that they put ridges on the macaroni.

00:46:49.480 Yeah, let's try the macaroni things this time, actually.

00:46:52.580 Okay.

00:46:53.120 You're a woman of sophistication and a wonderful chef. You know, you cook for your husband now, right?

00:46:58.660 Only because you asked me to.

00:47:01.140 Would you want me to not ask you to?

00:47:03.040 No. I think our evening setup works really well. So I'm happy to do it.

00:47:08.500 I appreciate you giving me time to do it tonight. I love you. Bye.

00:47:11.620 Bye.

00:47:11.640 Bye.

00:47:11.700 Bye.

00:47:11.760 Bye.

00:47:13.700 Bye.

00:47:15.700 Bye.

00:47:15.740 Bye.

Based Camp - August 13, 2024

The Hope Crisis： Suicide's Connection to Demographic Collapse

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