The Progressive Pronatalist Book that Broke My Wife ( ＂What Are Children For？＂)
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
187.78914
Summary
In this episode, we discuss the new left attempt at pronatalism, What Are Children For? by Anastasia Berg and Rachael Weisman, and the lack of progress in the progressive movement on the left's attempt at understanding the concept of pernatalism .
Transcript
00:00:00.000
hello everybody it's simone collins here and i'm so glad to see you here today i am taking over
00:00:07.520
this podcast oh no it's been taken over yeah because i am going to leave the discussion today
00:00:14.440
i've decided not to phone it in and we are going to talk today about a new pronatalist book that
00:00:20.140
came out called what are children for which is basically the left attempt at pronatalism it is
00:00:29.000
a book that we were just told about by a friend at a conference and she basically explained it as
00:00:34.300
this is the pronatalist argument but from the perspective of a an educated brooklyn elite who's
00:00:40.120
highly progressive but they got like an opinion piece in the new york times for example yeah it
00:00:44.600
got an opinion piece in the new york times it got a write-up in the new yorker obviously and
00:00:48.560
they would never even consider giving us we we have done we've reached out to them before they don't
00:00:54.860
know they don't talk to us but they do talk to them because this was co-written by two of their
00:00:59.280
people and so obviously we're super excited to read this book because oh my gosh maybe because we
00:01:06.280
cannot apparently speak to pronatalism in a way that gets progressives excited maybe two progressive
00:01:12.660
pronatalists could speak to progressives in a way that gets them excited and so they did and so i read
00:01:19.260
the book um and okay let me just start off by giving you the book's description now i want to
00:01:25.960
get your impression because i've read the book malcolm is not let's see what you think so this
00:01:29.660
is what are children for on ambivalence and choice by anastasia berg and rachel weisman it came out on
00:01:35.420
june 11th so right now only like three reviews have been written about it it's very new here's the
00:01:39.980
description becoming a parent once the expected outcome of adulthood is increasingly viewed
00:01:45.460
as a potential threat to the most basic goals and aspirations of modern life we seek self-fulfillment
00:01:51.420
we want to liberate women to find meaning and self-worth outside the home and we wish to protect
00:01:56.780
the planet from the ravages of climate change weighing on the pros and cons of having children
00:02:01.480
millennials and zoomers are finding it increasingly difficult to judge in favor with lucid argument and
00:02:07.660
passionate pros on astasia berg and rachel weisman offer the guidance necessary to move beyond
00:02:13.900
uncertainty the decision whether or not to have children they argue is not just a woman's issue
00:02:19.320
but a basic human one and at a time when climate change worries threaten the very legitimacy of
00:02:25.540
human reproduction berg and weisman conclude that neither our personal nor collective failures ought to
00:02:31.960
prevent us from embracing the fundamental goodness of human life not only in the present but in choosing
00:02:37.760
to have children the in the future so what do you think of this description would you like to know more
00:02:43.380
what's your impression here i mean that it is what you said it is it is pronatalism uh and progressives
00:02:51.200
are screwed if they can't figure out a pronatalist cultural sub-faction their entire value system is
00:02:57.700
going to go extinct yeah and a lot of people look at us and they think that we're like secretly trying
00:03:04.080
to save the progressives or something like that i would like some aspect of their culture to survive
00:03:09.200
but i don't want them to have the cultural dominance they have now i think that they've shown
00:03:13.320
that they basically become nazis whenever they gain cultural power and they start dividing humans by
00:03:18.620
ethnic group i'm going to say a lot of the things that progressives fight for that they they say they
00:03:23.520
want pluralism freedom of lifestyle etc are things that we very much support it's just that in terms of
00:03:31.020
what they actually allow foreign support progressives don't tend to do that in practice today yeah in a
00:03:37.320
way that aligns with our values and that's what you're talking about we actually do care about
00:03:40.600
progressive values but the progressive movement now does not actually support those values that's what
00:03:45.720
you're saying yeah yeah it is it's wild that this has become the case i think the parties have flipped
00:03:51.120
basically with trump but anyway so so the interesting thing as a person like me is hearing you read this
00:03:59.740
and seeing your reaction to this and you guys haven't had to live with simone while she was
00:04:03.140
reading this oh no we're gonna go over all these things and you're gonna react to all my little
00:04:06.440
bits i have all these little things i can share with you about the book but we're just i'm just
00:04:09.480
getting your impression on the the description as provided by the publishers i i feel like i've just
00:04:15.260
been read like miranda writes this is about to like that was a trigger warning for conservatives
00:04:19.900
that entire intro was a trigger warning for conservatives okay all right i'll give you my tldr because you
00:04:26.000
you say you should never bury the lead in these videos i read this book it included things like
00:04:29.960
literary analysis because that's apparently a necessary part of discussion of pernatalism which
00:04:34.460
this is clearly why we're not convincing any progressives we forgot the literary analysis
00:04:39.600
in this context what do you mean huh explain literary analysis i as a listener don't know what
00:04:46.620
you mean by they did okay the authors literally talk about a series of books there's one chapter where
00:04:52.160
they just talk about books on motherhood that were written by various highfalutin fiction authors
00:04:56.420
and then there's another chapter where they talk about books that are about climate change and climate
00:05:01.540
disasters in fact one of the reviews of this book complains about the fact that there were spoilers in the
00:05:08.300
literary analysis that was one of her primary complaints because she cared enough to actually go
00:05:12.440
and read these books which is i think also interesting reading all this literary analysis it actually took me back
00:05:17.860
to my high school days and it i realized that the reaction i had at the end of this book was very
00:05:24.100
similar to the reaction i had after finishing the grapes of wrath where you read that scene with the
00:05:31.040
weird birth in the barn that was supposed to be like analogous to jesus or something and you're just like
00:05:37.660
what the fuck happened to me everything is terrible and that is where i ended this book what the fuck
00:05:45.780
happened to me and everything is terrible and before i wanted to bring all my my criticisms of the book
00:05:51.720
to you and actually air them on this podcast because i am very concerned about leaving a somewhat critical
00:05:55.820
review of this book in video form without being justified in it i went and looked at the other
00:06:00.640
reviews to be like am i crazy did this book basically leaves no reason to have kids so the punchline to
00:06:07.220
what are kids for or reasons for having kids there are none bad because i do not think you can
00:06:14.020
justify above reproductive childbearing rates within a progressive moral framework it genuinely it seems
00:06:21.020
like what children are for is nothing children is a book no but from what you told me it's a book about
00:06:27.200
why you may want one kid that not even that i can't find justification in this book even for one kid
00:06:33.860
but anyway it turns out the three reviews that exist so far there's a total of four but one on amazon was
00:06:38.620
also published on goodreads all of them were by people who were sent the book by a publisher who
00:06:43.640
clearly wanted them to post reviews two of them are from mothers one a mother of six and i'll just read
00:06:50.560
you from the one person who left a review as a member of the actual target audience which is a progressive
00:06:57.460
woman who does not yet have kids shannon whitehead wrote i appreciate the book's premise and liked it
00:07:03.040
overall but it's not the guide it builds itself as the summary describes what are children for as
00:07:09.540
quote an argument with quote-unquote guidance on how to overcome parenthood ambivalence however it's
00:07:15.280
more a collection of various people's thoughts on having children throughout history the authors
00:07:18.960
definitely add to these perspectives but as someone who absolutely is the target audience for this book
00:07:23.180
i don't find much of what i would consider guidance or advice which okay so i'm not crazy because part of
00:07:28.460
me was like oh i'm just too dumb for this educated progressive view like i'm just it's going over my
00:07:33.440
head the literary analysis reading a cultural framework that we are not familiar with and may
00:07:38.880
not pick up some of the nuances in like that's what i thought like jewish literature i'm not going to
00:07:44.440
necessarily catch everything a jewish person would catch yes but here is i think what the book actually
00:07:50.280
is and i think that you are engaging with it incorrectly okay i think that a progressive woman
00:07:58.160
was thinking about having kids and then decided to do what was essentially a progressive literature
00:08:04.060
review on the subject of having kids now if you think like us like you're some sort of a rationalist
00:08:10.460
nerd and you're doing a literature review you're going over all the research and everything like that
00:08:15.180
if you're a progressive and you're doing what is for them a cultural literature review
00:08:19.500
they are going over all of the thoughts anyone in the intellectual intelligentsia zeitgeist
00:08:26.560
has had in modern times or in history about having kids so this is like a the arts literature review
00:08:34.700
of what the intellectual intelligentsia has to say about the meaning of human life and i think
00:08:42.980
fundamentally what you and this other person took away from it is that they just don't have strong
00:08:50.180
arguments for it because i think that the the larger so when people we say the larger progressive
00:08:56.880
ideology is fundamentally anti-natalist i should probably explain what i mean by that we argue
00:09:01.760
that the urban monoculture which is what progressivism largely is it's this cultural framework that exists
00:09:06.420
around the world mostly concentrated in urban centers it's a modern memetic virus you can look at our
00:09:11.540
video the anatomy of the urban monoculture if you want to go deeper on this but its core draw is
00:09:17.940
come to us and you won't have to experience any in the moment emotional suffering and so this is
00:09:24.700
where like trigger warnings come from this is where the haze movement comes from this is where like
00:09:28.320
we're going to hand out meth meth on the streets comes from like it these things make no sense if
00:09:35.260
you are operating within most moral frameworks that's why i bring them up like the idea of telling
00:09:40.000
somebody that eating too much is going to make them unhealthy and suffer in the long run doesn't make
00:09:45.200
sense in most even like basic utilitarian frameworks so you need this very strange moral set where like
00:09:50.340
in the moment emotional pain is the ultimate negative trigger warnings for example fall into
00:09:53.960
this as well and there is the way that you resolve emotional pain in this framework is clearly
00:10:00.740
remove humans you remove humans you remove emotional pain every additional human is just a being
00:10:07.420
that might at some point experience emotional pain and therefore should not come into exist
00:10:12.860
and you also have this problem downstream of broad utilitarian frameworks it's just less immediate
00:10:19.140
which is say if you take a broad utilitarian framework but then lean heavily on the negative
00:10:25.900
utilitarian side which progressive culture definitely does like it sees the fact that humans suffer as
00:10:32.380
much more of a negative than the fact that they feel emotional good there's not a way that you can
00:10:37.360
motivate when telling a parent if i'm telling them you need to have over x many kids the argument i need to be
00:10:42.780
presenting them with and i think that the good book that does this is selfish reasons to have more
00:10:47.020
kids brian i think that's the book that has actually convinced a number of progressives and he's
00:10:52.800
actually been yes and he's responsible for like at least a hundred people that exist in the world
00:10:56.940
today or more but these are like the ones pretty cool um because selfish reasons to have more kids
00:11:04.460
engages with progressive culture as it really exists which is a woman asking how will having kids improve
00:11:10.620
my life the problem is that the kids often don't improve your life that's not the point of kids
00:11:16.820
it's to give them a good life and so when you have kids to improve your life you end up with all of the
00:11:24.800
stuff we talk about in our video about the parents who regret having kids and why this is a rising trend
00:11:29.240
i feel like the people who would be convinced by this book would end up regretting their decision to have
00:11:36.100
kids and you mentioned that at the end of the book even the author seems to regret her yeah one of the
00:11:40.760
two authors has has a kid at the end of the book and describes her experience as a mother and she sounds
00:11:47.520
like a genuinely miserable mother who regrets having kids and is still extremely ambivalent about the
00:11:53.940
choice to have kids and is trying to just be like but it's meaningful which is crazy and i think what
00:12:00.800
you're saying is right about them just doing a literature review of the experts when trying to
00:12:06.600
evaluate this but then not really finding anything that justifies it like one mother who wrote a
00:12:12.880
review says this book has a lot of references to feminist texts often citing works uh the works of
00:12:18.020
rachel kusk and sheila hetty um this provides the reader with additional materials to seek out and
00:12:23.180
read more about direct experiences with motherhood and ambivalence i don't necessarily think this book
00:12:27.780
would be a directly helpful guide to those struggling with the decision to have children
00:12:31.560
while there is an exploration of different arguments including climate change not finding a
00:12:36.480
suitable partner financial concerns and self-interest there is perhaps obviously no direct path to coming
00:12:41.620
to a conclusion for yourself i would also say that the author's perspectives on motherhood seem to
00:12:46.300
skew slightly negative which is obviously not everyone's experience who chooses to have children
00:12:51.340
so even like other reviewers of the book who've been given free copies presumably because they will
00:12:56.660
write positive reviews are kind of like it's clear these women don't want to have children
00:13:01.160
which is crazy and yeah i actually think that what this book is and i think it's something we're
00:13:07.400
going to see increasingly as a culture wars shift in the direction of pronatalism is there is a faction
00:13:14.300
of progressive women who will recognize that having kids is a moral good like that their worldview that
00:13:22.220
everything we say their worldview their perspectives on reality are going to die out
00:13:25.860
this progressive cultural framework that they champion is slated for extinction right now and
00:13:31.280
therefore from their perspective it is a moral good to have kids and now they need to come up with a
00:13:37.840
logical structure that can motivate this decision that they've reached at from a logical deduction from
00:13:43.820
their higher order moral framing the problem is that there is no real or good logical framework that
00:13:51.060
motivates kids in a progressive world view i think something else at play is that intuitively
00:13:56.100
i think a lot of progressive women really want to have children and yet the culture they've adopted
00:14:01.180
prevents them from enjoying it and the lifestyle that they choose and the approach to parenting that
00:14:06.120
they feel they have to take prevents them from enjoying it when i read the final chapter where one of
00:14:10.440
the authors describes her experience as a parent of a young girl it's clear that she could have had a good
00:14:15.860
experience as a mother but the way that she chooses to raise her daughter and the fact that she only has
00:14:19.960
one child actually makes it just really hard and stressful and a fairly miserable experience but
00:14:26.360
let's let's go ahead i wanted to discuss with you because i think this is something interesting
00:14:29.440
some of the central themes and claims of the book there are three so i'm gonna read them off to you and
00:14:35.040
then you can tell me what your thoughts are on them because i think that these are the core things
00:14:39.340
with which you and i would probably disagree and i found it quite interesting so one central claim and
00:14:44.860
theme is that that either going back to or creating a hard culture is impossible that's a big thing and
00:14:53.060
of course clearly we're of a very present this argument i this is obviously it was um it was
00:14:58.480
explicitly discussed but in a very offhand and of course we can't go back and we also couldn't create
00:15:04.560
a new one that was it basically just said like that oh so they just offhandedly are like you can't
00:15:10.760
recreate yeah they're just like offhand of course you couldn't just go back and create a new culture
00:15:14.300
it was that explicit so i thought that was really interesting that just basically zero and that the
00:15:19.340
pithiness with which that was expressed demonstrates the extent to which they've given very little
00:15:23.860
thought i actually think that this is really important because you need to ask like why didn't
00:15:28.220
they say that could be a solution like altering their cultural framework and the answer is because
00:15:33.340
you could not stay within the urban monoculture if you created a a side cultural group that wouldn't
00:15:39.920
seem to be a threat to it so they literally can't like if they struggled herself to sleep by the
00:15:46.180
way oh no you're awake again sorry carry on if that is so sweet if she did present it god i don't
00:15:57.540
remember what i was saying there if they did develop a hard culture they by definition wouldn't be
00:16:02.540
progressive anymore which is a big deal yeah it's funny that's basically what we did we were
00:16:06.900
who'd been ended up developing a hard culture and are like okay now we are more of the framework
00:16:11.560
yeah yeah so here's another very pervasive theme and i think this is especially crucial which is that
00:16:18.340
the readers sorry the authors and the readers of this book and basically every woman whose perspective
00:16:24.720
they mention in their literary analysis in all their other references lack an objective function
00:16:30.720
we define an objective function as basically a few or just one thing of inherent value that you
00:16:36.960
yourself have chosen to optimize your life around it is the thing you're seeking to maximize and it
00:16:41.920
could be the well-being of all humankind it could be the well-being of all sentient animals and beings
00:16:46.040
it could be serving god it could be having fun it could be whatever right no one reading or writing this
00:16:53.700
book has an objective function and this is the very source of that ambivalence about parenthood because
00:16:59.640
as soon as you have an objective function and then ideology on how you're going to maximize that
00:17:04.160
thing or those things that you're going to maximize in your life you have an answer as to whether or not
00:17:08.100
you're going to have kids period because i like this is what i'm optimizing for by the way if you don't have
00:17:12.980
an objective function and you are interested in developing one yourself without a lot of bias
00:17:17.480
read the pragmatist guide to life we wrote that during a time in our life where we were much less
00:17:22.740
ideologically biased than we are now and i think it is as close as a true neutral resource for
00:17:28.860
finding an objective function exactly yeah to clarify objective function in other words as to
00:17:35.160
what you're saying it is a moral framework for interacting with reality i.e this is what i think
00:17:40.520
is good this is what i think is bad and at what measures do you think those things are truly good
00:17:45.760
and bad and then you can just use that to plug into a moral equation when you're making individual
00:17:51.180
decisions should i have kids but i also would say the answer if you're like how do i if you're genuinely
00:17:57.100
like how do i morally justify having kids like you're in this progressive culture the actual
00:18:02.400
argument i would most use is to say you're doing it for them and not you don't think about you or
00:18:10.100
society or anything like that this is an entire human who's going to live a hundred years or 80 years
00:18:16.480
who knows what technology being what it is now who's going to experience an entire life and you can
00:18:22.280
create this multiplicatively based on the level of sacrifice you're willing to make how much are
00:18:28.500
you willing to sacrifice to give other humans the chance to live and then you could say oh what but
00:18:34.500
then i could take the money into whatever and just give it to people in africa or whatever right
00:18:39.700
yeah but those people are different from you they're culturally different from you they're
00:18:44.140
genetically different from you they're not going to experience the same type of life
00:18:48.220
your child would be experiencing so you are exchanging one of those lives for another one of those lives
00:18:54.400
here is where progressives can't come up with an answer to this they would then say yes but all lives
00:19:01.880
are exactly equal and i might be like that might be true from a universal perspective but that is not
00:19:06.660
true from a parent's perspective your child's life as a parent is not equal to every other child on the
00:19:13.580
world um i'm telling you that in absolute sense you're you the parent who says that my child's life
00:19:21.500
is equal to a random child growing up in another country i'd say nope and there's probably something
00:19:27.560
emotionally wrong with you if you think that because even if at a universal perspective all human lives
00:19:33.560
may be equal we do disproportionately value ideologically even the lives of those who are closer to us than the
00:19:42.280
lives of those who are further from us and it is one of those lives that you are creating was the
00:19:46.600
sacrifice but the progressive moral framework doesn't allow them to say that so you can't really
00:19:52.920
pierce with this argument anyway continue so the third element and core premise of this book is that
00:20:01.240
the authors and pretty much everyone that are describing as well are raised by parents who are in soft or
00:20:08.380
super soft cultures or even parents who themselves were raised by parents of soft cultures so we are
00:20:14.300
seeing either one or two generations in to soft or super soft cultures and i think that's also really
00:20:20.480
important is that these people predominantly were raised by also people who were not from hard cultures
00:20:26.600
and that definitely shows there are some there are just a few exceptions in the book but i think that's
00:20:30.580
important to note is that at this juncture in society it's not that like people for the first time are going
00:20:36.280
soft it's that we're seeing multiple generations into soft culture yeah well when we abandoned the
00:20:41.540
religious systems that we co-evolved with a lot of people i think expected the majority of the effect
00:20:47.100
of this abandonment to happen in the generation that was abandoning these systems exactly but it turns
00:20:52.220
out it most of the there's a certain amount of inertia yeah there's inertia but also i think most of the
00:20:58.000
benefits of these systems are actually uh transmuted during childhood so even if for example and i see this
00:21:06.740
with mormons we've talked about in other videos even if a mormon leaves the faith if i interact with them
00:21:12.480
and they were raised in a mormon household i can immediately tell that they were raised in a mormon household
00:21:16.260
like the way they interact is very different than the way other people interact and it's generally more
00:21:21.720
emotionally healthy than the way other people interact whether they stayed in the face or stayed out of the face
00:21:26.060
and i say this as a non-mormon so this is me just elevating also true with jews i've met jews who grew
00:21:32.200
up in religiously observant households even if they've left typically have that vibe as adults and are more
00:21:38.980
emotionally healthy and stuff like that you don't begin to see the mental breakdown that comes from
00:21:45.480
leaving a hard tradition that you were raised in until you get to the generation that was raised in
00:21:53.480
their childhood without even that tradition that's right in what these people look like from the
00:21:59.520
perspective of society when you see them when you interact with them is like a robot that's like
00:22:04.380
short-circuited the book feels from what simone was telling me in terms of reading it is like the active
00:22:12.340
breakdown of progressive culture in real time so derived from any sort of hard cultural framework that
00:22:19.340
makes demands of an individual that puts that expects discipline whether it is external discipline
00:22:25.580
or self-discipline on an individual that's why progressives freak out at us as we've said that's
00:22:29.720
why they freak out at starship troopers this world you should watch our starship troopers videos that is
00:22:34.440
totally equal ruled by a black african female sky marshal tahatma rule the entire planet is where the
00:22:41.820
all the genders are the same in the shower what's the one thing that's different what's the one thing
00:22:46.240
that makes it the fascist dystopia to them that you are expected to do something you are expected
00:22:51.380
to sacrifice something yourself for the rest of humanity if you are going to take on a role in
00:22:59.060
terms of deciding the future of that society i.e voting and when you completely remove discipline
00:23:05.160
from individuals lives and the expectation of sacrifice from individuals lives and you do this
00:23:10.540
intergenerationally you get this short-circuiting and static which i think is what this book is and i
00:23:18.060
would encourage if our words end up being remembered in the future because i don't think this book's
00:23:24.640
going to end up doing very well given the number of reviews it has so far and stuff like that when
00:23:29.400
we're doing our best to promote it right now by the way we're doing our best to promote it i know for
00:23:33.680
example that at least one of the listeners listeners of this podcast was present with me
00:23:38.360
at manifest when we were told by another woman a friend of ours that you know about this book
00:23:44.400
and she said this is great this is exactly what i need because she herself is progressive
00:23:50.280
and she wanted to hear this argument so even people watching this podcast are the target audience for
00:23:57.080
this book and i am here to promote it we were going to have the authors on but that that the follow-up
00:24:02.840
and connection never took place y'all are welcome by the way to come on and talk about this but hold on
00:24:07.900
i have to finish this statement when you future anthropologists are trying to understand
00:24:13.600
how progressive culture how the dominant culture in the world the first culture that basically ruled
00:24:19.920
the entire world through the u.n through the american government how did it suddenly kill itself
00:24:26.260
within one generation this book will hold the keys to their way of seeing reality that you in the
00:24:32.960
future are no longer able to model yeah anyway some positives i learned some things that i didn't
00:24:39.620
expect from the book for example they cited one study which i had not come across they found that
00:24:47.260
many women freezing eggs are not in highly paid careers they just needed to separate fertility
00:24:53.380
constraints from finding the right partner and i think that's quite interesting we might even do a
00:24:57.520
whole podcast on this because they pointed out that one of the major constraints of course is
00:25:01.840
actually finding the right partner and someone who listens to this podcast to point it out to you
00:25:06.100
malcolm i think that really what we should be promoting isn't having kids but just actually
00:25:10.920
having a wholesome healthy marriage because that is the bottleneck in so many of these cases i think we
00:25:16.000
do that through our interactions as we show and we model a possibility that i think a lot of people are
00:25:21.420
just unaware of and i would say for the women who are doing this is the problem because i've talked to
00:25:26.080
these women okay and they're not finding good partners there are a lot of good men out there
00:25:31.380
looking for a wife right now they are not finding good partners because two they are using as a
00:25:37.680
benchmark for the type of partners that they can get as the type of partners who while polyamorous
00:25:43.520
will date them look lady let me tell you what if a guy is dating four other women and he's also dating
00:25:51.440
you or he's dating you but he's saying i'm not going to be exclusive with you of course i'm going
00:25:55.180
to be dating other women that person is going to be a much higher quality male than you can secure
00:26:02.120
within a monogamous market that's just clear like you will not get that you need to be dating like
00:26:08.260
three or four and also if you have a child with that man his value on the market will plummet and
00:26:14.600
suddenly sometimes secure him so do be aware of that that is a pretty good gambit that we've mentioned
00:26:19.300
in another podcast the other thing i'd say is a lot of these women are looking for progressive men
00:26:26.340
and there are two progressive women for every one progressive man you i do not think that most
00:26:32.360
progressive men are emotionally healthy they're generally like psychological wrecks who are like
00:26:36.580
seeing a psychologist every week so yeah sorry i know we're not supposed to shame seeing a psychologist
00:26:42.640
anywhere but the modern iteration of psychology is just so harmful so to these women you gotta
00:26:49.100
break out of that you gotta break out of the that that mindset because that is not where you're
00:26:53.860
gonna find the good guys i also did not know that weapon they're sorry that women try to weaponize
00:27:00.340
their fertility tell me about this by saying that they'll refuse to have kids or out of protest
00:27:05.980
because others such as family members are not doing enough to fight climate change or that they're
00:27:11.060
like not voting democrat and there are groups like birth strike and no future children that
00:27:16.460
oh we need to look these up i know i need to yeah we need to maybe do a whole episode on those i did
00:27:21.760
learn some interesting things the reasons that they presented for not having kids are pretty much
00:27:26.700
all the typical reasons you'd expect being forced to compromise their careers which is totally fair i
00:27:31.020
think that's a huge reason to not have kids that's why i said i wasn't gonna have kids not finding a
00:27:35.080
suitable partner high cost concerned about not being able to give the kids the same upbringing they
00:27:40.320
received like going to college without going into debt then of course there's just the typical
00:27:44.280
negative utilitarianism climate change and then just misery being apparent and i think that's due
00:27:49.320
to the unreasonable expectations this is actually really interesting is the idea of a fertility strike
00:27:55.100
so fertility strikes only work on your genetic relatives and yet progressives don't seem to
00:28:02.860
understand this there was that case in canada that we did the joke on that i'll play here
00:28:06.800
oh good look your friends are here hey you're supposed to want to have children and this is your
00:28:11.980
ultimate goal in life it is a very archaic idea an old idea and representation of a woman
00:28:18.680
you you're getting people to sign a pledge basically saying that they will not have children until the
00:28:31.360
canadian government takes serious action on climate change is that your blood what no no it's college
00:28:38.040
kid blood and how many people have signed on so far 1381 as of right now i know what this is
00:28:45.780
this is a suicide pact oh my god that makes so much sense we have got to hide all of the sharp
00:28:53.420
holy mother of god some kid he just hooked himself right into the wood chipper what head first right
00:29:06.900
into the wood chipper it looked like it might have been one of the college kids where they tried to do
00:29:11.140
a fertility strike for climate change like a bunch of young women and i'm like okay me as somebody who
00:29:16.640
doesn't care about climate change i'm glad you're leaving the gene pool right like the people who already
00:29:21.180
care about climate change they're the people who you're appealing to is this right and so
00:29:26.480
presumably you can't get them to vote more democrat than they're already voting right so they don't
00:29:33.960
matter like the metric of similarity to yourself that you are demarcating here is the metric that
00:29:40.820
decides your enemies and allies so you're not really pushing anyone so why would women think that this
00:29:46.220
would work and it is because they view the world with a completely socialist mindset they genuinely
00:29:52.540
believe that all children belong to the state and not to the family not to the cultural group and
00:29:59.240
because of that they believe that a progressive woman threatening to not have kids is going to
00:30:05.680
motivate a for example conservative man to change his perspective when i'm just like okay good riddance
00:30:12.600
i would be the worst noah i've ever said the fairies and the unicorns they're like i i hate you and i'm
00:30:18.600
not getting on the raft and i'd be like give him the bird and go on the raft i'm like i don't care you
00:30:23.900
guys can drown and that's really where we are right now is a lot of groups react angrily when you point
00:30:29.540
out the truth that if people like them cannot motivate fertility they're going to disappear in the
00:30:34.660
future yeah there was also some butt hurt in the book that just got me angry they were complaining that
00:30:40.520
egg freezing and ivf is tough because there are needles and you can't have sex during the egg
00:30:46.080
freezing round and i'm like like just the sheer amount of and they also didn't point out they
00:30:53.280
pointed out a little bit how expensive it is but it just it bothered me and then they also argue of
00:30:58.180
course that women can't have it all and i think that goes back to this major issue of people who read
00:31:04.940
this book and wrote this book did not have objective functions because you can have it all
00:31:08.680
if you know what you care about you can have all that you care about if you choose what you care
00:31:15.100
about because then you know there are two different versions of having it all there's having it all
00:31:19.000
with an objective function where i literally have it all but i have many of the things that
00:31:23.680
people would want if they don't have an objective function that they don't have for example we don't
00:31:30.880
do a ton of travel internationally anymore obviously because we have kids we don't eat out
00:31:35.320
i i don't buy a lot of stuff so i don't have it all in those ways but also those are not things i
00:31:41.260
care about i literally have everything that i care about and that's great and i think that's how
00:31:45.720
a lot of other mothers feel who have objective functions is they know exactly what they want they
00:31:49.640
know exactly what doesn't matter to them and they're able to have everything that they want
00:31:54.160
because it's actually not that much and that's why i think it's so important to have an objective
00:31:57.480
function but yeah so to the point of literary analysis it was actually within the literary
00:32:02.620
analysis portion of the book that i inadvertently came across what i thought was their most clever
00:32:09.620
way of convincing progressive women who tell me to want to have children i told you this when i just
00:32:15.600
listened to that portion of the audiobook they described this one it sounded like a complete
00:32:20.600
nightmare of a book about a it seemed like partially or mostly trans polycule and like their journey into
00:32:28.900
motherhood and although maybe not motherhood maybe there was an abortion in there it just sounded like
00:32:33.720
the ultimate progressive fiction book but they described this one character who was a trans woman who
00:32:41.580
desperately wanted to experience true motherhood and it really brought across the privilege that women
00:32:51.780
experience and being able to be mothers and the fact that there are all these trans women who would
00:32:59.380
genuinely if you're a real trans woman right and like you just desperately want to be a woman you desperately
00:33:04.820
want to be a mother and you can't you can just feel the entitlement the the spoiled rottenness of women in their
00:33:13.780
ability to carry children and then just complain about it and be like how dare you expect me to have children when there are
00:33:19.780
children when there are people both infertile women and like me right and trans women who take the same
00:33:28.360
amount of estrogen that i do apparently who just desperately want to have children and that was the
00:33:33.680
one time reading this book where i was like oh shit yeah like that argument would work on progressives that
00:33:39.100
actually would work on progressives and it's interesting yeah like how dare trans women would die to be where
00:33:44.200
you are that was the most pernatalist argument in the entire book so i thought that was very interesting
00:33:48.380
wanted to point that out wrote oh my god these authors are overthinking themselves into abject misery no
00:33:53.700
wonder university educated women are not having kids yeah that's really how i fall through a lot of
00:33:58.120
this i think overthinking is a central theme here and especially in the literary analysis there's these
00:34:03.560
descriptions of either books describing yeah i think it's books describing this with feminist authors
00:34:09.300
saying oh when i was breastfeeding my child i like felt this miasma of whatever and they're just these
00:34:15.960
women who are overthinking it so much and they clearly don't have anything else that they're doing
00:34:20.880
and this is why you shouldn't take maternity leave because you're just going to go completely crazy
00:34:25.420
and it just it bothers me how much overthinking there is in this process and they also argue in the book and
00:34:32.000
this is a big thing that bothers me about progressives and conversations around pronatalism
00:34:37.740
is that girls are taught from a very young age that motherhood is their destiny and that we live in a
00:34:43.320
pronatalist world and that women are pressured to have children because i until i met you and you
00:34:49.580
talked with me about children was antinatalist i planned on never having children and i was never
00:34:56.420
shamed for that i was never questioned for that so they claim that women are being shamed for yeah
00:35:01.340
they claim and i've seen this done before by people who make antinatalist arguments that women that
00:35:07.040
we live in this pronatalist world where they're shamed for being child free and they're shamed for not
00:35:11.180
having kids but i was in their position i never felt questioned and actually i felt quite judged
00:35:17.360
when i wanted to have kids even by my own parents who were oh you're gonna be they were like what are
00:35:23.040
you guys doing why are you having so many kids oh no but at least my mother was like oh malcolm
00:35:27.600
you're gonna be such a great parent and then she like turned to me and was like
00:35:30.780
yeah to one kid your mom was very clear we're gonna have one kid yeah after fertility my mom
00:35:39.080
began because your mom died before we had more than one kid but my mom started freaking out at
00:35:45.020
two kids she's you need to stop you need to stop then she gave up though she got zen about it
00:35:51.540
no she said four was the perfect number and we needed to stop at four i know she's a fan of the show and
00:35:56.280
everything like that and the first fan of the show really who really was watching it daily but i don't
00:36:01.440
think she could deal with the press we're getting these days no um emotionally she wouldn't be able
00:36:06.340
to deal with it and i would likely have to pull back or something like that agents of providence act
00:36:11.240
as they act right we are able to move as far as we can we actually saw that in her like notes after she
00:36:19.120
died that one of her dreams was that we got famous but that couldn't happen in a world where we also
00:36:25.440
weren't so attacked that they you just can't be famous without being hated these days yeah if you
00:36:31.380
look at younger celebrities that are up raising through the ranks and that's one of the problems
00:36:34.700
with this progressive mindset is it is a desire to conform at the same time as to have pride in who
00:36:44.160
you are and what makes you different and that's especially where those things aren't from progressive
00:36:50.440
culture i.e the random things that turn you on but your cultural background you know your family's
00:36:58.100
background and pride in anything that is not granular in the progressive world is sin which is
00:37:06.020
so interesting that you are allowed to be as prideful as you want about the random things that turn you
00:37:12.720
on but having pride in your culture or your religion or your ethnicity those things are seen as core sins
00:37:25.200
in progressivism and they must do that because all of those things represent alternate cultural
00:37:30.500
frameworks that could compete with their own yeah so anyway i came away from this book feeling
00:37:36.560
pretty disheartened because i thought okay clearly we're not getting through to progressive groups
00:37:43.060
in terms of making a strong prenatalist argument actually you know what i'm going to take that back
00:37:48.540
progressives don't think we're getting through to them but we are because i'm noticing for example
00:37:55.080
when we've gone viral twice in british publications for whatever reason young turks has done a segment on
00:38:02.280
the piece that goes viral and the first time they went in on us to attack us they're like wow like
00:38:08.860
these monsters they did not acknowledge demographic collapse as an issue second time they're like
00:38:16.020
obviously demographic collapse is an issue and pronatalism is important but like these motherfuckers
00:38:21.880
are doing it in a super evil bad way like they're terrible people and i think the important thing is that we
00:38:26.940
are raising awareness and we're getting a subset of progressives to be like oh yeah it's an issue and i
00:38:34.660
hate these guys but i care about this and i'm going to do something about it i actually think our advocacy
00:38:39.800
is doing a good job i think doubling down on the reasons not to have kids which is what this book does
00:38:47.320
is quite as much as it speaks to the antinatalist sentiment of the progressive movement it's not solving the
00:38:54.080
problem and as the other reviewers stated it's not giving a real practical framework now i welcome
00:38:59.140
either or both of the authors to come on and talk with us about this and give a defense for the book
00:39:05.360
and perhaps because i'm too low iq to actually catch the message that is inspiring women who read this
00:39:11.780
book to have kids explain what i missed and dumb it down for what's the specific arguments that's what
00:39:16.920
we want to know like it's dumb it down for me a meditation on children and motherhood and i
00:39:22.460
actually think this is the core thing where progressives fail at this is when they focus on
00:39:31.520
children they narcissistically focus on motherhood instead of focusing on humanity
00:39:38.660
oh and actually that is what when when our friend told me about the book that's what i thought it
00:39:46.100
was going to be about because the way that she explained it to me was that it tries to take all the
00:39:51.780
arguments that progressives are using for not having kids such as the environment such as negative
00:39:58.620
utilitarianism and just allow people to look at the inherent question of should i have kids but that's
00:40:07.740
not what it ultimately was about so either she had not yet read the book or that's what i assume
00:40:12.480
yeah maybe it had just come out so i think she had an advanced copy she literally had a physical
00:40:17.440
hard copy with her it was before she anticipated that it would address those issues but maybe but
00:40:22.620
yeah i but i don't think that those issues are like we address each of those in turn in the
00:40:26.480
pragmatistic crafting religion which is our pronatalism book we have a section where we just go through
00:40:31.240
every one of the progressive arguments environmentalism antinatalism etc and we give a logical counter to it
00:40:36.380
but the problem is that those are logical counters and from first principle perspectives which do not
00:40:42.140
register with progressives i think you could also argue it's a very masculine take right so the approach
00:40:47.280
that we take to problems is what the boyfriend does when he's not being a good boyfriend when the girl
00:40:53.840
comes to him and he's can she or she says i'm with this terrible thing happened to me at work and can
00:40:58.440
you believe what he said in the boyfriends obviously what you should do is this here's how to solve the
00:41:02.560
problem and then she gets mad because what he was supposed to say was oh my gosh that's so horrible
00:41:08.900
you must feel terrible oh so this is more this book is a feelings circle i think that's what they're
00:41:14.700
going for here is yes it's so expensive and your career is hampered and you're gonna be miserable
00:41:21.240
you are heard you are heard valid yes and maybe actually you know what i think we just figured it out
00:41:27.800
i think we just figured it out that's what this book is doing it is doing the good boyfriend it is
00:41:33.440
being the good boyfriend of prenatalism we are the bad boyfriend we're like okay shut up bitch this is
00:41:38.700
how you handle it we gotta we're like no don't worry i'll fix it for it we mansplain okay we are
00:41:43.360
mansplaining and this book is listening and acknowledging and the readers are heard they're
00:41:51.500
definitely heard like all of the progressive female concerns are aired ad nauseum in this and
00:41:58.220
that's it that's it and but i think here's the problem here's the problem is mansplaining and
00:42:03.780
problem solving is still the correct pathway and listening and saying oh this is so terrible you must
00:42:09.000
feel so terrible the boyfriend who does that is enabling a girlfriend to develop more neurosis to not
00:42:16.300
solve her problems to establish learned helplessness that good boyfriend behavior is toxic and ultimately
00:42:23.620
abusive i love you to death you are the best wife any man could hope for it's true though right and tell
00:42:30.480
me i'm wrong no you but i'm the guy here you're saying you're you are so right that i've never even
00:42:38.360
a scene somebody as right as you you are the pick me of the already chosen and i am the chosen
00:42:46.260
i am not a pick me i am chosen i'm not a pick me i am the chosen oh that'd be great if there's a new
00:42:51.980
group of women who call themselves the chosen oh my god yeah you're like i've already been chosen
00:42:57.580
i already have the kids yeah i won this game i'm in the post game yeah love you to death would you mind
00:43:07.640
getting the kids and then locking the fence and then i'll make dinner while they play outside
00:43:12.040
will do thank you all right little one let's get you changed and get your dinner