Based Camp - September 21, 2023What Happens to Africa Long Term？ The Pronatalist Perspective
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Summary
In this episode, Simone and I talk about the growing influence of pro-natalism in Africa, and the implications for the future of the continent in a pronatalist world. We also discuss the rise of wokeism in the Middle East and the impact this has on their fertility rates.
Transcript
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in Africa, those conflicts are going to get worse in the short term. But I swear it all
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hashes out a lot of the world's winners. I'd say probably half of the world's winning
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cultural groups are probably going to come out of Africa just due to the sheer diversity of
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the continent. In literally every context, a thing can be diverse. Yeah, I'm excited,
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especially because the more people in different cultures in and from Africa we've encountered,
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the more, oh my gosh, these are cultures that over time and with more and more technology are going
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to react in really interesting ways. Would you like to know more? Hello. Hello, Simone. Today is
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going to be a fascinating topic. It actually came up because I had a friend interviewing me and we
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were talking about what the future of Africa is going to be in a pro-natalist world. What's the
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end goal was Africa. What ends up happening was Africa. And it also reminded me of a conversation
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we'd had with Edward Dutton when he was over at our house. He was asking, why is it that so many
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people in the pro-natalist movement are Black and specifically African? The two groups that are most
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disproportionately represented in the pro-natalist movement are the people from Jewish backgrounds,
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sometimes now they're secular, and people from African backgrounds. And so the question was why?
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And I actually, I don't feel like I had a really good question for it when he was asking me when he
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was filming for this documentary thing, but I've been thinking a lot more about it. And I think I have
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a better reason now. So at the time, my intuition was, is it was for the same reason as Jewish people
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disproportionately being in the pro-natalist movement. However, I think that that's still true.
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I was just pulling at the wrong threads. So specifically what I had thought that it was
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group identity, like the idea of being like, I like my people. I have no shame in my people.
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I want my people to exist in the future. And that was a big part of it. However, I actually think now
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what it is familiarity was a mental framework of intergenerational tribalistic thinking where
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people, where you recognize that different groups are different from you, but you plan to work
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alongside them intergenerationally, a non-dominant way, like it, not in a way where you plan to
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eventually convert them. And that is a type of thinking that sort of, I guess you could say our
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entire movement is really heavily based around. And it's something that when you talk with Jewish
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people, they're immediately familiar with it. Oh yes. I understand the concept of working alongside
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people who are different from me without eventually trying to convert them and living in a multicultural
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environment. And when you talk to people from Africa, because many of them have really strong
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tribal identities, they really understand this as well. Oh yes, of course. I understand the idea
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of my, my people might be different from this group's people, but we would still be able to
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work together long into the future. But here's where it gets interesting. What actually ends up
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happening with Africa as wokeism continues to spread? Because right now, as wokeism has spread
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around the world, this sort of, we call it the mind virus, right? The super virus. It is a sterilizing
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medic set, which is eventually going to destabilize many of these regions. But it requires regions often
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to have a sufficient amount of wealth to easily spread among them and sufficient amount of like
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social technology. And I think to an extent, China has been resistant and India has been resistant,
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like South and East Asia have been resistant to it, but the cultures that they had alternative to it
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seem to just do very poorly against technology and lead to some of the lowest birth rates in the
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world, even lower than woke populations. Middle East, I think this is something that people might be
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surprised about, but it's been uniquely susceptible to wokeism or not uniquely, but surprisingly
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susceptible to wokeism. And the reason it's been surprisingly susceptible to wokeism is not because
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wokeism penetrates the entire depth of the society, but because the society is very
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hierarchical and the people at the top of that society try to ingratiate themselves or like
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socially get along with, to some extent, Western friend groups that are of similar socioeconomic
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levels. And as such, begin to adopt some woke ideas that then permeate down throughout society.
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So a great example of this would be Iran's like devastatingly low birth rate, which was actually
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created by a government program, which the Imam of Iran was convinced to undertake by like a group of
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like population counts, like far lefty professors or something who were like hanging out there for a
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period. Of course, they've long since realized it was a big mistake. And for the past 10 years,
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they've been trying to get rid of it and trying to get their fertility rate up to very little effect.
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But it shows how susceptible those areas have been. But I think Africa is going to be a completely
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different game going into the future, both genetically and in terms of its susceptibility
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to wokeism. So do you want to talk to this at all, Simone? Well, what makes me really interested
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about this concept is that the original vision that one just assumes with Africa is that Africa is going
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to every other developed nation so far, get more wealthy, and then become very susceptible to
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wealth induced fertility collapse, and then just see the same kind of decline that we've seen in
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other areas. But then, yeah, the more we've talked about this, the more it seems obvious that,
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no, actually, culture in Africa is really different. It isn't. So I think what happens is people really
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lose their culture, right, in the nations, especially where they've seen a collapse in fertility.
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And you said that China has been somewhat resistant to this, but I really don't think so.
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Their birth rate has collapsed. And while China is very-
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Well, China has very thoughtfully tried to fight back against this. And I think you were alluding
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to that. They're trying to make a culture of strong men and family orientation and just
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generally strong-willed people. They've really failed to do so.
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But let's talk about China's biggest weakness and I think why it's failing as hard as it is.
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It didn't have multiple cultural hypotheses to tackle this. It's just, so there are different
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ethnic groups within China, but when those ethnic groups begin to get really high fertility rates,
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the Uyghurs had a really high fertility rate. The government sees it as a problem and will do
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Well, it's that. It's not just homogeny though. I think it's also, it's homogeny plus
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lack of an ability to cling to culture. And that's why you'll see like in, in Israel, which is,
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it is diverse, but religiously you could argue it's fairly homogenous. This is a pretty,
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I think it's really bad. So Israel has been resistant in part due to its heterogeneity.
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Now, typically most Jewish groups maintain a high fertility rate. They're not like pseudo-Jewish
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groups like reformed Jews, but most of the like more conservative Jewish groups do a very good
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job of keeping their fertility rate high, even when they become secular. But there is a huge
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diversity among these groups, more so than other religious traditions.
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So it's diversity and strength of culture, because I think the other thing is you have the United
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States too, but the United States has diversity, but it is still in the middle.
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Well, and the United States has a much higher fertility rate than most developed countries.
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It does, but I think it's still in the middle of a controlled collapse.
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Let's take a step here and talk about why Africa is going to matter so much in the future.
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And I think a lot of people today, they, they, they, they are scoffing at Africa because they see
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the Africa of today instead of the Africa of tomorrow. So there's three core things to know here.
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One, the African population is going to be one much bigger in the future. It is continuing to
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grow really rapidly at the same time as all of the other world's populations are collapsing.
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So just in terms of number of people, it's going to be more relevant in the future.
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Two, they still have, so here I'm going to use the word eugenic and dysgenic, not in the way that we
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would normally use it where eugenic is like a scientist who's trying to make the world better.
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But we're just talking about like positive selective pressure on a group's genetics.
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When we talk about the world's IQ dropping by about one standard deviation over the next 75 years,
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that statistic is specifically only relevant to developed countries.
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It is not, we're not seeing those selective pressures in developing countries.
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Uh, specifically when I say developing countries here, I don't mean like South America where they've
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already fallen below reproductive rate when South America, Central America, and the Caribbean combined.
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But I'm talking about the specific regions that are in extreme desperate poverty
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and that still have really high population wide fertility rates, which means even if you do believe
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in inter-group IQ differences, you're, you then are one of the people who says, okay, well, humanity has,
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I can see that being selected against the mainstream populations.
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And what that means is in a hundred years, you're going to have a lot of really comparative to
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developed countries, populations, really smart people in Africa.
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Now they might not be compared to modern day populations, but you're going to have a lot more Africans.
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They are going to be proportionally smarter than other population groups due to genetic pressures.
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And I think that the more diverse thing, I'm going to put up a graph of how different populations
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relate to each other, genetically speaking, because I think something that people really miss
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is just how culturally and genetically diverse Africa is.
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It is, if you're looking at somebody in one African country against somebody in a nearby African country,
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those two people will often be more genetically distant from each other than I, someone of a pretty,
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well, a totally purely European ancestry would be to a native American, like the most distant
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cultural group that is not African or one of those weird Islander cultural groups that came out of a
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Yeah. Like the Polynesians, they're actually pretty different.
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Well, and I think that's, it's not just the genetic difference either.
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Even after South Africa finished apartheid, like there was severe conflict in between different
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Absolutely. But I think that people really sleep on this. Like when they,
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the people who are like the gene head kids or something like that, like they know it,
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like they're like intuitively aware that this is a true thing. They just don't really think
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through the implications of, and this is similar to if you talk about the African genetic variant,
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right? That's a bit like me in the U S talking about like the British accent. So if you've ever
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actually been to the UK, what you would know is that there is far more diversity in accents than
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there is in the U S you walk down the street and you'll have a different accent. And the reason for
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that is simply because the language evolved there at the same way the species evolved in Africa and had
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more time to differentiate within that region into really distinct accents. And so you had the same
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thing in Africa, which is I am much closer to any Asian than most Africans are to a person, one country,
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one country away from them. And the, you should really, if you're thinking about the world's sort
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of genetics and you were dividing it into different, like genetically meaningful ethnic groups, Europeans,
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Asians, and native Americans would be part of the same group. And then there'd be like 30 groups in
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Africa. And then the one that we mentioned earlier was like the, not the Polynesians. I'm thinking
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like the Australian aboriginals and then the, the people in the North of Japan. And then there's
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a few other groups that are also pretty different, but this is meaningful. If it turns out that some
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something in a person's genetics is what gives them a sociological profile that is resistant to
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prosperity and technology induced fertility collapse. It is also relevant as Simone mentioned culturally,
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but it's also relevant. And then the other thing that really matters about Africa is
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the mindset of Africans. So the way that the wokes have done a very good job within countries is,
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especially Europe, America, South America, and stuff like that is when they go into a country,
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they say your differences, you, one, you, the groups within your country, aren't really different.
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And through recognizing that we can remove the pain of all of your emotional group of all of the
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intergroup turmoil, everything like that. And you guys can finally live in this, the gray bland shirt
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utopia, right? Where everyone's basically the same. The genders aren't really different. Ethnicities
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aren't really different. Cultures aren't really different. You all are the same. And through
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recognizing and embracing that you will be able to work together better into the future. I think that
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just falls flat in Africa for two reasons. The first reason is one, you don't have the emotional
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hooks. You can't as easily say, and where you could say this. So there were places like South
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Africa where you were able to go in and say, Hey, the whites are now the dominant group in this region.
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They achieved that through ill gotten means, but you should give it all back. You should act equally and
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everything like that. And everything will work out. Right? So they, there were a few places in Africa
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where there were still like really dominant, politically dominant white groups, like in
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apartheid South Africa, that claim no longer works. And you can't easily go to like a Zulu president
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and say that that's just not going to have any effect. They're going to be like, fuck off. I don't
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care. And you also can't say that you're all really actually the same, that they would see that as
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preposterous. They'd be like, no, I'm Igbo. He's not that we are not the same. What are you talking about?
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And then the final thing, and this is something that the, the, the, the wokes,
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I think don't want to hear is everywhere that sort of wokeism has tried to be implemented in Africa,
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like where they have convinced a group that has one power to give up that power has then collapsed.
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I don't want to go into specifics here, but I'm sure anybody who's, who's actually following
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situations in Africa will know what I'm talking about. Yeah. I think there are plenty of prominent
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examples of, um, nations that have fallen into either steep or gradual decline that people can
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see. But to your point, that actually means that the Africa of the future is going to be dominated
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by much stronger nations and arguably by much, much stronger cultures. And like you say,
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I think the future is what wokeism trying to move into Africa looks like. What does a prosperous
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Africa actually look like? What does the future of Africa actually look like?
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So one, I think one, one thing that's important to remember is I don't know if one, the cultural
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and genetic diversity in Africa is part of why I don't think we'll ever get a totally prosperous
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Africa. I think you will get regions that are prosperous because you have so much cultural
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diversity. Okay. So you're essentially saying like some groups allow to compete.
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No, I'm saying some groups will be persistently resistant to prosperity. So what you're imagining is
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a group economically out competing than having a lot of kids and replacing their neighbors.
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I think that it'll be a long time before that happens. So one, I expect Africa to be much more
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patchworky as it begins to become wealthy than other countries in part due to its intrinsic diversity.
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The second thing that I would expect with Africa is these groups to have much more animosity.
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You can think of it more similar to like old European city states as they begin to gain wealth and power
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and be much more on a tribal level. Then I expect wokeism to penetrate some groups, some cultural
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groups in Africa. I expect to just be completely pierced by wokeism and they, as they get wealthy,
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as they get successful and they will like a wet balloon filter out and disappear. Like all woke
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infected groups do. Then other groups will maintain their fertility rate in the same way that many
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groups in the West have maintained their fertility rate, which is through disengagement with technological
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innovation. These groups will likely stay economically poorer than other groups, but still, I think do
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depending, there will be a scale as to how wealthy these groups become, but some of them will do well.
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Some of them will do poorly, but none of them will really outcompete like a middling engagement
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because your economic possibilities are intrinsically limited when you disengage with technology.
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Your economic possibilities are limited when you disengage with technology. The final groups, which are
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the ones I'm really interested in, which are the groups that I think are actually going to lean hard
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into technology. So these are groups that are going to one use polygenic selection. They may even use more
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technology than that, because the actual tools behind this technology are much more usable than
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one would think. So there's already examples of this. So if anyone is familiar with the transhumanist
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Mormon group, so I'll talk a bit about them because they started in the US. So they were started as a
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predominantly white group in the US, but they were just like a bunch of, let's be honest, like college
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nerds. I don't think that they were ever that big of a movement, but their interpretation of Mormonism,
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and this is accurate to an extent. So Joseph Smith, when he was writing the original books of Mormon,
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he was really heavily influenced by sci-fi of the time and fantasy of the time. If you look at the
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books that the Book of Mormon is most similar to, there's some great, if you want to like, I'm really
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into like origins of religions and studying them. Very interesting. So you could almost see the origins of
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Mormonism as combining Christianity with frontierism, technophilia, and sci-fi of the time.
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Now, not modern sci-fi, but sci-fi of the time. And that is where Mormonism came from. And then they're
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saying, if you take this mindset and you bring it into the present and you say, actually the promises
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of Mormonism were all true, humanity really will eventually be a godlike entity, really will rule
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multiple different planets that they will have responsibility to go to and seed and build new races
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on and not races in like a racial context, whole new species that they will curate and that
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our planet may actually have a god from a previous one of these outward things.
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It was like a weird thing in the US. So they had some people go to Africa and preach this.
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Turns out it exploded. And the guy who I was talking to in it was,
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yeah, they've got 30,000 members or something already. This is in Guinea, I think. So,
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so it's really exploding, but he's also, he was a little worried about introducing me to them.
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So I haven't met this group yet. Cause he's, they're actually like a lot more conservative
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than your average American Mormon. Like he was a guy who was really like worried that we did like
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the, we don't care that Kevin Dolan, who's like a super guy is writing the Navalist conference.
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And we get along with him. Uh, we get along with like really canceled people. And he's like,
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well, I guess if you get along with him, you might be able to deal with these people.
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So basically what he's saying is they are both incredibly technophilic, but so conservative that
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he's squished out by it. And I'm like, oh, that's my type of people. I think that's a successful group.
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And so I think we're going to see more groups like this in Africa. And I think what people are
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missing is how quickly a group can split out from the mainstream population. Once it begins to,
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at a wide scale engage with genetic selection technology in terms of positive physical
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characteristics and IQ. So if you're doing, for example, polygenic IQ selection, uh, within three
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generations, I haven't ran all the math yet, but my intuition is you're probably looking at about
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a 2.5 X increase in, in, in IQ standard deviations, which, and then this is going to
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and continue to snowball into the future. Now, of course these groups will start small,
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but once they are able to start mass producing people with things like artificial wombs and stuff
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like that, then they can begin to geographically outcompete their neighbors, which I think you
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were talking about. However, I think that after the world undergoes the first population collapse,
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the idea of geographically outcompeting your neighbors will be seen as old school.
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So live in Shram will be seen as not an important thing anymore. If I can explain this differently,
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if you have a technophilic group, which is exploding in population, historically,
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what you would want to do is displace your neighbors, put your people on their land and grow that way.
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However, if these groups are really high IQ and really technophilic, they'll probably be culturally
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prepping for space travel essentially, which means, because that would be the obvious long-term,
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I think we are on a sinking ship on this earth. They can say, well, I love it. People are like,
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oh, and like rats, you want to scurry off of it? Like, why don't you fix the mother Gaia? And I'm
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like, okay, you guys can be given the mast a hug and whatever while the ship goes down. I'm just being
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realistic. Well, but hold on. So you're saying this, but earlier you were saying that you expected there
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to be a lot of like international conflict within the continent of Africa. So I do. Yeah. The
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when groups get, well, actually, I don't know. What do you think? Do you think there will be more
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conflict? I guess what I've said is there's much more comfort with the idea of conflict that I've
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seen was in my African friends. They're not as pussified as the West, I guess I'd say,
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but I also think that war is a bad thing. And that may, I don't know. What do you think is
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going to happen? I think that there will be conflict. I just, in general, I feel like
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we can expect that it's easier to count on that than to not count on that. And I do get this
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impression that there's more of a, like a tolerance for intergroup conflict than in Africa, than there
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has been in other regions recently. But at the same time, I'm not really sure. This sounds terrible.
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I mean, I would definitely say that our experience traveling in Africa totally changed the way that
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we looked at the whole continent, right? Yeah. So we went to Johannesburg and we went traveling
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in the various townships, you know, meeting, meeting with the local authorities in, in various
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of the, of the poorer townships. And it was really eyeopening for us in terms of how bad things were
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and getting to interview the people actually living in these communities and getting their perspectives.
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Yeah, it was, it was sobering. It was sobering driving around and hearing about how like
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property rights were managed. But also like how, in theory, that should mean that anyone could be
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able to get a house. But in practice, that meant that people, there was like a huge housing crisis.
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So yeah, I mean, of course, we've learned a lot more since being there in person, but being there
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in person was insanely sobering. But what I do keep thinking about as you describe all this is I'm like,
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wow. So like the Black Panther series is basically just the future. Europe's going to shit. The United
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States, I don't know, it's a wild card. Like Asia just appears to be evaporating, like rapturing.
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And then over here, like over time, you've got Africa just like slowly developing, slowly thriving,
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in most ways, quite resilient in the face of sterilizing.
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No, not resilient. A lot of Africa is going to continue to circle the drain.
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That's the very point I'm making. I think people are, one, underestimating the depths and severity
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of poverty that some areas in Africa are going to face, even some classically developed areas.
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For example, I think South Africa is going to completely collapse.
00:23:57.640
Oh, definitely. It's not going in a good direction.
00:24:01.240
No, but what I'm saying people are underestimating is everywhere is collapsing to an extent right now.
00:24:07.960
There is more diversity of cultural groups for a resistant group to spring up from
00:24:15.800
in these collapsed areas. So I think most African countries right now are going to collapse from
00:24:22.600
their current state into an even worse state. But I think if you're looking at a fertile soil for
00:24:29.800
something to then spring up from, I also think that the sheer diversity of cultural groups within
00:24:36.040
these countries, their resistance to wokeism, the fact that they don't have strong dysgenic selective
00:24:41.240
pressures on them. And that they are, I think just mindset wise, much more okay with this idea of
00:24:52.280
we are a cultural group. Like they see the world in terms of cultural groups, which are different
00:24:57.240
from each other and interact with each other. And that's the mindset that people need going into the
00:25:02.200
future. And that those cultural groups can exist within a country or transnationally.
00:25:07.720
So I think historically the successful mindset was the nationalist mindset, which is to say one
00:25:13.880
country, one people. And I think that that really worked. And I think that that is not going to be
00:25:20.520
the mindset that is successful in the future. It's my cultural group comes first, but I can build
00:25:27.240
intergenerational alliances with other cultural groups. And when you look at all of these things
00:25:33.560
together, even if you do believe in genetic population differences between groups, I think
00:25:41.160
that saying things that would cause African groups to build animosity to your group is probably not or
00:25:48.440
not be able to build intergenerational alliances. Your group is a really bad intergenerational tactical
00:25:57.160
So then why are so many people who are also commonly associated with pro natalists very commonly
00:26:03.720
racist against black people and or, but usually and also anti-semitical? What's going on here?
00:26:14.120
That's not, yeah. So, so this is the entry. That might also be why there's so many Jewish background and
00:26:19.640
black background pro natalists is our movement is the non-anti-semitic, non-racist against black
00:26:24.440
iteration within. Oh, so we're just like disproportionately seeing. No, but I think that
00:26:28.520
there's two things going on here. So first we need to remember that when we're talking about Africa,
00:26:33.320
it's very different and we could probably do a different episode on the American black population,
00:26:37.960
which is just culturally very different from the African population. I actually think that the,
00:26:41.960
like when I think about my African friends, they're much closer culturally to my Indian friends
00:26:48.440
Would you say that? Or would you say they're just so totally different? You can't even.
00:26:56.360
Yeah. They're just super different. They have some things in common. Like many of my African
00:27:02.120
friends are super like Catholic, for example, but there's all this other cultural background. I
00:27:06.520
don't know. Yeah. I just see them as unique and really culturally robust and strong. And
00:27:11.000
Wait, what was the question? Oh yeah. So where's the anti-semitic? So
00:27:13.480
the anti-black stuff I think is coming from people who are just looking at interpopulation statistics
00:27:21.000
and interpopulation differences. And they feel like they have found a piece of forbidden knowledge.
00:27:26.360
And then they begin to build like their identity around this forbidden knowledge because they're just
00:27:32.040
so excited about it, but they don't think five steps into the future of once people can have access
00:27:38.200
to genetic technology about declining IQ rates in the West and stuff like that. They're just not thinking into
00:27:43.000
the future about all the implications of this forbidden knowledge that they've grasped to.
00:27:47.800
Then there's the second thing, which I think is really true. And I think that this is to some
00:27:51.480
extent elucidated by the anti-semitic sentiments, which really remind me of BLM sentiments and stuff
00:27:57.400
like that. And the worst of woke-ism, which is if white people are economically out-competing
00:28:02.520
black people, it must be because they're cheating in some way. They can't possibly be like
00:28:07.320
a cultural difference. And it's the same thing with these white supremacist groups,
00:28:11.000
right? Which I think do play with genetic language sometimes where they're like, well,
00:28:15.160
if Jews are out-competing me, it must be because they're cheating. It can't possibly be any sort of
00:28:21.400
cultural child rearing techniques or anything like that, or God forbid genetic differences.
00:28:26.440
And so I think that a lot of it, wouldn't that build animosity? If it is, it's the same reason that
00:28:33.160
it was in the US population. I think a lot of black people are like, yeah, let's work to improve
00:28:39.800
things that are going on within our larger cultural group. I see problems here and here
00:28:45.480
that are causing within our culture, black on black violence that are causing problems in our
00:28:50.200
communities. And I think we can fix that. And then there's another group, which is just going to be
00:28:53.960
like, no, if bad things are happening to us, it must be because other people are cheating.
00:28:58.040
And I think that to some extent, that's really where a lot of anti-semitism in these white groups comes
00:29:02.840
from. Okay. So it's not sour grapes just because those two groups appear to be more culturally
00:29:08.120
cohesive and likely to inherit the future. No, I do not. I genuinely do not think that
00:29:13.000
they are aware. So what they're looking at, like their worldview of Africa is they're looking at things
00:29:18.520
like what's happening in South Africa, which is genuinely terrible and catastrophic and really sad.
00:29:23.960
And the truth is, is we can't even fully talk about it because if you mentioned some things like
00:29:29.240
farmers are being attacked or something like that, you're seen as like a crazy white supremacist when
00:29:35.720
it's just, I'd encourage people. Well, I think people, at least let me say this with South Africa,
00:29:40.360
people are really missing the beat. Like they immediately, you can't talk about the collapse
00:29:45.320
of South Africa without being racist, but I think they're totally missing the beat. And this is why
00:29:50.040
I so admire that you wrote a book on governance. The problem with South Africa is bad governance.
00:29:55.800
This was a bunch of very inept, corrupt people who have really bad adverse incentives, who were
00:30:02.280
trained by Soviets before all this happened. There are so many governing reasons why this was all
00:30:07.800
like it was written in this. Yes. A lot of people, when the post-apartheid government came in,
00:30:12.760
like a Soviet training force went in and they were really buddy-buddy and they were training them
00:30:17.560
how to translate their state into a communist state. But because of sort of the tribal identity and tribal
00:30:24.440
conflicts, it worked even worse than it did in Russia. Well, and there were all these, yeah,
00:30:28.360
they were, yeah, they were inter-tribal. But we can't go too deep into this because I really think-
00:30:30.920
What I'm saying is like the problem is that I think people are making this a racial thing,
00:30:36.440
when in most cases, it's a governing thing. It's an incentives thing. It was the wrong people
00:30:41.640
corrupting the wrong people and the wrong people getting power. So if you want to read on this,
00:30:46.600
there's a really, what was the thing that you read? It was a book review that you were like,
00:30:50.040
this is just really solid. I'll post a picture of it on YouTube.
00:30:54.440
Right. I think the best thing to read, if you want like a very quick snapshot of what went wrong
00:31:02.280
in South Africa and why it went wrong, I recommend a book review written by a couple on Substack. It's
00:31:08.280
called Review, South Africa's Brave New World by RW Johnson. So it's a book review of a history. And it
00:31:14.360
was a history written by a formerly very pro end of apartheid activist who grew up in Africa around
00:31:21.960
the sixties and then saw what happened to South Africa. And I think that's, yeah, we're not the
00:31:27.000
authorities on this. And what's really cool about this review is I think it shows you
00:31:30.840
how long it's been hidden from the general public, how bad things have gotten in South Africa. I think
00:31:36.840
some people have this perception that wokeism and this sort of-
00:31:42.440
We began to really pull the wool over people's eyes systemically in like the past 10 years.
00:31:47.880
And before that broadly, we knew what was going on in the world.
00:31:52.200
Anyone from my generation who reads this will understand that Africa and people with like
00:31:58.120
knowledge of things knew that South Africa had fundamentally failed and was on its path to
00:32:03.880
becoming a failed state, but we're not allowed to talk about it. And so the general public believed
00:32:09.720
that everything was hunky dory, yet all of the writing was on the wall, that it was circling
00:32:14.040
the drain and that really bad things were going to begin to happen. And it's really sad that we
00:32:18.760
can't talk about what's actually going on in the world. But yeah, this is really interesting stuff.
00:32:24.760
And I think, but again, and I really need to emphasize this, the future of Africa is small
00:32:30.280
cultural groups that do really well. The vast majority of Africa, I actually think will be
00:32:35.960
worse off in the future than it is today, specifically because as globalism begins to
00:32:41.240
fall apart and as international charity begins to fall apart. I think a lot of cultural groups
00:32:46.200
that it's of course, you're going to have cultural evolutionary pressures to begin to rely on those
00:32:50.040
things who had begun to are going to are in for enormous hurt. And as the world's eye begins to
00:32:57.000
move away from policing inter-group conflicts in Africa, those conflicts are going to get worse in the
00:33:03.800
short term. But where it all hashes out, a lot of the world's winners, I'd say probably half of the
00:33:11.400
world's winning cultural groups are probably going to come out of Africa, just due to the
00:33:15.640
sheer diversity of the continent. In literally every context, a thing can be diverse.
00:33:22.200
Yeah, I'm excited. Especially because the more people in different cultures in and from Africa we've
00:33:27.720
encountered, the more, oh my gosh, this is, this is going to, these are cultures that over time and
00:33:33.160
with more and more technology are going to react in really interesting ways. So I'm excited. I'm
00:33:37.880
excited for the future. Yeah. Well, and here's one thing I'd really like to put a point on because
00:33:42.360
this is actually something I've seen. So I've seen, you were talking about some people who are like
00:33:47.160
into like genetics, but anti-anti-black. And these people seem like aware that IQ could be
00:33:55.640
partially heredible or IQ is partially heredible, but they then refuse to engage with the fact
00:34:04.040
of how quickly a group would change an IQ if they begin to genetically select their offspring.
00:34:10.760
They're like aware of one thing, but they do not want to engage in genetic selection themselves.
00:34:16.120
So they blind themselves to the effects of genetic selection.
00:34:20.120
Yeah, they usually act like your traits can only be what they are now or get worse.
00:34:27.640
Yeah. Well, and they have this weird assumption that through genetic sort of purity or going back
00:34:34.600
to the way things used to be. So we've probably had dysgenic selective pressures on IQ in, in the
00:34:40.120
Western world for a while. Like our ancestors were almost certainly smarter than us. The Flynn effect
00:34:45.480
was hiding that. I'm talking genetically speaking due to like poor nutrition, due to like lead in the
00:34:50.040
atmosphere and stuff like that. Yeah. And so they are right that if you went back a generation, if I took
00:34:57.000
a clone of somebody from two to three generations ago, they'd probably be smarter than people in our
00:35:01.000
generation. This is people of a European background, but what they're wrong is that isn't the only, there is
00:35:07.720
no way to do that other than just have kids that are like clones of your ancestors. But what you can do
00:35:13.480
is move forwards using genetic technology to, to improve your cultural group. And that technology
00:35:22.840
is accessible to anyone who's willing to use it. And I think that the reason they blind themselves
00:35:27.720
to this is many of them are part of cultural traditions that have been able to keep birth rate
00:35:32.680
high by being technophobic. And so they are just like intrinsically against the idea of, well, I love one of
00:35:39.320
them, the federalists wrote a piece on us and they were like, this sick family plays a game with their
00:35:44.920
children. We're only the strongest get to survive. And I was like, one, that's what sperm do. So that's
00:35:50.760
happening every time you have sex, a sick game where only your genetically strongest descendants get to
00:35:55.480
survive. But two, so what, even if we are engaging in that inter-generationally, how can you compete?
00:36:02.840
But Simone's like, don't say that, Malco. You don't want me to say that?
00:36:09.000
It's Sparta. Gotta do it. Other ways of relating to kids. No, but the point being is that I suspect
00:36:18.440
that given the cultural diversity was in Africa, you're going to see many more that are open to
00:36:22.760
ideas like this than the much more homogenous cultural traditions, which exist in the Western world.
00:36:28.200
Well, what I like is that basically, not basically, literally, humanity started in Africa and humanity
00:36:38.200
may jump to other planets from Africa. And all these other like offshoots are like struggling,
00:36:45.240
flailing around and maybe not getting anywhere, but they're playing the long game.
00:36:50.360
Well, they're not playing the long game. They just lucked into this position due to history.
00:36:54.840
And most people in Africa that exist in Africa today, remember I'm saying their strengths is
00:37:00.200
the cultural diversity, which means I think 95% of cultural groups in Africa are going to do poorly.
00:37:05.640
Well, I think that's the brutal thing that we love about diversity though, right? Is that we love it
00:37:09.640
when there's a very large market in which different enterprises compete, because it means that only
00:37:15.320
the very, very best will win. That does lead to a world that is highly unequal, but that's also like
00:37:20.360
how biology works. Well, and then hopefully the world can reach a level of prosperity where the
00:37:27.400
inequality is irrelevant. That's the idea of capitalism, right? We do that. You eventually reach
00:37:32.200
a level of prosperity where even relatively poor people are living better than middle income people
00:37:37.800
in like a communist country. Yeah. Oh, sorry. Well, I love you, Simone. This has been a fascinating
00:37:44.440
conversation and very different than most of the ones you're going to hear in this space, I think.
00:37:49.880
Yeah, definitely. I don't hear anyone, at least in the circles that we follow, talking much about
00:37:56.440
Africa at all, if they're not like paternalistically talking about how they're going to quote unquote,
00:38:01.720
save people there from disease. So that's depressing. I think they're looking at-
00:38:08.920
Yeah. So, and well, I respect the view, but I also love looking at the long-term
00:38:13.880
and the upside. So this was fun. I love you a lot, Malcolm. Thank you.