Why Female Leaders Abuse Their Power (The Science)
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Summary
In this episode, we dissect two persistent myths in society and dissect them, looking at the actual data to show that no one has ever had a female-led society, both historically and in modern times. The first is the myth of the peaceful, matriarchal bonobo, and the second is the idea that women should be allowed to run things.
Transcript
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hello simone i'm excited to be here with you today today we are going to be going over
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two persistent myths in society dissecting them looking at the actual data to show that no one
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female-led societies historically are and actually in modern times because we're going to be going
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into new data not just the old data that we had in our book the pragmatics guide to sexuality are
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more violent than non-female yeah sure of course that makes sense but also the myth of the peaceful
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bonobo is where we are going to start because bonobo society is actually horrifying i don't
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understand why people have this vision of a gentle ape all all apes and monkeys terrify me
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more than pelicans and there's nothing scarier than a pelican so we're just going to go over a bunch of
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mostly drawing from a chapter from the pragmatist guide to sexuality about why you shouldn't let
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women run things and not just that but how the progressive movement and the progressive part of
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the academic movement has this tendency to create these conflations or confabulations of unique
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examples or cherry-picked data to try to say that we should go back to some earlier way of doing
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things or some earlier way is back ah the old sapiens argument sex at dawn where they're like
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well our ancestors were polyamorous look at the gentle bonobo look at the tribal they are and i'm like
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well uh first of all that's not true of all tribal groups and it's certainly not true of the more
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successful ones you just chose one that fit the society that you wanted you're like okay where's the
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most communist the most matriarchal the most okay we will say this is a model for early humans when
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that's not actually the predominant evidence that we have and we can do a separate episode on that
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but it's the same with you know with with bonobos they go oh well there was a period where like
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some researchers really romanticized bonobos and now we know that they basically made a mistake
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and they create it is true that bonobos do have a matriarchal society it's just not true that it's a
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benevolent matriarchal society so let's go into this all right i wonder yeah and i i'm very curious to
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to know when in history women were seen to be nice i'm thinking maybe certainly with the victorian era
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there was this picture of like the woman is being the moral anchor of the household but yeah i'm this
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is going to be fascinating some of our readers may be wondering at this point why we have not referred
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to bonobos it has become popular to cite bonobo behavior as evidence that humans in their natural
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state would be free-loving polyamorous matriarchal communities this view of bonobos has been aggressively
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pushed by those whose political agenda benefits from the belief that our distant ancestors lived in
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this kind of utopia first we would point to the fact that women tend towards submissive sexual fantasies
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much more than men that this tendency does not appear to be socialized and male humans almost
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certainly have an infanticide impulse this serves as fairly concrete evidence indicating that early
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humans did not interact like bonobos or at least how people believe bonobos interact matriarchal
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utopias do not create evolutionary pressures nudging women to become turned on by violence against
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themselves or sexually aroused by men stomping on babies like lucy mcgillicuddy stomping in a great bat
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a 2015 psychology study of one said this is not from the guide i'm just sort of adding this for
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people who don't know because in the guide i just citation citation citation citation is i'm just going
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to go into some of this right a 2015 psychology today review of 1516 participants found 52 percent of
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women fantasized about forced sex verse lower male rates for submission often weekly linked to implicit
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associations of sex with surrender rather than cultural norms a 2006 sex role study confirmed women's
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non-conscious sex submission link predicted lower arousal if not acted on suggesting an innate component
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so i want to pull out what both of those studies are saying it's saying that if a woman has a forced
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submission fetish and she engages in vanilla sex she will not become as aroused during that vanilla sex
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as a woman it's not like it's just an additive to her arousal it is a necessary component of her arousal
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to reach a a full arousal state um and in terms of this 52 percent when you get to 52 percent of women
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fantasizing about forced sex that means that it's the normal thing to do that means that well it's not by a
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huge amount it means that the women who don't fantasize about this are the weird ones it also
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just says something really sad about our evolutionary history i'm throwing that out there yeah it does it
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does it does because there i mean clearly there was an evolutionary pressure to be turned on by that
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right yeah yeah interestingly here high resource women eg executives report even more forceful submission
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fantasies as per a 2009 journal of sex research analysis
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that is important to note the reason why we need to bring this up that a woman's desire to be
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subjugated goes up as she reaches higher levels of status and power within society is that means if
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you put a woman at the top of an organization or say a country she will have a desire for not just her
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but everything associated with her to be subjugated as a result of that no obviously we don't always act
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on our desires and obviously not all women right you know margaret thatcher was a goat leader right
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but it does mean that on average you're going to get this tendency and i can think that this might be
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why a lot of women politically hold views that lead to a culture or a country to end up in a
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position of subjugation if they feel like they are overly lauded or overly high status within that
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culture or country and the reason i point all that out is stronger your survival instinct perhaps
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if we lived in a like if the forces that shaped our arousal pathways came from environmental pressures
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and those environmental pressures and those environmental structures looked like the imagined
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social setup of a bonobo there would be no reason to see this pattern so basically we know even if they
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were right about bonobos they would not be right about us living in that we don't have a matriarchal
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evolutionary history exactly no no no to continue further the concept of peaceful hypersexual
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matriarchal polyamorous bonobo is complete pseudoscience motivated by political fringe groups
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read the naked bonobo for a more in-depth review of the scientific literature about this species
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it bucks the mainstream narrative though it certainly has its own axe to grind real bonobo behavior is far
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more interesting than the myth and no less a living nightmare than the situation we propose for early
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human social structures some examples here there have been instances of female bonobos holding other
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females infants lives hostage in exchange for sex imagine a woman picking up an infant by the head
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and threatening to wring its neck unless its unpopular mother went down on her this is a a real and
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repeatedly observed phenomenon among bonobos so yes women are in charge in the most horrifying way
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you could conceivably imagine i would point out that this is not a behavior that we have ever observed
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in male chimpanzees so male chimpanzees when they're in charge do not do this to other female chimpanzees
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infants in exchange for sexual favors female bonobos do although i will admit this is a bit of a cop
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out because male chimpanzees practice infanticide so they wouldn't be in a situation in which the
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female would have another male chimpanzees or an unpopular male chimpanzees kid and they wanted
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sexual access to her to go further here this isn't in the book but just to add some color a 2018 study
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on infant handling at the university of oregon's bonobo enclosure found that adolescent females quote
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unquote carry away infants after grooming mothers sometimes leading to tense standoffs that escalate
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to threats if demands including socio-sexual ones aren't met i love the way that that's not
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threatening their lives in exchange for for for sexual favor so so really quite a horrifying society
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and it shows that women even when we're talking about non-human women are significantly more sociopathic
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in the way that they will treat other people when they enter a position of power
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and i know this sucks but it's just the way things are like it's and and we all know it like we can
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look at all these studies i meant to prep an episode on this where we look at the instances where women
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tried to have like all female offices oh we really gotta do that eventually i think you wanted me to do it
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because i would get really well there was also a good study that looked into not not just it was oh yeah
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what percent of women want a female boss and it was like extremely low it was like two to three percent
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or something if i remember correctly so there was a gallup poll conducted in 1953 that showed only five
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percent of women preferred a female boss if you look at more recent studies in 2013 only 27 percent of women
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and in 2014 only 25 percent of women preferred a female boss although it's been ticking up by 2017
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it's only 28 percent of women so what you see is women really do not like working under other women
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in a in any sort of a context here like women intuitively understand that women will treat them
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worse everybody knows this right like but we've made up this fantasy about the type of rulers that women are
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because it fits this weird power inversion thing that's important within the urban monoculture
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or sort of like social inversion thing so anyway high-ranking females will fight to increase the social
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status of their sons but not for their daughters so even in a matriarchal society women care less for
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their daughters and their sons which i find to be very fascinating and low-ranking female bonobos
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trade sex for food while high-ranking females never do this implies that low-ranking females do not particularly
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enjoy doing this i.e they are being forced to be prostitutes to eat so we know people act like what they're
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seeing in bonobos is this culture of free love right because they see them you know going down on each other
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right and everyone's having fun no no no no the high status females never do this this is what they
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see well what's also kind of implied beneath this it's something that you and i talk about a lot that
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that sex isn't really about pleasure after a certain point you know it's it's more about power and or
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self-perception and i kind of have a feeling like this is more how these female bonobos are
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exerting and communicating and confirming their level in the hierarchy like what else would you force
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other members of your troop to do aside from perform sexual we don't we do not see this behavior in
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chimpanzees either so we essentially what bonobos are is it's like somebody walked into a group of
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humans and they go oh look at these women always like going down on other women and like sleeping
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together and stuff like this what a what a wonderful free love culture and then you go in and and sit
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down and you notice all but one of the women is like sitting on the floor and you're like wait wait
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what's what's going on here and she goes oh these are my sex slaves what you just walked into was
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one woman was a bunch of sex slaves not a culture of sexual freedom okay you as a leftist were not
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primed to see that but that is functionally what was happening yeah and these women who were the sex
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slaves did not want to be doing that no it was grape
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as as epstein would say grape soda and cheese pizza so to go further here lower ranking females
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trading sex for food implying coercion in bonobo groups low status females engage in social sexual
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behaviors eg genital genital rubbing to access food controlled by higher ranking individuals while
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dominance rarely reciprocate a 1994 estno study observed that young or immigrant females use sex
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to appease alphas for resources suggesting it's not purely enjoyable but a survival strategy
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in unique hierarchies a 2021 scientific report analysis of quote-unquote biological markets in
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bonobos confirmed that not swollen low value females groom and offer sex to swollen high value ones
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for food access following supply and demand dynamics now here's where it gets even crazier than
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everything else i said there so you could be like well as bad as things are in bonobo tribes yes all of
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the women might be sex slaves yes you know you might only have like one or two actual high status women in
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society and that but at least we are trading male rule for less male violence
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problem is is this is factually untrue male aggression rates in bonobos are higher or equal to those among
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chimpanzees so male aggression rates are equal to higher than chimpanzees contrary to peaceful stereotypes
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male bonobos exist higher rates of intergroup aggression than male chimpanzees a 2024 current biology study
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comparing cockalapari bonobos and bombay chimpanzees found bonobo males engaged in 2.8 times more
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aggressive interactions overall three times more physical ones like pushing slash biting though less
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lethal for the bonobo lovers out there the rates are actually even higher than we had thought originally
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specifically specifically a 2024 study in current biology showed that in bonobos aggression was 2.8x to 3x more
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violent or more physical as they worded than chimps aggressive bonobo males also achieve higher mating success
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so bonobos don't just do sex more but women also female bonobos are also turned on
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by the physically violent and aggressive male bonobos because they are having more sex with them and this
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is something we see in chimps as well and i'm sure we see in humans as well this is this is what women are
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looking for looking for in a partner now what is fascinating is that it does still appear that female
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bonobos when they are in positions of power within a tribe are more turned on by acting dominant
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themselves towards especially other females and this may make them more optimized for positions of power
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than human females i.e if human females actually acted like bonobos became very aggressive controlling
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monsters when they came into positions of power and didn't want anyone else to subjugate them
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then we may have fewer externalities in our society from putting them in power which ironically is
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exactly the opposite stereotype we have of bonobos now as a caveat here just like to give bonobos one
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point they have lower rates of lethal aggression oh than chimps so good job
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yay they're not being total psychopaths no they're total psychopaths i mean what is the point of
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emotionally and and mentally torturing someone if they're dead you can't okay that is actually
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the bonobo mindset the bonobo queen yeah i love that i know it's really like they think that they've
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entered this society of like equality just because a woman's at top and it reminds me of like the
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thunderdome like max road warrior road warrior three where it's run by that woman who's like
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very violent and aggressive and that's the way you should think of bonobos they have a thunderdome
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where people fight with weapons they have a a female running it but it's not it's not nice all right
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there is no perfect society out there hidden in the midst of our distant history enjoyed by some
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undiscovered tribe or orchestrated by another species of ape people desperately want to believe
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that if they just travel far enough back and pull back that last bit of dense foliage they will find
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like some sort of social el dorado some obvious and easy utopia the pragmatists of the world know where
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our hidden utopia lies it is not lived out by some faraway tribe or described on a dusty tablet chiseled by
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our ancestors our ideal society lies in the future we have the power to create optimal societies aren't
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easy they aren't obvious and they certainly aren't about following some simplistic ideological doctor
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into the letter an enlightened society will be nuanced slow to build and will need to constantly
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experiment citizens of a truly perfect society must update their beliefs about the world as they try
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new things to see whether or not they fail no one alive today knows how to create this glittering
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society not yet the best anyone of our generation can hope for is to climb mount nebu and catch a
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glimpse of what we might be for now we must be content with our lot as one of the many diligent
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marching in the desert we cannot allow ourselves to be distracted by the glittering idols simple easy
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answers every day we reap the rewards of ancestors who suffered so that our species might ascend from the
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total depravity of our primordial conditions and basal instincts we spit on their sacrifice by not
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doing our part to advance the flame of civilization because it is a flame which holds back the darkness
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both in the world and was in ourselves and then i have a oh sorry we just blacked out there did we just go
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on a crazy rant but you see i was driven by madness and how stupid the concept was that there is some
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hidden perfect way of living but let's go beyond the bonobo myth here what happens when women rule an
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otherwise male-dominated society the real world scenarios in which this has happened certainly
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defy stereotypes you can see we were so much less biased back then
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a study investigating rulers between 1480 and 1913 found europe's queens were 27 percent more likely to
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wage war according to economists or or delian dub and sp harish this is a fun historical nugget
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no it probably doesn't say anything innate about female rulers i would change that now but let's
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let's hear my explanation from back then when i'm trying to hedge my bets yeah let's do this
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queenly queenly warmongering was more likely a product of the societies in which queens lived
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when you break these stats down further for married versus unmarried queens married queens appear far
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more likely to go to war though unmarried queens had war declared on them more often during this period
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of history a married queen could socially pressure her husband's country to go to war with her to
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quote-unquote protect her while other kings could not do the same with their wives countries easily
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making war slightly easier and thus more tempting for women so you're people who don't understand what
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i'm saying there it was considered like if you took a husband from like the royal family if i'm a british
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and i take a a son from the royal family of germany to to to be my husband and now i the british queen
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declare war on france i can go to germany and be like oh i'm just a womanly woman i i need your help
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are you really going to let your son get crushed by the germans or by the french and they go oh yeah
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i guess but if you if you marry their daughter they were like well i married her to you because
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i thought you were strong like i'm not going to go to war with you right so women basically got this
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cheat card for for starting wars my my hunch when hearing you talk about it this time around
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was that women are at that time and even now today just don't get that much first-hand exposure to
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combat whereas men in positions of leadership were more likely to have at some point been exposed to
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combat combat firsthand and so they just were more easily able to abstract it and not see just how
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tremendously horrific it can be maybe that must i can't not be a factor the more removed you are
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from something the easier it is for you to make sociopathic decisions about it or you could just say
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that women are terrible because we're gonna go to the next women are terrible the alternate name for
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Simone you chose the bear you chose god oh no one will ever let me live this down
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i love it i love it anyway and by the way she didn't choose the bear in the classic woman bear in the
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woods thing it was when a bear had built a thing under a guy's house and she's like he's just not trying
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hard enough but the she i i love that as like a a slang for an overly woke woman like she chose the bear
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she chose the bear oh my god okay so a 2022 forbes review of global leaders found 36 percent of
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female heads of state had initialized military disputes versus only 30 percent of males
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so even today women are more likely to start wars a 2022 conflict management and peace society study
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on rebel groups showed conflicts last longer when females are mobilized as fighters as they enhance
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bargaining leverage and sustain war efforts echoing how queens leveraged alliances so when women are
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fighting in war it lasts longer uh medieval chronicles e.g saxo grammaticus guested donna more admire
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warrior queens like alvid who led battles while preserving quote-unquote modesty suggesting historical
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respect for female aggression without defeminization
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wait sorry in what way did she preserve modesty i mean everyone who's not trying to die on a
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battlefield is wearing as much armor as they can i mean this gamison for example it's not modest because
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i'm trying to cover up it's modest because i don't want someone to cut off my head with a sword right
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like that's the design of armor i i i think they were just impressed that she didn't dress like a
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man when they say modesty i think they mean not dressing in male armor and stuff oh that she would
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like i don't know road side saddle or something which actually was like a bird and like special
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armor a battlefield side saddle looks like it was really hard to do that people are doing jumps and
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stuff side saddle can you imagine i can't i can't stay on a horse first thing i ever did in the horse
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was fall off of it if we want to go back to bonobos to learn a bit more about how they structure their
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societies yeah so bonobo societies are female dominated overall but males inherit maternal ranks
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through filopathy staying in natal groups allowing high status sons to outrate some females a 2010 max
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plank institute study found that matrilineal presence boosts sons dominance and mating success
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creating a linear male hierarchy where the top males often the sons of alpha females can eclipse lower
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females this contrast with chimpanzees where male coalitions dominate and keep in mind the way that
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males keep power in chimpanzees is through coalition building okay so you want to be a dragon woman nepo
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baby is that what i'm getting from this well what you want to be is the chimp you want to
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understand that only through coalition building with other men can men maintain the higher spot
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within a hominid society bonobos keep men at the bottom while ensuring that men stay a strict
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hierarchy that really has no reason to make alliances among itself outside of with the women the high
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set of alpha women and stuff like that high ranking females ruining sons of her daughters bonobo mothers
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invest heavily in sons social advancement but not their daughters as females immigrate to maturity
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while males stay a 2019 current biology study showed mothers intervene in conflicts to elevate son's
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status tripling their paternity success by guarded matings and forming coalitions against rivals
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behaviors absent from their daughters this maternal bliss is linked to indirect fitness gains as the sons
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produce more grandchildren oh so you see it is useful for women to be nepotistic about their sons
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as bonobos as bonobos anyway that's that's what i got to say about that what are your thoughts
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on female-led society and why they're so terrible
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i mean i think on the human level because we talked a lot about bonobos i think there's just a lot of
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evolutionary drives that women have that i mean we we've talked in other episodes about how women
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are engaged in a lot of mate guarding behavior for example and and tend to tear each other down
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subconsciously like it's not intentional but that there there tends to be among female humans a lot of
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mate guarding behavior or even within like we'll say a harem environment you're still competing for
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resources and favor and security and so in the end other women are just inherently a threat they're a
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threat to your resources or they're a threat to your access to high quality men and so it's really hard
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to create an inclusive female environment where women aren't even if like logically and ideologically
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they really want to be supportive of each other where they're not taking each other out and i think a lot
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of that is just downstream of the instincts that were bred into women in societies where men were
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lynch pins in in resource provision especially in those periods of human history where a very small
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number of men did most of the reproducing implying that women were like competing for the best man and
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also competing for the resources that those men had does that make sense yeah it doesn't make sense and
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i think if i was gonna say like why you see i mean i think that there's a lot of individual reasons
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why you see this but i also think that the way that women resolve disputes works really well when they
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are in the submissive role which is sort of aggressive socializing bickering scheming yeah it's
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yeah i mean catherine the great did seem to do a really good job in her leadership position queen
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elizabeth the first famously successful in her leadership position queen victoria was seen as a
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good leader as was queen elizabeth the second there there are lots of great female leaders of course and
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there's you know bloody mary who came right before queen elizabeth the first cleopatra was a hot mess for her
00:29:03.320
country as much as she did a great job in the beginning but it was more just by courting
00:29:08.360
popularity among the common people and like actually pretending to be egyptian instead of
00:29:12.920
there's really only been a very small handful of good female leaders and england's had a lot of them
00:29:17.880
if you look at other countries typically like when you have like female egyptian pharaohs you're
00:29:23.640
like oh a dark age is about to come like that's that's the way it normally works it just depends on
00:29:29.240
on what area region you're talking about but i don't think this is necessarily because of the
00:29:34.120
females themselves i think it's because most heavy you know hard cultures would prohibit a female leader
00:29:41.000
and so by the time you have a female leader get into power you know that it's already a very yeah
00:29:46.600
this was plan d it was not plan a b or c yeah there was that i know that was certainly the case with
00:29:54.440
queen mary and queen elizabeth king henry the eighth tried so freaking hard they were there
00:29:59.720
the whole time and he's like no no no so we're conflating two people here one was mary bloody
00:30:09.480
mary this was king henry's oldest daughter who was totally evil and just murdered tons and tons of
00:30:15.960
people and then the other was mary queen of scots another evil catholic who elizabeth locked up and
00:30:24.120
tried to have her killed on three separate occasions the reason she was even in england
00:30:30.040
and needed to be locked up was because her well so this guy murdered her husband and then she married
00:30:37.000
him and then she also wanted to kill a ton of people but that's a whole other thing so sorry
00:30:42.120
here that we conflate the two evil catholic mary queens of this period so if you are a tutor queen
00:30:50.120
and you ever run into any catholic named mary keep in mind they're basically telling you nice to meet
00:30:56.440
you listen if you ever need anybody murdered please give me a call you're giving him a card no code of
00:31:01.240
ethics i will kill anyone anywhere children animals old people doesn't matter i just love killing you
00:31:08.040
but i'm no that's one of the worst queens in british history and one of the best yeah i mean
00:31:24.200
it's also interesting now i'm just thinking about him and his daughters the the mothers the first one
00:31:29.960
with his his brothers right yeah his brother's widow but the marriage was annulled she swore up and
00:31:39.240
down that it was never consummated the with the brother the spanish queen yes yeah and then she ends
00:31:46.920
up having the the evil daughter and and mary queen of scots was just a purely evil person like if you read
00:31:54.600
history she's one of the most comically evil characters in all of history she she like
00:32:00.280
famously her sister who you know after she had put on these trials and just done you know a hundred
00:32:07.880
that's because a lot of people were were using her i mean a lot of it had to do with misaligned
00:32:13.240
incentives when you are you have to take out anyone who threatens your position so after she was put
00:32:20.760
in the the tower of london by elizabeth elizabeth was like look i really don't want to have to kill
00:32:27.960
you i'm going to try to give you the best life i can she then attempts to kill elizabeth in spite of
00:32:32.680
that elizabeth again comes and says stop trying to get me killed i'm really trying my best to give you
00:32:39.720
a good life here no the problem though was that there were a lot plenty of people who did not care
00:32:43.960
really whether elizabeth died or not no no no no no no no mary was found organizing these plots
00:32:50.840
yeah but people were telling mary that elizabeth and her supporters were out to kill her
00:32:56.680
no she she was clear they could have killed her at any point they obviously just go and execute her
00:33:01.320
when when after the second murder attempt right like they could have killed her at any point she
00:33:06.600
was in the tower there was no political fallout it was purely a net negative for elizabeth it was purely
00:33:12.600
an act of mercy to leave her alive but mary was just incapable of not trying to take the most evil
00:33:22.600
choice with every single thing that she chose in her entire life evil maxing that's this
00:33:30.920
weird joke about but i feel bad for her and it's weird to think that elizabeth's mother was seen as
00:33:35.800
as as like the more cunning and evil one and mary's mother was seen as the like
00:33:40.760
more witness one but i think that's part of what led mary to become so evil is she was very easy for
00:33:47.000
the people around her to manipulate and elizabeth was not so well yeah plus you kind of had like a nepo
00:33:55.800
baby family versus a very very cunning sociopathic mercenary family you know like this this was
00:34:04.760
this that family had clod their way into influence versus a you know catherine had just married into it
00:34:12.520
and had not only you know connections at the height of power in her own home country but also with the
00:34:20.920
papacy so you know she was extremely privileged and didn't have to be good in fact she never even
00:34:29.080
really learned proper english you can see from her spelling in her letters that she still pronounced
00:34:33.400
things with a really bad accent throughout her life because she would just even if you're a
00:34:40.040
cat's like you should hate her because if she had just had grace and told her family members to get
00:34:47.240
the annulment for the king yeah she could have lived out her life in luxury in true luxury yeah
00:34:53.400
but she and she had such a good go of it and she was also just having all these miscarriages like if
00:34:57.960
i were her personally i'd be like yeah i and also like i'd be grossed out by the fact that my husband
00:35:03.000
was sleeping with all these other women and like clearly wanted to end like if if you wanted to end
00:35:07.000
your marriage with me and you're clearly trying i would be like well yeah like if you love someone let
00:35:11.880
them go i don't want to like i do not want to be a ball and chain i don't know what kind of woman
00:35:17.080
wants to be i don't know what her game was it was it was very stubborn and that's and so yeah not not
00:35:23.320
great not great yeah not not great but just to think if she had just not been such a prick
00:35:30.040
the the protestant movement might have just died out my god you're right yeah that is that is really
00:35:36.120
something yeah but to be too arrogant to learn the local language and just come on come on she was
00:35:43.720
always going to be that way she was always going to be a nightmare god that cathedral in st andrews then
00:35:48.920
probably could still be standing right and there's so many gorgeous cathedrals in the uk that would
00:35:54.120
not be yeah but we probably would have never had the enlightenment yeah yeah i mean a lot of conservatives
00:36:00.200
these days like i should do a video on that the enlightenment was a very good thing like it was
00:36:04.760
was like the idea that like our problems or wokeness's problems stem from the enlightenment
00:36:09.960
is a die-up on people like the enlightenment was everything that we need to return to it is what
00:36:18.360
we lost was wokeness it was when civilization made a major jump forward yeah the the enlightenment was
00:36:25.080
gentlemen scientists the the enlightenment was tech pro accelerationism of its time it was not
00:36:30.600
it was not it was not what people yeah it was not woke wokeness is the esoteric hermeticism of
00:36:40.120
of our time and you're absolutely right wokeism is in a way a sort of mystical framework it would not
00:36:47.000
sort of it is a mystical framework it is based on feelings it is based on what you wish were true
00:36:53.560
whereas the enlightenment is a a very like we can work this out we can reason this it's it's very
00:37:02.920
masculine at its core not feminine and i mean that's we you know we in our episode about peacocking that
00:37:09.400
sadly bombed the reason why men stopped dressing in a very fanciful manner was also due to the
00:37:16.040
enlightenment it was because they became focused more on form than uh sorry on function than form
00:37:22.520
and that's why suddenly clothing wasn't like you know it was like we dropped the lace we dropped
00:37:29.400
the buttons we dropped the frills we dropped the the man dresses and the heels and we got to work
00:37:35.080
and that's awesome that actually a good episode is how the enlightenment created masculinity because
00:37:40.280
before that men you know dressed very effectively yeah no even even military dress was
00:37:47.080
was very very what today we think of as as well literally the cravat was was modified for what was
00:37:55.480
it like autumn an ottoman military uniform like all of the super fancy stuff was was it the heel like i was
00:38:02.120
saying the high heel was taken from what was it persian warriors who rode on horseback and needed the heel to
00:38:09.480
to be able to stand up and do archery from stirrups on a horse while moving like all of the stuff that
00:38:17.240
is frou-frou fashion came from military dress military dress was fabulous and the enlightenment was when
00:38:24.360
some guys were like well i mean shouldn't masculinity be more about like stoicism and not wasting money and
00:38:31.000
you know focusing on things that actually matter for civilization and then you had the colonization
00:38:36.440
period during the enlightenment yeah which was huge as well and that was when you did the good
00:38:40.600
colonization not just the exploitative type you know nation building in other countries
00:38:44.680
yeah no it was it was it was space space style final frontier colonization it was we are going to
00:38:51.240
go to the unknown lands i mean of course any leftist is going to be like are you kidding me the americas
00:38:56.680
were fully populated with indigenous americans this is not the unknown open frontier which is
00:39:02.200
i mean not exactly true the the diseases that the europeans did not mean to bring over with them
00:39:08.280
had mostly wiped out most of the american population at that point oh so they were already it was heavily
00:39:14.280
depopulated i want to say were they more than decimated if i remember correctly i don't i don't actually
00:39:19.480
know like i want to say it was just 98 wow also decimation as a practice make any do you understand
00:39:27.800
the reasoning behind it why would you kill 10 of your troops even if they were naughty
00:39:35.640
that doesn't make like you need them unless they were too too expensive to feed and you were just
00:39:40.840
trying to like save money while also putting them in line do you understand the reasoning and behind
00:39:45.320
decimation so i i mean obviously it's it's a punitive thing it's so that you and everybody
00:39:51.480
understand what it means to failure to fail in an instance or in a case where failure rates could be
00:39:58.840
extremely high so yeah it says here okay so you as a general would decimate your troops when they
00:40:05.720
behaved really poorly because you knew that basically if they didn't shape up you probably
00:40:09.240
lose like 50 of them in your next time historically if if a route happened everyone died okay so yeah better
00:40:16.440
to to lose 10 and scare them straight than to lose 90 next time you go to battle that's so it says
00:40:22.440
the commonly cited figure is that diseases killed approximately 90 of the native american population
00:40:27.400
over the centuries following contact with some sources specifying up to 95 in certain regions or
00:40:33.240
overall so yeah and then yeah yep it is so 90 to 95 it was it was it wasn't decimation it was
00:40:41.960
the decimation is what was left yeah my god um so so yeah america was i i didn't mean to
00:40:49.800
not a a pleasant thing to say but and it's one of the things that i also almost want to do an episode
00:40:54.280
on is there have been various times in human history where a group has lived through a post-apocalypse
00:40:59.880
and we as we were expanding in the in the west and in the americas the the native populations that we
00:41:06.840
were encountering from their perspective we're living in a post-apocalyptic world their entire
00:41:13.160
society like when we talk about how savage many of them were well yeah it sounds kind of yeah it was
00:41:17.320
very road warrior right it was like we're just going to raid other groups they were acting like
00:41:22.200
road warrior raiders because they were living in a post-apocalypse there was still like one or two
00:41:26.840
peaceful settlement not like one or two but there were there were like i'd say it seems i don't know i
00:41:32.040
want to say well the the peaceful ones that i learned about i learned about in school in california
00:41:35.880
like the ohlone because i don't know like maybe in the west jerokee were the ones who got screwed
00:41:40.440
over the most they were they were fairly peaceful westernized so there there were there were some
00:41:46.840
peaceful indians but but a lot of someone told me recently someone i think who listens to this
00:41:51.480
podcast that the inuit or above repopulation rate by the way oh wow yeah the uh and and so much of
00:41:57.480
native american history we totally have to do a video on native americans like you're you're just
00:42:02.280
told lies like the the whole if you've been told the story about the giving or thinking about giving
00:42:09.480
infected blankets to native americans oh yeah what is not told about that story is the city was under
00:42:17.480
siege there were women and children in the city that very group of native americans had wiped out women
00:42:22.040
and children in other cities they had sieged um like they were in an existential fight for their
00:42:28.680
lives and the native americans were regularly committing war crimes like anybody who wasn't
00:42:34.280
stupid would have done the the infected blankets routine there by the way if you're like well the
00:42:40.120
indians were being massacred and that's why they attacked the fort no no that wasn't why the indians
00:42:45.240
attacked the fort they attacked the fort because they stopped getting random guests
00:42:48.360
for context on what caused potomac's war after the british defeated the french in 1763 they took
00:42:54.280
control over former french territories in the great lakes region in the ohio valley this shifted
00:42:59.000
alliances and policies towards the indian american tribes who had often sided with the french so
00:43:02.680
specifically they did this because the the indians of this area had previously sided with their
00:43:08.600
enemies and killed their people british commander lord jeffrey amherst implemented cost-cutting measures
00:43:15.320
implementing reducing gifts and trade goods to tribes which fueled resentment ottawa reader potomac
00:43:21.160
rallied the coalition of tribes including the ottawa delaware lenape schwanee mingo ajabi and the
00:43:27.320
others to resist british expansion so specifically this war was motivated because the indians stopped
00:43:36.040
getting gifts stopped getting gifts they were like okay now we gotta kill you the conflict was brutal
00:43:40.840
it was often estimates of around 2000 civilian settler deaths and this particular settlement had 300
00:43:48.520
people in it and if we're looking for the total death that potentially came of this i.e of the the
00:43:54.920
smallpox deaths it was only 60 to 80 native americans that is talked about and not the horror that led to it
00:44:02.040
is talked about i think shows the historical bias in how we remember these events and that in the eyes of
00:44:08.040
progressives and your professors growing up white lives are literally irrelevant i also learned though
00:44:14.040
that at one point benjamin franklin made up stories around native american war crimes to i think in in
00:44:20.440
relation to the revolutionary war implying that the redcoats that is to say the british were working with
00:44:25.880
these war crime committing the native americans i'm sure he was just using stories of actual atrocities
00:44:32.680
committed in other contexts but just made the connection with the british yeah they did a lot
00:44:37.960
of scalping and stuff like they did a lot no no one the whole shell thing that i told you about in
00:44:42.520
relation to oh yeah they killed this was the witch tribe pocahontas's tribe yeah they would pick off
00:44:47.560
your skin with a shell until you died i think they scraped it i don't think you like scraped it yeah well
00:44:52.040
you were tied to like a a post yeah but yeah no no so i i'm not saying that they didn't do that i'm just
00:44:57.480
saying like there was there was unfair propaganda and stuff but yeah anyway yeah we should we should
00:45:03.960
do something on that because another person who listens to this podcast was telling me how like
00:45:07.960
based on their calculations or telling us actually via email i think that most native american tribes
00:45:14.040
are functionally extinct if you define you know like pure like both sides like 100 inherited
00:45:21.800
native american which many tribes do define is like to be a member of this tribe you have to be
00:45:26.760
both mother and father of this tribe and also to be culturally of the tribe which i think he he said
00:45:34.440
was defined as dreaming in that native language like people just aren't oh yeah no if you are going by
00:45:41.240
those standards i'd say almost every native american tribe is extinct yeah and i think that this is just
00:45:46.920
functionally true even if you're talking about some of the more successful tribes like say the seminoles
00:45:52.840
or something like that you know their kids are growing up with tvs and iphones and and western
00:45:58.040
culture dreaming and debauched english which is a a bigger factor for their daily lives yeah because the
00:46:05.480
tribes that survived often survived by leaning into capitalism you know and and even when they perform
00:46:12.120
well in that they got absorbed entirely i don't think that there are functionally there might be
00:46:17.720
like a few meaningfully unique native tribes left but not really in terms of what you're talking about
00:46:25.080
here so that's another thing right i left there with like the the land acknowledgements and stuff
00:46:30.360
like that in their speeches which oh i just heard of maybe i'm blocked and reported i can't remember where
00:46:35.480
on what podcast i heard about this but about a professor who i think felt obligated or was pressured to
00:46:41.960
or possibly even like forced to by policy make a land acknowledgement but his was very passive
00:46:47.640
aggressive and then he actually did the research and discovered oh no he's like by the like this
00:46:52.600
theory of land ownership this tribe doesn't own the land it was like the like some some theory of
00:46:59.160
ownership that means like if you work the land you own it but this native american tribe had never
00:47:03.240
this indigenous tribe had never actually like cultivated the land so he's like by this definition of land
00:47:08.760
land ownership they never owned it and then he like proceeds to do his lecture no i think that
00:47:14.040
for that reason his syllabus was removed from the university website and the university apologized for
00:47:19.160
his that's not the way to do a passive aggressive how you do a passive aggressive land acknowledgement
00:47:25.080
is you research it and you start the land acknowledgement out totally normal like you know we think the x
00:47:31.160
tribe for this land who were then massacred by the y tribe who were then massacred by the z tribe yeah
00:47:38.840
and then we massacred this tribe who rightfully owned this land after massacring the so-and-so who had
00:47:45.560
massacred the so-and-so before them who had massacred the so-and-so using the following explicitly violent
00:47:51.400
methods that would be fantastic no no no no what you do it then you then and the lagged acknowledgement
00:47:56.600
and so we massacred that tribe to you know out of honor their tradition of ownership yes i don't know
00:48:04.040
what you pointed out with what i'm saying is that you structure it as a the the point of the land
00:48:10.200
acknowledgement is to say that we are showing our gratitude to the first tribe that owned the land
00:48:17.480
by slaughtering the tribe that took it from them as this yes as retribution for the land being oh we
00:48:25.160
yeah yeah because they how dare they take it from how dare they take it from the very first person
00:48:30.680
who walked we were doing we were just yeah it was revenge it was revenge yeah for the other native
00:48:37.000
americans don't you know so sorry not sorry you were wrong oh my god okay well love you there's a
00:48:46.200
dinosaur in my lap going to blow out so i have to run you want burmese minchican and rice perhaps
00:48:51.320
yeah that'll be easy okay i love you a lot thank you for your girl cheese today that was really
00:48:57.320
delicious oh i'm eating two meals today this is how you know today is a day of luxury yeah and it was
00:49:02.760
on homemade sourdough bread all ingredients sourced from our like that you can read no no mystery
00:49:11.400
ingredients finally getting to a point where a lot of people are finding no bugs on our fab which i'm
00:49:15.480
really excited about and tomorrow by the way i was thinking of running the star wars episode just
00:49:21.000
because i want to see people's reactions to it you okay with that one yeah let's do it all right i love
00:49:25.960
you to death we lost the ghostwriter well no i'm happy it happened and i'm really grateful for
00:49:33.640
everything we learned from that now i just have to figure out how we can do it i think creating an
00:49:38.680
ai agent to do it i'll i'll figure that out with all the time i don't it'll happen i'll i'll make
00:49:46.200
an agent to figure it out for me it'll be great you're it with the agents on our fab right now they
00:49:51.000
can at least do stuff like that pretty well help me out let's do it okay love you oh my god he has
00:49:58.600
such a blow up there's like way like my mercenary approach to life in the world and relations is
00:50:05.560
unfortunately if i'm going to be leading homeschooling going to become like disproportionately
00:50:11.320
represented in our children because it's already showing up in things like you know i i deleted all
00:50:18.440
the fun apps from our kids phones and or tablets for the end of the night that just put on like
00:50:23.640
learning apps and stuff but but even then the other night i asked octavia like can you set up a
00:50:31.320
tablet for indian like put on a pbs kids show or something and he's like only if
00:50:35.480
she does two lessons first because i am super mercenary with him i'm like you get to take a
00:50:40.440
break after you finish like three math exercises like only if she does two lessons and i love that
00:50:47.560
he's gonna be managing her education one day so you know yeah yeah and one and i bet you were wondering
00:50:53.240
why he was being so good when you came to help him get set up while we recorded my my mercenary exchange
00:51:01.400
with him today was he was allowed to watch the rest of that mr beast games episode if he finished
00:51:09.000
a bunch of lessons and boy did it ever like i've never seen him focus like that before which i just
00:51:15.160
actually came across a study showing that leaning into your strengths and interests with adhd is like
00:51:20.200
the top cure so like i get it but man he blew through it then he watched that episode and then tried to
00:51:26.440
cheat and watch another one and i immediately snatched up his laptop he pouted big time i thought
00:51:33.240
he was just going to tell me he hated me and that there was going to be nothing i can do for the rest
00:51:37.320
of the day and then i had this long conversation with him of like listen if we show you a thing and
00:51:42.520
then you behave poorly after it are we ever going to want to show you that thing again like obviously not
00:51:47.400
and i thought it was just going to go all over his head and he's just going to be mad at me all day
00:51:51.160
and then suddenly he's all like blasting through his math lessons and then you know like you come
00:51:57.640
to the room and he's like oh well can i take down my whiteboard and my my number magnets
00:52:03.880
to work downstairs yeah i gotta do some math like because now but it's all like so instrumental and
00:52:10.040
mercenary and i actually really like it because i don't think people should
00:52:16.680
like part of me is like oh i'm doing this wrong because you should just love math for math's sake
00:52:23.880
and you should just love learning words and phonics just for but honestly it's a little tedious getting
00:52:30.200
some of these fundamentals in place and it's i'm just realizing it's it's just bribery all the way down
00:52:38.040
and i don't know i feel very conflicted about it i love it is he is he learning by the way do you see
00:52:43.880
him making progress i was stunned i was actually going through the the primary thing i'm using to
00:52:50.840
evaluate where he stands grade level wise with his homeschooling and he might be getting to the second
00:52:56.760
grade like within a couple of weeks in some domains that would be amazing yeah because my our goal was
00:53:05.480
because he's in he's technically in first grade now to get him into the third grade by the end of the
00:53:10.280
year so to have him one semester ahead basically but i think we're gonna blow through that because
00:53:15.480
at school he was always considered behind yeah oh severely behind what also is insane to me though is
00:53:22.920
we i we're not going to stop over the summer you know we're just like every day is just going to be
00:53:27.400
a school day and it's so bizarre to me that we still have summer vacations in the u.s that like oh
00:53:33.400
i mean you can work we don't yeah like yeah and that was like this this social contract of like
00:53:39.320
okay please just let us teach your children to read you can keep them as farm workers don't worry
00:53:44.120
are you even going to send him toasty to school are we gonna just not send him at all i want it to be
00:53:50.760
his decision and every time i bring it up i'm not yet sure what his decision is going to be because he
00:53:57.880
much like octavian only knows of the school bus he has no understanding of what's on the other end
00:54:03.880
of the school bus but he wants it it's like i think it's very similar if you drive by a nightclub
00:54:11.080
then you see people waiting in line for the nightclub and you're like i gotta get in there you know like
00:54:15.800
that looks cool yeah like they're all waiting in line it has neon lights on the outside like i gotta
00:54:21.960
get you know you're like you know it's there's you can hear the music booming inside what's going on
00:54:26.600
in there and then you get in it's crowded it's loud there's vomit everywhere the four sticky i mean
00:54:31.880
actually they're exactly the same nothing happens you wait the whole time lines instructions
00:54:40.680
like oh god you should see our episodes on school we got to do an episode on how bad school is these
00:54:44.920
days like nobody's how you're gonna do on how bad nightclubs are too we're kind of notorious about
00:54:49.720
everybody knows that nightclubs are falling apart they're like not a thing anymore
00:54:53.080
i mean they're for old people that's that's what nightclubs are now you show up and it's just
00:54:57.800
boomer women boomer women yeah all right i'll get started here
00:55:16.360
octavian let him try it let him try to read it and then you can tell him if he does it right or not
00:55:20.520
okay okay you can have the book well you have well you have to show