The Shift from Optimism to Caution

In this episode, Simone and the host delve into a controversial discussion on the impact of women and feminist movements on society. The conversation heavily references a piece by Arctotherium titled 'Progress Studies and Feminization', which argues that the rise of women in politics, the labor force, and academia has led to a decline in societal progress and optimism. The host presents various graphs and statistics to support this narrative, highlighting trends in energy consumption, publication rates, and language use from the 1960s onwards. They discuss the role of rationality, reason, and scientific progress, contrasting the forward-looking optimism of past decades with contemporary societal anxieties. The episode also touches on the gendered differences in attitudes towards technology, housing, and environmental issues, suggesting that the increasing influence of women in cultural and political spheres has had a conservative effect on societal progress.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Hello Simone. Today we are going to be discussing how women destroyed society. And because of

Simone Collins: course they did.

Malcolm Collins: Of course they did. No, actually, so people, they go on our podcast and they might think we're gonna do one of our sort of bait and switch things here, or I'm like, well, women caused some problems, you know?

No. And, and especially, no, you're like, but

Simone Collins: actually no, seriously my

Malcolm Collins: words, I'm gonna be going over somebody else's piece. So no one attribute this to me. I'm not saying, I'm just saying it's worth talking about this piece. You're just asking a questions lot of, and statistics. Shows how society began to fall apart with the rise of the feminist movement and women participating in politics in the labor force.

Mm. And usually I'm not like particularly compelled by these sorts of cases if people know me. Mm. In this instance, I found it. But what's interesting is the entire piece, if you didn't like Wade through the first part, which I'm not gonna share with you guys 'cause it's boring. Thanks. [00:01:00] You and, and the title, you wouldn't know that that's what the piece is.

The piece is progress Studies and feminization. Okay. And, and then the subtitle is, you Can't Undo just one part of the 1960s, and it's by our favorite, one of our favorite writers for this show is Arc Ethereum. Oh, he's fun.

Simone Collins: Oh, and he also, yeah, no, he's definitely, it's Women's Fault. So, okay.

Yeah. Okay. Ardo fine. Let's hear your Ethereum.

Malcolm Collins: No. Yeah, and, and the broader thing is, and I, and, and I'll note here, I'm not saying all women are a danger to society. I'm just saying non-autistic women are a danger to society. Thanks, Malcolm. Like, women, like my wife are fine. You're, you're a sweetheart.

Simone Collins: Well, I mean, yeah. I mean, just, just to do basic female functions, I have to take the same amount of hormones as a trans woman, so. Can we really call me female,

Malcolm Collins: right? Yeah. So here I'm gonna pop on screen a graph that was in this first rambling bit he did which is the Henry Adams curve of energy consumption.

And it's supposed to go up [00:02:00] logarithmically, but actually what we can see here is around the 1960s it stopped, and if anything started declining while before, perfectly fitting to the curve. Then if we go down to this next study here we can look at total pages published in the federal Register, thousands of pages per year.

We can also see a logarithmic curve going up until we hit around 1975, and then it basically stops. Okay. Now to go into the piece where it starts getting interesting. We live in a age that has lost its optimism. Polls show that people think the world is getting worse and not better. Children fear dying from environmental catastrophe before they reach old age.

Technologists are as likely to be told that they are ruining society as they are bettering it. Da da da. And then he is right. This change is quantifiable books written in English, French and German. The Fri three major languages of the modern West showed a continuous rise in the number of terms relating to progress [00:03:00] and the future from around 1600 to 1970 when things suddenly took a turn for the worse.

And here I will put on a screen, a graph here, and what you can see here is. Going into the 19 hundreds basically until you get to around the 1970s. Two things happened in the English language. People stop using terms that stand for progress or the future, like moving forwards. Oh, and they start using more words that are associated with caution, worry, and risk.

Oh. So society basically became worried about the future getting better. And if you go, and we talked about this in our episode nationalism saves. Countries, and it's not just nationalism, it's retro futuristic nationalism where if you go to the 1950s sci-fi, it's just very forward looking. Very excited about the future.

You know, it's all, you know, rocket ships and exploration and, and utopian colonies. When that stuff is incredibly rare in modern sci-fi, you see very, very little utopian sci-fi anymore. And even. Sci-fi that used to have, I, I think Star Trek's a bit of a [00:04:00] dystopia, but it's at least written as a Di Utopia Watch.

Our Star Trek episode, one of my favorites. But the utopian nature has left Modern Star Trek where it's written much more dystopian. Now, if you look at something like, you know, lower decks or you look at the new like Picard show and stuff like that. And the larger piece, just so you know, that he is, he sort of views feminism as an antagonist to what he refers to as progress studies or like research into progress.

Now I actually think this framing is stupid when what he's actually talking about is human progress more broadly. But if you're wondering what progress studies is that's like what Tyler Cohen, like Mercer does, that sort of stuff.

Speaker 4: Mm-hmm. Right.

Malcolm Collins: Or I guess aporia more broadly does that, which is where this piece was written.

One of the biggest drivers. One works

Simone Collins: in progress too, right? Based outta the uk.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Okay, so then back to this piece, one of the biggest drivers of progress is rationality. Progress depends on the belief that the world is rational to begin with and can be understood, and therefore intentionally [00:05:00] changed for the better.

I would agree with that. Anton Howes, the historian behind the age of invention, calls this the quote unquote improvers mentality and observe that it is historically rare, only arising in a handful of cultures. This is not an intuitive belief. Exclamation mark. Muslim scholar Al Gali famously argued that as everything occurs the way Allah wills it, rather than according to predictable laws, science was impossible.

The idea of. Progress that sustained improvement is most possible and desirable is a fleeting one. And here, I'll note here, we've talked about when Islam began to fail and became sort of a religion of the dark ages, because there was a period when it was one of the greatest religions of progress out there.

So much so that when Western writers would write scientific works, they would often write under Arab pen names because people wouldn't take them seriously. So that's, that is how far ahead of us they were in the sciences. Right. And Al Gza comes along and basically everything begins to fall apart.

He's like, we need to become [00:06:00] mystical. We need to stop this, this progress

Simone Collins: stuff. Oh, no. Basically, oh, no.

Malcolm Collins: Right. Yeah. Not great. And I don't think it's, it's great for a lot of modern Jewish stuff because we are seeing this in modern Jewish religious traditions with the Habad movement, for example, moving them more towards mysticism and normalizing mysticism, which I see as sort of a Jewish version of Alga. Sufi mystics.

Speaker 4: Hmm.

Malcolm Collins: Even more importantly, reason allows people to stand on the shoulders of giants. Scientific. And, and I'll note here what mysticism, the reason why mysticism doesn't allow that is because mysticism says that the subjective experiences you, you have whether it's from corrupt in middle states like drugs or spinning, or just your own intuition, take precedence over subjective rationality that can be tested in sort of the court of, of the real world, right?

Simone Collins: Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: which means you can't stand on giant shoulders anymore because now you're just speculating on somebody else's speculation, which never had anybody really confirm its authenticity except for whoever was a popular idea [00:07:00] person at the time. Scientific and technological progress are driven by exceptional individuals, but reason makes it possible to reliably build on the past or to debunk them when they're wrong, which allows the collective brain to improve over time rather than running in circles.

With that in mind, the English purpose shows a steady rise in reason related words, a corresponding fall in intuition related words from 1850 to 1975. In here he shows a chart where you can see principle component words, sentiment intention related words, and rationality related words in four major language groups.

Here you've got English all you've got Spanish, you've got English fiction, and you've got English. Excel fiction. I don't know what that stands for. But you can see this is a very strong trend where you have a graph that's just going down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, hits the 1950s shoot, right up to right now we are at a lower use.

Of many of these words, like [00:08:00] let's say if you're looking at like the, how high intuition related words are used today. Mm-hmm. They are finally today used more or around as much as they were in the 1850s.

Simone Collins: Oh dear.

Malcolm Collins: In English and in Spanish. They're used more in English fiction, more Yikes. Right. That is horrifying.

If, if you look at sentiment like sentimentality related words you have it go down, down, down, down, down, down, down till you, you have the cold rationalist Victorians now shooting right up to like double the rate they were ever used in the 1850s. So this is definitely a real thing that he's note here.

And he said you can see the same trend in Congress. He shows here EMI ratings for Democrats and Republicans. Yeah. And you can see they, they were holding steady or sorry, it was going up. From 1880 to around the 1970s, and then it begins to crash.

And now it's at way lower rates than it was in 1880s. So, the big political sex difference [00:09:00] progress and, and this was really interesting ' cause I didn't know this, and we're gonna go into another piece here before I get into this, but I wanna hear your thoughts so far. I, I, I sort of feel this, this argument flushed out.

I mean. Society has sort of felt like scientifically we've been declining since the 1970s.

Simone Collins: Well, and, and that sentiment and optics and emotion have taken the place of reason and facts and science. So I don't disagree with this. I want to see a more stronger argument for connection between feminine influences.

Well, we haven't gotten to that yet,

Malcolm Collins: but I can argue for an alternate theory of what might be causing this. Yeah. It could be the establishment of the institutional academic bureaucracy because that didn't really happen until the 1970s. And, and, and a lot of people don't realize when they're like.

Trusts the science that the system we use to determine what science is true and what isn't. Like a a, a peer reviewed with like a score attached to it based on how many people have cited you. This system didn't really develop until the [00:10:00] 1970s before that science was something. Entirely different. And so when people say trust the science, they don't understand.

They're saying trust an entirely new system. That doesn't seem to work very well and that hasn't really been tested. And that in the way that we're seeing it tested in the court of public opinion is not doing well. If you look at the rate of scientific progress. Okay. The rate of funding going into scientific progress you see it's basically flatlined since the 1970s when you account for the amount of funding.

It

Simone Collins: seems so counterintuitive that although a rise of academia would see a drop in. Facts and arise in sentimentality though. That's so odd.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Alright, so anyway, he says here I've been thinking about this progress in the sense of progress studies lately as I'm wrapping up the fellowship and leading into the conference.

A common lament is that the progress community is very masculine, both in the sense that women are underrepresented among enthusiasts of markets and technology, and perhaps also in the sense that there may be something inherently quote unquote masculine in the gung-ho, [00:11:00] relentless, aggressive vibe of progress as a concept in itself.

And this is by Sarah Co Constantine who said this. So a woman said this, A woman said that progress is a masculine. But what I found really compelling, and I didn't know this. Is despite the widening gap in political identification, which we all know about sex differences on specific political issues are typically small.

But there is, and I, and I'm gonna put a graph on screen here because I didn't know this, and what this graph shows is just all of the various, you know, abolition, private health insurance against limited government magazines, you know, like just tons and tons and tons of different positions here.

And what you'll notice is that the male and female position is really not that far apart on most issues. Um hmm. But then he notes here was one enormous area where that is true support for technological progress, economic dynamism, and human abundance. This is the one area where women actually have a massive difference in terms of their preferences.

Why? Why? [00:12:00] Why? Well, you actually see that, okay. Think about it this way. If you go around and you ask people are, should nuclear reactors be shut down? Like, are nuclear reactors a danger? Women are gonna be hugely, disproportionately more likely to say they should be shut down. And you actually see this in the studies.

We'll get to this in a bit. Or you ask about GMO foods. Human women are wildly more likely to say GMO foods should be shut down. Mm-hmm. I would. AI technology, and this is why the conservatives have weirdly become the pro AI party and the progressives, the anti AI party because the progressives are, and I, and I note to our followers here, what this means is if you are the type of conservative who goes out there and is like, Hey, we need to like shut down.

Research. We need to not, you know, continue with all this scientific development. You fundamentally have a feminized mind. You're thinking like a woman, the conservative who comes out there and is like, well, we just need to stop all of this, this, this moving forwards. We need to go back to the way things were.

You are thinking like a woman. There we.

Simone Collins: There you [00:13:00] go.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I actually, now I'm gonna skip and go to the piece that he linked to where this graph came from that showed that women and men actually aren't that different in their political beliefs, because I thought it had some interesting ideas in it.

Speaker 4: Okay. So

Malcolm Collins: it says, I'm gonna put an image on screen here if the longhouse values. Feelings of a warmth and its safety among all elses. The longhouse is like this female cabal sort of idea. It's the, the male version of the patriarchy that, that some men come up with and don't want to admit that they're just blaming everything on the matriarchy reveling into learned helplessness, which the.

Longhouse does do I would argue like the whiter female vibe. The goon cave lacks decorum is unnecessarily cruel and generally repulses, most respectable people. And he has an image representing the two, and I'm like, yeah, that checks out for me. For example, your symbol of progress in the second half of the 20th century was space exploration.

For as far back as there is data, men have been much more likely to support increasing government funding for space exploration. Mm-hmm. Crucially around twice as much. I wanna put a graph on screen here, which shows this. [00:14:00] Oh, and increasing divide was Women Now more and more against space exploration.

Simone Collins: Well then women can't complain about not being astronauts at the same level. You gotta pitch in.

Malcolm Collins: There's women astronauts. There's those women who paid men to make them astronauts. They could be adored. They don't catch. Perhaps the single biggest political issue taken up by those under the banner of progress studies is housing political barriers to local construction.

Nimbyism, especially in highly desirable metropolitan areas, are blamed for low supply and thus extremely high housing prices. Which are in turn blamed for slow growth, climate change, poor health, financial instability, economic instability, and falling fertility. In Britain, which was one of the worst housing crisis in the developed world, men support building more houses in their local area by 17 points, while women oppose it by three points.

Speaker 3: That's a divide. Wow. Okay. So what are your thoughts so far? Before we go further here? I don't understand women. This is,

Malcolm Collins: if I say, no, autistic women know [00:15:00] your limits.

Speaker: See how the men look at her with utter contempt.

Women, know your limits.

Malcolm Collins: Mm-hmm. We need to, the greater replacement, the uti need to replace everyone else. We need to, we're working on it, man. Watch this. You need to get out there and get pregnant and make it your new special interest.

Okay. Because, because I don't want my kids out there dating some normy woman, all right. That's gonna be very dangerous. They're gonna have to deal with emotions and sense of mentality and anti-progress. It's very difficult. We need, we need to wash this outta the gene pool, whatever is leading women to, to feel this way.

So to continue here, nuclear power, which combines significant greenhouse gas emissions. Which, which is great. Very good at removing air pollution. Yeah. With the reliability of fossil fuels also true. It's, it's very reliable is another technology. The progress movement strongly backs as a supplement to solar.

There is a. 30 point sex gap in the support of increasing nuclear power generation in the US and being male is [00:16:00] one of the strongest predictors of support of nuclear in Denmark. And I'm, I'm putting a graph on screen here that shows this. As you would expect from their Lia, progress studies is broadly in favor of transgenic crops, GMOs, such as golden rice or Roundup resistant corn, giving their potential to contribute to rapid 20th century progress in agriculture.

GMOs don't get as much attention as they used to, but women are 16 points more likely to believe that they are worse for health than men. And I have another graph on screen here showing this. What do you, what do you think? I wonder

Simone Collins: like maybe it's not that these are inherent female views or intuitions, but rather that a pervasive culture that has permeated female spaces argues these things.

And if, for example, we just replaced, like if we bait and switched the cultures out, they would just,

Malcolm Collins: That was my hypothesis. But what he is gonna go into later in this piece is that the sentiment against technology is one of the few. Gender gap? [00:17:00] Things that hasn't changed in men and women over time?

Oh, it's just kind of universal. For example, women used to be like more anti-abortion than men. They used to be more religious than men. They used to be more conservative in a lot of areas than men. They were always anti-progress. And so that, you know

Simone Collins: who wrote Frankenstein, but a woman yeah, that's.

Malcolm Collins: So, so the is the men who are anti-progress today, who are anti, not progressives, but I mean like just being

Simone Collins: feminine. Yes.

Malcolm Collins: Human flourishing. Right. The technophobic men

Simone Collins: are just moving into the longhouse.

Malcolm Collins: Whatever you are, to a woman, they are to a man. Yeah, yeah, yeah. In their brain and made them like an atri hundreds woman, you know, they're, they're more conservative and more against abortion, but also terrified of technology.

Now, of course, they wouldn't say I'm terrified of technology. They'd just be like, well, technology, GMOs, editing human genomes, et cetera, that's all dangerous and scary and new. And it's like, well be a man, like barrel through, like that's what we always do. Right? You know, you, you get the Victorian like, yeah man, use

Simone Collins: tool, tool fix [00:18:00] thing.

Hello?

Malcolm Collins: I have cancer. Baby. Have cancer fix cancer. Fix means fix

Speaker 3: cancer. Yes, baby. Not smart. New tool, fixed thing, baby. Frail.

Malcolm Collins: Anyway progress studies is prenatal list. I love he throws that in there. You know, I get the prenatal list thing, right? Thank you. Or Ethereum. On the grounds that the purpose of progress is to benefit people.

There need to be people to benefit, and that more people means more agglomeration effects, more economies of scale, longer learning curves, more opportunities for specialization, more competition, and more potential innovators. Once again, women are more likely to believe too many children are being born than men.

26 to 19. In terms of points difference and are less likely to believe not enough children are being born. 14 to 30. Huh. So again this is something that we see here, right? Like we, we ISTs in the prenatal space, women are just much more resistant to wanting to save humanity. They sort of want like this to be the final generation society to ground to a halt.

And of course, I'm putting [00:19:00] a graph on screen here so you can see this. And this is where he notes, unlike sex differences on issues like abortion or religious attendance, these gaps go back as far as can be measured. Relevant sex differences in personality. This is a, a different piece here.

All that is solid melts into air. All that is holy is profane. Technological and scientific progress is intrinsically dangerous, frightening, and destabilizing. It also has a potential cornucopia of riches. Should the risk or reward dominate the greater reproductive variance of men means that men are more likely to accept a high risk, high reward course of action.

Mm-hmm. One way of looking at this, the most reproductively successful man of the second millennium was Genghis Khan, the most reproductively successful woman. Was his mother naively, we would expect men to be more willing to risk failure for an uncertain future payoff. And this is exactly what we see. So basically he's saying women are risk averse and the female mine is risk averse, which is why they are progress in technology.

Averse thoughts before I go further?

Simone Collins: Oh [00:20:00] yeah. Okay. That's, yeah, I mean, millions of years of evolution based on the limits of your biology and the, the risks to which you were subject.

Malcolm Collins: So per John Archer's 2019 meta-analysis of human psychological sex differences, some of the relevant personality differences for progress orientation.

So this is view of like wanting future to be better agreeableness, 0.29. Engineering interest, 1.11. Mechanical reasoning. I'm not gonna give you the numbers because you don't care. Risk taking and harm avoidance. But there is a reason to believe that personality differences are even bigger because personality is typically assessed via questionnaire.

This brings with it the obvious problems, such as people responding with different reference groups in mind, as well as social desirability bias, which can deflate results. For example, when assessed via questionnaire. The fearfulness gap between men and women is D 0.41, which is noticeable, but not huge.

But when assessed in the real world, the gap is much larger. 1.16 to [00:21:00] 0.49. Self-assessed difference in risk-taking might not seem that large, but consider that the blank. Slightest argue that young women's social anxiety over cooking a bad meal is equivalent. Risk taking to young men jumping off of cliffs for fun.

The reference frame for what constitutes a risk is not the same for men and women. That is why if you're looking for people who are both interested and able in engineering, disagreeable enough to break consensus and willing to take risk for uncertain payoffs, you will overwhelmingly find men as a result.

Technology slash market slash future and ideas oriented groups tend to be around 90% male. And here I'm gonna put some graphs on screen here. And the first poll is points allocated to five academic priorities by gender among undergraduate and graduate PhD students. Mm-hmm. And here you can see that women are less interested in academic freedom.

They are less interested in advancing knowledge. They are less interested in academic rigor, they are more interested in social justice, and they are more interested in [00:22:00] emotional wellbeing. Here you can see points allocated to all five academic priorities by gender among faculty. Women are less interested in academic freedom.

They are less interested in advancing knowledge. They're less interested in academic rigor. They are less, they are more interested in social justice and they are more interested in emotional wellbeing. Now, the atory part here, you getting, you're getting concerned, Simone, that oh.

Simone Collins: I mean, there's a time and a place for those things, right? Like it's good to balance, but. I don't know, man knows not the time.

Malcolm Collins: And I know here this isn't for the women who watch our show, you're basically a different gender. 'cause you're all a bunch of little autistics. You're, you're artisanal women which is very different from the, the category of creature I am talking about.

You have met these creatures. They are terrifying. I, I was, I was, I was talking with Simone recently, like her inability to understand like normy women, and I'm just like, I'm so glad you don't get it. 'cause

Simone Collins: Well also, like I'm getting the impression that most of my high school friends were probably on the spectrum.[00:23:00]

Malcolm Collins: Well, you have a lot of Asian, we're just

Simone Collins: culturally very different. Yeah. Like a Asian first generation. It may just be a cultural thing. Like I just joke, I can't model this because I didn't encounter it. It's so hard for me to understand this, but that, that's why I feel like the cultural argument remains.

I don't know. I don't, I can't model, I can't imagine. My friends from high school, for example, my first generation agent, immigrant friends, I. Being like, oh, GMO foods, that's scary. Like, they wouldn't, they wouldn't do that, you know, they wouldn't be afraid of ai. They, they, they adopt it fast, right? Like they were, they were the ones who told me how to use New Tech.

So, so

Malcolm Collins: yeah. I remember. Is this cultural

Simone Collins: maybe? I mean, I don't know.

Malcolm Collins: I I, my, my new joke about Asians, by the way, is that our, our great-grandchildren are gonna see Asians, the way people in the anime fryan see elves, where it's like elves in Fryan. If you don't know, they are [00:24:00] like, they don't, they're not really, don't get strong arousal.

And they don't they're not really interested in relationships or romance. So they just breed at incredibly low rates. And if you look at our video on is low Asian fertility, genetic, which is really interesting. We go into the data on this. It may just be that they feel like arousal and romantic feelings at a much lower rate because of high rates of arranged marriages in their cultures.

Okay. And so, they, our kids will be like, oh my gosh, you cute little have you, have you ever do, do you really not feel arousal at all? Are you not desired to go out and mate with people? Oh my God. But anyway, female cultural dominance. If women are psychologically more predisposed to small C conservatism than men and hence opposed to progress, we might expect female cultural dominance to lead to the pattern seen in the text.

Corpuses above does the timing work? Yes. Since 1970, women have gone from represent from present, but marginal and prestige cultural institutions to approximate parody was men First Women authored books [00:25:00] crept upwards. As a share of total books between 1800 and 1970s before rocketing upwards and are now the majority.

The publishing industry is itself, 74% female, and here all putting graph on the screen of female authored books where you can see it just explodes after the 1970s.

Speaker 4: Wow.

Malcolm Collins: Second. Academia is intended to be the brain trust of society. An association of professionals paid to discover the truth. In 2022, women became the majority of college faculty in the United States.

And you can see if you go back to the 1970s, they just were not present in very big numbers. Dead. It doesn't exist for the key year of 1970s, but we can plot the ratio instead. And we get the following chart where you can see women just explode as a proportion starting around the 1970s. This closely matches the picture of college graduation rates.

Note that the X axis is the cohort birth year in the chart below. So here, this is college graduation rates and you just see exploding female college graduation rates. But this actually stuck and that

Simone Collins: gap is widening apparently. I thought it would slow down eventually. It's just getting worse.

Malcolm Collins: Oh no, it's getting worse. [00:26:00] Yeah. Now you see men start to go into college less and less now. Yeah. So it's not just And more trade

Simone Collins: school, I mean, which is great. I mean, they're ultimately I think more and more having a college degree is a liability. So people are better off just

Malcolm Collins: Yep. And now we can look at number of women in Congress.

You can see it was very low before the really 1980s. And then it just explodes the same as the number of women in the house. So in politics, women started getting involved,

Simone Collins: huh? Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: So thoughts.

Simone Collins: This is all. He's painting a worrying picture. I feel like it's an incomplete picture, but I can't give a very strong argument as to why, aside from I think culture is playing a role, despite the fact that I will admit that there are evolutionary reasons why women need to be more conservative and have evolved to be.

Gender amorphously more conservative. Right? Like that makes sense. And it would be crazy if women were [00:27:00] like the gender known for risk taking

Malcolm Collins: because, well, this is really interesting about women. So when we talk about, you know, small c conservatives, traditionalist conservatives having feminized minds I think that, the, the, this is really messing with some small C conservative males because they get very confused when you actually look at what the two parties are attempting to do. Right now. The party that's like taking big risks and is really interested in long-term human flourishing is the. Republican party at the moment.

You know, you look at dos, you look at their engagement with like science and everything like that. And, and they're just way more interested in that. And the progressive party is become the party, as we often say of the urban monoculture. But because the urban monoculture is the dominant culture right now, if you, your core goal is society not changing, which is the core goal of the urban monoculture that currently has dominance.

You are gonna fight for small C conservative causes, right? You're gonna fight for things not to change, to maintain your existing power hierarchy. And so a lot of [00:28:00] people who are small c conservatives often take positions which are fundamentally very left-leaning, was in the current. Political ecosystem without understanding that's what they're doing because they think Big C conservatism or like the right is a small C conservative movement, which is just not, it is an almost anti traditionalist movement insofar as it.

Will aggressively take ideas from various points in human history but it's building something new with those ideas. Even, even the traditional religious organizations that are surviving and thriving are doing it through new cultural technologies. I mean, people think of Mormons as like. C culturally conservative, but they're really not like the entire way that Mormons date here.

Now, these days with the the singles ward, this was like invented in the 1970s. If, if you look at like Catholics, like the trad cast communities that are actually surviving are not actually structured [00:29:00] the way Catholic communities were in like the 1950s. It is a, a new way of being Catholic that takes.

Aesthetic inspiration from periods long before the 1950s in, in the way that they're structured. It, it, it's a fundamentally new thing that's built using fundamentally new technology. Mm-hmm. And this is why the small c conservatives, it's not just focused on, we need autonomy to run our own community and do our own thing.

They'll end up. As recently saying, if you actually look at our positions on one of our podcasts and I don't mean this in any way as, as negative about him but at what's his guy? Lotus Eaters?

Sargon of kod that we, not, not his words or not his public reputation, but his actual positions outside of abortion.

We are to the right of him slightly on most issues, and yet the public framing of him is that he's. Like this far right extremist when he's like a pro gay marriage atheist. Apparently he goes to church now. But, [00:30:00] and one person was like, well, you know, another area where he's to the right of you is he's for banning pornography.

And I'm like, that is the most left wing position you could, it's super left wing. Yeah. If, if, if within the modern political context banning pornography is hand in hand was banning VPNs it. Of expanding the reach of a government nanny state, and allying yourself with fat feminist to increase their market value because you lack self-control and you want to help save people who do not have your belief system and lack self-control.

And people

Simone Collins: also said that, that he's to the right of us on immigration. I don't know where he stands on it.

Malcolm Collins: I mean, what, what is our broad immigration stance? Our stance

Simone Collins: on immigration is very simple. You can have one thing, open borders. And no social services or social services and extremely closed borders, that that is our stance on immigration.

Malcolm Collins: They shouldn't get in the first generation any social services at [00:31:00] all. And that immigration should be based on the, the contribution to the economy. Which means that you know, you should be looking at like, how much is this person earning in their home country? How, how smart are they et cetera, which is.

Donald Trump's position. This is what he laid out in what, what podcast was that? It's, it's not the position that he's actually ended up taking his policy because he's, he's been pushed back, well, on the All

Simone Collins: In podcast, he was in favor of, of giving visas to people with degrees. But then that, that everyone pointed out after that, that like, well they did that in Canada and it really, really backfired.

So yeah, it makes sense why he didn't do that. But, I don't, I, I mean that is a very conditional stance on immigration

Malcolm Collins: condition was to the left of us, which was give degree, give admission to anyone who goes to a US university, which I'm like, that could be too hacked.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Well, and it has been hacked egregiously in Canada at the very least.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So,

Simone Collins: yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Where I'm like, let them pay maybe $10 million [00:32:00] per citizenship. You know, something like that. Right. Like, at the very least, you're not gonna get a drain on the economy if somebody's paying $10 million per citizenship. Well,

Simone Collins: but he did, he he released that Golden Visa program. Oh, great, great.

Which I think is less than 10 million. Cost of Golden Visa. US SA, the EB five Immigrant Investor Program only, only. 1 million, 50,000. It's

Speaker 3: nothing.

Malcolm Collins: So the the, the the, the reason I was saying this is, is because as the conservative party has begun, the big C Conservative Party, the, the right, the new right, I guess is a better way to put it, has become less small c conservative.

A lot of people have sort of lost their home and gotten confused and ended up in their confusion. Attacking their own side. The reason why something like a porn ban is such a terrible idea outside of the rise in child grapes, that, that it causes, go to our episode where we, we discuss this, it's like really big in the data.

In one country when they dropped it, I wanna say it was [00:33:00] Romania, the rate dropped of SA on children dropped by like around 50%. It was huge. And we've seen this everywhere that has been legalized. You see this in Hong Kong, like functionally, you are condemning children to this fate.

Simone Collins: Let them eat porn.

Okay? People.

Malcolm Collins: You are giving the government, which is really bad, you are giving the government the right to define what is porn slash vulgar, the ability to make VPNs illegal because you fundamentally need to make this illegal to make. Porn illegal. Yeah. And then they'll define your ideas as vulgar.

Eventually they'll define your, this is what we're seeing in the uk. Like a lot of the negative stuff that we're seeing now in the UK uses porn restrictions as justification for implementing the, the restrictions on free speech.

Speaker 4: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: The moment you go, we wanna restrict this. You have handed bureaucrats the ability to define vulgarity which is why it's so dangerous to do.

And, and you haven't even really helped our side. You're only helping people who don't agree [00:34:00] with these parts of our beliefs. And this doesn't

Simone Collins: mean like if you, from a religious standpoint, don't believe in. Masturbation of porn consumption, like by all means abstain, but don't legislate that on other people.

Yeah. I mean, on

Malcolm Collins: this topic, the thing I point out is, you know, countries that have had porn illegal in them for like the past couple decades are countries like Korea countries where porn is not illegal, which has a terrible fertility rate for its income level. Where it's legal or countries like Israel, which has a great fertility rate, or the United States, which has a great fertility rate.

Yeah.

Simone Collins: I mean, yeah, the results, the proof is in the pudding, but also like, I think from a religious standpoint, you, you need to have people make the decision on their own and, and build the discipline on their own. You don't get the benefits from a cultural standpoint by forcing it on people and removing their ability to make that a willful choice, to not engage in that activity.

You have like, you don't get the reps, you don't get the lift. If these people aren't choosing of their own [00:35:00] volition to not engage in this activity.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Just the point here being is if you go to Korea, right? How many Korean men, like what percentage of the population do you think actively believe that they shouldn't be consuming porn?

And then would, would, if it was legal, would make the choice to very small? I'm gonna guess like three or 4%. Yeah. You go to Israel and you say like, do conservative Orthodox Jews, do they have bans against pornography within their culture? Absolutely. They do. Right. You know, you go, yeah. Like in the us

Simone Collins: no, FAP is a big movement.

Like by all means, like don't, yeah. And go to the

Malcolm Collins: Christian communities that have these great fertility rates. They have restrictions on pornography right. Within the US because that's why we're higher fertility than a lot of the other countries. But that, but that is in part, maintained by the fact that we are forced to make these choices that affirm our identity regularly.

Speaker 4: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: You know, and I, I was, I was talking about this in regards to put together this memo for the Mormon church on how they can attempt to increase their fertility [00:36:00] rates. And anyone here who's like a Mormon and you're like, oh, I'd like to get that and, and give it to like my elders or whatever, to, to consider, now, one of the things I point out is, you know when, when you're putting on your garments that differ you every day. This is what people outside of the Warren Church Club, the magic underwear we, you, you are affirming that you are different from other people. Mm-hmm. And that different, you're leaning in.

Yeah. Yeah. Are, are expected for you. You are othering yourself to yourself and you're making the conscious choice to be different. When you remove that, if we made garments a legal mandate was in a state, you have now lost all of the benefits that garments provide. Mm-hmm. So I think that this is, you mean should some, should a, some state do that?

If a state were to do that, should some state do that, right? No. Said that, but I think that, that, that if a state were to do that, it would be drawn by a very feminine impulse. This impulse of, you know, well we need to, the, the sort of pearl clutching, like we need to control people impulse, right? Like mm-hmm.

It's not my responsibility to do these things. It's the [00:37:00] state responsibility in the same way that it's, you know, a feminine impulse that drives. Things like welfare and stuff like this, right? Like people shouldn't be expected to learn to control themselves in regards to you know, making an income, right?

So it's the state's responsibility, right? And it's a, it's a feminine impulse that drives you know, when you see the smallest sea conservative people do this, like we will, we will restrict. Drugs, right? Instead of expect people to learn. Now with drugs, there's externalities 'cause it's actually addictive.

And I think that it's worse talking about drug restrictions. But I think that if you're, if you're doing this from a well, we just. Force people to act in the way that we want to, right. In a way that maintains the existing status quo. The, these impulses have been increasingly normalized because of the rise of women within our societies.

And this has been fascinating for me, this, this cultural shift that we've seen with the new. Right. And, and what sort of defines modern conservatism within sort of youth [00:38:00] culture?

Speaker 4: Hmm.

Malcolm Collins: Which is very interesting.

Speaker 4: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And I, I mean, we see this, if you look at like the broad. Youth culture you see today?

Like if you go back to the porn thing, I think it's an interesting place here. If you look at the major online battles, you know, whether it's tracer butt or gamer Gate, or like Skull Girls or Ebony, whatever, it, it is always the, the, the conservative affection that is anti-censorship and the anti-conservative affection mostly made up of feminists that is pro more censorship.

And and why shouldn't they be? I mean, if so much of politics is actually about mate guarding and increasing their value is in sexual marketplaces that's, that's what you really see happening here is a fight. By many women to increase their value on sexual marketplaces and where they can sort of, Shanghai individual conservative players, they will.

But well

Simone Collins: just generally on the subject, one place where I feel kind of frustrated is like, if this is all women's fault, I mean really. Or did men fall [00:39:00] asleep at the wheel and women take it, right? Like.

Malcolm Collins: I don't think it's women's fault, but I will say that I think that the urban monoculture uniquely spreads fast within women.

And so I think that what we're seeing here, I mean if you listen to a lot of our talk, we'd say most of Societals Hill ills are downstream of the urban monoculture.

Speaker 4: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: And a lot of the ills that are coming from women having disproportionate positions of power and the expansion of the bureaucratic apparatuses that favor the female mind because women are better at operating within large bureaucracies, has been that women are fundamentally more small c conservative, which means they're much more likely to kowtow, to dominant cultural narratives.

Mm-hmm. Around, okay, you can't do this because this is vulgar or this is wrong. You can't say this, you can't talk about this. And so women have benefited. Hugely from like the urban monoculture. One more works with the female mind, but also works to ex. Sort of transform the environment that it's in to make it more conducive [00:40:00] with the female mind so that women can better outcompete men.

It's like a symbiotic relationship. Yeah. Where it sort of terraforms the environment into being an environment where women have disproportionately more power. Yeah. And point

Simone Collins: poisons it. To those who are immune or less likely to be infected.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Like, it like turns women into like this invasive species that like pump out this miasma that boast, kills off all the other species in the environment, but also you know, converts other women into miasma producers.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because I do think that the one thing that I think is most absent from Arc Ethereum's discussion here is the role that culture plays and the fact that women are. Just more likely to spread culture and adhere to it because all this, like the GMO stuff. Yeah, I don't know. I, I think that tech and, and progress could be framed in ways that to that would appeal to women's risk aversion and desire for safety and [00:41:00] consist.

Tech can maintain stability in times. It, it can, it can help. No tech is intrinsically

Malcolm Collins: disruptive because the point of technology is to change the way things work. You know, if I'm a worker, yes and

Simone Collins: no. I mean, like, as we run out of oil, nuclear is a really good resource to turn to if we don't wanna have to fundamentally change the way that we live and do things.

Malcolm Collins: Right, but if, think, think, think about what nuclear actually means for the global economy if we did switch to a nuclear run global economy, right? Mm-hmm. One of the largest industries today, the global oil industry would collapse. Right. Or, yeah, but are

Simone Collins: women really wring their hands about that? And it's, it's about something.

It's about an aesthetic framing of nuclear as risky and dangerous, which

Malcolm Collins: isn't. That is the framing. It's nuclear could explode. Nuclear is different. We're all gonna get deformed if we use nuclear. Right. But

Simone Collins: that didn't necessarily need to be. Be the narrative. It just happened to be the narrative. If the narrative was instead that nuclear is the only safe way for us to keep, you know, [00:42:00] our energy production stable as oil phases out it, it could have been, it could have been something that I think women would've found quite appealing.

Nuclear is cleaner. Nuclear doesn't get people into yucky coal mines that are so dangerous and, and it's in sparkly clean factories.

Malcolm Collins: Not nonsense. I also find it interesting when you talk about nuclear and I talking to you about this today is how little Germany has accomplished recently. And, and just how effed Germany is and how much France has despite, you know, having many of the, the downsides Germany does.

Hmm. People don't have an anti-free bias. I'm, I'm very anti-free. As I've said, the, the France would be a great place if it wasn't full of French people. But the problem is that France is technologically kinda killing it. Like one of my favorite AI models is mytral. And Mytral is built by a French company.

You know, France has developed a lot of good video game studios. Germany is just like doing nothing in these sorts of spaces, and you can look at the difference in nuclear between the two countries with Germany banning all of [00:43:00] its nuclear reactors and, and, and decommissioning them. While France is one of the most nuclear countries in the world in terms of the number of nuclear reactors that they use, I think it's like the majority of their grid.

They basically solved the carbon problem in their country just by going nuclear. And. Maybe it's because the French mind is more masculine than the German mind, maybe. And they're more open. And, and this could be a you know, a bottleneck effect. A a as I've mentioned Germany and France were changed in big ways by who died during the two World Wars.

Like what were the personality traits associated with death for each of the countries?

Speaker 4: Hmm.

Malcolm Collins: And, and they. Kind of were ified by that in a way that, that America was not, the soldiers ended up having a lot more kids than other people. I mean, if, if we wanna talk about that, like how many, how many kids did soldiers have?

Every single one of our male grandparents was at D-Day. Mm-hmm. And the commander at D-Day, which is interesting, it all was in a different one was

Simone Collins: no mine. Mine wasn't. He was, he [00:44:00] was flying. Planes to drop people off, behind enemy lines.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, to drop off like the paratroopers?

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I, I remember one of mine was a commander of a a, a boat, one of the boats, and the other one was a commander of an engineering group.

All right. Anyway, to chat with you. And have a spectacular day. Simone. Did, did this change your opinion?

I, I agree with you. I don't actually think it's because women, I think that there's been, I, I think that women likely played a role in this, but I think it's women's. The, the female, greater female tendency to converge on what is the socially dominant view combined with the growth of the urban monoculture that sort of worked symbiotically to create these awful times.

Simone Collins: Yeah, I, I see this much more as feminization and much less as women did this. I think if we were to actually look at it. Men played as much of a role in all of [00:45:00] these feminizing toxic shifts in policy and academia as women did. They're equally culpable. This isn't about women. I mean women, well, and also

Malcolm Collins: males are more feminine now than they were back then.

They're more ized. Hundred percent these things.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Because I mean, you can see women in positions of power in the past who did extremely masculine things. I, I don't, I mean, and I, I'm not gonna deny that their averages that make women more conservative, but yeah. I, I think it's an interesting take.

There are things about this that I agree with, but not, not entirely.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. But I, but I, I, I actually think, the feminization of the male mind is a, a large part of this and the normalization of that feminization in men not realizing when they say things that are fundamentally feminine. Yeah. That they think that this is a normal thing for a man to think.

Speaker 4: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: When, you know, you go back historically to sort of the explore mindset, that's this very masculine mindset that gets demonized within, within males more and more

Simone Collins: Yeah. And the risk [00:46:00] inventions and trying new tech and all that. Yeah. Frontier. My favorite takeaway from this is, is you're pointing out just how feminine many of these these male cultural comment reactions are when they're like me, tech, bad, genetic modification back.

But the great thing

Malcolm Collins: is, is we can probably fix all this with genetic modification. And I know our family will, I mean, within a generation, once we can get the the germline gene editing stuff up and operational I would almost certainly recommend our kids that they edit. Their, their daughter's brains to be more masculine.

Because I, I think it's, it's too risky to have feminine female brained people being a large part of your Look. You're not a female brained person, Simone, you know that. Yeah. Our followers know that.

Simone Collins: Well, there are other ways you can do that even after someone's born. You don't have to genetically modify someone too.

Be more feminine. But anyway, I love you very much. Or, or we

Malcolm Collins: could just take out these specific dangerous things like fear of progress. Anyway, [00:47:00] love you. How about spectacular day? You

Simone Collins: too.

Well, tomorrow we have our Basecamp monthly member. VIP members meet up. I'm so excited for it.

Malcolm Collins: So was you were saying that they were like James Lindsay as a grifter or something in the comments? Yeah,

Simone Collins: I, I honestly, like if I had to look, I, well ask AI like what do he is all about? Because I, I mean, you and I, people were like, you're giving way too much airspace to James Lindsay.

But specifically when we, when we plat or when we talk about someone's writing, it's not because. We consider them to be important. It's because we see that that particular piece of writing or media is getting a lot of attention. Yeah. And it's setting the tone for something, for a concept. So we don't care if it was written by Nick Fuentes or like some, you know, Taylor Lorenz or whoever.

Like, it doesn't matter. What matters is if a lot of people are talking about it, if it's in the zeitgeist, if it has influence, because that means that. It, it's worth discussing.

Malcolm Collins: So [00:48:00] honestly, of course, sometimes if the ideas are interesting,

Simone Collins: there are many people though, whose work we talk about. We have no idea what they are.

We have no idea what their other work is all about. People like assume that like if we talk about. Jordan Peterson that we're familiar with all the years of his work instead of just like, I've read one of his books and we've consumed isolated, oh. And somebody's like, oh, you, you

Malcolm Collins: read X thing from Y person, that must mean that you're a racist.

'cause they said a racist thing this one time in a different work. And it's like, what are you talking about?

Simone Collins: Yeah. We, we are not, we don't sit around reading. But yeah. So I, I just didn't expect. I didn't one, I don't, I don't, I didn't know anything about James Lindsay until I, I looked him up. The thing that made him famous was he was that person who did that really funny social experiment where he sent unhinged academic article concepts or something to journals that were like, okay.

Yeah. And they were super woke sounding. Yeah. And so he, it was actually quite fun

Malcolm Collins: when he [00:49:00] did that, when he like, yeah, that was so like when he did, that's for right wing journals as well where he took the communist manifesto and he changed it to right wing words.

Simone Collins: Oh, that's so funny. But the funny thing

Malcolm Collins: is, and I was actually gonna read that in the, the episode.

Is the article when he went, which I love. It's so different from the progressive ones. So he goes to whatever conservative journal it was who published this. Mm-hmm. And he is like, ha ha ha, I troll you. And they're like, we're not taking it down. We actually like this. Like this is pretty well written. Like, they're like, they nobody, nobody criticizes marks for being a bad writer, you know, if you change his point to our point.

Of course we're going to agree with it. It's really funny. Which is so based and so the opposite of how, you know, we've talked about how the lefties, like, they always want you to apologize and retreat and they're just like, no. When you write our thoughts in Marxist language, you don't make them not true.

Yeah,

Simone Collins: we, we liked it because we liked it, not because we disagreed. That's crazy. Well.

Malcolm Collins: Anyway. I love that. I love that. I'm trying [00:50:00] to, to skirt the center here. No, but he's he's, if you actually read his stuff or, or, or watch him on Twitter, he's actually a little like, actually crazy. In terms of some of his conspiracy theories when you dig deeper on it.

Simone Collins: Oh, just untrue. Things that he believes unfounded, things that he believes,

Malcolm Collins: like thinking that like. Cults like control society and are like, if only,

Simone Collins: honestly, I think that like the scarier truth is that no one's at the wheel. People like,

Malcolm Collins: yeah, no, they, there, there were these like satanic cults in like the 1930s or something and like, we should be so lucky.

I, it's, it's a, it's a. He draws a bunch of connections, which are well founded in and of themselves. But then he builds it into this conspiracy world framework, which can seem a little off the wall. And I think is, and I think when people see him as a grifter, they're sort of missing the point. I just don't think he's sort of like, he, he, he's so conspiracy brained. He's not entirely [00:51:00] all there. He's not connected to the world with a firm tether in the way that like you or I are. He's like, wherever, like Ruby Art is relationship to us. He's like a hundred times further in that direction.

Speaker 3: Wow. Oh, okay. Well,

Malcolm Collins: Like, like the, the the temperature on an AI just like turned.

All the way. I don't know if it's up or down to make it crazier. What, well, when I

Simone Collins: looked him up, I was like, well, what's his career background? And, and beat And AI told me that his original thing was opening, like a combined martial arts and massage studio. So that checks out.

Malcolm Collins: That checks out, yeah. Yeah.

Alright, I'll, I'll get started on this. Okay.

Speaker: Going.

Speaker 5: [00:52:00] Titan, where are you going?

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