People Used to Like Their Parents

We discuss the disturbing trend of people being taught to resent and blame their parents. This toxic attitude promoted in media and psychology isolates kids from families that sacrifice everything for them. Malcolm reads excerpts praising parents from his ancestor's book showing the stark contrast - people back then were grateful despite immense hardship. We must fight cultural forces manipulating younger generations and regain the wisdom to properly judge good parenting.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] So I'll, I'll read a little excerpt he wrote here at the end of this book he wrote about his parents life and his life. The little story I have told about my parents and their way of life and their children seems to me as rather poorly told.

For as good a basis as I had for writing the story, I do not suppose that any man is prouder of his ancestors and all of their descendants than I. If I had been giving an order to someone to supply me with parentage and with brothers and sisters, I would have ordered the very same parents I had, and all the brothers and sisters I had. in order to get this education, he would take these odd jobs, like digging irrigation ditches for people.

Or doing fences for people and then he take this money and he would use it to pay for like first grade, right? And he would do every he would pay for it like 23 months at a time. Maybe even a few weeks at a time. Wherever he would get any sort of a cash windfall.

Which is very different, you know, when you think about how hard these people's lives were and how much they sacrificed, you know, how much gratitude they had for their [00:01:00] lives. Why is it these people today who live these indolent lives where the state gives them education, where the state gives them everything, you know, where they're not, yeah, what, why, why do they feel this way?

You know, why do they feel this level of hatred and entitlement? And I think A key answer here is they're taught to

Would you like to know more?

Simone Collins: First, I want to tell a little story about you as a parent. So, , one, you've been like totally stepping up over the past eight days cause I have really bad pneumonia, fever, chills, pain. Like this is the worst. I'm finally on medication for it. But you've been really stepping it up with the kids, but then I just discovered like also what you deal with, with like routine kids stuff that we have this, this like routine at night where I, I take our infant Titan or I guess she's like a.

Twaddle her now. And I take care of her. I give her a bath. I like handle her. But you take the boys after we give them their bath and after dinner [00:02:00] and they go up to your bedroom and hang out with you and like they watch the little iPads and the educational videos you've queued up for them and you watch.

something or play a game. What are you playing now? You really like that

Malcolm Collins: Warhammer game? Oh, Rogue Trader. It's fantastic. I like it more than Baldur's Gate, to be honest. It is, it is fantastic. It's a Warhammer fantasy game and I'm obviously love the universe.

Simone Collins: Yeah. So, so you, you do that. And I just assumed like most of the times when I peek in the boys are sitting there, you know, well, always Octavian is under the covers hidden somewhere.

The little kid reading a book with a flashlight at night, Torsten is sitting there, like, on top of the bed. Totally normal. Everyone's kind of doing their thing. But I can kind of now, like, I take a shower after I Get Titan in order and I can see you from the shower if I leave the bathroom door open and I was watching as our son, Torsten, repeatedly crawl up Malcolm's back and then just began pulling on his hair just until he was [00:03:00] like, Maybe like move his shoulders a little bit.

Malcolm would, and then, you know, our kid tour scene would go tumbling off and immediately start climbing

Malcolm Collins: with his

Simone Collins: tablet. Yeah. Like whacking you, pulling your hair. And I'm just like, and there you are just patiently. Playing your game. Like

Malcolm Collins: this goes to our parenting philosophy or a lot of people would be like, why aren't you, you know, why isn't your son better behaved?

And I was like, because we believe not in breaking a child's will, but in stoking their will, the most valuable thing a child has their will. And insofar as they're just goofing around and being boys, like we don't care. And, and, and with tablets actually, and we'll do a longer episode on this. Cause I think this is a really interesting point is people know that generally.

Studies show that screen time is not good for kids and they're like, why would you give your kids any screen time? Right? What they also haven't done is look at the effect size of these studies. Yes, while it is generally agreed across studies that screen time is not good for kids, the effect size, like when people talk about like what's going on with general, it's typically below 5%.

It's like 3 to 5 percent on most measures, [00:04:00] whether it's behavioral measures or academic accomplishment measures. And not all the studies are even aligned. You know, you'll see I think the broad probably two thirds are on the it's not good depending on how it's deployed and how kids engage with it. But if you are a parent and, you know, how much easier it is to sometimes employ screens with preloaded, like, educational shows as part of your parenting technique and then you look at the studies that look specifically at educational programs for kids and see the effect size there.

And he started negative effect sizes. So, Very small. You'd be like, oh, yeah, obviously this is the right thing to do. And so much of parenting today has come to this sort of like, extra curated. Every child needs an adult. They're giving them this perfect environment all the time. And it's like, well, of course, you're going to be low fertility if you're doing that.

Instead of being like, you know, the tiger cub style parenting, which we've talked about in another video which is, I think it was when like, well, if you raise your kids, like Jordan Peterson suggests, there'll be simps which is to say, you know, we picked this up from a safari, you know, and, and Simone was talking about [00:05:00] how the little kids like pulling on me really reminds me of, of seeing the little tiger cubs in the safari, like playing on

Simone Collins: their parents, not, not tigers, just.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, the lion, lion you know, like biting at the, the adult lion and stuff like that. And then just knowing that they get bopped if they cross the line, but the adult, we'll let them know and growl at them first to let them know. But anyway this all comes to this wider phenomenon that happened to me recently.

So I discovered yet another book about one of my family members which happens sometimes. That's when I found it was like publicly available online about a. One of my ancestors named V. A. Collins so this would be my great, great grandfather. And he was in between the ancestor who had all the relatives in the Free State of Jones, and who was the leader of the Jayhawkers.

So this was the anti Confederacy. rebellion group that was like anti slavery, anti confederacy rebellion group that was in Texas during the Civil War. So that was his dad.

And then he, this guy won state office, so he was a state representative in Texas that got a bunch of laws [00:06:00] changed around actually, I have the notes right here.

What did he get changed while he was in office? In 1913, he wrote and introduced the worksmen compensation law because the measure was regarded as somewhat radical. He couldn't get a co sponsor. So he handled it alone. He also introduced the law, providing an 8 hour day for work on public projects. Oh, he also got the law that prohibited child labor in Texas passed, where he, he, he led that one and the law that limited work hours and I think it was some other one tied to like work hour links and stuff like that, all stuff that broadly now we're like, oh, this was all really obvious, like good stuff.

So those are things he fought for. His son was actually the one, we have another video. called, like, The True Story of O Brother Where Art Thou that in large part inspired the events of O Brother Where Art Thou, but they mix up some characters and stuff like that. But he would be like a, a version of Pappy O'Daniel from the, the show The Politician, but also, but

Great state [00:07:00] of Mississippi the only man in this great state who ain't a music lover is my esteemed opponent in the upcoming Homer Stokes. Yeah, well, there he tastes. It sounded to me like he was harboring some kind of hateful grudge against the Soggy Bottom Boys on account of their rough and rowdy past.

Looks like, looks like, Homer Stokes is the kind of fellow who wants to cast the first stone. You folks ought to forgive and forget Christian.

Malcolm Collins: Anyway, watch the episode if you want to see a full explanation of that.

But what really struck me about this guy's writing was the way he wrote about his family, which was so similar. So I'm sort of dealing with this conundrum. I don't know if it's [00:08:00] genetic the way I feel about my family or the way I relate to things like gratitude or if it's that society has changed.

And I just have some sort of like old iteration of, of relating to this because when I read it, it felt so different from anything I see in media at all today. So I'll, I'll read a little excerpt he wrote here at the end of this book he wrote about his parents life and his life. The little story I have told about my parents and their way of life and their children seems to me as rather poorly told.

For as good a basis as I had for writing the story, I do not suppose that any man is prouder of his ancestors and all of their descendants than I. If I had been giving an order to someone to supply me with parentage and with brothers and sisters, I would have ordered the very same parents I had, and all the brothers and sisters I had.

There would not have been a change made if I had been making the order before I had known them as I have. I think our family is one of the most remarkable families I have ever known. In the first place, I [00:09:00] had a very remarkable father and a very remarkable mother. They might have been distinguishable in some respects, but they were both endowed with the character and intelligence that made them superior in my estimation.

My father was a man of remarkable intellect. Of course, taking my estimate for his intellect, he was first among all people I knew. My mother was also well endowed intellectually, but the greatness of her character even exceeded her intelligence. I do not say that my father was faulty in any regard in the rearing of the family, but he seemed to be less adapted to the high responsibility of raising a family than was my mother.

In providing for a family, one thing very essential to consider is making proper provision in the mental direction and physical care. My father was entirely adequating a family mentality, but he was rather inefficient in managing his affairs to promote their great physical care. I have often thought that their contrast in character and intelligence was just a contrast that a couple should have to [00:10:00] raise a great family.

And if I needed to Proof of that fact, the family they raised would be sufficient evidence to prove to me that nature made just the right contrast in giving us our parentage. Ours is a great family, not in the large number of members of the family, but also in their characteristics. Of course we would admit that we are just common people, but that does not remove the elements of greatness in family character.

I do not know how many descendants my father and mother have living, how many have passed on. But I have lived long enough to know every descendant of theirs from the time of their firstborn onto the present, and I saw was a great deal of pride that I have never known a criminal in the family.

I do not mean to say that we are faultless people and that possibly some of our family have not been guilty of violating small, immaterial rules of government, but I've never known or heard of one of them being called before the courts to answer for a crime by society, which he lives.

I thank God for our heritage. Yours and mine[00:11:00] and for our parentage, he gave us and then after that in the book, there's this huge section that is just page after page. I don't do like it in the YouTube video here of just all of the living offspring that he knew about because he's 11 kids are 14 kids.

All of them had 14 kids. Always the same woman, of course who, who, you know, So, enormous amount of work there and just seeing this level of reverence for family, you know, which is something we don't have, and if you read the story, you also see this level of reverence was not necessarily because his family was incredibly rich or anything, in fact, they were, they were very poor, he did an inventory at one part of the story of all of the things they owned and it was the hut that his dad had built, And a, a spinning thing for weaving.

I forget what those are called. A spinning wheel? A spinning wheel. And that was it. And, and he actually bemoans a bit of all of the investments his father could have made if he was a bit [00:12:00] more ambitious a person in that regards. But he, he clearly, you know, does not hold that against him. He believes that all of the events of his life were necessary to make him into the person he was and his siblings into the people they became.

And I read that and something that really struck me is that's exactly the way I feel. You know, while I may have had some trials in my childhood, if I had had anything else, I wouldn't be who I am today, and I absolutely love who I am today. And if I could choose from all of the humans I had ever met, and I mean this very seriously, like, individually, when I look at my parents, I'm like, there's this thing they could fix, or this thing that could have been better, or my brother, you know, there's this thing.

If I could choose anyone in the world as alternatives for them, no, not a single human being, I would choose instead of them. And, and when did we start thinking like, I hate my parents. Like this has become like a big thing in society today. Or

Simone Collins: my parents traumatized me, or my parents were narcissistic, et cetera, et

Malcolm Collins: cetera.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, and [00:13:00] his father, one of the stories there was that he had gotten a bunch of pigs, right? And he had raised these pigs. And then his father decided that he needed to go and slaughter all of his pigs so that they could sell them to pay for the family's yearly expenses. And this He doesn't, like, say anything negative about his father, but this was right before he stopped living with the family.

So this was clearly a very traumatizing event for him. But it's also interesting the way that he approached it. It was traumatizing to him because They would have been worth so much more the next year. He just, Oh, so it

Simone Collins: wasn't the act of slaughtering a very intelligent animal. It was, it was the active, it was the economic

Malcolm Collins: inefficiency of it all.

They're selling

Simone Collins: your Bitcoin when it's low. Oh my God.

Malcolm Collins: Yes. Yes. He should have been able to make that economic choice. And then act on that choice. And also speaking about the economics, another thing that really. Surprised me about this story was I had a very different picture of what it was like living in the old west [00:14:00] back then.

So he was obsessed with educating himself. This was his, you know, every he. No, this guy was, if that's what's educating you. Oh, the author, okay. Not, not his dad. His dad was not, his dad was all involved in the revolution stuff and was known as being a really famous anti like big government guy, anti big corporation guy you know, as one of the leading, the guy who wrote the leading Texas socialist newspaper at the time wrote of him, May the Collins bloodline pour over this great country like clear water bringing socialism, was it?

How far have we moved from that? But I think if you look at what he meant by socialism, it was the type of things that you know, V. A. Was pushing it, you know, like no child, like child labor laws and like restrictions on work hours, which are all things that we broadly support. So I think that it's, you know, very in line with our existing political philosophy.

It's just that the powers that be have changed. But anyway and this is during the time of, you know, robber barons and all that. Right. So. So, his father was completely consumed with that and, and [00:15:00] helping you want to get a broad idea of what his life was like the movie The Free State of Jones, did a fairly good job because he ran the equivalent project in Texas and his brother was one of the founding members of that and 15 of his relatives were of the 50 founding members of that.

So that was basically his family back in Georgia before he migrated.

I'm tired of it. You, me, all of us. We're all out there dying so they can stay rich. Tax collectors coming around here, taking everything. We have nothing for the winner. Girls, you know how to shoot one of these? It's quite normal you got there. Last time I checked the gun, don't care who's pulling the trigger.

You know they shoot deserters, don't you? Hello. They runaways? They shoot. They're gonna die so they can get rich selling their cotton. That's why we lift them. No man ought to tell another man what he's gotta live [00:16:00] for, or what he's got to die for. I don't have the patience of five or six deserters hiding out in a swamp.

Just

hang him.

See anything? He's out there. He won't miss this.

This fight's for our children, and their children's children. From this day forward, we declare the land north of Pascagoula Swamp to be a free state of Jones. They're poor farmers. Deserters. Who, frankly, sir, don't have much to lose. The winds [00:17:00] is shifting. And you can't fight it this time. There's plenty left to fight for.

Malcolm Collins: But, but so he wasn't that interested in education. Now his son was so interested in education, which was really interesting to learn about because he would go out. And, and in order to get this education, he would take these odd jobs, like digging irrigation ditches for people.

Or doing fences for people and then he take this money and apparently there wasn't like public school or anything and he would use it to pay for like first grade, right? And he would do every he would pay for it like 23 months at a time. Maybe even a few weeks at a time. Wherever he would get any sort of a cash windfall.

And then he would use that in order to, by the time he completed first grade, he then went to the, you know, far away to the local state house to get certification so that he could teach first grade so he can be around school materials all the [00:18:00] time and just spend all the time educating himself.

Which is very different, you know, when you think about how hard these people's lives were and how much they sacrificed, you know, how much gratitude they had for their lives. Why is it these people today who live these indolent lives where the state gives them education, where the state gives them everything, you know, where they're not, yeah, what, why, why do they feel this way?

You know, why do they feel this level of hatred and entitlement? And I think A key answer here is they're taught to so I mentioned this theory a number of times. I think a big part of it actually came out of Freudian psychology to begin with. I think this is where we begin to see this shift, because Freudian psychology, what's the joke?

You're laying on the couch. They're like, what did your parents do wrong? Right? But this has come back into psychology. It was pushed out of psychology for a while because everybody Realize how evil it was, which you're essentially doing is like all cults. You are separating a person from their support network and then replacing that support network and saying, okay, now you have this problem, this trauma, and that to relieve it, you need to come see me.

A person's [00:19:00] closest support network is always going to be their birth culture and their family. And so they, in, in. Insinuate this trauma into a person's life and create dependency on them. And, and it's a very effective strategy. And so it's been able to economically outcompete other forms of psychology.

The, the efficacious forms of psychology, which used to be much more prevalent. And obviously not all psychologists practice this. Some are still actually good guys, but a lot of them do. And, and I think that the ones who are out there teaching people in Hollywood, teaching the people who are writing our cultural narrative, a lot of them have this framing of It's sort of parental hatred as being an important part in anyone's life story.

But then in addition to that, I also think that this twisted cat American narrative, which I do not think was early American narrative, early American narrative was, I'm from an honorable family. Even if they are from a hard background and I am going to do what I can to incrementally improve the situation of my family.

It then became this narrative of intra generational. So within a [00:20:00] generation Nothing to wealth rags to riches, but part of the rags to riches narrative is the denigration of the circumstances of your birth, which can combine like, if you believe one, you need to be to be liked by society. You need to tell this rags to riches narrative, right?

Well, this comes with a few implications, right? Like one, you need to find a way to convince everyone that you grew up in a very. trying environment and condemns yourself of this to have this level of self worth, but also believe that it is because of your own effort that you escaped this environment, which meant that your parents to have let you grow up in that environment must not have been great, must not have done a good job with their own decisions in their own lives, and therefore have been worthy of contempt.

And so I think the within both the conservative mindset where you have this rags to riches narratives and within the progressive mindset, you have these two forces which create this wedge between, and it's [00:21:00] a narrative wedge between individuals and their, their parents and families. Do you have thoughts on this Simone?

Simone Collins: I do see it happening. I mean, I think despite this, one thing that is encouraging is there are a lot of people. Who do really have good relationships with their parents. And I'm curious to hear your commentary too. I can try to dig it up after this, but when it comes to satisfaction with their parents at least like vis a vis the sixties or seventies, satisfaction with parents is actually much higher.

And you're seeing this with like higher rates of kids, not moving out, you know, staying at their parents house and sort of feeling to become real adults. They actually have really close friend, like relationships with their parents. So I wonder how you would contend with this dichotomy of, on the one hand, kids seeing their parents as narcissistic, abusive, you know, evil, terrible parents who've left them traumatized, et cetera, et cetera.

And on the other hand, their parents are [00:22:00] their best friends. They're never going to move out or grow up or. You know, whatever, because it's just frankly quite easier when you are really close with your parents, you like them, they make you food, they do your laundry, they don't make you pay rent, and the real world is

Malcolm Collins: hard.

So I think there's a confluence of two things going on here, which are worth talking about. One is I think if you look at the boomer generation, they really were pretty awful as parents. They did not take the responsibility seriously. They viewed kids as a status item. A lot of them did. And that was because society was framing kids that way to them.

So, so they didn't engage like, like when I say a status item, it was part of living like the standard American identity, but there wasn't this. Drive and desire for intergenerational improvement, which existed in earlier, especially immigrant groups within the US, which really, I think, defines our nation's character.

It's this immigrant idea of intergenerational improvement and coming and either to the country or moving to. You know, the, the West, you're [00:23:00] moving to new settlement areas where life is hard for this opportunity for intergenerational improvement. And they sort of had a, I've got mine. Now let's just put all this debt on the next generation and not really care about what happens.

So there was some motivation for that contempt, but also there was no mechanism for them to earn a steam in their kids eyes because society had begun to tell kids, you know, you don't respect your parents. For doing like good parenting, right? Like, like from, for setting an example. Yeah. Which

Simone Collins: is sometimes tough love,

Malcolm Collins: right?

Yeah. Get passionately helping you reach that example. In fact, a lot of media, when he was portraying, what does a good parent look like, you know, a lot of even children's media, you see this these days because it's coming from this ultra progressive mindset where these people never really grew up and, and, and they.

When they are writing about the relationship between a child and a parent, instead of historically when people were doing that, they were often thinking from the position of a parent, like, what does a good relationship like this look like? They were thinking from the position of a child and they were writing these, like, what do I [00:24:00] wish my parents allowed me to do without telling me you can be better?

You can do better, you know,

Simone Collins: what good has been replaced by indulgent. What does an indulgent parent do? And that seems to

Malcolm Collins: be parents begin to adapt to this, right? And this is when you get this. Gen X parent mindset, but also, you know, when I talk about this, let's, let's, I want to read another passage that it wrote in his book, which shows like the type of thing that he saw as giving his parents high regard in his estimation and what made them good parents.

So, um, in another chapter, he's talking about all of the hardship that his mother went through to raise the family. And he goes on to say. This daily and hourly routine of my mother working to keep her family closed and fed kept her very busy. Did she ever complain or think her task hard? No, she did not think so.

She was providing for her family. Her husband was her hero, and she would do anything to make him happy. Her children were [00:25:00] her angels, and she did not want to see them need anything instead of being unhappy, She was happy doing something to relieve the needs of her loved ones.

She was a happy woman. No greater blessing ever befell any man or his descendants than when my mother stood at the marriage altar with my father and plighted face with him that she would become the mother of his family and the business manager of his household. I will not compare her to your mother or the mother of some friend or stranger.

I will not say that I had the best mother in the world, but the way I think of her now, I think she was the best mother in the world. I think Instead of being burdened with her various duties, she got real pleasure out of them and doing something for her loved ones at home. But, hold on, one more quick thing I want to read here about her because this, describes part of her sort of daily routine, right, and the way that he thought of her and what he I thought it meant to be a good mother. This was actually the passage I thought I was reading, but the other one's a great passage, too. She had not lived there [00:26:00] long until she had some chickens, and we each had an egg for breakfast.

Every two or three mornings, we always had some first class cornbread cooked just right and some good steam fried bacon, which she had previously prepared in the smokehouse. She saw to it that every meal that went to our table was a well planned meal. A superior chemist could not have analyzed a breakfast that was on our table and found anything lacking in our meal to make healthy, rosy cheeked children.

She did not raise a weakly family of children, pale faces, or hookworm victims. She raised a husky bunch. Her girls were strong and healthy, and her boys were the strongest boys in the whole community. And then he goes on to talk about various, I don't know, like, wrestling and sports competitions that the boys had won and how strong and hearty the girls were.

And this estimation of what was expected of her. It wasn't, oh, she was N nice to us. It was, she cared about our emotional states. It was very obvious that our happiness was [00:27:00] important to her and our health was important to her, and she did. Everything was in her means to provide for those things while also obviously throughout the entire journey as the sacrifices the family made for his education.

And a really interesting part, and I'm not gonna. Read the whole thing here again. That's another quote, but this is a quote about his siblings. So he had a lot of siblings and he talked about how the thing that made a lot of money in the community was going to work at the sawmill. And that, and then he called these, you know, mill boys and they had more money than the other other people.

And two of his older siblings who were now too old to get educated, they dedicated all of their time to this higher earning profession so that they could And Put some money towards helping educate where they could the younger kids and that, you know, this family value that his mother had instilled in them made him so proud of his family and and they ended up being successful.

He ended up caring for these, these older brothers of his and. That in [00:28:00] today's society, when you hear kids like this forced parentage, like even you have complained about this, like having to take on the role of the family or having to support other members of your family with your own income, parentification.

Yeah, it would be a form of abuse, right? To these two older brothers. And, and yet. No, that is what it is to raise good children. That is what it is to be a good parent, is to instill caring about your family members. You know what, actually, I'll just read the paragraph here, because it is interesting and it is sweet, you know.

My oldest brother, E. W. Collins, had married several years before that and had his own family responsibility. Morg and Phil were still unmarried, and they had both become high priced sawmill men. Morg was a tram engineer. And then he goes on to talk about their jobs that paid almost as much as Long's job.

All of them for the time I had been going to school and even after I began teaching, my mother and the youngest sisters needed help, which one could not give them without giving up my studies. So he's saying that, He would have to [00:29:00] leave his studies to support his family. Have it said to the credit of my brothers and be it known that my gratitude to them will last forever.

Morgue and Phil helped my family very liberally and kept my youngest sisters and mother from being in want for anything and always encouraged me to go to school and get an education. They knew they could not go back and get an education and they would not hear of me stopping and going to work in order to help my family.

Um, You see these set of values that's instilled in them, and he was not when he talks about how great his parents are when he talks about how great his family is. This is not because they didn't demand sacrifices from some of the kids. It's because when the kids were forced to make sacrifices, they understood that they were all in this together, that they are all working together for this cycle of intergenerational improvement, this cycle of community improvement and for the best interest.

of the wider family and cultural group of which they found themselves members. And this is something that [00:30:00] today, the, the centers of power in our society, our kids are constantly being brainwashed and even ourselves to judge our parents by metrics, which are bad metrics to judge parents. And I would encourage our listeners, especially if you're younger, and this has always been a big.

If you haven't told your parents how much they mean to you in a while, if you haven't taken the opportunity to reframe the way you see your parents recently, really give it an effort. You know, your parents having a different value system than you is not a reason To to have any animosity towards your parents.

If your parents did the best by their own value system, then you should do what you can to to show your parents appreciation. Now, I would also say this was in the context of the wind would read quote, you know, the person who we sort of look to for philosophical advice, which is You know an un a person may live according to their conscience, but an untrained, but a person living according to an untrained conscience is the same as living according to no [00:31:00] conscience at all, because it can still lead you to sin.

But the reality is, you know, you look at these people's lives. His father lived basically as an outcast in society, having to give up everything he had. You know, when you turn against the confederacy in the south rough time. Having to constantly having assassination attempts against him, having to constantly run away.

You know, he had no land. He had no anything. He had to give all that away just to fight for what he believed was right. And he died being hated by many people in his community for what he did. And I think that's something that I'm glad that the Free State of Jones, it wasn't like, you know, was, was a lot of people think, oh, the people who's doing that to the Nazis, the people who stand up to confederacy, they were loved by their communities.

No, they were hated by their communities until the day they die. Because, but they were loved by their family because they did the right thing and they were people of character. And I think that this is a thing that, that is important to do, and this is what it means to be a family of character, to know that so long as you follow the family traditions and, and, and you raise them within this, you know, [00:32:00] humble yet elitist environment that you will be rewarded as well.

So I, I do encourage you to go show respect to your parents for the things that they sacrificed so that you could have. The life that you have. And I hope that you can instill this with your kids and that we can work to build a culture in terms of like the summer camp and the school and stuff that we're building for our kids.

It helps isolate them enough from these toxic, memetic viruses in our environment that thrive in the same way cults have always thrived by it. Peeling people away from their, their birth cultures and, and, and their families and their parents who sacrifice everything for them. And this to me, it's particularly heart wrenching when I see it happen to immigrant groups, where I know these people sacrifice everything.

It just doesn't care, you know, it brings them over with the goal of erasing their family's culture. Because it's the only way it can survive and it teaches them to have this hatred for their parents who gave up everything to come here and give up everything just to give them a better life. And then not just him, but their descendants, their family [00:33:00] line.

That's the point. That's the reason you did all this. It wasn't just so your kid could go party in clubs all day, every day. But anyway. I love you to decimum.

Simone Collins: I love you too, Malcolm. And I like that it's clear that the apple doesn't fall far from the tree, even when they were like. Multiple trees in between, it's hilarious.

So,

Malcolm Collins: yeah, it's a cultural group, you know, and I hope that we can spread in any way that we can, that this is a stable cultural strategy intergenerationally. And it's clearly been stable for many generations. I mean, the stuff that he said about his family, I think sounds very similar to stuff you guys have likely heard me or my wife say on this show.

And it is. possible to actually be appreciative for the things in your life and to live in a community that, that affirms you and gives you says that you, you deserve affirmation and status for saying those things instead of only affirming people who have this really toxic and negative mindset.

And yeah, anyway, love you to Desimone. Love

Simone Collins: you too.

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