This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit radixjournal.substack.comIn this episode of Alexandria, Alberto has secured for you all a very special guest—— Raven Connolly! Raven is a sex and fertility therapist, formerly of the Portland Anarchist scene. She now lives in Stockholm, and is a fixture of the Dark Renaissance or Intellectual Dark Web. She joins us to discuss with Richard the d…
Hi. Thanks for having me in this very interesting interior space.
This was a very fun invitation to get, I'll tell you.
And it brought me back to my days at the Evergreen State College when the alt-right was coming to campus and was threatening students.
I was there.
Wow. And all of that was happening.
So it's very interesting to be kind of like brought into this world from a completely different angle.
And I guess that shows all of you some of my intellectual trajectory over the years.
So yeah, I went to school at Evergreen and grew up in the Pacific Northwest, anarchist, progressive world, and then was introduced to Nick Land and the blogosphere, Robin Hanson.
And then went really far into looking into, you know, NRX, Mencius-Molbach, all these things.
And that has basically been my telos in life, is being like a free thinker and pursuing whatever ideas I find the most compelling.
And eventually that has led me to living in Europe, among other free-thinking intellectuals.
Now I'm part of a movement called Dark Renaissance, and we're producing events that are oriented around technology and the human condition.
And then in my private practice, I work with people who are trying to figure out their sexualities and get into relationships.
And my priority there is to help people increase their fertility, get into relationships that can actually bring forth families.
Wow. Well, I have a lot of questions about this.
So I'll start with the more recent one.
So you do sex therapy from a psychological standpoint and not a, you know, biological fertility standpoint.
Is that correct?
Yeah, it's from a somatic and relational standpoint.
I'm not actually, you know, a nurse or anything like that.
But what I find is that there isn't a lot of answers to existential questions within the medical profession.
They can just give you whatever procedures are available for assisting in your fertility, but they can help people make real existential decisions.
Well, yeah.
I mean, I didn't mean that as any sort of criticism, actually, because I meant it in the way that you're presenting it in the sense that You know, it's kind of like, you know, you can get a drug to lose weight,
like this new thing that is like shrinking people's faces and whatever.
You can, the question is like, why are you fat?
And that's a deep question.
And it might have something to do with, you know, let's say personal responsibility.
You're not going to the gym enough or you're eating Oreos at midnight or whatever.
But it also spreads out to something much deeper.
You're living in a suburban home where there is no park you could even walk to.
There's no sidewalk in this suburban environment you're living in.
And you drive one hour to work each day.
And so no wonder you're fat and depressed, in fact.
And the fact that you live like that has a deeper economic base, but also kind of a deeper spiritual base of why is this really happening?
And if you're not at least trying to address those questions or confront that reality...
You're not getting anywhere.
It's like a doctor can go, oh yeah, let's just freeze your eggs or I'll give you, what is it called again?
Ozimac or whatever this miracle drug that I'm sure is going to create disasters to lose weight.
They'll offer some superficial solution without confronting the problem.
Ozimpec, there.
I'm just saying that to try to distract you, to make you believe that I'm not actually on it.
Just a year ago, I was a 300-pound whale, and I've taken this right now.
Just kidding.
But yeah, go on.
I think that's fascinating.
I guess you don't have to give any details about patients or anything like that, but what are you dealing with on a personal level with people who are...
You know, failing to complete a relationship or failing to have children, etc.
Yeah. Well, sometimes it's quite simple things like, you know, moving out of your parents' house, right?
You know, especially for people who are Zoomers or even young millennials, like, they're just not thinking about the context that they're in.
And I think that's what you're speaking to, right?
Like, the world that you place yourself in.
The environment that you're in and how you design it really creates the affordances of a whole life, creates the possibility of even being able to bring someone of the opposite sex into your world and have them be repulsed by you.
So, you know, it depends, like most of the clients I've had so far have been men who are looking to define themselves in the world of dating, establish relationships.
And some of the things that they need to be told are quite basic.
I think that speaks to the maturity of this generation.
Well, like what?
Yeah, maybe if you move out of your parents' house into your own flat, then it wouldn't be so weird to bring a girl home.
Right, that would be weird.
Really basic things.
And just sexuality.
Is such a deep part of how we become ourselves, become our own identities.
And it's about deciding what we want to identify with.
I do think that sexuality runs very, very deep.
And obviously, if you go into the very, very depths of it, you end up with rape and conquest.
You end up with really intense forms.
I think we have a lot of interaction between men and women that most people aren't really capable of handling.
And that's why people who are into that stuff, they go into BDSM dungeons and they experiment with the very depths of human sexuality, the stuff that's usually put deep, deep into the cages underground.
But for people who are just beginning to start...
Without investigating sexuality, it's really about opening up the space to even get to know yourself as a sexual being.
And it really seems that highly disembodied, very intelligent people who are mediating their identities through language and through stories have a very difficult time being engaged with their libidinal,
vital life force energy.
And that's why bringing in a somatic approach, bringing in this design approach, what does your life look like?
How engaged are you on a bodily level?
Do you have sensory experience that invigorates you?
Can you even identify a sensation that you find pleasurable?
These types of things are the practices that we work on.
It's very important, especially for people who are on the spectrum.
Because they tend to be disconnected from their bodies.
And then these are also a lot of the more affluent mobile men in society because of how much being on the spectrum affords you the possibility of working in tech.
So, you know, yeah, there are these things going on.
I would really like to be working with more women, but so far, most of my practice has been with men.
Interesting. Let me throw out some kind of big picture items and you can pick up on some ideas within there.
So I would say that there are two paradoxes.
And the first paradox is one of the most secular in the sense of widespread phenomenon there is.
And that is As technology or the industrial revolution enters a society, as education begins to be promoted, especially education for women, as child mortality collapses from 40% to almost zero,
as you have an ability to go out to the market every morning and buy Basically, whatever you want, affluence, surplus, etc., we have a dramatic collapse of fertility.
And this seems to happen everywhere, maybe not so much in Africa, but it is definitely happening in Mexico.
It's happening in Iran.
It's happening in Western Europe.
It's happening in the United States.
It's definitely happening in China, etc., etc.
It is almost as if there needs to be more of a struggle or more of an existential angst to life in order to get people to fuck.
To put it as bluntly as possible.
You could even imagine.
There was a massive baby boom in Germany immediately after the end of the war.
And so these people had been around death, they'd been around destruction, they'd been around bombing campaigns, and they just wanted to go have sex.
And so there's this weird contradiction, because whenever you talk to a normie, or, you know, here, I guess I should quote...
When you talk to the intelligent, educated normie, they would say things like,"Well, we couldn't possibly have a child in this market," or,"Oh, my mortgage rate ran up 3%, so we're going to have to delay having children." They almost think that they need more money or more safety to fuck.
But looking back over the history of the world...
The exact opposite is the case.
So that's one paradox.
And then the other paradox, which I find equally fascinating, is that when I was growing up in the 80s and 90s...
I remember after-school specials, you know, nightly news programs on teen pregnancy or, you know, these 13-year-old girls, they're out of control, they're having sex all the time and getting pregnant and the boys don't care.
This, like, what is wrong with kids these days?
They're out of control.
Well, there still are things like that in our society, no doubt about it.
And I, of course, you would agree that that is...
Unhealthy, not the proper channeling of libidinal energy.
But the fundamental thing that's happening is a lack of sex.
And so Gen Z is having less sex than their parents and than their grandparents.
The silent generation was more likely to go for a roll in the hay.
Or even do something kind of stupid, like look up the skirt of a girl on the bleachers or whatever, than Gen Z are.
And yet the paradox is that Gen Z is overly saturated with sex through widespread pornography, through quasi or crypto pornography on something like TikTok, where attractive women will go and lip sync,
Hardcore sexual rap songs or just stuff like that.
It's effectively pornography, even if they're clothed.
And they're exploring gender in ways that baffle older generations.
And so it's this weird paradox, again, of they're the most kind of oversexed people perhaps ever, and they're not doing it.
So those are the two fundamental paradoxes that I see.
What are your thoughts on that?
Yeah, I mean, it's really weird stuff.
I mean, obviously, you framed this within the context of industrialization, and I do think that's quite important.
There has been an acceleration of technological mediation in our environment for, you know, you could argue 200 years now, but it's certainly accelerated quite a lot, even within the last 50 years, especially with the advent of the internet and the ubiquity of social media in the most recent decades.
And obviously this is having a massive impact on our whole experience of reality.
So I do think that that plays a major role.
There are instances in history where it seems like population decline has been an issue in other civilizations as they're going through their death phase.
It does seem like complex civilization do have a life cycle.
Human beings are interesting, and when we get a lot of abundance in our environment, there seems to be a mechanism that...
Shuts down our interest in reproduction.
It's very strange that this happens.
I don't think that anyone has a clear answer for why this is the case.
There have been some experiments.
For example, there was this mouse utopia experiment that was done.
Classic. Go on.
You can explain it.
Well, yeah.
I mean, they put these mice into a dense environment where they had all the entertainment that they wanted, any kind of food that they wanted.
But I think the real thing that was part of it as well is that it was a dense environment.
There were a lot of mice there.
And they ended up with these...
Mice that started to, at first they started to reproduce and fill up this environment to its capacity.
And then they kind of bifurcated into different classes where the males started to act more like females.
There were females that started to act more like males.
And then there was a group called the Beautiful Ones who just sat around grooming themselves.
And this was just a completely dysfunctional mouse community.
They didn't know how to communicate with each other.
They didn't understand how to communicate.
With the pheromones that they had.
And basically, this was the end of mouse utopia.
So there's also another very interesting scaling law that human beings have been kind of sucked into with urbanization, mass urbanization, without the cost of disease, right?
So our cities have just been able to get so much larger without there being these massive population fluctuations.
So some of the contexts that we're living in today have definitely had an impact on our biological fertility and our sexuality.
But it doesn't quite address, I think, the spiritual level of this.
Because what you're talking about as well is some sort of will, right?
This will to actually continue on and to see some legacy outside of your own individual life.
That is an interesting quality to me because right now we are dealing with people who are not only abstaining from sex, but even the people who are engaging with sex are doing it in a sterilized way where the risk of pregnancy is very,
very low.
And then if pregnancy does happen, you can go and get an abortion to make sure that the pregnancy doesn't actually come to term.
People who are still fucking, of which there are many, and even if they are a bit older, these people aren't actually having children either.
Just to interject real briefly, I was going through the New York Times today just to kind of see what's going on in the world.
There was a funny article about STIs among Gen X boomers and silent gen. They're like, there's a crisis of spreading whatever, gonorrhea.
among like 50 year olds or whatever.
And now granted, obviously that is a problem, but I was kind of like, yeah, because like people my age are the only ones doing it.
So it was kind of funny.
I was like, yeah, we're still cool.
Yeah, you're still fucking.
Yeah, there's a virility in these generations that Gen Z Seems to have in very few amounts.
There are still virile Gen Zs.
But what filter is spreading across humanity for Gen Z is quite extreme.
And there's a very narrow canal in terms of kind of a vital human spirit that seems to be getting through in that generation.
Well, let me throw this out there.
So do you think that maybe Freud was right?
So Freud famously, particularly in the first half of his career, was promoting the idea of a libidinal energy.
So the way to understand dreams, for instance, was simply wish fulfillment.
And he also went into trauma, but then he actually kind of moved away.
Many of the hysterical quote-unquote women that he treated as a young physician, he thought that they were suffering from abuse by a parent, most likely a father,
and that they were kind of repressing that memory and they weren't able to confront it and deal with it.
And you had to engage in a talking cure to the very least address this issue.
He then revised that and thought that trauma was, in fact, a fantasy.
So what they were doing was working through a fantasy, an unresolved developmental issue with their parents.
And so it's that they weren't, in fact, abused.
They had a certain fantasy, not of abuse, but a certain...
Unresolved or uncompleted relationship with a parent that was being expressed maybe through a fantasy of abuse or sexuality, etc.
Now, you can make of all that what you will.
I'm actually maybe surprising to some I'm more sympathetic towards Freud than most every other person on the right wing, but that's just me.
But he also complemented that with a A death drive.
And if I remember correctly, I haven't read this in a number of years, but there was a baby in a crib and he lost a toy.
So the toy fell off the crib.
And he was crying.
You know how children are.
They can obsess about a little stuffy or something.
And he was crying because he lost the toy.
And the caregiver...
Grab the toy from the ground and put it back in its crib.
And then, after a while, the young child would himself throw the toy out of the crib.
And so, what it was expressing was a control.
It was a will to power even in destruction.
And even something like suicide, I think...
I'm in control now.
I'm going out on my own terms.
I'm doing exactly what I want, no matter the cost.
And so there was a kind of will to power even towards destruction.
And so there were these competing energies.
It was almost like Nietzsche's Apollo and Dionysus, these kind of related and weirdly very similar gods.
They're both gods of music, but who were totally opposed.
One was a god of drunkenness and chaos and madness, and the other was a god of form and illusion and artifice and so on, and they're kind of mixing together.
I think these are painting with broad strokes here, but I think these things are very insightful.
I guess I would ask the Zoomers, I mean, I understand their complaints about the end of the American dream, and it's impossible to own a home, and the jobs suck, and the internet,
etc., etc., etc.
But I don't want to let them off the hook or give them some cop-out.
Maybe there is a certain spiritual nihilistic drive towards death that's in conversation, if you like, with that drive towards life and fertility and overcoming and advancement and goal setting,
that these are kind of like in conversation together.
And what do you think about that?
Yeah, I think that's very interesting.
One of my friends who is a Zoomer and is one of the most agentic people that I know, he used to destroy his toys when he was a child, like systematically, pull them apart.
So I think that there's something there.
And this idea of suicide is kind of taking control of your own existence.
I think that there is also a way of reading that as a...
Kind of life-affirming action.
So there is something pathic about open aggression and destruction.
What's interesting about Gen Z is that they have spent so much of their lives mediated by screens, and participating in the screen world seems to create an inward turn, an internalization of aggression.
This would be most exemplified by girls cutting themselves or anorexia.
Girls tend to suffer more in general from these internalizing disorders, but now boys are doing it as well.
It's interesting to think about the interface of the screen in a sense.
Just like the printing press kind of created the era of enlightenment and the idea of the individual and the concept of the possibility towards some sort of linear truth, we are living in a new paradigm that's being facilitated by this interaction with screens that are live,
they're living surfaces, and we have to project our imagination into them and we also receive All sorts of just completely stochastic nonsense into our minds without any narrative holding those impressions together.
And these are very intrusive kinds of experiences, right?
Just like you have to create and design a world where your body can flourish, you also have to take control of The mimetic landscape that you're within and the platforms that you're using, right?
It's very, very different to go, for example, onto Substack and interact with ideas versus going onto Twitter versus going onto TikTok.
I don't think that...
Lots of people don't have the literacy, don't have the awareness, they don't have the curiosity to go outside of what has just been given to them.
And then they complain that they don't like it, right?
And can even spiral into an identity that's formed around resentment.
Of course, that seems to be ubiquitous in the West and is a form of rot that seems to spread in cultures that have a lot of abundance, right?
So the problem today is the abundance.
It's the super salient stimuli.
It's the...
Impossibility of all the choices that we have around us.
And this need for like an affirmative stance is, it is the difference between not making it through the filter and making it through the filter.
And that's on the level of the individual life.
Do you want to create something and have a legacy?
Do you want to make something with your own spirit?
Or do you want to do that and also produce a family?
Both of these things are challenges today.
For anyone.
But I think if you get past that threshold, actually we live in a time of tremendous capacity to create.
If you can be a creator, the things that you can make, the worlds that you can move, have been asymmetrically designed.
And that is the affordance of being a creator today.
Could I pop in a question for you, Raven, real quick?
Yeah, of course.
You were talking about the resentful men and also about some of these autistic-leaning tech individuals.
I know a few of these people from school or work, and they want a family.
They make enough money.
Let's say they make $80,000 or $100,000 a year.
But on some level, they want a woman who's going to, in their words, love them for them or the way they are.
But the way they are is obtrusive and a little bit repulsive.
They don't know how to be camped or put together a good-looking outfit.
And I've tried to help these people to varying degrees of success.
But I was wondering, what has...
Like, what do you do with them that seems to, like, motivate them out of video games and Funko Pops and into, like, getting out of the wardrobe?
Yeah, that sounds a bit like they need to internalize their animal.
And this is something that we, as we mature into adults, like, it's so easy to just push the concepts that you have about the opposite sex.
Onto them, project onto them and to not internalize them in a productive way for your own personal development.
It's like, oh, I want a woman to care for me.
I want her to make me clean.
I want her to, you know, make me look beautiful.
I don't want to do those things, right?
And somehow the idea of being loved or being desired or wanting someone to take part in your life is wrapped up in these projections.
But really, at the end of the day, it's trying to externalize something onto someone else that makes it their responsibility rather than your own.
So once again, it's really about how to bring in that sense of empowerment from Someone else is responsible to I am responsible.
I have control.
I'm the one who decides what my body looks like, how I look when I'm operating in the world, that I respect myself enough to look at who I am and to think that I'm attractive, you know, that someone would be able to love me because I care for myself,
you know?
And yeah, it really depends when a client comes in how far they are kind of in that.
In that process.
But a lot of it is, you know, we do have different parts of ourselves and we can be very mature and developed in certain aspects.
And then, especially when it comes to sexuality and relationships, we're still quite infantile.
And so I, in a very non-judgmental way, we go into those parts and we listen to them and we hear what they have to say.
And even just the process of witnessing these things in a very non-judgmental container.
And I think as well, for me being a woman, being able to offer that can really release a lot of the inner tension.
And that produces energy.
And that energy can be channeled into higher-level beliefs that actually motivate someone to change.
Because a lot of it is when you've lived a certain way and you've kind of entrenched certain beliefs, especially if you've gone onto the internet and formed an identity around these beliefs, you have to be open to changing yourself.
Overcoming these inner tensions and taking that energy and producing a new identity out of that and a new story for who you are.
And it's much easier if you have high openness in your personality.
But if you have low openness, then you have to move more slowly and really create the motivational structure to do something that's difficult, which is to change.
Right. I've had these conversations with some of these guys where I, like, explained to them that, like, they would be, you know, they would have better success if they weren't 50 pounds overweight and if they, like, you know, went to a barber regularly and, like,
these types of conversations.
But it's almost like, like you said, like, almost like they want to offload it onto, like, it's a woman's responsibility to, like, just take them as they are.
It's like there should be no effort necessary on their part.
When I explain to them, that's nonsense thinking.
That's childish.
You're going to get in what you put in.
That's where the disconnect comes.
It's like, well, you can come to the gym with me three days a week, and you'll see results, but usually that's where the separation happens.
I'd rather play Counter-Strike with my Funko Pop than, like, work at this, in a sense.
Yeah, yeah, I mean...
And maybe this does go back to this idea of what is the existential container that we're living in now?
Because the...
I want to have a family.
It's like, well, what is that really serving?
Is that just some sort of weak illusion that you have?
A weak desire?
Because everyone else has it.
Or you have some sort of concept from childhood about what a family ought to be.
And you've identified with that in some way?
Or is it something actually deep and motivating, where you're willing to actually overcome things to go towards that thing?
And usually, when we're in the pits and we're trying to get out, we need something more than mere illusion to get us out of that place, mere fantasy.
It needs to be something that is existentially motivating.
And curiosity, I think, about the world and about the time that we're living in today is one of these things.
When you're looking around and seeing so much decay and chaos and madness and realizing that people are going into these evolutionary sinkholes and that you could be one of them, then it starts to reframe the context.
When I think about my own life, I'm just like, how was I not?
One of the people who is lost.
I don't know.
I have no idea.
And I don't even attribute it to myself on some level that somehow I've been able to find my way through this entangled landscape of competing ideas and values.
And I think everyone in this room probably can identify with carving their own path and creating their own worldview.
And some of us have that spirit in us.
And other people don't seem to have the will.
And I don't know, at the end of the day, why kind of spiritual power seems to be distributed so unevenly.
I don't have a good idea.
Well, I would push back on that a little bit.
I don't think in the history of humanity...
Most all people were generating their own worldview or something like that.
I think that was something that was given to them.
And maybe it's too much to ask of these people that they become their own mini Nietzsche or something.
Maybe the right question to ask is why aren't elite institutions, or just institutions, let's say, able to convey something to the public?
Where is that breaking down?
And here, I think even really basic things You know, like, why aren't the Zoomers more patriotic or something?
You know, why is the only football player they know or care about Colin Kaepernick or something?
You know, like, why are they even going out and protesting over Gaza?
I mean, I have my own opinion on that, but, like, why are they so unhappy?
Why don't they just kind of get along?
Maybe it's because our institutions, it's like the liberals now are hysterical, in an almost Freudian sense, about saving democracy from this threat that they can't even quite articulate.
Trumpism, it's fascist, it's stupid, it has no decorum.
It's going to cut taxes for the rich.
It's this weird, contradictory blob that they fear.
It's racist, white racist in the rural areas or whatever.
J-sex.
It's this weird, contradictory blob that they fear.
But they're not really interrogating what democracy is or means.
These people are in charge of the institutions.
It's really on them to corral the masses.
And if they're failing at that, it's their fault on some level.
They aren't articulating an American dream for the 21st century that really works, that gets average people thinking that they're part of something good.
And I don't know.
That's kind of how I see it.
I react a little bit against any sort of individualism and so on.
I guess precisely because I am an elitist.
It's too much to ask for my neighbors or something to confront the crisis and generate a way out.
All of this stuff that...
Nietzsche tried and failed and it killed him.
I'm not going to demand that of people.
I think that we need to demand that of institutions, that there has to be a big lie, as it were, that can motivate, an illusion that can motivate many people, many people who aren't very intelligent.
And the fact that they're...
Failing at that, I think, is really the key issue.
That even explains the existence of Trump and the persistence of Trump.
And in the 20th century, the United States really did excel at that.
There were problems along the way.
There were breakdowns, like what we think of now as the 60s, a very long period of time.
But they still were able to give people a sense of you're part of something exceptional, you're special, you have a mission in this world, and so on.
And the fact that the right wing, even the touchstone of America First, I think is fundamentally lame in the sense that...
It's not really anything.
It's just like, I don't want to give more money to Ukraine.
Or, you know, we don't want a military base in Asia or missiles in Poland.
Because who cares?
It's like this retreat from any sort of world mission.
And there's nothing.
But you retreat and you go back to putting America first and you find that there's nothing.
You know, you look at the actual America or the actual lives that these people are living, like Marjorie Taylor Greene's constituents, and what is this Americanism outside of maybe going to a megachurch on Sunday,
but most of them don't do that?
What is their life outside of visiting strip malls and paying their mortgage and watching a football game more religiously than they attend?
It's like this retreat from America as a world mission, which had high watermarks in the George W. Bush era in the 1950s and mid-60s with Kennedy, etc.
Maybe there was a sort of high watermark in the 80s.
And the fact that we don't have that, and so the big critique...
Coming from the right is like, don't do this.
We don't like it.
We should keep that money.
Isn't that kind of pathetic?
Isn't that like an expression of the problem?
There you go.
Yeah, I mean, I totally understand where you're coming from.
I think part of it is even the so-called elites have no fucking idea really what's going on.
I think it's a really...
Exposing moment, the contradictions in the narratives, you know, the motivations of people seem to be quite selfish and narcissistic.
People losing a sense of the scope of the responsibility of America as an empire, I think, is a deep, deep issue.
I mean, I'm living in Europe and that has definitely given me...
Much deeper understanding that America plays a significant role in peacekeeping in Europe.
And there needs to be a presence here of Americans and all over the world, right?
Americans are isolated from the globe in many respects, even ones who are well-educated, because it really takes setting yourself.
Onto the soil of another continent and seeing like, holy shit, there are other people here and their safety and their capacity to participate in the market and bring prosperity to their people is dependent on an infrastructure that is preserved by Americans.
And the global order is protected and preserved by Americans.
People are completely lost in terms of being able to understand the implication of that falling into decay.
Yeah, and isn't Make America Great Again ironic?
And it's not like Donald Trump was actually an isolationist.
If you look at what he did during his time in office and maybe what he would do if he gets back in.
The White House will be in a jail cell or house arrest in Mar-a-Lago.
Who knows?
It's going to be wild.
That's all I know.
But it's not really about what actually happened.
It's about the logical implications and consequences of the rhetoric.
And Make America Great Again, if you take its catchwords and What they're pointing back to in terms of some 20th century high watermark of Americanism is when America was on the move.
America was expanding NATO.
America was...
You know, mano a mano with the Soviet Union and a nuclear standoff.
America was...
Hollywood was building movie theaters and bringing American content to Europe and around the world.
And so there's this weird contradiction or kind of paradox where they want to make America great again and they want to like...
Relive this half-remembered dream of 1962 or something.
I don't know.
More accurately, what MAGA represents really is the end of America.
It's like the full withdrawal from the world, from being consequential in the world, from feeling like you have a world mission, like there's a charge that you have to complete.
And it's weird in my old age.
I remember when I was just out of college, I would, to the degree that I had any influence, I would just, you know, this is pre-blogging and all this kind of stuff, I would just make fun of George W. Bush.
I hated this idea of, you know, America represents a force of freedom that is attractive to all humans on the planet.
Everyone is a kind of monotheistic freedom lover just waiting to be released, and America is that designated force that brings it to them.
I hated this, and it's something that's kind of easy to debunk and point out the hypocrisy or something.
But I almost have a certain appreciation for that type of rhetoric as I get older because it was...
It was heady and idealistic, if also reckless and in need of tempering.
And what MAGA represents now is a kind of like evaporation of any sort of idealism.
You know, it's like everyone in charge of institutions are evil, Satanists, pedophiles.
We need to just keep all our money here.
Don't do anything for the world.
I find not that Trump himself will actually enact any of this stuff, but if you take the logic seriously, it's actually deeply depressing.
And so it's like the critique of liberalism is somehow worse.
I guess that maybe explains my own support for Joe Biden.
But anyway, that's my kind of perspective on it.
I can't really ever jump on the MAGA bandwagon ever again.
And it's not for any reasons of getting lambasted in the press.
That's superficial.
It's more of like that bandwagon is taking you nowhere.
Basically. It's taking you off a cliff or it's taking you to a desert.
And I would much...
I think there's a desperate need for something that offers some sort of heady idealism.
To quote Walter Sobicek or something, it's like...
Say what you will about national socialism, at least it was an ethos.
These men are nihilists.
That's a very funny line from The Big Lombowski, just become one of my favorite movies, but it's really actually insightful.
There's kind of nothing worse than being a nihilist.
There's nothing worse than trying to reduce idealism or reduce the libido, to put it maybe in terms that are more applicable to your way of thinking.
Yeah, well, it's a very powerful meme flex, what you're speaking about.
And it does seem to be something that many adolescents move through in reaction to the hegemony that they face.
You know, I mean, you went through it.
I went through my own phase with it.
Many of us kind of go through this phase of reaction to the existing power structures.
And I think that is one of the rites of passage of the youth to reject.
And react to existing narratives.
I think today this is extremely, the kind of possibility for being caught in a very powerful memeplex has just accelerated because of the types of technology that we have and the way that it can really integrate into our identities and also be weaponized for political gains,
obviously. There's also been a hollowing out of the American spirit.
And then what do you have to pull?
What leverage do you really have to bring people into an idealistic narrative about the role of America without there being some sort of, you know, catastrophic event or, you know, something that really motivates people.
But as we can see now, even war, like active war happening in the world is not sufficient to motivate people.
Either. So yeah, I would say nihilism is a very powerful state.
And getting out of it really takes an affirmation of existence as it is, and the desire for something invigorating, even in the face of nihilism.
It is part of the process to go through nihilism.
It's so...
Difficult to actually overcome it.
And now that you can galvanize people and utilize them for anything, really, for consumption, for votes, for donations, it's much harder for people to see that there's any reason to move outside of that.
So I do think that this is a moment for a different kind of elitism.
This isn't the elitism of the existing classes, because I think if you look at the rot in institutions, it's not just about being born into a wealthy family or going to a prestigious college.
There's something else that defines being an elite today.
And it seems to be the capacity to get through this nihilistic stage and affirm existence and move towards some sort of telos, some sort of State of possibility of the future and to put effort into it and will,
even when you don't know what will happen, right?
I also think that American consumerist culture has really bred this idea that, you know, I remember my grandmother would say it, I pay, I say, right?
This idea that if you're buying something, you're guaranteed to get it.
And this is a very corrupt cycle if you generalize this outside of markets and services, right?
Yes, if you buy a consumer product, you don't want it to break.
Yes, if you get someone to come and clean your house, you don't want them to stand you up.
But for all of these bigger, existential, idealistic ideas, you need something, you need to be motivated by something more than the guarantee that you're going to get what you want.
There needs to be something.
So there's just a clashing and colliding of these different memeplexes coming together and the malaise of a culture that's quite isolated from the rest of the world and the kind of media ecology that we're living in that isolates.
And maybe even liberalism, like if liberalism were a fundamental ideal In the American 20th century, it's kind of devolved into mere safetyism.
Yes. And this is where I am.
I've changed and evolved in a lot of ways, but I will always be a Nietzschean.
And it's like, danger is more important than safety.
And the fact that liberalism, we're not, again, we're not even We've evaporated any sort of idealism about liberalism, even the George W. Bush era, kind of like every human heart quest for freedom or something.
Look, that's kind of dumb, but yeah, it's something.
It's some sort of message or mission.
And now liberalism is reduced to just mere safetyism.
So it's like you need to be safe in your...
Transgender experimentation.
You need to be safe as a Jewish Zionist on campus.
You can't hear those mean old words.
You can't get into a shouting match with someone.
Oh, that's just the worst.
You need to have job security even.
It's like we're constantly questing towards that.
Fake. Because the ultimate safety is death.
You are really safe in your grave or in your urn.
No one is going to harm you.
And we should be promoting danger.
They have to be balanced.
Obviously, I'm not going to go out and not wear a seatbelt and just slam on the wall.
I'm thinking of that seat from Fight Club.
Just pressing the accelerator and seeing what happens.
I'm not going to do that, obviously.
It's a metaphor.
But we need to be thinking about ways of increasing danger as opposed to increasing safety.
I've said this maybe a few times on this broadcast, and I've said it with friends.
Think about the gay movement and its trajectory.
At one point, being homosexual was, in fact, dangerous.
You were an outsider.
And as an outsider, you might actually be able to offer some sort of deeper insight into society, or you might be able to do something that the insiders to the world can't do.
there's a certain privilege to being
Oppressed, or being marginalized, or being taboo.
There's a certain privilege in that.
And I think society needs that energy to move forward.
But as homosexuality, and here I would just say any sort of non-normative sexuality, becomes safety-ized.
It's a way, a form of nihilism.
At one point, Oscar Wilde's suffering, in some ways, self-inflicted suffering.
We have to remember, he brought the lawsuit that sent him to jail.
But anyway, his suffering was meaningful.
And compare that to 115 years later, and like...
Gary, who works at a corporation and has a good health plan and wants to go to the Gay Pride Festival.
It's like, oh, hey guys, I got my rainbow cake together and let's all go out and celebrate homosexuality.
I think the mayor is going to be there, maybe a senator.
It's lame.
It's no longer dangerous.
It's no longer...
Critiquing society.
It's no longer contradicting society in any way, shape, or form.
And so you're safe to be gay.
But all that means is that gayness has no...
It's evaporated of any sort of meaning that in some ways it had.
You're just now another corporate drone who has a particular sexual preference as opposed to Jim who...
It's evaporated of all meaning by liberalism and the bourgeois ethic.
Now you can become a heterosexual.
Ultimately going to end homosexuality.
It's this weird contradiction or paradox, but that's where it goes.
So it's like in this quest for safety, we're ultimately kind of neutralizing and destroying any sort of identity or way of thinking that might actually have meaning.
Like, wasn't it kind of cool to go and see, like in a repressed society, wasn't it sort of cool to like, Go on a late night, not tell your boss or your family or maybe your wife where you're going and go to see an erotic striptease act.
It's subversive.
It's titillating.
It's dangerous.
It's contradicting the norm.
But when that...
Is embraced by the system.
When that's become normal, it's now evaporated.
There's nothing dangerous about pornography.
It's, in fact, boring.
You don't get any...
It's constricting the libido, if anything.
It's not offering an exciting and dangerous...
New world, even if it's one that you ultimately reject, it's no longer doing that.
So it's like, in our bourgeois, liberal quest for safety, we have destroyed even subversion.
I mean, I think this is, again, why I can never be a liberal, because it's like there needs to be that...
That contrast.
There needs to be some sort of battle between normativity and the Dionysian, you could say, the excessive, the dangerous, the weird.
There has to be that battle.
And liberalism is so all-encompassing that it encompasses even that and thus ruins it and turns everything into some bourgeois preference.
Yeah, I mean, absolutely.
The way that we talk about this in my intellectual communities is the need for the tantric and the sutric divide.
So this comes out of Vajrayana Buddhism.
This idea of the sutra is, you know, you live by a set of rules, you live by a set of dogmas, you show up with a certain personality in public and in society.
And those are, that's the law of the land.
And the tantric spaces.
Are tight containers that are only there for the initiated.
And they're only there for the people who actually have the balls to go and seek them out.
And that's where you engage in transgressive activity.
That's where you engage with other people who can actually handle those types of environments.
And that's when you go into sex, drugs, you know, dark elements of the kind of human animal.
And learn how to be in relationship to those powerful sources of energy.
And, of course, those membranes have been broken, as you're speaking to.
And the kind of tantric containers of sex and even of drug use, right?
This kind of psychedelic renaissance, in a way, is also taking drug use, which has been contained and suppressed.
In the sutric aspects of society and making it a therapy.
Yeah. Doesn't Elon Musk promote drug use as it makes you more productive?
You have all these anxieties and you can take this drug and it will even things out and you can be a good corporate drone.
Transsexuality or transvestitism or whatever, that's existed for a very long time.
I'm sounding kind of like a liberal here, but I'm not.
It's existed for a very long time.
It's existed within a religious context.
To some degree, it's been able to kind of capture or express certain types of energies.
And even drug use and transvestitism, we've ruined.
We've turned that into like, oh good, you're a woman now.
Okay, get back to work.
Or like drug use.
Oh yeah, drugs can really help you get back to work.
We've learned this.
As opposed to taking a crazy acid trip and going to another universe, which I don't recommend, but it's still sort of cool.
We've evaporated everything.
And I just...
I don't know.
There's a certain type of...
I guess Nietzsche would say it's like a passive nihilism at the heart of the bourgeoisie and at the heart of the middle class.
And as the bourgeoisie dominate Western Europe and America and Australia and increasingly dominating the world, they're going to really destroy everything.
There is nothing that...
Yeah, it's interesting, though.
It's when you look at where fertility is dropping, it's in this class.
You know, the very, very rich and the very, very poor are still reproducing.
So I think that this mentality will lead itself to its ultimate end, which is death.
It's just a matter of patience, I guess.
Because these people who want safety and security in their lives above everything else, want everyone to be included, don't want to have any friction, just want to be given things guaranteed and have their identities reinforced and never have to change.
These are not the people who can even risk the idea of pregnancy or relationship or having a family.
Even that is too stressful to cope with.
Yeah, so it's, yeah, these people are not moving on into the future.
And it's, yeah, and I'm not trying to convince them to either.
It's being, I'm pronatalist, but I think it's a, pronatalism is for people who already want to have children and need to be encouraged to have more children and to fortify their family cultures so that their children can.
Be strong in the face of all of these mimetic contagions around them.
And that's the kind of thing that if this is the spirit that you're called to, you can foster that type of family, culture and community around you.
And yeah, it's just it's.
The ascent of the middle class has just been a byproduct of prosperity and of capitalism and markets functioning and an industrial model, you know, the wealthy needed workers.
But we're moving into an era where that will not be the case.
They will not need large bureaucracies of people shuffling papers around and HR managing, you know, microaggressions between people because all of that mundane work is going to be automated and those people will no longer be useful.
And at the end of the day, I don't think the hyper-rich are going to be all that sympathetic to the interests of these people once they are no longer useful for labor.
So it's an interesting time that we're moving through because these ideas are really being pushed to their behavioral extremes.
And I think the internet is also accelerating that process and sterilizing the capacity for these people to actually bring their gene plex into the future, which will, yeah,
I mean, it will filter them out.
It will.
Where do you think we're going with all this?
Because, you know, there's a famous book by Eric Kaufman called The Religious Shall Inherit the Earth.
And he mentions that, you know, within a society, the more...
It's not even necessarily more religious.
It's just more kind of fundamentalist are outbreeding the less fundamentalist.
So evangelical Christians have three kids and Episcopalians have 1.2 kids.
And so they will ultimately win.
It might take a few generations, but it's happening.
Between societies, it's also happening.
So religious fundamentalists or primitive cultures are out reading more secular cultures.
There's also some bad things about this.
like, um,
We're breeding for heart disease.
We're breeding for criminality.
There are a lot of bad things that happen there, but I don't know.
Even those people who are kind of psychotic and dumb at least are in touch with the libido, which is something.
Yeah, it's something.
It's some sort of life force energy.
There's nothing more libidinal than committing a crime.
Yeah, it's true.
It's interesting how the mind fits into this.
If you have enough mind to repress your instincts and conscientiousness to integrate into the virtual aspects of our society, then...
You can effectively sterilize yourself.
And if you're very intelligent, especially if you are disagreeable, you can use your libido.
You can harness your animal and channel it into a form of competition that allows for you to have a tremendous amount of asymmetrical success.
But these people in the middle who have just enough mind to inhibit themselves...
And to distance themselves from the animal end up kind of the most fucked because they have cut off their relationship to the body and to this kind of aggressive and primitive force of nature that just wants you to fuck and to kill or,
you know, to be this ape that we are.
And yeah, it's a domesticated class, a very domesticated class of people.
And within the context of an industrialized factory-based kind of architecture, right?
This can even be seen in the way that the spaces are designed and built, that this was the form that was domesticating people.
But there is still a streak of wildness in, like you're saying, these kind of These criminal ghetto populations.
And also the populations of people who are competing at very, very high levels.
These people also have a lot of libido.
And they do fuck a lot.
A lot of them do.
These are very successful men in bed as well.
So, yeah, I don't know.
I really think about this as a waiting game.
Sometimes I think about what's it going to look like when the Joe Bidens of the world are gone?
What's it going to look like even when my parents are gone?
The world will have a very different landscape.
Who will be young?
What will those people be like?
Who will be the parents of those children?
Obviously, there's still going to be a lot of this population that we're talking about.
Still around for a while, especially with life extension technologies and biotech, right?
There's going to be this attempt to prolong the existence.
I think about it as kind of using technology to prop up the corpse of our civilization.
And in the meantime, there just needs to be, at least this is where I've come.
I don't know.
You don't have to agree with my position here.
It's about maintaining some vitalist in-group culture that can get past this time and come out the other side and potentially be the grounds of a new era of civilization,
a new paradigm.
Possibly. There's lots of other contingent factors, but this is once again one of these things where it's not about a guarantee.
It's just about an orienting force.
A telos.
You know, it's about moving towards something.
And also having an intergenerational approach.
Because demographics, when you look at demographics and you really think through it, even past your own life, the world really starts to look very different.
And then you can think about, okay, what will my grandchildren be looking at if demographics is the main factor and all else being equal?
Who are they going to be competing with?
What kinds of cultures will there be?
Who is going to be technophilic?
Who's going to actually know how to leverage the instruments that have been left behind by the previous generations, right?
The people who have that capacity are going to have a lot of potential power in the world.
So it's like preserving things to the point where they can be utilized in the future by a technophilic vitalist.
You eat.
Yeah. This is fascinating, disgusting.
Yeah, Walter, you raised your hand.
Would you like to jump in?
Yeah, this is Walt Bismarck, guys.
Hey, I had a question for Raven.
What if the average IQ is just too high?
We're all familiar with the Flynn effect.
We're all familiar with how consistently executing every year, like the 1% most dangerous.
The most violent contingent of our population has radically decreased violent crime rates throughout the years.
What if we've sort of created a type of person who is just so kind of sheltered and is so focused on optimizing?
I mean, there's just kind of the optimization impulse in and of itself.
What if eugenics is actually bad?
What if you sort of need a population that has an average IQ of 88 or 90 just to not destroy itself in a way?
Because in a sense, when you get that sort of middle class culture that's always optimizing and that will promote republicanism and will promote like a constant increase of wealth, at a certain point, nobody's going to vote to make things more difficult for themselves
or to get into a conflict.
I mean, maybe we need to look at things like democratic peace theory from the other perspective.
Maybe you actually want to sort of warlike and violent and...
I guess sort of savage species because that's just going to prevent people from making these really dysgenic long-term decisions where they're just kind of like dying out.
I don't know.
I look at a lot of the sort of WN and a lot of sort of like alt-right or NRX talking points about just optimizing for eugenics at the expense of everything else.
And I'm almost wondering if we're looking at it from completely the wrong direction because maybe when you...
Go down that path as a civilization, you just inevitably end up optimizing everything for pleasure and optimizing for, I guess, creating like VR pods where, you know, the entire species will just die out in a simulation to their specifications, right?
I mean, that's in a lot of science fiction.
A lot of people say that's, you know, why certain, you know, like why we never encountered like another alien species before is because it's not even that they'll...
Wipe each other out in a nuclear war.
It's that any alien species would just invent virtual reality and sort of escape into that.
That's much more easy than colonizing the universe or whatever.
So I don't know.
Maybe you can still have a much higher IQ population that they can still achieve great things, great art, great literature, great accomplishments.
But maybe you need just the average man to be kind of a grug, to be kind of an idiot.
Because if you look at the Roman Empire, you look at any of...
You know, the great civilizations in our past.
I mean, it seems if you look at the Flynn effect and if you look at other factors, I mean, the average Roman was probably quite brutish.
It probably looked like, you know, the average resident of Detroit today in terms of, you know, just the abstract reasoning ability in terms of violent crime rate.
I mean, it was probably, you know, a pretty miserable existence with it to be a common person there.
But, you know, you still have the Caesars, you still have the Ciceros.
I mean, you have that aristocratic.
But maybe you just need that certain level of stupidity in the common man.
Maybe that's actually a good thing.
So I just wanted to submit that because we're talking about vitalism.
We're talking about how do you stop people from just optimizing away, like basically turning themselves into elves, right?
Like if you look at like War of the Worlds, I think H.G. Will's kind of predicted that, you know, he sees humanity diverging into Eloi and Morlocks.
I see this as kind of becoming...
We're sort of living longer.
These days, the sensibility among a lot of Zoomers is that you're not an adult until you're 25. We're certainly just much softer.
I mean, if you just look at people's faces, if you look at a 30-year-old today compared to 50 years ago, it's just night and day.
We're just softening ourselves to a level.
I wonder if that just precludes any sort of ability for having that vitality.
So I just wanted to submit that to both Raven and to Richard Spencer and see what you guys think about that.
Yeah, Raven, you can go first.
Well, I really love the flip there.
It's fantastic.
And I guess it's, in a way, kind of what we're describing if we think, you know, two, three generations.
If we continue to have high fertility in the upper classes and high fertility in the lower classes and the middle class basically breed themselves out of the population, we will end up with this kind of difference, especially.
Because, you know, the upper classes are not as large as the lower classes to begin with.
And then they also don't have as many children.
So we kind of will end up with the stratified culture.
And it's an interesting thought experiment to consider whether or not that is better for vitalism, you know, increasing the vitalism of the world.
And in a way, I think I definitely can imagine a future where that...
Is in some sense better for human vitality because the humans that don't have the capacity to interact with the highly abstract environment of the elite, they will live a much more primitive life,
a much more embodied life, life of our ancestors in a kind of tangible, tactile world.
I mean, hopefully that would help men have higher testosterone levels and actually just engage in kind of the processes of the animal human.
And maybe that will cause more territoriality and violence, you know, at the edges of different tribes.
And maybe that will mean different kind of mating dynamics that, you know, liberals wouldn't like very much or whatever.
But in terms of living...
A vital human life.
I think it's possible that that would actually be the case.
And then the elites would, I mean, they're just going to live in their city-states anyways.
So I don't think they're going to be very much, they're going to be bothered very much by the human animal just kind of existing in their own little enclaves.
Because the kind of asymmetrical power that will exist in that world will be so dramatic that, you know, the human animal would be no threat.
To, you know, a highly speciated elite group that's been using, you know, genetic modification and all sorts of other forms of technology to enhance their own capabilities.
And I don't know, spacefaring or maybe it's the Gnostic thing, like maybe it is about traveling to new realms.
Maybe that's what we will select for.
I'm not sure there's different ideas about what it actually means to ascend.
As a population into a new realm.
But yeah, I'm definitely going to think about that more because it's a very interesting idea.
Well, in Archaeofuturism, Guillaume Fay suggested a sort of bifurcated society where you would have a
primitivism in a way.
We give up on the kind of middle class dream and we move towards we're going to make sure that you're able to have a village and an organic farm and a temple in the center of it and lots of room to run and play and have fun and explore and hunt and all that kind of stuff.
That can be enveloped by an elite class that is pursuing higher levels of existence, maybe in a knowing Gnostic sense, or even in a sense of genetic modification or something like that.
I'll just admit my own sort of A lot of that stuff kind of does rub me the wrong way, to be honest.
But nevertheless, if it could be done at least consciously and seriously, it could have beneficial effects.
But maybe this is where we need to go.
And that bifurcated society would kind of eliminate the bourgeoisie, which is The fundamental problem.
And yeah, I mean, I think Walt Bismarck's, you know, criticisms of WN and so on is, they're appreciated in the sense that it's not so much like white nationalism or like the neo-Nazis or whatever those types of people who,
you know, wave flags and are really kind of gross.
It's more of a kind of refined white nationalism where it is a sort of safetyism in itself.
Whites are good because we don't commit crimes and whites are good because we're happy little consumers, basically.
And that's our justification.
We want a world more like that.
I have certain sympathies towards that, but I don't know.
I do fundamentally reject that, and we need to think about this stuff in a different way.
Walt, do you have any response?
Yeah, I mean, I fully agree, and I would just say, you know, if you were to take an average classical Roman and drop them in the middle of Kansas or something, I think that they would be disgusted by Where we've gone.
They would think that we are way too soft.
We're way too conflict-averse.
And I think that a lot of modern-day WNs would probably look at them and they'd see like a dindu, basically.
And I think that we've lost sort of just, I mean, the desire for conquest and the, I guess, willingness to sort of go there, you know, without even thinking about it too hard.
I mean, I think a big problem is we think too much these days.
We're sort of trapped in our, I mean, this is something you talk about with embodiment.
I mean, I think that just that sort of like visceral impact, like when somebody insults you to just like put your fist in his face.
I mean, like that's that's just something we sort of lost.
And that's there isn't I mean, there's an extent to which you still sort of have that vitality in our underclass, but we don't really appreciate them.
And I'm not necessarily suggesting that we should, but it's it's more it's more like you want that impulse in just like the sort of common middle class man.
And I think maybe we need like an average IQ of 90. In order to get that back.
Maybe in that vein, Brazilification isn't the worst thing in the world.
Not to be too controversial here, but I think that we just need to look at a lot of the assumptions that we've all developed collectively.
Thinking about eugenics and thinking about the path forward as a civilization and just think, what is really...
The biggest threat to us.
And I think that's, I mean, basically everybody just losing their vitality because they're sitting around jerking off all day or they just don't want to go outside because entertainment is too good.
And I don't think that people will ever vote that way.
I don't think that people will ever voluntaristically.
I mean, like, it takes an extraordinary amount of willpower, even for a very agentic person, to, you know, like, quit these addictive dopamine traps, to get out of these Skinner boxes, right?
It's extraordinarily difficult.
And for like a midwit...
Who has just been raised in this incentive structure?
I mean, imagine Zoomers, especially Gen Alpha.
They grow up, especially with COVID and everything.
They're just inside all the time, surrounded by particle porn at their fingertips, surrounded by immersive virtual reality-adjacent experiences at this point.
It's tremendously worrying.
And I feel like this is actually our biggest challenge as a civilization right now, is figuring out how to get rid of those dopamine drops and how to Young men especially, because young women are a bit more obedient.
They'll always follow the social script.
Whereas young men really require a firm incentive structure to kick them in the ass and get them out and plumbishing things in the world.
I just don't think anybody is posing anything close to a realistic solution that's actually going to get, especially Gen Alpha guys.
Zoomers, they're already making their way into the world.
I imagine if I have a son one day, how am I going to tell him?
You know, to go get a job.
How am I going to tell him to go to school when he has, like, Sidney Sweeney simulator, you know, at his fingertips at all times?
When he has, you know, he can go have any sort of experience he wants in VR with, you know, algorithmically generated AI experiences, like, virtually limitless.
I mean, it's just, it's tremendously scary.
And that's what I'm concerned about.
And I think that intelligence and especially just the...
Tendency to be in your head too much.
That's really what we have to avoid.
And really, eugenics, if you look at the practical effect of what eugenics did over the years, and we definitely practiced eugenics pretty heavily in Europe just in terms of executing violent, stupid people for many generations.
We had a lot of downward social mobility, right?
A lot of the second sons of the nobility would become merchants and their sons would become peasants and what have you.
It made the average person much more intelligent.
But I think that creating this mid-width class, That just constituted the great bulk of humanity.
That was tremendously dangerous.
And yeah, of course, it leads to the Industrial Revolution.
It leads to all these great things.
But unless you can get to escape velocity and make the average IQ 120 or 125, you get this really dangerous middle area where there's not enough agency and not enough forward thinking to be able to break out of the dopamine traps, escape the Skinner box.
But they're also just over-optimized and they're too...
They're too agentic to not just be a stupid grug and, you know, go impregnate their high school girlfriend and, you know, just get into fights all the time.
And because of that, you can get this really stultifying malaise where you just can't move forward as a civilization.
And I'd really be interested in both of your thoughts as to how we can deal with those dopamine traps and how we can provide, I mean, even for our own children, even if you have a kid who's 135, 140 IQ, who's very smart, I mean, how are you going to make a compelling case for, hey, go get a job, go date girls, as opposed to go...
You know, have this, like, maximally stimulating fantasy experience.
Well, yeah, you just do it.
I mean, you just take the phone away and don't give them a phone in the first place.
You ban TikTok in your home and heart.
What was Paul say?
Circumcise of the heart?
Like, ban...
Whatever Congress does, you should ban TikTok in your heart.
Yeah, I mean, it's just that.
In terms of on a personal level.
On a societal level, it's kind of too big for us to really figure out.
None of us, sadly, are just going to become king of the world or something.
I think we have to look at where these massive social trends are going and what are the ultimate consequences of these and how to survive them.
And also, what are some of the silver linings?
The right wing is so up in arms about the lack of middle-class fertility.
They want a mandatory monogamous society.
Every man gets a GF and we'll all be happy.
And that's not going to happen.
And so maybe what are some of the benefits?
Of the decline of this population that wants that kind of stuff.
That's reading red pill content and listening to Jordan Peterson and complaining about women all day.
What is the social consequence and maybe even benefit of their reduced fertility?
Yeah, you can already start to see this in the trends in South Korea, where the men's movement is quite strong.
And it's surprising what they're, I think, from a Western perspective, what they want.
They want the same kinds of privileges as women.
You know, they want to be served things.
And it's, yeah, it's embarrassing.
These men are asking for to be, they want to be catered to and given things by, I don't know who, Big Daddy or Big Mommy.
Consider this is a society where they have a draft, right?
So like everyone always proposes, oh, you know, in the West, we need to just send our boys into the military.
Well, you know, they have that in Korea and they have a constant threat of being obliterated by Kim Jong-un.
And yet they seem to turn into the biggest pussies.
So, I mean, clearly that's not like a straightforward answer, right?
Well, they have a draft.
They don't have a war.
Maybe a real conflict would man them up a bit.
Well, technically, it's an armistice, right?
I mean, technically, I think it's very much drilled into their heads at any time if they could.
Practically speaking, it won't, but they're a very heavily militarized society, right?
But definitely a real possibility, I would say.
Unlike being in an isolated America where we've got to worry about Canada and Mexico, it's a serious thing.
But yeah, I agree with your point, though.
I was just jumping on the technicalities.
But yeah, I mean, maybe the world really does need a big catastrophe.
And I don't know.
I've always been a little bit ambivalent about this World War III prospect.
Gosh, we're getting extremely dark here.
Usually on Tuesdays.
It's usually lighter and more kind of scattered.
And then Thursday night, when we do the same thing, that's when I might have had a glass of wine or two and we go into dark territory.
But I don't know.
I sometimes just kind of roll my eyes when conservatives are like, we don't want World War III or we need to prevent that or the greatest thing about Trump was no new wars.
War is good.
And it's the mother of all great things.
And war tests you.
And maybe precisely what we need is World War III.
Do you think if we don't have World War III that America is going to become less feminized?
In the sense of if we don't have a threat or a conflict that the Chads will take over or we'll start having all these families all over the place and we'll ever be based and red-pilled.
It seems like if that is what you want from society, and that's what conservatives do want, tough guy dads and Trad wives and babies.
That's what they constantly are promoting through imagery and memes, etc.
Then, how do you get there?
I would say that a massive global conflict probably is necessary to get to that type of society.
And the last thing you want to do is do the America first.
Like, oh, no more money for Ukraine.
Or China's base.
We should reach out to China or something.
Yeah, but even war has become disembodied and highly mechanized and virtualized.
So it may not even have the vitalist effect that...
You might hope for.
It would be a bunch of drones and then each side would be cutting off the internet of the other side.
There we go.
I mean, that might get people outside.
Well, that's true.
That might be the answer.
Mutually assured internet destruction would be what we want.
Cutting off my porn access is a violation of human rights.
It's a violation of human rights.
Exactly. So, yeah, I mean, it's unclear if war would even really...
I mean, ground war maybe, but the US, once again, is just so geographically blessed that the chances of that happening on American soil is really slim.
But to go back to the question of how to raise a family or how to create a family culture that...
Can persist with these corrosive forces just around trying to put your child into a skinner box?
I think that this is actually, for me, this is a very compelling, creative, and interesting question.
And there is something exciting about being on this existential quest for creating a hard culture and a family culture that's agentic and embodied and creative.
And forward-looking.
And I do think that it begins very, very young.
It begins with a different attitude towards education.
Literacy being a huge factor.
Starting to get your kids reading at a very young age.
Get them immersed in books.
Get them outside learning about nature and the world.
Take them out hunting.
Put a hunk of meat in their mouth.
You know, no baby food.
No pacifier.
All right, wait.
After they're one, I would say.
After they're one.
Yeah, after they're one.
Not when they're infants.
Serve a baby a steak.
It's kind of a funny image.
No, that won't work.
But milk from mom and then real food and being able to climb.
And I think some of it as well is having two children has created A different type of relationship between parents and children, right?
The idea of losing one of those children becomes very scary for a parent.
Whereas back in the day, it was obviously very tragic when people lost children, but this was happening a lot, and they were having a lot more children.
And the kids, they had to fend for themselves to a large extent.
And now there's so much poured into.
The two and a half children are you having or the one child that you're having.
It's very scary for parents to let their kid out in the world and to maybe get hurt or have something bad happen to them.
being in those types of environments as a child is exactly what creates that fighting spirit.
And, you know, being able to fostering a, a family culture where,
Authority is scrutinized, I think is also important, especially authority outside of the home.
Because if you're told to just be obedient in school or to do what other adults tell you, then that's the kind of attitude that reinforces the domestication of children and over-socialization of them in mainstream society.
If you want to create a hard culture that resists those things, then there needs to be A reinforcement of this questioning of authority by children, while also preserving a strong relationship of respect and authority in the home,
within the family culture.
Yeah, so I think that there are things that people can do, but then obviously family becomes its own creative project, becomes something that people have to actually think about and invest.
Energy into, to produce a kind of taste and a kind of style and an immersion in a kind of particular type of culture.
And it requires, I think, at least two parents and potentially, you know, a community of parents that are all on that journey, investing in that to actually foster this type of learning environment that leads to these highly agentic,
very contrarian children.
Yeah, for me, that's the kind of project that's exciting.