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Lies my liberal teacher told me, with Wilfred Reilly
2.4k Plays4 months ago
Education was once the search for truth. Sadly, this is no longer the case in many universities across the Western world. Instead of promoting debate, disagreement, and viewpoint diversity, too many institutions peddle a series of ideological narratives that seek to engrain a black armband view of history, an assertion of the importance of identity over merit, and a subjective definition of truth.
That’s why there is no more urgent priority in the world today for sensible conservatives than to fight back against the radical left’s colonisation of education. Wilfred Reilly has accepted the challenge. Wilfred is a political science professor at Kentucky State University, and the author of the wonderful new book, “Lies My Liberal Teacher Told Me: Debunking the False Narratives Defining America's School Curricula”.
NOTE: We had some very minor issues with Will's sound. Rest assured the tech team have been severely reprimanded.
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Transcript
Introduction to 'Far at Will'
00:00:20
Speaker
G'day and welcome to Far at Will, your safe space for dangerous conversations. I'm Will Kingston.
Has Society Reached 'Peak Woke'?
00:00:27
Speaker
Some listeners may know that I indulge in rank punditry once a week on Sky News. The same hopeful question comes up every few months, usually following some act of woke lunacy. Have we reached peak woke? Are we coming down the other side of this crazy mountain? Unfortunately, I always have to give the same gloomy response. This project took decades to ferment, and it will be with us for many decades to come. Why? Because education systems across the Western world have been so successfully captured by this toxic ideology. Every child in almost every school across the Anglosphere will receive variations on the same themes in the classroom.
00:01:19
Speaker
a black armband view of their country's history, an assertion of the importance of identity over merit, a subjective definition of truth, and a warning about the dangers of debate, inquiry, and free speech. I don't think any child, no matter how well-adjusted they may be, could emerge from today's education system and not be at least somewhat indoctrinated into the cult of identity politics.
Fighting Radical Influence in Education
00:01:48
Speaker
That's why there is no more urgent priority in the world today for sensible conservatives than to fight back against the radical left's colonisation of education. Wilfred Riley has accepted the challenge.
Introducing Wilfred Riley and His Mission
00:02:02
Speaker
Wilfred is a political science professor at Kentucky State University and the author of the wonderful new book, Lies My Liberal Teacher Told Me, Debunking the False Narratives Defining America's School Curricular.
00:02:17
Speaker
Wilfred, welcome to Far at Will. Glad to be here. Thanks for having me. Pleasure to have you on. The title of your book suggests that there was a liberal left bias back in education when you were at school. I think it's obviously got worse. To follow on from my opening comments, how has that
Shifts in Educational Narratives
00:02:36
Speaker
happened? How the education system Mera could become so successfully captured in recent history? Yeah, that's a good question. And I think if we're being honest, what this gets into is transitions over time between different partisan movements.
00:02:49
Speaker
So, I mean, there's an entire genre of books that's dedicated to critiquing kind of the jingoistic conservative racism of the distant past when you look at education and media. And I mean, the distant past, I mean, like, bury my heart at wounded knee, a native history of the United States was written in 1968. And it's talking about the school curriculum of say the 1930s. But there are there are dozens of these. I mean, there's ah Lies My Teacher Told Me, which is the so classic, if you will, by Loewen, which came out in 1995.
00:03:24
Speaker
The 1619, this is just last year, a black history of the United States and you know and sort of and the lies they're telling you. There is Howard Zinn, I always intro him as that old communist, but a people's history of the United States, which is purports to be told from kind of the perspective of the Cherokee Indians and the Irish working men and so on down the line. None of these of course are perspectives that Zen himself, upper middle class academic, had any access to, but that's beside the point. but i mean there are There are dozens of these that that sort of talk about the United States educational system or the United States media as presenting this story of the country as being exceptionally good,
00:04:00
Speaker
ah This is coming from the center right. People need to be taught reality. And I've read these books as you know an educated citizen myself, and I thought they had something to say when I was in high school in 1994. I'm about the 40 mark myself. But I mean, even by that point, it became obvious that they were talking about a different era of American history. I mean, Jim Crow segregation in this country ended with Brown v. Board in 1954. And by the time I was in school, the things had very much shifted in
Current Bias in Higher Education
00:04:33
Speaker
the other direction. So we were already going. Dinesh D'Souza at the time of basically an academic researcher, not yet a conservative sort of media pundit, wrote illiberal education in 1991.
00:04:44
Speaker
I mean, sort of hilariously making fun of, you know, Stanford took out its Western civilization curriculum. ah In 1989, there were people, a million black millionaire sons with big Afros chanting, hey, hey, ho, ho, Western cultures got to go with their blind girlfriends on the Great Lawn and a couple of years before that. So, I mean, it it was obvious that when I was a kid just in Chicago, which wasn't exactly Selma, Alabama, that the the The story that was being told was a story that was dated by 30 or 40 years. And this, by the way, I don't want to get on a side path. That's very common with the left. Like, I'll say something like, in the United States, there were 20,000 homicides every year, gun and knife crime, about evenly divided between blacks and poor whites. Good guy, that's a problem. Sort of an embarrassment to the world among civilized countries. We need to stop that. Crime needs to be our total focus.
00:05:33
Speaker
And people will say things like, well, I think racism is a bigger problem. Look what happened to Emmett Till. And, you know, you'll look up the case because it's not something you think about on a day-to-day basis. And you realize that Emmett Till was killed in 1955 or whatever it was. And that that was considered a national scandal even then. And it has to be understood that it's not a rebuttal to what you just said at all. Since that point, there've been 10,000 black men a year murdered by other black men or somebody, you know, working class white and Hispanic men, but the imitel doesn't have anything to do with any of that. So this is that on a much larger scale, the the telling of this sort of fake decades old narrative to avoid discussing actual issues in the structural system we have today anyway. So today, yeah American higher education is almost entirely, even as versus when I was a kid,
00:06:20
Speaker
dominated by the political core left. And this is something that's mappable. It's something that's measurable. So in a higher education, at least, there have been a large number of surveys where people have looked at the political inclinations of the faculty of the Professori Act. And the results are really remarkable. I mean, I actually have the data somewhere in my computer. I requested the data set. But as I recall, the field that was friendliest to to us conservatives was economics, where there were only 4.5 leftists, Marxists and such to each conservative, each Republican or libertarian. But then you go from there up to sociology, where there were
00:06:59
Speaker
No conservative, it was like one to 108 Marxists or Democrats. So that's what you have in the universities. And the universities obviously, I assume it's a bit different in preschool and so on, many young mothers and all that. But the universities teach most of the secondary school teachers and the like. So you have this incredible bias in one direction, and it really shows. So what I wanted to do with this book was look at what's actually being taught today, not what was being taught in 1954. See whether the bias is still to the right rather than the left, although I thought that was an incredibly easy research question. Of course, it was to the left. And then see whether the the narrative through lines today are any more accurate than they used to be.
00:07:40
Speaker
And the answer is as you probably guess because you normally you know you write a book when you know what you're gonna find and the publisher gives you that contract but i mean the answer is that no i mean that the things that are being taught slavery was unique to or at least in america. Native Americans were peaceful people who spent all day in dancing and making love. I got away with titling a chapter that the Red Scare didn't find any communists. I mean, they're just, many of them are fantastic lies. So I talk about one, what the reality is, but also two, how we got to this point, how we're saying that the Aztecs were peaceful people. It's an interesting book, I think.
00:08:16
Speaker
When the right sees an overwhelming ideological imbalance in the institutions, whether it be the media, politics, Hollywood, I think they make the mistake of pointing to a conspiracy in some way, you know, oh the WEF must be pulling strings and coordinating it. Here, there is an overwhelming ideological imbalance, but I don't think there is necessarily, you know, people in dark, smoky rooms saying we need to flood the education sector with Marxists. Nonetheless, it's happened. How
Historical Intentionality and Education
00:08:47
Speaker
does it happen? Why? What is it about that sector that has attracted that particular type of person? I think in the beginning, this was somewhat intentional. So there actually is an intellectual history of left and right wing competition in the world of ideas that includes everyone from Saul Alinsky to Andrew Breitbart.
00:09:05
Speaker
And one of the things I've noticed, I've read Graham, she, if I'm getting his pronunciation correct there, I've obviously read Alinsky, who's the great American contributor to this realm. And one of the things that they keep saying is, well, if you're a red, the term usually used at the time, you're probably not going to be successful in the steel business. You know there are a lot of sectors that are gonna be fairly unfriendly to you like professional competitive sport, the military, although we're seeing them make inroads now, surprisingly. But one of the places where you can go is the world of ideas. So you should intentionally try to find a place in television, radio,
00:09:41
Speaker
ah Hollywood, secondary education, higher education. This is a very, and in Britain, this goes back to the Fabian society. This is something that there are books about. I mean, how to look moderate in university and graduate and go get a job. So I think with the 1960s radicals in the US s and UK, Ireland, Australia, this was actually pretty intentional. Like, if you look at where a lot of the hippie terrorists went, they went into higher education in the NGO sector, to a degree that's kind of surprising. Like, I'm from Chicago, and my mom casually knew Bill Ayers, who was one of the leaders of the... And im I don't know if they're close friends or anything. I mean, she mentioned the name once or twice. I assume they've met at dinner parties. But he was, I believe, the University of Chicago.
00:10:27
Speaker
going to miss campus at maybe the University of Illinois, Chicago. But he was a tenured university professor. He was a well-liked guy in the Chicago social scene. He was also just a former terrorist. I mean, he and his Bernadine Dorn, I think, was this former lover that had been blowing up buildings or whatever, they're setting bombs. I mean, so a lot of these people, he literally went to prison. send it just simply wasn't considered the equivalent of a normal present sentence for you know some black guy or mountain man who was robin breaks trucks to have to have fought the state. So many of the original radicals i think don't want to an academic position as well.
00:11:04
Speaker
Intentionally and directly went into the system with the goal of quote-unquote buying in instead of selling out to subvert major American and British institutions from the inside. that That's the thing that very specifically happened. And there were books about this where people outline it. I mean like Ron Radosh who went from ah being a leader in the new left to being a moderate conservative, wrote a book called The Commies, where he explained the pipeline, like how ah American leftist organizations would recommend students to ah faculty faculty hiring boards at universities and so on down the line.
00:11:44
Speaker
and I mean, I think that occurred in the beginning. Now, and by the way, that is what led to some extent to what you call the woke-ification of the university, because traditional liberals are to some extent the most vulnerable people to institutional takeover, you might call it. Conservatives and libertarians tend to be assholes. I mean that as a compliment and sort of a trading floor way. Like if someone comes in with pink hair and starts explaining how wearing neckties is an instrument of the patriarchy, there's a tendency just to say, well, like, I'm not going to abuse you, of course, but just shut up.
00:12:19
Speaker
you know you're the You're the new person here. Go publish your papers. um I don't have any interest in hearing this. And you're probably not going to hire anyone like that in the future, or you're going to be a bit quiet about it. Radicals, other radicals, whether you're talking about fascists or monarchists or, on the other hand, communists themselves, someone down the line, they have no objection about just ruthlessly pursuing their own interests. So they just do what they want. But I think that the true liberal believes that everyone should be given a chance and that concepts like merit should be ah followed to an almost 100% norm of perfection. So it was these people that let in the wokes, because for a long period of time, many of the applicants for academic jobs, for jobs in media were aw woke.
00:13:05
Speaker
And if you ignored the fact that they were obvious lunatics, they were the most qualified candidates. And as soon as the the woke people took those jobs, the obvious happened. They ate their old mentors and took over the institutions. And this is something that no conservative or no alternative fanatic would have allowed to happen because it was so predictable and rules aren't real. But the the classical liberals were very, very vulnerable to it. So I i kind of pity them. But at any rate, so that's the first stage of takeover and kind of like rambling a bit less about this. The second stage is just that academia, a lot of these institutions are very unfriendly now. I mean, I've known, I teach at a good state university that's also a historically black college. And I've had probably 30 black and Appalachian, specifically men say, you know, no, I wouldn't go get a PhD in sociology or something like that when I recommended it because, you know,
00:13:56
Speaker
they crazy. Like it's usually put pretty bluntly, but like, no, I don't want to sit through eight years of that of being told that I'm a rapist because I enjoy sex with the women or that I'm, you know, the USA is the great Satan reading just straight up Iranian propaganda. You know, if I want to go to an advanced university in terms of education, I'm probably gonna pursue law school. I might think about the medical boards and become a doctor even, but no, I wouldn't consider American studies or something like that. So I think that's the second level. It's just very difficult to and Also there's a question of what they hire or admit you. I mean if you're someone like if you're myself for you quite well qualified to your resume setting the spectator it says my books on it and you're applying to an american publishing house in a written for things you've edited a book but.
00:14:42
Speaker
Are they going to hire you? Probably not. So there are multiple levels to it. Like who, who took the jobs originally, who holds the jobs now are the wokes still admitting in a colorblind, nuanced fashion? I mean, and of course they're not. So you, you get without a conspiracy. Yes. But you get a very internally selecting system. That's hard to penetrate. So the book goes through a series of lies that you look to
The Objectivity of Colonialism in Academia
00:15:05
Speaker
rectify. And I want to touch on a few of my favorites. We'll start with European colonialism because this is a story that we have to grapple with in the United Kingdom and indeed in you Australia. We had Nigel Bigger on the podcast ah not so long ago. He's a wonderful academic. He courted controversy for something I thought was entirely uncontroversial, which was he weighed up the pros and cons of British colonialism, and then he came out with what was a balanced assessment
00:15:38
Speaker
Now, that is, to me, an entirely normal way of approaching not just an academic topic, but any topic. Why do so many academics refuse to take that entirely uncontroversial approach of saying there are some good things or some bad things? Let's look at this in its total context. Well, I think it's a complex issue. What ah what a good faith leftist, to assuming there is such a thing, but what a good faith leftist would say is, well, I follow a moral code that says some things are just bad and conquest and slavery and the mistreatment of women are just bad. So anytime that I see conquest or slavery or women having less than 100% equal rights, I cannot praise a society that did those things.
00:16:21
Speaker
The problem with this is that if you apply that standard fairly and neutrally that would mean you couldn't praise anyone. And i think this is very important so. Up until the very modern era, the quote-unquote morality that seems to be prevalent in the upper middle class in the West today did not exist. I don't think the morality that's prevalent in the upper middle class in the West today, which I sometimes mockingly refer to as prey morality, is very worthwhile. It seems to be based almost entirely on empathy with the rest of the quote-unquote nine noble virtues of the
00:16:55
Speaker
Old Vikings or Iroquois or Japanese or even Christians, pretty much absent. So, I mean, traditionally the first among the virtues of, at least of warrior peoples, was bravery. So, you know, being empathic, being kind to the other man was always valued. It was called tithing, alms housing, someone down the line of magnanimity. I'm quite familiar with the human moral writings, but it was viewed as perhaps sixth, seventh, you might correct that, but it was a thing you should do. Women valued it a little more highly, but it wasn't up there with bravery. It wasn't up there with honor and word keeping. It wasn't even close. But anyway, so I don't, I have my own opinion of our current ethics and it's a pretty low one. And it's only according to our current ethics that you could say absurd shit. Like, well, we should open our borders to foreign fighting men. Why? Well, because otherwise they'd be hungry. Oh, so what? I mean, it doesn't matter. It's the based on the first five most important virtues. It's a critical thing not to do, but at any rate, this moral system, good or bad didn't exist until relatively recently.
00:17:50
Speaker
Like when I mentioned that it wasn't until 1954 that the USA, quite a civilized country, declared that racial caste conflict was just off the table and fully integrated the country, that's a year actually when you see a lot of this sort of thing happening. So the last of the Geneva Conventions were formalized between 1949 and 1954, saying that if you capture battle captives in war, you can't say rape them or burn them or make them lumberjack for you for five years or all this sort of thing. I mean, so this this used to be very common in war. The last of those wasn't even considered abusive. It was just the idea of people had to earn their keeps. So you'd make them work as ranch hands or something for the entire duration of the war. you know So that that's something that we did until pretty recently. I don't even have a problem with that last one, but I mean, we've we've stopped all that sort of thing. You can't march prisoners of war in parade. You can't take battlefield trophies or soldiers still cut off a rank label and all that.
00:18:44
Speaker
That's very recent. but But the point I'm getting to, like the right of conquest wasn't abolished until 1947, if I recall correctly, where if there's a basically honorable war, and that was the conflict between Britain and most of her opponents, by the way, major countries like the Socató Caliphate, you're fighting, we're fighting, we win. The idea that was universally recognized, it was recognized, by the way, by the great POC powers like China, Ethiopia, so on, was if we win after we lost all those men and all that money, we're going to take all your stuff We own your country now. That's why there was an Ethiopian empire. That's why China is the size it is. So this was a universally recognized right until the modern era, until the 1950s. No one thought of it as even dishonorable following declared wars. So for anyone to take the leftist moral system seriously, where the argument is where we just can't recognize
00:19:33
Speaker
the legitimacy of conquest. That would have to be applied universally and it would have to condemn virtually all human action until, say, the rise of feminism. Obviously, the problem is that leftists do not apply this rule universally. There is no constant squalling condemnation of Genghis Khan or, you know, Shaka Zulu or any anyone else anywhere in the world, the Aztecs themselves are brutal conquerors. ah The classic example when you look at Britain might be in India, the British were fighting entirely external conquerors themselves, with the exception of two driving kingdoms.
00:20:06
Speaker
I mean, the Mughal empire in India was, of as I understand Mongolian descent, largely they'd converted to Islam. They basically just taken over the subcontinent. So, I mean, the British riding in with the gun were fighting these foreign Shatriya would written in with the spear and they beat them. So they took their land because that was the rule. But this is, this seems to be universally and intentionally not understood. So, I mean, why is it not understood? Because all SJWs do is lie. I mean, that's the real answer. They're politically motivated liars. like yeah I mean, this is a political debate to some extent. What that example speaks to is the broader principle
00:20:44
Speaker
of treating times gone by, by unrealistic moral standards that they did not help themselves to in that period. And we see this all the time. If you were to treat anyone before the year 1900 by the standards of today, well, 99.9% of them, they fail those moral tests when it comes to treatment of women or minority groups or whatever, like take your pick. Again, I think if you are centre right or if you're moderate, you recognize that that is an unrealistic expectation to expect someone living in the year 1200.
00:21:18
Speaker
to have a modern view of morality. That is obviously not that is obviously still a pervasive view.
Judging History by Modern Standards
00:21:25
Speaker
So how did we get there? and can Can I ask ah an additional question as well? And that is, is this a modern phenomena? Or were, say, the ancient Romans looking at the ancient Egyptians and expecting them to have an ancient Roman view of morality, for example? this Which I haven't actually thought of until that moment, but i'd I'd be interested with that as well. So first of all, I mean, it's worth noting a couple things there just briefly, like when you talk about applying our morality to the past, first of all, everyone would have been bad. People on the left are fond of noting certain things like, well,
00:22:05
Speaker
There weren't laws against marital rape, which actually, as it turns out, was quite rare across most European cultures in the modern sense that we would use. but there also It was physically impossible to be domestically violent against men in the law. I'm not comparing these two, and we don't need to go through ancient law and make a series of excuses. but i mean so For example, if you hit your husband with a skillet, this wasn't considered to be a crime. And there are, I mean, old couples cards that you can find in the USA that joke about this. They show their wife suspects her husband are cheating and she's chasing her around the house with a rolling pin. So, I mean, there's a different standard. And I'm not even sure, by the way, that if you suspect marital infidelity slapping your husband once is less effective than getting a divorce and destroying your family.
00:22:48
Speaker
But I mean, if we're applying, I mean, I think in fact, I'll be blind. I think that's more effective. You guys have an argument. and ah Hopefully he doesn't get physically violent. Did you do that once? And i the argument is over if the infidelity is not proven. Today's systems seem to be much more legalistic and mechanicalistic because we refuse to simply engage with people as people. So, I mean, friend groups will have an argument, and then even a group of males now will sometimes go to therapy. And it it strikes me, this is this is far, far less effective than just having a fistfight. But if you are applying that standard, then not only were all the men evil, all the women were evil. I mean, though well the way to punish a child was to slap at 15 them or her. I don't want to dehumanize the little buggers, but I mean, slap 10 times on the ass.
00:23:32
Speaker
you know, the way to punish your husband is I hit him with a pot. I mean, so you you can't just selectively take these rules in the past. I mean, I would actually suspect that the levels of actual sexual violence and domestic violence in middle class loving marriages in say, 1940, were probably considerably lower than they are today, when many people live in sort of aimless situationships that rotate between different people every year or two. But it's a depressing topic and I'm not really an expert on the data in either direction. But I mean, so if you, well I guess the point is if you are going to critique the past, you have to critique the past. Everyone would be bad by our standards. Not just your preferred group. Blacks would have a higher rate of domestic violence in both male and female directions and whites and so on.
00:24:16
Speaker
So a second point there, if you're going to apply our morals to the past, you also have to be willing to do the same in reverse. So, you know, many of the things that we take for granted today would be viewed as utterly despicable by our ancestors. I mean, and I think this is true to a hilarious degree. Like you can think of examples just off the head, like we have sunbomb nuclear weapons that could destroy the planet because we're afraid of hand-to-hand combat comes to mind. um you know We've moved away from the land to such a degree that we get our meat by torturing sapient animals and factory farms. I'm by no means a vegan, but i mean I've actually seen PETA documentaries at the inside of one of the CAFO's concentrated animal farming operations we use for pigs. Pigs have an IQ of 50. I mean, it's nightmarish. It looks like Buddhist hell.
00:25:04
Speaker
I mean, you know, it's really just disturbing. You know, so, especially if you understand the Buddhist theory of reincarnation and, you know, the idea that there are far more people now, but they have far less Baraka than they used to. Are people going to return into one of these environments? You know, I don't quite think so, but it's a disturbing prospect. But I mean, like a classic example going beyond the pseudo-theistic would be sort of only fans. So there are 3 million US and British women on the OnlyFans prostitution website. I mean, according to the perspective of any of the ancestors in any racial or religious group, these people would all be whores. They'd just be classical prostitutes. I mean, the punishment would be whipping or something like that.
00:25:46
Speaker
I don't have, actually, that judgmental of a view of this. I think most of these people are screwing around online and are going to delete the profile in two years. But if you really want to say that moral perspectives extend across time, I mean, the the response to Thomas Jefferson is a rapist to any grad student with an OnlyFans would be, I mean, are are you a prostitute that should be stoned in the village square? Is this just a one-way relationship or is this sort of reciprocal that the better ideas from the past extend forward into the present as well? But then also the future, there is this incredible arrogance that suggests that almost we have reached the end of history and moral perspectives have changed over time, but we won't be being judged in 200 years time for the actions of today when again, is that is at best thoroughly arrogant and at worst just idiotic.
00:26:37
Speaker
I think that's correct. Now, first of all, in an ultimate sense, I tend to doubt that there are many, if any, moral rules in the sense that humans didn't make these up. I'm an advocate of the civil rights tradition in law and ethics, which has a long honorable history. I mean, of course, there is a law against murder. whether or not it was invented by humans. But I mean, I tend to think there are few, if any, ultimate moral rules in the sense that you're going to be judged by a non-human God in a place not of this world after you walk the bridge of the separator based on your behavior against sort of this set of written codes. So I mean, once you accept that, morality exists largely within the social context of the societies that develop it.
00:27:19
Speaker
And that has a number of implications. So I think that there are moral rules that work better than others. I mean, for example, the some of those that we just discussed that you can no longer rape your wife or stab your husband. I think those are that's good. That definitely promotes the positive functioning of society or improve mental health or something. On the other hand, the increasing therapeutization of conflict below that level, I think is definitely bad. um I think the widespread acceptance of prostitution as a norm, although I'm not harshly critical at the individual level, but the the three million only fans go, I think that's bad. I mean, so in reality, transitions from society to society don't generally represent smooth progress forward. They represent the exchange of one set of socially created norms for another set of socially created norms.
00:28:11
Speaker
So the idea, yeah, that we have achieved perfection today with our factory farms and OnlyFans and Sunbombs, and that no one will ever criticize us, I mean, you just said that extremely well, yeah, that's obviously nonsensical. And the thing is that the next society that criticizes us won't achieve perfection either. I mean, in the United States, the next society that develops after us will very likely have something like 60% obesity rates. So I think that the idea is that they we people on the left and have the idea that we're progressing upward toward the summit of like Mount progress or Mount evolution or something, but there's actually rather little evidence.
00:28:47
Speaker
be of this, I think that, in fact, the backlash to prey morality is probably going to be something pretty fascistic in Starship Troopers-y. And we're going to have to come back from that for a few hundred years, if come back is even the right word. That actually might produce a pretty functional society. So i'm I'm not sure there's a definite right or wrong here on most of these points. That's an intriguing little comment to drop in at the end there. I want you to just play that out for me a bit more. What do you mean by that? Well, I mean, it's it's just obvious that the it so excessive and I mean, my moral rambling, I think when written out is actually pretty interesting. Like I've talked about the idea of prey morality is versus virtue morality at length. For the layman, what does that mean?
00:29:31
Speaker
The idea of prey morality is essentially what I'm criticizing as modern, western, empathy-only morality. So, as far as I can tell, what morality means to the woke-est is being as kind and empathic as possible to out-group members, and what evil means is sort of ruthlessly trying to advantage yourself and those close to you in any, whether or not it's dishonorable in any situation where this could theoretically hurt someone else. So just normal aggressive action is evil and helping others is good.
00:30:04
Speaker
The problem with this is that there's not a lot of distinction made between whether the others are good or bad or friendly or unfriendly. And so you wind up with these very bizarre situations where obvious predators are being let into the sheepfold by idiots. So like this is like the trans trans women or women thing. where the obvious campaign is male autogynophiles who say they want to enter women's rape crisis shelters, things like this. And it's just really obvious what's going on. But if you point this out, people start screaming at you and telling your your pervert, like, how would you notice what genitals people have after a two hour workout in a naked locker room? Like, you monster. You know, it's just it's so it's it's the morality that hamsters might have. It's just you assume that everyone is harmless. You assume that everyone wants the same things you do. And your goal is to be as kind as possible to people.
00:30:54
Speaker
morality for herbivores traditional virtue morality assumes that humans are dangerous predators and it's important to keep that in mind not everyone's your friend. And it's perfectly rational to seek your honorable self interest in fact that's the biggest goal in life it's perfectly normal to want your daughter to go to a better college than you did. And it's perfectly rational to want to make enough money to make that possible, to make her more safe from, say, sexual assault or more able to marry well or something like that, to value that more than improving the life of a Muslim immigrant from a country that you fought against in war as a younger man. I mean, it's it's just the most obvious thing in the world. So traditional moral systems, If you look at like muscular Christianity or Viking morality, Iroquois morality, Stoic morality from Marcus Aurelius, Japanese Bushino morality, the the virtues are almost identical in those, by the way. ah Generally just laid out what they called the noble principles, ten ways, eight ways of the path, nine noble virtues, that sort of thing.
00:31:53
Speaker
And I mean, I don't know, I don't have the list off hand, but generally it would include bravery, honor, perseverance, integrity, ready magnanimity, which means like not grinding down the lowly, that sort of thing, good lordship. So there's traditional more morality, especially for males, was designed around the idea of making yourself as productive and worthwhile as possible so that you can fairly compete with other productive, worthwhile people. so that you're not taking from or leeching from anyone. Then there's a secondary principle of giving perhaps 10% to the community. And there's a third principle that we call the non-aggression principle, which the libertarians have actually adopted as sort of a God-like doctrine, but just like don't don't be a warmonger, don't unprovokedly start fights. And those three things pretty much, this is basically my ethical system, you know to the extent I have one, ah, lawyer jokes, but I mean, that's basically what my ethical system would be. I mean, you develop yourself as much as possible so you can fairly compete.
00:32:49
Speaker
you're not a leech you're not a bomb you're not on any of the major welfare systems unless you're injured or disabled. You are not an attacker you don't grind out or abuse people out of in a beating your wife or anything like that you're not a tech picking fights outside every bar place you're in and then third you're just give on occasion to charity and that's that's traditionally what a normal fairly ethical person was thought to be the empathic moral system.
Contrasting Modern and Traditional Morality
00:33:15
Speaker
contrast really dramatically with that. In fact, it would say that person is a bad person. So this is a lot of the split that you have in our society right now, where the normal person will say, well, no, I mean, I have no problem with the 5% tithe to the countries of the world, but no, we don't want to let in non-assimilated foreigners from Bronze Age societies. And the empath will scream, no, but they'll be worse off in that situation. It's just a complete and misunderstanding of what good is.
00:33:45
Speaker
And a part of the empathic position is that you get into a whole lot of things. Like no one should ever ever have to do anything they're not enthusiastic about. This leads to all these Twitter debates. Like is it bad for me to expect a male partner to work? I mean, that was one the other day. um And as I recall, that was in response to another one. Is it unethical to think that my lover should sometimes want to sleep with me? And I'm not making these up. There were like three or four of these in a row. Like can I ever have any expectations of anyone? And obviously you don't want to abuse people you're in a relationship with, but no, it's of course you can expect your partner to be attracted to you and have a job and shit. I mean, like, it's just the, there are two systems clashing and that creates this kind of Coroboros of craziness there. So that's, that's my moral take. Oh, the Starship Troopers thing. A cruel competitive society is not ideal.
00:34:32
Speaker
but it can be functional. I mean, this was Rome. This was kind of pre-Victorian Britain. There was then a little you know more magnanimity applied to the the imperial system. But I mean, if you have a society of warriors and traders and so on, you can actually do quite well. I mean, it's you mean that just it is what it is. You'll fight with other societies of warriors and traders. You'll win about 70% of the time, and that's it. People may not like you, but so what? If you have a society full of people that are physically and mentally helped with, you actually can't do very much.
00:35:03
Speaker
so I mean, as America moves in that direction, I mean, when I said we're we're at about a 40% obesity rate, we're projected to hit about 60% before there's a real backlash from the leadership class, which can't allow that. You can't do much with that. I mean, when we talk about our military, 80% of young males couldn't join the military. So we're we're going to have to backlash to that pretty aggressively at some point. Yeah, I think if you remember that social media fad, how often do men think about the Roman Empire? hot That all came up.
00:35:35
Speaker
My hypothesis as to why men think about the Roman Empire as much as they do is because they're not allowed to say what you just said, that those sorts of brutal old-school morality empires were undoubtedly cruel in many ways, but in many other ways, very functional. You're not allowed to say that today, but I think a lot of people would secretly see a lot of the virtues in that type of culture. and By looking at, say, the Roman Empire, that is their way of being able to get that outlet in a world or a society today which frowns upon those types of of saying that sort of thing out loud.
00:36:13
Speaker
Yeah, I would encourage people to start saying it out loud to some extent. I mean, like, you can't let... It's like the lion from the TV show, taken, I think, from the General Subutai, but like, a lion does not concern itself with the opinions of a sheep. You can't let people say obvious prey gibberish and that drive you in your life. Like, it's obviously better to be strong than to be weak, to be smart than to be stupid, to be wealthy than to be in debt. I mean, you can argue that there's a level of behavior that has a level of importance above this kind of human success, the spiritual and all that. But I mean, in reality, what Wokeism kind of offers is just
00:36:59
Speaker
it's ah It's something below what she called slave morality it's it's literally just the idea that you should serve other people who dislike you. And that's that's an idiotic idea i don't yeah it's it's just ah it's a dumb idea the, the founding assumption is utopian you should give and give to others, But the assumption there is that the others are well intentioned or will give back or something like that. Otherwise, the system just doesn't work. This is why mass migration has been such a disaster for Europe. I mean, the Europeans and the North Africans have been fighting with honors about equal for 1500 years.
00:37:35
Speaker
So to let in these sort of ancient enemies with no major requirements for assimilation is ah something that's going to produce predictably disastrous results. And I actually, I, in fact, like both Southern European and North African culture in their own homelands. So i had I had kind of hoped the experiment would work and I, as a political scientist without too many biases, had taken a look at the results of migration early on and with the hope that there were stringent assimilation programs in place and so on. and No, the results when analyzed in the most positive possible way were just exactly what you'd expect them to be. I mean, when you have people who have, for example, a polygamous tradition colliding with European welfare states and so on. So this again is just like paparianism, right?
00:38:21
Speaker
like Pre-modernism doesn't work. It's just magic. Post-modernism doesn't work. It's just voodoo. like You can just use the scientific method and predict what's gonna happen. I can have three wives. I don't speak German. I'm coming to a country where if I can't get a job, I can get a welfare subsidy for each partner that I have. What will likely occur? And what you find is that what will likely occur occurs most of the time. So the logical predatory in the positive sense, not abusive person, should generally build their life based on what is likely to occur and what they want to make happen, rather than on fluffy fantasies.
00:38:58
Speaker
ah agree and luckily i think the tide is turning a tad on this whole conversation around multiculturalism but i want to turn to to another another line and that is the lie of how the use of nuclear weapons by the United States in World War II was evil. And the thing which is interesting here is this was traditionally a left-wing agenda, but in more recent times it's been taken up with gusto by some people on the right, you know, the Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson's of this world. How do you feel about the fact that that lie was a lie a liberal teacher told you, but now it's very much a lie that's being told by the right as well?
00:39:35
Speaker
Well, I mean, I think this is just horseshoe
Right-Wing Factions and the American Identity
00:39:37
Speaker
theory. So traditionally, ah well actually just I guess a good way to break this down. Traditionally, the right has been the group defending the mainstream social order. So I mean, like for most of his career, Tucker Carlson would be someone that you would assume would be pretty fond of Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs. I think would be a good way to say this would be someone who might own a more than one bow tie. He would be a guy that you would see like, I like, I love Tucker. I'm not like throwing out a bunch of like banter style jokes, but like somebody you'd see at a power lunch.
00:40:09
Speaker
lived in DC, New York, would consider Chicago a pleasant but somewhat small city. I mean, like, it's just that, you Tucker would be a defender of the order. And I think that's normally where the right falls. And that to some extent, that's where I fall. I mean, I'm a professor at a state university. I'm from Chicago. Like, I mean, I own a bunch of neckties. Like, that that's traditionally the role of the right. It's the coalition of small business owners, and you you got some preachers in there, housewives, this this kind of thing. The left has been the scruffy rebels and the union bosses and so on coming up with the working men, coming up against the established order. And in the USA not really wanting to destroy it, but wanting to establish a better starting wage and that kind of thing. And I mean, I'll break the old taboo and say you need both in society.
00:40:54
Speaker
But recently you've seen something interesting with the right, which is that the right large chunks of the right no longer view themselves as representing the established order at all. And that they want to destroy it. They don't view the contemporary United States as representative of them or as their country. Now to me, this is actually insanely weird. And I don't get this. I think I don't think this is the case with Tucker. I think Tucker's been, if you look what happened him with Fox, I think he's had some Pretty negative things happen in his life, his business. He probably just pissed off. He's starting his own television style thing. He's bringing on whoever who wants to talk to him. But with a lot of these people, I think that there's an element of just racism to this. Like this isn't my country anymore. I'm not sure how much sense that makes. Like the United States is the largest and most powerful country in the world. We're the number one economy in the world. There's actually data on this. You can pull this up. We're usually one of the, that's not number one, but 20 happiest countries in the world.
00:41:50
Speaker
We're the biggest military power in the world. If you really hate the our allies, Britain, Israel, so on, I mean, even Mexico, you can Canada, you can make fun of any of those places. But I mean, we're one of the NATO G8. We're one of the most powerfully aligned countries in the world. We're at the cool kids table. Like if you hate the USA, you would really hate almost any country that you happen to be living in. um I mean, I really think this when people start praising places like Hungary or Moldova, as a political scientist, I'm pretty familiar with that region of East Europe. um I mean Kosovo, Albania, Bosnia, the former Yugoslavia, Montenegro, nothing against those places, but in our analysis, it's often compared to say West Africa.
00:42:34
Speaker
It's a perfectly stable region of the world. But I mean, the idea that you'd move from the USA to Moldova to escape poverty or even crime in an urban area is not allowed to Russia. That's not a logical conclusion to come to. So I mean, I i think that there's a there's an element of bias or just discontentment with the government, with the media that's driving a lot of that. And I will say a lot of the things that people think on the kind of the dissident right aren't real. I mean, and so this is a chapter in probably my next book, but I looked at some of this stuff. Like there's the the meme 1360 online, which represents the idea that African Americans make up 13% of the population but commit the way this is usually rendered as 60% of the crime. um It turns out that that's a homicide statistic from one atypical year following the death of George Floyd.
00:43:27
Speaker
they we publish a national crime report. And in the last year that I looked at, I mean, black people, this is the BJS in CVS from 2022, you can easily for anyone listening, just pull this up yourself. um I mean, African Americans are 14% of the population and 25.4% of the Index which just means serious violent only ah criminal offenders that's strictly victim reported so there's no way for police lying to affect the data. No that's still and like one point eight to one like we need to work on our crime issue. But it's it's a good illustration of how many of the things that are sending kind of that online space are just bullshit honestly. Like i've looked them up there just not true they're kind of the equivalent of woke is on the right.
00:44:10
Speaker
Like well without black people, it'd only be 40% of the crime. Like I sounded so unrealistic. Although I'm not a criminal justice guy, primarily, I just pulled it up. I was like, Oh, that's not true at all. There'd be 80% of the crime. Okay. Then you just go back to doing your other work. I think that that entire space is, I'm kind of going on and on here, but that I think is ah partially explanatory for why you're seeing the right now arguing that American use of nukes was bad. America was always the bad guy. at last line, but Candace Owens the other day dropped a podcast where she, her opening line was, it's about time to talk about Hitler. And it was like, what, what are you doing? And it's a basically positive analysis of, you know, the mustachioed German. So I don't, I don't really have that much sympathy for that kind of stuff.
00:44:55
Speaker
I put out a tweet a couple of days ago on her latest commentary, which was speaking to a flat earther and basically coming out the conclusion that because she no longer believes in scientific institutions, she will therefore no longer believe any scientific position. And that includes that the earth is round. And so she now is agnostic on whether the earth is round or not. It's an interesting thing that has happened. Because the institutions have failed so monumentally over the last couple of decades, and trust has eroded so completely, it has actually had the negative consequence of turning a lot of healthy skeptics into just idiots. And that's the overcorrection that I think we talked about before in a different context. And it's unfortunate because healthy skepticism is a good thing. Trust in institutions is low for a reason, but that doesn't then mean that you should take on you know entirely ludicrous positions on the presumption
00:45:47
Speaker
that everything is a conspiracy. Yeah, no, as ah as a fellow ah business person of African-American descent, I mean, I actually winced when I saw that. It was like, what is she doing, man? like that was That was unbelievable. And it was it was presented in such a like a faux professional way. Like, yeah, look, I'm not saying I believe in a flat Earth. I'm not saying I believe in a round Earth. It was as though she were discussing the lab leak origins of COVID or something that people could really disagree on. No, I mean, like I'll come out and say that I believe in a round Earth.
00:46:20
Speaker
I mean, so no, that the the phenomenon you're discussing, though. So, I mean, first, many on the right have come out against American and European society. I don't think there's anything wrong with saying mass migration is a problem or we need to get some of this perverse stuff out of the public arena. But the basic idea, for example, like the idea that women shouldn't vote. I don't mean to keep targeting what might seem like fringe alt-right perspectives, but again, there's a petition online, ah repeal the 19th, that has I mean if you pull up this on a search engine that's not as limited as Google, I mean DuckDuckGo or Yandex would probably work.
00:46:58
Speaker
As I recall, this has hundreds of thousands of signatures. I mean, the actual repeal, the 19th first petition, they've taken it down a few times. So I don't know if you're still able to see that, but when people start saying crazy stuff like this, I don't, I don't see a productive end game for that. Uh, anyway, yeah, that's definitely something going on in the right, but aside or adjacent part of what we're seeing today, I think definitely is audience capture, which plays into right-wing nuttiness, but what you also see on the left. I mean, if you i mean watch from Chappo to the Young Turks, I mean, this is not just a right-wing phenomenon.
00:47:33
Speaker
but where people are very definitely tracking what makes the super chats come in on their their YouTube channels and so on, and and going along with that. So, I mean, you've seen a number of people, I don't want to mislabel, but was it the Weinstein's recently, the Douted Evolution? Like every time I watch one of these like YouTube men's channels, there's there's some crazy shit that they say where it's just like, you know, I i really don't think if this was a non-monetized podcast, I just would have heard that. And it's the question is, what do you do about that? I personally, I by no means am presenting myself as one of the great intellectuals of our day. But I do think that because a lot of my income comes from teaching and investments, I'm able to say stuff that's true. And I do think that's one of the great advantages of having an anchor.
00:48:19
Speaker
Like I do teach it a state you I do write for the utterly mainstream national review um I do still submit to academic journals as one of the authors on a Corey Clark paper recently in penis which is actually one of the major. journals in the game. And I think that National Review or PNAS or Kentucky State University would have no problem kicking me to the curb if I did certain stuff that was not at a certain level of political activism, but at a certain level of unprovable stupidity. So having that anchor there is is probably a good thing for a lot of people.
00:48:51
Speaker
Yeah, I've thought about that a lot. The work with The Spectator and Sky News for me is very much a passion. It is not my job as such. And I've often thought it would just be so easy to push clickbait nonsense. And I can see how, if you have to feed your kids and they're just dependent on that, I can see how how you would be compromised into doing that sort of stuff.
Women's Happiness Post-Sexual Revolution
00:49:12
Speaker
final Final lie that I want us to cover, and that is that the sexual revolution was good for women. ah Simplifying, I think that the statement in the book attached I want you to respond to a comment that I heard from Gadsard on this podcast not so long ago. and He was referring to the data on happiness that's been tracked over the last 70-odd years. and What he said is that you can see that male happiness has remained relatively consistent from about the 1950s, give or take. Men today are about as happy as they were 70 years ago.
00:49:44
Speaker
women's happiness has fallen off a cliff. Women today are and considerably less happy, if you look at it statistically, than they were in say the 1950s or 1960s. And this is paradoxical, right? Because that's come at a time when at least legally women have equality and they have never been more equal culturally and and um you know across all sorts of different dimensions in society. How would you reflect on female happiness today and and potentially how that decline or why that decline has taken place.
00:50:16
Speaker
Yeah, i'm not I'm not surprised by that at all. So that that chapter actually contains a lot of different material. I mean, chapter four of the book is titled, the hippies were the bad guys, the sexual revolution was awful for you feminists or something like that, or bad for women. And the Vietnam War was winnable and popular. And just as a very brief overview of those, I mean, I think one, we often forget in the USA, and I suspect this is true in much of Western Europe, there's kind of a golden gloss put over the 1960s. Because everyone remember so many upper middle class Americans remember taking acid and having sex in the mud at Woodstock. you know Martin Luther King, you when you put your clothes on again, marching next to the great man, and Alabama in the summer with the birds chirping and so on. But I mean, so much of that, like the Black radicalism, and the Panthers and all that, which and the new Panthers are with us today. BLM is with us today. At least their actual fighters doing some damage. The protest movement's obviously legally protest.
00:51:12
Speaker
But the white radicals, the weathermen and all that stuff, SDS, their descendants are with us today, Antifa. But more seriously, the anti-nuke and eco-frico movements, which in my opinion have killed millions of people just on and on the drug movement. We're talking about the end of the sexual revolution, the last waves of feminism, i mean and many the kink movement. like a lot of much of what came out of the 1960s would not strike the average person as a positive, and we tend to forget that, and I outline that in a chapter. And you can check out the chapter for things like the takes on the Vietnam War and so on. Now, the the thing about the sexual revolution being largely negative for women, this is something... I've spent a lot of time recently, and i'm um I'm almost done with it, but sort of sparring with feminists online, because I think it's very obvious that the ideas of the later waves of feminism are bad.
00:52:01
Speaker
Pretty much everyone agrees, and I think virtually all urban men by this point agree, that of course women should have jobs if they want them, and access to checking accounts and cars, and indeed orgasms, which is a big part of the second wave of feminism and so on. ah yeah But like the the core idea, feminism seems to have fallen in the trap that most left-wing philosophies fall into, which is essentially the idea debunked by the great Thomas Sull, which is that disparities equal discrimination. So when you see a disparity in performance between two groups, you've seen bias, i.e. if there were fewer female astronauts or garbage men than there are male astronauts or garbage men, you found sexism.
00:52:41
Speaker
The problem with this, which is at least plausible when you're looking at whites versus Asians or middle class blacks, and even there it's not correct. um The typical black male, at least in mode, is 27 in terms of years of age. Typical white male is 58, so you're going to see massive disparities in crime and wealth and so on if you don't You don't look at anything besides that. But, I mean, that that's not even plausible for men and women. I mean, the average man is 60 pounds heavier than the average woman, um has 8X the testosterone levels, which predict aggression if you're looking at things like piloting or military officer careers.
00:53:17
Speaker
someone down the line it's a women have babies so you're the front of your body is literally ripped open for weeks after delivery and then as least as i understand not to be sexist here is a natural process that makes you want to care for the kid for a year or more i mean these are just obvious things that exist in reality no one who's. Ben on a successful date can deny that there are physical differences between men and women are. to a a doctor's office. i mean Anyone who's been alive, who's read a book on how their body changed during puberty doesn't know this. so it's there There seems to be a weird blank slate denialism of this from at least the end game of the feminist movement. and i mean What you're talking about, for example, um it's it's not especially surprising that female happiness is crater. Following the sexual revolution, I talk about this in the book,
00:54:10
Speaker
ah sexual prospects for at least elite men improved dramatically. um you know i'm chubby and not especially gorgeous right now but i mean my friends in high school are mostly fairly successful athletic i mean we i went to law school we many of us did I mean, I have a number of friends that have slept with probably 100 to 120 women. I'm not, I'm obviously not going to give any sort of a pain on that for myself, but it would just, you know, that there I mean, I remember tender in the 2000s, the sexes could literally order each other off the internet. People would show up at your house with like cake and sleep with you. I mean, so I think that for men, this is pretty close to ideal.
00:54:46
Speaker
And this is what, and I don't mean ladies to mock, but this is what the feminists said they wanted. There was a feminist Hefner Alliance in the 70s. This turned out to be non-ideal. And I discussed the psych research for the large majority of women. But it correlated with other patterns that impacted almost every upper middle-class woman. One of those is the expectation that you work. So traditionally, above the lower classes, and I hate to class this, but I mean, women stayed home right in the house. And unless you had an abusive husband, that was a role of substantial importance. He'd come home, give you the pay packet, you'd manage the financial affairs. And that was the that's how you too broke down the roles. Now that almost never occurs. So instead of being a home manager, who's the person in the house that meets and then the butcher, the craftsmen that work around the place, who does this this set of chores,
00:55:35
Speaker
You're a clerk at Home Depot or something like that. The average person's not an astronaut, so you just have a shitty, unpleasant job just like your husband does. I mean, so that's that's just the reality. um I think it was Betty Friedan said that feminism was great for women with careers and terrible for women with jobs. And I mean, that that sounds like one of those lapses, like when Jesse Jackson said that he was walking to the money machine, heard sneakers, looked behind him, and thank God it was a white kid running. I mean, that's, you know, the lapse is when a politician tells the truth. So you have the the growth of the tender style sexual economy, where every urban woman after two to three dates is pretty much expected to have sex.
00:56:13
Speaker
You have the the growth of the lower end job market economy, where unless you are married, actually married into a successful man, you're expected to work. You have the decline of marriage. I mean, right now, the average marital age in USA is 31 for a man, 29 for a woman. Now, I don't want to get creepy and Dr. Mengele-ish with this, but peak human fertility is 23 for both sexes. So when we look at these declining birth rates, it's actually not any kind of mystery. It's not explained by porn or something like that. It's people take birth control until they're 30. That's it. so And by the way, women like kids. Men don't especially like kids, but women like children and children are a major source of happiness for most women. There are a lot of aggressive business women that don't love them. I actually enjoy dating those people quite a lot, but that is not the majority of women.
00:57:05
Speaker
Just as men enjoy sparring and physical conflict, most women enjoy children. And it's a good thing the two sexes enjoy those things, or we all would have been wiped out by tigers long ago. So as we've moved away from the traditional marital model, where again, as we discussed earlier, there may have been some abuse on both sides in the household once every 15 years, but people are generally playing their role. The guy went to work, the woman ran the home, and people loved each other. I mean, that caused depression. I think that's pretty accurate. This will no doubt be condemned as Harrison-Butker-style sexism, but it tracks exactly with the data.
Modern Feminism and Gender Roles
00:57:41
Speaker
A core point here is that third and fourth wave feminism often attack gender roles themselves as sort of a sexist creation of the patriarchy. I mean, I'll say right now that I'm not an evolutionary biologist, but that seems obviously and empirically untrue.
00:57:59
Speaker
Among all mammal predators that I'm familiar with, except hyenas, which are kind of badass if you're a feminist, but among all other mammal predators, that that basic dynamic of while the like in a relationship, females provide sexuality, which males also provide, but females don't seem quite as enthused about, but and reproductive potential, and men do males do more of the hunting and providing. And during the period when children are being gestated and born, males gripe about getting laid less and hunt even more, this sort of basic structural dynamic. You see this with wolves. You see this with almost every creature that has to hunt, because unlike plant leaves, game moves around. It's hard to chase it with young.
00:58:45
Speaker
So, I mean, the basic dynamic of one partner does this, usually the male, another partner does that, usually the female. Sometimes multiple females will care for children. We see frequently throughout nature. It strikes me that marriage in the modern, formalized, absolutely monogamous, adultery is punished since, was something that was codified by both male and female leaders over the years. And if you look at Elinor da Aquitaine, Catherine de Medici, Queen Victoria, this is pretty obviously what happened, that there were rules and formalities instituted over time in large part to protect women, although also to protect men from female sexuality, which is an immensely powerful thing. But so you wound up with this system that has been developed over time, which eventually has all these components. You can get divorced for these reasons, but not these. This is what a marriage is. This is how you formalize it. This is what a dowry is. This is the role of the preacher and so on.
00:59:39
Speaker
And the idea that you could just tear that down without any kind of social consequence is sort of the classic example of Chesterton's fence. Like, well, what would happen if instead of doing that, I spent 10 years sleeping with 100 men and my future husband spent 10 years sleeping with 200 women and then we tried to get married. Now I know a lot of people that did that and just got married and are much better in bed and have very happy lives, but overall there's obviously going to be some impact. So I'm i'm not surprised by the data. And again, I would encourage people just to do things that work. Like I don't really care about the quote unquote body count, but I think that for the majority of people, it'd probably be a good idea to think honestly about what they want to do in life. So if you are, if you want to have kids as a woman, how's that going to work? When might you want them?
01:00:29
Speaker
Or do you want to have a career at the same time? If so, I mean, would something like ads executive where you can work remotely be possible? like I mean, you have to actually ask those practical questions. Or do you want to stay at home dead? And when every time I asked this to my class, like 95% of these future business weren't like, hell no. Not at all. So unless you want that, unless you want a male feminist, very submissive guy, then you're going to have to make some accommodations to reflect your your desires and interests. So I would encourage people to do that. I would encourage people to face reality, sort of.
01:01:01
Speaker
reality It's funny how that sounds almost heretical in 2024, and yet it has never been more
Conclusion and Book Recommendation
01:01:07
Speaker
important. And I think you are facing reality with this book, Wilfred, by calling out lies which have just become commonly accepted and and bringing forth eternal truths, which which have been forgotten. and Thank you for doing it. Everyone should go out and buy it. I think it's a wonderful read and very entertaining. Thank you again for coming on the show today. Thank you.