Based Camp: The Cybernetic Birds and the Bees

In this episode, Malcolm and Simone discuss how they plan to teach their children about sexuality, relationships, and gender identity. They explain their perspective that biological sex differences exist but shouldn't overly define someone's life and goals. They emphasize teaching kids these are tools to use towards efficacy and warn against overinvestment in temporary cultural narratives. The couple advocates early spouse-seeking in college, avoiding compromising photos, and considering dating strategies and metagames. Overall they aim to equip their kids with knowledge to make informed choices given cultural realities.

Transcript:

Malcolm: [00:00:00] if you look at the cultural groups that are strict, but are otherwise forced , to engage the progressive monoculture, this is where you get the meme of the Catholic school girl, right? And this is definitely something when I was more promiscuous, I ran into girls like this a lot where the most promiscuous girls typically come from conservative religious backgrounds.

Malcolm: They do not come from the backgrounds closer to you, where their parents laid out both options.

Simone: Yeah, that's actually come to think of it. Yeah. ,

Malcolm: they, they're like this system used to work in the past, but it used to work in an environment where this urban monoculture didn't exist and wasn't constantly sniping at it,

Would you like to know more?

Simone: Malcolm Collins, hello.

Malcolm: Hello, Simone. It is wonderful to be chatting again today. I thought today, given that we have done some episodes that discuss things like people's sexuality, gender, stuff like that that we talk about, because another big theme of ours is, well, what are we going to do for our culture, for our kids?

Malcolm: How are we going to build something that's [00:01:00] intergenerationally durable, that focuses on these concepts specifically in relation to... How we are going to conceive them as a cultural group and, and the, the way we will teach our kids about them or teach them to contextualize them within their own life.

Malcolm: Yeah, exactly. Before we go any deeper down this, particular rabbit hole, I think it's important to survey the landscape of how cultures relate to sexuality and why they relate to sexuality, the way they relate to sexuality. So, cultures can be thought of as broadly an evolving software that's sitting on top of evolving human hardware.

Malcolm: Which is a person's pre coded genetic predilections, and then on top of that you have this sort of software package. And if the package does a good job at getting people to reproduce, and pass that software package on to the next generation, then, then those iterations of the packages exist in higher proportions than other iterations of the packages.

Malcolm: And this is why [00:02:00] most successful cultural groups throughout history have prohibitions on masturbation and sex outside of marriage and stuff like that. So first let's talk about why, why would you have a prohibition on sex outside of marriage, right? Well, sex outside of marriage and it's not that there aren't cultural groups that allow a lot of sex outside of marriage, there are.

Malcolm: They just have not been very successful, and by that what I mean is they didn't conquer their neighbors, they didn't grow a lot, often, they, they are typically smaller cultural groups that are really pushed to the wayside. By history and this is because one, monogamous cultural groups typically out compete polygynous cultural groups.

Malcolm: Now, first, we need to make clear that almost all cultural groups are polygynous to some extent. By that, what we mean is the ultra wealthy and ultra powerful in almost any society in history yes, even the Catholic monarchies and stuff like that often had uh, timepieces. It was expected.

Malcolm: So let's be clear. When I call a culture [00:03:00] monogamous all cultures are polygynous to some extent where the elite are typically allowed multiple partners. The question is where's the slider there. And if that slider is under 1% of the population.

Malcolm: It's expected to have multiple partners. I call it a monogamous culture. If it's 5% to 10% those are where most polygynous cultures stay. Very few polygynous cultures get as high as like 20% of men having more than one wife. So, so it's important to understand what we mean when we call a culture polygynous versus...

Malcolm: Monogamous. And it should be intuitive. A lot of people are like, oh, in a polygynous culture, every man has a lot of wives. And it's no obviously that won't work because you have about an equal number of males and females in almost any society, unless there's a lot of war. So the monogamous cultures typically out compete the polygynous cultures.

Malcolm: And there's been some great studies on this. You know, we have them cited in our a book on, on both sexuality and relationships because they're really interesting and you can see them side by side in, in some places like Africa where you can see these cultures operating side by side. And what you see is that these [00:04:00] more monogamous cultures typically have lower rates of ape, and we're not going to use the, the full word there because we don't want to get demonetized.

Malcolm: They usually have lower rates of crime, lower rates of violent crime. Lower rates of unpaid debts and and most importantly, lower rates of terrorism. And this is usually directly correlatory to the number of unwed men in these societies. And so the groups that adopted these monogamous practices outcompeted the groups that did not, so that's one reason. And then once they adopt monogamous practices, if a person is having relations outside of their marriage, well, they might, as a single woman, end up having kids outside of marriage. And that's typically really bad for any cultural group because those kids often end up becoming wards of the state in cultures that don't allow women to work as much.

Malcolm: And typically when a culture Encourages women to work more their fertility rate decreases and nearby cultural groups end up out competing them, which is why it's [00:05:00] so common in these cultural groups to say, so this is why historically, the cultural groups that have won have one often been more monogamous they, they often really discourage premarital relations and, and, and relations outside of a marriage because that could break up a marriage, which then causes you know, obviously problems.

Malcolm: For a society where it's expected that people are going to be together forever, right? Because maybe they don't care for one kid, and then the kid becomes like a vagrant. And you know, Oliver Twist, right? Roaming groups of kids without parents were a major problem in these societies. Almost like packs of stray dogs that were intelligent and were constantly trying to screw you over.

Malcolm: It's something we don't really see in the world today as much, but it was a major problem historically speaking. So that's, that's why you have that. And then the masturbation push. The reason why so many groups are against that is because it lowers fertility rates, right? And you can look at some cultural groups.

Malcolm: I'm pretty sure some Jewish sects do this, where it's like you can't [00:06:00] even have sex with somebody when the person would not get pregnant due to their stage of the menstrual cycle. That would be considered sinful. And so, like, why are you doing this? You're trying to