Are Relationships Supposed To Last For Life? - Mads Larsen - #704

Why is it useful or interesting to study mating ideologies at all? It is the foundation of all social orders. We like to think that politics, philosophy, all those big subjects are what it's all about, but at the foundation, it's how men and women reproduce. And upon that, everything else rests.

So if that falls apart, our societies fall apart too. Why does mating need an ideology to sit over it at all? It's a physical activity. Like, why the need for a story and what it means and how we should do it?

Because we've changed so much from our ancestral environment. Having people commit to peer bonding for decades and to providing for offspring to dedicate the resources that that requires needs a lot of coercion. We have our biological impulses, but they do not align very well with modern demands for mating. So we need, in addition to that, an ideology that compels people to make that core system, that makes them think that it's their duty to peer bond and have children.

And the ideology we have now is, compared to previous ideologies, very weak in that regard. We're not having an ideology where this has become completely voluntary, and where you can make a good case for why perhaps you shouldn't have children. And that's a rather unique situation. I like the use of the word coercion.

Oh, absolutely biological and cultural coercion. It's a huge sacrifice to reproduce and to make enough people do that to a significant extent. Now that we also have effective contraception, it's really difficult. Right.

So what is it that's changed primarily in terms of the demands on mating and resource supply in the modern world or even in the developed world compared with 10,000, 50,000 years ago? So much. There are several factors. Contraception is huge.

Before you just needed to want it to copulate, and if you did that enough, you'd have children. And then you'd be coerced by your communities to pair bond and take care of that children that child until it's big enough. In the modern world, we've now made, we've de-connected copulation from reproduction. And also, in these industrialized environments, children have become much more expensive.

Instead of being free labor, they're a huge cost. Also, we have an ideology that over the past millennium has become more and more individualistic. So we're not necessarily convinced that God is forcing us to have children because that is the meaning of life. We now think that perhaps being single and traveling and taking care of ourselves is more important than putting more children out into the world.

And in addition, at the moment, we have this quite significant uncertainty about the future. There are also disincentivizes reproduction. What do you think is the ancestrally typical mating strategy for humans over time? I know that we've had a few human ancestors and then we kind of had a little bit of a movement.

What was the journey through human predecessor mating systems? You're thinking the past six million years? Yeah, yeah. Give us a story.

It's not six million years ago. We'll take it from there. Yeah. So we started out like most vertebrates.

We made it promiscuously. That means that we probably live together in groups, multi-male, multi-male, multi-female groups. We're individuals, we're free to populate. We're reproductive opportunities.

We're mostly channeled to high status males. And the purpose of that is that you then distribute the most successful genes within the population, which helps us adapt more quickly to changes, et cetera. This is what's most common across animal groups. But then some species, they develop a need for pair bonding.

If you can get paternal investment, if the males contribute with more than just genes, this can be very beneficial. And this is what happened with our lineage, with early hominins about four million years ago, where the ecology changed, where it was so beneficial, if males would contribute, that we then had a transition. We don't know precisely which way. The main hypothesis is that high status males started keeping heroms and providing for females.

And then there's an alternative hypothesis that is rather new, but quite interesting, that this was a sneaky new strategy for low status males to be allowed to co-opulate and reproduce if they offered provisioning and protection to females. Wow. It was like the pre-historic simp version. Yeah.

It's an interesting hypothesis. This is a scholar. He's a theoretical biologist who did mathematical models and he just couldn't make it add up for high status males. It would never make sense for them to go along with that initial transition from prunis to parabond, to parabond, and polygonous parabonding.

It made a lot more sense that those males that were excluded from mating saw as offspring needed more help, more provisioning. They were more dependent on the females that they would now go in and make the deal that, okay, I will provide you with calories and protection, but then you let me have sex with you exclusively, so I know that you offspring our mind. And then the females had to make a trade-off. Do you want the good genes from males that are only willing to contribute with genes, or do you want a low status male to be around there and help you get food, help you get protection, help you out with the kid?

And that would result in kind of like a resource acquisition and supply arms race between the low status and the high status males. Yeah. So then this would push so it would then start because this was so beneficial because across those four million years, the offspring development period doubled. We just got bigger heads, more helpless when we were born.

So it became more and more beneficial to pass on the good genes and instead get a male that would help you out through the most vulnerable years, so through the pregnancy, and then in the beginning phase of when the child needed the provisioning the most. And then it just developed until around two million years ago when most homo communities consisted of mostly facial females, a provisioning males, and then a small number of polygonists and a small number of prunis to the males, because it would always in some instances been beneficial for the female to choose the superior genes of high status male rather than get a provisioning low status male. So this is a competing hypothesis that intuitively it seems interesting. Just how rare is male parental investment in the mammal and primate world?

Pear bonding? Yeah, male parental investment primarily. Yeah. So I think among mammals, it's 10%.

Do pear bonding and among primates is 29%. But the reason why we think that our lineage where promiscuous maiders, six million years ago, is that chimpanzees and bonobos are promiscuous maiders. And once a lineage has evolved, it is so beneficial that it's exceptionally rare that you devolve from it. That's why we assumed that six million years ago, we also had prunis to ancestors.

Interesting. Okay. So two million years. What happens next?

Because we go through some rapid changes over from then until now. Yeah. So the interesting part is that although it became highly beneficial with pear bonding, there was little pressure on males for not wanting multiple females to want to make promiscuous, and likewise, while it was beneficial for females to opt for the provisioning of low status males, there was little pressure on them for not wanting or desiring a more successful mate. So what we see, what is quite interesting is that for those two million years, the norm was monogamous pair bonding with some polygamy, but a really superior forager just couldn't provide for that many females.

But we see that with agriculture that took off and resulted in pretty extreme polygyny in the most inequities environments. But that would have been, when was the agricultural revolution? 15,000 years ago, something like that, 20,000 years ago? Around 12.

Yeah. Okay. So, and then the main period was from around 7,000 years ago, all the best agricultural land had been taken. So then if you wanted to grow, what you had to do was to take land from others, and that created a 2,000 year period from 7 to 5,000 years ago that had a pretty bizarre mating regime.

I don't know if you're familiar with this. No, tell me. Yeah. So I think you've cited this research.

I saw your episode with Harry Nam. He cited this study from Carmine at Al in 2015, and he cited the original hypothesis there where the original researchers thought that when it happened 7,000 to 5,000 years ago, there were just these extreme levels of polygamy. That the y chromosome diversity in our lineage was reduced by 95%, meaning that 19 out of 20 males disappeared, while the x chromosome diversity increased in the live population growth. And if you think about it, that doesn't make sense.

It's just not plausible knowing what we know about human behavior. So you can imagine that to one generation of patriarch might cast great every other male in just pregnant all the females, but that would make evolutionary sense for him to do the next. When all the men are his sons, and this would be an extremely unstable system, and that this would happen all over the world for 2,000 years. It just seems implausible.

So in 2018, a new main hypothesis was established that speaks no more favorably of our ancestors' mating practices. And what probably happened was that for those 2,000 years, all everyone did in order to be able to grow their tribes because the only way to grow was to take the fields of your neighbor. So then you had a universal system of inter-tribal raiding. When your kin group was strong enough, you would go to your neighbors, kill all the males, and take all the females and all the fields.

And that was yours. And people kept doing this for 2,000 years until 95% of the original male DNA was just wiped off the genetics site. So it's, yeah, 2,000 years of universal genocide and rape. That's what our ancestors were up to.

That's what it seems like. And the reason why we got out of it was that we invented new stories because up until 5,000 years ago, we could only cooperate with kin, and then somebody invented that. Some men, they are the descendants of gods. So we can submit to them as leaders, and now we can grow our in groups.

So instead of just being a kin group, we can now be thousands and we can keep growing, and that is, of course, beneficial, because then we can kill our smaller neighbors. A lot more easily. Okay, so is this the inception of having a broader mating ideology about 5,000 years ago? Well, what that created was the ability to create a lot larger societies.

And it also, the invention at the time was slavery. Before that, when you conquered someone, you killed all the males. Now you could either turn them into your slaves or your allies. So that was, it's a weird thing to think about, but if we think that slavery is better than genocide, that was actually progress at some point in our past.

So when you look at our ancestors, they've been, yeah, it's a rather unpleasant group of people at times. When the choices between slavery and genocide, and you're having to make a value judgment of which one, which one is the least bad of the two? That's a little bit rough. Okay, so what, given your research, looking at this sort of journey of mating ideologies over time, what is the furthest back that you've managed to find?

Now, obviously, as you say, some kind of prototypical religion bonds groups together in a way that civilises them beyond what they normally would and given that so much of what we were driven by previously, the motivation was very heavily mating derived, or at least mating with one of the outcomes that we wanted. And then it goes, you can say that any ideology that cohesive group together beyond kin is a mating ideology. But what about when it becomes a little bit more sort of specific about what you should, what a man's role is, what a woman's role is, how we should combine all of this together? Yeah, that's a good intuition to have that.

That is the kind of civilising direction. But the ideology, mating ideology didn't change that much from the period we've described now, and up until the church's dissolution of Europe's tribes about a thousand years ago. We can call that ideology, it's often called heroic love. So if you want to start following the mating ideologies we had for antiquity, up until the church's dissolution of the tribes, heroic love, and it's a term that's a little bit problematic, because the point with it was that during this regime, a woman had to always be ready to submit to the greater warrior.

You didn't necessarily have a few rulers or other state structures that could protect people. People always up until this time lived in kin groups, and if other groups came and defeated you, then the men would be killed and enslaved, and the women would often be captured. So if women wanted a chance to survive and protect themselves and their children, they now had to submit to whomever had killed their father or their husband. So this was an extremely misogynistic rape culture, and this is what marked up until a thousand years ago.

From the beginning of agriculture, from that period we talked earlier, this was the original patriarchy, where the male images was matter, and women are, they had different ways of conceptualising this, but women were more like soil, where the patriarchal seed were put. So this way, as long as you had these beliefs, you could just capture as many women as you wanted and were able to, and then keep growing your kin group. I suppose as well, this heroic love narrative is a useful strategy to legitimise to the men what they are doing, but also as a coping strategy to dampen down the discomfort of what the women are subjected to. But if there is an ideology that sits over the top, that maybe this is the way that mating is supposed to be done.

Maybe it is beneficial that your last husband was killed and murdered and that now you have a new one, because he's evidently the more heroic of the two. Therefore, it is quite right that you should go, as opposed to the person that I cared about has just been dismembered in front of me, and now this guy that I don't know. That's not a particularly reassuring story, whereas the heroic love narrative is useful for both sexes in some regards. In some regards, but I'm sure it was an absolute nightmare for these people that had to go through this.

And what drove much of this was that these kin groups generally practised polygamous mating. So you had elite individuals who would hoard women as wives, concubines and sex slaves, so for the low value men, they didn't have access to pair bonding or a copulation. So then they were driven throughout antiquity to when they had a strong enough position to go to whichever, whomever their neighbors were, and then kill the men, take their stuff and take their women. So this polygamous mating that marked this period under heroic love drove a lot of war, a lot of social instability.

It was quite enormous change that happened when the church imposed lifelong monogamy, even on the most superior of males. That changed everything. When did that happen? Well, the Roman Empire played around with monogamy, but they were never very serious about it.

And then the church started imposing it in the fourth century, but also not very serious. And then you have a period that's referred to as the Gregorian Reform at the beginning of the second millennium that you had a lot of church councils that worked with these matters because the church wanted to grab more power of the people. And if you can control their mating, if you can control their marriages, their sexual behavior, etc, that gives you a lot of power over powerful men. So this is when they dissolved Europe's tribes through prohibiting cousin marriage, changing rules for inheritance and ownership, and then imposing lifelong monogamy, which was a very unusually unique, rather extreme way of thinking of mating.

But when you do this, if you want to understand the origins of the modern world, this was it. Because then you create the sexual egalitarianism. This is how you make parents invest in children. This is where you prepare for growth and where you start creating a different, more individualistic psychology, different way of thinking, your low amounts to testosterone.

So instead of superior men competing all their life to acquire more women, you get to compete until you get one. And then you have to put your efforts in more in a more productive direction. How does it help investment in children? Why was there not a massive amount of investment in children during the heroic mating era?

Because you would have one father with several women, with a bunch of children, and you would try to maximize that to the extent that your resources allowed. So you just had a lot less attention per child, and you also didn't have an ideology where you should necessarily invest so much in your children. They were more expendable. While if then these children are distributed over more men and you have a more limited amount of children, then you will be more incentivized to take care of those children that you do have.

What is the reason for the church or anybody wanting to impose some sort of rule from a civilization design perspective? What was the advantage or the change that they were looking to enact? What was the outcome that they wanted by encouraging lifelong monogamy? Well, that's really interesting.

In hindsight, if you like modernity, we think it was brilliant. But when we look at the document that exists at the time, it's a bit of a mystery. We can suspect certain things through dissolving Europe's tribes and changing the rules for ownership and inheritance. The church by the 10th century had grabbed 40% of the agricultural land in Western Europe, so that was good.

You can see that as a pretty strong incentive that when you die instead of your land being passed on to your kid, you're now given to the church so you don't have to go to hell. That's a pretty strong material incentive. And then the other aspect, as I mentioned earlier, is that powerful men that hoard a lot of women, if you can impose on them certain mating structures, then you as the church, if you have to acknowledge or permit their marriages, if you can restrict them, then the church get power over powerful men, which is another good understanding of our material incentive. And then it's all just speculation in terms of what the spiritual ramifications are, what they might have suspected the long-term consequences would be.

But my impression from having studied a lot of deep cultural changes is that to some extent, things just happen. It's just a bunch of people doing a bunch of things, and then it almost magically sorts itself out, and nobody really understands what's happening. When it's happening, and then 100 years later, or in the modern times, historians look back and try to make sense of what it was. But generally, there aren't that many grand architects that have a particular vision that they're able to impose on their culture.

Yeah, what's that quote about life happens forwards, but only makes sense in reverse. Absolutely. History's kind of the same, but we can post-talk rationalize what was it that the church's grand plan was, whereas it's much easier to go for a simple explanation, which was they wanted to control powerful men. These powerful men had lots of resources.

If the church slots themselves in between those men and one of the things that they want the absolute most, which is women, because presumably they couldn't slot themselves in between the men and their resources. Unless the church is going to wage a war, and say, half of this farm's hours, now half of this house is ours, now, it's a much more crafty, subversive strategy to be able to somehow make divine the union between a man and a woman. And then for you to be the arbiter that sits in between them, I can totally see how it gives you power over powerful men. One thing that hasn't been mentioned so far, which I thought would have come up, is sexual redistribution.

If you have high amounts of inequality within a sexual system, you get your male syndrome, it's not very good. Does this play a role at this stage, or is it just such an accepted part of the way that the world existed that no one has really bothered about the chaos that came along with it? No, in hindsight, we see that it was hugely beneficial. The modern world would not have happened if that redistribution of women hadn't happened, that the church imposed on medieval Europeans.

But whether anyone in the church were able to predict what greater sexual egalitarianism would have for consequences, for social stability, the potential for growth, for peace, etc. I don't know. I'd like to think they were that smart, but I kind of doubt it. Maybe they noticed this as they went along that they saw the beneficial effects.

I don't know. But yeah, the end result was quite impressive, but how it came about, who the architects were, if they really imagined this, I'm kind of doubtful if they understood the ramifications of what they were doing. Okay, so, heroic love finishes. The church comes in.

Sorry, man. No more gangbangs for you. What comes next? Well, this is fascinating.

And this speaks again to how nobody's in charge. So, some of these mating ideologies, when I refer to as cultural dissolvents, these are mating ideologies upon which you cannot be able to social order, but they kind of make you lose faith in the previous ideology. So when courtly love was created and disseminated through romance as a balance from the 12th century, this was an ideology with values and norms that primarily undermined heroic love. So it had an exaggeration of the emotion of love as something that was incredibly strongly resistable and that lasted a lifetime.

And this was meant to discourage high status men from being polygamous, that if you pick just one woman, that's going to last for life. And it's going to give you this special ecstasy that you can't get if you have more women and also if you force yourself on a woman. So what men should do, and this is what balance and romance is promote, that instead of being the greatest warrior, well, you also have to be the greatest warrior. But in addition to that, you have to talk to women.

You have to use sophisticated social skills. You have to flirt. And instead of just raping her after you killed her husband, you have to make the woman feel a high degree of lust and love. So when she can't help herself from having sex with you because she lust you so much and she loves you so much, that's when you can have sex.

So you have all these values that if you just read the romance as a balance and you don't know what they're reacting against, it's kind of hard to make sense of. But when you know the tenets of heroic love, you see that all these elements of court love are constructed in a sense to undermine those strong beliefs from the previous regime. And also it has to do with the new sociality that when you lived in kinship groups, you stuck to your own, you were skeptical towards strangers, strangers might want to kill you and take your stuff. And now that we lived in a feudal Europe where everyone was supposed to be Christian, then we're supposed to have this openness towards strangers.

We're supposed to be friendly, courteous and all these norms that define scorpion love is also the way European Christians were supposed to treat each other and not just women. So you have all this brand new type of sociality that would have never worked in the kinship system, but was crucial for feudal Europe to have an effective cooperation. So as you're becoming more civilized and as you are more open to new people, to being friends with people, stuff like pubs and ale houses and things like that, people will be migrating a little bit more. So there's my family bonds with the family next door.

Okay, so what about what is the role of marriage? Is marriage widespread at this point? Is it that you go through the church and the church does this thing? What about the role of sex before marriage and those sorts of impositions?

Yeah, so the transition was before marriage was private, but with the Goryn Reform, they had to be church marriages, which is also very important for court to love. And what's unique about it's something called the European marriage pattern that develops there, because this had never happened before. No kin groups have been dissolved the way the church did it. So you got a unique situation in the West.

What happens is that you have when you can no longer move in with your kin, you have to start accumulating resources. So people's marriage age were pushed up from, say from their teens, early 20s up to the late 20s. So you shorten people reproductive period. And this was crucial because under in antiquity, we practice what you could call forced trimester abortion.

You might know this from Vikings. You have the babies. You have and then you have a look at them and then you kill the ones you can't race. So this was how you kept the population in check and they tended to kill more females than males.

So you'd have a low sex ratio. What they did now, because individual life became sacred, you're not to restrict people's sexuality. They had to have less sex. And one way that they did this was through this European marriage pattern, where you reproductive period didn't start until you're around 30 years old.

That way you didn't have more children. So it was very crucial in this period that people's sexuality were restricted. Otherwise you run into a multiple crisis because you'd have too many children. But what happened, interestingly, is after the Black death in the mid-14th century, north of Europe lost over in my country last over 50% of the population and around Europe, the third to a half was lost.

So in the 1400s, you had what's called the sexual laxness of the 15th century, where people were having a lot more permises with sex sleeping around, etc, etc, because our environment could afford it. And then when we rebuilt the population around the year 1500, that's when you have the reformation. That's when you have a retightening of these sexual norms because we couldn't afford it anymore because we'd refilled up our population. And that's when you get Puritanism, etc, etc.

What you were talking about this sort of window, this reproductive window that age 30, age 80s was important, is that people were told that they shouldn't reproduce after 30s, and they weren't permitted to reproduce until 30. So before when you had polygamy and you lived in kin groups, you'd have a man with a lot of resources and he'd marry every time you feel like it. And then he'd married a, see a woman at 20 and he'd be 30 or 40, and she'd just start reproducing right away. And the same, if they were younger, you would always have a place to live, you'd move in next to your kin on your kin groups land.

Now, in feudal Europe, you'd have to accumulate resources to be able to afford what's called a neo-local resident. You don't live with your family, you live on your own. So you'd have to be on labor, men and women would have to be on labor markets, typically in their 20s, until they had accumulated enough resources to get their own place. And this is what pushed up the marriage age.

So reproduction didn't start until typically in your late 20s for women. Wow, because I, you know, Game of Thrones, as my greatest window into an accurate historical representation of what would have happened in medieval times for reproduction, you know, you've got a lot of essentially child and teen marriages and women occurring. And I certainly know that some of the aristocracy were doing this, was that only a behavior or a trend that occurred in the upper echelons of the high inability? Those who had resources.

So you see that the very highest, the highest classes are those that are marked the least by these changes to the past millennium and mating rallies. They still, the very highest status men, they still had lovers on the side. They still had a couple of wives for a few centuries longer than they were supposed to. So they got away from this and the church tried to rest power from them, but it was a bad there.

They were still powerful. So yeah, among the higher classes, you typically would marry still when you were around 20 perhaps. Right. So this is really interesting.

Obviously we're going to get into it as we continue down this little journey through time. But a lot of the conversations at the moment are for the first time since records began, more women are childless at 30 than with children at 30. But it seems to me like if we look only 500, 600 years ago, you're maybe going to see very similar sort of fertility patterns amongst women, all be it for very different reasons than individual choice and traveling the world and getting an education and stuff like that. But yeah, you're going to see because of the demands that were placed on their requirement to accumulate resources, both as men and as women, in order to be able to get started with a family plus, you don't have quite as sophisticated social safety nets.

So you do have this malthusian problem that keeps everything down. So it's like, okay, we need to restrict, restrict, restrict, basically like an entry price into a nightclub that up until the point at which you can pay the entry price, you can't go to the dance, right? The dance being having kids. Yeah, and also at this point, what was characteristic of the European marriage pattern was an exceptionally high percentage of never married women.

In a polygonist system, mostly all women are married. Under this system, it had extraordinary high percentage of typically 10%, which to us sounds very low, but at the time that was unheard of. So around 10% of women never married during this regime. Okay, so we are currently in courtly love.

I love the fact that it's like one of its primary design justifications was to be a counterweight to the heroic love narrative, right? It's overly restrictive on men compared with what they had for their values set previously, that you must ensure that the woman is lusting after you, then we potentially add to no sex before marriage in as well. That gives you the restriction of resources. You need to be able to pay the dowry.

You need to make sure that you've asked for her father's hand in marriage. I'm going to guess that that comes around to some point around about this time too, which would mean the most difficult gatekeep arbiter on the planet. You've got to get his seal of approval before you can do it too, then you've got to go through the church, presumably the assessments that get done by the church too. So yeah, all of this not only acting as a what would end up being a useful sexual redistribution for creating the foundation of a non-chaotic civilization moving forward, but probably at the moment, the main thing it was trying to do is let's just stop all of the powerful men raping everyone.

Let's just stop that from happening first and we'll see where we go from there. And the core value here, this is the first sexual revolution. You can place that around near 1200. And the core value here is female consent.

So in antiquity, women were commodities. A marriage is usually arranged between families. Again, it was a commercial contract. And then with these reforms, they instituted something called a double consent.

So women aren't free to choose to marry men aren't free to choose to marry, but women now have a chance of refusal. So it's still you go from in antiquity, the kin group was to thordine marriage. Now you move to the nuclear family because that is how you live now. So it's still parents arranged marriage, but crucially women are given leverage to being allowed to say no.

So they are still coerced into marriage, still not individual choice, but they can say no. And that's huge progress. And that's like women on a path of emancipation that is ongoing. The beginning of female emancipation in the West was the shortest imposition of female, the female right to consent in the first sexual revolution.

That changed everything. That's yeah, everything that has happened since was a result of that first movement. Okay, what comes after Caul D'Love? Well, the mating ideology that the society was built on that is something called companion at love.

So this was a very pragmatic ideology and very different from corporate love. In corporate love, you and I, we are aristocratic knights and we're going to travel through Europe to find our one true love. And we're going to fall incredibly much in love and we're going to live in blessed forever after. Naturally, this was not the reality for European peasants.

So the ideology of companion at love is that a man and a woman shall marry for life through an arranged marriage, whether they like each other or not is not a big deal. And their primary task is to run the farm as partners, to run the farm and keep their children alive. So we're not going to sleep around. We're not going to divorce and find somebody else.

We're just going to huddle down and make sure that as many children as possible are alive in the spring. So it's a very pragmatic, very unromantic ideology. It's about submitting to the needs of your family and your community and not giving into emotions or erotic or romantic impulses. So this was the reality for European peasants from the beginning, from the end of the first sexual revolution and the kindred through this all.

And all the way up to 1750, which was the West's second sexual revolution. This was when you, this was a period of companion at love, arranged marriages, pragmatism, and then you had a period before 1500 with sexual laxness and then appeared afterwards with Puritanism to restrict people's impulses to avoid more using crises. Right. I was just about to ask why the Puritanism.

Well, after this period of sexual laxness, when we had rebuilt our population, we entered into a period of stagnation and stagnant per capita growth, we needed to prevent Europeans from having too many children to having premarital sex, extramarital sex. And the way we have done this in the West is to villainize female sexuality. Women are the sexual selectors. And in order to prevent extramarital sex from happening or premarital sex, the church has in those instances gone after the women.

So you'll see in the 1400s, female sexuality is acknowledged and to an extent celebrated. And then when Puritanism comes, the ideologies, women do not benefit from sex outside of marriage. Women who are lustful are aligned with Satan, et cetera. So it's a way to oppress women and to coerce them into not having sex with women.

And to coerce them into not having sex that they shouldn't have, which could then contribute to multiple-tuse increases. So the choice we face in these situations is either we kill babies when they are born, the surplus of them, or we have to find a way to prevent people from having extramarital sex or sex that produces too much babies. And the means we have tended to use in the West is to demonize female sexuality in those instances. Why not try to control male sexuality?

It's a really good question. If you look at the differences in male and female mating psychology and who is in charge on these markets, markets, it seems like the more effective choice. I'm not condoning it. But it seems like the most effective choice to place the cost on the sexual selectors.

You could imagine that men are so driven that telling men, men generally do not have sexual access to women and to tell men that they shouldn't have sex. Number one, it would be harder because they have a stronger driver's short-term relationships. But also that access isn't there for them. Well, if the women are the ones who make the decisions in these cases of at least the voluntary sex, then placing an enormous burden on women that from our modern perspective seems totally misogynistic and unfair, it seems that that would be the more effective way of doing it.

Yeah, because if you're going to try and restrict men overall, but even now, I'm going to guess that there is still a very large cohort of men, more than 10% who go to their graves without family or unmarried. Therefore, you're pointing the finger at the less reliable potential, mate, whereas if you point the finger at the women, it is more likely that you get more bang for your book, basically, on restriction. But presumably, there must be some moralizing around male sexuality too, just probably not quite the same level of demonization that women had. Absolutely.

So, yeah, Puritanism also demonized promiscuous men in those stories and the literature that exists from this period. The greatest villain is our, the favored villain is often a man who is known to have slept around. So, promiscuous men are also put forth as villains and discouraged, but the male sexuality is still acknowledged. There's something pathological about a woman who wants to have sex with someone who isn't her husband in the Puritan ideology.

If you want to talk about patriarchal misogyny, the Puritans were really, really bad. But then we have to try to then step aside back and, of course, memorialize on it and say that this is terrible, but then we try to understand why did they do this? What was the function of this? Why did Puritanism arise in a period when it was crucial for the West to restrain people's sexuality to avoid an all-dosing crisis?

Right. Yeah, I understand. If everybody is dying of famine and starvation, the difference between the pain of that and the pain of you shouldn't have sex outside of marriage, it doesn't, yeah, I can't understand. Well, we have to choose.

If we're not okay with killing babies and Christians haven't been because of their ideology, while in antiquity, people generally wear, we have to choose. Either kill babies or restrict people's sexuality or reinvent contraceptives, which we got around to later. What was the reason for not just killing babies? Oh, and with Christianity, life became sacred.

So the Christians said that you can't take any life. So once a child, so they didn't, they criminalized infanticide. So infanticide, in particular females elected infanticide killing, they would typically kill girls because they were costlier, dependent a little bit on the context. But yeah, so the practice of infanticide was just cracked out on really hard by the Christians because it went against their belief of every life being sacred.

Yeah, okay. Well, that's interesting that the church's doctrine is both like, give us and take it away here that they have made their own bed. Okay, we say that infanticide isn't good. We value human life.

Oh, fuck. Downstream from that, we now have this other problem, which is being able to control population so that we don't get some ficherian runaway, like, mouth using bullshit. Also not good. Okay.

So, I mean, one of the things that's kind of, I guess, interesting to add here is that the Middle Ages didn't finish until the 1500s. We're still in the Middle Ages from pretty much fall of Rome 500 to 1500 ish. Like, that's just one big, long fucking medieval, like, hodgepodge, right? Then we get to, you said, 1750 ish.

Yeah. I mean, you know, we're talking now only 250 years ago, and it feels like there is an awful lot of ground to cover in terms of sexual ideology. So what happened 1750? So that's the West's second sexual revolution.

This was one of individual choice. So what we don't think about in the West, this is, it's a evolutionary psychologist called the last up of Stuller's done great work on this house throughout human history. We've had arranged marriages. It makes the case that the human species is the only species on the planet where men select other men for reproduction.

This has always been the case. And during agriculture, it was more the kin group. And then after the first sexual revolution, this was more a matter for the nuclear family, meaning the patriarch, the father of the family. So human men and women, this is important to understand, to understand the present day mating dysfunction.

We did not evolve under regimes of individual choice. We generally, we had an influence, but we generally didn't pick and attract our own mates. We were given mates by our families and communities. So our, in a somewhat weak ability, or many people's weak ability to flirt and attract partners, attract short-term partners, this is thought of as a form of mismatch due to individuals not having that responsibility in the past, that in the West started getting from 750.

So what happened with the dissolution of Europe's tribes is that our psychology changed fundamentally. This was the biggest change in its introduction of agriculture. So we were put on a journey then, say, for 900 years ago to whatever greater individualization, more and more and more and more nonstop, still ongoing, and it's not going to stop for a while. And by the 18th century, Europeans started more and more thinking that they should be entitled to make the wrong decisions in terms of mating, population and parabony.

And what facilitated this materially is that you have this commercial revolution where more and more people worked as servants in their youth for cash payments. So to accumulate these resources to be able to marry, people moved further and further away from family, and they were paid in cash. And this was the material foundation for the West's second sexual revolution. So among these young parallitarians, around 1750, this European marriage pattern just burst.

And people started having a lot more sex pre before marriage on the side also. So you had this enormous growth in sexual activity, especially among young people, that had enormous consequences. And this continued, so it wasn't like everybody started riding a way making the wrong decisions, but it started among these young wage earners and then over the centuries that spread and the dam completely burst with a third sexual revolution in the 1960s. I love the idea that flirting is basically like an evolutionary anomaly that if you were to have the ability, ancestrally, if you come from a long line of flutters and your great, great, great, great granddaddy, he was a flutter in the granddaddy before it's like, why?

Like, why? You know, previously you would have just been taking what you wanted, then after that you would have been told what you wanted, then after that your dad would have told you what you wanted, and then only 250 years ago, would you have actually chosen what you wanted? You got Leif Kener, who, you know, he makes this interesting case today to be an effective director. If you're a really good looking guy and really charming, a good flutter and you're short term oriented, you're going to have a lot of mating success.

In the olden days, there would be a significant chance that you would get snuffed out. If you were a solid guy who created alliances, worked hard, led a family, you would be chosen for reproduction by other men and given to their daughters. If you were just as good looking at dawn as you like to sleep around, you're probably going to get killed by the men and the kin group of your latest illicit affair. Yeah, because you're a threat in some regard, even if you don't get rumbled by the kin group of the men of the woman that you just managed to seduce outside of her marriage and outside of your own marriage, even if you don't get caught by the scruff of the neck by them, you're just going to create an ambient sense of concern and envy and mistrust.

Because we know that Mads, we've got to be careful about him. He's got the fucking charm. I've heard rumors and then it almost becomes, I guess, to some degree, a little bit like the witch trials that you have this, it's not quite original sin, but it's something inbuilt that will cause other men to feel envy and jealousy and way rather than understand and turn it inward and work out what it is that's lacking in them that makes them envious of this person. It's way easier to just moralize about the person that's the outgrew now and say, let's fucking kill him.

And also, times were really tough a lot of the time. You needed a really solid guy willing to work really hard to do whatever he can to provide for his wife and children to keep them alive. If you're just discharming Hardy who likes to chat up women around the farm, that did not generally promote a good genetic legacy. Times the demands of the times were just different.

Times were very different than they are today. Are you saying that we are the descendants of the least charismatic, least good-looking, least flirtatious men that existed? Well, it depends on the ecology, but yeah, generally our ancestors have not been lotharials. That's only recently where that has been very beneficial.

Right. So we get to 1750. People are now able to make their own decisions. I actually want a question there.

How is it that the church loses control? Does the church feel like it is losing control? Does it try to claw it back? In any regard, I know that in the time of Charles Darwin, you know, Victorian England, we had an awful lot of sexual puritanism there.

I think the year of Darwin's birth, the total number of British divorces was eight. Yeah. Yeah. No, thousands, not 100.

Eight. No, what happens 1750 is really interesting because there's a counter reaction. So we have what we call the romantic century from 1750 to 1850. So I'm sure with your imagination, you can't imagine what happened when this dam burst in 1750.

Now we're going to start sleeping around. Whoops, we haven't invented the contraceptive pill yet. What's going to happen? So what happens is you have an enormous increase in illegitimate birth.

Across Europe, it doubles, triples, quadruples. So what you typically have are all these lower-class women who now can make their own decisions in terms of population and pair bonding. And their ancestors know what's been with this. So we didn't evolve to see through the intentions of men.

Wouldn't involve to assess our own mate value precisely. So what would happen that you would have a lot of high status men or at least higher status men, say, a sons of farmers, urban men who would then go after the daughters of crafters and other at the lower rungs of society. And they would say, I love you and I'm going to marry you. And let's have sex.

And they would do that. And when she got pregnant, they would leave her. So in Denmark, Norway, up until 737 34, if you had sex, that was a de facto marriage contract. And then what we see in the beginning of the 1700s, there's a huge increase in women taking men to court for having sex with them, but not marrying them.

So they end that law in 1734. So after that, if you get pregnant, you're not entitled to marry the guy you had sex with. So from 1750, you get this enormous increase in illegitimate birth at the worst in Sweden and in Stockholm, 50% of childbirths were by unwed mothers. Lower and rural areas.

In Paris, you see an enormous increase in the amount of abandoned children. So in the late 1700s, there was an ideology which I also consider as a cultural disarvent because you couldn't build a social order on it. And this was Liberty in Love. So this is the kind of Casanova ideology where you're supposed to just enjoy sex for the sake of sex.

You're supposed to sleep around, follow your lusts. And this was an ideology that spread from the French court and then throughout Europe. And it reached a, uh, getting aviar around 1770. So you had this period where you have certain eccentric amilios where people advocated.

Let's just sleep around, let's just have a hell of a good time, let's just party. And this created this enormous burden on women because women were left with a burden of childcare when these liberteans left them once they got pregnant. So typically high status men took advantage of, of impoverished women and then just abandoned them. And this is what laid a foundation for the romantic ideology of the early 1800s.

So Liberty in Love undermined companion at Love where you're just supposed to be pragmatic and double down. They curve your family and Liberty in Love said, no, let's just have fun. And then when the social ramification of that came manifest themselves, the counter reaction was romantic love, which did the same as pure and love had done where you again. So Liberty in Love celebrated female sexuality, let's just have sex romantic love said no, women have no benefit from sex outside of marriage.

We're all going to have to stop doing this. And similar to court in Love, it exaggerated the emotional love as something incredibly strong and something that lasted for life. And then on men and women were only supposed to have sex within the confines of marriage and you should be married forever. And this started having an effect around 1850 and then across the West, the legitimacy rate started plummeting.

So you see this counter reaction first, you dissolve companion at Love, then you see the effects of all this promiscuity. And then in order to reduce the suffering of the women that this affects, you have a counter act romantic love where you then become more pure and again. And then you see the effect of that in the statistics. Right.

You re-prioritize the emotional connection, the romantic connection between the man and the woman. And what that does is that again creates a dampener on the Liberty in Casanova guy, Lothario. That's just okay. Yeah, that's so interesting.

What I'm seeing here is this flip flop between what seems, sometimes human nature kind of just bursts through the cracks. It kind of grows and grows and grows enough. And then it splits through that there is innate desires that people have. You're also responding to the local resources.

So I'm going to get around about 1750 agriculture and greenhouses and shit like that meant that the ability to get an amount of food and an amount of living out of a square foot of land would have increased. Pretty dramatically, which means that it's my enthusiasm problems. Okay, right. So we can't really, we're no longer limited in terms of food.

What's the next thing that we can use? Fuck, they're having sex with each other. Say that it's all about romance. Say that it's all about the over-prioritize the importance of emotional connection because that allows us to create.

But we've also lost at least a little bit here. We've lost the church's moralization, or at least it sounds like we've lost the church's moralization of the act of love. Yeah, and the 1800s, this was the time of enlightenment. This was about individual rights and empowering individuals, not compressing them, letting them make their own choices, personal agency, et cetera, et cetera.

And this was also at the dawn of the industrial revolution. So when this European marriage pattern burst around 1750, we were very fortunate for two reasons, because we now experienced a population explosion going ahead. That is still ongoing. Well, I take that back.

It's not ongoing anymore. But we had, we got this moving into this pyramid, tremendous economic growth that helped us take care of the population explosion. And also we offloaded an enormous part of our population to America and other colonial territories. Otherwise, we would have faced dire trouble in the West as the change of our mating practices and also with reduction mortality from other causes.

Okay, then perhaps the shortest, most acute change when it comes to human reproductive history, the introduction of reliable contraception. Well, yeah, so one of the aspects of romantic love is that you have gender inequality. You conceptualize men and women as complimentary that people are born as incomplete halves, and then to become whole, you have to find women as a whole. You have to find your true love.

You have to bond with her. And then you individualize and you become a whole human. So this means that the man is supposed to go out and work and the woman is supposed to stay home and take care of the domestic arena. So they're conceptualized as equal but complimentary, but in reality, this drove stark inequality.

So the next mating ideology we move to, which is the one we believe in today, it's called Confluent Love, which is a mating ideology of gender equality, of convenience, reward, and self-realization. And this ideology arose quite a while ago. It was first introduced into Scandinavian literature in 1839, where it had existed in the West somewhat earlier. So people were thinking about this, that we should get to equality, that women should be the same and have the same opportunities, and that we should be able to have sex outside marriage and sleep around.

But the environment wasn't prepared for that, like you mentioned, this couldn't really be implemented until we invented effective contraception, otherwise this kind of mating would have placed too strong of a burden on women. So we see this discussion in Western culture from, say, around 1830, and then with the Darwinian Revolution, we start thinking, okay, so we're dramatically, obviously, this is what God wanted us to do, that we have this impulses that you also mentioned, that's just a test from God to see if we deserve to go to heaven, so that we want to have sex and that we want to divorce, that's just a test. And also at the beginning of our conversation, you asked, why do we need this ideology? And this is precisely why?

Because we have this biological impulses to copulate in our love cycle, probably evolved to last around three to four years, which was the mating cycle of foragers. So with agriculture, we needed to commit to lifelong monogamy, because in case of divorce, you can't split up the fields and bring your part of the farm somewhere else. So we were kind of stuck in these marriages that had to last many, many more decades than what we evolved for. So then you need these ideologies to make us fight these urges that we have to sleep around, to have evolved for serial monogamy or serial pair bonding, to fight that, because the agricultural environment and the modern environment just required something else for us.

So then we use religion, we say that this is what God wants, but then with the Darwinian Revolution, we start thinking, well, if we're animals, we too, then these impulses, we have to not moral tests. This is our nature. So we started exploring what human mating nature is. And this was a very strong literary movement in Scandinavia in the late 1800s.

And then also through the 1900s to literature, we started exploring how could we make differently. But what's really interesting is that the Romantic regime did not peak until after World War II. So we experienced something that was really unexpected, because in the 1910s and 20s, we were moving away from Romantic love. We wanted female equality, we were moving toward Confluent love, but then after World War II, we had this enormous economic prosperity that allowed us to implement the Romantic Utopia, which is the breadwinner housewife model.

So suddenly, marriage in the West became near universal. Almost everyone married, they married young, and now we got to experience that the Romantic Utopia has a couple of shortcomings. Number one, life doesn't, love generally doesn't last a lifetime, and Utopia staying at home wasn't that great for all women. So this, you had this in the 1950s and beginning of the 1960s, and then you have the social revolution of the 1960s, and you could say as symbolically that the break through Confluent love was in 1968.

And then you start seeing the beginning of the 70s around the mid 70s, across the West, you see the statistics that this modern marriage pattern that we've had in that peak, that's the beginning of the 70s. We're going to be in the same age pattern that we've had in that peak, after World War II, just disintegrates divorce, peaks, remarriage goes down, people marry later. You have a lot more casual sex outside of marriage, and people start having sex earlier. And you just see this complete change in the Western marriage pattern from the 1970s and on, and this is the, and this is mostly just gone in one direction.

And this is the mating regime that we live under now, which has been accentuated to dating apps, to increase prosperity, through all that has happened in the past 40, 50 years. When you say Confluent love, am I right in thinking that what that means is our union works and continues to make sense for as long as you are useful to me and I'm useful to you. Yeah, so romantic love emerged for life. That's done with the whole people.

Confluent love, we come together either for an optimistic short-term relationship, casual sex, or for a romantic relationship, for as long as we have emotions for each other, we benefit in another way, and then we move on to single them or another relationship. So we're not meant for each other for life, only for as long as we want to. So it's this confluence of people coming together and meeting and moving on. Right.

So now that we've arrived pretty much close to the modern era, how do you think of modern dating dysfunction, demographic collapse, all of that stuff? Is that from 1200, was that just the first domino gets flicked and it's an inevitable kind of all the way along? How do you conceptualize this altogether? Yeah, I wouldn't use the word inevitable, but I completely read what you're intending to say behind that.

Yeah, that is what set it in motion. We've always had arranged marriages and lived in kin groups and then more strictly under agriculture, but still. And then we was set on this path toward individual choice and ever going individualism. And then it's just to have, like we talked about in the very beginning, it's hard to convince people to take upon themselves the burden of decades of peer bonding with the same person and providing for offspring.

And when you have a strong and realistic culture and a mating ideology that says that this is optional, that you don't necessarily have to do that, we're facing an evolution that is quite predictable. And as you've talked about on many of your podcasts, it seems to be going the direction where we've ran out of tools. There's not much we could do. We had in the 1930s, declined in for Kili also, which we countered.

Then the numbers I've seen in Scandinavia went down to 1.8, which was seen as catastrophe, and then we countered through effectoring social democracy. We made it materially easier to have children through social democratic welfare. All that is played out. Now, that's no longer an option.

In Norway now, a typical average woman, she receives more than $1.2 million more from the state than she pays in taxes, while men pay more in taxes than they receive. And when even that can't motivate reproduction at replacement levels, and this is Norway's richest country in the world, and we have the best welfare system, and when even that kind of money transfer can't facilitate reproduction, there's very little other countries can do. So up until 2010, Scandinavia wasn't anomaly across the West for Chile as declined for a long time. So we thought that the answer or many thought that the answer was that other countries had to be like the Navy.

They needed gender equality because we're the most general equal region, and they needed generous welfare. And now in the past decade, the new region for Killer rate dropped from 2010 from 2.0 to 1.5, and now it's dropped down to 1.4. And that's with each woman on average being transferred $1.2 million over lifetime. That's a lot of money.

There's economic incentives no longer cease to work. So we kind of know that for other countries too, that would only be a short-term solution that would be countered by other forces that are more powerful. So if we think it's a good idea to still make people and avoid a demographic collapse, it's very difficult to see what kind of means we can't effectuate that would have a substantial effect that could turn us around. What are the forces that are driving the decrease in fertility rates at the moment?

Well, the larger forces are the material ones as urbanization like we've talked about before, and like many others have talked about how there's been when we lived as agriculturalists, having children was free labor, and now they're just huge expenses. So that is one issue. The other one is ideological that we know with romantic love, the meaning of life was to merge with a partner and have a bunch of children. With conflict love, it's about self-realization, reward, convenience.

When we have those beliefs, it's just less incentivized to take upon ourselves, these burdens. It's also mentioned, fair of the future. And then you have what I've researched a bit is what happens with our mate preferences in this new environment of the past decades. On one side, when you make, as it's going to have gender equality and you have gender as well, it makes it mature easier to have children, so that counts in a positive direction, but it also disincentivizes women from peer bonding with men of similar mate value.

So that's another aspect of these ideologies in mating regimes, that it's really difficult to make women with men with low mate value unless they have to, unless they are materially dependent on it or coerced to do so by their society. We have two attraction systems. We have the original one that we talked about when we started 6 million years ago, where promiscuous maiders, and this is a very discriminatory system for women where they're supposed to only be promiscuous attracted by the very most attractive men. Maybe this is somewhere between 5 and 20% of men, probably closer to 5.

And then 4 million years ago, we have all this other system to facilitate peer bonding, which is a much more in the sense democratic system, where a much larger proportion of men is able to trigger that love mechanism that motivates a woman to mate with them. But we see that when women don't have to, they become choosier and they direct their efforts at men with higher mate value than what they have themselves. And that makes it harder to pair up more people within a community, which then will have adverse effects on their for killing. Right.

And when women are not financially or resourcefully beholden to their partner in order to be able to keep them ticking over because they have no job, they have no education or they have limited socioeconomic opportunities, I need to stay with my partner because the alternative is that me and potentially 12345 children are out on the street. So we were basically kind of like a financial prisoner in some regards to their husband and now that women don't need that anymore. The gods are. And from modern ideology and I'm sure both you and I feel this way, this is grateful women, women aren't dependent on being with a man.

They are they are independent. They have their own money, their own economy, and they can make their own choices and they can choose to direct their efforts and compete harder for the high value man, instead of settling for someone with a similar value as themselves. But then the consequence of that is that we have a very high increase in single them. We have a decline in fertility.

And it also affects people's well being generally expressed a desire to be pair bonded and they want to be together with someone. That's kind of what we've been doing the last four million years. And then when people react to different incentives in a modern environment, we see that quite a few of those work counter to people being able to find each other and create relationships. Yeah, I looked at a study, a pretty, what looked like significant assessment that said gender inequality, specifically when it comes to finances is correlated with both male and female satisfaction in relationships.

Which is a really, if you want to talk about like unfortunate uncomfortable realizations that if you as a man are able to, whether by coercion or restriction or capacity or whatever, out earn your female partner and if the breaks are put on your female partner, she's happier and you're happier on average. Yeah, I know. There's so many depressive statistics. If you want to look at what actually get the fertility rate up, you have to what would really work is to, and we don't want any of this, we have to get rid of gender equality, get rid of prosperity, domestic violence works.

There's tons of stuff that work to make women submit to being in a relationship that they always want to be in. Yeah, to go to being a whatever is cost benefiting to what's it called when the man, there's two types of make guarding, right? Yeah. Whatever the second one is, I don't mean, yes.

Yeah. So no, there's, if you look at what actually would work to get the fertility rate up, these are very dystopic choices we have. There are pretty much nothing that we in the West would be ideologically disposed to doing that could have a significant positive effect. All those mechanisms that we know would have an effect would be a go against what we believe in.

So we're in a very difficult situation. One thing that has kind of been running through my mind, as you've told us this tale is, especially when you look at the modern world, which still has an awful lot of the carryover, I think, from the romantic era of, you know, moralizing around faithfulness, chastity, loyalty to your partner, stuff like that. It seems so insane that we've managed to get ourselves to a place where our evolved mating psychology and the structures that we had for so, so long have just become perverted and perturbed and ruined and repurposed and countered and so on and so forth. And we are, you know, we talk about evolutionary mismatch and awful lot.

Everybody knows what that is. But this seems to be like, it's a fucking sedimentary rock of evolutionary mismatch, right? You know, you've got the culture from before and the counterculture to that culture. And then you've got new technology, reproductive technology.

What about the fact that we're all individuals, female socioeconomic access and egalitarianism? That's fucking you. Like, how do we work that up? We're no longer living in pan-generational houses.

Our kin doesn't give us any advice about the world is moving so quickly that our parents advise basically doesn't even work for the new generation because they don't understand what it means to be dating on Tinder. And then we've still got all of these vestigial mating systems from before. So it really doesn't surprise me. You know, when you take a really global look at human mating psychology plus the modern world, plus the journey that our psychology has been dragged through really over the last few millenniums.

It's really not surprising that people are struggling at the moment. Yeah, on top of that, dating apps are a little over a decade old, and we haven't figured that out at all. And the incentives that drive those apps and those who create them go so counter to people's needs and desires and how our psychology functions. We put ourselves in a situation where there's like you say, there's so much novelty on top of novelty that men and women don't even understand what their mate preferences are and how those are being influenced by the social order and the technology they use to meet people.

So we're just we're following these six million year old impulses, which are the strongest one. And they're overriding impulses that are four million years old, not even to think about the newer ones that we've developed. And in all of this, we're in this uniquely new mating regime of individual choice that we have not evolved for at all. So it's when you look back and you think why was it that, say, perhaps through the two million year history of the Guinness Homo, if it is the case, in fact that we always had parental choice through that, is it because everybody discovered that individual choice doesn't add up?

I mean, there's no way the West is going to go away from that. And I certainly wouldn't advocate it. But if no one else managed to figure that out, how sure are we that that this is going to work for us? And yeah, if you extrapolate from today, if with this decline in forchility, maybe, I mean, we're certainly going to ride out this experiment.

I don't see us changing anyway. But there are there are people around the world who aren't in the art pursuing that regime that are showing different numbers. And it's, I mean, we love our ideology. We think it's superior to everybody else's ideology.

That's just how humans work. But there's one fender. I mean, you could say everything is relative, but there's one thing that isn't relative. That's an evolutionary iron law.

No matter what your ideology is, if that ideology causes you to stop reproducing, that ideology will cease to matter. You will disappear. Yeah. I mean, this was one of the most interesting takeaways I've had from a lot of conversations about demographic collapse and population decline, which is ideology, political leaning, your worldview at large, your openness, your conscientiousness, all the rest of those things are highly heritable.

Highly heritable. Your political ideology is very highly heritable, right, as is the rest of your fucking psychology. So if you are somebody that is part of a particular political movement that either doesn't promote or actively discriminates against reproduction, you are a dying breed because your children would have more likely been like you and look at the groups that are reproducing. Something tells me that conservative Ashkenazi Jews are not going to have that much of a fertility problem, right?

Something tells me that Mormons or that some sex of Christianity, I know that some are down, but some sex of Christianity also going to be fine. So what do you look at over a long enough time horizon? You actually look at this sort of almost like full circle loop back around to a much more, not necessarily, puritanical, but like a religious sacred view of what this is. And remember, if you are somebody that's conservative or somebody that's religious, the likelihood that your children are going to be that way is absolutely not predetermined, but they are predisposed, right?

So you end up with this sort of ever increasing cycle of this. So there was an argument to be made, I think, that, you know, like anti-natal climate concerns, liberalism is not long for this world, right? It's not to say that you can't have a sufficiently compelling ideology that comes around in 50 years time and reconverts a bunch of seventh generation conservatives or whatever, but yeah, you will end up with less demographic, you know, demographic, political variety over time. If you have this because the selection effect occurs within particular cohorts within very particular strata and it presses down very hard on them.

And the other ones are just like, what demographic collapse? I'm fine. Yeah. Well, we also have some tremendous novelty coming up, which we have to bear in mind.

I predict that the West will have a fourth sexual revolution coinciding with the fourth industrial revolution. What will happen when we start being able to create babies outside of women's wombs, when we'll be able to gene edit, et cetera, et cetera, and we'll get AI robot lovers and spouses, et cetera, et cetera. There's going to be such tremendous technological novelty that's going to change society, that it's almost inconceivable that this will not have a tremendous effect also on mating. So if we extrapolate into the future without taking that into account, yes, then the West as it function out would just made itself out of existence and other groups would take over who have higher fertility.

But that doesn't seem to be the future we are facing. There will be so much change in the decades ahead that it's very difficult to imagine how mating will be in the future. But I think that revolution will be so large that it will fundamentally change that aspect. Like we talked about in the beginning, the foundation of our social order is mating.

So then the question is, how will these new technologies affect how we mate and how will that create a new foundation for a new form of society? Yeah. Yeah, I suppose we are living maybe in the last death throes of something that even slightly resembles an ancestral mating system. You know, as soon as you have external wombs, as soon as you have AI companions that can give you better than real life love, yeah, the pod HIKI MORI problem gets sorted, but you don't get sorted from the individuals perspective.

From the population perspective, it's not sorted at all. But then if you can counter that with artificial wombs, but then who is it that you're choosing, like, who's genes are you choosing to do this? And if you have, you know, embryo selection, which is already online, you know, embryo selection for IQ, for externalizing behavior, for depression, for anxiety, for autism, you already have this. And then if you can get into gene editing, and then if you can get into IVG, it's like, okay, here's like a section of the skin from my arm.

Go forth and make 1 million Chris Williamsons, like Jesus Christ, but yeah, it's a maybe we are. Maybe this is a uniquely interesting time, but I wonder whether some of the interventions that we are thinking about at the moment, you know, hungry, you have one kid and you do this thing and you have two kids and you get more taxes off and you have three kids and you don't pay taxes for life or no way. And the way that you guys 1.2 million that you give to women and, you know, we need to get people to do CBT to overcome approach anxiety and all of the rest of it. I wonder whether ultimately all of those things are going to be in vain within the space of five decades, because the technology is just going to rip out anything that we try to construct using, like, cultural technology, ideological movements.

And then we should have Hollywood, why don't we get Hollywood to put dads that are competent again at the front and we shouldn't have Homer Simpson and Peter Griffin as the lead. We should have like a good stand up family guy. And you're like, yeah, but if in five decades, it's artificial wombs and sex robots all the way down, what does any of those interventions really matter? That's not to say that making the well-being and flourishing of people who live right now isn't nothing, but over a long enough time horizon, they all just get like someone shakes the etch a sketch and just deletes all mating history.

Yeah, no, when you look at the history of Western mating, it's I don't fear very much that we'll be returning to a handmade, stale, purer kind of female oppressing regime. I think we're going to move forward in that we will experience a novel to the level that it's very difficult for us to imagine today. So, yeah, we can talk about it, we can speculate, but when we are at this side of these big revolutions, as we seem to be now, before we go into it and see how dramatically the world will change. And this time, a lot more rapidly than with previous revolutions.

It's all we can do is mostly hold on. Like, I don't believe that. I love what you're doing with your podcast, but people can get informed and that's good, but that's somehow we're going to figure something out, make a plan and then effectuate it and stuff the demographic collapse. That doesn't seem to be how the world works.

It's just going to be a whirlwind, a hurricane of change. And then at the end of it, I think it would be really cool if we still have a bunch of humans around. I'm kind of a little bit specious that way, but things can play out in a matter of ways that are just impossible to predict on this side of the singularity. Yeah, yeah, it's the technological change, the size of the wall that occurs is so high that it's very difficult to have something permeate through it.

And I totally agree. One of the other things that you do, your other wing, one of your other wing, evolutionary lens on wellbeing. And obviously we've had a lot of conversations recently about in cells. And I only learned this from you in sings as well in voluntary singletons.

Given your evolutionary lens background and your studies into wellbeing, what are you making of the generalised anxiety, depressive states, whatever it is, 50% of girls aged 12 to 16 have regular, persistent feelings of hopelessness. You've got guys who test us running the toilet, the single biggest threat to a man under the age of 50 is his own hands, in terms of suicidality, all this sort of stuff. How do you conceptualise all of this together from a wellbeing perspective? Why are the in cells and the in-sings and everybody else so unhappy?

Yeah, no, that's something I think we should really be concerned with. We should try to change the world and make a better world, but as we've spoken about, it's our ability to fix change that way somewhat limited. But when we're going through these deep changes as we are now, when we have before, people will face despair. They will lose faith in the story that has united us.

We haven't yet found tomorrow's ideology that will give us the answers and the comfort and less in our anxiety. So we really should be sympathetic towards each other and that pain that people are suffering when we go through these changes, because these changes are very hard on humans. We like stable periods when we know, when we convince the self that we know what truth is. So when you look at in-sells and in-sings, you should expect them that they should be miserable.

From an evolutionary perspective, happiness is a reward you experience when you solve adaptively relevant problems. And nothing is more central to that activity than reproduction. So if you're not succeeding on short or long-term mating markets, if you're not able to pair bond, your wellbeing system should go into high alert and let you know that your strategy is a failing. So when men become depressed and despondent from not succeeding on the short-term market, and women become depressed and despondent because they know it is on modern dating markets, they have unlimited access to sex with high value men.

But none of these men are willing to pair bond with them. That is supposed to give you depression. That's your organism telling you that you're failing. So instead of villainizing in-sell men or making fun of in-sings women, we should try to spread a better understanding.

And here your podcast is valuable. People need to understand the different mate preferences that men and women have. They should understand the different power dynamics and short and long-term mating. And see how today's mating, particularly with dating apps, is creating a stratification that is creating dysfunction for almost all groups of society, or at least potentially.

So a better understanding of what is going on might not help us tear this clown car into safe shores, but it might help us sympathize more with each other's plight, especially between men and women, because men and women have such different challenges in today's dating economy. And if men impose male mate preferences in their analysis of how women are doing an opposite, we just don't understand each other, and that just creates bigger dysfunction, poorer communication, and people get even more miserable. How much of the current unhappiness do you think should be laid at the feet of mating and dating problems? Because there's lots of other things going on.

Social media and comparison and intergenerational competition theory, where we are the first generation that's not done better than our parents and so on and so forth. But how much of this do you think ultimately is post-doc rationalization that I can't find a mate and romance seems to be dead, and my partner might leave me at any point if the confluence no longer works? It's a good question, and I haven't seen any statistics that are able to get at it. It doesn't show up there, so we'll have to speculate.

So in Norway now, we have something called immense panel. It's a big research project or more of a council that you're trying to figure out why men are falling behind. And you see this around the world. In the UK, they're talking about having a men's minister.

It's been suggested, et cetera. And I know at least for this Norwegian effort, which by the way is the third in 15 years, to figure this out, to have it figured out anything previously, it's not even within their mandate to look at mating marginalization and the stratification that is happening in modern dating markets. It's just a thing that feels inappropriate to talk about. But especially when it comes to men, one of the prime functions of having two sexes, to have sexual reproduction, is the sexual selection where women select which men get to get to breed.

So males of all species have been under enormous pressure to succeed in this regard. That is the motivation. That is their reason of being at the deepest, most foundational level. So we have reason to think that now that more and more men are being excluded from short and long term mating when they're being selected away by women because they are not valuable enough in the modern environment, we would predict that these men would do poor and poor.

They would not be motivated to put in the effort because they have a sense of how hopeful it might not be a conscious sense, but that drive that men would have in other times when they had a better prospect of acquiring a mate, when that disappears, we should expect male marginalization also in other areas of life and society. So that we're not looking at that is unfortunate because we would expect that to be the foundational level upon which these other malaise attaches to. But I haven't seen any statistics or research that allows me to assign a proportion of unhappiness to men being selected away from mating. So I don't think that is possible.

I think it's more a foundational aspect that it's really difficult to get at. Yeah, man. I mean, the fact that we're not tearing each other apart, I suppose, you know, when you look at the sadness and the depression and the hopelessness and stuff like that, and a more obvious question would be, how wouldn't we all feel like this? You know, so much change and adaptability is fundamentally one of the things that humanity has as its keystone advantage.

But there's a limit, you know, dear God, there's a limit to how quickly the world can change and we can hold on for the life. Yeah. And, yeah, I think it's such a slippery slope, right? Because as soon as you say, well, the world is changing very quickly and we're not adapted for technology.