A Based Camp listener encouraged us to read Performative Bafflement’s post Against “more marriage” as a solution to the fertility crisis and while we came in with our mockery sneers at the ready, we came away radicalized. Is this the beginning of our Dark Pronatalist era? Oh no…

Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] Simone Collins: This big Ponzi scheme we like to call the American economy isn’t just going to make it without a bunch of kids cranked out en masse to keep the wheels spinning, right?

[00:00:08] Well, friends, I’ve got news for you here too. You do not approach the net neutral in taxes paid versus consumed unless you are in the top 10% of income for 40 plus years. Oh. Interesting argument here. So only the rich people have to get married

[00:00:23] Malcolm Collins: Okay, I buy this.

[00:00:25] Yeah, let’s get rid of- Sterilize all- ... the average person. Ster- and Leaflet has said this as well, that we should offer money- Yes ... for people to sterilize themselves. Yeah. Let’s move to le- what do we call this? Twist. Like, dark pronatalism?

[00:00:36] Simone Collins: Twist.

[00:00:37] Elitist pronatalism. We’ve always been accused of elitism.

[00:00:40] You know, oh, the Collinses, they want people to have kids, but only the right people. And they want everyone to think that we’re like white people or like, Christian people, but we’re like, no, just like competent, happy people. Well, wow. I mean, yeah, I, I like that it’s always really fun when something fundamentally changes our view of something,

[00:00:58] Speaker 3: So for context, today’s episode is actually one that I had not planned on releasing to the general public. We had planned on doing this as a paid private episode. and throughout most of it, what you will see is us being rather snarky and dismissive of the ideas being presented because we’re like, “Well, what’s the alternative?

[00:01:17] What’s the alternative? What’s the alternative?” And at the end of it, I was convinced, I think that this person makes a pretty good argument. And so this has been a major sea change in how I see reality, , which is to say it could be actively harmful and selfish to fight for the vast majority of people to get married and have kids.

[00:01:40] ,

[00:01:40] Speaker 4: Because the vast majority of people make bad partners, they make bad parents, they make bad children, and they would live a worse life if they were married and had kids

[00:01:54] Speaker 3: Whereas the virtuous thing is to just replace them

[00:01:58] But see if it convinces you as well

[00:02:01] Would you like to know more?

[00:02:02] Simone Collins: Hello, Malcolm. I’m excited to be speaking with you today because today we’re doing a listener request. So those are always really exciting. We have a lot of people with excellent taste. And I- Do we?

[00:02:15] Malcolm Collins: Do we? Yeah. Yeah, we do.

[00:02:17] Simone Collins: Yeah, we do. Yeah.

[00:02:17] Malcolm Collins: I actually quite like our fans. They, they’re, I, I like you guys because you typically are living productive lives and doing interesting stuff, which is neat.

[00:02:24] Yeah,

[00:02:25] Simone Collins: like s- smart people who always give us new ideas and push

[00:02:28] Malcolm Collins: us further. And the number of you who have found partners and started making kids since we started this podcast is astonishing.

[00:02:34] Simone Collins: It makes us really happy. Yeah. So if you’re still looking, don’t give up. There’s a lot of hope, and you could be next.

[00:02:40] So-

[00:02:40] Malcolm Collins: And I, I promise you guys, it gets better as they get a bit older.

[00:02:44] Simone Collins: Oh, yeah, ‘cause... Yeah, Malcolm has been reading my old diaries from early in our pre-married and newlywed days, and apparently it sucks. Wait, that’s gonna dissuade people.

[00:02:55] Malcolm Collins: Not the women- Ignore ... the babies.

[00:02:57] Simone Collins: Oh, the babies. Okay.

[00:02:58] Malcolm Collins: But the women also get better.

[00:02:59] Yeah, we got in fights all the time in the early days.

[00:03:02] Simone Collins: Not fights. We disagreed about things strategically, but sure, fights. What we had been s- encouraged to read is a, a Substack post by an excellence name- excellently named Substack, Performative Bafflement. I’ve always loved the name of this Substack.

[00:03:17] Haven’t read everything in it. Haven’t read this. The title of this particular article that we’re gonna read is Against More Marriage as a Solution to the Fertility Crisis: Let’s Create the Torment Nexus to Pump Out a Few Incremental Taxpayers. All right, let’s go into it. It has 66 likes, 48 comments, and 15 restacks, so did pretty well.

[00:03:37] They write, “Okay, so we all know about the fertility crisis, right? All the developed countries are going extinct. Many consider this bad or worrisome idea, et cetera. Said crisis is happening for hundreds of interlocking reasons, but the big KPI people like to point to here seems to be marriage. /Marriage directly tracks fertility, and the decline in relationship formation and marriage drives [00:04:00] most of the fertility gap since 2000.”

[00:04:02] He inserts graphs showing the clear... what looks to be causation. Okay, okay. It is correlation, but looks like it. “One of the main solutions,” he writes, “to the fertility crisis that most folks seem to like is pro-marriage incentives and initiatives. I am here to argue against this. These people are basically advocating for creating the torment nexus for megafolks of people,” megafolks, “to pump out a few incremental taxpayers.

[00:04:29] My position: Let’s not create a torment nexus, please and thank you. Aren’t I being totally histrionic and ridiculous here?” What? Let’s see. Okay, I wanna see where they’re

[00:04:36] Malcolm Collins: going with this. I have no idea. I have no idea where they

[00:04:38] Simone Collins: could be going. Yeah, my guess is they’re just gonna be like, “I don’t know, let the system break.

[00:04:41] I don’t wanna grind for some boomers to have more Social Security.”

[00:04:47] Malcolm Collins: Is this a leftists or a right? I don’t even know. I, I, they

[00:04:49] Simone Collins: could be like a big toe It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. I don’t care because Performative Bafflement is a great Substack name, and I’m not gonna color your view of this person.

[00:04:57] Don’t click on their Substack. Be good.

[00:04:58] Speaker: So I decided to check and they are, , center right, , and of the based variety. They talk a lot about genetics, stuff like that, , working out, that sort of stuff, but not, you know, as, probably as far as us, , and male. , So at least I didn’t have my mind changed by a lefty woman as I thought

[00:05:17] Simone Collins: Okay, let’s go into the argument. Sexual, sorry, sexual. Where is my mind today? Secular marriage trends. First, they’re absolutely right that marriage is declining. It has been declining every single generation since the ‘40s, when we hit a local peak of 90% marriage rates, which have, which drove the baby boom.

[00:05:37] 90%. I didn’t know that, actually. Can you imagine living in a society where nine out of 10 people were married?

[00:05:44] Malcolm Collins: No

[00:05:45] Simone Collins: It’s crazy. Okay, I continue. Literally every single generation on generation since then, each cohort of women has looked out at the world, said, “Well, nope,” and opted out of marriage at higher rates than the one before.

[00:05:59] And they show a graph of women in the US by decade of birth who are getting married, and it, it ain’t looking, it ain’t looking good. The, it’s, it’s, it looks like a rainbow that’s dying. And I continue, and just as a note, I am framing this as primarily women’s choice because one, women are traditionally proposed to and say yes or no.

[00:06:22] Two, historically women are the sex that wants and pushes for marriage while in a relationship more often. Three, women getting educated and having jobs and careers of their own is a big part of the fertility crisis in the sense those things all reduce fertility when first introduced to a society. And indirect-

[00:06:41] Malcolm Collins: Wait, that doesn’t sound right.

[00:06:41] Do women push for marriage more than men? I don’t think so.

[00:06:44] Simone Collins: So these days definitely men are pushing more for marriage, so she’s, I mean, she’s right that women are, are driving the decline in marriage. You can see it in the polling. We’ve done plenty of episodes that cite this polling. So I, that is true.

[00:06:56] When you look at at least historical tropes, ‘cause we didn’t live in this time. I

[00:06:59] Malcolm Collins: mean- Yeah, I know historical tropes, but I think the reality is, and, and potentially even into history, that’s been the men, I mean, in a lot of the stories that, you know, I remember from my childhood, the romance stories, it’s the man pushing for marriage.

[00:07:11] It’s the- No ... I’ll go to Ipswich for you. It’s the- Mm ... you know, like-<...