In this hard-hitting Based Camp episode, Malcolm and Simone Collins dive deep into the “Us vs Them” framework that’s essential for any society’s long-term survival. Why does attempting to build a world without in-groups and out-groups inevitably lead to eradication? From the Mass Effect genophage dilemma (where 96% of gamers make the “moral” choice that dooms the galaxy) to real-world immigration, fertility rates, and cultural resistance, they unpack why shared culture, laws, and realistic alliances matter more than feel-good universalism.

Topics include:

* Why high-fertility, low-assimilation groups shift societies over generations

* The scorpion, snake, and panda metaphor for incompatible cultural scaling

* Strategic allyship in a collapsing urban monoculture era: who can conservatives actually work with?

* Charter cities, space colonization, and preserving high-agency lineages

* Why purity spirals and suicidal aesthetics fail civilizationally

If you’re tired of bleeding-heart policies that ignore math, biology, and history, this is for you. Malcolm drops unfiltered red pills on why “enforcing existing laws” has become controversial and how groups like Orthodox Jews, Mormons, or even certain Latin American conservatives might make better tactical allies than expected.

Would you cure the genophage? Drop your take below.

Episode Transcript

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Like you can’t just invite somebody into your society without them agreeing to any conditions, you know, have no shared culture and no conditions at all.

And just be like,

Simone Collins: well, it, it, and it, and once it wasn’t even that anymore. It was also though like, okay, but at least you, you promised to follow the law, like to, to adhere to our rules and laws. Yeah. And what’s so interesting about the current divide between. Democrats and Republicans in the United States is that right now it seems to be boiling down to whether or not we are going to enforce laws.

So now exactly, that’s, it’s not even, we don’t expect you to adhere to our culture. It’s, we don’t even expect at least these privileged groups to adhere to our actual laws

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: Hello Simone. It’s exciting to be here with you today. Today we are going to be going back into the concept of us versus them in our [00:01:00] society. And the reason I want to dive into it is because it’s not e like, okay, you’re a random conservative influencer out there and you’re gonna be like, yeah, we should be more us versus them in the way that we see reality.

Who saying which, which is true, but how do you define us is us. You know, Americans is us. People who are genetically similar to you is us. Some sort of ethnicity is us, a religion or a cluster of religions. And so this matters a lot. How, how we think about this. And I’m gonna point out during this, if you try to build a world without an us and a them, you in every scenario are eventually eradicated.

And the, the reason, this is something that often comes up in conversations that I have in a reality fabricator or. Our fab.ai, our like chat bot site because one of my favorite chat bot stories to play is an ambassador for the Tarn Empire. Going [00:02:00] to meet with the sort of, gay space communists of the federation.

And having diplomatic discussions with them was obviously the goal of being eradicating them. And, and so I have to discuss, you know, why their values don’t actually work long term and always lend to more conflict and suffering. But I want to get to how cooked this actually is as a concept.

Simone Collins: Okay.

Malcolm Collins: So there’s a video game mass effect three. And I will describe a scenario to Simone because she probably won’t know this now, maybe if you’re a gamer, you will know the statistics on this particular decision. But gamers generally like to choose the choice that they see as more, more, right. Oh,

Simone Collins: interesting.

Yeah. Because you don’t wanna see yourself as a bad guy or be doing bad things. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: So there is one moment in it that’s framed as like this morally complex choice. So there was an incredibly war-like species that ended up [00:03:00] destroying their own planet after being artificially given technology by an outsider species.

Okay? This species, because they lived in an incredibly harsh environment, had around a thousand eggs. Per year and lived about a thousand years on average. And so when most of the eggs stopped dying in infancy because they industrialized, the populations immediately exploded leading to nuclear war because they’re already a very aggressive species, anding out most of their planet.

So then the species that uplifted them, infected them with something called the genophage. And the genophage is said to make. One in only a thousand Rogan births result in a live healthy baby. Now, I would note here, if you’re already looking at the numbers, this should still lead to a heavily growing Rogan population because [00:04:00] Rogan females live a thousand years and have a thousand eggs a year.

So even if only one of them is surviving, that’s still one kid a year for species that lives a thousand years. It’s still

Simone Collins: That’s pretty good. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. But the way the game plays out, it’s like somehow implied that the devs did the math wrong.

Speaker 3: Okay. This is so much worse than I thought. So in the game, the reason why the one in a thousand was chosen by the species that chose it for them, or the scientists who chose it for them, was he thought that this would stabilize the population because, well, it wouldn’t even stabilize it. It would just make its growth, not stupidly explosive aid.

If in human society, most human women had one kid per year, we wouldn’t say that’s stabilizing the population. But no, the krogan culturally doubled down on this and become even more violent and kill even more of their children, and [00:05:00] mass migrate off planet to become mercenaries. So, it proves the choice.

Malcolm Collins: And they thought that this meant that the Rogan population was declining fairly quickly in, in numbers.

And so there’s this huge moral choice of do you eradicate the genophage? Like do you cure this thing that is lowering the Rogan birth rate? Okay. Okay. I think the moral answer in this should be obvious. It’s so obvious. I have never been able to, whether I’m playing paradigm, whether I’m playing rogue, even wanting to see everything that happens in the game, I cannot bring myself to cure it.

It seems so obviously stupid to cure this. Okay. Because the species would just explode and destroy the galaxy, right?

Simone Collins: Well, yeah. It would be bad for the species, bad for probably anyone else.

Malcolm Collins: Bad for like the universe on a mega scale. Okay. So can you guess what [00:06:00] percent of gamers choose to cure the geno fish?

Simone Collins: 60%,

Malcolm Collins: 96%.

Gamers, you know, so this isn’t even like necessarily a particularly cooked population, right? When, when we think of gamers, like who do we think of, right? Like gamer gate, everything like that. Like gamers did vote with their wallets, gamers did leave. But these are still gamers nonetheless, right?

Simone Collins: So, well don’t you, this is somewhat of a, a trolley problem though, right?

Where no one wants to be responsible for pulling the lever that allows for death, I guess, right? So if they don’t, they don’t want to see themselves as responsible for participating in what could be argued as genocide adjacent, but they are actively

Malcolm Collins: pulling the lever because they’re curing the genophage.

You, they, they are, they are the ones actively curing something that’s

Simone Collins: already set in motion.

Speaker 4: And I wanna point out how absolutely [00:07:00] 96% of the population, how absolutely retarded you have to be to make this decision. This is not a species that right now will go extinct unless they continue the actions that they are taking, which is constantly killing each other, which is why they wanted to limit their reproduction.

But if you restore them to full reproduction, we’re not talking about a species that like humans. You know, at most is dealing with like four or five kids per woman, per generation. We are talking about a thousand children per year per woman who lives a thousand years with their TFR being what it is now.

So. EEG woman lives a thousand years. Let’s assume that she’s reproductive for 800 of them. , And, , she has one kid a year because only one in a thousand survive and they can fertilize a thousand per year. , [00:08:00] This means that it is a species that right now has a TFR of 800. Okay? Humanity. , Yeah. We’re at a TFR of like 1.6 in the United States.

The actual stupidity, like you, you are outright dooming the universe for sure. By curing this, I.

And if you say, oh, but the species can change. I’m sorry buddy. If having a TFR of 800 puts you at an extinction level event because you are so kill happy and you can’t change in that event, I really don’t think you’re gonna change for the rest of the universe. And. Even if one faction of Krogan decides to limit the reproduction, there is going to be other factions that don’t, that don’t care about the externalities, and then what do you do about them?

Exterminate them? Ho...

Us Vs Them: But Who is "Them"? (The Insanity of a Genophage Cure)