Austrian Economist on Why Tolerance Became the West's Highest Virtue and Incel Culture

Alexandra Kaschuta [00:00:00] I think it's, it's really interesting also how hungry for community people are in these cities. But because, you know, the anywhere culture is just not conducive to community. It's very much a transactional thing. You know, it's like, you know, kind of like in Fight Club. You have your single serving friends, you have lunch with them, but you're not really part of a thing. You're not, you're not forced to live together. 'cause in a small town, you're essentially kind of forced to interact. This is Jordan Gahl, a senior communications associate living in Minneapolis, Minnesota. And you are listening to the Van Scro podcast.

Vance Crowe [00:00:32] Welcome back to the podcast. I'm glad you're here. Today we talk with Alexandra Kta, who is a writer and Twitter phenom out there talking about things that are relatively controversial. Like, what is the role of women in the workforce and how much does that cost them in having children? Or why are some ideas completely open and able to be talked about in society, but other ideas not. This is one of the edgier podcasts I've done in a while, but it was refreshing because Alexandra comes at it from an economist's objective view of the world. So I really enjoyed this conversation, and if you like conversations like this and you think you'd like to join a community of people that have conversations about deeper ideas, then I highly recommend you check out the Articulate Ventures network. There you can find a group of about 50 people that are working on ideas, that are having conversations about what they think and what they believe, and they're having other people collide into these ideas and give them feedback, but not the sort of feedback we see on Twitter and Facebook where it's yelling and arguing, but instead the type of feedback that allows people to say, Hmm, I never thought about that before. I'm really glad you brought that up. So if you're interested in joining a collection of people that are away from the tragedy of the Commons, I highly recommend you go to Network dot Articulate Ventures and become a member of our private social media network. Alright, we're gonna get on to this interview with Alexandra Kta.

Vance Crowe [00:02:03] Enjoy Alexandra Kuchta, welcome to the podcast.

Alexandra Kaschuta [00:02:08] Thank you. It's nice to be here.

Vance Crowe [00:02:10] So you are brought to my attention by my good friend and executive producer of the podcast, Ben Anderson, who said, Hey, there's this character from Romania that I think lives in the UK that is writing about all of these concepts that we talk about, and you should check her out. And so I did, and I went to your Twitter page and I would say you have one of the most intriguing Twitter feeds of anybody I have seen in a very long time. So tell me about yourself. Who are you and why are you writing these? What I would say are somewhat radical ideas in, in the relative to the rest of the world?

Alexandra Kaschuta [00:02:47] Hmm. Who am I off the deep end there? I am a kind of a new addition to Twitter. I only started tweeting in in September, and it's kind of snowballed a little bit. I was writing essays for, for a longer time, kinda have a blog and just kind of throwing my essays into the void. I didn't really have that much of a following, but then I thought, you know, maybe Twitter would be a, a place to be if you're a writer. So went on Twitter and it got, yeah, I got a little bit of a following. And yeah, it's been pretty good. I mean, who am I? I used to be a journalist. I, I work in kind of tech finance now. I used to live in London, now I live in Romania where I'm from, in Transylvania. So yeah, I guess, you know, I've, I've always been interested in, in ideas. I'm an economist by trade, so I'm kind of interested in, in more large scale things and kind of how things interplay. So yeah, just, just a, a woman of many interests, that's for sure.

Vance Crowe [00:03:47] One of the first things that I read that I was like, oh man, that is hot, was one of your ideas where you said, living in this mostly post-Christian world, we are led to believe that tolerance is essentially the highest good, and that, and that you simplified it by saying, one thing that we all agree on is that Nazis are bad, and therefore tolerance is good. Break that idea down because it is a little bit mind bending for me.

Alexandra Kaschuta [00:04:15] Yeah, I think it's, it's our culture kind of like, you know, global homogenized cultures attempt to have a, a bit of an epistemology, a bit of a, you know, a consensus on what is true. And I think that the truest thing historically that everyone can pinpoint and that everyone has as an anchor is the second world war. It's, you know, it's kind of relatively fresh in our collective imagination. It, you know, conjures the most demonic aspects of humanity. It's like an incontrovertible evil. And because, you know, we don't, there is, you know, kind of this unifying western Christianity, it's kind of a bit a bit passe now. Most people are not either a religious or not really that tied into religion. So it's, it's kind of become, it's morphed into this, you know, core moral principle that, you know, we know this because this is, you know, this is our reference point. And tied to that, tied to, you know, Nazis are bad, there's also the concept of, you know, you need tolerance to make the, the global economy work. You essentially for us to play together, you know, tolerance must be the highest virtue. So I think that it's kind of an interplay between that. So, you know, the, the decaying of Christianity, because that's not a, a guiding principle anymore, you know, historical freshness and also the fact that it's, it's quite conducive to, to, to the global playing together that we kind of have to do as, as being part of the, the global economy. So tolerance is number one virtue and kind of to the exclusion of all others.

Vance Crowe [00:05:50] Yeah, and it's a weird thing because tolerance is a little bit like liberty in that liberty has this weird function that the only way it's valued is if people choose to value it. You can't force people to love liberty or to prioritize liberty, because if they make the trade off for safety, for example, then you no longer have liberty. Liberty is either number one or it's nothing. And when tolerance gets pushed up into the number one priority spot, then all of a sudden all of these other axioms or beliefs that you could have from Christianity now start getting sorted underneath that in some really unusual ways. So if you're coming from a Christian faith, the idea of tolerance doesn't, isn't repellent at in the beginning, but when you vault it all the way up to the primary spot, things get weird.

Alexandra Kaschuta [00:06:38] Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I think, yeah, as you said, the it, it does warp every other interpretation of reality because it also warps power because that's kind of what you see with this, you know, this wall of woke and essentially, you know, you kind of have to play the tolerance game and to kind of signal that you're the most tolerant and you're tolerant of these groups and these groups and all these other groups. And now it's kind of fracturing into, you know, how many groups can you be tolerant of? And you must do it in a very visual and, and, you know, very, you know, wonderful way and as publicly as possible to declare your allegiance to all these new groups. And it's, it's, it's kind of the, the machinations of power. This is, this is now the, the face of it, you know, this is the, the luxury belief that you must have if you wanna be part of the upper class, is to be extremely tolerant in a visible way of all these, you know, up and coming groups that need, need extra tolerance, or at least we're told they need extra tolerance or they need to be protected from other people that are less tolerant, we're told.

Vance Crowe [00:07:40] Yeah. And there's that weird kind of cultural thing where, you know, the, the swastika itself, you should not be tolerant of that or anything around intolerance. But then you juxtapose that against something like the hammer and the sickle, and that is, hey, this should be acceptable. Or people in college campuses could wear it around on their shirts. I've, I've been to places where the hammer and sickle is still up on the wall, and it's just one of those things where we have tolerance for some things and not for others. It's a weird, it's weird how those came up.

Alexandra Kaschuta [00:08:13] Yeah, I think it's, it's also, you know, it's, it's, in a way it's no problem, or at least it's not that important that, you know, the communist or communism in general, you know, ended up killing more people than than the Nazis could ever think of killing. It's the idea that in what, in what name were they c killed, you know, they were in under communism was all about, you know, brotherhood and equality and holding hands. The Nazis were more, more explicit in their, in their dark tendencies. And I think that's what people, you know, kind of like, oh, you know, at least a communist had good intentions. And I think it's, it's a lot about, you know, good intentions and professed intentions and professed virtue. 'cause if people know, or at least you know, that, they know that you're virtuous. And there's kind of this thing where, you know, at least, at least we all agree that, you know, good things are good and bad things are bad. And that's how we know that we're part of this, this class of people who, who make these distinctions, though most, most people, any normal person makes these distinctions, but this particular class makes him in a very, you know, visible way.

Vance Crowe [00:09:16] Yeah. And I know that you are a reader of Nasem Taleb, and I think I have a similar kind of love hate thing with him. I, I find his bravado to be really aggressive and something that's hard for me to understand. But he has some ideas that are brilliant, and one of them is the, the concept of the intransigent minority, right? Where there is a group of people that have a story in their head about the way the world ought to be, and they will just keep yelling and screaming and not accepting anything other than their way. And then what ends up happening is the middle of society that's like, oh, just give them a little bit, just, you know, give into that one demand and then it just keeps moving further and further. Do you agree that this is kind of where woke culture comes from? Or the reason woke culture has become so strong maybe?

Alexandra Kaschuta [00:10:03] Yeah, I, I think so because if you think about the whole system and everyone who's participating in it, you know, the intransigent minority, especially when it's something tied to, to moral values where, you know, your downside is very, very, very deep. If someone actually points you out as, you know, a a moral defector that you're someone who's, you know, unacceptable socially, but your upside, you know, even if it's small, if you virtue your signaling just a little bit is, is you know, good enough for you to post, you know, your black BLM things or whatever is needed, you know, whatever profession is required this month. And the even the upside is a little bit, and people do it sometimes just, you know, because they wanna, you know, hedge the downside, which can be catastrophic now because it's kind of been set up by this even small, you know, the, the little, the first mover had to be very small because the, the, the downside so catastrophic, you know, people tend and end up pushed into this direction just by the, by the sheer momentum of it.

Vance Crowe [00:11:01] Have you had the mob come after you for anything you've said?

Alexandra Kaschuta [00:11:06] Not yet. Not yet. I mean, depends what you call a mob. I've had, you know, detractors, I've had people say that I'm, I don't know, you know, people on Twitter complaining about me, but not in a systematic large scale way. So I think, yeah, not yet.

Vance Crowe [00:11:22] Is it something you are worried about

Alexandra Kaschuta [00:11:27] A little bit. 'cause I'm, you know, I'm a person. I'm, I'm out there with my own name. I'm not, you know, hiding behind, you know, anime avatars or anything. Yeah. I kind of, you never know, you know, if, if people start harassing my family or something like that, I wouldn't, I wouldn't be pleasant, you know, I, there probably wouldn't be that, you know, upset, but still, you know, there's always a risk.

Vance Crowe [00:11:51] And so you're in Romania right now, is, is the intransigent minority using woke culture there too? Is this an a global phenomena or just one in the west?

Alexandra Kaschuta [00:12:03] It it is, it is seeping in, I mean, our minority is not that intransient, but I think it's, it is part of a certain kind of like high status neoliberal culture that is high status. You know, if, if you're coming from Romania, you know, you speak English, you wanna be part of, you know, like the global hive mind of young people. If you go on the internet, this is mainstream. This is the culture, you know, people, you know, every, all every one of my girlfriends here knows about, you know, abortion laws in Alabama and who George Floyd is and all this type of stuff. 'cause this is, you know, this is the soul of the internet. This is what, you know, PepsiCo is thinking about. And this is what every, every advertiser on the internet is leveraging to, you know, create their rage bait and, and segment their audience.

Vance Crowe [00:12:48] And well, it's so interesting to think about young people wanting to be a part of the hive mind because if you came to a young person and said, is that what you want? They would say, no, I want to be an individual. But you do see people jumping in and loving all of the same celebrities, talking about all of the same issues. It's like a, a massive gravity. Well, that's so deep. People don't even realize that they're in it.

Alexandra Kaschuta [00:13:11] Yeah, exactly. And you know, it, it really is about status in a way, because if, if you know about these things, you already, you know, you have access to a certain type of media, which is kind of a higher status here. You speak English, you're, you're part of that. You're not like, you know, your average, you know, Romanian bumpkin who's not as sophisticated to, to actually get to become part of the hive mine. So there's kind of a little bit of a, a threshold to, to getting there. So, but I see this everywhere. There's kind of a bit of, I, I mean, I'm a millennial, this is kind of my, my milieu, but I see it in, in younger generations as well. You know, the, the, the mind of the young person is quite, you know, there, there's all sorts of little groups on the internet that you can be a part of, but they're all very global now. So, you know, you can just plug and play your, your culture. Whatever you're interested in

Vance Crowe [00:14:02] Is Romanian culture. You know, like in the, in the United States, when you think about culture, many people think, oh, well, we're just the most vanilla that there is. Because when you're inside of a culture, it's almost impossible for you to understand what is cultural, you know, how do you greet one another? How long should you stand and talk? When should you offer food? Those kinds of things. Do the Romanians also view themselves as having this sort of vanilla culture and like Yeah. How does that play out if you're living in that place?

Alexandra Kaschuta [00:14:34] I think because we're, we're kind of this little enclave among other enclaves in Europe and we have all sorts of like, kind of a bit of a heterogeneous ethnic population. We've got Hungarians living here in Transylvania. You're always rubbing up against other cultures and that makes it much more visible, you know, how you're different to, to other cultures, I guess, in America because, you know, the melting pot and people kind of having, you know, a bit more homogenous, at least ways of treating each other. Obviously now with, with more immigration, that's changing a little bit, but we've always had that here in Eastern Europe. So, you know, I'm about 10 kilometers away from the Hungarian border and sometimes I go to a restaurant in Hungary just because it's better than the one here. And there's always kind of a, a tension with other cultures and you kind of know, maybe it's a bit stereotypical. We kind of know how Romanians are, you know, Romanians kind of identify with the stereotypes and they know how Hungarians are and they also kind of identify with the stereotypes. And you also, you know, kind of have Western Europe pretty close by, which are also a completely different type of person, which is, you know, different from Germany to Austria. Even Czech Republic is different as well. So it's very, yeah, it's just very varied, the types of interactions that you have. So I think culture is pretty salient here, which I, I'm not sure to be honest, I've never been to the us I couldn't really tell you. I've only been to the US in, in my, you know, in my presence on the internet.

Vance Crowe [00:15:57] Well, so, you know, you talk about things that are really important to us, culture, particularly right now, one of which is how there's been a movement for women to be a deep part of, of the workforce. So they are told they should have careers and they should work hard in those careers and they should put off having children until many, many years later. And even even then, you had posted a tweet about that the high paying jobs can subsidize the fact that the women have to freeze their eggs to be able to have children later in life. Is that going on? Is that sort of culture happening in Romania as well?

Alexandra Kaschuta [00:16:36] It is, it is in the cities and it's, it's kind of slowly morphing into that because everything, everything that's happening in Western Europe and in the US is, is slowly happening here as well. The contrast between the city here, which is very similar to, you know, a place like London where I lived for a while, and the rural areas is still extremely sharp. So, you know, rural areas are, as you can imagine, but much more traditional and much more, you know, retrograde in some ways. But it, it is happening. I mean, people working in multinationals, you know, people delaying, you know, marriage, children prioritizing their careers, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's not necessarily new because it was under communism. It was kind of a very kind of forcefully, almost gender egalitarian norm where women, you know, had to be, you know, there had to be parody in some certain industries quotas, you know, they really, really forced through gender equality. And you know, we've had the huge numbers of women engineers, like in the fifties, sixties, it's, it was quite a, you know, almost kind of like an example country for how you can integrate women into the workforce. The second you didn't have to do that anymore, people just went, went back and, you know, became, you know, know, stay at home moms or nurses or stuff that, you know, wasn't necessarily as high status or as high earning, but was, you know, fit their lifestyle or their interest a bit more. And I see this a lot, especially in countries where, you know, gender equality is kind of like a state program. The second you lift the restrictions, people just relax back into, into like the, the, their, their normal momentum as men and women.

Vance Crowe [00:18:16] To me, that's some of the stuff that's the hottest that you put out, right? Like, because my wife and I waited a long time to have a child and, and then ended up having all sorts of problems that we did not expect. And, and like we talk about it that it's not really fair to say that somebody lied to us, but we were definitely taken in by this concept of just wait. The most fulfilled that you can be is by having a, a career. And then, you know, you can have kids on the side, but that's not fundamental to the human experience. And, but when you go out and talk about that stuff out in the wider public, people show up and they are very angry when you start to push against the kind of cultural changing norms towards having children at a later time. Is have you had, have you felt that?

Alexandra Kaschuta [00:19:05] Yeah, absolutely. I felt it on, on both ends. I mean, I was that that person, you know, who either didn't hear anything about, you know, about having children, it just wasn't a priority. It was all about building your career and people were keep keep telling, keep telling me to, you know, freeze my eggs and you know, whatever. You can have children at 40 and then you kind of have to go deep into like the bowels of the internet to get actual data about this stuff. 'cause it's not, it's not out there. No one's promoting this because it's, it's against, you know, it, it's kind of a, a freedom reducing aspect of, of nature. You know, this is, you know, this is the kind of thing that even with te the technology we have now, and there's been so much money poured into this, you can't really game nature that much, you know, but after 35 your fertility has a, you know, a inverse hockey stick. It just doesn't, it just doesn't work. So, you know, the fact that I know a lot of women just, you know, by being a woman and having women friends that kind of fell into this trap and then either were desperate to either get married in the short term or, you know, didn't really know what to do with themselves or went the other route and became like extreme feminist, you know, railed against the patriarchy and just kind of sublimated their, their rage into, you know, extreme politics with the pussy hats and the whatever marches it. You can see that there's, there's a problem. No one's really talking about what the source may be in a nuanced way. And I think the, the problem is nature itself, and that's probably the thing that greats greats feminist the most.

Alexandra Kaschuta [00:20:39] 'cause it's not really, you can't really introduce a social program that's gonna change this, this is, you know, the, the bare facts of, you know, nature red and tooth and claw and there's no way to overcome this.

Vance Crowe [00:20:51] Yeah, I think one of the hardest parts about this conversation is that, like, for example, my wife is an aerospace engineer turned physical therapist. Her iq her ability to operate in the world is super high. So there is definite value of having that level of intelligence be a part of the overall economic system. But because it's complicated, because having her in the workforce now, I, I think most people don't realize that one of the reasons we have so much pressure, downward pressure on wages, is we effectively doubled the amount of people in the workforce. And then at the exact same time didn't tell women like, Hey, you can deal with this. You, you, you must deal with the state of nature. This fact that we have, because the corporations actually benefit by saying, just put it off. Just put it off because you get the best working years of a woman. And those were years that that nature requires her to use into putting towards children. But it's just not a, it's too nuanced of a conversation for regular people to be having on a level that allows our culture to adapt.

Alexandra Kaschuta [00:21:57] Yeah, it was, it was quite shocking to, to find out that one of the, the big consulting firms just subsidized, you know, freezing someone's, someone's eggs, you know, just to, to to milk another five to 10 years outta their employees, which is,

Vance Crowe [00:22:10] Wait, no, that was legit. I thought that was a joke. They they actually did that.

Alexandra Kaschuta [00:22:14] Yeah, they, they help you fi finance it. It's, it's pretty, it's it's pretty intense. It doesn't surprise me, obviously. Whoa,

Vance Crowe [00:22:20] That's dark.

Alexandra Kaschuta [00:22:22] Some women would see this as a perk, you know, they've, they, it's either this or they have to pay for it. So I guess, you know, if, if they wanna, if they wanna put the bill, but it's, it is pretty dystopian. And the, the truth is, I mean this is such a, you know, such a so-called black pill territory. 'cause it is, it is pretty stark. You know, the reality of the situation is pretty stark. And, and even if you think, you know, you have this, these high IQ women who could, you know, benefit society immensely by becoming, you know, physicists or whatever, but they could also benefit society by having, you know, five extremely high IQ children who would, you know, go into the workforce and, you know, you know, propagate their intelligence in multiple directions. So it, it is in a way, you know, a a a local benefit or a proximal benefit, but it's also, you know, there the, the opportunity cost to, to spread the, the good genes is also a huge thing that no one wants to talk about. 'cause it's like, oh my God, this is like, you know, Handmaid's tale, you wanna turn women into breeding mares and whatever. But it, it is just a, the stark truth.

Vance Crowe [00:23:27] Yeah. And I think I was completely unprepared for this discussion. 'cause even I myself would would've told my wife like this, it would be a total loss for you to, to exit the workforce for any amount of time to have children. But now that we actually have a child, the the idea of forcing my wife to go work if she didn't want to, would be one of the most painful things that, that a husband could do, right? Because you see how much she wants to bond with the child, how much time she wants to spend with her. We're fortunate that she actually built her career so that, that way she could do both. But man, it's, it is not a conversation that is out in the open at, at all.

Alexandra Kaschuta [00:24:07] Yeah. And, and the way, you know, kind of the feminists in, in the west solve this problem is to just kind of offload it to lower income women. So it's not like, you know, the child is being raised by robots or by some, you know, ethereal cloud thing. It's still, there are still women who are not, you know, doing astrophysics or, you know, something, something really interesting. And, and personally, you know, developing or co contributing to society. It's just literally other women from lower income countries coming in, getting paid, you know, I don't know, 10 bucks an hour to play mother to your child. I don't know necessarily if, if displacing this work to, to the other place or just like maybe, you know, not having that bonding opportunity with your kid, especially. 'cause you know, a lot of the, the women nowadays are expected to be back in the office, you know, six months later and to go back to being a partner or whatever high intensity job they have. So, you know, childcare will be delegated to, to a care for, for a lot of them. It's, it's not this, you know, utopian egalitarianism that we imagine 'cause it's just, it's just mo shifting, shifting work around.

Vance Crowe [00:25:18] You used a term that I have heard of, but I don't think I could define black pill. So I'm, I'm well aware of, you know, taking the red pill. But what do the different pills mean for people that don't follow this stuff? Mostly

Alexandra Kaschuta [00:25:29] The different stages of the pill. I think a black pill is typically kind of the, the confrontation with a very, a very dark truth about, you know, kind of an invariant truth of, of human nature of nature in general. It's kind of like the, the, the darkest shade of red pill. 'cause you know, red pilling is kind of just being a bit, a bit kind of being awake to the realities that are kind of uncomfortable. Black pill is, for example, a black pill would be someone it's used a lot in the incel community. Like for, so for people who really don't have any prospects and, and you know, getting a girlfriend marrying, or at least they, they're on that mindset. They can't do that for them. A black pill would be that, you know, looks and height are extremely important and women really care about it. So, you know, they're, they're not gonna be able to, you know, to, to find a partner because of that. And they're, they're not very attractive. So that would be the black pill. And they, they have very specific ways to quantify why this is so, you know, the, the world of, in Sodom it's quite interesting and I think black pill's kind of associated with that. But it's, it's come into wider culture and it's just, you know, it just means a dark truth, A very dark truth.

Vance Crowe [00:26:38] How in the world do you know what incel culture is?

Alexandra Kaschuta [00:26:42] It's just like more morbid curiosity. I mean, I don't know. I've been, I I love to Google stuff. I like to, I've been like to lurk around weird forums just to see what people think and I'm not easily rattled. 'cause there's some places that are just like, woo, there's like, there's fumes of misogyny coming over them. So I don't think many women go in there, but I'm like, ah, you know, let's see, let's see what this is all about.

Vance Crowe [00:27:06] Well, we should talk about that community because I definitely have friends that didn't fit into the hierarchy. They were not great mate choices. They were really good guys. They had very low self-esteem and oftentimes felt like they couldn't fit into, you know, being an acceptable mate. And you can see why a group like the incel, which for anybody that doesn't know is like the voluntarily in voluntarily celibate, right? So they're, they they don't have a choice. They

Alexandra Kaschuta [00:27:36] Voluntarily celibate. Yeah,

Vance Crowe [00:27:37] Involuntarily celibate. Yeah, that's right. And it's just, it's a very unusual community because what most people don't realize is there are a lot of men out there that have literally no chance of, of finding a mate. And, and so it's a part of our society that we are not talking about or addressing. And it's easy to mock them, but you can't have an entire section of your, of your world be disconnected from marriage and, and sexual tension relief thing. Weird things happen in society when you do that.

Alexandra Kaschuta [00:28:08] Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's, it's kind of accelerated by changes, you know, in, in online dating where, you know, physicality and kind of like things that are hard to translate, you know, once you, you know, know someone are very important now. So, you know, people literally swiping through physical aspects of, of people and it's become I think, probably the top way of meeting someone now in 2020. And it's really, it's moving into that direction. So if you have a database that sorts people by attractiveness selecting your mates, you know, women tend to cluster around the top guys and you know, men kind of go for a mix, but there's a a bottom set of guys that never get picked because they don't qualify for the, the pretty high standards that women have, both in terms of physics of your physical appearance and also in terms of, you know, if you're successful, if you are, you know, if you look like you have your life together. And it's, it's, it's quite tough. And I think I, I read, I read recently that the, the levels of celibacy that exist now are very similar to those in like feudal medieval times. So I think it's like 20 to 25% of men are absolutely at least, you know, completely celibate. Which in, in previous times would've gone into, you know, being monks or there was kind of a social role for a man who's either voluntary or involuntarily celibate. Now that's gone and now they, I don't know, retreat into online fandoms and video games and things that, you know, just, just disconnect them even more from society.

Vance Crowe [00:29:39] Well there is a historical concept around, in international relations, around guesstimating, when will a culture ultimately go to war? And one of them is called bear branches theory. Meaning that when you get enough branches on a family tree that have no hope of growing new branches because they're not able, they're involuntarily celibate, you end up having huge increases to things like banditry gangs, groups of people that are social outcasts. So crime goes way up. And so you can actually look at different periods in history and look at when did giant conquests begin? And it oftentimes is in cultures where some men could take more than one wife. And so they would, they would soak up some amount of the available sexual partners and then those bare branches would become a, a danger. So eventually you would have to drum up a war to go to fight with an enemy outside of your country, otherwise they will decay your country from the inside. And when we were talking earlier about black pills, that that's one that seems like a real reality. If we can't solve the incel challenge in the United States or or around the western world, you will have a bare branches problem.

Alexandra Kaschuta [00:30:53] Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, you see this 'cause a a a lot of, you know, kind of the, the violence has been committed by, you know, people who've kind of been disenfranchised, you know, mass shootings and things like that. A lot of people like that were, were kind of, you know, being outcast like this, you know, they, they had no chances of having a mate. They were, you know, kind of confined to the video games section of, of society. And it's, it, it's kind of been on a break now, but I see how, you know, it, it would be possible that that's gonna, you know, accelerate and increase in time because the number of these people is increasing and also the, the, the callousness of society towards them is unchanging. There is no solution for them except for, you know, be yourself, go to the gym. So I mean, for some of these guys, you know, especially guys who've, you know, been kind of traumatized by being inadequate or awkward early in life, they just don't have, they, they don't have the bootstraps to, to just pick themselves up and just like become a social butterfly. 'cause they're already a bit social. They're, they're kind of pre-programmed to, to be socially awkward. And it's, it is a really hard jump. You know, for some people it's easy. I mean, if you've been, if you've kind of had a relatively decent time throughout high school and grade school and stuff, you can, you know, you can do the self-help route and just become a little bit better. But if the delta between where you are and where you have to be is that huge, it's, it's almost impossible. And these guys know it. And that's essentially the black pill.

Vance Crowe [00:32:22] Yeah. I, and I think when we lived in an agrarian society, you know, 1900 in the US at least 40% of the people, you know, lived and worked on farms. And so you had a geographic region and if you didn't fit in the family pretty much pushed you with somebody. But then as people started moving into the city and you start having this incel challenge in, in our culture and that delta gets wider and wider, it was the same time that you were talking about like the self-help thing came along and really most of the self-help was about tolerance for yourself. So it started being like, you should accept yourself exactly as you are. And then you have these people being like, yeah, but I don't like what's going on around me. I want something different. And they keep getting patted on the head and saying, oh, you should just accept yourself the way you are. Which is why I think people like Jordan Peterson had such a dramatic rise in, in, in the global culture. 'cause he was finally coming around being like, these are the things that you can do to, to, to get better. But if you don't have somebody that's a positive force, you will have people that come in and take advantage of that lost community as a negative force. They'll they'll use it to their own ends.

Alexandra Kaschuta [00:33:31] Exactly. I mean this is a, a, a perfect breeding ground for all sorts of radicalism. And I mean, it's, to me, I think it's not surprising that Islamic radicalism has taken root in, in kind of these disenfranchised communities of young men in Europe that, you know, they're not part of mainstream culture. They live in these enclaves like, you know, at the outskirts of towns. You know, they prospects aren't that great. They're not, you know, their prospects aren't that great with, with local women who, you know, just have a tendency to like local men more, you know, the, the girls in their community are also kind of off limits. There's all sorts of restrictions around sex and you know, there there comes this arian cult where you can be like a soldier of light. Yeah, sign me up, you know, of course I wanna be part of isis. You know, it's much more fun than being, you know, someone who's a loser in in my own community. And I'm sure there's all sorts of variants of this, you know, for all sorts of other, you know, subgroups and it's just, you know, we're just, like you said, you know, the, the naked branches situation, we're just creating a breeding ground and not addressing these problems for all sorts of other nightmares that we can't even imagine now.

Vance Crowe [00:34:36] Yeah. And that's the, the speed with which culture is changing is only getting faster. And like our imagination that hey, the craziness that just happened in 2020, like I, I find it almost like to be a, a really obnoxious when people are like, oh, I just can't wait for 2020 to be done because then we can finally get past all this craziness. And it's like, no, no, the reason we're in this craziness is because it appears to me that we're in a chaotic era. We're in an unstable time when so much change has happened that literally no one can predict what will happen. They, they, they're the it's at times like these, when you discover those black pills that you were talking about earlier.

Alexandra Kaschuta [00:35:19] Yeah, exactly. And you know, there's, there's so much complexity in the system and like Naim tale episodes, there's so much fragility in the system as well. 'cause everything's so interconnected. You know, we saw this, you know, with the idea that the US isn't producing penicillin, like hasn't really been for the last 20 years. And now it's like, oh, it's just, you know, Ricardian, you know, a local specialization Yes. Until you have a pandemic and the whole system crashes or, you know, there's, there's so much fragility and everything being tied together and, and having, you know, so many butterfly effects butterflying at the same time that that's, that makes ev everything completely unpredictable. And you know, little things like this, you know, in seldom could be a huge historical force that no one's even thinking about.

Vance Crowe [00:36:02] Yeah. And I think that the, the pushback that people have when they feel like a certain worldview or a certain thing is going on that they don't agree with, and people talk about that pendulum swinging, but it's oftentimes we think we know where that pendulum is gonna swing, but it doesn't swing exactly back the same direction it came. It goes in a slightly different vector. And one of the things that you had written about that I found to be totally interesting was this paleo conservatism, which I had never heard, but I saw you with a photograph with your, was that your grandmother with the, with the food all around at this giant table? What is going on with paleo conservatism?

Alexandra Kaschuta [00:36:39] Yeah, it's, it was just a, a kind of a joke. I think there's just kind of this meme going around of, of, you know, people, you know, people who are very online and have all these like ideological labels tied to them. You know, they're hyper boyan, you know, paleo conservatives, all sorts of things. Trad things that, that people like to associate themselves with online and how they try to explain that at dinner with their, with their parents during Thanksgiving

Vance Crowe [00:37:02] Or

Alexandra Kaschuta [00:37:03] Christmas. So that was essentially my, my grandmother, unfortunately, she died years ago. So this was a stock eastern European granny, but kind of looked almost the same to me on all Eastern European grannies, kind of have a same similar look. And essentially I was just listing paleo conservative as one of the things that I would have to explain to this, this hypothetical granny and, and what is, what is up with paleo conservatism. It's, it's, I think it's a useful term. 'cause you know, people ask me like, so what, what, what do you believe? What's your thing? And the paleo conservatism used to be, it's, it's essentially an American movement. You know, it's kind of the conservatives that didn't really wanna be part of Vietnam or didn't think nation building was a, was a good thing. And then you kind of had the split between the paleo cons and the neocons and you know, everyone knows about the neocons that, you know, love to go get some oil somewhere else or like to nation build, go and, and do some conquering or some, some democratizing in other places. And the paleo conservative was kind of a bit of a more parochial type of conservative that kind of took into consideration the fact that, you know, people are, are local beings. They, they, they cluster together in families and groups and communities. And that's kind of a, the, the nucleus of thriving for people. And it, the, the more you expand these circles, the more instability you bring into, into society. So you kind of have to start locally and be decentralized and kind of, you know, yeah, just have this, this parochial human as the, as the center of, of your organizing principle.

Alexandra Kaschuta [00:38:37] There's, there's more layers to this. But I think to me that's, that's kind of the, the, the core of it.

Vance Crowe [00:38:43] I think it's so important to have names for things, even if the name doesn't encompass every aspect of something. Because when I was in graduate school, so I studied diplomacy, there was no like response to neoliberalism. It was just like, neoliberalism are the facts of the world. And that, you know, what we believe, like, not, not even what we believe is the right thing. It is, it is inevitable that we will move towards a more United nations world. That the World Bank, for example, will have much, much more power. And really ultimately when we get there, then all of the good guys will be in the right place and the bad guys will be pushed out. And so when I look back on that experience, as much as I learned, I also realized there was a whole set of ideas that remained in the dark. Because there wasn't even a name for them. There wasn't even something you could do to describe paleo conservatism.

Alexandra Kaschuta [00:39:37] Yes, absolutely. I mean, I, my education is a, as an economist, and it was the same thing. It was actually interesting 'cause it was a very neoliberal education. There was no, you know, Milton Friedman Hayek, no one, no one actually mentioned these guys until, until I had to research it a bit later. And interestingly, 'cause I studied in, in, in Austria at the Vienna, at the Austrian School of Economics, which is oh

Vance Crowe [00:40:02] My gosh. Oh, all right. Which

Alexandra Kaschuta [00:40:03] Is very funny when no, none of the Austrian were mentioned about my education. It was all, you know, very Stig, very krugman esque type of type of economics. And strangely they called neoliberalism essentially everything that they didn't like about neoliberalism. So essentially for, for them, the, the obviously we're going into the direction that you just described, you know, for world government, everything's very consolidated, everything's centralized. But the problem with current neoliberalism was that it was under-regulated. So it just needed a bit more regulation, a bit more centralization, a bit more super nationalism, and then things would be fine. And everything that was wrong with that was called neoliberalism. 'cause I think when I went to college was kind of during Occupy Wall Street. So neoliberalism was a really kind of a, it felt like a bad word, it had a bit of a stench to it. So whatever we didn't like about neoliberalism, which is obviously the thing they propped up with all their might. 'cause the school that I went to was just essentially a farm from McKinsey and, and Bain and things like that. So they like neoliberalism. They definitely didn't dislike it, but they do love to use kind of the cool terminology. 'cause it doesn't really mean anything, you know, it, it, I I understand what neoliberalism means to me, but you know, you can use it to mean whatever. So it, it was really interesting that they, that they did this switcheroo.

Vance Crowe [00:41:25] Yeah, the, the naming of terms and how those names change over time is, is one of those things that like, it goes on in society and it happens and you wake up one day and you're like, wait, that's not what that used to mean. And I think that happens with all kinds of movements. Like, you know, occupy Wall Street turns into the 99%, which then turns into more wokeness and maybe it's BLM or something else. But you like when, when you stop and you're like, Hey wait, where can we draw the clear lines about where this movement started and then, and then what it ended, it almost never happens. 'cause it's always this rolling ball.

Alexandra Kaschuta [00:42:03] Yeah. It's, it's interesting and I think, you know, like semiotics is a, is a, is a branch of people's is definitely understudied. And I think, you know, a a lot of Donald Trump's success is tied into this. You know, he's a, he's a symbol manipulator. He really knows how to create a picture in your mind. And I think, you know, he's, he's definitely a master at that. And I think a lot of, a lot of institutions and organizations, you know, hire people who know, know how to do this very well and they kind of mold your perception with the use of symbols. And I think, you know, what, what you call things is, you know, the the, the ultimate symbol. And yeah, some, some people are very savvy in how to use that. And I think this morphing terminology as part of that, the fact that, you know, people can co-opt words or, or release them or, or make them completely negative, you know, almost overnight. It's, it's pretty, it's pretty crazy.

Vance Crowe [00:42:59] Well, and I think, you know, when we talk about naming things, it's, that goes all the way if you go to look at basically any founding document, founding religion, and we can take the Bible for example, it is, before they even get out of the Garden of Eden, God gives Adam and Eve the power to name things. And then what they're named is supposed to remain immutable because in the, in the world of logic, right, whoever creates the definition controls the argument. So if, if you get to change the way that words, how words are defined, you can actually win an argument without ever having done anything to make your point. Correct. You just change the definitions as you moved.

Alexandra Kaschuta [00:43:39] Exactly. I think a lot of, a lot of woke arguments are won that way. You know, just wait two years and, and wait for the goalpost to shift in your direction and then you're a winner. Yeah. Just enough patience. It works out.

Vance Crowe [00:43:52] One of your other writings that struck me was somewhere people versus anywhere people. And I was definitely at one point in my life in anywhere person, and now living in St. Louis, Missouri, I find myself morphing into a somewhere person. How do you describe this concept? 'cause I thought it was a fascinating one.

Alexandra Kaschuta [00:44:13] Yeah, it's essentially in a way it's the difference between like our, the, our neoliberal betters, you know, the kind of the, the class that just knows how to play well in, in a global context. You know, the, the people who could, could and do live anywhere. And they're part of kind of this, this universalist culture. And they're also often associated with, you know, liberal politics. They've, you know, they're, they're kind of the, the open borders people. They want, they want the world government, they want all of this, you know, they're very concerned about the environment. There's just kind of a set of almost luxury beliefs that you have to, you know, plug into to, to be part of the set. And then on the other hand you have the, the somewhere people which are essentially, you know, your, your average Joe who is from a place, you know, has family in a certain place, is tied to customs, to their kin, to, to, you know, the morays of of of the Yeah. The local place. And if they are displaced and put into a more, you know, cosmopolitan place, they might feel out of place because yeah, they're, they're somewhere they're, they're from somewhere and they like to be somewhere and they're invested in that place.

Vance Crowe [00:45:28] Yeah, I used to always make the comparison when I moved to South Orange, New Jersey from California, people would be like, oh my gosh, it would be so great to live in California. And my point to them was always, well actually one of the weird things about the community on the coast of California, if you're in the agriculture section, it's not the same way. But on the coast, everybody moved out there as they grew up and turned 18 or 21 or whatever because they wanted to get away from the people that didn't understand them or didn't, you know, appreciate them for their individuality. So along the coast you have a whole bunch of people that are individuals and that there's no, there's virtually no community building, they're transient. As soon as they don't like it, they move on. Whereas a place like South Orange, New Jersey, nobody goes there 'cause they think, oh, the, the environment looks so great, or I love passing by factories. They're all there because that's their small town, their community, they understand how everything operates. So as a new person going to a place, I felt like New Jersey was way more open than the, than the anywhere filled coast of California.

Alexandra Kaschuta [00:46:32] Yeah, I think, I think it's, it's really interesting also how a hungry for community people are in these cities, but because, you know, the anywhere culture is just not conducive to community. It's very much a transactional thing. You know, it's like, you know, kind of like in fight club you have your single serving friends, you have lunch with them, but you're not really part of a thing. You're not, you're not forced to live together. 'cause in a small town you're essentially kind of forced to interact, you know, you know the baker and if you don't know the baker and you're not friends with him, you might not get bread or you know, there, there's certain, there's a bit of a forcefulness to, to being a local that you have to integrate with in the big city or in these anywhere communities. You don't have to do anything. You don't have to know your neighbors, you don't have to interact with anyone. 'cause you have a transactional relationship with everyone. You know, they're the person who brings you your food is some nameless, faceless Amazon employee, the person who brings you everything else. It's also, you know, the, these are very low touch experiences and, and yeah, living with people is pretty tough. And if, you know, if you're, if you're have to choose and you usually don't, but then after, you know, years of doing that, you really feel the whole of not having a community. 'cause it is just kind of a human universal that you'd need that. But there's also no clue of how to do it. I really see people kind of grasping at straws, not knowing, you know, you know what it is that creates community. Well I think at, on some level, constraint is what creates community. You know, being forced to live together is what creates community.

Vance Crowe [00:47:59] Yeah. Social media is so much a, an honor culture, right? Where people go out there and they fight to the death and it becomes this very much zero sum game where if you somehow best me, I'm obliterated, which is why you, I can let loose on you, but if you're going to the same community group every week, or you're going to the same baker every week, the people you encounter, you can't just annihilate them because you have to see them next week and the week after and the week after. And so all of a sudden it tempers your own emotions. And I think that that also makes you more porous to other people having an influence over you. I think like social media has given us this illusion of conflict and feedback, whereas we're actually not getting it. And that's what you get in community. You get people actually hold a mirror up to you and say, Hey, this is what I see whenever I interact with you. I like it. I wanna make more of it happen. You get invited to more things and social media just doesn't work that way.

Alexandra Kaschuta [00:48:59] Yeah. And it's essentially there's no obligation in social media. Yeah. Not the same obligation that you'd have to family or to close friends or people you actually physically interact with, you know, in social media, even if people, you know, shower you with praise, it's a very shallow level of, of interaction. It's like they could unfollow you tomorrow and that would be it. You know? That's, that's it. And I think a lot of people just kind of like it. I mean, I like it. It's just great to tell, have people tell me, oh, this is amazing. But also it's, it doesn't really, it's, it's just not a human interaction. It's a, it's kind of a human machine, human interaction. It's always, you know, the, the, the layer of of, I don't know, distortion between me and the other person. Even if we are communicating about real things and, you know, it's, it's all kind of tokenized, you know, it's all like, oh, I, it's not that the person likes my thing, it's that they gave me a, like there's always the, the layer of, of, you know, the fang signaling or tech oligarchy.

Vance Crowe [00:50:00] Yeah,

Alexandra Kaschuta [00:50:01] Yeah, exactly. Trying to, trying to, trying to make them addicted to me and me addicted to them as well, which is also kind of a bit distorting. It's also a bit, a bit dystopian, the fact that, you know, these, these machines are calibrated to milk my attention to a, a crazy degree and they do the same to you and essentially they're selling me to you and you to me. Which is, you know, it's, it's always a, a, a weird, a weird thing to think about.

Vance Crowe [00:50:27] I think that your point here about people not knowing how to create that community is actually something I'm, I'm grappling with right now. Because you have coronavirus, which has given everybody permission to violate all social, you know, constructions that they had before. If you don't want to go to a meeting, you don't have to anymore. If you don't want to see people, you can say, ah, I'm not feeling well and nobody's gonna question it. But then on top of that, like we don't actually know what it takes to run a community organization. Like how do you keep running into people? What do you do when you have somebody that dominates the group? Because we've lost all those skills that I think normally would've been enculturated by people growing up with, you know, in the US it'd be four H and FFA, these children's organizations that ultimately morph into adult organizations. And now we don't have either really.

Alexandra Kaschuta [00:51:17] Yeah, it's definitely a, a thing, you know, it's a, it's a, if you don't lose it, if you don't use it, you lose it type of situation. Even with like social skills and I mean, we've had entire generations that have never really developed social skills. I think it's, it's quite a, you know, transhumanist situation that we're in. You know, liking something is not a social skill. You know, being able to negotiate conflict with, you know, a group of people and, you know, pick out, you know, what, what you're gonna play today. That's, that's how you, you kind of rub up against other people and their interests and that's how, how you develop them. I mean, I can, I can see this in myself as well. I mean, I used to be much more of a social person. And now with Coronavirus especially, I'm a bit like, I feel like I've kind of slightly got, you know, self, self-induced autism where I'm just not, not always sure what exactly is happening when I'm in a social situation. 'cause I'm just so starved of it. Or just haven't had the chance to Yeah, to practice.

Vance Crowe [00:52:11] Yeah. Well, like with a four month old child, I am constantly looking for any signal on her face, like through emotion. And I find myself having this one experience with the child in my home. I'm watching her intently. And then you go out into public and you have two thirds of somebody's face wiped away. It, it turns out that now in today's culture, the emoji is about as much emotional spin as you can put on things because in real life the mask covers it up. You, you, it's like, I don't know about you, but I feel like normally I would smile at people and it would encourage this interaction and now I don't get that. And I think that this is gonna have really weird long-term impacts on our culture that people just are not, you're not even allowed to bring it up because to question the validity of masks in and of itself is, is seen as abhorrent.

Alexandra Kaschuta [00:53:04] Yeah. This is exactly what I was thinking about in the last few days. 'cause we, we have a, like a total mask mandate here in, in, in our city, and it's like indoor outdoor all the time. And it's, it's really distorting because like you said, you just, you don't get even those minimal interactions, you know, 'cause you don't interact with people. You can't even smile to a stranger. It's, it's dehumanizing. It really is. And I mean, whatever the effic, you know, efficacy of masks is, is it, what's, what is this doing to us? It's quite, it's quite a, you know, quite a dystopian reality. Also. There is no end date to this mask mandate here. You know, we've had it in, in, in effect for about a month. There's nothing either on like the government websites, you know, in the news. Nothing. It's just indefinite.

Vance Crowe [00:53:51] And we don't even have a place outside of social media where we're able to gather to have a reasonable discussion that is more than 280 characters at a time or a 32nd news story. Well, Alexandra, I would love to keep this going. In fact, if you'll come back on again, I would love to have you on, if people wanted to read your writings or check out some of the stuff we've talked about today, where would they go to do that?

Alexandra Kaschuta [00:54:14] I'm pretty much mostly active on Twitter now, so I'd be at Kata on Twitter. And I have my blog that is called sort alex out.com, which is yeah, which is kind of my, my older essays. And I'm, yeah. And I'm increasingly more published in all sorts of outlets. But if you go to my Twitter, all of my links are there in my, my profile.

Vance Crowe [00:54:36] Well, I absolutely loved exploring that and I will be a big voracious reader. So thanks for coming on, Alexandra.

Alexandra Kaschuta [00:54:43] Thank you so.