In this enlightening episode, Simone shares insights from her grandmother's memoir, "Memoirs of a French War Bride," which recounts her experiences living in occupied Paris during World War II. Malcolm and Simone discuss the hardships endured by civilians during this time, from food shortages and air raids to the constant fear of informants. They explore how these experiences shaped the post-war generation, instilling a sense of purpose and resilience that seems to be lacking in modern society. The conversation delves into the allure of teen dystopias, the dangers of dwelling on trauma, and the importance of opting into hardship to build the mental fortitude needed to overcome adversity. Join them as they reflect on the lessons we can learn from our ancestors and the need to cultivate a strong sense of purpose in the face of contemporary challenges.
Simone Collins: [00:00:00] I think there may be this deep, subtle craving in the generation that really got into teen dystopias because there's this desire to live this life of deprivation and desperation, but more importantly, striving to survive, because given that opportunity.
You do have motivation again. You do have a reason to believe and. I feel like there's this desire for that, When we think about everything that our ancestors went through and everything that they sacrificed to create a better world, because they did incrementally contribute to a better world, no matter how small it may have been, they did contribute.
How can we complain about what we
Malcolm Collins: have? like, if you're a cult and you're trying to break someone psychologically down, that's what you target for.
First is their pride in who they are to make them think that they're nothing so that then you can brainwash them. And it's a naturally evolved mechanism. It's not like this was maliciously chosen by the left, but just the leftist traditions that did this ended up recruiting more people than the ones that didn't.
And so now it's become the predominant strategy of the left within the [00:01:00] educational system within everything like that.
Would you like to know more?
Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone. I am very excited for this one. We did an episode called Kids Used to Like Their Parents. And it actually did fairly well. I strongly suggest people watch it. It is on a, a diary or autobiography I found of one of my ancestors.
And today we are going to be diving into the autobiography of one of Simone's ancestors and the things that it has taught us about our modern society. So Simone, take it away.
Simone Collins: Yeah, I my, my, I've read it before, but not since I was a teen. My grandmother wrote a book, an autobiography, or at least a portion, she read about a portion of her life in a book called memoirs of a French war bride, which had a limited publication release.
And Doesn't it's difficult to get, but it's actually quite interesting. Because what she does is recounts her experience as a late teens. So [00:02:00] we'll say 18 to early twenties living in occupied Paris during world war two. And it really. Has made me think differently about everything from teen dystopias to dating in a way that I quite like.
So I thought it might be fun to talk about. But the first thing that really did strike me was just how, how bad it was for, for people, even in just occupied areas of a nation. You know, this wasn't, this wasn't people You know, just dealing with a new regime suddenly coming in and being kind of mean it was people fleeing Paris in cars running out of gas and then driving along on roads that were constantly being bombed by planes.
So my grandmother. And her, her two parents and her aunt fled Paris in an attempt to not die. When the Nazis came [00:03:00] in, they didn't know what they were going to do. But nearly died quite a few times because Italians and Germans would bomb the roads, major roads leading out from Paris, even though this was civilian traffic which is insane.
I had no idea that that was happening. But imagine just trying to leave your city. And. Lying in ditches by the side of the road and having cars be bombed. At one point, a horse cart flipped over on top of her and she would have died. Had she not been in a depression under the road, they were machine gunning, civilians running into wheat fields from the road.
So I just had forgotten how, because we mostly read in high school about frontline experience where we look, we see movies about what soldiers were experiencing when fighting in the war. I don't think we realized what it was quite like for civilians.
Malcolm Collins: What I really like about this, what it reminds me, both writing my own ancestors accounts of the period right before this in history, and your ancestors accounts of this period in history, [00:04:00] is How history in the U.
S., like secular U. S. education, has become so focused on the sins of, basically the sins of the white man. Like that is what the history is these days. It's just over and over again that, and then some stuff tied to frontline battles but very little on the average lifestyle of the average white man.
Going through many of these events whether they were civilians or like, what was it actually like to just live as a normal person in the old west? Right? Like that's, that's what I was reading was in my family's account. Her family's account. What was it actually like to be a teenage civilian in. Paris during the
Simone Collins: occupation.
Yeah. Like what was it like to dance? What was it like to like, try to date?
Malcolm Collins: Dancing
Simone Collins: was a really, yeah. So in occupied France, you could not convene with, with two, more than two people on the street, basically. So any sort of social [00:05:00] gathering for college students, which is what she was throughout this period.
was completely out of the question, but that didn't stop anyone. So what they would do is pack themselves into a small Parisian apartment and dance with a record playing very softly and someone would wait at the door. And if anyone heard footsteps and they would all just immediately freeze, turn off the record and wait.
And of course all the windows are blacked out. All of the windows are closed. No one has air conditioning. It's, it's, it's, typically like dead of heat in the summer. So these people are sweating like pigs. I, I, I don't know why you would bother dancing at all, but they really, really wanted to. And they would sometimes when she spent some time in the countryside outside Paris, there would be barn dances that were similar.
Someone would be waiting outside and looking to see if any Germans were on patrol. So to think that people it's, it's funny now that like, people cannot be bothered to date at all. And yet here are these people in occupied Germany, risking their lives just so they could dance. No, we can't. Now we're [00:06:00] going in a totally different direction of Hikigomori.
You know, people are not leaving their apartments. The internet has changed a lot in that respect. But what I also read about dancing during this period as a. We'll say sexual signalings, sexual display and and social compatibility tool is way underrated. And I didn't quite think about that until this book, even after the war.
My, my grandmother ended up marrying. A lieutenant in the U. S. Air Force that she met while he was on a five day leave in Paris. And that is because the Red Cross would host these dances for soldiers and for local French women who spoke English just to kind of, I don't know, boost morale or something.
And she described because she would go to these mostly to smuggle home donuts because she was really hungry and she liked donuts and they had them there. But she would go and, and the dancing, she described it as being in [00:07:00] this almost clinical way. Of, of, of how she would use a dance to judge potential partners.
So it was, how did they approach you? Did they smile? Were they stuttering when they tried to ask you for a dance? Once you started dancing, did they get clingy and want to spend the whole time with you? Did they grab you too forcefully? Did they even know how to dance? Did they have the social graces to dance really well?
How did they smell? I mean, like you, it's interesting to me because it is a really good way of judging personality and sexual compatibility without doing anything untoward. You know what I
Malcolm Collins: mean? Yeah. Yeah. Well, and it's used so much across traditional cultures and it's interesting how much we have lost the traditional dance as a partner sourcing mechanism.
Because, you know, you're not getting that with something like twerking or something like that.
Simone Collins: No, no, no. Yeah. Dancing in a club, I don't think is quite the same thing.
Malcolm Collins: But, but, but traditional line dancing and, and, and Kaylee and stuff like that is, is definitely of this variety of dance. There was another thing that, so [00:08:00] one thing I just want to, you know, as she goes over these stories about what her grandparents went through, like her grandfather also went through this horrible thing where he was lost in the woods during this period.
And, and, and everyone on his plane died. And we might do a separate video about that. That would be like our version of a Mr. Bolin video. But I might pitch it to Mr. Bolland because it sounded so much like a Mr. Bolland story when I heard it. But and I tried to elevate this was with my family history is people look to their parents generation and say, look at how hard we have it in this generation.
Oh, yeah, so laughable when World War Two was just our grandparents ago, when all around the world, imagine what it would be like, like, people are like, yeah, but that's not in the world today. Imagine what it'd be like to be in Haiti today to be growing up there to be a young girl there. All around the world today, people are experiencing these things.
You in the developed world. Do not have a hard life. You just [00:09:00] don't, no matter how hard you think your life is. It is a joke easy compared to your ancestors. Well, this is
Simone Collins: what made me think completely differently about teen dystopia fiction is I remember reading it when I was younger. I still sometimes read it because it's fluffy and ridiculous, but reading it, I get this feeling of, wow, like what a crazy sci fi world.
Could you ever imagine something so horrible as this? You know, people spying on you all the time and you know, the, the horror of that or being deprived. That happened. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So in occupied France a lot, and because resources were really scarce, a lot of people In every local neighborhood decided to become informants to the Germans.
And you could never really tell until you could who was an informant. So people were terrified to talk to each other. People were terrified to be honest about anything except with their closest family members,
Malcolm Collins: the [00:10:00] bread would
Simone Collins: have like, yeah, no. And it will, of course, yeah, the food rationing was terrible.
And the, the bread that was left for the French people because everything was being sent to Germany. Was the worst leftover. It was mixed in with sawdust. They would find rubber bands in it, bits of mouse. It was just completely gross and disgusting. They were given half a pound of butter every month as a family to cook with theoretically, although they didn't always have enough coal to cook with.
So, you know, my grandmother said that. When people greeted each other, it was never, Oh, how are you doing? How's the weather? It was, do you have enough coal to make dinner tonight? Did you actually get your food ration today? Because you'd be waiting in line for hours. You had to have a dedicated family member for it essentially.
But. They, they tried to preserve their half pound of butter by making it float in a bowl of cold water because they didn't have a refrigerator. It was just so desperate and terrible. And the, yet despite all this, everyone continued to work. My grandmother went and got a law [00:11:00] degree and political science degree at one of the major Parisian universities.
Everyone still had to live their lives. And. They, they came out so much better and I realized
Malcolm Collins: not working as well in this context.
Simone Collins: Yeah. This, yeah.
Malcolm Collins: Bizarre. All women had jobs back then. Like, I don't know what modern people, one of the things that you mentioned that I thought was really interesting is you were talking about butchers having this high class in this society because they could like smuggle meat.
Beyond what was a lot of the people,
Simone Collins: yeah, they did really well,
Malcolm Collins: apparently the regular butcher's house and the man would do all the cutting and the woman would manage the, the, the books and the selling of the meat. And this is just the way things were historically. There were not like women not working.
And
Simone Collins: this was this, yeah, this was like 1940. You know, late 1940s. So this was, this was right
Malcolm Collins: around Shraddwey's period. You know, her mom had a job. She had a job. The sister who was living with them had a job. Oh no, the mom didn't have a job. The mom's job was waiting at food lines, but you needed that back then.[00:12:00]
But anyway, get back to the context of this as a teen dystopia.
Simone Collins: Yeah. Well, so it made me realize when, you know, she also described the, the ebullience in Paris and how happy and childlike everyone became when. The allied forces retook the city and how relieved and excited people were, but also how she felt in moments when she thought she was going to die when bombings were taking place or when she slow mo knew that a horse cart was about to fall completely on top of her and probably kill her, she didn't feel.
Nihilism. She didn't feel malaise. She felt a desperate desire to survive and have a family and have kids and in some way, moderately contribute to the improvement of society, which is so interesting to me. And then there's, of course, everyone got this huge boost and motivation after. The war ended to go and do something and build the world and have kids and have a family and even families that suffered from infertility.
It seems like there was a lot of adoption taking place as well. She keeps [00:13:00] mentioning friends who had adopted kids and it, it strikes me that there's maybe this craving for hard Simone, by the way. Yeah. Like war from, but also I can imagine a lot of people fighting in the war. We're exposed to so many really dangerous chemicals that they became infertile.
My grandfather got every color of cancer on the rainbow. And I think a lot of it had to do with the stuff he was exposed to in the air force. But I think there may be this deep, subtle craving in the generation that really got into teen dystopias because there's this desire to live this life of deprivation and desperation, but more importantly, striving to survive, because given that opportunity.
You do have motivation again. You do have a reason to believe and. I feel like there's this desire for that, although we would never choose it and no one ever wants these terrible things to happen. Well, no, no,
Malcolm Collins: no. Individually, they don't want to, but I think that they, they fantasize about it more than I think you would admit.
Both women and men, and it's [00:14:00] interesting that the way that each group fantasizes about dystopia, I think, is often somewhat different. Yeah. Then it is apocalyptic dystopia where they are rebuilding society, which you often have in the apocalypse narratives, like
Simone Collins: fallout zombie stuff. Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Whereas with women, it's like French occupation, right?
It's society is ordered. It's unfair. People are stratified based on their birth. You know, it's
Simone Collins: more, it's more handmaid's tale. It's more, hunger games, et cetera.
Malcolm Collins: But these are both pretty horrifying. What's interesting is that these were often the roles because many of the women who were under these societies, like the men weren't there, they were out fighting.
They were actually living a separate apocalypse. And so, we forget that the people recently went through these things and that in a way it made them better people. And they really seems to have parents generation. was the first generation to genuinely live in a post scarcity environment. And by that, what I mean is, you know, not starving to death [00:15:00] as like a major risk of everyone's life.
That is what destroyed them to an extent. And this isn't to say that you can get around, you can get around this in this generation. There are solutions. It's called living with austerity. You know,
Simone Collins: for a reason, though, and I think people have to live with austerity because we know a lot of so a big group that lives with austerity are the people who are trying to live forever, right?
You know, they have these very strict diets. They're on all these vitamins. They can't, you know, eat at certain times. They have to work out in this very specific way. That is a life of deprivation. But I also don't see them as being terribly satisfied or content people in the same way that I get this feeling from post war boomers, not boomers post war greatest generation members.
Do
Malcolm Collins: you get that? It's because they're not living with A meaningful purpose, their purpose is a fear of yeah, so it's actually one of the funny things that we tweeted recently where I was like, it's funny that, and you and I have talked about this, neither one of us has a [00:16:00] particularly acute fear of death.
Like, I really don't mind if anything, I look forward to eventually dying.
Simone Collins: It's the reward at the end of this thing.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Once I finished all the tasks that I have, and keep in mind, we don't believe in a strict afterlife either. I just, you Don't really fear death yet. I am desperately excited to be alive.
I love my life. It's awesome. It is, it is, you know, the greatest life I could imagine for myself. And yet when I look at the people who fear death the most, they often do not seem to enjoy life. A, a fear of death is to me, a hope of finding some meaning in the future because you haven't found it yet.
You haven't, once you. know how great life can be because you are fighting for something that matters and that means something to you, and you know that your actions You know, if everything works out, end up having an impact on society that is like, you know, then, then you're like, okay, this is it.
Like I've done the good thing. I just need to complete the good thing. Then I get to [00:17:00] die, you know?
Simone Collins: Yeah. And one, another thing I think about too is aside from just this choosing deprivation and having a purpose thing. Now there's so much Abundance around us that we don't even realize that. I think we're so distracted by it that we can't get focused on it.
Yeah. Like, so my, my grandmother, after, after meeting my grandfather, but before they got married, traveled from Paris to the United States to kind of decide on whether they were going to get married and get engaged and they did she, upon arriving in New York, Really sport splurges goes crazy, hog wild and gets.
Some milk and two bananas and ate them both. Malcolm, she ate both bananas and Mr. Her was an insane
Malcolm Collins: thing. She ate two
Simone Collins: bananas and then after that, of course she had terrible indigestion, but she could not help but indulge in this [00:18:00] imported fruit that was just so luxury. , and
Malcolm Collins: like the level of luxury is so obscene in our society.
Yeah. And when we talk about austerity, the important thing about austerity, like, if you want to return to this date, because I feel like when I read the, the happiness that I see these people had and the sense of purpose these people had, and I look at somebody like my wife, she obviously has this. Right?
Like, like, to me and my interactions with her, it's something I don't see in society that much, but she obviously has this. I feel that I have it too, and I just don't see it in other people that much. When people are like, why are you so excited every day? Why are you? And I'm like,
Simone Collins: because everything matters!
You did know. Personally, you did experience. starvation and deep deprivation and having your life at risk. True.
Malcolm Collins: Which was
Simone Collins: fortunate for me. And I imposed it on myself. I, I literally starved myself. So I also know what it's like to obsess over food. Well, so
Malcolm Collins: there's two questions. One is, [00:19:00] you know, do you actually need to undergo something like this to, to hit one of these mindsets?
Or can you structure a, a A belief system and moral framework around this in terms of how we raise our kids. This is a little experiment with who will engage. And we'll have future videos around this, around some form of opt into austerity or deprivation for the kids, where the kids enter some state as a coming of age ritual that is designed.
To genuinely allow them to test themselves in one of these really hard ways, but take ownership of that test themselves with the understanding of look at society right now. Like these people never went through this. You do not want to end up like 1 of the zombies, right? That's the alternative. And the alternative is scary to kids because kids see it.
They see the nihilism that's pervading our world and consuming our reality. Like, like, It reminds me of in the in the never ending story. I don't know if you remember the, the nothing that's the villain and that the thing that consumes all creativity and, and, and happiness and joy which is [00:20:00] what, what's happening.
This nihilism of our society
People have begun to lose their hopes, and forget their dreams. So the nothing grows stronger. It's the emptiness that's left. It is like a despair, destroying this world. And I have been trying to help it. But why? Because people who have no hopes are easy to control.
And whoever has the control has the
Malcolm Collins: is really eating this for kids. And I see it in Gen Alpha and I see it in Gen Z. So create some defense around that. But. The way that you maintain that as an individual is individual austerity and austerity is not something that can be imposed upon you. Austerity is always living with less than what you have.
So even if you're poor, that's not austerity. Austerity is choosing to live with less than even you are [00:21:00] making because you are living for something bigger than yourself. And a portion of your resources are going to see that goal.
Simone Collins: Yeah. Austerity is not austerity if it's not a choice. Although here's the thing though reconcile this.
Our, our ancestors didn't choose the austerity. I mean, my grandmother certainly didn't choose to have to live with this level of deprivation. After the war, she did. That's true. She continued up until the very end of their lives, they would pick
Malcolm Collins: up. She had all this money turns out. saved up because she chose to live for something bigger than herself.
And I think that that's the thing when you wake up in the morning, like, and you open your eyes. And I think that this is the biggest thing, like when, when you determine like people, like, how do I find purpose or whatever one pragmatist guide to life is totally dedicated to this topic without trying to push people in any specific direction.
But when you open your eyes in the morning and you're like forcing yourself to get out of bed, like what's doing that for you, right? Is it just the. You're going to lose your job. Then, then what you are living for, [00:22:00] like your morality is just keeping your job, barely staying alive. Right. And that's pretty impressive worlds at like a turning point and you have taken it upon yourself to try to ensure that you can preserve the safety of all future humans and the vitality of the human species, you know, for us, that's what's, what's been, we're like, yeah.
And if we don't do this, it all falls apart.
Simone Collins: And I'll be honest. It's not always hope that Gets me up in the morning. Sometimes it's rage. Because I know
Malcolm Collins: you'll see the horrible things that are, that people do
Simone Collins: to babies and young children and the injustice that children and babies throughout the world face.
And I will spend entire nights crying about it because I literally cannot help myself. I think it's hormonal. But that rage is enough. And I think a lot of people were fueled by rage back then. I'm very, very
Malcolm Collins: angry that they can do something about all of this. I mean, one of the things that society has tried to do to individuals is to remove this internal locus of control.
We're young [00:23:00] people today really grow up believing they can't do anything. And then many who do believe they can do something Like it's like Greta Thornburg.
I mean, our job is to demand solutions, not to provide solutions
Malcolm Collins: And it's like, okay, that's really great. Like that helps you with social status within your community, but it's not a thing of utility.
Simone Collins: No, I think there are always going to be people like that in society. And this showed up in my grandmother's book because she kept talking about all these various people, neighbors and friends and colleagues who joined the resistance movement, who are putting everything at risk, completely everything at risk.
Because they believed in doing it. And then there were a bunch of other people who were just like, wow, this really sucks. I guess I'm going to go along with it. And then there were even a bunch of other people who were like, I'm going to become an informant. I'm going to help the Germans. So I think it's, it's not that we have a complete dearth of that.
I think that maybe there are just fewer moral frameworks enabling people to come. To the conclusion that they can make a difference now.
Malcolm Collins: Well, I think it's this [00:24:00] framing of them genuinely believing that their lives are hard. Like, like they genuinely believe this many people today, or that by just bitching about something, they're genuinely trying to make the world a better place.
Like. That that's not the way it works. And so many people see this with our advocacy that it comes across as very weird to them. Like we never point out a problem we don't try to solve. Like at the moment we mentioned,
Simone Collins: Oh, we complain about plenty of stuff. We're not working on
Malcolm Collins: it. We're like, okay, fertility problems is an issue.
Okay. Maybe we should try matchmaking our friends and see if we can come up with a sustainable system. Okay. That didn't work. Let's look at the other thing. And then this can lead to weird solutions. Like for us, one of the weird solutions is like, why are you guys trying to build like your own cultural framework?
Doesn't that seem. More insane than just Advocating that the government gave half a million dollars a year to every prospective, like, marginal bank. I remember that time. That was like well, this could fix the problem. And I'm like, yes, this could fix the problem. In the same way when, like, Greta Thornburg is bitching about global warming, she comes up with Theoretical policy solutions, but they're never going to actually [00:25:00] pass.
They can't actually solve the, like, like nothing that she's saying that could realistically get into
Simone Collins: policy. Yeah. And well, pronatalists arguing that, you know, everyone should just get 500, 000. It's like environmentalists or people fighting for sustainability saying everyone has to just stop eating meat right now.
Yeah. Yeah, it could happen. It could happen. It's not going to happen.
Malcolm Collins: And so people are like, why have you done something as crazy as trying to create like this own culture for your family? And it's like, look, I'm not saying that what we're doing is likely to succeed. Okay. But at least it's Possible that it succeeds of the various things that I can wake up and actually fight for every day, raising my kids in a way that sustainably works and replicates is one of the things I can strive for.
And it sounds crazy to other people because actually trying something and basing your solutions around what might actually work sounds crazy [00:26:00] today. Yeah. But I think another thing that you said that I want to meditate on here is. If people actually had the full history of all of their ancestors, they would never be acting in the way that they're acting today.
Simone Collins: Yeah, no, and it's, it's funny because I'd even read this book before. As a teen and forgot so much of it, so much of what my grandmother was amazed by, you know, bananas and, and what she'd gone through and that she, you know, even as a young woman would brave complete, like, Social rejection just to try to smuggle doughnuts back from a, for a Red Cross dance for her parents, for her parents.
Malcolm Collins: Oh, another one that mommy say she goes into a bar at one point. Cause what were they looking for? They were looking for food. I
Simone Collins: think. Yeah. So when they were fleeing, right, as the Nazis were coming into Paris, she and her family were driving and being bombed. And [00:27:00] then one night they tried to take shelter in an abandoned village.
And she walked into a cafe because her family was asking her to find a place where they could get food. And she found a, what she thought was a French soldier slumped over on the bar, like the bar of the cafe or restaurant. And when she tapped him to ask him if anyone was there, fell over and was clearly dead.
And she. That was her first time seeing a casualty from the war. And she also never told her parents about that. She just went back to her parents and said, yeah, it's closed. No one's there. And you know,
Malcolm Collins: like PTSD, like symptoms from that or something you mentioned.
Simone Collins: No, that's from the air raids every time.
I mean, and this is, I'm sure so common for people who lived through the air raids, every time she heard a fire truck or alarm, she thought about those nights when she'd have to constantly, you know, wake up, put on clothes, go out to the Metro, wait there forever. Hope that your home doesn't get [00:28:00] bombed terrifying.
But I mean, it's, I don't even know if that's PTSD and she certainly didn't frame it that way. She just, she mentions how later in her life. Like the one time she ever had to wait in a really, really, really long around the block line. She was reminded of waiting in food lines in Paris where every time she heard a siren, she was reminded of the air raids and it just kind of took her back there.
But I think it also made her really grateful for what she had. And to your point, yeah, when we. When we think about everything that our ancestors went through and everything that they sacrificed to create a better world, because they did incrementally contribute to a better world, no matter how small it may have been, they did contribute.
How can we complain about what we
Malcolm Collins: have? Like everyone doing their thing for their society and their cultural group and having pride in that society and cultural group, which now the, the progressive specifically works so hard to destroy is our pride. Our pride in being Americans, our pride in whatever ethnicity we're a part of, our pride in whatever religion or cultural [00:29:00] tradition we come from which is part of, like, if you're a cult and you're trying to break someone psychologically down, that's what you target for.
First is their pride in who they are to make them think that they're nothing so that then you can brainwash them. And it's a naturally evolved mechanism. It's not like this was maliciously chosen by the left, but just the leftist traditions that did this ended up recruiting more people than the ones that didn't.
And so now it's become the predominant strategy of the left within the educational system within everything like that. But also what I really liked about this story of the dead person in the bar. Is somebody today online, they would say this is my source of trauma, and then they use this to like, if this is just one event of many that she went through, and they use this to justify, well, I can't do this, or this is why I can't go into bars, or this is why I have to be a dick at parties, or this is why, you know, they use it to justify all of the things that they wanted to do to begin with.
And then they begin to dwell on the trauma. The trauma becomes a larger and larger part of their identity. Until it [00:30:00] eats all of who they are. And they are nothing but Trauma wearing human skin, because it is so easy to do that when you live for nothing but self comfort and self affirmation, which is what they're taught to do, because their mind isn't meant to work that way.
And we see when reading these older stories, that This wasn't the way things were like this modern YouTuber who recently said the reason we have such a psychological health problem. You say that there's not enough psychologists. It's like, no, it is that there are too many psychologists. Is it when something bad happens to you?
You don't just go Get the over it.
Simone Collins: But I also, I do think, you know, I've been thinking more about what you're saying in terms of how we raise our own kids and what we can do. I'm thinking about different people that she brings up in her stories and her recountings of the war and how actually different people's backgrounds and how they were raised and the class in which they were raised, but also the hardship with which they were raised didn't really change their [00:31:00] outcomes during and after the war.
For example, my grandfather. Like Malcolm alluded to was in a, in a plane crash and then abandoned or well stranded in the wilderness in Oregon during late November and he had to figure out a way to get his way out and survive and another person also parachuted out of the plane and
Malcolm Collins: landed near him.
First, because I think that this is important context.
Simone Collins: Okay. Anyway he, he was, he landed in a place in the wilderness near where another person landed. Both of them were caught in trees. Both of them were suspended maybe 75 feet above the ground.
My grandfather, instead of just, you know, Sitting there and not getting his way somehow out climbed up one of the ropes of his parachutes that was attached to the tree Pulls his parachute out the other side and then used a rope to shimmy down the tree And then he tried to direct the same well his his companion I guess the other guy who parachuted and landed near him to do the same thing and he [00:32:00] refused to he said he was just Too scared and too shocked but then when I think about The pre war childhood that my grandfather had, I think, Oh, wait, this was an opt in lifestyle that he had that made him the kind of person who would just kind of tough through a situation like that and just climb up the fricking tree and get down, even though it was a really scary.
Now, what was that childhood? He lived in Oklahoma during the dust bowl during the great depression. This was a period where. Most farmers in the area just had this massive exodus that many of us as United States based students, former students read about in the grapes of wrath, where they just, they just all left because it was a desert.
There was nothing, there was no food. Everyone was starving. So they left. My grandfather's family was like, no, we're cool. We're just going to, we're just going to stay. It's fine. Everything's fine. And they're in this run one room farmhouse with like an outhouse out back was very austere. But these are people who chose the hard path intentionally.
So that makes me think that there actually is hope that [00:33:00] when you create a family that opts in to hardship, that chooses the hard path and lives lives of opt in to your point deprivation. When real shit hits the fan, like you're in a plane crash and you need to survive in the wilderness, you're going to have what it takes to actually do what you need to do.
Yeah,
Malcolm Collins: well, and I think what's really interesting is we talk in one of our tracks about like the trial of the lotus eaters and stuff like that. And in a way we sort of are in a mass massacre of our species right now, of the weak within our species, the people who succumb to hedonism. And I think we forgot how recently, you know, before our parents generation in, in the second world war, we underwent a massive selection.
You know, the guy who stayed in the tree ended up freezing to death. Well, no, he ended up breaking his spine. He was freezing to death and then he cut the ropes and he died. And so we don't even know exactly how, but that's how they ended up finding him. And when the grandfather was walking away, I mean, just as the ultimate dick move, he could hear the guy calling, like he changed his mind.
He's like, come back, like, [00:34:00] help me. And the grandfather. Barely made it out of this situation alive if he had taken the guys actually to his best interest that the guy didn't go because he almost certainly would have died. Had he been taking an injured guy and trying to get to to safety though, to
Simone Collins: be fair, my grandfather spent several hours trying to get the guy down, trying to convince him to climb up the rope.
And then the guy was like, no, no, no, you should just go on without me and go get help and. So this was what the guy asked for initially. I just
Malcolm Collins: need you to save me. Yeah. And then he burns the screens into the grandfather's memory when he's far away. He can't go back at this point. It's snowy. It's terrible.
Anyway so, and we haven't gone through like everything he went through to get to civilization after that. It was crazy. And he had gangrene and he still insisted on going back out and looking for the guy. But anyway What was interesting about this is I think that we're sort of at this moment again and everybody can ask themselves this, you know, in this age of plenty, the people who are like, I just don't want to have kids or I want to justify this hedonistic lifestyle.
I've chosen for myself. They're the guy who's [00:35:00] like. Hanging from the tree and it's like, you just have to go save me.
Simone Collins: You're just gonna have to rescue me. That Cartman, Cartman
Malcolm Collins: move. You just have to save me. Yeah, go, go, go, go save me and I'll wait here hanging in the tree. And the people who survive, the people who make this work, they're the people, Who do the thing that seems crazy, climb up the line to their parachute take it, turn it around.
When she said she made it into a shimmy, she means like he made a thing that attached to one hand, threw it around the tree, attached to the other hand, and then used it like tree climbers do to, to climb down the tree. Not like he made a rope from it or something, like he had to invent a device 75 feet off the ground in a tree to get out of the tree.
And then he gave that. The other guy didn't even have to figure out how to escape. He told the guy how to escape and the guy still couldn't do it, right? And that's sort of where we are in society. We have come up with some crazy solution for our family. It may work, right? I think it will. And we're just [00:36:00] out there to a lot of people and they're like, yeah why don't you guys just save civilization and I'll just stay here playing video games and eating cheese puffs and or, or worse, you know, the guy at the end when society realizes.
Oh shit, like they're actually going to get out of this. You know, why, why didn't you save me? Why didn't you come and do it for me? Why didn't you tell me that this was how I needed to get out of this situation? And it's like, we did, we told you everything. Like you just hated us for it. And then, and then yelled at us when we're walking away and it's working, whatever we're doing.
And that's the way it always works. And that's the way it will work again within this generation. It's just, we went a generation without that. And because of that, people have become So weak.
Simone Collins: The important takeaway too, is that we, we have to remember that it is often hardship that I think creates the kind of people who have that mindset.
And I think if you're raised soft, or if you fail [00:37:00] to, as an adult who was raised soft, to find a way to make yourself hard. You're not going to have those resources when the time comes, and you can't just build those resources when the time comes. I, I get the impression that the, you know, the man in the tree who now is like our poorest scapegoater, metaphorical whipping post for all this he really didn't have it in him to do that.
This is not something you can just suddenly become. You don't just suddenly become. a resilient person who can handle hardship and who can push forward in life. That's why
Malcolm Collins: genetic selection events matter. I mean, I think many people who realize the existential threat of perinatalism and falling fertility rates and the disappearance of their cultural group, they know that they need to do something about it.
But they just don't have it in them. Like having it in you to actually go out and do what's necessary to move everything forward is a lot. And a lot of people are in that exact situation. And I mean, I feel for the guy, I can only imagine, you know, so many people are scared like that [00:38:00] in society right now.
So many people want to adopt the nihilism of the cold and someone else will figure this out instead of just being like, no, no matter what it's all about. always up to you to figure this out on your own. And, and you are responsible for whether or not you and your group makes it out of this because we can't do it for you.
We can only alert you to the consequences of staying in the tree, which is you're going to freeze to death.
Simone Collins: Yeah. Hold on. Give me a second because
is there anything else that I'd learned from her experiences?
No, she was hypergamous though. She definitely
Malcolm Collins: said no to a bunch of people. No, I mean, she would talk. She has, she's like very classist as well. Talk down about something.
Simone Collins: She was like, well, he was, you know, very nice for a farm boy, but you know, or like she refused to marry this one guy because he was.
She was probably too dumb for her and also too bourgeois. She [00:39:00] didn't want to marry someone who is middle class, which is funny because I think when she met my grandfather and heard that, you know, his family had a farm in Oklahoma, she assumed that that meant that he was a landowner, like in Europe, which means something very different from being
Malcolm Collins: an Okie with a farm.
Simone Collins: With a one one room farmhouse and an outhouse post depression in Oklahoma. Rolling in it. But yeah, that's, those are my big takeaways so far. I am now going to get to the second part of the book, which is about her experience as a French war bride in the United States. So I can't wait to reread her experience.
I mean, she
Malcolm Collins: was an immigrant in France. She wasn't from there.
Simone Collins: Okay. Can you come up here? I'll put on speaker. I'll leave it.
Malcolm Collins: Great. Sorry, I was talking with a friend of ours who worked at Escalate on this issue internally.
Simone Collins: [00:40:00] Oh, that's really nice of them. And wow, hope it works. Sorry about that.
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