begins in the womb

In this transmission we argue that health is generational. Good nutrition begins in gestation, nursing, and childhood. Those who come late to good food are unlikely to completely reverse a bad start, even by heroic efforts.

But the good news is that by establishing patterns of health that are tied into your family concept, these patterns can replicate throughout the generations. You can become the best kind of founder: a bio-founder.

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The mid-Victorians were perhaps the healthiest people we know of in this modern age.

Cancer was a novelty. Doctors at teaching hospitals would show off cancer patients to their students as a treasured rarity.

But around 1880 health started to decline across the Western World (and generally hasn’t stopped). By 1900, the lower class men who robustly shoveled 20 tons of dirt a day in 1850 were being rejected for military service as too tiny and weak.

What happened in 1880? The first era of Globalization, which meant cheap sugar, cheap alcohol, lots of canned goods (for shipping), more preservatives (for shipping), cigarettes, margarine. . . .

So which one was responsible? One of them? All of them? Something else?

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The jury is still out, but if sugar isn’t the only culprit, its probably at least one of them. Especially for the young children.

The babies of 1880 were the sickly young men of 1900.

A few decades and wars later, the British ran a natural experiment on the effects of sugar exposure on the young.

In WWII the British government drastically rationed sugar. That rationing lasted through the era of post-war severity. Then in September 1953, it stopped. Brits rushed out to get sugar, much like Americans swarming for alcohol with the end of prohibition.

Tens of thousands of babies and toddlers before September 1953 were in the womb, nursed, and spent their earliest food years with little sugar. Immediately after September 1953, tens of thousands of babies and toddlers got their sweets.

Multiple studies have tracked the health of of the two groups of children born in these years, in almost every respect contemporaries except for the sugar. Researchers have compared their cancer rates, their risk of chronic disease, their heart health, and their Alzheimer’s. In every case, the sugar-ration babies did much better.

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So what does this suggest? Cut out the sugar? Well, probably. At least to an extent. But in a way that is the least important conclusion of the study.

Sugar bad, Family GOOD

The real headline is that the nutritional environment you expose your children to is going to be with them for life.

Another interesting finding was that the sugar-rationed babies appeared to show persistent dietary habits that lasted into adulthood, compared to their non-rationed peers.

“Rationed cohorts consume less sugar, eat smaller food quantities, and maintain healthier, more diverse diets five decades after the policy ended,” the researchers write in their paper.

The bio-founder is pushing on an open door. Nature is your venture capitalist. Your children “want” to be molded by you and pass on your ways.

the user interface stinks

I can’t even find the build menu

and the command screen leaks

Our son has recently been initiated into the Civ franchise.

It brings back our own happy days of being nuked by Gandhi.

We were all of us statesmen when we were young.

The problem of real-world statesmanship is that America is not a 4X video game. It has no build menu, no production points, no advisers who can tell you your citizen’s happiness rate, no formula to tell you how much production loss you will experience from the lost happiness.

This game stinks.

Now, America is maybe more video gameable than most countries, because it is the only country with an obvious win condition— Settle the Stars—but it still isn’t very video gameable.

But our leadership class insists on acting like it is. In the absence of stats they generate them, stats like GDP, unemployment rate, stock market price, and CPI, and treat them as if they were the real goals of policy.

Imagine a video game but different.

You get your starter village and you have no stats and no screens. You have to go around and talk to people. You ask the woodsman how much wood he can cut a day and he tells you it depends. What kind of wood are you wanting cut? How much care do you need with it? And some days he’s sicker and tireder than others.

You ask the mayor what the town’s production value per turn is and he stares at you like you’ve lost your wits. What turn? What production value?

In other words, this video game is a lot more like real life. You could roll with it, maybe creating measures that make sense to you based on information you gather, taking them with a grain of salt, and checking and revising from time to time as they outlive their usefulness.

Or you could try to fit this square video game into the round hole and create some statistic that you try to treat as real.

Maybe you insist on measuring hours of labor. You’re a video game Marxist.

Maybe you insist on tons of steel. You are a video game Maoist.

Maybe you insist on entrusting some clerks with elaborate rules for determining how many coins your little town’s economy is worth, and when they tell you that according to procedures the fact that Farmer John died and his farm is now pasture for Rancher Bill means the economy is worth 5 less Coins you are sad, and when they tell you it means the economy is worth 5 more Coins you are happy. You are a video game American.

Would you be overjoyed if your Mayor told you did in fact have a stat for you, everyone in the town loved beads and traded them back and forth, and it wasn’t the actual beads that counted it was ledger beads, and according to the ledger they were all worth more beads than ever. Likely you wouldn’t be overjoyed, but if you would be, you are a video game stock marketer.

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The Washington-NYC effect is when everyone knows that a measure is fake, understands why it is fake, and promptly forgets and goes back to treating it as real.

GDP

GDP is a tangle.

You might think that a measure of manufacturing would in some way measure actual manufactured goods emerging from U.S. factories, like tons of steel rolling out of mills, number of CPUs coming out of chip fabs, and cars rolling off the assembly line. But this is not the case. Despite the name, “real GDP” in practice is the result of hundreds of arbitrary and subjective decisions made by government-employed economists, such as “education administrators are more productive than teachers” or that a 25% increase in automobile “quality” can theoretically show up as a 166% increase in “real GDP value added.”

. . . .

What we see are bizarre results where “real value-added” is implausibly up even when the production of actual things, or the actual inflation-adjusted value of the things coming out of the factory, is flat or down:

• Motor vehicles, bodies and trailers, and parts: actual light vehicles produced down 11%, real gross output of vehicles up 39%, real value-added up 125%. Inputs as a percent of gross output rose from 74% to 77%.

• Semiconductors: actual computer CPUs shipped is up 94%, gross output of semiconductors up 262%, real value-added up 1698%. Inputs as a percent of gross output fell from 52% to 25%.

• Steel mills & manufacturing from purchased steel: in raw tonnage, steel shipped is down 18%, real gross output is up 5%, real value-added is up 125%. Inputs as a percentage of gross output rose from 73% to 74%.

Actual steel rolling out of the mills is down, the inflation-adjusted value of the steel and steel products rolling out of the mills is flat, inputs as a percentage of output is the same as ever—yet value-added is up 125%!

The Stock Market

That is not to say that the Stock Market in grams of gold is the obvious right metric either. There isn’t one.

Any more than U-3 is clearly better or worse than U-6 or U-8, nor that there is an obvious superior measure of inflation to the CPI.

The point is that they are flawed, and they are being used to measure our health more or less because no one is sure what the alternative is.

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Many years ago Chairman Mao decided to video game his country. The stat he was trying to min-max was steel production. Everyone knows that the Great Leap Forward was a giant crime.

Peasants were working long hours, all year round, even contributed their own cooking utensils to be melted as a source of production.^[65] Officials at multiple levels inflated production figures, leaving central leaders poorly informed about conditions and encouraging further unrealistic demands.^[66]

The consequences of the Great Leap Forward were devastating, leading to one of the most severe famines in human history.^[67] The policies that diverted labor from agriculture to industrial projects, such as backyard steel furnaces, resulted in a catastrophic drop in agricultural output; consequently, food shortages became widespread. According to demographic studies, the famine caused an estimated 15 to 45 million deaths, with rural areas being the hardest hit.

Is it possible we are in the middle of another great human catastrophe, where we are burning human flourishing in the backyard to produce more GDP, and the casualties are measured in birth rates and never-marrieds?

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In your family, in your company and your community, in your nation, reject video-gamification.

You have to be wise.

Has to rank

High on the list

of what one could wish

In this transmission we explain that American identity is a high value crown in the gutter. It is free for the taking for you and your steader family project. I.

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Here is what you have at your disposal:

Movies,

books, fiction and nonfiction,

‘And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortune, and our sacred Honor.’

No one cheered. It was more like a moment to say ‘Amen.’ But no one knew quite what to do.

Then Pa began to sing. All at once everyone was singing:

My country, ‘tis of thee,

Sweet land of liberty,

Of thee I sing . . . .

Long may our land be bright

With freedom’s holy light;

Protect us by Thy might,

Great God, our King.

The crowd was scattering away then, but Laura stood stock still. Suddenly she had a completely new thought. The Declaration and the song came together in her mind and she thought: God is America’s King.

legends,

National songs for every taste,

iconography,

massively sophisticated technology

monuments that will—barring human intervention—last longer than any other work of man

history, stories, belief

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An identity so powerful that the whole world tries to claim it, at least what they think it is

And it is yours

The stagnation and dissolution of all national narratives, the self-disgust of all Western elites, means it is yours for the taking.

And within pretty broad limits, you can emphasive and personalize it however much you wish. There are decades and centuries of history, hundreds of great men with differing opinions, you can trace the course you want.

Better, this is an identity that naturally fits with your goal of building something new and lasting, for generations.

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It can all be yours but you have to live it. Blood in, blood out.

Claim these men as your own for your children

creates a yearning.

But to make it real

you must see and feel.

The Steader project looks to the broad flourishing of human systems small and large.

Because the family and the household are the most parlous of those systems while also the most important the Steader project has mostly focused on principles of how to run a successful multi-generation continuing family.

Our principle author has the advantage of being in the fifth generation of a successful conscious generational family project that is now on its 7th generation—he has process knowledge—but also man-brained enough to break down and explain what he knows from having lived it from the inside.

Process knowledge: tacit knowledge of how to actually do things; technical and industrial expertise;

Successful families are process knowledge.

What are the implications?

A. Read, discuss, and engage with the Steader project and similar. Immersion and interaction is a partial shortcut to process knowledge. Apply and iterate.

B. Draw on your own family history for positives. Most family chains of transmission are broken in the US, but not completely broken or you wouldn’t be here. If you want to do better than your parents, the correct approach is to build on what your parents did, not to reject it entirely and start from scratch.

C. Find real-life models. Talk to oldsters about their memories of being raised. Try to find a multi-generational family and make friends. There is nothing low or shameful in this. Instead, it is beautiful. They will appreciate your interest.

D. Re-orient your own self-knowledge about what your goal is. It is not Raise My Kids to Become Adults. It is not even Raise My Kids to Raise Kids, although this is closer. It is Apprentice My Kids to Become Parents. How will you treat your kids differently when you realize they are your apprentices in the honorable and arcane craft of passing on your multi-generational family, embedded in the history and lineage and traditions and ways that only your family has.

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with reverent breath

and waited quietly

for death.

The truest science is trying things.

Experiments run at home with the help of the family have two important benefits—for one, they make your family into the site of knowledge production, one of the most prestigious activities in the modern world. This helps a great deal in your project of establishing your family as a rich and high status independent source of identity. For two, it induces a healthy scepticism of expertise.

(For three, they are fun).

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Last year we tried transplanting squash, which most experts say you aren’t supposed to do. It worked, until a dry patch coincided with a family vacation and a hose timer that broke…

This year we expanded the experiment. Our goal was to establish the makings of a garden indoors before the last frost, then transplant them outside already full sized, for a much earlier garden. We wanted to enjoy the fresh vegetables for a month longer.

We tried tomatoes, squash, and cucumbers. The latter two are not supposed to transplant well.

To avoid transplanting issues, we used cardboard boxes and homemade jute grow bags. Biodegradable material that we could put directly into our garden. The soil was a healthy mix of compost, peat moss, bio char, and a touch of bone. We watered frequently.

About half the squash and cucumbers just died or didn’t grow. This was acceptable.

Choosing biodegradable containers worked too well. The cardboard and the jute started rotting well before we put them outside. This made hardening them off difficult.

Hardening off—before transplanting, new plants grown inside should be gradually exposed to the outdoors

Getting them into the ground turned into a three-ring circus of multiple hands shoved in everywhere trying to hold soil behind a tattered remnant and trying to coordinate an ungainly shift to the ground. It was ludicrous. Next year we think packing them in less tight inside and maybe putting them on top of a wire cooling sheet so the bottom isn’t sitting in water. On the other hand, having the container rot is part of the point, so we would probably have to compensate by watering very heavily at first.

We started getting tomatoes mid-June, a full 30 days before we would have otherwise.

We also got early cucumbers, but the plants are just not thriving. The comparison cucumbers we planted directly at the normal time are doing better.

The transplanted basil died, but the one we forgot to put out has just kept growing nicely in the house.

The squash has been doing very well, so much so that we apparently timed it perfect with an insect predation cycle and we are now swarming with squash bugs. Ugh.

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Verdict: try again next year with the tomatoes, and with the cucumbers in an even more biodegradable format. No squash.

I never had an eagle ceremony. I got my eagle by accident.

It was back on the 250^th, the semiquincentenary, and I was on the border testing out kinetic citizen-aided deportations using a catapult I had built. It was going good, I was getting clearance over the wall almost every time, and that’s when it happened. To be straight with you, I was distracted and wasn’t thinking about range safety like I should and to my horror when I released and flung, I saw a bald eagle soaring into my field of vision. I nailed him. I rushed over to where he was and saw I’d broke his wing and his precious eagle blood was seeping into American soil. Well, at that point I felt the earth shake with the wrath of George Washington and knew I had better heal this eagle quick if I ever wanted to be a son of liberty again. I took him home and tried nursing him back to health but nothing worked until I started feeding him home-made ice cream handcranked on my front porch. It had blood (mine), gunpowder, and dust from patriot graves sprinkled in. He loved it. He would slurp it down and then nod off to me singing him some war hymns as lullabies. Talk about patriot dreams!

So that’s how I met Semiquint. Bros for life!

Some guys have telepathic eagles but Semiquint isn’t fancy like that. He’s just a regular bald eagle. He can split atoms with his mind though so we communicate using a geiger counter.

I’m not ashamed to admit it, my eagle ceremony didn’t happen until well into my 20s. I wasn’t American enough yet. You can be born American but you still have to be made American, people don’t want to admit that. So, yeah, I think we need more awareness and openness about delayed-development Americanism. If it happens to you, don’t give up, just overcome it. We all have to have our Valley Forge, you know, there’s no shame in it. So, anyway, here’s my story in case it helps even one person out there.

I’d tried a few things, had a couple of minor ceremonies, and nothing. It was pretty crushing and maybe that was part of it after that, I just couldn’t seem to put myself wholly into it. I was pretty burned out about the whole thing when, I don’t know, one day I just decided I had to try for real. Do or die.

So if I was going to do it, I was going to do it right. It wasn’t easy, I could tell you tales, but long story short we are out in the Mojave desert on the 4^th of July, I have massive diesel generators pumping enough AC to freeze the place in the open air, I have sound speakers the size of nuke-power cooling towers blasting sound, so loud their volume is measured on the Richter scale, I have corn-fed blondes in color-coded red or white or blue bikinis dancing in the shape of a giant waving flag, the kids are out there dancing their hearts out—that part’s pretty normal except for the tomahawks--, and just when the sun is setting my rock band hits the end of the guitar solo where the electric fife and electric drum join in and I start blasting shotguns into the mikes, and that’s when it happens.

Thundering out of the west in perfect formation comes the Blue Angels with a massive EAGLE taking point. She is perfect in ever way. And then she screams.

It pierces me to my very soul. I take out my bowie knife and slash my chest and out I bleed red, white, and blue.

Manifest Destiny is the best eagle there is and I will fight anyone who says different.

Shucks, there’s nothing much to tell. I met my eagle down in the holler one day and we are going on together until we die. Blood to blood.

Blessed are those rich

in land and grandchildren and cash

Blessed are those rich

in grandchildren

One way of summarizing the family portion of the Steader project is that it sets the best practices guide for establishing a middle or working class generational extended family. A Middle House, if you will. A yeoman dynasty.

This is not to reject the aristocratic Great House model. Far from it. A Middle House should aspire to become a Great House if it can. The Middle House has precarities that the Great House does not.

But everything necessary to become a Middle House is necessary to become a Great House; no steps are wasted. A Great House that does not follow Middle House principles will never be a Great House at all.

And there are advantages to becoming a Middle House. It is easy. You can do it right now—you are probably already doing much of it.

Similarly, building the village can only help your Middle House project, especially at the crucial courtship stage. But a “village” that doesn’t consist of many long-term generational families is a flash in the pan.

We have a functioning Middle House ourselves, going on at least generation five, and we often field questions from our friends about it. That was the genesis of the family portion of the Steader project. (That’s not the only part of the Steader project—there’s also homestead agriculture, mystical natalism, and so on.) For example The First Ever Natalist Kids' Book

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GUIDING PRINCIPLES

Want to have a Middle House (or Great House)— the first step is usually just setting out to do it. Gone are the days when you could stumble on to it.

Large families. Shots on goal, identity reinforcing, and its hard to say family is important if you don’t splurge on it. Modeling is Hard, Family is Easy ; Naturally Grown Family Identity

Extended families. Cousins create memories. Extended Family

Household. Your home needs to be an economic and production unit, not just an emotional one. Hearth and Home

Primary production: close the production-consumption loop in a felt, physical way. Whistle while you Work

Felt reward. Have a spiritually, emotionally, and physically rewarding and enriching home experience. Be idyllic. Summertime

Take the merry pill. Be happy and jolly yourself. Take the Merry Pill

Identify formation. Your family needs to be a thing. You need to have an identity. Pickin’ Your Vibe

Culture drafting. Have the larger culture reinforce your family project. Name Your Girlchild Semiquincenta

But also cultural distance. Your relationship to the larger culture needs to be like the Amish to technology—you pick and choose. Be Wholesome, but don’t Be Disney

Faith

Thrift. Getting comfortable with thrift and making do is the one element of the Middle House that doesn’t translate to the Great House, but it is hard to do without i t. The Thousand Dollar Middle Class Wedding

Hang a lantern on your project

It’s easier than you think—God and nature are on your side. Teenagers are psyop. Human Colony Collapse Disorder; Live Like a Trust Fund Kid; Everyone Wants to Tell You Your Kids Won’t Make It

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THE BARE ESSENTIALS

What is the Bare Minimum Needed for a Family Founder to Succeed?

The Bare Minimum, continued

Excitation

Asks the Question

What’s a Nation?

Proposition One: Every immigration question is implicitly a question about what a nation is.

Proposition Two: Every answer is implicitly referring to a smaller scale organization that people are using as a model for a nation, and this is good and as it should be.

Immigration is a ferociously divided topic right now across the West both because the scale of immigration has been vast with vast and ongoing consequences but also because the models are so deeply divided. And the two most productive models for what a nation is are no longer part of ordinary life and so aren’t mentally available to most people.

In this transmission, we fix that.

BAD METAPHORS FOR THE AMERICAN NATION

First, let’s clear the ground by making explicit the implicit bad models that most people have.

The nation as extended family. This is a very obvious way of understanding a nation and is arguably what the word ‘nation’ is supposed to mean. The problem, at least for Americans, is that even the strictest standard for Heritage Americans still includes Anglo-Americans and other North European groups, Black Americans, American Indians, and others who are not a blood extended family writ large. The metaphor doesn’t work. If you try to save the appearances by saying that we are like an extended family, you are adopting a different model, see below.

The nation as found family. While actual found families are scarce on the ground, they do exist. There is a there there. But it is completely unclear how this model can scale up. The nation as a found family is gibberish. The found family idea is a group of people acting like a family because of close personal friendships and other ties. The found family is already a metaphor, so there is no such thing as being metaphorically a found family. People who think this are trying to generalize their friend group, or a TV friend group, to the nation at large.

The nation as corporation in an indiscriminate hiring frenzy. “If anyone comes here and doesn’t make waves and works hard, they should get to stay.” It is hard to think of any organization or entity that would adopt this attitude, but there is one: a company that is so desperate for labor that it will take almost anyone. That doesn’t seem to be a good fit for modern America, if it ever was.

The nation as procedure. Less coherently than “if they work hard...,” we have “if they follow the rules…” The concept is that a nation consists of a set of rules or procedures for becoming a resident or a citizen, and the only relevant question is if the rules or procedures have been followed. This view is completely unable to address where the rules came from and how the procedures came to be.

The nation as proselyting religion. This seems to be the metaphor that is implicit in the common claim that “America is an idea,” and all the claim’s European derivatives, such as “British values.” Proselyting religions do take all comers, provided that the comers accept the teachings of the religion, and in fact if the proselyting is baked into the religion’s DNA it would arguably be apostasy from the religion to want to reject outsiders who were believers. Some of the most fervent advocates for American immigration have this implicit model. The difficulty is that proselyting religions have doctrinal and sociological reasons for proselyting. Sociologically, proselyting is how the religion came to be and continues in existence. While there was a recruitment element to early American settlement, it wasn’t the same thing. Doctrinally, religions have a theory of salvation that means the unproselyted are disadvanted, even damned. This does not apply to a nation. “Have you heard the good news of America? Have you accepted the Constitution as your mortal savior?”

To be fair, America is more like a religion than almost any other nation. In fact, arguably the original conception of America was as a religion but whose members and objects of conversion were the states, not individual people.

Successful proselyting religions either offer very little material benefits or else have strict standards for admission, demanding standards for maintaining membership, and wield the banhammer of excommunication.

The nation as looting zone. It is quite possible to view the nation as an environment to be exploited. A pile of resources. The nation as free stuff. Less negatively, the nation as cornucopia. This is a common implicit metaphor but is incompatible with the long-term existence of the nation. It is hard to see, by almost any standard, how people who have this metaphor can continue to be full members of the nation.

The nation as economic zone. “If it earns money, then do it.” (This shades over into looting zone very quickly). But it skips over the fundamental question of why this particular region should be a zone. Zones are arbitrary unless created by something else.

GOOD METAPHORS FOR THE AMERICAN NATION

Nation as commons. Even educated people today have generally only heard of ‘the commons’ as a gauzy metaphor for public property, as a game theory staple in the tragedy of the commons, or as a moldy term for the British Parliament.

But in fact commons were a well-established form of property and active legal concept under old English law (the “common law” was itself conceived of as a commons). But due to enclosure, it isn’t well-understood enough today to act as a good metaphor for the nation.

We await a Steader popular history of the concept to reintroduce it to the educated citizenry.

Nation as Household. At last, the ideal metaphor. The American public has a hard time thinking clearly about immigration because American life lacks the concept of the household: a unit organized around a blood family but not limited to it, that acts as a locus of economic activity. In its highest form, the Great House, the household has land and a mission and ideals and a culture.

In short, the household neatly ties together good citizen’s different intuitions about what is important in the nation while giving each part its proper place.

The more you learn about what a household is and should be, the more you learn about how to help your nation thrive. That is the Steader way.

to Make a Splash

Splash Harder

for a Family that Lasts

This is the 250^th anniversary of American independence. So far the planned celebrations seems a little anemic—though we would love to be at the Sail 250 event!

Coca-Cola, a lonely nation turns its eyes to you

But the nation’s anemia is your family’s opportunity.

A key Steader concept in the realm of generational families is culture drafting.

Just as a car can get a lot more gas mileage by drafting right behind a semi (Do Not Advise), your family identity benefits immensely if you draft from the culture’s own momentum.

The key is to find things that the culture and its millions of people and organizations admire and have invested a great deal of momentum in already...and aren’t doing very well at. These are prime chances to establish your family in the minds of your children as something valuable, precious, rewarding, high status...and worth continuing.

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In America, American patriotism and the Semiquincentennial are one of those things.

Drafting off the 250th is the same concept as holiday engineering--being the 4^th of July flag family--but even more so.

Creating a sense of occasion is difficult. Here the work has already been done for you, and a bit of that sense of the vast and numinous rubs off on you if you let it.

Perhaps you’ll read the Constitution out loud and discuss, or the Declaration of Independence. Perhaps you’ll boo King George lustily, find ancestral stories to tell, or take a special trip to the capital or a national park.

And if your celebration happens to be a little bit rebellious, a little bit in your face, a little bit American, so much the better.

Whatever you do, do something, and direct about what you are doing. “Patriotism has always been very important to the Jones. We are true Americans. So for the 250^th anniversary, we are going to...”

it’s barely even wry

but Ehrlich just died

so let’s give it a try

Paul Ehrlich just joined the ranks of the doers of mass evil who died quietly in their beds: Mao, Stalin, Genghis, Ehrlich. At least Hitler offed himself.

He published his extinctionist manifesto The Population Bomb in 1968. At the time the American birth rate was a healthy 3.6 TFR. It is now 1.6 and dropping. There was a bomb, and it blew up underneath the population. His primary victims were the mature, the intelligent, the educated, the conscientious, and the forward-thinking. Where other murderous ideologies had to be inferred to be murderous by their results, Ehrlich’s ideology was only one step removed from pure anti-humanism and extinctionism.

The man was one of history’s greatest monsters. But just how great a monster was he? Let’s get straight to the ranking.

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MAO 40-90 million

HITLER 20-40 million

GENGHIS 30-40 million

STALIN 15-35 million

In America alone, from 1968 to now there have been around 60 million babies eliminated from the population, with similar and even bigger numbers in Europe, Japan, China, South Korea, and elsewhere. His toll of people now absent from the population numbers in the hundreds of millions.

Now, we can imagine some Lucifer of genocide sitting in judgment on Ehrlich’s soul. This Lucifer might demand to know why he should thrust Ehrlich down into the lowest level of hell with the greatest monsters of history when these other guys killed people and Ehrlich just prevented them from existing.

Then imagine that some diabolus advocatus acknowledges the point but responds that Ehrlich is still the prophet of the greatest extinction event in human history, with numbers that already exceeds the other guys on the list, and this extinction event is still ongoing with no end in sight.

This Lucifer then asks about the fact that at least Mao and Stalin and Hitler and Genghis at least caused moments of sheer horror to their victims, not to mention the long tragic aftermath of broken souls and absent friends.

But here the advocate does not concede the point. What about the millions of elderly dying alone in a hospital bed or a facility. What about the sheer terror of going unloved into the dark? And what about the decades of slow, stagnant, childless life—the anti-depressants, the alcohol, the frantic hobbies, the desperate causes and activism, the soporific evenings alone? There is no measure of human suffering that redeems Ehrlich’s cause.

And last, this Lucifer—or even you, reader—might wonder if Ehrlich really deserves to be ranked as one of history’s greatest monsters since the birth rates would have dropped quite a bit without him. He is surely not responsible for ALL the drops in births.

True, but he is responsible for a great deal of it. He shaped elite opinion, government action, and the general consensus about what a “good person” thinks. The best that can be said for him is that he didn’t cause the worst disaster in human history, he only was the main cheerleader for it and did his damnedest to push it along. If he didn’t start the fire, he poured on the gasoline.

“I was a college student when I read Mr. Ehrlich’s ‘The Population Bomb.’ I took it to heart and now have no grandchildren, but 50 years later the population has increased to eight billion without dire consequences. I was gullible and stupid.”

— Kenneth Emde, Woodbury, Minn.

People today forget or simply can’t believe how depraved Ehrlich really was:

Demanded that the FCC require TV shows to depict large families in a negative light, so that parents with multiple children would be shamed and ostracized by society.

Proposed forcibly sterilizing millions of Americans by poisoning the water supply to make them infertile. He couldn’t think of a drug to do it “safely,” but wanted to do it anyway.

Supported actual forced sterilization campaigns in India and China, where millions of people

Warned that population growth would lead to starvation, but also proposed cutting off food aid to “overpopulated” countries to reduce their populations… by starvation

-Payton Alexander, X.com

Paul Ehrlich, welcome to the ranks of History’s Greatest Monsters. If there is still a human race in 200 years, it will be because you are remembered as worse than Hitler.

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If you want to wrap your mind around the sheer scope of the current disaster, pick any of the famous atrocities or horrors of history and compare their human toll to this one. Do it. We will work through one and leave the rest as an exercise to the reader.

The Rape of Nanking: a truly sickening event, in which as many as 300,000 were put to death. China now has around 5.6 babies born per 1000 people. In 1968, it was 35 babies born per 1000 people. Given Nanking’s population, that means a toll of over 250,000 babies taken off the board in 2025 alone.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki

The Irish Potato Famine

The Jewish Holocaust

The Armenian Genocide

Almost the only disaster that Ehrlich’s birth collapse hasn’t reached yet is the Columbian Exchange, which by the most extreme estimates reached 90% population loss.

However, we haven’t reached the end of the Ehrlich’s birth collapse yet. Sober, moderate estimates that do not assume miracles show us reaching the 90% point or more.

on the edge of the land

Archimedes boasted that with a long enough lever and a place to stand, he could move the world.

In times when the wind of change’s a’blowin’, a small group of men can be their own lever. (For good or for ill).

Hernan Cortes and 500 Spaniards against an Empire of millions

A young guy with leprosy and his knights, outnumbered 50 to 1

https://xcancel.com/WomanDefiner/status/1996619507549585497#m

https://x.com/WomanDefiner/status/1996619507549585497#m

Covadonga--a few remnant rural Goth lords and their remaining band assemble for what could have been a last stand but instead began

the long Reconquest of Spain.

Or for that matter, the Arab explosion that the knights of Covadonga were reacting against.

At one point literally hiding in a swamp by himself, an army of one. Then he won. The only English king to be called the Great.

From our own history:

We are in another such time. All factors are pointing to a phase change where everything crystal dissolves back into the solution and then precipitates out in another matrix.

Little wonder then that the visionary and ambitious in unlikely places are seeking each other out. The old men are dreaming dreams, and the young men are seeing visions.

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But this is not just another such time. Most phase changes are changes in regime, law, economy, society—at their most profound, even changes in language or culture.

But beyond all these, there are changes that reach all the way down to the germ line and the blood. There are biological phase changes.

On December 18, 1620 (Julian) a small, wretched ship cast anchor off the sullen shores of New England.

102 bedraggled pilgrims and others set foot on the ground of their new, unwelcoming home. 37 adult men, 18 adult women, 44 children and teenagers.

Half died in the next 6 months, particularly the adult women. Three quarters of the adult women died, half the men, but most of the children made it.

As someone said with a pardonable degree of exaggeration, but with a core of truth, the women starved themselves so the children could live.

Today, that tiny band—you could fit them all in an elementary school gym--has as many as 35 million descendants.

They and the follow-on ships, and their First Families of Virginia equivalents further south, had for generations the highest total fertility rates ever measured, exceeded only, perhaps, by the Quebecois in Canada, who like these early Americans also built a nation out of a trickle of settlers.

214 settlers. Only 60 survived. The colony survived thanks to this guy doing whatever it took. Their descendants, mixed with the Mayflower people, rule the world.

Ben Franklin’s Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, perhaps the founding document of demography and population studies, was based on staring at the fact of this astounding growth. Franklin saw the results of it all around it. His America had been built in just a few generations by axe and by womb.

Even more remarkably, in this essay, written in 1751, he comes close to predicting the American Revolution based solely on these demographics. He was right. The Revolution, and everything that came after, was predicated on the astonishing biological revolution that had happened before it. Where there had not been a people, there was now a people.

It is a fact that the American empire, in all its many manifestations, was first and foremost an empire of the blood.

And now you. You now stand on the rocky shore of a greater frontier.

This is the century of germ-line extinction. From a far enough perspective, the total collapse of lineages and bloodlines that is happening now is the second most significant event in human history after the Toba Event. Except that the Toba extinction may not have happened, while this one is.

Last year was the lowest recorded birth rate ever recorded for nearly every country on earth, the second lowest was the year before that, and we are likely to set a new record low this year.

If you contrive to get you and your children and your grandchildren through the Great Extinction, you will be one of the founders of the entire human race. Your descendants will number in the hundreds of millions and in the billions. The future is a great unpeopled wilderness, and you can settle it the same way settlement has always occurred. By axe and by womb—by effort and by births.

It is not easy. This shore is rocky and cold. These wilderness wastes are hostile to human life. It takes a truly heroic effort to find a spouse in the wreck of dating culture, to build a successful home in the face of some of the most damaged family patterns in human history, to raise your children to do the same when everything in the culture makes it difficult, almost impossible.

The only thing is, it has to be done.

Take heart from your ancestors, whether by genealogy or in the spirit. Captain John Smith fought the Powhatan Confederacy with a handful of drunk layabout malarial 17th C trust fund kids and won. The women on the Mayflower starved themselves to death so the children, our ancestors, could live. Daniel Boone trekked 800 miles through hostile forest in less then two months to warn settlers of a pending attack. Rebekah Boone raised 18 kids by herself for years at a time in a howling wilderness. Davy Crockett left Congress and traveled 2000 miles to die at the Alamo from pure cussedness.

If you desire to be great, God and nature have given you the means for greatness.

If you fight to have children, if you fight to have them get married, if you fight to have grandchildren, and you succeed, then you are not just a victor—you are a founder of an empire of the blood.

Make your family big.

Many don’t realize that the rewards of building large family social capital are not just intangibles like happiness, fulfillment, and meaning. There are tangible returns.

my wife’s younger sister moved into our spare bedroom for the year, rent-free, while she does an unpaid internship in this city. She earns here keep, explicitly, by doing dishes and helping care for her five nieces/nephews. Now my wife has a kitchen chore companion, sister makes breakfast when my wife has other things to do, she eats family meals with us, pays little of her own board, has become a good tertiary authority figure for the kids, and I can claim her as a dependent on my taxes. Everybody is happy with this arrangement.

My wife’s youngest sister (10 yr gap) did this w us when she moved out of their parents house and was there for my wife’s pregnancy and the first 18 months of my kid’s life, it was great

Same same. My sister stayed with us for the first 6 months after my daughter was born.

When we just had our oldest and she was sick, I have big family and they set up a rotation for someone to stay with us. My youngest sister stayed the whole summer. We paid it back by having an older daughter be a mother’s helper for her when she started having kids

My oldest daughter just moved by another daughter who is in college. The college girl just called us excited, she got to babysit her nephew and loved it.

Some older friends of ours told us that your big milestones with a big family are when your first kid gets old enough to babysit and then old enough to drive everyone around. They were right.

I’m the oldest of 8. When we started having kids, I told my parents it seemed easier the more we had. They said that your first was a huge change, the second was still a big increase in effort though not as much, the third was less but still noticeable, and after that there was barely a net change in the work load. It’s all “free.”

https://x.com/SimoneHCollins/status/2017708214419116537

https://xcancel.com/SimoneHCollins/status/2017708214419116537#m

First we got a little pushback in the DMs about the concept of living like a cultural trust fund kid. Aren’t trust fund kids lazy and shiftless, they just surf all day?

First, awesome. Second, no. That’s one kind of trust fund kid. The other kind uses their endowment as a springboard for great things.

Being the second kind requires high goals and high agency.

The high goal you already have. You want to survive and thrive in this most unhumaniformed social environment-create a little niche of light and growth, marry, have children, and then have them have the same, like colonists on Mars building their shelters and posts and then slowly spreading out, liberating the water and the air from the soil. You want your communities to thrive. You want your nation to be great and enduring. You want to live worthy of eternity. Yes, high goals.

The high agency you already have or else will obtain as you struggle for the goal. Agency can be destroyed; it can also be created; and where the goal is strong enough and the desire is great enough the agency flows in like water.

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Second, we want to chronicle what it is like to be living on cultural passive income. Where the work of creating a family culture has already been done and you just have to watch as the income rolls in. Where the family identity is so established that it self-perpetuates without you pushing. You are a Sisyphus whose boulder has now taken to rolling itself.

This was a great Christmas. I and my folks put a lot of work into making our family identity about homemade stuff and also with lots of jokes. This Christmas we saw it happen all over the place, the kids mostly, without us doing anything. I didn’t even encourage it. Wu-wei. Here’s a list:

A plum wood cutting board, made from a wild plum I helped my dad cut down after the peach borers got to it. The unusable chunks burn nice.

Homemade eggnog.

A homemade tallow-and-rosemary deodorant (its great)

A colored ink drawing of the grandparents and assorted cousins in a typical evening scene by the fire

A headrub coupon

Repaired pants

Fine grit sandpaper and a promise to polish up my prairie diamond ring

Homemade apple-cider vinegar beef jerky (a big hit)

Handknit merino wool cap

Homemade face mask cream

Another handknit merino wool cap

Another handknit merino wool cap

Handknit ear warmers

A handmade belly button shield (inside joke)

Candy cigarettes and a smoking pipe tie clip (another inside joke)

Handpainted card game

Homemade face cleanser and handknit fine wool washcloth

Homemade bath salts

Handknit scarf

Engraving pen

Grow bags and hemp string for early starts on tomatoes and cucumbers and squash

Seeds for tomatoes and cucumbers and squash

“Walls of water”

Nasal strips (another joke)

Ding-dong ditching an enormous white elephant at 5 AM Christmas morning. It was the front porch of the guy who ranted and raved at the white elephant party about how it was the worst

It all felt really good

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Your work will be rewarded. You will reap where you have sown.

for generations of time

worked to make

your Christmas sublime

You can create culture. If you want a generational family, you have to.

The good news is that anyone can do it. The bad news is that it takes effort and judgment.

Culture is to groups what habits are to individuals. Culture and habits are the slow repetition of ideas and actions until they become almost unthinking. Until they become values and identity.

You can create almost anything into your culture if you put enough effort into it. You will have to think it, talk about it, do it, over and over and over. That’s if the larger culture is indifferent. If the larger culture is hostile, even more so.

But the easiest culture to create is the one where most of the work has already been done for you. The wind is at your back.

Take Christmas. Books, movies, TV, songs, poems, Currier and Ives lithographs, ready-made iconography, standard custom sets, your own memories. It’s all there for you. The work has already been done. All you have to do is do it.

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Don’t worry that your Christmas will just get submerged into the larger cultural mass. Christmas is so large that just by doing what you do your Christmas will be customized. All you have to do is repeat it, or make sure your variations fit a theme.

The only real important thing is that you define your Christmas by what it is, not by what it is not. No Santa? Fine, but the point isn’t denying Santa. Be genial, merry, and easy about all the Santa stuff that you see around you, and do your version of Christmas with warmth and cheer. Less commercial? Fine, but make your holiday bright. Less secular? Also fine. So long as you feel joy.

Find something you can enjoy and be proud of and lean into it.

Fires in the fireplace.

Lights in the darkness.

Service.

This is Not a Holiday Gift Guide - The Steader Manifesto

Cozy.

Telling stories of Christmases long long ago.

Christmas is an enormous trust fund of cultural capital that has been invested for you. All you have to do is cash your check like a trust fund kid.

A great marriage requires great sex. Great sex does not rely on great pre-marital sex. In fact, it’s probably a negative.

In this transmission, we rebuke the common notion that premarital sex is a necessary or even useful method to determine “sexual compatibility” (an anti-concept).

The sex is the marriage

Not to put too fine a point on it--marriage is about sex. The existence and proliferation of alternate sexual arrangements does not refute this basic truth, any more than the introduction of McDonalds stopped home-cooked family dinners from still being about food.

At some level everyone knows or suspects that marriage sex can be better than any other kind. This is true. Great sex is the foundation of a great marriage. Great sex produces a great family, both literally (great sex leads to more conceptions) but mostly because a happy, fulfilling family life interates down through the generations and the foundation of happy fulfilling family life are a man and a woman whose bodies yearn for each other.

“Sexual compatibility” does not produce great sex

But beyond that point of suspecting that marriage sex can be the best sex, the mass understanding breaks down. Most people assume at some level that great sex leads to great marriages instead of the inverse. In reality, both are true. But from this partially false thought they get to the fully false anti-concept of “sexual compatibility.” They believe that great sex happens because of some mysterious undetectable but highly important quality called “sexual compatibility.” When the sexual compatibilities align, boom, great sex. In turn, the way you detect “sexual compatibility” is by having sex. It’s just amateur science, apparently. Or product testing.

All of this thinking is silly, of course, it can barely survive being said out loud. But most people think this way anyway.

There is one negative reason and two positive reasons why it’s all nonsense.

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Bed death has nothing to do with sexual incompatibility

What gets people worried, and rightly so, are the unhappy marriages stuck in bed death and frigidity. In many cases, the unhappiness preceded the bed death. In others not. But in very, very few cases is the cause some mysterious X factor that could have been determined in advance by just having sex before marriage. 99% of these people did have sex before marriage, with each other and with others. They got married anyway, and then the bed death happened. Amazingly, people see a problem and call for a solution that they have just seen tried and failed. It as if spectators at the Hindenberg walked away vowing, next time, for sure, to put some kind of fabric envelope around the hydrogen.

Great Sex is More Made than Discovered

Marriage sex has the greatest potential for great sex because sex echoes forward. The husband and wife are building on their past intimacy. Their flight soars on the wings of flight. And then there are the opportunities for mutual support, the growth of memories and associations, the adventure of starting a family and a household, the security, the love... great sex is made, not discovered through market testing.

The Body Knows

No couple who felt a great deal of desire for each other has discovered they were “incompatible.” The body knows. You can find out if you can achieve escape velocity together just by kissing. You can almost literally find out just by smelling.

The compatibility carousel is costly in money and emotions and especially in time and it leaves you just a little bit crippled. Avoid it if you can.

The brain has a hack—its called “our kind”

We are going through a historic selection event. In a few decades, only those families that establish a multi-generational identity the children want to pass on will survive. In other words, who dies with the most grandkids, wins…. by default.

In this transmission we are going to explore the implications that mental social modeling has for your ideal family size, on the assumption that as a family founder you want your family to continue.

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Human brains spend a lot of time social modeling. Even in primitive conditions, getting left on an ice floe is more dangerous than polar bears.

This includes modeling how the people you are modeling are modeling you. And if they know each other, then you are also modeling how the people you are modeling are modeling the other people you are modeling, and how these models will interact with each other, and so on. If you had to do it consciously and individually, it would be quite a task.

Take a family, for example. A small two-child family is fairly straightforward. But even a family with just 5 or 6 kids is a web.

https://x.com/simonsarris/status/1987142324858572910

Your brain has a shortcut to compress the complexity. When you have multiple people all interacting with each other over time, your brain models them as a group. It compresses the multiple people into one identity.

Voila, family identity. You have created a node on the social graph.

Further, the easiest way to model an identity is to share it.

The easiest way to model an identity is to share it.

Efficiency isn’t the only reason for family identity. Love and beauty and intimacy are obviously real. But even if only for pure efficiency reasons, if you have a large family the minds of its members will automatically assume there is a group identity, work to detect or create it, and work to become it.

The more of you there are, the more you you are.

(One of the family dots has as many connections outside as inside. Yet it is obvious where its identity lies. There is also at least one smaller family in the diagram but it blends in with the flow).

Some of the more callous family founders might say having more kids is good because it gives you more chances at having children who embrace the family project. Quantity beats quality they might say.

(Renowned Theorist of Large Numbers)

The sweet truth is that quantity produces quality.

Quantity produces quality.

Bonus points for extended family and telling stories about ancestors.

Human relationships are immensely valuable and the felt reward is high. The more of them your home offers, the stronger you will be. It is a form of wealth and value that it is entirely up to you to create.

for doing family in the right way

won’t be surprised we take a victory lap

when they agree with what we say.

The Mormons (Latter-day Saints) have their problems but they also have a good deal worth aiming for. We aren’t going to chartapalooza but we could—higher marriage rates, lower divorce rates, earlier marriage, replacement levels of fertility even among educated professionals, and so on. They are, in other words, Steady.

So when their new leader makes family and fertility the keynote of his annual worldwide address, we should take notice.

(In his 90s, cried when he remembered his father dying when he was 7).

In this transmission, we cover what the LDS are worried about, and what they suggest can be done about it; we also point out where we have given you specifics and analysis on these solutions already.

The Warning

(beginning at 7:07:06)

Text here.

In the United States, we are suffering from a deterioration in marriage and childbearing. For nearly 100 years, the proportion of households headed by married couples has declined, and so has the birth rate. The marriages and birth rates of our church members are much more positive, but they have also declined significantly.

The national declines in marriage and child bearing are understandable for historic reasons, but Latter Day Saint values and practices should improve, not follow those trends.

That’s it. That’s the warning. Births and marriage rates are dropping, and its bad.

We love the ambition of not just resisting the declines of the rest of society, but actually getting even better.

Why are they dropping? Among other things, because families have ceased to be centers of production.

In my boyhood, 70 years ago, I lived on my grandparents’ farm in a setting where almost all that happened during the day was under the direction of the family. There was no television or other electronics to distract from family activities. In contrast, in today’s urban society, few members experience consistent family-centered activities. Urban living and modern transportation, organized entertainment and high speed communication, have made it easy for youth to treat their homes as boarding houses, where they sleep and take an occasional meal, but where there is far less parental direction of their activities. Parental influences have also been diluted by the way in which most current members of the Church earn a living.

In times past, one of the great influences that unified families was the experience of struggling together in pursuit of a common goal, such as taming the wilderness or earning a living. The family was an organized and conducted unit of economic production. Today, most families are units of economic consumption, which does not require a high degree of family organization and cooperation.

Yes, yes, and yes. Being part of a closed production loop—producing what you consume—is a critical and overlooked foundation for group identity.

The Solutions

Families unite when they do meaningful things together. Family gardens build family relationships. Happy family experiences strengthen family ties. Camping, sports activities, and other recreation are especially valuable to bond families….

Parents should educate children in the basic skills of living, including working in the yard and home.

In other words, primary production. Primary production is closed-loop production where the household produces some of what it itself consumes. We first laid out the theory of primary production three years ago in 2022.

Gardening is a great and rewarding way to engage in primary production. Grow it, can it, cook it, eat it.

But cultural production is even easier. Camping, sports activities (where the family is doing the sport, not just watching), telling stories, reading aloud…

Families should organize family reunions to remember ancestors….

Your family needs to be part of a chain. Extending family, ancestors, children yet to be, the unseen but felt presence of more than just the nuclear family.

None of these are that hard. Not just surviving, but thriving, is within your reach. You will have more grandchildren than the grandparents of the Baby Boom.

So you plant a tree, and its all over but for the picking and the eating? Well, not if you have a thriving tree, it isn’t. Now you have to figure out what to do with all the fruit. What started out as a bare roots seedling in the ground may turn into a food dryer or a freezer or a pressure canner or a fruit stand before you are done.

These are all wonderful, and give you chances for family work and family enjoyment throughout the year.

But in this transmission, we introduce you to a possible alternative. Sometimes the solution to too much fruit is more fruit trees.

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Here is a Rubinette apple coming on right now. There are just about enough apples for everyone to eat their fill for a week and for a pie or two.

Here is a row of fruit trees

They are staggered so that in the next few weeks other apples and pears will be ready to pick.

The apricots and peaches and plums have already come and gone. A few of their leaves are already turning.

What allows all this amazing variety of fruit in a not very large space is planting them closer together than normal, 6 feet in this instance, and keeping them pruned for the space they are in. This results in more trees, but less fruit per tree. Which is fine when all we want is to keep a little fruit fresh on the tree for eating throughout the summer and fall.

Pros: you get to try out a lot more variety of trees and fruit, you have fruit for longer, with less chance of being overwhelmed with too much fruit at any one time. If you have a small space, you can still get more than one variety of fruit using these methods.

Cons: More pruning, you also need to plan your varieties and their expected ripening times (and rootstocks) more carefully.

You can do tight spacing like we do, down to as little as 3’ between. You can also plant two-in-a-hole, three-in-a-hole, or most commonly, four-in-a-hole.

These methods work with standard rootstock fruit trees. Unlike with close columnnar style planting in commerical orchards, you don’t need trees that are specially bred for growing in small spaces. In fact, the method works best with standard, though dwarf and semi-dwarf can also work.

For more information, check out the Dave Wilson website here. https://www.davewilson.com/home-garden/backyard-orchard-culture/

For extra beauty or for even smaller spaces, try espalier!

As wizened old men, well into the golden senescence of our late 20s and even 30s and 40s, we steaders usually do not give the young ones dating advice. But this time, we're going to break the rule and say something that will be a benefit for men of all ages and marital conditions. In this transmission, we tell you to take the merry pill.

Men who are merry do better in courtship, are more likely to be married, and are less likely to be divorced. Merry Men obviously enjoy life more. So take the merry pill.

Archetypes

Everyone loves Christmas, the quintessential merry holiday. We hear that women love it too.

There are strong connections between being merry and successful teasing and giving off roguish vibes. Robin Hood and his Merry Men are the original model for the rogue, which is to say the safe bad boy.
Bad boy but safe? Courtship catnip. If you want to get an idea of what merry is, read the canonical Pyle version. Robin liked laughing and he liked laughing at himself.

Another word for merry is jovial. It comes from Jove, which is the English version of the name of Jupiter. Jove is the highest god, the father figure, but he is also jovial.
He's merry.

So being merry has strong archetypal power, both with being a rogue and a bad boy and with having
extreme patriarchal authority.
In both cases, what the merriment does is it makes the authority (Jove) and the unaccountable exercise of power (Robin Hood) palatable.
Merriment says this is someone who could be trusted to be in charge.

Even despite all the layers of acculturation at the base level of root instinct that a man and a woman share with a beaver or a frog, in courtship, his instincts and her instincts are saying that he is seeking to become her authority.

And how will that authority be exercised--with some self-awareness and the consequent ability to laugh at himself? Kindly?

The merry pill helps solve that dilemma.

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Be Goofy

Goofiness is merry without authority, but even goofy guys, people who have no authority, clean up. There are plenty of dads who are doing fine just purely being goofy. They would be better if they had some real masculine weight behind it, if they went merry instead of goofy, but they're still doing okay,
as much as offends our sense of what is fitting.

If you have some real accomplishment or strength, then being merry is as easy as being goofy. Goofy + jawline + good 1 RM max = merry.

Steader comment:
My wife often says that there are two kinds of guys you can marry, adult men who are inwardly 16 year old goth emo teenagers, or adult men who are inwardly 12 year old boys. She says she's very grateful that I am basically an overgrown 12 year old boy. Yes, I told her, sticks are cool, and I don't care who says otherwise.

Be Funny

Being merry is similar to, although not exactly the same as having a sense of humor.

There's a man who has developed an approach to courtship for men he calls sexy hobbies. The idea is you develop hobbies that are fun and attractive to women, such as playing the guitar. They help you display mastery. They make emotional connections, they're cool, they're high status.

https://x.com/alpharivelino/status/1683143692008271873

https://xcancel.com/alpharivelino/status/1683143692008271873

Curiously enough, he leaves off his list being funny, which absolutely is a hobby that can be learned and is probably the greatest ‘sexy hobby’ of them all.

You get funny mostly through trial and error, although there are plenty of YouTube videos and books that can point out various aspects of humor. Feel free to steal jokes. The most effective humor, of course, is situational, but even telling canned jokes that makes people laugh makes them like you.

The best way to develop a sense of humor is first to practice on yourself. Make yourself laugh first.
In practice, humor isn't just a set of outside expectations that you can manipulate like an engineer. It's a social process that you have to participate in yourself. If you aren’t amusing yourself, you aren’t merry.

The second piece of advice is just to practice on others. The good news is that women are not wholly alien creatures. There will be some overlap between getting your bros to laugh and what will get a woman to laugh.

Seeing you make your friends laugh is attractive, even if she doesn't herself. It shows you have a sense of humor even if she doesn’t get it yet. It shows that you have allies, some kind of mastery and authority over other men.

There'll be some overlap between what gets your grandma or your sisters to laugh and what gets a girl that you're with to laugh.

Being willing to fail and shrug off failure is another requirement for being funny in a merry way.
One of the first things you should learn to do when you are being funny is to have a joke or two when the joke doesn't land.

Having a sense of humor probably has sound evolutionary reasons for women being attracted to it. First of all, it's a display of a kind of social mastery, an ability to read the room, understand social cues, have verbal intelligence--this would especially be true of situational humor—and emotional intelligence. No one really gets funny without taking risk and dealing with embarrassment, so it shows some courage.

In fact, humor, a person's sense of humor reveals a lot about their character in general. If you have bad character, that will show up in your sense of humor; if you are funny at all, your humor will be mean spirited, nasty, not self deprecating. There'll be something false about it. The good news is that character like humor is something you can grow.

There's another reason why you having a sense of humor, which always has to come from yourself, hits well. The type of humor that goes over well is usually an expression of joy. It shows in a fairly unfakeable way that you are enjoying being who you're with. You're relaxed and happy.
A woman, as the expensive fertilization sex, is by nature, at the root level used to people trying to get into their pants and lying to do so, including lying about liking her. And it's hard to tell if people actually genuinely like her, which she would like. Seems like that would make for a better lifelong partnership that way.

Inside jokes and shared humor is a standard mechanism for small, tight, knit human organizations such as families. Having a sense of humor shows that you'll make a good dad you or shows that you are already a good dad. There's a reason that jokes are associated with dads and not with bachelors.

You have to be merry, not just funny

There are a series of paradoxes that are found in a lot of religious traditions. They're in the New Testament=, they're called the dominical paradoxes. You see similar things in Buddhism, that in order to get a thing, you have to want it but not want it. And in order to try and impress a girl with your humor and with your merriment, you have to be willing to be funny for its own sake. You can't impress her if you are only performing trained actions in order to impress her, the artifice, the fakery, will always show through. You have to just like laughing. You have to love to laugh. That is the core of being merry.

Not every other piece of courtship advice out there is bad. Many are really good, but this is one of the best ones, and it's pretty easy to do, and it's just not very commonly given. It won’t seal the deal all by itself, but it will get you a long way there.

Be merry, be jovial.
Let out your inner rogue. Make yourself laugh.
Laugh at yourself.
Take delight in seeing her face light up.
It really is wonderful.

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It’s your mutual heritage

Having a sense of humor and being merry is also Anglo American. Its in your heritage.
The English people, for a long time, have prided themselves on their sense of humor and have treated it as something to be developed and refined.

In the reign of good Queen Bess, a nobleman was being presented at court, and in the act of kneeling,
unfortunately, absolutely ripped out a stunning one, noise and odor, 10 out of 10. Never bean before you queen.
In embarrassment, he fled the court and fled the country for a while. After a few years,
he apparently missed England, or at least thought the hue and cry had died down. So he came back, and he's now at court again, and Queen Elizabeth says, “put your mind at ease, Sir Wossname, we have forgotten the fart.”

English and American humor even has developed futures that are extremely uncommon in the rest of the world, such as light hearted sarcasm and the non joke or the absurd joke, where the joke is, the subversion of the expectation of humor.

How many surrealists can fit in a doghouse? Pancake.

Merry Old England. You come from long lines of men who were hilarious.

Dating is supposed to be fun

The way courtship works in a modern setting also pushes in the direction of humor and merriment, and has for a long time, because although the ultimate purpose of dating is to find a relationship the actual act of dating is structured so that the immediate goal is to have fun, to have a good time, to enjoy yourself, to relax.

So someone who is better at helping the people to enjoy themselves and relax is going to be better at dating. Just the way it is. If the rules for courtship in our culture involved bride capture, guys who were better at riding horses would have better luck. But in our culture dating is a leisure time activity, and the purpose of leisure time is to have fun.

But no one likes my jokes

“But I'm a weird guy and I have a weird sense of humor.
There's basically three people in the world who get my jokes,
and they all have XY chromosomes. And two of them are my dad and my brother.”

Never fear. There's probably some ways that you can broaden your sense of humor, understand where people are coming from a little bit, translate what you're doing into a larger audience. To an extent, these are actually spiritually productive exercises. Sometimes you learn a lot about life trying to do that.

But the other thing to think of is that for humor, just like for pheromones, being individual is a feature, not a bug. For successful courtship and a happy marriage and lots of children, you only need an N=1 success rate. And the fact that this one girl really vibes to your sense of humor when other girls don't is actually going to make things better for you, not worse. Remember that in the West, and despite what many say, I tend to think in antiquity and outside the West, also, the point of courtship is not just to get access to a monthly ovulation which you can inseminate. The point is to form a union.
And the compatibility of your character and your souls is revealed many, many times, probably most effectively, through your senses of humor, just as the compatibility of your flesh comes in the smell and the chemistry.

But she only laughs if she already likes you

There is a feeling that whether she laughs at your jokes or not is 100% a feature of whether she already likes you. False. It helps, yes, and in this aspect helps you maintain attraction. Which is a good thing. It helps you figure out if you are hitting some attraction buttons, which is also a good thing.

But mainly its just false. This is something that people who aren't really funny say. When you get funny, you absolutely can tell when people are laughing because they like you. It’s obviously still great. It's convivial. You're all friends. You have charisma. That's a real laugh. There's real joy going on.

But you can also tell when you have just stunned someone, their whole face is transformed with laughter that's erupting out of them. You have reached down into their soul and twisted.

No More Buts

The good news is that the kind of woman who is most susceptible to the merry pill is the kind of woman who is most likely to be looking for marriage and wanting to have children.

For some must push and some must pull,

As we go marching up the hill;

So merrily on our way we go

Until we reach the Valley-o

-Mormon children's song

There's a pretty little girl in the wagon train ahead
whoa haw buck and jerry boy
and I wish she was by my side instead
whoa haw buck and jerry boy.

-Mormon pioneer song

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Sociology, anthropology, and political theory are in a renaissance, led by online amateurs. We are bringing the intellectual world back to life..
One justly-praised example was this introduction to the Rallye Mondaine.


In this transmission we will introduce you to the Mormon (Latter-day Saint) "Pioneer Trek." For the wide awake, lessons to be learned abound.
In the course of it, we will discover an innovation in political engineering for the rising elite.

It All Began in 1847

The year is 1847. The founder of the Mormon church has been killed extrajudicially, his successor Brigham Young has barely asserted control, and he has to lead his people away from their city on the Misissippi--they have been told by armed militias that they can leave on their feet or on their backs, but either way they are leaving. He has decided on the mountain fastness of the Rockies, some 1300 miles away. The first pioneer company sets out along the Oregon Trail at first and then blazing their own way in the latter parts of the journey, eventually arriving at their remote mountain valleys in what is now Salt Lake City. They began to build and irrigate and settle. Other companies soon arrive. Over the next few years, tens of thousands make their way across the American plains, many all the way from England or Northern Europe.

Some 3000 of them even forgo Conestoga wagons and set out pulling "handcarts" of their own design.

This epic migration was an act of ethnogenesis and is remembered among the LDS (Mormons) today with the qualities of a myth or a legend. Basically every Mormon knows the basic outlines of the pioneer trek. They will have heard multiple stories from the pioneer experience and probably know at least a few well enough to tell them themselves. They are proud of their pioneer ancestors. Those who don't have any will be told that they are the pioneers for their family lines. The pioneer experience is a living touchstone for what it means today to be a Mormon.

(This painting refers to an incident that it appears almost every Mormon has heard about).

There are even movies, focusing on the experience of two 1856 handcart companies that left late in the season and suffered incredible hardship in the early snows of that year before the survivors were saved by flying rescue parties from Salt Lake. Their's are stories of sacrifice and miracle.

(The second one is probably better).

"Pioneer Trek"

Today, most LDS congregations will have a reenactment pioneer handcart trek for their teenagers every few years. There are some guidelines from church headquarters, and there is a handcart history site maintained by the LDS church, but mostly the local congregations are coming up with their own program to be conducted in the woods or plains near themselves. This was and is a bottom-up social movement.

Nonetheless, a fairly standard social script has emerged. To the point where there is a movie about it.

(Surprisingly decent but fairly insiderish).

Usually several nearby congregations will band together several months to a year in advance. They will rent or build handcarts, get youth to sign up and start prepping their clothes and supply, and recruit adults. The crucial adults are the Pas and Mas. For reenactment purposes, each handcart is a family and the adult couple assigned to the cart is the family's Pa and Ma. Other adults are recruited as needed for cooking, specific reenactments, logistics, and so on.

Typically there is at least one event or more before the actual trek for everyone to meet each other. Often there will be arrangements for the youth to research to find a pioneer ancestor or just to pick one of the handcart pioneers that they are "going for."

On the day of Trek, everyone assembles at the kickoff point in their reenactment clothing. For the women, this can be as simple as a long flowy dress of some sturdy fabric and a bonnet but can be more elaborate--petticoats, aprons. and more authentic period fabrics and period patterns. There are small businesses that will sell them online. For men, its usally just khaki pants and a long-sleeve shirt with a widebrim hat, often leaning as much 'western' as '19th century pioneer.' Go-getters will have suspenders. With this and other reenactment aspects, there is a spectrum of authenticity/austerity. Most treks end up somewhere in the middle. Enough nods towards reenactment authenticity and enough hardship to create a psychological break from ordinary life and an emotional connection to pioneer life, but not enough to induce misery during the trek or serious expenses before. It's the business casual of reenactment.

In addition to the clothing the trekkers usually show up with some kind of satchel (often homemade) for sundries and usually a 5-gallon bucket with a list of approved supplies and often with a homemade padded cover on the lid for sitting on. No phone.

They put their buckets in their handcart, they play some get-to-know-you games, pray, and then they are off.

It will be 2-4 days normally, anywhere from 4-8 miles a day or more. Not utterly taxing (though some groups at the extreme do go for utterly taxing) but still challenging for some teenagers of both sexes and as young as 13 or 14. Often also there will be a doll designated as the family’s baby that has to be held at all times. The holder obviously cannot push.

The itinerary will then have a series of reenactments and pioneer events and family and group devotionals on spiritual topics and pioneer stories (there will often be a theme: Come to Christ. Doubt Not, Fear Not. Faith in Every Footstep.) The actual content will vary depending on local interests and abilities. There is usually a mix between fun, reenactment, physical challenge, and spiritual focus. Almost every Trek will have a Women’s Pull. The men and boys will leave and the women and girls will pull by themselves up some particularly challenging hill. It is usually extremely emotional for all concerned. Done properly it happens after the “families” have already started to bond hard so it is very difficult for the boys to see their girls having to struggle on their own, and the girls feel desperate without “their” boys.

There will usually be a dance that has some or all fiddle music and reels. The teenagers will surprise themselves with how much they enjoy it with their barriers broken down.

There will usually also be a “testimony meeting” at the end, where the youth take turns recounting how the experience has strengthened their faith. Usually fervent and emotional.

Results

It works. The teenagers finish up with a sense of identity and a stronger commitment to their faith. From a Mormon perspective, pioneer treks are a great success.

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Application

Any group with an identity with some history should consider coming up with their own variation if they wish to pass on an identity from generation to generation. Youth or adults alike, it doesn’t matter. Homo ludens can fall into playing roles quite easily and is affected by them.

Americans can easily do their own Pioneer Trek with wagons (or heck, handcarts). A mountain man style rendezvous. A stockade wilderness experience. Get a sailboat and reenact the Mayflower. Or WWII, or the Civil War, or King Phillip’s.

Catholics could have a crusade reenactment, or a Jacobite one. Presbyterians could reenact the Covenanters. All that is needed is inspiration and committing to the bit.

The Next Elite

In talking to Trek participants, it becomes clear that the experience generates more social capital than gets used. In particular, the Pas and Mas and their families bond really tightly but there is no particular organized outlet or venue to use this bond.

I and [his wife] keep up with our kids from 10 years ago on facebook. They talk to us a lot. One of them called me to tell me he just had his first child!

Our cart was sort of the leftovers. Me and this 15-year old boy did almost all the pulling, we almost killed ourselves. I think about him about once a week. That was probably almost 20 years ago.

At a lot of stake conferences [a service involving multiple congregations in a regional area] you will see a couple of adults and several teenagers off in a corner talking excitedly. That’s trek people.

One of the longstanding challenges for elites is trust. They often turn to the people they when they were young, before they made it big. The rich man who staffs his enterprises with his war buddies. The “old school ties.” The Paypal Mafia.

The Mormon pioneer trek is a template to do the same thing without a war.

Imagine its 2050. The families of the next American elite who have a teenage son or daughter of the right age this year are jockeying to get their child into one of the wagon trains. Three months of American settler living with other children. The wagon masters are retired men of accomplishment. The Mas and Pas are likewise notable. Here’s a man and his wife who are taking a sabbatical from his real estate business. Here’s a young couple just starting out—they just graduated, and this is their summer before he starts his first job.

Imagine its 2060. There’s a new business, a new military unit, a new university, a new sociological niche—it’s being led by one of these wagon train “families” and others in their train. The Pa and Ma are trusted mentors.