Latest / Honey Badger Radio / Dowry and the Gold Pill with This Is Shah | Fireside Chat 266

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Dowry and the Gold Pill with This Is Shah | Fireside Chat 266 · Honey Badger Radio

• 0:01
  Speaker 1: Hello everybody, and welcome to Honey Badger Radio. My name
• 0:05
  Speaker 1: is Brian and this is the fireside chat where we
• 0:08
  Speaker 1: talk with let's say, interesting people that are sort of
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: in and around our wheelhouse the things that we discussed.
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: And today I'm joined by this is Shaw whether HEAs
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: that's the name of your channel. That's not your name
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: unless your name is Sha, which I should have asked you. Yeah,
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: all right, well dude, thanks so much for coming on.
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: Welcome to the show. Really appreciate you having, you know,
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: taking a time.
• 0:34
  Speaker 2: Yeah, no worries, it's it's great to be on. So
• 0:36
  Speaker 2: hoping we'll have a fun discussion here. Got a lot
• 0:39
  Speaker 2: to talk about, I'd say.
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: Yeah, definitely a lot to talk about. So I want
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: to give people a little bit of a background on
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: how I found your content, and you came recommended partly
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: by another guy who's on the channel It's Complicated mentioned you.
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: But before that I saw you on a talk with
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: Paul Elim. You've done a couple of shows with him
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: discussing Dowry and the history of that. So tell us
• 1:03
  Speaker 1: a little bit about your background and what it is
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: that you do and how you found yourself getting involved
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: with this kind of content.
• 1:10
  Speaker 2: Yeah, well, my background was I actually used to work
• 1:14
  Speaker 2: at a child support agency. So I did that for
• 1:17
  Speaker 2: five years, and you know, it kind of the whole gamut.
• 1:20
  Speaker 2: I guess what you'd imagine what child support, you know,
• 1:23
  Speaker 2: the genetic tests and calculating people's child support, meeting with
• 1:27
  Speaker 2: the parents, going to court, the enforcement of child support.
• 1:31
  Speaker 2: I've trained other child support well, child support agents, we
• 1:35
  Speaker 2: would call them child support officers. This was all in California,
• 1:38
  Speaker 2: so I was very familiar with that. I've spoke with
• 1:40
  Speaker 2: many moms and dads and seen kind of how the
• 1:44
  Speaker 2: system work, not just with the parents, but also on
• 1:47
  Speaker 2: the back end with like you know, the welfare system
• 1:51
  Speaker 2: and all these kinds of things, and just saw that
• 1:53
  Speaker 2: stuff come together. And I never really had any idea
• 1:56
  Speaker 2: or never really thought about that aspect so much.
• 1:59
  Speaker 3: Prior to that.
• 2:01
  Speaker 2: I did see some sort of manosphere stuff like I
• 2:04
  Speaker 2: used to read, you know, on the subreddit, the red
• 2:06
  Speaker 2: pill subreddit back then, So that was about the time
• 2:09
  Speaker 2: I kind of discovered that. And then that was just
• 2:12
  Speaker 2: after college, and then not too long after I started
• 2:15
  Speaker 2: working at the agency, and I started seeing these things
• 2:18
  Speaker 2: come together, especially when it came to families falling apart,
• 2:22
  Speaker 2: not so much just about people having struggles with dating
• 2:26
  Speaker 2: or you know, stuff that I would have been concerned
• 2:28
  Speaker 2: with just as a young guy. But then I started
• 2:30
  Speaker 2: seeing you know, divorce judgments and all that kind of stuff.
• 2:33
  Speaker 3: So it it just.
• 2:35
  Speaker 2: You know, seeing that in front of me for so long,
• 2:36
  Speaker 2: it just got me really interested in the history of
• 2:40
  Speaker 2: all that and kind of how we ended up with
• 2:41
  Speaker 2: the system that we ended up because I used to think, well,
• 2:43
  Speaker 2: if we just changed the laws or something like that,
• 2:45
  Speaker 2: everything should be fixed. And then it's like, well, how
• 2:47
  Speaker 2: did we get the laws that we have? Okay, well
• 2:50
  Speaker 2: this is the culture we come from, and just all
• 2:52
  Speaker 2: these different changes.
• 2:53
  Speaker 3: So it set me down a pretty big rabbit hole.
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, so okay, well out of curiosity, what got
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: you involved just before all the red pill stuff happened?
• 3:02
  Speaker 4: Why did you get involved with child support stuff?
• 3:05
  Speaker 1: Was it just like, oh, I just need a job
• 3:07
  Speaker 1: and this, you know, helps me put food on the table,
• 3:11
  Speaker 1: or were you particularly interested in this?
• 3:13
  Speaker 3: To be honest, it was a fluke.
• 3:14
  Speaker 2: It was so my buddy and I we'd graduated college
• 3:17
  Speaker 2: and he came back into town and him and I
• 3:21
  Speaker 2: were we were hanging out together because we were trying
• 3:23
  Speaker 2: to figure out, like, you know, to find some employment somewhere.
• 3:28
  Speaker 3: I was.
• 3:28
  Speaker 2: I was selling beds and stuff like that. Just I
• 3:31
  Speaker 2: made the small business in college and I was doing that.
• 3:34
  Speaker 2: So we were kind of supporting each other. And my
• 3:36
  Speaker 2: friend he actually found the job posting, and I'd never
• 3:39
  Speaker 2: heard of child support really, I didn't know what it was.
• 3:41
  Speaker 2: I was like, oh, it's something that helps kids, I guess,
• 3:43
  Speaker 2: you know. So we both and we took the preliminary
• 3:47
  Speaker 2: tests that you know they were doing so you got
• 3:50
  Speaker 2: as part of the application, and him and I both
• 3:52
  Speaker 2: applied and I ended up getting the job. So I
• 3:57
  Speaker 2: thought I was never going to hear back from him.
• 3:59
  Speaker 2: In like six months later, they sent me a criminal
• 4:01
  Speaker 2: history disclosure form and I was like, oh, I almost
• 4:03
  Speaker 2: missed seeing that in the mail, and I filled it
• 4:05
  Speaker 2: back out and then before you know it, I was
• 4:07
  Speaker 2: working there. And then that's how I was working there.
• 4:09
  Speaker 2: I was like, Oh, this is what it is, you
• 4:12
  Speaker 2: know what I mean? Yeah, I just could have never
• 4:14
  Speaker 2: imagined just how complex and how many layers to that
• 4:17
  Speaker 2: system there was. I thought it was something way different.
• 4:21
  Speaker 1: Yeah, So like in broad strokes, because I'm actually interested
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: in this because I you know, family courts and broken
• 4:28
  Speaker 1: families are like a big thing that I advocate to address,
• 4:32
  Speaker 1: you know, on this channel.
• 4:33
  Speaker 4: That's one of my central focuses.
• 4:35
  Speaker 1: So as someone who worked or works, I assume you
• 4:38
  Speaker 1: still do in the this you know, in this field,
• 4:42
  Speaker 1: Like what are some of the things like, first of all,
• 4:45
  Speaker 1: what is it generally? And also what are some things
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: that people may not know about child support that they
• 4:49
  Speaker 1: should know?
• 4:51
  Speaker 3: Gosh well?
• 4:52
  Speaker 2: I mean typically child support is there when you know,
• 4:56
  Speaker 2: a family breaks up or if there was really never
• 4:59
  Speaker 2: a fanamily established in the first place. To be frank,
• 5:02
  Speaker 2: I mean, there's a lot of out of wedlock birds
• 5:03
  Speaker 2: and things like that. You can say families no longer
• 5:06
  Speaker 2: cohabitating if you don't want to discuss marriage in that way.
• 5:09
  Speaker 2: But when that happens, there is usually an obligation from
• 5:13
  Speaker 2: one parent to the other to pay a monetary amount
• 5:17
  Speaker 2: and that's based off of factors like custody and income.
• 5:22
  Speaker 2: The things that surprised me, and this surprised most people,
• 5:25
  Speaker 2: you know, because most people I would meet up with,
• 5:27
  Speaker 2: they're not meet up with, but that would come into
• 5:29
  Speaker 2: the agency and be sitting across the table from me.
• 5:31
  Speaker 2: They'd say, hey, why do I have to pay child support?
• 5:34
  Speaker 2: We have fifty to fifty custody or something like that.
• 5:36
  Speaker 2: It doesn't make sense. Then I'd have to explain the
• 5:39
  Speaker 2: laws and the calculator and say, well, whoever the higher
• 5:41
  Speaker 2: earner is has to pay into the lesser earner, and
• 5:43
  Speaker 2: you know it's written.
• 5:44
  Speaker 3: In the family code that.
• 5:48
  Speaker 2: You know, especially I was explained to us that they're
• 5:50
  Speaker 2: trying to kind of even out the lifestyles there for
• 5:52
  Speaker 2: the kid as they go back and forth, or things
• 5:55
  Speaker 2: like paternity laws. One of the things that really surprised
• 5:58
  Speaker 2: me was in California, child if paternity is established, you know,
• 6:05
  Speaker 2: especially when the kid's born, and typically through marriage there's
• 6:08
  Speaker 2: a presumption of paternity, so there's no need for an
• 6:11
  Speaker 2: extra kind of parental establishment sort of mechanism. It just
• 6:15
  Speaker 2: happens from the marriage itself, as the child's issued forth
• 6:18
  Speaker 2: within the marriage. That you know, once the child turns
• 6:22
  Speaker 2: to you can't you know, you're the parent, you know
• 6:25
  Speaker 2: what I mean, And you can't challenge that.
• 6:28
  Speaker 3: You can't.
• 6:29
  Speaker 2: They're not going to undo it because they're going to
• 6:30
  Speaker 2: say it's going to cause psychological harm to the child.
• 6:33
  Speaker 2: So you know, I see a lot of people getting divorced,
• 6:35
  Speaker 2: you know, maybe the kids three or four now, and
• 6:37
  Speaker 2: then suddenly, you know, whatever comes out of that blow up,
• 6:40
  Speaker 2: Hey I cheated on you, or I don't think the
• 6:42
  Speaker 2: kid's mine or something like that.
• 6:44
  Speaker 3: Then then they got to get that.
• 6:45
  Speaker 2: Kind of spilled to them, and some of them would
• 6:47
  Speaker 2: do a private genetic test and find that out and
• 6:50
  Speaker 2: then or you know, she'd go back to live with
• 6:53
  Speaker 2: their ex boyfriend who actually fathered the child or something
• 6:56
  Speaker 2: like that, and he's still pining, like I saw all
• 6:58
  Speaker 2: these wacky things. And there's all these things about the
• 7:01
  Speaker 2: system that people aren't aware of or they don't think about.
• 7:05
  Speaker 2: And also sixty five percent of our cases were started
• 7:08
  Speaker 2: because of welfare. So typically somebody would go sign up
• 7:12
  Speaker 2: for welfare a cash grant for you know, them and
• 7:15
  Speaker 2: the child, and then when they saw that you know,
• 7:19
  Speaker 2: one or the other parent wasn't in the home, we
• 7:20
  Speaker 2: would get a request from their office to say, hey,
• 7:23
  Speaker 2: go get the money back, because when they sign up
• 7:25
  Speaker 2: for welfare, they're signing over child support rights to the state.
• 7:28
  Speaker 2: So we were trying to recoup a lot of these
• 7:30
  Speaker 2: these tax dollars going out, and you know, and then
• 7:34
  Speaker 2: there was all kinds of welfare fraud. That's a different
• 7:36
  Speaker 2: kind of thing. I used to call that spillage. And
• 7:38
  Speaker 2: then on the back end, you know, there's there's matching
• 7:41
  Speaker 2: funds for child support based off how it's collected.
• 7:43
  Speaker 3: So there's these different performance measures.
• 7:45
  Speaker 2: There's these different sort of family law aspects that were
• 7:49
  Speaker 2: set up in order to try to establish paternity for
• 7:51
  Speaker 2: kids born out of wedlock. And then you had this
• 7:53
  Speaker 2: kind of interfacing of this original family law that we
• 7:57
  Speaker 2: had for a long time, especially before genetic tests that
• 8:01
  Speaker 2: would find different ways to say someone is the father
• 8:04
  Speaker 2: based off of holding out to be the father things
• 8:06
  Speaker 2: that weren't genetic in nature. Then you have this other
• 8:09
  Speaker 2: thing here, which is now we have the modern science,
• 8:11
  Speaker 2: and it kind of seems to come together in a
• 8:13
  Speaker 2: way that is really tough on fathers in my opinion.
• 8:17
  Speaker 2: So there's a lot going on there.
• 8:20
  Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, yeah, well okay, so that sounds like a
• 8:27
  Speaker 1: lot of red tape for you know, for and it
• 8:30
  Speaker 1: seems like it just comes out of maybe there's just
• 8:34
  Speaker 1: something wrong with like marriage right now, and that's what
• 8:38
  Speaker 1: so so like families, you know, just like forming them.
• 8:42
  Speaker 1: So then how did you go from doing this child
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: support stuff, which kind of got you into the red
• 8:47
  Speaker 1: pill stuff to then looking at the dowries and the
• 8:51
  Speaker 1: history of that.
• 8:52
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 8:52
  Speaker 2: You know, so for a long time I had been studying,
• 8:56
  Speaker 2: even after having worked at child support. I mean, we
• 8:59
  Speaker 2: did learn about the history there and the family codes,
• 9:02
  Speaker 2: but it didn't go that far back. And I was
• 9:05
  Speaker 2: very much interested in the history of these laws. So
• 9:08
  Speaker 2: I kind of just kept digging back and digging back,
• 9:10
  Speaker 2: and it's like, okay, no Fall and then to at
• 9:12
  Speaker 2: Fall and what came before that, and you know, there's
• 9:15
  Speaker 2: this huge cultural conversation going on about what marriage is
• 9:18
  Speaker 2: really supposed to be or what it really was, quote unquote,
• 9:22
  Speaker 2: and I was interested in child support laws, and I
• 9:25
  Speaker 2: kept going back and back and back and back, and
• 9:28
  Speaker 2: I got all the way back to like Hamerabi's code,
• 9:31
  Speaker 2: and in there, I can't remember the line is this
• 9:34
  Speaker 2: is this line about, you know, what kind of happens
• 9:37
  Speaker 2: to the produce of the farm or whatever if the
• 9:39
  Speaker 2: couple divorced but they had children, and where that would go.
• 9:42
  Speaker 2: And I'm I'm getting a little kick out of that,
• 9:44
  Speaker 2: like hey, look, it's the world's oldest child support law
• 9:46
  Speaker 2: or something like that.
• 9:47
  Speaker 3: And then but in Hammerabbi's Code.
• 9:49
  Speaker 2: Also bride price and dowry are both mentioned and it's
• 9:53
  Speaker 2: discussed you know, what happens to those in the event
• 9:56
  Speaker 2: of splitting up or just just rules around that. And
• 9:59
  Speaker 2: that wasn't the f first ping I got in my
• 10:01
  Speaker 2: mind about that, but that was like the recent one.
• 10:03
  Speaker 2: So as I was looking for child support, it kind
• 10:05
  Speaker 2: of and looking at the history of child support, it
• 10:08
  Speaker 2: took me back to that.
• 10:09
  Speaker 3: Then I finally decided.
• 10:10
  Speaker 2: I was like, you know, I've seen this a couple
• 10:12
  Speaker 2: times just in my life, and I thought, you know,
• 10:15
  Speaker 2: maybe I should really do a comprehensive study of this.
• 10:18
  Speaker 2: And that's when I started digging into academic journals and
• 10:21
  Speaker 2: just trying to find anything I could find to learn
• 10:23
  Speaker 2: about the system. Prior to that, i'd say in my
• 10:26
  Speaker 2: early twenties, I was reading a lot of books, and
• 10:30
  Speaker 2: one of the books I was reading, I was reading
• 10:32
  Speaker 2: some Douts Staevsky, you know, and he wrote a book
• 10:34
  Speaker 2: called Brothers Karamazov and he also wrote The Idiot.
• 10:38
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 10:39
  Speaker 2: It's interesting because in these books, a lot of the
• 10:41
  Speaker 2: discussions about the characters, you know, kind of involved their
• 10:44
  Speaker 2: marriages or their marriage prospects, and there's this discussion about
• 10:48
  Speaker 2: the dowry, and as I'm reading this, I can see
• 10:51
  Speaker 2: how the characters are weighing their options based off different
• 10:55
  Speaker 2: dowry amounts and the different motivations that the characters have.
• 10:58
  Speaker 2: When I had first read that book, I thought it
• 10:59
  Speaker 2: was I was like, oh, that's weird. So the woman's side,
• 11:02
  Speaker 2: I just thought it was weird that the woman was
• 11:04
  Speaker 2: bringing money because I had always thought it's the man
• 11:06
  Speaker 2: who brings the money. So that was like my first ping,
• 11:09
  Speaker 2: and then it kind of just existed back there for
• 11:12
  Speaker 2: a bit. And then as I was digging into child
• 11:14
  Speaker 2: support and family law and how we kind of got
• 11:16
  Speaker 2: the system we ended up with, I just ran into
• 11:19
  Speaker 2: that basically. And then I I as when I saw
• 11:22
  Speaker 2: that and I started reading more and more about it,
• 11:24
  Speaker 2: especially the anthropology about it, it just kind of blew
• 11:26
  Speaker 2: my mind.
• 11:27
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 11:28
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I've been I've been thinking a lot about like,
• 11:31
  Speaker 1: you know, we look at the divorce rates and all
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: these issues with you know, like child support and paternity,
• 11:38
  Speaker 1: fraud and false paternity and all this other stuff, and
• 11:42
  Speaker 1: just how like cutthroat it gets, you know when divorce
• 11:45
  Speaker 1: comes around. I mean, I've heard my parents stayed together,
• 11:48
  Speaker 1: but I heard horror stories about friends and even my wife,
• 11:52
  Speaker 1: you know, but and it got me thinking, like something
• 11:55
  Speaker 1: about this is just wrong, and I think that it's
• 11:57
  Speaker 1: been wrong for a long time. So well, first of all,
• 12:01
  Speaker 1: someone in the chat is asking me, so I'm gonna
• 12:02
  Speaker 1: do this because we're gonna move.
• 12:04
  Speaker 4: On into towery stuff.
• 12:05
  Speaker 1: But someone is asking, what is the craziest situation you've
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: ever seen with child support?
• 12:10
  Speaker 4: Doing the child support thing.
• 12:11
  Speaker 2: I mean, I've seen some very large amounts, I've seen
• 12:14
  Speaker 2: some very weird divorce judgments. The one I always remember
• 12:17
  Speaker 2: and I've I've shared this in some other places. But
• 12:19
  Speaker 2: the one that was like both my coworker and I
• 12:22
  Speaker 2: just had to like take a break for a second.
• 12:25
  Speaker 2: Was I kind of touched on it earlier. But my
• 12:27
  Speaker 2: coworker who sat next to me, he was on a
• 12:31
  Speaker 2: phone call. He was on our advanced collections team, so
• 12:33
  Speaker 2: when people really didn't want to pay, we had a
• 12:35
  Speaker 2: special team in the office that would try to go
• 12:38
  Speaker 2: in there and get this money and with whatever enforcement
• 12:41
  Speaker 2: tactics they had. And he was on a pretty tough
• 12:43
  Speaker 2: phone call. And when he got off the phone call,
• 12:46
  Speaker 2: he walked over to come just he just had to
• 12:48
  Speaker 2: talk to somebody, I guess, but I was hearing him
• 12:51
  Speaker 2: on the phone and he's like, he was just like,
• 12:54
  Speaker 2: I don't know what I would do if I was
• 12:56
  Speaker 2: that guy, you know. And I was like, what's going on? Man,
• 12:58
  Speaker 2: I'm like, you know what happened? And he was explaining
• 13:01
  Speaker 2: to me that this guy was married and he had
• 13:03
  Speaker 2: I think it was two kids with somebody, and then
• 13:05
  Speaker 2: they had gotten divorced, and you know, he had to
• 13:07
  Speaker 2: pay child support. And what ended up happening though, according
• 13:10
  Speaker 2: to this guy, is that she went to go live
• 13:13
  Speaker 2: with her ex boyfriend with the kids too. And according
• 13:16
  Speaker 2: to him, those kids are you know, we're from his
• 13:20
  Speaker 2: own private tests or whatever. It's actually not his kids
• 13:24
  Speaker 2: and they were the kids of that boyfriend. So he
• 13:27
  Speaker 2: couldn't stomach it. I don't think most guys could having
• 13:30
  Speaker 2: to have his labor slaved over to that household and
• 13:33
  Speaker 2: pay every month to go pay into a household of
• 13:38
  Speaker 2: you know, for that's their family and it's not even
• 13:40
  Speaker 2: his kids, and you know, he was having just he
• 13:43
  Speaker 2: just couldn't take it.
• 13:44
  Speaker 1: That ruling was made with that knowledge or was it
• 13:47
  Speaker 1: that like did the did the judge or whoever asked
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: the ruling? They were like, I know, these aren't your kids,
• 13:54
  Speaker 1: but you're paying for them anyway.
• 13:55
  Speaker 2: Like that, That's essentially what happened, just because of how
• 13:58
  Speaker 2: the law works here and when they got divorced. I
• 14:01
  Speaker 2: don't know if if the judge took that into account,
• 14:04
  Speaker 2: but even if he did, presumption of paternity was already there,
• 14:08
  Speaker 2: you know what I mean. So since the kids were
• 14:11
  Speaker 2: issued within the marriage, and you know, the kids were
• 14:14
  Speaker 2: above two at the time of the divorce, even though
• 14:17
  Speaker 2: he wasn't the father, he still had a legal obligation
• 14:20
  Speaker 2: to fulfill as as the legal father of those kids.
• 14:24
  Speaker 2: And we just live in such a weird system where
• 14:27
  Speaker 2: it's like she can get away with doing that, and
• 14:29
  Speaker 2: the custody to him at that point probably wasn't worth
• 14:32
  Speaker 2: fighting for, especially if they weren't his kids, and we
• 14:35
  Speaker 2: knew that, and everybody you know pretty much knew that.
• 14:39
  Speaker 2: But there's no there's unless you can, like maybe somehow
• 14:42
  Speaker 2: facilitate an adoption, and like that other guy, and everybody
• 14:45
  Speaker 2: would be willing to do that.
• 14:47
  Speaker 3: There's no way out of it for that guy. So
• 14:49
  Speaker 3: he just he refused to pay.
• 14:50
  Speaker 2: And you know, refusing to pays another problem, because you
• 14:55
  Speaker 2: can't bankrupt. That debt interest is going to keep growing
• 14:57
  Speaker 2: on it. Child support has like the strongest ENFORCEM and
• 15:00
  Speaker 2: actions right up there with the IRS. It was modeled
• 15:02
  Speaker 2: off of the IRS system when it was pitched to
• 15:04
  Speaker 2: Congress to vamp up child support in the mid nineties.
• 15:07
  Speaker 2: So you know, no license, no not able to renew
• 15:10
  Speaker 2: your passport, bank account levies, business licenses, fishing's licenses, all
• 15:15
  Speaker 2: that stuff, revoked, gambling winnings, intercepted tax returns, intercepted lians
• 15:20
  Speaker 2: put on houses, liens put on your parents' houses, if
• 15:22
  Speaker 2: we think you're going to inherit it, I mean it
• 15:24
  Speaker 2: just the list goes on of stuff that we would do.
• 15:27
  Speaker 2: So that's one thing that that always stood out to me.
• 15:30
  Speaker 2: Other than that, it was just seeing you know, a
• 15:32
  Speaker 2: lot of divorces. I've seen a lot of I've seen
• 15:36
  Speaker 2: a lot of guys kind of take the trad con deal,
• 15:38
  Speaker 2: so to speak, at least that's what I call it,
• 15:40
  Speaker 2: and then just kind of end up, you know, with
• 15:42
  Speaker 2: high style my child support just in the sense of
• 15:45
  Speaker 2: like being the sole provider and having to stay at
• 15:48
  Speaker 2: home mom. And you know, I know a lot of
• 15:50
  Speaker 2: people my especially conservatives, and I get it. It definitely
• 15:54
  Speaker 2: is strange or feels strange to them. I reading so
• 15:59
  Speaker 2: many divorce or I had come to the conclusion if
• 16:01
  Speaker 2: I was ever going to sign based off of the
• 16:03
  Speaker 2: laws that we have, that I would do it with
• 16:07
  Speaker 2: someone with a similar income with me, or at least
• 16:10
  Speaker 2: putting something significant into the marriage. Because of all the
• 16:13
  Speaker 2: divorces I saw, the ones where they seem to make
• 16:17
  Speaker 2: around the same amount, seem to be the most amiable
• 16:20
  Speaker 2: go figure, and you know, typically what would happen is
• 16:22
  Speaker 2: they would just waive spousal support, both of them, and
• 16:26
  Speaker 2: they would they would figure out custody, you know, as
• 16:28
  Speaker 2: best they can, and one person I have to pay
• 16:30
  Speaker 2: a smaller amount of child support depending on what the
• 16:33
  Speaker 2: custody arrangement was going to be, but it just makes
• 16:35
  Speaker 2: it a lot easier. It was either that or don't
• 16:38
  Speaker 2: have the marriage license involved at all. Then you're gonna
• 16:41
  Speaker 2: have to still pay a significant amount of child support,
• 16:43
  Speaker 2: but at least you're not also paying spousal support and
• 16:46
  Speaker 2: going through these other things.
• 16:48
  Speaker 4: Right, Yeah, yeah, no, I think you're right about that.
• 16:51
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 16:51
  Speaker 1: I believe that the trad cons I guess as we
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: call them today, they think they're living in a world
• 16:58
  Speaker 1: that or there a world that existed, but I think
• 17:01
  Speaker 1: that what they're living in is still modernity in a
• 17:05
  Speaker 1: lot of ways, Like it's it's a recent invention, which
• 17:08
  Speaker 1: is why I wanted to talk to you about the
• 17:10
  Speaker 1: dowry stuff.
• 17:10
  Speaker 4: So, so, like when people think of the.
• 17:13
  Speaker 1: Term dowry, if they are aware of it, they usually
• 17:16
  Speaker 1: associate it with you know, like countries like India, where
• 17:20
  Speaker 1: it still goes on, and of course there's a lot
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: of issues with that even there. There was a documentary
• 17:25
  Speaker 1: made about, you know, the problems with the dowries in India.
• 17:29
  Speaker 1: But this is not like really exclusive to those parts
• 17:32
  Speaker 1: of the world. So could you just for the you know,
• 17:34
  Speaker 1: people watching, explain what dowry is and like how it
• 17:38
  Speaker 1: differs from the current system.
• 17:40
  Speaker 3: Sure.
• 17:41
  Speaker 2: Yeah, And most of my research has focused on Western history,
• 17:46
  Speaker 2: and I specifically did that on purpose because when we
• 17:49
  Speaker 2: do think of dowry, we think of these far away
• 17:50
  Speaker 2: places from cultures that are different from us. But the
• 17:53
  Speaker 2: most surprising thing for me was how pervasive and how
• 17:56
  Speaker 2: prevalent dowry was in European and Western history altogether, but
• 18:01
  Speaker 2: dowry specifically, and this is as opposed to bride wealth
• 18:05
  Speaker 2: so this is this is a book Bride Wealth and
• 18:08
  Speaker 2: Dowry by Jack Goody and S. J. Tambia. Jack Goody
• 18:11
  Speaker 2: At was an Oxford anthropologist and dowry very specific bride
• 18:16
  Speaker 2: price dowry.
• 18:17
  Speaker 3: These are housed.
• 18:18
  Speaker 2: Under the term the umbrella term of marriage transaction. Okay, yeah,
• 18:23
  Speaker 2: So a marriage transaction is a transfer of you can
• 18:26
  Speaker 2: say wealth, goods, property, cash at the time of marriage.
• 18:30
  Speaker 2: So basically there is a property transmission, a property trans
• 18:34
  Speaker 2: transfer event, a wealth transfer at the time of marriage.
• 18:37
  Speaker 2: And for most of human history, most marriages had some
• 18:41
  Speaker 2: kind of wealth transfer.
• 18:43
  Speaker 3: Okay.
• 18:44
  Speaker 2: Now, a dowry very specifically is a wealth transfer from
• 18:49
  Speaker 2: the bride's parents to the bride, so she becomes endowed
• 18:53
  Speaker 2: with what is essentially an inheritance except you know, you
• 18:57
  Speaker 2: might hear okay, sons used to inherit and then sons
• 19:00
  Speaker 2: got the inheritance and daughters didn't, but daughters did get
• 19:03
  Speaker 2: an inheritance, and that that's what the dowry was. So
• 19:06
  Speaker 2: they would get their portion of the family fund at
• 19:09
  Speaker 2: the time of marriage and then this would be you know,
• 19:12
  Speaker 2: dowered upon them, I guess you can say endowed, and
• 19:16
  Speaker 2: then when they got married that would go with them
• 19:18
  Speaker 2: to form the new household with their husband. Okay, so
• 19:21
  Speaker 2: it is a very real material amount of wealth, right, Okay,
• 19:26
  Speaker 2: it was.
• 19:26
  Speaker 1: Like a business merger then, or something like forming a
• 19:30
  Speaker 1: if you or is that like to crew to call
• 19:33
  Speaker 1: a marriage like a business.
• 19:35
  Speaker 2: It's creating new conjugal estate or conjugal fund. I mean,
• 19:39
  Speaker 2: because you know, when you think about it, this new
• 19:41
  Speaker 2: couple forming will need something to get them started. I mean,
• 19:46
  Speaker 2: there's a bargain there, there's a there's a marriage bargain.
• 19:49
  Speaker 3: You could call it a.
• 19:50
  Speaker 2: Business kind of thing. I think the issue with that
• 19:53
  Speaker 2: is what really ends up happening to this whole system
• 19:56
  Speaker 2: if something called the love match comes and unseats it,
• 19:59
  Speaker 2: you know what I mean. I mean, especially as labor
• 20:01
  Speaker 2: value between the sexists start to change, and we can
• 20:03
  Speaker 2: get into that. But there is a negotiation, and typically
• 20:07
  Speaker 2: what you would see happen is that the size of
• 20:09
  Speaker 2: the endowment to the daughter or the dowry would typically
• 20:13
  Speaker 2: match either the son's potential the groom. The potential groom's
• 20:17
  Speaker 2: potential income and then also his inheritance are bequest from
• 20:21
  Speaker 2: his parents down the line. So in the marriage contract
• 20:24
  Speaker 2: and in the negotiation, you see a positive ascertain of matching,
• 20:28
  Speaker 2: and there's a balance there between what she's coming with
• 20:31
  Speaker 2: now and what he's pretty much expected to get. So
• 20:36
  Speaker 2: this helps set up the new household and it helps
• 20:39
  Speaker 2: set him up to then be, you know, the person
• 20:43
  Speaker 2: that's out there providing and all these kinds of things,
• 20:45
  Speaker 2: and dowries were no joke. I mean, families work together
• 20:48
  Speaker 2: to save the dowries for their daughters. And in a
• 20:51
  Speaker 2: lot of places Italy, France, even England, Germany, Cyprus, Greece,
• 20:56
  Speaker 2: a typical dowry would be a house from the wife's side,
• 21:00
  Speaker 2: provided you know, by them. And this is like middle
• 21:04
  Speaker 2: class stuff right here, as you go from top to bottom,
• 21:07
  Speaker 2: so you know, you might another myth you might hear
• 21:09
  Speaker 2: is that it was just wealthy people, just royalty or.
• 21:11
  Speaker 3: Something you did this.
• 21:12
  Speaker 2: That's another thing that I discovered isn't true. It's it's
• 21:15
  Speaker 2: everybody from from top to bottom. And if you don't
• 21:18
  Speaker 2: have a dowry, well then you didn't get married. I
• 21:20
  Speaker 2: don't know if I can share my screen, but it's
• 21:22
  Speaker 2: like I have newspaper articles of the pope giving out
• 21:25
  Speaker 2: dowries in the eighteen hundreds, so that women who couldn't
• 21:28
  Speaker 2: get married, can then get husbands or use it to
• 21:31
  Speaker 2: join a convent, which is typically a little cheaper than
• 21:34
  Speaker 2: the entry into marriage.
• 21:35
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I won't be able to share screens right now
• 21:38
  Speaker 1: because I don't have it set up for that.
• 21:40
  Speaker 3: But well that's no problem. That's no problem.
• 21:41
  Speaker 1: I can just I trust that it's really You can
• 21:43
  Speaker 1: give me the links and I'll put them in the
• 21:44
  Speaker 1: description people.
• 21:45
  Speaker 2: Yeah, sure, yeah, but yeah, anyway, so that's that's no problem.
• 21:49
  Speaker 3: But so it is from top to on. So that's
• 21:52
  Speaker 3: the dowry.
• 21:53
  Speaker 2: The other thing is is the bride price, which anthropologists
• 21:57
  Speaker 2: renamed bride wealth because bride price carried this connotation of
• 22:02
  Speaker 2: buying and selling, which once anthropologists really looked at this,
• 22:06
  Speaker 2: that's not the case. And so a bride price that's
• 22:09
  Speaker 2: what you'd see in like the Old Testament, like the
• 22:11
  Speaker 2: Mohar basically, and when you read in the Old Testament
• 22:14
  Speaker 2: about some of the marriage transactions there, that's what you
• 22:16
  Speaker 2: see typically, and that is a transfer from the groom
• 22:19
  Speaker 2: side and that goes to the bride's family. Okay, And
• 22:23
  Speaker 2: the reason anthropologists changed it from brideprice because it's not
• 22:27
  Speaker 2: like a highest bidder situation. Typically, bride prices are uniform,
• 22:32
  Speaker 2: meaning that there is just this one set bride price
• 22:35
  Speaker 2: within the community and then it creates a circulating fund,
• 22:38
  Speaker 2: so unlike a dowry, which goes and it stays with
• 22:40
  Speaker 2: the new couple and solidifies them in a certain class
• 22:43
  Speaker 2: because it tends to be people of matching wealth, you know.
• 22:47
  Speaker 2: Marrying you get essentially a circulating fund around the community.
• 22:51
  Speaker 2: So you pay a bride price, and that bride price
• 22:53
  Speaker 2: needs to be enough to get that other family the
• 22:57
  Speaker 2: ability to procure another daughter as a wife their family,
• 23:00
  Speaker 2: and then it goes around like that. So the differences
• 23:03
  Speaker 2: between the dowry in a bride well their bride price
• 23:06
  Speaker 2: system is that in dowry systems you see a lot
• 23:09
  Speaker 2: more income stratification, so there's very rich, there's middle class,
• 23:13
  Speaker 2: there's poor, and you also see you see less divorce
• 23:16
  Speaker 2: and you see monogamy. Typically in bride price paying systems,
• 23:20
  Speaker 2: you see more uniformity in wealth, so there's less variation there,
• 23:23
  Speaker 2: and there tends to be higher divorce from what I've
• 23:26
  Speaker 2: read and what they see nowadays, And a lot of
• 23:29
  Speaker 2: the difference has to do with women's labor value. So
• 23:31
  Speaker 2: what you see historically is that in bride price paying societies.
• 23:36
  Speaker 2: A women's labor value was the bulk contribution to agriculture,
• 23:39
  Speaker 2: so they the tools humans were using in order to
• 23:44
  Speaker 2: do agriculture was a lot more primitive. Then the plow
• 23:47
  Speaker 2: comes on board, and the plow, oh, you have this
• 23:49
  Speaker 2: ability to plow a bunch of land, make a lot
• 23:52
  Speaker 2: more calories, make a lot more money. And then things
• 23:55
  Speaker 2: like you know, private landholdings start to become more important
• 23:58
  Speaker 2: and you start seeing a differentiation. But it was mostly
• 24:01
  Speaker 2: men that can do the plow because it required a
• 24:03
  Speaker 2: lot of burst strength. You got this giant thing digging
• 24:05
  Speaker 2: into the earth. You got too big cattle over here,
• 24:08
  Speaker 2: and you're trying to keep this thing straight. So women
• 24:10
  Speaker 2: weren't really doing it, so their labor value went down
• 24:12
  Speaker 2: in respect to men. And this led to a further
• 24:15
  Speaker 2: complexity of society, a class stratification, more specialization, and different
• 24:20
  Speaker 2: niche type of professions. You can say private property mattered
• 24:24
  Speaker 2: a lot more. The transference of private property through the
• 24:27
  Speaker 2: generations meant a lot more. But as you saw this
• 24:30
  Speaker 2: change in the amount of labor value, women now need
• 24:33
  Speaker 2: to be endowed with the dowry in order to match,
• 24:36
  Speaker 2: in order to you know, keep them in league with
• 24:39
  Speaker 2: guys who are up here, and that's how you get
• 24:41
  Speaker 2: this stratification with it land in bride price. Typically, land
• 24:46
  Speaker 2: is not scarce in bride price paying societies because people
• 24:48
  Speaker 2: can only work so much of it and the land
• 24:51
  Speaker 2: is more so held in corporate As this starts to
• 24:54
  Speaker 2: change over, you see this historically. You see you know,
• 24:57
  Speaker 2: Israelites changing from bride price a dowry. You can see
• 25:00
  Speaker 2: this in the history of marriage contracts as they're still
• 25:03
  Speaker 2: paying some mohart, but the dowry the woman's bringing in
• 25:06
  Speaker 2: dwarfs that by a lot and we have that, we
• 25:09
  Speaker 2: have all that stuff, and then you know, so it
• 25:11
  Speaker 2: really much is in league with how society developed pretty much.
• 25:15
  Speaker 3: So I know that was a long answer, but those.
• 25:18
  Speaker 2: Are that lasts all the way down from bride price,
• 25:21
  Speaker 2: specifically in the Near East. It's still in Sub Saharan
• 25:24
  Speaker 2: Africa and a lot of places because they didn't really
• 25:26
  Speaker 2: get the plow. But what you what you see is
• 25:28
  Speaker 2: in ancient Athens they're doing a dowry system. And we
• 25:31
  Speaker 2: know ancient Athens is fairly sophisticated compared to the rest
• 25:35
  Speaker 2: of the surrounding bride price paying societies, and they would
• 25:38
  Speaker 2: almost look at them as as more barbaric or something.
• 25:40
  Speaker 2: But this is where you get these these high works
• 25:42
  Speaker 2: of philosophy and geometry and music and all these things
• 25:47
  Speaker 2: that we have from then on, and there's been this
• 25:49
  Speaker 2: unbroken dowry, you know, sort of going from there to
• 25:53
  Speaker 2: the Romans, and then as they start to you know,
• 25:55
  Speaker 2: spread into Germania, then the dowry starts to take over
• 25:59
  Speaker 2: there as they start to you know, change society there
• 26:03
  Speaker 2: and it becomes more sophisticated. Then you get you know,
• 26:06
  Speaker 2: Germany doing dowry. You get France doing dowry. France had
• 26:10
  Speaker 2: dowry until the laws were there until the mid sixties
• 26:13
  Speaker 2: is when they got rid of them. Italy it was
• 26:15
  Speaker 2: in I believe it was in the in the seventies
• 26:18
  Speaker 2: when they abolished their dowry laws. Greece was in eighty three.
• 26:22
  Speaker 2: I believe Spain was eighty one. So as you start
• 26:27
  Speaker 2: to see industrialization, you start to see feminism, you start
• 26:31
  Speaker 2: to see the change in labor value between men and
• 26:33
  Speaker 2: women and what people are doing.
• 26:35
  Speaker 1: Do you think it started with industrialization because I was
• 26:38
  Speaker 1: wondering about that, Go ahead.
• 26:40
  Speaker 3: Think yeah, So.
• 26:43
  Speaker 2: The dowry system was still alive and well in a
• 26:45
  Speaker 2: lot of places, and that is one major factor. Or
• 26:47
  Speaker 2: you can say modernization, but really industrialization too, because England
• 26:52
  Speaker 2: is one of the first two to modernize, you can say,
• 26:55
  Speaker 2: and that's pretty much the first place where it started
• 26:58
  Speaker 2: to fall out of favor because in the early parts
• 27:01
  Speaker 2: of modernization, people can make a lot of money and
• 27:03
  Speaker 2: they can finance things a lot easier. So I don't
• 27:06
  Speaker 2: want to say it's just myrinization, because it's also the rise.
• 27:09
  Speaker 3: Of romantic love. I would put that there.
• 27:12
  Speaker 2: And for a long time that was not something that
• 27:15
  Speaker 2: happened within marriage. It was happening outside of marriage, and
• 27:18
  Speaker 2: only a very small amount of people can even afford
• 27:20
  Speaker 2: to really indulge in that. As time goes on, you
• 27:23
  Speaker 2: get the printing press, you get these tales of you know,
• 27:26
  Speaker 2: romantic chivalry starting to become more popular. It's still very
• 27:30
  Speaker 2: hard to have a marriage just based off of you
• 27:33
  Speaker 2: have a love marriage or a marriage based off of
• 27:35
  Speaker 2: passion instead of reason. And then as we get into
• 27:38
  Speaker 2: industrialization and modernization and all these kinds of things, we
• 27:42
  Speaker 2: start to see great wealth, we start to see different
• 27:45
  Speaker 2: forms of media, and the culture starts to change. Suddenly
• 27:48
  Speaker 2: in England they're not saving dowries for their daughters anymore.
• 27:52
  Speaker 3: Now it starts to.
• 27:53
  Speaker 2: Be like, well, you know, as a man, you shouldn't
• 27:56
  Speaker 2: even you know, ask for a dowry. But meanwhile, over
• 27:59
  Speaker 2: in France they're still doing their dowry and their marriages
• 28:03
  Speaker 2: are turning out fine, and you have newspaper clippings of
• 28:05
  Speaker 2: English writers comparing their system to the French system and thinking,
• 28:10
  Speaker 2: should we, you know, bring back the dowry for us
• 28:13
  Speaker 2: or not? And then you know, the US had some
• 28:16
  Speaker 2: history with dowries as well for a long time, but
• 28:19
  Speaker 2: you know, pretty soon after independence that started to go away,
• 28:22
  Speaker 2: even though there were still plenty of people doing it.
• 28:25
  Speaker 2: I think that really was only made possible because of
• 28:29
  Speaker 2: a huge boom in wealth basically. And then you know,
• 28:32
  Speaker 2: as you get into that, you get into World War Two,
• 28:35
  Speaker 2: and then there's feminism as well, what was called the
• 28:38
  Speaker 2: woman's Movement. I have a newspaper article on that from
• 28:41
  Speaker 2: about one hundred years ago, and it's called the Dowerless Girls,
• 28:44
  Speaker 2: and it's talking about how you can say it's written
• 28:48
  Speaker 2: kind of by a feminist. It's almost like a propaganda piece.
• 28:51
  Speaker 2: It's talking about, well, if you're not going to give
• 28:52
  Speaker 2: us dowries, then you should at least let your daughters
• 28:55
  Speaker 2: get educated, because if we end up as spinsters, then
• 28:58
  Speaker 2: we want to be able to take care of ourselves.
• 29:00
  Speaker 2: So you get all this stuff, and then as it
• 29:02
  Speaker 2: comes in more recently, then there starts to be more
• 29:05
  Speaker 2: of a harshness against it, and they're doing everything they
• 29:08
  Speaker 2: can to get rid of dowry laws. I have an
• 29:11
  Speaker 2: article from seventies from Italy and it's talking about how
• 29:15
  Speaker 2: once they allowed divorce there because there was no divorce.
• 29:19
  Speaker 2: I mean, there was divorce prior in European history, from
• 29:21
  Speaker 2: Roman times and all that. But then when Christianity was
• 29:25
  Speaker 2: really managing things there, it was just the Nulmans, so.
• 29:28
  Speaker 3: That's what they had to deal with.
• 29:29
  Speaker 2: But then in the seventies, when Italy finally allowed divorce,
• 29:33
  Speaker 2: then suddenly it was like, what do we do about
• 29:35
  Speaker 2: these old dowry laws that used to be here? And
• 29:38
  Speaker 2: then it became this whole thing where, oh, the dowry
• 29:41
  Speaker 2: is something that puts these unfair expectations on women. And
• 29:45
  Speaker 2: then you see a lot of this stuff about like
• 29:46
  Speaker 2: dowry violence and India and stuff like that and all
• 29:49
  Speaker 2: these kinds of things. But it's sold it's spoken of
• 29:53
  Speaker 2: in a way to where they want, in my opinion,
• 29:55
  Speaker 2: they want people to have a kind of collective amnesia
• 29:57
  Speaker 2: about it. But it was a system that was there
• 30:00
  Speaker 2: for a long time. And then when you bring it
• 30:01
  Speaker 2: into today, we get our knees marriage, which is kind
• 30:04
  Speaker 2: of what was sold on TV. You know, it's a
• 30:07
  Speaker 2: love match. The man brings everything to the marriage. Women
• 30:10
  Speaker 2: don't have to worry about that. I think we can
• 30:13
  Speaker 2: afford that back then, but nowadays, as the cost of
• 30:16
  Speaker 2: living goes up, the cost of housing goes up, we
• 30:18
  Speaker 2: have no fault divorce, which has been a disaster. At
• 30:20
  Speaker 2: least at fault divorce gave you some protection if you
• 30:22
  Speaker 2: were going to be the sole provider of everything. I
• 30:25
  Speaker 2: think men are having to recalibrate and we're kind of
• 30:28
  Speaker 2: having a look at this to see what is it
• 30:30
  Speaker 2: that our ancestors were doing and how can we apply
• 30:32
  Speaker 2: some of that.
• 30:33
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 30:34
  Speaker 1: Yeah, So for the audience, do you guys have any
• 30:37
  Speaker 1: questions or statements that you want to send us, and
• 30:39
  Speaker 1: you have questions for Shaw here, feel free to send
• 30:43
  Speaker 1: us a super chat, a rumble rant, or a super
• 30:45
  Speaker 1: child by going to feed the Badger dot Com force.
• 30:47
  Speaker 1: Last just the tip to send it and I'll be
• 30:49
  Speaker 1: sure to read it on stream.
• 30:51
  Speaker 4: I'll do them in a bulk.
• 30:52
  Speaker 1: So it's interesting we're looking at all of these different phases,
• 30:57
  Speaker 1: and I was thinking, it's funny that we're living in
• 30:59
  Speaker 1: a time I'm where conservatives are preserving something that's actually
• 31:04
  Speaker 1: really new, Like they think they're conserving something, but it's not.
• 31:08
  Speaker 4: It's like this.
• 31:10
  Speaker 1: Illusion, this mythology from the fifties that you were just
• 31:12
  Speaker 1: talking about, and then you have like the I guess
• 31:16
  Speaker 1: you could say the feminists or the progressives, and they're
• 31:18
  Speaker 1: railing against that like it's oppression. But there's something much
• 31:22
  Speaker 1: older that seems to have been memory hold by people right,
• 31:25
  Speaker 1: Like we don't even talk about it, and it confuses
• 31:27
  Speaker 1: people a lot because I feel like we've been sold
• 31:31
  Speaker 1: this idea of romantic love as the most aspirational goal
• 31:36
  Speaker 1: for people.
• 31:37
  Speaker 4: It just doesn't.
• 31:39
  Speaker 1: I mean, it seems like marriages were more stable, more sustainable,
• 31:44
  Speaker 1: more realistic. Even if you according to what you said,
• 31:48
  Speaker 1: it seemed like people of the higher classes were matched
• 31:51
  Speaker 1: with people of the higher classes, and then the middle
• 31:54
  Speaker 1: classes were matched and the lower classes were matched, and
• 31:56
  Speaker 1: people were relatively satisfied, like hypergamy wasn't you know, at
• 32:01
  Speaker 1: least it couldn't like get its claws in even if
• 32:03
  Speaker 1: it did exist.
• 32:04
  Speaker 2: Right, I often say that dowry is a check on hypergamy. Yeah,
• 32:10
  Speaker 2: and it was because you know, there are these things
• 32:13
  Speaker 2: whirling around like like romantic love or passion, you know
• 32:17
  Speaker 2: what I mean. And yes, these two people might find
• 32:19
  Speaker 2: each other and they might have some sense of that.
• 32:22
  Speaker 2: But what would happen is eventually, when the marriage discussion
• 32:25
  Speaker 2: came around, it would be okay, let's get down to
• 32:28
  Speaker 2: brass tacks here, and the families would then start parlaying
• 32:32
  Speaker 2: in that way. And if the dowry is not commensurate
• 32:36
  Speaker 2: with what you know, would make sense for that family
• 32:40
  Speaker 2: and what they know to be, you know, is going
• 32:42
  Speaker 2: to be the level that their son is at, they
• 32:45
  Speaker 2: would reject the marriage. So there was a level of
• 32:47
  Speaker 2: pragmatism that existed within the system. Then what happened is
• 32:51
  Speaker 2: that all kind of got thrown out the window of
• 32:53
  Speaker 2: a moving car and it was well, if you two
• 32:55
  Speaker 2: love each other, then that's all that matters, and the
• 32:58
  Speaker 2: rest will figure itself out. We even have articles from
• 33:01
  Speaker 2: back then of people It's like people knew once the
• 33:04
  Speaker 2: love matt started becoming popular that after a few years,
• 33:07
  Speaker 2: you guys would would hate each other or start fighting
• 33:09
  Speaker 2: each other. And a lot of it, you know, did
• 33:11
  Speaker 2: surround money and these kinds of things. So it's just
• 33:15
  Speaker 2: it's amazing seeing that stuff in the written word, you
• 33:19
  Speaker 2: know what I mean. And it's just it's it's absolutely fascinating.
• 33:23
  Speaker 2: Just it's just fascinating to me.
• 33:25
  Speaker 3: And you know a.
• 33:26
  Speaker 2: Lot of the stuff too, you can you can see
• 33:28
  Speaker 2: you know, in the marriage contracts, and there there were matchmakers,
• 33:32
  Speaker 2: matchmakers who knew, you know, what a woman's dowry was
• 33:35
  Speaker 2: or what a man's prospects were.
• 33:37
  Speaker 3: You know.
• 33:37
  Speaker 2: Another myth is like this kind of arranged marriage understanding
• 33:40
  Speaker 2: of like, well, you guys are both kids and your
• 33:42
  Speaker 2: parents figured it out and it's forever going.
• 33:44
  Speaker 4: To be that way.
• 33:46
  Speaker 2: But it wasn't really like that. It was more of
• 33:48
  Speaker 2: like who's available, what does this look like? You know,
• 33:52
  Speaker 2: let's have a discussion. Can we make this work? You know,
• 33:55
  Speaker 2: there was no prevailing welfare system back then, that people
• 33:59
  Speaker 2: just lived off the tea of that system. It's like,
• 34:01
  Speaker 2: if we're going to get married and do this project together,
• 34:05
  Speaker 2: we need to make sure that we have some kind
• 34:07
  Speaker 2: of plan so we don't do this and then run
• 34:09
  Speaker 2: out of steam and it's just a complete disaster, especial
• 34:12
  Speaker 2: if we're going to bring kids in the world. Nowadays,
• 34:14
  Speaker 2: it's just like there's all these other mechanisms that you know,
• 34:17
  Speaker 2: because of the states sort of barging into the private
• 34:20
  Speaker 2: home life of people to where either there's going to
• 34:22
  Speaker 2: be a welfare system for you know there, or there's
• 34:26
  Speaker 2: going to be a sort of forced wealth transfer through
• 34:29
  Speaker 2: child support and the family courts and these kinds of things.
• 34:31
  Speaker 2: So in order to secure good marriages, you know, the
• 34:35
  Speaker 2: bride side is looking for a guy with a good
• 34:37
  Speaker 2: potential income. Here the groom side is looking for a
• 34:41
  Speaker 2: well and dowed daughter, and in that negotiation process, both
• 34:44
  Speaker 2: sides are actually being hypergamas. She's trying to get the
• 34:47
  Speaker 2: highest she can get, he's trying to get the most
• 34:49
  Speaker 2: well in doubt he can get. And in that negotiation
• 34:51
  Speaker 2: process people end up getting the best bargain they can get.
• 34:54
  Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, but it's realistic.
• 34:56
  Speaker 1: It's like like today we have you know, fating and
• 35:01
  Speaker 1: there is no Families are generally not involved at all
• 35:04
  Speaker 1: in that whole process. Like men and women are just
• 35:06
  Speaker 1: swiping left or right, or they're going to you know,
• 35:10
  Speaker 1: swap me to whatever it is they do.
• 35:11
  Speaker 4: I don't even know because I've been married for ten years.
• 35:13
  Speaker 1: But but whatever it is, people do they do that now,
• 35:17
  Speaker 1: and I think it's it's it's they think that this
• 35:20
  Speaker 1: is like the best you can do is working with
• 35:23
  Speaker 1: the system as it is.
• 35:24
  Speaker 4: But I don't.
• 35:24
  Speaker 1: I don't think it's I don't think it's designed to work.
• 35:27
  Speaker 1: I think it's broken. And I think that you can
• 35:29
  Speaker 1: just look at, you know, the state of marriage, divorced children,
• 35:34
  Speaker 1: dating in general. So like, do you think that do
• 35:38
  Speaker 1: you ever wonder or do you believe that maybe the
• 35:40
  Speaker 1: concept of romantic love came into place specifically to sabotage
• 35:45
  Speaker 1: like marriages or do you think there was some some
• 35:49
  Speaker 1: like optimistic view of those who were pushing it and
• 35:52
  Speaker 1: then they didn't know what the consequences might be.
• 35:54
  Speaker 2: I think that I think that to some extent, you know,
• 35:57
  Speaker 2: it did come in when there was opportunity for it
• 36:01
  Speaker 2: to come in. Maybe people felt like they could afford
• 36:04
  Speaker 2: to do that. It was still something that you can
• 36:07
  Speaker 2: say was shamed for a very long time, even up
• 36:09
  Speaker 2: until recently, and seen as a more selfish thing I
• 36:13
  Speaker 2: think more recently, especially it's become commercialized, you can say,
• 36:19
  Speaker 2: and definitely encouraged that way. It's a tough question for
• 36:21
  Speaker 2: me to answer because I don't want to say it
• 36:24
  Speaker 2: was on purpose, you know what I mean.
• 36:27
  Speaker 3: It almost seems like women in a.
• 36:29
  Speaker 2: Way use romantic love, you know, especially culturally speaking, and
• 36:33
  Speaker 2: especially when it comes to certain entitlements that they believe
• 36:36
  Speaker 2: that they have in a way to say, this is
• 36:38
  Speaker 2: what it's supposed to be and that's traditional, and men
• 36:41
  Speaker 2: are kind of shamed into this role or told that
• 36:43
  Speaker 2: they're not masculine. The whole discussion of what masculinity really
• 36:46
  Speaker 2: is I think revolves around this because men feel like
• 36:50
  Speaker 2: they have to play into this otherwise they're shamed if
• 36:53
  Speaker 2: they don't. But deep down, I think men have this
• 36:55
  Speaker 2: gut feeling that something just isn't right, you know. And
• 36:59
  Speaker 2: when I looked at this system, I was like, Okay,
• 37:01
  Speaker 2: now I understand, like this makes complete sense. But I
• 37:03
  Speaker 2: do think it has been used, you know, I don't know.
• 37:07
  Speaker 2: I don't want to say by this or that, but
• 37:09
  Speaker 2: it's like, as as a culture, I can say it
• 37:11
  Speaker 2: has been used to encourage hypergamy, and you know, for
• 37:15
  Speaker 2: a there's definitely an element of people wanting to indulge
• 37:19
  Speaker 2: in it itself because I would say it's like a
• 37:20
  Speaker 2: sweet sugar, you know what I mean. And you had
• 37:23
  Speaker 2: these more pragmatic style marriages that I would say really
• 37:26
  Speaker 2: built the entire West or all of civilization. And then
• 37:29
  Speaker 2: it's like, okay, well we're going to try to allow
• 37:32
  Speaker 2: love into marriage when typically love was was an extra
• 37:35
  Speaker 2: marital thing that was not like I don't want to
• 37:38
  Speaker 2: say Dowry style marriages are loveless marriages. There is a
• 37:41
  Speaker 2: love built on respect, there's a familial kind of love.
• 37:44
  Speaker 2: There's a love that comes with the mutual investment. But
• 37:46
  Speaker 2: it wasn't like a romantic save the world that's just
• 37:49
  Speaker 2: you and I against the world type of thing. It's hey,
• 37:51
  Speaker 2: our families matter and our communities matter. But then what
• 37:54
  Speaker 2: happens is you start to see these changes in family
• 37:56
  Speaker 2: law because you know, pretty much when the US is born,
• 38:01
  Speaker 2: they break away from the Church of England. They want
• 38:04
  Speaker 2: divorce where you couldn't have divorce before, and then it
• 38:07
  Speaker 2: moves into the state legislature to decide that. But this
• 38:10
  Speaker 2: is how you get our system of at fault divorce
• 38:12
  Speaker 2: because and then then you start to have reasons like
• 38:13
  Speaker 2: adultery or you know, infidelity or abandonment, and you start
• 38:17
  Speaker 2: to see this whole process evolve. But with at fault divorce,
• 38:21
  Speaker 2: the reason you needed fault was was to decide, okay,
• 38:24
  Speaker 2: what happens to the assets and stuff within the marriage.
• 38:27
  Speaker 2: If she did something that was untoward, then you know,
• 38:31
  Speaker 2: the courts can see that and say, okay, you're the
• 38:33
  Speaker 2: injured party, You're going to keep all the assets and
• 38:36
  Speaker 2: then you guys are gonna get divorced. So or if
• 38:39
  Speaker 2: he did something bad, even if he's the one coming
• 38:41
  Speaker 2: in with the wealth, then you know she has the
• 38:43
  Speaker 2: right to go seek a divorce there at the courthouse
• 38:47
  Speaker 2: and if if they can prove that, then then she
• 38:49
  Speaker 2: would get the bulk of the assets. Then when you
• 38:51
  Speaker 2: got no fault divorce, it's like they really just took
• 38:54
  Speaker 2: off any.
• 38:54
  Speaker 3: Restraints they out on hypergamy.
• 38:55
  Speaker 2: It was already now you were allowing hypergamy with the
• 38:58
  Speaker 2: love match to occur, but and then it became okay.
• 39:01
  Speaker 2: I know people don't like hearing fifty to fifty, especially conservatives,
• 39:05
  Speaker 2: but they need to understand that in our family codes,
• 39:07
  Speaker 2: it's just a rote fifty to fifty, especially when it
• 39:09
  Speaker 2: comes to divorce. Then we got no fault marriages and
• 39:13
  Speaker 2: all hell, I'd say, really broke loose at that point,
• 39:16
  Speaker 2: and then it became love matches being used against people
• 39:20
  Speaker 2: or in a predatory manner. I do think also, to
• 39:23
  Speaker 2: answer your question a bit, I do think there is
• 39:26
  Speaker 2: an aspect of governments having an incentive to move away
• 39:29
  Speaker 2: from the dowry system. I was reading about Greece, you know,
• 39:33
  Speaker 2: and they were looking to join the EEC, which became
• 39:37
  Speaker 2: the European Union somewhere there in like the late seventies,
• 39:40
  Speaker 2: early eighties, and I think my suspicion is is that
• 39:43
  Speaker 2: there was a lot of conditions in order to sort
• 39:47
  Speaker 2: of receive the economic benefits of joining these larger sort
• 39:50
  Speaker 2: of groups of economic networks was to modernize, basically, and
• 39:54
  Speaker 2: they saying, okay, well, in order to modernize, this is
• 39:56
  Speaker 2: what you need to do. You're gonna want women in
• 39:58
  Speaker 2: the labor force, because that's gonna make it make sense
• 40:01
  Speaker 2: for us to take you into this commitment, into this union.
• 40:04
  Speaker 3: Here.
• 40:04
  Speaker 2: What happened in Greece was that they were looking to
• 40:07
  Speaker 2: abolish the dowry system, and it was the Greek Orthodox
• 40:11
  Speaker 2: Church was the one that they were standing against it,
• 40:14
  Speaker 2: and they had been doing dowry since ancient Athens over there,
• 40:17
  Speaker 2: And then there was a meeting with the Justice minister.
• 40:19
  Speaker 2: This isn't a newspaper article from the late seventies talking
• 40:22
  Speaker 2: about this or early eighties, I believe, and somehow they
• 40:26
  Speaker 2: convinced the church to basically stand down. They never gave
• 40:28
  Speaker 2: their approval to it, but they said, well, just we
• 40:31
  Speaker 2: have no opinion on this basically.
• 40:32
  Speaker 3: And then they got rid of that, you know what
• 40:34
  Speaker 3: I mean.
• 40:35
  Speaker 2: And it's like, so I do think not I guess
• 40:39
  Speaker 2: what I'm trying to clarify is it's not just an
• 40:40
  Speaker 2: individual basis of people wanting to indulge in this. But
• 40:43
  Speaker 2: I do think there is such a thing as this
• 40:44
  Speaker 2: economic incentive for states in themselves to try to essentially
• 40:48
  Speaker 2: juice the family nest eggs, so to speak, and bring
• 40:51
  Speaker 2: it out into the economy for this short term run up.
• 40:54
  Speaker 2: And we're now seeing people that have nothing left and
• 40:57
  Speaker 2: they're trying to figure out what to do.
• 41:00
  Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, I think I can see that.
• 41:01
  Speaker 1: It's like these things happen maybe a little organically, maybe
• 41:05
  Speaker 1: mostly organically, but then there are other entities that see
• 41:07
  Speaker 1: that and they're like, oh, we can you know, like
• 41:09
  Speaker 1: let's leverage this to benefit like the state does. And
• 41:12
  Speaker 1: I could see how that would work out. So yeah,
• 41:15
  Speaker 1: it seems like, you know what, another thing about the
• 41:17
  Speaker 1: dowry that you're pointing out with I guess you could
• 41:20
  Speaker 1: say like it's essentially bringing two families together to like
• 41:24
  Speaker 1: strengthen them by having them marry, you know, like the
• 41:28
  Speaker 1: son to the daughter or whatever, and you get like
• 41:31
  Speaker 1: a larger family as a result of that, which has
• 41:33
  Speaker 1: a ton of benefits to it.
• 41:35
  Speaker 4: You know.
• 41:37
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm sorry to interrupt you, forgive me. These people
• 41:40
  Speaker 2: own this land over here. You guys own this land.
• 41:42
  Speaker 2: You now have some kind of tie that's just on
• 41:45
  Speaker 2: a normal peasant landholding level.
• 41:46
  Speaker 3: Yeah, on the level of royalty.
• 41:49
  Speaker 2: You know, England is looking at France, and Spain is
• 41:52
  Speaker 2: looking at France, and France is getting too powerful. Let's
• 41:55
  Speaker 2: marry you know, a daughter of Spain over into England
• 42:00
  Speaker 2: and give her a large dowry, and we now have
• 42:02
  Speaker 2: an alliance to hold France back. I mean, so this guy,
• 42:05
  Speaker 2: you know, the king in England could sit here and
• 42:07
  Speaker 2: say I want to marry the hottest tavern wench I
• 42:09
  Speaker 2: can find you know what I'm saying or whatever, or
• 42:12
  Speaker 2: he can indulge in romantic love, but it's going to
• 42:15
  Speaker 2: seem irrational to everybody if he chooses to do that
• 42:19
  Speaker 2: instead of marrying you know, a princess of Spain and
• 42:22
  Speaker 2: then you know, receiving one entire annual year of income
• 42:26
  Speaker 2: that the crown brings in as dowry and solidifying this alliance. So,
• 42:31
  Speaker 2: you know, the other myth I guess to the spell
• 42:33
  Speaker 2: is that people have no choice in it. That's not
• 42:36
  Speaker 2: entirely you know, true. It's people do have a choice
• 42:39
  Speaker 2: in it. It's just that they have to face the
• 42:42
  Speaker 2: sort of community ire of there's a good marriage here,
• 42:46
  Speaker 2: why why wouldn't you consider it? This one, especially when
• 42:48
  Speaker 2: it comes to all these benefits that help the family
• 42:51
  Speaker 2: and also helps put you in a better position.
• 42:54
  Speaker 3: So typically, you know, the incentive that the parents have over.
• 42:57
  Speaker 2: The kids is the inheritance, right, because the the daughter's
• 43:00
  Speaker 2: dowry is is it's what's called the pre mortem inheritance. Okay,
• 43:04
  Speaker 2: obviously the son's gonna get one too on the back end.
• 43:07
  Speaker 2: But what they're doing is they're negotiating for for the
• 43:10
  Speaker 2: kid's marriages, and the kids are negotiating too. And it's
• 43:14
  Speaker 2: if the kid, if you know, son or daughter, wants
• 43:17
  Speaker 2: to elope with their lover Romeo and Juliet style, you
• 43:20
  Speaker 2: will get disowned. And to be disowned means you're giving,
• 43:23
  Speaker 2: you're forfeiting your inheritance. That's going to affect you greatly
• 43:26
  Speaker 2: down the line, because if one kid wants to do that,
• 43:28
  Speaker 2: then the parents might say, let's put our money into
• 43:30
  Speaker 2: these other two kids or other kid that we have
• 43:33
  Speaker 2: who's actually has our the family's concerns at heart. And
• 43:37
  Speaker 2: it's just I guess what I'm trying to say is
• 43:40
  Speaker 2: it's there's this level of pragmatism and consideration that that
• 43:43
  Speaker 2: people have to think about. And before the era of
• 43:46
  Speaker 2: class mobility, so with modernization, you can it was a
• 43:49
  Speaker 2: lot the sell of college. For instance, It's just like, okay,
• 43:52
  Speaker 2: you could take this relatively poor person and you can
• 43:56
  Speaker 2: put them to college and then they can have a
• 43:58
  Speaker 2: big jump and income.
• 43:59
  Speaker 3: Okay.
• 44:00
  Speaker 2: So so with class mobility comes to certain thing where
• 44:02
  Speaker 2: it's now you can make a bunch of income. We
• 44:04
  Speaker 2: have all these apartment buildings that are you know, coming
• 44:07
  Speaker 2: in this megacity that we're building, and that's cheap. We
• 44:10
  Speaker 2: actually don't listen, need to listen to mom and dad
• 44:13
  Speaker 2: so much anymore, because we can just we're eighteen now
• 44:15
  Speaker 2: we can pay for everything. Back then, for a long time,
• 44:17
  Speaker 2: it wasn't like that. What I'm basically saying is it's
• 44:20
  Speaker 2: it's looking like it's kind of becoming like how it
• 44:22
  Speaker 2: used to be. As the cost of rent go up,
• 44:25
  Speaker 2: as the cost of.
• 44:26
  Speaker 1: Housing, people are staying at home longer, and yeah, yeah, that's.
• 44:29
  Speaker 3: A whole thing.
• 44:30
  Speaker 4: You know.
• 44:30
  Speaker 2: Oh well half a millennials are at home or whatever.
• 44:33
  Speaker 2: So it's like, okay, as this becomes tougher, Maybe it's not.
• 44:37
  Speaker 2: It's not really because of you know, like instead of thinking, oh,
• 44:41
  Speaker 2: idealistically it should be like this for everybody, it's like, no,
• 44:43
  Speaker 2: we've had the fruits of modernization. We are now at
• 44:47
  Speaker 2: a point where we're kind of at the tail end
• 44:49
  Speaker 2: of this. Costs are high, and literally right before this
• 44:52
  Speaker 2: we had to do things a certain way. So what
• 44:55
  Speaker 2: are we going to do now now that that conditions
• 44:57
  Speaker 2: are changing?
• 44:59
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 44:59
  Speaker 1: And the the other thing too, is that like if
• 45:01
  Speaker 1: you when if you live in that time, it wasn't
• 45:04
  Speaker 1: I would guess that in most cases people weren't really
• 45:07
  Speaker 1: against like, you know, marrying into this other family because
• 45:10
  Speaker 1: they were probably people you knew very well, you grew
• 45:13
  Speaker 1: up with, you probably felt like strongly for them already
• 45:17
  Speaker 1: because you were they were in your community, and you
• 45:19
  Speaker 1: wanted to bring this together. And so I don't think
• 45:22
  Speaker 1: it was like, you know, there's this usually this come
• 45:24
  Speaker 1: out of these romantic stories where there's a girl and
• 45:27
  Speaker 1: she's betrothed to somebody and she doesn't like them, and
• 45:30
  Speaker 1: that person's not a nice guy or whatever. But that's
• 45:33
  Speaker 1: I mean, that's obviously just there to make it make
• 45:36
  Speaker 1: the other guy see more appealing. But the truth is,
• 45:39
  Speaker 1: I think most people were, you know, like if you
• 45:42
  Speaker 1: even when I was growing up, I lived in a
• 45:45
  Speaker 1: neighborhood and I knew everyone that I went to school
• 45:48
  Speaker 1: with because we all lived in the same area. We
• 45:50
  Speaker 1: didn't have the internet, so you know, there was a
• 45:52
  Speaker 1: pretty good chance that if I didn't move, I was
• 45:56
  Speaker 1: going to probably end up with a girl who lived
• 45:58
  Speaker 1: in the neighborhood. And you know, but even but even then,
• 46:01
  Speaker 1: that's not that's still in modernity more or less. But
• 46:05
  Speaker 1: I think that, you know, that's that's another thing to.
• 46:07
  Speaker 4: Point out as well.
• 46:08
  Speaker 1: And also, I so what I'm also understanding from this
• 46:12
  Speaker 1: is that when you when you do this, you make
• 46:15
  Speaker 1: your clan larger and you make these connections. That this
• 46:19
  Speaker 1: is tied to something that I think that in particular,
• 46:22
  Speaker 1: men are losing and this and this has a lot
• 46:24
  Speaker 1: to do with the sort of fatherlessness that we're that
• 46:27
  Speaker 1: we have going on. A lot of people, especially men,
• 46:31
  Speaker 1: young men, they are losing their connection to their ancestry
• 46:36
  Speaker 1: because of how adomized they are from their own fathers,
• 46:41
  Speaker 1: grandfathers and so on. Right, this is like a big
• 46:44
  Speaker 1: and people don't want to acknowledge this as a problem
• 46:46
  Speaker 1: because we keep hearing this is essentially patriarchy, right, But
• 46:50
  Speaker 1: I think that this is like a necessary thing, like
• 46:53
  Speaker 1: when you have all these For example, there's a lot
• 46:55
  Speaker 1: of men out here now that are you know, they
• 46:59
  Speaker 1: join radical groups. They you know, become members of Antifa
• 47:04
  Speaker 1: or some you know, the KKK or Neo Nazis or
• 47:08
  Speaker 1: communists or whatever, because they're looking for something to belong to,
• 47:12
  Speaker 1: and a lot of them are fatherless, like they come
• 47:14
  Speaker 1: from single mother homes. And if you look at the
• 47:18
  Speaker 1: number of generations of single motherhood, we have like men
• 47:22
  Speaker 1: who are so whose fathers didn't have fathers and whose
• 47:25
  Speaker 1: fathers then didn't have fathers, right, So this is the
• 47:29
  Speaker 1: opposite of the thing that you're talking about, which is
• 47:31
  Speaker 1: normally you would be able to say, like you know
• 47:34
  Speaker 1: what your last name means right now, like you know,
• 47:37
  Speaker 1: women are taking their husband's.
• 47:39
  Speaker 3: Name support.
• 47:42
  Speaker 4: Hyphenated names.
• 47:46
  Speaker 1: It's weird too, because they think that they're disconnecting from men.
• 47:50
  Speaker 1: But they're just taking their father's name if they you know,
• 47:53
  Speaker 1: like if they hyphenate, so it's still the man's name.
• 47:56
  Speaker 1: But but there's this propaganda, this thing that we're fed
• 48:00
  Speaker 1: like you know, you the attachment to the father is
• 48:04
  Speaker 1: there's something wrong with that. There's something you know, like
• 48:06
  Speaker 1: toxic about that. And I think that like don't I
• 48:10
  Speaker 1: don't know if we're gonna get back to that system,
• 48:13
  Speaker 1: but I think that there should be an acknowledgment that
• 48:16
  Speaker 1: it existed. Like this whole concept of dating is new,
• 48:19
  Speaker 1: isn't it, like in the grand scheme of things?
• 48:21
  Speaker 2: Oh yeah, oh yeah, like the way we do dating now.
• 48:24
  Speaker 2: I would absolutely agree. You said a lot of things there,
• 48:26
  Speaker 2: and a lot of important salient things, especially about the atomization.
• 48:31
  Speaker 2: I mean, just on an individual level, like me working
• 48:35
  Speaker 2: at Child'sport, reading all the divorce judgment. One of the
• 48:37
  Speaker 2: things that I realized even before all this stuff was
• 48:40
  Speaker 2: that I was watching and understanding how hard it is
• 48:43
  Speaker 2: to build generational wealth in this country. Cause if you
• 48:46
  Speaker 2: can't have solid marriages that you can rely on property
• 48:50
  Speaker 2: transmission between the generations, it just falls like sand through
• 48:53
  Speaker 2: your fingers. As soon as the family law courts touch it,
• 48:56
  Speaker 2: I would see, you know, what's supposed to go to
• 48:59
  Speaker 2: the sun and dots there, whether it's for college or
• 49:02
  Speaker 2: their marriages. It gets, you know, juiced by the attorneys.
• 49:05
  Speaker 2: You have all these custody issues with fathers, you know,
• 49:08
  Speaker 2: not being able to see their kids unless they pay
• 49:10
  Speaker 2: a lot of money, and that that's unfortunate in itself.
• 49:14
  Speaker 2: You don't have parents looking forward to their to their
• 49:17
  Speaker 2: kids' futures in that way. And then you have a
• 49:19
  Speaker 2: lot of kids born out of out of wedlock or
• 49:21
  Speaker 2: born from these unions that didn't have much thought put
• 49:25
  Speaker 2: into them. And then people get tired of each other
• 49:27
  Speaker 2: once once the love's gone. That's the sort of unfortunate
• 49:30
  Speaker 2: thing there is. What a lot of families understood back
• 49:33
  Speaker 2: then is that love is very fleeting, and a lot
• 49:36
  Speaker 2: of our marriage therapy.
• 49:37
  Speaker 3: I'm sorry was it.
• 49:39
  Speaker 4: I'm sorry for interrupting.
• 49:40
  Speaker 1: I said, I think that love is not like people
• 49:42
  Speaker 1: think love is this like chemical thing that you just
• 49:44
  Speaker 1: feel and your butterflies and all that. But I think
• 49:47
  Speaker 1: that it's something that you build over time, like you
• 49:49
  Speaker 1: you don't. You don't just either have It's not one
• 49:52
  Speaker 1: of these things that either happens or it doesn't happen.
• 49:54
  Speaker 1: You work on it and and I think the work
• 49:57
  Speaker 1: that you put into it is where it comes from,
• 49:59
  Speaker 1: and it lasts a lot longer. I think Bruce Lee
• 50:01
  Speaker 1: had a saying about that that it was like, it's
• 50:03
  Speaker 1: not like a roaring flame, but it's like an ember,
• 50:05
  Speaker 1: you know, that burns for a long time.
• 50:08
  Speaker 2: So well, yeah, and I mean, you know, families, I'd
• 50:11
  Speaker 2: like to think over the long course of the generations
• 50:14
  Speaker 2: figured out that if you build a marriage on what's essentially,
• 50:18
  Speaker 2: you know, seduction and romantic love, I mean, some element
• 50:21
  Speaker 2: of seduction can be there, like there is some element
• 50:23
  Speaker 2: of you being attracted to your wife and your wife
• 50:26
  Speaker 2: being attracted to you. I get that, you know, but
• 50:28
  Speaker 2: if it's front and center and nothing else means anything,
• 50:31
  Speaker 2: and you're making your decision based off that, A lot
• 50:33
  Speaker 2: of people knew that that was a recipe for disaster.
• 50:36
  Speaker 2: A lot of our marriage therapy is about when the
• 50:39
  Speaker 2: love dies, you can kind of say, and it's about, well,
• 50:41
  Speaker 2: what do you do to reignite that spark, so to speak,
• 50:44
  Speaker 2: And it's just about like, there's we know what we
• 50:48
  Speaker 2: know that that that kind of I've seen the light
• 50:50
  Speaker 2: switch happen so much, even with just people that I
• 50:53
  Speaker 2: moms and dads have had to speak with that child support.
• 50:55
  Speaker 2: I can tell that the people who hated each other,
• 50:57
  Speaker 2: by the time they were talking to me, probably we
• 51:00
  Speaker 2: were in love with each other the most, you know,
• 51:02
  Speaker 2: before they ever had to deal with our agency.
• 51:04
  Speaker 3: So it's just it's this thing.
• 51:07
  Speaker 2: And I think even naturally as guys in our current
• 51:09
  Speaker 2: dating sort of scene, I mean, there's just so many
• 51:12
  Speaker 2: relationships that don't work out. There's plenty of heartbreaks, and
• 51:14
  Speaker 2: then you get to a point where you are more pragmatic,
• 51:17
  Speaker 2: I think, with how you choose or you're gonna be
• 51:19
  Speaker 2: because you realize love is so unreliable, you know, for
• 51:23
  Speaker 2: a long time, even love stories are always like tragedies.
• 51:26
  Speaker 3: You can say, you know.
• 51:27
  Speaker 4: That is not actually a romance, it's a tragedy.
• 51:30
  Speaker 1: Yeah, because they were stupid kids that thought they could
• 51:33
  Speaker 1: make it work, right, and you know, then they like
• 51:36
  Speaker 1: meet in the next day. I think they fall in
• 51:38
  Speaker 1: love like instantaneously, and it's yeah, I think it was
• 51:41
  Speaker 1: supposed to be like this is stupid.
• 51:43
  Speaker 3: Right, Yeah.
• 51:44
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 51:44
  Speaker 2: Well, and to say your point about you know, kind
• 51:46
  Speaker 2: of the strengthening of families within a community, there's a
• 51:49
  Speaker 2: lot of fraud that can happen. You know, if you
• 51:51
  Speaker 2: don't know who you're marrying into. Well, most people don't
• 51:53
  Speaker 2: even want to see their their potential bride or grooms
• 51:57
  Speaker 2: to be's credit report before they get married. Then they
• 52:00
  Speaker 2: find out down the line that they have crushing student
• 52:03
  Speaker 2: loan debt, or have all these weird things that they're
• 52:06
  Speaker 2: bringing into the marriage or whatever happens to be. And
• 52:09
  Speaker 2: you know, one of the things the benefits of it
• 52:11
  Speaker 2: is is the family can verify they do know these people. Well,
• 52:15
  Speaker 2: there's an incentive to There's the words kind of related
• 52:18
  Speaker 2: to hypergamy called endogamy, and endogamy doesn't always mean like
• 52:22
  Speaker 2: marrying within like a specific ethnic group or something. It
• 52:25
  Speaker 2: can mean marrying within a specific economic group, whatever the
• 52:28
  Speaker 2: factor happens to be.
• 52:30
  Speaker 3: Marrying it means in group versus.
• 52:31
  Speaker 2: Out group and in the one sense encourage more in
• 52:34
  Speaker 2: You can encourage in group marriages sort of by this
• 52:37
  Speaker 2: means because it's like, Okay, we do want you within
• 52:40
  Speaker 2: the culture, so to speak, as far as the family's
• 52:42
  Speaker 2: concerned or or you know, you're not going to get
• 52:45
  Speaker 2: disinherited basically, so there's an incentive to marry within than
• 52:48
  Speaker 2: to marry without. There's still the dowry still plays a
• 52:51
  Speaker 2: big role in marrying without, and if anything, the dowry
• 52:54
  Speaker 2: proves that this family is serious about the marriage, if
• 52:58
  Speaker 2: they know that there's a particular high state as family,
• 53:00
  Speaker 2: you know, from an out group or something that's going
• 53:03
  Speaker 2: to make sense for them based off the situation. You
• 53:05
  Speaker 2: also have people using love by the way to do fraud.
• 53:09
  Speaker 2: In Greece, you had these things, these people that they
• 53:11
  Speaker 2: would call broika theories. Breka means dowry and Greek and
• 53:15
  Speaker 2: it means dowry hunters. So you have these kind of
• 53:18
  Speaker 2: early pickup artist types even in other parts of Europe,
• 53:21
  Speaker 2: that are using these seductive methods to try to get
• 53:24
  Speaker 2: these women, and then if the family wants to save face,
• 53:26
  Speaker 2: then they would do the marriage and give the dowry
• 53:28
  Speaker 2: over to make it a kind of clean thing. So
• 53:32
  Speaker 2: there's all these all these different factors for how it works.
• 53:34
  Speaker 2: But one interesting thing is is I think it does
• 53:37
  Speaker 2: encourage this kind of sort of community building aspect of it,
• 53:42
  Speaker 2: because that's the families know each other. They know, they're
• 53:44
  Speaker 2: not lying about what they have or what they don't have.
• 53:47
  Speaker 2: People know each other there, they own land near each other.
• 53:50
  Speaker 2: It keeps things very strong within the group, and it's
• 53:53
  Speaker 2: it's better than as these things start to break, you
• 53:57
  Speaker 2: see the state get more and more and more powerful.
• 53:59
  Speaker 3: You know, kind of proto changed to.
• 54:01
  Speaker 2: This was prior to the church coming in, you had
• 54:04
  Speaker 2: these very strong, strong clan type systems. Then as the
• 54:07
  Speaker 2: church came in, it did make the more more of
• 54:11
  Speaker 2: this sort of individual, nuclear family style thing, with the
• 54:15
  Speaker 2: church kind of as the glue in between it. Then
• 54:17
  Speaker 2: that kind of lended itself over to becoming even more
• 54:20
  Speaker 2: atomized with the state frankly just being and you know,
• 54:24
  Speaker 2: having their tentacles and most aspects of our lives at.
• 54:26
  Speaker 3: This point, you know. So it's an interesting change.
• 54:29
  Speaker 4: Yeah, So going back to these old writings about dowry
• 54:36
  Speaker 4: and romantic love stuff like when when this I guess
• 54:40
  Speaker 4: like this shift or this change started happening. What were women.
• 54:45
  Speaker 4: I don't know if women.
• 54:46
  Speaker 1: Wrote a lot of articles or pieces or you know,
• 54:49
  Speaker 1: essays on this, but do you know what if there
• 54:52
  Speaker 1: were women that were also concerned about this move, because
• 54:56
  Speaker 1: I'm sure that there are men who.
• 54:57
  Speaker 2: Wrote about Yeah, there's a newspaper clip of women saying
• 55:02
  Speaker 2: that the love match is a bad idea, we should
• 55:04
  Speaker 2: go back to the dowry system. There are different writers
• 55:06
  Speaker 2: back then that are simply should be endowing our daughters
• 55:10
  Speaker 2: with dowries. We're setting them up for a life of failure.
• 55:12
  Speaker 2: And these are older women who have seen a lot
• 55:15
  Speaker 2: of marriages in their lifetime. Yeah, and there's one called
• 55:19
  Speaker 2: Dowries for Daughters. Gosh that I'd have to dig through it,
• 55:22
  Speaker 2: but I found that one early on. So there is
• 55:25
  Speaker 2: this kind of The interesting thing about the newspaper articles
• 55:29
  Speaker 2: is you can see there was a very definite period
• 55:31
  Speaker 2: of debates going on, because you can see in the
• 55:34
  Speaker 2: search queries that the world. You know, it's being used
• 55:38
  Speaker 2: a lot here, especially in English newspapers around the time
• 55:40
  Speaker 2: they abolished it and got rid of it, and then
• 55:44
  Speaker 2: after that just kind of dealing with it. So there
• 55:46
  Speaker 2: were plenty of people who are just like, we don't
• 55:49
  Speaker 2: like this system. But you know, I think by that
• 55:51
  Speaker 2: point feminism really started pushing against it and modernization and
• 55:57
  Speaker 2: its just I think people probably felt like they could
• 56:00
  Speaker 2: finance love. But even in places like Germany, as love
• 56:04
  Speaker 2: started becoming popular and even so much, you know, being
• 56:07
  Speaker 2: kind of hailed in the pulpit, so to speak. If
• 56:10
  Speaker 2: you look, there's a there's a paper I have. It's
• 56:12
  Speaker 2: called romantic love or material interest. And in this particular
• 56:16
  Speaker 2: city in Germany, in order for people to get married,
• 56:19
  Speaker 2: they had to register their assets at the time of marriage.
• 56:21
  Speaker 2: It was a requirement. So we have all this data
• 56:24
  Speaker 2: about who was getting married to each other. And when
• 56:27
  Speaker 2: you chart out the data, you can see it's pretty
• 56:29
  Speaker 2: much people of like equal assets that are getting married,
• 56:32
  Speaker 2: sometimes with women having more. The bulk of it kind
• 56:35
  Speaker 2: of clusters with women having more because you know that
• 56:38
  Speaker 2: money's then being used to open up a trade shop
• 56:40
  Speaker 2: or something for the new husband and.
• 56:41
  Speaker 3: Then he's working and all that kind of stuff.
• 56:43
  Speaker 2: But what it says in there, what that data shows
• 56:46
  Speaker 2: is that in that time period that the data is
• 56:48
  Speaker 2: taken in, romantic love is being sort of spoken of
• 56:51
  Speaker 2: on a surface level, as this beautiful thing. But when
• 56:53
  Speaker 2: you look at the actual marriages, people are negotiating marriages
• 56:56
  Speaker 2: based off of assets and the purse held all the
• 56:59
  Speaker 2: weight is is what it's said in there.
• 57:01
  Speaker 4: So she had yeah from the table? Is that what
• 57:03
  Speaker 4: you're saying?
• 57:05
  Speaker 2: Yeah, essentially, right, he's not the table, She's not exactly
• 57:10
  Speaker 2: I am the table.
• 57:11
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 57:14
  Speaker 1: So then okay, So when what did feminism have to
• 57:19
  Speaker 1: do with taking away the dowry? What were there any
• 57:23
  Speaker 1: Because I know that it, I know that it. There's
• 57:26
  Speaker 1: a lot to say about that, but I think we
• 57:28
  Speaker 1: have to touch on it a little bit at least.
• 57:30
  Speaker 1: So what was feminism's role or reasoning behind removing the dowry?
• 57:35
  Speaker 1: What was the arguments and why did it get pushed through?
• 57:38
  Speaker 3: Can I read to you a paper?
• 57:40
  Speaker 2: It's a three paragraphs and I can't show it because
• 57:43
  Speaker 2: I can't share my screen.
• 57:43
  Speaker 4: But yeah, it's okay.
• 57:45
  Speaker 2: It's it's from an article I believe it's from nineteen
• 57:48
  Speaker 2: seventy one or nineteen seventy excuse me, and it says
• 57:52
  Speaker 2: no more dowry. When Italy finally legalized divorce in December
• 57:56
  Speaker 2: nineteen seventy, there remained the problem of the dowry. The
• 57:59
  Speaker 2: dowry or goods and money which the bride brings into
• 58:02
  Speaker 2: a marriage, is firmly established an Italian law. The State
• 58:06
  Speaker 2: Civil Code contains thirty two articles defining the amount, use,
• 58:09
  Speaker 2: and title to the dowry everything accept its disposition in
• 58:12
  Speaker 2: the case of divorce, arguing that a man could divorce
• 58:15
  Speaker 2: his wife and still keep her dowry. Italy sent it
• 58:18
  Speaker 2: recently decided to abolish the age old dowry tradition outright.
• 58:22
  Speaker 2: The act was favored, needless to say, by Italy's liberated
• 58:24
  Speaker 2: young women, who considered the dowry a price on their
• 58:27
  Speaker 2: heads and a hostage to their fidelity. Under the old laws,
• 58:31
  Speaker 2: you see adulterous women forfeited all claim to their dowries.
• 58:34
  Speaker 2: So it's stuff like that that.
• 58:38
  Speaker 3: Sounds fair to me.
• 58:39
  Speaker 2: If you're gonna cheat on your husband in the marriage, yes,
• 58:41
  Speaker 2: you're forfeiting the assets now within the marriage, which includes
• 58:44
  Speaker 2: your dowry. But what's going on is they're coming in
• 58:47
  Speaker 2: with a lot of propaganda saying that there's violence against women,
• 58:50
  Speaker 2: or it's unfair to expect that towards women, and it
• 58:55
  Speaker 2: treats women like chattel, and a lot of that isn't true,
• 58:58
  Speaker 2: but this is kind of the narrative is being pushed around.
• 59:01
  Speaker 2: And then you know, there's I think I have a
• 59:03
  Speaker 2: few others here. Gosh, there's there's one from Greece. I'll
• 59:07
  Speaker 2: try to pull it up while while we're talking, and
• 59:09
  Speaker 2: it's talking about how you know a lot of feminists
• 59:12
  Speaker 2: were pushing to get to get rid of the dowry,
• 59:15
  Speaker 2: and a lot of it is wrapped up with women,
• 59:17
  Speaker 2: women wanting control, full control over their property basically, and
• 59:22
  Speaker 2: the way the dowry works is the dowry always was
• 59:24
  Speaker 2: the woman's property, but throughout a marriage, a man would
• 59:27
  Speaker 2: have usuffruct over the benefits of the dowry basically like
• 59:30
  Speaker 2: if it was land, the harvest coming, therefrom.
• 59:33
  Speaker 4: Building something with it.
• 59:34
  Speaker 1: So but he would like till the land and turn
• 59:38
  Speaker 1: it into something that produces more values.
• 59:41
  Speaker 3: Yes, exactly.
• 59:42
  Speaker 2: And you couldn't just go and gamble her dowry tomorrow.
• 59:45
  Speaker 2: There were laws protecting against that. And if you were
• 59:47
  Speaker 2: acting in a way that was irresponsible, she can get
• 59:50
  Speaker 2: her dowry back and either you know, put it, keep it,
• 59:54
  Speaker 2: you know, under her own decisions, or put it under
• 59:56
  Speaker 2: the decisions of her brother or father. Or something like that. Yeah,
• 1:00:01
  Speaker 2: but what what ends up happening? I have I have
• 1:00:04
  Speaker 2: another paper here.
• 1:00:05
  Speaker 3: Oh no, no, that's the same one.
• 1:00:06
  Speaker 2: Sorry, I was trying to find one. There's another paper
• 1:00:08
  Speaker 2: I have. It was in the New York Times. It's
• 1:00:10
  Speaker 2: from the seventies. It's around the same time. And what
• 1:00:12
  Speaker 2: happens in that paper is it describes how the sort
• 1:00:15
  Speaker 2: of the communists and the feminists were working together in
• 1:00:19
  Speaker 2: order to get this this dowry of boss. So what
• 1:00:21
  Speaker 2: we read there about nineteen seventy Italy when they finally
• 1:00:23
  Speaker 2: got rid of this stuff, it was a result of
• 1:00:25
  Speaker 2: like the alliance of feminists and at least in that
• 1:00:29
  Speaker 2: country coming together. So I have one from from Greece here,
• 1:00:34
  Speaker 2: if I mean, this is pretty long, so I'll try
• 1:00:36
  Speaker 2: to find the sort of the sort of feminist aspect
• 1:00:41
  Speaker 2: of it. It says persistence of the dowry. So this
• 1:00:43
  Speaker 2: is a quote. So I'm going to read to you
• 1:00:45
  Speaker 2: about five or six paragraph if you don't mind me
• 1:00:48
  Speaker 2: doing that, but it'll show you the feminist perspective. But
• 1:00:50
  Speaker 2: I want to start off with the church. It says
• 1:00:53
  Speaker 2: the strongest opposition to change had come from the Greek
• 1:00:55
  Speaker 2: Orthodox Church. But after a meeting this week between the
• 1:00:58
  Speaker 2: governing Holy Synod and the Justice Minister, the church announced
• 1:01:01
  Speaker 2: that it was quote unquote not interested if the dowry
• 1:01:04
  Speaker 2: was abolished or not. It was not clear why the
• 1:01:06
  Speaker 2: church changed its position. I would have loved to be
• 1:01:08
  Speaker 2: a fly in that meeting. The dowry originated in ancient
• 1:01:11
  Speaker 2: times as a continuation by the woman to as a
• 1:01:14
  Speaker 2: contribution by the woman to the family. At the time,
• 1:01:17
  Speaker 2: a wife was not expected to work outside the home,
• 1:01:19
  Speaker 2: but she was expected to take care of the home
• 1:01:21
  Speaker 2: and children. A man who expected his wife to work
• 1:01:23
  Speaker 2: outside the home was seen as incapable of caring for
• 1:01:25
  Speaker 2: the family. Negotiated marriages have often had the dowry as
• 1:01:29
  Speaker 2: a key feature, with real estate or other valuables offered
• 1:01:32
  Speaker 2: to attract a quote unquote good husband. The need was
• 1:01:35
  Speaker 2: accentuated by social pressures and that stigmatized the woman who
• 1:01:39
  Speaker 2: remains unmarried. Now here's where the feminism comes in, and
• 1:01:42
  Speaker 2: this is a quote. Persistence of the dowry has proved
• 1:01:46
  Speaker 2: socially harmful in an international embarrassment for the country. According
• 1:01:49
  Speaker 2: to Aleko Mirago Pulo Pulu, a deputy dean of the
• 1:01:53
  Speaker 2: Athens School of political science and leader of a feminist
• 1:01:56
  Speaker 2: group pushing for change. It humiliates women, this is quote,
• 1:02:00
  Speaker 2: makes them an object of bargaining and marriage and economic transaction,
• 1:02:04
  Speaker 2: and in fact also humiliates men by rendering them.
• 1:02:08
  Speaker 3: Sort of purchased husbands.
• 1:02:09
  Speaker 2: She said, they're the ones that are making this system
• 1:02:11
  Speaker 2: seem like it's just about buying and selling meat.
• 1:02:15
  Speaker 1: Turning into this cold transaction. But they're also kind of
• 1:02:18
  Speaker 1: boiling it. They're using I think, okay, like stay with me.
• 1:02:22
  Speaker 1: I think that there is a they're using the concept
• 1:02:26
  Speaker 1: of love match or like you know as a romantic
• 1:02:30
  Speaker 1: love as the baseline or the basis the framework to
• 1:02:35
  Speaker 1: turn this to like shame the dowry system as cold
• 1:02:39
  Speaker 1: and unloving by saying, oh, you're just treating women like
• 1:02:42
  Speaker 1: a bargaining chip or whatever. And where's but they have
• 1:02:45
  Speaker 1: to lean on romantic love to do that. Where which
• 1:02:48
  Speaker 1: is what they're doing right?
• 1:02:50
  Speaker 4: Yeah?
• 1:02:51
  Speaker 2: And if I can read this next paragraph, this gives
• 1:02:53
  Speaker 2: you an idea of what the promise was, because there
• 1:02:56
  Speaker 2: was kind of a promise or a sort of deal
• 1:02:59
  Speaker 2: that was being made, it says missus. Marago Pulo said
• 1:03:03
  Speaker 2: dowries had become outdated since most Greek women now work,
• 1:03:07
  Speaker 2: have similar educational opportunities as men and can generate similar incomes.
• 1:03:11
  Speaker 3: Do you see what the promise is there?
• 1:03:13
  Speaker 2: The promise is that if we got rid of the
• 1:03:15
  Speaker 2: dowry system, then they would be contributing to the household finances.
• 1:03:19
  Speaker 3: But they really haven't been doing.
• 1:03:21
  Speaker 2: What was about women were entering the workforce, then entering
• 1:03:24
  Speaker 2: the workforce, and yeah, and education opportunities. Yeah, so it says,
• 1:03:28
  Speaker 2: I'll read another paragraph says the report by the Social
• 1:03:30
  Speaker 2: Research Center said dowry survived through the ages largely because
• 1:03:33
  Speaker 2: of tradition. Okay, is that bad real tradition?
• 1:03:36
  Speaker 1: Well then, but yeah, but when they say tradition, they
• 1:03:39
  Speaker 1: do mean yeah, that's like the actual tradition, not what
• 1:03:44
  Speaker 1: people today call tradition, but.
• 1:03:46
  Speaker 2: Go on exactly, and the support of a large portion
• 1:03:49
  Speaker 2: of the population that was over sixty five and more
• 1:03:51
  Speaker 2: inclined to respect tradition, so that the older population was
• 1:03:55
  Speaker 2: aging out, but they still said, no, keep the traditions,
• 1:03:58
  Speaker 2: and then you have feminism coming in. It found that
• 1:04:00
  Speaker 2: the practice had been shaken by workers who returned from
• 1:04:03
  Speaker 2: industrial centers like the United States and Western Europe with
• 1:04:06
  Speaker 2: more financial security and less dependency on the Dowry. So
• 1:04:09
  Speaker 2: you know, as college was coming into people were sending
• 1:04:12
  Speaker 2: their kids over to a place like England to be
• 1:04:14
  Speaker 2: educated or these modernized places to then come back and
• 1:04:19
  Speaker 2: then by that time they'd be kind of educated into
• 1:04:23
  Speaker 2: not really being with this system anymore, which is kind
• 1:04:26
  Speaker 2: of unfortunate there. So that's where the propaganda comes in.
• 1:04:29
  Speaker 2: And then you know, it's like you can imagine, you
• 1:04:31
  Speaker 2: get the TV, you get the movies, and you get
• 1:04:33
  Speaker 2: all this kind of stuff, and it's just like, oh
• 1:04:35
  Speaker 2: my gosh, and people somehow people think everybody in the
• 1:04:37
  Speaker 2: past were just these I don't know that they just
• 1:04:40
  Speaker 2: didn't know what they were doing. They were really just
• 1:04:43
  Speaker 2: taking in from the propaganda.
• 1:04:45
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it was basically like the idea of the time
• 1:04:48
  Speaker 1: we live in now is the most enlightened, the most intelligent,
• 1:04:52
  Speaker 1: the most you know, forward thinking, and everyone before that
• 1:04:56
  Speaker 1: was primitive, backwards, sexist, racist, you know Volger and a
• 1:05:00
  Speaker 1: lot of that came, yeah, from our media, but I
• 1:05:03
  Speaker 1: think that the seeds of that were probably being planted
• 1:05:05
  Speaker 1: like way before that.
• 1:05:08
  Speaker 3: Sorry, go ahead, I just want to know I have
• 1:05:11
  Speaker 3: one more I want to read to you. If yeah,
• 1:05:13
  Speaker 3: go ahead for god time.
• 1:05:14
  Speaker 2: So this one's from nineteen thirty three from the Aberdeen Press,
• 1:05:17
  Speaker 2: and it says off the dot. The dot is another
• 1:05:19
  Speaker 2: word or an adult for for the dowry. The French
• 1:05:21
  Speaker 2: usually call it that. The old word dowry is seldom
• 1:05:25
  Speaker 2: heard nowadays, at least in this country, although with the
• 1:05:28
  Speaker 2: French and the Jews it still seems still as essential
• 1:05:31
  Speaker 2: to a marriage as the bride. The French were doing dowries,
• 1:05:33
  Speaker 2: and they were very serious about it. These are the
• 1:05:35
  Speaker 2: people that gave us the city of Love, by the way,
• 1:05:37
  Speaker 2: for a long time, way further than England, a greater
• 1:05:40
  Speaker 2: chivalry holds that the bride herself is gift enough. So
• 1:05:43
  Speaker 2: there's a direct tie there in that article of how
• 1:05:46
  Speaker 2: the the table, that's it. That's from the table, yeah,
• 1:05:50
  Speaker 2: saying we are the table. But if it does, but
• 1:05:52
  Speaker 2: if it does happen that she quote unquote has money.
• 1:05:55
  Speaker 2: As the idiom now puts it, bridegrooms are not expected
• 1:05:58
  Speaker 2: to object. Dowry was a romantic word means tied up securely,
• 1:06:04
  Speaker 2: we hope under the married Women's Property Act, And I
• 1:06:07
  Speaker 2: think that's really what undid coviture in England was the
• 1:06:10
  Speaker 2: Women's Property Act, because it gave them more control over it.
• 1:06:12
  Speaker 2: It's purely prosaic. But the words, I'll have to double
• 1:06:15
  Speaker 2: check that. But the word still survives in the civil
• 1:06:17
  Speaker 2: service for one thing, as one would expect in that
• 1:06:20
  Speaker 2: atmosphere of hallowed antiquity, where women employees on marriage receive
• 1:06:25
  Speaker 2: their dowry. So you had women that were working and
• 1:06:28
  Speaker 2: they would have these contracts basically off when you complete
• 1:06:30
  Speaker 2: the contract, especially if you're from a poorer background. Women
• 1:06:33
  Speaker 2: would work to save up their dowries and then once
• 1:06:35
  Speaker 2: they got the dowry, you can now be married.
• 1:06:37
  Speaker 3: And then they could focus on home life.
• 1:06:38
  Speaker 2: It survived until yesterday too and the National Union of
• 1:06:41
  Speaker 2: Distributive Workers, but is now no more. The trade union
• 1:06:44
  Speaker 2: has decided against the giving of dowries to members who
• 1:06:46
  Speaker 2: become brides on two very sound and up to date grounds.
• 1:06:50
  Speaker 2: The first that since women claim equality with men who
• 1:06:53
  Speaker 2: have no dowry, they should have it in this and
• 1:06:56
  Speaker 2: the second even more conclusive, that there is no money
• 1:06:59
  Speaker 2: to pay them. And at last we suggest it's probably
• 1:07:01
  Speaker 2: the main reason why dowries have dropped out of custom
• 1:07:04
  Speaker 2: in this poverty stricken world.
• 1:07:05
  Speaker 3: So that the important part.
• 1:07:06
  Speaker 2: There is that this particular work union or whatever is saying, okay,
• 1:07:12
  Speaker 2: we're not giving the dowries to the women are having
• 1:07:13
  Speaker 2: these deals anymore for them because women are saying we're
• 1:07:16
  Speaker 2: equal to men, so they're wanting the same deal or whatever.
• 1:07:20
  Speaker 2: And then so it's like, if they're equal to men
• 1:07:22
  Speaker 2: and they're making incomes, then they should be figuring out
• 1:07:25
  Speaker 2: their marriage that way.
• 1:07:26
  Speaker 3: But somehow we.
• 1:07:26
  Speaker 2: Went from let's abandon the dowry system to women working. Therefore,
• 1:07:31
  Speaker 2: since women make money too, then that's okay, all the
• 1:07:34
  Speaker 2: way down to trad cons who are just like women
• 1:07:37
  Speaker 2: should not have to think about money at all.
• 1:07:38
  Speaker 3: That's a man's job.
• 1:07:39
  Speaker 2: And it's but it's like when you look in the past,
• 1:07:41
  Speaker 2: families worked so hard. Sometimes the brother's marriage would be
• 1:07:45
  Speaker 2: delayed just so they can save up for the sister's dowry.
• 1:07:48
  Speaker 2: The sister herself would be working. You know, this is
• 1:07:54
  Speaker 2: from Bridewells.
• 1:07:55
  Speaker 4: Everybody worked all through history.
• 1:07:57
  Speaker 1: Like this whole thing about the stay at home why
• 1:08:01
  Speaker 1: and mother is a very recent invention and it's held
• 1:08:05
  Speaker 1: I think it's held up by this. It's almost like
• 1:08:08
  Speaker 1: a kind of virtue signaling to be like a man
• 1:08:10
  Speaker 1: that says, my wife doesn't have to work, right.
• 1:08:12
  Speaker 3: But yeah, like an ornament.
• 1:08:14
  Speaker 1: Yeah exactly, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's when my wife works.
• 1:08:19
  Speaker 4: God damn it.
• 1:08:20
  Speaker 2: Well so yeah, but I'm joking she does. Oh yeah,
• 1:08:24
  Speaker 2: that's that's good. You know that that's that's a blessing.
• 1:08:26
  Speaker 2: And it wasn't something that was strange to the past,
• 1:08:29
  Speaker 2: but they they made it into this thing, which I
• 1:08:30
  Speaker 2: think feeds into something that I like to call like
• 1:08:32
  Speaker 2: the sort of Barbie archetype. There's another This is from
• 1:08:35
  Speaker 2: bride wealth and dowry. It's just a quick thing, but
• 1:08:38
  Speaker 2: it says the propensity of bride wealth systems to lead
• 1:08:40
  Speaker 2: to male migration into the towns has an interesting corollaryan
• 1:08:44
  Speaker 2: dowry systems, where considerations of status and honor dictate that
• 1:08:47
  Speaker 2: a woman has to acquire a certain measure of property
• 1:08:50
  Speaker 2: before she can get married. The opposite kind of migration
• 1:08:53
  Speaker 2: may result. In many parts of Europe, young women moved
• 1:08:56
  Speaker 2: into households, into the households of other people in order
• 1:08:59
  Speaker 2: to become domestic servants until the time for their marriage
• 1:09:01
  Speaker 2: came along. And they're doing that in order to say,
• 1:09:05
  Speaker 2: for their dowry. And then once they hit that minimum amount,
• 1:09:08
  Speaker 2: now you can get married, and you know, you can
• 1:09:10
  Speaker 2: you can begin a domestic life that way. So it's
• 1:09:13
  Speaker 2: a it's a fascinating history, and all this stuff has
• 1:09:15
  Speaker 2: been largely almost successfully swept under the rug by feminists
• 1:09:20
  Speaker 2: and even trad cons alike, or they they must really
• 1:09:23
  Speaker 2: have a collective amnesia or something.
• 1:09:25
  Speaker 4: And yeah, I don't think.
• 1:09:26
  Speaker 1: I don't think trad cons want to know, like they've
• 1:09:30
  Speaker 1: not bothered to look into it. In my opinion, they
• 1:09:32
  Speaker 1: probably I'm gonna guess that they picked up their framework
• 1:09:37
  Speaker 1: for what a marriage looks like from the Boomers, And
• 1:09:41
  Speaker 1: I think that, yeah, because I think the boomers they
• 1:09:44
  Speaker 1: were they they had like a big effect on this
• 1:09:47
  Speaker 1: shift away from the dowry just be considering the timing
• 1:09:50
  Speaker 1: and everything to the system where we're living on her now,
• 1:09:53
  Speaker 1: which is just like a completely lopsided mess that just
• 1:09:56
  Speaker 1: leads to you know, like every cause. Like the reason
• 1:09:59
  Speaker 1: why I say the track cons are like they don't,
• 1:10:02
  Speaker 1: they don't, they're just ignorant of the history is like
• 1:10:04
  Speaker 1: at best that though they didn't really think it was
• 1:10:06
  Speaker 1: worth looking into. They only look as far back as
• 1:10:09
  Speaker 1: like the nineteen sixties, Yeah, and exactly, and that's as.
• 1:10:12
  Speaker 4: Far back as they look.
• 1:10:13
  Speaker 1: And they say, well, my my parents, my grandparents did fine,
• 1:10:17
  Speaker 1: you know, and it's like.
• 1:10:18
  Speaker 2: But yeah, but like that, and Matt Walsh will like
• 1:10:20
  Speaker 2: somebody like Matt Walsh he said it recently, he will say,
• 1:10:23
  Speaker 2: going all the way back to time immemorial, like somehow
• 1:10:26
  Speaker 2: that gets pushed back into what it always was. And
• 1:10:30
  Speaker 2: but it's it's mind boggling to me that that they
• 1:10:33
  Speaker 2: just haven't even looked at it. I have another couple
• 1:10:35
  Speaker 2: of senses here. This is from a book called Marriage
• 1:10:37
  Speaker 2: Bargain from nineteen eighty five, and this is Frankly, this
• 1:10:41
  Speaker 2: is written by a woman who's frankly a feminist, but
• 1:10:43
  Speaker 2: I like to just read whatever I can find to
• 1:10:45
  Speaker 2: see what's in there. She's talking about different articles from
• 1:10:48
  Speaker 2: you know, the Sicilian peasantry in the nineteenth century, Imperial
• 1:10:51
  Speaker 2: German bourgeoisie, Greek workers and farmers. And she's talking about
• 1:10:56
  Speaker 2: these articles that are going to be presented in this
• 1:10:58
  Speaker 2: book which features all the articles, and she says the
• 1:11:01
  Speaker 2: articles illuminate the ways in which families protected their lineage
• 1:11:04
  Speaker 2: and property, endeavoring to maintain or enhance their class status
• 1:11:08
  Speaker 2: by matching a quote unquote promising young man of appropriate
• 1:11:11
  Speaker 2: status and good economic prospects with a financially well endowed
• 1:11:16
  Speaker 2: young woman. They underline the controls, particularly arrange marriages and
• 1:11:20
  Speaker 2: the threat of disinheritance the noble bourgeois and property peasant
• 1:11:25
  Speaker 2: families exerted over their daughters and sons to ensure the
• 1:11:29
  Speaker 2: continuity of existing social relations. Also, they de tel the
• 1:11:33
  Speaker 2: broader economic and social structures within which young women married,
• 1:11:36
  Speaker 2: and to the degree to which the institution of dowry
• 1:11:37
  Speaker 2: structured courtship and marriage.
• 1:11:39
  Speaker 3: But you know, what you hear.
• 1:11:40
  Speaker 2: From these trad cons is about preserving the way of
• 1:11:42
  Speaker 2: life and this and the culture's disintegrating and all these things.
• 1:11:46
  Speaker 2: But you have to understand how families did this, how
• 1:11:49
  Speaker 2: they kept this train moving, and if you don't want
• 1:11:53
  Speaker 2: to accept that, it's not going to work.
• 1:11:56
  Speaker 4: You know.
• 1:11:57
  Speaker 2: So there's this, I really believe there's a fundamental just
• 1:12:01
  Speaker 2: disconnect and misunderstanding.
• 1:12:03
  Speaker 3: It almost seems purposeful.
• 1:12:04
  Speaker 2: I'd hate to say that, but they've sort of gotten
• 1:12:06
  Speaker 2: the wool pulled over their eyes at least, you know,
• 1:12:09
  Speaker 2: from the feminists and all these, yeah things, it could
• 1:12:11
  Speaker 2: be purposeful.
• 1:12:12
  Speaker 1: But yeah, I mean, as if I'm being charitable, I'd
• 1:12:14
  Speaker 1: say it's just ignorance. If I'm being charitable, but we
• 1:12:17
  Speaker 1: can't really know for sure. So someone asked, why you
• 1:12:21
  Speaker 1: think the Communists were interested in getting rid of the
• 1:12:25
  Speaker 1: dowry since you said that they got involved.
• 1:12:27
  Speaker 4: I think I know.
• 1:12:28
  Speaker 1: But but do you know if there's anything that was
• 1:12:30
  Speaker 1: said about that or if it was like if there's
• 1:12:31
  Speaker 1: a theory about why the Communists were getting Yeah, I.
• 1:12:34
  Speaker 2: Just have some of the stuff I've read, so I
• 1:12:36
  Speaker 2: haven't seen like like I wish I could find like
• 1:12:39
  Speaker 2: an academic thing that digs deep into it. So I
• 1:12:42
  Speaker 2: only have kind of what I've read and my suspicions.
• 1:12:45
  Speaker 2: The entire dowry system and system of marriage transaction revolves
• 1:12:49
  Speaker 2: around this idea of property, property ownership, and property transmission.
• 1:12:53
  Speaker 2: So if you believe in private property and the right
• 1:12:56
  Speaker 2: to private property based off of you know, your labor's frankly,
• 1:13:00
  Speaker 2: then the ability to transmit the property in past, the
• 1:13:04
  Speaker 2: sort of towards so to speak, requires a system like this,
• 1:13:07
  Speaker 2: I think to do it do it most efficiently when
• 1:13:09
  Speaker 2: it comes to communists, their their view of property is
• 1:13:12
  Speaker 2: let's say, it's different, you know what I mean? Yeah,
• 1:13:18
  Speaker 2: And also with feminists too, Feminists have this sense of
• 1:13:22
  Speaker 2: entitlement that sort of meshes into a welfare system, right,
• 1:13:25
  Speaker 2: And this idea of a welfare system, I guess you
• 1:13:28
  Speaker 2: could say socialism is not too far off from the
• 1:13:30
  Speaker 2: government sort of controlling all property and redistributbuting wealth as
• 1:13:34
  Speaker 2: it sees fit. So you know, you know, when you
• 1:13:37
  Speaker 2: look in China, so it's like where there is a
• 1:13:38
  Speaker 2: communist society, these systems tend to go away or get
• 1:13:41
  Speaker 2: really broken because it's like, well, the government's supposed to
• 1:13:44
  Speaker 2: provide the home, not the bride's family, or you know what,
• 1:13:46
  Speaker 2: I all these kinds of things.
• 1:13:48
  Speaker 1: Communists also want to live in a classless society. So
• 1:13:51
  Speaker 1: like the thing is that the dowry system is it's fair,
• 1:13:55
  Speaker 1: like it works for people of all levels because they're
• 1:13:57
  Speaker 1: sort of like matching, right, and communists thing, well, there
• 1:14:01
  Speaker 1: shouldn't be levels at all, so that they have to
• 1:14:03
  Speaker 1: like take it apart. And one of the best ways
• 1:14:06
  Speaker 1: to do that is to destroy families by eliminating like
• 1:14:11
  Speaker 1: that connection. So it's not just like getting rid of fathers,
• 1:14:13
  Speaker 1: but and that's where they're at now.
• 1:14:15
  Speaker 4: It's that that's inevitably leads to a destruction of the
• 1:14:19
  Speaker 4: entire line.
• 1:14:20
  Speaker 1: Imit, Like from what is it the Chinese called filial piety,
• 1:14:24
  Speaker 1: right that like familial piety, like I am my father's
• 1:14:28
  Speaker 1: you know son and his father before hid in Ka.
• 1:14:31
  Speaker 2: Well, yeah, because and there's more dependence on the state,
• 1:14:34
  Speaker 2: and it's like the state kind of grows in on
• 1:14:36
  Speaker 2: itself and wants that. The feminists want the state transfer
• 1:14:39
  Speaker 2: of wealth to women because they say that that's the
• 1:14:43
  Speaker 2: equality that they deserve. And then you know, you have this,
• 1:14:47
  Speaker 2: you have the state coming in and taking what families
• 1:14:50
  Speaker 2: used to save for themselves and for their care and saying, okay,
• 1:14:54
  Speaker 2: you know, like we have social Security for instance, we
• 1:14:56
  Speaker 2: all pay out of our checks into Social Security. If
• 1:14:58
  Speaker 2: you look into these older marriage contracts, sometimes it wasn't
• 1:15:01
  Speaker 2: just about the two people. It's also discussing what's going
• 1:15:04
  Speaker 2: to happen with the parents. And okay, the bride's parents
• 1:15:06
  Speaker 2: are giving this land as dowry, but they're gonna have
• 1:15:09
  Speaker 2: useufruct and to be able to live on the land.
• 1:15:11
  Speaker 2: And the sun is responsible for providing them with you know,
• 1:15:14
  Speaker 2: three new tunics a year, and you know, whatever food
• 1:15:16
  Speaker 2: or whatever it happens, whatever happens to be, you know,
• 1:15:19
  Speaker 2: from what the farm generates.
• 1:15:20
  Speaker 4: Right.
• 1:15:21
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so elder care and all that stuff kind of
• 1:15:23
  Speaker 2: goes in and it's very important that stuff starts to
• 1:15:27
  Speaker 2: get subsumed by the state, and so now we're paying
• 1:15:30
  Speaker 2: taxes into that, so it's harder to then save money
• 1:15:33
  Speaker 2: to put into something like this. And instead of having
• 1:15:36
  Speaker 2: reliance on the community and on your family's it's about
• 1:15:40
  Speaker 2: the state saying have reliance on us. And then on
• 1:15:42
  Speaker 2: the back end you have this feminist wealth transfer through
• 1:15:45
  Speaker 2: family law. It's just people just can't hold families together
• 1:15:48
  Speaker 2: because the environment we've created. It's just not conducive for
• 1:15:51
  Speaker 2: strong family building. I hate to say that, and I
• 1:15:54
  Speaker 2: want to be wrong about that, but there's just these
• 1:15:56
  Speaker 2: other avenues of control that people can take of vantage of.
• 1:16:01
  Speaker 4: For sure.
• 1:16:02
  Speaker 1: Yeah, you know about the Greek Orthodox Church, I can
• 1:16:06
  Speaker 1: probably find out maybe because I know the Orthodox priests
• 1:16:12
  Speaker 1: and so like I could they they and you know
• 1:16:14
  Speaker 1: Orthodoxy is it's there's a lot of like let's say,
• 1:16:18
  Speaker 1: reverence for history, because it's it is, you know, one
• 1:16:21
  Speaker 1: of the oldest churches. So like for them, like you know,
• 1:16:25
  Speaker 1: three hundred years ago was like yesterday, Like they keep
• 1:16:27
  Speaker 1: track of like everything, So I might be able to
• 1:16:30
  Speaker 1: find out, like what the reasoning was. My suspicion is
• 1:16:33
  Speaker 1: that it might have something to do with you know,
• 1:16:36
  Speaker 1: what does it render unto Caesar? What is Caesar's like
• 1:16:38
  Speaker 1: basically staying out of the state's involvement. And yet like
• 1:16:42
  Speaker 1: within the church, marriage is not a legal thing. It's
• 1:16:46
  Speaker 1: a sacrament, so it's it is a holy sacrament. And
• 1:16:49
  Speaker 1: you know the church I go to, people get married
• 1:16:51
  Speaker 1: all the time, and of course they I mean, they
• 1:16:54
  Speaker 1: do the paperwork because you're supposed to, but that's not
• 1:16:57
  Speaker 1: like the that's not for them what's important, right, So yeah, yes,
• 1:17:00
  Speaker 1: and I could probably try to find out something about that.
• 1:17:03
  Speaker 3: That would be fascinating.
• 1:17:04
  Speaker 2: I would love to learn more about that, because when
• 1:17:07
  Speaker 2: I came across that in the in the newspaper, I
• 1:17:10
  Speaker 2: found that fascinating and it did make sense that the church,
• 1:17:13
  Speaker 2: I mean that the church would would stand up against that.
• 1:17:16
  Speaker 2: I tried to look more up about it. I just
• 1:17:18
  Speaker 2: couldn't find primary sources.
• 1:17:20
  Speaker 4: You know.
• 1:17:20
  Speaker 2: One thing I found seemed to indicate that there were
• 1:17:23
  Speaker 2: differing opinions amongst the church fathers there and that it
• 1:17:26
  Speaker 2: had to do with being concerned about See I don't
• 1:17:29
  Speaker 2: know if it's just feminist revision stuff or not. Or
• 1:17:31
  Speaker 2: about women's property. I really, I really don't know. The
• 1:17:34
  Speaker 2: feminists could be just misrepresenting for sure. My suspicion about
• 1:17:38
  Speaker 2: that is that Greece wanted to join the EEC. There
• 1:17:41
  Speaker 2: were a lot of short term economic benefits to be
• 1:17:44
  Speaker 2: made if that happened, so they kind of negotiated them
• 1:17:47
  Speaker 2: to stand down, so to speak, so that they can
• 1:17:50
  Speaker 2: avail themselves of this new system.
• 1:17:53
  Speaker 3: That's my sort of tinfoil hat. Guess.
• 1:17:56
  Speaker 2: I think there is maybe some story about maybe changes
• 1:18:00
  Speaker 2: in Christian thinking that might have to do with some
• 1:18:02
  Speaker 2: of this, like because you know, France was doing dowries
• 1:18:05
  Speaker 2: for a long time, same with Spain, the same with
• 1:18:07
  Speaker 2: you know, well in Italy too, and I know I
• 1:18:10
  Speaker 2: think those are majority Catholic, so that may like it's
• 1:18:13
  Speaker 2: given me a clue that there may have been some
• 1:18:15
  Speaker 2: differences in opinions there. And then you have, you know,
• 1:18:17
  Speaker 2: your Protestant Reformation alongside a lot of this the printing
• 1:18:20
  Speaker 2: press not only did it make you know, tales of
• 1:18:25
  Speaker 2: romantic chivalry, but we had different pamphlets and stuff that
• 1:18:28
  Speaker 2: got that whole Reformation stuff going along. And then I
• 1:18:31
  Speaker 2: think you start to see this change and maybe that
• 1:18:33
  Speaker 2: strain of Christianity that views the spirituality around marriage different
• 1:18:38
  Speaker 2: the way I I kind of see the folks in
• 1:18:41
  Speaker 2: the past looking at it as there is a spiritual
• 1:18:43
  Speaker 2: component to marriage, but that is in balance with the
• 1:18:45
  Speaker 2: material component, the tangible aspect of marriage, which the dowries.
• 1:18:48
  Speaker 2: So it's like, once you figured out a dowry, you know,
• 1:18:51
  Speaker 2: once you figured out a marriage bargain or negotiation, then
• 1:18:54
  Speaker 2: you go to the church and get that, you know,
• 1:18:56
  Speaker 2: spiritually certified, they're sanctified, whatever word you want to use,
• 1:19:00
  Speaker 2: and that that became a way of doing things, you know,
• 1:19:03
  Speaker 2: But then it became like trad cons nowadays sell it
• 1:19:07
  Speaker 2: as like the spiritual aspect is the most important aspect,
• 1:19:10
  Speaker 2: But I really believe both aspects.
• 1:19:12
  Speaker 3: Of that are are important. I acknowledge it.
• 1:19:15
  Speaker 2: I respect that there is a spiritual aspect, and I
• 1:19:18
  Speaker 2: think that's an important thing, and I think it's great
• 1:19:20
  Speaker 2: that people see it that way. But I think it's
• 1:19:24
  Speaker 2: a mistake to neglect the very real material realities that
• 1:19:27
  Speaker 2: go along with something like marriage and creating a family.
• 1:19:30
  Speaker 2: And we live in a society that values private property.
• 1:19:33
  Speaker 3: I think we do, I hope we do.
• 1:19:35
  Speaker 2: We live in a society with the class stratification, Yeah,
• 1:19:39
  Speaker 2: and things like inheritance that I think ideally families do
• 1:19:43
  Speaker 2: want to leave stuff to their kids, but it's you know,
• 1:19:46
  Speaker 2: there's so many things that change. There's the gold Sorry
• 1:19:49
  Speaker 2: I was thinking that. I was looking at this on this.
• 1:19:50
  Speaker 2: There's the there's the technology aspect of it. This, this
• 1:19:53
  Speaker 2: is what gets me into this conversation of gold pill is.
• 1:19:57
  Speaker 2: The X factor for me is always technology and how
• 1:20:00
  Speaker 2: far we've come, And it's just like, can't we go back?
• 1:20:02
  Speaker 2: I don't know if we can go back. I don't
• 1:20:04
  Speaker 2: know if our psyche is fundamentally changed or if we
• 1:20:07
  Speaker 2: can only try to learn from this old system and
• 1:20:09
  Speaker 2: try to see how do we apply it going forward
• 1:20:11
  Speaker 2: on an individual or even collective level of how do
• 1:20:14
  Speaker 2: we negotiate marriages going forward? When does it make sense?
• 1:20:17
  Speaker 2: You know what I mean to pull the trigger on it,
• 1:20:19
  Speaker 2: so to speak.
• 1:20:20
  Speaker 1: Yeah, well, this has been a really great conversation. We're
• 1:20:23
  Speaker 1: running out of time, but.
• 1:20:25
  Speaker 2: Yeah, for me, but if there's questions in the chat,
• 1:20:28
  Speaker 2: like I can stay for longer, just try to address
• 1:20:30
  Speaker 2: them if if you need to do that, So.
• 1:20:32
  Speaker 1: All right, let me see, just looking to see if
• 1:20:35
  Speaker 1: anybody has a question that I like we should call
• 1:20:37
  Speaker 1: them holycons because their ideas of traditionalism come from fifty
• 1:20:41
  Speaker 1: and advertising.
• 1:20:42
  Speaker 3: I like that one.
• 1:20:43
  Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, that's that's basically what it is. It's it's
• 1:20:45
  Speaker 4: not it's not really reality.
• 1:20:48
  Speaker 3: Yeah, let's remove.
• 1:20:51
  Speaker 4: So like the engagement ring where what is that? I
• 1:20:57
  Speaker 4: saw you your video on it.
• 1:21:00
  Speaker 1: I watched some of your videos just see like, yeah,
• 1:21:02
  Speaker 1: get in the sense of like what it is you
• 1:21:03
  Speaker 1: like to talk about.
• 1:21:04
  Speaker 4: And it was all around that engagement.
• 1:21:07
  Speaker 1: Ring photo that uh yeah, that one track con Chick
• 1:21:10
  Speaker 1: shared and all of the essentially intersexual competition that came
• 1:21:15
  Speaker 1: out of that with all these women attacking each other
• 1:21:17
  Speaker 1: and you.
• 1:21:18
  Speaker 4: Know over it. I don't think that's tread Yeah, I
• 1:21:23
  Speaker 4: don't think it is.
• 1:21:23
  Speaker 3: But I thought it was a sorry go on, Yeah.
• 1:21:26
  Speaker 1: No, I was just gonna say, like the what's the
• 1:21:29
  Speaker 1: Is there a relationship between this idea of the engagement
• 1:21:32
  Speaker 1: ring that which seems to be a product of like
• 1:21:34
  Speaker 1: the romantic love worship stuff, But is there some relationship
• 1:21:39
  Speaker 1: to that and the dowry?
• 1:21:40
  Speaker 2: Like historically yeah, the dowry specifically not really. There is
• 1:21:46
  Speaker 2: something called the Morning Gift and this was kind of
• 1:21:48
  Speaker 2: in that transition period of of you know, like these
• 1:21:51
  Speaker 2: these sort of German lands as as they're becoming, as
• 1:21:54
  Speaker 2: they're changing, as the church started after the Romans movement,
• 1:21:56
  Speaker 2: but then as the church starts to move in there
• 1:21:59
  Speaker 2: and the changing the way marriage is done basically, and
• 1:22:02
  Speaker 2: the dowry system is starting to take over. They did
• 1:22:04
  Speaker 2: have something called the Morning Gift, and a lot of
• 1:22:06
  Speaker 2: that was that was kind of given, you know, the
• 1:22:08
  Speaker 2: day after I guess you could say, you know, consummation
• 1:22:12
  Speaker 2: or whatever. I do know that there was like rings
• 1:22:15
  Speaker 2: do go back quite a ways, but it's not like.
• 1:22:18
  Speaker 3: A dowry proper in the sense, you know, it's it's
• 1:22:21
  Speaker 3: something symbolic.
• 1:22:23
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it was more symbolic you can say. And then
• 1:22:25
  Speaker 2: it really gets taken over with you know, the diamond
• 1:22:28
  Speaker 2: industry and that it should be three months of a
• 1:22:30
  Speaker 2: man's salary or something like that. Then then it really
• 1:22:33
  Speaker 2: goes that way. So I know, I know there is
• 1:22:35
  Speaker 2: a little bit more history that just isn't you know,
• 1:22:37
  Speaker 2: the diamond industry back there, But it's not like a
• 1:22:40
  Speaker 2: true marriage transaction or something like that. It's not a
• 1:22:43
  Speaker 2: bride price because it doesn't go to her family. It
• 1:22:46
  Speaker 2: goes on her finger, and it's not a dowry in
• 1:22:49
  Speaker 2: a sense because well it's not coming from her family
• 1:22:52
  Speaker 2: first of all, to be her, so it's it's it
• 1:22:54
  Speaker 2: really is different from what those transactions represent.
• 1:22:57
  Speaker 3: To begin with.
• 1:22:58
  Speaker 2: You know, yeah, yeah, but you know there is a
• 1:23:01
  Speaker 2: history around it. I don't have it off the top
• 1:23:03
  Speaker 2: of my head. I have read a little bit about it.
• 1:23:05
  Speaker 2: Some people will say it still represents a kind of
• 1:23:08
  Speaker 2: nod to the bride price or the mohar, which was
• 1:23:11
  Speaker 2: the man giving you know, the amount over. But since
• 1:23:13
  Speaker 2: it doesn't go to her family and it's not enough
• 1:23:16
  Speaker 2: for that family to procure another daughter, you know, for them,
• 1:23:19
  Speaker 2: I don't see it as the bride price. It's more
• 1:23:21
  Speaker 2: just a kind of symbolic exchange, you know, between them.
• 1:23:24
  Speaker 4: Yeah, I think it's lost.
• 1:23:26
  Speaker 2: It's the funny part about the Twitter storm was, you know,
• 1:23:30
  Speaker 2: there's this aspect of I guess showing off. I don't
• 1:23:32
  Speaker 2: even know if it's fair to say that, but it's
• 1:23:34
  Speaker 2: like this idea of well, it's a status signal or
• 1:23:36
  Speaker 2: it's my change in status. But typically, you know, that's
• 1:23:39
  Speaker 2: what the wedding is for, and there is this idea
• 1:23:42
  Speaker 2: of status signaling. I mean, sometimes you'd present the dowry
• 1:23:45
  Speaker 2: so everybody can see and then that would firmly say okay,
• 1:23:48
  Speaker 2: this family, it's not just about the wedding and the
• 1:23:51
  Speaker 2: status change, but it's status signaling the entire family to say, hey,
• 1:23:54
  Speaker 2: this family is here on the sort of status hierarchy.
• 1:23:56
  Speaker 2: Somebody who wants to marry into that family you can
• 1:23:59
  Speaker 2: expect to pay a dowry commensurate on what you're seeing in.
• 1:24:03
  Speaker 3: Front of you.
• 1:24:04
  Speaker 2: You know, so I can see how like a an
• 1:24:06
  Speaker 2: engagement ring sort of becomes this kind of quasi status
• 1:24:10
  Speaker 2: signal that people kind of like to show off.
• 1:24:11
  Speaker 3: How yeah, the bigger the ring Ronaldo just got.
• 1:24:15
  Speaker 2: Married or he just got engaged, and you know, her
• 1:24:17
  Speaker 2: diamond was like gigantic.
• 1:24:19
  Speaker 4: Well that's why she said what did she say? I won?
• 1:24:21
  Speaker 1: And that was like it And there was a picture
• 1:24:23
  Speaker 1: of her hand with the ring, and we don't know
• 1:24:25
  Speaker 1: who what what that means?
• 1:24:27
  Speaker 4: Who she married?
• 1:24:28
  Speaker 1: The man's exactly right, Yeah it was.
• 1:24:33
  Speaker 4: That's all it is.
• 1:24:35
  Speaker 1: But okay, so one more thing I wanted to say,
• 1:24:37
  Speaker 1: because I just thought about this. One of the things
• 1:24:40
  Speaker 1: that I think we lost as a result of all
• 1:24:43
  Speaker 1: that we've been talking about. When you are bringing a
• 1:24:46
  Speaker 1: family together through marriage, through this dowry system. There's there
• 1:24:51
  Speaker 1: has to be like obviously get an established relationship between
• 1:24:54
  Speaker 1: the two clans, I guess, or there usually is, and
• 1:24:58
  Speaker 1: there has to be because you said that there are
• 1:25:00
  Speaker 1: people who you know, use fraud or they exploit this
• 1:25:02
  Speaker 1: in some way, so what you want is to have
• 1:25:05
  Speaker 1: like trust between them. So I think that one of
• 1:25:08
  Speaker 1: the things that gets lost by that is first of all,
• 1:25:11
  Speaker 1: the value that we put or the amount of value
• 1:25:15
  Speaker 1: put in trust itself as like an idea, and also honor,
• 1:25:19
  Speaker 1: because I think that honor is a thing that we
• 1:25:23
  Speaker 1: people express or use, like believe in, but it's not
• 1:25:26
  Speaker 1: something that we value very highly these days. I mean
• 1:25:29
  Speaker 1: I don't think so, you know, and I think that
• 1:25:31
  Speaker 1: that's something that men in particular, like, I think they
• 1:25:34
  Speaker 1: care about that a lot.
• 1:25:36
  Speaker 3: You know, yeah, I you know, it's they absolutely do.
• 1:25:40
  Speaker 1: And there is like the reputation matters, right, your reputation,
• 1:25:44
  Speaker 1: your word, things like.
• 1:25:45
  Speaker 3: That, your values and all that.
• 1:25:48
  Speaker 2: I mean, there's it's one thing to proclaim that you
• 1:25:51
  Speaker 2: have a certain value system and that you live by it.
• 1:25:54
  Speaker 2: But the dowry is the tangible proof that you guys
• 1:25:56
  Speaker 2: have been doing this family project and actually been living
• 1:25:59
  Speaker 2: by those values. So it's not just about the exchange
• 1:26:02
  Speaker 2: of money, but it's saying here, we're serious about this,
• 1:26:05
  Speaker 2: We're serious about how we represent ourselves and what we do,
• 1:26:08
  Speaker 2: and these are the you know, expectations that come with that.
• 1:26:11
  Speaker 2: I think honor is something that men, or at least
• 1:26:13
  Speaker 2: the space discusses that I think trad cons maybe even
• 1:26:17
  Speaker 2: want to discuss as a phenomena. Is that's something we
• 1:26:20
  Speaker 2: should care about because they're saying, hey, we want you
• 1:26:22
  Speaker 2: to live by a value system, and it's dishonorable not to,
• 1:26:26
  Speaker 2: you know, if you proclaim to have these these but
• 1:26:28
  Speaker 2: it's important, you know, beyond that, but to actually have
• 1:26:31
  Speaker 2: these tangible things behind it that sort of declare this
• 1:26:34
  Speaker 2: is how it is.
• 1:26:35
  Speaker 4: You know.
• 1:26:35
  Speaker 2: When it comes to dowries too, there is a lot
• 1:26:38
  Speaker 2: of honor there in a way, because you might have
• 1:26:41
  Speaker 2: whole families contributing to somebody in the family is getting married.
• 1:26:44
  Speaker 2: They may not be your direct they might be your
• 1:26:46
  Speaker 2: extended relative, maybe a cousin or something, or a niece basically,
• 1:26:51
  Speaker 2: and you might send money over that way to put
• 1:26:54
  Speaker 2: in on her marriage, so that the whole family has
• 1:26:57
  Speaker 2: come together and contributed something and they put it in
• 1:27:01
  Speaker 2: on this marriage. So these other people that you're getting
• 1:27:03
  Speaker 2: married to, they're gonna understand that, Hey, this entire family
• 1:27:07
  Speaker 2: has put in on this, you know what I mean.
• 1:27:09
  Speaker 4: And yeah, it's like Italy.
• 1:27:12
  Speaker 1: Yeah, we were talking about Italy, and I'm thinking about Italians,
• 1:27:17
  Speaker 1: the ones I know. You know, they're like things like
• 1:27:20
  Speaker 1: honor and family obviously, and I'm not making a mafia joke,
• 1:27:23
  Speaker 1: but like honor and family is a big.
• 1:27:25
  Speaker 4: Deal, and I think that that's probably why they held
• 1:27:28
  Speaker 4: onto it for so long. So I agree with you.
• 1:27:31
  Speaker 1: I mean, I think it's inherently masculine too, just in
• 1:27:33
  Speaker 1: my opinion. But anyway, I don't know, do you have
• 1:27:35
  Speaker 1: any final thoughts. We got to wrap it up, unfortunately,
• 1:27:38
  Speaker 1: but this has been a really good conversation. I hope
• 1:27:39
  Speaker 1: you'll come back.
• 1:27:40
  Speaker 2: On some time absolutely though. Thanks for having me. I'm
• 1:27:42
  Speaker 2: sorry about that scheduling snafu earlier, and uh I no,
• 1:27:47
  Speaker 2: I I just what I'd like to see is just
• 1:27:49
  Speaker 2: more more folks talking about it and just you know,
• 1:27:52
  Speaker 2: understanding what it was.
• 1:27:54
  Speaker 4: You know.
• 1:27:55
  Speaker 2: Me personally, I don't know if we can go back
• 1:27:57
  Speaker 2: in time and completely revive the system as it once was.
• 1:28:00
  Speaker 3: I don't believe that.
• 1:28:01
  Speaker 2: I do think romantic love has changed the Western psyche
• 1:28:04
  Speaker 2: over hundreds of years to some degree. And I don't
• 1:28:07
  Speaker 2: think that we shouldn't have love and marriages. I just
• 1:28:09
  Speaker 2: think to some extent we have to understand the priority
• 1:28:12
  Speaker 2: of all these things when we're making these decisions. Should
• 1:28:15
  Speaker 2: romantic love be front and center. Probably not. Could it
• 1:28:18
  Speaker 2: be some small part maybe, But we have to have
• 1:28:20
  Speaker 2: these practical considerations. And it doesn't mean that you're less
• 1:28:24
  Speaker 2: of a man, or you're not masculine. Masculinity back then
• 1:28:28
  Speaker 2: it wasn't viewed that way. Men did expect dowries, and
• 1:28:31
  Speaker 2: if you didn't, even the bride's father would think there
• 1:28:34
  Speaker 2: was something wrong with you if you said, I've seen
• 1:28:36
  Speaker 2: that written in here in several places, you know. So
• 1:28:39
  Speaker 2: it's important to not be captured by this idea of
• 1:28:42
  Speaker 2: masculinity that kind of big media is selling you. It's sometimes,
• 1:28:47
  Speaker 2: you know, not sometimes, but all the time. It's better
• 1:28:50
  Speaker 2: to negotiate things upfront and see what you're getting into.
• 1:28:52
  Speaker 2: Because I don't want people to be afraid of marriage.
• 1:28:56
  Speaker 2: I don't want to say you should never be married.
• 1:28:59
  Speaker 2: This whole cop versation that we're having and that we've
• 1:29:02
  Speaker 2: been looking into When I look at red pill stuff,
• 1:29:06
  Speaker 2: I kind of have this thing where I say, red
• 1:29:07
  Speaker 2: pill helps guys max my short term relations with women. So, yeah,
• 1:29:11
  Speaker 2: you're having trouble dating women or whatever, and you understand
• 1:29:14
  Speaker 2: these techniques to get them attracted to you. But a
• 1:29:17
  Speaker 2: lot of these the red pill people come into a
• 1:29:19
  Speaker 2: problem when it comes to what do we do about
• 1:29:21
  Speaker 2: marriage and this family creation thing now? And that's where
• 1:29:24
  Speaker 2: they've struggled for a long time. And I believe that
• 1:29:27
  Speaker 2: the answer to that lies in all of this history
• 1:29:29
  Speaker 2: right here, because negotiating a short term relation versus a
• 1:29:35
  Speaker 2: long term sustained family are two different things that require
• 1:29:38
  Speaker 2: two different, you know, modes of thought.
• 1:29:41
  Speaker 1: One hundred percent, I think the red pill guys are
• 1:29:43
  Speaker 1: are looking for the short term solutions, and that's why
• 1:29:47
  Speaker 1: they're they're you know, like the whatever podcast. Those guys
• 1:29:51
  Speaker 1: they're unequipped to handle the real like problems of marriage
• 1:29:57
  Speaker 1: and family and children and parenthood because it's going to
• 1:30:01
  Speaker 1: require a lot.
• 1:30:01
  Speaker 4: Of hard work.
• 1:30:02
  Speaker 1: And that's why we do what we do, you know,
• 1:30:05
  Speaker 1: And we're not the only ones, but but I think that, yeah,
• 1:30:08
  Speaker 1: I mean, like, you know, no matter what you think
• 1:30:09
  Speaker 1: about the modern world, a lot of men want to
• 1:30:12
  Speaker 1: get married and they want to have kids, and so
• 1:30:14
  Speaker 1: we should try to make that, you know, like possible
• 1:30:18
  Speaker 1: for them.
• 1:30:18
  Speaker 3: Exactly. Yeah, that's exactly what it is.
• 1:30:21
  Speaker 2: So I've I've really been enjoying, you know, learning about
• 1:30:24
  Speaker 2: this and having discussions about it. And again, thanks for
• 1:30:27
  Speaker 2: having me on, and you know, maybe we could do
• 1:30:29
  Speaker 2: it again sometime.
• 1:30:30
  Speaker 1: Yeah, definitely, Well we'll do it again sometime. Maybe Allison
• 1:30:33
  Speaker 1: will join us or something. Okay, So thanks guys for
• 1:30:37
  Speaker 1: coming on the show, and thank you so much Shah
• 1:30:39
  Speaker 1: for joining me and sharing your insights. If you guys
• 1:30:42
  Speaker 1: want to check him out, I got all of your links,
• 1:30:45
  Speaker 1: your YouTube channel, your x your email address. Do you
• 1:30:48
  Speaker 1: have like a substack or something or am I thinking
• 1:30:50
  Speaker 1: of somebody else?
• 1:30:51
  Speaker 3: No? I don't know, no, suse Okay, Okay, it.
• 1:30:54
  Speaker 1: Was a guy I had on me that it had
• 1:30:56
  Speaker 1: a substack that was pretty good too, where he was
• 1:30:58
  Speaker 1: looking at the spending of like you and women and
• 1:31:01
  Speaker 1: stuff like that.
• 1:31:02
  Speaker 3: But oh's fascinating.
• 1:31:04
  Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, very good stuff. Okay. So anyway, thanks guys
• 1:31:08
  Speaker 4: for coming on the show.
• 1:31:09
  Speaker 1: If you guys like this video, please hit like subscribe
• 1:31:11
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• 1:31:14
  Speaker 1: me a comment, let me know what you guys think
• 1:31:15
  Speaker 1: about what we discussed on the show today, and please
• 1:31:17
  Speaker 1: please please share this video because sharing is caring. Thank
• 1:31:20
  Speaker 1: you guys so much for coming on today's episode of
• 1:31:22
  Speaker 1: The Fireside Chat, and we'll talk to you all in
• 1:31:24
  Speaker 1: the next one ends right.
• 1:31:26
  Speaker 5: Activists are machines, dude, Okay, they are literal machines.
• 1:31:31
  Speaker 3: They are talking point machines.
• 1:31:33
  Speaker 5: They are impossible to fucking deal with, especially if you have, like,
• 1:31:36
  Speaker 5: especially if you have like a couple dudes who have
• 1:31:39
  Speaker 5: good memory. On top of that, too, Holy shit, you're
• 1:31:42
  Speaker 5: fucked