 I got a question in the Super Chat the other day about hypergamy and, you know, hypergamy is not exactly something, an idea, concept, field that I am interested in or that I have any expertise in or that I've done any particular research in. So I said, I don't know what that is. And then the questioner provided a definition and I commented on the particular definition that they provided, which might or might not be a good definition. The more I look into this, yeah, I mean, it was probably a pretty bad definition that the guy gave for what it is. So now, while I think that everything I said during the show was right, there's more to be said on this topic. And I think there's something more broadly to be said about the dangers of evolutionary psychology and about the dangers of social science, social science research more broadly that I think that this kind of issue, the issue of hypergamy brings out. So hypergamy is the idea that women in particular have a preference for marrying up and marrying up means based on social status, based on income, based on cash, based on education, but based on features like that for women. But there are those who argue that men have also this hypergamy can be applied to men. And in the case of men, hypergamy applies to men who attracted, hypergamy applies to men in that men are trying to marry up, but they're trying to marry up in looks, in attractiveness, in physical appearances. So it makes men particularly seem shallow. Women at least, you know, you have to have some competency in order to, in order to, I guess, be productive, but which is what at the end of the day, it seems like what they mean by women marrying up. Men marrying up means just physical looks, which is completely an accident of nature. So there, you can find dozens of websites online that deal with these kind of stories, that deal with these ideas, and they tell, they give women strategies and how to appeal to men of a higher status, and they give men strategies and how to get more attractive women or how to play the game of all of this. And I find the whole thing ludicrous and absurd and, and you know, fairly disgusting I think, because what it fundamentally rejects and what I think unfortunately much of evolutionary psychology fundamentally rejects is what makes us human. What it fundamentally assumes is that we're just guided, we're just automatons driven by some kind of genes, playing out some kind of genetic game, playing out some kind of gene mating strategies that have nothing to do with reason, that have nothing to do with choice, that have nothing to do with preferences, with ideas, with values, nothing to do with values, you'd never have any discussion of values in any of these websites in any of these discussions. And when you look at the social sciences that study this and they see X number of women marry up and men marry down, and they define up and down in various ways, first I often find that the math doesn't work. If everybody marries up, how does that work? Because let's assume, just for the sake of it, that 50% men and 50% women, if all the women marry up, that's like all the children in Lake Wobbigan, Wobbigan, no it's something like that, anyway it's something like Wobbigan, all the children would be like Wobbigan, being above average. Not everybody can be up, unless women start much lower than men, so for every woman there's a man who constitutes up for, I mean the whole thing. So the math often doesn't add up, because it turns out most people get married at least once in life. By the time you reach 75, 85, about 96% of all people who reach that age are being married at least once, but they couldn't have married up. Not all the men could have attracted married so-called attractive women, and not all the women could have married so-called up men at a higher status, it just doesn't work mathematically. And then how they define up and how they define attractive and different cultures define attractive and up differently. And then the studies, so this is the problem I see with, so first I think everything is value devout, but deeper than that all of these studies are reason devout, there's no reason, there's no choice, there's no thinking about who you want to spend time with, thinking about who you want to have sex with, not sex as an animalistic, just material, physical thing, but sex as a full spiritual intimate act. None of that is in consideration, your spiritual benefits of mating, they even call it mating preferences, as if we're animals. I mean animals in the sense that we are animals, but animals in the sense of not having the capacity of free will, not having reason, not being rational beings. And this again is the problem with most evolutionary psychology and a lot of social sciences. They study people as they are. They ask people questions about how they behave. And you know a lot of people in the world in which we live, because of altruism, because of our educational system, because the human species has only been enlightened for a few hundred years, still behave like pretty primitive animals, pretty primitive human beings. And therefore they conclude, because a majority of people behave in a particular way, they conclude that we are genetically programmed to behave in that particular way, and that's how human beings behave. Of course they can't then explain to outliers people who don't behave in that way. In other words, most of social sciences measure how people are rather than how they should be, whether they how they could be. Now I'm not talking about some Marxist idea of perfecting the human being, but to be a human being, to be a full human being, to live as a human being, to maximize one's potential as a human being, requires effort, it requires engagement. It actually requires applying reason on a regular, steady basis to your life. It requires engaging your mind in making choices, in evaluating options, in accumulating data, in evaluating facts, in discarding non-facts, in putting your emotions in your right place. You have to live up to Aristotle's term of a rational man. Now other animals are not like this. Other animals cannot live up or down, they just are what they are. They have no choice in the matter. You cannot become a better cat. A cat is a cat. Cat A is not the same as cat B, but it is cat A and it's, it can't choose to be better. It can't activate a part of itself through free will to become a better image of a cat. But human beings can. Aristotle's science is not only, not only, need to study how human beings behave. But more importantly, we need to understand how people should and could behave. What the potential is for human beings. Indeed, that is what morality, as one feels, should be studying. Like Adam Smith, for example, when he does morality, if you read the theory of moral sentiments, he takes the way people behave normally, generally, normally, as a standard of morality. So he lives in a Christian era, or people's perception of morality is what morality is. And then he examines how they behave, and he looks for people who are more consistent versus people who are less consistent. He says, well, here's what the more consistent people do, and this is what morality is. So he accepts the status quo. He accepts the Christian morality is morality, and then describes it. So the theory of moral sentiment is more a description of how people engage in a Christian morality than a theory of morality or presentation of a moral code. And most social sciences, that's what they do. They describe, rather than telling people, people who give people advice about relationships should be doing. It's not giving you strategies on how to assume the other sex has no free will, and it's just playing mating strategies, because your purpose in life is to have sex, and if you're a man, to leave your seed, and as many women as possible, and if you're a woman, to catch a man so they can take care of your baby. But what people should be talking about is how to create a meaningful relationship that bonds you of shared values, of shared respect and admiration, irrespective of what caste you come from or what class you come from. But what is admirable about that, the person defining for yourself what you're looking for, not in your preconceptual state, and this is the thing, right? Because reason requires effort. Many people don't engage in that effort. Therefore many people are preconceptual. In other words, they're basically moved by percepts, by what they see and observe directly, without abstracting away, without thinking, and by their emotions, which are consequence of conclusions they come to that again are not very conceptual, are not based on thinking, but based on perceptual observation. And I see this in economics. Why is it so hard for people to see the win-win inheritance trade? Because, and I know a lot of you, why is it so hard to explain that socialism doesn't work? Why is it so, it seems so simple, it seems so obvious. But think about trade, win-win nature of trade. Why is it so hard for people to hold that? Well, because perceptually, the world looks like a zero-sum game. I give up my thousand dollars, I get an iPhone, I got a thing, and a thousand dollars are gone, and no value seems to have been created. You have to actually engage a process of thought to conclude, well, no, I have more value than I gave up, and Apple has more value than they gave up. But that requires another step, another step. Most people don't engage in that step. Most people stay at the perceptual level and assume that everybody else stays at the perceptual level. So what happens is the evolutionary psychologists come in and say, we're programmed to view the world zero-sum. In a sense we are, in a sense that, unless we engage our conceptual faculty, the world appears zero-sum. But as human beings, what makes us human is engaging that faculty. So instead of telling us, well, we're genetically made up this way, no, we're genetically made up to use our reason if we choose to do it. But you can't have choice in the social sciences. Free will screws all their data up. Free will screws up all their so-called science. So they don't have free will. They don't introduce free will. They don't recognize free will. It's too messy. And I see this in every field where I read up a little bit about either evolutionary psychology or about these studies that human beings behave this way or that way and women have these kind of preferences. Or men have these kind of preferences. Which men, which women are they rational men? Rational women, those are the only people I really care about. Why do averages matter? Why do majorities matter? It's not indicative of anything other than it's indicative of a unthinking mentality. And so many people are unthinking. So I think you have to be very, very careful in reading social sciences data, social sciences experiments, social sciences. Because the fact is that what is true of unthinking majorities, unthinking masses, is not true of you. So I really encourage you to think in terms of what is rational, rather than thinking in terms of mating strategies. Which is just, the elevation is irrationally. I mean, really, I mean, it's again the same kind of attitude that Ben Shapiro has when he said that selfishness means if there's an attractive woman at the bar, you abandon your wife, you abandon your kids and you run off to have sex with her. Yes, if you view human beings as unthinking, as not having values, as not being able to conceive of a long term, as not being able to conceive of spiritual values, as not being able to conceive of anything beyond some urge to mate. But we're not just animals with an urge to mate. We're far more complex beings with the capacity to choose the reason to think, to evaluate, to project into the future, to understand that sex and marriage and relationships have far greater implications than just the physical act itself. And that the physical act itself loses much of its meaning and its pleasure when it's devoid of the other aspects related to sex. It's just the woman at the bar stops being attractive. Jacob says, if I model a population's behavior, the model should describe the population behavior as it is now, not how I think they should be. Yes, that's true, but to extrapolate from that to human nature is wrong because human nature is not about how they are. Human nature, as I understand it, is how they couldn't and should be. All right. So yes, I'm not saying if the social science is just saying, this is how the population behaves, that's fine. But if then it extrapolates in that behavior to human nature, that's where the danger is. What we need today, what I call the new intellectual, would be any man or woman who is willing to think, meaning any man or woman who knows that man's life must be guided by reason, by the intellect, not by feelings, wishes, whims or mystic revelations. Any man or woman who values his life and who does not want to give in to today's cult of despair, cynicism and impotence and does not intend to give up the world to the dark ages and to the role of the collectivist broad. Using the super chat, and I noticed yesterday when I appealed for support for the show, many of you stepped forward and actually supported the show for the first time. So I'll do it again. Maybe we'll get some more today. If you like what you're hearing, if you appreciate what I'm doing, then I appreciate your support. For those of you who don't yet support the show, please take this opportunity, go to uranbrooksshow.com slash support or go to subscribestar.com uranbrookshow and make a kind of a monthly contribution to keep this going. I'm not showing the next...