➡ Economist George Gilder, an advisor to Presidents Nixon and Reagan, discusses his book “Men and Marriage”. He argues that the decline in nuclear families and the rise of the welfare state have led to societal problems such as increased violence, a surplus of men without familial responsibility, and a rise in various ‘perversities’. He posits the family as central to society, asserting the welfare state can’t replace the role of fathers. The book’s republication comes with new material and addresses modern “woke lunacy.” Gilder believes this social disintegration began in the 1960s and has been exacerbated by a bureaucratic welfare state that disrupts personal responsibility and charity.
➡ The text discusses the negative effect the expansion of welfare had on families, mainly the black family, due to pushing men out of their homes. It also points out the regenerative role men play, especially their contribution to science and technology. The religious perspective towards family and procreation is highlighted as a strength against a culturally liberal view that often discourages reproduction. The discussion leads to the overview of the book “Men in Marriage”, linking the upliftment of civilization to men’s transformation from their natural dominate nature to productive contributors through the institutions of marriage and family.

Hey, gang, it’s me, Dr. Steve. And today I am joined by a legend, particularly for conservative politics, one of my intellectual heroes, the one and only George Gilder. George is a former speechwriter for Richard Nixon. He’s a renowned economist, early advisor to President Ronald Reagan. He’s written a number of very influential books, very important books. My favorite, relatively recent one is Life After Google that you definitely want to check out if you want to understand the coming blockchain economy.

But the one we’re going to be talking about today earned George the title, the esteemed title of Male Chauvinist Pig of the Year from the Clowns over at Time magazine. But also the National Organization of Women. Also, of course, we can’t forget them again. Just two very esteemed organizations, right? This is Men and Marriage by George Gilder, first released in 1986, as I understand it. But it’s now getting a new reprint and with some new material to provide guidance amidst today’s woke lunacy.

So, George, welcome. It is an absolute honor to have you on the channel. It’s great to be here. Thank you for having me. It’s our honor. So this book, Men and Marriage first published almost 40 years ago. What’s the backstory? It actually was first published 50 years ago because it began under the title Sexual Suicide. And then when I published wealth and Poverty and it became a worldwide bestseller.

My publisher had signed up for my next book, and when I did Men in Marriage, an adaptation of Sexual Suicide, they refused to accept it as my next book. And it got turned down by twelve publishers in New York. All the major publishing houses they’d call back. It’s wonderful. And I know you’ll get it published somewhere, but we have a special problem in our editorial staff and we can’t publish Sexual Suicide.

So it ended up being published by Books of Louisiana. I got a Melbourne Calhoun down there. Wow. Published it. And it’s been in print with Pelican now for 40 years. Close to 40 years. And now Canon Press, a wonderful publishing house in Moscow, Idaho, is publishing it, republishing it with a new introduction, two new introductions, a lot of new material. And you can get a whole kit. Mine came with a whole kit, a movie, all kinds.

It’s really a good movie. Gildormovie. com is really a good item. I love it. It surprised me. They made my whole life make sense in this beautiful film that they did around my home in about two weeks. Oh, wow. But pouring through all my old papers and stuff. They did a great job at Canon, Jake. They always do. They’re an amazing publishing house. What’s the basic thesis of the book? What’s your claim? Well, it’s just that the differences between the sexes are central to all civilized life.

They can’t be eclipsed or suppressed without destroying civilization itself. And we’re creating a kind of sexual suicide society where men are really excluded from the fabric of familial life in large domains of our society. And the welfare state has spent trillions of dollars in enabling impoverished women to raise children without fathers, and the fathers are relegated to the streets. And we see the problems that arise in the inner cities and in poor regions of appalachia all over when fathers are not connected to children.

And the future of the race through the wombs of women. And the father role is central to civilization and can’t be replaced by the welfare state. Men are being cuckolded by the welfare state. Right. It’s so fascinating because you really do draw this straight line between marriage, family and civilization. While men are primed to build civilization, you’re arguing that’s not the only thing we’re primed for. We could be primed to burn civilization down as well.

And it’s marriage in the family that holds that balance, that holds those different outworkings that links particular men to children and thus to the future of the race. Otherwise, men live in a transitory present without any real biological links to the future. And the man’s link to the future passes through the wombs of women. That’s sort of a theme. And when men are oriented toward the future through love and family, they become heroes and they build gigantic cities and civilizations and they make America great.

But when you have a regime essentially what the alternative is is well known in anthropology and Men in Marriage explains anthropology and it shows that polygony, that is, when the powerful men can have a series of young women or a harem lots of young men are necessarily excluded from the fabric of society and they tend to attack the fabric of society. Sometimes they get mobilized as warriors and attack other countries.

We’ve seen that in recent days. Or they get relegated to expanding realms of homosexuality and violence, which we see in the inner city and the rising crime rates across the inner cities of America. And when I wrote Men in Marriage Sexual Suicide, the illegitimacy rate in the inner city was around 25%. And everybody regarded that to be appalling. Yeah. Paul right there. Patrick Moynihan. Right. And now it’s almost 80%.

Yeah, it’s crazy. And among white people across the country, it’s 25%. And kids without fathers grow up disoriented and disordered. And we see it everywhere with the trans movement and the bi movement. All these multiplying perversities are really the result of the collapse of the crucial sexual constitution that I describe in Men of Marriage. I’ve heard it put that family really is the only institution by which we learn that we are obligated to people, places, ideas, identities that we didn’t choose for ourselves, but that chose us.

And because liberalism was largely agnostic and now obviously hostile towards the institution of the family, it inadvertently, or perhaps purposely eroded the very institution that would teach and instill in us our moral obligation, our duty to society, itself. Therefore, rather than when families and marriages collapse, rather than build, inevitably we’re going to start burning. That is a very beautiful statement of the themes of men and marriage. Yeah, it’s brilliant.

How much worse have things gotten socially in this country since the book came out? You mentioned the illegitimacy rates basically doubling in the inner city, but it seems like not doubling. Tripling, tripling, tripling. And this kind of illegitimacy and polygony where powerful men have essential harems even though they don’t acknowledge them, they really do have harems, as much as some Muslim Islam might have a harem. We’re creating a kind of society where the powerful men rule the sexual domain as well as the industrial and economic domain.

What Men in Marriage shows is that the formation of nuclear families with essentially monogamy was central to the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution happened in precisely the parts of Europe where previously had been established. The Christian monogamous, essentially monogamous nuclear family. Where the community didn’t take care of the kids, the kids really were assigned to particular fathers and mothers. And that’s what released the entrepreneurial energies which fueled this fabulous growth unprecedented in the history of the world, where we have where the populations suddenly went from 300 million global population to 8 billion now, and the longevity of each child rose from 30 to 70 and higher.

Huge benefits were unleashed by the emergence of the nuclear family, where fathers, rather than being barbarians on the prowl, became builders of great cities and civilizations and artists and solja NEETs and literature, music, poetry, everything. The whole nine yards again, gang, it the book is Men and Marriage by George Gilder. Absolutely fascinating thesis is the family nuclear family is literally the foundation of civilization. I mentioned before you were involved in conservative politics since the early 60s.

Many would argue that’s really the time, ironically sort of the heart or the vanguard of these civilizational advances. That’s the moment when things began to unravel. Would you say that’s the case? Would you say that it was really the 60s where we began to see the sexual revolutions, the welfare revolutions and so forth all kind of come together? I think that’s right. However, it’s a kind of bifurcation of the society.

We essentially relegated large regions of the society to sort of female headed families and embittered men and estranged from the social order. But we got richer and richer through the contributions of mostly completely nuclear families. I mean, our suburbs are full of families that are essentially fathers taking responsibility for their kids, going to work every day and attempting to create in the image of their creator. And that is really what makes America work.

And the big mistake, I think Christianity tells you that charity is a personal responsibility. Charity is something you do for your family. You do for strangers that come in your path. It’s a personal thing you do. But when you institutionalize it and create a kind of administrative state, a really bureaucratic web that kind of separates you from the whole process. The process doesn’t work anymore. Right. It’s amazing.

We are spending trillions of dollars in the inner city, and the result was that the illegitimacy rate went from 25 to 75. It’s not as if the welfare state run by women social workers almost entirely. It’s kind of feminization of the ghetto. It’s not as if it’s been a mixed success, sort of. It’s done some good. It has done zero good. Zero good. Right. It’s done exactly what I said it would do in Men in Marriage.

When I first wrote it as sexual suicide, I said this expansion of the welfare state through AIDS to Families with Dependent Children, which really meant women supporting women and children, that it would destroy the family, the black family, and drive men out into the streets. And as we see them today, you can’t come off a highway without being panhandled now by some man. The welfare state is completely alien to men.

Men don’t have anything to do with it. They hate it in general. Right. When you first wrote the book, it was more of a warning. Just like you said, there of a potential future if we don’t change course. This is what’s going to happen now, 40 years later, it comes out as fulfilled prophecy, basically. Yeah. Trying to salvage the free thinkers in the midst of the deluge, as it were.

So what would you say to someone who says it’s too late to fix this issue? Are you offering hope in this book? Well, yeah. The hope I offer is it’s a big country and There Are Men in Marriage is published by Canon Press, which is really affiliated with this massive Christian church led by Doug Wilson, pastor Doug Wilson out in Moscow, Idaho. And it has been a formidable force out there.

You go to Moscow, Idaho, and it’s a thriving city. One of the biggest business consultancies in the country is out there, and it tells companies how to avoid destroying their meritocratic systems with ESG rules. Oh, yeah. Red balloon. Redball. Yeah. I think it’s Andrew Prabhu shuts it out there. They’re doing amazing stuff. Amazing stuff out there. And they’re skyscrapers in Moscow, Idaho, and Google and Apple and all these companies are moving there because their engineers insist on it.

But this is happening all across the country. I believe there is a great awakening in store where the you know, the it’s self limiting, these cultures which are based on, you know, think, think, think the world’s overpopulated. This is, you know, that I’ve I wrote the introduction to a book called Superabundance, and I have a new book now which is about superabundance, too, called Life After Capitalism, which explains how as the world population grows, commodities grow more abundant.

Wow. Human beings are not chiefly mouths to feed. They’re minds that create in the image of their creator, and they’re entrepreneurial risk takers that pioneer new technologies and open new possibilities. And the latest one that I write about a lot is graphene. A lot of people never really focused on graphene. It’s a single layer of carbon atoms that’s 100 times stronger than aluminum, 200 times stronger than steel, more thousand times more conductive than copper, the best thermal performance of any material.

It can completely transform the entire economy, and it can be made from garbage. Wow. As Jim Tor, the great Christian figure and also one of the 50 leading scientists in the world by various judgments, is really the leading pioneer of graphene, he says, we don’t recycle. We upcycle. We take any carbon refuge, plastic, garbage, any kind of refuse and we transform it into the world’s most valuable material, which is graphene, a single layer of carbon atoms.

And this is what male, chiefly male creativity. It’s not that women can’t contribute and don’t contribute all around the world to various entrepreneurial ventures, but there’s no question that the leading scientists throughout history have been men. And that’s not a problem. It’s not an inequality. It’s a redemptive role that men have. They’re not as important sexually. Women are central to maternity and families and nurturing the next generation, which is absolutely critical to human survival.

If women abandon that role, there won’t be much role for men or women. Are you familiar with the University of London scholar Eric Kaufman and the religious shall inherit the earth thesis? Well, that sounds like a good thesis. Yeah, it’s a very fascinating study. It came out in 2013. And that’s his basic thesis. When you look at all the data across the world, liberalism basically kills itself. He calls it yeah, he calls it a demographic contradiction because of this notion that it necessitates the freedom not to reproduce.

Whereas classical civilizational religions, virtually all of them, even Buddhism to a certain extent see children as sacred. They see family as sacred and that we have an obligation to procreate. We have an obligation to have families and to have flourishing marriages and the like. And so it’s actually working itself out demographically. So the Amish double every 20 years. Right. And it’s not through conversion either, I can assure you.

That’s a thesis of men in marriage, too. I’d love to read Hoffman, though I have not read Hoffman. What’s the name of his book again for? It’s called shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? By Eric Kaufman. It’s very, very good, and I think it overlaps perfectly with your thesis on both levels, both with the collapse of liberalism but also the flourishing of more distinctive civilizational religions, particularly Christianity.

And exactly what you’re seeing in Moscow, Idaho. They’ll be the majority probably by 2050. I mean, they’ll make University of Idaho look pale by comparison. George, what do you make of the whole trans movement? I don’t know if you saw any precursors to it in the 60s, well, it’s just the manifestation of this sexual suicide. Ultimately, polygony causes chaos, and that is when and we’re creating a kind of polygitous form in the name of feminism, we endow a few powerful men with dominance across the society and allow them to take the marital year or the procreative years of many young women.

And that’s what happens when monogamy breaks down, when scriptural rules are defied and the society turns away from its children, essentially, and tries to enjoy a copulative present right. Pleasure seeking in the present rather than commitment to the civilizational cause of futurity and children and descendants. Right. The basic gist of what I’m getting that you’re arguing here, which I find so fascinating, men are going to dominate. One way or another, they’re going to dominate.

And women, through this institution of marriage, can transfigure that domination into civilizational building pursuits, move it from being predatory to exactly. Yeah. Productive. And yes, yes, I love that. Predatory versus product. They’re going to dominate one way or the of Jordan Peterson’s been arguing this. Right. What kind of man do you want to dominate? Do you want a productive man or a predatory man? I love that. Yeah.

No, absolutely fascinating. You have to get this book, men and Marriage by George Gilder. Absolutely wonderful. Wonderful thesis. And if you click on the link below, you can actually get a special package that I got in the mail where you get movie. You get all kinds of knickknacks with the book as well, and a lovely Gilder called it. George Gilder is known for being quite prescient in being able to foresee things.

I guess that’s why they call economists the queen of sociology, right? Yes. Sage against the machine. I love that as well. So click on the link below. That’s the movie. That’s the movie. Sage against the machine. Got to check it out. And is there a website? We’ll have it down below as well. But there’s a website associated with that. I’m sure there is. Well, Oldermovie. com is one website, and Canon Press has got their website.

It’s all on that package. It’s wonderful. I love it. I got in the mail, I was like, this is too cool. So, guys, click on that link. Grab this. Grab a few. Grab a few for the family and the friends. Hand them out for Christmas. Do a little Christmas shopping early. George Gilder. You’re a legend. And I’ve been looking forward to this interview for so long. I can’t thank you enough for all your work and just the absolutely incredible insights you have into society and civilization.

Thank you so much. Thank you. I really appreciate it. Dr. Steve, glad to meet you. Glad to meet you as well. Thank you so much. .