Unplugging

Sizzle & Steak: Hustling the Hustlers

Hustlers and the Hustled

Today’s Hustle Economy is measured in market shares of ‘influence‘. How many Followers do you have? How many subs (subscribers)? Comments? Likes? Views? What’s your engagement like? In an age when anyone can have a free digital soapbox to prosthelytize from our egos become our brand. So, when you attack an idea you also attack the brand; and when you attack the brand you also attack the ego whose identity is the brand.

Our livelihoods, our wellbeing, are vitally connected to with a Brand of Me which in turn is intimately connected to the self. The separation between man and brand becomes more difficult when his revenue stream(s) is dependent upon man and brand being synonymous. That brand’s value is also quantified and qualified by the platforms (soapbox) it’s based on. Lose followers, lose viewers, lose money and lose self. As a result you get pathological hustlers grifting on other pathological hustlers by selling them access to exposure, influence and and insurance for their very precarious-but-lucrative brand of me. In turn, this “insurance” is a buffer against losing an equally precarious sense of self.

From 2000 to about 2015 organizing live events and conventions was a fairly lucrative proposition in the burgeoning Hustle Economy. Being a speaker at a TED talk held a certain gravitas for the Brand of Me who was invited to relate his very important, self-affirming ideas to a rapt audience. Today, not so much. The TEDx series saw to it that anyone could pay-to-play and thus debased any legitimacy the original TEDs started with. I remember the pay-to-play grift that destroyed the late 80s’ metal scene in Hollywood. Show promoters would buy out a classic venue like Gazzari’s or the Troubadour for a night and then talk “up-and-coming bands” into playing the gigs. All they had to do was sell enough tickets to cover their portion of whatever the promoter had paid to reserve the venue. Whether the bands decided to sell their tickets at a profit or a loss was irrelevant to the promoters – they just had to cover the rent on the club for that night. Most promoters were making their money on marking up that rent, and a percentage of the alcohol sales they’d arrange with club owners. It didn’t matter if the bands were great or they sucked, just that they covered the rent with ticket sales – usually to friends and family to come watch them play on the same stage that Van Halen and Ratt got their start on. The promoters weren’t selling actual talent, they were selling the fantasy of playing on historic stages in L.A. to guys who believed they were good enough to play them. By 1989 pay-to-play was killing what was once a vibrant music scene that naturally culled the talentless bands from the great ones.

Hustle Economy conventions today are following the same pay-to-play graft. It makes little difference what the niché is – masterminds, hotseats, summits, etc. – conventions have become Brand Showcases replete with (gumroad) book signings and the hot girl “Booth Candy” to prove proof-of-concept (i.e. Receipts). Convention promoters care less about the messages of the personalities who speak at their events and more about the gravitas it brings to their event (which is also part of their own Brand of Me). And the loudest most extroverted (pathological) brands of that year always draw attention.

What you get then is a competition of escalation. Punch the biggest guy in the face as soon as you arrive in the prison yard or you’ll end up as his bitch. If you want to make a name for yourself as a niché marketer (especially as a noob in the Manosphere) you have to punch up. Call the biggest name in that sphere a charlatan or a hack and some of his followers might defect to your cult out of spite. Grifters sell other grifters programs and templates to ensure their brand’s value, which increasingly is tied to their own sense of personal worth. Mastermind sessions and “hot seat” workshops become psychotherapy for the Hustle Economy “Guru“.

Insurance of personal brand value will be big business in this decade. It will be sold using the same perception marketing that Instagram influencers use. It will be based on the same insecurities the Hustler sells his products with. Image is all – the Hustler becomes the hustled – but image is fleeting. Even mediocre minds can figure out how to jump on a current trend. Copy & paste a viral tag, aligning with something trending; all that is easy to do, but most niché marketeers lack the talent and insight to understand (much less foresee) a zeitgeist. Good hustlers borrow, great hustlers steal, but the true “ideas guys” are exceptionally rare in the Hustle Economy. Innovators and New Thinkers are the carrion that draws the Brand of Me vultures out in the open.

Ideas Guys

Hustle Economy carpet baggers live a very insecure and unpredictable existence. They are not innovators – they are fast followers. Not only is their sense of self fused to their brand, but their brand’s success is their metric of self-esteem. Their (often tenuous) mental health is measured in Followers, subscribers, views, comments, likes, engagement, analytics and clicks-per-minute (CPM). It’s never quality of ideas that define value; it’s only numbers. Money in the payment processor or number of email addresses on your list. It’s never ultimate causes / effects, it’s only proximate causality. It’s the number of trees over the health of the forest. But the numbers don’t lie, so the new teachers give the Lost Boys cigarettes, candy bars and cheap booze – or their emotionally proximate equivalents (hope). It’s what they really want, it’s what makes you money and it’s what your ego-brand’s long term security needs. Besides, if you don’t give the temporary salve for their miserable lives another Influencer has already copy & pasted your tags to lap you on the Hustle Economy racetrack.

Insecurity in self, brand, livelihood, sustainable ‘lifestyle creep’, even family relations are what define the Hustle Economy today. Most personal brands rarely last more than two years – at least in their initial incarnation. As such, there is a constant need for belief pivots and “brand makeovers” for influencers. Reinventing one’s “self” becomes a vital part of existence for the career grifter. And there’s a lot of money waiting the clever guy who figures out how to cater to this pivoting need. Those unable to adapt, or those who miss the cues of the rapidly changing zeitgeist, will become extinct. Only true innovators – the Ideas Guys – have any kind of real staying power, and that’s if they can roll with the social changes; if they can put off the ennui of seeing their ideas cannibalized and bastardized by the next wave of hustlers who will plagiarize their work with impunity.

Continued in part III next week,…

Sizzle & Steak: Evangelism in the Hustle Economy

What exactly are we teaching the Lost Boys today?

I came across the term Lost Boys in 2016. It’s attributed to the fan base that Dr. Jordan Peterson was generating around that time, but I had heard similar references to “drop out” young men as early as 2014. The fem-stream media was concerned that these 18-29 year old men were deliberately thwarting women’s mating/life strategies by not preparing themselves for adulthood. Women were concerned that fewer young men were going to be suitably ignorant-yet-dutiful husband material by the time they were 30. Meanwhile, TradCon media (predictably) made this crisis of masculinity all about men “shirking their responsibilities” from a want to “perpetuate their adolescence”. As expected, men assuming more masculine responsibility was the cure to solving this social malaise. Both sides of the ideological spectrum have never had a real interest in discerning the root causes for the now two generations of Lost Boys. To do so would challenge both ideology’s base presumptions about innate sex differences, feminism, gynocentrism and female empowerment stretching back to the sexual revolution. Hannah Rosen called it the End of Men in The Atlantic back in 2012. The Kidults and Peter Pan Men were an easily shamed novelty. Breitbart called them the Drop Out Generation and we’re similarly dismissed as “lazy kids not preparing themselves for being fathers and husbands.” Even I threw my hat in the ring when I penned Are You Experienced.

In 2021 we are now two generations into the Lost Boys. Just like the latter half of the Millennials, now Gen Z young men are becoming the next wave of guys trying to find purpose in a life that has no need of them – or they’re endlessly derided for not living up to an old order standard. As Rian Stone has said, they are sheep in search of a shepherd – students with no teacher – young men who are effectively rudderless in life. This is where the Red Pill, Manosphere, male space or whatever we’re calling it now is stepping in to become the teachers these young men have lacked. But what are we actually teaching the Lost Boys? From what I see today, most “coaches” haven’t done much more than profit by them. Today, they are more lost now than when Dr. Peterson identified them. What will be the long-term human, societal, cost of two generations of young men guided, taught and/or hustled into, or out of, embracing conventional masculinity?

The Blind Lead the Blinder

“Who’s the more foolish, the Blue Pill chump or the chumps who follow him?”

If you’ve read my latest book The Rational Male, Religion you’ll already be familiar with the concept of The Brand of Me. Today, everyone is their own brand. From the frustrated soccer mom, to the 12-year-old girl interacting with “friends” she’s never met, to OnlyFans girls, to niche marketing Gurus, everyone you know is actively engaged in some form of personal brand management. Even your grandmother on FaceBook is her own PR agent. Likewise, masculinity/positivity gurus are their own personal brands. I’m emphasizing ‘are’ here because we live our own brand identity as our personal identity in our day to day lives now.

It’s becoming exceedingly difficult to separate the ‘man‘ from his brand today. In the Hustle Economy, managing brand identity, is managing livelihood, is managing personal identity. Everyone is their brand. In the early 2000’s it was the likes of Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian who were the pioneers of being famous for being famous. Neither had (has) any real exceptional talent that made them celebrities; they simple were famous. There are other examples, but most of that “fame” was generated via careful personal brand management in a time when social media was nothing like it is today. Then, it took a lot more work and money to curate fame for being famous. Now, in the new order, it’s never been easier to create an easily believable perceptions of fame – even if it’s just a low degree of it.

It’s all sizzle and no steak. E-Celebrity is now reality show entertainment that virtually anyone, any demographic, can create for themselves. In my 2014 essay Hysteria I detailed the social experiment of a guy who created his own instant celebrity:

Basically, the guy had a few friends follow him around the mall, one guy filming him and the other two guys (I can’t tell if any of his hired guns were women) acting as his “groupies” or entourage. He goes around identifying himself as “Thomas Elliot” when people, mostly women, ask him his name. Eventually, he begins to pile up admiring and gawking female attention, which only snowballs into more female attention. Apparently, not one of these starstruck chicks thought to question if Thomas Elliot was a real celebrity. That’s the power of preselection and fame; so powerful, it can disengage a woman’s neural logic circuitry.

Remember, the linked videos were produced in 2012. This experiment required a film team, at least 2-3 collaborators to give the guy some legitimacy. You don’t need this today. In fact you don’t even need great post-production or computer skills now. All that’s required to create a similar video is a smart phone and Instagram. Social proof, preselection, status, clout, prestige, indignation and fame have never been easier to manufacture for average people than in the first 20 years of the 21st century.

Never have more people (and mostly women) been so rewarded for so little real work, talent, virtuoso, education or creativity. And rewarded with money, adulation, admiration, “respectability“, love, attention and importance. Today, anyone can become influential – an influencer. Potentially, anyone can get paid better and enjoy more status than the career they may have went to years of college to get. As a result, the value of a formal real education is debased.

But, who cares about college or education anyway, right? Even STEM fields and the hard sciences have been infiltrated by Wokezis. Academia is rife with socialists and Marxism at every level now. Post-modernism has owned the humanities and the arts since at least the 1960s if not the late 1800s. True education has become a grift too. Most universities are just very expensive diploma mills that supply you with the paperwork necessary to allow you to be considered for an entry-level job – usually determined by an underpaid Karen in the HR department; likely with less “education” than what you paid for just to get an audience with her. Now, is it any wonder that education and “preparing oneself for life and responsibilities” is effectively worthless to the Lost Boys generation?

‘Cause I’m a twenty-first century digital boy
I don’t know how to live but I got a lot of toys
My daddy’s a lazy middle-class intellectual
My mommy’s on Valium, so ineffectual
Ain’t life a mystery, yeah?

Bad Religion, 21st Century Digital Boy, 1990

Damn, that song was prophetic. If an education’s purpose is to allow the graduate access to the job (in the working world) he believes will profit him best, and he’d have better results in the Hustle Economy, why bother with the investment of time and student debt? If a young woman can make a fortune from the minimum investment needed to be an OnlyFans influencer (sex worker) why bother to study nursing? If a guy can make more money and be more attractive as a “life coach” for far less investment than a degree in a suspicious major like psychology what’s the incentive to be educated?

The motive is profit and the process is profit. In the New Order we’ve become hyper-efficient at commodifying both motive and process. This has led to a mistrust, if not disdain, of education, science (as a method), wisdom and genuine creative inspiration.

“If it doesn’t lead to my first million dollars what’s the point of doing it?”
“Fuck it, I’ll just be a stripper OnlyFans girl or entrepreneur.”

As a result the Hustle Economy tends to attract pathological personalities. As most of my readers know, crazy tends to draw more crazy into its orbit. Pathological doesn’t always mean criminally insane. Guys like Steve Jobs or Elon Musk had/have pathological reality distortion fields about them. And while they are what we’d excuse as eccentric, maybe asocial, they weren’t destructive malcontents. Unfortunately, they’re the rarer exceptions. Get rich quick, get fit quick, get clout quick, get love, adoration, props, respectability, attention, concern, empathy/sympathy, and commiseration instantly, with the least amount of money and personal investment is an irresistible pull to pathological personalities. In any other era, these guys would have to be supremely creative and driven to get up and over the loser status barrier to become more than they started as. And only then after a constant learning from defeat and setbacks. For today’s TL;DR generation, if it can’t be delivered instantaneously why else would you bother doing something?

“Only the insane have the strength to prosper. Only those who prosper truly judge what is sane.”

Part II, next week,…

Truth, Awareness and the Post-Gynocentric World

For the past 12 years I’ve been asked some variation of this question:

“Rollo, why should a man bother with women at all today? All women today, yes all women, are vain, self-important, narcissistic, hubristic and entitled. What average man would ever want to have anything to do with the average woman? By the time a girl reaches her late teens she’s already conditioned to expect a High-Value Man is what she’s due in life. By the time she’s in her early 30s she still hasn’t had the delusions of her entitlements dispelled for her – no matter what the realities of her situation might hold up in her face. What’s the average guy supposed to do about the average woman?”

Although I’ve been writing about intersexual dynamics for 20 years now, there’s definitely been a sea change in those dynamics since the rise of social media. While the last two generations of women have been the test experiments, it’s not just a case of “Bro, women’s egos and assessments of their own SMV are blown out of all proportion because of Instagram.” Men’s expectations (really anticipation) of average women’s overblown egos is also part of the experiment. We’ve come to a point where men don’t expect anything else from women than an aggrandized sense of female self. The average guy has little recourse but to accept this ego-appeasement and adapt to a sexual marketplace defined by women’s hubris; or by choice, or necessity, (usually necessity) they simply opt out of that marketplace – or they convince themselves they do. In fact, much of what passes for dating now is really a form of personal brand management that has to contend with the rigors of a global sexual marketplace. No one really “dates” in this market. Without realizing it they simply look for strategic co-branding opportunities that align with the changing perception of sociosexual value in global society.

  • How will the images of me dating this guy increase my brand engagement?
  • How will the pics and video of him appearing in my feed impact my future opportunities to get with a hotter guy?
  • How many Simps (commodified Beta orbiters) funding my lifestyle will abandon my brand as a result?

While these (and more) may not be conscious concerns for women “dating” today, the sociosexual context of this brand management is pervasive. It is the acknowledged environment in which men and women have play the game.

In a Gynocentric global social order the sexual marketplace is by women, for women’s short term and long term mating strategies. Men are simply the replaceable accessories needed to optimize those strategies,…or to be used as convenient foils when the consequences of those strategies become unignorable. So, it’s hardly surprising then that we’re moving into the second generation of Lost Boys. Young men with no real purposeful direction in life, less creative drive and a generation-defining sense of existential ennui.

And what would be their incentive to prompt them to creativity or purpose? Certainly not the long-term reward of an adoring woman or of sexual satisfaction born of her genuine desire. Those rewards are reserved for the High Value Men all women (young and old) believe are their due. Anything less is just brand management now. In an age when girls are raised on the ideal that no woman ought ever to do anything for the express pleasure of a man, doing something pleasurable for one becomes an act of rebellion against the Strong Independent Woman character they’re raised to emulate. Thus, any guy she’s motivated to go against her Fempowerment programming for had better be extraordinarily, confirmedly, high value. To paraphrase Patrice ‘O Neil, women want a man who’s better looking, smarter, stronger, more dominant, educated, taller and richer than they are, yet still wants him to think of her as his equal – or his Queen. He’s the ideal Superman who still defers to her socially-mandated authority (because he respects women) despite being her superior in every way she measures high-value. Oh, and he still has to continually qualify for her intimate approval even if he initially passes the average woman’s filters. Otherwise she might begin to feel as if she settled on him.

One thing that our new order communication society has made unignorable is that the truths we used to build the previous social orders on aren’t exactly what we believed them to be. In some cases those presumptions were useful faiths in truths we expected others to mutually accept; others were pretty-but-useful lies. Regardless, we still cling to romantic ideals that were tenable in previous eras despite the growing (easily accessible) research, data and empirical evidence that puts the lie to that romanticism. What we’re left with is a conflict of old order hope, faith, romance, emotionalism and the lives shaped by these influences versus the often harsh, empirical, objective truths about human nature that are unignorable in this age. Reason itself doesn’t destroy comforting faith, but it does take the magic out of faith by explaining it. Faith confirmed by reason only reinforces faith, but it can never go back to being a faith again once it’s explained. This is a hard pill to swallow for generations that have made a faith in emotionalism the guiding principle that defines their personalities, entitlements and expectations of the opposite sex. And this is to say nothing about the current global social order founded on emotionalism (Feels Before Reals).

Long ago I wrote an essay titled The True Romantics where I asserted that it was men, not women, who are the true romantics – of this age and those past. Men are innate idealists. This idealism prompts us to the performance we use to establish dominance and competence hierarchies amongst ourselves, but it also incentivizes us to the romanticism we hope will solve our reproductive problem. I’ve said in the past that this idealism is both our greatest strength and our most exploitable weakness. For the past two generations this idealism has been a liability for most men. When you make a man necessitous it’s his idealism that makes him hopeful in hopelessness. It’s idealism that makes him a suicidal nihilist or a pollyanna optimist. It’s idealism that keeps him going to work each day in the hopes that his dedication to a proscribed rule-set he believes everyone else is (or should) be playing by will earn him respectability. It’s idealism that makes him a Black Pill Doomer when he can’t reconcile his old Blue Pill conditioned hopes and goals with the Red Pill aware, new order data confirmed for him every day on social media or is just a Google search away. And it’s idealism that makes him hate the women who will never make those pleasant Blue Pill fictions a reality, while he hates the men who brought him to that despondency even more.

Both sexes are gravely, irreversibly, disillusioned today. Both would like to return to some idyllic time where women could swoon for a dashing high-value man who would become a husband they could admire (and be hot for) – and men could find a suitable mate via an understandable and realizable performance, acceptable responsibility, and actionable authority. But an underlying blind faith in the Blank Slate, Social Constructionism, Emotionalism and Subjectivism have made all this impossible. Progressivism, feminism, gynocentrism, (Wokeism) and all of the fallacies that built them, are really old order faiths founded on previously accepted presumptions – presumptions that are destroyed by new, easily accessed, empirical data every day. The more empirical truth (or even the questions that come from it) the more desperate the old social order becomes in maintaining the frameworks its power relies on to sustain it. Red Pill awareness of intersexual dynamics is one such catalyst that is disrupting those old order, Blue Pill, false ideals. It exposes a game we all enjoyed playing up until technology made public what the winners and losers had to do to be so. Women want to play the game, they don’t want to be told they’re playing it is an old maxim I’ve used for over a decade. Now we can apply this to the entirety of our globalized social order; except being told we’re all playing an old game is unavoidable. It makes playing it seem contrived, but it also calls into question why we’d ever build our lives around the contrivance.

Women and men are being dragged from this comfortable game based on emotionalism, false potentials of a Blank Slate and social constructivism. They are being forced to take the Red Pill and cross an abyss very few will have any idea how to deal with. We need new paradigms of thinking, and new ways of inter-relating with each other that align with an empirical understanding of our natures. This will require an acceptance of Red Pill awareness, and innovation and creativity that is sorely lacking in these generations.

The Empress has no Clothes

Tomi Lahren vs. Rollo Tomassi.

I’ve had a lot of my YouTube subscribers tell me that my admittedly “long form” live stream videos are being chopped off at the 2 hour mark. I’ve been aware of this problem for a month now and as much as I’d like to suspect it’s YouTube/Google censorship, it’s really a compiling error between StreamYard (my streaming app) and how YouTube saves the video after it streams. I had to search for a fix right after the Will Smith / Jada Pinkett breakdown video I did was likewise chopped at the beginning. That was easily my most popular and best watched video on the channel and people wanted the whole damn thing.

I discovered a workaround. I noticed the entire video was in fact compiled on YouTube when I opened it in their editor software. However, the playback was limited to only 2 hours from the end of the clip back up to wherever the 2 hour mark was. The fix was simple: delete about 6-10 seconds of the silence before the intro music starts and then resave/recompile the video. Presto! The whole video is now watchable. Well, not exactly Presto!, it takes about half a day to recompile a 2:45:00 video on YouTube’s very slow encoders.

Needless to say, this is kind of frustrating when I dig into videos like Will Smith and now my dissection of Tomi Lahren’s dating/men ragequit video. Tomi’s fem-screech has been all the rage du jour in the Manosphere and on ProRevenge doompill YouTube since last Wednesday. You just can’t pass on that kind of Grade A, USDA Choice, Red Meat. Even Trad-Con women holding “legitimate” opinionist positions at some of the bigger news aggregate blogs had to put something out about raging Tomi’s meltdown. And as expected they were either piling on with her frustration about men not “living up to the responsibility of being Real Men®“ or else it was more unwitting anti-feminist feminism; the same thing Tomi has suffered from since she was 20.

Even with that ‘fix’ of recompiling the original video I’m still getting guys emailing/Tweeting to me that they can’t watch the whole thing on various formats (mobile, web, tablet, etc.). Maybe that’s because they need to clear their video cache, I don’t know, but I’ve taken it upon myself to host the full video on my own server here. This is the whole analysis of Tomi’s PSA to Boyish Men.

The Empress has no Clothes

This task gave me an occasion to review the whole thing in a better light. There’s so much going on in this video it’s hard to sum it up. Tomi’s will be 28 this month (August 2020). She’s right on schedule for her Epiphany Phase, and as a Farm League celebrity who happens to be reasonably attractive the end of her 20s are weighing heavy on her ego. For the record, I’ve been privy to some DMs from guys in my and Jon MLD’s communities who’ve dated (banged) Tomi and had some interesting details as to what prompted her to this ragequit. I’m not going to make these public. Honestly, it’s TMZ style salaciousness, but these conversations confirmed my initial assessment: Tomi is barreling headlong into the Epiphany Phase and it’s not pretty.

In the video I mention that Tomi needs to find some kind of humility. She’s arrogant, entitled, self-aggrandized and completely oblivious to the fact that her opinions of herself and her “attractive” girl-friends are in fact the product of the feminism she claims to despise. Insight, humility, grace and poise are among the many conventionally feminine characteristic the women of Tomi’s generation (and older) desperately lack. I’m sure Tomi and Co. would disagree, but increasingly more men today are realizing the Empress has no Clothes. Women today like to believe they already have these feminine traits – this is part of the Fempowerment narrative that teaches women they uniquely hold the attributes that make a woman a Quality woman, while also possessing all the best traits that make men admirable and respectable.

As mentioned in An Essay for Women, feminist ideology and gynocentrism has conditioned four generations of women to believe they can be the embodiment of the best of both genders. Self-fulfilling, independent and needing for nothing outside themselves (“You are enough girl.”), the women of Tomi’s generation are now discovering that the elite men they desire the most have the least use for them. Why would they? I’m not talking about MGTOW here, I’m talking about high SMV men in the global sexual marketplace who are in the Game and would like to eventually start a family with a devoted wife who needs him. If the best a woman of can be is a self-fulfilled, ego-assured, independent thing with no needs outside herself, why would she ever seek out an elite man? Why would a man be attracted to a woman who screeches at the top of her lungs,…

“It’ll be a cold day in Hell before I EVER CHASE A MAN!”

By definition, high value men – the men with their “shit together“, the men with a plan, the men who “value value” – have no attraction for a woman who publicly expresses she doesn’t need him. Now, Tomi and her Sisters doth protest too much. Her frustration with men is the result of her inability to accept that she does, in fact, need men; and her standards would predictably crumble given the right incentives. Granted, Tomi correctly assesses that the men of today are increasingly more effeminate, pussified, rudderless and apathetic than any generation that came before them. But ironically, she misses that the sad state of men today should make her even more hyperaware that her bitchy, self-entitled and decidedly masculinized sense of self is unattractive to the elite men she believes she and her sisters deserve.

The prime directive of feminism is:

Never do anything for the express pleasure of a man.

Since the post-Sexual Revolution rise of gynocentrism, this feminist maxim has played well with women’s empowerment messaging. There was a time (from the late 60s to late 90s) when men identifying with the feminine – getting in touch with their emotions – was a form of Game. Misguided as it was, men were taught that by supporting, identifying with, and empowering women they would be adapting to that era’s sexual marketplace. Today, this is old order thinking, but the legacy of those generations’ beliefs about women are what is causing such frustration in Tomi’s generation.

It’s too easy to just dismiss her as another entitled, stuck up bitch heading for her date with the Epiphany Phase and the Wall. The problem, and the solution to it, is right in front of her generation’s face. No man needs a woman who has no need for him. Men and women evolved to be complements to one another. This Complementarity and gender interdependence is one of the greatest adaptive strengths of our species, yet the surest way to debase and destroy it is to foment the idea of autonomous, androgynous, independence of one sex.

Tomi Lahren is a Feminist in the truest sense of the term. In one breath she screams men are trash, and in the next she claims to love men. This is the cognitive dissonance that generations of feminism embeds in women. Years of socio-psychological upbringing trains them to distrust, despise and emancipate themselves from men, while at the same time their evolved, biological, mental firmware cries in frustration for a need of men to love, protect, provide and sexually satisfy them.

This inner conflict becomes more and more stressful as this generation of young women approach the Epiphany Phase. One conflicting shift I see among this crop of young women is a greater, and earlier, awareness that they will be less likely to optimize Hypergamy with an acceptable, elite, man they are taught to believe they all deserve. Settling for anything less than optimal is anathema to the Strong Independent Woman ideal; settling for a suboptimal man is the main source of inner conflict for the Equal-but-Better expectations women place on today’s admittedly lacking men.

This is what Tomi is screaming and crying about.

The Rise of the Hustle Economy

Back in January of this year I published a bit from my upcoming 4th book in The New Age of Enlightenment. As I get closer to publication the current events of 2020 have made me consider a new dynamic in regard to how, in an unprecedented way, the new power of cancel culture has given rise to what I’ve called the Hustle Economy.

How many YouTube content producers rely on their channel as a ’side hustle’ revenue to pay their bills today? How many self-published authors have quit their day jobs to write for their new employer, Amazon, today (Amazon owns 86% of the publishing market today)? How many former cubicle workers decided it was more lucrative to start an internet business than continue slaving away at a corporate gig that only made their bosses rich? Today, we’ll readily shift to the digital world to sustain us financially – in the end we don’t have much choice – but it’s the old order thinking that pervades this new “reality” and causes problems.

I write this at a time when several prominent names in the Manosphere (and other spheres) with large subscriber bases are having their channels erased by YouTube/Google. In some cases this erasure is a complete deletion from mainstream social media (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and even WordPress). I’m not a fortuneteller, but I did predict this happening as far back as my State of the Manosphere address in 2018 and as recently as a defunct convention I spoke at back in May of 2019. I said a storm was coming. I saw then that a mainstream Village would need convenient foils, easy targets, to defeat in the 2020 election cycle; and the “Red Pill” – as subjectively defined by every online ideologue-grifter – would make the perfect, easy-to-hate, villains to bring down to prove a point. Purging long-overdue “hate accounts” would seem like a necessary and needed step to prove ideological virtue to the ‘woke’ masses.

Well, that storm is upon us now, and the people who convinced themselves they were entrepreneurs, and a much more profitable side hustle was their true calling in life, are looking around with a bit of nervous hesitancy now. Even the guys with the temerity to start an online business in the wake of the Corona Virus eliminating their jobs are now realizing they may not be as anti-fragile as they thought. Cancel Culture isn’t just about getting ideological enemies fired from their day jobs. It’s about total personal assassination, and stealing that person’s bread in the form of denying them any future ability to exist online, much less generate revenue, is the real objective. Right now, the Cancelled are just faceless randoms online losing jobs and tenured university staff who got too comfortable in the belief that they could never be fired. But in the coming months the Cancelled are going to look like an army of dispossessed with nothing to lose by hunting down the ones responsible for canceling them.

An Economy of Hustlers

The Hustle Economy came about because the barriers to entry into that economy have never been lower. For roughly 7-8 years anyone with a laptop, webcam and a basic understanding of social media and WordPress could join the hustle revolution of online “influencers“. Who wouldn’t want to make more money than the shitty 9-5 corporate cubicle job they spent 4 years in college to get into? Is it any wonder that for a decade the various ‘spheres have been dissuading young men from attending college, to get worthless degrees, in order to get into one of these jobs? Why bother with the “leftist indoctrination” we call education when you can make six figures in a couple of years online if you learn how to leverage SEO, engagement, grow an email list and pitch offers and merch? Hell, you can pretend to be a dog online and make more money than that job you thought assuming all that student debt for would be so rewarding.

The Hustle Economy was a natural progression from the Gig Economy. A lot of companies understood the sense in ‘retaining’ at-home employees, or project/contract workers. No benefits, next to no overhead, productivity was up to the freelancer completing the tasks on time (instead of monitoring hourlies’ productivity in a cube farm) and all for about the same, if not less, compensation. Don’t like your gig? Fine, just fire your “employer” and go back to your service advertising site to pick up a new one. For being a hired gun or contractual employee working from home most smart pros saw the freedom of the Hustle Economy almost immediately. Cut the middleman out and have the “jobs” come to you in the form of a potentially worldwide clientele.

Around 2014 the online Coaching/Guru hustle really began to develop into a template that anyone with a bit of social media savvy could follow. ‘Smart’ men and women quit their dead-end cubicle jobs or rearranged their Gig Economy jobs, for the more lucrative positivity hustle dollars that only required the small investment of a laptop, webcam and a willingness to parrot the scripts of Tony Robbins, Zig Ziglar, Napoleon Hill or Norman Vincent Peale. To be fair, this new Hustle Economy isn’t unique to the Manosphere; the Lost Boys Generation – this generation of directionless young men – niche market is just one among many lucrative markets today. Health & Fitness, “Entrepreneurs”, dating/relationship/marriage, personal empowerment, motivational positivity, the Law of Attraction, these are just a sampling of what I’ve called the Success Porn industry in the past. And new order technology makes all the old order grifts seem novel to a generation that’s never experienced them before. This Hustle Economy online template is cross-cultural and largely globalized now. Religion, psychology, motivation, business, philosophy, fitness, medicine/health, dating/relationship, marriage, child-rearing, or even just catering to the red meat needs of others’ desire for affirmation in their own despondency; all of these and more are now the spheres of the Hustle Economy.

Old Order Mastery vs. New Order Hustle

In 2015 I had a guy approach me at the Man in Demand conference who wanted to thank me for my work and The Rational Male. He said he’d come to reading it at the suggestion of his (male) therapist while he was recovering from a nasty divorce. This was the first time I had ever been told that a legitimate clinical psychologist had been using my book as a part of their therapy practice. The significance of this was profound for me then, but I don’t think I fully appreciated it until I had more men relate a similar beginning to reading my work in 2017 up to today. Here were real psychologists with doctorate degrees using The Rational Male as a reference in their practices. It was at this time I began to pay more attention to doctors and scholars and legitimate business pros who were aligning themselves with the various influencers of the new order spheres.

Psychologists are the best example of this because of the diversity of fields they can involve themselves in. Take a guy like Gad Saad, easily one of my favorite evolutionary psychology researchers. He’s a bonafide doctor and evo-psych scientist who’s found a new celebrity in various Hustle Economy sub-spheres on Twitter and elsewhere. His YouTube channel is pushing 180K subs and he managed to leverage himself as an e-personality. But Gad is one of the few legitimate psychologists to successfully transition to the new order hustle. More psychologists struggle with it because they still cling to an old order thinking that their pre-New Enlightenment educations were founded upon. They may still hold private clinical practices that they developed some 10-20 years ago. That’s the way you did it as a therapist in the old order. In fact, one reason I never pursued a postgraduate in behavioral psychology was because the only way to make any “real money” was to get a doctorate and start a practice. Masters degrees would get a you a job as a social worker.

Today, legitimate psychologists must actively compete in the Hustle Economy to make the hard work, time and money they invested in their degrees pay off as well as an online self-help Guru or Coach‘s hustle; some of whom have had their own practice open online with a 99 page “e-book” available filled with positivity pablum lifted from The Secret, going for as long as they’ve been in school. When WebMD first launched in the late 2000s doctors everywhere had to contend with their patients diagnosing themselves with whatever disorder they believed their symptoms indicated according to what they read on the site. The age of the self-educator had begun in this regard and online “clinicians“, both certified and holistic, saw the opportunity to profit from the symptomatic fears of people about their health. Real doctors had to either fight a losing battle of reeducating and allaying the fears of increasingly more people’s health concerns one by one, or find their own angle in the Hustle Economy and leverage their title and credentials to add validity to it. Today, an honorific is respected in name, but it’s by no means the path to earning potential – at least in the short term.

I occasionally encounter the critic who will claim I don’t site sources or my own work is speculative or just opinion. Wherever possible I do in fact cite sources, stats and research, but in the new order information age quoting stats or correlating studies has become an exercise in “dueling research”. And that’s assuming a critic has the time and interest enough to consider what you’re citing and counter it with their own. If you’re diligent enough it’s likely you can counter even the most basic of scientific presumptions with some research, TED talk or meta-study data. The truth is most people simply don’t develop their personal belief sets based on the data of multiple peer-reviewed, independently funded, experimental research PDFs someone links them online. They usually go with experience, emotional resonance and what “sounds right” according to how they were raised. If anything, rationality and critical thinking – the kind of mental presence sorely needed in higher education – is distrusted above all else in the Hustle Economy.

So, I can certainly see the frustration most old order career professionals have with the online template success models of their new order competitors. Add to this that they are both vying for the very sparse attention of the same customers – all of whom are little experts themselves – and you begin to see the practicality of, “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em”. Thus far I’ve used psychology as the illustration, but this Hustle Economy dynamic applies to all old order businesses, academia, government systems, and religion. Religion in particular (as I’m writing about) was, and is, one of the first spheres to eagerly embrace the Hustle Economy. With everyone online being a little expert and everyone having some relative platform on which to prove it, religion, spirituality and magical thinking were easily monetized and template-formed. And their profitability is made all the better when one sphere’s template (religion) complements or amplifies another (government, psychology, fitness, sex, etc.).

Garbage In, Garbage Out

Kicking and screaming will the old order thinkers be dragged into the Hustle Economy of this new age of digital enlightenment. Back in the late 2000s I can remember being told that to make ends meet a family needed two incomes and a side hustle. Now that side hustle is the main thing. The old plan of going to 4, maybe 8 years, of college to get a good job that paid well is hard to sell in the age of hustles that can pay far more than a formal degree does. Don’t think for a moment I’m in any way celebrating this development. A good education should be its own reward. Being well versed in a variety of areas, and understanding critical thinking and how to learn should be a priority for well-educated people. But even our institutions of higher learning, our esteemed universities, must also contend with the Hustle Economy. As COVID forces us to stay home, and classes, and jobs, are moved online, people are only now realizing just how unprepared their schools and employers are to deal with the new order way of learning and working. They’re beginning to see how many hours of their lives they waste in pointless formalities and commutes, but more so, they see how antiquated the old order systems they relied upon for security for so long really are. And in turn, those universities and corporation must now enter the Hustle Economy themselves if they want to survive.

This is the essence of the Red Pill. While I believe that Red Pill ought to only be used for intersexual dynamics, I do see the parallels in transitioning from a reliance on old order thinking to seeing how deceptively false the premises of that thinking are in light of new order, readily accessible, information today. We are presently in a state of radical transition – made all the worse because most of the last 4 generations neither realize it nor understand how to deal with it – and the old systems based on old presumptions are failing right before our eyes. These generations are ill prepared because all they know, all they’ve been taught, are failed, failing or outmoded ideas of the old order.

Pro Revenge

Several years ago I wrote the essay Rejection and Revenge. Eventually this piece found its way into my third book Positive Masculinity, but I had considered it for inclusion in the first book because it covered a core principle I had discussed on the SoSuave forums years prior. A desire for revenge is something innate to the human experience. Most higher-order animals have some rudimentary sense of what’s fair. Even dogs have a sense of fairness and can experience some form of jealousy. The study of altruism in animals, to say nothing of humans, is a complex affair. However, somewhere along the evolutionary path a species did better if they cooperated and had some investment in promoting the survival of their kin.

That leads to an innate understanding of fairness and unfairness. Human’s add ethics and morality to this equation, but the root is the same; on some level of consciousness we make comparisons, and from them we evaluate what is equitable according to our own interests. It serves a species’ survival interests to evolve pattern recognition and make reasoned judgments about those patterns.

Collectivists will argue that this dynamic is proof of a need for an idealized egalitarianism to promote the greater good, while selfish gene individualists will argue that it’s evidence of unconditioned self-concern for one’s own survival. Either way, human beings are very motivated by the emotional response to a perceived injustice – so much so that we will raise those feelings to metaphysical significance. Even our gods rage over injustice; Revenge is mine sayeth the Lord. A tooth for a tooth and an eye for an eye might make the whole world blind, but it’s the foundation of our evolved sense of fairness.

And why wouldn’t fairness be so impactful for us? Our lizard brains associate that imbalance with a threat to our survival, our wellbeing and our reproductive efforts. Our limbic system detects some unfairness – usually via our peripheral awareness – we get a squirt of some hormonal cocktail into our system, and now we can’t shake this feeling that we ought to feel jealous or suspicious of someone or some environmental condition where we’re getting the short end of the stick. We are literally wired (and piped) for making judgement calls. Even when those judgement calls prove unfounded, and maybe detrimental to us, to err on one side or the other of that innate judgmentalism served our ancestors well enough to get us to where we are now.

It’s easy to consider this evaluating, judgmental nature in terms of simplistic right or wrong choices. Right being what ever benefits the individual in equal measure to another, wrong being whatever thoughts or behaviors conceal the interests of individual self-concern. The Seven Deadly Sins are all fundamentally about this evolved fairness equation. Greed might be a benefit to the individual – and their kin by association – but to our limbic evaluation it’s unfair to the greater, necessitous whole of society. Ergo, greed becomes a sin, and social conventions like do unto others as you would have done unto you becomes a counterbalance to the unfairness. However, most of the choices we make in life are not simple right vs. wrong equations. Some of the greatest stories ever told by humans are about right vs. right and wrong vs. wrong (or maybe less wrong) choices. While dogs may feel jealousy, and chimps may give a banana to another who didn’t get one, they’re rarely confronted with the nuances of justice that humans have to consider.

Why We Love Revenge

When we attach this innate sense of fairness to biological imperatives things get dicey. The purview of my work is intersexual dynamics, so I’ll be focusing on that imperative here. But remember that concepts like fairness, jealousy, revenge, rivalry and the indignation that accompany these and more are not just limited to solving one’s reproductive problem. That said, human beings love revenge. We fantasize about it. We write epics about revenge. Some invest their lives in creating fictions to find some psychological catharsis for an injustice they will never actually resolve in their lifetime. I would argue that humans enjoy the chemical cocktail, and associated emotions, that stem from a desire for revenge.

To be clear, I’m not talking about some ephemeral sense of justice. This is root-level, squirt of adrenaline, desire to balance a perceived or actual unfairness that threatens the individual’s (or associated group) survival or propagation. I’ve written extensively about women’s innate need for Indignation and the associated chemical-emotional response they derive from it. Primarily I believe this need stems from the way women (neurologically) prioritize and process emotion, but it also serves as a confirmation of their Hypergamous filtering. No indignation is more satisfying for women than the feelings they derive from thwarting the sexual efforts of a false-Alpha male. This indignation response, and the good feels that reinforce it, serves to aid (sometimes trick) women’s sexual selection imperatives and avoid their existential fear. Ultimately, what’s fair for women is whatever serves the Sisterhood’s Hypergamous best interests.

For men, and particularly the young men of this new order generation, revenge fantasies hold a similar, indignant appeal. As we’ve systematically feminized the males of the last 4 generations, we’ve also conditioned them to prioritize the same emotional responses we would expect in women. As I’m fond of saying, we raise boys as defective girls who then become parodies of defective women. Part of this conditioning is training young men to identify with the female experience, but also to want to become a part of that experience. The female experience is always the “correct” experience. So it follows that the prioritization of emotion as a peak experience is something this generation of men have internalized. Feels before reals. A common lament of women and feminized men today is that if men could be more expressive in their emotions (the emotions women are comfortable with) then the world would be a better place. Thinking and feeling like a woman makes for a better “man“, right? That’s today’s gynocentric logic.

But indignation (the result of inherent unfairness) based on reproductive imperatives works very differently in men. Men’s evolved existential fear is based on ensuring his own paternity. Determining that a child is a man’s actual genetic progeny has been an imperative evolution has embedded in men’s mental firmware. Until DNA testing arrived men had relatively no empirical way to determine if he was a cuckold (a female mating strategy) and his parental investment and evolutionary imperative had been wasted. Thus, indignation, prompted men to create social conventions to provide at least the semblance of socially enforced parental certainty. The deal is, if a man is to invest his reproductive potential in a woman and their children she should be bound by social expectations that the child is his genetic progeny. It’s only fair.

But, life’s not fair. And men and women’s reproductive strategies are inherently adversarial, so what constitutes justice in the sexual marketplace is often defined by the gender with the most social power at the time. In every age prior to the Sexual Revolution that was men, now it’s women.

Men innately process emotion, particularly negative emotion, differently than women. Again, this is how evolution wired men, but the social dictates of this time go to great lengths to condition men to believe that the way they process emotion is “incorrect”. Their natural proclivities make them bad humans when their innate way of being emotional conflicts with the “correct” female way of experiencing emotion they were taught. As a result of this conflict we have recent generations of men who seek the same indignation rush women have an innate attraction to. However, these young men get their endorphin rush from revenge scenarios that align with their innate imperatives – exposing paternity fraud, cuckoldry and exposing the duplicity of women’s innate mating strategies.

Comeuppance

Revenge is an expanding topic of interest for average frustrated young men. Closing in on almost a million subscribers, the Reddit sub-forum r/prorevenge is one of the fastest growing topics on the platform today. I was only made aware of the sub after doing some research on the popularity of tags for YouTube videos. ‘Pro Revenge’ is a Black Pill (and MGTOW) sweetheart tag for what I referred to as the Doom Pill in my video Red Meat for the Red Pill. The Pro Revenge concept is simple; guys in the forum relate stories about how ‘deserving’ people got their comeuppance. Justice or Karma is served up to cheaters, scammers, liars, thieves and other assorted attempts to offend our innately human sense of fairness. To be fair, all Pro Revenge topics are not about cheating or duplicitous women – there are loads of stories about bad employers, plagiarists and Success Porn gurus – but real-world revenge stories about women’s duplicity being thwarted by a smart Red Pill guy or just blind circumstance are clearly the most popular themes.

The popularity of young men experiencing revenge either in fantasy or vicariously through others is becoming a very lucrative profit model for agile YouTube channel hosts as well as Lifestyle Coaches. When I consider the ceaseless hunger for Red Meat topics in the Black Pill, MGTOW or just the Manosphere in general the source of that hunger always comes back to the emotional rush attendant to indignation. When a woman “gets hers” because her mating or empowerment strategy was foiled, men get a sense of righteous indignation; particularly guys who enjoy commiserating in their shared sense of powerlessness. And that commiseration has never been easier or more organized than in our new order technological world. Pro Revenge is just one of many innovations that cater to men’s desire to see things put straight and experience the endorphin rush that comes with it. It feels good to see “justice” served.

Of course, women turned the revenge fantasy into various art forms long ago. Carrie Underwood sings openly about vandalizing and destroying a cheating (now ex) lover’s expensive four-wheel drive truck and countless commiserating women (even today) can recite the lyrics verbatim. In a gynocentric social order, destruction of personal property is entirely acceptable if the perpetrator is a woman who discovered her duplicitous lover was not the man her Hypergamous instincts believed him to be. Women’s existential fear meets justice. And women and feminine-sympathetic men all nod in agreement. Essentially, Pro Revenge has been a thing for women for ages. Courtesy of centuries of bastardized Chivalry and the romantic ideal we just accept it more because Beta men reinforce it as a form of Game. Thus, we have women manufacturing their own indignation in fiction and daytime talk shows that expose an incorrigible pickup artist getting his comeuppance and confirm women’s Hypergamous intuitions. And yet, even this openly embraced double standard only serves as fuel for the Pro Revenge instincts of more young men today.

For all the hopelessness and despondency the information age has brought to men and women it’s also revealed the evolved motives beneath our want for what we think is justice. The Doom Pill is becoming the logical extension of this nihilism and the players in the Hustle Economy are now perfecting ways to profit from it. Exploiting the Gender War for fun and profit has never been easier – because this new generation of men and women enjoy the indignation derive from it so much they become oblivious to their own exploitation.

The Red Pill Path

The Red Pill, with respect to intersexual dynamics, is, and will always be a praxeology. It is unconcerned with value judgements. Issues of how one interprets the data presented by Red Pill praxeology as right or wrong is an exercise in subjectivity and personal belief. In essence the Red Pill should always be about what is – not what should be, not what seems moral, immoral or amoral. 

I knocked on about this in The Believers vs. The Empiricists back in July of 2019. The problem with adding ideology to the Red Pill is that it distorts the intent of staying as objective as possible. A Praxeology is the study of those aspects of human action that can be grasped a priori; in other words, it is concerned with the conceptual analysis and logical implications of preference, choice, means-end schemes, and so forth. In a praxeological context, the Red Pill is a ‘loose science’ concerned with the understanding of the underlying motivators of why we do what we do as men and women. It doesn’t get everything right, but it does ask the right questions. It’s these questions that make believers uncomfortable. The beauty of The Red Pill as a praxeology is that we get to write those questions and conclusions down in pencil, not ink, to be erased and edited as new information changes them. The Red Pill is not an ideology itself. Despite what many moralist critics would like to redefine it as, a Red Pill awareness is about an obligation to understanding the truth about men and women’s natures.

Yes, I know, it is impossible to be entirely objective in anything. In fact, just the thought required in asking a particular question implies a particular subjective bias. You wouldn’t be asking those kinds of questions if you didn’t subscribe to some belief-set that caused you to think about them in the first place. Even a commitment to objective truth is itself perceived as a value judgement. What’s worth your consideration is at least as important as why you think it’s worth considering. I get it. It still doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to be as objective as humanly possible, in spite of the pre-knowledge that we have underlying reasons for being curious about something.

Objectivity vs. Ideology

There. Now that’s out of the way.

What one does with the data the Red Pill praxeology aggregates, and how one interprets that information, is up to the individual. The prescriptions we create for ourselves with this knowledge are almost always a value call. The real question for men, new to the Red Pill, is are they beginning from a position of value judgement first and then seeking to find the Red Pill data that best aligns with that preconception? Or are they beginning from a neutral, objective position of interpreting this information and then forming well-thought, rational prescriptions for themselves based on that objectivity?

How we make this information useful to us is just as important as how we came to the conclusion that it should be useful to us. After having written in this ‘sphere for almost 20 years now I’ve come to see how men will use Red Pill awareness to either better (save) serve their lives by changing their minds about themselves and implementing it, or else they use that awareness to validate their preconceived belief-sets. Usually they do this by cherrypicking the parts that align with those beliefs and discarding or disqualifying the data that conflicts with them. This is how you get the Purple Pill. Accept just enough empirical Red Pill data to validate a belief-set rooted in their Blue Pill conditioning. And it’s made all the better if you can profit from pandering to those Blue Pill beliefs in others by calling yourself a ‘coach’ of some kind.

PUAs, MGTOW, MRAs, Trad-Cons, Positivity and Success Porn advocates, Red Pill Ministry Pastors, Father-Figure Fitness Coaches, Masculinity Psychologists, Female “Relationship Experts”, and a plethora of other sub-factions that reside in the ‘sphere are all belief-set prescriptions. Their subjective prescriptions either follow in the wake of Red Pill praxeology, or they find their preconceptions validated – in some part – by the data and awareness that the Red Pill brings to them.

When the information that the Red Pill presents conflicts with these belief-prescriptions, that’s when we see believers attempt to redefine the Red Pill as an ideology. When a stark empirical truth challenges an ego-invested belief, most people feel attacked. That belief is often one that people have based their lives on, so challenging the belief is challenging the way that person has lived for a long time. In terms of the Red Pill, it’s much easier to redefine or reinterpret what that empirical data really should mean to a man. And whenever we see words like should or ought we know we’re dealing with a value judgement. 

The only way a believer can protect an ego-investment challenged by Red Pill awareness is to reduce the Red Pill to an ideology. Bring the enemy to battle on your own field and on your own terms. So long as the Red Pill is just about objective observations, connecting dots and collating data, the right or the wrong of it, the value judgement of what ought to be, is irrelevant to discerning the truth. But if you can convince yourself and others that the Red Pill is in fact an ideological pursuit – not an objective pursuit – then you choose the terms of terms of the battle. If the Red Pill can be redefined as a belief-set then you can lock horns with it with your own belief-set. Then the debate isn’t about what is, it becomes about what’s right or wrong, or what that data should mean, or how it should be put to proper use in a person’s life. Hypergamy becomes less about women’s nature, and more about how women are inherently predisposed to evil as a result of it. Alpha or Beta become defined by how well a man aligns with a preexisting belief-set – “You’re not a real man if you believe/don’t believe this!” – and the Soulmate Myth might become an article of faith that wins an ideological argument.

Redefine the premise of the Red Pill as an ideology and you can fight it as an ideology. But even if you could, the data the Red Pill presents still forces a lot of conflict in the believer. That leaves the believer to reconcile that data with the cognitive dissonance he/she feels about it. It is much more intrinsically satisfying to redefine, disqualify and then re-qualify information that confounds our beliefs than it is to go into outright denial of that conflicting data. Sometimes outright denial is all that’s left.

People resort to denial when recognizing that a truth would destroy something they hold dear; and there are few things we hold more dear than our investments in what we think are right and wrong with respect to how we solve our reproductive problem. In the case of a cheating partner, denial lets you avoid acknowledging evidence of your own humiliation. Short of catching a spouse in bed with your best friend, evidence of infidelity is usually ambiguous. It’s motivated skepticism. You’re more skeptical of things you don’t want to believe and demand a higher level of proof.

Denial is unconscious, or it wouldn’t work: if you know you’re closing your eyes to the truth, some part of you knows what the truth is and denial can’t perform its protective function. This is why we say, “Once you’ve seen the code in the Matrix, once you’ve taken the Red Pill, there’s no going back.”

One thing we all struggle to protect is a positive self-image. The more important the aspect of your self-image that’s challenged by the truth, the more likely you are to go into a state of denial. If you have a strong sense of self-worth and competence your self-image can take the hits but remain largely intact; if you’re beset by self-doubt (a hallmark of self-righteous Beta thinking), however, any acknowledgment of failure can be devastating and any admission of error painful to the point of being unthinkable. Self-justification and denial arise from the dissonance between believing you’re competent, and making a mistake, which clashes with that image.

Solution: Deny the mistake or redefine the terms of the debate.

By nature men are deductive problem solvers. This is manifest in many ways, but for a Beta male who still believes solving a woman’s problems will lead to him solving his reproductive problem, more often than not it leads him to a worse life. Once a man unplugs and begins to internalize what a deeper, more accurate understanding of intersexual dynamics means to his life he’s going to look for ways to apply it to his own circumstances. This is a natural, unavoidable progression. As I’ve stated in many an essay, I’m not in the business of making better men, I’m in the business of giving men the tools with which to build better lives for themselves. I expect men, at some stage, to use what they’ve learned from what I write to change their minds about themselves and become the better men they can be with a better awareness.

I do not offer prescriptions. I do not have a one-size-fits-all formula or 12 catch-all rules that will help you live a better life. Most men want that formula, and a lot of them will pay a small fortune to avoid the work necessary to effect a real change in their lives if some coach even hints that they have the cheat codes to do it. They are sheep in search of a shepherd. I have precious few expectations of my readers, but one is that I expect you take it upon yourselves to be the artists of your own lives. If it frustrates you that I won’t hold your hand and lead you to a better version of yourself just know that going through that frustration is necessary for you to be your own man. Not an adherent, not an acolyte, but the author of your own decisions. 

A lifetime of Blue Pill conditioning has already attempted to remove that control from you long enough.

Your Mission, Her Mission

Does your woman think of you before herself? 

Does she make your priorities her own priorities?

Does she surprise you with acts of kindness and appreciation?

Does she inherently know that your success is her success?

Does she admire you? How does she show it?

Does she know what you need before you know it yourself?

Does she plan ahead to ensure you’re taken care of?

Does she care to know who, not just what you are?

Does she take time to learn about or participate in the things you are passionate about?

Does she look forward to having sex with you?

Does pleasing you please her?

Does she do any of these things with genuine desire or is she fearful of your displeasure?

Or

Is your woman ‘high maintenance’?

Is pleasing her or avoiding her discomfort your mission in the relationship?

Is your relationship defined by how well you measure up to her expectations?

Is your woman’s success more important than your own?

Are you the sentimental one in the relationship?

Do you plan ahead to ensure she’ll be in the right mood?

Do you perform chores in the hopes that it will make her amenable to you sexually?

Do you believe your relationship is (or should ideally be) an equitable one?

Does her family take priority over your own at holidays?

Is your relationship based on quid pro quo?

Is she ever surprised by your anger?

Is your relationship perpetually a “work in progress”?

Is your relationship’s success defined by qualifying to her metrics?

Do you measure the quality of your relationship by how well you meet her needs?

These are tough questions for most guys. I’m often asked how to vet a woman for a relationship or marriage and the hard part of coming up with a list of qualifications is that you have to actually be in a relationship with that person to really judge a woman’s suitability for a long term commitment. Hot sex is a great ‘up-sell’ for women to convince a man to commit, and it’s usually at the top of a guy’s list of must-haves for his commitment, but you don’t really understand her motivations or genuine desire until you are already in a relationship. Now you have emotional investment in her (caught feelings) at the same time you’re realizing she’s really not the person you thought you were vetting her for.

The ‘Asshole Alpha’

A hard thing for most Blue Pill, Beta men to appreciate is the genuine desire a woman has for an Alpha man. When that guy sees a relationship that’s based on a woman’s dedication to please her Alpha man, his Beta Hamster goes into action. A lot of things don’t line up with what he’s been conditioned to believe about women and how a relationship should go.

His first presumption is that the Alpha guy is a ‘manipulative asshole’ and if he ‘respected’ her she would be better off for it. It’s certainly not how he would treat her. Default respect for women plays well for a Blue Pill mindset. If you read through my first set of questions above the most common impression a feminized mind will have is that I’m implying a woman ought to be beholden to an Alpha man. While it’s true that, ideally, a solid conventional relationship is founded on a man’s ambition and success, and his woman sharing that mission, she has to want to be a part of it. Forcing a woman to be a part of a man’s world is actually the methodology of a Beta man.

Monogamy can occur either because a female chooses to be faithful to a male, or as a consequence of a particular lifestyle.

Promiscuity, Tim Birkhead

Exploring the Desire Dynamic has been a key feature in all of my writing. Understanding that genuine desire cannot be negotiated is usually one of the toughest parts of the Red Pill to accept when a guy is just coming into it. It’s hard because most men already realize the principle; they’ve just been building lives around the contingencies, and forming deep rationales, to avoid accepting it. I have readers tell me all the time that what I put forth in my books and essays is stuff ‘they already knew in the back of their heads‘, they just didn’t have the words to articulate it. Your relationship sucks, or your marriage is soul-destroying not because you can’t seem to live up to a false ideal (which is true), but because your woman has no genuine desire to be a part of your world. Modern marriages fail, not because of trust issues, or security, or even ‘her needs not being met’ – they fail due to a lack of genuine desire.

Most women today are in monogamous relationships as a consequence of a particular lifestyle.

Blue Pill men have a hard time with this as well. A relationship based on a woman’s choice to be faithful to a man, based on her genuine desire, looks a lot like what he’s been taught a lopsided manipulative relationship is all about. The prime-directive of feminism (the female Blue Pill) is that a Strong Independent Woman® should “never do anything for the express purpose of pleasing a man.” Part of a Blue Pill man’s lifelong conditioning is to think like a feminist woman thinks.

Most Blue Pill men are male feminists by default. Whether they vocally identify as one is largely a formality; Blue Pill men think like feminist women, because their social education came from feminist women.

When a Blue Pill male encounters the rare conventional relationship – one based on a woman’s genuine desire and a man’s Frame and ambitions – and he sees a woman doing things for the express pleasure of an Alpha man, his first impression is that she is with him by coercion. That conventional relationship model doesn’t fit with what his female teachers taught him was the egalitarian ideal. Thus, rationalizing that a beautiful woman would only feel obligated to please an asshole is because she has low self-esteem, she’s forced to please him because she’s destitute, she’s codependent, he overtly uses Dread on her, etc. This becomes his ego defense of his Blue Pill conditioning. His default presumption is that she is with that guy as a consequence of a particular lifestyle. It never enters his thought process that she is with that Alpha by choice.

Objects of Desire

Most men are uncomfortable with being the object of genuine desire. Even the idea of having a woman do something inspired for his express pleasure makes them feel like they’re falling into the role of Asshole Alpha. Promise Keepers in particular hate this impression of themselves and will go to great efforts to quash it in themselves, by deriding it in other men.

If you read the first list of questions above and thought, “Damn, that sounds harsh or manipulative. What about her needs?” this is your Blue Pill training coming to the surface of your consciousness. Just the thought that, as a man, you might ever be truly desired by a woman gets conflated with ‘abuser’ status. Either that, or the first consideration is to default to Bank Slate thinking – “What about her?” This is the egalitarian, presumption of ‘equal-and-opposite’ as the ideal thinking. 

Most Blue Pill conditioned men, and virtually every Fempowered woman, defaults to “What about her?” as their Mental Point of Origin. Guys do this because it’s been hammered into their brains since grammar school that ‘putting women first’ is the surest way to gaining their intimate favor. As such, the idea that they might ever ‘come first’ with a woman becomes an alien thought to them. Not only that, but they see the hypothetical Alpha I mentioned above as the villain to defeat in order to prove his quality. That ‘quality’ is based on his ‘putting women first’, so an Alpha Asshole becomes a golden opportunity to display how well he’s learned his Blue Pill lessons from his female teachers.

Without the Red Pill, without the insight to question his conditioned belief-set, this mindset is impossible to break in a guy. For the most part he’s attached his Game – his hope of solving his reproductive problem – to that Blue Pill, Village training. Some guys may never break the cycle. They never see the code in the Matrix. Most men fall into a grind of constant qualification to women because they have never, and will never, be the object of genuine desire of a woman. Their mental models prevent them from ever being that object to a woman. They would feel awkward, dirty, for making anything about them.

When a man’s Burden of Performance can be directed towards qualifying himself to women, men will begin to conflate their masculine identities with how well they can ‘put her first’.

The religious Trad-Con mindset revels in this, but the ideal comes from the same source – feminine primacy. Directionless, purposeless, men find a purpose in making the pleasing of a “quality woman” ideal the metric by which they measure their manhood. The Feminine Imperative figured out how to make women’s security the measure of a man long ago. It was written into men’s sense of duty and his Gods’ will. They must become less so she becomes more. It didn’t always used to be that way, but since the advent of romantic love as an ideal, it’s been the game men were told they had to play. And now, men’s natural competitiveness is channeled to outperforming his rivals in how better he can serve the Feminine Imperative.

IV. Don’t play by her rules

If you allow a woman to make the rules she will resent you with a seething contempt even a rapist cannot inspire. The strongest woman and the most strident feminist wants to be led by, and to submit to, a more powerful man. Polarity is the core of a healthy loving relationship. She does not want the prerogative to walk all over you with her capricious demands and mercurial moods. Her emotions are a hurricane, her soul a saboteur. Think of yourself as a bulwark against her tempest.

16 Commandments of Poon, Roissy

I can make appeals to men to make themselves their Mental Point of Origin, but few actually wrap their heads around the concept. Fewer still will give themselves permission to do so. The reason for their difficulty is that their reproductive success was pinned to the Blue Pill mindset they’d had beaten into their psyches a long time ago.

The equal partnership ideal is antithetical to how men and women evolved to be complements to the other. That ‘equal’ partnership is predicated on a man endlessly proving his dedication to ‘putting her first’ that his hindbrain believes will lead to a woman’s genuine desire for him. His hope, his understanding, is that if he works at his relationship long enough, if he puts her first, eventually she will appreciate him and desire him based on his efforts and performance. But it is just this priority in his life – the priority he’s linked to what little sense he allows himself to have of his manhood – that defeats his ever getting to that state of a woman’s genuine inspired desire.