Kill the Beta

Rational reader Paul recently sought out my guidance for probably the single most asked for advice I receive.

I’ve read through your blog entirely, and my biggest issue is, how do I kill the beta? Every girl I sleep with, or even fool around with, I end up developing feelings for. Even if it was a one night stand or the girl is cheating on a bf with me. It’s like I have no self control; like I’m a girl that agonizes over every guy she sleeps with.

I wish I honestly had a definitive answer for Paul. If I could construct some step-by-step program, a universal template that men could all follow in order to kill their inner Beta, I’d be rich beyond my wildest dreams. Just as I said with about the Alpha Buddha, if I could find a way to bottle the essence of Alpha I’d be set for life. The real truth is that there is no simple answer to this, because each man’s conditions are unique to him. To be sure there are common roots to their problems, and common mindsets that form as results of attempting to formulate working sexual strategies (Beta Game) within the feminine Matrix, but undoing these mental schemas and reforming a better functional sexual strategy is unique to the individual.

I feel that this is the major reason Game is not taken as seriously as it should be – it’s a lot of work doing your own self-analysis and then creating a strategy to remake yourself. One of the reasons PUA gurus and the Game demigods of the last decade seem so cheap, like snake oil salesmen, is because they fail to take into account the degree of personalization necessary to truly kill the inner Beta that guys eventually have to confront. That’s an element of internalized Game that the guys doing seminars would rather not address because your degree of success, in truth how you even measure success, is entirely dependent upon you. Hooking up with girls you’d never had access to before may sell pick up DVDs; changing the inner workings of your personality is a much tougher order. If you ever look through the ‘self-help’ psychology section of a book store and wonder why there are so many books published in the topic, it’s exactly due to this dynamic – effecting a fundamental change in one’s life requires an effort that few people have the patience and perseverance for.

So with all of this in mind, let me say right now, I don’t have a map for you – anyone telling you they do is selling you something – however, I will attempt to point you in the right direction. I can’t say what will work, only you can find that out on your own, but try to bear in mind that changing yourself is a process that takes time. Even for the guy’s who have an easier go of transitioning to an internal Game-state personality, it’s still an ongoing process. I’d like to think of myself as at least a lesser Alpha (by Roissy’s measure), but that doesn’t mean I don’t trip up at times. This is what I mean by the process; you’re not going to be bulletproof and pass every shit test ever thrown at you, but be encouraged in knowing you learn from what you do wrong and adjust for the next time. There is no grand arrival moment when you know you’re an Alpha, or if you don’t like that term, there is no definitive point at which you’ve internalized Game. You don’t get some certificate of Game completion. You can, however, definitively change your thinking, it’s always on-going.

Knowing is half the battle

If there truly is a first step in internalization then it has to come from educating yourself. This is actually one of the most difficult tasks. If you’re a reader of my blog, or are at least peripherally aware of Game as a concept, this is going to seem pretty obvious, but remember that there’s an entire world of men who are still plugged in. Only a fraction of them will even be amenable to considering Game and positive masculinity, and fewer still will see its value. From our perspective it seems like a matter of course; we read the books/blogs, familiarize ourselves with the concepts, we pick what might work, experiment with ideas, evaluate the validity of them and adopt them or toss them. However what’s apparent to the unplugged seems like blaspheme to the plugged in.

Your “education” doesn’t stop once you’ve unplugged. In fact I’d argue that it’s even more vital in internalizing a new mindset since you’re now putting things into practice. One thing I remind guys who spit the red pill back up is that there is no going back. A lot of frustrated guys who discover Game and fail to apply it because they lack the social skills or they convinced themselves that PUArtistry was their easy magic formula to fuck the girl of their dreams, they tend to want to regress back into the comfortable shell of their former ignorance of intergender social dynamics. Only they find that there is no return. They see the truth in the what they’d been blind to no matter where they turn. The social interactions, the feminization, the raw deal they’ve been conditioned to accept as normal – all of that subtly reminds them of the truth they’re avoiding and they hate it. They become hostile to it.

I add this because it’s a very real danger for guys transitioning into internalizing positive masculinity. In the same respect you now have become (or should become) more sensitive to Game truths and the unplugged reality you now find yourself in. There’s a point of departure from what you thought was normal to seeing the signs around you. An easy illustration is really contemplating any gender related issue in popular media. You’ll hear a song, watch a sit-com, overhear a conversation in the lunch room, and begin to realize how surrounded you are by basic presumptions of a culture remade by feminine primacy. Understanding what your position in all of this is is crucial to internalizing a new mindset or backsliding into your old frame of thinking.

Practicing the change

It should be self-evident that applying what you’ve come to see as a new truth for yourself is vital. You need to get off the internet and field test the theories you learn here and elsewhere. Whether that means going to sarge at the clubs, or adopting a new attitude with your wife, or even the women you deal with at work, it’s really up to you. The hardest part of practicing change is the initial shock of having the people who know you question the validity of the new you. If you were to move to a new city, completely change your social circle and play the role of an asshole Alpha, no one is the wiser. However, make a radical shift in your personality with those who’ve known you for years and you’ll be a poser who’s “trying to be something he’s not”.

Human beings need predictability – it gives them a sense of control over others. When you alter yourself, or have your personality altered by an outside force, this is a threat to that predictability, so the logical counter is for others to attempt to put us back into our places. Shaming comes as a natural tactic for women, but the push is always to get you back into their frame. And that’s essentially the threat others interpret, the new you is a frame grab. Do it all at once and people will accuse your personality of being a disingenuous reaction to having been burned. Do it subtly and persistently over a time and people will be more willing to accept the change as genuine. Always insist on change, but never too quickly.

This is important to remember because your friends will be your biggest source of doubt in your transformation. They might mean well, but understand, that intent comes from a desire to see normalcy, not your best interest. The first time an old girl-friend you had a thing for calls the new you an “asshole”, it’s kind of a shock to the system. There’s always this stab at the old you who wants to set things rights, but you have to resist this impulse to take offense. It’s really hard to say “yeah, I am an asshole” as a point of pride when your whole prior life’s learning taught you not to offend others and particularly not girls you ever wanted to fuck. It’s counterintuitive to the beta in you. As sadistic as it sounds, you’ll be more consistently rewarded for your capacity to indirectly offend the women you want to get with, and the internal conflict this creates between the beta you and the burgeoning alpha you is the hardest part to reconcile. This is where most guys fail in transitioning, and this is primarily due to an unpracticed ability to keep their emotions in check.

Aesthetics vs. Social Robots

As I’ve stated before, men are the True Romantics, women are simply the vehicles for that rarely appreciated romanticism. One of the biggest gripes the post-sexual revolution feminization had with men was some prepackaged notion that men weren’t in touch with their feminine sides. We were “out of touch with our feelings”. God curse Carl Jung’s rotten corpse to hell for ever convincing popular culture that each sex had equal, but unexpressed, measures of feminine and masculine energies. Western culture has been so saturated with Jungian theory that we don’t recognize it as such. It’s become normalized to believe an idealized goal-state is a genderless, androgynous society.

Rants aside, up until the last 50 years, it has in fact been men who’ve been the sex with the most self-control regarding emotion. It’s been just this reservation that’s made Men more endearing to women. Either as enigmatic poets and artists to figure out, or as natural stoics who’s every measured expression of emotion is an event unto it’s self,  it’s been Men’s classic reservation of emotional inaccessiblity  that’s made women more interested in Men. In contemporary society, men are encouraged to express themselves as a primary way to accessing a woman’s intimacy – essentially killing any sense of mystery to unravel with full disclosure. Brain function gender differences aside, It would be my guess that men socially evolved a more reserved expression of emotion, not due to some juvenile insecurity, but rather because it so consistently worked in generating interest in women.

Not so in this age. At every instance boys and men are conditioned to think that emotional expression is a means to solving problems. Boys don’t cry, was instituted with a purpose. Unguarded easily expressed emotion is a feminine trait. It’s not that men should become social robots, deadened to all but the most intense emotion; it’s just become normalized to cheapen that expression by overuse. Displays of a Man’s emotions should be rarely given devine gifts  for women who are generally lacking in true appreciation as it is.

Unlearn what you have learned

It’s very difficult for a beta man, conditioned for so long to be emotionally available, to turn these emotions off. The good news is I’m not suggesting you do, I am suggesting you unlearn your reasons for developing emotional sentiments so easily. It’s easy to go emotionally cold as a result of being burned, it’s a much taller order to tamp that emotionality back into check when you’re really feeling good about it. Our emotions make us human and humane. It’s important to embrace that, but equally important to see how easily it’s used against you. You need to unlearn the reasons why you’re so easily emotional. Maybe it’s abandonment issues, maybe it’s a more deliberate conditioning in your upbringing.

Remember in high school, in drivers ed class, when you were taught to turn into a skid rather than turn with the skid? When we’re driving and we find ourselves in a skid our natural impulse is to slam on the the breaks and/or, worse still, to turn with the skid. Everything in our self-preservation instincts tells us to do this, but all it does is aggravate an already precarious situation. However, when we’re taught, and we practice, not hitting the brakes and not turning into the skid, often enough we make this our default reaction and we find that the car rights itself, we avoid disaster and continue safely on down the road.

You have to unlearn the old behaviors and condition new ones in order to right your course. This takes practice and repetition – even in the face of conditions that you would impulsively think would need to be reacted to otherwise.There is no substitute for perseverance.

Changing your mind about yourself is the first step. This is actually the most difficult step for guys because most don’t want to believe they need to internalize a new way of thinking about themselves. Lethargy, for the most part, can be the primary reason most guys don’t want to change. It’s far easier to create rationales for oneself as to why they are happy in their present condition than it is to critically confront and initiate real change.

Unfortunately, I can’t give you some standardized program to help you magically turn into the Man you hope to be. Only you can determine that course, but I will say this, the Man you wish to become requires you to take action. The goal posts for your own satisfaction will always keep moving away from you, and that’s a good thing. This is what inspires us to grow and mature and develop a capacity to overcome challenges. However, all this requires action on your part.

You can pore through all of the advice and sift out the wisdom from this blog and the community at large, but none of it will amount to anything for you if you wont act. I can’t begin to recall all of the times I’ve counseled young guys, giving them all manner of advice and encouraging them to put it into practice, only to have them constantly bemoan that they can’t find the motivation. More often than not it takes some traumatic experience or they have to be reduced to having nothing left to lose before they’ll really have the fire lit under their asses to become more than they are.

I don’t consider myself a motivational speaker, but at some point you have to cross the abyss and change your mind about yourself.