Hear Me Now, Believe Me Later

One of the most common lamentations I read in the manosphere usually goes something like this,…

“Where the hell was all this info and wisdom when I was single? I so wish I’d discovered the manosphere / red pill before I proposed / had kids / got divorced / got burned by listening to what my girlfriend said / was younger,..etc. etc.”

It’s even more of a shame because so often it’s guys in what should be the prime of their SMV who relate this. I wish I had a better response than “better late than never.”

Blunt Force Trauma

Unplugging is difficult enough in and of itself, but realizing and accepting that your previous mindset might not be entirely accurate is a hard conversation to have with yourself. It’s unfortunate that experience teaches harsh, but teaches best. However, I’ve found it much healthier to accept that, like the majority of  men, we don’t want to come to terms with  our faults and inaccuracies in mindset until we’re shaken awake by a trauma sufficient enough to break us down.

Religion has long realized that the best opportunity for conversion is when a person is at a low point in their life. Depending upon the intentions of the person doing the converting this can be a good or a bad thing, but what they’re seizing upon is a point at which we’re the most receptive to influence because we’re earnestly reconsidering our beliefs in light of some failure or tragedy. Perhaps unfortunately, it’s a state of the human condition that we learn better from our failures than our successes.

This is due to painful experiences making a more profound impact on our psyche’s and memories than pleasurable ones. While the birth of my child and my wedding day were pleasurable, benchmark memories, I learned less from them than when I finally tore myself away from the neurotic BPD woman I’d been a voluntary prisoner of for years. It’s been written into our brains to learn from pain. It was a selected-for survival trait that corrected us when we were repeatedly making the same fatal errors. The things that are important to us as evolving beings are associated with what we most vividly remember.

Patience

So, it’s with this in mind that I came to learn to have patience with men who were diametrically opposed to what I offer as positively masculine enlightenment here. Over the years on the SoSuave forum I gradually made friends of formerly hostile opponents for no other reason than patiently awaiting their having an experience that validated some principle  or behavior I was trying to relate to them. Former critics (JOPHIL, R.I.P.) became fantastic friends once they’d experienced first hand the dynamic I was describing. All it took was a bit of patience, and a consistent, cogent explanation of idea.

I’ve stated in the past that unplugging chumps from the Matrix is dirty work, akin to triage; save the ones you can and read last rites to the terminal. However it’s equally important not to casually NEXT a guy that could be unplugged once he’s been made brutally aware of the system that’s keeping him trapped. Often enough it’s his lack of traumatic experience combined with an extensive conditioning that’s holding him back from really understanding a Game-aware perspective. He’s not an asshole, he simply hasn’t had the experience that would make him reconsider his perspective.

In the same respect that I feel relationships based on negotiated desire are disingenuous, I also believe that coercing someone else to see my perspective is not a valid expression of genuine desire. I cannot make a person believe what I do, I can only present my belief to them. A person, man or woman, has to come to that genuine change of their own volition. I’m not interested in a readership full of yes-men clones; there needs to be challenges in perspective for a marketplace of ideas to thrive. I encourage people to tell me I’m wrong, because if my ideas can’t weather open scrutiny then they aren’t strong enough ideas to profess.

I don’t want to unplug robots from the Matrix just to make them robots of my own perspective. I may be guilty of a tough-love approach by a well needed kick in the ass to understand the reality of what a guy may be going through in that moment, but I know that a real shift in understanding comes not from force, but from a person determining that shift for themselves. Jarring a person awake isn’t the same as attacking them personally.

So at the end of all this I want to encourage all of my Game-aware readers not to give up too readily on the guys they may think are hopeless. In fact I’d suggest that the guys you know who are the most hostile to your perspective are the ones who’ll more readily accept and understand your wanting to make them Game-aware. Their fervency in the Matrix is only a short trip to fervency in positive masculinity if you’re patient enough. All these guys are just one traumatic experience away from grasping the truth of Game.