Denial

In most popular stories Betas may be protagonists, but they’re never really heros. Every movie, that I can remember, that has a beta as a protagonist has been a comedy; beta males are good for laughing at – no one actually admires them.

The same situation exists with Betas/AFCs you know. If you tell them the truth- they’ll say you hate women, or have dated the wrong types, or whatever else they can come up with to protect the mental model underwhich they operate. They’re invested in that mental model and they’re happy with it; to challenge it is to, almost literally, destory the world they live in. Not only will how they view the world be destroyed, but how they view themselves will be destroyed as well.

Ego Investments and Denial

The psychological term for this is called ‘ego-investment’. I use this term a lot on my blog so I thought it deserved a bit of explanation.

When a person internalizes a mental schema (see belief) so thouroughly and has become conditioned to it for so long, it becomes an integral part of their personality. So to attack the belief is to, literally, attack the person. This is why we see such polarization and violent reaction to people’s political, religious, inter-social/inter-sexual, etc. beliefs – they perceive it as a personal attack, even when presented with irrefutable evidence that challenges the assertions of their belief.

One common frustration that the Game-aware express is how dificult it is to open an AFCs eyes as to why he’s not hooking up, why he’s not getting dates (or 2nd dates if he is), why he’s constantly getting LJBF rejections, etc., and the flaws in what is really ego-investments and conditioned internalizations. As I’m fond of saying, unplugging chumps from the Matrix is dirty work, and this is made all the more difficult when a person is in a catagorical state of denial.

People resort to denial when recognizing that the truth would destroy something they hold dear. 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.

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 hits but remain largely intact; if you’re beset by self-doubt (a hallmark of self-righteous AFC 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.

Therefore we see AFCs tenaciously cling to a moralistic sense of purpose in their methods which is only reinforced by popular culture in our media, our music, eHarmony, our religion, etc. What they fail to realized, and what becomes cemented for them in denial, is that what they believe are their own, indigenous, self-righteously correct beliefs were designed for them by a fem-centric influence.