People are People

One of the most predictably common responses I get when I read comments on other blogs or forums linking back to one of my own articles goes something like this:

“He’s a great writer, but it’s all such bullshit because people are people, everyone is different. We’re all individuals, there is no universal ‘human nature’.”

I will admit there was once a time when I would’ve had the same response. An integral part of our feminized, equalist conditioning teaches us to reject propositions of ‘human nature’ – really even venturing to guess about it – in favor of a blank slate philosophy. Equalism, the religion of feminism, cannot exist in a world predicated upon even a margin of common influence determined by our biology’s, our evolved psychology, or even evidence of the mechanics which account for that collective influence on human beings.

It’s not that most people subscribing to this wont admit to extrinsic influences on the individual when pressed, it’s just that they believe that freewill, conscious effort and determined conviction will lift the individual above their biological limitations and therefore the greater collective. And, in focussed concentration, on a by-person basis they’d probably be right. What they don’t account for is acknowledging the subconscious influence of extrinsic and intrinsic prompts that motivate human beings to hold those convictions in the first place. The evolutionary, innately biological limitations they wish to rise above aren’t “bugs” they’re “features”

The standard rationale fallback of the feminine mindset, NAWALT (“not all women are like that”) finds its roots in the individuated, experiential reasoning of the blank slate, “people are people” equalist reasoning. While I think that a wholesale rejection of individual personality development is an extreme, it’s merely the other side of the extreme coin compared to a wholesale rejection of environmental and biological influences on personal development – then extrapolated to social and cultural extremes. This is where the “people are individuals” mindset flourishes.

Peripheries

When I was in college I was a competitive fencer (Epée and Sabre if you must know), and it was from my fencing coach that I learned a very valuable lesson in psychology. He told me, “When you are facing your opponent, concentrate your vision directly at where his eyes would be behind his face mask. You cannot possibly track the tip of his weapon with your eyes, and neither can you focus enough attention to follow all of his body movements.”  What I learned was that when you apply focus to that central point, your peripheral vision aids your subconscious understanding of what your opponent is doing. It’s in the uniting of this gestalt, peripheral awareness and a focused awareness that makes for the best competitors.

Human beings have an amazing capacity to multi-task, but a real trained focus on multiple sources of stimuli was problematic for us in our evolutionary past. Too much constant stimuli leads to sensory overload and a breakdown in functionality, which then proves fatal if we’re distracted from reacting to a lethal threat. Thus we evolved psychological mechanisms to push less (though still) important information to the peripheries of our conscious awareness, to afford us a mental acuity on information of more importance.

An entire world goes on around us that we are only peripherally aware of, and in some senese only exists in our peripheral consciousness. For instance, at this moment you’re probably focusing your attention on this text on a computer monitor or maybe a mobile device, but in your peripheral vision you interpret and understand that there are other things in the environment with you, pictures on the wall, a cabinet, maybe a nearby printer, etc. You’re reading this text, but you know they’re there. If someone threw a ball at your head right now you’d reflexively react to it by focusing your awareness on the incoming projectile.

Our conscious awareness works much in the same way. We push less pressing information and conditional awarenesses to the peripheries of our awareness and concentrate on more pressing information until such time (if ever) that we choose to adress those issues. Sometimes we call this insight, but it’s really the focused effort of applying our consciousness to conditions, thoughts and self-acknowledgements that we have pushed to our peripheral awareness. For instance, I’m typing and concentrating on what I’m writing here, but in my peripheral awareness I know I have a meeting to attend in a few hours, and deeper than that I know I’m a 44 year old married father and how am I going to make a significant impact on the world in my next 10 years?

One of my personal, foundational theories about psychology is that people are intimately aware of their own conditions.

On some level of consciousness people understand what has influenced them, what has motivated or demotivated them. They may only be peripherally aware of those conditions, they may be more introspective of them, but they understand that those influences exist for them. For as much as a single mother may say she’s not looking for a supportive father figure for her child, she still knows, if only peripherally, the reality of her condition as a single mother. A post-Wall, childless never-married woman of 38 is intimately aware of her condition and the reality that comes from that.

This isn’t to say that people are all-knowing about what creates these conditions, but it is to say that we are aware of them. In fact I’d argue that for the better part most people are unaware of the origins of their conditions until someone or something with a broader perspective can bring them into an awareness of their origins, but they realize the conditions that contribute to their present state.

The Devil Biology Made Me Do It

A large part of the red pill perspective leans on evolutionary psychology. Of course evo-psych isn’t the only factor in red pill awareness, but for the vast majority of Game deniers (people unaware of the origins of their conditions) this poses a problem of convenience. When the revelations of evo-psych agree with our comfortable social models and ego-investments we’re all too happy to embrace the science. But when the science shows us the more uncomfortable truths about evolved human nature, the reaction is to either question the ‘science’ or blame the moral conviction, resolve and character of the person/people expressing that aspect of human nature.

Presently we have an active debate on SoSuave all sparked by a woman decrying the evils of ‘men behaving badly’ (i.e. not in accordance with the feminine imperative), and her presumption that those men find a convenient absolution for that behavior in blaming how nature has made men ‘the way they are.’ This of course is the inconvenient flip side to the War Brides phenomenon, but the basis of her argument is rooted blank slate individuated equalism.

Hypergamy (an evolved species-survival schema) doesn’t care about personal conviction, freewill or definitions of moral behavior, it just is.  So in the interests of perpetuating the best interests of one sex (and by extension the entire species) social and cultural norms fluidly evolve around it to accommodate what’s really an uncomfortable aspect of our humanity. Can Hypergamy be controlled? Can men’s sexual impulses be tempered? Of course, but not without the effort of freewill, conviction and social structures. I know of precious few men who’ve blamed their infidelity or sexual impulsivity solely upon their biological makeup. With the exception of the more natural Alphas, more often than not it was a carefully calculated (Game) and coordinated event.

People don’t like the idea of not being in control of their lives and themselves, and they certainly wont tolerate the uncontrollable extrinsic reasons for other’s behaviors. We like the idea of personal responsibility, because it implies order in an otherwise chaotic world. In fact, due to this, people are far more likely to attribute their failings to their own personal decisions. It may be a confession of a lack of their own control, but it still implies that they once had that same control to lose and can again regain it.

I’ve written in the past that nature trumps conviction, and I still hold to that estimation. People have called me to the carpet over that assertion, but I don’t think they really understand what I mean by it. The nature is the environment in which we live in, the nature is the condition. Conviction, freewill or even notions of morality cannot exist if ‘nature’ isn’t the dominant, operative environment we exist in. It’s not that we can’t rise above our natures, it’s that we should have to in the first place.