For about the last two weeks I’ve been conferring with a good friend about a situation I’ve yet to address since becoming red pill aware.
My friend James is an interesting fellow. Now at 56, he’s had a life of ups and downs, and varied experiences. He’s travelled extensively both in his impoverished youth and now in his affluence (and relative celebrity) he still makes trips to location most people wouldn’t have on their vacation destinations list. He’s insightful, mature and what I’d call a lesser Alpha.
James has been through two tumultuous marriages – one from an idealistic phase where he pedestalized not just his young wife, but the institution of marriage itself, and one from his 30’s after not having learned his lessons in idealism. He’s been on the receiving end of the divorce industry, but thankfully he didn’t come into his money until after these were settled. He is presently on his 3rd marriage and this is the “one that stuck” for him. They compliment each other well, but considering they were in their late 40’s and he’d finally come into some marked success when they married I’m hardly surprised.
For the most part, and by my own estimation, James is a successful, well-intentioned Man – his only delusion in being still firmly entrenched in his blue pill understanding about women and the greater game that’s influenced his life thus far. He’s resisted my efforts to educate him in Game-awareness for a while now, and since he’d married a woman who complements his personality so well I didn’t see the harm in just letting him be and focus my efforts elsewhere. James has a demonstrated predilection to white knight and his somewhat Alpha attitude has made him one of the more vocal opponents I’ve had in explaining red pill truths to him or others involved in our past conversations. He has a knack for baselessly rejecting or sidestepping red pill truths that just don’t fit into his personal narrative, or he feels in someway invalidates how he’d handled the women in his past.
The Mentor
One thing James was never able to do situationally (not biologically) with his past wives was to have children. He makes the convenient declarations about how he “never wanted to be a father” most successful childless men do. Once he’d met his 3rd wife they were both at an age where kids were impractical for them. Remarkably his present wife was childless when they married and both of them didn’t want to run the risks of pregnancy at such a late stage in life. Neither did they feel any compulsion to adopt since James’ success came to him at a later stage in his maturity, however that didn’t stop him from wanting to, at least indirectly, be a father to someone.
Almost six years ago James became a mentor to a relatively impoverished boy of 12. Over those six years, he’s filled in for the father role of this boy who’s own father left his mother when he was 5. Whether it was from a sense of wanting to pass on his wisdom or an unachievable need to be a father in some respect, James admirably took Michael under his stewardship.
Over the years James played the role reasonably well considering the demands of his job and personal life. He payed for Michael’s schooling needs, encouraged him in sports, made attempts to motivate and inspire him, and gave him opportunities to experience things he would never had the chance to without his mentorship. He was certainly a great father figure for a kid who had no father.
The years went on and like most father’s James had to deal with his ‘son’s’ teenage misbehaviors. Nothing criminal occurred, but the requisite delinquency and sometimes truancy that boys will engage in was off-putting for him. In actuality Michael’s personality was a lot like James’, a lesser Alpha when he wanted to get his way (or ignore other people’s ways), but a confirmed beta when it came to deference to women. Michael has the predictable ‘promise keeper’s‘ Oedipus beliefs about his biological father, as a result of his having been raised by a single mother’s predominantly feminized influences.
The Perfect Storm
All of this investment and third hand discipline has come to a head now. James is currently dealing with a 17 (soon to be 18) year old boy who’s entered into the perfect storm phase of his life. He’s gotten himself a girlfriend, and is struggling with what to do with himself after high school ends in June. Michael has no interest in planning for a future beyond graduating from high school. He’s become increasingly disconnected with James – which is really putting James off for having invested himself in his adolescence – and essentially disregards anything James has to say about his interests in his future.
Recently James footed the bill for Michael to take the SAT and ACT exams for which he never showed up for, and this set James off. His understandable reaction was to lecture him about the necessity of a good education (something James himself only came to after ‘exploring’ on his own for the first 3-4 years after his graduation) and was met with simple ambiguous disinterest in his ‘fatherly advice’. Michael claims to have a plan, but say “college isn’t for him”.
James’ next step was to seek advice himself on how to deal with his ‘family’ crisis from other fathers he knew as well as anyone he thought might have more insight than he. He’s only been doing the father thing for six years as it is, so logically he needed some outside advice from other parents. Most predictably sided with his indignation. The kid is just ungrateful and doesn’t realize the advantage he’s been given to him from people truly invested in his future success. The tough love route was suggested and James is no longer going to be paying for certain bills he’d assumed for Michael while he was in high school.
James says it’s not a punishment, but a learning occasion to teach Michael the necessity of having a job in order to pay for things, but it’s difficult to believe coming from James who’d had high hopes for future appreciation; for doing good in some young man’s life – it’s almost a Savior Schema. Only now that expectation of a shared association of Michael’s future success is looking more like a dead end.
Revelation
About a week and a half ago James asked me for my input. I’ve been familiar with Michael and James’ commitment to being a good surrogate father with him for about 4 years now. I wasn’t sure that James really wanted to hear what I was going to tell him, because it was going to require that he listen to the red pill reason he didn’t like.
Having been raised by the feminine imperative, Michael is now making the transition into dealing with the insecurities that come as a part of that conditioning. He’s finally having sex with his first girlfriend and everything revolves around ensuring a future where he can perpetuate it. His girlfriend is one year behind him in school so his greatest ambition at this point is finding a way to guarantee they will be together once she graduates and moves on to some college of her choosing. His plan for his future is to follow along with whatever plan is her future.
Asking Michael to abandon her, in his own best interests, is to ask him to be selfish – much in the same fashion that he associates his biological father as being selfish. Michael can’t think past this because focusing on himself would be aligning himself with his real father. Beyond this, the reinforcement of semi-regular sex cements the certainy of his duty to making his future her future.
As expected, James didn’t like this revelation. He was a white knight, and to a degree so is Michael, but the point of contention was too obvious to ignore – Michael’s dependency on what the feminine imperative had conditioned into him (really both of them) was now at a loggerhead with the financial, personal and emotional investment James had committed himself to, and expected appreciation for, over the last six years.
James went into denial. He wouldn’t accept that what I’d been telling him for years was the source of his frustration with Michael. Out came the standard boilerplate platitudes, “Ah kids, they never appreciate anything you do for them! He’s just at that age. Who really knows what they want to do at 18? I didn’t.” I thought his words were ironic, not because he’d only been a parent for 6 years, but because of how similar his own experience was with Michael’s. It was almost a surrender for him. He wanted better for Michael, but that desire was conflicting with his own ego-investment in the feminine imperative.
So I find myself at an impasse here. I’m attempting to simultaneously unplug a soon to be 18 year old kid and a 56 year old man, both suffering from from the same infection. James, like I think most men do, had hopes of directing his ‘son’s’ path towards a brighter future by avoiding the pitfalls he had to endure. Only now he’s being cruelly reminded of how his own social conditioning began by re-experiencing it through Michael.
For his part Michael isn’t going to have any ambition for himself until he has nothing left to lose, including his girlfriend. He’s not going to join the military, sees no point in taking the SAT and will most likely only do just the bare minimum to sustain himself until such time that his girlfriend’s ambition supersedes his own and she moves on, or worse, he knocks her up. Even James’ framing the possibility of his girlfriend leaving him due to his lack of ambition doesn’t register for him because Michael’s feminine conditioning has ‘taught’ him that she’ll inherently appreciate his investment in her.