The Second Set of Books

One of the cornerstones of red pill truth is in men coming to terms with what amounts to (in most cases) half a lifetime of feminine conditioning. It’s interesting to consider that there was a time (pre-sexual revolution) when a man wasn’t in someway socialized and acculturated in his upbringing to give deference to the feminine or to become more feminine-identifying. There are plenty of other manosphere bloggers who’ll run down in detail all of the many ways boys are now raised and educated to be what a feminine-primary world would like them to be, but at the heart of it is a presumption that boys should be raised and conditioned to be more like girls; conditioned from their earliest memories to be better providers for what women believe they will eventually want them to be as adult ‘men’.

For men who’ve become aware of this conditioning through some trauma or personal crisis that prompted him to seek answers for his condition, we call this period our blue pill days. I think it’s important to make a distinction about this time – whether or not a man is Alpha or Beta doesn’t necessarily exclude him from the consequences of a blue pill conditioning. That isn’t to say that a more natural Alpha Man can’t see the world in a red pill perspective by his own means, but rather that his feminine-primary upbringing doesn’t necessarily make a man Alpha or Beta.

The Blue Pill Alpha

I’m making this distinction because there is school of thought that being blue pill (unaware of one’s conditioning) necessitates him being more Beta. To be sure, feminine-primary conditioning would raise a boy into a more feminine-pliable man – ready to serve as the good Beta provider when a woman’s SMV declines and she’s less able to compete with her younger sexual competitors.

However, there exist more Alpha Men also conditioned to be servants of the Feminine Imperative. These men make for some of the most self-evincing White Knights you’ll ever meet and are usually the first men to “defend the honor” of the feminine and women for whom they lack a real awareness of. Binary absolutism and an upbringing steeped in feminization makes for a potent sense of self-righteousness. Blue pill Alphas live for the opportunity to defend everything their conditioning has taught them. To the blue pill Alpha all women are victims by default, all women share a common historic suffrage and any man (his sexual competitors) critical of the feminine are simply an opportunity to prove his worth to any woman in earshot who might at all find his zealousness attractive.

The Second Set of Books

On June 15th, 2011, Thomas Ball set himself on fire in front of Cheshire Superior Court in New Hampshire. While I strongly disagree with his decision to self-immolate, I understand his sentiment. In last week’s Possession, Living Tree attempted to call me to the carpet about how a man might come to the conclusion of suicide or murder once he’d become confronted with a total loss of all his personal and emotional investment in life:

But Rollo, you just justified murder as “logical”, by illustrating that insecurity is the prime motivator for this man’s life (and many others, I’d imagine). The decision may have be understandable in an empathetic sense, and he might have seen it as logical at the time, but there is nothing logical about it. You are making extreme beta-ism seem more and more like a mental disorder.

Just for the record, I’d argue that ONEitis, however extreme, is in fact a mental disorder.

I haven’t justified anything, murder or suicide, I’ve simply outlined the deductive process men use when confronting the actualized loss of their most important investment (or perceptually so) in life. They are convinced and conditioned to believe that women are playing by a set of rules and will honor the terms of those rules, only to find that after ego-investing themselves for a lifetime in the correctness and appropriateness of those rules does he discover in cruel and harsh terms that women are playing by another set of rules and wonder at how stupid he could be to have ever believed in the rules he was conditioned to expect everyone would abide by.

Suicide or murder is certainly a deductive and pragmatic end for some men, but by no means is it justified. Thomas Ball, for all of his due diligence in uncovering the ugly processes of the American divorce industry, was far more useful alive than dead in some symbolic suicide. He wasn’t the martyr he probably expected he’d be, he’s just a footnote.

For all of that, Thomas Ball and his last message to humanity serves as an excellent illustration of a man coming to terms with his own conditioning. In his message Ball makes a very important observation about his legal ordeals. He comes to understand that there are two sets of books rather than the one he’d been lead to believe that everyone understood as ‘the rules’ everyone should play by.

The confusion you have with them is you both are using different sets of books. You are using the old First Set of Books- the Constitution, the general laws or statutes and the court ruling sometime call Common Law. They are using the newer Second Set of Books. That is the collection of the policy, procedures and protocols. Once you know what set of books everyone is using, then everything they do looks logical and upright.

Ball was of course making a political statement in his account of going through the legal system and the cruel education he got in the process, but when men transition from their comfortable blue pill perspective into the harsh reality that the red pill represents, the experience is a lot like Ball discovering that the set of books (the set of rules) he’d believed everyone was using wasn’t so. Likewise, men who’ve been conditioned since birth to believe that women were using a common set of rules – a set where certain expectations and mutual exchange were understood – were in fact using their own set. Furthermore these men ‘just didn’t get it’ that they should’ve known all along that women, as well as men’s feminization conditioning, were founded in a second set of books.

In and of itself, this is a difficult lesson for young men to learn and disabuse themselves of before they’ve invested their most productive years into what their blue pill conditioning has convinced them they can expect from life and women. However, when a mature man, who’s based the better part of his life and invested his future into the hope that the first set of books is actually legitimate set is disenfranchised by the second set of books, by the actual set of rules he’s been playing with, that’s when all of the equity he believed he’d established under the first set of books counts for nothing. Literally his life (up to that point) counted for nothing.

When faced with the prospect of rebuilding himself after living so long under false pretenses, after having all he believed he was building turn up to be a lifetime of wasted effort, he’s faced with two real options. Recreate himself or destroy himself. Needless to say suicide statistics among men are a strong indication that the majority of men (Betas) simply don’t have the personal strength to recreate themselves. Thomas Ball didn’t.

There’s usually a lot of disillusionment that comes with making the transition to Red Pill awareness. I’ve written more than a few posts about the stages of grief and acceptance that come along with that transition. Guy’s get upset that what they now see was really there all along, but it’s not so much the harshness of seeing red pill dynamics in women or a feminized society play out with such predictability, it’s the loss of investment that cause the real sense of nihilism. When I wrote Anger Management, the overarching reason most men experienced what they called a righteous anger, wasn’t at how the second set of books had been dictating their lives for so long, but rather it was anger at having invested so much of themselves in the first set of books and losing that very long term investment.

The good news is you can rebuild yourself. A lot gets written about how nihilistic the red pill is, but this is for a lack of understanding that you can recreate yourself for the positive with the knowledge of both sets of rules. One common thread I see come up often on the Red Pill Reddit forum is how Game-awareness has completely destroyed a guy’s world view. I get it, I realize it’s a hard realization, but their depression is only for a lack of realizing that they can become even better in this new understanding than they were in their blue pill ignorance.