The Red Pill Balance

Before you move on to reading today’s post, please take 14 minutes and listen to Niko Choski’s latest here Man:the being made of stone, it’ll be relevant in the second half of this post.

Niko is MGTOW, and from what I know is fairly highly regarded in that sphere. I did an interview with him back in August and since then have become a semi-regular listener of his youtube channel. We’ve occasionally bounced ideas off one another since the interview and I hold Niko in the highest respect for his intellectual approach and insights.

So it’s with that in mind that I’m going to use his latest offering here as a contrast to what I’m going into today.

Reader Divided Line stopped me in my writing tracks on another post with this comment from the last post thread. Not the least of which because I’d just finished listening to Niko’s audio here, but also because it was an interesting juxtaposition to what I’d planned to go into today. I’m going to quote Divided Line here and riff a bit as I go (emphasis mine):

@reloadedbeats

A lot of what you’ve said here echos my own thinking to such a degree that it’s as if you read my mind. I agree 100%.

What you’re talking about here, I think, is the inherent value of goodness or justice. I think Plato took up this question in the Republic and nailed it better than most.

In the beginning of the dialogue the question is “what is justice?” But it quickly transforms into “what is the value of justice?” In other words, if goodness wins us no reward, then what value does it have? Is it valuable in its own right? Would it have value even if it cost us something, or indeed cost us everything?

Glaucon puts the question like this (paraphrasing): “What if the perfectly just man is seen by everyone as perfectly unjust, while the perfectly unjust man is seen as perfectly just?” He then puts it on Socrates to effectively prove that, even in this scenario, justice would be worth it.

We could gender this question and simply ask “what if the perfectly good man is seen as perfectly unattractive to women, while the perfectly evil man is seen as perfectly attractive?”

Is goodness worth it even if it isn’t profitable sexually or socially? It’s the same question.

Why be a ‘good’ man when what we consider good by both personal and social measures isn’t rewarded (or only grudgingly rewarded), while what we consider ‘bad’ is what is enthusiastically rewarded with women’s genuine desire and intimacy? In other words, Hypergamy doesn’t care about what men consider good or bad.

It seems like this is the predicament red pill awareness puts us in when we have to consider the value of our formerly beta self. What makes the beta the beta is his weakness, of course, but it is simultaneously his civility. We’re not defective people for wanting or even needing the possibility love, empathy, truth, friendship, kindness, and – above all else – trust in our lives. It just makes us human. If we project our deeply rooted desires for these things and treat others the way we want to be treated, wouldn’t society be better off for it? And isn’t this what the supplicating, loyal beta does when latches on to a woman he believes to the “the One?”

No Quarter Given

In my post (and book chapter) Of Love and War I quote a reader who summed up this want for relief from men’s inherent Burden of Performance:

We want to relax. We want to be open and honest. We want to have a safe haven in which struggle has no place, where we gain strength and rest instead of having it pulled from us. We want to stop being on guard all the time, and have a chance to simply be with someone who can understand our basic humanity without begrudging it. To stop fighting, to stop playing the game, just for a while.

We want to, so badly.

If we do, we soon are no longer able to

When I consider Niko’s perspective alongside this I begin to see a stark paradox; mens’ want for a relief or a respite from that performance burden tends to be their undoing. I wont get too deep into this, but one reason I see the MGTOW sphere being so seductive is the hopeful promise of that same relief. Simply give up. Refuse to play along and reject the burden altogether. Japan’s herbivorous men crisis is a graphic example of the long term effects of this.

However, this is the same mistake men make in their Blue Pill, Beta conditioning. They believe that if they meet the right girl, if they align correctly with that special ONE, then they too can give up and not worry about their performance burden – or relax and only make the base effort necessary to keep his ONE happy.

The Beta buys the advertising that his Blue Pill conditioning has presented to him for a lifetime. Find the right girl who accepts you independent of your performance, and you can let down your guard, be vulnerable, forget any notion of Red Pill truths because your girl is a special specimen who places no conditions on her love, empathy, intimate acceptance or genuine desire for you.

And this is also very seductive and inuring for the Beta who’s been conditioned to believe there can realistically be a respite from his burden.

That’s how it seemed to work in my own life. Looking back on it, I was so grateful to my ex, who was easily the most attractive girl I’d ever been with, that I would have taken a bullet for her. I didn’t want anybody else. I didn’t even think about other girls – the first time that had ever happened to me in a relationship. I can remember thinking that even if she gained weight, lost her looks, and got old, I’d still want her. I would have “loved” her forever. I was good and ready to cash in my chips, exit the SMV, and retire. I would have arranged my whole life around making her happy and would have felt lucky to have had the privilege.

At the time, all of that felt noble and brave, but looking back on it, it just seems pathetic and pathological, the result of my neediness. But the thing is, what if she had reciprocated it? Wouldn’t it have been a relationship worth having? Had she reciprocated it – if any woman was capable of reciprocating that – it wouldn’t have been Disney movie bullshit, but the real thing. We’re supposed to think such a thing is possible and that’s what keeps us playing along. The Red Pill is really about recognizing its impossibility, I think. There is no possible equity. To be sure, a woman can be loyal and dedicated to you, in theory, but she’ll only give that loyalty to the guy who needs it least. It’s like a cruel, cosmic joke.

Such as it is, that girl lied to me, ran for the hills the moment I showed weakness and needed her the most, and cheated on me. Big surprise, right? With a red pill awareness now I can see how predictable that result was, but at the time I was blindsided by it. I never saw it coming. I couldn’t understand how she could do such a thing when I’d invested so much in her, when I was so willing to give her all the things I’d always wanted most. I assumed she wanted the same things – men and women are the same, right? That’s what the egalitarians tell us. I couldn’t understand how those things could be so valueless to her that she would just throw it all away like that. She didn’t value them at all.

On occasion I’ve suggested that men watch the movie Blue Valentine. You can check out the plot summary on the IMDB link there, but you really need to watch the movie (on Netflix) to appreciate what I’m going to relate here. The main character suffers from the same romantic idealism and want for a perfected, mutually shared concept of love between himself and the single mother he eventually marries.

It follows along the same familiar theme of Alpha while single / Beta after marriage that most men experience in what they believe is their lot. More often than not the Alpha they believed their wives or LTR girlfriends perceived they were was really just a guy who’d do for their needs of whatever phase of maturity she found herself in.

By itself this would be enough for me to endorse the movie, but the story teaches a much more valuable lesson. What Dean (Ryan Gosling) represents is a man who idealistically buys the Blue Pill promise that men and women share a mutual love concept, independent of what their sexual strategies and innate dispositions prompt them to. Because of this misbelief Dean gives up on the burden of his performance. He drops his ambitions and relaxes with his ONE girl, contenting himself in mediocrity, low ambitions and his idealistic belief in a woman sharing and sustaining his romanticized Blue Pill love ideal – performancelessness.

He relaxes, lets his guard down and becomes the vulnerable man he was taught since birth that women would not only desire, but require for their false, performanceless notions of mutual intimacy. The men of this sphere who don’t find themselves divorced from their progressively bored wives are often the ones who trade their ambitions and passions for a life of mediocrity and routine,…so long as the security blanket of what they believe is a sustainable, passable semblance of that love (but not desire) exists in their wives or girlfriends.

Their burden of performance is sedated so long as their women are reasonably comfortable or sedate themselves. That false sense of contentment is only temporary and leads to their own ruin or decay.

No Quarter Expected

I’ve since watched something similar happen to a friend not once but twice. It’s textbook, standard shit. AWALT.

Cultivating these unrequited beta aspects of somebody’s character, if we did it on a mass scale, creates a society worth living in. It’s a civilized society where these things are most possible and it’s a truly worthwhile relationship where both parties regard each other this way and can full expect it to be reciprocated. It requires faith and trust, but we all know better. Our survival depends on knowing better, post sexual revolution. Women were never worthy of such trust and they’re entirely incapable of it. They were never capable of it. We were just supposed to think they were and cultivate the better aspects of our natures in order to be worthy of them.

The ugly truth of it is that women were never worthy of us.

Women’s sexuality doesn’t reward justice or goodness – if it did, reciprocity would be the norm and none of us would be confused about relational equity. Women reward not goodness, but strength. And strength is amoral, meaning it can be either just or unjust, good or bad. The guy with strength can either be the villain or the hero – it makes no difference to women. They can’t tell the difference and in truth don’t care anyway.

There is a set of the Red Pill that subscribe to what I’d call a ‘scorched earth‘ policy. It’s very difficult to reconcile the opportunistic basis of women’s Hypergamous natures with men’s hopeful, idealistic want for a love that’s independent from their performance burden. So the idea is again one of giving up. They say fuck it, women only respond to the most base selfishly individualistic, socio or psychopathic of men, so the personality they adopt is one that hammers his idealism flat and exaggerates his ‘Dark Triad‘ traits beyond all believability.

It’s almost a vengeful embrace of the most painful truths Red Pill awareness presents to us, and again I see why the scorched earth PUA attitude would seem attractive. Women do in fact observably and predictably reward assholes and excessively dominant Alpha men with genuine desire and sexual enthusiasm.

Agreeableness and humility in men has been associated with a negative predictor of sex partners.

The problem inherent in applying reciprocal solutions to gender relations is the belief that those relations are in any way improved by an equilibrium between both sexes interests. Solution: turn hard toward the asshole energy. Men understand the rules of engagement with women and they know Game well enough to capitalize on it so why not capitalize on that mastery of it?

The dangers of this are twofold. First, it lacks real sustainability and eventually becomes a more sexualized version of MGTOW. Secondly, “accidents” happen. MGTOWs will warn us that any interaction with a woman bears a risk of sexual harassment or false rape claims, but for the scorched earth guy a planned unplanned pregnancy on the part of a woman attempting to lock down her Alpha is far more likely to be his long term downfall. Emotional and provisioning liabilities for a child tends to pour cold water on the scorched earth guy.

It wouldn’t be inaccurate to say that women are philosophically, spiritually, and morally stunted. They have a limited capacity for adherence to higher ideals and this is why they don’t know or care what actual justice or goodness is. Like Schopenhauer said, they “mistake knowledge for its appearance.”

It took me a long time to be able to accept this. That is women’s true inferiority – and women are profoundly inferior. And I take no pleasure in recognizing that, as if I’m somehow touting the superiority of team men. It’s awful, in fact. Dealing with it is the ultimate burden of performance for us as individual men, but also as a society. At some point we’re simply going to have to confront women’s moral inferiority. If we look at our institutions, the very same that are crumbling now all around us, we can see that previous generations of men already figured this out. We just forgot what they knew.

So what’s the answer? Is justice valuable for its own sake? All of us would probably on some level want to be able to say yes and argue the case, but I don’t know if I can do so convincingly.

I’m with you on this, part of me thinks “Fuck this. It can’t be like this.” But it is. I wish I had the answer.

Niko attempts to redress the assumption that men feel some necessity to be someone they really aren’t. In Vulnerability I go into how the Feminine Imperative is only too willing to exploit this self-doubt by labeling men as existential posers and their conventional masculinity is a ‘mask’ – a false charade – they put on to hide the real vulnerability that lies beneath.

Unfortunately many men accept this as gospel. It’s part of their Blue Pill upbringing and is an essential aspect of their feminine ‘sensitivity training’ and gender loathing conditioning. When masculinity is only ever a mask men wear the only thing real about them is what real women tell them it should be.

What we don’t consider is the legitimacy of our need for strength, independence, stoicism, and yes, emotional restraint. That need to be bulwark against women’s emotionality, that need to wear psychological armor against the Red Pill realities of women’s visceral natures is legitimate and necessary. If a man’s vulnerability is ever it’s because his display of it is so uncharacteristic of his normal impenetrability. The woman’s demeanor, and the narrator’s voice, in the last post’s Campbell’s soup commercial is an example of the weak, vulnerability women expect from lesser child-men – and a commensurate expectation of him to just get that he needs to be strong.

That’s the inconsistency in women’s Hypergamous nature and the narrative of the Feminine Imperative’s messaging. Be sweet, open, vulnerable; it’s OK to cry, ask for help, be sick and weakened, we’re all equal and empathetic – but, Man Up, “what, you need your mommy?”, assert yourself, the asshole is sexier than you, where’s your self-discipline? – but, your masculine identity is a mask you wear to hide the real you,……

I play many roles in the male life I lead today, and I’ve played many others in my past. I’m Rollo Tomassi in the manosphere, I’m a father to my daughter, a husband and lover to my wife, a brilliant artist and pragmatic builder of brands in my job, an adventure seeker when I’m on my snowmobile and a quiet contemplator of life and God when I’m fishing. All of those roles and more are as legitimate as I choose to make them. Do I have moments of uncertainty? Do I waiver in my resolve sometimes? Of course, but I don’t let that define me because I know there is no real strength in relating that.

The Red Pill Balance

Red Pill awareness is both a blessing and a curse. The trick is balancing your Red Pill expectations with your previous Blue Pill idealism. It’s not a sin for you to want for an idealistic reality – that’s what sets us apart from women’s opportunism. You do yourself no favors in killing you idealistic, creative sense of wonderment of what could be. The trick is acknowledging that aspect of your male self.

KFG had a comment to this point:

If men did not hold heroism as a higher ideal, we wouldn’t be here.
If women did not hold survival as a higher ideal, we wouldn’t be here.

This was precisely the dynamic I was referring to when I wrote Idealism.

Men’s idealism and idealistic concepts of love are the natural counterbalance to women’s pragmatic, Hypergamously rooted opportunism and opportunistic concepts of love and vice versa. Those differing concepts can be applied very unjustly and very cruelly, or very judiciously and honorably, but they are the reality of our existence.

Red Pill awareness isn’t just about understanding women’s innate natures and behaviors, it’s also understanding your own male nature and learning how it fits in to that new awareness and living in a new paradigm. Is something like justice valuable for its own sake? I’d say so, but that concept of justice must be tempered (or enforced) in a Red Pill understanding of what to expect from women and men. Red Pill awareness doesn’t mean we should abandon our idealism or higher order aspirations, and it certainly doesn’t mean we should just accept our lot in women’s social frame because of it. It does mean we need to balance that idealism in as pragmatic a way with the realities of what the Red Pill shows us.