While I’d had another post on deck for today I simply couldn’t let Divided Line’s most recent comment go unanswered. I was going to riff on his comment in that thread, but it occurred to me that his concerns would be educational for many new readers and what I tell him here might give even my regulars something new to think about.
This is the part I can’t get. I can look back and see how my beta behaviors made it impossible for my ex to respect and love me. I see those behaviors for what they are, but what I can’t do is internalize a competing value system, or a competing idealism, one which would allow me to judge myself in the way you’re judging yourself here. I still get stuck on “but she *should* have loved me for those behaviors,” even if I understand on an intellectual level why she didn’t. Even if I game myself into believing I feel differently about it, I know that on some level, I’m still going to be hoping that every girl I get involved with will prove to be capable of fulfilling that blue pill idealism. I fully expect to just fall back into oneitis and needy supplicating behaviors whenever I meet somebody. they just creep up on you without you even realizing it.
When I go into the intricacies of men’s innate sense of idealism this is what I mean. In a Blue Pill context there will always be an expectation of some possibility of an ideal state with a woman. The problem here isn’t men’s idealism, but rather the conditioning of it to expect an idealized Blue Pill outcome.
From a strictly deductive standpoint DL’s ex should have loved him for the idealized, pro-social, pro-family, pro-parental investment, pro-providership and pro-egalitarian that were some of the most integral parts of his life’s Blue Pill conditioning.
The reality is that he’d been convinced of a Blue Pill social order founded on an Old Set of Books.
Let’s get real about it. It’s not like women have good reason to behave the way they do. Whatever evo-psych explanation we can come with, it doesn’t provide them with an excuse. They’re not stewards of the gene pool, there is no greater good that is served by hypergamy. In a modern context it’s a liability, not an asset. At the limbic level they’re screening for traits that would have been advantageous 20,000 years ago, not in a modern industrial or post industrial society. Should I try to convince myself otherwise and judge myself according to my evolutionary fitness or something? It seems absurd.
When I wrote Our Sisters’ Keeper I delved into the question of whether it could be expected of women to take responsibility for their own decisions, moral or otherwise. It generally comes down to a question of the seeming determinism that Hypergamy represents, and the deductive male-logic that, idealistically, expects women to take personal responsibility for the consequences of their actions.
In this respect Hypergamy doesn’t provide women with an excuse for the consequences, but the question of personal responsibility still doesn’t change the the underlying motivators, incentives and influences that Hypergamy exerts over women. The devil biology made me do it is the same alibi for Hypergamy as it is for men’s Selfish Gene.
While the software may change with the environment, our firmware and our hardware are still very much based in the evolution that benefitted our prehistoric predecessors. What measure you personally choose to judge yourself by is up to you, but again, the hardware and the firmware doesn’t change.
Under our modern social environment women have an unprecedented, virtually unilateral, stewardship of the gene pool. So much so in fact that women’s sexual selection strategy, Hypergamy and feminine social primacy are enforced by law and ensaturated into our social fabric. Whether this is for ‘the greater good’ or not all depends on who’s agenda defines what ‘good’ is.
For a very long time men had at least some measure of being able to direct the course that the gene pool was going. Men’s influence today is only as potent as women’s legislated sexual selection will allow them.
Women aren’t dogs, they’re human beings. They’re perfectly capable of self awareness and of awareness of others. In theory they’re perfectly capable of higher order idealism – anybody who can think at an abstract level should be. Women are unaware of themselves because the bar is so low for them, because they are profoundly privileged and everything is handed to them on a silver platter, not because they’re incapable of treating men in a way that would have made the blue pill equality ideal possible.
It really just boils down to a profound form of inferiority, their unwillingness to empathize or give a shit. They don’t care because they don’t have to. It’s a fundamental hollowness at the core of their character.
You’re presuming an egalitarian inspired similarity between men and women, and once again I’ll refer you to what I proposed above; you’re expecting software to override firmware and hardware. There are simply evidential and provable physical and cognitive differences between men and women.
I believe you’re correct – women are perfectly capable of self awareness and of awareness of others. In theory they’re perfectly capable of higher order idealism – however, this is not women’s firmware directive. It is not their initial mental point of origin.
True, women can learn to be empathetic, learn to be idealistic, and yes, learn to sublimate their innate solipsism, but their capacity to learn to override their firmware doesn’t erase the root conditions they must learn and practice to override.
And yes, we’ve reached a (western) social order that prioritizes and privileges women by setting the bar very low for them, thus making this ‘learning’, or even the desire to learn, to override their neural firmware not just a challenge, but entirely unexpected of them.
The capacity fro women to realize that Blue Pill ideal is there, but what this does is pit women’s innate dispositions against what men think would be an ideal state for both sexes, and then holds women personally responsible for not ‘learning’ to override their firmware.
Dalrock has a series of posts about feminism that blames men for the failures of feminism. Feminism would work if not for uncooperative men; the same is true for Blue Pill men – Blue Pill idealism would work if not for uncooperative women. Both blame the failures of their goal-states on the other sex’s personal / social character flaws without consideration of the hindbrain, firmware that always rebels against those states.
How do you just accept that and blame yourself for being beta? I’m not saying you shouldn’t, I’m saying I want to be able to do the same thing. I just can’t access that mindset.
What was so terrible about the blue pill equalism really? We all regard it with contempt, but we’re just being pragmatic, since it’s unworkable, a cruel lie we were all fed from birth. I get all that. But in and of itself, what was so terrible about it? Had it been possible – which it is not – would the idea been worthy of such contempt? I can’t convince myself of that.
Again, men’s idealistic root note wants some kind of cooperative Blue Pill harmony to exist in a mutually shared, mutually negotiated and mutually agreed upon state between men and women. Yes, Blue Pill equalism seems very pragmatic, that’s what makes subscribing to it so seductive, and potentially so damaging for idealistic men. The Feminine Imperative figured that out a hundred thousand years ago – men are the True Romantics, and that’s been their thumbscrew for millennia.
All I did was treat my ex the way I wanted to be treated. In fact, that’s all I did in any of my relationships. And not even because I was trying to be Ghandi or live according to some conscious code, but simply because that is what came naturally. That’s what made the relationship appealing and worth investing in in the first place. Feeling that way about her cultivated a selfless aspect of myself, one that I actually *like.* I miss feeling that way. I loved her because she inspired me to treat her the way I did, or to want to treat her that way. I can look back on it and see it as beta, and if I regard women like robots running an evo-psych script, I can see that it would have been impossible for her to love and respect me, I guess. So is that what it boils down to? Thinking about women as if they are children or dumb dogs and accepting it?
There is great power in the Golden Rule. I don’t mean that from the sentimentalist, “do unto others” perspective, but rather how available you make yourself to exploitation and manipulation when adopting that mindset. There is no position more vulnerable than an expectation of equal treatment from another for like treatment from yourself. It presumes a mutually shared acknowledgement of how that other would perceive treating you as they would themselves.
The fundamental differences between men and women (idealistic vs. opportunistic love concepts) virtually ensure that a conflict will occur when you pair this expectation of equal treatment and equal appreciation with the cardinal rule of sexual strategies:
The Cardinal Rule of sexual strategies:
For one gender’s sexual strategy to succeed the other gender must compromise or abandon their own.
Men’s predilection for idealism make them the logical candidates for this compromise or abandonment of their own imperatives, however, in doing so they fall prey to self-sacrifice in the hopes of mutual appreciation, earning relational equity and all while idealistically affirming for themselves their own righteousness of that sacrifice. The more you suffer the more it shows you really care, right?
The problem then becomes one of women fundamentally lacking the capacity to appreciate the sacrifices a man must make to facilitate her own reality.
And thus we come back to the software vs. firmware conflict again.
This is what I mean when I say that women are “awful.” I don’t even have words for it. I don’t understand how I’m supposed to get past the contempt or sense of being wronged. You can tell yourself “stop being beta, bro. Don’t wish it was easier, wish you were better, etc.,” or anything you like, it doesn’t change the reality or the fact that I recognize the reality. It’s like trying to convince yourself that 2+2=5.
My idealism was co-opted to serve the FI, but what is competing idealism? Stoicism and being a badass who can take it? Beating myself up for being beta and striving for what? It’s like I’m supposed to improve myself, but I can’t see anything that I would actually regard as an improvement, just traits that would appeal to women’s hunter gatherer libido.
The first step is giving up hope on the Blue Pill ideals you’ve been conditioned to believe are desirable, much less achievable. You need to accept that Blue Pill idealism will never be achieved in a Red Pill paradigm.
The next step is to accept that you can create new hope and a new ideal founded on Red Pill awareness rather than succumbing to a nihilistic despair that’s based on the hope for Blue Pill falsehoods.
Men’s idealistic nature can either be his greatest vulnerability or the source of his greatest strength and drive. It’s the context and conditioning of that idealism that makes it a danger or a boon. Stoicism is a practical measuring of that idealism based on self-knowledge and a truthful understanding of the state in which a man lives (Red Pill awareness).
Why are we so much more idealistic and imaginative in our youth? Because we have very little life experience with which to measure that idealism against. This is exactly why the Feminine Imperative must condition men from an early age – to direct that idealism to its own Blue Pill ends before a man learns enough about his reality to reject the imperatives’ ends in favor of his own.
And that is why undiluted, uncompromised Red Pill awareness being widely available is a threat to the Feminine Imperative.