Tribes

I received this email some time ago, but I felt it needed some serious consideration to give the concept the justice it deserved.

Rollo — You’ve been a major help to my understanding the underlying dynamics between men and women. I’ve observed them in bits and pieces over the years but never really understood the whys behind them or how to turn them in our favor.

It seems like one mid-term focus you have is on male-male dynamics, specifically fathers and sons. But I also wonder whether you’d consider writing more about bonding and support between men and how those relationships can anchor men’s lives at a time when male relationships are regarded with skepticism by larger society. Lately it’s struck me that men tend to innately trust the men they know and distrust those they don’t (and that it’s often the reverse for women). This inclines us to believe women when they decry the “assholes” who have mistreated them in the past while women are empathetic and credulous toward women whose character they don’t know and whom they’ve never met.

Many of us out here are lacking strong male relationships, and our small social circles translate to fewer men we innately trust and more men we innately don’t. Women seem to regard male friendships as a luxury at best–we should be focusing on career, family, and her needs–while women’s friendships are seen as a lifeline in their crazy, have-it-all world. Indeed, a man discouraging his SO’s friendships is widely seen as a sign of emotional abuse, whereas the reverse is “working on the relationship.”

This strikes me as a deep but largely untapped Red Pill well and could provide essential guidance for men looking to live a proud, constructive Red Pill life however women and children might fit into it. I’d definitely welcome your insights in future entries.

Look forward to every post!

Back in February Roosh proposed (and attempted to initiate) a worldwide event that would be a sort of ‘gathering of the tribes’ with the intent of having men get together in small local gatherings to “just have a beer and talk amongst like-minded men.” My impression of the real intent of in putting this together notwithstanding, I didn’t think it was a bad idea. However, the problem this kind of ‘tribes meeting’ suffers from is that it’s entirely contrived to put unfamiliar men together for no other purpose than to “have a beer and talk.” The problem with unfamiliar men coming together simply to meet and relate is a noble goal, however, the fundamental ways men communicate naturally makes the function of this gathering seem strange to men.

Women talk, men Do.

The best male friends I have share one or more common interests with me – a sport, a hobby, music, art, fishing, lifting, golf, etc. – and the best conversations I can remember with these friends occurred while we were engaged in some particular activity or event. Even just moving a friend into his new house; it’s about accomplishing something together and in that time relating about shit. When I lived in Florida some of the best conversations I had with my studio guys were during some project we had to collaborate on for a week or two.

Women, make time with the express purpose of talking between friends. Over coffee perhaps, but the act of communication is more important than the event or activity. Even a ‘stitch-and-bitch’ is simply an organized excuse to get together and relate. For women, communication is about context. They are rewarded by how that communication makes them feel. For Men communication is about content and they are rewarded by the interchange of information and ideas.

[…]From an evolutionary perspective, it’s likely that our hunter-gatherer tribal roles had a hand in men and women’s communication differences. Men went to hunt together and practiced the coordinated actions for a cooperative goal. Bringing down a prey animal would have been a very information-crucial effort; in fact the earliest cave paintings were essentially records of a successful hunt and instructions on how to do it. Early men’s communication would necessarily have been a content driven discourse or the tribe didn’t eat.

Similarly women’s communications would’ve been during gathering efforts and childcare. It would stand to reason that due to women’s more collectivist roles they would evolve to be more intuitive, and context oriented, rather than objective oriented. A common recognition in the manosphere is women’s predisposition toward collectivism and/or a more socialist bent to thinking about resource distribution. Whereas men tend to distribute rewards and resources primarily on merit, women have a tendency to spread resources collectively irrespective of merit. Again this predisposition is likely due to how women’s ‘hard-wiring’ evolved as part of the circumstances of their tribal roles.

From this perspective it’s a fairly easy follow to see how the tendency of men to distrust unfamiliar (out-group) men might be a response to a survival threat whereas women’s implicit trust of any member of the ‘sisterhood’ would be a species-survival benefit to the sex that requires the most parental investment and mutual support.

Divide & Conquer

In our post-masculine, feminine-primary social order it doesn’t take a Red Pill Lens to observe the many examples of how the Feminine Imperative goes to great lengths to destroy the intrasexual ‘tribalism’ of men. Since the time of the Sexual Revolution the social press of equalism has attempted to force a commonly accepted unisex expectation upon men to socialize and interact among themselves as women do.

The duplicity in this striving towards “equality” is, of course, the same we find in all of the socialization efforts of egalitarian equalism; demasculinizing men in the name of equality. A recent, rather glaring, example of this social push can be found (where else?) at Harvard University where more than 200 female students demonstrated against a new policy to discourage participation in single-gender clubs at the school. You see, women were very supportive of the breaking of gender barriers when it meant that men could no longer discriminate in male-exclusive (typically male-space) organizations, but when that same equalist metric was applied to women’s exclusive organizations, then the cries were accusations of insensitivity and the banners read “Women’s Groups Keep Women Safe.”

That’s a pretty fresh incident that outlines the dynamic, but it’s important to understand the underlying intent of the “fine for me, but not for thee” duplicity here. That intent is to divide and control men’s communication by expecting them to communicate as women do, and ideally to do so on their own accord by conditioning them to accept women’s communication means as the normatively correct way to communicate. As I’ve mentioned before, the most effective social conventions are the ones in which the participants willingly take part in and willingly encourage others to believe is correct.

Tribes vs. The Sisterhood

Because men have such varied interests, passions and endeavors based on them it’s easy to see how men compartmentalize themselves into various sub-tribes. Whether it’s team sports (almost always a male-oriented endeavor), cooperative enterprises, cooperative forms of art (rock bands have almost always been male space) or just hobbies men share, it is a natural progression for men to form sub-tribes within the larger whole of conventional masculinity.

Because of men’s’ outward reaching approach to interacting with the world around him, there’s really no unitary male tribe in the same fashion that the collective ‘Sisterhood’ of women represents. One of the primary strengths of the Feminine Imperative has been its unitary tribalism among women. We can see this evidenced in how saturated the Feminine Imperative has become into mainstream society and how it’s embedded itself into what would otherwise be diametrically opposed factions among women. Political, socioeconomic and religious affiliations of women (various sub-tribes) all become secondary to the interests of ‘womankind’ when embracing the collective benefits of being women and leveraging both their victim and protected statuses.

Thus, we see no cognitive dissonance when women simultaneously embrace a hostile opposition to one faction while still retaining the benefits that faction might offer to the larger whole of the Sisterhood. The Sisterhood is unitary first and then it is broken down into sub-tribes. Family, work, interests, political / religious compartmentalizations become sublimated to fostering the collective benefits of womankind.

While I can speculatively understand the socio-evolutionary underpinnings of how this psychological dynamic came to be, I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out just how effective this unitary collectiveness has been in shaping society towards a social ideal that supports an unfettered drive towards women’s gender-coded need to optimize Hypergamy. This unitary, gender-primary tribalism has been (and is) the key to women’s unilateral social power – and even in social environments where women still suffer oppression, the Sisterhood will exercise this gender-tribalism.

Threat Assessments

Asserting any semblance of a unitary male tribalism is a direct threat to the Feminine Imperative. In The Threat I began the essay with this summation:

Nothing is more threatening yet simultaneously attractive to a woman than a man who is aware of his own value to women.

When I wrote this essay I did so from the perspective of women feeling vulnerable about interacting intimately with men who understood their own value to women and also understood how to leverage it. One of the reasons Game is so vilified, ridiculed and disqualified by the Sisterhood is because it puts this understanding into practice with women and, in theory, removes women from the optimization of Hypergamy. Red Pill awareness and Game lessens women’s control in that equation, which is sexy from the standpoint of dealing with a self-aware high SMV man, but also threatening from the perspective that her security depends on him acquiescing to her Frame and control.

Up to this point, Game has represented an individualized threat to women’s Hypergamous control, but there has always been a larger majority of men (Betas) who’ve been easily kept ignorant of their true potential for control. However, on a larger social landscape, the Feminine Imperative understands the risks involved in men forming a unitary tribe – a Brotherhood – based solely on benefitting and empowering men. The manosphere, while still effectively a collection of sub-tribes, represents a threat to the imperative because its base purpose is making men aware of their true state in a feminine-centric social order.

As such, any attempt to create male-specific, male-empowering organizations is made socially synonymous with either misogyny (hate) or homosexuality (shame). Ironically, the shame associated with homosexuality that a fem-centric society would otherwise rail against becomes an effective form of intra-gender shame when it’s applied to heterosexual collectives of men. Even suggestions of male-centered tribalism are attached with homosexual suspicions, and these come from within the collectives of men themselves.

The above picture is from an “academic” conference (class?) Mediated Feminisms: Activism and Resistance to Gender and Sexual Violence in the Digital Age held at UCL in London. There’s quite a bit more to this than just collecting and codifying the sub-tribes of the manosphere, more can be found here.

Now, granted, this conference is replete with all of the uninformed (not to mention willful ignorance) concern to be expected of contemporary feminists, but this does serve as a current example of how men organizing for the exclusive benefit of men is not just equated with misogyny, but potential violence. As a unitary collective of men, the manosphere terrifies the Feminine Imperative. That fear, however, doesn’t stem from any real prospective violence, but the potential for a larger ‘awareness’ in men of their own conditions and the roles they are expected to play to perpetuate a feminine-centric social order. They fear to lose the control that the ‘socially responsible’ ignorance of men provides them with.

Men’s predisposition to form sub-tribes and intrasexual competition (“lets you and him fight”) has always been a means of covert control by women, but even still the Feminine Imperative must insert its influence and oversight into those male spaces to make use of  them. Thus, by assuring that feminine primacy is equated with the idea of inclusive equalism, all Male Space is effectively required to be “unisex space” while all-female sub-tribes must remain exclusively female. For an easy example of this, compare and contrast the reactions to Harvard’s unisex institution of campus club equalism to the worldwide reactions to, and preemption of, the “Tribe” meetings only attempted to be organized by Return of Kings in February.

Making Men

By controlling men’s intrasex communications with each other the Feminine Imperative can limit men’s unified, collective, understanding of masculinity and male experiences. Feminine-primary society hates and is terrified of men defining and asserting masculinity for themselves (to the point of typifying it as potentially violent), but as connectivity progresses we will see a more concentrated effort to lock down the narrative and the means of men communicating male experiences.

I’ve detailed in many prior posts how the imperative has deliberately misdirected and confused men about a unified definition of masculinity. That confusion is designed to keep men guessing and doubting about their “security in their manhood” while asserting that the feminine-correct definition is the only legitimate definition of healthy, ‘non-toxic’, masculinity. This deliberate obfuscation and ambiguity about what amounts to ‘authentic masculinity’ is another means of controlling men’s awareness of their true masculine potential and value – a potential that they rightly fear will mean acquiescing to men’s power over their Hypergamous social and personal control. Anything less than a definition of masculinity that fosters female primacy and fempowerment is labeled “toxic masculinity” – literally and figuratively poisonous.

This is the real, operative reason behind the obsessive, often self-contradicting, need for control of male space by the Feminine Imperative. Oversight and infiltration of male sub-tribes and instituting a culture of self-policing of the narrative within those sub-tribes maintains a feminine-primary social order.

Building Better Betas

Since the time in which western(izing) societies shifted to unfettering Hypergamy on a social scale there has been various efforts to demasculinize – if not outright feminize – the larger majority of men. Today we’re seeing the results of, and still persistent efforts of this in much starker contrast as transgenderism and the social embrace of foisting gender-loathing on boys becomes institutionalized. A deliberate promotion of a social constructivist narrative about gender identity and the very early age at which children can “choose” a gender for themselves is beginning to be more and more reinforced in our present feminine-primary social order.

As a result of this, and likely into our near future, today’s men are conditioned to feel uncomfortable being “men”. That discomfort is a direct result of the ambiguity and misguidance about conventional masculinity the imperative has fostered in men when they were boys. This feminization creates a gender loathing, but that loathing comes as the result of an internal conflict between the feminine-correct “non-toxic” understanding of what masculinity ought to be and the conventional aspects of masculinity that men need to express as a result of their biology and birthright.

Effectively, this confusion has the purpose of creating discomfort in men among all-male sub-tribes. These masculine-confused men have difficulty with intersocial communication within the sub-tribes they’re supposed to have some sort of kin or in-group affiliation with.  Even the concept of “male bonding” has become a point of ridicule (something typical of male buffoons) or suspiciously homosexual , so, combined with the feminine identification most of these men default to, today’s “mangina” typically has more female friends and feels more comfortable communicating as women communicate. These men have been effectively conditioned to believe or feel that male interaction or organization is inherently wrong, uncomfortable or contrived, possibly even threatening if the organizing requires physical effort. Consequently, interacting as a male becomes ridiculous or superficial.

Pushing Back

What then is to be done about this conditioning? For all the efforts to destroy or regulate male tribalism, the Feminine Imperative still runs up against men’s evolved predispositions to interact with the outside world instead of fixating on the inside world of women. Below I’ve pieced together some actionable ideas that might help men come to a better, unitary way of fostering the male tribalism the Feminine Imperative would see destroyed or used as a tool of soci0-sexual control:

• While it is vitally important to maintain a male-specific mental point of origin, together men need a center point of action. Women talk, men do. Men need a common purpose in which the tribe can focus its efforts on. Men need to build, coordinate, win, compete and problem solve amongst themselves. The ‘purpose’ of a tribe can’t simply be one of getting together as like-minded men; in fact, groups with such a declared purpose are often designed to be the most conciliatory and accommodating of the Feminine Imperative. Men require a common, passionate purpose to unite for.

• Understand and accept that men will naturally form male hierarchies in virtually every context if that tribe is truly male-exclusive. There will be a reflexive resistance to this, but understand that the discomfort in acknowledging male hierarchies stems from the Feminine Imperative’s want to make any male authority a toxic form of masculinity. Contrary to feminine conditioning male hierarchies are not necessarily based on Dark Triad manipulations. That is the ‘fem-think’ – any male created hierarchy of authority is by definition evil Patriarchy.

• Recognize existing male sub-tribes for what they are, but do so without labeling them as such. Don’t talk about Fight Club, do Fight Club. As with most other aspects of Red Pill aware Game, it is always better to demonstrate rather than explicate. There will always be an observer effect in place when you call a male group a “male group”. That tribe must exist for a passionate reason other than the express idea that it exists to be about men meeting up. Every sub-tribe I belong to, every collective interest I share with other men, even the instantly forming ones that arise from an immediate common need or function, all exist apart from “being” about men coming together.Worldwide “tribe” day failed much for the same reasons an organization like the Good Men Project fails – they are publicized as a gathering of men just “being” men.

• Push back on the invasion of male space by being uncompromising in what you do and organize with passion. Make no concessions for women in any all-male space you create or join. There will always be a want to accommodate women and/or the fears of not being accommodating of feminine-primary mindsets within that all-male purview. Often this will come in subtle forms of anonymous White Knighting or reservations about a particular passion due to other men’s Blue Pill conditioning to always consider the feminine before considerations of themselves or the tribe. It is vitally important to the tribe to quash those sympathies and compromising attitudes as these are exactly the designs of the Feminine Imperative to destroy a tribe from within.Make no concessions for competency of women within the tribe if you find yourself in a unisex tribal situation. Even the U.S. military is guilty of reducing combat service requirements for women as recently as this month. If you are a father or you find yourself in a role of mentoring boys or young men it is imperative that you instill this no-compromise attitude in them and the organizations that they create themselves.

• The primary Red Pill / Game tenets that you’ve learned with respect to women are entirely applicable in a larger scope when it comes to resisting the influences of the Feminine Imperative. Frame and a return to a collectively male-exclusive Mental Point of Origin are two of the primary tenets to apply to non-intimate applications of resistance in terms of aspects of society. Observations and the Red Pill Lens should inform your interactions with women and men on a social scale.

Finally, I want to close by restating that my approach to resisting the influences of the Feminine Imperative on a meta-social scale is the same bottom-up approach I used with unplugging men from their Blue Pill doldrums. Once men have taken the first steps in Red Pill awareness this new perspective has a tendency to expound into greater social understandings and a want for applications beyond hooking up with desirable women. That Red Pill awareness becomes a way of life, but moreover, it should inform us as men, as tribes, about how best to maintain ourselves as masculine-primary individuals and organizations.