The Power of Emotion

Science fiction has always sought to portray human emotion as a weakness to be overcome.
Some have gone further to express the notion of our physical being as a limiting factor. This is notably seen in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

I’m aware this is fiction, but I just want to reinforce the point from my earlier post that we don’t have to be held to eternal hostage by nature. We can strive to be better.
A quote from Terminator 2, sums it up admirably.

T-800 to John Connor: “I now know why you cry. But it is something, I can never do.”

While emotions are a part of our experience as human beings, Red Pill aware men need to understand the functionality of emotional responses. Rationality is, of course, the charter of this blog and my books, and while I make my best efforts to approach each aspect of what I write from as objective an origin as I’m able to, I also understand that there are limitations to remaining completely objective. I’m human like anyone else reading this (chatbots excepted) and I’ve always been fully aware that my emotional state, my own ego-investments and biases, as well as the observer effect are all something I need to make a conscious effort to account for while I’m writing about a new idea or observation I’m connecting dots with.

In a few prior posts I’ve made an effort to account for a balance between rationality and emotionalism. I say “emotionalism” because I think there needs to be a separation between the physical experience of emotion and the significance our fem-centric social order would have us place on those experiences. There is a difference between emotional response (evolved stimulus-response adaptations) and the ideologies that elevate human emotion to a metaphysical state (emotionalism).

Seeking, rage, fear, lust, care, panic and play are what are commonly recognized as primal emotions. I didn’t make this list up myself, these are just the most base-level imperatives from which more complex experiences of emotion are distilled. All of these root-level emotional experiences have been studied extensively and can be stimulated chemically and neurologically today. An easy example of this biological connection to emotional experience can be triggered and observed in the ‘roid rages’ experienced by the users of anabolic steroids.

Have you ever been “Hangry“? The feeling of anger / aggressiveness due to being overly hungry is an evolutionary survival adaptation. You’re far more motivated to kill and eat something if the feeling of hunger, prompted by its chemical triggers, also stimulates feelings of aggression. In today’s era that aggression may be inconvenient or anti-social, but our hunter-gatherer ancestors found it both acceptable and useful.

There are dozens of other examples I can give for the connection between our environmental, physical and chemical conditions and our emotional state. Similarly, there are chemical (dopamine) and behavioral prompts we associate with a particular emotional state. I don’t imagine this is anything revelatory to most Red Pill aware readers, but reviewing the objective aspects of emotion is necessary in order to separate it from the social influence of emotionalism.

Testosterone is well known to stimulate feelings of aggression and sexual arousal, but did you know that the chemical make up of testosterone is actually an inhibitor of the chemicals that prompt sadness and crying? When considered in this respect and the fact that human males produce 12 to 17 times the amount of testosterone females do, is it any coincidence that men may feel less compulsion to cry over things? Yet, men are shamed for “holding back” tears. This is an example of the connection between our physical experience of emotions and the importance to which our social order places on (primarily female) emotionalism. There are a lot of complexities that make up our emotional state and the more we study the influences of our own biologies the better we can make a connection between the evolved, survival-beneficial, effect these emotions elicit in us.

The nuts and bolts science of emotions demystifies the more magical, romanticized association we like to apply to them. And at the risk of prompting any kind of nihilism, it’s important that we consider our emotional state in terms of the concrete physical stimulus that’s provoking our emotional states. It’s easy to get into the science of emotions when we’re trying to solve a problem like clinical depression and the feelings and potential behaviors it evokes, but it’s much harder to look at upsetting an elated feeling of happiness. If it ain’t broke there’s no reason to think about fixing it.

But what sets us off about really coming to terms with the science of emotion is it tends to kill our gods. Up until advent of our understanding the cause and effect influences of emotion we’ve applied a lot of metaphysical importance to our emotions. Historically, our emotions have inspired us to create some of the greatest cultural and artistic masterpieces, and they’ve urged us to some pretty ugly atrocities too. Even today, western cultures raise emotion to a mythical grandeur. We romanticize and apply great significance to how we feel. We prioritize expressing emotions to being some enlightened state and the repression or control of them as some kind of horrible evil or some form of retardation.

Emotionalism

The Washington Post (I know, I know,…) recently published the findings of a study outlining how “sexist” men have psychological problems:

Researchers then identified 11 norms considered to be “traditionally masculine” — desire to win, need for emotional control, risk-taking, violence, dominance, sexual promiscuity or playboy behavior, self-reliance, primacy of work, power over women, disdain for homosexuality and pursuit of status — and looked to see whether they were associated with particular mental health outcomes.

In general, the men who stuck more strongly to these norms were more likely to experience problems such as depression, stress, body image issues, substance abuse and negative social functioning. They were also less likely to turn to counseling to help deal with those problems. The effect was particularly strong for men who emphasized playboy behavior, power over women and self-reliance.

As you might expect, what’s defined as “toxic” masculinity today is decided by people invested in a mindset that confirms the Feminine Imperative. This article follows along with what will likely be the Trump-era narrative for masculinity – anything remotely considered “traditionally” masculine will be conflated with a psychological disorder. The cure to which is, of course, ego-investing men in feminine-primary mental states; effectively feminizing men.

If we look at the norms identified by this study we are expected to nod in agreement about the negative, potentially damaging, connotations these traditionally masculine aspects imply. But they are only negative because the objective environment we are supposed to interpret them from is one of feminine primacy. Anything that can be considered an impediment to female societal control, any aspect of men’s intrinsic natures that lessens the same potentials of women is considered “toxic”.

Desire to win, need for emotional control, risk-taking, violence, dominance, sexual promiscuity or playboy behavior, self-reliance, primacy of work, power over women, disdain for homosexuality and pursuit of status – by orders of degree these are the foundational aspects of masculinity that’s been responsible for the advancement of humanity for millennia now. I’m not entirely sure what ‘playboy lifestyle’ entails, but consider the problems these aspects of male nature evolved to solve for men. Each one of these characteristics has a functional prompt; they didn’t evolve in a vacuum. These parts of masculinity were and are functional benefits to men. Only in a society that defines supremacism of women and the primacy of female-correctness do these aspects become negative.

I doubt it will come as any surprise to the Red Pill aware that all of these traits used to have a higher social value in virtually all social orders prior to our present one. It’s not enough to make female social interaction the preeminent one, masculinity and its conventional aspects must be pathologized. They must become a sickness if gynocentrism is to sustain itself.

I’m exploring this here because the female way of socialization is founded upon emotionalism. I think it’s important for Red Pill men to understand that the defining of what particular emotional states are acceptable is intimately linked to what those states mean to the Feminine Imperative. In the past 60 years western(ized) culture has become one in which the feminine defines the predominant cultural narrative with regard to intersexual communication, correctness and the psychological values we are meant to infer from it. This discourse is one that is primarily informed by women’s high priority on an investment in emotionalism.

In past essays I’ve outlined how men and women’s brains are neurologically wired for different, yet complementary functions. Women experience negative emotions differently from men. The male brain evolved to seek out sex before food. And while our feminine-centric social order insists that, in the name of equalism, boys should be forced to learn in the same modality as that of girls, the science shows that boys brains are rudimentarily wired to learn differently.

“Greater emotional reactivity in women may explain many things, such as their being twice as likely to suffer from depression and anxiety disorders compared to men,” Mendrek added, who is also an associate professor at the University of Montreal’s Department of Psychiatry.

Yet for all of these very evident physical differences in men and women’s experience of emotion, it is women’s experience, and a feminine priority for the ‘correctness’ of that experience we apply to men. I would suggest that much of this is primarily due to women’s innate solipsism, but we’ve normalized women’s experience of emotion as the common and correct one in terms of intersexual communication and social dynamics.

Emotionalism and the applying of metaphysical meaning to the feminine-correct experience of them has pervaded our social consciousness since the time of the sexual revolution. This elevated importance of emotion has been a part of popular culture for millennia of course, but until the rise of a socially mandated importance of female Hypergamy we haven’t had female emotionalism direct the course of society as it has for over sixty years now.

As such, we see that men “getting in touch with their feminine sides” is really a concerted effort to repress their natural experience of emotion as a male, and to attempt to force their own emotional states into ones females can identify with. As I mentioned above, there are literally biological limitations for a man to experience emotion as a woman as well as his impulse to want to prioritize those feelings as women do. The presumption is that a man is emotionally stunted if he feel that repressing his emotions is what he ought to do. “Boys don’t cry” is a sickness when it is women’s experience and importance of emotionalism that drives our social discourse.

Women bemoan men’s stereotypical lack of “emotional availability”, and we put a religious importance upon our capacity to express our emotions in some way, but all of this is constrained to the box that is women’s correct experience and importance of emotion. This is not what men’s brains are naturally wired for, and in a Red Pill context this is not what women’s hindbrains want from men.

It’s important for Red Pill men to understand that our feminine-primary social order is founded up the importance women place on the God of emotion. Part of your Blue Pill conditioning was to convince you, as a young boy, that the way women emote and the importance they put on emotion is what you needed to accept as the healthy, normal way of experiencing and expressing it. The truth is you are not wired to experience emotion as a woman will. That isn’t to suggest you deny or repress your feelings, but to understand that you shouldn’t feel bad for not feeling as a woman feels. This kind of goes back to the point I was making in Empathy; while it may be possible for a woman to sympathize with your feelings, she will never be able to empathize with them as a man would experience it.

Furthermore, it should be part of men’s unplugging to come to terms with the metaphysical importance women place on (largely their own) emotional states. They remove the functional aspect of emotion and elevate it to something only women have a unique sensitivity to understand. Separating yourself from this self-induced, self-applied belief in emotion can be a very powerful tool for a Red Pill man in his dealing with women – and not just the ones he’s intimately involved with. Separating your ego from the religion of emotion and coming to terms with the science of emotion is a very difficult step for Blue Pill invested men to make. As I said, it’s like killing your gods, but it’s also killing the notion of the emotionalism you think you need to identify with in order to connect with a woman.