The Awareness

I feel I should begin here with a bit of a disclaimer. I don’t think any of my regular readers would ever presume this blog’s intent was anything but to help men unplug from their Blue Pill conditioning. With that unplugging comes a drive for self-improvement once a formerly Blue Pill guy has his moment of clarity and begins to see the influences that have shaped his life and his beliefs up to that stage. Along with this awareness comes a measure of anger, but mostly this is due to having long held ego-investments revealed for what they are – internalized beliefs that were developed as a result of Blue Pill social conditioning. I’ve covered this anger phase in  Anger Management, The Five Stages of Unplugging, The Bitter Taste of the Red Pill and The Dangers of the Red Pill.

My purpose in writing what I do for as long as I have has always been to benefit other men, to hopefully unplug the guys who are on their last nerve, but have a desire to really understand the whats and the whys that have led them to the point in their lives where they are ready to dissolve the barriers that have prevented them from becoming Red Pill aware. It’s an unfortunate fact that our disillusionment from our Blue Pill investments is often spurred by a really bad trauma. The anger that follows is usually the result of self-regret more than directed at women as a source of it. When a guy who’s based his existence on Blue Pill idealism has it destroyed after having had it shape who he is for so long, the anger he feels usually comes from not having become aware of it sooner. That anger is directed inward or at the social order that’s held him in that idealistic delusion for so long. The frustration comes from wasting ones years invested in something that now seems so obviously false. That isn’t to say that some men wont carry this resentment over into a fully realized misogyny, it’s just to say that it begins from the regret of having lived what’s now an obvious lie for so long.

A popular misconception about the Red Pill – the popularized notion of it, not the actual praxeology – is that it makes men misogynists or it’s inherently negative, or it’s function is ‘truthful anger’. I am reminded of the explanation of the 32nd Law of Power:

The truth is often avoided because it is ugly and unpleasant. Never appeal to truth and reality unless you are prepared for the anger that comes from disenchantment.

That disenchantment is really what’s at root here for those who would paint the Red Pill with the brush of anger, negativity or hate directed at women in general. There are certain elements within the manosphere and Purple Pill commercial interests that would like to turn a profit from this mischaracterization. They would sell a ‘cure’ for it with sunshine rhetoric and reheated narratives of the power of positive thinking that has been a secular religion for generations now.

Praxeology

The Red Pill, from the respect that I interpret it, is a praxeology. Simply put, it s the deductive study of human action, based on the notion that humans engage in purposeful behavior, as opposed to reflexive behavior like sneezing and inanimate behavior. With the action axiom as the starting point, it is possible to draw conclusions about human behavior that are both objective and universal. For example, the notion that humans engage in acts of choice implies that they have preferences, and this must be true for anyone who exhibits intentional behavior.

This is primarily why I continue to use the phrase ‘Red Pill awareness’ in what I write. Once a man truly unplugs and reorders his life according to what it presents to him, this developed awareness extends to many other aspects of his life than just his intersexual relations. This awareness makes men sensitive to others around him who, like he was, are caught in the same Blue Pill conditioned way of interpreting his personal and social existence. With a Red Pill Lens he begins to see the sales pitches, the ego-investment defenses, and the predictable responses of men and women whose lives have been colored by a feminine-primary social conditioning that has defined their lives for so long they are unaware of it, but would cease to exist without it.

Once a man comes into this awareness, once he sees the code in the Matrix, once he realizes how all-encompassing it is, the old him literally ceases to exist. He may well be the same man with the same personality, the same gifts and the same disposition, but his Red Pill awareness makes living in his old paradigm an impossibility. On some level of consciousness, no matter the cognitive dissonance, he knows the Blue Pill world, the world pulled over his eyes, is a lie. Sometimes this disenchantment of Blue Pill idealism can (usually does) lead to significant anger.

This anger doesn’t lessen the reality that the Red Pill praxeology has made him aware of. In fact, it may be that anger that inspires him to become more aware, more sensitive, to it. That anger may prompt him to add his experiences to that praxeology which in turn benefits others. For others, this disenchantment may be depressing or a source of nihilism. And for others it can be a liberation and motivation for a new and much more hopeful life founded on a new awareness of a condition he now has better control of. On many occasions I’ve attempted to address exactly this hopelessness.

From A New Hope:

The key to living in a red pill context is to unlearn your blue pill expectations and dreams of finding  contentment in them, and replace them with expectations and aspirations based on realistic understandings of red pill truths.

Learn this now, you will never achieve contentment or emotional fulfillment in a blue pill context with red pill awareness.

Killing your inner Beta is a difficult task and part of that is discarding an old, comfortable, blue pill paradigm. For many newly unplugged, red pill aware, men the temptation is to think they can use this new understanding to achieve the goal-states of their preconditioned blue pill ideals. What they don’t understand is that, not only are these blue pill goal-states flawed, but they are also based on a flawed understanding of how to attain them.

I devoted an entire section in Preventive Medicine to that post. I expect this sentiment will be a bit of an inconvenience to the marketeers who’d rather misdirect those men seeking Red Pill awareness to believe that the “Red Pill” is just “Truthful Anger”. There is a lot to be very positive about in Red Pill awareness, but the ugly truth is that your Blue Pill existence, and the idealism it used to promise you, is now dead. As I’ve stated before, the truth will set you free, but it doesn’t make that truth pretty, nor does it absolve you of accepting it. Red Pill awareness is upsetting, but what follows from that unplugging, whether it’s anger and frustration or liberation and hopefulness is not the focus of becoming ‘aware’ in a Red Pill perspective.

Those are just possible, and fungible, outcomes of that awareness.

When I go into what I do on this blog or my books my point is to give men the tools of a new perspective. I’m not a Life Coach, a dating Guru or a motivational speaker. What I offer is the awareness that I, and many others, have contributed to what is Red Pill praxeology. I write what I do because I feel compelled to; the message and the awareness is my primary focus. While I do offer occasional, general advice about certain aspects of The Red Pill I generally try to resist being prescriptive. I’ve stated this before, but it bears repeating, I’m not interested in making better men, I’m interested in men making themselves better men. My life and my interpretations of it are not going to be a template for anyone else to follow. Red Pill awareness, based on the praxeology of intersexual dynamics in the personal and social realms, will save and/or improve your life, but that life has to be lived by you as an individual.

The Red Pill®

All that said, this awareness does not preclude other men (and women) from attempting to profit by selling men a template upon which they believe others should follow. I covered this in The Purple Pill, but there’s a lot more to this profiteering. The term ‘Red Pill’ has evolved to the point where it’s become a brand unto itself. This leaves its popularity up for exploitation and reinterpretation to suit the commercial interests of whomever has a personal agenda or ideology they wish to promote as ‘Red Pill’. That term ‘Red Pill’ (not the praxeology) then becomes a convenient substitute for whatever subjective truth the one (or party) appropriating it would have others believe.

The bastardization of the Red Pill is something I’ve predicted for some time now. When I wrote Could a Man Have Written This? my concern then was that women would eventually appropriate and redefine ‘The Red Pill’ to serve the Feminine Imperative by bastardizing it to mean whatever best fit women’s purposes. The point in that (November, 2011) essay was that, in our feminine-primary social order, it is only women who are allowed to speak with authority about intersexual dynamics and that any man attempting to apply a measure of critical thought to those dynamics will immediately be accused of male bias and misogyny. As such, only women would be allowed to decide what aspects of the Red Pill praxeology ought to be part of the Red Pill brand.

Naturally, I reject that notion, but it is precisely what has happened with The Red Pill Movie; a documentary that is ostensibly about the MRM. I say ostensibly because, while on the surface it seems to be about the Men’s (human) Rights Movement, the focus of the film is really on its (I presume formerly) feminist director/producer Cassie Jaye, a cutesy 29 year old whose feminine-solipsism pervades the entire documentary as well as all of the post-production promotions and interviews.

Casie the feminist makes the entirety of the documentary not about the MRM as such, but more about her own ‘journey of self-discovery’, a common romantic theme that appeals to women’s innate solipsism. In every post screening interview about the film the story becomes primarily about her; the MRM just playing a supporting role in her ‘transformation’. This is sort of a poetic justice for the MRM who all too readily employ and endorse any and every ‘former feminist’ who’s not-a-feminist (until they become a feminist again) as part of their efforts to transform into more perfected egalitarian-equalists than the feminists they despise.

This film is not about The Red Pill, it’s about a 29 y.o. “feminist” actress-turned-indie-fim-director and her ‘journey of self-discovery’ in which an opportunistic MRM is only too happy to play as her supporting actor.

These are the faces the MRM wants to represent “The Red Pill”:

This is a pretty accurate depiction of how I expected ‘The Red Pill’ to be misrepresented back in 2011. It encapsulates the disingenuousness with which commercial interests (or solipsistic interests, take your pick) will portray ‘The Red Pill’ while blithely ignoring any effort to really understand the praxeology. That doesn’t make for good tingles of indignation for women, but a good outrage broker knows their what their audience wants.

However, we now have several other profiteers making similar claims about what the Red Pill really is and who ought to be able to redefine it to best serve their own motives. All of these factions have one common purpose; to reinterpret whatever bastardization of The Red Pill as a brand that will be a proxy for ‘truth’ whatever it is they are selling or what would affirm their ideology.

Todd from Real Social Dynamics picks up this profit model here:

Here we have a blatant attempt to reinterpret what the “red pill” is really all about by conflating the Red Pill brand with being the opposite side of a White Knight® coin. And again, it’s packaged in TL;DR easily digestible feints at humor. Anyone versed in The Red Pill praxeology understands just how Blue Pill Todd’s assertions here are (get a pre nup). This is the same Purple Pill sugar coating of Red Pill truths I’ve been warning against for years now, but it becomes potentially dangerous to men because it encourages them to follow the Children with Dynamite path with regards to Game. Learning Game becomes a quest of acquiring only enough understanding of the nature of women and intersexual dynamics (the ones that are palatable to the profit model) to achieve a Blue Pill idealistic goal-state monogamy that brought these men to look for their own answers in the first place. They are selling the key to a Blue Pill dream.

Ultimately, RSD Todd is selling this same, comforting, Blue Pill idealism, and a means to achieving it packaged as Game, while personally defining the Red Pill based on little or no understanding of the praxeology of it. Not to split hairs, but I believe this distortion on the part of both Todd and Cassie is intentional. Neither one made any attempt to really research or make any critical inquiry into what The Red Pill is, the dots it connects or the awareness it instills in men before they decided they were qualified to build their own brands around it.

I should add here that a lot of ideological factions have appropriated The Red Pill in recent years as a proxy for validating their own agendas. The Red Pill was always about intersexual dynamics from as far back as I’ve been familiar with it. I can remember using it as a term for awareness about men’s feminine-centric conditioning from at least 2002 on the SoSuave forums. We didn’t even refer to it as Red Pill as such so much as we’d call what we know as Blue Pill men (AFCs) as being trapped in the Matrix – unaware of their conditioning. It kind of went from there.

I’ll still continue to use The Red Pill as a term for the praxeology we use to come into an awareness of true intersexual dynamics, but I realize it’s becoming a bastardization. Roosh made an attempt to separate himself from The Red Pill going on three years ago, by trying to rebrand it as his own Neomasculinity, which hasn’t really made any real traction to my knowledge. However, the point is that whatever TRP is renamed as it will still be a branding effort on the part of those who see it as anything but a praxeology.

I’ve made this point in several prior posts, but, The Red Pill is the theory while Game is the practice and the fieldwork experimentation. Both inform the other, and one suffers without the other. This is what is at the heart of The Red Pill and it’s what shocks men into a new awareness and a new experience in life. It is not founded in pessimism, cynicism or misogyny, but rather, honest, unvarnished assessments and correlated experiences of men. Those assessments are often disconcerting, but they are only upsetting to a mindset that holds Blue Pill conditioned ideals as a correct interpretation of them. That can lead to those outside a practiced knowledge of it to believe that the awareness the Red Pill brings is a net negative. What is undeniable is the appeal of the truth The Red Pill presents and that appeal is attractive to men who are still trapped in their Blue Pill idealism.

Their want is to find some way to achieve a Blue Pill idealistic goal with the very harsh reality a Red Pill awareness brings to them. They want to be reinserted back into the Matrix, but with just enough Red Pill awareness to make their Blue Pill hopes a reality. They don’t believe The Lady in Red is real, but they do believe that she’s attainable and can be made real because they have the Red Pill awareness to effect it.

They also see the potential for selling a sugar-coated version of the Red Pill’s knowledge-base as a means for other men to achieve their own false hope in Blue Pill idealism. There really is no going back once you have a grasp of the praxeology of the Red Pill, but it’s a comforting fiction for Blue Pill men (who’ve yet to kill their inner Betas) to believe they can achieve those Blue Pill goals with just enough Red Pill awareness (the pro-feminine parts they think women will approve of).

And this false hope, one that conveniently ignores the uncomfortable parts of Red Pill awareness, is what will be sold by profiteers no matter what title they apply to it.