Men and Suicide

Before I launch in here today I need to confess that this post has been in my drafts folder for a while now. As most of my readers are aware I’ve known two personal friends who’ve taken their own lives as a result of having their Blue Pill conditioned beliefs set them on a path to self destruction. One of the more important parts of my charter when I started writing was to reach the men who were at their wits’ end in figuring out how to deal with their personal, romantic or married lives that had until then been directed by what their Blue Pill acculturation and their understanding of intersexual dynamics were molded to be. Since I started and stopped and then restarted this topic again there have been a few recent developments in my perspective on men taking their own lives as a result of the Blue Pill’s influence on them.

All of this really began about two months ago while I was engaging in a debate (or what passes for debate) on Twitter with a very unsympathetic woman who thought she’d set me straight about why it is men choose to take their own lives at a far greater rate than women. As it stands today, men are statistically between 4 and 5 times more likely than women to kill themselves. For most Red Pill aware men this is a fairly well known stat and one that gets quoted often enough when women trot out their own stats about abuse or whatever issue they think it is that MRA are ‘confused’ about. They usually get owned when this sort of back and forth goes down, but I’m always drawn to the comparative issues women think are equitable to that of men losing their lives.

Men’s disposability is also nothing new to the manosphere. Sperm is cheap, eggs are scarce and men are expected to sacrifice their lives for the security and betterment of women even in the most patriarchal of prior social orders. It’s always interesting to me that issues of mandatory male conscription into the military (potential death) and the unignorable high male suicide rates are something women still won’t accept as being a pretty raw deal for men. Women’s innate solipsism will still compel women to find some “yeah, but;…” rationalization for men’s disposability. Whenever I bring something like this up the reflexive presumption is that I’m bemoaning men’s victim status for being disposable. However, it’s impossible to discuss male disposability without such a connotation. My issues isn’t one of seeking some equitable disposability for women, but rather it’s drawing attention to the way women react and rationalize away their own part in that disposability.

True Powerlessness

I covered a lot of this in Chivalry vs. Altruism, so I won’t belabor that here, but I will point out the inherent power imbalance in this disposability. I’ve stated in the past that true power is not the control we can exert over the lives of others, but rather the extent to which we have control over the direction of our own lives. When we discuss issues of power between men and women the real, ultimate, loss of that control is in the context of our deaths.

There is no greater powerlessness for men than a lack of control over our own disposability.

Again, this isn’t some cry of victimhood for men – I happen to believe there’s an evolved component in the male psychological firmware that actually predisposes us to sacrificing ourselves in lieu of the security of our women and children. That’s not so much altruism as it is an inborn subroutine for protecting women that triggers in life-threatening situations. When a mass shooter opens fire indiscriminately at a crowd of people it is the men, not the women, who instinctively put their bodies between that gun and women or children, even the one’s they don’t personally know.

In the bigger scope of things, men will always be more disposable than women, and on some level of consciousness women’s hindbrains instinctively understand this. As such, women’s conscious process must find ways to reconcile this understanding in order for them to move on from men’s sacrifices. Sometimes this can manifest in the War Brides phenomenon, but I would argue that in today’s social learning environment of mass media, instant gratification of women’ solipsism and feminine-primary social order, this reconciliation takes some even uglier turns. Today, women have become very efficient in consoling each other’s solipsistic rationalizing of men’s sacrifices. In this environment of default female victimization and presumed oppression even men’s ultimate sacrifice, men’s ultimate powerlessness in their own deaths, cannot ever be consciously or unconsciously acknowledged in a state of fempowerment.

While I had this debate it occurred to me that even men’s suicides could never be attributed to anything less than their own ‘male egos’ by women, thus making them victims of their conditioning into “toxic” masculinity. Essentially, women were arguing that men would put a noose around their necks because they were socially conditioned to do so. Their suicide rate was attributable to their self-pity and inability to be ‘real men’ as some nebulous toxic masculinity had predefined for them. I thought this was kind of ironic when you compare this reasoning to the narrative shift away from ‘toxic’ masculinity to masculinity itself is toxic. This is really a stupid argument when you consider that it’s just another social convention used to absolve women of the guilt associated with men’s sacrifices. Men are hardwired for self sacrifice, but likewise women had need to evolved psychological adaptations to help them clear the red from their life’s ledger in this respect.

So, in the end, it helps if women can fall back on social conventions that put the associated guilt of men’s sacrifices back on the men themselves. Chivalry and traditional masculinity are fine when they serve the Feminine Imperative, but if a man actually gets killed or kills himself as part of that, well, that’s on him then. And this is what I was beginning with in this debate; there will always be a desire for absolution of women’s guilt or complicity in the deaths of men. I should also add that in terms of war and men being drafted women regularly default to the same asinine presumption that if women were running the world that there would be no wars. I won’t dignify that with any deeper analysis than to say that this too is one more (feeble) way of looking for absolution in the sacrifices men make to facilitate women’s reality.

Suicide Solution

That still left the question, why do men take their own lives in such alarmingly high numbers compared to women? I had to do a bit of research on this, but the demographics for male suicide today show some patterns. 7 in 10 suicides are men (majority white) between the ages of 45 and 65. As expected from gynocentric media, the primary reason always cited is men’s so called stubbornness in seeking out psychiatric help before they attempt suicide – again absolving women’s influence of any complicity – but ignoring what would motivate men, and this demographic in particular, to suicide. Again, there’s no attempt to understand the underlying reasons for male suicide, only a stereotypically easy ‘male-stupid’ answer to absolve women’s complicity in it.

There’s a lot to consider and be sensitive of when it comes to male suicide, but I’m going to speculate about a few reasons here coming from a Red Pill perspective. At no other time in western history has there ever been a generation of more purposeless men. From an evolved psychological perspective, men need a function. We are innate idealists. We look outward at the world and like to imagine what could be possible. I believe there is also an innate part of our evolved mental firmware that predisposes us to problem solving and improvisation, and much of that comes as an adaptation to women’s own innate need for men who can display cues of competency.

In Competency I made the case for women’s attraction to men displaying signals of competency, confidence, mastery and creative intelligence as a selected-for survival adaptation. In short, our competency in life, whether stemming from physical prowess, social dominance or creative intelligence is integrally linked with our reproductive success as well as overall life success.

However, at no other time in history has men’s competency been so devalued and so debased; other than perhaps in terms of physical prowess and accommodating the short term (Alpha Fucks) breeding imperatives of women. At no other time in (western) history has the equity in what a man can provide or create or solve been so implicitly unnecessary or superfluous to women. When we consider the rates of college enrollment and graduation of women compared to that of men, when we consider the practical problems that men used to solve, our utility has never been less needed – or at least that’s the zeitgeist of today.

We read about how men need to accept this new social reality – that our need for purpose and function is no longer needed or as valued – and we need to change our headspace about it as if it were something men might simply turn off. This is the result of equalist beliefs that anything gender-specific is something learned rather than the innate firmware we were born with. But we cannot simply change our minds about needing a function. We evolved to be problem solvers, women talk, men do, but now we are expected to accept that men are obsolete.

Loss of Utility

In Relational Equity I made a case for men investing too much of their egos into what intrinsic (and extrinsic) value they believe their respective women ought to appreciate about themselves. Under the old books, old social contract this equity may have had some conditional value to women, but as a buffer against Hypergamy today there is very little a man might consider value-added equity (unless it’s exceedingly rare or exceedingly valued) as a hedge against Hypergamy. Before any defeatist critics tell me how not all women are like that, yes, I get it, there are a lot of variables to consider here, but the equation and the reality doesn’t change – relational equity, overall, is no insurance against Hypergamy. It is also no insurance against women’s security and providership needs being met by resources that come from outside that relationship. I’m not considering this because I’m trying to depress any man, but it is vitally necessary to consider when we look at reasons why 45-65 year old men are predisposed to higher rates of suicide and higher rates of alcoholism and opioid abuse.

I would argue that a major contributing factor to high male suicide rates finds its origins in men’s need for purpose, function and accomplishment during this phase of life. Every day I read an article about how men my own age are dropping out of social discourse. I mentioned a Boston Globe article about just this phenomenon in Male Control. In some respects I can understand that despite the unprecedented connectivity we enjoy today men really don’t seek out bonds with other men. This is primarily due to the fact that men need a common purpose in order to form these bonds. Again, this is just how we’re wired. Women intentionally schedule time to simply interact with their same-sex friends just for the sake of communicating and enjoying the act of communicating. Men need function or a common purpose to come together. We need an activity or a problem to solve and then we communicate and form bonds.

Women talk, men do. This is a well studied fact; our brains and, by extension, social networks largely center on purpose and function. Now, lets presume that in spite of having literally all the information in the world at our finger tips we remove all need for the utility that men are wired to provide to not just women, but the larger scope of Society. We get a generation of men on the outside looking in. Only the most creative, resourceful and motivated of men can really utilize, much less master, all that this information has to offer him. And even a portion of those men can really see past the antipathy of their supposed obsolescence to do something truly meaningful or masterful. As the saying goes, most men live lives of quiet desperation, but in the modern era these men are demonstrably useless. And I mean that in a functional sense; once a Beta man has been wrung of his utility to women, he ceases to be able to convince his hindbrain that he can build, improvise or solve things.

Once a man is stripped of his usefulness, once it’s made clear that all of the equity he believed would support his relationship has been erased after so long, men will still resort to practical, deductive solutions. That solution may be suicide when weighed with the prospect of having to rebuild himself in a new context; and even if he did would he just be building a new ‘him’ based on his old belief set?

When my brother in-law committed suicide it seemed to me at the time to be the most logical end he would come to. He was a man very steeped in Blue Pill ideals, but he was also a man who prided himself on what he could do – and if he didn’t know how to do something he was always a fast learner. He literally built his life, and expectations of a future life, around the relational equity he believed defined him as a man. He was very invested in the old books, old social contract that rooted a man’s attractiveness and quality in what it was he could do. What he built for himself and his wife defined his identity.

All of that 20+ years of building equity and an identity based on it was erased for him in the space of about six months. But it was more than the 20 years he’d been saving, building, solving and refining, it was a perceived future he believed would be lived out for the rest of his life that got erased.

To me, at that time, his suicide made absolutely perfect sense from a male-deductive logic perspective. What didn’t make sense was all of the endless rationalizations I heard from his family, friends, his kids, his Ex (my now widowed sister in-law) about why they thought he went through with it when it was plain for anyone who wanted to confront the truth to see. A lot of these rationales were almost verbatim the same that the article I linked used. “If only men would reach out when they have suicidal thoughts”, any and every rationale that might absolve his Ex of the guilt, and still more that were meant to console her (he must’ve been mental ill) though in the end she really didn’t need it.

My brother in-law made a practical decision not an emotional one, and while I wouldn’t presume to say that a guy’s emotional state isn’t very influential in his suicide, how he comes to the decision is very much attributable to men’s deductive nature. He showed no outward signs of emotional distress. In fact, right up to his hanging himself he was in very good spirits and seemingly accepting of the fact that the wife he lived his life for was going to be leaving him soon. He was very matter of fact in a way that men are when they’ve resolved something for themselves. When a guy seems to be taking things in stride we don’t want to create a problem where we see none.

When we look in this context at the high rate of male suicide in this age demographic we begin to see how men come to this decision. Everything they’ve built up to 45-65 years of age is now debased, devalued or simply erased. All of the value and equity they’ve committed their lives to – doing the right thing according to their Blue Pill conditioning – is as if it never mattered. So they’re confronted with a choice, rebuild themselves (hopefully in a new Red Pill aware paradigm), reconstruct a new life and tough it out, or, simply, pragmatically erase themselves.

Personally, I’ve had at least two occasions where I’ve been confronted with rebuilding myself. It’s a tough prospect, make no mistake, especially when you’re Red Pill aware and understand the reality behind having to rebuild a life from scratch after so much investment in plans and projects you truly believed in when you made them. My father had to confront this rebuilding too at around 55 years of age, but rather than rebuild or kill himself I watched him slowly decay into a man I never knew could exist as my dad.

Zeroed Out

I apologize if this topic is a bit of a downer, but I think it ought to be part of any Red Pill aware man’s understanding that at many points in our lives we will be confronted with the prospects of having to rebuild ourselves. Failure, rejection and disappointment will happen for you, that’s just part of a man’s life, and it’s easy to rattle off platitudes about how many times you get back up being the measure of a man. But what I’m saying is there will be times when total reconstruction of your life will be a necessity.

You will be zeroed out at some point, and how you handle this is a much different situation than any temporary setback. This zeroing out is made all the more difficult when you confront the fact that what you believed to be so valuable, the equity you were told was what others would measure you by, was all part of your Blue Pill conditioning. At that point you need to understand that there is most definitely a hope for a better remake of yourself based on truths that were learned in the hardest way.

To end this I’m going to quote the comment of a man I met when I spoke at the 21 Convention in September. I won’t use his name, but after we talked he confessed that he was the commenter here. He’d made the trip to the convention to meet me face to face, to thank me for my work and gave me permission to use his example in a post. I won’t quote it entirely, but you can read the whole thing here. His situation is an example of, and inspiration for, everything I’ve illuminated in this essay

After a long marriage I divorced the mother of my children. A couple of years later, after some casual dating, I met a woman I would come to describe as my soulmate. I got married young – but this time, with all my infinite wisdom gained over the years – I was finally wise enough to pick a woman I was super compatible with.

We were together for a few years and even lived together. Things started out great and it was mostly smooth sailing until we moved in together – at which time I slowly allowed myself to be betaized in a slow motion, excruciating painful way.

About a month after breaking up with her I fully planned to commit suicide. I wrote a long letter explaining my rationalization and took other affirmative steps towards going through with it. About a week after I wrote the note – with D(eath) Day fast approaching – I took a break from getting my affairs in order to surf the net. I stumbled upon an Ask Reddit thread that was bad mouthing various subreddits. Some feminazi or male feminist mentioned the Red Pill subreddit as an example of a subreddit filled with craziness, and I decided to check what all of the fuss was about. Now

I’m not a religious man, but I will never rule out divine intervention. The timing of finding TRP – by complete coincidence no less – couldn’t have been more fortuitous. I stayed up all night reading the side bar – Rollo’s essays having the deepest effect on me – and everything…just…clicked….Talk about connecting the dots! Wow! It was very much like a come to Jesus moment. It was like divinity revealed secret knowledge to me just when I needed it the most – knowledge that gave me hope and very well may have saved my life. This all went down not really that long ago in actual time – but from where I metaphorically stand now it seems like an eternity.

Stay strong my friends, you can rebuild yourself even in the face of being zeroed out.