I want to thank you if you’ve made it through the first part of this series and you stuck with it. In some respects I can see why it might be odd that I’m covering cognitive processes, however, these are really the foundational premises for so many other Red Pill intersexual dynamics, as well as interpersonal and even social dynamics between humans that they deserve some sort of fleshing out. Again, I want to stress that these cognitive processing models are ideas I’m coming to and not settled science. However, they are based on both classic interpretations combined with the benefit of what we know about the biological, evolutionary and anthropological aspects of the cognitive processes today.
If you made the connection to Freud’s components of personality models – the Id, Ego and Super Ego – in the last post you at least grasp something of the initial theory I’m building on here. Useful as they are, Freud’s models lacked anything like an understanding of how the human mind works or how it evolved to the degree we take for granted today. Freud made his best guess at these processes from an inner psyche perspective. He formed his theories from what he deduced was operating inside our heads. My belief is that his (and others’) cognitive process models evolved and developed in response to interpreting our environment and the stimuli that our senses translated to them in our formative evolutionary past. Really, all of these interpretive processes, Instinct, Emotion and Reason, are the result of our experiential lives and the many benefits they provided us in surviving and reproducing.
All of that is not to discount the internal psyche and how these processes define who we are. Freud’s model proposed the Id, Ego and Superego are components of personality, what I’m proposing is that these components are the result of evolved cognitive processes – Instinct, Emotion and Reason – that served to create these inner models which later became those components of personality. I should say that I’m not entirely sold on these Freudian components, but I can see how cognitive processes would’ve led to developing them. I propose that these components of personality, Freud’s or other’s, are the products of these interpretive processes.
The Ego is a result of the Rational (Reason) process, while the Superego is a summation of the Emotional process. Since I don’t want to veer off into the psychology lesson in all this I’ll leave this proposition for another essay, but I do want to make a distinction here; What I’m proposing in this series is that our evolved interpretive processes are the means by which we interpret our reality, which in turn shapes who we are individually, socially and sexually.
Base Instincts
Stripped down, the Id is a result of the Instinctual process and largely resides in our unconscious or preconscious experience. Instinct is reflexive, and the behaviors it prompts are directly related to our basic survival and reproductive needs. Instinct operates outside our consciousness because of the inability of the human brain to focus on the endless sources of stimulus we experience in life. As good as we’d like to think we are with multi-tasking our interpretive cognition can only process so much; the rest is pushed into our subconscious periphery and hindbrain subroutines. This is the auto-pilot part of our instinctual cognition.
Since we largely see our Rational and Emotional processes (not to mention our social consciousness) as “higher order” processes, we tend to downplay the importance of Instinct. Our Instinctive process evolved to sustain our physical survival and reproductive imperatives in as pragmatic and practical a way as would be expedient. In most respects Instinctual interpretation and cognition is, by necessity, based on immediacy. By comparison, Emotion and Reason are slower forms of cognition, and, in the case of Reason, requires a period of learning, development and internalization. As such, there is no complication of conscience or morality, nor time for rational or emotional reflection when instinctual awareness and action is necessary. All the things we call sin or immoral, unethical or duplicitous, are manifested by our Instinctual process. But so too are ennobling aspects like self-sacrifice, violence-in-protection, mate guarding and parental investment. Hypergamy is also a behavioral and psychological dynamic that is deeply rooted in the Instinctual process.
Because of all that instinct often carries a negative preconception, at least by modern standards. And thus the Id becomes the part of the human psyche inseparably connected to the instinctual process. The desire for immediate gratification, the direct, unmitigated satisfaction of our most basic needs, and the hedonistic pursuit of pleasure; all of these we associate with the Id. However, all of these basic gratifications are directed towards elements of our evolved, instinctual needs for survival and insurances of thriving in the future. Much of what we think of as impulsivity is connected to the immediate aspect of instinct, but even this often serves some latent biological or survival purpose.
Gendered Differences
In psychology 101 we’re taught to think of the Id as our ‘childish’ selves. How many times have we read in the manosphere about how men can better relate with women via Amused Mastery or relating to them like a bratty younger sister? This process, this PUA technique, is a subconscious appeal to women’s Id via the Instinctual process. When I proposed that women want a man who Just Gets It a huge part of that dynamic relies on a man appealing to a woman’s Instinctual cognition. This is exactly why demonstrating an intent serves so much better than explicating an intent. Actions speak louder than words because actions always speak clearly to our Instinctual processing. Yet one more reason I, and most of my Red Pill contemporaries, advocate for the Medium being the Message – behavior almost always appeals to instinct.
One of the questions I’m always asked by guys is, how do I know when a woman is in whichever phase of her ovulation? Usually this is prompted by some reasoned want to be able to know when to turn up the Alpha around their girlfriend’s proliferative phase and ease off when she’s in her luteal (down cycle) phase. When you look at this in terms of cognitive processes, a man’s Reasoning process wants to deductively solve a problem that is rooted in the Instinctual process. It certainly makes sense, like a lot of other problems, to use our smarts to solve that reproductive problem. The real problem is that the use of Reason is what defeats the Instinctual cognition. There are actually many subconscious, instinctual mechanisms men have evolved to determine a great deal of information about women reproductive states, but our Reason and what goes into influencing it, tends to make us discount what out Instinctive process is telling us.
Most guys get frustrated with Game at some stage of their learning (Reason) it. The most common complaint is “I can never hope to remember all of this shit perfectly all the time. I can’t calibrate the way I need to, or, this is all an act, when can I let my hair down and just relax with a girl?” Another common question/presumption guys hit me with is how I manage to continually Game my wife. The answer I almost universally give is that I don’t, in fact, consciously Game my wife. Rather, my success in our marriage and really all of my relationships with all the women in my life is the result of having internalized what I’ve learned from Red Pill awareness and made it who I am. I’ve taken what I’ve learned and internalized it to the point that Game became my instinctual response to women’s instinctual process.
Game is not an act for me, it’s an instinct. If you were to put a guitar in my hands today I could play it with a good degree of proficiency. I can play by ear and instinctually I anticipate where notes and chord progressions go if I’m trying to play a song I’ve never played before because I’ve been playing guitar for the better part of my life. However, there was a point in time where all of that was foreign to me. I could play by rote memorization, but playing music wasn’t instinctual. Playing an instrument wasn’t part of who I was at that point in time.
The same is true for internalizing Game. It is entirely possible for your Rational process to inform your Instinctual process as well as your Emotional processes. This interplay can work for all our cognitive processes, but as I’m focusing on instinct today I want to stress again that Rational and Emotional processes can alter the, largely subconscious, Instinctual process. I have pretty good pitch as a result of being a musician for so long. If you asked me to play a particular note or chord I would instinctively do so. What I wouldn’t do is hunt around the fretboard counting frets and string to come to it. This is the best illustration I can give you with regards to internalizing other things.
Martial arts is another good example. There are certain innate, instinctual reactions we have when we’re confronted with conflict or protecting ourselves. When something flies at our faces we flinch. When we hear a sudden loud noise we startle. These are inborn parts of our firmware that evolved in us for very good reasons. What martial arts training does is forces us to sublimate those natural instincts and replace them with more efficient instinctual responses. Again, this is the Rational process rewriting the instinctual process via internalization.
Art has always been something I’ve had an innate ability for. I have do doubt that many of our natural cognitive ‘gifts’ are in some way gene expressions. So when we see a ‘natural’ at something our rational/emotional minds tend to think of it as something almost supernatural. However, I had to learn to play music because I was determined to express myself creatively in that fashion as well, and that took perseverance and internalization of skills. I think the same can be said for guys we think are ‘naturals’ with regard to Game and women. They may have an instinctual affinity for Game. They may be blessed with good genetics. But Game can be learned and internalized down to the Instinctual level.
All of that said, there are still fundamental parts of our mental firmware that are ‘pre-loaded’ into us at birth. Shit tests, Hypergamy, mate guarding behaviors, ovulatory shift behaviors, and many more are in-loaded in women and every bit as Instinctual as breathing or eating or self-preservation. Just as there are physical gender differences in our brains and bodies, so too are their differences in men and women’s Instinctual processes. The easiest one for us to consider is in sexual imperatives. I’ve noted in many essays that only women are Hypergamous. Men and women’s sexual strategies are reflective of their differing physical and mental make up, but those strategies are also different (and often contradicting) as a result of the Instinctual process unique to men and women as well.
One of the more powerful instincts men have is our sexual impulse and as a consequence it’s one that we are taught to control the most. Hypergamy is also a product of women’s Instinctual process, however, since about 60 years ago, prosocial control over Hypergamy has become something individual to a woman. Men’s self-control over their sexual nature is something that’s been part of our upbringing for millennia, women today are just now being expected to self-police their own sexual impulsivity.
These innate gender differences in instinct are a very difficult aspect of human nature for both egalitarian equalists and traditional moralists to accept. Equalists chomp at the bit with respect to their ego-investments in blank-slate idealism. Even the idea of a gendered difference in human nature, much less a human “nature” at all (a concept most deny) conflicts with the social constructivism that forms most of their ideology. Moralists tend to think that acknowledging (much less embracing) our instinctual selves is endorsing the worst of it, or it’s some kind of license to shirk the personal responsibilities for it. And, for both equalist and moralist, accepting our instinctual natures seems deterministic in a way that conflicts with their sense of existential control.
Well, the good news for both is that understanding men and women’s Instinctually processed natures is something our other two processes (for better or worse) have an influence over. There’s a common refrain from equalists today that presumes we’ve “evolved beyond” our base instincts (if they acknowledge them at all). From moralists we’ve always been ‘higher minded’ and above our instincts, that is if we accept some ideological ‘truth’. The root of both of these presumptions can be traced to the Emotional and Rational processes influencing our Instinctive process.
I’m of the opinion that very few of us are actually ruled by our instincts, but they are always the favorite scapegoat for ideologues. As a Red Pill aware man I think it’s important to have an objective understanding of how the Instinctive process operates in ourselves and women. Denying or disqualifying the importance of instinct and why it evolved is usually one of the biggest blindspots for a Blue Pill conditioned mind.
In the next part of this series I’ll explore the Emotional process and how it’s become the preeminent social-defining experience for us.