Articles from May 2018

The Rational Process

 

One of the most vexing things a lot of Red Pill aware men encounter when they interact with women today is the expectation that women are coequally as rational agents as men. We were taught from the earliest ages by our blank-slate equalist teachers that boys and girls are all the same, having coequal potential for coequal successes in life (as they define them), then primarily focusing on the ‘correct’, female way of educating both sexes. This education isn’t limited to just the classroom; the Village uses many ways (media, pop culture, religion, etc.) to deliver what is fundamentally the same message – boys and girls, men and women, are essentially, effectively, the same with respect to their potentials. Now, that’s the message not the practice. Even when they are forced to recognize definitive differences they simply dismiss them by saying “We’re more alike than different” in the presumption that this should be enough to refocus and reinforce their blank-slate belief set.

So when men and women consider differences in gender, differences in double standards, inequalities in gender-specific issues and pretty much any empirical debate about these and other differences, men presume that the women they are ‘debating’ with are also looking for earnest, equitable answers beginning from the same coequal state of mutual interest. This is almost never the case.

The pretense that’s been embedded into men from the earliest years of their Blue Pill conditioning is since men and women are coequal agents they should both be interested in finding an objective truth together. But the frustration in this ‘debate’ comes from the simple fact that our differences are actually much more significant than the dismissals of equalists would want them to be. The roots of this deliberate misunderstanding are twofold: First, the innate solipsistic self-interest of women, and second, women’s predisposition to interpret information using the Emotional (versus Rational) interpretive processes.

When men and women debate intersexual issues of contention men opt for their innately preferred Rational interpretive process; we look for factual evidence to support a premise. Women opt for the Emotional process and then consider evidence. This difference in processing is where a lot of personal and ideological obstacles come into play between men and women. Our educational priorities of both men and women prioritizes the importance of emotion and its expression before a consideration of the Rational process. We teach boys/men to sublimate their natural proclivity towards reason by replacing it with the Emotional process. Thus, we’ve seen the push to encourage men to get in touch with their feelings or their feminine sides since the late 60s.

As I mentioned last week, women prioritize context (how a conversation makes them feel) in communication while men prioritize content (the information of the conversation); these differences are part of our biological/neurological evolved inheritances. This is where the misunderstanding starts between the sexes; however, calling this a ‘misunderstanding’ is a bit of a misnomer.

I’m sure a lot of readers think this is a longwinded way of saying women’s emotions blind them to the facts that men present to them when they debate. While this is true in a sense, this is shortsighted because, in the interests of simplifying things, most guys will just blow off the dynamics that build up this (often deliberate) miscommunication. Women don’t like the way a Rational-prioritized conversation makes them feel. Often the reality is unflattering to their solipsistically defined egos – but the communication feels wrong because women’s presumption is that men should just know to acknowledge their feelings in that debate (all communication really). On the female side the presumption is that men and women, being blank-slate equals, already know to prioritize the Emotional process, while on the male side men presume women will prioritize the Rational process because, again, we’re all the same, right?

This presuming that one sex sees the same way as the other is endemic in our time. I had a reader pose me with a similar example:

I had a conversation with my LTR at dinner tonight where I did a thought exercise with her. I asked her to imagine what it would be like if people visually saw different colors when they looked at various objects but had consistent names for those colors in their own minds. For example, person A sees what person B calls Blue, but it looks like what would be called green if person A could peer into person B’s mind. The point was we can’t know what colors actually look like from an individual subjective perspective. Although I tried several times to walk through this, she couldn’t comprehend what I was trying to explain. I then realized that this exercise involved imagining a first person conscious experience from multiple perspectives. This test could be a proxy test for (women’s) solipsism.

This thought experiment is a good way to illustrate solipsism in women, but it’s an even better example of the default presumptions men and women have of each other in other areas. As it stands today, in our feminine-primary social order, the Blue Pill conditions us to default to cognitive models that are defined by the female experience. Thus, whatever best satisfies a female-primary purpose is always considered the correct purpose. The way women think, the way women prioritize their Emotional interpretive process, is the right way for men to think – and the mutual presumption is that men already do (or should) think and process stimuli like women do. Anything else, anything that would recognize a difference in men from women, always feels wrong.

This default presumption of a female-correct way of interpreting and experiencing the world isn’t limited to our differences in communication. This misalignment of interpretive differences also extends to the false presumption that men and women approach the concept of love from a mutually understood perspective. Men love idealistically, women love opportunistically, yet men’s presumption is that both men and women approach love from the Disneyesque idealism they believe women are capable of. Men too believe that women see the same colors they do and have the same names for those colors. In this case those colors are the concepts and approaches women have towards love. I may write a new essay outlining this dynamic soon, but I’ve already written many prior posts on this experiential difference.

Rationalism vs. The Rational Process

As a result of pushing the Emotional process as the correct way of interpreting our world the Rational process necessarily gets demonized today. It feels wrong to a social order predicated on the Emotional process, so the truths that the Rational process reveals seem cruel, biased or vindictive when they refute the interpretations of the Emotional process. The importance of Emotion has been elevated above an interpretive process to where it’s now entered a metaphysical realm. This is where the Emotional process becomes Emotionalism. In the light of this, the Rational process is overshadowed and sublimated in importance. But the Rational process is what exposes emotionalism for what it is: Emotion is an evolved, biological interpretive process that serves our species well, but the feelings it generates are biological responses to environmental stimuli, not evidence of some higher consciousness or mythic existential importance that goes beyond anything in the physical realm.

The Rational process throws a cold bucket of truth on lofty emotionalism. As a result, and because emotionalism has been a basis of our social order for millennia now, the Rational process had to be debased in importance.

Trust in the LORD with all your heart and do not lean on your own understanding. – Proverbs 3:5

This scripture is an example of the conflict between emotionalism and the rationalism that popular social consciousness would like to apply to the Rational interpretive process. The Rational process is based in our collective and subjective intelligence. Healthy men and women both have the mental hardware to use the Rational process well, but where we differ is in our gendered mental firmware. When we collectively prefer one process to the other, this is where we decide which gender’s process will define our social order. In order for emotionalism to supersede rationality and ensure its preeminence appeals to the emotional above the rational have to be popularized.

If we could depend on an unbiased, unadulterated form of reason the Rational process would be a superior methodology. But as I stated before, rationalism is dependent on intelligence and that intelligence takes time. In some ways the Rational process is sensitive to both instinct and emotion, in other’s that reasoning is painfully, sometimes fatally slow. The world happens fast and vacillating in the reasoning process might easily kill an individual. Fortunately we have instinct and emotion to carry us through. The Rational process requires time because it requires learning, contemplation, theorizing and any number of high-order thinking processes to be effective. And even then, that effectiveness depends on reasoning’s accuracy. For the past three or four hundred years we’ve increasingly had the luxury to develop our Rational process, but for all the advancements it’s given us, when it comes to intersexual dynamics emotion is still the priority.

We have placed such importance on emotion at the expense of reason that we’ll risk personal safety in our ‘right’ to express it. No doubt most men are familiar with repressing their emotional responses, but it’s interesting to consider that even with this self-control and even with our innate predilection to process emotion differently than women, men are the ones accused of failing to be ‘in touch with their emotions’. On first glance Robert Greene’s quote here appears to be wisdom (I think it is) – self-control, mastery of one’s emotional state, is a virtue. Yet, in our emotional-primary social order we’ll hear women complain that men are less emotionally available. And this conflict illustrates again that whatever is expedient to the female imperative is what is to be considered ‘correct’ at that moment.

Empiric reason is the foundation of what humanity has made of itself. Setting aside emotionality and considering challenges in a Rational interpretive process is fundamental to understanding the emotional and instinctive process and their advantages and weaknesses. For the record it’s my belief that all of these interpretive processes in union are are necessary elements in the human experience, but my focus on these processes is to lay a foundation for a better understanding of them. It’s easy to get caught up in the demonization of the instinctual and the rational when the emotional is defining what’s bad or good for our collective experiences.

When I wrote Appeals to Reason I was exploring the futility of expecting women to transition into a logical reasoning of why she should logically be with a guy who was more than happy to embody all of the aspects she stated she wants in a man. The manosphere idiom is “no woman was ever reasoned or logicked into bed with a guy”, women don’t follow the Rational process when it comes to interrelating with men. It’s all Instinctual and Emotional, and usually in that order. A man might be able to use his rational facilities to better understand women’s evolved instinctual and emotional responses, and what prompts them, but reason itself isn’t the key to that interrelation.

Appealing to women’s logic and relying on deductive reasoning to sort it out is the calling card of a Beta mind. There is nothing more anti-seductive for women than appealing to her reason. Arousal, attraction, sexual tension, subcommunication of desire, all happen indirectly and below the social surface for women. It’s not that women are incapable of reasoning (hypergamy is one logical bitch) or are crippled by their emotion-based hindbrains, it’s that if you’re asking her how to be more attractive you don’t Get It. It’s in the doing, not the asking.

If you’ve stuck with me to the end of this series I want to say thanks. I really felt that these interpretive processing models needed to be fully outlined as what I’ll get into in the coming months will need this as a basis for it.

Emotional Differences

The following was from a reader’s comment exchange I had back in March. I wanted to add this here before I move on to the Rational process, because it think it encapsulates a lot of the (often misguided) presumptions we have when it comes to the primary importance we apply to our Emotional process. As I mentioned last week, for millennia now we’ve elevated our Emotional process of interpreting our reality to mythical importance. So insaturated is this importance in our personal and cultural being that to even question it seems sacrilegious. We are literally born into a dependence on emotions for our own survival. That is part of our earliest development, but the conditioning that gives rise to the primacy of emotionalism is layered onto us for the rest of our lives. Emotionalism is the religion that we’ve fashioned from our Emotional interpretive process.
Women practice emotional manipulation and men practice emotional detachment. It’s been a game playing out for thousands of years. Somehow the roles got scrambled in the last century. Things will balance out one way or another in the coming future.

What’s been popularized in our social consciousness as ‘emotional detachment‘ is not a manipulation tactic of men. Men’s mental firmware processes emotion differently from women, but because we live in a feminine-primary social order we’re conditioned to believe that the way women process emotion is the “correct” way for men to process them as well. I made the point a little while ago in another essay that what we think is men’s incorrect way of communicating with other men is really men’s natural way of communicating. I’d linked to an article in the Boston Globe about the problem of “lonely middle aged men” and how they don’t do communication and friendship like women do. Men’s natural, general, indifference to their emotional state isn’t a bug, it’s a feature of our mental firmware.

This isn’t to say men don’t get lonely or share the same emotional states as women, but it is to say that men do emotions differently than women. We are naturally predisposed to prioritize information above emotion; the Instinctual and Rational processes come before emotion in our interpretive process. I can remember early on in my marriage when I would talk to a buddy of mine on the phone and then abruptly just say “see ya” or hang up. He knew I’d call him back to relay whatever info we were discussing sooner or later, but my wife thought something was wrong. “Is everything OK with Ray?” she’d ask, and I said “Yeah, why wouldn’t it?” She explained that she thought my ending the call like that was rude or that we’d had an argument. She was used to long drawn conversations with girlfriends or her sister and then ending them by some confessions of how much they would miss each other or some other meaningful way.

She thought my way of communicating was wrong, but this is how men interact with each other – say what you mean, mean what you say and get to the point. This was also the presupposition of the Boston Globe article and many other posts; men do communication wrong, men do emotion wrong, and therefore they must be conditioned to do them correctly. That is to say, like women do.

Men lack the hardware and the firmware to do this, but they are conditioned to reflexively respond as women do from the earliest age. Thus, when a man processes emotion naturally it appears he’s not “feeling” correctly or isn’t “emotionally available” to female-correct sensibilities. In this context a man doing emotion as his innate predispositions compel him to seems like he’s deliberately playing out some ’emotional detachment’ game. But rather than accept that men and women are different and deal with emotions in different ways our egalitarian Blue Pill conditioning makes us presume the man is being inauthentic.

“He’s not really that way, it’s an act, or he’s just withholding his emotions to hurt a woman.” This is the rationale that female-correct society has to resort to because accepting that men evolved to process emotions differently would also mean that men and women are not the functional “equals” that blank-slate equalism is founded on. Thus, their emphasis is to pathologize this emotional detachment and make it one more negative aspect of maleness in need of a ‘cure’.

I think your comments are pertinent and you brought good rational arguments. However they are along the lines of “that’s how we are, men and women”, that’s how we evolved and we can’t do anything about it because it’s in our DNA and our mental programming. Feminism is marching on the fact that we’re born equal, even if there are obvious biological differences. Yes, women emote more and have the means to be greater emotional manipulators. But men can learn the so called feminine behaviors (The so called Game actually involves this and I noticed some of the PUAs mentioning that it’s the bisexual men who are actually the greatest players) and women can also learn the so called manly behaviors (there are a lot of examples especially in our current society). Is it good, is it bad? Hard to say. The thing is that the family is an artificial construction that helped our civilization flourish and it’s been lately systematically destroyed due to what you’re calling feminine primary social order.

Evolution is a continuous process and my opinion is that it’s either people will somehow transcend their biology (see AI or some kind of other conscious evolution) or after some “dark” times of men being more like women and women more like men the things will come to the previous “normality” of feminine women and manly men.

Human beings will not transcend their own evolution, they will adapt with their environments, but they will not be removed from its influences. We’ve been force fitting and conditioning men to be women for the past five generation. We presume that the feminine is the correct, unitary way that humans should be. We call that egalitarian equality, but what it comes down to is adopting a universal correct mode of being and it’s founded on feminine/female control of what is right and wrong – at least for the time being.

However, this force-fits boys and men into an unnatural state they never evolved for and all because the feminine is the presumed correct gender norm that we base equality on. We’re all expected to be equally female. What has that got us in those past five generations? A male suicide rate five times that of women. Boys prescribed sedatives for acting like boys instead of ‘correct’ girls. I can go on.

The fact remains that you and many others of your mindset believe that evolving or being in control of that process only progresses if boys and men “transcend” their biology and think like correct females. It is the height of new agey metaphysical woo woo hubris to expect one sex to behave counter to its 100,000 years of evolved nature and become like the other to accommodate what it thinks should be correct. This is the crux here; the feminine-primary social order we live in today is predicated on the infallibility of the female experience, however, this experience is only validated if both men and women are prioritizing women’s Emotional process as a way of interpreting the world.