The Red Pill Path

The Red Pill, with respect to intersexual dynamics, is, and will always be a praxeology. It is unconcerned with value judgements. Issues of how one interprets the data presented by Red Pill praxeology as right or wrong is an exercise in subjectivity and personal belief. In essence the Red Pill should always be about what is – not what should be, not what seems moral, immoral or amoral. 

I knocked on about this in The Believers vs. The Empiricists back in July of 2019. The problem with adding ideology to the Red Pill is that it distorts the intent of staying as objective as possible. A Praxeology is the study of those aspects of human action that can be grasped a priori; in other words, it is concerned with the conceptual analysis and logical implications of preference, choice, means-end schemes, and so forth. In a praxeological context, the Red Pill is a ‘loose science’ concerned with the understanding of the underlying motivators of why we do what we do as men and women. It doesn’t get everything right, but it does ask the right questions. It’s these questions that make believers uncomfortable. The beauty of The Red Pill as a praxeology is that we get to write those questions and conclusions down in pencil, not ink, to be erased and edited as new information changes them. The Red Pill is not an ideology itself. Despite what many moralist critics would like to redefine it as, a Red Pill awareness is about an obligation to understanding the truth about men and women’s natures.

Yes, I know, it is impossible to be entirely objective in anything. In fact, just the thought required in asking a particular question implies a particular subjective bias. You wouldn’t be asking those kinds of questions if you didn’t subscribe to some belief-set that caused you to think about them in the first place. Even a commitment to objective truth is itself perceived as a value judgement. What’s worth your consideration is at least as important as why you think it’s worth considering. I get it. It still doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to be as objective as humanly possible, in spite of the pre-knowledge that we have underlying reasons for being curious about something.

Objectivity vs. Ideology

There. Now that’s out of the way.

What one does with the data the Red Pill praxeology aggregates, and how one interprets that information, is up to the individual. The prescriptions we create for ourselves with this knowledge are almost always a value call. The real question for men, new to the Red Pill, is are they beginning from a position of value judgement first and then seeking to find the Red Pill data that best aligns with that preconception? Or are they beginning from a neutral, objective position of interpreting this information and then forming well-thought, rational prescriptions for themselves based on that objectivity?

How we make this information useful to us is just as important as how we came to the conclusion that it should be useful to us. After having written in this ‘sphere for almost 20 years now I’ve come to see how men will use Red Pill awareness to either better (save) serve their lives by changing their minds about themselves and implementing it, or else they use that awareness to validate their preconceived belief-sets. Usually they do this by cherrypicking the parts that align with those beliefs and discarding or disqualifying the data that conflicts with them. This is how you get the Purple Pill. Accept just enough empirical Red Pill data to validate a belief-set rooted in their Blue Pill conditioning. And it’s made all the better if you can profit from pandering to those Blue Pill beliefs in others by calling yourself a ‘coach’ of some kind.

PUAs, MGTOW, MRAs, Trad-Cons, Positivity and Success Porn advocates, Red Pill Ministry Pastors, Father-Figure Fitness Coaches, Masculinity Psychologists, Female “Relationship Experts”, and a plethora of other sub-factions that reside in the ‘sphere are all belief-set prescriptions. Their subjective prescriptions either follow in the wake of Red Pill praxeology, or they find their preconceptions validated – in some part – by the data and awareness that the Red Pill brings to them.

When the information that the Red Pill presents conflicts with these belief-prescriptions, that’s when we see believers attempt to redefine the Red Pill as an ideology. When a stark empirical truth challenges an ego-invested belief, most people feel attacked. That belief is often one that people have based their lives on, so challenging the belief is challenging the way that person has lived for a long time. In terms of the Red Pill, it’s much easier to redefine or reinterpret what that empirical data really should mean to a man. And whenever we see words like should or ought we know we’re dealing with a value judgement. 

The only way a believer can protect an ego-investment challenged by Red Pill awareness is to reduce the Red Pill to an ideology. Bring the enemy to battle on your own field and on your own terms. So long as the Red Pill is just about objective observations, connecting dots and collating data, the right or the wrong of it, the value judgement of what ought to be, is irrelevant to discerning the truth. But if you can convince yourself and others that the Red Pill is in fact an ideological pursuit – not an objective pursuit – then you choose the terms of terms of the battle. If the Red Pill can be redefined as a belief-set then you can lock horns with it with your own belief-set. Then the debate isn’t about what is, it becomes about what’s right or wrong, or what that data should mean, or how it should be put to proper use in a person’s life. Hypergamy becomes less about women’s nature, and more about how women are inherently predisposed to evil as a result of it. Alpha or Beta become defined by how well a man aligns with a preexisting belief-set – “You’re not a real man if you believe/don’t believe this!” – and the Soulmate Myth might become an article of faith that wins an ideological argument.

Redefine the premise of the Red Pill as an ideology and you can fight it as an ideology. But even if you could, the data the Red Pill presents still forces a lot of conflict in the believer. That leaves the believer to reconcile that data with the cognitive dissonance he/she feels about it. It is much more intrinsically satisfying to redefine, disqualify and then re-qualify information that confounds our beliefs than it is to go into outright denial of that conflicting data. Sometimes outright denial is all that’s left.

People resort to denial when recognizing that a truth would destroy something they hold dear; and there are few things we hold more dear than our investments in what we think are right and wrong with respect to how we solve our reproductive problem. In the case of a cheating partner, denial lets you avoid acknowledging evidence of your own humiliation. Short of catching a spouse in bed with your best friend, evidence of infidelity is usually ambiguous. It’s motivated skepticism. You’re more skeptical of things you don’t want to believe and demand a higher level of proof.

Denial is unconscious, or it wouldn’t work: if you know you’re closing your eyes to the truth, some part of you knows what the truth is and denial can’t perform its protective function. This is why we say, “Once you’ve seen the code in the Matrix, once you’ve taken the Red Pill, there’s no going back.”

One thing we all struggle to protect is a positive self-image. The more important the aspect of your self-image that’s challenged by the truth, the more likely you are to go into a state of denial. If you have a strong sense of self-worth and competence your self-image can take the hits but remain largely intact; if you’re beset by self-doubt (a hallmark of self-righteous Beta thinking), however, any acknowledgment of failure can be devastating and any admission of error painful to the point of being unthinkable. Self-justification and denial arise from the dissonance between believing you’re competent, and making a mistake, which clashes with that image.

Solution: Deny the mistake or redefine the terms of the debate.

By nature men are deductive problem solvers. This is manifest in many ways, but for a Beta male who still believes solving a woman’s problems will lead to him solving his reproductive problem, more often than not it leads him to a worse life. Once a man unplugs and begins to internalize what a deeper, more accurate understanding of intersexual dynamics means to his life he’s going to look for ways to apply it to his own circumstances. This is a natural, unavoidable progression. As I’ve stated in many an essay, I’m not in the business of making better men, I’m in the business of giving men the tools with which to build better lives for themselves. I expect men, at some stage, to use what they’ve learned from what I write to change their minds about themselves and become the better men they can be with a better awareness.

I do not offer prescriptions. I do not have a one-size-fits-all formula or 12 catch-all rules that will help you live a better life. Most men want that formula, and a lot of them will pay a small fortune to avoid the work necessary to effect a real change in their lives if some coach even hints that they have the cheat codes to do it. They are sheep in search of a shepherd. I have precious few expectations of my readers, but one is that I expect you take it upon yourselves to be the artists of your own lives. If it frustrates you that I won’t hold your hand and lead you to a better version of yourself just know that going through that frustration is necessary for you to be your own man. Not an adherent, not an acolyte, but the author of your own decisions. 

A lifetime of Blue Pill conditioning has already attempted to remove that control from you long enough.