Series

The Rational Male – Religion

After 3 years the time has finally arrived. I pushed the button on the official publication of The Rational Male – Religion on January 4th, 2021. I know, I know, it’s been a long time, and try as I might I think the blog suffered a bit for it. The good news is I’ll be getting back to my writing here on the regular again, but I will admit this project consumed me more than I had ever anticipated. The process of writing a book of this caliber taught me a lot of valuable lessons, not just as a writer, but as a researcher and a thinker (if you’ll grant me that). I bit off way too much for me to chew in a lot of ways when I embarked on this project. I’m proud to say I had the commitment to chew it all eventually, but writing a book more or less from whole cloth was something I was less prepared for than my previous 3 books. So, for this Return to the Blog post I’m going to tell you about the book itself, my approach to it, the process of researching and developing it, and what I learned along the way.

The Rational Male – Religion has been available on Amazon (print) and Kindle for a little over 2 weeks now. It’s been the #1 New Release in the Science and Religion category since I published it, and it’s been #1 through #6 in some of the Religious subcategories as well. This is a big compliment to me since my intent from the beginning was to open the Red Pill up to an audience that wasn’t likely to be savvy of the Manosphere. Thus far the dozen or so reviews have all been 5 star, but moreover the comments have been overwhelmingly positive – to the point that some are calling it my best work since the first book. Flattering as that is, it’s the result of a degree of planning, research, discussion and attention to detail that I’ve learned is needed to have anyone outside the ‘sphere take Red Pill praxeology seriously. It’s one thing to discuss the often unflattering truths about women’s nature and the latent purposes of mating strategies; it’s quite another to assert that our personal beliefs and religious faiths are intertwined with them. I knew from the start that I’d be navigating a minefield of readers’ preconceptions, and ego-investments in them. This was my challenge: convey the Red Pill praxeology of intersexual dynamics in the context of personal beliefs while being mindful that the past four generations have had Blue Pill conditioning inform a lot of these beliefs. I also had to bear in mind that the convictions, values and faiths being informed by Blue Pill conditioning aren’t just limited to those with a belief in God.

This was my prime directive in writing Religion. I wasn’t about to sugarcoat or dance around the tough, ego-investment challenging aspects of the Red Pill. I have an obligation to objective truth, but I also didn’t want the book to become a “Rollo bashes religion in this one” effort. The most common hesitation I get from people curious about this 400 page book is “Hey man, I’m an Atheist, religion is just a bullshit cope, should I just skip this one?” Likewise, I have Believers ask me, “Is this book just about bashing Christianity and traditional values?” The answer to both is ‘No’. In fact from the Introduction I anticipated this response. It’s why I wrote the book actually. The Rational Male – Religion is an exploration of human intersexual dynamics and their influence on spiritual belief, religion and social values. Empiricists and Believers alike will get a lot from this book. It is a Red Pill look under the hood at the roots of men and women’s “need to believe” in love, God and the metaphysical to solve our mating imperatives. I don’t try to convert anyone to religion, nor do I try to convince you to abandon your beliefs. As always, it’s about connecting dots and seeing correlations.

Religion is structured differently than any of my previous books. The Rational Male was originally a collection of what I believe are the most imperative Red Pill truths for men to understand in this new era of information. These were drawn from my past essays on this blog, which were prompted by long discussion threads on the SoSuave and other forum posts from as far back as 2002. I then reworked and curated these essays into what is now the Bible of the Red Pill. For Religion I had to take a new approach. Although I drew upon some prior essays, the majority of this book I wrote from scratch. Dalrock of course was a major influence throughout the book, but even for the older ideas it was necessary to rewrite the concepts both to modernize them for the coming decade and to make them accessible to a reader who may not be familiar with the Red Pill we take for granted now. This meant that I had to start from a point of explaining Red Pill root concepts in the beginning chapters and build chapter by chapter to the greater concepts. The overarching theme of the book is the need to recognize that we are now 20 years into a New Age of Enlightenment brought about by the internet, social media and an accessibility to information unprecedented in human history. I make a distinction between old order thinking versus a new order understanding that challenges (and confirms) those old order belief sets. This is the first hurdle most unfamiliar readers will have to consider. Most old order thinking is what constitutes our beliefs, convictions and values, but the data age (for better or worse) access to information (accurate or not) is challenging these ego-investments. Whether or not you think these challenges confirm your beliefs isn’t the point; the point is that this new order information is forcing the past 4 generations – and future generations – to reassess how we’ll progress as a globalized society by accepting new truths or clinging to old order thinking.

The book builds chapter by chapter up to the most salient parts in the final chapters. This is by design. I needed old and new readers to digest the way I come to the bigger concepts of the book before I get to them. This book is by far the most meticulously researched and sources-cited book I’ve ever written. In my prior books and on this blog I’m accused of not having peer-reviewed, har data to back up my assertions. Most of this is just disingenuous filibustering by lazy critics who don’t have the time to click on the links I put in my essays. However, I wasn’t going to have that in this book. I footnote every source I used in the research of this book. If you’re wondering why a book like this took 3 years to produce, a good portion of that time was spent reading and archiving the research. I should add that this aspect of the book is something I don’t see any writers in this sphere doing to such a degree. This process taught me to be very detail conscious about what I was writing. Most people don’t really care about the sources you cite, they just want to know you did look something up. In the TL;DR generation no one will take the time to read through the 20 page, peer-reviewed, meta-analysis they require from you to prove your assertion. They just find one study that reinforces their beliefs, link it, and dismiss you. So, my intent in citing sources in this book was more in the interests of thoroughness and less about trying to change anyones mind about their beliefs.

On Authorship

The biggest change you’ll note in this book is my writing style. I’ve learned to kill my darlings and only rarely pepper in a $10 word when I thought it served. This came from my reading Writing without Bullshit by Josh Bernoff. This book made me realize the importance of presenting my ideas with clarity. The cardinal rule of writing is this; never waste the reader’s time. In the past I’ve used some complex terms and, lets just say long-form, sentence structures to get an idea across. Too many people thought that I was trying to sound intelligent by using words they had to look up afterwards, but I’ve always thought that the English language was too rich to be limited to basic ‘caveman’ words. I don’t write for the 8th grade reading level most journalists are taught to do, however, I realized my ideas were too important not to be accessible to everyone. This book is 400 pages of tight, concise, cohesive writing in a way I really had to retrain myself for. Gone are the superlatives, qualifiers and needless reinforcer adjectives I used to think were useful. I had ample material to use and I knew where I wanted to go with the book from the start, so content wasn’t going to be a problem. The challenge was making it intelligible to all readers, not just the ones who already knew the Red Pill lingo. My purpose then became making the read engaging enough to give readers an Ah-ha! moment about the prior chapter when they got into the following chapter. It became an effort in knowing what to throw out, what to keep and how to simplify saying the same thing in fewer words. As a result, my outlines and my drafts are littered with dead darlings that I wouldn’t have thought twice about keeping in my prior books.

I feel like I’m a better writer for it now. Most of my essays average between 1,800 and 2,800 words. My process usually starts with a hand written outline of concepts I want to hit on and I go from there. Some of these outlines can get really complex as I move from point to point, which create further concepts sometimes. I’ve learned that I don’t necessarily need to cram all of the outline into one essay or one chapter. While I’ve always crafted each post on this blog, I recognize the need for brevity now. The Red Pill praxeology and intersexual dynamics span many subfields, and while I try to be comprehensive in relating the data that makes up Red Pill concepts, at some point I have to trust my readers to get it. Either that, or I have to link what I can and let the bigger ideas carry the concepts into future posts. My challenge now is balancing being thorough with being concise – and all while considering what counterarguments will arise.

I finally feel like an author now. To be an author requires a certain amount of conceit. You read that right; in order to be an author you’ve got to be at least somewhat conceited. Not necessarily in a bad way, but you’ve got to make some presumptions about yourself before you can get past the sticking point of actually typing out ideas on a blank page. The first presumption is the hardest. You have to ask yourself, “Do I actually think I’m so important, worldly or wise that anyone should take me seriously enough to care about what I have to say?” Even if you’re just blogging about something you know well enough, or you just like the topic enough, you have to get past the the hesitation in thinking other people who know better, or are bigger fans than yourself about something you love might be considered better authorities or authors than you.

I don’t really believe in fear being the biggest stumbling block for would-be writers. Most people aren’t fearful of failure or ridicule when it comes to becoming an author. Fear is a stupidly common theme for motivational speakers. Fear is the easiest rationale to target for the ‘go getters’ trying to build a brand on positivity. Fear just sounds like something people would deal with. Athletes, artists writers, everyone’s fearful of failure, right? Wrong. It’s about hesitation in thinking anyone should take you seriously. Then hesitation turns into procrastination and would-be authors turn into pundits or critics, or else they endlessly pontificate about how wrong other authors are and how they’ll correct them in the book they’ll eventually write,…eventually. If you think would-be authors are fearful of failure just look at how easily people blather on for multi-Tweet threads on Twitter, 280 characters at a time. The truth is, damn near anyone can write, but few people are actually authors.

Getting past that hesitation is becoming much easier in the internet age. First it was user groups, then discussion forums, then blogging was the thing that got us past the hesitation. We had to presume that someone, somewhere, might actually read our thoughts and care about them. While social media and Twitter destroyed our critical thinking and insight about what we were writing, it did help to kill any hesitation about presuming someone might think we were unqualified to have an opinion on anything. Fan fiction was one of the first genres of writing to evolve along with the internet. 50 Shades of Grey was literally the work of an amateur fan fiction writer who took the time to become an actual author. Her book was roundly criticized as fan pablum by critics, but you couldn’t argue with the numbers. At some stage a writer has to say screw it and just go for broke. Readers and critics be damned, when we become and author we write a book we want to read.

Once you get past the hesitation, and trot your ideas out in the open it comes down to honing your craft.  The craft of writing is the next stumbling block to becoming an author. Anyone can write Tweet or a blog post and be entertaining. It takes an author to hold a reader’s attention for 300 pages. Most writers today are little more than word processors. The self-published “authors” of today were the cubicle jockeys of yesterday writing fan fiction or political screeds from their workstations on company time when they got bored. Just the self-appointed title of author has a romance to it. Few writers today actually know the craft of writing or storytelling, much less a comprehensive knowledge of what they’re relating most of the time. Even learned professors with lots of letters in their degree’s titles who find a new popularity in the Hustle Economy really have a grasp of how to write well.

I’ve often wonder when I could start thinking of myself as a real author. One book? Three books? How many pages do those ‘books’ need to have for me to be considered legitimate? Hemingway’s, Old Man and the Sea is 128 pages long. Hmm,…so, not pages. What about word count? 27,000 for that book. Nope, not word count. Damn, what makes a book a book and a writer an author? Inspiration? Sincerity? Drive, moxie, perseverance? Probably all of those and a few more adjectives I can muster, but when should a guy start calling himself an author? The best answer I can come to is when he’s honest with himself. When you’re honest with yourself about the reasons why you write, why you feel you need to write, when you have mental conversations with yourself about what you’re going to write, all without the pretense of how anyone will misinterpret your words or any thought to what your grandchildren will think about you in the future – that’s when you’re an author. When you’ve filled your 7th little notebook to remember ideas in because your sick of forgetting the brilliant things that came to you at 2am when you woke up to take a piss in the middle of the night, that’s when you’re an author. When you write to yourself and not for your readers, that’s when you’re an author. When you sit down at your iMac with no inspiration and write for 4 hours anyway, then you proof read the brilliant, inspired, words that came to you during the last 30 minutes, that’s when you’re an author.

That’s all very prosaic, but being an author needs to be defined now more than ever. It’s easy to write — it’s a calling to be an author. Lord knows, I never planned to be an author. The Rational Male wasn’t published until I was 45 years old. It took a lifetime to come to the knowledge and craft necessary to write it. Few people actually read books today. They’d rather listen to them, or they skim through them, watch the movie or just read the outline to form an opinion of the ideas or material. I’ve called this the TL;DR Generation – Too Long; Didn’t Read. Feed me the salient points so I can see if you’re full of shit, call you on it or give you praise, and then move on to the next post. Actually writing something that stops a reader in their tracks is the hallmark of an author. Writing something that inspires genuine conversation, debate or writing a story that a reader can lose themselves in is the craft of an author. Writing something a reader actually internalizes, especially in this generation, is a rare, practiced, gift of an author. Being an author is difficult today. The distractions are endless. It’s not enough to just write ideas and relate them with skill, you have to be engaging and accessible to your readers in ways that authors from past eras never imagined. This is why most writers never become authors. Writers lose themselves in the distractions. They get lost in building identities, brands and images of themselves they believe their fans expect of them. Authors write in spite of themselves. Authors are so enveloped in their ideas and craft that they don’t care if they come off as assholes for ignoring distractions. Writers get off on the image of being writers, authors are too busy exploring and relating ideas.

Male Authority – Provisioning vs. Duty

I’ve been watching Outlaw King on Netflix recently. There’s a part where the wife of Robert the Bruce says ‘Power is making decisions, and whatever course you are charting, I choose you, my husband’ It struck me that my own wife had said almost these same words to me in 2005. When I’d decided to take a job in Orlando that would uproot us from family and friends. There was no “,…but what about my friends, career, etc.?” from her and I had no hesitation to consider anything but taking the position. She said, “You are my husband, I go where you go.”

How many men hold a default Frame in their marriage? Many women are reluctant to even accept their husband’s last name today. There’s a lot of bullshit reasons for this, but the core truth is that women have no confidence in their man in the long term. They don’t trust his ‘course’. There’s holding Frame, and then there’s establishing a long term Frame, a paradigm, a reality of his own, that defines a man’s authority in his marriage and family relationships. Women today still want marriage, but few want to defer to their husband’s ‘course’. They don’t trust him with her life.

And why would they? For the past four or five generations men have been portrayed in popular culture as untrustworthy. Either they are Beta buffoons in need of women’s uniquely female ‘reasoning’ (which is really male reasoning with breasts) to save them from themselves, or they’re malicious Alpha malcontents (or perverts) also in need of female correction to bring them to female approved justice. It’s the retribution fantasy of feminism played out in popular media, but the societal result is generations of women who have no inherent respect of men and even less trust in any beneficial course they might plot out for them as future wives.

There’s also the male perspective to consider in this. Most men approach their marriage and long term relationships from what is ostensibly an egalitarian perspective. “Equality”, playing fair, being an “equal partner” a pretense of egalitarianism, is all a cover story for a power dynamic that is truly based on resource dynamics. In a ‘modern marriage’, male authority, even just the idea of it, is ceded by default to the woman. I’ll explain why in a moment.

Today’s marriage stats and the socioeconomic variables within marriage point to a very cold truth; if you make less money than your wife, statistically, your marriage is far more likely to dissolve. In couples where a woman outearns her husband divorce rates increase. Virtually every article written about this power dynamic attempts to paint the men involved as ‘feeling threatened‘ by their wives’ success, but the visceral truth can be distilled through the process of women’s Hypergamy. As you might guess, our feminine-centric social order can never allow for an unflattering picture of women, thus men must look like ridiculous, insecure, man-babies – this is another piece of the puzzle – but the stats don’t lie, only the reasoning for them misleads us culturally.

In an “egalitarian” marriage it is actually financial considerations that imbalance that idealistic fantasy of a “coequal partnership”. Men and masculinity are made to look ridiculous, insecure, potentially violent and incompetent on a social scale. This effort to delegitimize anything male has been going on since the late 1960s. The social impact of this has resulted in several generations whose default impression of men in general is one of distrust. Either distrust based in men’s potential for abusiveness, or largely more a distrust based in a default presumption of incompetence. Women cannot trust a man with her life because a majority of men are ridiculous buffoons, no better than big children and now we add that almost 40% of them are outearned by their wives.

Is it any wonder women have no default respect for a man’s course for their lives? In fact, given these modern circumstances, fantasies of an egalitarian marriage being the ideal notion are really the only way to justify marriage at all for women. Thus, we’ve crafted a new ideal of marriage that furnishes women with legal and social failsafes to make what looks like a really horrible, life-long attachment to a buffoon or an abuser just palatable enough to have women believe things might work out for them. Don’t worry ladies, the egalitarian ideal, that any potential husband worth your consideration will subscribe to wholesale, provides you not only with options that will absolve you of all responsibility for his (and your own) failures, but you’ll never have to really do anything he says. The law is on your side, and the very premise of an egalitarian marriage frees you from ever having to go along with one of his half-baked life plans for the both of you. In fact, as long as you make more money than him, you’ll almost surely be doing the ‘course’ setting for the both of you.

Needless to say this is not conducive to women entertaining a default deference to men’s authority. If women’s baseline impression of men is one of incompetence, ridiculousness and distrust, and then you combine it with the fact that over a third of them wont be earning the same financially we begin to see the reasons for the decline in marriage today. If the default perception of men is one of expected incompetence, why would a woman ever want to get married?

This is kind of a quandary. In marriage, a man’s authority today only extends to this monetary wealth – there is no inherent authority associated with being male despite what feminist bleat about ‘male privilege’. Wealth enforces will, but women still seek to find ways around accepting that authority by assuming control of that wealth. This is one reason why “financial abuse” has been fashioned into a form of spousal abuse, but there are many other means of emotional control that mitigates male authority-by-wealth.

Even when a man is the primary breadwinner his means to authority in his marriage is still mitigated. A man’s provisioning for his wife and family has always been considered a ‘manly duty’. Even the most masculinity-confused, Vichy Males are still conditioned to assume providership as a masculine trait that is ‘non-toxic’ and approved by their teachers. In most Trad-Con thought a man isn’t even to be considered a “man” unless he can prove his competence in generating more resources than he needs for himself. The direction of every aspiration he has must be applied to providing for a future wife, their children, likely their (her) extended family and then extended to society. By the old set of books a man can’t even be given the title of “man” (or “a real man”) unless he can prove he’s prepared himself to be a good husband, father and community leader.

While there’s nothing inherently wrong with a strong desire to fulfill this provisioning agenda, the men who do accept this as their “manly duty” are conditioned to only see their sacrifices as their expected responsibility. They are actively discouraged from ever assuming any authority might be forthcoming in exchange for their sacrifices. Not even a man’s wealth is a guarantee of authority; certainly not if he’s been conditioned to believe that an egalitarian marriage is an ideal, much less a possibility.

And now we come full circle – the promulgation of an egalitarian ideal in marriage, in gender equity, in the retribution and restitution that feminism is based on, all of this and more has the latent purpose of stripping men of any concept of authority, while enforcing the ideal of male responsibility. In The Second Set of Books I made the case that most (Beta) men today live by, or would like to live by, an old social contract that on the surface seems noble. They believe in an anachronism that promises them that honor, duty, chivalry and a default respect of women will, sooner or later, be appreciated by a woman with the “quality” enough to appreciate it and show that appreciation by accepting him for her intimate attentions. Only later do they come to realize that their dedication to that anachronism is misplaced and the exchange of duty for authority is not only erased, but he’s perceived as a “toxic” monster or a ridiculous “macho” fool for ever expecting that exchange. The world is actually playing by a second set of books that expects all of his ‘honor-bound’ beliefs are his responsibility, but nothing he sacrifices grants him any authority.

Last week I hosted a Special Edition of the Red Man Group in which we discussed whether a married man today is by default Blue Pill or Beta.

RMG_Patriarchs_Title_defaultIt’s almost impossible to broach this topic without accusations of bias or personal circumstance coloring a man’s perspective of marriage – and that’s from either side of the topic. I wasn’t endorsing marriage in this; if anything I made a case against marriage based on the same questioning of men’s authority I’ve explored in this essay. By today’s standards, marriage is far too dicey a prospect for me to ever advocate for. But how far are we willing to take this abandoning of dominance hierarchies in intersexual relationships? I recently got into a debate as to whether monogamous relationships – outside formal marriage – were even beneficial for men today. In that discussion we dissected the history of monogamy and in human relations it’s at least somewhat accepted that monogamy and two-parent investment in offspring was a dynamic that’s been beneficial to our own and some other species. I think that in the past, when social circumstance was different, the concept of monogamy and the institution of marriage were instrumental in our advancement and largely beneficial. All that’s changed now and much of the second set of books I referred to in this essay is predicated on an egalitarianism that has erased male authority and placed it on the shoulders of women who are ill-equipped (and honestly not wanting) to use that authority.

This last sentence here is going to seem like heresy to those invested in blank-slate, egalitarian equalism and fempowerment, but the truth is evident and unignorable that an evolved patriarchal authority has progressed us to an age where we’ve become prosperous enough to entertain thoughts of abandoning it. Stripping men of authority while still expecting a default, and total, responsibility is a really good summation of the two sets of books – the conflict between the old and the new social contract. And yes, I’m aware of the all the arguments that this state of disempowering men is by some political design. Destabilizing the family starts with delegitimizing male authority and confusing generations of men about the aspects of masculinity. Doubt and self-loathing are key in men policing other men for presumptions of authority. It’s crabs in the bucket – when one man presumes authority there need to be ten more to pull him back down into confusion and doubt.

So where do we go with this from here? Even the most ‘Con’ of Trad-Con women will still default to their fempowerment conditioning when presented with a default male authority they are supposed to follow. Can a man be a leader in his own home anymore? MGTOWs will tell you no, and they’d be right. You can’t out-Alpha the state. But the state is still comprised of men and women with their own preconceptions and belief-sets. Our evolved firmware still predisposes us to conventional gender roles, and that predisposition is also one of women expecting  male competence, decisiveness and dominance. Women still want a man to follow in spite of their conditioning to distrust men’s competence. Maybe a new form of monogamy is in order. Egalitarianism is a dead end, it only defaults to 100% female authority and 100% male responsibility. But perhaps at some point, when things get so bad that women are forced to take a chance on the men they think are potential buffoons and abusers, a new kind of “marriage” can come out of the morass that egalitarianism has made of marriage.

How do we get back to a state of male authority based on a woman’s trust of her husband? I would like to believe I have this with my wife today, but I know that this is tenuous from the perspective of true, actionable authority. I once came down hard on a pastor who was advising the women of his congregation to “allow” their husbands to lead them. He was basically asking the women to stand down and trust God that their husbands we’re actually worthy of their trust. He didn’t know it, but his entire premise stemmed from women already acknowledging that they had ultimate authority over their husband as a given. Most pastors are pussy-whipped, so this default authority is usually presumed as a sexual threat-point women will exercise over their husbands. What he didn’t understand was that women’s authority is his default for a much deeper, more socially expansive reason. So even to ask women to allow their husbands to exercise ‘headship’ is ludicrous – it’s something even those women have no power to do because the presumption of authority is always in their favor. They can’t allow their men authority over them because the social paradigm they live in wont allow them to allow it.