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 Praxeologyis 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.
I received this comment on my January 29, 2020 livestream of Rational Male 101:
I think Rollo is talking about an idea that I’ve read about before in Thomas Sowell’s famous book Conflict of Visions. One side of the spectrum says that humans are very animalistic despite their capability of rationalizing otherwise, and human nature must be constrained by laws and social processes (such as constraining hypergamy). The other side of the spectrum says that humans are entirely capable of overcoming their Darwinian natures through intentional decisionmaking and must be unconstrained in order to flourish. Everyone lies somewhere between the two. I assume most men here lean more toward a constrained vision.
Nature vs. Nurture is a constant theme in the Manosphere. Yes, it’s a constant theme throughout most natural sciences, but it’s a paradox that’s going to always pervade intersexual dynamics. And mostly because people’s belief sets are rooted more in one or the other. Personal responsibility versus biological determinism is an issue that defines what our perspectives are on a great many things; not just intersexual dynamics. This isn’t an issue of politics or even worldview. There are plenty of believers in our human capacity to rise above our personal circumstances and evolutionary dictates on both sides of the political spectrum. For every hardline Trad-Con espousing the virtues of the human spirit and freewill superseding our physical conditions there is a left-leaning humanist who’ll conveniently agree that humans aren’t beholden to what some inconvenient science says if it aligns with their belief set.
Most “old order” ideologies today are struggling with relevancy in what I called the age of “new order” thinking or our New Age of Enlightenment. This new order understanding is the result of the unprecedented deluge of information we now have access to in this millennium. Not only is it this new influx of data that’s challenging the old order ideologies, but also the accessibility to it that old order thinkers can no longer keep pace with.
The response to this influx of information requires us to parse it out like never before. In predictable human fashion most people will make a hard turn towards the old order dictates that used to be able to explain harsh truths to us adequately enough for us to move on to other things. Thus, we see the global Village return to an interest in old religions, shamanism, metaphysics and tribal superstitions (and a lot of Chick Crack) today. That’s not to say that some of these old order institutions never had merit. A lot of what new order data presents to us can be confirmed by old order beliefs and wisdom. What we used to take on faith can now be confirmed by new order information. But this is also problematic for old order believers. It’s never a comforting thought to be confronted with what you had thought was sublimely metaphysical actually being something that can, in fact, be quantified. Yes, your religion was correct about some things, but those things are no longer the magical articles of faith they once were.
But We’re Better Than That, Right?
The Nature vs. Nurture debate is really a polite proxy for the war between two perspectives – Determinism vs. Freewill. While questions of consciousness and personal philosophies are outside the scope of this blog, what is in scope is how these perspectives define the way we approach our understanding of innate mating strategies, long term relationships, forming families and raising children.
As I mentioned early, determinism feels wrong to both kinds of believers. When ever I debate the harsh realities of how Hypergamy works, not just for our species, but most of the animal kingdom, I’m invariably met with the question of whether or not Hypergamy is ‘Good or Evil’. There’s always a want to qualify what’s really a natural dynamic. Is a pack of wolves evil for bringing down a caribou to feed the pack in the dead of winter? It all depends on who you’re rooting for I guess.
The ‘sphere’s contemplating these scenarios are nothing new. Considering the moral implications of the uglier aspects of Hypergamy is just one easy example among many other naturalism vs. moralism dilemmas in Red Pill praxeology. Empiricists will explain the dynamic in the hope that knowing about it, and how it works, will lead to better predictive outcomes. Hypergamy works thusly X-Y-Z; now plan accordingly and build a better life upon that predictive model. Believers on the other hand will absorb this data and look for moral equivocation:
They believe that the goal of debate is to establish what is morally better, and what everyone should do. They argue about what is right.
On a recent video I did with Rich Cooper and Dr. Shawn Smith one point of debate was whether or not the idea of Hypergamy should be used as a “predictive framework” for understanding intersexual relationships. The topic of our discussion was the merits of Hypergamy in its expanded, robust, definition and whether it’s a reliable metric to compare people’s relationships (married and dating) against. As you might guess a lot of Red Pill awareness centers on Hypergamy; it’s why I continue to stress it even when my detractors lie about my interests. It’s really that important.
But as we we’re debating the ins and outs I posed another question to Dr. Smith, “If Hypergamy is not a reliable predictive framework for understanding intersexual relationships, then what is a better one?”
I wasn’t being facetious, nor was I trying to hit Shawn with a gotcha question; I genuinely wrote this question down in my preparatory notes for the show. If not Hypergamy, in its expanded definition, (that describes women’s innate mating strategy) then what is a good outline by which we might judge women’s (and men’s) motives, incentives and behaviors with respect to their mating strategies.
Do women even have mating strategies defined by their innate, evolved, natures? Or are their sexual, reproductive decisions purely an act of cognitive will, as defined by their socialization? If 100,000 years of human evolution didn’t shape women’s reproductive strategies, then what are we left with that explains the commonalities we see women using (with our new order data gathering) in their mate selection and breeding (or aborting) habits? Is it entirely freewill and personal choice? We’re certainly meant to believe it’s “her body, her choice” and the decisions are an extension of her cognitive will.
Yes, I get that it doesn’t have to be one or the other. The possibility exists that it’s both nature and nurture affecting women and men’s mating strategies – and certainly choice is involved in the outcome of those strategies. I’m more inclined to believe it’s both, or at least we want to believe our conscious decisions are what’s pulling the strings. I’ve been in all the livestream debates when we asked the question, “Do women have agency?” and if not then are we our Sister’s Keeper? The more moralistic a guy is usually the more he’s likely he is to include women’s lives to his list of masculine duties and personal responsibilities.
The underlying assumptions in all these accounts is “Aren’t we better than this?”
As reasonably rational, self-aware creatures, with what we presume is freewill and a liability of personal responsibility for the choices we make when exercising that freewill, then haven’t we evolved above all our base impulse? If not, then shouldn’t we have by now?
Every day I harp on about the fallacy of the Blank Slate that most old order thinkers can’t seem to disabuse themselves, but if we are in fact “above it all” then the fallacy of the Blank Slate, as well as the notion that we might ever be influenced by our evolved natures is all a moot point. If our conscious selves are in fact better than our evolved natures then the variables of evolution are rendered meaningless. All that matters is the self and developing our consciousness to rise above our conditions.
Our conscious minds are capable of overriding our innate natures. We can, sometimes do, kill ourselves by not eating. A fast or a hunger strike is something we can consciously do as an act of will. A sense of righteousness and virtue can get mixed into that conscious and our will supersedes our innate nature (we get hungry and need to eat or we die). It doesn’t change the operative physical state that our bodies need certain things. We often commit suicide as an act of will or the conscious act of our depressive emotional state. Again, will (however it’s defined) overrides our physical conditions, but how much of what we believe is our willpower is uninfluenced by the same physical conditions, environment, upbringing, socialization and personal circumstance that we hope to rise above?
Very soon, perhaps within my own lifetime, we will be able to genetically engineer humans. In 2018 a Chinese scientist broke codes of ethics to create the first gene-edited baby. The science, if not the technology, is already here. The possibility exists that human beings, through sheer force of will, can custom engineer our physical states to conform to what our ideologies would tell us is preferable. If you’ve ever seen the movie Gattaca you’ll understand the implications of this technology. It’s this author’s opinion that we are living in a time when the ideologies we subscribe to today will affect the ethics of what we engineer into the humanity of tomorrow.
Gattaca is science fiction, but the philosophical questions it poses are very real now. From a objective, humanist perspective this raises a lot of interesting questions. Should we engineer-out of humanity “diseases” like Down’s Syndrome? What about sickle cell anemia? If a gay gene is ever discovered (I don’t believe homosexuality is genetic), should we edit it out of humanity to ensure “normal” heterosexual human beings in future generations?
The Chinese scientist who broke the rules of ethics was reprimanded for his experimentation. “When the news broke, peers in China and abroad condemned him for manipulating life’s building blocks using a relatively untested gene-editing tool.” But why? Chinese official declared his experimentation illegal. It’s entirely possible that a new race of superior humans could be engineered to be better ‘adapted’ to live longer, be smarter, more immune to certain diseases, possibly eradicate some disease and make for a stronger human species. Why would it be wrong or unethical to strive for “perfection”?
Have we not elevated our will above our physical limitations? Or are we using our physical conditions as an implement of our will? We’ll find out soon, but our ideological bent and the ideas of what right and wrong is most certainly influenced and defined by the realities of our physical selves.
Rise of the New Order
This was a comment from Jack about the rise of the New Order:
Rollo, the digital age has ruined us. Culture and pop culture today move at an alarming rate, what was hip now won’t be in the next year or month, society has never moved this fast and as a result the new way is merely a day away from being the old way. The demon’s out of the ring now, no turning back, and there’s no real way to deal with the modern age.
If you are not born into greatness, or utilizing the vast knowledge of the net to surpass everyone and stay there, you get nothing. It’s now the same way with women, previously, our worlds were smaller and hypergamy wasn’t as out of control. There were checks and balances, God and church being two of them, shame was a motivator for keeping women in check as they don’t understand loyalty like men. Now, they have infinite access to all top men, with upwards access to all jobs, and no reprecussions for acting in their very best interests and base instincts at all times. This shrinks the dating pool dramatically to only a few desirable mates because they value themselves so highly. So, if you’re not a natural at flirting with women, or learned how to do it through you and the many other “red pill” men out there AND CAN KEEP THAT ON 24/7 WHILE DOING IT BETTER THAN EVERYBODY ELSE, you will get nothing or lose what you have.
It’s almost all risk no reward for modern men unless you’re alpha”, and even then you’re not safe. Women will always want more and better, so if you’re not constantly 100% on at all times, you lose. If Jeff Bezos and Johnny Depp aren’t safe despite their fame and fortune, what does that say for everybody else? It’s exasperating as a modern man, you have to be and do too much to compete on the global market, as a man younger than you I don’t know if you can understand how daunting it is to have to be everything all at once and it STILL not being enough. You can’t even stay established anymore, if you’re not constantly putting out content, you fall to nothing again and have to start from scratch.
Your competition as a red pilled man, are other men armed with this knowledge, and it will get harder as time goes on with more men are forced to adapt this way of thinking or give up entirely. The new system forces you to constantly adapt faster, and better than all of your peers, or die instantly. There is no rest, no reprieve, no time to catch your breath, either you constantly innovate and improve on the new or you simply don’t eat. I cannot understand how this can keep up when this new “enlightened” era leaves the majority of the male sex in the dumpster.
That being said, without men such as you or Dalrock, established constant fonts of content for this, the kind of thing men need to hear, there will be no direction for men in the coming years. Yes, someone might come along eventually to replace you and the groups you represent, the thought even, but the men like you are very much buoys and lighthouses to keep those of us drifting in the digital age’s ocean from sinking. Without that, we’re all absolutely lost. Without guys like you, it’ll be even harder to aggregate that information and even try to compete or establish relevance. So the destruction of Dalrock’s work means setting those of us who wish to live and fight for a better life back several years, which none of us can afford. Many of us have learned partly, or greatly from you and men like you, whether that’s connecting the dots or having the entire mind opened. So wether or not he wants to delete everything, his work must press on for every one of us who wants a chance to survive in this.
While I’m flattered to be considered one of the pioneers of understanding intersexual dynamics from Red Pill perspective, I can entirely relate with the sentiment of perpetual vigilance. “If [insert male celebrity] can’t make it in today’s sexual marketplace with today’s women then what hope does the average guy have?” is a common MGTOW refrain. I understand men’s desire to just throw in the towel and accept one’s sexless fate. We now live in a Global Sexual Marketplace. The old order rules for the localized sexual marketplace that the last 3 generations of men still expect to work for them today are a thing of the past. And this is only one symptom of the rapid expansion of technology and its effect on our cultural narratives.
For all the alarms we’d like to raise about humans’ genetically engineering future generations of humans, the effects of the meta-scale social engineering experiment that is gynocentrism are already here. Men have always formed adaptations to the realities of solving their reproductive problems, but never have a generation of men had to adapt to so rapidly a changing environment. And it’s only going to get more complex as we move forward.
Today’s men have few options available to them in our present state. Most of us will continue to keep pace and attempt to see the signs of ways to best advantage what comes at us in the sexual marketplace, and really life in general, until we can no longer keep up. Evolve or die. Keep pace with the trends and stay sharp enough to look ahead and leverage what you can based on an objective assessment of what human beings really are. Stay sharp until you no longer can. Hopefully, if you’ve wisely conserved and protected your resources during that time you’ll have some security until you die. If not, then you can expect to fall prey to the next generation of vultures who see your nest egg as their source of revenue.
Or you can give up. You can do just what’s necessary to survive in a system that passed you by and console yourself with complaining about how degenerate and unfair it is. And you’ll be right on both counts because that’s where you are. Old order thinking is very comforting, and it will be until there are no more old order thinkers – replaced by a succeeding generation of new order thinkers who themselves will be swept aside by new order thinkers.
More and more we’re going to see a return to the old order religions, metaphysics and tribalism as the generations that cannot keep pace with human advancement seek meaning and consolation. As a result we’ll also see a new virtue signaling and ego-investments in the power of the self, freewill and mindful consciousness. The Trad-Cons of today are already here and the more ‘spiritual-but-not-religious’ social justice adherents apply their own brand of magical thinking, but for the same reasons. The effect is the same – the retreat from competing in a globalizing system that, sooner or later, will outpace us all.
And like all other aspects of this rapid advancement, even this retreating demographic will be coopted and commercialized by savvy ‘players’ who are still keeping pace. Formalizing the retreaters, organizing them, catering to their idiosyncrasies, all will be big business for those who learn to sell consolation (if not hope) to those who think they’ll never keep up.
I can remember a time back in the 1980s when I would visit my mother for a weekend and she’d insist my brother and I go to her church on Sundays. At this point in her life she was very much an Evangelical Christian. I would go with her because my mom’s side of the family had always been the religious side, and that was just part of who my mom was. I did have a basic faith in God and Christianity at the time, but my father was a card carrying atheist (and nominal Unitarian) for his whole life, so I had a pretty eclectic religious education when I was a teenager.
My father was a skeptic by nature and a lot of my own questioning nature was indirectly influenced by him. I can remember going to my mom’s church and suffering through the worship music to get to the sermon. I actually enjoyed the sermons because they gave me something to chew on intellectually. Not that the 15 year old Rollo was much of a thinker at that time, but I always had basic questions for these guys after the speech. When I got a bit older, in my early 20s, I started wondering who these ‘pastors’ really were as people and what made them qualified to deliver sermons. I really wanted to talk with these guys, but doing so meant I had to sit through their hard sell about how Jesus had saved them from themselves. I always thought this was kind of silly considering most of these guys weren’t much older than me. How hard a life could these guys really have lived by 25?
Most of these pastors weren’t used to was really having to engage much with their congregations beyond what was required of them to maintain appearances. I don’t mean that they were inaccessible; most of them had something outside of church that kept them involved with people. It’s that prior to the internet the way a pastor, or a church, did business usually centered on a man delivering a message (presumedly inspired by God) and then shaking hands with the faithful after the sermon was over as they filed out the door. End of sermon. End of discussion.
If you wanted to talk about the sermon, or, heaven forbid, criticize the interpretation or message in some way that was a conversation relegated to your family, or perhaps a home group discussion. Assuming you even were in a home group or had a few peers you could discuss it with, you always risked running afoul of someone whose ego-investments in his/her faith would put them on edge by questioning it. The old order of religion, not just Christianity, used to be based on respecting the man delivering that message as God’s ordained spokesman, or reading whatever book he might’ve published, processing it yourself or with a handful of other believers, sussing things out and waiting for the next message on the next Sunday. There was very little engagement about articles of faith or doctrine unless you were a guy on the inside.
All of this changed with the advent of the internet and the globalization of mass media and communication.
Today, there’s hardly a pastor (mainstream or obscure) who doesn’t have a blog or a YouTube channel on which he (or she) contemplates his last/next sermon. In the 80s-90s even the most introspective religious leader would have only a handful of people to bounce ideas off, but today a sermon is almost focus grouped before the guy walks up to the pulpit on a Sunday. Meanwhile, that same pastor is engaged on two or three social media accounts discussing everything from religion, to politics, to praying for his favorite NFL team to make the playoffs.
The old order of how religion was done has given way to a new, globalized process of how we do religion. Today anyone, believer or not, has access to that pastor on a moments notice. Didn’t like the message? Thought the interpretation was inaccurate? You can tell him on his blog’s comment thread or fire off a tweet to start a discussion about it before he can even drive home from church.
This is the age of globalized engagement – and this new paradigm is fundamentally altering old order institutions. What the Guttenburg press did for religion by publishing the Bible for the masses, now the internet has done for the old order way in which people can engage with the process of their beliefs – and not just religious belief.
The New Enlightenment
February of last year I wrote an essay about the Global Sexual Marketplace. In that post I described how globalization isn’t just about economics or demographics – globalization also applies to intersexual dynamics. Gone are the days when a young man or young woman could expect to meet one of the handful of eligible, single people in their high school, small town or limited social circle to pair off and start a family with. In the old order young people were stuck with the choices of a limited Local sexual marketplace. Today, with our instant, robust forms of communication, a worldwide sexual marketplace has now opened up the romantic prospects of virtually anyone with a smartphone and an internet connection. Don’t like your prospects in your hometown? Now there’s a whole world of men and women waiting to meet you. The old order of intersexual dynamics has fundamentally shifted and all in less than 20 years.
The rapidity of this shift is what I believe is at the root of the problems that surround the new way of doing the old order institutions. As a global society we are still reluctant to let go of the falsehoods of those old order institutions; even in light of the new order evidences and data collected as a result of this unprecedented access. While we attempt to reconcile our old order beliefs with what a global information network confronts them with, we cling evermore tightly to what we thought we knew because it formed the foundation of who we are. And as we try to make sense of it we are presented with both true and false narratives that pander to the fact that this information and technology is progressing at a rate that most human beings’ minds were never evolved to keep pace with.
My good friend Aaron Clarey (Captain Capitalism) recently published a tour de force article on women entering into and dominating most of the future of Corporate America, and how men ought to welcome this change. It’s a great post, so definitely go read the whole thing, but after I’d finished it I was struck with the idea that what Clarey was on to was describing an old order institution (Corporate America) and how we still perceived it from an old order understanding. On the surface it seems counterintuitive to think of women assuming authority over what was the Male Space of Corporate Culture as a good thing. Cap was being facetious for the whole thing, but his point was really this: women have coveted the reigns of Corporate America for a long time now, but their feminist thirst for power (Fempowerment) is based on an old order understanding of what Corporate America really is, or will eventually become. Like a debutant late to the party, the status and prestige that the Feminine Imperative sells women to believe is inherent in Corporate America is all old order bullshit. So, yeah, have at it ladies. The information age has stripped back the curtains on the Corporate America you assumed all that student debt to participate in.
Academia is another area in which this old order vs. new enlightenment understanding is taking place. Prior to 2000 if you heard a particular professor had a reputation for being tough, you had to get it from a third party. Today we have rate-the-professor.com or something similar. Now you can see how well a teacher performed from students who took their classes from a decade ago.
GlassCeiling.com is an aggregate of current and ex employees rating the work environment of damn near any company today. Yelp.com does something similar to a businesses performance. And as a result most of these companies hire specialized personnel to maintain their online reputations – and this is the paranoia that comes from presuming old order impressions of a company are relevant in a new order paradigm.
Analog Thinking vs. Digital Thinking
“In the future, everything that can be digital will be digital.”
I’m not sure who originated this quote, but I can remember it being tossed around in graphic design circles as early as 1993. Back then the print industry was transitioning to a digital way of production. Adobe Photoshop was at version 3.0 (when I started using it) and QuarkXpress was revolutionizing pagination for pretty much every publication at the time. The writing was on the wall. I was fortunate to be coming into my career on the cusp of the old order traditional ways of creating ads and publications (stat cameras and pasteup galleys) and learning their digital equivalents in design applications. I had to get real good, real quick, not only in terms of understanding the hardware, software and networking, but also in using it to create effective, creative, advertising. A lot of my contemporaries struggled with this transition. My mentors in design were old school designers. They taught me a lot with respect to effective advertising and design, but they couldn’t teach me the new tech that was changing every 6-8 months. Whereas in the old order a design agency only focused on print media and employed a full complement of professionals for each aspect of production (photography, typography, pasteup, pressmen, etc.) now I was responsible for all of these jobs and more to come as the internet opened up more new media to desktop publishers like me.
I had to get real good, real fast, and maintain my creative edge all while expanding into more and more new areas and methods of producing what I do. The old order designers either adapted or went extinct. Since the early 90s this narrative has played out across countless professions and trades. I can remember listening to Lars Ulrich from Metallica complain about how Napster’s peer-to-peer file sharing of MP3s was going to be the death of the music industry. The old order musicians weren’t ready to accept the realities of “everything that can be digital will be digital”.
Analog business models, analog thinking, that have formed the basis of who we are as a society are still in place today. In some ways we can force-fit those old order ideas into our new order digital reality, but eventually that old order thinking reveals its age. College professors, church pastors, your 9-5 corporate American cubicle supervisor, the self-help guru you think has some sort of relevance, the old pop psychologist whose heyday was in the last millennium, all these personalities and an endless number more are all struggling to stay relevant against the information that the new order of 2020 confronts them with.
It’s not that these people are luddites. They embrace the technology and the new means of disseminating their craft, their ideas, their ideologies, in the digital age. It’s that their thinking is still mired in the analog age – an age in which ideas were formed on information that was limited to what generations that came before could gather with the means they had available to them then. The ideas of an analog age are what we’re presently trying to force-fit into the new understanding presented to us by this digital age. We enjoy the luxuries, sensations and entertainment that the digital affords us, but we immerse ourselves in it without realizing how our old order thinking defines why we enjoy it. Our analog selves, the product of millennia of evolution, still defines what our digital selves are without realizing the dangers inherent in our engaging with it. As such we get digital addictions – pornography, social media, ‘engagement’ – and we make our analog selves dependent on a digital economy.
How many YouTube content producers rely on their ’side hustle’ revenue to pay their bills today? How many self-published authors have quit their day jobs to write for their new employer, Amazon, today (Amazon owns 86% of the publishing market today). How many former cubicle workers decided it was more lucrative to start an internet business than continue slaving away at a corporate gig that only made their bosses rich? Today, we’ll readily shift to the digital world to sustain us financially – in the end we don’t have much choice – but it’s the old order thinking that pervades this new “reality” and causes problems.
The number one way that couples meet, since 2005, is online. Via Tinder or Match or other net based ways. Gone are the days of boy-meets-girl, eyes fixed on the other across a crowded high school gym dance floor. Gone are the days of meeting your “bride” at church camp. Those are old order romanticisms, and ones that we still want to force fit back into our new order reality. We think in analog, but we live in digital.
Barriers to Entry
Another thing I did at age 15 was play a lot of guitar. My teenage, MTV fueled, mind really had a love for music. The heavier the better. But the barrier to becoming a “Guitar God” like my heroes was something that was very prohibitive at that time. If you wanted to get good; good enough to actually get a band going, you had to seek out a guitar instructor at the local music store who hopefully shared your taste in music. Beyond a once-a-week, 1-hour lesson, you had no other means of learning an instrument than practicing on your own, buying a book of guitar tablature from the music store, or endlessly wearing down a cassette tape by going back over the song you wanted to learn again and again. And all this was the process of learning to play just a song you liked. I had to learn how to compose a song, write some lyrics, form a band, learn to promote it, and somehow figure out how to scrape up enough money to record a demo in a music studio. The barrier to entry was very steep. You had to love the art so much that you would dedicate a good portion of your life to mastering it.
Today I can go on YouTube and find a 9 year old girl in a country I’ve never heard of before play Eruption by Eddie Van Halen, note for note, because she learned it from another YouTube “content provider”. We have far more resources to understand how to be competent in, if not master, virtually anything today than at any other time in history. We have access to the entire world’s aggregate of information in a device that fits in our pocket.
In his book, Mastery, Robert Greene describes how the barriers to entry into previously prohibitive arenas of life are gone in the digital age. And just like the music industry of the 70s through the 90s, old order industries and institutions have had to cope with the restructuring of their businesses and lifestyles as new generations of digital savvy (if not digital thinking) people become competent in, sometimes master, what took them decades of perseverance to master themselves. What we see in this shift is the Barons of the old order media, industries and institutions – who jealously guarded their own knowledge-base – attempting to force-fit their analog thinking into a digital mold.
As a result, conflicts arise. When Über revolutionized the idea of ride-sharing in the digital age, the old order taxi companies enlisted every legal tool in their arsenal to fight the inevitability of their old revenue model disappearing. We see the same scenario play out in everything that can be digital becoming digital now. Even the old order institutions that built their mastery and prosperity on a successful pivot to the digital (the early dot coms) are finding that even newer aspects of the digital now threaten the successes of that initial pivot.
Content is King
Mastery is now easier to attain than at any other time in human history. The old order, analog thinking masters strictly limited teaching their secrets to anyone but the most worthy of apprentices. Those apprentices had to had the most serious dedication to their interests and would likely do menial tasks for much of their apprenticeships just to be in the presence of their mentors. That hard-won mastery is gone in the digital age. That’s not to say that practice and dedication aren’t still necessary for mastery today, but the barriers are largely removed. As a result, we are now encountering a generation of self-appointed “masters” in arenas wherein previously the title of that position of mastery implied respectability. Again, old order thinking predisposes us to believe that if a self-declared master online grants himself a title we should presume he “did the work” to earn that title.
For all this easy access to competency, mastery, information-based skills, what we find lacking is real, valuable content. It’s great that we have access to the tool boxes of old order masters, but what do we build with those tools? Thus far, not very much. Usually those tools build rehashes of old order ideas to be sold as something novel in the digital age. When I’m critical of the Success Porn grifters of this digital age, what I’m really drawing attention to is the reselling of old order, tired ideals. Motivational speakers, new age gurus, self-help “coaches” of today, are really only selling the same old order thinking in a more convenient, more easily disseminated digital method. The content is old. The religion is old. The thinking is old, and it’s thinking that is still firmly rooted in an old order understanding of how the world ought to be based on the limited information set available to the people creating it at that time.
The ease of the digital new order makes us lazy. For all of the access we have now, for all of the information we have, we’ve never been more unmotivated. The process of mastery, the process and dedication needed to attain it, used to contribute to the creative impetus required to use it. Today we’ve never been less creative in our thinking. It’s why we keep returning to old order stories and movie franchises. We just retell the same old order thinking stories in more advanced and colorful ways with the technology of the digital order. But we just repeat ourselves; or we add some social justice twist to stories that were timeless because the art took precedence over any other consideration.
The Red Pill
In the earliest days of the seduction community the forums that sprang up around men looking to get laid was an extension of this old order vs. new order thinking. The internet and conversation forums dedicated to Game, pickup artistry and dating were a predictable application of attempting to solve old order problems (getting laid) with new order information. Men in particular wanted to figure this out, so, as expected, they would coalesce and compare notes across the planet, each sharing their personal experiences with other men. Then further combining that experience with data available from psychology, anthropology, sociology, evolutionary theory and dozens of other related fields of study to provide a global consortium of men with a more accurate database on intersexual dynamics than they’d ever had available to them in any prior era.
Up to this point (I estimate 2001 or so) men had to figure out the dynamics between themselves and what women were becoming since the Sexual Revolution. And most of that “figuring it out” was based on limited information, based on old order thinking. The old challenges of understanding ourselves doesn’t change, but the way we think about those challenges is in constant flux; and that changing has become increasingly more rapid in a global age.
With that change comes conflict with the old order thinking. In terms of the Red Pill, old order thinking manifests itself as Purple Pill regressiveness. Often times the new Red Pill awareness conflicts with the old order thinking that present generations have based their existences on. They refuse to acknowledge the data we have access to now that we didn’t when they were forming beliefs and ideals that would form their personalities and ego-investments. Yes, there are certain timeless truths, but we must hold “common sense” to the same scrutiny we would apply to new ideas in this age. When I identify a person or a concept as Purple Pill this is what I mean by it; usually, it is an old order ideal being force fit to conform to align with new order data.
We desperately want our belief sets, our ideals, to be confirmed by the information we have access to in the digital age. Sometimes this does happen and we feel validated for it, but more often we see that our efforts in building a life according to the old social contract or an old order way of understanding ourselves and the world is invalidated. And this is what either builds us up anew or forces us into stasis in our lives.
The Red Pill has been redefined in many ways on many occasions over the past 20 years to fit the sensibilities of people who really want to give a new validity to whatever pet ideology they think it should apply to. Most of these people have no business calling anything “red pill”, but they’re attracted to the concept as a proxy term for ’truth’.
Initially, in the earliest days of the SoSuave Forums, we used the Matrix analogy to describe how a guy who still believed and still behaved according to his old order understanding (his conditioning) of intersexual dynamics was stuck in his ignorance. The old way of thinking about women – that up to that point was based on limited and largely inaccurate information – was still what a Blue Pill guy would accept as reality. It required a guy to “unplug” himself from that old order-informed way of thinking and transition to a new awareness of intersexual dynamics. Hopefully that guy could live a better life (even save his own life) by using the information in that new order tool box. Thus, we have the Red Pill analogy, but what the Red Pill really describes is exactlythe casting off of an old order ignorance in favor of a new order thinking predicated on information we were limited from in prior ages.
We are entering a new, digital Age of Enlightenment. I know a lot of the Manosphere would tell us we’re heading for a new Dark Ages of degeneracy and decay. Enjoy the decline, right? If this is true and we are spiraling to more ignorance, depravity and superstition on a now globalized scale it will be the result of not changing our ways of thinking according to the new data we have access to today. It’s never been easier to become what we want to become today, but with that facility comes lethargy, a lack of creativity and insight, and self-gratifying sedation. Just because we’ve been enlightened by this new, globalizing knowledge-base doesn’t mean we know how to apply it.
If we do enter a decline it will be the result of an inability to unplug from a comforting old order way of thinking.
This essay is from an abridged preview of my upcoming book The Rational Male – Religion.
Fortune cookie, non-comital internet “wisdom” like this abounds on Twitter and in the self-improvement sphere today.
I read a lot of these rationales from women and male allies whenever a guy makes a general, empirical, but unflattering, point about the nature of women. Even casual observations or questions about this nature are met with subjective answers that put the blame of asking back on the guy. There must be something wrong with you for even making mention of it.
As I mentioned in my last post, there’s a kind of ‘talking past’ one another when it comes to believers vs. empiricists. Notice that all of these common dismissals are based on value judgements. The nature of the conversation between these mindsets begins in the misunderstanding that both are focusing on a mutual goal.
People resort to denial when recognizing that the truth would destroy something they hold dear. 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.
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 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.
The ideology of personal responsibility is the Swiss army knife of subjectivist rationalization. “Extreme Ownership” is a lot like the “just be yourself” non-response people will give you when they don’t know what to tell you about your lack of Game. It sounds like wisdom, but it’s really based on the presumption of knowing a guy must always find fault in himself before any other consideration. Guys rarely struggle with overconfidence, but tell him the solution to his problems lies in him self-deprecating more and that he can get behind.
In this subjectivism there are no outside variables. There is no intentional maliciousness from others, or extenuating circumstances, only how you react to them and what you did to bring them on yourself. All the blame for anyone’s bad condition rests on the shoulders of the individual:
Your life is fucked up? Your fault.
Your Game/relationships suck? Your fault for tolerating it.
You think women are one way – a way counter to the popular norm? You’re just meeting the ‘wrong kind of women’.
Again, value judgements replace objectivity. If your life sucks it’s real easy to presume the individual is the cause of the suck. And any analysis (even the desire to objectively analyze) of other people’s will, motives or outside circumstance is always an excuse; a redirection away from owning the suck yourself.
Maybe that person was the ‘right‘ one all along, you just were the wrong one for her? Self-doubt is a key element in subjectivism.
Your Game/relationships suck? Your fault for tolerating it. You think women are one way – a way counter to the popular norm? You’re just meeting the ‘wrong kind of women’. Again, value judgements replace objectivity. There’s no such thing as a general truth when your grasp of human nature is that, subjectively, everyone is a random unknowable snowflake. “People are people, man. Everybody’s different. If you think different it’s because you’re judgmental.“
Own It
The popularity of ‘Success Porn‘ online today depends heavily on this self-evincing subjective ownership. It’s far easier to solve a person’s problems if he’s the source of his problems rather than the particulars of his circumstances. The Tony Robbins of the world have raised this to an art form. Owning your faults locks in very well with stoicism, but too much stoicism and you cancel out the emotional high that you need in an adherent to get pumped on your motivational speaking.
Guys who ‘go black pill‘ are the opposite extreme of this. Black Pill as a movement focuses on objective realities to such an extreme degree that nihilism defines it. But that nihilism is also a necessary part of subjectivism.
It gets a lot wrong in the problem solving department, but what Black Pill gets right is their understanding of the shifting of causality. For Success Porn gurus, optimism is an easy sell in an age of negativity. So maintaining the idea of an endemic negativity in the culture is a necessary part of the ‘rise above it‘ mantra. You don’t have to actually defeat anyone else today, you have to defeat the worst parts of yourself. It’s much easier when there’s no real external opposition and it’s just you against you.
All the salesmen of the “feel-good pill” have an ironclad rationale; people are the source of their own misery. ‘Own your problems’ is a go-to answer because it gets the salesman off the hook with respect to actually analyzing and solving anyone’s problems.
This is the counselor’s dilemma: Most people’s internal struggles are personal to them and require a personal understanding and interaction on the part of the counselor. That kind of personal investment is tough to do when you’ve got 10,000 people in a concert hall all begging for you to solve their unique set of problems. Thus, finding a way to convince the majority of a commonality in their personal problems with those of everyone else is necessary. Personalized subjectivism fills this need for the believers, but it has to have a common root that everyone can commiserate around – me against me.
Subjectivism, social constructionism and blank-slate egalitarianism are the -isms that have defined western cultures and their thinking for the past 60 years. Now, I know the tone of all this seems like I’m picking on Trad-Cons or the new wave of Manosphere Moralism today, but it’s also a mistake not to highlight just how this subjectivism pervades the ideologies of the Village, social justice, intersectional feminism and religion steeped in the Feminine Imperative today.
One common theme I see in researching how feminism and the Feminine Imperative are assimilating mainstream religions is where almost all of them end up – this same, all-is-one subjectivist belief set. In every instance of the Feminine Imperative assuming control of a faith, that faith is converted to unitarian tolerance, then acceptance, of elements that religion was opposed to in its prior iteration. Clear, distinct, articles of faith are replaced with an unconditional doctrine of inclusiveness that homogenizes separate faiths into one global faith based on the ‘cult of love’.
In my upcoming book, Religion, I detail this ‘cult of love’ and it’s end-goal of creating a unitary world-faith that’s dependent on the Feminine Imperative defining it. For now, its enough to consider that this push towards a one-world religion will find its foundation in the same subjectivism we’re seeing clash with objectivism in the ‘sphere today.
A consistent criticism I’ve received over the years is that the Red Pill is so negative. Why cant the Manosphere just sweeten up? Its truth is definable and self-evident, but why can’t Rollo adjust the ‘tone’? I’ve lived and written through several waves of newcomers to the ‘sphere and in each generation the same want for a ‘kinder, gentler’ Red Pill is always there. The idea is that if you just changed the delivery of the truth it would somehow make it more palatable to a wider audience.
Who’s It For?
I want reiterate here that it’s never been my goal to write for an audience. Whether it’s writing on this blog, my books or when I’m discussing things on various podcasts my only imperative is to convey the information I think is relevant to the topic of intersexual dynamics. My obligation is to picking apart and considering as close as I can get to an objective truth. And I don’t do this by way of some sense of duty to objectivism – it’s just the way that’s always seemed most efficient to me to come to a usable truth. It’s pragmatism on my part, not dedication.
Yes, I know, true objectivism is impossible for human beings. Yes, I also know that even biases we’re unaware of will subconsciously influence our rationality. Spare me the classicist intellectualism, I’ve been at this long enough to have considered all that. But the fact that objectivism is never perfect doesn’t mean we should strive for our best attempt at it – nor replace it with moralism.
I don’t write for an audience. I write about what I see going on around me and I connect dots. Writers today, of all medias, will tell you to “give your readers what they want” if you want to be successful. Writing about uncomfortable truths that rattle people’s cages is counterintuitive to the write-for-success mindset. If you want to sell books, if you want to monetize blogs, if you want to get more channel subscribers you gotta give the folks what they want, right? That’s how most churches work today; cater the message to the congregation if you want the tithe checks to stay consistent.
And always write to appeal to emotions too. People don’t enjoy thinking, but boy do they ever love feeling something – particularly in an age when female emotiveness is the order of the day.
When I began writing regularly it was in a forum environment. We hashed out many ideas and weren’t afraid to get ugly. It was a necessary part of the process. There was no pretense of appealing to an audience for money, traffic or readership. The sole focus was debating the truth about a dynamic. That debate was always a hot kitchen, but the results were something greater than the process.
As a result my essays carried over a lot of the heat from the SoSuave days kitchen. I wasn’t writing to impress readers or increase traffic to the blog it was just to document and codify the objective truths I came to. There is no monetization and the comment threads have never been moderated (besides spam and trolls). Almost 8 years later my charter is still about the same objective debate.
The drawback to this commitment to objective truth is that it rarely appeals to emotionalism. No, it’s not the ‘tone‘ or the feel of the information being related that’s so off-putting – it’s the information itself, and how it makes one feel, that determines whether it’s perceived as positive or negative.
Feels Before Reals
Most people who are still plugged into the proverbial Matrix are living in a world that prioritizes feels before reals. The purpose of consuming really anything is to judge it by how it makes us feel; and especially so in an era defined by the female experience. Emotion always comes before reason in women’s natural, unlearned, interpretive processes. This is also extended to men who’ve been conditioned to prioritize emotions before reason. And this is exacerbated by their need to be better feelers, better emoters, than those other ‘typical’ guys if they want an emotional woman to ever bear their children at some point.
Anything that prioritizes reason before emotion will always run the risk of being perceived as negative. Even if the sum of the information is positive, the fact that you had to come to the truth by way of reason rather than emotion will make it negative.
If you used your head instead of your heart to figure something out, in Girl-World, at best it’s bad form. At worst, you’re a negative pessimists or a cynic.
Usually those designations are reserved for the men who make a habit of using reason to the exception of emotion to relate an objective truth that’s unflattering to the feminine. Again, it’s the information, not the tone, that’s offensive to the emotions-first prioritization. To the Blue Pill mind, any strong idea that conflicts with this prioritization is an affront to the personal investments they’ve made in ideas that it challenges.
So, understand, I’m not a negative person by nature. I’m an artist. Few people know that my 2nd degree is a BFA. I draw, I paint, I play four instruments, I used to do Shakespearean stage acting – I’ve even done children’s theater.
I fully embrace the emotional as a necessary part of the human experience – Hell, half of Red Pill awareness is acknowledging and confronting emotions. I’m certainly not a cynic or a pessimist. Anyone thinking so usually hasn’t read my work. I’m very much an optimist when it comes to creating a New Hope for men in a Red Pill paradigm. I don’t just stop at clinical realism and leave men hanging. I don’t subscribe to the ennui of the “Black Pill” – I’m certainly not absolutist or a determinist.
However, I also have a commitment and an obligation to objective truth in everything I write. Trust me, there are times I wish I could use my wife and my marriage as a ‘proof of concept’ example of how a Red Pill aware guy can make a relationship work today. But the objective truth would make me look like a charlatan if I tried to convince a man that marriage was at all a good idea in its present state.
That’s tough for me. I have had to hold back from posting pictures of my beautiful wife and daughter to prove something to truly negative naysayers. Ladies, you want me to write something positive about women? I love my wife dearly. She’s been a net benefit to my life for all of 23 years now. My daughter is a model. She’s feminine to a fault and she’s smart and ambitious. I would die for her, gladly.
But I never use my personal life as an example in my work for their protection, but also because I don’t want to lead men astray by in anyway implying that what I have is possible for them. And I’ve had men tell me that, “I want what you have.”
But I don’t make value calls. I consider information, I try to interpret it, and I present it in such a way that it’s useful to men where they’re at. I want to give you tools to use to build your own life, not mine.
Truth & Hustle
Admire the Hustle. We read this a lot in the Manosphere among the guys who fancy themselves entrepreneurs. I think one reason critics think the Red Pill is negative is because all they see is the Hustle. The Hustle has a way of becoming the whole point of anything.
I’m an abortion doctor, but I make six figures and I’m the best at what I do. No one will out-work me. Admire the Hustle baby.
When the selling is more important the the product itself, then you have problems. When the truth is less important than the Hustle inevitably our truth becomes the Hustle. There needs to be a balance and that’s getting harder and harder to find now.
We’re at a moment in the Manosphere where the truth is starting to get lost in the Hustle. I’m accused of it, or I’m accused of associating with ‘too much Hustle’. Well-meaning colleagues with too much perception and not enough information are feeling that salesmen care more about the sale than the product.
I hear you.
Let me finish here by reiterating that my obligation to objective truth will always be my motivation for doing anything I put my name on. It always has been. However, I have worked for amazing companies who sold things that people loved and enjoyed only to watch them crumble and die because the sales team assumed control of the ‘product’. The selling became more important than what was being sold.
My books, my blog, my appearances, every aspect of The Rational Male is my art. I craft each essay. It’s what I care about most. I will never allow the truth to be compromised by the Hustle. The Hustle is important, particularly when it’s about disseminating the truth, but it is secondary to the truth – even to the exception of the Hustle. Sometimes the truth doesn’t sell.
This Is Important
We are rapidly entering a time when our ideas will be vilified. Very soon the objective, life-saving, praxeology that is the Red Pill will be used as a label, as a synonym, for negative ideologies that never had anything to do with the Red Pill. And people who are all about the Hustle will gladly abandon the truth they’re selling now if it means the public opinion of it would compromise their Hustle. It’ll be less about what we’re discussing than how influential and how many followers the person we’re discussing it with has.
Others, those who were appropriating the ‘brand’, will throw the Red Pill under the bus to save their own necks. The coming storm is going to test the resolve of people who are all about the Hustle and all about the Red Pill. I know where my obligations lie, they’ve never changed.
I’m writing this post on the day before I head off to this year’s 21 Convention and I thought I’d just do something a bit freeform to get a few ideas on the page and let you all know where my head is at these days. I generally don’t make a habit of using The Rational Male as a sounding board for my personal thoughts. Most of what you read here is what I can best describe as crafted essays. Last week’s post was a good example of that. I took about 2 weeks to to write that essay, but the the germ of the idea for building an essay on body language and implied meanings was something I’d had percolating for almost 6 months. When you write about what I do for as long as I have I’ve learned it pays to be thorough, and I enjoy the building process.
Now that I’ve said all that, I’m going to break this rule today and do a bit of stream-of-consciousness writing here now.
One thing I’ve learned since I decided to write intentionally is that I’m never off-duty. I’ve always been an artist and I’ve always kept sketchbooks with me to scribble down ideas for larger work, but it wasn’t until I started really writing that I began to keep notebooks for my posts and then my books; and now my talks. I presently have 4 small notebooks that I put ideas in. I just finished filling one up and now I need another one. I was never that Emo writer kid who was so artsy and self-absorbed he had to write a diary because he thought people must find him fascinating. In fact, I’ve always thought of art as something temporal.
Now this is changed for me. I find it an absolute necessity to keep notebooks with me to capture ideas in. I think my brain has changed somewhat since I began being a ‘serious’ author. My mind now works in a way where I get ideas that don’t stay for long, but the internal conversations I have to flesh out those ideas can get pretty involved. I’ve freaked my wife out on more than one occasion when I got up to take a piss in the middle of the night, had an idea and then had to go write it down knowing that it would fade from memory by the morning. I think I’m kind of torn between being a creative thinker and a deductive thinker as a result of applying myself to writing .
I guess that makes me a writer, but I still don’t know what I am in that respect. I do know I have an obsessive compulsion to write, but not so much to write as an author of books but a capturer of ideas. Occasionally I read about authors’ writing processes and rituals and it sounds really artsy. Honestly, I think a result of the self-publishing revolution is that it created a lot of writers who just wanted to be writers. Like they just revel in the identity and love to say ‘I’m special, I’m a writer‘. The same thing happened in desktop publishing when computers started replacing all the analog ways of graphic design. Everyone you knew was a ‘graphic designer’ because anyone could do it then.
I think it was Stephen King who said writing for him was like excrement. Not in the way that his writing was shit, but rather it was something that just came out of him, something he excreted like hair or fingernails. I think I understand that now. I never set out to be a writer, I’m an ideas man. Sometimes those ideas are great and help change men’s lives. Then sometimes I think maybe I’m a messenger for something that just needs to be conveyed in this day and this time.
The Rational Male, my first book, just turned 5 years old on October 1st. Granted, it still needs to be cleaned up and I’m in the process of a reedit with the help of two editors now. Nothing will change as far as content is concerned, but lets be honest, the font size needs to be kicked up a couple points and there are a fair amount of grammatical errors that need to be corrected. So, I’m reading back through the whole book these days and in doing so I almost can’t believe that the voice is my own. Although the book was published in 2013 all the material is from essays I wrote as far back as 2002, and a lot of that was from conversations and debates I’d had on SoSuave from back in the day. Re-reading it is like having a conversation with myself from when I was 34 years old.
The book is important in so many ways to so many people now. That’s something I have to keep in mind today. The Rational Male is a living text. It’s not a book you you read once and put on a shelf. Readers keep returning to it when the need to be reminded of a relevant truth that they’re experiencing in life.
A year ago, when I was at the 21 Convention the thing that struck me the most was signing men’s copy’s and seeing how well-worn they were. Every one had liner notes and highlighted in at least 2 different highlighter colors. It was then I realized this book was something more than a self-published book turned out from the print-on-demand mill.
I’m sure I’ll see the same this year and it makes me happy to have been the instrument to bring these truths to men. I still get chills when men tell me it saved their lives or it fundamentally changed them for the better. I re-read my work and think ‘who is this guy?’ I wonder how my grandchildren, maybe great-grandchildren, will see what I was about. And this is what concerns me most when I consider the ease with which I could be erased from the online world.
I would be lying to say that recent social events haven’t flustered me. The fact that Roosh’s books could be so casually deleted from all of his distribution sources is unsettling. He wrote about this, prophetically, about five years ago in The Most Insidious Method of Control Never Devised. Roosh has had his bread taken from him. And yes, I understand, his right to ‘free speech’ hasn’t been impinged, he still has the right to say what he thinks, but this is a reminder that for all the high-minded talk about being ‘anti-fragile’ we’re all more fragile than we think.
I don’t know what Roosh’s revenue situation looks like, I know he’s put Return of Kings on indefinite hiatus, but I wonder what men who’ve made the manosphere their sole source of income will do when their ability to generate revenue from it dries up. This is the main reason I advise men against becoming revenue-dependent on the manosphere. It’s too easy to have their convictions compromised for the sake of profit, but it’s also one keystroke away from being deleted by platforms they depend on for that revenue.
My main fear is that the vital work I’ve done with The Rational Male might be casually undone through the ignorant vindictiveness of a feminist critic somehow made an authority over what men should and should not read in digital publishing. My fear is that the men’s lives who might be saved by my book would be prevented access to it. I made a joke on Twitter a few years ago; I said, ‘there will come a day when The Rational Male will have to be read in secret, by candle light among secret societies of men like Christians in Mao’s China had to do. I don’t laugh at that prophecy anymore.
I’ve always encouraged men to buy the physical, print copy of the book. Mainly this is because I’ve always hoped men would in fact discuss it among themselves. It was meant to be a conversation (debate) starter because I’ve always believed in the bottom up approach to making people think in new ways. I want men to physically pass the book on to the next guy they think will need it. I make the least amount on royalties from the print book, but it’s what I think is most important – but also because it is a permanency that digital books cannot insure.
The Red Pill community has grown exponentially since I began writing almost 20 years ago. While I don’t believe we’ve hit critical mass just yet I do think we’re becoming too big to ignore now. The Red Pill forum on Reddit was ‘quarantined’ last week, and unsurprisingly the latent message sent in that act was one that aligned with a pseudo-concern over what an appropriate expression of masculinity is. Ironically, the redirect from the quarantine was linked to the ‘masculinity studies’ department of Stony Brook University – every bit the Vichy male plantation for men to align with the definition of masculinity approved for them by the Feminine Imperative – and led by, the now condemned for sexual assault allegations, Michael Kimmel.
What the Red Pill reveals is dangerous and threatening to a gynocentric world order. As the #MeToo movement evolves into the opportunistic weapon of social and political control, our online presence and our message stand out in sharp challenge to its false foundations. I can remember when I wrote Fem-Centrism and The Feminine Reality and the hostility those posts generated among critics. It’s always been a man’s world they said; how dare I suggest women were the true power behind the throne. That was 7 years ago. I had a new WordPress blog and although I was semi-well known on SoSuave I was just another blogger who wrote about this new thing called the ‘Red Pill’.
The Gestalt Feminine vs. The Gestalt Masculine
In 2018 the stakes are much higher, the game has changed and the tolerance for challenges to an ideology intrinsic to our feminine-primary social order is at its breaking point. There is now a presumption of authority to go along with the presumptions of entitlement for women and default guilt for men. The very platforms that made our coming together possible are ruled by the world views we’ve always warned against.
I once wrote a post called Appeals to Reason and in it I made a rational case as to why it is never in a good idea for a man to try to reason his way into intimacy or sex with women. Most Beta men subscribe to a very literalist mindset. Our Rational Interpretive process evolved to make men natural, deductive, problem solvers. As such, we evolved different strategies and different communication methods apart from those of women. We believe in the statistics, the empirical data, the proven methods, the ‘science’ behind the processes to make informed decisions. We prioritize information when we communicate.
To the contrary, women prioritize the context of communication – they feel the communication before they apply a rational interpretation to what’s been communicated. Even when confronted with a succinctly reason position founded on empirical facts, their first priority is to personalize how that data makes them feel. Their Emotional Interpretive Process is their evolved default.
What I see happening today on a larger meta-social scale is a collective gestalt of the masculine trying to assert their deductive reasoning to assess the disposition of the meta-female gestalt which is firmly founded in how issues of monumental social importance make the whole of the feminine feel.
In Appeals to Reason I used a guy’s petition of women as an example of this. The kid had created a list of questions for women to fill out as to why they didn’t want to go out with him on a date and to assess what it is that women want. This is classic male deductive reasoning. For millennia men have tried to apply reason to dealing with women only to find themselves confounded by what women say and what they do. The same is now true in a social scope and about decisions that have global importance today.
However, in today’s scenario it is women who presume an authority that is just on the cusp of totalitarianism. It’s like we’re collectively, as Beta, Blue Pill conditioned men, attempting to logically deduce what it is women want in order to satisfy their desire for a total authority. And when that woman doesn’t get what she wants, when men try to reason her into bed, she reacts like a violent child having a tantrum. She says what she feels, not what she needs.
And the gestalt of men turn on one another and blame the other for setting her off. “If only you assholes would give her what she wants we wouldn’t be in this mess” they say. Then to make matters worse we pander to her tantrums, we believe her insanity, we take her feelings as facts and the other half of the gestalt masculinity wonders why the other can’t see the real story while the other is swept up in female hysterics.
Then the gestalt female is pandered to so thoroughly that we come to the point that we follow their Emotional Interpretive process as the only measure of legitimate discussion. This is where we are today, only, to compound things, we’ve collectively approved for the gestalt feminine a universally effective means of destroying the parts of the gestalt masculine who would dare to challenge their feelings, their emotional priorities. We’ve given the feminine the power to wish us away to the cornfield if we upset the child.
And so here we are, at the figurative mercy of the gestalt feminine (and their Vichy male “allies”) keeping our collective heads down for fear that they’ll deny us our bread if we upset the insane, collective female Id.
There will be more to this essay in my address at the 21 Convention this Friday. I will also be doing various videos from Orlando on my Periscope, Twitter and possibly my new YouTube channel. I hope to see you there.
Reader KFG dropped this insight in last week’s post and I thought it was very relevant to something I’ve been contemplating for a while now:
As a general principle genetic fitness is always relative to the environment. A spread of genetic traits makes a species more robust, because it will have individuals better suited for survival in a greater range of environments.
There’s more than one breed of working dog because no one is “better.” Each has its specific strengths, paid for with corresponding weaknesses. A terrier is to small to hunt wolves, but you’re not going to stuff a wolfhound down a badger hole.
This was a great analogy. It’s also one of the primary reasons I believe the egalitarian equalist narrative is a deliberate lie with the hoped-for purpose of empowering people who cannot compete, or believe they have some plenary exclusion from competing in various aspects of life. One of the primary selling points of egalitarian equalism for men is the idea that they can be excluded from the Burden of Performance.
There is no such thing as ‘equality’ because life doesn’t happen in a vacuum.
The tests that a chaotic world throws at human beings is never equal or balanced in measure to our strengths to pass them. Equality, in the terms that egalitarian equalists are comfortable in defining it, implies that that every individual is equally matched in both value and utility within a totality of random challenges. Aside from this being patently false, it also demerits both strengths and weaknesses when that individual succeeds or fails at a particular challenge as a result of their individual character.
This is ironic in the sense that it provides easy, repeatable, excuses for a person’s successes or failures. If someone wins, well, we’re all equal so that person’s strengths which led to the success can be passed off as a result of assumed or circumstantial ‘privileges’ that made them better suited to their challenges – rarely is their hard work recognized, and even then, it’s colored by the overcoming of a presumed-unequal adversity that grants them ‘privilege’. If they fail, again, we’re all equal, so the failure is proof of a deficit, or a handicap, or a presumed repression of an equal person in a state of baseline equal challenge.
Individual Exceptionalism
One of the longest perpetuated cop outs (I should say paradoxes) that equalists cling to is the notion that People are People; that everyone is a unique individual (snowflake) and as such there is really no universally predictable method of testing character or knowing how a particular sex will respond to various challenges. It’s all random chance according to the individual’s socially constructed character and their capacity to be a ‘more evolved’, higher-thinking being.
On the surface this all-are-individuals notion may seem the antithesis of the ‘equality’ narrative that equalists cling to, but it is part of a cognitive dissonance all equalists struggle with. This approach is a means to standardizing individuality, so no scientific evidence that might find patterns of an evolved ‘nature’ of a person – or in our Red Pill case, a sex – can be predicted. It’s the hopeful cancellation of reams of empirical evidence that show how influential our biologies and inborn predispositions are. This ‘higher order’ individualism is always touted so the equailist mindset can claim that the exception to the rule disqualifies the overwhelmingly obvious general rule itself.
“We’re all exceptions to the rule.” – Carl Jung
“…and when we’re all special, no one will be.” – Syndrome
This fallacy is where we get the NA*ALT (not all ____ are like that) absolution of the most unflattering parts of human nature. Not All Women Are Like That is standard feminine-primary boilerplate for women and sympathizing men (White Knights) who’d rather we all ignore the aspects of female nature that shine a bad light on what are easily observable truths about their behavior and the motives behind them. The social convention relies on the idea that if there is even one individual contradiction to the generalization (always deemed an ‘overgeneralization’) then the whole idea must be wrong.
Of course, this individual exceptionality rule only applies to the concepts in which equalists have invested their egos in. When a generality proves an equalist’s ego-investment, that’s when it becomes an ‘endemic’ universal truth to their mindset. A binary over-exaggeration of this effect is the reflexive response for concepts that challenge their ego-investments. Thus, we see any and all of the (perceptually) negative aspects of masculinity (actually the totality of masculinity) painted as evidence of the endemic of ‘toxic’ masculinity as a whole. The individualist exceptionality in this instance is always ridiculed as ‘insecurity’ on the part of men even considering it.
The exceptionalism of the individual is always paired with some high-order consciousness, and/or the idea that anything that proves their ego-investment is “more evolved” – despite any evidence that proves the contrary – is proof of that this individual is a being who represents some evolutionary step forward. If you agree and support feminine-primacy it is ‘proof‘ that you are more ‘evolved’ than other men. Thus, the ‘more evolved’ status becomes a form of reward to the individual who aligns with the ideology. Conversely, the avoidance of being perceived as ‘unevolved’ serves as a form of negative reinforcement.
This is kind of ironic when you consider that the same equalist mindset that relies on the individualist exception is the same mindset that insists that everyone is the same; equal value, equal potential, equal purpose and equal ability. Again, the irony is that everything that would be used to establish the ‘unique snowflake’ ideology (so long as it contradicts innate strengths and weaknesses of an opposing ideology) is conveniently ignored in favor of blank-slate egalitarianism. There is a degree of wanting to avoid determinism (particularly biological determinism) for the individual in this blank-slate concept, but it also provides the equalist with a degree of feel-good affirmation that the individual is a product of social constructivism. So, we get the idea that gender is a social construct and, furthermore, that blank-slate individual is ‘more evolved’ to the point of redefining gender for themselves altogether. Even when that ‘individual’ is only 4 years old and hasn’t the capacity for abstract thought enough to make a determination.
To be an egalitarian equalist is to accept the cognitive dissonance that the individual trumps the general truth and yet simultaneously accept that the individual is just the blank-slate template of anyone else, thus negating the idea of the individual. It takes great stretches of belief to adhere to egalitarian if-then logic.
I apologize for getting into some heady stuff right out the gate here, but I think it’s vitally important that Red Pill aware men realize the self-conflicting flaw in the ideologies of post-modern equalism. Our feminine-primary social order is rife with it. They will disqualify the generalities of Red Pill awareness with individualist exceptionalism and in the next breath disqualify that premise with their investments in blank-slate egalitarianism.
This is easiest to see in Blue Pill conditioned men and women still plugged in to the Matrix, but I also see the same self-conflicting rationales among Red Pill aware men using the same process to justify personal ideology or their inability to de-pedestalize women on whole. There’s a common thread amongst well-meaning Red Pill men to want to defend the individual natures of women who align with the Blue Pill ego-investments they still cling to. All women are like that so long as those women are granola-eating, furry-armpit feminists – ‘Red Pill Women’ then become the individual (snowflake) exceptions to the otherwise general rule because they fit a different, idealized, profile.
The Inequality of Equality
I’ve stated this in many prior threads, but, I do not believe in “equality”.
I don’t believe in equality because I can objectively see that reality, our respective environments, our personal circumstances, etc. are all inherently unequal. Everyday we encounter circumstances in life which we are eminently unequalled for in our ability to address them. Likewise, there are circumstances we can easily overcome without so much as an afterthought. Whether these challenges demand or test our physical, mental, material or even spiritual capacities, the condition is the same – reality is inherently chaotic, unfair and challenging by order of degree. To presume that all individuals have equal value in light of the nature of reality is, itself, an unequal presumption. To expect sameness in the degree of competency or incompetency to meet any given challenge reality throws at us is a form of inequality. And it’s just this inequality that equalists ironically exploit.
As KFG was stating, “each dog has it’s strengths for a given task”. One dog is not as valuable as another depending on what determines a positive outcome. What equalism attempts do to – what it has the ludicrous audacity to presume – is to alter reality to fit the needs of the individual in order to make all individuals equally valuable agents. This is the ‘participation trophy’ mentality, but it is also a glaring disregard for existential reality. Which, again, contradicts the idea of individual exceptionalism; reality must be made to be equal to accommodate the existence of the equally valuable individual.
To say you don’t believe in equality is only outrageous because it offends the predominant social narrative of today. It seemingly denies the inherent value of the individual, but what is conveniently never addressed is how an environment, condition and state defines what is functionally valued for any given instance. Like the dog bred to hunt ferrets out of their warrens is not the functional equal of a dog bred to run down prey at 45 MPH. The value of the individual is only relevant to the function demanded of it.
The default misunderstanding (actually deliberate) most equalists believe is that functional worth is personal worth. I addressed this in Separating Values:
When you attempt to quantify any aspect of human ‘value’ you can expect to have your interpretations of it to be offensive to various people on the up or down side of that estimate. There is simply no escaping personal bias and the offense that comes from having one’s self-worth attacked, or even confirmed for them.
The first criticism I’ve come to expect is usually some variation about how evaluating a person’s SMV is “dehumanizing”, people are people, and have intrinsic worth beyond just the sexual. To which I’ll emphatically agree, however, this dismissal only conveniently sidesteps the realities of the sexual marketplace.
Again, sexual market value is not personal value. Personal value, your value as a human being however one subjectively defines that, is a definite component to sexual market value, but separating the two requires an often uncomfortable amount of self-analysis. And, as in Ms. Korth’s experience here, this often results in denial of very real circumstances, as well as a necessary, ego-preserving, cognitive dissonance from that reality.
Denial of sexual market valuation is a psychological insurance against women losing their controlling, sexual agency in their hypergamous choices.
This is where the appeal to emotion begins for the equalist mindset. It seems dehumanizing to even consider an individuals functional value. Human’s capacity to learn and train and practice to become proficient or excel in various functions is truly a marvel of our evolution. Brain plasticity being what it is, makes our potential for learning and overcoming our environments what separates us from other animals. We all have the potential to be more than we are in functional value, and this is the root of the emotional appeal of equalists. It’s seems so negative to presume we aren’t functional equals because we have the capacity and potential to become more functionally valuable. The appeal is one of optimism.
What this appeal ignores is the functional value of an individual in the now; the two dogs bred for different purposes. What this appeal also ignores is the ever-changing nature of reality and the challenges it presents to an individual in the now and how this defines value. What equalism cannot do is separate functional value from potential value.
Adopting a mindset that accepts complementarity between the sexes and between individuals, one that celebrates and utilizes innate strengths and talents, yet also embraces the weaknesses and compensates for them is a far healthier one that presuming baseline equivalency. Understanding the efficacy of applying strengths to weaknesses cooperatively while acknowledging we all aren’t the same damn dog will be a key to dissolving the fantasy of egalitarian equalism and create a more balanced and healthier relations between the sexes. Embracing the fact that condition, environment, reality and the challenges they pose defines our usefulness is far better than to assume any single individual could ever be a self-contained, self-sufficient island unto themselves – that is what equalism would have us believe.
The Matrix is a system, Neo, and that system is our enemy. But when you are inside and you look around, what do you see; businessmen, lawyers, teachers, carpenters. The minds of the very people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of the system and that makes them our enemy.
You have to understand that most of these people are not ready to be unplugged and many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system that they will fight to protect it.
I apologize for breaking up the continuity of last week’s post with this one today, but I felt it was necessary to address the recent firing of James Damore by his employers, Google, for allegedly breaking company conduct codes for raising many of the issue I and other’s in the Red Pill community and the Manosphere have been dissecting for a long time now. I generally don’t like to get too wrapped up in current events until more information develops about an incident I think is relevant to how the Red Pill (as it correctly applies to intersexual dynamics) is perceived in mainstream society. It’s easy to make mistakes so if I miss anything here please feel free to correct me or add to things in the comment thread.
To the best of what I’ve been able to ascertain James Damore posted what mainstream media wants to define as a 10 page “manifesto” (really a ‘memo’) about why it is he believes certain gender/sexual stereotypes persist in the tech field. After reading it, there is really nothing all that shocking from a Red Pill perspective in his essay. If anything, Damore is still deluded by Blue Pill conditioned idealistic hopes for gender equalism not dissimilar to those held by the MRM. Really there’s nothing in this PDF that the Manosphere and even the sexual sciences haven’t been revealing for over a decade now. Damore just had the balls to post it on what Google promoted as an anonymous inter-corporate intranet forum, ostensibly established to allow their employees to voice their opinions and concerns about the company in anonymity. Google is only one of many multi-national companies to have these forums set up in some lame effort to make it seem as if they value the opinions and engagement of their employees.
Now we see just how private and dangerous these forums really are to the livelihood of their employees. To be fair, I doubt that Damore is the first guy to get fired for expressing himself on one of these forums. I’m sure there’ve been countless other men shown the door by many companies with a lower profile than Google. What made Damore a target wasn’t so much Google from a corporate sense, but rather the ‘progressive’ feminine-primary corporate culture that is endemic to Google. Once Damore had published his very well-thought op-ed about the fundamental biological, psychological and neurological differences between men and women, and how this affects innovation and employment in the tech industry, the intra-corporate witch hunt was on for the guy who anonymously posted. No doubt Google code monkeys would have little problem identifying and doxxing James, but where this witch hunt stemmed from was far more likely his co-workers and fueled by the egalitarian-equalist, postmodernist mindset that pervades Google.
This is a snapshot of the Google corporate culture. The last gal, Danielle Brown is Google’s “Diversity VP”.
The official line from Google is that Damore’s “manifesto” constitutes a breach of Google’s code of conduct. Yet for all of Google’s insisting that they respect the right’s of speech within the company, Damore’s doxxing came from within Google’s corporate culture:
The employee memo — which was up for days without action by Google — went viral within the search giant’s internal discussion boards this weekend, with some decrying it and others defending it. Sources said the company’s top execs have been struggling with how to deal with it and the fallout, trying to decide if its troubling content crossed a line.
Apparently it did. In a memo to employees titled “Our words matter,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai said that the employee — who has been named on Twitter, although his identity could not be verified — had violated its code of conduct. (I am not publishing his name, because he — and others who disagree with him — have been threatened with violence online.)
Well, apparently James was doxxed identified and was threatened with violence both from within and without Google now. Thus, the predictable constitutional excuse that ‘you can say what you want, but you’ll be held accountable’ and Google was within its rights to fire Damore doesn’t hold water when Google promoted its internal forum as an anonymous place for employees to provide their input so the company can get honest feedback. I’m not a lawyer, but I think Google’s got a really sticky situation on their hands in that their actions technically constitute entrapment.
Furthermore, I get the feeling that Google’s campus is not unlike many other large corporate cultures – a core of skilled labor that actually puts numbers on the board as far as productivity is concerned working within a larger bureaucracy of basically superfluous positions that define the company’s corporate identity to the world around it. The writing on the wall now, that this skilled labor pool is seeing, is that this bureaucracy set of the company can have them fired for daring to voice a dissenting reality to their own ego-investments. How long before that talent pool opts for a more secure jobs in a corporate culture that looks less like the “people’s” revolution in China?
Now, all that said, James Damore, unwittingly or deliberately, has fallen into the trust-trap that I outlined back in 2013 in It’s Their Game. And while I think he’s got a pretty good case against Google, he had to have understood to some degree that Google owns his Frame. Perhaps this was his intent all along (nowhere have I seen how long he’d been employed there), but he was either very naive or very cunning in his in publishing his ‘memo’. Maybe he thinks this is his Atlas Shrugged moment, or maybe he actually bought the lie that Google (any company) cared about his employee feedback – that fact remains that the Feminine Imperative has assimilated every aspect of western society. The frame in which the overwhelming majority of men depend upon in their corporate, career, job, lives is one into which the Feminine Imperative seized social control over long ago.
For as much as it seems that standing up to systemic, calculated, postmodern ignorance is a heroic act of Red Pill aware defiance, never forget the insistent frame of the system you find yourself in. A lot of men in the ‘sphere like to tout the virtues of being ‘anti-fragile’ enough to weather the inevitable retaliations of the postmodern herd for their dissenting world view, and that may well be the case for a few men, but remember, everyone, with rare exception, is fragile about something – family, respect, integrity, personal relationships, the people who depend on him as well as his revenue (and the capacity to generate more) all apply.
Feminine Correctness
Every social, religious and corporate institution has been saturated with feminine-correctness. It’s important for Red Pill aware men to make this distinction because it will inform your decision making for as long as you remain in most corporate environments. I know many ideological and political factions like to trot out the idea about how they are against “Political Correctness”. That term, PC, has been with us for a long time now and its definition has been passed back and forth along political lines almost interchangeably for decades. Whatever it is one side isn’t allowed to address in public discourse becomes politically incorrect conversation. However, the distinction that conveniently (calculatedly) goes unnoticed is what I described as the Sisterhood Über Alles in my most recent book. Feminine Correctness permeates both sides of the political spectrum, but this is only one social arena amongst many where the appeasement of women’s perspectives as being the only correct perspective has been saturated.
Anyone who’s read my essay, Losing My Religion regarding how the Feminine Imperative has covertly (and recently overtly) assimilated authority of church culture – and ultimately doctrine – in mainstream religion can get an idea of what I’m talking about here with regard to corporate culture. The corporate workplace, big and small, has similarly been assimilated over the course of over six decades now; to the point that a feminine-primary influence has become a de facto authority under the premise of diversity, gender-neutrality and combating a presumed endemic male-sexism. All of which feed into the default, feminine-correct, presumption of female victimhood. Thus, we see the rise of the ubiquitous, almost universally female staffed, Human Resources departments whose true purpose is not about hiring, company morale or corporate culture, but rather an enforcement of feminine-correct initiatives and bylaws intended to give unquestioned authority to the feminine-correct social narrative.
In our modern corporate culture we’ve seen a meta-scale enforcement of what I termed Overseers in the Locker Room in my essay, Male Space:
Overseers in the Locker Room
The second purpose in the goal of female inclusion into male space is really a policing of the thought dynamics and attitudes of the men in that space. When women are allowed access to the locker room the dynamic of the locker room changes. The locker room can take many different shapes: the workplace environment, the sports team, the group of all-male coders, the primarily male scientific community, the ‘boys club’, the group of gamer nerds at the local game store, even strip clubs and the sanctuary you think your ‘man cave’ is – the context is one of women inserting themselves into male space in order to enforce the dictates of feminine social primacy.
When the influence of feminine-primacy is introduced into social settings made up mainly by men and male-interests, the dynamics and purpose of that group changes. The purpose becomes less about the endeavor itself and more about adherence to the feminine-inclusionary aspect of that endeavor. It starts to become less about being the best or most passionate at what they do, and more about being acceptable to the influence of the Feminine Imperative while attempting maintaining the former level of interest in the endeavor.
Men unaccustomed to having women in their midst generally react in two ways; According to their proper feminized conditioning, they embrace the opportunity to impress these ‘trailblazing’ women (hoping to be found worthy of intimacy) with their enthusiastic acceptance of, and identification with, their feminine overseer(s), or they become easy foils of an “out moded” way of thinking that the new ‘in-group’ happily labels them with.
Once the feminine-primary in-group dynamic is established a ‘feminine correct’ social frame follows. This feminine correction restructures the priorities of goals, and validates any accomplishments, in terms of how they reflect upon the feminine as a whole. Thus any in-group success is perceived as a feminine success in male space, while in-group failures or simple mediocrity is either dismissed entirely or blamed on out-group men’s failure to comply with, or the rejection of, the Feminine Imperative’s ‘correcting’ influence on the in-group.
In all honesty, Jame Damore’s rationales in his ‘memo’ were very measured, bordering on Blue Pill, in his attempts to preempt what he obviously knew would be a workplace viral insult. However, his experience is a high-profile illustration of how corporate culture has been taken hostage by a mindset fed and raised by the Feminine Imperative. When you consider that this is the corporate culture of a company dubiously responsible for global access to information – ostensibly legitimate, authoritative information by the larger populace – you begin to see the extent to which the imperative as assumed control not just of our social discourse, but the unquestionable authority to direct the acceptability of personal belief and critical thought.
When I wrote The First Female President, I attempted to reveal just how globally extensive the reach of the Feminine Imperative really was. So encompassing is the presumed understanding of feminine-correctness, so ensaturated is it into our societal subconscious that we tend to take its presence for granted until Hillary (the she)was denied the presidency (to the he). Then the societal scale outrage comes to the surface because what was presumed to be correct is not a universally accepted foreknowledge as their social subconscious had presumed was believed.
That outrage was on a geopolitical social scale, yet it was due to the same presumptions that cause the outrage we see over a kid at Google who dared to say ‘no’ not just to Google’s corporate culture, but to all corporate cultures that have been subsumed by the Feminine Imperative for over 60 years now. That any company would need a Vice President of Diversity is an indictment of how deeply embedded the Feminine Imperative is in corporate culture.
