Blue Pill Mindset

The New Age of Enlightenment

The Old Order

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 exactly the 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.

Heirs of the Blank Slate

“Yeah, well, not all women are like that. Men do it too and they’re even worse!”

“People are people. Everyone is different, you can’t predict human behavior because we all have freewill.”

“What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.”

“Everyone is born equal.”

“If women are hypergamous, men must be too.”

“Double standards are so unfair.”

The legacy of the Blank Slate has been one of the most pivotal influences on understanding intersexual dynamics for over the last century. In the time I’ve been writing I’ve covered egalitarianism’s influence on Blue Pill conditioning on at least 5 occasions. In all of these essays I’ve made the case that what we consider the Blue Pill, and the perceptions it instills in us, is firmly rooted in a preconception that an egalitarian state between the sexes is not only possible, but eminently desirable. In fact, I would argue that the presumption that an egalitarian state between men and women is ideal is the foundational premise of a Blue Pill social order.

Since I began writing on these topics one thing I’ve experienced that underpins people’s understanding of intersexual dynamics is an established belief that men and women are functional equals – or ideally they ought to be – who exist in a state of disequilibrium. This equalism (my term) is akin to a religious belief, albeit one most people are unaware they believe in. I first encountered this belief when I was in college. Around the same time I discovered that among the most rational of my fellow students and professors in behavioral psychology, most clung to the soulmate myth, I also noticed that most of them held to the hope of an “equal partnership” with whomever their ‘soulmate‘ turned out to be. Here I had some very empirical minds who would write thesis papers on human nature according to what we knew about evo-psych, evo-bio, anthropology and sociology, yet they would revert to the Blank Slate hope that ‘people are people‘ and we’d evolved past our innate natures when it came to finding their ‘One‘.

The idea that humans have ‘evolved beyond’ our animal natures is the lynchpin in the modern belief of the Blank Slate.

What we know as the Blank Slate, as a concept, evolved from the Enlightenment era idea of Tabula Rasa. Originally it was Aristotle who came coined the term, then it passed through the Stoics, then other notable minds of antiquity, but the root of what it has become today began in the Enlightenment era with John Locke.

On paper it’s a very ennobling idea. All people are born with the same intellectual (and later spiritual) potential; we’re all the same except for what society, environment and circumstance writes on the slate that is our intellect and personality. The object of this essay isn’t to give you a history lesson, but if you’re really interested in the development of how we got to our default, equalist, concept of the Blank Slate I’ll refer you to Steven Pinker’s great book The Blank Slate.

From the time of the Enlightenment the concept of the Blank Slate has been embedded into our core cultural beliefs about human nature. It dovetails very nicely into the concept of freewill and it also satisfies the of hopefulness human beings need to combat the determinism that might lead to nihilism. It’s exactly this human need for hope that makes the Blank Slate so appealing. People who hold a belief in the Blank Slate take it for granted to the point it becomes an ego-investment, and internalized thoroughly, it becomes the subconscious point from which people begin when it comes to understanding human nature. So, challenging the validity of whether human’s have innate, evolved, aspects of their natures – and their influences having a bearing on our decisions – borders on attacking their religion or who they are as a person.

From a Red Pill perspective, proposing that men and women are different physically and mentally, and that we’re subject to evolved influences as a result of these differences, is also sacrilege. The Blank Slate ideal is what defines every aspect of what Blue Pill conditioning would have men and women believe about intersexual relations and gender ‘equality’. In fact, as James Damore found firsthand, the Village forbids even the discussion of questioning the Blank Slate. The religion of the Blank Slate is also the state-approved religion, and this has implications in social realms that go well beyond intersexual dynamics.

With the rise of feminism and a feminine-primary social order, social adherence to the Blank Slate ideal became vital to the survival of feminism’s power base. Once the modern research and understanding of human beings’ evolved nature became unignorable the social institutions founded on the Blank Slate were challenged. Today, Red Pill awareness in men is one of those challenges.

A Blue Pill, equalist, mindset doesn’t coexist well with empirical evidence that shows men and women are more different than alike on fundamental levels. Today’s Blank Slate is, as Dr. Pinker describes, a ‘modern denial of human nature‘. The Blank Slate belief set is codependent on Social Constructionism. The idea is that we are all just empty vessels that a nebulous ‘society’ builds through media, culture, school, religion, family, etc. And while all of these outside influences certainly mold us, by necessity the Blank Slate ignores the import of our mental ‘firmware‘ – the innate proclivities that come standard in males and females.

The Human System

I use the term “evolved mental firmware” a lot in my writing. I look at it like this; we have the hardware that is our biological reality, a firmware that is our in-born, evolved proclivities (and the psychological aspects of how men and women’s hardware affects it) and the software that accounts for the social programming we learn from our environments and circumstances. From the perspective of my theory on perceptive processes (Instinct, Emotion & Reason) our firmware influences all three of these processes.

Blank Slate equalism would condition us to believe that our biology (hardware) is insignificant, our firmware is non-existent or inconsequential, and our programming (social learning) is the only thing that makes us what we are. If this sounds like progressivist boilerplate you’re not too far off. Modern concepts of social justice use exactly this social constructionism to justify their positions on a great many issues – and especially gender issues.

However, it’s a mistake to think the Blank Slate is a religion only for leftists and feminists. Equalism is the starting point for the beliefs of many well-meaning Blue Pill conservatives too. Feminism depends on egalitarian ideals setting the intersexual ‘Frame‘ for selling its ideology.

“If only men would cooperate and help smash the Patriarchy we could live in an ideal state of egalitarian equalism.”

The cover story of a ‘push for equality’ all depends on the Blank Slate notion that men and women are functional equals and all this inequality is the result of social doctrines (and plenty of evil men). If it’s all about social constructionism then all that’s needed is to change everyones’ programming and thus an idealized gender neutral world ought to be possible.

Male feminists, Mens Rights Activists and Masculinity Apologist organizations all have this in common – they buy into the Blank Slate and the feminist lie that gender equality is an achievable goal based on it. Most of them don’t realize they’re carrying feminist water in their egalitarian beliefs. They just believe in the hope of an “equal partnership” in their marriages and ignore or demonize the influence our evolved firmware exerts in themselves and their wives. So even when they accept intersexual differences and the influence of our firmware, the next defense of the Blank Slate is moralism.

Moralism for Rationalists

The Blank Slate is a lie, but it’s a lie that’s pregnant with hope. Men and women are different; and our differences are too significant to ignore. But even when the Blank Slate is effectively challenged and our evolved natures are acknowledged, the next rationale is that, if we’re only moral enough, intelligent enough, or “evolved” enough, we ought to ideally be able to effect the ideals of the Blank Slate above our base natures. The appeal to rising or evolving above the influences of our evolved natures is always the path of the moralist and the intellectual. Shouldn’t we strive for Equality? Would an equal state between the sexes not be a good thing? If we were good enough, and exercising our powerful freewill, men and women should be able to be more equitable, right?

The question isn’t whether we can overcome our evolved natures – we do this all the time actually – but whether we should strive for the egalitarian ideal. In the most egalitarian societies on the planet human being still opt for “traditional” (conventional) gender roles. Given the freedom to believe in a Blank Slate ideal and choose their roles in an egalitarian social order (or its best approximation) men and women still prefer the roles we’re supposed to believe are so constraining for us. The roles we’re supposed to believe are foisted on us by social constructionism.

I would argue that much of the gender conflicts we experience today are the result of force-fitting men and women into an egalitarian ideal with the expectation that our evolved (or designed) proclivities are ‘unnatural’ creations of a nebulous society. We’re told that gender is not binary and it’s really a social construct, yet we still need hormone therapy to alter the biochemistry of children to help them ‘transition’ to another binary gender.

I find it kind of ironic that a mindset, a social force and a belief system that would otherwise call for a natural balanced harmony in life is the most disharmonious with respect to a natural evolved order among men and women. The conclusion I come to then is that promulgating the Blank Slate social religion is more about power dynamics than a real push for an equalist harmony.

In 2019, after decades of advancements in the cognitive sciences, neurological study, anthropology, sociology, etc. we can lay the Blank Slate to rest, but so much of our social and intersexual understanding of human nature (or even the denial of it) is dependent on it being an ideal to strive for.

When I make an unflattering observation of women’s nature the first response from conditioned men and women is to firing back with some equal-but opposite-reaction. Our natural, human inclination is to look for symmetry and balance in things. The default belief is to think that what’s good for the goose is good for the gander, or to distract from the observation by making value judgements.

Well, men do it too, only worse.

Deal with the plank in your own eye before you pluck the mote from mine.

If it’s true for one, there’s an opposite truth for another.

The reflexive need for a symmetrical balance – even when there is none – is a human default. ‘Men and women are different’ is a radical statement in this era, not the least of which because it contradicts the Blank Slate religion that persists in spite of itself. When people ask me whether I believe men and women are equals and I answer ‘no’, they look as if I pulled the wings from a butterfly. I believe men and women are complements to each other and we’re better together than apart, but we are not equals. We are different, with differing motives and strategies that are part of who we are. We could achieve a far more harmonious social state by accepting and embracing these differences.

The Wrong Girl

“You just married the wrong girl mate.”

“You must be attracting the wrong kind of women.”


“Not all women are like that, you need to go places where the quality women are.”

“Those girls are just damaged.”

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.

Solution: deny the mistake.

Denial, July 11, 2012

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.

“The Believers” vs. The Empiricists

I’ve been meaning to do a post about this for a while now, and given the present ideological schism in the Manosphere (still searching for a better term) I thought reposting this would be relevant to the discussion. This is from an old Purple Pill Debate thread on Reddit. I was made aware of it by Rian Stone about a year ago and I’ve returned to it often enough in commentary and Tweets that I felt it deserved a post and a discussion of its own here.

Now, I understand that the definitions of what constitutes a red pill understanding versus a blue pill outlook are always going to be subjective to the individual guy. The “red pill” and the “blue pill” have become so distorted recently that as terms, as loose brands, they’ve become effectively meaningless. Anyone who reads my work or has heard me opine about these terms already grasps what my own interpretations are. However, far too many disingenuous actors have entered this community of late and all have an interest in shifting those definitions to cater to their pet ideology. In fact, converting the Red Pill to be interpreted as an ideology rather than a praxeology (or a heuristic if you prefer) founded in an objective understanding of intersexual dynamics has been their primary goal.

All this redefining has done is (deliberately) confuse the purpose of understanding gender interrelations by inserting ideology into the mix. Often this is an effort at reprioritizing how interpreting intersexual dynamics ought to discussed. Most often it’s a conflict of the ‘correct’ way of approaching the interpreting of observable facts & data. So moralists believe in one goal for the interpretation while objectivists see another. The result is we talk past one another. Then one disavows the other, goes off to broadcast what he thinks is truth – according to their origination premise – and builds a brand based on that redefinition of “the red pill” according to them.

You’ll get a better understanding here (emphasis my own):

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Red Pill and Blue Pill people end up talking past each other because they cannot even agree on what they should be debating about. The sets of values they hold are completely disjointed. They cannot even agree on what a “debate” is, and what the goals of a “debate” are.

Red Pill people generally bring the following assumptions to a debate:

  • They believe that there is exactly one reality, and that truth is what accurately describes that reality. The better a statement describes reality, the more true it is. They are factual absolutists.
  • They believe that whether something is “good” or “bad” is a matter of opinion, and that all systems of morality are things societies invented to get a result, and it is therefore pointless to argue about whether something is “evil” or not, instead of about what effect it has. They are moral relativists.
  • They believe that the goal of a debate is to establish what the facts are, and how this knowledge can be used to control outcomes. They argue about what is true.
  • They believe that debates are a cooperative process between two or more people who have the shared goal of achieving a more accurate picture of absolute reality, and that, while people may stick vehemently to their positions, they can also reverse them on a dime if new information comes to light, because the only real attachment is to the truth. They believe debates occur between theories, not people. Thus questioning someone’s character is off-limits, because it is irrelevant.

Blue Pill people generally bring the following assumptions to a debate:

  • They believe that reality is subjective, and what is “true” is simply a matter of who you ask. What is called “truth” is simply a codification of someone’s perspective, and it is therefore pointless to argue about what is “true“. They are factual relativists.
  • They believe that there is exactly one set of moral laws, which human beings have gradually discovered in a historical climb towards ethical perfection (or degeneration). Certain people are ethically better or worse based not only on what they do, but also on what they believe. They believe that different ethical systems exist, but they can be ranked from ethically worst to ethically best based on a sort of meta-ethics whereby they can be tested for degree of compliance with the one absolute set of ethics that underlies reality. They are moral absolutists.
  • 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.
  • They believe that debates are a competitive process between two people, who each have the goal of establishing their views about right and wrong by attaining a state of moral ascendancy over the other person. They believe that anyone who changes their views is revealing a flaw in their moral character (because their previous views were not morally correct), and must thereafter relinquish the moral high ground and submit their actions to the moral judgement of others (usually the person who won the debate). They believe debates occur between people, not ideas, for the precise purpose of establishing who should be allowed to set standards for the behavior of others (because they are morally superior). Thus, questioning someone’s character is not only relevant, it’s the whole point.

This is why Blue Pill adherents think “those Red Pill guys” are “misogynists” or bad people. Because they cannot imagine an analysis that does not occur for the purposes of judgement, much less one that doesn’t include any idea about what people “should” do.

This is why the Red Pill insists that the Blue Pill are willfully blind. Because, to them, anyone who doesn’t admit the truth must be unable to perceive it. They cannot imagine anyone not caring what the truth is.

This is why Blue Pillers keep thinking that Red Pillers are trying to restore the Dark Ages. They cannot imagine any group with shared views not having one moral agenda that they wish everyone to abide by.

This is why Red Pillers think that Blue Pill adherents must be hopelessly bad at understanding human social structures. They cannot imagine anyone not wanting to do things in the most effective possible way.

Here’s an example of this kind of misunderstanding in action:

Comment from discussion Bluepillschool’s comment from discussion "So much for men’s rights".

Here we see an interaction between RP and BP regarding age of consent laws.

  • RP’s primary objective to propose an algorithm for making legal judgements about consent or lack of it, which he believes will best serve what the majority of people desire to see these laws do. He looks at the issue as an engineering problem, and he proposes a solution.
  • BP’s objective is to establish whether or RP is a bad person. If he can be gotten to agree to a statement which BP thinks of as diagnostic of “evilness”, then the debate can be won, and anything RP says can thereafter be dismissed as originating from an evil person.
  • BP says “All this so you can justify getting laid.”. BP thinks RP is trying to “justify” something according a set of moral rules, because to BP, every act has a moral valance, and anyone who wishes to do anything must at least be ready with a moral excuse.
  • RP has been arguing, meanwhile, about which metaphors best illustrate human social and mating dynamics. RP does not address the issue of right or wrong at all, and seems to believe BP is engaging with him on factual level.

Thus RP and BP cannot even agree on what the argument is about.

RP thinks right and wrong are a matter of opinion, and BP doesn’t care what the facts are.

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I imagine the discussion thread for this post is going to get pretty heated. However, I want to point out that a lot of what I’m seeing in the Manosphere at present is rooted in factual relativists attempting to establish what the “Red Pill” ought to mean to people, and thereby redefining it to suit their goals of couching any objective discussion in moralist terms.

What’s happening is that factual relativists want the Red Pill to be about what’s right or wrong according to their ideological bent. So they will bend over backwards to reinterpret what is actually an objectivist exploration of intersexual dynamics to fit their ‘interpretive headspace’ – or they will simply write off the Red Pill wholesale and say “Those Red Pill guys are just bitter, negative, misogynists” without a hint of their own irony.

Example: The realities of Hypergamy aren’t right or wrong, they simply are. In any of my numerous essays outlining Hypergamy, and for all my attempts to dispel the misconceptions about it, I’ve never once stated that Hypergamy was ‘evil‘ or that women’s nature is evil because of it. It’s simply a reproductive strategy that manifests per the realities of women’s nature and needs.

The factual relativists responds to this in two ways: First, is the nihilistic approach (Black Pill if you must) – Hypergamy conflicts with their personal interests and ideological bent. Thus, Hypergamy, or women’s inability (or choice) to police it for their betterment, or humanity’s betterment are evil. Second, is the approbation approach – “You talk about Hypergamy too much (or at all), it must be because you’re fundamentally a bad, damaged, morally compromised person.”

A debate never really occurs between these headspaces because the goals of the debate are never the same. Now, add to all this that factual relativists are appropriating the ‘red pill’ as their own “Brand of Me” and building revenue streams around their ideological interpretation of its original intent. Any counter argument proffered by factual absolutists is not only a challenge to their ego-investments, it’s also interpreted as an attack on their livelihoods.

In 2015 and again in 2018 I made this point:

It’s my opinion that red pill awareness needs to remain fundamentally apolitical, non-racial and non-religious because the moment the Red Pill is associated with any social or religious movement, you co-brand it with an ideology, and the validity of it will be written off along with any preconceptions associated with that specific ideology.

Furthermore, any co-branding will still be violently disowned by whatever ideology it’s paired with because the Feminine Imperative has already co-opted and trumps the fundaments of that ideology. The fundamental truth is that the manosphere, pro-masculine thought, Red Pill awareness or its issues are an entity of its own.

Unfortunately, this is where we are at today in the modern ‘Manosphere‘. The reason I’m attacked with accusations of enforcing some ideological purity tests for the Red Pill is directly attributable to the mindset of the factual relativists; whose livelihoods are now dependent upon the redefinition of whatever the Hell the “Red Pill” means to them or should mean to those they broadcast it to.

So, I become a ‘Cult Leader‘ because their minds can only think in terms of ideology. Again, the factual relativist never leaves the ideological Frame in which they believe the debate takes place.

The Real You

One thing I’m always asked by guys is “How do I switch from a Beta loser to and Alpha winner?” There’s always a lot involved in how a guy can transition from one state to another and to today’s generation of low SMV men if you don’t have their immediate solution you must be selling snake oil. Most guys want a magic formula. They want a mantra to repeat or a set of steps to follow that will shift them from Beta virgin into Alpha cad. 

Well, maybe not ‘cad’. Most guys still cling to their Blue Pill hopes and attempt to see what the Red Pill presents to them as a key to getting to their Dream Girls. As I’ve pointed out countless times, a majority of men’s (80% Beta) only real problem is finding that one girl that fits their sexual strategy as ideal. In The New Polyandry I touched on this a bit; the Blue Pill conditions men to expect the old social contract of monogamy to be his default setting, even if he’s a high SMV man and could actually pursue a non-exclusive sexual strategy.

However, real change takes time. I know that sounds cliché, but part of that change almost always involves some kind of reassessment of one’s life during that process – and that’s always hard for the TL;DR generation. One of the more daunting aspects of unplugging a guy from the Matrix is that the goals he had while he was Blue Pill conditioned and ‘plugged in’ tend to fall away once he’s shifted to a Red Pill aware mentality. The “girl of his dreams” loses her veneer of desirability. The previous goal state that was defined for him by Blue Pill ideals is no longer the end he wished to achieve when he started his transformation. I think this is sometimes the hardest aspect of ‘awakening’ for guys to accept. Anger at oneself for wasting so much time and so much potential for not grasping the truth sooner is part of that process. So too is a sense of helplessness, if not hopelessness, that accompanies the realization that a man might not have what it takes (at the moment) to achieve what he’d like in life in this Red Pill paradigm.

There was a time when I was 21-22 and I first began playing in the Hollywood metal scene of the late 80s that I had one such transformation. By the time I was 20 I’d already been put through the wringer by my cheating ex-girlfriend from high school – who I was sure would be my eventual wife. I was Beta in the extreme, and thoroughly Blue Pill conditioned at that point, but I was going through what I termed the “Break Phase” in the timeline I created in Preventive Medicine.It took me about a year to shift from that mental state to one of making myself my Mental Point of Origin. Once I had – and once I’d decided I wanted to experience sex with hotter women – I found that through trial and error I could direct the path of what my personality would be, and what was going to be acceptable or not. I’d been emancipated from the expectations of being a Nice Guy as Game to essentially not caring what I was supposed to be doing to placate women. I figured out what worked for me.

I finally got into a ‘real band’ at 21. I played clubs every Friday or Saturday night between the ages of 21 and 25. I honestly only left my parents home because it was less convenient to bang a girl I’d met at a club on the weekend. But with that new identity came a new access to sex with women I could only fantasize about in a Hustler or a Penthouse magazine. The pivotal point came when one of my girlfriends (I had a rotation of about 4-5) was a bonafide swimsuit model. I thought I had finally ‘arrived’ at that point because my head was still measuring success by what the 15 year old version of myself thought was ‘it’. She was hotter and more fun in bed than any girl I’d gotten with previously. But my mindset was still mired in my Blue Pill ideals. According to those ideals she was the goal. And she was, until I managed to pull a centerfold who happened to live near me in Southern California. (Ask me about it sometime).

The point I’m making here is that a guy has to reconsider what his conditioning has taught him he should consider success based on the foundation of that conditioning. It wasn’t so much that I’d made myself my Mental Point of Origin, rather it was that I simply wanted to make the most of that time of my life and to do so meant that I needed to change my mind about who I wanted to be. I had transitioned from one personality to another and I liked it. I was rewarded with women’s genuine sexual desire and this served to further reinforce that new me as the genuine me. This begs the question, what is authenticity when it comes to ‘just being yourself’?

Later in my twenties I made the dangerous decision to involve myself with a woman who was clinically, psychologically disturbed. Of course she never wore a t-shirt that said “I’m insane” and I had wound myself up in her neurosis over the course of about four years. You can read the details about this relationship in Borderline Personality Disorder, but one thing I don’t get into in that essay is how I willingly became someone else – fundamentally changing my personality again – in order to solve this girl’s problems because I believed that who I was when we met was so flawed it was causing her neurosis. Now granted, I didn’t understand what I was involving myself in, but my point again is that who I was had shifted, but my core, internalized belief set was still very much informed by my Blue Pill conditioning. 

People who ride hard on the Personal Responsibility belief love to think that something so damaging must be self apparent. No one’s really a victim because they should’ve seen it coming – as they believe they would – but the reality is we want to believe that the Blue Pill ideals we’ve been raised with can come true. We want to believe that the ideals we internalized since five years old and on into our adulthood are in fact a possibility. In all my writing I make the case for a need to unplug oneself from the Matrix that is this Blue Pill conditioning. That’s what Red Pill awareness is; an awareness of the false existence we used to live out according to what others – often well meaning others – would like us to believe is true, because they want it to be true for themselves too. When I allowed myself to change my personality for my BPD girlfriend I had no idea that I was even doing so because I wanted to believe that she represented the ideal that the Blue Pill had raised me to think would be possible. A woman who fucked like a pornstar and looked like a swimsuit model and “loved me as much as I loved her”. And this came after I’d already check a swimsuit model and a centerfold off of my bucket list.

Personality is malleable, in fact it’s so malleable we often don’t realize we’re forging a new one. In both of these instances I’ve described that shift in personality was not by my conscious choice. I knew what I wanted to do; even in the worst case scenario with my BPD my shift was prompted because I thought if I changed my personality her own psychosis would resolve itself. My Blue Pill conditioning exacerbated this because it always teaches men that any problem a woman has with a guy is due to his own lack of investment, support, sensitivity or not giving enough of themselves. This is a very damning aspect of the Blue Pill and it’s also one that guys will reinforce in themselves and with other men because they believe their sacrifices are what women appreciate.

Beneath all this was my Blue Pill subroutine manifesting itself. Hell, even when I was on top of my game in the Hollywood clubs I still wanted to find a ‘good girl’ to be my girlfriend. I had changed my personality to succeed in getting what I wanted, but my root programming was still Blue Pill. Many a famous PUA has come to the conundrum of trying to make his Blue Pill idealistic dreams come true because he learned how to reliably ‘get the girl’. Good Game doesn’t make a man Red Pill aware. It’s certainly the gateway to understanding women’s nature and the nature of intersexual dynamics, but killing the Beta is a long term project.

So how do you shift from Beta Nice Guy to Alpha Cad? These are euphemisms usually meant to disparage the whole idea of changing yourself into something better. Most people don’t have it within themselves to even have the insight to think they’d ever want to change their nature. It’s easier to trot out “Just be yourself” when someone has that introspect. People don’t want you to change. Your predictability gives them comfort. You’re an easy element to deal with so they think that if you act in some new way you’re not being authentic. You’re a wannabe, a poseur, and they need you to behave predictably because it gives them a sense of control over you. Others want to pigeonhole you. They want to categorize you into immutable personality types or astrological designations that make them feel better about dealing with you. Again, if they can categorize you, if they can make you believe they know the truth of it, you’re just that much easier to control. Humans have a need to see patterns in their environment. The world is a chaotic place so it comes natural to us to think we can set some kind of willful order on it.

Eventually, after I’d finally torn myself away from my BPD girlfriend I returned to that Alpha personality that had been so successful for me, only this time I had finally realized that I needed to make myself my Mental Point of Origin. I looked back on all the women I’d applied the Blue Pill set of rules, ideals, hopes and dreams with. I was 26 and had nothing to show for all the potential that people kept telling me I had. I had done everything according to the old set of books; I was supportive, kind, sensitive, uplifting and empowering to every woman I’d been in a relationship with because I thought that was what would make me desirable. But as I looked back on all of that I realized I had done so at the expense of myself – at the expense of my potential. That sacrifice will alwayslead a man to his own destruction. I thank God it didn’t lead to my own.

It was at this point in my life that I realized that I had to unfuck my life and that meant a radical reimagining of who I wanted to be going forward. I get asked a lot about how I became unplugged and my usual answer is that it was a gradual process. This is true, but it was at this point I had to reject all the lies and idealistic fantasies that I’d been raised to believe in; to invest my ego in. I made a point to spell out to guys in A New Hope that you will never achieve Blue Pill ideals with Red Pill awareness and this is where that comes from. Unplugging, killing the Beta, reinventing who you are is not only possible for you, but it’s necessary to sustain you in a life of your own imagining. This doesn’t happen just by reading a book or going to a seminar, ultimately you have to live it and internalize that new you. You have to do this in spite of friends who want you to be ‘authentic’ and stay the old you so you’ll be comfortable to them.

All of this takes time, persistence and introspection, but it starts with an act of will on your part. You will only get what you have gotten if you keep doing what you have done. I can teach you Game. I can teach you the habits that would make others believe you’re a self-sufficient Alpha success, but only you can change your authentic personality. This is where a lot of guys lose the trail when it comes to being Red Pill aware. They read my books, they open their eyes, but they don’t know what to do with the information. Rich Cooper once told me that reading The Rational Male was like drinking from a firehose. There’s a lot to digest and a lot to confront with regards to how that information shows you, convicts you, of how you lived your life up to this point. But what do you do with it? Knowing is half the battle, the other half is action. The other half is implementing that knowledge to your own advantage.

Ever since I started writing I’ve always referred to myself as a Lesser Alpha. Some people think that’s self-deprecating, others think I’m just a married Beta with delusions of Alpha. Whatever. Either way, I’m a guy who took this knowledge and applied it to serve my own best interests and forge a truly authentic personality based on what I understand of what we call the Red Pill. I created a me of my own volition based on a realistic understanding of intersexual dynamics, but also of a better understanding of myself in that Red Pill paradigm as a result of it.

So, who is the real you? Who decides what your real personality is and what is authentic for you? What is the estimate that your  personality is based on? I get sick of hearing women and men talk about finding themselves. Women love the idea of a journey of self discovery. This is a fantasy of Blue Pill idealism meant to, again, keep one in a state of helplessness and hypoagency. Women use this garbage as a convenient rationale meant to excuse their past bad decisions. 

Red Pill men don’t find themselves, they build themselves. 

They forge themselves  into a creation of their own choosing based on realistic assessments of themselves, their conditions and the world that challenges them not to build himself. I wrote this essay to encourage you, but also to warn you that this building takes time, and you will meet all manner of resistance to the masculine project that is you.

Blue Pill Trauma

Something I’m asked a lot is,…

“How do you unplug a guy from the Matrix? All of this Red Pill awareness about intersexual dynamics has radically changed / saved my life for the better!  I want to let my friends, my brothers, my dad, know about how this knowledge will help them in their relationships, with the women their involved with, and dealing with women in life in general.

This stuff is SO IMPORTANT. But I run into such resistance from even my close friends and family. What can I do? I want to give these guys your book and discuss it rationally with them. I want to pass on this awareness like you encourage, but it’s like they’re just unwilling to see the truth. They don’t even want to talk about it. They just want to persist in doing shit that’s frustrating them and dealing with women from a blue pill perspective. Rollo, how do I help my brother?”

There was a time when I was a moderator on the SoSuave forums when we would discuss exactly this question. The frustration of knowing that your brother or your best friend could be living such a better life if only they would open their eyes and see how they’ve been trapped in a way of thinking about intersexual relations that they were conditioned to accept from a very early age. Believe me, I still get frustrated today. I see stories about how a guy like the one in the discussion above here is on the verge of despondency or suicide because they’re unable or unwilling to consider anything outside the box that the Blue Pill will allow for.

That’s a pretty serious thought. Blue Pill conditioning, and a guy’s capacity to break away from it, is literally a matter of life and death. Now, imagine you’re a Red Pill aware man and you have the experience of seeing your best friend or brother’s descent into relationship madness only because his ego-investments in the Old Set of Books wont permit him to think any other way. They’d rather put a noose around their neck than reconsider their investments in how things ought to be between men and women.

She’s My Everything

We’re going to come back to this question later in this essay, but now I’d like you to have a look at the IM exchange I had a reader make me aware of on Twitter this week. I apologize for the resolution; the tweet was deleted not long after I commented on it and I had to rely on screen captures. What you’re looking at here is an exchange between a very invested Blue Pill guy and the thought process guys like this typically go through when the woman they’ve made their ‘everything’ wants them gone. There’s a lot going on in this and I wanted to parse it out here. When you’re Red Pill aware for any length of time it can sometimes be confusing to see the thought process that Blue Pill conditioning predisposes a guy to. The Red Pill Lens is one of the gifts (and curses) of having unplugged, and internalizing the awareness can make us somewhat confused or jaded to the experiences of guys who are still plugged in and trying to make their blinded understanding of intersexual dynamics work for them.

“Can this guy really not see why this girl wants to get away from him?” From a Red Pill perspective we might think this guy is an idiot for not seeing what he’s doing. It’s plain as day for us so their must be something wrong with him, right? Usually, the only thing wrong is that these guys’ Blue Pill conditioning has limited them to understanding their situations from that old set of books – the rule set that they believe (like a religion) that ‘quality women’ acknowledge and play by too. Lets try to put this jadedness aside for a moment.

[…] I can’t take my mind off of you no matter what I do and yesterday I literally cried for an hour in my room because I didn’t know what to do. I just really need you in my life and it kills me to know that I have messed our relationship up,…

This kid’s (it reads like he’s an adolescent) whole exchange is riddled with self-incrimination. This is an intrinsic part of Blue Pill conditioning – the guy is always at fault in any break up. Even with his now ex’s admission of her own complicity in their split, he’ll have none of it. If a relationship, a marriage, fails it is always because a guy wasn’t invested enough; even if she cheated on him the Blue Pill conditioned mind will only accept his complicity in her looking outside the relationship. I should also add that this is an integral part of the Promise Keepers mentality as well as the ‘Oprah-Marriage Counselor Approved’ notion that “relationships take a lot of work” and it’s always a man’s responsibility to qualify himself for a woman’s intimacy by maintaining that work.

As a result, the Blue Pill mind automatically defaults to self-blame and looks to find ways to negotiate some kind of new work-program that will ‘fix’ the ‘broken’ relationship he somehow caused. Blue Pill conditioned men are still men, and as such they default to the deductive reasoning that we’re largely predisposed to. So in that Blue Pill state it seems like logic to look for solutions that will put the relationship back together again. This is how Blue Pill men’s minds work; they have a set of (Old Books) rules they believe everyone is, or ought to be, playing by and since he also believes the lie of coequal agency (blank-slate) between men and women he thinks a woman’s desire and intimacy can be deductively bargained with.

He realizes his failing and will be sure to correct it. But that’s not how all this works. In fact, it’s this very acknowledgement that only reinforces this woman’s decision to leave him. Hypergamy is rooted in doubt, and it turns out he is as Beta and optionless as her Hypergamous hindbrain suspected. His reaction to her confirms it.

[…] how can you just cut me out of your life so quickly? I want to make things better and work on our relationship because I know what it can be, why don’t you want to work on it?

I’m trying to avoid most of the clingy emotional shit in this exchange. Blue Pill guys will pepper in their emotive state even in the best of times in a relationship, but when they’re facing a break up, that’s when all the stuff he’s been taught about vulnerability being a strength turns into a huge liability for him. Not to mention it disgusts the woman leaving him.

Here we see the standard Blue Pill bewilderment over why this woman he’s deeply invested in can so casually blow him off and move on. Isn’t she playing by the same rulebook he’s been playing by since he learned to dutifully put women as his mental point of origin? I linked my War Brides essay in his quote above because this is the nuts and bolts reason as to how women can, and often do, move on so quickly. It is literally part of women’s preinstalled mental firmware to have the capacity to turn on a dime with their emotions.

Next he makes the Blue Pill appeals to Relational Equity and declares his willingness to ‘work on the relationship’ in order to fix it. In a breakup this ‘work on the relationship’ narrative works against women; particularly if the guy they’re leaving is overly invested in equalism. He’s been taught that “open communication is the key to any healthy relationship®” so he’s confused as to why his coequal ‘soul mate’ wouldn’t want to work on things and patch it up. When things are good the ‘work on things’ narrative is a benefit for women getting the things they want, but when she wants to leave a Blue Pill guy (usually because she wants to open herself to better Hypergamous options) it’s a leash around her neck. Why doesn’t she want to ‘work on the relationship’?

This is really what defines his outlook on this breakup, but he can’t see that it’s what his Blue Pill conditioning has embedded in his ego. He is incapable of interpreting his situation in any other way.

So, yeah, it gets worse. Now we discover that this guy has done exactly what I explained most Blue Pill men do when they define themselves by their ego-investments: the Blue Pill kills their capacity not to just achieve their dreams, but to have dreams or ambitions at all. We have a guy whose dreams center on being the “perfect boyfriend”; the guy who’ll literally do anything to make it work. A ‘good relationship’ is his highest aspiration, so when that woman isn’t playing her part – playing by the ‘do anything to make it work‘ rule set – the response is usually to find fault in himself, because to find fault in his ‘soul mate’ is to question the whole Blue Pill mental apparatus.

But still, she won’t play ball, so there are 3 possibilities: The first and go-to reason is that he must’ve fucked something up somehow. The next is that there’s something wrong with her because she’s not playing by the same rules he was conditioned to believe women play by. And lastly there’s something wrong with his entire ego-invested Blue Pill outlook on the whole rule set. That last one is the most difficult and unlikely conclusion a guy will ever come to.

Out Come the Knives

More often than not this is the stage at which the woman involved begins building her defenses against the attacks her ex Beta boyfriend is lobbing at her in an effort to explain why “working on the relationship” isn’t solving his fear of having to be single (and optionless) again. You’ve got a Blue Pill conditioned guy who believes he’s done everything by the books and is now very confused that his commitment to ‘making it work‘ hasn’t earned him the Relational Equity that any coequal, co-rational, woman should count towards his value to her. Whatever he did that was ‘wrong’ should be paid for by that equity. And anyway, the rules clearly state that open communication and negotiation are what’s expected from her too, right?

Only, that ‘equity’ isn’t protecting him from a Hypergamy that can’t afford for her to spend a minute longer with him. But he doesn’t know this, so, like any deductive Beta he pleads his case and this is what sets off her defensiveness.

Even the sweetest, most unassuming wallflower of a girl has her ego intimately linked with Hypergamy. Optimizing Hypergamy is her Darwinistic prime directive in life. So when just the notion of her being forced to compromise that optimization looks like a possibility she rebels with the intensity of a survival instinct level of self-preservation. There was a time when social controls were expected to buffer the worst exploits women would use to optimize Hypergamy. Arranged marriages, social and religious conventions, peer pressure, etc. were all, in some part, a means to controlling this survival instinct, gut level anxiety – and instituting a degree of control over Hypergamy by men and society.

Today, in our post Sexual Revolution dystopia, the idea that a woman might be personally or socially expected to compromise her Hypergamous stakes in life is met with that reflexive, feral, survival instinct. This is why women bristle at the idea that they might ever need to “settle” on Mr. Good Enough once they reach their sexual market expiration date. It’s like telling their hindbrains that they need to consider spending the rest of their lives invested in children that aren’t as good as they might be had they held out a little longer. Hypergamy bets a woman’s life on a future with a given man, so yes, it’s very muck a survival instinct.

All of this gets compressed into the hostility a woman feels when a ‘lesser man’, one confirmed to be unworthy of that lifetime bet, essentially tells her she wrong for betting on him and then removing her bet. That feral response comes at him full force, but only after she’s absolved her complicity in playing along with his Blue Pill paradigm. She needs to be able to explain to her ego that she did try to ‘let him down easy’ before she ripped off the bandaid in one go. Now he’s “crazy”, “needy”, has “mommy issues” is “insecure” and various other rationales as needed to keep her ego blameless for what she really knew was his dedication to the Blue Pill.

He’s Blue Pill, but He’s Crazy

I’m sure there are men and women alike reading this and thinking, well, this guy is genuinely disturbed. Maybe he’s just an Incel who made good for a while and then his codependency surfaced and she wisely ejected from the relationship. That seems like an obvious take, but I’m going to argue that all Blue Pill conditioned guys are this guy. That life-long conditioning plays on men’s innate Idealism and fosters exactly his way of thinking. When women are your conditioned Mental Point of Origin, rearranging your life to accommodate “working on the relationship” is a natural progression. Getting Zeroed Out is a lot easier when you’re taught to believe that you literally cannot live without a woman.

Finally, we come to the point where this guy – maybe the friend you’ve been trying to unplug before something like this happened – is confronted with staying the course, self-righteously accepting his dumping and clings even more so to his Blue Pill Lens on the world, or he develops some introspect and confronts the idea that his outlook on the set of rules he’s been playing by is not valid. The most common way men find the Red Pill community is via an experience like this. Unfortunately, it often requires a significant life trauma to shake the sleeping man awake, but having your outlook on intersexual dynamics challenged is the only way most men will ever be open to anything contradictory.

When men ask me, “Rollo, my friend, brother, dad, are heading towards something awful, how do I get them to realize they need to unplug?” I have to say wait for the right time. There are some guys who will make this transition on their own and all it might take is your handing him my book and talking about it. There are some guys who will come to it because what they’re doing isn’t bearing fruit in their personal lives and they become Red Pill aware because circumstances pushed them that way. But most men are Betas. Most of them have lived through an extensive conditioning that put them right where this guy is, and most of them will fight you tooth and nail for trying to convince them they were raised the wrong way.

It’s sometimes just easier to ghost on these men, but what do you do when it’s your brother who White Knights at any opportunity in spite of being run through the machine of a Blue Pill social order?  My best advice is to wait for your moments. A lot of people will tell you that it’s manipulative to lay the Red Pill on a guy who’s at his most vulnerable, but it requires a stripping away of all the Blue Pill pretense and mind-fuckery to really make a cogent case and unplug the guy.

I would always advise that you stay honest, open and forgiving of the guy. Most likely he’s told you how fucked up or misogynistic your world view is in his White Knighting efforts in the past. It’s like he ridiculed you for thinking you could ‘educate him’. You have to let that go when you make your case for Red Pill awareness. It would be better to ghost him than to be vindictive, gloating or tell him “I toldja so.” Let him tell you you told him so when he thanks you later.

As an aside here I need to draw readers’ attention to just how vulnerable this shit makes Blue Pill, Beta mindset men to the predations of what I call “Success Porn” brokers. One of the most fucked up outcomes of understanding how Blue Pill idealism affect men is the desire to capitalize on this weakness by Purple Pill life-coaching hacks. One in particular is RSD’s (Real Social Dynamics) new “get me a girlfriend game” program that, in my opinion, plays directly on this hopeful Blue Pill “make it work” idealism.

“Life Coaches” see this neediness as a perfect niche to sell Blue Pill dreams back to guys who want to cling to their Blue Pill security blankets in Red Pill awareness. How miraculous would it seem to think you’re Red Pill savvy enough to make all your old Blue Pill dreams – the ones you went through hell to disabuse yourself of – come true. Hacks like this are too happy to ruin your life for you in rekindling that fantasy as long as you buy the premier edition of their “program”. Caveat emptor.

 

Kill Your Idols

The Family Alpha had a motivational post about getting over a past lover this week.

https://thefamilyalpha.com/2017/06/09/getting-over-your-relationship-ptsd-pt-ii-give-love-one-more-chance/

I thought this was a reasonably good post. My only reservation (and this is no reflection on TFA) is I’m seeing a lot of “get back on the horse and ride” positivity attempts to replace rational understanding of intersexual dynamics when it comes to men’s bad experiences with women or break ups in the Manosphere these days. I’m not saying that “steel sharpening steel” encouragement or a sharp kick in the ass isn’t helpful for these men. Lord knows I’m apt to do just that myself with what I’ve been writing for over a decade, but it’s my view that understanding the mechanics of why that experience happened, and learning about women and oneself is vital to a man’s personal development.

It’s not enough to say ‘sack up, go lift and get over it’; a man’s got to learn from that pain, go through the process of developing insight from what Red Pill awareness shows him about it and grow from it. Yes, men can dwell on it and let it consume them or they can utilize those feelings to motivate them to understanding how they came to be in these circumstances. I don’t think I’m exaggerating here when I say that the most common way most men come to my blog (or any number of other Red Pill blogs) or the Manosphere proper is as the result of going through a traumatic breakup.

I’ve mentioned this in many prior posts that, unfortunately, the time men are most receptive to Red Pill awareness comes when they’re experiencing the loss of a lover whom they believed was a key goal of their Blue Pill idealism. Their “perfect” Blue Pill world was destroyed for them, but more importantly their ego-investments in that world reached a point that Red Pill reality would no longer sustain for him. It’s at this juncture men seek out the Red Pill community. Some of the most common search terms The Rational Male blog gets linked to are phrases like “How do I get my girlfriend back?” and “How do I get over an Ex?”

While I can empathize with men in such circumstance, I also recognize that men need to Kill the Beta before it kills them. A lot of guys reeling from having the Blue Pill rug pulled out from under them resort to either suicide, self-improvement or a long-term dwelling upon what they believe was a loss they will never be able to replace. And even after the acceptance of that loss becomes normalcy for him, his subconscious still wont allow him to move on – even when he thinks he has.

Studies have shown that while women may take a breakup the hardest (generally, only when they’re the ones being dumped) it is men who suffer more in the long term, and, because of men’s mental firmware and differing sexual strategy, may never truly get over it:

But men are more “competitive” in their approach, meaning the loss of a woman they see as a good catch could be deeply felt for months or even years.

Anyone familiar with my essay War Brides, understands the evolutionary reasoning behind why women have an ability to move on after a breakup so much quicker than men. However, much of men’s inability to let go is dependent upon his investment in his Blue Pill conditioning; that and how his subconscious believes in where he fits in a sexual marketplace founded on Blue Pill idealism:

“The man will likely feel the loss deeply and for a very long period of time as it sinks in that he must start competing all over again to replace what he has lost – or worse still, come to the realization that the loss is irreplaceable,” says Morris.

And because women have more to lose by choosing the wrong partner, they are also more likely to pull the plug on a relationship – with 70% of divorces in the US filed by women.

Kill Your Idols

This only reinforces my stance on Blue Pill men investing themselves in the fallacy of Relational Equity. One reason men have such trouble getting over a previous lover is because Blue Pill conditioning predisposes men to idolize women on whole, while their old books perspective fosters the idea that their investment in the relationship should be what sustains it – rather than accepting the cold, harsh reality of Hypergamy.

TFA writes:

Many men have given the power over their inner-self entirely to the women of their lives. They let their ex-relationships dictate their future relationships, trying to do the opposite of before or they’ll fall into the same routine ultimately leading to a love life filled with redundancy without progress.

You need to break the cycle.

Married men, divorced men, guys coming out of a shitty LTR, and even the men who had a plate cheat on them thus scarring their soul permanently are not acting in accordance with their masculine self if they’re basing decisions off how they can avoid heartache again.

This is good advice, but I think one of the mistakes Blue Pill men make when they exit (or are ejected from) a relationship is that they see a relationship as the only legitimate form of intersexual dynamics. Once a man unplugs, for better or worse, that idolization, the giving over power of self to the Feminine has to be dispelled – but not at the expense of a full understanding of the Red Pill awareness that brings him to unplugging in the first place.

Most men, the largely 80% Beta majority, are conditioned to be serial monogamists. They are taught to identify with the feminine to the point that only what he believes women’s (old books) sexual prioritization should be is correct and valid for himself. A lot of well-meaning Red Pill men think monogamy is the only rational decision to break the cycle.

One of the maxims of the Manosphere is that the best way to get over a woman is to go fuck 20 more before you consider monogamy with another one. This advice actually makes, an albeit simplistic, sense in that the best way to avoid ONEitis is to Spin Plates. Usually, that’s what a bad Blue Pill rejection amounts to; a losing of the best thing that Beta has ever had in terms of sexual access. The Blue Pill conditioned mindset predisposes men to a scarcity mentality and it does so by training men to believe that exclusive monogamy is the only meaningful condition in which a sexual, intimate relationship can take place for him.

So, stemming from this scarcity mentality, we get generations of preconditioned Betas latching on to self-induced ONEitis-prone relationships. Thus, you get pitiable Beta men just this side of suicidal over average HB 5-6 women. I would argue that the reason we see such a preponderance of men bemoaning their post-rejection state (suicide or self-pity) is directly attributable to Blue Pill conditioning and then taking it from there.

Telling this post-rejection Beta, who thought he’d had his Blue Pill dreams come true, that he ought to Spin Plates, fuck 20 women and go lift is like speaking a foreign language to him. His Blue Pill mindset can’t comprehend it, at least at first. Getting past this state of shock usually involves despair, anger, disillusionment – he’s as likely to fight you for being misogynist as he is to fall apart in tears – but as I’ve always said, unplugging guys from the Matrix is dirty work.

Now, just for sake of comparison here, it should be noted that if we go by the Pareto Principle and presume 80% of men are Betas and 20% are some shade of Alpha, we’ll see the dynamics for a breakup change accordingly. I would argue that for the 80% of Beta men, they are the ones women are breaking up with. And the logic of women’s sexual strategy would also suggest that if a woman perceives her mate to be 1-2 steps in SMV above herself she would be less (if at all) inclined to initiate a breakup with a guy she sees as Alpha. Thus, the more Alpha a man, the less prone to ONEitis and lingering post-breakup psychosis he’ll be.

Doing the Work – Pre vs. Post Unplugging

Recently there’s been a push to paint Red Pill aware men as bitter guys who get stuck in the anger phase of unplugging. No doubt this can happen, and considering the mass effect of Blue Pill conditioning in men it’s easy to see how it happens for them. For the larger part I concur with what The Family Alpha is suggesting here; for both psychological and personal reasons it can be all too easy for men to get stuck dwelling on an experience with one woman and then transferring that anger and regret to a self-limiting outlook that holds him back from interacting with women. I imagine some of my MGTOW readers see this as being pragmatic, but as with everything for men, isolation is dangerous.

On the other hand, however, I still think we need to guard against falling into the trap of thinking that a man’s holding onto his Blue Pill regrets, or transferring that pain to a real misogyny means that fundamental Red Pill awareness is the source of his self-limitations. The point of Red Pill awareness isn’t to make a man ‘hate’ women, but rather to inform him of women’s nature so he wont hate what he’d never expect from women.

I really think there are two opposing sides that evolved from Red Pill awareness. On one extreme we have hardline MGTOW men wanting to remove themselves wholesale from interacting with women – largely because of their Red Pill awareness. And on the other we’ve got the Positive Mindset brokers believing that Red Pill awareness leads to the anger and resentment that causes men to limit themselves with women.

In the middle of this we have men who’ve found a new balance in their lives because they became Red Pill aware and created a new, healthier paradigm for themselves with it. It becomes a game of exaggerated nihilism vs. exaggerated optimism, but in the middle we have to find a healthy pragmatism in how we will use this awareness to redefine ourselves. It appears to me that at either extreme there comes a limiting of just how much Red Pill awareness either set is willing to embrace.

Blue Pill Conditioning and Equalism

Rational reader Playdontpay had a very poignant comment in last week’s thread:

I’ll stick with the “boner test”. Women are only playthings anyway!
Do I enjoy fucking her? After sex is she good feminine company? This is all I need to know, if shit goes sideways I’ll just get another one.

She’s only going to lie and present a fictional version of herself based on what she thinks you’re looking for anyways. Women don’t do real self improvement they just convince themselves that they already are “better” because if she can’t convince herself it will be more difficult for her to sell it to you.

She will rewrite her sexual history and “because she’s a different person now”, well, that’s the way she has always been. Stop taking them so seriously, how are you going to vet a Machiavellian liar that’s been learning game from the age of 12?

His perspective on women is exactly why I tell men to avoid marriage altogether even though I’ve had a fantastic marriage myself for over 20 years. A lot of my haters, and more than a few supporters often get hung up on this.

Most of the criticism I get for writing what I do and still maintaining a good relationship with Mrs. T comes from men who cannot wrap their heads around the very simple, accepted truths described in this approach towards women. They think there must be something more to it. They think in their preconditioned equalist mindset that women are wired for the same introspection and development that men are. So, naturally, the easy presumption is that any self respecting woman would never put up with a Red Pill man’s outlook and approach, because they believe the blank slate lie.

If an egalitarian ideal between men and women were tenable I’d completely agree, but it isn’t. So, in order to protect their ego investments, the rationale follows that any woman who falls for a Red Pill man must, by definition, be lacking in self esteem, self respect, low quality, etc. They believe that because anything else destroys their equalist fantasy world. This stems from a much deeper, root level, ego-investment in egalitarianism and I think this is a perspective a lot of Red Pill aware men have a tough time with to say nothing of men still plugged into the Blue Pill world view.

If you’ve read me for any length of time you’ll know I’m rarely prescriptive in my writing. I’ve always been of the belief that men need to find ways to utilize Red Pill awareness of intersexual dynamics for themselves on an individual basis. However, I will say that there are certain general aspects of that awareness and how to put it into something applicable in a man’s life that seem self-evident to me. First and foremost among these generalities is that in killing your inner Beta and disabusing oneself of his Blue Pill conditioning, a man needs to understand that the foundational belief that informed and defined his Blue Pill existence is equalism. The presumption that an idealized, blank-slate egalitarian state between the sexes is both possible and desirable informs all Blue Pill beliefs that follow it.

This equalist presumption often forms the mental point of origin for most Blue Pill men. Ostensibly, this mental prioritization of some equal state between the sexes is what most Blue Pill guys will tell you attracts women. This notion is also fundamental to Blue Pill guys’ drive for identifying their own psyches with the feminine and forms the basis of Beta Game.

Transitioning this early equalist ideology to a sexual strategy is a simple, deductive process for men. Little boys are raised on feminine primacy memes and the narrative of Fempowerment, all the while being conditioned to believe that, beyond some insignificant biology, boys and girls are identical beings with the same potential and proficiencies. It’s gotten to the point where this process is normalized and pushed to the backgrounds of most people’s consciousness. We’ll raise boys in feminine-primary educational standards, we’ll teach them they’re the same as girls, but we’ll also teach them they’re defective for not aligning themselves with girls, for not getting in touch with their feminine sides.

I’m fleshing this process out a bit here because unlearning this equalist’s mental point of origin is a key transition in a man’s unplugging. Often the hardest part of killing the Beta and accepting Red Pill awareness is replacing equalism with oneself as a mental point of origin. This is a hard step for most guys because it requires he shift his opinion of himself and risk being called a selfish asshole. Remember, anything that would disagree with or challenge the idea of intersexual egalitarianism will always be equated with misogyny, intolerance, tyranny, etc. Questioning the validity of equalism (however it’s applied) will always be countered with a  binary extreme.

This is exactly why Playdontpay’s comment appears so outrageous and self-indulgent to anyone not Red Pill aware. HIs pragmatism will be conflated with anger.

Interghangeability

Anonymous Reader posits:

Rollo
…men who cannot wrap their heads around the very simple, accepted truths you describe about your approach towards women. They think there must be something more to it.

Often because they’ve been told since they were toddlers that there is “more to it”, also known as the Blue Pill.

They think in their preconditioned equalist mindset that women are wired for the same introspection and development that men are.

Exactly so and very important. The feminist fallacy of “interchangeable” leads to this. The mental habit some men have of projecting themselves onto others, believing “Well, I’m like this, so everyone else must be also” leads to this. It is extremely frustrating to encounter female behavior that is so obviously stupid it is like catching someone peeing in the kitchen sink.

Many betaized men will put up with bad behavior for far too long, then have a major blowout of anger and expect behavioral change. That doesn’t work with toddlers or dogs or women. Constant, low key, correction does work. Neuroplasticity points to a “why”; daily reiteration of a desired habit works better than once per week, etc.

It’s important to recognize the difference between real introspection and brooding or ruminating, too. Some women will brood over wrongs done but not connect that up with their own behavior. That’s not introspection. That’s not “failure analysis”. That’s rewiring neural pathways to perpetual resentment.

It is extremely difficult for an equalist, betaized man to accept the fact that women want and need to be dominated, because they for sure would hate and resent that. It is even worse for the churchgoing men, because the equalist chant from the conservative feminists in churches is almost always slathered with a layer of “sisterly love”.

What Anon is driving at here is my second point in Blue Pill and Red Pill men understanding the depth of their conditioning. Equalism and feminism depend on interchangeability. In order for little girls to grow up to be anything they want to be there must be an agreed upon “level playing field” from a socio-sexual point of view. This means that if little girls want to grow up to become football players and little boys want to grow up to be prima ballerinas there (at least ostensibly) must be an agreed upon equalist environment in which this can happen.

The egalitarian ideal the Blue Pill conditions us to believe is possible presumes there is a mutually agreeable state of intersexual equality. In reality this state is entirely contradictory to our evolved sexual strategies and our biological realities, but in theory, an egalitarian ideal can only exist in an environment that is deemed equal by both men and women. If such a state were possible, if evolved influences of our biological realities for both sexes were non-factors, then this state would also presume a mutual interchangeability between the sexes.

The combination of our equalist conditioning and this interchangeability is the root of much of the dysfunction we see between men and women today. Because we are taught all-is-one, because we presume we’re all the same except for the plumbing, there is also a presumption of uniformity of purpose between the sexes. Equalism is really just the religion of the Feminine Imperative, but it hides behind this feminine-primary advertising that men and women are playing by a mutually agreed upon set of rules, striving for mutually agreed (Blue Pill) goals and all in spite of our natural predilection or any competitiveness. No other social condition in the history of mankind could place women in a more socially controlling position than Hypergamy excused by equalism.

In such a state women can mandate their unilateral control over Hypergamy, but there is one downside – men expect a mutual interchangeability. Blue Pill men actually expect women to play by that mutuality of purpose. That’s the interchange. Women will still ensure that optimizing Hypergamy is the prime directive, and they’ll hide behind equalism to keep men in check and absolve themselves of the worst of their predations in doing so, but men still expect women to feel as men do. Blue Pill men believe that women can and will love them in an idealized way that runs contrary to their Hypergamous opportunism. Why? Because they were conditioned to believe, from a very early age, that interchangeability exists between men and women.

The difference between men and women’s concepts of love is a prime example of this equalist interchangeability fallacy. Men’s concept of love is rooted in idealism; love for the sake of love. This is a result of men’s outward looking idealism and existential experience being male. Women’s concept of love is rooted in opportunism. This is a result of natural solipsism and the need to optimize Hypergamy. It is intrinsic and inward looking and based on security and ensuring survival. When we introduce a condition of egalitarian equalism to men and women only one of these concepts can be the mutually correct concept. Both can exist in a natural state of complementarity between the sexes, but if all-is-one, there can only be one concept of love that decides for both sexes.

The confusion Blue Pill men have is presuming that men’s idealistic concept is the mutually accepted one. This then wars with women’s natural opportunistic concept; and by extension her intrinsic need to optimize Hypergamy. Of course, I’m under no illusion that equalism is anything more than a social utility to ensure a feminine-primary social order, but this is one illustration of how deeply conditioned equalism is what a majority of men base their intersexual understandings on.

I see this conditioning persist even amongst men I would otherwise think had a firm grasp of Red Pill awareness. As I said, they think in their preconditioned equalist mindset that women are wired for the same introspection and development that men are. They still want to hope in that Blue Pill goal of interchangeability. For all of the Red Pill and self awareness I could credit men of the MRM with, they still cling to this equalist mindset. This Blue Pill ideal of true equality between the sexes ultimately works against their best intentions since it is women who are more perfectly placed to take advantage of this ‘equality’. Once again, you will never achieve Blue Pill idealistic goals with Red Pill awareness. Most men are taught that those Blue Pill goals are worthwhile, but they are carrots proffered by the same builders of the cart who hope to get the mule to pull it.

I have read and heard the words of many otherwise brilliant, otherwise Red Pill aware men who simply cannot unlearn the falsehoods of egalitarian equalism. Nothing’s more frustrating to me than to hear a guy I have a deep respect for parrot back some meme or catchphrase of a feminine-operative social convention, or what he thinks is a funny, gender-deprecating quip that belies his ego-investment in the same equalism he just spent a book’s worth of research to debunk. I see brilliant men like Dr. Jordan Peterson, Dr. Warren Farrell or Steven Pinker, who I would hold up as guys who have a lot figured out, still rattle off the same memes I would expect to see from equalists on Facebook. I find it the height of irony that the same men who would systematically destroy the idea of the blank slate still pander to the hopes and goals of the equalists who built those goals based on a blank slate ideology.

Understanding how your prison is constructed, how it works, who your jailers are, is not the same as understanding how to escape it. It’s interesting how refined our Red Pill Lenses can become yet we still never drill down to the root beliefs that still keep us ignorantly hopeful. It’s time we embrace an ideology of true complementarity between men and women. It’s time we accept that we are not equal and in some circumstances that puts men and women at respective advantages and disadvantages based on what any challenge poses to us. It’s time we threw away the Blue Pill goals that equalism has taught us are ‘correct’ and replace them with realistic ones founded on Red Pill awareness.