emotional response

Emotional Differences

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Emotional Process

Of the three cognitive, interpretive processes it is the Emotional process that people are most familiar with, and yet it’s also the most glorified when it comes to determining reality and truth. I’m probably going to ruffle some feathers with this essay – people invest a lot of themselves in their emotions. The reason for this is because for a very long time we’ve been taught to deify (sometimes literally) the importance of emotion to the human experience. We want to impart our emotions with a metaphysical quality to the point that understanding those feelings is something we expect our omniscient Gods to have a relation with. This is the mythic apex of the grandeur with which we regard emotion, but on a visceral level, the opposite end of that understanding, emotion is something very understandable and very ‘knowable’.

We interpret stimuli via the Emotional process, but we also express our emotional state through art and personal means. And this is the dual nature of emotion; it’s interpretive, but those interpretations are subjective to an individual. As such, these interpretations and expressions become part of our personality and identity. I’ve mentioned the concept of ego-investment in many prior essays. A person can invest themselves so much (ego) into personal beliefs that they become a component part of who they are. Thus, an attack on the belief is literally an attack on the ego, but’s important to point out that those investments are integrally linked to the Emotional process. Emotion is not just an important filter through which we interpret the world, but its effects often shape us as individuals. So because of this subjective, ego-investment dynamic it’s hard not to step on a few toes or challenge the emotionally-inspired belief sets by considering emotion in an objective way.

As with most other aspects of Red Pill awareness. parsing out the nuts and bolts of how and why emotions work, how they evolved and the important survival functions they serve often has a way of dispelling the magic we apply to emotions. From a biological perspective we can prompt certain emotions (or buffer them) by creating the stimuli that evokes them. We can chemically induce an emotional response. We can alter moods with drugs and we can chemically compare the endorphins released into our bloodstream when we experience the ’emotional’ effects of love, lust and infatuation. There are many studies comparing love to addiction, and the effects of a breakup being comparable to ‘withdrawal’ symptoms.

Emotion has prompted virtually all of mankind’s greatest art, music, literature and so many more cultural effects it’s hard to think that emotion doesn’t define us as a species. Emotion has started wars, prompted self-sacrifice, moves us to mercy, ensures that our children are nurtured and sees that we care and cooperate with each other. Emotion is a blessing and a curse as environment and circumstance demand, but for all of that the Emotional process is a result of our evolved biology. Emotion is firmly rooted in our evolved capacity to experience and interpret our environment and circumstances. Emotion is rooted in the physical. And while it inspires us to acts that may seem divine or diabolic the fact remains that emotion is very much dependent on our evolved capacity to physically experience it.

I begin this essay stressing this point because the concept (not the process) of emotion has been elevated to such a mythic degree of importance in our present times that it supersedes almost all other considerations in life. We’re largely taught and conditioned to prioritize the importance of our emotional states above both the Instinctual and Rational processes, so to reduce emotion to a physical dynamic runs counter to what we feel it should mean to us. Unless we’re dealing with a clinical, physical depression we rarely consider that emotion is an interpretive process. We want to apply meaning to emotion rather than see it as the evolved tool it is to human beings.

Both Instinct and Reason influence and modify the Emotional process, and like both, Emotion is interpretive and functional. If we look at base emotions we can make inferences as to what their latent purposes might be. In the first post of this series I drew the lines between the effect of oxytocin inspiring feelings of trust and caring, and how the environmental prompts that trigger this hormone have a practical ‘real world’ function. We can speculate that the instinctual prompts that trigger the oxytocin then lead to the emotional processing of the feeling of trust/caring which then prompts physical behavior (nurturing a child, etc.) Hunger is another good example. Our physical state of hunger prompts feelings of anger or discontent which then compels us to action. In our evolutionary past this anger prompt would’ve been beneficial in that it motivated us to seek/kill food.

Those are just a couple of the many different basic prompts for the Emotional process, but emotion is much more complex and nuanced than this. The Emotional process is multi-layered, so when you combine various emotional interpretive processes with emotional responses you get various new iterations of emotion which then builds into more complex emotions. While instinct is the fastest of these processes, emotion can be more time intensive. Base emotions are relatively quick interpretations (though slower than instinct), but the more complex, compound emotions take time to interpret, build and then reinterpret. Because of this compositing process humans have a tendency to fixate on the emotion itself as being of primary importance; often forgetting or dismissing entirely the stimuli that originally prompted it. Furthermore, we forget or dismiss the latent purpose of that initial emotional interpretation that caused that composite cascade of emotions.

An understanding of this emotion compositing is necessary to understand why we tend to imbue emotions with such importance and power. While base emotions are linked to the ‘fast-twitch’ Instinctual process, the more complex emotions – the ones we subconsciously craft over more time – tend to be the ones we build belief sets around. This is very important to Red Pill awareness because it explains the motivations for, and foundations of, feminine-primary belief sets of both men and women, as well as the feminine-primary social order that is a result of those belief sets.

Gender Differences

Despite all the protestations of egalitarian minds, men and women are fundamentally different. Biologically, neurologically, endocrinologically and psychologically our gender-specific differences are significant. This isn’t a revelation to my Red Pill aware readers, but it’s a radical statement for the past generations who are emotionally invested in the idea of a blank-slate parity between the sexes they’ve been conditioned to believe is true. As I mention above, an ego-investment is component part of the personality of the individual so invested. To attack the investment, the belief, the ideology, the educated-but-misinformed opinion, is to attack the person. That belief set, like the emotions that compounded to develop it, is subjective to the individual experiencing the emotions that led to it.

One presupposition that has been a part of the manosphere for as long as I’ve been a part of it is that women put “feels before realz”. In several essays I’ve made a case for women’s innate communication style being context based – women focus on how the communication makes them feel; the information conveyed is secondary. For men this is reversed; men prioritize the content (the information) of the communication and the context is secondary. I’ve written a lot about how each sex evolved into their communication priorities, but down to the biological level, per our sex, the answers can be found in how our brains differ.

There are many multivariate studies that reveal similar findings and brain imaging, and the uncanny complementarity between men and women’s brains. For the most part studies indicate that women tend to prioritize the Emotional interpretive process above the Rational interpretive process and vice versa for men. That is not to say women are entirely incapable of reason, nor does it imply that men are emotionally stunted. What I’m suggesting is that our innate, biological predispositions prioritize our interpretive processes to emotion in women and rationality in men. Women can be taught to prioritize reason over emotion and, as I’ll illustrate next, men most definitely can be taught conditioned to prioritize emotion above their innate reason.

There are also numerous studies on how these interpretive prioritization function as a result of neurological gendered differences in men and women. Women process negative emotions differently than men. Men largely lack the brain architecture (wiring) to process emotion in the same manner and with the same degree of prioritization as women do. This is simply how we’re built, but before any woman pops off about their ‘superior’ emotional capacity, bear in mind, women’s brains are not wired for the rational and spatial tasks men’s brains are more suited to. Out of the womb, a boy is predisposed to throw an object with greater force and more accuracy than a girl. And that’s just one easy illustration of the mental firmware men are born with.

None of this, however, is about one sex being superior to the other’s innate predispositions. It’s not a contest, it’s just about which disposition is better suited to a task. But still, the first inclination today is to presume women’s greater emotional capacity should be the normative in our present-day feminine-primary social order. For the past 60+ years we’ve lived in a social condition that has made every attempt to feminize men; to get them more in touch with their emotions – to condition men, despite their brain wiring, to prioritize the Emotional process above both instinct and reason.

To reiterate, women are not necessarily handicapped because the Rational process isn’t their innate, predisposed preference, but neither are men handicapped for lacking the interpretive hardware to prioritize the Emotional process as women do. That said, for the past 4-5 generations we’ve lived in a social order that has presumed a blank-slate equalist perspective of men and women. We live in a time when men not emoting like women is a disorder to be treated and conditioned. We presume today that boys are defective girls because they don’t prioritize the Emotional in their communications or their interpretive process. Today the Emotional process that women innately prefer is the ‘correct’ way for all, egalitarian, blank-slate equals to prioritize their interpretations of the world and each other with.

As most of my readers already know, I see the presumption of equalism as being little more than a cover story for feminine primacy. For several generations now, and especially since the Sexual Revolution, the pretense of gender equality has been the vehicle for female social primacy. At first it was subtle and inoffensive, but today this social engineering effort is out in the open. And with more and more empirical evidence mounting that proves the sexes are far less “equal” in nature than prior egalitarian doctrines would allow anyone to accept, we see an intensifying effort to retain the social narrative on the part of equalist. Only now it’s focused on the innate ‘wrongness’ of masculinity by demonizing and pathologizing anything conventionally masculine. This new intensive effort is only able to find legitimacy because prior feminized generations base their belief sets on the the inherent ‘correctness’ of prioritizong the Emotional process – a process that is fundamentally, biologically linked to women’s preferences in interpreting the world around them.

So today we look at men as if they’re stunted and ‘wrong’ for communicating with other men in a way that prioritizes information before how it makes them feel. We still today implore men to get in touch with their feminine sides – the last vestige of Car Jung’s bastardized and now disproven animus theories – but pity men for lacking the hardware to emote ‘correctly’ like women. We don’t teach boys emotional control because in our emotional-prioritizing social order anything that looks like control seems like masculine oppression of emotional expression. Instead we create new, more intense, ways of discouraging men of ever embracing or “getting in touch” with their masculine sides. We discard masculine discipline for emotional pretense. We teach boys at younger and younger ages to fear and despise their innate masculine selves. We create programs to cure masculinity as if it were a health crisis. This effort will only intensify as gender differences become more and more unignorable and the social engineering of the last 60 years becomes more obvious.

As a basis of that cure is the fundamental presumption that interpreting our world through the filter of Emotion should supersede or entirely disqualify the Rational interpretive process. As you might guess, men’s innate predisposition is to interpret our world through Reason. Today we live in a world where feelings trump both instinct and reason. This is why the current generation makes the Emotional process and their feelings more important than any other consideration – they are the cumulative result of having prioritized women’s emotional preferences above all else, while simultaneously engineering consecutive generations of feminized men to facilitate it for the last seven decades.

In the next and final installment in this series I’ll be addressing the Rational interpretive process and how we might imagine better future generations based on seizing and instituting a social order founded on masculine reason.

Instinct, Emotion and Reason

Before I dig in here today I want to give credit where it’s due. I was inspired to consider what I’m about to go into here by a quick-hit Tweet from Illimitable Man. I didn’t bookmark it so I apologize for not linking it here today, but the general gist of it was about the mental processes humans go through when we’re presented with environmental stimuli that demands interpretation and a behavioral response. I considered this process quite a bit while I was studying behavioral psychology – Instinct, Emotion and Reason (or rationality if you prefer) – and I’m almost embarrassed that I haven’t covered this in terms of a Red Pill perspective in over 600 essays now.

The idea is fairly simple; when we are prompted by environmental (and sometimes internal) stimuli human beings process this information using three psychological mechanisms – our primal instincts, our emotional interpretations and our rational (reason) facilities. I’m not sure these processes get their proper due in Red Pill theory today.  I’ve detailed all of these processes individually for years on this blog, but generally they were outlined in the context of whatever topic I was focusing on. In this essay I’m going to elaborate on these aspects individually. Later, as part of this series, I’ll explore how they act in concert for our overall cognitive process, and then how they influence intersexual and intersocial dynamics. I think this is a useful exercise because a lot of foundational Red Pill ideas stem from these processes as well as the social conventions and interpretive priorities the Feminine Imperative relies on today.

For sake of clarity I am going to use a few behavioral psych terms like stimuli in this essay. This isn’t to throw $10 words at you, it’s just easier to elaborate on these processes with abstract terms. For example, when I use stimuli I mean any physical, environmental or cognitive prompt that our conscious or unconscious mind demands an interpretation, processing of and response to. That can be a wide variety of things so, stimuli serves as a general term.

Lastly, the following here is my interpretation of these processes. While a lot of this will align pretty well with established theories, this is my take on them and not some official, settled science of facts. If you think I’m full of shit please tell me why, this is still a work in progress for me.

Instinct

Instinct seems like the easiest of these processes to understand, but it’s really the cognitive aspect that’s most misunderstood, marginalized and often demonized. The reason for this is because our instincts reside in our subconscious (hindbrain) processing of stimuli. When I refer to men or women’s evolved mental firmware in my essays it’s our instinctual process that I’m referring to. These are the unlearned, inborn aspects of our human nature that influence the other processes and remain largely in our subconscious. Our instinctual processing is a direct result of our evolution. It evolved as a vitally necessary aspect of our cognitive processing in that it aided in our ability to survive in, and adapt to, a chaotic, primal environment when food was scarce, predators and rivals wanted us dead, and reproductive opportunities and raising a child to a survivable age were at a premium.

There are a lot of examples of our instinct level processing and each instinctual response triggers more complex processing up the cognitive chain through emotion and reason. If we were presented with a dangerous stimuli (a sabertooth tiger) our instinctual process triggers a fight or flight response physically in our bodies (adrenaline release). Needless to say this was an evolved adaptation that served our species well and was passed along genetically as part of our mental firmware. I’m going to use some simplistic examples here but, if you really want to dig into our preloaded mental firmware and how we developed it I would suggest looking into the earlier works of Dr. Steven Pinker and The Red Queen by Matt Ridley (I’ll post links in the comments).

Another example is human beings’ innate fear (reservations at least) of snakes and spiders – poisonous animals that looked easy to kill, but could kill humans without warning. That’s an example of relatively beneficial firmware, but the reason instinct gets a bad rep is due to the instincts that once were beneficial to us individually, but are less beneficial to us socially. Greed and gluttony were very practical, instinctually motivated behaviors that stemmed from a need to survive in a time when resources were scarce. Today greed is (mostly) seen as anti-social and a compulsion to overeat in a time when food is abundant is why we presently have an obesity epidemic.

Those are easily understood examples, but where things get more complex is in how our instinctual process influences the other processes (emotion and reason). Instinct gets demonized because in our ‘enlightened‘ era we like to believe that instinct is more trouble than it is beneficial. Most of that is due to a belief that our other processes are superior to (or at least should supersede) our instincts. Most of what we call sin or immoral behavior is motivated by the instinctual process. In fact, the only time our instinctual awareness and reactions are really credited with anything positive is when it gets us out of some life threatening situation or it leads to some prosocial outcome. For instance, the male instinct to protect women by putting ourselves between them and danger; that’s an instinct and resultant behavior (seemingly altruistic male self-sacrifice) that gets a lot of praise in our feminine-primary social order. However, for the most part, we tend to judge ‘baser instincts’ as a net negative.

The truth about the instinctual process is that none of our other processes function at full efficiency without it. Today, as a result of our feminine-primary acculturation, we want to relegate instinct’s influence to something “we’ve evolved beyond”. The popular consensus is we’ve raised ourselves above base instincts by either acknowledging the importance of the emotional process or that rationality and the self-control based on it immunizes us from its influence. Not only are these belief foolish and hubristic, they’re provably untrue. When it comes to concepts like the ‘selfish gene‘ and the physical differences in the evolved instinctual processes of men and women, it becomes necessary for a social order based on blank-slate equalism to demonize and marginalize the influence of, and behaviors attributed to, instinct.

The survival benefits and behaviors that make up the instinctual process were so necessary that they had to become part of our unconscious species firmware. Because the instinctual process is part of our animalistic hindbrain mental subroutines it’s something we have little or no direct control over until its effect is brought (often forced) into our conscious awareness. As such, and because we prefer to think of ourselves as emotional and rational beings, we tend to think of the influence of instinct as something we either have or need to have mastery over, and to a large extent this mastery makes sense. The truth is that instinct is an aspect of ourselves that needs to be controlled as well as embraced depending on circumstances.

Emotion

From an evolutionary perspective, the emotional process of interpreting stimuli is a mechanism of how our brains and biochemistry interact to affect our moods, demeanor and ’emotionality’ in response to both instinctual cues and the raw information of stimuli itself. Furthermore, the emotional process can also be influenced and/or modified by the rational process. I’m trying to be concise here, but our emotional response to information/stimuli is very much an evolved dynamic with latent purposes and practical functionalities. I’m making this distinction here because for millennia we’ve raised the effects of emotion to a mythical, metaphysical, importance.

While emotion often has immediate effects on us, emotion also has long term effect with regard to the stimuli it processes. There are dozens of definitions of emotions and there’s no way I’m going to lay them all out for you here. However, popular psychology asserts that there are as many as ten and as few as six base emotions:

  • Anger.
  • Disgust.
  • Fear.
  • Happiness.
  • Sadness.
  • Surprise.

Sometimes Contempt is added to this list. If these seem overly simplistic they are, again, abstracts to build more complex emotions on (some paleo-researchers insist there are only four base emotions across our evolved ethno-histories). For our purposes these base emotions will serve to show the connections between the instinctual process which prompts them and the rational process that modifies and sometimes informs them.

Each of these emotional responses is prompted by how our senses, brain and then instinctual process interprets a stimuli. Again, using our sabertooth tiger example, the instinctual process determines imminent danger and triggers a synaptic and hormonal response to that danger. As a result of that instinctual process an emotional process and response is triggered – likely fear (flight in most cases), but sometimes anger (fight).

Another example: you see an arousing woman (stimuli) at a party who is displaying behavioral cues and environmental indicators of interest (IOIs). Your instinctual process determines a high potential for a reproductive opportunity. From there the emotional process kicks in: hormones and dopamine (and not a small testosterone spike) that your instinctual process triggered flushes your system and serves as the basis for your emotional process to form an emotional response to the same stimuli. If it all passes the smell test that response (hopefully) will be happiness (and a little surprise mixed in).

There is a visceral biochemical interrelation between emotion and the stimuli/instinct relation that prompts the reaction. Adrenaline is one easy example, another is oxytocin or the “love hormone”. This is a bit of a mischaracterization of the hormone. Oxytocin induces feelings of trust and comfort and is thought to be a significant factor in human’s forming pair bonds and parental investments. There’s a lot more to oxytocin’s implications to our evolution than that, but for now lets look at how our biology influences the emotional process.

We proceed from stimuli to an instinctual response. If there is nothing mitigating that response (such as a rationally learned buffer to mitigate it) the next step in the chain is a biological reaction to that instinct – such as dumping adrenaline into our bloodstream or a post-orgasm flush of oxytocin after sex. From there the emotional process picks up the interpretation of this information as prompted by the cocktail of chemicals moving through our bloodstream and affecting our mental and physical interpretation of that stimuli. That biochemical factor prompts one, or a combination, of the base emotions listed above.

From there more complex emotions (feelings) and combinations thereof begin to form an emotional interpretation and response. This emotional response can be anything from a fast, reflexive one to a more nuanced and contemplative one. Furthermore, this emotional interpretation and response can also be modified by our rational mental process as well as our gendered capacity to process emotions. One thing to bear in mind about our emotional process is that it can imprint its interpretations into our ‘hard memory’ – sometimes so significantly that the memory of that stimuli can re-trigger that physical and emotional response.

Gender-modified interpretation of our emotion process is an important aspect to consider in Red Pill praxeology and one I’ll be elaborating on in the next part of this series. Until recently the accepted ‘science‘ about our emotional process has been based on a blank-slate equalist approach to emotion. In fact we still suffer from the outdated presumptions of academia that both men and women process emotion in the same manner, and, in theory, ought to be expected to have an equal capacity to interpret, respond and express emotion. In light of new technology and new research in a variety of interrelated disciplines we know this is old presumption is patently untrue. Men and women have different mental hardware and are born with different mental firmware. Both sexes interpret and process emotion in gender-specific manners.

I’ll be getting into the personal and social implications that the legacy of this (deliberate) misunderstanding presents in the next essay. For now it’s important to consider that human beings have an innate predisposition to elevate the emotional process above instinct and reason. Likely this is due the to the survival dependency we had on our feelings in our evolutionary past. In a time when we lacked the greater rational facilities and information we’ve developed in our more recent past, depending on and learning from emotion, and the latent purposes it serves, was a species-beneficial system. We depended on our emotions to guide our behaviors (long and short term) for us more in our prehistory when we lacked the more developed rational process we take for granted now. Emotions served latent evolutionary purposes for us in our prehistory and today are still overly emphasized – often to metaphysical attributes – as superior to reason. More on this soon.

Reason

The final piece of our interpretive process is reason, or rationality (I’ll use these interchangeably). Ironically, for all of the social preconceptions that our emotions have made us “more evolved” above instinct, it is our rational process that has evolved us above both instinct and emotion. From and evolutionary standpoint our rational process is a relatively recent development; pushing us past the limitations of instinct and emotion. The definition of rationality is the quality of being based on or in accordance with reason or logic. It is the quality of being able to think sensibly or logically and being endowed with the capacity to reason.

Biologically it’s postulated that our larger brains allowed us to develop a capacity for reason, but that doesn’t mean other animals lack the same facility, it’s just that the rational process is less developed (some would say less environmentally necessary) in those animals by order of degree. Dogs, for example, rely primarily on the instinctual process and the mental (vestigial) firmware they’re born with to solve most of their existential/environmental problems. That doesn’t mean that they lack the ability to learn and form novel (adaptive) behaviors using a rudimentary form of logic. Animals can be taught things, but their capacity to form novel ideas and behaviors is limited to their cognitive abilities. Humans, being the apex species on the planet, had the leisure to take the time necessary to evolve a capacity for logic and as such the rational process developed in us.

Of all our interpretive processes reason is the one that takes the longest to function. Our rational process forms our interpretation of stimuli based on information dissociated from the interpretations of instinct and emotion. Reason requires (accurate) knowledge derived from learning and experience, but there is also an improvisational element to the process.

Before I get too far in the weeds here I need to make a distinction; what I’m outlining is the rational mental process we employ to interpret and interact with stimuli, not rationality, the concept of reason or rationalism. That’s important because it’s all too easy to get lost in philosophical implications of reason when we look at the process of how we come to it.

As mentioned above, the rational process modifies the instinctual and emotional processes. Example, in high school, in drivers ed class, we’re taught to turn into a skid rather than turn with the skid. When we’re driving and we find ourselves in a skid our instinctive impulse is to slam on the the breaks and/or, worse still, to turn with the skid. Our self-preservation instincts tells us to do this, but all it does is make a precarious situation worse. However, when we’re taught, and we practice, not hitting the brakes and not turning into the skid, we make this our default reaction and we avoid disaster. This is the rational process interpreting a stimuli and forming a novel behavior that modifies the interpretation of the instinctual process.

The limitation of the rational process is in its necessity to take time to interpret information and develop a new apparatus. Where instinct and emotion are intimately linked with our biological hardware and psychological firmware, the rational process is dissociated from them in the same immediacy. Instinct and emotion are processes that evolved from a survival-need for fast interpretation and reaction. The rational process requires time, repetition and the right biological structures to be effective. Human beings are remarkably fast learners (even with complex challenges), but the learning that the rational process leads to is slow in comparison to instinct and emotion – which are essentially preloaded firmware in humans.

The rational process deals with the nuts and bolts of what we can understand of our reality. From there it can modify the other processes or it can serve to interpret stimuli on its own.

In the next part of this series I’ll be exploring how these cognitive processes interact and cooperate and conflict with each other. I will also consider the gendered advantages and disadvantages these processes represent to our individual experiences as men and women and the influence they play in intersexual and intersocial dynamics.

State Control

Reader, constrainedlocus had an interesting thought in the Anger Bias essay comment thread:

“The point is that a feminine-primary social order readily makes this nature a useful tool in dismissing what would otherwise be valid, but uncomfortable Red Pill truth. This anger bias mechanism is a tool for message control.”

What I find interesting is that, from my own personal observations of men in both marriage and long-term relationships, is that this dismissal happens readily and frequently at the micro level in sexual relationships as well. It’s impossible for men not to notice the hypocrisy.

A man need not experience the trivialization of his anger from “the sisterhood” response in the media, in the corporate setting, or even while at a party with other couples.

I think it now common for a wife or long-term girlfriend to assume a certain privilege or “authority” to express and direct her own anger, indignation and outrage rather freely and loudly – whenever she wishes – toward her male companion, without much consequence.

But should her male companion ever lose his composure, raise his voice in anger toward here, then this is either considered “verbal abuse”, an uncalled for overreaction, or his complaint is simply trivialized, ridiculed or disqualified by her, much like she would belittle the tantrum of her own young child.

Who has not witnessed wives scold their husbands in public at a restaurant or at a park like little children for his getting angry at her attitude or behavior? “Don’t you EVER raise your voice at me, mister!”.

I realize this is all about a man’s frame in the relationship.
I know that it is a weak man who tolerates this, while a wise man just ignores or nexts it.

Indeed, it is all about control.

But I still find it fascinating the confidence level with which so many women feel they can just scoff and ridicule the anger of men in relationships overtly, while unilaterally assuming the validity and overriding importance of their own anger whenever convenient for them.

It’s seems like an added bolt-on power up of feminist triumphalism.

Even among ourselves, we men are not supposed to show such angry emotions, at risk of verbal abuse or a humiliating well-deserved fucking beat down. Us dudes are to be these rational Vulcans walking around and doing shit, deleting emotion commands from our code. Because the thought is this: allowing someone else’s behavior to determine your feelings and emotional response is regarded as a sign of male weakness.
Anger should be expressed infrequently, and when expressed, done decisively and with brevity and action.

I think a lot of dudes recovering from blue pill conditioning struggle with this immensely, and are not sure what to do when their anger and frustration is openly minimized, trivialized or negated by their wife or LTR.

In a feminine-primary social order men are expected to show exactly this emotional restraint out of fear for being considered a typical, angry bully for any marginal display of aggressiveness. Yet, men are simultaneously conditioned to be emotionally expressive, emotionally available, in order to be ‘fully actualized’ human beings. They’re taught that strength is weakness and weakness is strength, and that vulnerability and emotionalism makes them whole persons.

Then the narrative changes again as per the needs of the Feminine Imperative. Men who are agreeable and show humility are punished with a removal of women’s sexual interest in them, while more conventionally masculine men, more Alpha, potentially more aggressive men who display outward signs of it – the emotions they’re taught to repress – are more commonly rewarded with women’s sexual interests.

When you have a social structure based on a calculated duplicity and confusion of purpose is it any wonder we see a generation of frustrated Betas with a perceived potential for violence? We’re supposed to delete emotional commands, but also to be more emotionally available and in touch (whatever the fuck that means) with our emotions. What it really comes down to is men are socialized to be automatons whose emotional connection should only apply to those emotions that benefit and complement with the Feminine Imperative and repress the emotions that frighten or potentially threaten the Feminine Imperative. In other words, to become more like women is to become a more perfected ‘man’ by today’s metric.

Blank-slate Feminism

We presently live in a feminine-primary social order that wants to convince us that egalitarian equalism is the normative presumption between men and women. The blank-slate idea is that men are the functional equivalents of women, but, for all the social constructivism, men need to train, learn, be conditioned to constrain the aspects of themselves that conflict with their identities becoming more like women in their emotional nature. If boys and men can be conditioned (or medically treated) to repress every evolved aspect of their maleness that conflicts with aligning with the feminine they can be trained to be ostensibly more ‘equal’ beings. In this mindset, for a man to become more ‘equal’ he must be more feminine.

The normative belief is that boys and men are simply unperfected women, but the subtext to this is that men and women, binary genders, are (or ought to be) functional equivalents. This too is based on the (I believe flawed) Jungian theory of anima and animus; that no matter the sex, every ‘person’ has some counterbalancing elements of male and female nature to them. I believe this is a flawed theory for the simple fact that men and women have never been functional equals from an evolutionary standpoint and modern science is disproving Jung’s (often metaphysical) presumptions with neurological and hormonal (and the functional behaviors that derive from either sex’s innate structures) understanding that didn’t exist in Jung’s time.

I’ve dug into why I have a problem with Jung in the past, but the point I’m making is that, in Jung, the Feminine Imperative and 2nd and 3rd wave feminist agendas have had an incestuous affair with his theories and conflating overwhelmingly disproven blank-slate equalism. This conflation of flawed theory has been the foundation for normalizing the social feminization of boys and men for almost a century now.

With this equalist presumption as a point of origin, the first step is to condition boys for emotional control.

State Control

Emotions have an evolutionary purpose in men and women. We can trace the manifested behaviors of emotional response to survival-specific functions. Oxytocin, for instance, predisposes human beings to feelings of trust and nurturing which primarily affects women most. The effects of testosterone, which men produce 12-17 times the amount that women do, are well known and masculinize the human body. These are just some basic hormonal differences, but the function behind the effects of those hormones (as well as men and women neurological structure) is where we run into conflict with the Feminine Imperative.

For millennia, boys and men have been taught to control their emotive states. This practice in control isn’t something that sprang up a few hundred years ago, we’re talking ancient cultures teaching their young men to resist losing their rational state-control over to an emotionalism that had a potential to get a man into some serious trouble. In some respects this self-control has been a necessary part of men’s upbringing, but also because men and women experience emotional states differently as a result of evolved biological differences. Women tend to process negative emotions differently than men. This processing isn’t due to some socially constructed acculturation, it is the result of the differences in men and women’s mental firmware. This is also a primary reason why making an emotional impact on a woman, positive or negative, is a source of stimulation for them. Men’s arousal may be founded on visual cues, but women are wired for emotional cues.

Likewise, men’s emotive states run a different gamut than that of women. As I mentioned in the Anger Bias essay, men are less predisposed to emotional states that women believe are beneficial in their own experience. In a feminine-correct social state, where women’s experiences define the norm, and in a social constructivist perspective, this amounts to a ‘repression’ of emotions. The idea is that an overly masculine acculturation of boys leads them to holding back the emotions that women tend to build their lives around. The real truth is that men process emotions, and prioritize the expression of those emotions, much more as a result of our own mental firmware than social repression.

That’s not to say there isn’t some social influence over teaching men to learn self-control over those emotions. As I just mentioned, young men have been taught for millennia to have state control by each other, their mentors and their peers, but since the time of the sexual revolution and the rise of a feminine primary social order this state control has been turned into a net negative.

So, in a sense, young men of the last 4-5 generations are caught between pleasing two masters. To be considered the ‘equal’ that feminine-primary egalitarianism would have them be they must first get in touch with their emotions. However, the only emotions they are taught are valid are those that make them more alike and identifying with women; nurturing, crying, expressing vulnerability, etc., essentially anything not characteristic of conventional masculinity. This of course has the effect of women subconsciously perceiving them as they would other women, and not potential intimates. Essentially, this aligning with women’s experience of emotion desexualizes men.

Yet, on the other hand, men are expected to repress their emotions in terms of having a state control that appeals to women’s Hypergamous need for security. Thus, the emotions that might better serve men in a survivalist utility are exactly those which feminine-correct society considers negative or ‘toxic’ and therefore must be controlled. The problem inherent in all of this is that it is feminine-primacy that is defining what men’s experience of emotion is acceptable despite it being the cause of so much of women’s frustration with men.

As the saying goes, women get the men they deserve and the emotive, masculine-confused men of today are simply the result of a social order that’s standardized the female experience as the definition of what blank-slate equalism should be for both sexes – but really as a means of social control for women whose experience is defined by an unsolvable need for certain security.

None of this is to say men ought not to express themselves emotionally or avoid being artists and poets or whatever in favor of some uninspired stoicism, but it is to say that Red Pill aware men should also be aware of the feminine-primary influences informing their expectations of expressing any or no emotion. That may seem like a drawn out way of saying ‘own your emotions’, but it’s my belief that for men to reclaim conventional masculinity it will require them to honestly assess why and how they choose to express or control their emotional states based on their own definition of what is correct from a male perspective, not the female perspective.

The Power of Emotion

boxitup

Science fiction has always sought to portray human emotion as a weakness to be overcome.
Some have gone further to express the notion of our physical being as a limiting factor. This is notably seen in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

I’m aware this is fiction, but I just want to reinforce the point from my earlier post that we don’t have to be held to eternal hostage by nature. We can strive to be better.
A quote from Terminator 2, sums it up admirably.

T-800 to John Connor: “I now know why you cry. But it is something, I can never do.”

While emotions are a part of our experience as human beings, Red Pill aware men need to understand the functionality of emotional responses. Rationality is, of course, the charter of this blog and my books, and while I make my best efforts to approach each aspect of what I write from as objective an origin as I’m able to, I also understand that there are limitations to remaining completely objective. I’m human like anyone else reading this (chatbots excepted) and I’ve always been fully aware that my emotional state, my own ego-investments and biases, as well as the observer effect are all something I need to make a conscious effort to account for while I’m writing about a new idea or observation I’m connecting dots with.

In a few prior posts I’ve made an effort to account for a balance between rationality and emotionalism. I say “emotionalism” because I think there needs to be a separation between the physical experience of emotion and the significance our fem-centric social order would have us place on those experiences. There is a difference between emotional response (evolved stimulus-response adaptations) and the ideologies that elevate human emotion to a metaphysical state (emotionalism).

Seeking, rage, fear, lust, care, panic and play are what are commonly recognized as primal emotions. I didn’t make this list up myself, these are just the most base-level imperatives from which more complex experiences of emotion are distilled. All of these root-level emotional experiences have been studied extensively and can be stimulated chemically and neurologically today. An easy example of this biological connection to emotional experience can be triggered and observed in the ‘roid rages’ experienced by the users of anabolic steroids.

Have you ever been “Hangry“? The feeling of anger / aggressiveness due to being overly hungry is an evolutionary survival adaptation. You’re far more motivated to kill and eat something if the feeling of hunger, prompted by its chemical triggers, also stimulates feelings of aggression. In today’s era that aggression may be inconvenient or anti-social, but our hunter-gatherer ancestors found it both acceptable and useful.

There are dozens of other examples I can give for the connection between our environmental, physical and chemical conditions and our emotional state. Similarly, there are chemical (dopamine) and behavioral prompts we associate with a particular emotional state. I don’t imagine this is anything revelatory to most Red Pill aware readers, but reviewing the objective aspects of emotion is necessary in order to separate it from the social influence of emotionalism.

Testosterone is well known to stimulate feelings of aggression and sexual arousal, but did you know that the chemical make up of testosterone is actually an inhibitor of the chemicals that prompt sadness and crying? When considered in this respect and the fact that human males produce 12 to 17 times the amount of testosterone females do, is it any coincidence that men may feel less compulsion to cry over things? Yet, men are shamed for “holding back” tears. This is an example of the connection between our physical experience of emotions and the importance to which our social order places on (primarily female) emotionalism. There are a lot of complexities that make up our emotional state and the more we study the influences of our own biologies the better we can make a connection between the evolved, survival-beneficial, effect these emotions elicit in us.

The nuts and bolts science of emotions demystifies the more magical, romanticized association we like to apply to them. And at the risk of prompting any kind of nihilism, it’s important that we consider our emotional state in terms of the concrete physical stimulus that’s provoking our emotional states. It’s easy to get into the science of emotions when we’re trying to solve a problem like clinical depression and the feelings and potential behaviors it evokes, but it’s much harder to look at upsetting an elated feeling of happiness. If it ain’t broke there’s no reason to think about fixing it.

But what sets us off about really coming to terms with the science of emotion is it tends to kill our gods. Up until advent of our understanding the cause and effect influences of emotion we’ve applied a lot of metaphysical importance to our emotions. Historically, our emotions have inspired us to create some of the greatest cultural and artistic masterpieces, and they’ve urged us to some pretty ugly atrocities too. Even today, western cultures raise emotion to a mythical grandeur. We romanticize and apply great significance to how we feel. We prioritize expressing emotions to being some enlightened state and the repression or control of them as some kind of horrible evil or some form of retardation.

Emotionalism

The Washington Post (I know, I know,…) recently published the findings of a study outlining how “sexist” men have psychological problems:

Researchers then identified 11 norms considered to be “traditionally masculine” — desire to win, need for emotional control, risk-taking, violence, dominance, sexual promiscuity or playboy behavior, self-reliance, primacy of work, power over women, disdain for homosexuality and pursuit of status — and looked to see whether they were associated with particular mental health outcomes.

In general, the men who stuck more strongly to these norms were more likely to experience problems such as depression, stress, body image issues, substance abuse and negative social functioning. They were also less likely to turn to counseling to help deal with those problems. The effect was particularly strong for men who emphasized playboy behavior, power over women and self-reliance.

As you might expect, what’s defined as “toxic” masculinity today is decided by people invested in a mindset that confirms the Feminine Imperative. This article follows along with what will likely be the Trump-era narrative for masculinity – anything remotely considered “traditionally” masculine will be conflated with a psychological disorder. The cure to which is, of course, ego-investing men in feminine-primary mental states; effectively feminizing men.

If we look at the norms identified by this study we are expected to nod in agreement about the negative, potentially damaging, connotations these traditionally masculine aspects imply. But they are only negative because the objective environment we are supposed to interpret them from is one of feminine primacy. Anything that can be considered an impediment to female societal control, any aspect of men’s intrinsic natures that lessens the same potentials of women is considered “toxic”.

Desire to win, need for emotional control, risk-taking, violence, dominance, sexual promiscuity or playboy behavior, self-reliance, primacy of work, power over women, disdain for homosexuality and pursuit of status – by orders of degree these are the foundational aspects of masculinity that’s been responsible for the advancement of humanity for millennia now. I’m not entirely sure what ‘playboy lifestyle’ entails, but consider the problems these aspects of male nature evolved to solve for men. Each one of these characteristics has a functional prompt; they didn’t evolve in a vacuum. These parts of masculinity were and are functional benefits to men. Only in a society that defines supremacism of women and the primacy of female-correctness do these aspects become negative.

I doubt it will come as any surprise to the Red Pill aware that all of these traits used to have a higher social value in virtually all social orders prior to our present one. It’s not enough to make female social interaction the preeminent one, masculinity and its conventional aspects must be pathologized. They must become a sickness if gynocentrism is to sustain itself.

I’m exploring this here because the female way of socialization is founded upon emotionalism. I think it’s important for Red Pill men to understand that the defining of what particular emotional states are acceptable is intimately linked to what those states mean to the Feminine Imperative. In the past 60 years western(ized) culture has become one in which the feminine defines the predominant cultural narrative with regard to intersexual communication, correctness and the psychological values we are meant to infer from it. This discourse is one that is primarily informed by women’s high priority on an investment in emotionalism.

In past essays I’ve outlined how men and women’s brains are neurologically wired for different, yet complementary functions. Women experience negative emotions differently from men. The male brain evolved to seek out sex before food. And while our feminine-centric social order insists that, in the name of equalism, boys should be forced to learn in the same modality as that of girls, the science shows that boys brains are rudimentarily wired to learn differently.

“Greater emotional reactivity in women may explain many things, such as their being twice as likely to suffer from depression and anxiety disorders compared to men,” Mendrek added, who is also an associate professor at the University of Montreal’s Department of Psychiatry.

Yet for all of these very evident physical differences in men and women’s experience of emotion, it is women’s experience, and a feminine priority for the ‘correctness’ of that experience we apply to men. I would suggest that much of this is primarily due to women’s innate solipsism, but we’ve normalized women’s experience of emotion as the common and correct one in terms of intersexual communication and social dynamics.

Emotionalism and the applying of metaphysical meaning to the feminine-correct experience of them has pervaded our social consciousness since the time of the sexual revolution. This elevated importance of emotion has been a part of popular culture for millennia of course, but until the rise of a socially mandated importance of female Hypergamy we haven’t had female emotionalism direct the course of society as it has for over sixty years now.

As such, we see that men “getting in touch with their feminine sides” is really a concerted effort to repress their natural experience of emotion as a male, and to attempt to force their own emotional states into ones females can identify with. As I mentioned above, there are literally biological limitations for a man to experience emotion as a woman as well as his impulse to want to prioritize those feelings as women do. The presumption is that a man is emotionally stunted if he feel that repressing his emotions is what he ought to do. “Boys don’t cry” is a sickness when it is women’s experience and importance of emotionalism that drives our social discourse.

Women bemoan men’s stereotypical lack of “emotional availability”, and we put a religious importance upon our capacity to express our emotions in some way, but all of this is constrained to the box that is women’s correct experience and importance of emotion. This is not what men’s brains are naturally wired for, and in a Red Pill context this is not what women’s hindbrains want from men.

It’s important for Red Pill men to understand that our feminine-primary social order is founded up the importance women place on the God of emotion. Part of your Blue Pill conditioning was to convince you, as a young boy, that the way women emote and the importance they put on emotion is what you needed to accept as the healthy, normal way of experiencing and expressing it. The truth is you are not wired to experience emotion as a woman will. That isn’t to suggest you deny or repress your feelings, but to understand that you shouldn’t feel bad for not feeling as a woman feels. This kind of goes back to the point I was making in Empathy; while it may be possible for a woman to sympathize with your feelings, she will never be able to empathize with them as a man would experience it.

Furthermore, it should be part of men’s unplugging to come to terms with the metaphysical importance women place on (largely their own) emotional states. They remove the functional aspect of emotion and elevate it to something only women have a unique sensitivity to understand. Separating yourself from this self-induced, self-applied belief in emotion can be a very powerful tool for a Red Pill man in his dealing with women – and not just the ones he’s intimately involved with. Separating your ego from the religion of emotion and coming to terms with the science of emotion is a very difficult step for Blue Pill invested men to make. As I said, it’s like killing your gods, but it’s also killing the notion of the emotionalism you think you need to identify with in order to connect with a woman.

Detox

“Who needs reasons when you’ve got heroin?”

Letter from an addict:

I can’t get my ex to stop popping in my mind. No matter what or where I go, everything reminds me of her. What can I do? As it stands I have the power, she’s called me last, but I keep gettin the urge to give in and call.

The fact that I’ve been spinning plates has only made it worse. When I’m out with these new girls, keeps reminding me of stuff that I did with her, its whacked.

I feel like I just can’t get away, no matter where I look or go, there she is. The sad part is, I don’t even pine over her, I despise her, I think of her negatively but I’m addicted.

I need help.

If you were a drug addict or an alcoholic the first step back to sobriety is your moment of clarity. You’ve obviously had that. The next step is to detoxify yourself – that’s the hard part. You need to isolate yourself, and put yourself into complete separation from your drug of choice; in this case that’s your ex.

You’re feeling hopeless about her and your present condition because the cessation of what you’ve mistaken as a reward for so long is now out of reach. You need to understand that what you want to go back to isn’t what you think it is, nor will it ever “get better”. Even if you could reengage with her, it will never be what you think it could.

Withdrawal Symptoms

I think half the battle of controling an emotional response is consciously recognizing that it is taking place. Children (of both sexes) cannot help but react emotionally to external stimulus. They do this because they have no prior experience with that stimulus to associate a response to. In addition, they have an underdeveloped capacity for abstract thought and therefore an emotional response is almost a given. But as we mature and experience things, we understand what is happening (because it’s happened to us prior) and we can better react and prepare responses for them accordingly.

When a person first experiences jealousy this triggers a complex chain of hormonal and emotional imbalances. True jealousy, the type generated by the suspicion of having invested emotionally in a person who betrays that investment, rarely occurs before puberty so there is no prior experience to prepare an individual for it. It also happens so rarely that we don’t acknowledge it as an issue to consider until we’re in the middle of experiencing it. This is further complicated by an immature, but developing capacity for abstract thought, as well as the fact that jealousy is an in-born, innate biological response that has served our species well for millenia. Needless to say this severly limits rational thought processes and the ability to form appropriate behaviors based on them.

Now lets further complicate the situation with the same chemical cocktail and the emotional responses associated with sexual relations and you can see where this is going.

Depending upon the level of emotional attachment, what most guys experience in a breakup are withdrawal symptoms from an addiction. The brain’s neurochemistry in response to environmental cues and the effects solidified by routine experience are truly fascinating. Studies have shown that the chemical/hormonal signatures that naturally occur in the human body while one is experiencing love are virtually identical to the euphoric properties of heroin. The reason you pine over this girl, the reason that her rubbing your nose in it (so to speak) seems satisfying, the reason seeing her with another guy or the idea of renting her a room to go fuck him in provokes such an intense emotional response from a guy is because it re-triggers that same hormonal charge you got from it the first time and you’re seeking ways to re-stimulate that rush. You’ve yet to develop the cognitive capacity to deal with the associations of this rush because you have few or no prior experiences with this jealousy/betrayal dynamic, so you think of it in the only terms that have been available to you up to now – that which media/culture has conditioned you to take at face value. Therefore you have this Shakespearean sense of betrayal.

There is a quantifiable hormonal response to environmental cues that inspire jealousy. From an evolutionary perspective this makes for a semi-efficient genetic-investment protection mechanism. Animals that get hormonally pissed off at the cues indicating cuckoldry will reserve their parental investments for better, more prolific breeding opportunities. However , the same evolutionary advantages that same hormonal response causes are also liabilities in other instances. While it may be beneficial for parental investment that a chemical cocktail engendering feelings of trust, infatuation, love, etc. be pumped into our bloodstreams to inspire pair bonding, that same cocktail can also become a powerful narcotic when the rewarding ‘high’ is removed.

Detox

What happens in a breakup is similar to coming down off a narcotic. The addict seeks to re-stimulate the reward process, only now that process is denied to him (or her). Thus the addict is forced to create novel ways to reestablish that reward, however under these new circumstances that reward rush doesn’t compare to the original high of infatuation, love, etc.. Creating situations where jealousy, indignation and suspicion are present is an attempt to trigger that rush the original triggers did, only this time it’s cheaper and less potent since its conditions are temporal, few and far between. So is the high of love, lust and infatuation replaced with the lesser high of suspicion and jealousy.

This is the biochemical addiction phase most guys find themselves in in a post-monogamy breakup. I should add that this is yet one more reason to cultivate a Plate Theory mental model of abundance, however, once again, knowing is half the battle. As the more rational and reasoned sex, one condition for dropping this default mental state is whilst under the influences of intoxication (funny we call love intoxicating) and hormonal imbalances. In other words it’s very hard to make rational assessments when your physiology is jonesing for a fix, but if you know you’re jonesing and why you’re jonesing, you’re half way to recovery.

The Beta Response

As an end note here I think I should elaborate that Beta men, in comparison to more Alpha Men, tend to have a much tougher experience when it comes to jealousy and postpartum emotional states. You’ve got to consider that men who have less opportunity for sex, love, emotional investment, etc. will experience a sense of loss greater than men who have more intimate opportunities. On a subconscious level, the Beta male has a much higher investment risk in losing a potential long-term lover since most of his proverbial eggs are going to necessarily be tied up in one basket at a time. This is a liability of the Beta  breeding strategy – All In, but also All Out if he loses on his bet.

Furthermore, by his nature, the Beta will have less prior experience in coping with the emotional response prompted by that biochemical rush. Ergo, the guy who you “never though was capable” of the actions he takes will often surprise you by the extents to which he will go to reestablish that reward prompt. The Beta male and post-partum rejection, jealousy, betrayal, suspicion, etc. are often a very volatile mix.