factual relativist

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.