mental models

The Instinctual Process

I want to thank you if you’ve made it through the first part of this series and you stuck with it. In some respects I can see why it might be odd that I’m covering cognitive processes, however, these are really the foundational premises for so many other Red Pill intersexual dynamics, as well as interpersonal and even social dynamics between humans that they deserve some sort of fleshing out. Again, I want to stress that these cognitive processing models are ideas I’m coming to and not settled science. However, they are based on both classic interpretations combined with the benefit of what we know about the biological, evolutionary and anthropological aspects of the cognitive processes today.

If you made the connection to Freud’s components of personality models – the Id, Ego and Super Ego – in the last post you at least grasp something of the initial theory I’m building on here. Useful as they are, Freud’s models lacked anything like an understanding of how the human mind works or how it evolved to the degree we take for granted today. Freud made his best guess at these processes from an inner psyche perspective. He formed his theories from what he deduced was operating inside our heads. My belief is that his (and others’) cognitive process models evolved and developed in response to interpreting our environment and the stimuli that our senses translated to them in our formative evolutionary past. Really, all of these interpretive processes, Instinct, Emotion and Reason, are the result of our experiential lives and the many benefits they provided us in surviving and reproducing.

All of that is not to discount the internal psyche and how these processes define who we are. Freud’s model proposed the Id, Ego and Superego are components of personality, what I’m proposing is that these components are the result of evolved cognitive processes – Instinct, Emotion and Reason – that served to create these inner models which later became those components of personality. I should say that I’m not entirely sold on these Freudian components, but I can see how cognitive processes would’ve led to developing them. I propose that these components of personality, Freud’s or other’s, are the products of these interpretive processes.

The Ego is a result of the Rational (Reason) process, while the Superego is a summation of the Emotional process. Since I don’t want to veer off into the psychology lesson in all this I’ll leave this proposition for another essay, but I do want to make a distinction here; What I’m proposing in this series is that our evolved interpretive processes are the means by which we interpret our reality, which in turn shapes who we are individually, socially and sexually.

Base Instincts

Stripped down, the Id is a result of the Instinctual process and largely resides in our unconscious or preconscious experience. Instinct is reflexive, and the behaviors it prompts are directly related to our basic survival and reproductive needs. Instinct operates outside our consciousness because of the inability of the human brain to focus on the endless sources of stimulus we experience in life. As good as we’d like to think we are with multi-tasking our interpretive cognition can only process so much; the rest is pushed into our subconscious periphery and hindbrain subroutines. This is the auto-pilot part of our instinctual cognition.

Since we largely see our Rational and Emotional processes (not to mention our social consciousness) as “higher order” processes, we tend to downplay the importance of Instinct. Our Instinctive process evolved to sustain our physical survival and reproductive imperatives in as pragmatic and practical a way as would be expedient. In most respects Instinctual interpretation and cognition is, by necessity, based on immediacy. By comparison, Emotion and Reason are slower forms of cognition, and, in the case of Reason, requires a period of learning, development and internalization. As such, there is no complication of conscience or morality, nor time for rational or emotional reflection when instinctual awareness and action is necessary. All the things we call sin or immoral, unethical or duplicitous, are manifested by our Instinctual process. But so too are ennobling aspects like self-sacrifice, violence-in-protection, mate guarding and parental investment. Hypergamy is also a behavioral and psychological dynamic that is deeply rooted in the Instinctual process.

Because of all that instinct often carries a negative preconception, at least by modern standards. And thus the Id becomes the part of the human psyche inseparably connected to the instinctual process. The desire for immediate gratification, the direct, unmitigated satisfaction of our most basic needs, and the hedonistic pursuit of pleasure; all of these we associate with the Id. However, all of these basic gratifications are directed towards elements of our evolved, instinctual needs for survival and insurances of thriving in the future. Much of what we think of as impulsivity is connected to the immediate aspect of instinct, but even this often serves some latent biological or survival purpose.

Gendered Differences

In psychology 101 we’re taught to think of the Id as our ‘childish’ selves. How many times have we read in the manosphere about how men can better relate with women via Amused Mastery or relating to them like a bratty younger sister? This process, this PUA technique, is a subconscious appeal to women’s Id via the Instinctual process. When I proposed that women want a man who Just Gets It a huge part of that dynamic relies on a man appealing to a woman’s Instinctual cognition. This is exactly why demonstrating an intent serves so much better than explicating an intent. Actions speak louder than words because actions always speak clearly to our Instinctual processing. Yet one more reason I, and most of my Red Pill contemporaries, advocate for the Medium being the Message – behavior almost always appeals to instinct.

One of the questions I’m always asked by guys is, how do I know when a woman is in whichever phase of her ovulation? Usually this is prompted by some reasoned want to be able to know when to turn up the Alpha around their girlfriend’s proliferative phase and ease off when she’s in her luteal (down cycle) phase. When you look at this in terms of cognitive processes, a man’s Reasoning process wants to deductively solve a problem that is rooted in the Instinctual process. It certainly makes sense, like a lot of other problems, to use our smarts to solve that reproductive problem. The real problem is that the use of Reason is what defeats the Instinctual cognition. There are actually many subconscious, instinctual mechanisms men have evolved to determine a great deal of information about women reproductive states, but our Reason and what goes into influencing it, tends to make us discount what out Instinctive process is telling us.

Most guys get frustrated with Game at some stage of their learning (Reason) it. The most common complaint is “I can never hope to remember all of this shit perfectly all the time. I can’t calibrate the way I need to, or, this is all an act, when can I let my hair down and just relax with a girl?” Another common question/presumption guys hit me with is how I manage to continually Game my wife. The answer I almost universally give is that I don’t, in fact, consciously Game my wife. Rather, my success in our marriage and really all of my relationships with all the women in my life is the result of having internalized what I’ve learned from Red Pill awareness and made it who I am. I’ve taken what I’ve learned and internalized it to the point that Game became my instinctual response to women’s instinctual process.

Game is not an act for me, it’s an instinct. If you were to put a guitar in my hands today I could play it with a good degree of proficiency. I can play by ear and instinctually I anticipate where notes and chord progressions go if I’m trying to play a song I’ve never played before because I’ve been playing guitar for the better part of my life. However, there was a point in time where all of that was foreign to me. I could play by rote memorization, but playing music wasn’t instinctual. Playing an instrument wasn’t part of who I was at that point in time.

The same is true for internalizing Game. It is entirely possible for your Rational process to inform your Instinctual process as well as your Emotional processes. This interplay can work for all our cognitive processes, but as I’m focusing on instinct today I want to stress again that Rational and Emotional processes can alter the, largely subconscious, Instinctual process. I have pretty good pitch as a result of being a musician for so long. If you asked me to play a particular note or chord I would instinctively do so. What I wouldn’t do is hunt around the fretboard counting frets and string to come to it. This is the best illustration I can give you with regards to internalizing other things.

Martial arts is another good example. There are certain innate, instinctual reactions we have when we’re confronted with conflict or protecting ourselves. When something flies at our faces we flinch. When we hear a sudden loud noise we startle. These are inborn parts of our firmware that evolved in us for very good reasons. What martial arts training does is forces us to sublimate those natural instincts and replace them with more efficient instinctual responses. Again, this is the Rational process rewriting the instinctual process via internalization.

Art has always been something I’ve had an innate ability for. I have do doubt that many of our natural cognitive ‘gifts’ are in some way gene expressions. So when we see a ‘natural’ at something our rational/emotional minds tend to think of it as something almost supernatural. However, I had to learn to play music because I was determined to express myself creatively in that fashion as well, and that took perseverance and internalization of skills. I think the same can be said for guys we think are ‘naturals’ with regard to Game and women. They may have an instinctual affinity for Game. They may be blessed with good genetics. But Game can be learned and internalized down to the Instinctual level.

All of that said, there are still fundamental parts of our mental firmware that are ‘pre-loaded’ into us at birth. Shit tests, Hypergamy, mate guarding behaviors, ovulatory shift behaviors, and many more are in-loaded in women and every bit as Instinctual as breathing or eating or self-preservation. Just as there are physical gender differences in our brains and bodies, so too are their differences in men and women’s Instinctual processes. The easiest one for us to consider is in sexual imperatives. I’ve noted in many essays that only women are Hypergamous. Men and women’s sexual strategies are reflective of their differing physical and mental make up, but those strategies are also different (and often contradicting) as a result of the Instinctual process unique to men and women as well.

One of the more powerful instincts men have is our sexual impulse and as a consequence it’s one that we are taught to control the most. Hypergamy is also a product of women’s Instinctual process, however, since about 60 years ago, prosocial control over Hypergamy has become something individual to a woman. Men’s self-control over their sexual nature is something that’s been part of our upbringing for millennia, women today are just now being expected to self-police their own sexual impulsivity.

These innate gender differences in instinct are a very difficult aspect of human nature for both egalitarian equalists and traditional moralists to accept. Equalists chomp at the bit with respect to their ego-investments in blank-slate idealism. Even the idea of a gendered difference in human nature, much less a human “nature” at all (a concept most deny) conflicts with the social constructivism that forms most of their ideology. Moralists tend to think that acknowledging (much less embracing) our instinctual selves is endorsing the worst of it, or it’s some kind of license to shirk the personal responsibilities for it. And, for both equalist and moralist, accepting our instinctual natures seems deterministic in a way that conflicts with their sense of existential control.

Well, the good news for both is that understanding men and women’s Instinctually processed natures is something our other two processes (for better or worse) have an influence over. There’s a common refrain from equalists today that presumes we’ve “evolved beyond” our base instincts (if they acknowledge them at all). From moralists we’ve always been ‘higher minded’ and above our instincts, that is if we accept some ideological ‘truth’. The root of both of these presumptions can be traced to the Emotional and Rational processes influencing our Instinctive process.

I’m of the opinion that very few of us are actually ruled by our instincts, but they are always the favorite scapegoat for ideologues. As a Red Pill aware man I think it’s important to have an objective understanding of how the Instinctive process operates in ourselves and women. Denying or disqualifying the importance of instinct and why it evolved is usually one of the biggest blindspots for a Blue Pill conditioned mind.

In the next part of this series I’ll explore the Emotional process and how it’s become the preeminent social-defining experience for us.

 

The Evolution of Game

evolution

If you ever need a reminder as to how you came to a particular belief or set of beliefs, the best way to consider (or reconsider) that process is to write a book about it. As most of my readers are aware I’m in the process of publishing my first book based on the writing of the past ten years of my involvement in the manosphere. It wasn’t even known as the ‘manosphere’ back then.

For the men (and women) who’ve read my ideas since the inception of the SoSuave forum almost 12 years ago, I expect they’ll find the book kind of remedial – like going back over old classics they’d internalized and take for granted now. If I make a reference to Hypergamy or the Feminine Imperative, for most, there’s a standard level of pre-understanding about the elements associated to each of these and many other concepts. However, a problem of familiarity arises when I, or anyone else familiar with red-pill awareness makes an attempt to educate the unfamiliar. The Red Pill reddit community makes a good effort of this, but after going through 2 revisions of my book it’s become evident to myself and my editor that familiarizing the uninitiated is a major obstacle to reaching the men who’ll benefit most from unplugging (yet another manosphere term).

Familiarity

The majority of the requests I’ve received over the years for a comprehensive book of Rational Male ideology has come from readers expressing the desire for a condensed version in book form which they can give to family and friends (mostly male) in the hopes that they’ll better understand their need for emancipation from their fem-centric mental models. Of course that’s always been my goal from day one, but it presumes that a large part of those reading will be unfamiliar with common terms and concepts I, or familiar readers, will already have a grasp of.

Another issue I often run into is the presumption that readers new to my blog or commenters on other blogs have a familiarity with my work. I often find myself having to link back to articles where I covered a specific topic that a critic or an inquisitive reader might want to take me to task about. For the most part I make a conscious effort not to repeat something I’ve addressed, sometimes years, before, but that’s simply a part of this medium. For convenience I’ve recently added a new page to the top of the blog with all the relevant links I think cover most of my basics from the Year One post.

It’s a difficult enough proposal to unplug men from their blue pill conditioning, but leading them to an understanding of principles they mentally have a resistance or aversion to is a particular challenge. My editor is only peripherally familiar with these principles which is kind of a blessing and a curse. In one sense it requires me to revise old posts and concepts to be more ‘noob friendly’, but it also challenges me to review how those concepts evolved over the years to be what I and other red pillers now consider common foundations. For instance, while I might rigorously debate the Feminine Imperative with those familiar with it on Dalrock’s blog, I had to spend over an hour defining it further with my editor after he’d read my seminal posts about it.

Game

Of these concepts the one I return to the most frequently is that of Game. My editor asks, “Just what is Game?” Throughout the upcoming book, this blog, and virtually every major manosphere writer’s blog there’s a constant presumption that readers will know exactly what Game is when it’s referred to. Game has been lifted up to an almost mythical state; like some panacea for the common guy struggling with achieving women’s attentions and intimacy. It’s gotten to the point where familiarity with Game has become a flippant aside for manosphere bloggers – we have varieties of Game, we have internalized Game, we have ‘natural’ Game, direct Game, Beta Game etc., but defining the term ‘Game’ for someone unfamiliar with the very involved intricacies, behaviors and the underlying psychological principles on which Game is founded is really tough for the uninitiated to wrap their heads around in the beginning.

For the unfamiliar, just the word ‘Game’ seems to infer deception or manipulation. You’re not being real if you’re playing a Game, so from the outset we’re starting off from a disadvantage of perception. This is further compounded when attempting to explain Game concepts to a guy who’s only ever been conditioned to ‘just be himself‘ with women and how women allegedly hate guys “who play games” with them. As bad as that sounds, it’s really in the explanation of how Game is more than the common perception that prompts the discussion for the new reader to have it explained for them.

At its root level Game is a series of behavioral modifications to life skills based on psychological and sociological principles to facilitate intersexual relations between genders.

Early Game

In its humble beginnings, Game was a set of behaviors, learned, adapted and modified with the express purpose of bettering a guy’s prospective sexual ‘success’ with the women he had only limited (if any) access to. Game was defined as a series of behavioral skills and techniques observationally experimented with, and developed by the burgeoning PUA culture of the early 2000’s. While there was a peripheral acknowledgement given to the psychology that made these behavior sets effective, the purpose was more about the result and less about the head-mechanics that made the result possible.

This introduction was many of the current manosphere’s first contact with ‘formalized’ Game. The quality of the Art in pick up artistry was (and still is) really left up to the practitioner’s capacity to understand the basics of behavioral psychology (with regards to women) and refining a deft ability to adapt and react to his target’s changing behavioral cues on a given environment and/or context..

If this were the only extent of Game it would understandably be very short sighted and limited in scope. In the beginning Game had a utility in that it helped a majority of men lacking the social intelligence to approach and develop a real, intimate rapport with women they fundamentally lacked. The problem was that beyond Game’s “in-field” uses it wasn’t really developed past the point of ‘getting the girl’, and left even the most socially adept PUAs unprepared to deal with the real psychology motivating women on a greater whole. It was just this feminine meta-psychology that drove men, unaccustomed to enjoying and then losing the affections of women formerly “out of their league”, to depression and suicide.

Game was a wondrous tool set of skills, but without the insight and foresight to deal with what these tools could build, it was potentially like giving children dynamite.

Evolving Game

From the earliest inception Game was more or less viewed as a solution to a problem. Game has been described as a logical social reaction to the women that the past 60+ years of feminism, social feminization and feminine primacy has created for the men of today. Courtesy of modern connectivity, the internet and collectivized social media, evolving Game or some variation of it was inevitable for men.  Despite the public social stigma and ridicule attached to men attempting to understand the psychologies of women, privately the internet facilitated a global consortium of men comparing experiences, relating observations and testing theories.

The behavioral psychology that led to Game which prompted the desired reactions in women began to take on more import for men. Sure, the now classic Game techniques like being Cocky & Funny, Amused Mastery, Agree & Amplify, Neg Hits, Peacocking, etc. were effective in their own artfully used contexts, but the latent psychology that made those behavior sets work prompted the questions of why they worked.

The psychological aspects of effective (and ineffective) Game began to take on a new importance. Through this broader exploration of the role biological, psychological and sociological factors affected Game sprang new ideas, theories and experimentative models leading to new behavioral sets and the abandonment of less effective ones.

As connectivity grew, so did the knowledge base of the Game community. No longer was Game exclusive to the PUA pioneers; Game was expanding to accommodate the interests and influences of men who’d never heard of the earlier version of Game, or would’ve rejected it outright just years before due to their feminine conditioning. Married men wondered if aspects of Game could reignite the sexual interests of their frigid or overbearing wives. Divorced men embraced the Game ridiculed when married to improve their potential for new sexual interests, but also to relate their experiences and contribute to that Game knowledge base. Men, not just in western culture, but from a globalizing interest began to awaken with each new contribution not only about how women were,  but why women were. Game was making the unknowable woman knowable. The enigmatic feminine mystique began unraveling with each new contribution to the Game knowledge base.

Game was becoming something more. Men could now see the code in the Matrix: we knew the medium was the message, we began to see the  feminine social conventions used to control us, we began to see the overarching reach of the feminine imperative and fem-centrism, and we came to realize the insidious, but naturalistic, influence feminine hypergamy had wrought in both men and women. Game was prompting Men to push back the iron veil of feminine primacy and see what made her tick.

Predictably, fem-centric society sought to cast the rise, and expansion of Game as a modern version of the ridiculous macho archetypes of the 50’s-70’s. The threat of an evolving, more intellectually valid form of Game had to be ridiculed and shamed like anything else masculine, so the association with its infamous PUA forerunners was the obvious choice for the feminine imperative. The feminine standard appeal to the Masculine Catch 22 was the first recourse: any man who desired to learn Game was less than a man for that desire, but also less of a man for not already knowing Game (as approved by the feminine imperative). Any guy actually paying for, or personally invested in, Game was associated with the PUA culture that was characterized as a throw back to the ‘Leisure Suit Larrys’ of the 70’s.

Contemporary Game

For all its marginal efforts to shame Game back into obscurity, the feminine imperative found that the Game movement wasn’t being cowed as easily as it might have been in the mid 1990’s. The Imperative was falling back on the reliable tropes and social conventions that had always pushed the masculine back into compliance. At the apex of fem-centrism in the 90’s these social constructs worked well on an isolated, shamed and ignorant masculine imperative, but with the evolution of the internet, by the late 2000’s Game was snowballing into a threat that required new feminine operative conventions.

Game evolved beyond the behavioral sets, and beyond the psychological and sociological mechanics that underlined women’s psyches and larger socializations. While still encompassing all that prior evolution, Game was becoming aware of the larger social meta-scale of the feminine imperative. Game began to move beyond the questions of why women are the way they are, and into piecing together how the intergender acculturations we experience today are what they are. Game asked how did we come to this?

Game branched into specific areas of interest in its scope to answer these broader questions and solve more expansive problems. While we still have all of the prior iterations of Game, we have expanded into christianized Game, married Game, divorced Game, socialized Game, high school Game, etc.

However, underpinning all of these areas of specialization was still the need to internalize and personalize Game in a Man’s life. Game was the path to male re-empowerment; an empowerment that even women today still feel men should Man-back-Up to. Game required a reinterpretation of masculinity towards something positive, beneficial and competent – something entirely apart from the negative, shameful and ridiculous archetypes 60 years of feminization had convinced women and men of. Call it Alpha, call it Positive Masculinity, but Game necessitates the reimagining of the importance of the masculine imperative. Game needs Men to change their minds about themselves.

Needless to say, even in its most positive of contexts, the male re-empowerment that Game led to was a Threat too great for the feminine imperative to allow. Controlling the intrinsic insecurities that the feminine imperative is founded upon has alway depended on men’s ignorance of their true value, and true necessity to women. Men have to remain necessitous to women in order for their insecurity to be insured against, and the feminine imperatives control to be insured of.

The well of knowledge and awareness that Game represented had to be poisoned. The social conventions the feminine imperative had relied on for decades was no longer effective. The continued expansion of Game into the social, psychological, evolutionary and biological realms was evidence that Game was something those old convention couldn’t contain, so the imperative evolved new tacts while reinventing old ones.

Shaming and ridicule were (and still are) the rudimentary tactics that the less intellectual of the feminine imperative would resort to, but the expansiveness of Game needed something more distorting. Proponents of the feminine imperative began to concede certain universal points that Game had long asserted about feminine nature (and the FI had long rejected) in an effort to co-opt the social momentum Game had taken over a decade to develop.

The Feminine Imperative couldn’t argue with the extensive validity of the tenets of Game, so it sought to reengineer Game from within and modify it to its own purpose. The Feminne Imperative wants just enough male empowerment to return men to an improved (really an older) state of usefulness to its ends, but not so much that true male emancipation from the imperative would threaten its dominance. In co-opting Game and conceding to the truths it finds less threatening the imperative hopes to build better betas – men who believe they are empowered by Game, but are still beholden to the Feminine Imperative.

True emancipation from the imperative threatens its dominance, so Men with the vision to see past this are labeled Dark, Sociopathic and Deviant by the imperative. It wasn’t enough just to infiltrate Game and sanitize it fot its benefit, the Feminine Imperative had to categorize Game for itself – Evil vs. Good Game. The good of course being characterized with whatever aspects benefitted the imperative and the bad being whatever ‘selfishly’ benefited the masculine. The Feminine Imperative doesn’t care about the various branchings of Game – natural, internalized, marriage, etc. – it only concerns itself with what aspects can be distorted to its advantage and what aspects cannot.

This brings us to Game as we know it today. Game is still evolving, and had I the prescience to see where it will go next, I would veture that it will come to a real emancipation with the FI. Not an emancipation from women, but an emancipation from their imperative. Not a ‘men going their own way’ negligence of women in the hope that they’ll come around to behaving as men would like being given no other choice, but a true Game driven emancipation from the control that fem-centrism has maintained for so long.

Make no mistake, the Feminine Imperative needs men to be necessitous of it, and it will always be hostile to the Men attempting to free other men from that necessity. In this respect, any Game, even the co-opted Game the imperative will use itself, is by definition sexist. Anything that may benefit Men, even when it associatively benefits women, is sexist. Freeing men from the Matrix, breaking their conditioning and encouraging them to reimagine themselves and their personalities for their own betterment is sexist.

Encouraging men to be better Men is sexist.