Something I’m asked a lot is,…
“How do you unplug a guy from the Matrix? All of this Red Pill awareness about intersexual dynamics has radically changed / saved my life for the better! I want to let my friends, my brothers, my dad, know about how this knowledge will help them in their relationships, with the women their involved with, and dealing with women in life in general.
This stuff is SO IMPORTANT. But I run into such resistance from even my close friends and family. What can I do? I want to give these guys your book and discuss it rationally with them. I want to pass on this awareness like you encourage, but it’s like they’re just unwilling to see the truth. They don’t even want to talk about it. They just want to persist in doing shit that’s frustrating them and dealing with women from a blue pill perspective. Rollo, how do I help my brother?”
There was a time when I was a moderator on the SoSuave forums when we would discuss exactly this question. The frustration of knowing that your brother or your best friend could be living such a better life if only they would open their eyes and see how they’ve been trapped in a way of thinking about intersexual relations that they were conditioned to accept from a very early age. Believe me, I still get frustrated today. I see stories about how a guy like the one in the discussion above here is on the verge of despondency or suicide because they’re unable or unwilling to consider anything outside the box that the Blue Pill will allow for.
That’s a pretty serious thought. Blue Pill conditioning, and a guy’s capacity to break away from it, is literally a matter of life and death. Now, imagine you’re a Red Pill aware man and you have the experience of seeing your best friend or brother’s descent into relationship madness only because his ego-investments in the Old Set of Books wont permit him to think any other way. They’d rather put a noose around their neck than reconsider their investments in how things ought to be between men and women.
She’s My Everything
We’re going to come back to this question later in this essay, but now I’d like you to have a look at the IM exchange I had a reader make me aware of on Twitter this week. I apologize for the resolution; the tweet was deleted not long after I commented on it and I had to rely on screen captures. What you’re looking at here is an exchange between a very invested Blue Pill guy and the thought process guys like this typically go through when the woman they’ve made their ‘everything’ wants them gone. There’s a lot going on in this and I wanted to parse it out here. When you’re Red Pill aware for any length of time it can sometimes be confusing to see the thought process that Blue Pill conditioning predisposes a guy to. The Red Pill Lens is one of the gifts (and curses) of having unplugged, and internalizing the awareness can make us somewhat confused or jaded to the experiences of guys who are still plugged in and trying to make their blinded understanding of intersexual dynamics work for them.
“Can this guy really not see why this girl wants to get away from him?” From a Red Pill perspective we might think this guy is an idiot for not seeing what he’s doing. It’s plain as day for us so their must be something wrong with him, right? Usually, the only thing wrong is that these guys’ Blue Pill conditioning has limited them to understanding their situations from that old set of books – the rule set that they believe (like a religion) that ‘quality women’ acknowledge and play by too. Lets try to put this jadedness aside for a moment.
[…] I can’t take my mind off of you no matter what I do and yesterday I literally cried for an hour in my room because I didn’t know what to do. I just really need you in my life and it kills me to know that I have messed our relationship up,…
This kid’s (it reads like he’s an adolescent) whole exchange is riddled with self-incrimination. This is an intrinsic part of Blue Pill conditioning – the guy is always at fault in any break up. Even with his now ex’s admission of her own complicity in their split, he’ll have none of it. If a relationship, a marriage, fails it is always because a guy wasn’t invested enough; even if she cheated on him the Blue Pill conditioned mind will only accept his complicity in her looking outside the relationship. I should also add that this is an integral part of the Promise Keepers mentality as well as the ‘Oprah-Marriage Counselor Approved’ notion that “relationships take a lot of work” and it’s always a man’s responsibility to qualify himself for a woman’s intimacy by maintaining that work.
As a result, the Blue Pill mind automatically defaults to self-blame and looks to find ways to negotiate some kind of new work-program that will ‘fix’ the ‘broken’ relationship he somehow caused. Blue Pill conditioned men are still men, and as such they default to the deductive reasoning that we’re largely predisposed to. So in that Blue Pill state it seems like logic to look for solutions that will put the relationship back together again. This is how Blue Pill men’s minds work; they have a set of (Old Books) rules they believe everyone is, or ought to be, playing by and since he also believes the lie of coequal agency (blank-slate) between men and women he thinks a woman’s desire and intimacy can be deductively bargained with.
He realizes his failing and will be sure to correct it. But that’s not how all this works. In fact, it’s this very acknowledgement that only reinforces this woman’s decision to leave him. Hypergamy is rooted in doubt, and it turns out he is as Beta and optionless as her Hypergamous hindbrain suspected. His reaction to her confirms it.
[…] how can you just cut me out of your life so quickly? I want to make things better and work on our relationship because I know what it can be, why don’t you want to work on it?
I’m trying to avoid most of the clingy emotional shit in this exchange. Blue Pill guys will pepper in their emotive state even in the best of times in a relationship, but when they’re facing a break up, that’s when all the stuff he’s been taught about vulnerability being a strength turns into a huge liability for him. Not to mention it disgusts the woman leaving him.
Here we see the standard Blue Pill bewilderment over why this woman he’s deeply invested in can so casually blow him off and move on. Isn’t she playing by the same rulebook he’s been playing by since he learned to dutifully put women as his mental point of origin? I linked my War Brides essay in his quote above because this is the nuts and bolts reason as to how women can, and often do, move on so quickly. It is literally part of women’s preinstalled mental firmware to have the capacity to turn on a dime with their emotions.
Next he makes the Blue Pill appeals to Relational Equity and declares his willingness to ‘work on the relationship’ in order to fix it. In a breakup this ‘work on the relationship’ narrative works against women; particularly if the guy they’re leaving is overly invested in equalism. He’s been taught that “open communication is the key to any healthy relationship®” so he’s confused as to why his coequal ‘soul mate’ wouldn’t want to work on things and patch it up. When things are good the ‘work on things’ narrative is a benefit for women getting the things they want, but when she wants to leave a Blue Pill guy (usually because she wants to open herself to better Hypergamous options) it’s a leash around her neck. Why doesn’t she want to ‘work on the relationship’?
This is really what defines his outlook on this breakup, but he can’t see that it’s what his Blue Pill conditioning has embedded in his ego. He is incapable of interpreting his situation in any other way.
So, yeah, it gets worse. Now we discover that this guy has done exactly what I explained most Blue Pill men do when they define themselves by their ego-investments: the Blue Pill kills their capacity not to just achieve their dreams, but to have dreams or ambitions at all. We have a guy whose dreams center on being the “perfect boyfriend”; the guy who’ll literally do anything to make it work. A ‘good relationship’ is his highest aspiration, so when that woman isn’t playing her part – playing by the ‘do anything to make it work‘ rule set – the response is usually to find fault in himself, because to find fault in his ‘soul mate’ is to question the whole Blue Pill mental apparatus.
But still, she won’t play ball, so there are 3 possibilities: The first and go-to reason is that he must’ve fucked something up somehow. The next is that there’s something wrong with her because she’s not playing by the same rules he was conditioned to believe women play by. And lastly there’s something wrong with his entire ego-invested Blue Pill outlook on the whole rule set. That last one is the most difficult and unlikely conclusion a guy will ever come to.
Out Come the Knives
More often than not this is the stage at which the woman involved begins building her defenses against the attacks her ex Beta boyfriend is lobbing at her in an effort to explain why “working on the relationship” isn’t solving his fear of having to be single (and optionless) again. You’ve got a Blue Pill conditioned guy who believes he’s done everything by the books and is now very confused that his commitment to ‘making it work‘ hasn’t earned him the Relational Equity that any coequal, co-rational, woman should count towards his value to her. Whatever he did that was ‘wrong’ should be paid for by that equity. And anyway, the rules clearly state that open communication and negotiation are what’s expected from her too, right?
Only, that ‘equity’ isn’t protecting him from a Hypergamy that can’t afford for her to spend a minute longer with him. But he doesn’t know this, so, like any deductive Beta he pleads his case and this is what sets off her defensiveness.
Even the sweetest, most unassuming wallflower of a girl has her ego intimately linked with Hypergamy. Optimizing Hypergamy is her Darwinistic prime directive in life. So when just the notion of her being forced to compromise that optimization looks like a possibility she rebels with the intensity of a survival instinct level of self-preservation. There was a time when social controls were expected to buffer the worst exploits women would use to optimize Hypergamy. Arranged marriages, social and religious conventions, peer pressure, etc. were all, in some part, a means to controlling this survival instinct, gut level anxiety – and instituting a degree of control over Hypergamy by men and society.
Today, in our post Sexual Revolution dystopia, the idea that a woman might be personally or socially expected to compromise her Hypergamous stakes in life is met with that reflexive, feral, survival instinct. This is why women bristle at the idea that they might ever need to “settle” on Mr. Good Enough once they reach their sexual market expiration date. It’s like telling their hindbrains that they need to consider spending the rest of their lives invested in children that aren’t as good as they might be had they held out a little longer. Hypergamy bets a woman’s life on a future with a given man, so yes, it’s very muck a survival instinct.
All of this gets compressed into the hostility a woman feels when a ‘lesser man’, one confirmed to be unworthy of that lifetime bet, essentially tells her she wrong for betting on him and then removing her bet. That feral response comes at him full force, but only after she’s absolved her complicity in playing along with his Blue Pill paradigm. She needs to be able to explain to her ego that she did try to ‘let him down easy’ before she ripped off the bandaid in one go. Now he’s “crazy”, “needy”, has “mommy issues” is “insecure” and various other rationales as needed to keep her ego blameless for what she really knew was his dedication to the Blue Pill.
He’s Blue Pill, but He’s Crazy
I’m sure there are men and women alike reading this and thinking, well, this guy is genuinely disturbed. Maybe he’s just an Incel who made good for a while and then his codependency surfaced and she wisely ejected from the relationship. That seems like an obvious take, but I’m going to argue that all Blue Pill conditioned guys are this guy. That life-long conditioning plays on men’s innate Idealism and fosters exactly his way of thinking. When women are your conditioned Mental Point of Origin, rearranging your life to accommodate “working on the relationship” is a natural progression. Getting Zeroed Out is a lot easier when you’re taught to believe that you literally cannot live without a woman.
Finally, we come to the point where this guy – maybe the friend you’ve been trying to unplug before something like this happened – is confronted with staying the course, self-righteously accepting his dumping and clings even more so to his Blue Pill Lens on the world, or he develops some introspect and confronts the idea that his outlook on the set of rules he’s been playing by is not valid. The most common way men find the Red Pill community is via an experience like this. Unfortunately, it often requires a significant life trauma to shake the sleeping man awake, but having your outlook on intersexual dynamics challenged is the only way most men will ever be open to anything contradictory.
When men ask me, “Rollo, my friend, brother, dad, are heading towards something awful, how do I get them to realize they need to unplug?” I have to say wait for the right time. There are some guys who will make this transition on their own and all it might take is your handing him my book and talking about it. There are some guys who will come to it because what they’re doing isn’t bearing fruit in their personal lives and they become Red Pill aware because circumstances pushed them that way. But most men are Betas. Most of them have lived through an extensive conditioning that put them right where this guy is, and most of them will fight you tooth and nail for trying to convince them they were raised the wrong way.
It’s sometimes just easier to ghost on these men, but what do you do when it’s your brother who White Knights at any opportunity in spite of being run through the machine of a Blue Pill social order? My best advice is to wait for your moments. A lot of people will tell you that it’s manipulative to lay the Red Pill on a guy who’s at his most vulnerable, but it requires a stripping away of all the Blue Pill pretense and mind-fuckery to really make a cogent case and unplug the guy.
I would always advise that you stay honest, open and forgiving of the guy. Most likely he’s told you how fucked up or misogynistic your world view is in his White Knighting efforts in the past. It’s like he ridiculed you for thinking you could ‘educate him’. You have to let that go when you make your case for Red Pill awareness. It would be better to ghost him than to be vindictive, gloating or tell him “I toldja so.” Let him tell you you told him so when he thanks you later.
As an aside here I need to draw readers’ attention to just how vulnerable this shit makes Blue Pill, Beta mindset men to the predations of what I call “Success Porn” brokers. One of the most fucked up outcomes of understanding how Blue Pill idealism affect men is the desire to capitalize on this weakness by Purple Pill life-coaching hacks. One in particular is RSD’s (Real Social Dynamics) new “get me a girlfriend game” program that, in my opinion, plays directly on this hopeful Blue Pill “make it work” idealism.
“Life Coaches” see this neediness as a perfect niche to sell Blue Pill dreams back to guys who want to cling to their Blue Pill security blankets in Red Pill awareness. How miraculous would it seem to think you’re Red Pill savvy enough to make all your old Blue Pill dreams – the ones you went through hell to disabuse yourself of – come true. Hacks like this are too happy to ruin your life for you in rekindling that fantasy as long as you buy the premier edition of their “program”. Caveat emptor.