One thing I’m always asked by guys is “How do I switch from a Beta loser to and Alpha winner?” There’s always a lot involved in how a guy can transition from one state to another and to today’s generation of low SMV men if you don’t have their immediate solution you must be selling snake oil. Most guys want a magic formula. They want a mantra to repeat or a set of steps to follow that will shift them from Beta virgin into Alpha cad.
Well, maybe not ‘cad’. Most guys still cling to their Blue Pill hopes and attempt to see what the Red Pill presents to them as a key to getting to their Dream Girls. As I’ve pointed out countless times, a majority of men’s (80% Beta) only real problem is finding that one girl that fits their sexual strategy as ideal. In The New Polyandry I touched on this a bit; the Blue Pill conditions men to expect the old social contract of monogamy to be his default setting, even if he’s a high SMV man and could actually pursue a non-exclusive sexual strategy.
However, real change takes time. I know that sounds cliché, but part of that change almost always involves some kind of reassessment of one’s life during that process – and that’s always hard for the TL;DR generation. One of the more daunting aspects of unplugging a guy from the Matrix is that the goals he had while he was Blue Pill conditioned and ‘plugged in’ tend to fall away once he’s shifted to a Red Pill aware mentality. The “girl of his dreams” loses her veneer of desirability. The previous goal state that was defined for him by Blue Pill ideals is no longer the end he wished to achieve when he started his transformation. I think this is sometimes the hardest aspect of ‘awakening’ for guys to accept. Anger at oneself for wasting so much time and so much potential for not grasping the truth sooner is part of that process. So too is a sense of helplessness, if not hopelessness, that accompanies the realization that a man might not have what it takes (at the moment) to achieve what he’d like in life in this Red Pill paradigm.
There was a time when I was 21-22 and I first began playing in the Hollywood metal scene of the late 80s that I had one such transformation. By the time I was 20 I’d already been put through the wringer by my cheating ex-girlfriend from high school – who I was sure would be my eventual wife. I was Beta in the extreme, and thoroughly Blue Pill conditioned at that point, but I was going through what I termed the “Break Phase” in the timeline I created in Preventive Medicine.It took me about a year to shift from that mental state to one of making myself my Mental Point of Origin. Once I had – and once I’d decided I wanted to experience sex with hotter women – I found that through trial and error I could direct the path of what my personality would be, and what was going to be acceptable or not. I’d been emancipated from the expectations of being a Nice Guy as Game to essentially not caring what I was supposed to be doing to placate women. I figured out what worked for me.
I finally got into a ‘real band’ at 21. I played clubs every Friday or Saturday night between the ages of 21 and 25. I honestly only left my parents home because it was less convenient to bang a girl I’d met at a club on the weekend. But with that new identity came a new access to sex with women I could only fantasize about in a Hustler or a Penthouse magazine. The pivotal point came when one of my girlfriends (I had a rotation of about 4-5) was a bonafide swimsuit model. I thought I had finally ‘arrived’ at that point because my head was still measuring success by what the 15 year old version of myself thought was ‘it’. She was hotter and more fun in bed than any girl I’d gotten with previously. But my mindset was still mired in my Blue Pill ideals. According to those ideals she was the goal. And she was, until I managed to pull a centerfold who happened to live near me in Southern California. (Ask me about it sometime).
The point I’m making here is that a guy has to reconsider what his conditioning has taught him he should consider success based on the foundation of that conditioning. It wasn’t so much that I’d made myself my Mental Point of Origin, rather it was that I simply wanted to make the most of that time of my life and to do so meant that I needed to change my mind about who I wanted to be. I had transitioned from one personality to another and I liked it. I was rewarded with women’s genuine sexual desire and this served to further reinforce that new me as the genuine me. This begs the question, what is authenticity when it comes to ‘just being yourself’?
Later in my twenties I made the dangerous decision to involve myself with a woman who was clinically, psychologically disturbed. Of course she never wore a t-shirt that said “I’m insane” and I had wound myself up in her neurosis over the course of about four years. You can read the details about this relationship in Borderline Personality Disorder, but one thing I don’t get into in that essay is how I willingly became someone else – fundamentally changing my personality again – in order to solve this girl’s problems because I believed that who I was when we met was so flawed it was causing her neurosis. Now granted, I didn’t understand what I was involving myself in, but my point again is that who I was had shifted, but my core, internalized belief set was still very much informed by my Blue Pill conditioning.
People who ride hard on the Personal Responsibility belief love to think that something so damaging must be self apparent. No one’s really a victim because they should’ve seen it coming – as they believe they would – but the reality is we want to believe that the Blue Pill ideals we’ve been raised with can come true. We want to believe that the ideals we internalized since five years old and on into our adulthood are in fact a possibility. In all my writing I make the case for a need to unplug oneself from the Matrix that is this Blue Pill conditioning. That’s what Red Pill awareness is; an awareness of the false existence we used to live out according to what others – often well meaning others – would like us to believe is true, because they want it to be true for themselves too. When I allowed myself to change my personality for my BPD girlfriend I had no idea that I was even doing so because I wanted to believe that she represented the ideal that the Blue Pill had raised me to think would be possible. A woman who fucked like a pornstar and looked like a swimsuit model and “loved me as much as I loved her”. And this came after I’d already check a swimsuit model and a centerfold off of my bucket list.
Personality is malleable, in fact it’s so malleable we often don’t realize we’re forging a new one. In both of these instances I’ve described that shift in personality was not by my conscious choice. I knew what I wanted to do; even in the worst case scenario with my BPD my shift was prompted because I thought if I changed my personality her own psychosis would resolve itself. My Blue Pill conditioning exacerbated this because it always teaches men that any problem a woman has with a guy is due to his own lack of investment, support, sensitivity or not giving enough of themselves. This is a very damning aspect of the Blue Pill and it’s also one that guys will reinforce in themselves and with other men because they believe their sacrifices are what women appreciate.
Beneath all this was my Blue Pill subroutine manifesting itself. Hell, even when I was on top of my game in the Hollywood clubs I still wanted to find a ‘good girl’ to be my girlfriend. I had changed my personality to succeed in getting what I wanted, but my root programming was still Blue Pill. Many a famous PUA has come to the conundrum of trying to make his Blue Pill idealistic dreams come true because he learned how to reliably ‘get the girl’. Good Game doesn’t make a man Red Pill aware. It’s certainly the gateway to understanding women’s nature and the nature of intersexual dynamics, but killing the Beta is a long term project.
So how do you shift from Beta Nice Guy to Alpha Cad? These are euphemisms usually meant to disparage the whole idea of changing yourself into something better. Most people don’t have it within themselves to even have the insight to think they’d ever want to change their nature. It’s easier to trot out “Just be yourself” when someone has that introspect. People don’t want you to change. Your predictability gives them comfort. You’re an easy element to deal with so they think that if you act in some new way you’re not being authentic. You’re a wannabe, a poseur, and they need you to behave predictably because it gives them a sense of control over you. Others want to pigeonhole you. They want to categorize you into immutable personality types or astrological designations that make them feel better about dealing with you. Again, if they can categorize you, if they can make you believe they know the truth of it, you’re just that much easier to control. Humans have a need to see patterns in their environment. The world is a chaotic place so it comes natural to us to think we can set some kind of willful order on it.
Eventually, after I’d finally torn myself away from my BPD girlfriend I returned to that Alpha personality that had been so successful for me, only this time I had finally realized that I needed to make myself my Mental Point of Origin. I looked back on all the women I’d applied the Blue Pill set of rules, ideals, hopes and dreams with. I was 26 and had nothing to show for all the potential that people kept telling me I had. I had done everything according to the old set of books; I was supportive, kind, sensitive, uplifting and empowering to every woman I’d been in a relationship with because I thought that was what would make me desirable. But as I looked back on all of that I realized I had done so at the expense of myself – at the expense of my potential. That sacrifice will alwayslead a man to his own destruction. I thank God it didn’t lead to my own.
It was at this point in my life that I realized that I had to unfuck my life and that meant a radical reimagining of who I wanted to be going forward. I get asked a lot about how I became unplugged and my usual answer is that it was a gradual process. This is true, but it was at this point I had to reject all the lies and idealistic fantasies that I’d been raised to believe in; to invest my ego in. I made a point to spell out to guys in A New Hope that you will never achieve Blue Pill ideals with Red Pill awareness and this is where that comes from. Unplugging, killing the Beta, reinventing who you are is not only possible for you, but it’s necessary to sustain you in a life of your own imagining. This doesn’t happen just by reading a book or going to a seminar, ultimately you have to live it and internalize that new you. You have to do this in spite of friends who want you to be ‘authentic’ and stay the old you so you’ll be comfortable to them.
All of this takes time, persistence and introspection, but it starts with an act of will on your part. You will only get what you have gotten if you keep doing what you have done. I can teach you Game. I can teach you the habits that would make others believe you’re a self-sufficient Alpha success, but only you can change your authentic personality. This is where a lot of guys lose the trail when it comes to being Red Pill aware. They read my books, they open their eyes, but they don’t know what to do with the information. Rich Cooper once told me that reading The Rational Male was like drinking from a firehose. There’s a lot to digest and a lot to confront with regards to how that information shows you, convicts you, of how you lived your life up to this point. But what do you do with it? Knowing is half the battle, the other half is action. The other half is implementing that knowledge to your own advantage.
Ever since I started writing I’ve always referred to myself as a Lesser Alpha. Some people think that’s self-deprecating, others think I’m just a married Beta with delusions of Alpha. Whatever. Either way, I’m a guy who took this knowledge and applied it to serve my own best interests and forge a truly authentic personality based on what I understand of what we call the Red Pill. I created a me of my own volition based on a realistic understanding of intersexual dynamics, but also of a better understanding of myself in that Red Pill paradigm as a result of it.
So, who is the real you? Who decides what your real personality is and what is authentic for you? What is the estimate that your personality is based on? I get sick of hearing women and men talk about finding themselves. Women love the idea of a journey of self discovery. This is a fantasy of Blue Pill idealism meant to, again, keep one in a state of helplessness and hypoagency. Women use this garbage as a convenient rationale meant to excuse their past bad decisions.
Red Pill men don’t find themselves, they build themselves.
They forge themselves into a creation of their own choosing based on realistic assessments of themselves, their conditions and the world that challenges them not to build himself. I wrote this essay to encourage you, but also to warn you that this building takes time, and you will meet all manner of resistance to the masculine project that is you.