“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.