suicide

A Sense of Ownership

When I was studying behavioral psychology there was a point when I came across this phenomenon called the Endowment Effect. A friend showed me this video recently and it reminded me of when I’d studied it.

It’s really fascinating how early our sense of ownership develops. There is a school of thought (one I happen to agree with) that this need for ownership is an innate part of out psychological firmware – it’s something we’re born with. We value things more highly once we believe we own something. It makes perfect sense that this would a selected-for part of our evolution. Individuals that possessed this Endowment Effect, theoretically, might have been more adaptable to their surroundings by having something on hand that would aid in their survival at the cost of a competitor. For early man this was likely to be physical tools, but this Endowment Effect would also extend to our progeny and long-term female partners – more on this later.

By extension, our belongings literally become a part of us. This is observable even on a neurological level. Furthermore, our belongings have an essence that becomes unique to us. In other words, we wont settle for (even exact) imitations of our stuff even when they are exact duplicates.

As you might expect from a TED video, the bias towards making this ownership dynamic one of being a bug, rather of a feature, of human development is evident. The new-agey narrative goes like this – if we’re ever to reach the utopian state of egalitarian equalism the Village would have us believe in, we need to somehow unlearn this innate Endowment Effect we evolved to hold. This anti-materialist sentiment is part of a larger socialist/collectivist message that seeks to disempower us by convincing us that this connection to our things is innately bad. Issues of socialism, communism, collectivism, capitalism, etc. are beyond the scope of this blog, but it’s important to consider the drive behind this ‘anti-materialism’ push and how it affects our sense of ownership in intersexual dynamics.

I think it’s interesting that we have a part of our psyches that evolved for ownership; a part of our nature that is decidedly unegalitarian.

If you’re ever read Dawkin’s book, The Selfish Gene, you kind of get a clearer picture of it. Selfish, self-concerned, organisms tend to survive better than overly altruistic or egalitarian ones. Now before you tell me, “On no Rollo, Bonobos are the peacenik, free loving hippy example of egalitarianism in the wild” have a read of The Naked Bonobo and you’ll understand how deliberately false that impression is. If anything Bonobos are far better examples of the more visceral side of Hypergamy in humans. Self-interest is the driver of a great many survival instincts and adaptations in all animals.

Getting back to humans here, combine that evolved, adaptive, selfishness with a hindbrain level, intrinsic sense for ownership – one in which we feel as if it has a direct connection to ourselves – and you can see what social constructivists and equalitarians are trying to undo in humans. If you watch today’s video you’ll better understand this deep connection we have with the things we, selfishly, consider our own. There is a neurological connection between our sense of self and our things.

I’ve mentioned the concept of ego-investment in our belief systems many times throughout my past essays. Briefly, ego-investment is phenomenon of being so intrinsically connected with our beliefs and ideologies that they become part of our personalities. So, to attack the belief is to, literally, attack the person. In a similar fashion the connections we apply to our things also become (to varying degrees) part of who we are. In essence we invest our egos into the things we consider ours – and the greater the effort, cost or the applied significance involved in getting those things the greater the injury is to the self when they are lost, destroyed, damaged or stolen.

In the video there is also a mention of how original items are more valued than an exact copy of those items. Again, this is part of the evolutionary side of humans investing their egos into those things. There is a limbic level need to know that these items are our things because only those things somehow contain the essence of us. Also in the video it’s postulated that the higher price of common items owned by celebrities we admire are a cost we’re willing to pay because we believe part of that celebrity’s essence is somehow contained in that item.

Why is it that we evolved to place such importance in knowing that some thing is ours, and only that thing is ours? Why do we, sometimes obsessively, need to imbue that thing with the essence of us? Why is this (apparently) part of our evolved mental firmware?

The Need to Know

I’m going to speculate here a bit. I think a strong argument can be made for men’s intrinsic need to verify his own paternity being linked to the Endowment Effect. In fact, I’d suggest that this ownership need can extend to not only a man’s children, but also to the women (even potential women) in his life. This isn’t to say women didn’t also evolve this sense – women display the Endowment Effect as much as men – but I’m going to approach this from the male side for the moment.

The video refers to this compulsive need to verify the authenticity of a thing as ‘magical thinking’, but is it really so magical? I think the writer and researcher would have us think this dynamic is silly because it’s ‘just a thing’ right? We shouldn’t place such a high degree of importance on a bicycle or an old guitar. That’s just vulgar materialism, right? Granted, some things, heirlooms maybe, can have sentimental value, but ultimately even those might well be replaceable too. It shouldn’t be so important to know something is magically your own.

Unless the thing that’s your own is your only shot at passing something of yourself into the future.

The butter knife that Elvis used to spread peanut butter on his peanut butter and banana sandwiches could be anything you can find at Walmart, but if his ‘essence‘ was in someway invested in that knife (and anyone cared to know about it) that part of Elvis might go on into perpetuity. That seems like childish magical thinking until you realize that the only part of the average person’s essence that might actually do this is their children. And until just recently, evolutionarily speaking, there wasn’t any completely dependable way to know if a man was 100% invested in his own ‘things’ – his progeny. His kids would carry on his essence, so in our evolved past it made sense to be obsessive-compulsive about the things that we’re one’s own.

As I stated, women also exhibit this effect as well, and I’d argue for much of the same reasons. Though, in none of the research related in this video was this Endowment Effect controlled for by sex – at least none that I’m aware of. Again, this is conjecture, but I would think that with the intrinsic certainty a woman has in knowing a child is her own, and the collectivist communal nature of women in hunter-gatherer society from which we developed, it might be that women place a higher ‘endowed’ value on different things than men do. I think this effect may be more pronounced in an era where women are almost unilaterally in control of Hypergamy.

I recently saw a video of a fertility doctor who had either used his own sperm to fertilize women’s eggs, or completely random samples to father about 40 children. The women, the children (mostly female) were absolutely aghast that he was their father or some donor who they would never know had contributed to half their DNA. The idea that the selection and control of Hypergamy was taken from them was worthy of the death penalty. Yet this is exactly the control we expect men to relinquish in this age. We will pat men on the back for abandoning their evolved instinct to ascertain paternity. We’ll tell a man he’s a hero for wifing up a single mother and “stepping up to be a father” to a child he didn’t sire and at the same time pretend that father’s are superfluous. We’ll change ‘Father’s Day’ to ‘Special Person’s Day’ and tell men they’re insecure in their masculinity for preferring a son or daughter of his own – but try to remove that control from a woman, try to tell her that Hypergamous choice wasn’t hers to make and it’s tantamount to rape.

“She was never yours, it was just your turn.”

I think it was my fellow Red Man Group friend Donovan Sharpe who coined this phrase. I might be wrong. I’ve read this around the usual Red Pill Reddit subs and other manosphere forums, but it wasn’t until last month (July) when I read yet one more story about a husband whose wife was leaving him and was in the process of Zeroing him out when he decided to kill her, their three kids and then himself. You can read the Twitter reaction to this here:

Naturally women were appalled at the deaths of the wife and kids, as they should be. Pre-divorce women will prep months in advance for their new singleness. Often they’ll check out of the marriage and live without any real connection to their, usually Beta, Blue Pill conditioned, husband who languishes in this Blue Pill hell for the duration it takes his wife to establish a new mental persona and finds a way to exit the marriage. She’s already gone from the marriage, but the typical Blue Pill husband believes that he is the source of her discontent and resorts to anything he can to ‘keep things fresh’ or ‘rekindle the old flame’ that a feminine-primary popular culture tells him should be his responsibility. Unfortunately, this guy’s situation is typical of middle aged men today, and I honestly believe is the source that drives suicides and murder-suicides in this demographic. This man was going to be Zeroed Out and he knew it was coming.

That’s when I thought, ‘Was this guy’s turn with her just over?’ Was it as simple as that? If you read this couple’s story there wasn’t a history of him losing his mind. If anything Matthew Edwards was a pretty dedicated and invested father. No history of depression, suicidal tendencies or abuse; just another average frustrated chump who built a life for himself likely based on his Blue Pill conditioning.

But his turn was over and he likely believed the soul-mate myth. How was he supposed to live with out her?

The fem-stream media offers up their standard pablum – “Misogynistic society teaches men that they’re entitled to women’s bodies. Men need to be taught that they don’t own women.” or something similar that goes entirely against a man’s evolved Endowment Effect. What exactly does a man get to think is his own if not his family? When a woman finds out that her Hypergamous choice was made for her by a fertility clinic doctor rather than herself they’re out for blood – again, rightfully so. Then why are we surprised that men, particularly men in Matthew Edwards demographic, resort to murder and suicide when faced with losing everything they’ve invested themselves in.

Now this week we see another, almost identical, tragedy in Colorado this week.

And once again we have what looks like another guy being Zeroed out and another quadruple homicide. How man more of these murder-suicides (or just murders in this case) is it going to take before we collectively see the commonalities in all of them?

I had a conversation with several women in the wake of this latest tragedy and every one of them couldn’t wrap their head around why the guy would kill his kids? They could understand why he might kill his wife – the assumption being her unborn child was sired by guy who wasn’t him – but not his kids. I think this is interesting in the light of how men and women approach paternity/maternity and the Endowment Effect. The best answer I could come up with is that a man doesn’t want that part of him to go on into the future without him. The idea that his kids bear some of his essence and he would rather erase that essence entirely than live or kill himself with the knowledge that his children wouldn’t have him in their lives. Killing a wife might be the result of an uncontrolled rage, but killing your kids takes premeditation – there has to be some point to the act, some reasoning (corrupted as it may be) that made sense to him.

The Strategic Pluralism Theory is from a research study by Dr. Martie Haselton:

According to strategic pluralism theory (Gangestad & Simpson, 2000), men have evolved to pursue reproductive strategies that are contingent on their value on the mating market. More attractive men accrue reproductive benefits from spending more time seeking multiple mating partners and relatively less time investing in offspring. In contrast, the reproductive effort of less attractive men, who do not have the same mating opportunities, is better allocated to investing heavily in their mates and offspring and spending relatively less time seeking additional mates.

From a woman’s perspective, the ideal is to attract a partner who confers both long-term investment benefits and genetic benefits. Not all women, however, will be able to attract long-term investing mates who also display heritable fitness cues. Consequently, women face trade-offs in choosing mates because they may be forced to choose between males displaying fitness indicators or those who will assist in offspring care and be good long-term mates (Gangestad & Simpson, 2000).

The commonalities in every one of these murder-suicides is a Blue Pill conditioned, Beta husband who by all indications was playing by the First Set of Books. By all indications these men would fit into the second type of man mention in Strategic Pluralism Theory – they did everything right, they played by the rules, they did their best to invest themselves in their mates and offspring and likely believed they’d earned some Relational Equity from it. But then, their turn was over with their wives. For whatever reason they were faced with a complete loss, a Zeroing Out, of everything they believed they owned. The things they invested so much of their lives in, the things they worked so hard for, the things that retained his ‘essence’, the things they invested their egos in were all being taken away from them. When faced with such a reality men tend to look at only two options; remake and rebuild what they had in the knowledge that this too might be taken from them, or they can simply erase all themselves and all the ‘things’ they were attached too.

Big Fish

It’s likely readers here have been following my twitter threads about the Anthony Bourdain suicide and I’ve been discussing the particulars about his death on Pat Campbell’s show and the Red Man Group for almost 2 weeks now. As readers know I’ve personally dealt with two suicides under circumstances  like this and I’ve picked apart dozens more over the years I’ve been writing. I’ve got a pretty good idea why old Beta guys off themselves.

But the Beta part is only one aspect of the story. Anthony being a ‘paper alpha’ is certainly an aspect too, but the more I dig into the background of the “love of his life”, Asia Argento, the more the puzzle pieces fit together. This bitch was a piece of work. If you watched the Red Man Group last Saturday I explained why I don’t think she was a BPD case (borderline personality disorder), but after reading this thread I’m beginning to change my mind:

So, she’s a witch. A literal witch, and all of her ‘sisterhood’ are witches are too. You can digest that however you feel is necessary, but this is a 42 year old woman who practices literal witchcraft – which is an extension of feminism with a pagan spiritual  woo woo magical thinking whipped into the mix. I really need to do a more expansive post on Chick Crack soon.

But, even this isn’t what I want to confront you with. What I want to raise your awareness to is something I’ve never really had an occasion to explore until now; Anthony Bourdain was a very big fish.

Anthony Bourdain (AB) was a long term, life-long, Beta. He was every bit of what I call a ‘terminal Beta‘. Yes, he had the Bad Boy thing working for him and if you want to get a more complete idea about his past Black Label Logic has a great piece on his blog you really ought to read. But, with respect to Bourdain’s understanding of intersexual dynamics he was very much a Beta.

People immediately gave me shit for naming him such. That was expected. He’s Anthony-fucking-Bourdain and I’m just some “half-assed self-published Red Pill writer, what the fuck do I know, right?” Well, I knew enough to recognize the profile of a Contextual Alpha who’d been plugged into his Blue Pill conditioning for 61 years and the huge mark he put on himself by being so publicly co-dependent on the idea of the soul mate myth. Anthony had been through 2 wives. The most recent one cheated on him with her MMA fighter / personal trainer he no doubt was paying to “train” his soon-to-be ex wife. I have no doubt AB would’ve attempted to lock down Asia Argento because this is what overly possessive, perpetually mate guarding Beta men do when a woman approaches his “dream girl” ideal. His social media was rife with declarations about how happy he was to have finally met his ‘kindred spirit’ soul mate (and self-avowed Wiccan) Asia Argento. AB sincerely believed his ship had come in. The woman who would finally complete him (this time) was at last in his life.

In every Instagram image, every Tweet, AB was gushing about how he’d never been happier as he cuddled with Asia like a boy who loves his mother. Intermixed with these images were many others with him in classic possessive-Beta encroaching posture – interposing arms like an affectionate headlock, while she looked away wistfully, or directly at the camera with the look of a woman who knows the Beta she’s with is deadweight to her Hypergamy.

Big Fish and the Cookie Lady

There is a larger dynamic at play in all this, one I probably could add an addendum to in my second book, Preventive Medicine. An aging Beta male, and particularly one with a notable amount of money, success, fame or status is a big fish for a necessitous woman. A woman who’s long practiced in using her sexual agency to its best advantage with men knows a prime target in an older man who’s never unplugged himself from his Blue Pill conditioning. Bourdain was one such big fish, and his Blue Pill conditioning, his eager white knighting and immediate deference to the feminine, his soul mate idealism would’ve been instantly recognizable to a 42 year old woman long accustomed to being the center of orbit for many a prior Beta.

I don’t want to call it an epidemic, but there is a set of women who look for aging men with resources to befriend and pretend they have a genuine interest in. Men with even moderate means and a Blue Pill conditioned idealism that ‘love springs eternal’ are prime targets for women who can read and assess that man’s state from years of practice. A woman who shows interest in a man who’s been starved for affection, sex and a real connection with a woman (married or not) will seem like more than an oasis in the desert. She’ll appeal to his romantic, idealistic Beta soul; a last chance at ‘true happiness’, a true miracle, as he enters his old age.

My own father was one such target for a woman we called the ‘cookie lady’.

My dad passed away from complications of Alzheimer’s/dementia before he was 72, but before his dementia had really become apparent the ‘cookie lady’ had already made a mark of my dad. My father was also what I’ve called a terminal Beta. He never unplugged to his dying day and lived a life based on the old set of books, being a good provider, dutiful, responsible and he was perpetually disappointed by the women in his life never reciprocating with their intimacy and appreciation the ‘rules’ clearly stated should happen. They never loved him in the way he thought women ought to be capable of loving him. Nevertheless, dad always clung to the (noble?) belief that if he saved his pennies and was of the highest service to women that eventually, one day, his efforts and quality would be appreciated by the right woman. He was a good example of the Savior Schema.

The ‘cookie lady’ understood all of this – all of dad’s Blue Pill conditioning, the way he thought the world and women should work, the old social contract investments, his idealism about women, everything – all of it in less than a week. She really wasn’t all that different from my step-mother in that respect, but at this late in the game, at her age, and noticing the subtle hints of cognitive degeneration in dad, the stakes were much higher for her long term security. I should also add that I would include my own mother in this schema; she’s a lovable loon, but she knew a good opportunity for security back in the 60s, so it may be my father had a knack for attracting this type of woman due to his Blue Pill idealism.

The reason we called this woman the ‘cookie lady’ was because she always brought my dad fresh baked cookies when she was trying to play into his Blue Pill end-of-life last ditch hope for happiness. We never knew her real name and if it hadn’t been for my dad getting very upset with us for preventing him from rewriting the ‘cookie lady’ into his will and power of attorney within the first month of her ‘dropping by’ we may very well have been suckered into her scam too.

Respect Your Elders

It was this incident that opened up a whole new understanding of the Red Pill and intersexual dynamics for me. I think it may be important going forward in Red Pill awareness to consider how intersexual dynamics and the Feminine Imperative affect generations of older men. My brother and I had to really watch out for similar scams to take advantage of my dad’s condition and his Blue Pill mindset that was making him a target. It wasn’t until this incident that I did a bit of research to find out how common this scam really is. In a sense it’s one more angle on the ‘stripper effect’ for younger, desperate, men for whom the feigned attention of the stripper, the kino, the deferent concern, is more seductive than her sexuality. It feeds a deeper emptiness. In a young man, in an Incel, just the possibility for that connection can become an obsession. For an older man, who’s been starved of the same (in or out of marriage) for the better part of his life, it seems like a storybook ending all his Blue Pill conditioning told him was possible. And what would a man like that give for on last shot at that idealistic ‘love’?

When Will We Face the Facts about Suicide in Older Men?

The instance of elderly men’s suicide is something not too many people want to talk about. Much of what I’ve read about it throws out a lot of feminist boilerplate about how old masculine ideals are to blame, but as expected, it uses this ‘toxic’ masculinity narrative to cover the uglier truths. Most men are Betas. Most men spend their lives wondering why all the Blue Pill hopes they sincerely believe are possible just don’t happen for them. They blame themselves, or they blame others, but they never really unplug because their existence was centered on the certainty that Blue Pill dreams come true if they can just work on the relationship harder or they made more money or if they’d only met a more perfect ‘soul mate’ in the story that is their life.

Anthony Bourdain fit this profile to the letter. And while it may not have been Asia Argento’s conscious, forethought purpose to gravy-train him, his Blue Pill, Beta, perspective had to have been apparent to her. On some level of consciousness she knew he had the capacity for self-harm as an extension of this. It’s exactly why she pleaded to the paparazzi who photographed her on the streets of Rome with her far more Alpha lover Hugo Clement, not to publish the photos. For all the guilty foreshadowing from Rose McGowan trying to convince the public who adored Bourdain about their “relationship without borders”, the truth is deathly apparent that Bourdain’s idealism believed otherwise.

Asia Argento didn’t kill Anthony Bourdain, but in what she represented to his Blue Pill mind, her actions were the catalyst that prompted his suicide. Yes, he was depressed. Yes, maybe he was on Chantix (we’ll never know now that his body was cremated unceremoniously, without a toxicology screening and against his family’s wishes). Yes, he was a hard drinker, drug addict and had suicidal thoughts before (after his 2nd divorce), but he killed himself 3 days after the pictures of his “soul mate” and Hugo Clement were published.

I think the bigger lesson here is a wake up call for older men who are still plugged into the Blue Pill Matrix as well as those who’ve become Red Pill aware much later in life. I’m of the opinion that it’s never too late to unplug and live a Red Pill aware life, but I will concede it’s a lot to lay on a guy who’s lived most of his life plugged in. Looking back on decision after decision influenced by a Blue Pill conditioning, influenced by a set of rules you believed others were playing by and then seeing the results of those decisions and wreckage that followed. It’s one thing to be “awakened while married” when you’re in your early 40s, but it’s quite another to realize Red Pill truths when you’re 70 and maybe have another good 10 years to live if you took care of yourself. That’s a rough realization.

In Positive Masculinity I stressed the importance of Red Pill aware men being mentors for boys and younger men and helping to raise them out of the influences of the Feminine Imperative’s Village, but I think it’s going to be important to mentor and protect the interests of older men as they age in a Blue Pill mindset and become Red Pill aware.

Zeroed Out

Last week I introduced a new concept in what most men can expect at some point in their lives. This is the idea of being Zeroed Out – basically men having most of a lifetime of status, financial equity, reputation, professional & educational growth, emotional investment and other metrics of men’s life equity being erased. I wanted to detail this a bit more here now as I think much of this concept gets easily misconstrued for men.

I think it ought to be part of any Red Pill aware man’s understanding that at many points in our lives we will be confronted with the prospects of having to rebuild ourselves. Failure, rejection and disappointment will happen for you, that’s just part of a man’s life, and it’s easy to rattle off platitudes about how many times you get back up being the measure of a man. But what I’m saying is there will be times when total reconstruction of your life will be a necessity.

You will be zeroed out at some point, and how you handle this is a much different situation than any temporary setback. This zeroing out is made all the more difficult when you confront the fact that what you believed to be so valuable, the equity you were told was what others would measure you by, was all part of your Blue Pill conditioning. At that point you need to understand that there is most definitely a hope for a better remake of yourself based on truths that were learned in the hardest way.

As I mentioned last week, it’s really easy to think of this as male victimhood or that a guy is complaining about his lot in life. Empathy, especially amongst men, has always been in short supply. I’ve learned the hard way never to bring up how sick I am, how bad my job is or how little sleep I got the night before in the company of 3 or more men – because I guarantee you that one has cancer, the other works in raw sewage and the last one’s an incurable insomniac. As men, our masculinity has classically been about how well we accept and adapt to adversity, so like I said, just mentioning a guy would be Zeroed Out at some stage in his life sounds like I’m saying “menz gots it so tough”. We’re supposed to take it on the chin and come back for more.

Guys will even get competitive with each other about how hard they’ve had it and how well they adapted to a bad situation. Others just don’t want to hear about another guy’s misfortunes, and others still will just say that men are living their lives wrong if a he bases his sense of self on the opinions of others – and women in particular.

The first two are simple to address. Men are in a general state of competition with each other even if this is only ever recognized as something going on in the social background. It doesn’t necessarily have to be vicious competition; even friendly rivalries are still rivalries.

It stands to reason that men will certainly be sympathetic with one another depending on circumstance, but that competitive nature is still something winners and losers instinctually understand. Out-group men will understand this state much more distinctly than in-group men (kin affiliation is an evolved survival adaptation), but even within that in-group there will still exist male dominance hierarchies. How those hierarchies are established is contextual to societal and environmental influences, but that they exist at all is often something our feminine-primary social order would like men to sweep under the carpet for themselves.

Qualifying Value

Competition is one thing, however, the idea that a man might base his life’s expectations, and his metric of success or failure, on external qualifiers is something I’d like to explore here. Social influences, family influences and men’s (often conditioned) subconscious understanding of how he can best effect intimacy and reproduction with women according to what he perceives are their expectations of him is a point of contention. If men feel Zeroed Out at various points in life, is that ‘zeroing’ just the effect of a man having built his personal integrity and equity on a foundation of Blue Pill sand?

MGTOWs are invited to correct me here, but as I understand it, this is a primary tenet of men going their own way – a rejection of women’s qualifying men’s personal worth based on their Hypergamous standards. I get that, but I would argue that there’s more to a man’s sense of self-worth than any qualifier womankind might place on him.

It’s no secret that Red Pill aware men need to understand the Game that they’re a part of and should indeed reestimate their personal worth based on this cutting away of oneself from their prior Blue Pill deceptions. This is why I believe every man who unplugs himself from his old ideals is, by order of degree, going his own way, but where he decides to go with it and how he decides to create value in himself according his new understanding is what’s at issue. Even in creating and building a new sense of self-worth there is still the potential of men becoming subject to losing that value irrespective of how he believes it should be measured.

I can imagine that whether or not a divorced man is ‘woke’ and living by his own terms, losing custody of and influence in the lives of his children can be something of a zeroing out for him. There are aspects of what we hold as our own personal worth that can be zeroed out no matter by what metric we think we should be evaluating it by. As I’ve always said, a woman should only ever be a complement to a man’s life, never the focus of it, but regardless, we still have intrinsic value that can be erased and it doesn’t alter the fact that women, family, career peers, etc. will be affected by it.

That said, it’s just an easy cop out to just say “Well, what you thought should be valued by others really isn’t, and because you thought it was, when you lose it you lose everything.”

III. You shall make your mission, not your woman, your priority

Forget all those romantic cliches of the leading man proclaiming his undying love for the woman who completes him. Despite whatever protestations to the contrary, women do not want to be “The One” or the center of a man’s existence. They in fact want to subordinate themselves to a worthy man’s life purpose, to help him achieve that purpose with their feminine support, and to follow the path he lays out. You must respect a woman’s integrity and not lie to her that she is “your everything”. She is not your everything, and if she is, she will soon not be anymore.

This is the third commandment from Roissy’s 16 Commandments of Poon. It has relevance here because it’s illustrative of how a majority of men think about prioritizing what metric to build their personal equity on. As Red Pill aware men it’s too easy to get upset at plugged in men who are blind to some of the simplest Red Pill principles. It’s easy to lose sight of the fact that most men are still Blue Pill and will fight you just for suggesting they might be wrong about the reality they find themselves in. They need that comfort even if they fail to see it will potentially be their undoing.

More importantly, we need to remember that the suicide rates I quoted in last week’s essay are based on men who built their own personal value on what their Blue Pill conditioning embedded into their psyches for a lifetime. That’s what we’re up against, and until more men come to unplugging this sad fact will continue. This is the gravity we’re faced with as Red Pill aware men trying to help other guys unplug. It’s not just about how a guy can get himself laid better; it might be about saving his life.

As I was saying in the last post, my brother in-law killed himself because he was convinced for a lifetime that by sacrificing every ambition and ‘doing the right thing’ he would be appreciated for it all. The Blue Pill quite literally killed him. He was convinced that he couldn’t live without his ONEitis of whom he’d made the “center of his existence”. Remove that center and he ceased to exist. Tragically though, his was only one story that mirrored countless more men’s. We live in a very dangerous age for men. The Blue Pill is even more of a liability today than it was in times past, because we live in an era that encourages men going all-in in their life’s investment in that conditioning.

Seeing that men build their sense of self-worth on this false ideology is obvious. And yes, we should make ourselves our own Mental Point of Origin, but more important is realizing that our lives depend on Killing the Beta and discarding the idealistic hope that our personal equity ought to be measured by a Blue Pill metric. One reason I take umbrage with Purple Pill hack ‘life coaches’ is because this is the dangerous value system they can never let go of and encourage other men to readopt.

Men will find themselves Zeroed Out at various stages of their lives, but if those guys are still mired in a belief set that the Blue Pill has convinced him is the only legitimate way of valuing himself he’s positioned to become another suicide statistic. And the real tragedy is that its this false evaluation that will lead most men to it – all the while he hears ‘atta boys’ and positivity thinking mantras from others who really don’t know what else to say.

Men and Suicide

Before I launch in here today I need to confess that this post has been in my drafts folder for a while now. As most of my readers are aware I’ve known two personal friends who’ve taken their own lives as a result of having their Blue Pill conditioned beliefs set them on a path to self destruction. One of the more important parts of my charter when I started writing was to reach the men who were at their wits’ end in figuring out how to deal with their personal, romantic or married lives that had until then been directed by what their Blue Pill acculturation and their understanding of intersexual dynamics were molded to be. Since I started and stopped and then restarted this topic again there have been a few recent developments in my perspective on men taking their own lives as a result of the Blue Pill’s influence on them.

All of this really began about two months ago while I was engaging in a debate (or what passes for debate) on Twitter with a very unsympathetic woman who thought she’d set me straight about why it is men choose to take their own lives at a far greater rate than women. As it stands today, men are statistically between 4 and 5 times more likely than women to kill themselves. For most Red Pill aware men this is a fairly well known stat and one that gets quoted often enough when women trot out their own stats about abuse or whatever issue they think it is that MRA are ‘confused’ about. They usually get owned when this sort of back and forth goes down, but I’m always drawn to the comparative issues women think are equitable to that of men losing their lives.

Men’s disposability is also nothing new to the manosphere. Sperm is cheap, eggs are scarce and men are expected to sacrifice their lives for the security and betterment of women even in the most patriarchal of prior social orders. It’s always interesting to me that issues of mandatory male conscription into the military (potential death) and the unignorable high male suicide rates are something women still won’t accept as being a pretty raw deal for men. Women’s innate solipsism will still compel women to find some “yeah, but;…” rationalization for men’s disposability. Whenever I bring something like this up the reflexive presumption is that I’m bemoaning men’s victim status for being disposable. However, it’s impossible to discuss male disposability without such a connotation. My issues isn’t one of seeking some equitable disposability for women, but rather it’s drawing attention to the way women react and rationalize away their own part in that disposability.

True Powerlessness

I covered a lot of this in Chivalry vs. Altruism, so I won’t belabor that here, but I will point out the inherent power imbalance in this disposability. I’ve stated in the past that true power is not the control we can exert over the lives of others, but rather the extent to which we have control over the direction of our own lives. When we discuss issues of power between men and women the real, ultimate, loss of that control is in the context of our deaths.

There is no greater powerlessness for men than a lack of control over our own disposability.

Again, this isn’t some cry of victimhood for men – I happen to believe there’s an evolved component in the male psychological firmware that actually predisposes us to sacrificing ourselves in lieu of the security of our women and children. That’s not so much altruism as it is an inborn subroutine for protecting women that triggers in life-threatening situations. When a mass shooter opens fire indiscriminately at a crowd of people it is the men, not the women, who instinctively put their bodies between that gun and women or children, even the one’s they don’t personally know.

In the bigger scope of things, men will always be more disposable than women, and on some level of consciousness women’s hindbrains instinctively understand this. As such, women’s conscious process must find ways to reconcile this understanding in order for them to move on from men’s sacrifices. Sometimes this can manifest in the War Brides phenomenon, but I would argue that in today’s social learning environment of mass media, instant gratification of women’ solipsism and feminine-primary social order, this reconciliation takes some even uglier turns. Today, women have become very efficient in consoling each other’s solipsistic rationalizing of men’s sacrifices. In this environment of default female victimization and presumed oppression even men’s ultimate sacrifice, men’s ultimate powerlessness in their own deaths, cannot ever be consciously or unconsciously acknowledged in a state of fempowerment.

While I had this debate it occurred to me that even men’s suicides could never be attributed to anything less than their own ‘male egos’ by women, thus making them victims of their conditioning into “toxic” masculinity. Essentially, women were arguing that men would put a noose around their necks because they were socially conditioned to do so. Their suicide rate was attributable to their self-pity and inability to be ‘real men’ as some nebulous toxic masculinity had predefined for them. I thought this was kind of ironic when you compare this reasoning to the narrative shift away from ‘toxic’ masculinity to masculinity itself is toxic. This is really a stupid argument when you consider that it’s just another social convention used to absolve women of the guilt associated with men’s sacrifices. Men are hardwired for self sacrifice, but likewise women had need to evolved psychological adaptations to help them clear the red from their life’s ledger in this respect.

So, in the end, it helps if women can fall back on social conventions that put the associated guilt of men’s sacrifices back on the men themselves. Chivalry and traditional masculinity are fine when they serve the Feminine Imperative, but if a man actually gets killed or kills himself as part of that, well, that’s on him then. And this is what I was beginning with in this debate; there will always be a desire for absolution of women’s guilt or complicity in the deaths of men. I should also add that in terms of war and men being drafted women regularly default to the same asinine presumption that if women were running the world that there would be no wars. I won’t dignify that with any deeper analysis than to say that this too is one more (feeble) way of looking for absolution in the sacrifices men make to facilitate women’s reality.

Suicide Solution

That still left the question, why do men take their own lives in such alarmingly high numbers compared to women? I had to do a bit of research on this, but the demographics for male suicide today show some patterns. 7 in 10 suicides are men (majority white) between the ages of 45 and 65. As expected from gynocentric media, the primary reason always cited is men’s so called stubbornness in seeking out psychiatric help before they attempt suicide – again absolving women’s influence of any complicity – but ignoring what would motivate men, and this demographic in particular, to suicide. Again, there’s no attempt to understand the underlying reasons for male suicide, only a stereotypically easy ‘male-stupid’ answer to absolve women’s complicity in it.

There’s a lot to consider and be sensitive of when it comes to male suicide, but I’m going to speculate about a few reasons here coming from a Red Pill perspective. At no other time in western history has there ever been a generation of more purposeless men. From an evolved psychological perspective, men need a function. We are innate idealists. We look outward at the world and like to imagine what could be possible. I believe there is also an innate part of our evolved mental firmware that predisposes us to problem solving and improvisation, and much of that comes as an adaptation to women’s own innate need for men who can display cues of competency.

In Competency I made the case for women’s attraction to men displaying signals of competency, confidence, mastery and creative intelligence as a selected-for survival adaptation. In short, our competency in life, whether stemming from physical prowess, social dominance or creative intelligence is integrally linked with our reproductive success as well as overall life success.

However, at no other time in history has men’s competency been so devalued and so debased; other than perhaps in terms of physical prowess and accommodating the short term (Alpha Fucks) breeding imperatives of women. At no other time in (western) history has the equity in what a man can provide or create or solve been so implicitly unnecessary or superfluous to women. When we consider the rates of college enrollment and graduation of women compared to that of men, when we consider the practical problems that men used to solve, our utility has never been less needed – or at least that’s the zeitgeist of today.

We read about how men need to accept this new social reality – that our need for purpose and function is no longer needed or as valued – and we need to change our headspace about it as if it were something men might simply turn off. This is the result of equalist beliefs that anything gender-specific is something learned rather than the innate firmware we were born with. But we cannot simply change our minds about needing a function. We evolved to be problem solvers, women talk, men do, but now we are expected to accept that men are obsolete.

Loss of Utility

In Relational Equity I made a case for men investing too much of their egos into what intrinsic (and extrinsic) value they believe their respective women ought to appreciate about themselves. Under the old books, old social contract this equity may have had some conditional value to women, but as a buffer against Hypergamy today there is very little a man might consider value-added equity (unless it’s exceedingly rare or exceedingly valued) as a hedge against Hypergamy. Before any defeatist critics tell me how not all women are like that, yes, I get it, there are a lot of variables to consider here, but the equation and the reality doesn’t change – relational equity, overall, is no insurance against Hypergamy. It is also no insurance against women’s security and providership needs being met by resources that come from outside that relationship. I’m not considering this because I’m trying to depress any man, but it is vitally necessary to consider when we look at reasons why 45-65 year old men are predisposed to higher rates of suicide and higher rates of alcoholism and opioid abuse.

I would argue that a major contributing factor to high male suicide rates finds its origins in men’s need for purpose, function and accomplishment during this phase of life. Every day I read an article about how men my own age are dropping out of social discourse. I mentioned a Boston Globe article about just this phenomenon in Male Control. In some respects I can understand that despite the unprecedented connectivity we enjoy today men really don’t seek out bonds with other men. This is primarily due to the fact that men need a common purpose in order to form these bonds. Again, this is just how we’re wired. Women intentionally schedule time to simply interact with their same-sex friends just for the sake of communicating and enjoying the act of communicating. Men need function or a common purpose to come together. We need an activity or a problem to solve and then we communicate and form bonds.

Women talk, men do. This is a well studied fact; our brains and, by extension, social networks largely center on purpose and function. Now, lets presume that in spite of having literally all the information in the world at our finger tips we remove all need for the utility that men are wired to provide to not just women, but the larger scope of Society. We get a generation of men on the outside looking in. Only the most creative, resourceful and motivated of men can really utilize, much less master, all that this information has to offer him. And even a portion of those men can really see past the antipathy of their supposed obsolescence to do something truly meaningful or masterful. As the saying goes, most men live lives of quiet desperation, but in the modern era these men are demonstrably useless. And I mean that in a functional sense; once a Beta man has been wrung of his utility to women, he ceases to be able to convince his hindbrain that he can build, improvise or solve things.

Once a man is stripped of his usefulness, once it’s made clear that all of the equity he believed would support his relationship has been erased after so long, men will still resort to practical, deductive solutions. That solution may be suicide when weighed with the prospect of having to rebuild himself in a new context; and even if he did would he just be building a new ‘him’ based on his old belief set?

When my brother in-law committed suicide it seemed to me at the time to be the most logical end he would come to. He was a man very steeped in Blue Pill ideals, but he was also a man who prided himself on what he could do – and if he didn’t know how to do something he was always a fast learner. He literally built his life, and expectations of a future life, around the relational equity he believed defined him as a man. He was very invested in the old books, old social contract that rooted a man’s attractiveness and quality in what it was he could do. What he built for himself and his wife defined his identity.

All of that 20+ years of building equity and an identity based on it was erased for him in the space of about six months. But it was more than the 20 years he’d been saving, building, solving and refining, it was a perceived future he believed would be lived out for the rest of his life that got erased.

To me, at that time, his suicide made absolutely perfect sense from a male-deductive logic perspective. What didn’t make sense was all of the endless rationalizations I heard from his family, friends, his kids, his Ex (my now widowed sister in-law) about why they thought he went through with it when it was plain for anyone who wanted to confront the truth to see. A lot of these rationales were almost verbatim the same that the article I linked used. “If only men would reach out when they have suicidal thoughts”, any and every rationale that might absolve his Ex of the guilt, and still more that were meant to console her (he must’ve been mental ill) though in the end she really didn’t need it.

My brother in-law made a practical decision not an emotional one, and while I wouldn’t presume to say that a guy’s emotional state isn’t very influential in his suicide, how he comes to the decision is very much attributable to men’s deductive nature. He showed no outward signs of emotional distress. In fact, right up to his hanging himself he was in very good spirits and seemingly accepting of the fact that the wife he lived his life for was going to be leaving him soon. He was very matter of fact in a way that men are when they’ve resolved something for themselves. When a guy seems to be taking things in stride we don’t want to create a problem where we see none.

When we look in this context at the high rate of male suicide in this age demographic we begin to see how men come to this decision. Everything they’ve built up to 45-65 years of age is now debased, devalued or simply erased. All of the value and equity they’ve committed their lives to – doing the right thing according to their Blue Pill conditioning – is as if it never mattered. So they’re confronted with a choice, rebuild themselves (hopefully in a new Red Pill aware paradigm), reconstruct a new life and tough it out, or, simply, pragmatically erase themselves.

Personally, I’ve had at least two occasions where I’ve been confronted with rebuilding myself. It’s a tough prospect, make no mistake, especially when you’re Red Pill aware and understand the reality behind having to rebuild a life from scratch after so much investment in plans and projects you truly believed in when you made them. My father had to confront this rebuilding too at around 55 years of age, but rather than rebuild or kill himself I watched him slowly decay into a man I never knew could exist as my dad.

Zeroed Out

I apologize if this topic is a bit of a downer, but I think it ought to be part of any Red Pill aware man’s understanding that at many points in our lives we will be confronted with the prospects of having to rebuild ourselves. Failure, rejection and disappointment will happen for you, that’s just part of a man’s life, and it’s easy to rattle off platitudes about how many times you get back up being the measure of a man. But what I’m saying is there will be times when total reconstruction of your life will be a necessity.

You will be zeroed out at some point, and how you handle this is a much different situation than any temporary setback. This zeroing out is made all the more difficult when you confront the fact that what you believed to be so valuable, the equity you were told was what others would measure you by, was all part of your Blue Pill conditioning. At that point you need to understand that there is most definitely a hope for a better remake of yourself based on truths that were learned in the hardest way.

To end this I’m going to quote the comment of a man I met when I spoke at the 21 Convention in September. I won’t use his name, but after we talked he confessed that he was the commenter here. He’d made the trip to the convention to meet me face to face, to thank me for my work and gave me permission to use his example in a post. I won’t quote it entirely, but you can read the whole thing here. His situation is an example of, and inspiration for, everything I’ve illuminated in this essay

After a long marriage I divorced the mother of my children. A couple of years later, after some casual dating, I met a woman I would come to describe as my soulmate. I got married young – but this time, with all my infinite wisdom gained over the years – I was finally wise enough to pick a woman I was super compatible with.

We were together for a few years and even lived together. Things started out great and it was mostly smooth sailing until we moved in together – at which time I slowly allowed myself to be betaized in a slow motion, excruciating painful way.

About a month after breaking up with her I fully planned to commit suicide. I wrote a long letter explaining my rationalization and took other affirmative steps towards going through with it. About a week after I wrote the note – with D(eath) Day fast approaching – I took a break from getting my affairs in order to surf the net. I stumbled upon an Ask Reddit thread that was bad mouthing various subreddits. Some feminazi or male feminist mentioned the Red Pill subreddit as an example of a subreddit filled with craziness, and I decided to check what all of the fuss was about. Now

I’m not a religious man, but I will never rule out divine intervention. The timing of finding TRP – by complete coincidence no less – couldn’t have been more fortuitous. I stayed up all night reading the side bar – Rollo’s essays having the deepest effect on me – and everything…just…clicked….Talk about connecting the dots! Wow! It was very much like a come to Jesus moment. It was like divinity revealed secret knowledge to me just when I needed it the most – knowledge that gave me hope and very well may have saved my life. This all went down not really that long ago in actual time – but from where I metaphorically stand now it seems like an eternity.

Stay strong my friends, you can rebuild yourself even in the face of being zeroed out.