THE WAY FORWARD
In case you missed it, there were some great thoughts by La Playboy in response to my article on the ultimate imperative. Basically, La Playboy took issue with my emphasis on marriage, making the point that most men already prefer to have a family, and that for the rest, there are alternative systems that work. His tweets are posted below, I am going to respond to them holistically rather than individually.
First off, I want to make it clear that I understand not all men are cut out for married life. Since the beginning of time, there have been cads and casanovas, artists who lived the unconventional, and freedom-seekers opposed to anything that ties them down. LA Playboy himself, Goldmund, avaritia, and a handful of others in the sphere (less though than you think) represent this outlier class. Power to them — as long as a man lives his truth, I respect him.
But unfortunately, I think LA Playboy missed my overall point. The consensus among “red pillers” for awhile now has been:
“Society and culture are degenerating, which is leading to the degeneration of women. You have two choices: If you are a man who wants a family, you are going to have to be extra selective with your woman and work very hard to keep her in line and your family together. If this doesn’t seem worth it to you, hook up with lots of girls and enjoy the decline.”
Restating this — that we should accept reality and take whichever path we want based on how we want to live our life — while not an unreasonable proposition (though I will return to this later), is not what my article inferred.
What I noted was that while gaming tons of girls is understandable — perhaps unavoidable — given the circumstances, it is facilitating the problem with women and society these men claim to have contempt for. Indeed, to take the logic further, it is in direct opposition to the men trying to get married and have families. Enjoying the decline means accelerating it. It’s not an observation one can easily brush aside.
Note, for those that lack nuance, this doesn’t mean I’m judgmental towards people choosing to play the field. I have been in the position of these men, hell I have a business helping guys in this situation. I not only get the temptations but the incentives, and know that even if it’s not for you for ever, often you’ve got to experience the harem lifestyle to move past it.
But from a logical perspective I see a divide, and I want people to be honest with themselves. We can’t blame or shame women for destroying society by indulging their sexual strategy when men are doing the same as them — especially since both sexual strategies are identical in goal and outcome.
In defense of LA Playboy I don’t think he disagrees with this last point, and seems more inclined to try and find alternative lifestyles that accommodate both women and men who want to take their biological imperative to its conclusion. Truth be told, I would like that too. But with the exception of substituting long-term co-habitation for legal marriage — a plausible proposal but still an imperfect one — I don’t see how unconventional living can be managed on a mass scale. It strikes of wishful thinking to me; there’s no evidence that tells me it works.
The Polyamory Possibility?
Polyamory, in its different permutations, is the common go-to when discussing alternative romantic lifestyles. And to be fair, I have seen successful polyamorous / open relationships among men and women who have done a lot of inner work. Such men are confident yet not jealous; the women bisexual and similarly non-possessive. High sex drive rather than the desire for multiple romances usually define these relationships.
But most polyamorous “relationships,” in reality, aren’t like this at all. Some are complete façades — a way for the less emotionally committed party to “soft jump” to another one. Others genuinely love each other and want to make it work, but are not psychologically cut out for what they entail. Such couples spend hours upon hours every week talking through emotions, taking “compersion” classes and exercises to pare back jealousy and insecurity.
Some might overcome their predilection for monogamy in time, but the amount of energy required means polyamory is not simply a preference, it is an all-encompassing lifestyle — a job. No surprise most I see who practice it, like a pyramid scheme, have businesses teaching it. It demands so much attention you’ve got to go all in.
Socially, this is a problem. It’s hard to imagine a society thriving when all of its energy is spent dealing with inter-relational drama.
But the market is after all the market, and if people are buying, I am hard pressed to make a critical case against it. People can live how they want if they can sustain themselves.
More relevant by far is the issue of children.
Children are the future; a society that does not produce them is a society that will not soon exist. For polyamory to be a viable form of living, it must be conducive to raising children in a healthy way.
Which is why it is damning to see almost no polyamorous couples having children, and the few that do, breaking apart before the child is in pre-school.
In case you’re wondering how I know this, I spent some time in the Southern California polyamory community, and have a broad range of contacts there. To this day I know exactly one woman who has had children while living the “lifestyle” — two with two separate men in three years. All the others that have children — and there are not many — brought them into this world during their previous life… when they were married and monogamous.
The verdict is clear: the polyamory experiment is a biological failure.
Yes, I’m sure you or your friend’s friend knows an exception to all of this. But there’s a reason we call them exceptions — they are not common or consistently replicable. For every broken up “modern family” that manages well there are *at least* thrice as many disasters.
The fact is these alternative lifestyles don’t cut it — not in the aggregate, not in the long-term, and since they vastly favor alpha males, not even sexually for most guys. Promoting them as acceptable options to the masses simply causes confusion and destabilizes the overall dating-market. I have no issue with an individual man doing as he wishes, but from a structural standpoint we have to be honest: these aren’t good for society and they are not a solution.
The Writing On The Wall
The historical record is clear: excessively conservative societies are oppressive, overly liberal ones collapse. To be healthy, a balance between the two needs to be struck. Today we lack this balance. We have become an unhealthy culture, because our focus is consistently on our present and ourselves, not our progeny and our future.
We all know it’s not going to last if it continues.
There’s a fork in the road approaching, and individualists are going to have to choose: to find a new liberal place they can run to and be individualists, or to stand and support the social structure of the place that has protected individualists more than any other in history — the West.
The reality is that there’re not many more places, nor time, to run. Whenever an individualist jumps to Eastern Europe or Asia to game trad girls because “American girls are sluts,” they carry the pathogen with them that will destroy the place. Whatever your personal objectives, encouraging this in others is self-defeating. The more who try and get on your lifeboat, the more likely it is to sink. Indeed, with the internet pushing consciousness ahead of people, even this will not be enough — natives will be reprogrammed remotely.
There is nowhere to go; certainly no place like home.
No, unless you can find your own private island to wait this out, you are trapped in the current of the times. The pendulum has gone as far as it can; now it is swinging back with a vengeance. Tolerance, for better or for worse, is disappearing. Weimar Germany’s libertinism led to the Nazis; the conformist 50s gave way to the radical 60s. The normalization of extreme, soulless promiscuity this past decade will lead to a conservative pushback whether we like it or not.
Our ability is not to resist, but to set the terms.
The truth is we self-aware men cannot live in 2010 anymore and feign helplessness, pretending it is still sufficient to observe and discuss these problems without dealing with them. We have been in a free-fall — it was all well and good to enjoy the rush at the beginning of the jump, but we are now only a couple hundred feet from the ground. It’s time to pull the parachute.
“Enjoy the decline” as a credible philosophy is dead.
We all know it, even if some don’t want to admit it. But for those still in denial, Mark Baxter’s departure should be a wake up call. This community has begun to miss the point. We are in an era of existential drift, it is insufficient to continue to grasp onto an amoral and limited praxeology for survival. We must evolve.
As Artful Man once said, “Some people are still acting like Jordan Peterson hasn’t changed the game.” It’s taken a few months, but the cognitive dissonance of the manosphere has reached its breaking point. We must either come together towards something higher than bitching about “alpha fucks, beta bucks,” or we must split.
You may hate to hear it, but to ignore what is happening is to be caught unprepared.
What To Do About Women
Although I suspect many don’t have true complaints about the sexually indulgent state of modern women, the fundamental wedge between the two camps of the manosphere revolves around what to do about how women today act.
It’s a chicken-egg problem: if women are going to be promiscuous, it follows that men might as well take advantage of the situation — even if it is an acknowledged bad thing socially. After all, if the store’s already getting ransacked and nobody’s getting in trouble, might as well grab a TV for yourself.
I get the philosophy — it’s a very convenient rationalization, after all, if your approach to the destruction of your society is to do nothing. But the irony in this apathy isn’t simply its premise of male victimhood, but its contradiction of one of the most fundamental “red pill truths” out there: alpha male agency.
Recall, one of the first things you learn when you begin to understand human sexual nature is that the women follow the alphas, the betas follow the women. What seems to be forgotten here is that if women follow the alphas, then female behavior is dictated by how alpha males respond to it. This means, in effect, that alpha males determine the mores of women, and therefore, society.
If we are who we say we are, it begs the question of why the manosphere — the men ostensibly rising to the top of the food chain while the rest become passive soy-boys — feels helpless in the face of female sexual strategy.
There are in fact no better men positioned to tame it.
Taming Ourselves To Tame The Beast
One of the most relevant and mentioned figures in the new testament is that of Mary Magdalene, a prostitute-turned top follower of Jesus.
So important was Mary Magdalene that she was there with Jesus’s mother (the more well known Mary) when he died, and was even the first to learn from the angel about his resurrection in one of the gospels. Some even have theories — unlikely but not unreasonable — that Mary and Jesus were in fact married.
One of the reasons Mary Magdalene strikes me as so interesting is her story arc: she was a whore — the bottom rung of society — and yet, in the presence of a masculine man’s frame and shame, she became a saint.
Don’t misread me, there is no implication here that you should go into the depths of Tinder and try to salvage damaged women. I only request some sacrifice from men, not suicide. But there is something to the psychology here that is worth noting:
Women will completely change their behavior in the face of approval from men who are aligned and certain of their mission — in other words, men they are attracted to.
The truth about Jesus is that he wasn’t simply a compassionate man, as the modern converged-churches would have you believe, but a deadly self-assured one. If you were not living your life in alignment, Jesus called you out on your bullshit with an accuracy that shook you to your core.
What made him relevant was not his sympathy but his truth. He psychologically devastated everyone in he came into contact with; some shrank away in resentment and fear, others were reborn.
In other words, Jesus, in his own niche of moral authority, was as alpha as it comes. The women — who were noted repeatedly throughout the bible as his biggest followers — responded accordingly.
We can learn a thing or two from Jesus.
Authority comes from capacity. The inner work we do to control ourselves and to become the best we can possibly be is what gives us leverage with women. It is what makes women want to be submissive; what makes them want to help us.
It’s what makes women the women we’ve missed.
Despite what some would have you believe, not all women are broken — not even close — and if you believe that they are, you are as broken as the worst of them. Most are simply as lost and disillusioned as the rest of us, looking for someone to admire.
When we lead by example, they will follow.
It’s the secret not only to a great relationship, it’s what’s required to save the world.
Coda: The Death of the Red Pill… and The Way Forward
As I’ve noted in the past, the women we have are the women we deserve. It was men that inflated female ego, it was men that decided to take the “easy way out” and abscond responsibility. Men are the leaders, and so men are to blame.
Understand, you cannot become free so long as you view yourself as a victim. Even if your sexual and material world improves, your emotional one will deteriorate, because victims always hate their victimizers, and nothing puts chains on a man’s mind like hate.
This was the poison within the red pill, and this is why whatever the red pill means to you — despite the truths within it — it is fundamentally dead as a brand. Its framing breeds contempt and nihilism; presented in isolation it is gangrene on the minds of abused and aimless men.
The question is now where we go from here.
Not everyone will have the same path. I am loathe to tell someone like Andrew Tate, for instance, who is enjoying his traveling harem to “wife up” (though, sorry Andrew, I suspect you might get one in the distant future 😉 ). That is not only absurd and ineffective, but unnecessary. There are other ways such obviously exceptional men can help by using their authority as shock troops against the status quo. If you watch his Twitter, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about.
No, the overarching mission is to focus on the 80% — to build the foot soldiers — helping the average lost guy to understand not simply game, but the game. To help him find his purpose and live his life in such a way that men want to emulate him and women want to follow him — not simply out of envy or lust, but because he represents a way out of the malaise.
In other words, to develop a complete framework of what it is to be an attractive leader, and to embed that in a moral philosophy that is not based on slavery but commitment to truth; that structures rather than degenerates both self and society.
Ambitious? Perhaps.
But we need it. The hour is late, and our boys need to become men.
Buckle up, it’s going to be a wild ride.
– Pat
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