The previous installments of this series were surprisingly controversial, but I got bogged down with real-world stuff and couldn’t follow up as quickly as I would have liked and unfortunately lost a lot of momentum.

One of the issues I wanted to talk about regarding maturity is which gender is more in touch with their emotions in a mature connected way. Many of the commenters who disagreed with my assertion that modern, Westernized women are actually less mature than men kept using the topic of emotions to prove their point. Dissenters kept repeating that women are far more likely to talk about their emotions and listen to the emotional problems of others than men are. Mark Manson kept mentioning studies that proved how men are much more reserved with their emotions, keep them bottled in, and are terrible at talking about them with other men.

However, such studies are never persuasive to me because I don’t accept the premises they start with when judging emotional maturity. Instead I prefer to ask, is what the average American woman displaying here truly a mature manifestation of emotion, or actually something else, a different form of immaturity?

To utilize a comparison, masturbation is no substitute for sexual intercourse that has a deep, emotional connection, fueled by genuine mutual empathy. And I doubt anyone would argue differently. Masturbation is by definition a self-centered act. However, there are forms of masturbation that masquerade as intercourse. Immature, self-centered people, even when they have sex with other people, are still engaging in masturbation. They’re just masturbating with other people’s bodies.

This is an important distinction to understand. Sometimes it gets boring to just masturbate by yourself. So you masturbate using someone else’s body instead of your hand. “Excuse me, can I just borrow your body for a bit?” The other person’s job is to be an audience, to provide validation. If you worry about the other person’s pleasure, it’s only because you know pleasuring the other person helps boost your ego and image and you understand a bit of quid pro quo is necessary. You have to help the other person masturbate with your body a little bit in order to get the favor returned. The sex is a mutual masturbation society where you’re using each other’s bodies.

And of course since it’s not real, mutually connected, empathetic sex, it’s like empty calories. It doesn’t satisfy for long or fill deeper needs. This is why sex addicts can never get enough sex, are rarely satisfied once it’s over, are filled with shame and guilt afterwards, and are soon looking for their next fix. They’re expecting masturbation to fill the need that real lovemaking does and are invariably disappointed each time.

In a way the disappointment is even worse with mutual masturbation than with regular solo masturbation, because at least with solo masturbation you’re never under any illusions about what you’re doing. No matter how you close your eyes and fantasize, what you’re watching or reading, or who you’re on the phone with, you’re always fully aware that you’re masturbating and have no expectations that you’re going to experience a soulful mutual connection with another human being.

With mutual masturbation pairings, many times people are too immature to realize that all they’re doing is just masturbating with other people’s bodies rather than engaging in real, bonding sexual connection. So when they feel that same void and lack of fulfillment afterward as the solo masturbator, unlike the solo masturbator they can’t understand why they feel this way, since in their minds they were doing the opposite of masturbating.

Masturbating is an immature act, and an immature person engaged in sex will always be masturbating, whether having sex alone or with another person.

To bring this back around to women and maturity, modern American women rarely engage in true emotional intercourse, they are emotional masturbators. Guys, how many times have y0u gone on a first date with a woman or just met a woman and she proceed to projectile vomit all types of emotional baggage on you and try to turn you into her therapist on the spot? And there’s no connection there. Whatever self-absorbed emotion dilemmas she’s projectile vomiting at you, these are the same  dramas and non-crises that she’s cycling through her head nonstop when alone. Now that she has someone with her to be an audience, she gets to emotionally masturbate with someone else’s brain, just like the solo physical masturbator may be masturbating alone but still biding time until the next opportunity comes to physically masturbate with another person’s body.

Sometimes the smarter emotional masturbators realize that people get tired of being an audience to their emotional masturbation, so they will allow and even encourage the other person to emotionally masturbate too. They will both now be emotionally masturbating with each other’s minds, just like the two people in a sexual trysty are both physically masturbating with each other’s bodies, but once all the energy dies down, both pairs of mutual masturbators will feel more drained and unconnected than before they began.

When it comes to physical mutual masturbation societies, the ultimate group expression is the sexual orgy. When it comes to emotional mutual masturbation societies, the ultimate group expression is girl’s night out, as seen in this Onion article Although the article is obviously fictional and intended for humor, there is a lot of truth in it. How much genuine emotional connection and empathy do you really believe occurred in the girl’s night out that was described in that article? And do you think it was significantly more than the emotional connection experienced in an average guy’s night out binge drinking? I’d argue that the emotional expression in both cases is superficial and largely not genuine or deep.

Saying that modern Western women are more mature than men because they express their emotions so much more freely is not a good analysis unless you look at how they’re actually expressing their emotions. Is it in a mature, mutually connected, empathetic way or in a self-centered, indulgent way that is mostly a one-way transaction? It’s the equivalent of saying that compulsive solo masturbator or sex addict is much more sexually mature than the repressed guy who avoids sex altogether, because the former thinks, talks and engages in sex all the time, even though it’s in the most reckless and irresponsible way.

As I’ve said repeatedly in this blog, there are three faulty, immature coping mechanisms: avoidance, surrender, and overcompensation. Immature men avoid their emotions, or overcompensate against them. The modern Western woman who is wallowing in emotional dilemmas in her head and online whenever alone, or blabbing about her emotions nonstop whenever she has an audience, is constantly surrendering to her emotional states, and has a total inability to master them, not unlike many children. That’s why the entertainment she’s so attracted to is hardcore emotional pornography, much like the sex addict is drawn to sexual pornography. The main difference is that the modern American woman has gotten society to view her self-indulgent addiction as a sign of strength.

For all of you doubters out there, let me lay some Cosmic Wisdom on you: Love exists.


That may seem like a whacky thing to hear from a dude who prides himself on taking a Red Pill approach to life -- but the Red Pill isn't about just the harsh, stark realities of life, it's also about being honest about the good things in your life.

Take a step back and think about it for a moment: the idea of the Red Pill is to substitute, as much as possible, an Objective perspective ("how things actually are") for a Subjective perspective ("how things seem to be through our own perception filters") when collecting data and making decisions about your life. That means ALL things, not just the stuff we're buggin' about.

Now, I'm not running down the power of the Subjective approach to reality. There are whole vistas of human endeavor that depend utterly on our ability and willingness to set aside the Objective facts and substitute a Subjective perspective that proves more useful. Hope, for instance, is predicated on the idea that even though things are shitty, that things will not remain shitty . . . without any shred of evidence that is, in fact, true.

Similarly, Fortitude is based not on the idea that you can, objectively, make it through a crisis, but that you, subjectively, WILL make it through a crisis, even though the objective facts of the matter seem to run counter to that proposition. Hope, Fortitude, Courage, and dozens of other facets of the human condition require a Subjective approach to reality in order for us to overcome our perceived weaknesses and achieve.

Blue Pill reality happens when you put all your chips on the Subjective, and discard all but the most glaring elements of the Objective.You not only believe in the power of Love, you're willing to use it as a justification and rationalization for the most foolish and self-destructive behaviors. You not only believe in Fairness, you assume thateveryone else also believes in Fairness and is trying to promote it just as fervently as you. You not only believe in Equality, you insist that you're getting Equality, even when you are unfairly penalized by a system or culture that determines that your group, for whatever reason, is less equal than others.

That Blue Pill overdose leads to irrational idealism. The Red Pill overdose leads to hopeless cynicism.

Neither one of those things leads to actual happiness.



Athol makes an excellent point when he discusses the need for the Blue Pill, despite the number of ardent Red Pill proponents who insist that Love is a fruitless endeavor undermined by the "Red Pill Reality". The Red Pill can be a heady experience, don't misunderstand - it will open your eyes to see the social universe in a whole new perspective. Once you understand the underpinnings of modern social/sexual behavior through the lens of the science of evolutionary biology and neurochemistry, the impulse to reduce everything to those terms is almost irresistible

But while the Red Pill shows you the stark reality of the dating arena in this day and age, it should also point out the fact that yes, Love still exists in the world, and it's possible for any human being to find it. Hopelessly shmaltzy? Or pragmatic observation? Attend:

Love, as we understand the base emotion, can be loosely defined as "the emotion of feeling another person's happiness and well-being are a precondition of your own".

Mother love, Caritas, first results when a mommy fulfills her baby's vital need for comfort and sustenance, and that emotional transaction continues to be replayed throughout our lives.

Philios, "brotherly love", first results when we are children, and we develop empathy and sympathy for our playmates. We don't want our friends to get hurt, and we don't want our friends to hurt us. Those who take Philios to extremes often find themselves tirelessly devoted to improving the welfare of their fellow man even at the expense of their own well-being, using the buzz of Universal Compassion as their justification.

Agape, the love between Man and the Divine, is exercise of self-awareness and an existential development of a total psycho-spiritual response to the Universe. It can develop in anyone, at any time, and be either profound or fleeting or both.

Then there is Eros.



Our conception and perspectives on Eros develop at adolescence when our child bodies are subjected to the forge of puberty and we start noticing the opposite (or same) sex in a sexual manner. "Sex", of course, is the goal. Sex for reproduction, sex for pair-bonding, sex for recreation, sex because the cable is out again.

But Sex is not Eros. It's merely a component -- albeit the essential component -- for Eros. The motivation for Eros may be Sex -- 'cause orgasms are cool and all -- but Eros encompasses a far wider field than the mindless rutting implied in hook up culture. True Eros is the combination of Sex with a deeper understanding of the soul of the Other Person.True Eros is the institutionalization of a mutual feeling in which each party's happiness and well-being is essential to either and both.

True Eroshappens -- and keeps happening -- because our sexual feelings become entangled with our compassionate feelings, the whole thing gets washed out in a wave of oxytocin and serotonin and vasopressin, and somewhere in our neurology a switch gets flipped: we make the emotional decision, quite apart from the objective situation, that the Other Person's well-being is now essential to your own.Every aspect of their well-being.

The gratification we get from the experience can be completely one-sided. I've seen cases when unrequited love, instead of turning sour, was enobled by sacrifice and higher purpose. I'm not saying that those people went on to be happy, but they did feel the satisfaction of seeing the Other Person thrive and prosper which, to them, was reward enough.

But usually Love - Eros - the love between (for about 75-80% of the population) a man and a woman for the implied purpose of pairbonding and reproduction is mutual, at some point, in some form or fashion. It may be unequal, it may be toxic, it may be abusive, but there is areciprocalelement there. She loves me, I love her. Or "My happiness is predicated on her's, and vice-versa". That's Love. And when that Love is Eros, then the implied responsibility for that Love takes us into some very intimate areas, places where the other forms of love - Agape, Caritas, Philios - cannot touch.

Eros implies a pairbond, a mutual exchange of compassion, fulfillment and caregiving at the most intimate of levels, an exchange that benefits both parties. The benefits may not always be equal in strength or capacity, but it is thereciprocitythat is the key element in true Eros. Following your wife around, kissing her ass and begging for sex Blue Pill style is not true Eros, because it has lost the reciprocal element. Similarly, demanding sex from your wife regardless of her feelings in the matter might be pure Red Pill, for some people, but it is not true Eros.


There is balance in Eros. Equilibrium. Rarely is their Equality, simply because relationships are dynamic things and the notion of "equality" is highly contextual and idealistic. Balance and Equilibrium are pragmatic concerns: when your wife is sick, you tend to her, you don't order her to clean the house. When you lose your job, she should tend to you, not berate you for your failure. True Eros implies not just the willingness to put another person's well-being as conditional to your own, but the willingness to adapt and modify your personal behavior to improve the nature of the equilibrium.

True Eros means you don't kidney-punch in an argument. True Eros means you don't call each other mean names. True Eros means you recognize and acknowledge the vulnerabilities of your mate, and while you are not obliged to "fix" them, you are obliged not to damage them further or put them in a position where others may do so. True Eros means you are not just each other's intimate lover, but also their guardian, defender, and protector. True Eros means that you hold each other to a high standard of accountability, but don't dwell on failures except as they serve as learning experiences. True Eros means withholding summary judgement, considering your partner's perspective thoughtfully before acting, and being willing to sacrifice on their behalf.


That last part usually makes people squirm. Thanks to 2000 years of Christianity (no offense), the idea of 'sacrifice' has been kicked around so much and in so many arcane directions that we often forget what it means, at its root: to give something meaningful up to the Sacred. It doesn't have to be your life, it can be a goat, a cow, a car, a belief, a cherished heirloom, a perspective, a prejudice, an ignorance, a purpose, a plan, a vacation, a dream. Because of the Big Sacrifice implicit in the Passion, too often Christians (and our Christian-influenced secular culture) misunderstands the nature and utility of sacrifice, seeing it only in its most stark and mortal terms. They often miss its pragmatic nature.

Yet if we consider our pairbonds sacred, see our marriages as holy rites implicit with sacred responsibilities, if we accept that we are the priests and priestesses serving the higher purpose of establishing Eros - the basis of the Family - in our sanctified unions, then we alone are responsible for its success or failure . . . and far too often the abortive marriages we see in our society are due to the unwillingness of one or both parties' willingness to sacrifice for the benefit of the greater entity.

Western consumer "me" culture has taught us to ask "what's in it for me?", and then reduce the answers down to the absolute most objective elements, making a relationship a cost-benefit analysis, first and foremost. Women shop for husbands like shoes, these days, trying on one after another and then changing their mind in a fit of hypergamous indecision. Men shop for wives like cars, finding the shiniest, prettiest model they can afford and then being all-to-willing to swap it out for a newer model if he can afford it.


Neither approach leads to true Eros, and those who seek "love" through a numbers game or based on superficial issues are almost always doomed to disappointment. True Eros isn't just passion -- we can just about bottle and sell passion these days. Yet true Eros is in scant supply. True Eros isn't about "variety", it's about interest. True Eros doesn't come and go; it's hard to start, it's difficult to encourage, it's fiendishly tricky to maintain, and it takes skill and talent to sustain over the years.

True Eros implies trust, and that's a hard thing for a battle-scarred Red Pill veteran of Combat Mating to generate, when every member of the opposite sex is viewed with automatic suspicion. True Eros implies compassion, and that's hard for a Red Pill man or woman to indulge in without being critical - for we are compassionate when the Other Person is damaged or weak or unfortunate. The Red Pill often reveals to us just why they got that way, and it becomes all-too-easy to dismiss their pains and anxieties as "their own fault", which is the antithesis of compassion.


True Eros implies Respect, and the Blue Pill is far too ready to lend itself to a condescending, disrespectful, or obsequious pattern of behavior. When we are too idealistic about how things should be, we hold out unrealistic expectations for our partner, which leads inevitably to disappointment which leads - too often - to disrespect. True Eros implies Devotion, and the Blue Pill seeks to bury both the intensity and the commitment intrinsic to that impulse under the weight of "independence", as if Eros could exist when either party is more devoted to their own happiness and well-being than that of their mate.

Trust. Compassion. Respect. Devotion. These are the things that contribute to the Love that is true Eros: the real True Love, leading to the real Happily Ever After. Those are the ONLY things that can get you there. If you don't have all four, then you don't have true Eros.

But to get there, as a priest or priestess devoted to the sacred nature of their union, you must sacrifice your mistrust, your vulnerability, your disdain, and your selfishness. That may seem contra to the Red Pill philosophy to some, but I argue that the Red Pill insists we see things as they are . . . and the objective fact is that there are plenty of people who achieve true Eros, even in our damaged and evolving society.

The Red Pill Fact is that it isn't impossible to trust, respect, love and devote yourself to a person and not be betrayed. While we see plenty of examples of total disasters, when it comes to marriage and relationships, if we look objectively we can also see quite a few examples of folks who, through talent, trial and error, or luck, got it right.

Love, true Eros, isn't impossible under the Red Pill. Indeed, it is the ultimate fulfillment of the Red Pill, if you have found and vetted the Other Person to the point where you trust them, feel for them, respect them, and can comfortably devote yourself to their well-being. That doesn't mean harboring illusions about their personality, mental and emotional state, or other issues, it means acknowledging the problems, being dedicated to the solutions, and being willing to weather a tempest or two while you come to that equilibrium.

Athol says we need both the Red Pill and the Blue Pill, the ALPHA mode and the BETA mode to be in a fulfilling Red Pill marriage, and I cannot disagree.Vox adds, cogently,

"I don't recommend choosing illusion over reality, but it is also important to understand that the potential for doing evil is not the same as actually committing it. And experiencing temptation is not action.Knowing that a woman does not belong on a pedestal is not synonymous with believing that she dwells in a sewer."

I will go one further: you cannot discard the possibility of true Eros, of Love fulfilled, even of passionate and exciting Romance, and hope to find happiness with the Red Pill. Contentedness, perhaps, but not happiness.

There are no guarantees, and the cynics who abound in the Manosphere desperately want some. That's their fear talking: fear of rejection, fear of failure, fear of judgement. They deride the idea of love because it's naturally safer for them to do so - without expectation, there can be no disappointment Love, even the possibility of true Eros, is a very scary thing regardless of your gender, and often it seems just more sensible and reasonable to abandon the idea altogether -- hell, it's very tempting. Athol, Vox and Iget that.

But those supposedly Red Pill men who are certain that all women are secretly evil and prospective goldigging hypergamists, who don't think that love, true or otherwise, is even possible . . .y'all aren't just ignoring the objective fact that it is possible,y'all are being a bunch of pussies.

Seriously. It's implicit to a mature masculinity that good men are willing to take risks. Hell, taking risks is the male prerogative, it's our forte. Yet men who would put their life savings on Black and spin the wheel with abandon won't even approach women because of the "risk" of their hearts and wallets. Men who would gamble that they can draw just a little bit faster than the other guy don't want to risk their feelings being hurt by rejection. Guys who are willing to borrow extravagantly to fund an enterprise with little hope of a return aren't willing to consider that maybe -- just maybe -- all women aren't there to take them to the cleaners in a divorce. That all women aren't unfaithful.

You men who feel that love is beyond your reach due to your culture, your era, your society, or the vagaries of feminism . . . stop being such a pussy. Take a risk. That doesn't mean you have to be stupid about it, blinded by love and led around by your dick, but right now you sound like the whiny kid who always stands on the sideline during Dodge Ball because he's scared to get hurt. Yeah, love is scary.Get over it and take the hit like a man.



The Red Pill didn't promise you Love, it merely shows you the schematics. It didn't make you divorce-proof, it merely gave you some skills to deal with the possibility. Vox can't tell you how to find the perfect woman, and Athol can't tell you how to have the perfect marriage, all they can do is point you in the right direction. It's up to you to take the risks, make yourself vulnerable, and open yourself to the possibility of trusting a woman . . . because there are dudes out there who have made it work, and work well. It's not impossible. We're not fooling ourselves. Yeah, we're lucky . . . but we were also smart enough to know when to sacrifice what was needed for the greater glory of our union. We have taken upon ourselves to be the priests who do what needs to be done to keep the union sacred, and part of that is the risk of being hurt.

That's why a lot of us Old Married Guys (defined these days as anyone who has made it 10 years -- yeah, we know, we're depressed by that, too) who have taken the Red Pill and are running and enjoying Married Game shake our heads at the MGTOW who are so vocally anti-marriage. Because taking the calculated risk of finding and loving someone who will, likewise, trust, love, respect, and devote themselves to you IS a perfectly valid way for a Man to Go His Own Way.

The key is to keep an objective eye on everything, the bad and the good, and a subjective perspective in your heart that knows yourself well enough to recognize a good thing when you see it.


Look, if you really, truly aren't "the marrying type" or genuinely recognize that you truly aren't that interested in pairbond in general, if you are preoccupied by your profession or your vocational passion and you feel that splitting your focus would detract from that, if you just don't think that romance, love, and Eros are that important . . . dude, I hear you. Quit talking about how the rest of us are doomed idiots. Go your own way with our collective blessing secure in the knowledge that you have made a conscious, informed decision . . . for you.

But if you harbor secret longings for true love and romance and a woman who will stay steadfastly by your side, devoted, loving, capable and as respectful of your masculinity as you are of her femininity . . . then don't look at the Mating 2.0 world as a disaster. To do that is to admit defeat and concede that you have abdicated the quest for greatness, and have clung instead to the flotsam of mediocrity. If you look at the women of the world and recoil in fear and horror instead of preparing yourself for the challenge of finding a superior mate -- and in the process make yourself a superior mate -- then you've already lost. You're spiritually soiling yourself in front of ancestors who tamed the wilderness, crossed the oceans, built mighty empires and defeated insurmountable foes . . . because you can't handle the idea of losing something you don't even have yet.

Now go out there, learn some Game, inform yourself, hone your skills, take a fucking risk . . . and quit being such a pussy about love. This isn't rocket science. This isn't a marathon. This isn't a fiendishly clever international plot to turn you into a mindless ATM machine . . . believe me, feminists just aren't that bright about that sort of thing. Yes, the weather conditions could be better, but a man doesn't shirk from cloudy skies when sunshine might be over the horizon.


Love is ahuman universal -- not just sex, but true Eros. It occurs in every human culture, and is the basis for some of our most powerful myths and legends. Many, if not most of your ancestors knew of love, even when they were terrible at it. This is something that men have mastered for thousands of years . . . and your whining and despair about how awful it is right now insults your ancestors and undermines your own self-respect.

That's not how a mature, masculine man reacts to danger. He educates himself, understands the risks and the rewards, he prepares, he trains . . . and he at least makes the best attempt he can.

No Guts, No Glory: Either get in the game or quit yelling to the rest of us from the sidelines that we'll get hurt . We know the risks, we know the dangers, but we know the rewards possible, too. Assuming that no men are capable of managing a successful relationship just because you can't - when it's pretty clear that quite a few of us are -doesn't make you more wise, intelligent, or Red Pill-astute.It just makes you look like a pussy who's just scared of getting hurt by the ball. So get over it.

You'reembarrassingus.

In Malcolm Gladwell’s bookThe Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, there is a discussion of policing tactic based on a social science theory called Broken Windows Theory. Picture you own a house, and you allow the windows of this house to remain broken. Other people who live in and visit this house will believe that they too can break windows in your house, because you give the impression that you don’t mind the windows in your house being broken. Furthermore, they may feel free to escalate and do even bigger acts of vandalism to your house. There are three major effects of allowing broken windows in a house. One is more obvious and has already been partially discussed: the fact that people don’t respect your house. The second is less obvious but equally important: people don’t respectyouas an individual for allowing your house to be disrespected like that. They may act like they’re having fun with you while the two of you vandalize your house together, and on the surface it may seem like a bonding activity, or that you’re winning them over by letting them vandalize your house, but the whole time you’re engaging in this activity together they’re actually losing more and more respect for you. Third, people start losing respect for your neighborhood as a whole, because there is a house with broken windows in the neighborhood. And the more houses with broken windows a neighborhood has over time, the lower the status of that neighborhood. So broken windows hurts the standing of the house itself, of the people who own and live within the house, and of the neighborhood the house is in.

These general Broken Window ideas were reflected in various urban planning and policing initiatives during the late 20th century. As described in the Broken Windows Wikipedia entry:

A successful strategy for preventing vandalism, say the book’s authors, is to fix the problems when they are small. Repair the broken windows within a short time, say, a day or a week, and the tendency is that vandals are much less likely to break more windows or do further damage. Clean up the sidewalk every day, and the tendency is for litter not to accumulate (or for the rate of littering to be much less). Problems do not escalate and thus respectable residents do not flee a neighborhood.

It was also specifically used in New York City under Rudy Giuliani:

In 1990,William J. Brattonbecame head of theNew York City Transit Police. Bratton described George L. Kelling as his “intellectual mentor”, and implementedzero toleranceof fare-dodging, easier arrestee processing methods and background checks on all those arrested.RepublicanMayorRudy Giulianihired Bratton as hispolice commissionerwho adopted the strategy more widely inNew York Cityafter Giuliani’s election in 1993, under the rubrics of “quality of life” and “zero tolerance“.

Influenced heavily by Kelling and Wilson’s article, Giuliani was determined to put the theory into action. He set out to prove that New York’s infamous image of being too big, too unruly, too diverse, too broke to manage, – was, in fact, manageable.

Thus, Giuliani’s “zero-tolerance” roll out was part of an interlocking set of wider reforms, crucial parts of which had been underway since 1985. Bratton had the police more strictly enforce the law against subwayfare evasion, public drinking, urination, graffiti artists and the “squeegee men” who had been wiping windshields of stopped cars and demanding payment. Near the beginning, Bratton received criticism for his work for going after these “petty” crimes. The general statement towards this was “Why care about panhandlers, hookers, or graffiti artists when there are more serious crimes to be dealt with in the city?” The main notion of the broken window theory is that small crimes can make way for larger crimes. If the “petty” criminals are often overlooked and given space to do what they want, then their level of criminality might escalate from petty crimes to more serious offenses. Bratton’s work is to attack while the offenders are still green, as it would prevent an escalation of criminal acts in the future. According to the 2001 study of crime trends in New York by George Kelling and William Sousa, rates of both petty and serious crime fell suddenly and significantly, and continued to drop for the following ten years.

I think the Broken Windows theory is also valuable to apply in personal relationships, whether professional, platonic, or romantic. There are two major ways I can illustrate for using Broken Windows in relationships.

The first way Broken Windows theory helps in relationships is when dealing with emotional vampires. I call this Abusive Broken Windows. Supposedly, if you drop a frog in a pot of boiling water, it will immediately jump out. But if you put a frog in a pan with room temperature water and then turn the heat up very gradually until it hits boiling, that same frog will remain in the pan until it cooks to death, never jumping out. Emotional vampires are like that with their victims: they don’t do the egregious boundary violations and abuses right away. They test what they can get away with by starting with smaller violations. Many people, because these violations are not that major and because they want to keep the peace and don’t want to make a big deal over what appears minor, often let these boundary violations slide, or if they do protest, they are too quick to forgive. This emboldens the emotional vampire to repeat and escalate the boundary violations, until they gradually reach a level of boundary violations that they likely wouldn’t have been able to get away with earlier in the relationship, and just like the frog is now willing to tolerate the boiling water when the temperature is raised slowly, the emotional vampire’s victim is now willing to tolerate the new disrespect levels when the abuse is escalated slowly.

By not protesting and repairing the emotional broken windows, the victim has allowed the situation to go out of hand.

The second way Broken Windows helps in relationships is among friends, family, and coworkers, and is somewhat less obvious. I call these “Friendly” Broken Windows. I notice, for example, that many guys who are friends, when meeting a group of girls, or even just one girl, will be quick to playfully diss each other while kissing up to the girl. The dissing and kissing up can manifest in many minor ways. For example, if the girl makes a joke about one of the guys in the group, the other guys may laugh a little too hard and long at the joke, in a manner far out of proportion the how clever the joke actually was. If the girl is rude to one of the group, the others in the group may concur and join with the girl in criticizing the other guy. Sometimes the other guys may initiate the mockery of one of their group and encourage the girls to join in. Sometimes the guys will be self-deprecating and mock themselves for the amusement of the girls. Another people manifestation is when guys use dissing each other as a way to break the ice with and score cheap points with a woman they just met. These are all examples of broken windows.

I noticed that guys are far more likely to engage in “Friendly” Broken Windows than women. Like, if a strange woman is to make fun of a member of a group of guys, the other guys are far more likely to let it slide or even pile on than when the situation is reversed and a strange man makes fun of a member of a group of women. Men are far more likely to throw each other and themselves under the bus to impress strange women than vice versa.

At first I thought that this was a sign that women have much stronger loyalty to each other than men do, but I’ve encountered so many women who are catty and backstabbing to each other in friendships, especially behind each other’s backs, that I can’t say that women are any more inherently loyal to each other than men are, even if they are more likely to present a united front publicly and in social encounters with strangers.

Then I realized: it’s not a gender thing, but rather, a status thing. When someone is of lower status than you, you are less likely to do things to win their approval, especially if those things involve throwing yourself or your friends under the bus. Since in society, the default position in social encounters is that women on average are assumed to have higher social status than men until proven otherwise, most of the time it is the men who are breaking their own windows. In most male-female encounters, conventional wisdom is that the man must “win” the girl, that he must impress her, that he must show his value. Her value is simply assumed, especially if she’s at all attractive. (I call this the Assumed Value Fallacy, and I’ll discuss it in a later post.)

The group that socially breaks its own windows only does so because it perceives itself to have lower status than the group it’s trying to impress. And ironically, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy because once they start breaking their own windows, they immediately communicate that belief about their lower status to the other group, and end up making that lower status a reality and cementing it. For example, if you take your average group of guys who engage in Friendly Broken Windows strategy with pretty girls, and have a fat, ugly girl try to diss one of them, they will blow her out of the water similar to how a group of pretty, thin girls would shut down most guys who tried to disrespect one of their group. It’s not so much about in-group loyalty as an absolute, but rather about in-group loyalty relative to the perceived status of the other group. The higher the perceived status of the other group, the lower the in-group loyalty becomes. And since a group of women is almost always presumed to have higher status than a group of men, it is almost always the men who show less in-group loyalty and break their own windows.

Similarly, I’ve noticed that in situations where the man or group of men is presumed to be of higher status, either because of Adonis-level looks, money, celebrity status, or some combination of the aforementioned, a group of women will behave not that differently than your average group of men does when faced with an attractive female. They will break windows within the group like crazy. The reason we rarely see it is because we rarely see the social status dynamics tip in the man’s favor.

[If you doubt that a group of men are on average presumed to have less status than group of women, compare a group of men going out on the town versus a group of women. The group of men will be turned away from all the top nightlife spots, or forced to stand on line and wait an ungodly amount of time, or forced to purchase bottle service. Meanwhile, pretty, thin women will be whisked right in like royalty, with no one even knowing who they are. For a group of guys to get similar treatment, one or all of them would probably need to be a celebrity or known to be a big spender.]

Just like with all broken windows situations, the same three effects occur: people lose respect for your house [in this case, whoever you're specifically throwing under the bus], you as an individual [what kind of person treats their friend like that?], and your group as a whole [your whole group suffers and looks weak].

However, sometimes the behavior does seem to work. Some people do seem to like when you break windows, and are attracted to such behavior. I’m sure everyone can think of times when they broke windows within their group and won someone over by throwing their friend under the bus in a good-natured (or not so good-natured) way or by self-deprecation. The problem is, this is a strategy where even when it works, it fails. Because more often than not, anyone you attract by such a method is usually going to be a shitty person anyway. Any worthwhile person is going to be turned off by how your group is conducting itself in order to impress them, whether it’s the person who is getting thrown under the bus, the person doing the throwing, or the group as a whole for tolerating such a dynamic. It communicates extreme weakness, and since like attracts like, it will attract extreme weakness as well, either in the form of a codependent who wants to commiserate with weakness, or a Cluster B Vampire who wants to overcompensate for their own submerged feelings of inferiority by finding someone more obviously self-loathing to dominate and exploit.

The people you attract into your life by allowing broken windows are never people who improve things for the better. It’s similar to the people in society who not only tolerate but are actually prefer blighted neighborhood with lots of literal broken windows and dilapidated structures: they’re usually not positive people.

The point is, don’t allow other people to break your windows, because they usually won’t stop with just that, and don’t break your own windows to impress other people, because you’ll drive away worthwhile people and attract parasites, takers, and energy vampires.

Recommended Reading:

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell. A great read that has a wonderful chapter on Broken Windows Theory as used in urban development and community policing strategy.

Of all the scenes in the Matrix, Cypher’s 30 pieces of silver moment here is the one that requires the most suspension of disbelief. Granted, it’s the Matrix, so you’re going in with a lot of suspended disbelief, and I understand Cypher’s Judas moment is central to the movie’s plot, but for as cerebral and philosophically rich as the Matrix is, this scene begs a lot of questions.

First we have to consider how long Cypher’s been cut away from the Matrix – 9 years. His experience of awakening, or something like it, we can presume was much like Neo’s. Shock, disbelief, denial, depression and finally acceptance. The experience Cypher and Neo, and anyone else so unplugged, would somewhat follow a predictable path, and thus the people doing the unplugging have pre-established programs to help those awakened adjust to a ‘real’ life.

What Cypher has here is 9 years of experiencing the harsh reality of the ‘real’. Although he understands it, he wants to forget it. He wants the comfort and bliss that being unconscious and ignorant in the Matrix makes possible for him.

The disbelief we have to suspend here is that the automatons of the Matrix will actually honor their end of the bargain and graciously wipe away all of his memories of being in the real world, to say nothing of actually improving Cypher’s ‘life’, such as it is, once he’s blissfully oblivious of the ‘real’. One would think that after 9 years of watching the Matrix ‘code and understanding how that system works Cypher wouldn’t have been so naive as to think that the system wouldn’t simply kill him once he’d betrayed Morpheus to it.

Still, the want for an escape from harsh realities is certainly an aspect of the human condition. We all have them and for the most part they’re harmless distractions to ease what we can bear of the real world. However, depending upon the personality and the severity of the need to escape, we can find ourselves preferring the fantasy to the reality. This is what can make harmless distractions into compulsive obsessions. It’s easy to on pick MMO games as an illustration, but the ‘addiction’ element of them stems from a personality that prefers the fantasy to the reality of its conditions.

Artificial Joy

Cypher is one such individual. He’s been rejected by Trinity – one of the only two women on his ship – in favor of the (at the time contextual) Alpha of a better looking and less creepy Neo. He resents Trinity’s attraction to Neo and spends his off hours watching encoded Matrix porn (not only a Buffer, but also an escape) and has a direct line to the only alcohol on the ship (courtesy of Dozer). Both of these classic male escapes, and many more just like them, are the characteristic remedy intended to cope with a reality that borders on insufferable. It’s almost prescient that this movie was written and released well before the rise of ubiquitous internet porn.

“If you entirely removed men’s access to porn and booze from society the male suicide rate would increase tenfold.”

I’ve read this comment on a couple of manosphere blogs in the past, and it’s almost a truism when you consider the most visceral of Buffers men turn to in order to escape their realities. Whether or not that guy is lost in his blue pill  mental jail cell or he feels destitute in the perceived  hopelessness of a cruel, but real, red pill existence he’s unprepared for, a man will always look for his escapes – and usually he gravitates, and fixates upon the ones that best satisfy what he’s unable to actualize.

On second thought, maybe we don’t need to suspend any disbelief with Cypher. Once we understand that condition and situation, and the abject lack of an ability to adress it, can drive someone to desperation, to hopeless suicide, acts of violence, to fanciful absorbing escapes, etc., ‘real’ naive beliefs and willful intellectual negligences seem of small consequence by comparison.

Reinsertion

I’m using Cypher’s character here today thanks to an enlightening post Athol Kay dropped last week. I disagree with his assertion here that red pill men need their occasional blue pill escapisms, but really only in how he’s applying terms. Athol sites this same video and character to illustrate how men have a desire (need?) to regress back into their former ‘magical thinking’ in order to cope with the reality our red pill, our Game awareness, our new ability to make sense of, and confront, our conditioning and the mechanics of fem-centrism now demands of Men.

My main objection is conflating to blue pill ignorance as some sort of escape that a Man might artificially enjoy from time to time in order to balance the harsh, and admittedly cruel truths his new awareness brings to him.

The trouble is, a lot of the Red Pill approach to life assumes a near telepathic assumption of negative intentions in others. Is it often right? Sure it is. But it’s almost impossible to live happily if you are endlessly paranoid and jaded about the intentions of everyone around you. If every woman is a hot mess of whorish desire and nothing else but a lying cunt of a hamster justifying her Alpha male sperm seeking… well it gets tiring being on edge after a while. Likewise every man is a third wheel seeking an opportunity and plots behind your back, pumping you for information about your woman, seeking to make a run into the endzone the moment you blink too slowly.

I read versions of this breakdown from a lot of guys who resist the idea of a red pill or a Game awareness altogether when it’s first presented to them and they acknowledge the basics of it. I addressed this in The Bitter Taste of the Red Pill and Bitter Misogynists, but the simple version is that what’s being outlined for red pill men seems too hopelessly nihilistic to actually be true. It sounds so paranoid and attention consuming that it can’t actually be.

From The Bitter Taste of the Red Pill:

The truth will set you free, but it doesn’t make truth hurt any less, nor does it make truth any prettier, and it certainly doesn’t absolve you of the responsibilities that truth requires. One of the biggest obstacles guys face in unplugging is accepting the hard truths that Game forces upon them. Among these is bearing the burden of realizing what you’ve been conditioned to believe for so long were comfortable ideals and loving expectations are really liabilities. Call them lies if you want, but there’s a certain hopeless nihilism that accompanies categorizing what really amounts to a system that you are now cut away from. It is not that you’re hopeless, it’s that you lack the insight at this point to see that you can create hope in a new system – one in which you have more direct control over.

Little Lies

The reason most men experience this initial hopelessness is because their only prior frame of reference for the way life works up until then has been that of a blue pill existence. It’s a very difficult aspect of killing the Beta and relearning how to exist in a red pill awareness – most men either reject it in wholesale denial or they turn paranoid and see the signs of the real intent or the underlying motivations for every action a woman or man presents them with as per Athol’s example.

The trouble this presents is one of switching a man’s paradigm from blue pill to red pill. Many transitioning guys tell me how impossible it is to “keep up the act” that they believe a red pill awareness requires of them. They believe so because their operative mindset, the direction they think will work best for them, are still based on the rules and mental framework of their former blue pill existence.

In the blue pill Matrix, everything was set for them, but with a red pill awareness comes the responsibility of doing things for themselves. They’re unprepared and cut away from a comforting system, but they don’t know what to do with that freedom. They understand that the blue pill is really a complex series of little lies meant to soften painful truths, and that they’d tell themselves more little lies to comfort themselves when those truths’ consequences hurt them, but now they know better. They have only themselves to blame for allowing the speeding, red pill train they knew was coming to flatten them. For one so unprepared it seems impossible to avoid.

Internalization

NEO: So what’re you trying to tell me, that I can dodge bullets?

MORPHEUS: No Neo, what I’m trying to tell you is that when you’re ready, you wont have to.

The problem lies in the assumption that Red Pill awareness is a consuming force in a Man’s life that demands his constant effort and vigilance to defend himself against.

Once this awareness is internalized and becomes a part of a Man’s personality there is no vigilance, just awareness. There is a subconscious understanding of the order of things from a red pill perspective, but that doesn’t mean I suspect the female bank teller I’m making a deposit with is ready to rob me blind the moment I turn to walk out the door.

Neil Strauss hinted at ‘social robots’ in The Game; guys who were nothing but Game all the time and were unable to make real emotional connections. I would argue just the opposite. The real danger inherent in Game and Red Pill awareness is a man using it to fulfill his former blue pill idealisms – that does require a constant effort.

A healthy red pill awareness requires not only a Man’s reassessment and recreation of himself, but also that he abandon his former blue pill paradigm and learn to live in a new, positive, red pill paradigm. It seems like a daunting task when you first come to terms with it, but ultimately your awareness becomes an internalized part of who you are. You can allow that to consume you with a paranoia  rooted in your former blue pill frame, or you can learn to create hope in a new system – one that you not only have more control over, but one that requires you to assume that control.

Don’t wish it were easier, wish you were better. Easier is telling yourself that you actually need the little lies the blue pill provides. Easier is is thinking the blue pill is the sugar that helps the medicine go down. Better is recreating a new, positively masculine, direction for yourself based on the awareness and the opportunity that the red pill provides and requires of you.

*Before I finish here I want to say that this post was in no way a ‘take down’ of Athol’s article. I have nothing but respect for the guy and count him as a valuable peer and colleague. His work with MMSL is a much needed resource in the manosphere, and I can’t say enough good things about his efforts. I simple disagree with his take on a need for blue pill illusion.

Filed under: Game, Idealizations, Positive Masculinity, Psychology, The Matrix, Uncategorized, Unplugging

Opinions and organization theory has generated quite a bit of feedback.

If you recall, one of the points of that post is that decisions are often made by everyone, meaning no one is accountable.

Those in power often facilitate this. Each time they tell someone “the committee,” or “executive” decided something poorly they’re masking personal accountability. (At this point a critical reader should have a host of questions: Who on “the committee?” Was it unanimous? What did the argument swing around? Should this have been know at the time? … )

And thus the inertia continues. That same poor decision will be made again, perhaps by the same person. We learn nothing.

Vagueness undermines personal accountability. This is a sign of a dysfunctional and bureaucratic culture.

cultue.