A New Hope

The Rational Male - Preventive Medicine - Rollo Tomassi 2015


A New Hope

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Worst part of the Red Pill?

Seeing how I fucked it all up. Really.

There’s days when I get up in the morning, sit on the edge of the bed, and just feel like I wish I could forget what I’ve learned. I wish I could close Pandora’s Box and stuff all the knowledge of the stupid shit I’ve done back in there. Just go back to sleep and plug back in.

But then I realize: while I can see how fucked up things are and that’s a bit depressing, I was completely and utterly fucking miserable when I didn’t know all that I’ve learned. Like when the Blue Pill was all I knew, my misery was worse because I didn’t realize where my power to change things ended and the things I couldn’t change began. It left me with a feeling of so little power and control that I was miserable.

There’s a lot of research that says a big part of “happiness” in a per-son’s life is a feeling of agency. I felt none. I was fumbling in the dark.

Now I can see where I fucked up, and there’s a lot of mistakes I made that were choices under my control. But I didn’t know it at the time if I’m being honest. Young, stupid, ignorant me just didn’t know. But I also, each day, see more and more clearly what is and is not in my control.

Further, before I wouldn’t have known how to control the things that I could control even if I had known what they were. Now I learn more each day about controlling them.

Ignorance might be bliss in some respects (especially when looking back on your own life), but when ignorance was the cause of your misery it pays to remember why you educated yourself. Remember why you took those steps. While you’re looking back at how you fucked up, think long and hard about why you fucked up. There’s a good chance you didn’t understand things well enough to make a good choice. That’s where my trying to be fair with myself about past mistakes comes from.

Try really hard to remember what it was like being ’young you’.

Why did you make those choices? Did you understand risk/reward properly? Did you have a Socratic understanding of your own ignorance?

Did you have enough experience to know for a fact that something was a bad choice? Were you aware enough of your own biology working against you to counteract its bad decisions?

I bet you were a lot more ignorant and inexperienced than a cursory glance at old mistakes from your current point in life lets you realize. I know I was.

— Sun Wukong, comment on The Rational Male

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NEW HOPE

In the first book, towards the end of The Bitter Taste of the Red Pill I wrote this:

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.

One of the hardest lessons I had to learn when I unplugged was throwing away ’hope’.

Not real, internal, personal hope, but rather the ’hope’ I had been led to believe was a realizable state — if circumstances, if personalities, if fate or some other condition defined by the feminine imperative would just align in such a way that I’d been conditioned to believe it could, then that feminine defined contentment could be actualized.

I wanted very much to realize that idealized state by defining hope (or having it defined for me) in a context that was never of my own real choosing. I got just as depressed as anyone else when I unplugged. I got angry. I didn’t want to think that I’d invested so much of myself in something that was fundamentally unattainable because my understanding of it had been incorrect, either by purpose or by my own hopeful interpretations of it. Turns out it was both.

My own ’unplugging’ was a gradual affair and came after a lot of drawn out trauma. And yes, to realize that all of that trauma amounted to nothing after hoping and struggling to mold myself into something that I was led to believe was achievable was even more depressing.

It wasn’t until I realized that the hope I was sold on came from the same social paradigm that never held my best interests as a priority that I threw it away. That was a tough day because I realized in doing so I would have to find a new sense of hope for myself. It seemed very nihilistic at the time, and I had to really make a determined effort not to make that choice from a sense of self-pity.

One particularly hard revelation I had to disabuse myself of was understanding that women’s concept of love differs from that of men. That was tough to embrace because the old hope I was struggling to realize was based on the primary tenet of Blue Pill thinking; the equalist notion that men and women share a mutually acknowledged, mutually accepted, concept of love.

Once I understood this was an idealization rather than a reality, and that women can and do love men deeply, but in an entirely different female-specific opportunistic concept of love, I discovered that I no longer ’hoped’ for that mutuality. It was then I embraced the hope that men and women could still genuinely love each other from their own perspectives of love without needing a mutual consensus.

I remembered then an older man I had done some peer counseling with while in college and how this man had essentially striven his entire life to please and content his ex -wife, and his now second wife of more than 30 years. From his early 20s he’d spent his personal life in the hopeful attempt at contenting, appeasing and qualifying for a mutually shared state of love which he believed these women (the only 2 he’d ever had sex with) had a real capacity for.

At 73 (now) he’s spent his life invested in a hope that simply doesn’t exist — that he can be loved as a man ideally believes a woman ought to be able to love him

— just as all the romantic, feminine-defined ideals of love he’d learned from a feminine-centric social order had convinced him of for so long.

This is why I say men are the True Romantics, because the overwhelming majority will devote a lifetime to the effort of actualizing a belief in a male-idealized love to find fulfillment in a woman and for that woman. Men will dedicate, and take their own lives to realize this.

Old Hope for New Hope

I hope all that doesn’t sound too fortune cookie for you, but it’s a prime example of redefining hope in a new Red Pill-aware paradigm. You can hope and thrive in a new Red Pill context — I know I have — but it’s much easier when you internalize Red Pill truths and live with them in a Red Pill context instead of force-fitting them into your old, feminine-defined, Blue Pill context. I can imagine what my marriage would look like if I hadn’t made the Red Pill transition and learned to use that awareness in it. There are a lot of guys paying ’marriage coaches’ $150 an hour because they never did.

There was a great comment I received in this regard that was too good not to include in its entirety here:

I think I get it!

For years I have been bitter about this need to “perform” about how this shows that women do not love us as we love etc.. And just now I was reviewing my old relationships and I recalled something.

In each of my relationships, prior to meeting the women I eventually fell in love with, I was constantly working on myself, I would get in shape, hang out with friends, explore my environment and work on myself and my music etc. As soon as I would “fall in love” I would slowly drop those activities,

I’d focus on being a good bf, I would focus on providing and “being what she wanted” what I thought she wanted, better said.

But here is my Eureka moment, what I recalled each time was being unhappy, what I recall each time was feeling boxed in and kind of dull…of feeling trapped.

Is this what Rollo means when he says our response to women is a conditioning, and that the sadness we get from Red Pill truth is the result of behaving and believing something that is not really our nature, but the result of having someone else’s behaviors and beliefs installed into us?

So I think I finally understand it for myself… the talk of putting yourself first, of “performing” etc. is really just a way of saying “you don’t have to do what people say you’re supposed to do in a relationship — you don’t have to drop everything for her, you don’t have to stop doing what you like and love and you don’t have to kiss her ass”

In my case I dropped everything for two reasons. One was to do what I thought I was supposed to do…what I heard women say they wanted from a man, what my mother said a man should be etc., and the second reason was insecurity. I wanted her to love me, I didn’t want to rock the boat, I was scared of losing her…so eventually I did. I believed that in order for me to be worthy of her, of her love, I had to go along and give her what she said she wanted, what I was taught she wanted.

Is this what Rollo and everyone else is talking about? Because I think I finally get it.

Up to now I have faked my Game, to some extent. I just knew better than to do certain things or did things I knew would make me attractive, etc. to women. But seeing this now, not only am I realizing there is nothing to be bitter about — I was always happier working on myself and my interests and actually resentful of having to stop them — but that I am actually happier doing this thing women want of us we call “performing”.

In a way, you are performing, as Rollo says, either way. If you stop and think you can rest, in many ways you are doing so because you have been conditioned to believe, as I was, that you should. That real love meant you could and should.

Anyway, maybe this is simply me and my personal experience of it, but it makes sense to me.. and I think this has revealed to me something monumental, personally. Maybe other guys have a different experience of it, but this is how I have seen it played out in my life.

I feel better.

Unlearning

The key to living in a Red Pill context is to unlearn your Blue Pill expectations and dreams of finding contentment in them and replace them with expectations and aspirations based on realistic understandings of Red Pill truths.

Learn this now, you will never achieve contentment or emotional fulfillment in a Blue Pill context with Red Pill awareness.

Killing your inner Beta is a difficult task and part of that is discarding an old, comfortable, Blue Pill paradigm. For many newly unplugged, Red Pill aware, men the temptation is to think they can use this new understanding to achieve the goal-states of their preconditioned Blue Pill ideals. What they don’t understand is that, not only are those Blue Pill goal-states flawed, but they are also based on a flawed understanding of how to attain them.

Red Pill awareness demands a Red Pill context for fulfillment. Never seek emotional fulfillment through women. Blue Pill fulfillment is based on feminine-primary, Blue Pill conditions for that contentment. Even when men achieve these Blue Pill goal-states, the ones they’re conditioned to believe they should want for themselves, they find themselves discontent with those states and trapped by the liabilities of them.

The periods when a man is not striving to achieve or maintain those Blue Pill goal-states are the times he will be most fulfilled with his life, talents and ambitions.

As if this weren’t enough to convince a man he needs to re-imagine himself in a Red Pill-primary context, when women are presented with ’the perfect guy’ in a Blue Pill context they gradually (sometimes immediately) come to despise him. As proven by their actions, even women don’t want that Blue Pill perfected goal-state because it stagnates the otherwise exciting, self-important men they are aroused by, and attracted to, in a Red Pill context.

“Women should only ever be a complement to a man’s life, never the focus of it.”

Living in a Blue Pill context, and hoping you can achieve fulfillment in its fundamentally flawed goal-states, conditions men to make women the focus of their lives.

Throw that hope away and understand that you can create hope in a new system

— one in which you have more direct control over.