Sex controls the world.
That's not even a controversial opinion. It's been known since the first Cro-Magnon man decided to go out and do something insane in the hopes of impressing a cute little Neanderthal chick enough to get into her moose-pelt loin-cloth, or whatever weird material all those unevolved jerks used to cover their junk back then.
People legitimately go to war over sex stuff. Sure, they sublimate the urge behind other levels of higher-order needs and desires (food, ideology, etc...), but at the end of the day, that biological imperative for men and women to slingshot their DNA into the future is probably the biggest underlying motivator for people to go to war, work, build civilizations, and do, well--everything else that people do.
It's so obvious that it's almost silly to go to the trouble of pointing it out or proving it.
Somehow, though, with the creation of the internet, a bunch of guys who are just-educated-enough-to-misuse-science and philosophy words (and science words and philosophy words, and just words themselves) decided that they'd discovered the concept that "Sex Controls Things." And, they got amped up because, maybe for lack of an encyclopedia or basic social observation skills, they thought this was A Big Secret that Society (they like to use big weaselly generalizations without ever really defining their terms clearly) Has Hidden.
So starting from this unremarkable premise dressed up to seem like the biggest discovery since Newton was bopped on the head with the falling apple, they came up with an entire system to explain this Hidden Truth.
And like some self-appointed Eleusinian Hierophants, these guys waste countless days--years even--of their lives trying to bring people (read: "men"...women, for most sad captives of the Manosphere cult, are generally considered as a kind of demiurgic servants who, by Nature, can't ::really:: ever gain the "True Knowledge") to their Sex-Based Paradise through understanding of their Hidden Wisdom.
It sounds crazy, because it is.
I don't dislike the guys (and, ridiculously, the small group of women) who have been misled by this absurdity. I just feel awful that they end up consigning themselves, necessarily, to a lifetime of frustration, emptiness, and discontent, because they have nowhere to turn for good, corrective information, refuting all the Red Pill Piffle.
Don't get me wrong. Some guys will spend a fairly good chunk of time feeling pretty high. Because some of the ideas promoted by the Red Pill hucksters are, in fact, true. They're not usually true for the reasons the crazy people claim, but they are true none-the-less.
And, to be frank, getting lots of sex and attention from women feels wonderful.
Just like taking amphetamines feels wonderful. You can get a great high, feel like you're flying and on top of the world.
But like amphetamines (which have some, but frequently overstated, neurological and psychological effects as sex), it will never give you any lasting Equanimity, True Happiness, or Deep Contentment.
This is a fact.1
Yet, more and more men are buying into this joke of a worldview, because they have nowhere to turn for legitimate, educated refutations of the Manosphere/Redpill ideology in a language that they believe and understand.
Because, let's face it, with few exceptions, the people who take Manosphere ideas seriously enough to spend any time refuting them are never refuting them on the same grounds as the Manosphere itself.
In other words, the Redpillers and their debunkers are just talking past each other.
Think about it. Trying to convince a Redpill guy that his ideas are wrong by bringing in ideas from Feminist Studies or post-modern critical theory, is like trying to convince Islamophobes that they are wrong by quoting from the Koran. You're not even speaking their language.
I can speak the Redpillers' language. Not because I ever bought into their Crazy. I'm too much of an Alpha Iconoclast for that bullshit.
But I actually get where they went wrong, why it's so easy to fall into the Manosphere's crappy fallacious reasoning, and--if they are willing to stand by their self-proclaimed commitment to rationalism--how to have real contentment, each in his own way according to his own unique qualities, by retaining the various bits of healthy Truth they've picked up, and discarding all the rest of the useless chaff.
The RedPillers get their name from the scene in The Matrix where the professor from Higher Learning explains to Washington Sentinels standout Quarterback Shane Falco that if he chooses to take a certain red pill, he will obtain access to Reality as it really is, Truth instead of lies. But, importantly, he won't be able to go back to living with the false comfort that the fake reality can occasionally provide to a weak-minded person.
The problem with the analogy in our case here, is that the Red Pill fed to you by the Manosphere doesn't bring you any closer to the Truth. It just brings you to a different kind of bizarro-world filled with a few crappy approximations of Reality swimming in a sea of meaningless gibberish.
When a person "takes the red pill" they end up drowning slowly in the Manosphere. A lot of times they don't even know that they're drowning because the water's pleasant (and they are probably having sex in it). But after a while, when their minds turn pruny and the waves pick up, these guys will realize that something--something inexplicable--just isn't right. Except, a lot of them have been in the water so long, or have been dropped in so far out, that they don't even know what they need to make things right again.
I'm just one guy, and I can't do everything myself. I'm not Jesus (or Hermes Trismegistus if you're more of a mystic...or The Rock if you're more of a fan of the True Great One). So I can't give every one of these poor guys an island, or even a helicopter ride back to dry land.
But I can toss you a Life Raft with one of those dinky little plastic emergency paddles, so you can slowly start making your way back to shore. I'll even toss you down a volleyball you can dress up with grass and blood and talk to so you don't lose your damn mind anymore than you already have by being a person who talks to a volleyball.
So, for all you men who have taken the Red Pill...for all of my brothers who might have bought the pill, opened it up, and taken just a little taste of the gel inside the capsule...and for all of my fellow males who have always known that there's got to be something better than the grind of the boring birth, school, mortgage, marriage, death cycle, but who have also realized that the Manosphere really doesn't seem like the place to find that something better:
Welcome to The Life Raft. Hop in and...legs first is probably...no just swing your leg up over...you're gonna tip it you idiot...you need to...just, like, use your leverage to kind of, you know, get up...wow, you are really out of shape man...Alright, I'll use this glorified spatula to get us moving, you take a little nap and we'll start when you wake up.
Endnotes
- To be proven over the course of this series. I'm obviously not going to try to prove all of this in a cutesy Preface. There are few people in the world who are deserving of scorn than people who think it's a good idea to shove data in your face in a preface. You wouldn't want to eat a rib-eye as your appetizer before a rib-eye, unless you're a deranged monster. You'd want some poutine or a good un-chopped salad (because you're not a baby and don't need your food smashed into pieces by a waiter doing side-work in the back). So for any redpiller maniacs coming in here whining about your not-so-humble author merely asserting something to be a fact without grounding it, justifying it, or proving it...take a moment and read a few articles about Writing 101 so you can have a solid foundation in how different sections of a piece of writing, including prefaces, are understood by the entire civilized world. And then take your weird misunderstanding about something so simple as a very wonderful hint that perhaps you have a lot to gain by letting me help you extricate yourself from your current ideological and psychological situation. My hand is out to pull you in brother, just reach out and grab it...