I started going through this, but while this is my first set of meditations on the topic, I think I may end up elsewhere soon because there's a bigger idea I'm missing, but here's my first look at this set of ideas:
I tend to think that the Andrew Tate red pill lifestyle is a lifestyle with the ultimate goal of being the owner of a strip club who's a millionaire. You'd be rich, lots of sexually desirable women would be showing you respect and under your control, and everyone knows you're important.
Now some people think that the best criticism against the red pill is that most men will never become millionaires, or will never own a strip club, but I think that that's way off base, it's the wrong criticism. On the other hand, it could also be that criticizing the point of view for being what it is is to miss the point.
Even if you're destined to become a millionaire and you're on track for that, even if women love you and will do anything you say, most men don't want their final destination to be as owner of a strip club. There's a phase in many men's lives where they want something like that, but eventually they grow out of it because it's a very surface level success.
I don't think that the reason the red pill vision draws men in is just because of the final goal, I think it's because a lot of the things that will let you become a millionaire strip club owner will also let you find conventional types of success on your path to becoming a more self-actualized human being. I don't think that most men are dumb enough to want to become the owner of a strip club in their twenties and then just shut down for the rest of their lives. On the other hand, let's say you aim at financial success, physical competence, and romantic (romance in the red pill sense being sort of shallow but still something men who have never succeeded can understand) -- even if you get a little slice of that kind of success, a little wealth, a little success with women, a little competence, that's a pretty good spot to start on the rest of the journey of your life.
Many men get into manosphere stuff, whether it be red pill or pick up arts or something else, but many put that part of their lives away after a few years.
Obviously it isn't red pill per se, but Neil Strauss, the famous author of The Game -- a New York Times bestseller that spoke of the at the time secret world of pick up artists, he basically won the red pill game. He was making lots of money selling pick up guru services, and he was world famous, even going on shows like The View, and he was popular among women -- their Project Hollywood setup in LA was a hedonistic paradise -- but eventually back then, he moved away from that scene. A later book, called The Tuth, was in some ways a repudiation of the lifestyle talked about in the first book, because the lessons he learned ended up being unproductive when trying to navigate marriage and fatherhood (as Hollywood goes, his marriage started in 2013 and ended in 2018,) and recently his life has been about doing things entirely unrelated -- he wrote a book about a rock star, and another book about surviving a bunch of apocalypses. He's likened the face of his life where he got deeply into the pickup arts as something like a later adolescence or going to college -- short time in his life where he had a lot of experiences and learned a lot, but eventually had to put it aside for adulthood. One of his most recent books was the first book to ever be put on to the ethereum blockchain, and as a result was acquired by a major museum.
Contrast that with one of the other main characters of the book, Eric von Markovik aka Mystery. According to a 2018 BuzzFeed article, so take that as you might, it seems that he never really stopped doing the thing that he was doing, and in a lot of ways he sounds in the article like one of those guys who's best days were in college who is constantly hoping to relive The Glory Days -- he talks about getting back to LA to create a project Hollywood 2.0 "just like in the game". Even without the extreme bias of far left BuzzFeed editors, you do get the impression of a guy who is exactly where he was 15 years ago, except no longer in his prime physically or mentally.
This touches on two chapters from the graysonian ethic, in one chapter called think ahead, I asked the reader to consider what their lives might be like in 10, 20, 30 years from now. It's been 6 years since von Markovik gave that interview, do you think his life has gotten markedly better since then? In the article, he has two kids on the other side of the planet. He doesn't strike me as a present father, and so you kind of have to ask the question what is the purpose of his life? And he's I think by now in his 50s, he's got to be a pretty weird sight in the club. And he hits his 60s, did he really still going to be doing this? And his 70s, what sort of weirdo will he be? What happens if he lives to reach 100? "50 years ago I had lots of sex!" That's great, granddad. Second, I have an entire chapter on attraction that starts off with a warning about he pretended dangerous of love and sex without prudence, but later on closes off in part with a warning about letting chasing the opposite sex become the only thing that matters anybody, and without really realizing it I ended up writing about someone like mystery who have had all these ephemeral successes; notches on a bedpost that has long been sent to the incinerator because the owner of the bed no longer needs it. These things are important, but they aren't all there is to life.
If one takes the various religions as ancient wisdom that helped their civilizations thrive, then it is clear that a focus on this sort of short-term success is something that virtually every religion warns against. The Bible famously contains the line "my name is Ozymandias, king of kings, look upon my works in despair" with an admonition to focus on following the commandments of God and finding greatness through dedicating yourself to a higher purpose. Buddhism advocates for a disconnection from the physical world to focus on spiritual things. Islam, Hindu, Shinto, all of them contain a similar idea.
That's all true that life must be more than just these ephemeral things, but just as man cannot live on bread alone, man still needs bread. We still need to learn how to achieve the things in life we require -- safety and food, companionship and sex, and community, before we worry about self-actualization, and so a phase of your life where you focus on that is sensible, and thinking you can avoid such a phase of your life is self-destructive unless you were born with a silver spoon in your mouth. There's an inherent paradox in the fact that you must leave ephemeral success behind to advance as a person, but you must still often require ephemeral success to reach those higher levels of advancement because without that base you won't be able to see higher up. Of course, one of the truths you find along the way is that the complexities and contradictions inherent in understanding these ideologies and even embracing them while not letting them completely define you because there are other contradictory truths one must learn and embrace to be fulfilled is just part of the dance between competing forces in the world -- most of the things red pillers say about women are in fact true, but they are also in fact false, because the world is a filled with many ambiguities and contradictions can coexist at one time. Just talk to happily married men and women who do not by any means hate women or men, but are happy to engage in sexist humor that describes parts of the life they love that are paradoxical or frustrating.
I myself had an era between about 2007 and 2009 where I was deeply interested in the pick-up arts (again, being a space older than but somewhat adjacent to the red pill movements). I had just graduated from college and was working my first professional job and was ready to find companionship, but having spent my formative years focusing on either school or computers (not gonna pretend I'm not a huge nerd) or fitness, I thought I'd never learned what I needed to. One of the key lessons I needed was to put myself in a beautiful woman's shoes, and realize that their whole existence was much different than mine, and from 18 onwards even mid women were constantly geting propositioned for sex, much unlike 99% of men. That's kind of a red pill moment, isn't it? Realizing how different the world is. Eventually, after dating or going out with a bunch of women, I got married, and that part of my life went into the box, never to come out again -- I needed it in that moment no matter how ugly some people might have considered it, and I appreciate it for what it gave me, but I don't want or need such a thing any longer. Unlike the perception that red pill ideas would foster misogyny, many of those red pill ideas are the shadow to the ideas of the blue pill my generation was raised on, and just as an intellectual diet consisting solely of red pill ideas would be a toxic negative environment, so too is the intellectual diet consisting solely of blue pill ideas a toxically positive environment, and not representative of the lived experience of women, or representative of the lived experience of men who have been either successful or unsuccessful with women.
After I learned a little bit more of the pickup arts, I ended up helping a number of men learn how to pick up women themselves. Now typically these were not hulking giga chads who needed to get their game from a 30 to a 31, they were good people who nonetheless had to get themselves from a 0 to a 1 or higher. In both cases, those men had a severely lacking understanding of the women they were pursuing. In both cases, they had a wildly optimistic view of the women they were pursuing, and so thought that the only thing stopping them from getting into relationships with these women was some major romantic gesture, effectively just confronting the girl they liked about the fact that they liked them. I told them both that they had some highly unrealistic expectations of what was going to happen, and I explained in no uncertain terms what could be described as a highly red pilled version of what was going to happen. In both cases, after going off to try to prove me wrong by confronting their crush about the attachment that they felt, the women in question ended up showing they were much better described by the red pilled version of reality. In one case, the woman he thought was this pure virginal sweet thing threw it in his face the fact that she was actually having an affair with a married man. These moments helped them understand women a little better, and forced them to disregard previous misconceptions about women's perspectives. If the only perspective these men came to understand was the red pilled perspective that would be a big problem because the world is more complicated than that and some blue pilled ideas are also correct, but
There was a study in the 2020s that actually investigated whether the pick-up arts ultimately led to relationships (and I'm still considering the two directly adjacent), and it found that it had a large impact in creating long-term relationships. I directly credit it with a series of situations that ultimatley led to my marriage. In that sense, while it may appear on its face to be misogynistic (one of the primary moral arguments against following such ideas), it may in fact be good for women by helping good men become noticable, bringing good men and good women together being a net good in the universe even if the methods seem incongruous with that. The other primary moral argument is that the methods themselves are immoral. I think it's important not to paint with too broad a brush. While it's true "all's fair in love and war", it's also true that even war has rules and what you do to find love you'll have to live with the rest of your life. Being a bit cringey such as negging or using the pick up arts vernacular is one thing, but many would consider Tate's loverboy method where he attracts women to bait and switch them into working in his virtual brothel to be morally reprehensible given the chance to actually do it. I think that speaks to another paradox, that men might think they want that goal and will pursue them, but upon achieving such a thing may realize the goal isn't at all what they want -- going back to my original metaphor, owning a strip club would actually suck your soul away.
The Indian sacred text Bhagavad Gita (the source of the famous quote: "now I am become death, destroyer of worlds") is a god posing as a chariotman of a prince imparting lessons about morality. The Old testament book of Kings tells the story of many sovereigns, and their stories in relation to their relationship with God and they're following of His commandments. I think this suggests that early civilizations believed that in order to be conversing with God at the highest spiritual level you'd need to be at a certain level of material sufficiency, thus the focus on princes and kings who did not want for such things and so could focus on spiritual enlightenment. Later on of course ideologies such as Buddhism and Christianity changed that so the poor and middle classes could find spiritual enlightenment as well. The thing is, anyone who has been destitute and also without social structure in place knows they have nothing and can't build anything from the nothing they have and so forget about spiritual enlightenment, they will struggle just to achieve the day to day. One benefit of organized religion is it helps people have some of those bottom rungs of Maslow's hierarchy regardless of their personal wealth. In an atheistic world like ours, you need to build those bottom rungs yourself, and so despite the ugly nature of red pill ideas, they can actually be the beginning of a path to spiritual enlightenment and self actualization because it lets a man pull himself up the hill to see the next steps where one leaves behind such trivialities as being an owner of a strip club. That being said, it should be clear from this analogy that it's a tool you eventually leave behind.
I tend to think that the Andrew Tate red pill lifestyle is a lifestyle with the ultimate goal of being the owner of a strip club who's a millionaire. You'd be rich, lots of sexually desirable women would be showing you respect and under your control, and everyone knows you're important.
Now some people think that the best criticism against the red pill is that most men will never become millionaires, or will never own a strip club, but I think that that's way off base, it's the wrong criticism. On the other hand, it could also be that criticizing the point of view for being what it is is to miss the point.
Even if you're destined to become a millionaire and you're on track for that, even if women love you and will do anything you say, most men don't want their final destination to be as owner of a strip club. There's a phase in many men's lives where they want something like that, but eventually they grow out of it because it's a very surface level success.
I don't think that the reason the red pill vision draws men in is just because of the final goal, I think it's because a lot of the things that will let you become a millionaire strip club owner will also let you find conventional types of success on your path to becoming a more self-actualized human being. I don't think that most men are dumb enough to want to become the owner of a strip club in their twenties and then just shut down for the rest of their lives. On the other hand, let's say you aim at financial success, physical competence, and romantic (romance in the red pill sense being sort of shallow but still something men who have never succeeded can understand) -- even if you get a little slice of that kind of success, a little wealth, a little success with women, a little competence, that's a pretty good spot to start on the rest of the journey of your life.
Many men get into manosphere stuff, whether it be red pill or pick up arts or something else, but many put that part of their lives away after a few years.
Obviously it isn't red pill per se, but Neil Strauss, the famous author of The Game -- a New York Times bestseller that spoke of the at the time secret world of pick up artists, he basically won the red pill game. He was making lots of money selling pick up guru services, and he was world famous, even going on shows like The View, and he was popular among women -- their Project Hollywood setup in LA was a hedonistic paradise -- but eventually back then, he moved away from that scene. A later book, called The Tuth, was in some ways a repudiation of the lifestyle talked about in the first book, because the lessons he learned ended up being unproductive when trying to navigate marriage and fatherhood (as Hollywood goes, his marriage started in 2013 and ended in 2018,) and recently his life has been about doing things entirely unrelated -- he wrote a book about a rock star, and another book about surviving a bunch of apocalypses. He's likened the face of his life where he got deeply into the pickup arts as something like a later adolescence or going to college -- short time in his life where he had a lot of experiences and learned a lot, but eventually had to put it aside for adulthood. One of his most recent books was the first book to ever be put on to the ethereum blockchain, and as a result was acquired by a major museum.
Contrast that with one of the other main characters of the book, Eric von Markovik aka Mystery. According to a 2018 BuzzFeed article, so take that as you might, it seems that he never really stopped doing the thing that he was doing, and in a lot of ways he sounds in the article like one of those guys who's best days were in college who is constantly hoping to relive The Glory Days -- he talks about getting back to LA to create a project Hollywood 2.0 "just like in the game". Even without the extreme bias of far left BuzzFeed editors, you do get the impression of a guy who is exactly where he was 15 years ago, except no longer in his prime physically or mentally.
This touches on two chapters from the graysonian ethic, in one chapter called think ahead, I asked the reader to consider what their lives might be like in 10, 20, 30 years from now. It's been 6 years since von Markovik gave that interview, do you think his life has gotten markedly better since then? In the article, he has two kids on the other side of the planet. He doesn't strike me as a present father, and so you kind of have to ask the question what is the purpose of his life? And he's I think by now in his 50s, he's got to be a pretty weird sight in the club. And he hits his 60s, did he really still going to be doing this? And his 70s, what sort of weirdo will he be? What happens if he lives to reach 100? "50 years ago I had lots of sex!" That's great, granddad. Second, I have an entire chapter on attraction that starts off with a warning about he pretended dangerous of love and sex without prudence, but later on closes off in part with a warning about letting chasing the opposite sex become the only thing that matters anybody, and without really realizing it I ended up writing about someone like mystery who have had all these ephemeral successes; notches on a bedpost that has long been sent to the incinerator because the owner of the bed no longer needs it. These things are important, but they aren't all there is to life.
If one takes the various religions as ancient wisdom that helped their civilizations thrive, then it is clear that a focus on this sort of short-term success is something that virtually every religion warns against. The Bible famously contains the line "my name is Ozymandias, king of kings, look upon my works in despair" with an admonition to focus on following the commandments of God and finding greatness through dedicating yourself to a higher purpose. Buddhism advocates for a disconnection from the physical world to focus on spiritual things. Islam, Hindu, Shinto, all of them contain a similar idea.
That's all true that life must be more than just these ephemeral things, but just as man cannot live on bread alone, man still needs bread. We still need to learn how to achieve the things in life we require -- safety and food, companionship and sex, and community, before we worry about self-actualization, and so a phase of your life where you focus on that is sensible, and thinking you can avoid such a phase of your life is self-destructive unless you were born with a silver spoon in your mouth. There's an inherent paradox in the fact that you must leave ephemeral success behind to advance as a person, but you must still often require ephemeral success to reach those higher levels of advancement because without that base you won't be able to see higher up. Of course, one of the truths you find along the way is that the complexities and contradictions inherent in understanding these ideologies and even embracing them while not letting them completely define you because there are other contradictory truths one must learn and embrace to be fulfilled is just part of the dance between competing forces in the world -- most of the things red pillers say about women are in fact true, but they are also in fact false, because the world is a filled with many ambiguities and contradictions can coexist at one time. Just talk to happily married men and women who do not by any means hate women or men, but are happy to engage in sexist humor that describes parts of the life they love that are paradoxical or frustrating.
I myself had an era between about 2007 and 2009 where I was deeply interested in the pick-up arts (again, being a space older than but somewhat adjacent to the red pill movements). I had just graduated from college and was working my first professional job and was ready to find companionship, but having spent my formative years focusing on either school or computers (not gonna pretend I'm not a huge nerd) or fitness, I thought I'd never learned what I needed to. One of the key lessons I needed was to put myself in a beautiful woman's shoes, and realize that their whole existence was much different than mine, and from 18 onwards even mid women were constantly geting propositioned for sex, much unlike 99% of men. That's kind of a red pill moment, isn't it? Realizing how different the world is. Eventually, after dating or going out with a bunch of women, I got married, and that part of my life went into the box, never to come out again -- I needed it in that moment no matter how ugly some people might have considered it, and I appreciate it for what it gave me, but I don't want or need such a thing any longer. Unlike the perception that red pill ideas would foster misogyny, many of those red pill ideas are the shadow to the ideas of the blue pill my generation was raised on, and just as an intellectual diet consisting solely of red pill ideas would be a toxic negative environment, so too is the intellectual diet consisting solely of blue pill ideas a toxically positive environment, and not representative of the lived experience of women, or representative of the lived experience of men who have been either successful or unsuccessful with women.
After I learned a little bit more of the pickup arts, I ended up helping a number of men learn how to pick up women themselves. Now typically these were not hulking giga chads who needed to get their game from a 30 to a 31, they were good people who nonetheless had to get themselves from a 0 to a 1 or higher. In both cases, those men had a severely lacking understanding of the women they were pursuing. In both cases, they had a wildly optimistic view of the women they were pursuing, and so thought that the only thing stopping them from getting into relationships with these women was some major romantic gesture, effectively just confronting the girl they liked about the fact that they liked them. I told them both that they had some highly unrealistic expectations of what was going to happen, and I explained in no uncertain terms what could be described as a highly red pilled version of what was going to happen. In both cases, after going off to try to prove me wrong by confronting their crush about the attachment that they felt, the women in question ended up showing they were much better described by the red pilled version of reality. In one case, the woman he thought was this pure virginal sweet thing threw it in his face the fact that she was actually having an affair with a married man. These moments helped them understand women a little better, and forced them to disregard previous misconceptions about women's perspectives. If the only perspective these men came to understand was the red pilled perspective that would be a big problem because the world is more complicated than that and some blue pilled ideas are also correct, but
There was a study in the 2020s that actually investigated whether the pick-up arts ultimately led to relationships (and I'm still considering the two directly adjacent), and it found that it had a large impact in creating long-term relationships. I directly credit it with a series of situations that ultimatley led to my marriage. In that sense, while it may appear on its face to be misogynistic (one of the primary moral arguments against following such ideas), it may in fact be good for women by helping good men become noticable, bringing good men and good women together being a net good in the universe even if the methods seem incongruous with that. The other primary moral argument is that the methods themselves are immoral. I think it's important not to paint with too broad a brush. While it's true "all's fair in love and war", it's also true that even war has rules and what you do to find love you'll have to live with the rest of your life. Being a bit cringey such as negging or using the pick up arts vernacular is one thing, but many would consider Tate's loverboy method where he attracts women to bait and switch them into working in his virtual brothel to be morally reprehensible given the chance to actually do it. I think that speaks to another paradox, that men might think they want that goal and will pursue them, but upon achieving such a thing may realize the goal isn't at all what they want -- going back to my original metaphor, owning a strip club would actually suck your soul away.
The Indian sacred text Bhagavad Gita (the source of the famous quote: "now I am become death, destroyer of worlds") is a god posing as a chariotman of a prince imparting lessons about morality. The Old testament book of Kings tells the story of many sovereigns, and their stories in relation to their relationship with God and they're following of His commandments. I think this suggests that early civilizations believed that in order to be conversing with God at the highest spiritual level you'd need to be at a certain level of material sufficiency, thus the focus on princes and kings who did not want for such things and so could focus on spiritual enlightenment. Later on of course ideologies such as Buddhism and Christianity changed that so the poor and middle classes could find spiritual enlightenment as well. The thing is, anyone who has been destitute and also without social structure in place knows they have nothing and can't build anything from the nothing they have and so forget about spiritual enlightenment, they will struggle just to achieve the day to day. One benefit of organized religion is it helps people have some of those bottom rungs of Maslow's hierarchy regardless of their personal wealth. In an atheistic world like ours, you need to build those bottom rungs yourself, and so despite the ugly nature of red pill ideas, they can actually be the beginning of a path to spiritual enlightenment and self actualization because it lets a man pull himself up the hill to see the next steps where one leaves behind such trivialities as being an owner of a strip club. That being said, it should be clear from this analogy that it's a tool you eventually leave behind.
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