In the last couple of weeks, I've received a couple of really interesting reader questions that I think have some synergy. One gentleman spoke of how he as a red pill men can find other red pill men to hang out with, because he finds it very tiring to only hang out with "blue pillers" and secondly, he would like to have a group of men who can support each other on the journey.

The second gentleman asked me a fairly straight forward question of how I manage to both work in corporate and be red pilled. The implicit idea being that as a red pill man you have to employ law 38

"Law 38: Think as you like, but behave like others" Robert Greene

The reason why I view these questions as having much synergy, in that they are both reflective of the same desire, in the case of the former question, being able to be surrounded by men who share your perspective, have similar goal and act as a tribe, in other words; being included. In the case of the latter, the balance between being your authentic self, while you are surrounded by people who do not share your perspective, and would be likely to exclude you, if you reveal your authentic self.

Inclusion vs. Exclusion, feeling united by a common bond and shared goals vs. feeling alone and frightened in the crowd.

Surrounded by The Red Pill

To be quite honest, the only time I spend with Red Pill men is the time I spend engaged in the community, either on twitter, as a panelist on The Red Man Group, and doing Red Mornings with Rian. The rest of my time, I work a corporate job, I go to the gym, I go on dates, hang out with plates, and most of that time, I'm dealing with civilians.

Hanging out with Red pill men has it's upsides, because you have men who keep you accountable, take away your ability to rationalize, and friendly competition between men have always been a great tool for progress. I told the story of how myself and a few friends who also ran game would go out and have a contest where the guy who had the most spectacular blow-out in a set would drink for free that night. This is an example of how being surrounded by other men on the same path can be very beneficial in the same way that having a work-out partner who is slightly more into training than you can be beneficial.

Not only are they a great source of information and a partner to swap notes with, they are also there to be motivated when you are not, be disciplined when you are not, and shame the crap out of you when you are slacking. Very few people have the discipline and motivation to not fuck up a meal or skip a work-out in a year.

However, I think being submerged in the Red Pill subculture on a constant basis can be a bad thing, because we have to keep in mind, most of our time is spent interacting with civilians. Now, I hold the position that women are both naturally red pilled, while at the same time it is impossible for women to be red pilled. I realize that this sounds contradictory, however, what I mean by that is that women's instincts and sub-conscious behavior is naturally red pilled, women's conscious mind and logos are not.

The simplest way to understand this dichotomy is watching what a woman does, and then comparing it to what she says. Over the past 4 - 5 years since I got back into the community after a long hiatus, we have ample examples of "Red Pill Women", usually in their late twenties to late thirties, who while on one hand argue that men need to embrace their masculine duty, be virtuous and get married, who simultaneously sleep with and slide into the DMs of community leaders.

This means that even if all the men in the world went red pill, you would still need to interact with women as civilians, in a world where at most 1% of men are red pilled, you are constantly dealing with civilians. Thus, training yourself to compartmentalize your red pill persona is important.

I'm going to quote something Rian said on last week's Red Man Group episode "White belts talk the most about karate".

You are not your brother's keeper, it is not your duty to spread the gospel to other men. Pick your moments, perhaps share an episode of The Red Man Group, Red Mornings, or one of our essays or books when you see that the man would be receptive to the idea. If a guy was just cheated on, give him a copy of The Rational Male, if a guy is complaining that he can't get girls, offer to take him to the gym, clothes shopping, to get a decent haircut or otherwise help him out with the physical problem he has, then deal with the perspective later.

Red Pilled and Corporate

The corporate environment is rather complex to be in, and the red pill perspective is not really the only thing you have to hide about yourself. I have very strict rule-sets for what I will and will not discuss or talk about at work, which does mean part of my authentic self is suppressed. The struggle I suspect the gentleman is suffering from is feeling as if he is "faking it", it's a problem of compartmentalization.

One of my early lessons in the corporate world was that adaptability and personae control is paramount. If you are a military man, you have to deal with the fact that the military has a strong hierarchy that at all levels depends on every man following orders (within certain parameters) in order for the large machinery that is a modern military to work. It doesn't matter if you think your CO is an idiot or that the top brass have no idea what is going on on the group, you follow orders.

Corporate is often very similar in that you have to navigate a hierarchy, you have to deal with people with widely different personalities, perspectives on life, who are from different generations and have different backgrounds, your job is to make that work. You do that by being a "smooth operator", which means that you at all times think in a goal-oriented fashion, "What are we trying to accomplish", and efficiently "What is the best way to accomplish our goal". The nature any organization is that you will have different groupings and people who have different ideas about the best way of doing anything, what is the most important thing that should be done, and even about what the best possible outcome is, your job is to navigate that as a "smooth operator".

Quite frankly, I think having to deal with the former is great training for a red pill man, because your learn how to be Machiavellian, how to work the system and how to operate like a diplomat rather than as a despot.

This is where I suspect the gentleman who asked me the question is struggling, tailoring his approach and persona to different situations, contexts and groupings. I get it, tailoring your image is hard work, you have to consider a lot of different input variables and determine the best approach to getting your desired outcome, and it's just so much more comfortable and easy to "Just be yourself".

His solution to this problem was entrepreneurship, however I think that owning and running your own company gets much too good a reputation in our sphere. Running your own business in most cases, as long as "your own business" is more than an online "one man show", perhaps with a single digital assistant helping you out with emails requires a higher degree of smoothness, pragmatism, efficiency and goal oriented thinking. On top of that it requires that you constantly be aware of various value chain interactions.

As an entrepreneur you are always walking that fine line of maintaining pragmatism, goal-oriented thinking and efficiency, while maintaining happiness among your employees, your suppliers, your buyers, your partners, and minimizing drama and conflict among those parties.

This is very similar to game on an abstract level, because you must remain pragmatic, goal oriented and think in terms of efficiency to maintain your value, keep your supply chain going, you need to maintain a degree of happiness among your plates, you need to minimize drama and conflict.

Authority is an important factor here, but the larger and more complex an organization grows, the more difficult it becomes to govern it with authoritarianism. If you are managing a restaurant and one of your servers is creating drama, you can fire that person and replace them fairly easily on short notice. If you are managing a large business, perhaps one that is dependent on knowledge workers, has heavy training requirements and so on. The lead time on replacing someone can be months, and while you're working on replacing them, you are losing money and business because you are operating sub-maximally.

Summary and Conclusions

Every way you elect to live life, has consequences. If you elect to move 2000 miles into the wilderness, live on a small homestead, hunt for food, gather wood, erect a small log-cabin and go for that Henry-David Thoreau lifestyle, then you can be more your authentic self, because you are not dependent on other people at all.

If you work a corporate job, have a family, or otherwise elect to include people in your life, the less authentically can you be yourself because you always have to walk that line between yourself and others. When I get told something like "Yeah Shelly cheated on Dave with John, apparently the affair has been going on for months" at work, I say something like "That's so sad, I hope they work it out" then I move on. I do not feel the need to explain that we've all seen that Dave has been complacent for years, have skipped out on doing the work, and probably hasn't gotten laid in years, and that Shelly has stayed in shape, handled her business and that what happened was just hypergamy in practice.

I also do not feel the need to explain in detail, via rant in public that the reason why initiative XYZ went to shit was that all the people they put on it were incompetent, the plan was not reality-checked and that the whole thing was a pet-project that is not in line with corporate strategy. I simply request permission from my boss to do an evaluation, citing that the project could be a source of organizational learning, that could assist in developing useful policies and procedures to prevent such events in the future.

It would be a hell of a lot more satisfying to dress down people you do not respect, who have gotten their positions due to politics rather than merit, in public in a rant that makes Alec Baldwin in "Glengarry Glen Ross" look understated, subtle, and indirect, but it would not lead to the desired outcome and would elicit a lot of blowback against you that will come back to bite you in the ass in the future.

However, that is "just be yourself" in a corporate setting, just like vomiting emotions and compliments at a girl that you just took to a $1000 first date dinner is "just be yourself" in a game setting.

To end on an observation, the smoothest operators I meet are rarely the men who have never had a boss, the entrepreneurs who have always been their own boss and always had their ass on the line. These men can be successful, but even Steve Jobs learned to temper his despotic tendencies in his last tenure at Apple.

The smoothest operators are often the men who have worked extensively in some form of liaison capacity, where their job is to get multiple organizations, with very different cultures, complex stakeholder configurations, to cooperate, while having no formal authority over the resources they are dependent on to realize the outcome. These people have their stick taken away, they do not have much of a carrot to use either, so they are purely dependent on persuasion and people management skills to get the job done.

The best skill-set you could elect to include in your skill-stack is the ability to read and manage people without formal authority. You have no formal authority over the women you run game on, you also cannot outright pay them in cash, well you can but then your game is not the reason you are getting laid. Good game, is being able to get laid, without formal authority, and without paying the girl off, it's persuading her to work with you to realize an outcome that you both enjoy, and which is what you wanted to begin with.

To end this on my favorite quote by Machiavelli

“The lion cannot protect himself from traps, and the fox cannot defend himself from wolves. One must therefore be a fox to recognize traps, and a lion to frighten wolves.”

If you want to read more of my essays check out my blog https://blacklabellogic.com/ to develop your competitive advantage as a man in the modern sexual market place.