A refutation of Rollo Tomassi’s concepts of love.
Readership: All
Theme: Problems with the Red Pill
Length: 870 words
Reading Time: 5 minutes
“What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus preface.
Over a decade ago, Rollo Tomassi made his most popular1 and controversial contribution to the Red Pill when he discovered that men and women do not share the same concept of love. Tomassi’s ideas on the concepts of love have since gained widespread Manosphere acceptance. These ideas, however, are wrong. They are less than wrong: they are suggestions posing as fact!
Tomassi’s discovery of women’s concept of love is not a discovery at all: it is the invention of a new sense of the word ‘love’. This is a common flaw of scientific rationalism. Darwin and Freud’s greatest achievements were also the inventions of new senses of common words. Darwin introduced a sense of the word ‘animal’ that includes human beings, making the difference between Bill Gates and a nematode one of degree, not of kind. Freud introduced a sense of the word ‘thought’ that allowed for ‘unconscious thoughts’; an oxymoron prior to his time (comparable to ‘unconscious hunger’). Similarly, Tomassi’s magnum opus is the invention of a sense of the word ‘love’ that, plainly speaking, isn’t love at all.
Because Tomassi’s novel use of ‘love’ affects the way women’s love is viewed, he is often accused of claiming women are incapable of love. In response, he reiterates his belief that women are not incapable of love as they define it. The ensuing argument is purely grammatical (and futile). Tomassi is like someone who insists the Indigenous Americans gave Custer a ‘makeover’ at Little Bighorn. This appears to be a historical inaccuracy, but is actually a morbidly sarcastic use of the word ‘makeover’. It was reported that when Custer and his men were found, they had been killed, scalped, and mutilated. In truth, however, the Indigenous Americans had only given them ‘haircuts and piercings’ — a ‘makeover’ — as they would define it. Needless to say, speaking plainly to avoid confusion (that is, without creating new definitions of words), they were mutilated and killed. Likewise, Tomassi’s detractors are correct when they say he denies that women are capable of love.
The question still remains: Are women only capable of an absurd definition of love? Does the word ‘love’, as Tomassi uses it, describe something real about women’s capabilities? No, it does not. The whole idea of Tomassi’s concepts of love is mistaken because it is a misuse of language. It is an Interpretation Game, set up to interpret phenomena, rather than report them as they are. It can never be anything but an invitation to view events a particular way — it can never be anything more than a school of interpretation. Freud, for instance, claimed in The Interpretation of Dreams that every dream is a disguised wish-fulfilment:
“When the work of interpretation has been completed the dream can be recognized as a wish-fulfilment.”
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams.
It would be foolish to suggest any counterexamples, because the whole point of an Interpretation Game is to see something as the game suggests it be seen. It is impossible to disprove an interpretation: it may be unconvincing, but it is never false. Therefore, seeming defeaters of the game’s central proposition only challenge the ingenuity of the interpreter, as Freud and Tomassi illustrate:
“The anxiety-dream does really seem to preclude a generalisation of the thesis deduced from the examples given in the last chapter, that dreams are wish-fulfilments … [H]as anyone ever tried to interpret these dreams — to discover their latent thought-content? If not, the two objections to our doctrine are no longer valid; for there is always the possibility that even our painful and terrifying dreams may, upon interpretation, prove to be wish-fulfillments.”
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams.
“There are always going to be examples of the Christopher / Dana Reeves story of selfless devotion and love in spite of circumstance. I don’t doubt that they both loved each other deeply, but to arrive at that point Dana’s hypergamy had to be settled by Christopher, and Christopher had to come to terms with Dana’s conditions for loving him to begin with.”
Rollo Tomassi’s comment under Dalrock’s post, Who Loves Best (2013/12/27).
In reality, propositions like Freud’s wish-fulfilment theory and Tomassi’s “Women are fundamentally incapable of loving a man in the way that a man expects to be loved” are not statements of fact. Instead of fact, each of these propositions is the rule of an interpretation game, where the objective is to construe everything as obeying it. And, depending on the creativity of the interpreter, it is always possible to make even the most stubborn facts appear to conform to the rule.
Conclusively, Tomassi’s concepts of love do not describe anything real; they only color our view of women inescapably, often leading to resentment against them. Any such thing as a concept of love would have the same effect — that of suggesting that we view things a certain way, rather than describing them as they are. Therefore, the very idea of concepts of love is flawed and the idealism-opportunism dichotomy is illusory, the rule of an interpretation game that has been played for over a decade. The concepts of love poison men’s thoughts toward women by ignoring Wittgenstein’s admonition to speak clearly, and whereof we cannot speak, not to speak at all.
Notes
1 The Rational Male: Preventive Medicine; chapter 6: Hierarchies of Love.
Related
- Dalrock: Who Loves Best (2013/12/27)
- Σ Frame: The Godfather undermines Fatherhood. (2023/7/10)
