I received the following from Mark Minter in this week’s comment thread. Regardless of what your or my opinion of Minter is, I will admit this is an area I haven’t explored before:
I have a request for a post. It is for a rework of a Rational Male post sometime back about sons of divorce that try to be “better than dad”.
I would think you might have more to say on the topic since a couple of years have passed since you posted it.
Or perhaps how a newly red pill divorced father might approach his son, especially if there has been a period of estrangement.
I have a “date” for a phone call with my son after quite a long period. You might imagine my relationship with my “old family” is sort of “interesting”, to put it euphemistically. My daughter has dropped my last name from social media accounts. My son calls himself “Younger Minter” and his assumed “middle name” is “Fucking”. Sort of a throwback to mine back in the day, but he seems quite pissed though.
I have been told these things can be quite emotional, and then a flurry of contact, but then a “backsliding” away from contact. Inevitably and probably rightfully so, he has innate loyalty to his mother. And he grew up in one of places that is so liberal it is often referred to as “The People’s Republic of …”
So the question is “How to bring him along?”
If by “bring him along” you mean convince him you’re not the asshole he’s convinced you are, that’s really subjective to your personal history and how amenable he is to listening to your side of the story. That said, there’s a world aligned against you that’s likely conditioned your son not just to hate you, but to loath his own sex by association with your past decisions and circumstances.
My intent with this weekend’s discussion isn’t to run Minter up the flagpole, but rather delve into a tough Red Pill area – reestablishing a lost or misguided connection with a son or daughter, from a post-Red Pill awareness perspective.
The post Mark is referencing was Promise Keepers. In that post I hit this situation from the opposite side:
Slay the Father
One common theme I’ve encountered amongst the more zealous beta White Knights I’ve counseled over the years has been this determination, bordering on fanaticism, with outdoing the life-performance of their asshole fathers. Before I go on further, many of them had legitimately rotten, alcoholic dads, who were abusive to them and their mothers. Others had the perception of their fathers colored for them either by their ‘strong independent®’ single mothers, or by watching their fathers resolve their own beta tendencies in a post-divorce life. Whatever the case, each of these guys had a mission – to be a better man than their father was, protect their mothers, and by extension the future mother their girlfriends and wives would become for them. His father’s personal failings would be his personal triumphs.
Being the father in this scenario and attempting to reestablish an after-the-fact, positive connection with a son is a very tall order. It’s almost easier to address the particulars of a daughter with ‘daddy issues’ who’s absent father contributed to her ‘victim status’ condition than it is to consider the upbringing and feminine conditioning a boy receives in his father’s relative absence.
The difficulty being that a son will have every negative perception of his father reinforced for him by a feminine-primary social order. Even in the rare instances when an insightful mother doesn’t resentfully color her son’s negative perceptions of his father during his formative years, there is an entire world of feminine social conventions pressing and affirming that impression into him.
From Daddy Issues:
Matrix Fathers
Have a look at postsecret this week. It’ll all be gone by Sunday so have a look while it lasts. This week’s thread is the usual fare for Father’s Day, a hearty “Fuck You Dad!” or “You’re the reason I’m so fucked up!” interspersed with a couple ‘good dad’ sentiments so as not to entirely degrade the feminized ideal of fatherhood – wouldn’t want to discourage men’s perpetual ‘living up’ to the qualifications set by the feminine imperative. There has to be a little cheese in the maze or else the rat wont perform as desired.
I always see a marked difference in attitude between mother’s day and father’s day, especially now that I’ve been one for 14 years. I was listening to a local talk radio show on the ride home Friday that was opening lines for callers to express their ‘gratitude‘ for their fathers, as they’d done the previously in May for mother’s day. Damn near every caller had the same “fuck you dad!” story about how shitty their lives were because of their father’s influence or his lack thereof. One girl had called in to bleat out her story about how her dad had left her mother 30 years ago and for the last 10 years she’d sent him a father’s day card with a big ‘FU’ on it to tell him she’d never forgive him. Another guy called in to say how horrible his dad was for leaving his mom and how he sends her a father’s day card because he thinks she fulfilled a masculine role for him that he owes some gratitude for.
Father’s Day is a slap in the face for me now – not because my wife and daughter don’t appreciate me as a father, but because it’s become a big “fuck you” Mr. Man. It’s now a reminder (as if we needed a special occasion) that masculinity, even in as positive a light as the Matrix might muster, is devalued and debased, and we ought to just take it like a man and get over it.
It’s a difficult task to unplug a man who’s a friend and open his eyes to Red Pill awareness. That guy has to be seeking answers to really be open to having his ego-investments in his conditioning challenged and realigned – you can’t really make a man Red Pill aware, he’s got to come to it in some fashion. This is a very important distinction to make when the man you’re attempting to unplug is your own son.
A father in this predicament has the double jeopardy of clearing his name as a father and as a representative of masculinity – the representation of all the negative aspects the Feminine Imperative has ever embedded into him about the taint of his own masculinity. As I mentioned in Promise Keepers, some of the most ardent anti-conventional-masculinity crusaders I’ve ever encountered all had the common denominator of a ‘bad dad’. There are no ‘deadbeat mothers’.
Minter’s not the first father to ask me for advice about this. One of the more painful aspects of waking up and accepting Red Pill truths is coming to terms with the consequences of basing your past decisions on a Blue Pill paradigm. I can empathize with younger unplugged Betas getting angry with themselves for having wasted part of their lives with the effort of chasing after the carrot of Blue Pill goals, but it’s an entirely different anger older men feel after coming to realize that their lives and the lives of their children (the only reason to get married, remember?) are the results of their Blue Pill decision making.
Fortunately I had my Red Pill awakening prior to my daughter being born and had the foresight to live by example. However I know enough men in similar straights as Minter to see what an impossible task it is to untangle the past Blue Pill version of themselves with the Red Pill aware men they’ve become. I do not envy them.
I think the questions for the weekend are obvious:
I understand that Mark is seeking reconciliation here, and it may not even be warranted, but what would advise you men in a similar situation?
Attempting to unplug a friend, even one in a trauma that makes him ready to hear Red Pill truths, is a difficult task, but when that man is your own son how do you go about it?
Bear in mind I do understand that raising your son by a Red Pill example would be ideal. I’ve written about it before. What I’m asking is how to approach a young man already steeped in a Blue Pill feminized conditioning for the better part of his life and make him Red Pill aware? That kid may be a son who’s made it his life’s mission to be a “better man” than you based on the definition of a feminine social doctrine that’s taught him to hate you, his own sex, or at the very least would prefer he remain confused about masculinity until after he’s committed himself to useful Beta provisioning when a woman needs it most from him.
I’ll give my own response in the comments.
Related:
Dreams of the Future Past
