What baffled me for a while is why hate for pickup is so innate. There's a lot more horrible things happening in the world, but we don't nearly have such an innate automatic polarized emotional reaction to it.

It occurs to me that it is because the philosophy that pickup espouses is primarily a "defect position" on the "social contract".

So the social contract is when everyone gets together and decides that instead of each of us doing what's best for ourselves, we all agree to follow certain rules of engagement that isn't best for ourselves, but is fair for everyone. In a way, instead of 1+1+1+1 = 4, it's 1+1+1+1 = 6.

But whenever there is a cooperative position, a defector can take most the gains. In other words, suppose someone defects in the game. It'll be 1+1+1+1 = 3, but the defector takes all of the three.

The cooperative/defect dynamic of groups has been happening for a long time. our emotions are expertly keen on detecting when cooperative solutions are happening, and when defecting is happening. In a way, this is one of the primary selection pressures for the evolution of emotions and morality.

So the social contract is basically culture that figured out that over time, if everyone does their best for everyone, is polite, etc, then things work out best for everyone. Pickup on the other hand is an individual who breaks the rules and takes as much for himself as possible. This leaves the people who are still hooked into the social contract in a bad position. They don't consciously know the dynamics, but their emotions have played this game for millions of years and know exactly why they dislike this.

It's also interesting that our emotions come to a conclusion, but most of our emotional algorithms happen subconsciously. So after our emotions come to a conclusion on whether something is good for us or not, it's left to our conscious mind to figure out what to do with the goal in mind, and why we feel that way. I can see why "hamsters" hate red pillers, but the reasons why hamsters say they hate red pillers are so smack full of blind incompetent backward rationalization.

Per the evolutionary thing though (I think this field is called evolutionary game theory), ultimately, a group of 1000 people all playing the hamster cooperative social contract game will do better than a group of 1000 people all playing the red pill defect game. But in a group of mixed hamsters and red pillers, whether hamsters or red pillers win depends on how well hamsters are able to "enforce" and punish red pillers for defecting on the social contract.

In game theory terms, this is nothing new. In various contextual manifestations of this underlying principle, the ideal strategy for an individual is to be hamster on the surface, and red pill beneath the surface.

In social dynamics, surface roughly translates to "social game" and what you say you are. Under the surface roughly translates to how you act.

So basically, an optimized hamster/redpill hybrid in a mixed group of redpill/hamster would basically play the game with the following rules.

1- talk like a hamster

2- act like a redpiller

3- punish other red pillers

4- Do this until the end game. In the end game, be a hamster.

Be darth sidious (the emperor), not darth maul (the obvious bad guy). a wolf/sheep hybrid needs to wear sheep's clothing.

Some books that discuss these topics, probably the best I've read is The Origins of Virtue by Matt Ridley (the same dude who wrote the Red Queen).