"Red Pill" as behavior, not philosophy

roe_ · 2014-01-30T21:47:54+00:00

You've presented a model for choosing a wife based a Bernoulli Urn-type selection process. Which is OK as far as it goes, but fails to capture a whole ream of the dynamics of how infidelity happens in a marriage.

Go to Athol's blog and check out the "Cheating and Infidelity" tag here - he's written a lot about this and I've watched this stuff play out on his forum a bunch of times - it really does get pretty predictable.

Here's the thing: TRP presents a few core concepts - abundance mentality, outcome independence, controlling ONEitis, making expectations known upfront, &etc - that are just really good general principles to work into your dealings with people.

It's not like future cheaters walk around with signs, but it's not like they don't present warning signals either. A man who is centred in himself won't lie to himself, and won't compromise on his values when choosing a mate.

Knowing how attraction works doesn't hurt, either.

sh1v · 2014-01-30T23:28:10+00:00

What if Red Pill isn’t “wrong” or “right” and it doesn’t “work” or “fail?” I.e. if Red Pill is just a set of behaviors that changes the type of woman you attract and the type of relationships you form.

This is a common analysis of TRP; ie, belief creating reality. I believe it's at least partly true. If you believe women are attracted to X trait, and cultivate that trait, you'll tend to attract more women who are in fact, attracted to X trait -- that conclusion is almost unavoidable.

However, while it's perhaps accurate to say that merely 50% of women cheat/initiate divorce, TRP would assert that its analysis of female attraction applies to far more than 50% of the straight female population.

An easy example would be raising one's physical attractiveness by becoming more fit, well dressed, developing better social skills/confidence, etc. It's hard to argue against these actions increasing one's chances with women overall, not just with a specific subset of women. Furthermore, the number of women this would decrease one's chances with is minimal.

So it's clear that at least some parts of TRP are as close to universal as any dating/sex strategy is going to get. While yes, raising one's physical attractiveness will tend to increase one's chances the MOST with what we might call shallow women, it will also increase one's chances overall, as most women have an eye for a fit, well dressed male.

TRP would argue that this is not the only near-universal determinant of female attraction. There are some other commonly accepted ones, such as height, confidence, and social status. These traits WILL increase attraction in a large percentage of women, and strongly. Even if the type of women one pulls is effected by cultivating these traits, the tradeoff of being able to pull more women, and choose from among them, is more than worth it.

Now, what of the less commonly accepted attraction factors espoused by TRP? Having good verbal 'game', for instance? For every such trait, there's basically a calculation that needs to take place. How much effort will it take to cultivate this trait? What will be its overall effect on my ability to pull women? What type of women are most likely to be attracted by it, and which turned off by it? Are those the type of women I'm likely to find suitable for my purposes? There are no studies that can easily answer these questions. It is ultimately up to individual judgement.

Another thing to take into account though, is that TRP generally emphasizes short term relationships over long term, exclusive ones. So not being able to find suitable LTR material, ie, women with compatible personalities and values, is not as important to the average TRPer. While this does play into your analysis of TRP as effecting the 'type of relationships you form', what I'm saying is that that effect is hardly inadvertant. People do not blindly go into TRP and then find themselves unable to find the type of women they were looking for. Part of TRP is the realization that marriage, cohabitation, and exclusivity in our day and age are all disadvantageous to men, for a variety of reasons.

whenifeellikeit · 2014-01-31T02:34:57+00:00

When you frame it this way, yes. That's exactly what it is. If all RedPill men are attempting to meet the same goal, which you laid out in your 8th paragraph, then this interpretation might be accurate. It would probably put the whole issue to rest. And if, furthermore, RedPill men weren't actively attempting to recruit, and to convince other men (and women), that their theories on dating and mating applied to the entire human race, there would be nothing to argue about at all. People who disagreed could simply write the men off as douchebags and the women off as imbeciles. I think the main point of contention, though, is the attempt at universal applicability. At claims of a moral and rational high ground.

See, the RedPill isn't just a set of behaviors men perform in order to attract 22 year-old bar sluts by the dozen and never get married. The men and women who subscribe to RedPill theories do treat it as a philosophy. They tend to genuinely believe that the RedPill is the only correct answer to the questions the human mating game brings up. And they also tend to insult and denigrate others who disagree, whether directly or indirectly.

If it could be as you describe, then none of us would be here right now.

TyrianXIII · 2014-01-30T20:10:01+00:00

if Red Pill is just a set of behaviors that changes the type of woman you attract and the type of relationships you form.

Goddamnit Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! If TRP just came out and said we prefer a certain kind of relationship dynamics where the man leads and the woman follows and here's how to find that and next the people who don't conform, I can't see how that could offend people. Some dynamics works for some people. It's when TRP proclaims this truth and that truth and how TRP sees the world for what it is and the rest of us are still in the Cave, well, that would piss off people who don't think they're clueless, they just have different experiences.

This said, I would still find the women-hating talk noxious.

ETA: I made this same point, here:

But that's if we assume /r/theredpill exists to identify and cultivate alpha traits. It's not, given the frequent advice to "next" the woman.

Nexting is a selection process, the alpha traits are pre-defined traits one adopts in order to attract a certain specific type of woman, and steer the relationship into a power dynamic where the woman is not an equal.

mrsamsa · 2014-01-30T21:59:29+00:00

Let’s start with a couple of givens from the internet: About 50% of women will admit to cheating on a man at some point in their life. About 50% of marriages end in divorce. So let’s just assume for the sake of argument that if you meet a woman, there’s about a 50% chance she’s going to cheat on you and/or the two of you are going to end up divorced. And a 50% chance that she’ll never cheat on you and/or your marriage will withstand the test of time.

This isn't directly related to the thrust of your question but I just want to comment on this first. This use of statistics is what rubs me the wrong way in discussion with red pillers - they are sterile, contextless, and practically meaningless when applied to real life situations. Take the "cheating" example, I'm not sure where the data is from but I would imagine that the large percentage of cheating was done when people were: a) young, and b) not in a long term relationship.

So the important question is what is the rate of cheating as is relevant to your specific situation? If you're dating a 20+ year old and in a serious committed relationship then, for all I know, the rate of cheating could be near zero. And that's not even taking into account every other variable that is relevant to determining the likelihood of someone cheating.

The "50% of marriages end in divorce" thing is a misleading statistic as that includes all marriages - even ones where people who are on their 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th+ marriages. And we know that those people with multiple marriages are more likely to divorce because they usually have some other factor that affects their divorce rate (e.g. they might be a golddigger marrying old men or they might be an abusive husband driving their wife away).

When we look at first marriages only, the divorce rate drops to around 20-30% and only half of those divorces occur in the first ten years, whereas most divorces from first marriages occur 40-50 years into the marriage.

Interestingly, if red pillers were really worried about divorce, the best way to make divorce a near statistical impossibility would be to marry a 25+ year old woman who is college educated, as the rate of first marriage divorce in this group plummets to below half the rate of all other marriages.

Your overall point isn't heavily affected by my comments above, I just wanted to point out the problem with using contextless generalisations and false statistics.

I.e. if Red Pill is just a set of behaviors that changes the type of woman you attract and the type of relationships you form.

As noted by /u/badwickednaughtZoot, if this is what red pillers were to claim, there would be absolutely zero controversy, TBP wouldn't exist and there would be no debate here. The fact that some women like the behaviors encouraged by red pillers is undeniably true, and the fact that using such behaviors to hook up with them will work is undeniably true.

The only problem that blue pillers point out with this situation is that if you're using behaviors which are designed to attract women who don't like nice guys (actual nice guys, not "Nice Guys") and women who respond well to RP philosophy and understanding of the world, then generally you're going to be hooking up with the kind of women that RP hate. That is, women who are self-centred, women perhaps prone to cheating, women who rationalise bad behaviors later to themselves, women who quote Monroe to justify shitty attitudes, etc.

This has the hugely negative feedback cycle of them initially thinking women were like this (hence why they adopted TRP), and then mostly being exposed to such women because they're the type of women who give red pillers the time of day so it reinforces their concept of women.

The problem is generalising those experiences to all women, which is why everyone tells red pillers that it's irrelevant what their experiences and anecdotes suggest, or even the anecdotes of thousands of men all using the same methods and attracting the same women say.

The fact remains that there will be an impassable gulf between red pillers and everyone else because our experiences are absolutely nothing like yours because we aren't (generally or at least exclusively) attracted to the same type of women that you aim to attract.

Archwinger · 2014-01-31T01:00:51+00:00

a certain type of woman

Manipulative and emotionally abusive behaviors tend to work better on women with little life experience or weak self esteem. I'm not sure how that's supposed to be a good thing.

SigmaMu · 2014-01-31T04:42:58+00:00

Look, hypothetical guy got fucked regardless. If he had been RP beforehand, he a.) would've never gotten married, and never had the opportunity to be divorced, and b.) would have other women much, much sooner, severely softening the blow of a break up. It's kind of like Pascal's wager, if we had hard data that 50% of people end up in hell.

Everyone thinks they can beat the odds.

redwhiskeredbubul · 2014-01-31T06:14:10+00:00

If you want to be successful with a 22-year-old, extremely attractive bar slut who’s going to go home with you that night, or the next night at the latest, and you’re not looking to get married ever, and you want to date six women just like this at once, none of whom will pressure you for commitment, you’ll be ten times more successful if you go at this with a Red Pill attitude, even though you might be turning off and chasing away other types of women. Likewise, if you turn that Red Pill stuff off and act “normal” (it’s debatable how normal and abnormal some RP stuff is – a lot of it is just plain jane confidence) you’ll be primed to attract a whole different type of woman, but at the expense of never attracting the type of woman Red Pill guys get.

Here's the thing: the reality with TRP is probably worse than this principle suggests. For three reasons.

1.) Some men have unfixable disadvantages in dating--they can never be the macho hunk that's assumed as the end point.

2.) Many men who attempt to live up to this standard will fail, even if they don't have unfixable problems.

3.) In all probability, TRP inherently selects for these first two types of men.

In other words, my guess would be that the majority of men who take the red pill are seeing their chances of nailing bar sluts rocketing from .5 to 5 percent. It's like buying your lotto tickets in strips of ten: the psychological impression that it might work is going to be way higher than the actual benefit.

Title	"Red Pill" as behavior, not philosophy
Author	Archwinger
Upvotes	4
Comments	28
Date	January 30, 2014 7:43 PM UTC (12 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/PurplePillDebate
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/PurplePillDebate/comments/1wkxpi/red_pill_as_behavior_not_philosophy/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/PurplePillDebate/red-pill-as-behavior-not-philosophy.286283 https://theredarchive.com/post/286283

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