Creating Ex-Red Pill Men
How To Change Minds
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When was the last time you changed your mind? Was it a small change or was it a worldview disrupting change? In the last year I have personally experienced the latter, with my entire worldview shifting in a way that has at times felt very inspiring as I redefine the kind of man I want to be. Other times…horrifying, like I’ve suddenly become untethered from everything I once took for granted as true about what I should be simply because I am a man.
The way I’ve experienced this shift is like the falling out of two close friends. Within me is the old self, afraid of what he’s losing and fighting desperately to not be left behind completely. The new worldview reacts with hostility as it realizes more and more how deluded that old self could be, how much was lost in his foolish attempt to win games this new man no longer values. There is also a fear there, a fear that I once again find myself playing games that I will one day regret trying to play at all.
However, there is also a third self, maybe even a third worldview that is only now becoming aware of itself as a mere kernel of a new perspective. This third self seeks to bring the two friends back into dialogue. There are parts of that old self that I still value and believe are important, despite all the very real criticisms from the new self. There are also many things that the new self is discovering that I find myself getting lost in, only to realize later are just as limited as the old self.
As time goes on, this third self has slowly begun to untie old knots and retie them across the old and new selves, bringing them into alignment in ways that neither of these two selves could have seen alone. It is this third self that has taken what Nakade calls the meta-ideological stance.1 Where the old and new selves constitute two distinct ideologies, the third self attempts to bring them together in a way that makes either better than they could be alone.
To see the changing of worldview firsthand has been fascinating and it isn’t my first time, but this time has brought me to the questions, how do minds change and what’s happening when they refuse to change? At the dawn of a new era for Masculinity, when all these competing narratives for who and how men should be have created a downright toxic, hostile landscape, how can we change minds in ways that respect the personhood of the men we seek to change? In this essay today, I am going to try answering those questions.
Umwelt, Naïve Realism, and Worldview Blindness
Before I get into that, my name is Will. I’m a Theory Artist and Mythwright and on this channel we craft new ways to think about masculinity through psychological development and Jungian psychology.
Now, to understand what I mean by worldview, I’d like to use a simple definition from Koltko-Rivera, where he defines worldview as, “sets of beliefs and assumptions,” but he advises us to “think of a worldview not as a […] description of reality, but as a lens through which one reads reality.”2
In other words, to understand how to change a mind, you have to understand that you’re not just changing a specific list of beliefs that person has about the world. A lot of the time people think that if you can just challenge each individual belief, provide statistics to show they’re false, and then offer a new belief that aligns more with what we know from science, then the person will happily take on the new belief. That’s simply not how it works because you are not changing individual beliefs, but the lens through which that person is reading reality.3
For example, in my series on the masculine philosophy Red Pill, I attempted to give a broad stroke overview of their worldview. The point of that series was not to be comprehensive, covering every facet of their worldview. It was more to give you a rough map of the lens Red Pill uses to understand reality, so that you could then apply that map to other facets of their worldview.
Again, the point of this wasn’t necessarily to challenge specific beliefs that Red Pill has, even though it obviously did that. The primary point was instead to understand the shape of their lens and to offer a counter-narrative to show how that lens distorted reality. Of course, the case can and should be made that the lens I provided distorts reality in its own way. That’s undeniably true. The fact is that no matter who you are, you are reading the world through a lens or worldview, and that worldview is distorting reality in some way.
With that being said though, what exactly do I mean by distorting reality? Remember that this isn’t merely about having “wrong” beliefs, but about how our worldview interprets the world in a way that leads us to those wrong beliefs. Such interpretations contribute to what Uexküll called an umwelt, or the private, first person view of the world that each of us experiences.3 Based on our own personal worldview, each of our umwelts take on their own shape and character, their own distorted falsehoods and half-truths.
For example, in his book, How Minds Change, David McRaney discusses research on the visual perception of cats.3 If you raise cats in an environment in which there are no horizontal lines, then as adults in a normal environment, the cats will literally have an umwelt in which horizontal lines do not exist. Clearly, horizontal lines still exist, but for the cats they may as well not. They’ll chase an object with any other lines as any other cat does, but the moment you switch the lines so that they’re horizontal, the cat will stop chasing that object.
Fortunately, with experience, these cats eventually learn how to perceive horizontal lines like any other cat, but this should make you pause. The fact that this happens is profoundly important for understanding how our worldviews shape our view of reality. Think about it. What do you take for granted as the unmediated REAL, that is in fact the simple consequence of everyone else being just as deluded, and then raising their children to be just as deluded?
McRaney challenges this naïve realism that so many of us have, which is that naïve idea that we have access to the unmediated real world as it actually is.3 Too many of us assume that when we experience the world, our environments, our friends, family, our culture, other cultures, and all the other events and circumstances that constitute our day-to-day lives, we are experiencing all of it, objectively, as it actually is. Despite all the delusions we see in people all around us, who believe things that make us wonder how anyone could possibly believe them, we assume that we have special access to a perfect reflection of reality as it actually is. That sounds kind of...deluded.
The philosopher Thomas Nagel called this idea the view from nowhere, but the truth of the matter seems to be that we have a view from somewhere and that somewhere is the worldview that shapes and organizes our experience.4 We each have our own upbringing, our own personal life history given our own cultural context. We each have our own genetic template that shapes how our brains process what our imperfect eyes and ears sense about the world. And, given all of that, we each inhabit a more or less unique umwelt that we call “objectively real”.
However, begin to think about what happens when our umwelt is invaded by an anomaly, by some new piece of information or some strange experience that doesn’t fit well enough into our worldview or defies it some way.
Just as spooky as the horizontally-blind cats, McRaney covers research where participants were supposed to name the cards they were shown.3 They’d say black spades, red heart, black diamonds, black spades, black clubs, red heart. Did you catch the trick? There is no black diamonds, but when the participants were shown cards that had incorrect colours they didn’t recognize them as incorrect. They just named them as if nothing was wrong. However, only once more incorrect cards were introduced, only once the anomalies started piling up, only then did the participants start having difficulties. They couldn’t recognize the once familiar shapes, or even experienced the incorrect cards to be purple rather than black or red.
Again, this should do more than make you pause. If you’re really getting what I’m saying, this should rattle you. Their umwelt was invaded by cards that defied their past experience and beliefs about what cards should look like, and so their minds changed the colours or failed to recognize shapes that they’d seen countless times before. At least at first, the anomalies broke their perception of reality, or perhaps better put, their minds changed reality before reality changed their minds.
This continued for them until enough incorrect cards appeared, and then finally their minds broke open and they could suddenly recognize, “holy shit the colours and shapes are just mismatched! That’s all that was wrong!”
Each of us is constantly being bombarded with anomalous information that defies our worldview and potentially, reality, but we fail to recognize it because it doesn’t happen frequently enough to matter enough. When it does begin to matter enough, even insignificant anomalies can shatter our view of reality. So not only does our worldview blind us to the world as it actually is, and not only does it blind us to the fact that it is blinding us, but it also sometimes shatters us before it updates.
And the thing is, you could be living a relatively successful, happy life, or even a miserable, depressing life. As long as the anomalies don’t challenge how your worldview is making sense of your experience, nothing will change because nothing necessarily needs to change. This is really important to understand. You cannot necessarily judge a worldview’s accuracy based on your happiness and success, or on your lack of happiness and success. In either case, your worldview could be just as bullshit. It’s very important to grasp the gravity of that.
And yet, what happens when the anomalies become too big to ignore?
The Social Death of the Conformist
In my essay, The Psychology of Epithymia, I made a comparison between the power of conformity and addiction. You can think of addiction as the narrowing of your ability to find solutions to your problems. Eventually you get to a point where the only solution to every problem is the addiction itself, and that, obviously, becomes a really huge problem…that you can only solve with addiction.
While conformity isn’t quite so narrow in terms of the possible solutions, it is still a set of solutions to the problems of meaning in life and ostracism. The cultures we conform to give us a rich tapestry of meaning through relationships and career, a Heaven we can aspire to, but then threaten us with the Hell of ostracism if we dare to drift too far from the accepted forms those relationships and careers can take. In fact, the sociologist Brooke Harrington has said that social death, the loss of our identity in the eyes of our group, our tribe, our people, is more frightening than even physical death.3
My point in drawing this comparison then, is to help you see a similarity between addiction and conformity. You need to understand the power that conformity has over us. In a certain way, we’re addicted to our cultures and to the worldview they give us to see through. We are the most susceptible to this at the stage of development called Conformist because our worldview comes in the form of the social identity our culture gives us.5,6 The consequence of this is that the only way we have to create meaning is defined by our culture and the most profound way we can be hurt is by having that definition torn away.
When it comes to changing people’s minds, we can see how absolutely important this idea becomes. If you’re forced to change your mind in a way that violates the accepted narrative of your group, you run the risk of the meaninglessness of nihilism and ostracism.
McRaney writes about this exact phenomenon through the story of Charlie Veitch, an ex-9/11 conspiracy theorist who changed his mind about 9/11 being an inside job. Members of his group reacted by making death threats. They also superimposed his sister’s children’s faces onto child --- videos and sent that to his mother.
And yet, despite all of that, he was still able to change his mind. He had created the social identity of the successful 9/11 Truther who was on Alex Jones, who made money speaking truth to power, who was loved and adored by his fans as a courageous fighter. He was able to take a step backward from all of that socially-validated success and say, “holy shit, my group and I are wrong, I need to change my mind.”
Despite everything working against his change of heart, he was still able to change. McRaney writes that this was because he had begun developing a sense of community outside 9/11 Truthers. He had been welcomed into a New Age spirituality community. He even found a romantic partner there. Once he was finally confronted with all of the evidence against 9/11 conspiracies, he was already in a place where he could actually challenge them without viewing it as a matter of social survival. In effect, he had been able to remove himself from one group and found a welcoming and welcomed social identity in another group.
This may remind of my essay Why Pain Is Necessary For Growth. There, I talked about the stages Level 1 Conformist and Level 2 Self-Conscious. When we are at Conformist we are very powerfully defined by our social identity, but once we get to the next stage, Self-Conscious, we become conscious of ourselves as being separate from our group. We are still defined in many ways by our group, but that little bit of wiggle room allows us to begin defining ourselves in small ways rather than being completely defined by our group.
One way this might manifest is being able to choose among the experts which one we seek to conform ourselves to. You can see how there is still a strong pull of conformity to an expert, to some sort of external authority, but rather than looking outside ourselves to see what others say about who we should follow, we start choosing among those experts ourselves, and then do what they say.5
However, our ability to select among options is not based on any legitimate epistemic standard like the scientific method. Even though we can compare what different experts say and choose what we consider the better option, we tend to be more limited by their charisma, perceived authority, or whether or not it aligns with what we believed prior to coming across that expert.
So for example, our expert might use the scientific method, but that doesn't mean we are actually using the scientific method to judge what the expert says. It’s a superficial veneer of science just because our chosen expert uses science, or perhaps more importantly, sounds as if they are using science.
Returning to these two stages, the psychologist Dabrowski wrote that people often oscillate between the stages of Conformist and Self-Conscious. They experience an emotionally painful disintegration that gets them to question their group, but then resolidify back into conformity, often just with another group.7 In that essay, I used the example of Red Pill, which gets guys to start questioning the bogus cultural script of romantic comedies, but then locks them back down in a new conformity. They now interpret modern culture as a feminist matrix that seeks to make men feminine and weak, all so that their resources can be taken from them to unjustly support women.8
Whether or not Veitch was able to move beyond Self-Conscious to the stage after that is anyone’s guess, but you can see the trap that would be very easy to fall for. While we can hope that the next conformity someone moves into is far healthier, we have to ask whether or not the move from one conformity to another is really the only path to change our minds.
Obviously, I don’t think it is and I don’t think McRaney does either, but an important caveat is that community is never non-essential. Please don’t take my argument here as an argument against community or a justification for self-ostracism as some sort of rugged individual. That’s not my point. As we move through the stages of increasing relational-autonomy, we have to remember always that this is partly to better relate with other people, especially those we care the most about. However, what happens when we learn to take our development within our own hands, and yet still find ourselves embedded deeply within a specific cultural context?
The Achiever’s Addiction to Opportunity
With all of that said then, let’s look at the stage after Self-Conscious, which is called Level 3 Achiever. The Achiever is able to select their own values and improve themselves in many profound ways, but they’re not quite able to see how what they value and how they improve themselves are shaped by the underlying assumptions of their culture.
With Red Pill for example, they would move from the “feminist conformity” to the “Red Pill conformity”, being given an entirely new set of cultural assumptions. They’re then given a toolkit to begin improving themselves. As much of a cult as Red Pill may be, it is a cult of self-improvement and so in some ways it’s more developed than the conformity that a lot of, for a lack of a better word, “regular” people are defined by. This toolkit of self-improvement can take them from Level 1 Conformist to Red Pill, through Level 2 Self-Conscious to Level 3 Achiever, still within the cultural context of Red Pill
However, this often just means they can improve themselves in a way that optimizes their character so that they maximize their success, again as defined by the culture of Red Pill itself. Even though there is this air of individualism within Red Pill, it’s a little “i” individualism rather than a capital “I” Individualism. They are not yet able to see how the worldview of Red Pill itself binds them and blinds them to a specific definition of success.
As self-chosen as their values may be, as aware of their specific talents and desires they may be, they are still used to pursue goals given and glorified by Red Pill – money, women, and power over others. They can even use the scientific method and logic to see how these desires are biologically-mediated, but they’re blind to how the specific toolkit of the scientific method and logic shapes them and their desires as they improve, or shapes the ways in which they can use their results to justify their goals and actions. This is what I meant before when I said that our worldview organizes and shapes our umwelt, our desires, our emotions that exist within our umwelt, within our personal experience of reality.
For example, while Red Pill itself is a cult of grievance, particularly of grievance against feminism and women, it is also one centered on agency. In other words, the point of Red Pill’s toolkit is to maximize your ability to enact your agency in the world through valorizing emotions such as dominance, aggression, and anger as unilateral power, while at the same time denigrating as weak those emotions such as empathy, sadness, and doubt.
Again, organizing and shaping our emotions. Saying that these emotions mean this thing, but then these emotions mean this other thing. All of that changes how we can interpret or react to those emotions when they arise, or to certain experiences when we have them. Be dominant in this context, or if you act in this way in this context you are a pussy, weak, or feminine.
Now understand that this is very much a Level 3 Achiever mode of being, with Cook-Greuter writing about the way Achiever’s deal with doubt and criticism:5
“Better to concentrate on the positive and on what can be done than to dwell on the problems and difficulties.”
As a cult of agency, Red Pill is primarily concerned with their self-interested position in a hierarchy of unilateral power. Anything that they’ve been taught gets in the way of that is seen as an obstacle to be overcome. I’ve even heard a pickup artist talk about how he wanted to raise his children to never experience any doubt whatsoever because it was an obstacle getting in the way of their ability to achieve success. In moderation some of this can actually be very empowering, but when taken too far it becomes toxic positivity.
This issue of toxic positivity is endemic to much of self-improvement culture.9 Any emotion that can be interpreted by the culture as negative is seen as an enemy to be vanquished, even if by feeling it fully and letting it go. The point is that these emotions must be gotten rid of because the only thing that matters is positivity, which in turn becomes defined as any emotion they believe helps them achieve their culture’s vision of success. Think about what we’ve already said about how worldviews function to blind us. Think about what this worldview of toxic positivity blinds you to, just like those cats who couldn’t see horizontal lines.
First of all, let’s look at the success of self-improvement culture. R.J. McAllister has criticized it for being more like an addiction than a solution, with most customers feeling like the next book will finally be the book that helps them achieve their goals.10 I can personally relate to that. Elsewhere, a self-improvement coach tested his own audience, with 96% of the 1000 people who answered saying they’d failed at their self-improvement goals despite investing money and time in seminars and courses.11 Finally, Christopher Buckley has written that the best way to get rich from self-help, is to coach people about self-help.12
So, what that means is that the entire industry of self-improvement is little more than a pyramid scheme, with coaches getting rich off of deluding people that they can get rich, often by coaching others. And what’s another amazing way to get rich, according to these coaches? Remove all doubt and focus solely on opportunity.13
Your doubts and fears attract failure, but if you just put the energy of opportunity into the universe, then the universe will reward you with success. Blind yourself to voices saying that you can’t succeed, focus on your failures and negativity only as things to learn from and conquer in your relentless pursuit of success. Burn all the ships by accruing “good debt” that allows you to make more money. This “good debt” will also give you the drive to achieve because your achievement becomes the only possible way to ever pay off the debt you got yourself into with all these seminars and courses that…fail 96% of the people who take them.
Through the worldview of agency and toxic positivity, the Red Piller at Level 3 Achiever is blinded to the very real power of the obstacles that stand in their way toward success, again, as defined by Red Pill itself. In extreme cases if you even acknowledge obstacles, you’re attacked as a “victim” who needs to take ownership over your life and fight harder.
To be clear, I don’t want to sound like a voice of hopelessness. In many ways this is a self-development channel, so I clearly think that self-development can be a positive thing. However, I draw a distinction between self-development and self-improvement.
Put simply, self-development is defined by developmental psychology where we have increases in the complexity of our feeling, thinking, and relating, and the increased degrees of autonomy and perspective-taking that this development gives us. While self-improvement can help with that and in some cases is incredibly positive, like actually is it, it is also largely defined by cults of capitalist success that demand you pay more and more in hopes of earning more and more. In Red Pill, success is narrowed around money, women, power, and other materialistic status icons.
This narrowing is, as both McAllister and I have written, very similar to addiction. While he was talking about self-help specifically, I was talking about conformity. The point is that when we’re contained by this worldview, we narrow around a very small set of solutions and those solutions demand that we ignore any emotion or mindset that might demonstrate that the solution isn’t effective. Again, don’t think any negative thought or else you’ll be a failure, but…how does that very commandment prevent you from seeing that the solution itself is ineffective or even damaging?
The Limiting Beliefs of Achievement
Before I get into that though, if you like this video so far please be sure to hit the like button and subscribe to the channel. This really helps the channel grow. Thank you so much.
Think for a moment about the consequences of only being able to focus on opportunity, whether you succeed or fail. This narrowing onto opportunity allows self-improvement cults like Red Pill to privatize the benefits of their worldview to a small select few who do make it. That 4% who succeed are held up as the victorious who actually took personal responsibility, enacted their agency in the world and proved that if they can make it, then you can too! They then socialize or externalize the costs of their success. Those 96% of people who fail? Those are the people getting the 4% rich.
Now obviously I’m using that statistic in a way that the statistic doesn’t necessarily show, just to call myself out there. Please don’t take that as a legitimate use of the statistic, but you get my point.
Within this cult of agency you are expected to win by your own hand, but are then blamed for the failure when the system of success can only ever allow a fraction of the people who invest money to achieve that success. Understand that some of that 4% are only getting rich because they realized the best way to get rich with self-help was to teach people self-help. So they really are getting rich off the failing 96%. Others are getting rich off of the labour of those who may struggle to feed themselves and their families, let alone have the time to actually connect with their family and friends, or to pursue meaningful hobbies.
You might say that any of those people who failed could have made it rich if they would have just worked hard enough or smart enough. Okay, let’s grant that anyone can get rich in today’s day and age. That does not in any way, shape, or form mean that everybody can get rich. And to be clear, some of these guys will admit that. However, the key point is that within the cult of toxic positivity and agency, this can’t be because of the system of self-improvement or even the overall economic system in which we live. It can only ever be your own lack of agency and positivity. Your failure can only ever be your own fault.
Cook-Greuter writes about the consequence of this mindset:5
“[Achievers] most often suffer depression in the form of guilt for not having fulfilled their goals and ideals, for the loss of a sense of being able to accomplish them, and the ongoing and deep fear of loss of control and autonomy.”
You can see here that rather than conformity itself being the block to changing one’s mind, it’s the underlying cultural assumptions of the toolkit of self-improvement that prevent the Red Piller from changing their mind. That distinction may take some explaining so let’s go into it.
The force of conformity demands you be like the group you’re a part of. That’s the primary driver that defines your decision-making, your responses to your feelings, and your goals in the world. Whatever you do, you implicitly or even explicitly ask yourself, what must I do to remain a part of this group? At Achiever, you have a far greater amount of autonomy. You can pick and choose what goals you’re after. You can self-reflect and ask yourself what parts of yourself need to change so that you can achieve those goals.
This is radically different than the Conformist because you’re not asking yourself, unconsciously or not, “what must I do to conform?” As an Achiever, you don’t need to conform and in many cases you don’t really care that much about external validation. You’re internally validated and pursue what is roughly speaking your own definition of success, but the shape of that success is still defined by your culture because the underlying assumptions of that culture are still taken for granted. The worldview you’re given still shapes and organizes your experiences and your interpretations of those experiences, and you still cannot challenge those assumptions simply because you’re blind to them.
Connect that to what I said before about the view from nowhere, the assumption that you can peer into the world and see it as it actually is. Within the Achiever’s perspective, there is a tendency to believe that you can take this view from nowhere, especially through the methods of science. You assume you can find a purely objective standard by which to measure your success. As such, you remain blind to the fact that the standard and your interpretations of your results in conforming to that standard are viewed from, not nowhere, but somewhere.
This somewhere is defined by reductionism, by your breaking apart of reality, of relationships, of career, of your own bodies, into dependent variables, the metrics of success. But not only is your success defined by Red Pill as more money, beautiful women, and power over others. Now, the way in which you break these “things” and your self as a “thing” into a series of things to be measured and compared to some standard are part of this assumption of the view from nowhere, which you now see, is itself a view from somewhere.
It is assumed to be objectively true that this is the best way to live the best life simply because you’ve reduced yourself into a collection of objective measures. Is it really true that you can “extract” the most enjoyment out of life by maximizing the values of these variables you’ve broken yourself and reality into? Or not even just maximizing, but optimizing them. Managing yourself in every moment to get these values not to their maximum, but to their optimum relative to one another, all in order to enjoy life to the maximum or optimum or whatever. Is the desire to enjoy life to the fullest itself a trap that confines you? How does all of that shape and determine how you can even define what it means to “enjoy” “life”?
The managerializing, entrepreneurializing, and biologizing tendencies of Red Pill’s worldview emerges from their neoliberal, androcentric, and bioconservative axiology, and I have an essay on each of those three components. But the point is, that they reduce themselves to mere biological machines made up of so many metrics that must be carefully managed, fine-tuned in order to achieve goals that are decidedly male-centric. Any aspect of their worldview that disadvantages women is justified by their use of evolutionary psychology, saying either that women prefer this arrangement or that they are condemned to it anyway so they may as well accept “objective reality”.
All of this is shrouded by a veil of “objectivity”. Their mode of relating to themselves and the world is not so much culture-blind as it is objectivity-filled. Their pursuit of the objectively true obfuscates the cultural ground from which their pursuit emerges. So concerned with the objectively true are they that they’ve managerialized humanity itself as resources or capital to be acquired and distributed. This managerialization is taken to be the moral Good, a necessity for the Good to be enacted in the world.
Understand that. They perpetuate their blindness to their own ideological horizontal lines because remaining blind is not merely necessary to achieve their own definition of success, but because remaining blind is itself – moral.
Is that not what they do? Do they not teach themselves through self-help that to become rich they must remove any belief that getting rich is immoral because that might cause them to sabotage themselves in their attempts to get rich?13 Do you see how that conflates “you must believe it is moral to become rich in order to get rich” and “it is moral to get rich”? And yet this has led to a system that extracts value from lonely, resentful men, privatizing benefit to the wealthy Red Pill influencers while externalizing the financial and psychological costs of this influence on the very men getting them rich, further polluting the relationship landscape and making it all the more difficult for any man to find love.
The most terrifying part of all of this is that we are all doing this. Remember, it is delusional to assume that you are the one who is not delusional, at least to some extent. Certainly some worldviews are more delusional than others, but all of our worldviews are deluded and distorted, and we must always keep that in mind. This is why I have time and time again stressed that the thing wrong, perhaps most wrong of all, about Red Pill’s worldview, is that it is far too closed, treating open questions as closed and decided answers. And it is precisely for that reason that I have gone to such great lengths to discuss why we resist so fiercely the changing of our minds and why our own development is necessary to correct for how our worldviews limit us.
Limit us. Like limiting beliefs. Another self-improvement trope. Or improvement and development themselves. Are these more distortions of our own worldview, of my worldview? Without doubt, to a certain extent. Do you value improvement so much that you prevent yourself from developing in ways that are important? Does your need for more development stop you from actually experiencing life, love, and meaning, whether they help you develop or not? And for the Red Pill Achiever, how does their definition of development determine the likelihood that they will ever change their minds?
The Closed-Mindedness of Frame Control
To remind you, McRaney writes that the reason people have so much difficulty removing themselves from their group is that they fear the loss of the identity and connection they’ve built there.3 This is why Conformists especially can have such difficulty in leaving. Their entire identity is composed out of their relationships and how their group chooses to define them.5,6 McRaney then discusses how the people he interviewed were able to become aware of their values across groups, which allowed them to compare any one group in question to those values. If the group fell short, then they were far more likely to remove themselves from that group.3
I was startled by how similar this description was to Dr. Kegan’s description of Level 3 Achiever.5,6 Firstly, this speaks very clearly to the necessity of having more than one group in one’s life. If we lack this capacity to center ourselves in our own values until Level 3 Achiever, then while at Level 1 Conformist and Level 2 Self-Conscious we are far more dependent on having different groups that can help us define ourselves based on (hopefully) better values. In today’s internet age though, it is far easier to separate oneself from real life communities and get stuck in a single, purely online echo chamber. But secondly, and perhaps counter-intuitively, I think this speaks to how important it is to have a healthy diversity of community while at Achiever.
We often hear about the dangers of a loss of biodiversity when we hear about climate change, but many of us don’t know why. Biodiversity, or having a diverse range of species, is important because not only does it make the ecosystem more productive, but it also makes it more adaptable when environmental conditions change. If you have very limited biodiversity, then that means a single disaster could completely wipe out the ecosystem. If you have high biodiversity, then that means a single disaster may be a horrible disaster, but many species may survive well enough for the ecosystem to bounce back.14
When it comes to our development, I think this same logic applies ideologically. Remember that I started this essay by discussing the meta-ideological perspective. Having your own internal values that are independent of any single group you’re in is a capacity that only really begins with Level 3 Achiever. In the same way, the meta-ideological perspective is one that requires Level 5 Autonomous. So we’re talking about a capacity that’s two stages above the Achiever.
As such, what a diverse range of communities affords the Achiever is the scaffolding they need to be meta-ideological before they can take on that capacity themselves. A Conformist however, would have difficulty having such a diverse range of communities because they would have difficulty tolerating that much difference from their primary group. Like think of a Westboro Baptist who screams, “God hates the gays”. How ideologically diverse could his range of communities really be?
With the Level 2 Self-Conscious, he’s still too concerned with the veneer of expertise in his external authorities, and so once he decides on his experts he can only compare any community he becomes a part of to what that small group of experts say. That’s of course not to say that the Conformist and the Self-Conscious shouldn’t try to have a diverse range of communities. There are just limitations given their stage of development.
The Achiever, however, is the first who has a strong enough internal set of values to not get lost in any single group, while also being able to tolerate a diversity of groups large enough for that meta-ideological support system to help them see outside of the boundaries of the ideological assumptions they aren’t yet aware of. Remember, that is one of the reasons Achievers get trapped, they don’t yet have the reflective capacity to see and challenge the underlying assumptions of their culture or ideology, even if they create their own internal values. Those values are still shaped by their culture in ways they cannot fully see.
This is, once again, the trap that prevents some Achievers from evolving beyond Level 3 toward Level 4 Individualist, even with a more diverse set of communities. Remember that your worldview organizes and shapes your experience, bringing some aspects to the front and hiding others in the background. Your worldview then causes you to interpret what it shows you in certain ways. In other words, not only does it offer you a small portion of reality, but it then further defines what you can do with that limited portion of reality. This means that anything you have left over to challenge the worldview is defined incredibly thoroughly in terms of that worldview itself.
This is why it requires development to Level 4 Individualist to be able to start questioning the underlying assumptions of our worldview. It is so cognitively taxing that the lower stages simply lack the ability to reflect that deeply. This is all the more difficult if your current worldview is capable of getting you the results you’re looking for. There is no perfect worldview, and so your incredibly imperfect worldview could still get you incredibly profound results. This means you have very little reason to ever think about questioning your worldview even if you did have the developmental capacity to do so.
All of that means that any result we do get from living our worldview is just used to justify the worldview. However, there is a huge difference between “this worldview is completely correct” and “this facet of the worldview is capable of getting me a result despite the other facets of the worldview”. As you can imagine, we often assume the former any time we do get a positive result.
What happens when we get a negative result though? Well, think about how incredibly ineffective we would be if any single negative result could completely throw our worldview into question. We would be constantly lost in chaos. So, how many such anomalies need to pile up before we start to question our worldview?
McRaney covers research in which people were given information that challenged their political beliefs. They found that when 40% or more of the information was negative, they changed their minds and abandoned their beliefs. However, when only 20% of the information was negative it strengthened their beliefs. In other words, each bit of negative information won’t necessarily challenge your worldview, but instead give you ample opportunity to fight back and prove to yourself that your worldview is true after-all.3
However, I think most interesting is the finding that you can increase this threshold.3 You essentially make your worldview so resistant to change that it may require more than 40% negative information to even begin to budge your worldview.
We can connect this with Red Pill’s concept of frame control, which I addressed in my essay on Red Pill’s epistemology. To control the frame is to control and define the terms of the interaction. If I’m flirting with a woman and she doesn’t want to flirt, we’re in a battle over the frame of the interaction. If I eventually get her laughing and flirting, then I have won the frame battle and the interaction is now one of flirtation rather than strangers or “just friends”.
So, you can see that Red Pill’s notion of frame control is quite literally the practice of strengthening one’s worldview despite negative information. No matter what the woman throws at you, your worldview is strong enough to disregard that negative information and force your frame of “we are flirting right now” onto the woman.
On top of that, consider the framing of flirtation as a battle for control with a woman over the framing of that interaction. What is this if not a cultural assumption that Red Pill has about what it means to flirt with a woman? It’s not a collaboration with a woman in which you both have the opportunity to create something together if the both of you consent to it. It is instead a battle, a war, in which you must dominate a woman’s perspective and mold it into the form you demand it be for the satisfaction of the desires you have placed above her own. Those are two very…different ways of looking at flirtation.
But try to convince a Red Piller of that when they’ve become so practiced in resisting information that challenges their frame, that challenges their worldview. Now, just to say, there are better ways of framing frame than this very competitive frame, even within Red Pill itself. However, I’ve had conversations with Red Pillers who say, without an ounce of irony, that they don’t trust sociology or other “leftist” disciplines, or in some cases, academia itself. If I mention disagreements that evolutionary psychology has with Red Pill, they’ll say they only trust Red Pill’s interpretations of evolutionary psychology.
As such, when a Red Piller’s worldview gets them the results they want, their faith in their worldview becomes stronger. This in turn justifies their use of frame to force women and other people to do as they say while simultaneously being direct practice in strengthening their ability to control the frame and resist anomalies. When they fail to get the results they want, they are given a script by Red Pill itself that they either have to work harder to control the frame more or the woman they’re talking to has simply been corrupted too severely by the feminist matrix.
With that all being said, how exactly does a Red Piller’s blindness to their own cultural assumptions work to keep them trapped at Level 3 Achiever, even with a diverse range of communities?
The Value and Opportunity of Community
Before I continue I just wanted to let you know that I’ve started a patreon. I’m going to be doing monthly Q&As, releasing my videos earlier for patrons, and including the names of patrons in end credits in my videos. I want to keep my content as free as possible, but I also would like to do this full time and start doing more with the channel. If you like everything I’ve been doing so far, then please consider supporting me and helping this project grow. Thank you so much!
Remember that within the cult of self-improvement, a decidedly Achiever subculture, negative emotion is often considered an obstacle to overcome rather than a meaningful and worthy experience in its own right. In other words, Achievers are so consumed by a need for the utility of emotion that they fail to see the utility of negative emotions, and in some cases, of emotions altogether. I want to be clear that there is more than just utility here, but even within the frame of utility they are losing out on utility because of their obsession with utility. (utility utility utility).
Firstly, emotions are useful because they are used to motivate us to take action. The idea that a purely logical, rational agent would be better able to live life is completely false. Patients with brain damage that prevents them from feeling emotion can logically tell you the best course of action, but lack the ability to even put on their socks. We require emotion to do anything.15 Even though Red Pill Godfather Rollo Tomassi states that men shouldn’t be unfeeling social robots, there is still a valorizing of rationality over emotion, rather than seeing them as mutually supportive.8
Secondly, patients with brain damage that prevents them from experiencing cognitive dissonance are also incapable of changing their minds. We experience cognitive dissonance when we realize we believe two contradictory things and we feel motivated to resolve that contradiction by changing our minds in some way. In other words, when you remove the experience of doubt, you render yourself incapable of changing your mind.3 So much for the “rational male”.
As such, if you’ve valorized frame control then you’ve valorized ignoring doubt, which means you’ve valorized the inability to change your mind, thus rendering yourself incapable of changing your mind. If that wasn’t ironic enough, then we can also explore even further how the “rational male” of Red Pill is in fact quite emotional. We can see this through McRaney’s writings on the feeling of certainty. He writes that we tend to believe that certainty is the conclusion of logical analysis, when it is in fact a feeling state.3
You’ll often see this happen. Because emotions are considered feminine, emotional aspects of masculinity are re-interpreted, or rather distorted by our worldview, as being logical or action-oriented in some way. The feeling of anger becomes the dominant action of power over others or the enactment of justice in retaliation for having broken some honour code. Since masculinity is truth, certainty, accuracy, and logic, we must re-interpret certainty as the byproduct of that logic rather than a feeling. By removing its emotional tone we can make it more emotionally palatable for us, the non-emotional, rational male.
Within Red Pill, frame control is framed as a masculine endeavour. It is up to the man to control the frame, and so it is masculine to be certain that you are right enough that the other ought to conform to your frame. This is justified as a necessity if you want to get certain results with women or with your career. Control the frame, get the result, justify your worldview that controlling the frame is necessary, or fail to get the result and justify your worldview by punishing yourself for not controlling the frame even more than you already were.
So, even though an Achiever can benefit from ideologically-diverse communities, Red Pill’s ideology co-opts the way in which the Achiever thinks with the effect of locking them down. They do this by valorizing closed-mindedness through the concept of frame control. However, this is made even more powerfully reinforcing because Red Pill is also a cult of self-improvement that creates a sense of belonging around the cultivation of hyper-agency and the denigration of communion as the dependent submission of victimhood.
That seems contradictory. They create a sense of belonging or communion around denigrating communion itself. This contradiction is actually how they make their ideology that much more closed. Remember from my essay Psychology of the Zombie that we live in a culture of hyper-individualism in which we blind ourselves to the necessity of communion. Then, remember from my essay on Red Pill’s Cosmology that high agency is associated with a fear of intimacy because we fear losing our agency through fusing too tightly into that communion.
So, we have a need for communion with an ideologically diverse range of communities, but we are raised in a culture that valorizes hyper-individualism. This births self-improvement culture that is a cult of agency, valorizing even further the taking of personal responsibility and a rejection of dependence that it frames as “being a victim”. This hyper-agency is associated with a fear of intimacy and belonging. We then have Red Pill that frames intimacy as a battle over who controls the relationship, or in other words, who has the greatest agency over that relationship.
I’ve argued previously that Red Pill is in many ways the consequence of Western culture taken to its logical extreme. I think we can see a clear example of this here. All of this prevents them from evolving beyond their worldview because relationships are re-interpreted in transactional terms in regards to how much value they bring to your life. With the managerializing and entrepreneurializing tendencies of their worldview they are constantly scanning others for the value proposition they have. Not only does this create a sort of self-interested view of other people as mere vehicles of value added to one’s own life, which has its own limitations, it also constrains the types of relationships one can have based on one’s definition of “value”.
In other words, because you’ve limited yourself to relationships that align with your values that actively privilege hyper-agency and denigrate communion when it can be interpreted as victimhood, you’ve prevented yourself from building relationships with people who might challenge your worldview of hyper-agency. If anything seems to threaten your agency, it is interpreted as a “low consciousness” enemy that is too focused on the negative and will poison your chances at achieving success. Even further than that, your valorizing of frame control means that you’ll interpret such interactions as an opportunity to control the frame and disregard everything they say that might cause you to self-reflect. However diverse the range of communities you have may be, they are still contained within the bounds of what your worldview can tolerate.
Bound so tightly within a cult of hyper-agency, you perceive any call for empathy for the struggles of others as the immorality of weak victimhood. Taken to the extreme we have Christians, professed followers of a man who said love thy neighbour as thyself, warning people about the sin of empathy. Protected so thoroughly from the experience of doubt, you rarely experience the cognitive dissonance necessary to challenge your worldview. How can such a person ever change their mind enough to begin reflecting on the cultural assumptions that bind them to the stage of development that prevents them from reflecting on their cultural assumptions?
The Absurd Nihilism Beyond Achievement
Closer to the beginning of this essay I mentioned that our worldview gives us meaning. Each time a person changes their mind about something radical it is painful. It could be something that takes them from conforming to one group and then with another, or with one expert and then with another, or with one value system and then with another. Each of these experiences can be incredibly painful. We are forced not only to give up our identity, the person we thought we were and the things we thought we stood for, but we also lose a sense of community and the rich meaning that we found in those relationships.
Think about how difficult it can be to realize that the people you still care about are living lives that you can no longer be a part of. Perhaps you even believe now that they are living immorally, maybe even destroying the planet, apologizing for genocide, or torturing animals you now see as persons. Perhaps you now realize that the God who filled the world with the sacred, who promised safety against the crushing fear of death, was really just a fairy tale told to children before they could think well enough to question. Now you believe that the world is composed of dead, lifeless matter that cares nothing for you or anyone else.
When we have a certain worldview, we use it to make sense and meaning about the things that happen to us and around us. When our worldview is confronted with something that it cannot explain, with anomalies that continue to pile up despite our best effort to avoid them or explain them away, we experience this as nihilism and absurdity. Nihilism is the absence of meaning and absurdity the absence of sense. To change one’s mind is to face this absurd nihilism that exists beyond our worldview. We suddenly can’t make meaning or sense about the things that are happening. They exceed the explanatory and interpretive capacity of our worldview. We can either allow this excess meaninglessness and senselessness to open us up so that we can evolve, or we can react against it and become even more closed-minded.
Consider, then, my essays on Red Pill’s worldview. Consider how it framed them in ways that were undeniably villainous, manipulative, and immature. I did this partly because I truly believe that their worldview is villainous in many ways and partly because with my channel I’m speaking to people who likely already agree with that position. However, what I’ve come to realize is that for them to see themselves from our position, to become the men we want them to be, they must also come to see who they are currently are as villainous, manipulative, and immature.
Imagine what it would take to change the mind of Rollo Tomassi, the Godfather of Red Pill, who has spent something like the last 20 years building a worldview that has not only made him very successful, but has given him an enormous amount of respect and belonging within the community. He doesn’t refer to himself as the Godfather, but was given that title by a community of younger men who he would now have to tell, “I was wrong all this time. I’m sorry.”
None of this would in any way be a small feat.
Remember that I said that Charlie Veitch had his sister’s kid’s faces used in photoshopped child videos. Charlie himself had this to say about the men he once considered ideological comrades, “You fucking animals. You disgusting fucking animals.”
This hostility functions to remove you from your group, to push you away so that you can begin to question, challenge, and find your way into a new community or ideology. And like I said before, in some cases that hostility is not just a functional byproduct of changing your mind, but is well-earned. However well-earned it may be, that hostility will still be imbued with all the pain of having lost an old friend.
One of the things that I remember from my days in self-improvement cults is the “gun to the head” mentality. The story goes that if you really want to achieve something, then you have to act as if someone has put a gun to your head and they will end your life if you don’t do what you must to succeed. Maybe they’ll even end the lives of your wife and kids, or your extended family. The point is that if you want to succeed in life you have to be willing to do whatever it takes, and in that moment, with a gun to your head, you would undeniably do whatever it took to do what the gunman demanded.
Add to that something you’ll learn from sales. If you want to sell something you have to ask the right questions to get the prospect to create their own definition of Hell and then their own definition of Heaven, and then position your product or coaching program as the bridge that will take them from their Hell to their Heaven. So, think about what’s really going on there.
There is a gun to your head. Ignore the fact that I’ve convinced you to put that gun there. There is a gun to your head bro, are you going to let him kill you or are you going to take massive action and buy my product? No no no man, you told me your deepest fears and now I’m going to use them against you because if you don’t take massive action you won’t reach your deepest desires! You have a gun to your head! No YOU put it there because you want the Heaven bro, do you want to be a failure? Do you want to sacrifice your wife and kids, future or otherwise, because you were too much of a pussy to take action? BUY MY PRODUCT! You told me you desired money, women, and power, and now I’m going to help you get there bro, I’m on your side, you’ve been watching my videos for months being convinced that your loneliness, rejection, and powerlessness in a world far bigger than you can all be solved by ADOPTING MY WORLDIVEW, SO BUY MY PRODUCT and make me rich! But I’ll help YOU GET RICH TOO bro, that’s the point of BUYING MY PRODUCT, even though 96% of you will fail, BUT THERE’S A GUN TO YOUR HEAD THAT YOU PUT THERE because you want YOUR DREAMS right man? You want that to happen, YOU TOLD ME in confidence WHAT YOU DESIRE even though I convinced you to DESIRE IT. You want your Hell? You want to be a BETA, you want her to CHEAT ON YOU, the love of your life! Do you want her to turn you into a CUCK? I didn’t put this gun to your head, YOU DID, take responsibility, be a man, I didn’t convince you that you should put a gun to your head, men like us don’t play the victim, we take action, SO BUY MY PRODUCT! Get into deeper debt making me and other coaches like me rich because if you don’t get into enough debt you’ll never motivated enough to be successful! Your worst fears will be realized! SO BUY MY PRODUCT!
The vicious entrepreneurializing of neoliberal capitalism reduces you, the buyer, to the technical utility you provide to the market, regardless of the cost this has on you, our society, or the world at large. All that matters is the accrual of profits and the unfilled promise that you can achieve it to. Taken to the extreme you are no longer a person who ought to be afforded their own agency, but human capital, a tool to be used in the manufacture of other tools or pleasure for other buyers.
From this perspective, all that matters is the win. If I can in some way interpret how you can win from giving in to my demands on you, then it can be considered a win. Even if you don’t truly value that as a win, even if you only believe you ought to value it because I’ve convinced you my worldview is superior because I “held the frame”, and even if you wouldn’t have chosen that as a win had you been given the real agency to decide for yourself. As long as I can convince myself, through only the lens of my own imperfect worldview, that you have won by buying my product, then I can be comfortable that we have all won, despite my manipulations of you.
As long as the Achiever is convinced to only consider the opportunity, only consider the win, only focus on the positive, any negative can be swept under the rug or else it’ll attract more negative into their lives.
My point in highlighting all of this, is so that you can see how difficult it would be for someone at Level 3 Achiever, whether they’re Red Pill or not, to be able to see how their worldview is limited. The manipulation and corruption that goes on in cults of self-improvement is mindboggling once you’ve become aware of it. The difficulty is that it’s not all bad. A lot of it can actually be very beneficial and in some ways I think everyone should learn from it.
But that’s the difficulty of changing your mind. There is no worldview that is all bad because if there was then no one would have ever adopted it. Our worldviews shape and organize our reality so that we can navigate that reality. It takes over 20% of the information we receive to be anomalous before we start to change our minds, and so that means that any worldview only needs to be effective 80% of the time. And recognize that effectiveness is itself defined by the worldview.
McRaney also covers research on belief-change blindness, where we are often completely blind to the fact that we’ve changed our mind even within the same conversation. And consistency bias where we assume that we have always thought in the way we currently think or believed the things we currently believe. And what about our hostility toward people who change their minds? A political candidate doesn’t “change her mind”, she flip-flops, she’s too inconsistent, she can’t be trusted. Or a person who now professes anti-racist or pro-LBGT+ sentiments is found to have posted a tweet 15 years ago that was offensive, and now we skewer them as if they still believe those things.3
Despite our desire to change the people around us toward what we consider to be the better, we do everything in our power to punish people who do change their minds. Given everything I’ve said about the difficulty of changing one’s mind, even at multiple stages of development where people become better able to question the power of conformity…how can we ever change a mind?
The Will to Love
Firstly, I highly recommend you read McRaney’s book, “How Minds Change”. This essay has introduced a much richer developmental perspective, but he gets far more into the nuts and bolts of changing minds using ethical persuasion, which he defines here:3
“a successful intentional effort at influencing another’s mental state through communication in a circumstance in which the persuadee has some measure of freedom.”
He goes on to add that ethical persuasion requires that we treat the other as an equal participant in the conversation. We do this by being completely transparent about our intentions upfront. McRaney shares a story about how revealing his intentions immediately softened the person he was talking to and I can relate to this as well. I was once having a conversation with a girlfriend about her social media use. Unsurprisingly, her back was up the entire conversation until I said that I was afraid she was using it more than being creative. My intention was to have her work on those projects because I knew how important they were for her. Again, unsurprisingly, the moment I revealed that intention, she softened.
And yet, however transparent our intentions are, we have to remember that the person we’re speaking to feels like they can reject what we’re saying. If you remember from my essay Psychology of the Zombie, I had said that only Zombified fingers point to Zombies. This was meant to capture the idea that in our world today we have fragmented ourselves into these hyper-polarized tribes that are more concerned about fighting over small differences than with finding ways to work together toward a better future. To call someone else a Zombie is to create an us vs. them narrative about all of them who think in us vs. them narratives. To recognize the Zombie as always a we is to step forward in healing our zombification.
Like I said before though, my essays on Red Pill framed them as a villain pretty severely. How much damage have I done by framing my essays in such hostile terms? Notice how you measure how much you like a perspective based on how much it hates someone you’ve labeled a “them”. What better way to keep your own worldview closed? While the opposite is an undiscerning mind that falls for any new idea it comes across, we want to, at the very least, be aware of the dangers of either extreme. The point is not a milquetoast middle, but a meta-ideological stance where we can let go of our attachments and play.
While I did aim to take a meta-ideological perspective with those essays, a large portion was coming from what I call an Akedian frame, or one of progressive masculinity, and how it reacts against the Kathekon, or traditional masculinity. I have essays on Kathekon and Akedia that I highly recommend. There are of course legitimate criticisms of Red Pill that must be made, but to what extent did I merely scapegoat them, blaming them rather than seeing how my own engagement with them was making all of us worse, locking all of us down even more?
On the other hand, what if I was too lenient? Maybe some were even turned off my essays for the very reason that I was too lenient. If I believe my message against Red Pill is important, which I do, then in my attempt to get that message out there, I may be too lenient or too harsh. And to be clear, I don’t want this to be a hand-wavey, “oh I may have been a bit too harsh, but it was for a purpose.” I will alienate far more Red Pillers than I change given those videos. They are likely not very effective for changing minds, but for educating the minds of those who already more or less disagree with Red Pill. Again, those are the people I’m talking to, but what damage was done?
All of this is why I believe that we ought to hold Truth as a value above, potentially, all others. Taking the world as it actually is in its holistic totality is how we are best able to turn it into the world we desire, at least as much as it can be. And this includes the truth of how minds actually change. We also can’t update our own worldview if we prioritize above Truth itself our own ego validation at convincing another of the Truth or even of actually finding the Truth. Find Truth for its own sake, rather than for the validation you receive for having found that Truth, as difficult as that may be.
However, we cannot be limited only to the Truth. In revealing our intentions, we must be motivated by a Love for the person we are talking with. Our transparent intentions become Zombified when our perspective is taken to be of greater value than the personhood of the human being we’re communicating with. When it comes to persuasion we can’t change someone’s mind unless we’ve created a circle of empathy in which a new welcoming and welcomed meaningful identity is offered. Remember that social death is often more frightening than physical death, and when we seek to change someone, we are demanding that they face the social death of who they currently are.
This is often why feminist deconstruction of patriarchy fails. They merely demonstrate how the identity men have is toxic, corrupt, and ought to be left behind. In some cases they literally say that masculinity as a whole is too dangerous and must be done away with altogether.16 They often simply create a circle of exclusion that demands men rid themselves of their bad parts, without really providing an inspirational and aspirational identity for them to move into. For as much as my channel has sought otherwise, I too have yet to really do this. My next series will begin to do so.
My point is though, that in deconstructing Red Pill, we must remember that relational reconstruction with a higher order perspective is necessary. This is the essence of the meta-ideological perspective. Relating to the ideas, yes, but relating also to the person holding those ideas.
In a recent podcast I did, the host had interpreted meta-ideology as trying to create a big picture framework that contains everything. This is sort of true. We want to be able to take into account as much of human knowledge as we can. I think there’s real value in that. However, it’s also about the dance between ideologies, or worldviews, or knowledge systems. We engage in dialogue with one another and through that dialogue, through that dancing, we create something more than either dancer alone. This dance depends on the dancers, but is far more than either of them, as it emerges out of how they relate with one another. It takes two to tango because the tango is not found in either of them alone.
McRaney quotes research that shows that reasoning and rationality evolved for that purpose. We tend to think of rationality as something we do alone for our own benefit, for our own understanding of the world. And yet, we seem to reason best in dialogue with other human beings.3 Dr. John Vervaeke is also very well known for his idea of the dialogos:17,18
“Dialogos is dialogue [that] affords a reciprocal flow state, also found in sparring and jazz, that foregrounds a collective intelligence [that generates] shared and emergent sense-making. Just as sparring and jazz train skills and perspectives one cannot generate on one's own.”
If we consider everything we’ve discussed so far, this just makes sense. Within the limited, worldview-distorted umwelt that each of us inhabits, our only path of escape is the umwelt of a transparent, open, curious, good faith, and loving other. Just as with that girlfriend I had however, the point wasn’t to get her to conform to me. It was instead to show her that we had the mutual goal of her pursuing her creative projects. Whatever else she believed or did with her time, we were now on the same side in the pursuit of a common goal rather than locked down in an endless debate.
McRaney writes about the limits of debate:3
“Misha said that on the surface, debate seems like a civil way to manage disagreements, because instead of attacking each other with clubs, we attack each other with words. But this is a dangerous concept, because the only way to win a debate is to avoid changing one’s own mind. Only the ‘loser’ of a debate learns anything new, and no one wants to be a loser. The more civil approach, he said, is to avoid asking ourselves which one of us is right, and instead ask ourselves why we see things differently. This creates a collaboration, both sides working together to figure out where their differences come from.”
I want you to walk away from my series on Red Pill equipped enough to understand why I believe their worldview goes wrong. Not so you can destroy them with facts and logic, but so that you can act as at least one community in that diverse range of communities we’d hope they have. Unfortunately, you might be the only other one they find themselves welcomed into. And that’s precisely the problem with Red Pill’s worldview. It is not merely that they have a closed worldview, but that we have locked it shut from the outside.
McRaney writes the following advice:3
“Assure the other party you aren’t out to shame them or put them in a position to be ostracized by their peers.”
Again, we are challenging someone’s social identity, the way in which they’ve come to be accepted as a person, as a human being, by a group they care much about and who they, at the very least, believe cares about them. In some cases we are challenging beliefs and social norms they think protect the world from chaos.
You must ask yourself what this group is doing and how you can stand against it in a way that will actually land with them, given where they currently are. Notice the meta-position there. You aren’t anti-conformist, moving horizontally away into a mere reflection, but are seeking a higher perspective that respects them as their own person while also respecting your own personhood. From this perspective, a higher order communion can actually emerge.
Maybe this is idealistic, but McRaney ends his book with a passage that shows how powerful each of us can be:3
“The system must become vulnerable. When it is, with so many people banging away, it is inevitable that someone will start the cascade that changes everything, but that someone isn’t preordained. You need no special privilege to start striking at the status quo, because no one is in control. What you are in control of is whether or not you stop striking. And if the change you want to make is big, you may need to strike all your life.”
The Dark Forest of Autonomy, our current cultural and systemic condition, is made of metal trees with neon leaves. We increasingly find ourselves pulled from our embodied existence as social primates who thrive in communion with others who respect our own agency as we respect theirs. We’ve replaced the campfire with parasocial podcasts, love with fantasies of power satisfied by for-purchase girlfriends, and purpose with the self-interested pursuit of wealth torn from the dying hands of mother nature.
As men navigating our way through this Forest, we need to find better ways to relate to other men so that we can become better men together. We obviously must understand how we ourselves have our minds change to defend ourselves and to support ourselves toward values and modes of being we personally aspire to. To do this, we must follow the Witch into the Dark Forest. Now that we have a better understanding of the Forest itself and the False Prophets who reside there, we now turn, in the next essay, to what it means to follow the Witch.
Until then, thank you so much for your time and attention. Please hit the like button and subscribe for more conversations on masculinity, psychological development, and the cultivation of a personal mythology. Thanks again, and all the best to you on whatever journey you find yourself on.
References:
1 – Nakade, R. (2021, June 18). 5 Signs You’re a Meta-Ideological Chad. Medium. https://greenteaji108.medium.com/5-signs-youre-a-meta-ideological-chad-8c7f62d6d90c
2 – Koltko-Rivera, M. E. (2004). The Psychology of Worldviews. Review of General Psychology, 8(1), 3–58. https://doi.org/10.1037/1089-2680.8.1.3
3 – How Minds Change: The New Science of Belief, Opinion and Persuasion. (2022).
4 – Wilber, K. (2001). Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution, Second Edition (2nd Rev ed. edition). Shambhala.
5 – Cook-Greuter, S. (2021). Ego Development: A Full-Spectrum Theory Of Vertical Growth And Meaning Making.
6 – Kegan, R. (1998). In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life (Reprint edition). Harvard University Press.
7 – Tillier, W. (2018). Personality Development Through Positive Disintegration: The Work of Kazimierz Dabrowski (Illustrated edition). Maurice Bassett.
8 – Tomassi, R. (2013). The Rational Male. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.
9 – Masters, R.A. (2010). Spiritual Bypassing: When Spirituality Disconnects Us from What Really Matters. North Atlantic Books.
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17 – Dr John Vervaeke [@DrJohnVervaeke]. (2022, October 28). Dialogos is dialogue the affords a reciprocal flow state, also found in sparring and jazz, that foregrounds a collective intelligence generating shared and emergent sense-making. Just as sparring and jazz train skills and perspectives one cannot generate on one’s own. [Tweet]. Twitter. https://x.com/DrJohnVervaeke/status/1586114339668340736
18 - Vervaeke, J., & Mastropietro, C. (2021). Dialectic Into Dialogos and the Pragmatics of No-Thingness in a Time of Crisis. Eidos. A Journal for Philosophy of Culture, 5(2), 58–77. https://doi.org/10.14394/eidos.jpc.2021.0017