The Serpentine Epistemology of Red Pill
What's Wrong With Red Pill's Worldview Part 2
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One of the most pressing issues in masculinity today is the rise and the hopeful fall of the Red Pill. In my last video, I introduced the Godfather of Red Pill, Rollo Tomassi, and began outlining his and Red Pill’s worldview.1,2 Understanding their worldview is important because according to Dr. Donella Meadows, changing a worldview can have the highest impact when it comes to systemic change.3 If we want to change Red Pill, we at the very least, need to understand its worldview.
Here, I use a definition of worldview as the overarching answer to the 5 big questions of philosophy – ontology, epistemology, axiology, praxeology, and cosmology.4
Today I’ll be covering their epistemology, but in my last video, which you don’t need to watch before this one, I covered Tomassi and Red Pill’s ontology or model of the world. Firstly though, I’ll be talking about both Tomassi and Red Pill. There are distinctions, so when I say that Tomassi believes something it’s because this is something he has written in his book, “The Rational Male” or said in a podcast. Either way, in that last episode, I said that Red Pill falls for what’s called biological reductionism. Whatever effect culture has, it’s our biology as a human animal that defines what is most real or authentic for us.
This in turn makes them fall for what I call the authentic desire fallacy, where a person’s desires are only real or authentic if they can be explained by their interpretation evolutionary biology or evolutionary psychology. For example, men can get many women pregnant in a very short amount of time, but a woman can only be pregnant once at a time. This means that men are innately polygamous and can only be truly satisfied by sleeping around as much as possible, whereas women are monogamous and can only be truly satisfied staying at home and taking care of the kids.
Again, they justify all of this because they believe that biology has the greatest causal influence on who we are as human beings. What’s more, if I as a man say that I’m okay with monogamy, that’s only because I have been brainwashed by gynocracy. Remember, females are monogamous, so if I say I’m happy with one woman, that’s only because I’ve given in to a female’s sexual strategy. I can only be truly authentic as an alpha male if I’m sleeping with as many women as possible.
If you want to get deeper into why that’s not necessarily accurate, then please check that first video out, but today I’m going to cover Red Pill’s epistemology. This is basically the way in which they come to know about the world, to find out what is true or false.
Red Pill’s Epistemic Hiccups
To begin, I want to reference Alex of Date Psychology’s article, “The Emotional Epistemology of Red Pill”. There he defines Red Pill’s epistemology as an imbecile empiricism. Empiricism is basically a grounding element of science where we learn through observation and measurement. Alex says the following:5
“The scientific method relies on empirical evidence to develop and test hypotheses, which are then evaluated based on their explanatory power and ability to make accurate predictions.”
He then says that Red Pill has an imbecile empiricism because:5
“The epistemology of the red pill relies more on third-person anecdotes. […] It is the belief that knowledge is best accumulated through one’s own experiences and intuitions. Further, that knowledge accumulated through one’s own subjective experiences is as valid as any other empirical evidence — maybe even more valid!”
This is a problem because it makes the assumption that you know the reasons for why things happen. Sometimes this is true enough, but just because you made a correct prediction, doesn’t mean that you know why your prediction was right. For all you know it could have been a lucky guess. That’s precisely why we have the scientific method. We want to be able to filter out the other explanations for why things happen and to repeat the same prediction over and over again to see how often we get the same result with that prediction. Alex explains what can go wrong when we don’t do this:5
“The red pill contains overlapping subcultures that say ‘all women are sluts,’ while at the same time encouraging men to […] pursue promiscuous sexual strategies. Men who have highly negative attitudes toward women end up having repeated bad experiences with women — and then report ‘all women are like that.’ Might the pursuit of a promiscuous sexual strategy put them in contact with promiscuous women that shape their perceptions? Might their own hostile attitude toward women determine the quality of women that they attract?”
Again, if you assume you know the reasons for why things happen, you don’t take into account the alternative explanations or the selection biases that occur. A selection bias is exactly what Alex described above. If you pursue women, then you’re more likely to sleep with women who are themselves promiscuous.6,7 That doesn’t mean you never sleep with women who aren’t very promiscuous. In fact, you might sleep with a woman who is incredibly unlikely to have sex, but it was just the right place, right time, for whatever reason.
However, most experiences you have sleeping with women are likely going to be with women above a certain threshold of promiscuity. The higher her promiscuity, the more likely you will be to sleep with her. This is especially true when Tomassi advises men to assume it won’t go anywhere if they haven’t hooked up after a certain number of dates. I couldn’t find the exact number in the book because I didn’t make a note of it, so I do apologize if I’m wrong about this, but I’m pretty sure it’s three dates. And that can actually be good advice, but again, notice how it selects only for those women who have sex three dates in or even sooner.
I’ve even seen some guys in these communities say that they only keep seeing a woman if they hook up on the first date. They say, “If she’s not willing to sleep with me that fast, then she’s not interested enough in me.” Again, notice the assumption that you know why she slept with you. Maybe she really, really liked you, or maybe you’re only selecting women of a certain level of promiscuity and then assuming that it was because she really, really liked you specifically.
If you then go and give guys advice about how only women who sleep with you on the first date really like you, then you are telling guys to only select for women of a certain promiscuity. Again, maybe she really liked you, or maybe she really liked you and was very promiscuous, or maybe she was just very promiscuous and you happened to be there. What is likely true is that if you then have a bad experience with her later, you’ve prevented yourself from saying, “Oh it was because she was very promiscuous and has other features associated with that.” If you assume it was only because she really liked you, then you can only explain her later toxic behaviour from that initial, faulty assumption of extreme liking and so that colours everything you can interpret.
And really, you’re still cutting off a lot of women who might really like you but prefer to wait a few dates. Furthermore, you might be selecting not even simply for very promiscuous women, but women who are also very impulsive. This is especially true if women are shamed for being promiscuous. I don’t mean to be judgmental, but you may be selecting for women who are so impulsive that they can’t even reach the cultural standard. Then, if you value being a dominant, aloof, alpha male, perhaps you’re also selecting for women who get off on that behaviour. That might be fine, but that’s also selecting for a very specific type of woman.
What’s true for all these situations is that you don’t actually know which of the possibilities I described before is true. You cannot generalize from your potentially limited interpretations to laws of female nature. Making this mistake results from two similar biases: misleading vividness and hasty generalization.8,9
Misleading vividness is when we take a dramatic or emotional example, something that’s vivid, and then assume that this says something about the typical case, “Wow she slept with me so quickly that must mean she really liked me, and so only women who sleep with me as quickly are the ones who really like me”. Hasty generalization, on the other hand, is when we make sweeping conclusions based on insufficient data. What I do successfully works on the women it has worked on, therefore what I do works on any woman anywhere in the exact same ways for the exact same reasons.
Alex doesn’t mention these biases explicitly, but in an article on Rollo Tomassi, he mentions Tomassi’s use of hybristophilia, which is when someone is attracted to criminals. Tomassi uses this to justify why women in general are attracted to dominant men. He takes a vivid story and then hastily generalizes a small portion of the population to all women. Interestingly enough, Alex wonders why Tomassi ignores the men who display hybristophilic tendencies.10
The point is that Tomassi is looking at the world through his worldview where his understanding of differences in biology explains everything. If anything supports his conclusion he’ll use it, even if his misuse of the data could even support the opposite conclusion. Additionally, if a tiny portion of women being hybristophilic means that women, in general, yearn for violent, dominating men, then the fact that 4% of men are gay means all men, in general, are gay.11 Or, if 1.6% of Americans are transgender or non-binary, does that mean that gender is entirely a social construct?12 That’s very obviously, not what he says at all.
Again, because his worldview selects for a specific type of woman who does respond to dominance, he and the men he influences will have first-person experiences that justify the claim, then, that is taken as even more evidence. All women like dominant men, I act dominant, I slept with a woman, therefore, all women like dominant men.
On top of that, there’s the assumption I mentioned before, where if they got the result they wanted, they assume that means they know exactly why. This is a combination of the post hoc fallacy and outcome bias.13,14 The post hoc fallacy occurs when we change a belief or behaviour, we get a new result, and so we assume the change is what led to the belief just because the belief change happened first. We assume there was a causal relation when there may have been some other explanation for why the new result was found.
Then, the outcome bias is basically where we judge things purely on the outcome, without considering other factors. The example Investopedia gives is of an investor who jumps into real estate just because someone else made it big. They don’t take into account any of the factors that helped the other person make a lot of money, they’re purely focused on the fact that a lot of money was made. I’ll refer to these biases together as the post hoc outcome bias.
In the case of Red Pill, they believe that if something gets you the result you desire, then you know why you got the result. They interpret their belief as a cause of the result, and because they did actually get a result, they hyper-focus on it to the exclusion of other possible explanations. They then fall for the misleading vividness and hasty generalization biases which lead them to assume that they know what the implications of that result are on males and females as entire groups.
I mentioned this before in my discussion of Red Pill unknowingly selecting for promiscuous, impulsive women. Just because you got the result, you got laid, doesn’t mean you know why, nor does it mean you can generalize about who that individual woman is, let alone all women everywhere. She could have had any number of reasons to sleep with you that time, but because you fell for the post hoc outcome bias, you assume you know that what you did or what someone else told you to believe is what got you the result.
This becomes even more difficult when it is assumed that any strategy will have a certain failure rate, which is true. There are very few 100% effective strategies, and more than likely none. I learned about a consequence of this from a pickup artist video where he said that men often have difficulty changing a strategy that worked even once, because, it worked even that one time.
For example, if a guy is super persistent with a woman, constantly asking her out, and she finally agrees, then his strategy succeeded. From that point onward he knows from experience that this strategy eventually leads to success, he just has to keep trying. This is especially true if she decides to sleep with him, bringing even greater vividness to the experience. He’ll then be just as persistent with every other woman he talks to because that one time it worked. Remember, there is no strategy that works every time. Guys have a very difficult time changing a strategy once it’s succeeded. Again, it is a successful strategy, even if it is a bad strategy.
I actually tested this in my own life during a time when I was working on my dating life. If you’ve been in the dating world then I’m sure you’ve experienced a woman “reject you” by agreeing to a date and then cancelling the day of the date. She hopes you’ll get the hint and give up the first time, but if you plan another date, she may agree to it, and then cancel the day of again. And by the way, I’ve literally had women tell me they do this, so this isn’t just me assuming things based on my experience or even the experience only of men. Personally though, I usually give it two cancellations. Sometimes something actually did happen, but she really does want to see you. If she cancels a second time, then she’s probably rejecting you and it’s better to not risk being persistent beyond that point if she really was trying to give a soft rejection.
Again though, I decided to test this out. After the second cancellation, I decided to ask for a third date. I said something like, “Oh don’t worry at all, I get it you’re busy, my next availability is Wednesday”. She said that Wednesday worked great. So, Wednesday comes along, and she cancels again. So, I asked for a fourth date. To be clear, this isn’t just a case of, “Oh but she never said no, so that must mean she consented.” She never said she wasn’t interested, she just said something came up so she couldn’t make it, and each time I asked for consent for the date, she explicitly said “yes”.
My goal was to see how many times it would take this girl to finally say explicitly, “I’m not interested”. I think it was on the fifth time when we finally went on the date. Persistence, beyond what anyone in their right mind should have, actually worked. On top of that, I then slept with this woman.
I want to be clear that I am not saying that this is a good strategy. My goal was to see when she’d reject me, and instead, much to my surprise, I discovered that this very bad strategy was a successful strategy. This speaks volumes to the fact that a successful strategy is not necessarily a good strategy, and that’s true even if it gets you good results.
With that said, I know that saying “persisting too much is a bad thing” is the same selection bias where you’re only selecting for women who cancel at most once. My point is that despite this not being a good strategy, I succeeded. We even had sex. This woman rewarded my persistence. Think about the consequences of that if I hadn’t been consciously testing how long it would take, if I had just been some oblivious guy thinking, “Oh geez, destiny is really against us on this one…”
Women complain a lot about guys who are persistent, but with the post hoc outcome bias, it only takes one woman rewarding the persistence strategy for how many guys to say, “Okay the persistence strategy is the most successful strategy I’ve had, so I will persistent until she finally gives in.”
When it comes to Red Pill, they use the post hoc outcome bias to justify their entire worldview. Again, the moment they get even one success, they don’t only justify their sexual strategy, but every other facet of their worldview. This post hoc outcome bias becomes all the more dangerous when it is combined with a radical form of behaviourism.
Radical Behaviourism and the Compliance-Love Conflation
Behaviourism is a school of psychology that basically says that observable behaviours are the only things we can measure, which means that the only way we can do psychological science is by measuring observable behaviours. In other words, the only way we can know about other people is through their behaviour. This has been an incredibly successful way of doing real science, but, when taken to the extreme, this erases internal experience altogether.15
Remember that epistemology means the way in which we come to know what is true or false. With a radical enough behaviourism, all that you really are can be understood only with the behaviours we can see. Notice the ontological statement there. Remember that ontology is our model of the world, or of what is real. If we say that internal experiences can be ignored because all we need is observable behaviour, then we are saying that ontologically, behaviours are more real or truthful than our conscious beliefs and statements about why we do things. Tomassi makes this exact claim here:1
“[Base] your estimation of a woman upon her actions and behaviors rather than her words or implied intents. […] behavior is the only reliable evidence of motivation. Even motivations not consciously recognized by the actor can influence behavior regardless of a consciously rationalized motive. In other words, sometimes we don’t realize why we’re hypocrites or saints as the case may be.”
I want to be clear that this is sometimes true, but notice the implication. Throughout his book Tomassi demands that the relationship be set on a man’s terms, even going so far as to say that a marriage should be set completely on a man’s terms. I talked about that in my last video. My point is that if a relationship must be set on a man’s terms, and the only way to judge a woman’s motivations is based on her actions, we have an epistemology that justifies ignoring what women say and assuming we know why she behaved in a certain way. Notice how at risk that is of the post hoc outcome bias.
I believed something, I got the result, so I know why I got the observable, measurable result. You assume her actions can be interpreted from your worldview without considering how your entire worldview shapes what you can know about why she does certain things. What if your interpretations are wrong? One horrifying example from history is Descartes assuming that dogs didn’t have an internal experience of pain, and so believed that their cries of pain could be ignored while they were being dissected alive.16 If you need more evidence for why your worldview matters in the real world, I don’t know what to tell you.
Applying this to Red Pill’s worldview, we can see how a woman’s internal experience can so easily be dismissed so long as you got the outcome you were looking for. This further justifies a worldview in which social influence is more important than relational value. Dr. Henriques defines relational value as being seen, known, and valued by important others, whereas social influence is about one’s ability to influence someone according to one’s own interests.17
For example, for Red Pill relationships are a constant battle between opposing interests in which you as a man must constantly be controlling the frame or premise of the interaction. An example of what I mean by frame is that if I want to joke around with you, but you’re in a bad mood, I would be fighting with you over the frame if I kept making jokes. Once I got you to laugh and start having fun, I have won the battle over the frame, and you have left your frame of “bad mood” and are now in my frame. The frame or premise of our interaction is now that we are joking and having fun.
In that situation, that might actually be a good thing. If you’re really feeling down, and I as your friend got you to start laughing, you’d likely be grateful. Most of us wouldn’t consider that a battle over the frame, but again, in Red Pill’s worldview, relationships are a constant struggle over who decides the frame. If you as a man aren’t the one controlling the frame, then your woman will lose respect for you. There was even a section in the Red Pill subreddit titled, “Guide to Managing Your Bitches”.18 I think that speaks for itself.
So, we have a radical behaviourism where the only thing that matters is what a woman does and a definition of relationships as a struggle for control where a woman wants you to be in control, even if she says otherwise. Remember, a woman doesn’t know her unconscious motivations, but you, as a Red Pill Alpha male, obviously know exactly why she does the things she observably does.
This brings into question what a person actually wants and even, who a person actually is. The tension here is between their actions or unstated and felt desires. If a woman complies to your demands, then is that what she really wanted? If a woman was noticeably excited to talk to you but didn’t comply, does that mean she really wasn’t interested in you at all? If she wasn’t expressing excitement, does that mean she wasn’t really excited whether she complied or not?
If expressed excitement is your only metric, then you miss out on the possibility of compliance, or in better terms, of her wanting to come with you but just being a little bit more reserved. However, if your only metric is compliance, then you miss out on other reasons for why she might have complied.
Maybe your partner complied because she feared abandonment, intimidation, or yet another drawn-out power struggle, but this fear doesn’t preclude the resentment she feels at complying with something she didn’t really desire. This brings us back to the question of what a person actually wants and who they actually are. The answer…is all the above. When they comply they wanted to comply because they feared and potentially because they do enjoy the benefits that might come with compliance, but they also did not want to comply and felt overridden once again by your demands for compliance.
When she is chronically forced, through the struggle over frame, to comply and be controlled by your frame, this potentially produces long-term resentment. This may eventually bubble over until she suddenly disobeys in a fit of rage, and “suddenly” starts seeing you as a villain. Given the Red Pill worldview, you assume that the only solution is to get her to comply because again, the only measure of success is her compliance to your frame. If you remember the authentic desire fallacy, that applies here because a woman’s authentic desires can only dictated by her biology. As long as you can find some way to relate all of this back to your own interpretation of evolutionary psychology, then no matter what she says, you know that her most authentic, real desire is to be controlled by you.
Now, you might assume that the fact that there is a contradiction between her different desires and actions means that there is something wrong because only one of those things can REALLY matter. No. They can all be true at the same time. For example, look at this picture:
The nice face you present is the observable behaviours. We as human beings have a need to appear consistent to others and to ourselves, and so we assume that the face we see, being consistent, means that whatever is most consistent is what is most true about a person.15
In reality, the truth of the person is the Lovecraftian horror behind even a person’s internal conception of who they are and that horror contains all the contradictions that make up a person. Just because someone is consistently a certain way, and then suddenly acts another way, doesn’t mean that the consistent thing you saw was the real them. It certainly could be, but if you found out you were married to a psychopath, the kind, charismatic person you thought you knew because that was who they most consistently were is not more real than the serial killer they only sometimes were.
A second assumption may be that her contradictory desires are unique to her being an irrational, emotional female. This assumes that men aren’t also contradictory. Remember, we have the need to appear to others and to ourselves as consistent. You are incentivized to hide your inner conflict from yourself, especially when you have a Red Pill worldview that tells you men are supremely rational agents. What we see in developmental psychology is that as people develop, they become more aware of their internal complexity and contradictions, and they realize that this is an integral part of their personhood and development.19,20,21 Ironically, if you believe yourself to be internally consistent, it may be because you aren’t self-aware enough.
My primary point though, is that just because someone consistently complies to your demands, and even feels and expresses honest enjoyment, that doesn’t mean there isn’t another part of them beneath the surface that is just as real or authentic as their enjoyment. If your only measure is whether or not your partner does as you say, then you completely miss out on the fact that she feels too afraid to disobey until she is so resentful that she finally stands up for herself.
This is what’s called Goodhart’s law, which says, “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”22 If you remove every other indication of a woman’s interest other than her compliance to your demands, then all you’ve come to measure is whether or not she complies, rather than why she complies. It ceases to be a good measure of anything other than compliance.
Unfortunately, Red Pill can’t see that. With a radical behaviourism in which controlling the frame is the only measure of a successful relationship, and with a post hoc outcome bias that tells you that you got the result so you know exactly why, you essentially make the erasure of a woman’s autonomy the measure of love itself.
Remember that I said that relational value was being seen, known, and valued by important others, whereas social influence was controlling for your own interests.17 If your only definition of love is influencing someone, you never really develop the relational value on which healthy love depends.
I’ll be getting more deeply into that conversation when we discuss Red Pill’s praxeology, but I think we can also extend this idea into worries about a woman’s consent. Dr. Valkenburgh points this out explicitly, referencing the sidebar of the Red Pill subreddit and its:13
“even more problematic concept of ‘last minute resistance,’ which posits that a woman will explicitly – but disingenuously – decline sexual consent,”
The idea behind Last Minute Resistance or LMR, is that a woman will say no to sex because she is afraid of being perceived as a slut. That’s reasonable, I’m 99% sure that happens. The issue is that Red Pill recommends specific strategies to convince or coerce a woman to…comply. Remember, a woman’s actions are the only measure of success because her love depends on her compliance to your frame. In other words, as long as you can get the lay, you know that you have “won” the interaction with her, and don’t worry, she really did want to because she did.
Now, what happens though, if a woman changes her mind? Firstly, let’s say there is no coercion involved, you guys were making out, she was physically engaging with your body, you asked for consent, and she immediately said yes. She cannot go back and say, “Oh but I really didn’t want to”. Maybe she really didn’t and that matters, but at least as far as I’m concerned, that would be unfair to blame the man. However, if there was a lot of coercion and tactics involved, or if she didn’t say no or yes, then that’s an important issue to think through.
In the case of coercion, then that’s coercion. Even if she said yes or simply didn’t say no, you’re intimidating someone into having sex with you. However, if there wasn’t any coercion and she simply didn’t say no, you can’t necessarily say there was consent. This is a contentious issue, especially within the Red Pill community.
I’ve heard men say that women need to stand up for themselves and we can’t just view them as helpless victims. I agree, women need to feel comfortable and capable of saying no. However, if women are so emotional, irrational, and need a man to lead them, wouldn’t that mean that she is likely to give a yes or simply not say anything, even when she wants to say no? Or when a man valorizes being dominant, alpha, and controlling, is she really going to feel like she can? The irony of Red Pill’s worldview is that their own logic can so easily be used against them.
So I want to be clear, that I’m not saying women are too emotional to say no, but instead that Red Pill’s beliefs about women and relationships can be used to explain and perhaps even justify why a woman wouldn’t say no. I’ve also often heard women say that they don’t say no because it’s easier to let it happen rather than to risk what would happen if such a domineering person hears no.23 They may have experienced it themselves or heard stories from their friends.
As a man, you may say that’s unfair, but you’re likely a stranger to them. They don’t know who you are or what you could be capable of. A single telegram group in Germany was found with 70,000 people, many talking about assaulting their partners, sisters, and mothers.24 Just ask Giselle Pelicot whether a familiar man or a stranger is safer.25 When Red Pill precisely says that a woman’s rejection is often a test to see if you’re strong enough to keep persisting, you can see how dangerous this becomes, and how justified a woman’s fear turns out to be.18
I also don’t want to misinterpret Tomassi. There are multiple times in his book where he says that a relationship is give and take, that’s it not about one person having all control all the time, but there are also many times in which he says that a man must completely set the terms and the frame, and that only a woman’s actions matter despite her saying different. It really does seem that he believes men must be in control, but this also isn’t the only contradiction. He says explicitly that he has never written anywhere that a man should be an asshole, and yet in the very same fucking book he says explicitly to be an asshole!1
I believe that theories of consent shouldn’t be based on the idea that women are defenceless and lack any sexual agency. However, when Red Pill itself is full to the brim with ideas that erase a woman’s autonomy as an ideal and to disregard her rejection because it really means she’s interested, you cannot turn around and demand that women have sexual agency. You’ve idealized the erasure of a woman’s agency. Dr. Valkenburgh quotes the following from the Red Pill subreddit’s sidebar:18
“The supposed mechanism for sleeping with women is to ignore intrinsic and extrinsic emotional cues: ignore one’s own inclinations to altruism, sympathy, and generosity and ignore women’s protestations and signs of discomfort”
You might ask at that point, “But if a woman’s behaviour changes to a no, shouldn’t the outcome bias lead them to realize that the outcome has changed and a new interpretation is needed?” Remember what I said before about how difficult it can be for men to change a strategy that’s worked once, and that even persistence beyond a reasonable degree can still sometimes payoff. Some women do give in to persistence and even have long-term relationships afterward. On top of all of that, the Red Pill worldview is structured in a way that defends itself from needing to change.
There will always be a failure rate no matter what, so even prolonged failure may simply be a dry spell. They happen. It’s part of the game. Or, perhaps good, submissive women are simply hard to come by because social media has turned them into entitled narcissists or feminism has corrupted them, making them think that they need to be “masculine” instead of “feminine”. They don’t realize that biologically women are happier when they submit all of their agency as human beings to a strong alpha male – woman follow, man lead.
Women obviously want to be controlled, even when they say otherwise. In fact, if they say otherwise, that could be a sign that she’s testing the resolve of your Alphaness. If her behaviour changed to saying no, she’s not interested, well then that means your frame slipped. You let her have too much wiggle room and now she realizes you’re not a real Alpha, so you need to force her into submission again or find a woman anti-feminist enough or young enough to know her place.
If a woman later says she didn’t really want to, at the end of the day, that’s to be expected because women are inconsistent, emotional, and irrational. She really did want to and that’s why she behaviourally complied to your frame, but she later changed her mind as all women do. Her truth is her emotions and so now that she’s feeling differently, her truth has changed. It couldn’t possibly be that she didn’t want to back then and is now revealing that, because, of course, all roads lead to an interpretation of only overt, observable behaviour that serves my interests as an Alpha male. As long as I got the result I wanted at some point, then I know that my beliefs and my interpretations must have been right.
You can see here how this entire worldview isn't just a list of assumptions or beliefs, but that these assumptions influence each other to create a whole framework or worldview for interpreting the things that happen and acting accordingly. This happened, but this assumption is true, so this happened because of this assumption, and then if this contradiction happens well then that aligns with this other assumption, so don’t worry, the initial interpretation is still correct. No matter how many contradictions occur, the worldview acts to reinforce the interpretation it gives.
In developmental psychology, this is known as assimilation. You assimilate a new piece of information into the current worldview. Sometimes this is fine because you don’t need to be constantly and can’t be constantly updating your worldview. Other times you have to break the new information to make it fit. The opposite process is known as accommodation, where the new information causes the worldview to update to take account of the information.26 When you have a very Closed worldview, the new information has to be so anomalous and radically different that it breaks the worldview wide open.27
Why does their worldview close so tightly? Well, because if you don’t make her comply she’ll leave your frame and then cheat on you. If you don’t make her comply she’ll lose respect for you and sabotage you. If you don’t make her comply she’ll use your secrets against you. Women are manipulative and have a “utilitarian […], tactical, opportunistic” form of love that seeks the most Alpha male, so you better be on your A game constantly and never let her leave the frame.18
To state it explicitly, this Closed worldview happens, in part, because they create a powerful enough nightmare that will come true if you don’t comply to Red Pill’s worldview. Religions use hell to scare the religious into obedience, and Red Pill secures your obedience using the fear of infidelity, the loss of love, and the shame you’d feel if you turned out to be one of the inferior beta cucks.
Languages of Training and Explaining
At this point, I think it’s clear how it is that Red Pill’s epistemology could act to keep their worldview Closed. It’s almost a work of beauty how well it works to only verify as true things that perpetuate the worldview itself. However, there’s one more component that I think is very important for understanding why Red Pill can be effective at achieving certain goals, and yet still be so limited.
Firstly, the idea that Red Pill could ever be effective seems ridiculous if you don’t like it. You have to understand that some of these strategies actually do work in the short-term of casual hook-ups. If you’re a very insecure guy and you learn how to “control the frame”, then that can make you act far more confidently. If you’re teasing women, then that can be more effective than agreeing with everything they say like a lot of “nice guys” do. Like I said in my last essay, if nothing else you now feel confident enough to put yourself out there, so you’re simply more likely to have more success.
The fact is that Red Pill works enough for stories about its effectiveness to spread through the community as a guiding light for those who it isn’t working for. You just have to keep working harder, or you just have to have a stronger frame, or whatever else, then it’ll work for you too.
This is also true for their business advice or anything else they talk about. Some will succeed, even if not everyone will succeed, and those successes will be used to motivate people to keep trying and to shame people who give up. This is known as survivorship bias.28 We hyper-focus on the few people who made it and ignore all the people who didn’t, and then through the post hoc outcome bias we assume we know why those few succeeded, which makes us overly confident that we can too.
What I’m getting to, however, is the trap of confusing a language of training that can get you a result with a language of explaining what’s actually happening. I originally learned this from Dr. John Vervaeke, and he gives an example of a language of training for meditation in his course on YouTube.29,30 While you’re watching your inhale and then exhale, you want to treat your thoughts like puppies. Each time you notice you’ve lost focus and you’re thinking, you want to collect that thought as if you’re trying to keep a puppy close to your body. You don’t get mad or judgmental, it’s a puppy! You calmly slide the puppy back in and refocus on your breath. Slide the puppy back in and refocus on your breath.
That’s obviously not what’s actually happening. There are no puppies, but that’s a great way to train someone to meditate. It’s a language of training. A language of explaining would be talking about transparency to opacity shifts, and optimizing your recursive relevance realization to generate a cascade of systematic insights that cause a trans-framing of current cognitive structures toward an experience of awe and wonder, and…you get the point.29
A language of explaining is a technical, scientific explanation to try to capture what’s actually going on. And yet, however much what I said may accurately explain what’s going on during a really good meditation by an enlightened master, it doesn’t tell you how to actually meditate. In fact, it might actually deter you from meditating.
The trap that happens when you mix up a language of training with a language of explaining is that you start to think that the puppy explanation is what’s really going on. Obviously, puppy meditation is one thing, but you have to understand that even though the things Red Pill says sound technical, that’s simply to justify a language of training about a certain lifestyle and code of conduct. It’s not a legitimate explanation of how women, relationships, or the world work.
This is a textbook case of the post hoc outcome bias. The language of training can get you the result, but that doesn’t mean it tells you why you got the result. If you did get the result though, you assume that the language of training says something about what’s actually going on.
You can have an effective language of training that says you have to hold the frame of fun, excitement, and sex and that’ll get her to consent better than falling into her frame of stranger, possibly dangerous. That’s true. If she thinks you’re a stranger and is creeped out, and then you get awkward and weird because you’re embarrassed, then yeah, that’s not going to go well. If instead you stay calm and fun, and just keep having a good time “controlling the frame”, then yeah, that’s at least more likely to go better.
Unfortunately, it’s far too easy to go from that effective training to suddenly making claims that the only measure of a woman’s love is her perpetual compliance to your frame even when she says, feels, and even acts otherwise after that initial compliance. Controlling the frame is effective for controlling anyone, but if you only date women then you’re likely to assume your successes with women mean you know something fundamental about female nature as a thing to be controlled, a tool to be used.
I won’t repeat myself, but I think you see how all of that connects with everything I’ve already said. This is the Red Pill epistemology that makes them continue to believe that their worldview is true, even as the counterevidence piles up. No matter what you might say or even what failures they might have, all roads lead to Red Pill’s Rome because of the fundamental unfalsifiability of their worldview. It can never be shown to be false. When you have easy fallbacks like “gynocracy”, “feminine imperative”, or “she’s testing you,” your epistemology cannot help but eat its own tail.
Notice the great irony of their epistemology. What is “controlling the frame” other than saying, “no matter what comes at me, no matter what the world does, I will control and dictate the frame”? When you have made the measure of love and success as a man the controlling of frame, you have idealized the very act of having a Closed worldview. In the next video, I’m going to discuss how this extends into their axiology, or what they value.
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 – Tomassi, R. (2013). The Rational Male. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.
2 – Destiny (Director). (2023, May 11). Sneako DESTROYS The Redpill Godfather On Fresh N Fit [Video recording].
https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=l1a1Wy4gues
3 – Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System. (n.d.). The Academy for Systems Change. Retrieved January 10, 2025, from https://donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-to-intervene-in-a-system/
4 – Taves, A., Asprem, E., & Ihm, E. (2018). Psychology, meaning making, and the study of worldviews: Beyond religion and non-religion. Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, 10(3), 207–217. https://doi.org/10.1037/rel0000201
5 – Alexander. (2023, March 16). The Emotional Epistemology of the Red Pill—Date Psychology. https://datepsychology.com/the-emotional-epistemology-of-the-red-pill/
6 – Alexander. (2022, February 18). How Many Sexual Partners Did Men and Women Have in 2021? https://datepsychology.com/how-many-sexual-partners-did-men-and-women-have-in-2021/
7 – Alexander. (2024a, March 25). “Casual sex” is often mismeasured and overestimated. Date Psychology. https://datepsychology.com/casual-sex-is-often-mismeasured-and-overestimated/
8 – Misleading Vividness. (n.d.). Retrieved January 31, 2025, from https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Misleading-Vividness
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10 – Alexander. (2024b, July 23). Rollo Tomassi vs Evolutionary Psychology—Date Psychology. https://datepsychology.com/rollo-tomassi-vs-evolutionary-psychology/
11 – Kinsey Institute. (n.d.). Diversity of sexual orientation. Diversity of Sexual Orientation. Retrieved January 31, 2025, from https://kinseyinstitute.org/research/publications/historical-report-diversity-of-sexual-orientation.php
12 – Brown, A. (2022, June 7). About 5% of young adults in the U.S. say their gender is different from their sex assigned at birth. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/06/07/about-5-of-young-adults-in-the-u-s-say-their-gender-is-different-from-their-sex-assigned-at-birth/
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14 – Post hoc ergo propter hoc | fallacy | Britannica. (2024, December 24). https://www.britannica.com/topic/post-hoc-ergo-propter-hoc
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https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=DeTm4fSXpbM
17 – Henriques, G. (2023). A New Synthesis for Solving the Problem of Psychology: Addressing the Enlightenment Gap (2022 ed. edition). Palgrave Macmillan.
18 – Van Valkenburgh, S. P. (2021). Digesting the Red Pill: Masculinity and Neoliberalism in the Manosphere. Men and Masculinities, 24(1), 84–103. https://doi.org/10.1177/1097184X18816118
19 – Cook-Greuter, S. (2021). Ego Development: A Full-Spectrum Theory Of Vertical Growth And Meaning Making.
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23 – Truong, K. (2018, January 24). Before You Ask Why Women Don’t “Just Say No,” Consider This. Refinery29. https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2018/01/188734/sexual-assault-consent-physical-intimidation
24 – Luyken, J. (2024, December 19). Telegram ‘rape chat groups’ with up to 70,000 members uncovered. The Telegraph. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2024/12/19/telegram-rape-chat-groups-germany-investigation-70000-world/
25 – Gisèle Pelicot. (2025). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gis%C3%A8le_Pelicot&oldid=1270201237
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29 – Vervaeke, J., & Mastropietro, C. (2024). Awakening From the Meaning Crisis: Part One: Origins (S. Coyne, Ed.). Story Grid Publishing LLC.
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* – “You can sift back through any number of forum pages of advice I’ve offered and read me over and over again telling young men to “get in touch with their inner asshole.” However, in any of my posts, never do I state to in fact become an asshole.”
I mean already he’s contradicting himself, but wait, there’s more!
“The first time an old girl-friend you had a thing for calls the new you an “asshole”, it’s kind of a shock to the system. There’s always this stab at the old you who wants to set things rights, but you have to resist this impulse to take offense. It’s really hard to say ’yeah, I am an asshole’ as a point of pride when your whole prior life’s learning taught you not to offend others and particularly not girls you’d ever wanted to fuck. It’s counterintuitive to the Beta in you”
“If you were to move to a new city, completely change your social circle and play the role of an asshole Alpha, no one is the wiser”.
“What’s depressing isn’t that a well delivered neg, or being Cocky & Funny, or harnessing the attractive Alpha Asshole energy could actually generate sexual interest in women, it’s the principle behind them – the reason why they work – that prompts the internal conflict. Are women, generally, more like this than not? So a guy experiments a little more, and tests other theories, and discovers that with some minor variations, yes, for the most part the principles are valid if not predictable.”
We can imagine Rollo might reply, “Oh but I didn’t tell them to be an asshole, Will! I just told them to be an inner asshole!”
No Rollo, you do tell men to be assholes.