Return of the Red Pill

Warning: Explicit Content

If you’re a Red Pill kind of guy, then you know all about what I’m going describe.  This article is not for you.  This article is written for any guy who is new to the Red Pill, or has heard about it and is curious. There are some things the Red Pill guys know, but the new guys probably don’t get.

A while back I wrote an article on The Red Pill, a theory promulgated by certain males who inhabit /r/TheRedPill on reddit.com.  I was not very kind to these guys or their theory at the time.  I feel a little guilty about that.  Perhaps I was too quick to judge.  Perhaps I was suffering from confirmation bias at the time, that is, I was looking for faults therefore I found them.

Since I was feeling guilty for a hasty judgement, I felt I should go back and look a little deeper into the Red Pill and see if I was off base. I spent 2 weeks reviewing and participating on /r/TheRedPill and getting to know it.  Was I originally too harsh?  You be the judge. 

One of the first things you’ll notice in /r/TheRedPill is that the guys there all share a common issue:  at some point in their lives they have all been wronged by one or more women.  Not insulted, or passed by, but truly wronged.  There are guys who have a had a woman sleep around, cheat on them, steal their stuff and basically screw them in the brains until they couldn’t think straight.  I’ve been there, about 4 times. These guys are angry and confused.  /r/TheRedPill even acknowledges that men tend to show up there angry as hell, the first stage.

These guys have experienced a blown engine on their trip down the relationship highway.  So what does a guy do when his metaphorical car breaks down?  He pulls off at the nearest exit or rest stop.  There he finds other guys with broken cars, broken hearts and broken spirits to commiserate with. These are the Red Pill’ers.

If your real car broke down, you’d suffer through a brief tirade, then buckle down, pull out your cell phone and call a tow truck, arrange for repairs and move on.  When there are lots of guys with the same breakdown hanging around, it takes a little longer.  You compare notes, feed each other’s anger, consider conspiracy theories, and you’d blame the car companies for manufacturing such pieces of junk.  You bond over your misfortune.  You find common ground in your bad experiences, and you’d relish the time with the guys who know what you’re going through.  Get the car fixed?  Move on? Maybe later, because you’re all bonding right now.

In real life, a mature guy would minimize his self-pity, then take masculine action to fix his problems, and move forward with his life.  I found that at the Red Pill rest area, guys will spend a lot of time in self-pity and fuel each other’s anger and paranoia instead of moving on.  There are guys on /r/TheRedPill who have been there a long time.  They’ve never bothered to move on.  These guys eventually become “Senior Endorsed” contributors.  The first guys to break down at the Red Pill are the “Vanguard” contributors.  

 From the Red Pill:

• “Senior Endorsed: Senior endorsed contributors began as endorsed contributors, and have remained active within the community for a long time. In addition to insightful comments, senior contributors often have a colorful posting history of informative and original content that is well worth reading. Because of their long participation and deep investment in the group, they have all but mastered the principles of the Red Pill. Senior contributors have been vetted TWICE, so you know that their words carry serious wisdom.

• Red Pill Vanguard: The Vanguard members come from the first generation of ORIGINAL endorsed contributors – these guys are the oldest members and have been here since the beginning. Their contributions comprise a lot of what is now the backbone of this community. Vanguards are not vetted – they are the ones who do the vetting. In some cases, they even selected which of us mods would help govern the community. When a Vanguard speaks, what you are reading is pure unfiltered Red Pill.”

Why would anybody build themselves a life at the rest stop?  Lord of the Rest Stop, aka Red Pill Vanguard, is not a title of honor, unless you are the type who spends his entire life at the rest stop.  Real life is out on the road, not along side the road.  Lord of the Rest Stop is equivalent to the not-quite-all-there guy who lives in his car in the parking space over by the vending machine shack and restrooms.  Yet, it seems Red Pill’ers prefer to sit out on the side, bandying about their problems, their shared hatred of women (which we’ll see in a minute) and their conspiracy theories.  

Another thing you’ll notice from /r/TheRedPill is how the younger guys seek to please the Lords of the Rest Stop by writing posts illustrating their grasp of Red Pill concepts like hypergamy, the shameful media portrayal of men, and the systematic denial of men’s rights in the courts.  These posts tend to not add anything to some already poor concepts.  The fallacy of hypergamy, for example, is based upon flawed, misogynistic assumptions, and you can’t really add anything to a concept that was flawed from the beginning.  (Perhaps this is another article for the future.)  I can only assume the purpose of theoretical posts is to gain favor points, and move up in the hierarchy of Red Pill’ers.

So who’s at the top of the hierarchy?  Let’s take a look.

A while back, when making my 2nd foray into /r/TheRedPill, I came across a post that I thought was interesting.  The poster expressed concern that he still saw a lot of misogyny on the forum and was afraid guys were setting bad examples for the newcomers (like me, I guess.)  Surprise!  Someone was concerned about the state of the forum and wanted to make sure it didn’t veer off track. (Sadly, I did not copy the original post.)  Sounds like a candidate for a future endorsed contributor, to me.  Well, the Red Pill denies they are misogynistic, so this was likely to be an interesting thread. Sure enough, here was the pre-eminent response from a Senior Endorsed Member: 

(explicit content)

“I’m going to assume you’re stupid. I will use small words. I seriously doubt there is a safe harbor for men who actually hate girls here. I’ve not seen it. We squash that shit, because it’s usually trolls and ignorant fucks such as yourself. Not angry, I talk that way every day, blame the military. 

Now if you use the feminist definition, then yeah every man who doesn’t kiss every female ass is misogynistic. Criticism is not misogyny. Pointing out reality is not misogyny. Accepting girls for who they are is not misogyny. Telling others of the true nature of girls is sure as fuck not misogyny. Withholding that information is definitely misandrist, particularly so when you tell them how wonderful girls are… When they’re not. 

You don’t get a free pass to be a useless waste of skin and oxygen because you have a vagina and tits. Yet that is exactly what your ilk want. Fuck that, we call it how it really is, if you can’t handle it, fuck off.”

(NOTE:  the post was later removed after sufficient people flagged it.)

According to /r/TheRedPill’s own words, this post is 1) colorful, 2) insightful, 3) informative, 4) worth reading and 5) carries serious wisdom.  Yes, this post supposedly carries serious wisdom because it came from a Senior Endorsed Member.  This is the Red Pill’s standard of quality, which is to say garbage is high-quality to them.  Whether it was removed or not, the long term contributor must have had a history of posts like this and still got to be Senior Endorsed.

Let’s dissect this a little more to get inside the mind of a Senior Endorsed member.  First of all, notice the phrase “blame the military”.  It’s a common characteristic of Red Pill’ers to never accept responsibility for their failings.  Cursing?  Blame the military,  Cuckolded?  Blame the fallacy of hypergamy.  Misogynistic?  Blame the women of not accepting how bad they are.  

It seems a common characteristic of Red Pill’ers that they refuse to take responsibility for their own position in life.  Instead they blame women, the media, and invent conspiracy theories.  This is not a good example for real men, nor does it carry any wisdom at all.  Yet blaming everybody else apparently shows mastery of The Red Pill concepts.

Accused of misogyny?  Deflect your guilt by shaming the character of the accuser.  Never look into the mirror, because you might dislike what you see.

No doubt I will take some flak for this position.  The Red Pill’ers very much endorse the self-improvement process, directing guys to make themselves better men.  The trouble is their reasoning for being better men.  It seems that better men can defend themselves more aptly against the evil women of the world.  Being a better man is more of defensive posture against those evil forces out to attack men, rather than an inward self-awareness.

Speaking of misogyny, have you ever read anything as misogynistic as that post?  Remember, this comes from the mind of a Senior Endorsed Contributor.  The phrase “useless waste of skin and oxygen because you have a vagina and tits” indicates this poor guy really has a problem with women.  As I posted before, you can tell what a person hates by how they use insults. This guy has a serious hatred of women, and refuses to acknowledge it.  He suffers from severe cognitive dissonance when confronted with his own misogyny.  Still, the Red Pill finds his attitude “insightful” and “worth reading.”  I find it witless and feebleminded.

And of course, when someone questions their credibility, the Red Pill’ers tend to say “if you can’t handle it, fuck off.”  I guess that’s considered insightful also.  I find it churlish (look it up.)

The endorsed contributors have little colored flags next to their names.  Supposedly this enables you to find the wisdom.  I think otherwise. As they say elsewhere, ignore the red flags at your own peril.  You might get poisoned by the pseudo-wisdom.

If you haven’t figured it out, my second foray into /r/TheRedPill was even worse than my first.  I have no respect for The Red Pill; It is a shady and dilapidated rest stop on the relationship highway.  Stop, fix your car, fix your life and MOVE ON.  The denizens of this rest stop are have their own vulgar and childish culture, like The Lord of the Flies on the internet.  Do not engage with them. There’s nothing to see there, other than perhaps their reading list.  (Their reading list is highly endorsed on other men’s groups; everything else is not.)  Much of the halfway decent Red Pill material is borrowed from more reputable sources.  Seek it there instead.  You can find some resources on the Masculinity page.

Frankly, I hope your journey to be a real, integrated man misses the Red Pill rest stop completely.