Possible gap in some of red pill philosophy

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I don't mean this in respect to academic papers that have replicated results but rather red pill in the colloquial sense.

I'm taking this back to what Adam Lane Smith calls 'avoidant attachment style'.

It seems like our culture's norms have taken a lot of people, lets say the masses of people who are easily influenced or broken down into NPC-like behavior by external pressures, and they're effectively trained into all of the hallmarks of avoidant attachment style via consumer culture.

A brief article on attachment styles:
https://www.attachmentproject.com/blog/ ... ent-style/

I've seen Adam discuss avoidant as also having a lot of aspects that simulate narcissistic behavior such as, on its farther ends, seeing other people's goals as so contradictory to one's own that the best one could do is have an extractive relationship with the sex of one's preference (and this would likely translate into extractive / self-centered friendships as well).

I don't know if there's 100% overlap but when I watched MondayBlue / MondayFAMonday talk about the coarseness and seemingly almost psychopathic self-interest that so many people showed even if they probably wouldn't meet full clinical diagnosis for psychopathy (that number's considerably lower, something like 2-4%?), talking about former girlfriends who asked him why he spent time with 'soulless' people, or his mutual admission with a former girlfriend that he'd actually withheld help that he could have given her in certain instances to avoid looking weak or eager, this seems to touch on this issue somewhat directly. He openly contemplated the possibility that a person could be surrounded by so many low-quality or worthless people that you actually could have your life - if not ruined - at least deeply impacted in the negative by that, and I'd agree that in many places the social game theory can be perverse enough to where a formally well-adjusted person could be in such a significant minority that they indeed can't hold their heads above water with the sheer quantity of mental illness around them (such as if they find themselves being something like 1 in 20, 1 in 30, 1 in 40, etc.).


This is where I really have to take seriously the possibility that the ratio of... lets say deep evolutionary wiring or tendencies based on dominance of testosterone vs. estrogen might be, hypothetically, one-third of the explanation of what we're seeing and the other two-thirds may very well be an epidemic of sub-clinical mental illness and maladaptation due to just just constantly bulldozing Chesterton's fences and increasingly moving toward Empire Roman ways of living - ie. rampant consumerism as a whole purpose for being alive turning us into throw-away commodities for one another and emotionally stunting us in the way that eight-course meals, vomitoriums, and orgies stunted Roman nobles (along with healthy doses of lead from the aqueducts). There's also Mary Harrington's suggestion that of the two types of feminism that she's been interested in contrasting, ie. the feminism of care vs. the feminism of freedom, the corporate / neoliberal world liked the feminism of freedom because it mirrored neoliberal values and thus they amplified their signal and demoted that of the other (which leads to Mary's suggestion that there's a kind of rollup between holding freedom as the highest value with inconvenience suppression based on biology working as it should but chastised by the current economic environment and self-modification for convenience being the starting gradient of transhumanism which goes toward increasingly whittling away what it is to be human for the sake of expedience in both private and economic life).

What we have though - if that assumption were true that this is mostly mental illness in both sexes or considerable distortion by dehumanizing technological encroachment - such a strong head of steam in the wrong direction, ie. sub-clinical mental illness so ubiquitous to actually be the norm and now picking up even more inertia reinforced by most people's desire to socially conform for conformity's sake, that it's both very hard to tell how much of this is really genes asserting themselves and it's very hard to figure out how we'd be able to change norms around how we treat each other in timescales where we'd be able to answer this question (are current challenges more nature or nurture) in our lifetimes because such a high quantity of mistakes as we've made (dutifully since short-term advantageous long-term maladaptations win arms races where the reverse loses in the short term and thus loses full-stop) just isn't something that we can realistically solve in a decade, two decades, maybe even three or four.


I get that the above might be a bit rambling but I'm hoping I can both honor - on one hand - the kinds of research that people like David Buss, Geoffrey Miller, Diana Fleischman, or even David Sloan Wilson are doing (whether Darwinian game theory on deep priorities in sexual behavior or group and lineage selection strategies and the importance of these issues to loopholes that these exploit in liberal democracy vs. similar issues that might lend a much tighter understanding of in-group and out-group dynamics as well as genetic self-sacrifice for lineage) but I'd also want to, at the same time, avoid the places where people are climbing the 'pessimism looks brainy' hierarchy where they're pushing things that superficially seem to fit but where I worry that we're in perhaps such novel times and such extreme environmental mismatch that a lot of this could be nurture-related and the waters are so murky that we wouldn't have a good way to know for sure unless we were really committed to high quality and apolitical social science.

So on one hand I don't think the ev psych should be dropped on from great heights by people who just don't like what ev psych has to say but simultaneously I think there's a seductive quality to certain ways of thinking, like black pill and certain strains of red pill thought, because they seem to either give hard / firm rules that seem easy to manage (regardless of whether or not they yield desirable results) or with black pill they cater to risk aversion and give mounting evidence as to why to not even bother (to which sure - if a guy sees himself as needing to spend tens of thousands of dollars to date hundreds of women just to find one or two long term relationships he may rather go it alone than do that much dating, but anyone who gives up before trying may be making a grave error that they pay dearly for later when it's too late to wind back the clock).

Part of what lead directly to my writing the above post - I've been watching more of Rollo Tomassi (The Rational Male)'s short clips and noticing that while he offers a lot of persuasive frames when offered from his perspective I also get the sense that there's something dangerously incomplete about what's presented. I still have to say that a lot of what he's presenting over short and specific ranges of content seem persuasive based on certain presuppositions but I'm really trying to hash out how much faith and credit can be placed on these presuppositions. Even in watching a few of the clips you can see his convictions in reading, for example, certain male behaviors and certain female reactions in ways that could be quite true in some cases but not in others and it's hard to vet how how much he is or isn't holding a hammer and mistaking everything for a nail.

In his case it seems like most of even the even-tempered red pill vloggers speak very highly of at least his first book or two, which makes me want to read them just to get the clearest understanding I can of where he's coming from or at least the version of him at the time those were written where people found his ideas most valuable. My goal here isn't to either endorse or refute him as a public figure or thought-leader in the red pill space but rather separate baby and bathwater. I don't think I can really do that accurately without steel-manning the case he makes to then figure out how likely it is that he's just out-and-out right about most things vs. being high IQ trying to date normies (for a lot of the highly successful red pill guys, like the Rule Zero roundtable I could easily see their experiences dating normie women being as unpleasant as intelligent women dating normie guys - not their fault but they're stuck in a 'fish in water' situation) vs. other factors that might be creating mistaken identity for causation.