The Internet fantasy bubble: the gap between the responsible and the spectators

The Internet lets people indulge in wild fantasy, and Twitter is more like World of Warcraft than is commonly assumed: this effect might also be more pronounced in “smart” people than dumb ones. Being smart, or high IQ, isn’t a shield from this effect either, and if anything it may make you more susceptible to these effects. Being rich also insulates a person from the effects of excessive fantasy: the richer we are, the more we seem able to indulge fantasy, because our base human needs are met.

To be good with women, you should be able to suspend disbelief and create an alternate reality, for women to step into, but that skill can be dangerous in regular life. Or useful. Along with suspending disbelief, rock-solid frame helps a lot with women, and thus the emphasis on bringing the woman into your world and worldview. Some guys seem to forget that that frame is a creation, and they carry it through on everything, even when it’s not correct.

Yes, the coronavirus is really dangerous and no, your view of the “media” being wrong is not relevant

There have been bad takes on Twitter about how the “media” was wrong about this thing or that thing, and therefore coronavirus isn’t dangerous. There is no “media,” but there are individual writers and thinkers whose work should be attended to. Some publications also do comprehensive fact checking and some don’t. The good publications do really well at fact-checking real things, like the number of cases or speed of spread. They may have political opinions you don’t like or agree with but are very good on basic facts (even if they sometimes ignore other facts).

In terms of being “right” or “wrong” in politics, and the consequences of being right or wrong, consider past political behavior in a crisis… both Bush and Obama, whatever else you think of either, reacted to the 2008 crisis with TARP, the stimulus bill, and bank prop-ups, because economists in both administrations had learned the lessons of 1929. Obama was roundly and wrongly condemned for this from the right and from the extreme left, but keeping banks upright is essential to a modern economy. 90 years ago we didn’t realize it. Firefighting: The Financial Crisis and Its Lessons is a good take, although it requires detail, which means 99% of the population lacks the sustained attention necessary to understand it.

Most people vote as a means of tribal identity. Less than half the (voting part of the) country identifies as rightish or Republican, so they foolishly voted for an incompetent who doesn’t have the acuity to run a pizza shop. “Basic competence” is why the White House’s occupant is such a potential disaster. He’s like holding a stick of lit dynamite with a fuse of unknown length. We are now seeing the blowup.

We are now seeing the blowup in a situation that demands high IQ, managerial skills, attention to reality, and fast reflexes, none of which the current White House occupant has. A competent president would have lasered in on removing FDA barriers to COVID-19 testing a month ago. He didn’t. With exponential processes, things can feel normal until it’s too late to prepare. Seriously, read that.

Yes, Trump is that bad, and many of the guys writing about game and women are unfortunately enamored of the stupidest parts of the right and the Republican party. Poor decisions from voters to elect Trump in the first place, and then to elect incompetent Republican Senators who have protected him, are likely going to lead to a lot of deaths.

Yes, the media’s hatred of men and being white is bad and annoying, but dying or being debilitated from a virus in a pandemic is worse. Much much worse. These two things can both be true and one can be a lot worse than the other. Right-wing voters are too tribal to have voted according to Trump’s fundamental incompetence. A lot of people may have to die because the real world exists (if we are lucky, states and local governments will step in). It’s not all Twitter and Fox News (much worse than most publications and not even remotely interested in facts).

This is not a matter of “bias.” This is a matter of real resources, which the country has not prepared, in part because of ineptness in the White House. The inept response is awful now and will likely be worse later. No, I am not a lefty. Think past right versus left. Avoid dogmas. This is “reality” vs “fantasy.” Develop a strong reality bias.

Most people’s ability to separate out what they want to be true and real from what is true and real is poor, and that is why we have the White House occupant we have.

If the other side had won the 2016 election, and the other side’s response to coronavirus had been this incompetent, the right would be screeching about that incompetence, for good reason. We are facing a real crisis with real stakes with someone who lacks the ability to understand what is happening at the helm. He should have been removed by the Senate already and every day the Senate delays removal we inch closer to the brink.

Can you view things correctly, regardless of who’s saying them? Some can, many can’t.

Singles push politics and societies to be more extreme??

How single men and women are making politics more extreme… fewer people are marrying and having children, but women with sons have a strong incentive to protect a “male” point of view and the same is true for men with daughters, who have a strong incentive to protect a “female” point of view. Strip out some of cross-sex ties that come from marriage and children and both extreme feminism and the red pill stem from the same family locus.

Go further than the writer, who can’t go as dark as anonymous writers, like this anonymous writer… a lot of guys feel shut out of the sexual market altogether, and form communities of lost boys on the Internet, or fill their time with porn and video games, cause why bother trying for sex if they’re so far out of the sexual marketplace? Anger takes the place of success, when a guy isn’t numbing himself with video games. The less practice with women a guy has, the less able he is to seduce, attract, and retain women, leaving him with an angry festering emotional void where a relationship is supposed to go. (I’m not advocating this point of view and advocate the opposite, but it is out there.) Yes, it’s true that feminism has destroyed a lot of the school system and made it extremely anti-male, fostering video game dependency with its anti-male hatred… but a guy still exists in this world and for most people not having any relationship at all is bad, worse than all but the worst relationships. Particularly as one grows older. At age 20 you can say it will happen for me one day. For the average 40 year old man (yes I know about 40 year old players with hot 20 something women, that’s not average), it’s probably not going to happen.

A lot of women, meantime, have been “liberated” from the scourge of male resources and support. Haha, thanks feminism. I bet most real women really love that liberation from male wages and secure male attention. Women are used to being financially and emotionally subsidized by men, but now women are freed from the bonds of marriage to pursue hypergamy… they can chase guys +2 in SMV or more, get f**ked by them, and then have those men move on to the next field (woman). This hurts women. Worse still a lot of women at the bottom of the scale don’t even get to feel the pleasures of male attraction and attention. Hot men won’t pay attention to me? Feminism has the answer, that men are scum, etc., answers that are not true or interesting.

The red pill is a reaction to this situation. Feminists weaponized gender first, and now it’s happening among men. Men have also realized that if we hit the gym, practice seduction, learn what women like, and learn how to press women’s buttons, we can get as much sex as we can handle without having to marry the woman and subsidize her. It used to be that men traded resources for sex in marriage. Now we don’t have to trade. So for some top men… why bother marrying? Divorce still favors women… so why do it?

Women are unhappy when society favors marriage… women are unhappy when society doesn’t favor marriage… women vote for various means to extract subsidies from men via taxes rather than via marriage… men have mostly not figured this out. Too busy playing video games and watching sports. And we wonder why national politics are hopelessly fucked up, when they mirror a gender fight we all see on the ground. Feminists who started this gender fight didn’t think about what would happen when men get into it. Average men and women are still probably okay, the ones not contaminated too much by feminism… elite men are doing well (f**king as much as we like, based on good habits and knowledge of female attraction triggers). Elite women are doing somewhat less well because they have to compete so hard for other elite men.

We are getting into a situation where the extremes are more extreme. There are more virgins and incels than ever, and more hard-core players than ever. The hard-core players can learn from each other… I have been hearing reports from guys racking up 10+ lays in under a year from learning the game, then applying it to sex clubs. A guy who wants to raise himself above average has a clear path to doing that.

It has never been a better time to be a player… or a sexually unrestricted woman… it has never been a worse time to be a provider guy… or a medium tier woman trying to lock down a higher status man. An individual who can’t get what he or she wants is annoying… an army of women or men who can’t get what they want is a political force. A destabilizing political force. Families moderate humans. Adult humans without families are reshaping our society for the worse.

Truthfulness, reality, politics, the Red Pill

This is another garbage politics essay, so you might as well go read the Ms. Slav saga, which is much more interesting and features a bunch of hot sex too. Plus girl management, which I may be doing somewhat poorly in her case. Also, no one has the attention to read and think about anything in depth, including this missive, which is why politics look like they do. That is not an endorsement of your side, by the way.

A commenter addressed a side note stashed into another post,

“It’s weird and incongruent to be interested in truthfulness and reality while at the same time admiring one of the greatest grifters in U.S. history.”

Thank you for this. One of the things that drives me absolutely nuts about TRP is the insane and completely irrational devotion to conservatism and [well-known political figure] in particular. You’re spot on: it’s 100% incongruent.

TRP, boiled down to its essence, is about the rational application of power and action to improve a man’s life with specific regard to his sex life, understanding the world, not as we’re told or want it to be, but how it actually is in reality.

I wrote a post on the reddit sub the other day I eventually just decided to take down about why guys shouldn’t be so freaked out about feminism and to focus on the signal vs. the noise–as in, how to discern if a woman actually is actually a crazy, man-hating feminist, or if she’s merely someone who nods to the notion but doesn’t actually care. TL;DR–most women, in my experience, don’t actually give a shit, and in fact want alpha Chads with a dominant frame because #evolution.

The reaction I got was no upvotes and guys questioning whether or not I was a woman. I don’t really care–simply trying to contribute, but what I’ve found is that if you go against the orthodoxy in any way, dudes get super defensive.

I’ve been thinking about this and have concluded a couple things, including that a) most people want to divide themselves into tribes and then go whack the other tribe over the head with sticks, and b) politics is one of these areas, like religion or philosophy, where belief is almost totally removed from and segregated from consequences. If you have poor game, or low masculine value, chicks won’t f**k you, and there is a direction linkage between the two. I also think most guys are more apolitical than conservative, but if you post typical us-vs-them political things, people get riled up and have to stick their oar in. Politics is the noisy screaming in the street, with people rushing to see the fight, while thinking happens with the guy sitting in the coffee shop, reading a book and thinking about the book while 100 people stream past him towards the square.

There are some other things going on too…

1. The crazy social-justice-warrior, angry-feminist left is legitimately awful. So guys think, “What is the opposite of that? Let me go do that instead.” No one thinks for themselves. Most people select either|or, instead of looking for third ways, or simply saying, “Neither.” If SJWs are on the left, then I must be on the right, right? Errrrrr… no… but that is how the typical person thinks.

2. Most people want a “system” to follow. Religion used to provide this. Today, religion is mostly dead, and so guys find politics instead. Once a typical person buys into a political party or system, they stay with that system, even when it is bad, or has bad outcomes. It’s useful to think to yourself, “If I didn’t know the source of quote x, and it came from a guy on the other side instead of the guy on my side, what would I think of it?” This goes back to politics as a team sport instead of independent thinkers.

3. TRP and seduction probably selects for guys who have been unsuccessful with or hurt by women. Probably guys with bad childhoods too. Guys who are getting what they want from dating, women, etc. are probably not spending a lot of time debating pickup tactics online or getting super angry about politics they barely affect.

4. It turns out that the core elements of game and pickup, while not exactly “easy,” can be mastered and, once mastered… there is not a gigantic amount to say. Thus lay reports becoming kind of repetitive. Once a guy is getting laid, what else can he talk about… how feminism sucks, or politics? Then that attracts other guys.

5. Certain current U.S. political leaders are doing serious, long-term damage to the American system itself and to the right/Republican party. This is not coming from a leftist or SJW, by the way. That nihilistic trolls might embrace him, makes sense. That anyone who is not a nihilistic troll might, makes no sense, but who said the world had to make sense?

Not me.

Unfortunately, “The Twitter Takeover of Politics Is Just Getting Started.” The level of political thinking of Red Pill / player guys is barely better than the SJWs and leftists who have become The Great Satan. Everyone is looking to hit the other team on the head with rhetorical sticks, while the other team is looking to hit “us” on the head with sticks. The clearest manifestation of this is the bizarre glee about the grifter who is presently on top of the United States’s Executive Branch.

At the same time, most people’s political knowledge is abysmal. Don’t take my word on this, read The Myth of the Rational Voter instead. In fact if you have not read this book, go read it before you consider commenting on this essay. That you probably won’t, is indicative of the problem.

To quote myself, “Markets are beautiful because they separate the lies people say (meaning, most of what people say) from what people actually want.” Politics have attenuated markets of sort in the form of voting, which is better than nothing, but it’s still pretty crappy. People are very insulated from their decisions. If you make bad game and life decisions you will not f**k hot chicks. Bad political decisions take a long time to propagate (remember that Chavez was initially legitimately elected in Venezuela, for example, and Nixon was legitimately elected in the United States). So people use politics as a signaling mechanism and are rather insulated from most political decisions. The kinds of people who take to Twitter to be SJWs on the left, then get image-matched by people who take to Twitter to be right-wing trolls and agitators on the right.

You may also notice that, in any forum devoted to a topic with good feedback loops, a political discussion descends into idiocy. Game and RP is no different. With game, the feedback loop is short and clear. A guy who improves his game knowledge, sees changes quickly. In politics, the feedback loop isn’t there; a guy who improves his political knowledge… sees nothing change. He may vote a little bit differently but still suffers from the myths of the irrational voters, mentioned above. The historical knowledge isn’t there. Neither is the incentive to improve. The market quality isn’t there. Voters are attenuated from individual decisions, and guys writing online about politics are also attenuated.

You put all these effect together and you get guys spouting “conservative” “Red Pill” slogans. No one can get past their identity to look at the data, to quote myself again. People who can do that, who can think in terms of systems, who can process past events and see how they might be able to apply to the future… those people are rare. People who can parrot back identity-bashing slogans… they are common. Including in the Red Pill.

Most RP/seduction guys have failed at normal dating, are too low status to achieve their desires in normal dating, or are otherwise dissatisfied with what they’re getting. Often, they’ve never learned what women are actually attracted to, or how to be attractive to women. Then they think, “If that is a lie, what else is a lie?” Thus, the spread to politics.

Now that you understand why RP guys can get taken in by marketing grifters and confidence men, can you can vote appropriately, or work on building your business, or go hit on chicks instead of screaming about politics online.

Today, the real question is about how the liberal west is going to respond to the rise of China. Neither the grifter in the White House nor Britain obsessed with Brexit is even thinking about, let alone dealing with, this issue. We squabble, they work. Think about that.

Get past your identity and look at the data

The stink of poly-ticks is high in this post, which has little to do with actual game, so you may want to skip it.

A reader finds it strange that I don’t have an anti-immigrant or right-wing identity, since both seem somewhat common among guys in some of the online neighborhoods I wander through, but I suspect I simply read a lot more than most guys, and that reading leads to posts like, “The best books for learning game.” It’s also led me to the literature on identity and identity formation, and there’s a good book on that subject, Identity Crisis: The 2016 Presidential Campaign and the Battle for the Meaning of America. Identity Crisis is about the presidential campaign, sure, but it’s also about how the stock of anti-immigrant sentiment got turned into a flow of anti-immigrant sentiment in 2016.

Anti-immigrant sentiment has a long and weird history in the United States. It’s “weird” because the United States is an immigrant country; unless you are Native American, your ancestors moved here, and they probably moved here in a way that would be “illegal” today (mine did). Seriously, go back and look at the Know-Nothing Party, or this article. People hated the Irish then, as a group. People hated the Italians in the first half of the 20th Century. Over time, these groups became part of the background of the United States, as other identities formed.

Today the arguments are the same… the immigrants are coming to steal your jobs, change your religion, dirty your house, etc., etc. When the arguments remain exactly the same but the targets of the audience change, you should be real suspicion about the argument’s accuracy. You should build your identity around examining arguments, not around believing one of them. We should read more history and put forth fewer online memes. We should look at the data that show immigrants are great. We should encourage people to be free and expressive.

So where’s this RP, right-wing thing coming from? Probably from the bad feminist tendencies on the left. It is true that the feminist left-wing in Western politics is very bad. But I would encourage Red Pill guys to avoid thinking that, because the feminist left-wing is bad, we must therefore join or admire the right wing. We don’t and we shouldn’t. Game works to make the world a better place by helping guys gain the social skills and make the connections that wouldn’t happen otherwise. We should be thinking about how to do the same thing, in political terms.

There are also few genuinely religious people left, particularly among the young. Most of the “Young Christians” I know have had so many “slip ups” and “mistakes” that you can discount their protestations of faith. What takes up the space that religion used to occupy? Claire Lehmann is one of the most interesting people on Twitter and she says, “Having hundreds of people explaining to me on Twitter that everything from sex to nature to beauty is ‘political’ makes me realise that Western civilisation really hasn’t come up with a viable alternative to religion, yet. Until we do, politics will be the opiate of the masses.” A lot of Red Pill guys—like Blue Pill guys and people more generally—treat politics like a religion, instead of like an intellectual field in which new information should be able to change your mind.

If you find yourself lining up behind one party on all issues, you should really stop and ask yourself: do my views on these numerous and unrelated issues line up so neatly? Or am I following the herd?

Players know the danger of herd-following. Try to be yourself.

Outside of Twitter and among people who study actual immigrants and immigration, there is little doubt that immigration improves lives. Here is one paper, but there are many more. Don’t let emotional coverage of one extremely uncommon event sway you. Look at the data. Just as a player should not let any interaction with any given chick sway him, you should not let some random and unfortunate event sway you (unless maybe you are going to let an equally random and fortunate event sway you).

Why doesn’t this information make it to guys on Twitter? Partially because Twitter is limited in character count, so no one can make complex arguments on it (like this argument). Partially because all of us, including me, like to incorporate information that already agrees with our preexisting worldview. Partially because almost all of us need someone to hate. It’s not the Communists anymore, so immigrants and Chinese are conveniently distant bogeymen.

One of the best guys I’ve ever worked with was born in Pakistan, and his family brought him to the U.S. when he was small. He didn’t get his immigration situation sorted out till he got married (to a U.S. citizen). It is striking that the people who are most opposed to immigration have the least exposure to actual immigrants. People are more alike than not, and that is why game works in different countries: there are cultural variations, but the male-female dynamic remains. It is true that wealth and access to medicine changes the supply curves and elasticities of sex, but the game skillset and mindset remain.

The United States is great at taking in people and, within a generation, turning them into Americans. Europe should be trying to do the same thing. So let’s have less blood-and-soil, less xenophobia, and more historical knowledge. Immigration is good from both a moral and practical standpoint. Don’t let your right-wing identity get in the way of those basic facts. Think for yourself.

I have seen lots of ill-conceived political tweets from Red Pill guys, but the real response to those political tweets is book-length, not tweet length. Even this post is far too short. I write it because I want at least one comprehensive statement out there. Your identity as a player need not be linked with an anti-immigrant or right-wind ideology. Go your own way. Be independent.

The world is not a zero-sum place. If it were, we’d not have had the incredible progress of the last two centuries. Most guys know f**k all about history, and it shows. The history of xenophobia is the history of humanity.

Let’s all try to do better.

Immigrants do a great job of becoming Americans.

Is this not enough on the topic for you? Here is a follow-up post with yet more data citations.