Even those of us in relationships, if our red pill dosage is sufficient, never worry about the hysterical wrath of a woman scorned, and we don’t bother ourselves satisfying a woman’s childish demands. We are perfectly prepared to invite her to seek that kind of satisfaction elsewhere, from someone else self-loathing enough to bend to that kind of infantile pressure. We don’t sleep on sofas because a woman is displeased, and we don’t retreat into a doghouse for anyone. In short, as far as lives go, it’s a pretty good one.
If you sense a but coming, you do so correctly.
There is another side to red pill life. A cost that comes with the shattering of the old paradigm. I’ve covered this in the past, writing on red pill rage and red pill grief, both familiar topics to red pill men. In those efforts, I did my best to paint the picture of both phenomena as processes, with anger and grief both being transient states for the most part. We can get stuck in either with results that are counter-productive, but in general, we expect them to pass and we expect to move on to a less angry, less depressed state of being.
This article is about one of the things that can keep us stuck in both grief and anger, that can retard our efforts to move on. I’ll call it red pill isolation. I think it is a pretty good label because it precisely describes the problem. And unlike red pill rage or grief, it isn’t a process. It’s not something that will just resolve on its own with time. It is a problem that you must fix in one way or another. The problem with the red pill awakening is that it takes you out of sync with a massive part of life that, for better or worse, is all you’ve known.
It truly makes you feel like the odd man in the crowd. Being completely open with people around you, talking about what you think and how you feel almost completely assures social rejection. Try being in a mixed group of men and women and saying you think chivalry is for chumps and see what happens. Try saying that only an idiot would marry a woman. Or just wear a t-shirt in public that says, “Men’s Rights are Human Rights” or “MGTOW for Life”, two innocuous, healthy statements that are held in disdain by the world around you.
For that matter, consider how many family members react to their own who make the red pill change. Mothers clutch pearls. Fathers show disappointment and contempt. Siblings shake their heads and judge. I see it here in the comments and get emails on a regular basis about how going red pill creates hardship and division between family members. I hear a lot more frequently about men who opt to say nothing to friends and family about their red pill experience because they can easily predict a hostile reaction, followed by some form of rejection.
The same is even truer in the employment setting. In workplaces, where employees even banter about subjects like politics, you won’t find men speaking a word on their thoughts about hypergamy and gynocentrism. And they are wise to remain silent. You’d stand a better shot staying employed talking about your retail meth business than to come to work with your opinions about the dangers of being vulnerable to the average woman. There is no other way to put it. If you are red pill, you are pariah. Though I expect no one needed to tell you that.
It’s why you see so many red pill men online who take great care to keep their identity hidden. Nobody wants the trashing of their reputation that comes with a lack of this kind of conformity. And to whatever degree you do choose to reveal who you are to the world around you there will be a price to pay for it. One look at the mainstream media’s coverage of MRAs and MGTOW tell you everything you need to know.
This isolation, the red pill isolation, isn’t a process that will resolve on its own. It is not a stage to pass through on the way to something better. And it has very serious implications for those whom it affects. You can see some of the attempts to compensate for this in the comments on this website and others that deal with the same subject matter. Most of these comments, while understandable, are lacking.
It’s going to take a lot more than video games, porn, sexbots, YouTube, and online MGTOW buddies to solve the problem.
In fact, if we are not careful, some of those understandable alternatives to human contact can become unhealthy allies in our quest to fill in the missing gaps. Human beings, with very few exceptions, need other human beings. In fact, if you look at this chart of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, also known as Maslow’s ladder, you see the basic, or what we call deficiency needs. Food, water, shelter, safety and physical security.
The very next level up on the pyramid is the psychological needs. Belonging, social connection, intimacy, love. I note that Maslow was astute enough to not have included marriage in his hierarchy, and sure enough, marriage isn’t required for psychological health. In fact, in these times it can be a significant contributor in men for the loss of psychological health. But the need for people, for social connection and acceptance, is an undeniable constant. And we would be less than honest, practicing a blind refusal to follow the evidence, to come to any other conclusion than the fact that the red pill awakening puts those badly needed things in peril.
It would be easy at this point, understandable even, to conclude that ignorance is bliss; that the price to pay for enlightenment about the real nature of sexual politics is too great. That we are just better off with blue pills and life on the sexual plantation. I am not buying that, though. First, there is not much we can do about the enlightening. You can’t unswallow the red pill. Like it or not, you’ve turned on the lights in the room, and at this point, there is no turning them off.
Second. The fact that 99% of the people around you are walking around in a fog of sexual indoctrination doesn’t mean their psychological needs are being met either. Performing like a circus animal for your dinner doesn’t make the meal nutritious. Men who sell out their self-respect and their dignity to please women aren’t getting their psychological needs met. They are getting pats on the head from their trainers, and they have to invest a lot of energy in the fantasy of being loved.
I am convinced this is at the root of a lot of depression for married men. Or, as the noted psychiatrist RD Laing said, “The person who does not act in reality and only acts in phantasy[sic] becomes himself unreal. The actual ‘world’ for that person becomes shrunken and impoverished.”
We see those fantasies shattered a million times a year in our family courts. That is the more obvious manifestation of the problem. More commonly, but perhaps less visibly, we see the result in the darkness of that shrunken, impoverished world. We have seen it in men who have simply died inside after struggling for years to maintain the illusion of being loved and valued, in marriages that constantly rub their faces in the fact that they are neither. We see it in that common consequence of marriage; the deterioration of social support for the man. The withering of all of men’s psychological needs.
Sure, there are some marriages that turn out much better than this. But a growing number of men are figuring out that rolling the dice on that isn’t a good gamble in 2017. And there are certainly families healthy enough to embrace the person, even if they can’t or won’t embrace their ideas. But again, the audience for red pill thinking doesn’t typically come from these unicorns of family health.
I say all that to point out that gratifying the true human psychological needs isn’t easy for anyone. We all yearn for human connection, affection and belonging, yet can quite commonly feel like we are missing the boat. Even in the age of social media, with access to other people previously unimaginable, we seem to be drifting further and further apart from each other. In the middle of all this darkness, I think there is a point of light for red pill men. Red pill men should have the easier go of this hard road because their relationships aren’t grounded in fantasy. They have been down that path and seen it fall apart. Indeed, that is what brought many to this place.
And they have a job ahead of them in carving out a place in life where the needs for social connection are not met at the cost of living lies. Sadly, I think the trauma that so often leads men to go their own way, also sours them on humanity. Thus, we see the push for the artificial remedies of a virtual existence. And while no one in their right mind would stand in harsh judgment about men seeking refuge in those things, our need for each other remains as it always has. Maslow’s ladder withstood the test of time.
Obviously, each man who beats the red pill isolation will have his own way of doing it. I think though, if my own path is any indication, that it requires the willingness to risk, to roll the dice on people, even though people are more often a source of disappointment than satisfaction. That reality only proves that we face the same dilemmas as blue pill men, only our radar for the disappointments is a little sharper.
The point about Maslow’s ladder is that it charts the path to human self-actualization, or the realization of achieving your full human potential, including, importantly, the creative elements of your existence. Maslow’s contention was that each rung on that ladder is essential to getting to the next level up. There is no skipping past one part on the way to the other. We need human contact, approval, acceptance, and love in whatever form that comes, lest we remain stuck at the level of deficiency needs, chained to an existence that can only be defined as meaningless. I think he was right.
We don’t need commitment to women to forge that path, but we do need people. It is my hope, for the men who consume the red pill that they keep that constant in their journey. That in coming to avoid that which has harmed them in life, they don’t cut themselves off from the things and from the people, that will heal them.
I’m not saying it’s easy. I’m just saying there is nowhere else to go.
About Paul Elam
Paul Elam the founder of A Voice for Men, focusing on men's mental health issues. Paul was featured in The Red Pill Movie and founded the International Conference on Men's Issues series. He is the co-author of the acclaimed book, Say Goodbye to Crazy, and offers personal consulting for men. You can support Paul's work at his Patreon page.Source
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