During the golden days of the Red Pill space, the progression a male would take was a very streamlined process. There will always be the landmines in the 5 stages of the Red Pill, but if you were willing to put in the work, people went into the RP space as males looking to get laid, and emerged with an understanding a desire for masculine excellence.
The journey into the Red Pill space isn’t because everything is going great and you're swimming in women and money. It typically starts as some sort of heartbreak or mishap with women due to your blue pill understanding of dating.
"Be nice, treat women with respect, work hard and get a good job, and women will love you for doing what you were supposed to do."
And before you know it, you're googling something about why nice guys finish last.
- Three Rs of the Manosphere
- Male Progression in the Manosphere <-You are here
- Red pill rage
- Masculine Excellence
- Content Creators: Positive Male Archetypes
- Building a Super Player
Blue Pill vs Red Pill
In The Matrix, the blue pill represents the mental programming ingrained in you by society. We are born knowing nothing. Our belief over the inner workings of the world is informed by what our 5-senses tell us: Electrical signals sent to our brain.
The Blue Pill can be equated to being born with drunk glasses on. A classic case of, "you don't know what you don't know."
The Red Pill isn't seeing what's there once the goggles are taken off—it's realizing you are wearing drunk goggles.
You’d feel some type of way, especially after you consider that women do know this, and don’t tell you either. Steps two and three of the red pill are anger and bargaining.
Today you can see the red pill rage running amok as people are getting lost in these two phases. We will get into the specifics of why that is happening next week. But as stated above, once upon a time with the correct guidance, you could transverse the red pill and learn to pull what you wanted out of the world.
PUA: Pick Up Artist
With books like 'The Mystery Method' (2007) and The New York Times bestselling 'The Game' (2005), PUA had a flash-fry into the mainstream. Peaking with the VH1 reality TV Show “The Pick Up Artist” (2008), with Mystery himself helping some dorks tap into the game.
Today Pick up has become antiquated with cornball-ness. But once upon a time, all of it was mainstream terminology for getting girls like, "pick up” chicks, and "he's got game".
Learning pick up, aka learning game, was nothing more than understanding how to game female evolutionary inclinations to hunt for the strongest mates. And how leveraged in your favor as a man. This is the initial red meat of the Red Pill.
Within pick up, one of the key tools is DHV: to display high value.
A term that has contorted and bastardized its way into today’s “high-value man”.
DHV’s are not necessarily the actual thing, but more so what it says about your competency of a man, something the biology of a woman is attracted to.
While pick up could help you land a girl, keeping them was another skill set unto itself requiring self development.
The Manosphere
This is my personal interpretation, the Red Pill opens up one to the manosphere, a self-improvement space for all masculine issues. Getting laid is one aspect of the male-self improvment space, but not all there is:
"Much like all squares are rhombuses, but not all rhombuses are squares."
By itself, pick up has women as the mental point of origin. Men are reactionary towards the end result of getting a girl. But under the lens of self improvement, being able to land the woman you want is an internal (man) mental point of origin.
As such, pick up is a part of the manosphere. And a very important part as the masculine desire to reproduce drives many of our actions. But not all pick up artists are a part of the manosphere.
As you learn to master game, men inevitably find themselves developing other aspects of masculinity, particularly frame control. Frame control is placing yourself at the center of why you do things, this of course begins to bleed over into the totality of a man's life: “Who am I doing this for? Am I following my own lead or that of someone else?”
Masculine Excellence
As men level up and optimize other areas of their masculinity, they will inevitably reach a plateau as their driving force is getting laid. This plateau can be disinterest with women having mastered game, being unable to keep or attract higher quality women, or wondering what's next.
Masculine excellence.
Having achieved a mental point of origin of the self, men are working towards finding the best version of themselves, working towards their perceived life purpose, starting a business, carving out their own chink in the universe, or attempting to escape the societal matrix.
In a way, achieving self-sufficiency and self-fulfillment. After all, isn't that what being a man is really about?
Jon from Modern Life Dating describes these areas as Money, Muscles, Game, and Frame.
And within the pursuit of masculine excellence, we arrive at our second bastardized term: Alpha male. A phrase no one can agree upon. But for good reason as there are various iterations of it.
But the core thing that we can all agree on is that an alpha is a leader within the meritocracy. And to be a leader requires understanding the inner workings of people or systems. And the financial or physical power to enforce your will.
Each version of the alpha has its own weakness. At this level of self-improvement, men will be pushing to eliminate all their weaknesses. For accomplishing masculine excellence requires a man to become the best version of themself.
Conclusion
Entering the Red Pill space used to be about finding actionable advice that would ultimately provide the steps to masculine self-fulfillment.
Whether or not people are Red Pilled, Youtube channels like Fresh & Fit and Kevin Samuels have made it impossible to miss that the blue pill reality has major flaws.
While that is awesome, it does bring about a sense of disappointment as the lack of guidance has created a choke point at the anger and bargaining phase of the Red Pill: AKA Red Pill Rage.
Next week, we will cover the 5-Phases of the Red Pill: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance. And the specific miscommunication that is causing Red Pill Rage to dominate the male improvement space.
- Three Rs of the Manosphere
- Male Progression in the Manosphere <-You are here
- Red pill rage
- Masculine Excellence
- Content Creators: Positive Male Archetypes
- Building a Super Player