What Motivates Us? (Part Two) – The Issue of the Return to Nomalcy

This topic circled my head again today and leads on from part one (found here). I asked myself what motivated me, and I think I went very close to the crux of the matter: the coping mechanisms we develop as children carry out into adult life for better or for worse. Sometimes these coping mechanisms are useful when it comes to Daygame and we benefit from them.

Today I’m going to focus on why we carry on when we’re hurting ourselves and/or others, and it comes off of the back of a question posed to me by a male relative after reading my book:

“Why did you carry on? I thought that the book was heading to you going back to being a normal person. You were doing so much damage to yourself.”

Straight off the bat we can see the implicit blue pill meta-narrative: the character makes their deal with the devil but somehow gets out of it and manages to rejoin the table of the righteous. It’s the ‘return to normalcy’ where the protagonist returns with a boon for the benefit of all. The problem is that at a meta level this cycle is broken when you introduce the red pill because your thought patterns are irrevocably changed.

If I could distill this effect down to one phenomena it would be: trust is a second order effect. Now of course, you will still trust people, but you realise how trust is built only on incentives. Perhaps me studying economics was why I was able to assimilate the red pill very quickly: simple models don’t include things like trust unless they are built into the prediction as hard constraints. Decisions are made purely on cost/benefit analysis. It’s the reason why I hate the word ‘should.’ The red pill makes you think this way and because of it your societal and interpersonal trust, taken as a given, will plummet. Instead you’ll expect people to act based on what is good for them.

I read an article this week by Rollo Tomassi which addresses this issue well: when you unplug from the matrix you have to ditch all of the old goals that you had in life because they’re built on faulty programming. This is old news for anyone who’s read this kind of stuff for years but the point I want to make is that the red pill takes the hero’s journey, which is circular, breaks it at the top and bends it until it looks like a horseshoe. The ‘return to normalcy’ doesn’t happen in the same way. Instead you come back to the real world but live on a kind of parallel plane to ‘regular people.’

As I said above, the trust you apply as given will plummet to only a few selected close friends, family and loved ones, because these are the people who’s incentives you know well. You can make a better than average prediction of how they will act and plan accordingly. Hopefully your incentives will be aligned.

Bringing this back to the question posed to me: I carried on because I see the world differently now. I don’t want to go back to who I was because I literally cannot, my thoughts are changed irrevocably. The amount of trust I give to people is much more aligned to the amount they actually deserve. That’s not to say that I think they’re evil and out to do one over on me, just that I’m going to treat outsiders with a much higher level of caution.

But what about the girls you Daygame, they’re outsiders aren’t they? Yes, and this introduces the carrot as to why I wouldn’t go back to being a ‘normal person.’ Taking the red pill means trading truth for happiness (I think I’ll write a separate post on this) where the trade brings you closer to the optimal mix of the two. Remember: truth can be exploited for pleasure, and happiness plus pleasure equals utility. Knocking out the middlemen: the red pill increases pleasure if you have the ability to exploit it.

Having that ability means that you can revise your expectations of yourself upwards, as Rollo describes in his post. Gaining that extra measure of truth means that you can properly measure your own value, and thus start earning the rewards which are inherent in it; it is a fundamental law that the resources flow to the most able.

Just like how a good leader or a very smart person will be able to command a greater salary. Makes sense to us all. But what about how a hot girl will be able to command free meals and free holidays? Incels might be seething at that, but it is only the high value of these girls which allows them to command such resources. The only people who think we should move towards some kind of equality in the distribution of resources are the ones without the value: they have to create an environment where the winners are shamed into giving away their winnings. These men are in fact the majority of men; the ‘normal’ person they’d like you to go back to being.

Consider the pareto rule of thumb: the square root of the total take half the rewards. In other words: 10% of men have 50% of the girls (of course we don’t work it the other way, saying 10% of women get 50% of the men, because one man can impregnate multiple women). It’s probably more than 50%but it’s a good place to start and lets us reason how the culture of shaming is created: sheer numerical superiority.

Imagine there’s a tribe of 100 men and 100 women all of reproductive age. That means that 10 men get to sleep with 50 women: five each. There’s 90 men left and 50 women left which spells higher competition already: one of the benefits of being in the top 10% is that you get first dibs. The top 10% are the alphas and sigmas.

Applying the rule again means that the next 10% of men get 25 of the women which is 2.5 each. Now unfortunately we can’t have half a girl so let’s be generous and round up to three each: 10 men get 30 of the women. These are the higher betas.

That leaves us with 80 men and only 20 women, which is a hell of a lot of competition, and so you can see how this culture of shaming is created: there are simply too many losers. And I don’t mean losers in an unjust way, I mean it in the high-school-right-hand-pressed-to-the-head-in-an-L-shaped way.

Here’s the complete table without rounding:

Obviously the numbers here aren’t exact, it’s only meant to provoke thoughts, but it describes the socio-sexual hierarchy well: women are cleaned up at a rapid pace leaving a huge amount of males to compete for a very small number of females. Once we get to the end, even after the gammas have snuck their way into a few unsuspecting girl’s pants, there are 60 men whose genetic legacy is wiped off the face of the earth. The remaining women can at least try and throw themselves at the top 40% of men to see their DNA live on.

At least 60% of men want to tear down what our value has generated. It’s obvious that our incentives are not aligned. Trading some happiness for truth allows us to climb the ladder and giving up that ability sends us back down again. This is exactly what the 60% want to achieve by shaming someone who is above them: try and create a redistribution of resources (based off of a supposed moral duty) so that they can then nab some of those resources for themselves. Now why would anyone go back to being like that?

Yours unfaithfully,

Thomas Crown