This is a bit meta. I go over the evolution and destruction of subcultures, of which the RP is the most current version. I talk about how one can avoid the pitfalls that everyone has when in a subculture, and end with some field reports from a new guy who has a great example of the difference between the pitfalls and a good old fashioned Male Action Plan
As this place evolves, it develops its own language. People then learn to use that language to cope with not doing anything the language describes.
My starting point is this: geeks, mops, and sociopaths. What does an opinion piece on subcultures going mainstream and losing the culture have to do with a guy who wants to fuck his wife? Everything. It’s convergent evidence, dummy!
My preface is that the red pill as Praxeology is a niche or a subculture, just like any other. Arcade Fire and Rollo Tomassi are Coke and Pepsi. You may think that it’s not the same thing: one is about music or cool things, and the other is about men’s lives and the struggle for pussy and life and death! But that’s not correct. Organized human behavior is subculture, and subculture has an organized chaos to it. Understanding the chaos is how you can look at this space, the Sidebar, the field reports, and the mental models and apply them better. Because the alternative is bleak.
When I first showed up, there was no structure. Dread didn’t exist. Frame was a barely known concept at the time, and no one knew what they were doing. It was thousands of guys reinventing the wheel, iterating on each other’s successes and mistakes. After a few hundred different iterations, we slowly discovered the parts that worked consistently, the parts that worked sporadically, and the parts that did not work at all. We wrapped jargon around the concepts as a shorthand way of discussing them with each other.
Everyone was working from the same play-book.
But this can cause problems. Over time, the geeks give way to mops. If you haven’t read the linked article, geeks are:
Before there is a subculture, there is a scene. A scene is a small group of creators who invent an exciting New Thing—a musical genre, a religious sect, a film animation technique, a political theory. Riffing off each other, they produce examples and variants, and share them for mutual enjoyment, generating positive energy.
The new scene draws fanatics. Fanatics don’t create, but they contribute energy (time, money, adulation, organization, analysis) to support the creators.
Geeks are fanatics and creators. In this case, the creators were the first guys with horrible relationships or a sex life and a blog. The fanatics were the ones who prodded and poked at theories and reports and created the subreddits and filled the comment sections. They are the Archwingers , the Rians, the whinemoreplease’s, and the RulezeroDads. If you don’t know these names, that’s fine. Just know that everyone is either creating the new RP thing or contributing to it in a substantive way.
If the scene is unusually exciting, and the New Thing can be appreciated without having to get utterly geeky about details, it draws mops. Mops are fans, but not rabid fans like the fanatics. They show up to have a good time and contribute as little as they reasonably can in exchange.
What I see now, in the public forum of this Praxeology, are mops. They see the jargon as a checklist. Do X and gain Y-type activities. Listicles of the ten things you need to do to make your wife suck your dick with enthusiasm—number 5 will surprise you!
Note: number 5 is always drink eight glasses of water a day.
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Rex has spent his entire adult life running from the shadow of his stepfather — a womanizing, manipulative man who treated relationships like a game to be won. Now with a successful career in the Navy and his own firm moral code, Rex tells himself he's nothing like the man who raised him. He's better than that. He has to be.
But as Rex navigates the complex world of modern dating, analyzing every interaction and female behavior pattern like tactical data, he begins to see uncomfortable parallels. From married women to single mothers, fellow sailors, and bachelor party strippers, each relationship forces him to question whether his calculated approach to romance is really so different from Jon's manipulations.
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We hit a critical mass of mops back in 2015. This drew the sociopaths.
The sociopaths quickly become best friends with selected creators. They dress just like the creators—only better. They talk just like the creators—only smoother. They may even do some creating—competently, if not creatively. Geeks may not be completely fooled, but they also are clueless about what the sociopaths are up to.
Mops are fooled. They don’t care so much about details, and the sociopaths look to them like creators, only better. Sociopaths become the coolest kids in the room, demoting the creators. At this stage, they take their pick of the best-looking mops to sleep with. They’ve extracted the cultural capital.
These are your Myron’s, your Tate’s, your Pearl’s etc.
An aside:
Part of why I do what I do, and how I do it is because I’ve always been aware of this dynamic. When illimitable man wrote the Monetization of the Manosphere back in 2018 it was well underway. If you don’t know his name, that’s also OK. Just know he was the geek like the rest of us.
This creates problems, both for you, the new and interested guy working on a lackluster marriage or relationship or sex-life, or wanting to avoid it in the first place:
Sociopaths have saturated social media with the smoother, and more creative, shinier objects and it’s becoming a problem for sincere men who want to use what’s there today.
This case study is an example of that.
When I started, there wasn’t a roadmap and there wasn’t jargon. Now that there is both, people have the mistaken idea that you only have to check off the list and say the magic words and you can magically transform your wife from being an anal retentive dick to having a dick retaining anus. It’s crass, yes. I want you to understand how crass this problem is, so it stays.
What was a system of practice, a set of guidelines and estimations and educated guesses with convergent evidence in any place that made sense has now become, magic. Does this mean there’s nothing left of value? No. What it means is that you have to really discard jargon and focus on whats important.
I recently wrote a piece for correspondenceTheory, Why You’re Lost. You may recognize it if you’ve read Frame,
It ends on the important line, get your philosophical house in order. It doesn’t mean to pick nihilism and call it a day, it means to focus on your own self interest before everything else, and that includes fitting into the cool niche Internet space:
Ditch the jargon. Use your own words. You may know what they mean, you may not. But you’re not writing field reports to communicate with others, and you don’t pay by the word. By removing the jargon you remove the barriers to you understanding what you’re talking about. I won’t call it nuance, which is jargon, but it is. Subtle differences in how it’s worded can help you understand it better as well as tell when you’re using terms as a salve.
Acta, non verba. It’s a jargon term from the early days, meaning you should always act and not talk. If your field report is all actions and not exposition, it’s easier to improve what you’re trying to improve.
Praxeology volume 3 is selling like hotcakes! The audio book should be out next month
Billy’s hernia.
A few months back, a callous hand of reality came and bitch-slapped my drunken, lazy face with a cruel and insensitive force. Ever since then, my mental state kept fluctuating between denial, depression and anger.
The remainder of this post is for paid subscribers of Rian Stone's Substack. TheRedArchive holds the freely published portion above; the full text is available from the author at https://rianstone.substack.com/p/case-study-the-more-we-know-the-less.
