Rollo Tomassi – The Rational Male (unabridged)

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Rollo Tomassi – The Rational Male (unabridged)

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In the almost nine years of of this blog I have only hit upon violence on a couple of occasions. I’ve only been in a physical altercation a handful of times in my life. And by that I mean real fights; the kind of violence that requires you to physically harm another person. I’ve been in lots of sparring fights and martial arts tournaments, mostly when I was in my 20s and 30s. While I’ve been hurt and caused hurt to my opponents, I can appreciate that there is a qualified difference between competitive sport fighting and real violence. The one mutual interest my younger brother and I had when we were growing up was beating the shit out of each other. By the time I got to high school I was no stranger to taking a fist to the chops or various headlocks and “wrassling” holds.

Most of the times I’ve been in real fights were in high school. It’s interesting just how Darwinistic our teenage years really are –we’re just too immature to appreciate it then. Unless you grow up in a sheltered family, learning about sex and violence is usually part of our adolescent experiences. After high school I got into a few fights when I was playing gigs in the late 80s-90s Hollywood scene. Depending on where we played and who we happened to piss off, those kind of fights were something you had to keep in the back of your head as being a possibility. Usually you had friends or bandmates who had your back, but not always.

Of those scuffles most of them were versus a drunk guy who presumed he could kick my ass, or my bandmate’s ass, because, well, we weren’t exactly the most physically imposing guys to be honest. And a lot of those fights were initiated in one of two ways; the guy was fed up with guys like us because the women (usually in some sexy outfit) preferred to fuck guys like us – or, the fight was provoked by a woman and the guys fighting were coming to blows over who’d fucked whose girlfriend. Often enough it was the girl herself who’d later admit she “made a mistake” and one or the other found out.

All of that was back in the late 80s and early 90s. Things have definitely changed with respect to how violence is initiated, normalized and respected (or delegitimized) today, but the basis of that violence will never change. Violence is part of human nature. We do ourselves no favors in denying this simple fact. I can remember in 2001-02 when I did casino promotions for this new ‘sport’ called King of the Cage. It was the forerunner for today’s MMA fighting, but back then it wasn’t as socially acceptable as it is now. I believe Nevada was one of the only states that could legally host such an event. The outcry then was that it was an underground ‘bloodsport’ and legitimizing it as a true sport was the first step towards degenerate social savagery. Or something like that. People used to be appalled by it.

Now MMA fighting is something I’ve seen some Evangelical Christian churches use as a draw to get their men to attend a ‘masculine revival’ weekend. Warriors for Jesus with a ‘saved’ MMA fighter speaking about using his sport as a ministry. I think there’s a primal, evolved side of men’s nature that makes violence attractive. And like love and respect, violence is another aspect of the human experience where men and women’s approach and understanding is innately different.

Boys and men are innately drawn to competition, combat and violence. We make ‘guns’ out of our fingers. We craft weapons from scraps we find in the garage to defeat our ‘foes’. We love our plastic army men and G.I. Joes, our cowboys & indians, and we play ‘war’ with our friends. Our video games from the first coin operated arcades to our immersive virtual reality consoles are about combat and strategy. Even sports have been called a “proxy for war”. Team sports are a facsimile of tribal competition. Human males’ physiology, by and large, evolved for combat and physical stresses. I realize that might be hard to believe by today’s standard of masculinity, but the evidence is there.

The male Burden of Performance began with a need for testing that performance against our primal environments and some very real opponents. I have read some interesting research that suggests human beings are innately risk averse. Most humans would rather avoid conflict than voluntarily engage in a fight that they could very well lose, if not die from. The logic is that humans’ success as a species is at least partly due to our evolved sense of caution for life and limb. If you cooperate and play it safe it’s likely your risk-averse genes would propagate into future generations.

Of course the flip side to this can summed up in an old Latin proverb,…

Fortune Favors the Bold.

There’s also research that shows men experience a spike in testosterone levels after defeating a rival in combat, and/or killing their opponent. This doesn’t even have to be actual violence; some studies show men experience a similar spike when their sports teams win a significant game. So, while in some instances avoiding conflict and backing down from a dangerous engagement has survival benefits, risk taking and enacting one’s will by force also has some reproductive benefits.

For as much as they rail to the contrary, women do have an affinity for violent men. Women get turned on by men with a capacity for violence. Modern psychology attempts to pathologize this arousal prompted by dangerous men (hybristophilia), but, by order of degree, women evolved to select for men with at least the perceived capacity to do harm to another man. I would speculate that this attraction stems from women’s evolved need to seek security and protection from men, and sympathetically, men evolved an innate protectionist aspect to our own evolved firmware. Competing with rival men for sexual access, sometimes violently, is part of our ancestral programming. As we developed into a more ‘civilized’ species that competition shifted to contests of performance between men, but the old violent firmware is still part of humans’ starting package.

Let’s You and Him Fight

On Twitter and a few past livestreams, I’ve pointed out that women today have developed a false sense of security with respect to the potential of real violence. This is equally a result of the masculinization of women as it is our accommodating the Feminine Imperative in mainstream cultures. In the age of social media, as the globalization of women’s entitlements have spread, so too has women’s entitlement to personal safety.

One very real downside to the Fempowerment narrative is that it has convinced women that the fantasy of the “strong female” is something they can aspire to personally. This is what I’ve called the Warrior Princess fallacy: Over the course of generations our feminine-primary social order has convinced women that they can realize the same warrior role as men. Via storytelling in various media the ideal that physical differences in men and women are relative, and women can be “just as tough and dangerous as men” is pervasive. This is a dangerous precedent, and one that is a direct result of old order beliefs in, and popularization of, Blank Slate equals.

In the idealized fantasy society of equalism, masculinized Amazon Warrior Princesses can give as good as they get from any man. But in the real world, men evolved for physical performance, competition and combat; women evolved to endure the rigors of childbearing and nurturing. And as the introduction of transgendered biological males into biologically female sports divisions is proving, the realities of our physical differences is unavoidable.

However, the idea that women are always entitled to physical protection in the new order presents some interesting dichotomies. Women mix an entitlement to personal safety with an expectation of clichéd female bravado. Remember, this all happens in the context of women’s innate solipsism; add a bit of alcohol and the social posturing of a group of women all vying for attention on a Friday night and you begin to see the volatile potential. Today’s women have grown accustomed to initiating or escalating inherently unsafe circumstances for themselves – to say nothing of the men they’ll involve.

Women have a limbic understanding that, for the most part, they can be violent with relative impunity. If a male ever strikes a female, even in self-defense, she can be assured that a mob of random males, following their evolved protectionist directive, will spontaneously form to beat the shit out of the guy. In today’s Blue Pill engineered society, even the most passive male waits for an opportunity to prove his quality to womankind by becoming ‘justifiably’ violent in defense of a woman. It’s what most men are conditioned for for most of their lives.

“Sorry babe, I don’t know what came over me. I just can’t abide by any man assaulting a woman!”

The old, vestigial, evolved response of violence is something our male hindbrains know will trigger ‘gina tingles in women. The primal ideal of the nobleman with the capacity to unleash justifiable fisticuffs is Blue Pill conditioned psychological red meat. That the woman provoked or escalated an unsafe situation isn’t even an afterthought – the guy raised a hand to a woman, opportunities to prove a legitimate capacity for violence are rare for low SMV men.

As such, women presume safety. Women will raise hell about feeling unsafe around men. They’ll bleat about fantasies of enforcing a ‘male curfew’ (only for undesirable Betas of course) out of safety concerns. We’ll hire security staff to walk a woman across a dark parking lot and install emergency call boxes on college campuses. But in social situations (particularly when drinking) will escalate inherently unsafe situations knowing that men will play by the old order rules.

There is an old PUA maxim that picked up on women’s penchant to provoke men to violence. It was called the Lets You and Him Fight dynamic. Whether women are aware of this and deliberately provoking a fight between men, or, their subconscious motivates the conflict is a debate that’s been around for a while. But the LYHF dynamic is a shit test women will use in assessing a man’s Alpha status. Women need indignation as it is, but in this dynamic is a woman’s hindbrain wants a visceral response from a man.

I first became aware of the LYHF shit test when a friend had told me how annoyed he was by his girlfriend starting fights with guys that she expected him to finish. She would honk the car horn from the passenger seat if someone had even slightly cut them off in traffic. Even flip off other drivers if the opportunity presented itself. She would start fights with other women which would provoke their boyfriends to step in on their behalf and he was tacitly expected to kick their ass to defend her provoking them. “What are you a pussy? Go beat his ass!”

I’ve tackled the subject of shit tests numerous times on this blog so I won’t belabor them here, but this test plays upon some very deep, evolved, intersexual and intersocial dynamics. On some level of consciousness a woman wants to know her man can get violent. Most Blue Pill men find that suggestion appalling. We’re supposed to be “above all of that”, right? For the most part I’m sure the majority of men would rather not be put into a position of taking a fist to the face. As such we build social conventions and rationales around not engaging physically in a real sense. So, to consider a woman might desire a man with a predilection for violence prompts them to qualify that woman for his own safety.

Intrasexual Competition

“Any group is weaker than a man alone unless they are perfectly trained to work together.” – Robert Heinlein, Starship Troopers

When a group (tribe) of primates reaches a certain number of members the potential for ‘hostile takeover’ by lesser males becomes almost a certainty. Beta male primates form coalitions to overthrow an existing Alpha leader. Most dominant Alphas instinctively cull this coalition building to ensure their position. A smackdown, abuse, punishment for anything that looks like a challenge to his position from lesser male troop members is something Alphas do to infrequently teaming up on him. Partially this is a display of dominance (social proof reinforces it), but it is also a curbing function.

Eventually the Alpha becomes weaker and less effective at enforcing his dominance, and the Betas grow in number until such time that they can band together and depose him. Then the cycle repeats with the most dominant male among them assuming the Alpha role. He gets access to the most fertile females, kills off his rivals’ offspring (which prompts the females into estrus) and reproduces for as long as he’s able to remain in that position.

And yes, I’m aware of the theory that pro-social Alphas that build loyalty-exchanges among other males, and display a willingness to share resources with females, tend to make for better ‘leaders’ within a tribe. What most of that research conveniently leaves out is the element of envy and jealousy that develops (even among primates) in the Beta male population until the sentiment reaches a point of challenge. Even the good-guy, prosocial Alpha has to watch his back.

As you might guess, many of these behaviors are paralleled in humans. Alpha displays of violence, even if by proxy, are ‘sexy’, but mostly we manifest male prowess in social displays. Athletics, resource acquisition, peacocking, conspicuous consumption, really any costly signaling of high sexual market value. To compete with these Alpha displays, lesser males must either:

Increase their own value, and learn to display it effectively,
Find ways to convince other men, (coalition building) and reproductively viable women, that those displays are worthless, while propping up his own displays as more valuable.

In the age of social media and mass communication Beta males are constantly reminded of their lesser positions. There’s no respite. Even the most well-meaning, prosocial Alpha’s presence is a reminder of Beta male inadequacies. High school bullies and ‘Jocks vs. Nerds’ is a constant theme across human cultures because the evolved human male experience is always one of competition and a Burden of Performance. To be male is to compete, and as such there will be winners and losers.

Deposing, or disqualifying, an Alpha – much in the same way primates do – is also a constant theme in human cultures. Beta males enacting ‘justice’ on an ‘evil’ Alpha or an Alpha proxy has always been a teenage fantasy for boys. Spiderman, Captain America, the wimp who incredibly transforms into a powerful Alpha himself will prove to the world how that Alpha power should be ethically used. The geek who gets the girl because she magically sees his superior quality that aligns with the terms he’s establishing as valuable is also a fantasy. All of these cast the Alpha as ‘oppressor’.

“O, it is excellent to have a giant’s strength, but it is tyrannous to use it like a giant.” – Shakespeare, Measure for Measure

Why is using strength, displaying value and exercising will an act of ’tyranny’? Why is restraint of power a moral imperative? How did we come to disqualifying value displays? I’ve seen a few talks by Jordan Peterson where he promotes the idea that a real man is a dangerous one who possesses the capacity for violence and oppression, but has the strength of will not to use it. This then begs the question, how does anyone know a man even possesses this capacity if he’s not to display it? Concealing strength is awesome, but it is, by definition, indistinguishable from weakness. No one knows if you’re a black belt or a white belt until you get in the ring and fight. However, the moral consensus is that it’s unacceptable for men to display value.

This then is the global, social coalition that was formed by the majority of lesser men. To continually disqualify the merits of superior men is individually taxing and makes lesser men look worse for doing so. But build a social order around men self-policing their displays of value; then you have higher value men doing the heavy lifting for lesser men. You may be powerful, but the social mores of the time (created to serve the majority of lesser men) will tell you to conceal it. In fact, they’ll build social conventions to convince the whole of men that displaying vulnerability, not strength, is a display of value.

Most of what I’m digging at here is old order thinking. Socially enforced monogamy has primarily served the greatest number of Beta men. And while it’s definitely been a stabilizing factor for civilization, I can’t ignore that the social expectation of monogamy is also the result of society-wide coalition building among lesser men to ensure that greater men wouldn’t out-breed them. Most male-specific social conventions are designed to control men’s innate directives. Their latent purpose is to teach rules that limit displays and usage of strength.

And in the new order we see this old order intersexual competition struggle to keep pace with a global sexual marketplace that centers on women’s innate mating strategies reseting context of intersexual dynamics. Open Hypergamy incentivizes men’s overt displays of higher value – and now on a worldwide scale. In response, men form online coalitions to disqualify those displays in an attempt to devalue the strengths of men they couldn’t hope to compete with in the old order. Meanwhile, women in the global sexual marketplace continue to reward men who display genuine value according to their mating strategy’s needs.
RULE ZERO LIVE! • LAS VEGAS – Update
I am officially sold out of my 20 tickets for this event!

First off, I want to thank all the guys who’ve reserved a spot to already. The response to what started as a small gathering of guys in Vegas has been overwhelming. As of this post I am sold out of my initial 20 tickets – in 5 days!

Jon (MLD) is also sold out of his tickets. Rich Cooper is about 3 away from selling out.

So that’s the bad news. The good news is that I do have 6 extra slots available for overage.

However, once these are gone that’s it! The price will still be $500 per until March 1st. At that point registration goes up to (and stays at) $750. You must be a Rational Male Patreon subscriber to purchase a spot.

BUT THAT’S NOT ALL…

We’ve just added a new gathering to the event activities,…

Watch Jon’s channel for details MODERN LIFE DATING
February 7, 2020
Rise Above

I received this comment on my January 29, 2020 livestream of Rational Male 101:

I think Rollo is talking about an idea that I’ve read about before in Thomas Sowell’s famous book Conflict of Visions. One side of the spectrum says that humans are very animalistic despite their capability of rationalizing otherwise, and human nature must be constrained by laws and social processes (such as constraining hypergamy). The other side of the spectrum says that humans are entirely capable of overcoming their Darwinian natures through intentional decisionmaking and must be unconstrained in order to flourish. Everyone lies somewhere between the two. I assume most men here lean more toward a constrained vision.

Nature vs. Nurture is a constant theme in the Manosphere. Yes, it’s a constant theme throughout most natural sciences, but it’s a paradox that’s going to always pervade intersexual dynamics. And mostly because people’s belief sets are rooted more in one or the other. Personal responsibility versus biological determinism is an issue that defines what our perspectives are on a great many things; not just intersexual dynamics. This isn’t an issue of politics or even worldview. There are plenty of believers in our human capacity to rise above our personal circumstances and evolutionary dictates on both sides of the political spectrum. For every hardline Trad-Con espousing the virtues of the human spirit and freewill superseding our physical conditions there is a left-leaning humanist who’ll conveniently agree that humans aren’t beholden to what some inconvenient science says if it aligns with their belief set.

Most “old order” ideologies today are struggling with relevancy in what I called the age of “new order” thinking or our New Age of Enlightenment. This new order understanding is the result of the unprecedented deluge of information we now have access to in this millennium. Not only is it this new influx of data that’s challenging the old order ideologies, but also the accessibility to it that old order thinkers can no longer keep pace with.

The response to this influx of information requires us to parse it out like never before. In predictable human fashion most people will make a hard turn towards the old order dictates that used to be able to explain harsh truths to us adequately enough for us to move on to other things. Thus, we see the global Village return to an interest in old religions, shamanism, metaphysics and tribal superstitions (and a lot of Chick Crack) today. That’s not to say that some of these old order institutions never had merit. A lot of what new order data presents to us can be confirmed by old order beliefs and wisdom. What we used to take on faith can now be confirmed by new order information. But this is also problematic for old order believers. It’s never a comforting thought to be confronted with what you had thought was sublimely metaphysical actually being something that can, in fact, be quantified. Yes, your religion was correct about some things, but those things are no longer the magical articles of faith they once were.

But We’re Better Than That, Right?

The Nature vs. Nurture debate is really a polite proxy for the war between two perspectives – Determinism vs. Freewill. While questions of consciousness and personal philosophies are outside the scope of this blog, what is in scope is how these perspectives define the way we approach our understanding of innate mating strategies, long term relationships, forming families and raising children.

As I mentioned early, determinism feels wrong to both kinds of believers. When ever I debate the harsh realities of how Hypergamy works, not just for our species, but most of the animal kingdom, I’m invariably met with the question of whether or not Hypergamy is ‘Good or Evil’. There’s always a want to qualify what’s really a natural dynamic. Is a pack of wolves evil for bringing down a caribou to feed the pack in the dead of winter? It all depends on who you’re rooting for I guess.

The ‘sphere’s contemplating these scenarios are nothing new. Considering the moral implications of the uglier aspects of Hypergamy is just one easy example among many other naturalism vs. moralism dilemmas in Red Pill praxeology. Empiricists will explain the dynamic in the hope that knowing about it, and how it works, will lead to better predictive outcomes. Hypergamy works thusly X-Y-Z; now plan accordingly and build a better life upon that predictive model. Believers on the other hand will absorb this data and look for moral equivocation:

They believe that the goal of debate is to establish what is morally better, and what everyone should do. They argue about what is right.
The Believers vs. The Empiricists

On a recent video I did with Rich Cooper and Dr. Shawn Smith one point of debate was whether or not the idea of Hypergamy should be used as a “predictive framework” for understanding intersexual relationships. The topic of our discussion was the merits of Hypergamy in its expanded, robust, definition and whether it’s a reliable metric to compare people’s relationships (married and dating) against. As you might guess a lot of Red Pill awareness centers on Hypergamy; it’s why I continue to stress it even when my detractors lie about my interests. It’s really that important.

But as we we’re debating the ins and outs I posed another question to Dr. Smith, “If Hypergamy is not a reliable predictive framework for understanding intersexual relationships, then what is a better one?”

I wasn’t being facetious, nor was I trying to hit Shawn with a gotcha question; I genuinely wrote this question down in my preparatory notes for the show. If not Hypergamy, in its expanded definition, (that describes women’s innate mating strategy) then what is a good outline by which we might judge women’s (and men’s) motives, incentives and behaviors with respect to their mating strategies.

Do women even have mating strategies defined by their innate, evolved, natures? Or are their sexual, reproductive decisions purely an act of cognitive will, as defined by their socialization? If 100,000 years of human evolution didn’t shape women’s reproductive strategies, then what are we left with that explains the commonalities we see women using (with our new order data gathering) in their mate selection and breeding (or aborting) habits? Is it entirely freewill and personal choice? We’re certainly meant to believe it’s “her body, her choice” and the decisions are an extension of her cognitive will.

Yes, I get that it doesn’t have to be one or the other. The possibility exists that it’s both nature and nurture affecting women and men’s mating strategies – and certainly choice is involved in the outcome of those strategies. I’m more inclined to believe it’s both, or at least we want to believe our conscious decisions are what’s pulling the strings. I’ve been in all the livestream debates when we asked the question, “Do women have agency?” and if not then are we our Sister’s Keeper? The more moralistic a guy is usually the more he’s likely he is to include women’s lives to his list of masculine duties and personal responsibilities.

The underlying assumptions in all these accounts is “Aren’t we better than this?”

As reasonably rational, self-aware creatures, with what we presume is freewill and a liability of personal responsibility for the choices we make when exercising that freewill, then haven’t we evolved above all our base impulse? If not, then shouldn’t we have by now?

Every day I harp on about the fallacy of the Blank Slate that most old order thinkers can’t seem to disabuse themselves, but if we are in fact “above it all” then the fallacy of the Blank Slate, as well as the notion that we might ever be influenced by our evolved natures is all a moot point. If our conscious selves are in fact better than our evolved natures then the variables of evolution are rendered meaningless. All that matters is the self and developing our consciousness to rise above our conditions.

Our conscious minds are capable of overriding our innate natures. We can, sometimes do, kill ourselves by not eating. A fast or a hunger strike is something we can consciously do as an act of will. A sense of righteousness and virtue can get mixed into that conscious and our will supersedes our innate nature (we get hungry and need to eat or we die). It doesn’t change the operative physical state that our bodies need certain things. We often commit suicide as an act of will or the conscious act of our depressive emotional state. Again, will (however it’s defined) overrides our physical conditions, but how much of what we believe is our willpower is uninfluenced by the same physical conditions, environment, upbringing, socialization and personal circumstance that we hope to rise above?

Very soon, perhaps within my own lifetime, we will be able to genetically engineer humans. In 2018 a Chinese scientist broke codes of ethics to create the first gene-edited baby. The science, if not the technology, is already here. The possibility exists that human beings, through sheer force of will, can custom engineer our physical states to conform to what our ideologies would tell us is preferable. If you’ve ever seen the movie Gattaca you’ll understand the implications of this technology. It’s this author’s opinion that we are living in a time when the ideologies we subscribe to today will affect the ethics of what we engineer into the humanity of tomorrow.

Gattaca is science fiction, but the philosophical questions it poses are very real now. From a objective, humanist perspective this raises a lot of interesting questions. Should we engineer-out of humanity “diseases” like Down’s Syndrome? What about sickle cell anemia? If a gay gene is ever discovered (I don’t believe homosexuality is genetic), should we edit it out of humanity to ensure “normal” heterosexual human beings in future generations?

The Chinese scientist who broke the rules of ethics was reprimanded for his experimentation. “When the news broke, peers in China and abroad condemned him for manipulating life’s building blocks using a relatively untested gene-editing tool.” But why? Chinese official declared his experimentation illegal. It’s entirely possible that a new race of superior humans could be engineered to be better ‘adapted’ to live longer, be smarter, more immune to certain diseases, possibly eradicate some disease and make for a stronger human species. Why would it be wrong or unethical to strive for “perfection”?

Have we not elevated our will above our physical limitations? Or are we using our physical conditions as an implement of our will? We’ll find out soon, but our ideological bent and the ideas of what right and wrong is most certainly influenced and defined by the realities of our physical selves.

Rise of the New Order

This was a comment from Jack about the rise of the New Order:

Rollo, the digital age has ruined us. Culture and pop culture today move at an alarming rate, what was hip now won’t be in the next year or month, society has never moved this fast and as a result the new way is merely a day away from being the old way. The demon’s out of the ring now, no turning back, and there’s no real way to deal with the modern age.

If you are not born into greatness, or utilizing the vast knowledge of the net to surpass everyone and stay there, you get nothing. It’s now the same way with women, previously, our worlds were smaller and hypergamy wasn’t as out of control. There were checks and balances, God and church being two of them, shame was a motivator for keeping women in check as they don’t understand loyalty like men. Now, they have infinite access to all top men, with upwards access to all jobs, and no reprecussions for acting in their very best