A lot has been written about how a man who finds The Red Pill will go through the Kubler-Ross model of grief, also known as “the 5 stages of grief”. I myself have written two essays on the subject, one dealing with the 5 stages in general, and one focused on the anger phase. The interesting thing is that while a lot of energy has been spent talking about the anger phase, very little has been spent on the other 5 stages.

I suspect that the reason for this is that while a great majority of men who find The Red Pill, will either end up in the denial phase or the anger phase, there is much drop-off during the anger phase. To be frank, many men who find the red pill find themselves incapable of moving beyond the anger phase and simply remain there, utilizing a wide range of defense mechanisms to avoid having to deal with the problem.

The most common ones being:

Reaction formation where the person who still desires women but feels betrayed by womankind lashes out at women that he is attracted this is very commonly done via the “Chad & Stacy” meme. The lashing out at “Chad” is the same defense mechanism whereby the person wanting to be the target of Stacy’s affection, lashes out at the man who is actually the type of man Stacy desires. In a sense, this is the utilization of Law 36,

Law 36: Disdain the things you cannot have: ignoring them is the best revenge

Except, they forgot about the “ignoring” part and instead spend much time and resources lashing out.

Projection, is something I hate to reference simply because it’s over-used to the point of reaching cliche or meme levels, however in this case, I find it to be rather accurate. Frequently this takes the form of a man in the anger phase, who is struggling to balance his remaining blue pill ideal of being a “Good Man” with his internal turmoil. As a result, he projects his anger, disillusionment, entitlement and the result of his ego-injury to women or alternatively to the men who woke him from the illusion.

Sublimation, can quite easily be referenced through the common statement “Self-improvement is masturbation“, the man in this case channels his anger towards productive ends, such as developing their body and/or mind. I’ve advocated this as the best alternative among these reactions, because as a man’s value increases the better the world responds to him, thus giving him some of the results that he desires.

Displacement, the final of the common anger defense mechanisms is displacement. I would to some extent characterize this as less damaging than reaction formation and projection, however it tends to be the reaction to the anger phase that causes the most damage to The Red Pill Community. This is where the man feeling immense anger at having his illusions broken, shifts the target of his anger from targets that would get him in trouble, to targets that will not. The typical case being that instead of the anger being focused on a wife, girlfriend, parents or society at large, it is targeted at men who shattered his blue pill illusion.

This is the cliffnotes version, and I would like to do a larger essay on this subject in the future, however I decided to write this as an introduction to the topic of this essay, namely the bargaining phase.

Movement in the Stages

The Kubler-Ross model is somewhat designed like a process model, when one only reads the short version, it appears very much like a straight forward A-B-C-D-E model, as depicted below.



This model seems pretty straight forward, a person progresses from Denial, to Anger, to Bargaining, Depression and then finally reaches a stage of acceptance. They have adequately processed their grief, and can move on in life. However, the reality is a bit more messy, as it often is, which is depicted in the second process model.

In this model, there is only 1 change, which is the addition of being able to transition between stages, in the first model, there are only 2 stages, you are either in a phase, or in the next phase. In this model, you can move forwards, backwards or remain in the same position, this ability to move both backwards and forwards in the model is a central explanatory concept.

A man finds The Red Pill [because reasons], at this point there are two options, if he has not walked up to his crucible, he will most likely write it off and move on. If he is at his crucible, usually an event that caused a glitch in the blue pill illusion, he may become intrigued and continue to read the material in order to familiarize himself with it. Should he continue, he is likely to arrive at the anger stage, where he becomes angry for a multitude of reasons:

A) His ego investments are challenged

B) His view of women and men are challenged

C) His view of the world is challenged

Once in the anger phase, the man has 3 potential outcomes, he can regress to denial, stop engaging with the material and move on to other pursuits. He may remain in the anger phase forever, this often manifesting in either anger with women, anger with men, or general anger towards the world for having wronged him, this gives rise to bitterness and disgust and an incel is formed. He may revert to the denial phase and go about his day to day life, always having that nagging knowledge in the back of his head. The third possibility, he moves on to the bargaining stage.

The Bargaining Stage

Once the man enters the bargaining stage, things become quite interesting. In the anger phase the man faced the potential loss of his ego investments, had to come to terms with the challenge to many of the axioms on which he had based his life, and thus has to accept a great deal of sunk costs. As the anger subsides, they enter the 3rd stage, bargaining, summed up very well by an anonymous Wikipedia author:

The third stage involves the hope that the individual can avoid a cause of grief. Usually, the negotiation for an extended life is made in exchange for a reformed lifestyle. People facing less serious trauma can bargain or seek compromise. [1]

In the bargaining stage, the man seeks to negotiate for the continued investment in his blue pill illusion and his idea of being the good boy. This is often where the Hegelian dialectic becomes of great interest to them, being that it is based on the fact that a thesis, in this case the blue pill, gives rise to an antithesis, namely the red pill, and thus they start to search for the final piece, synthesis of the two. The compromise between Blue Pill and Red Pill that would permit them to retain some of their previous world-view and ego-investments.

The primary reason why this is such a predictable path, is that the same schism took place already, several hundred years ago when Continental philosophy split from analytic philosophy, primarily driven by Immanuel Kant for which his motivation is summarized in Critique of Pure Reason as the following:

“I had to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith.”

In the time, analytic philosophy primarily rooted in Britain had in short order throughout the renaissance and enlightenment laid waste to many deeply held beliefs about our world. Men like Thomas Paine led an assault on religious thought in a philosophical battlefield, while men like Isaac Newton dispelled many of the established beliefs about how the world worked.

However, many people, including Kant saw this transition towards materialism and rationalism as being the death blow to faith and meaning. Thus, Kant wrote the two works that gave rise to continental philosophy, namely “Critique of Pure Reason” and “Critical of Practical Reason“, the former being a treatise on the limitations of reason, the latter a manifesto on the limitations of empiricism.

Kant’s thinking gave rise to what is now known as the Continental school that includes such philosophers as Nietzsche, Hegel, and Kierkegaard. The core differences between the analytic and continental schools being, that in the analytic school the pervasive view is that the natural sciences is the most accurate/only method for understanding natural phenomena. Secondly analytic philosophy often treats problems as discrete, meaning that they can be analyzed as separate from their context, whereas continental philosophers most frequently hold the view that a problem must be seen as being influenced by conditions such as space, time, context, language and culture. The third and perhaps most important aspect, is that analytic philosophers view themselves as interpreting the world (The end of philosophy (the means) is the interpretation) wheres continental philosophers view the point of philosophy as being creating change.

The Red Pill Framework is a work in the analytic (Materialist, empirical rationalism) and to some extent Austrian tradition (economics) primarily relying on Praxeology, being the deductive study of human action as a methodology and taking the form of a distributed grounded theory project. The inputs being research in the fields of human behavior, evolutionary psychology, biology, combined with field observations and testing.

For instance the early Pick-up artists that laid the foundation for what is now The Red Pill framework, observed the behavior of women, and the behavior of men that were successful at seeking and achieving mating success, created hypotheses, that were then field tested in experiments, and thereafter the results published in field reports. The hypotheses and theories that arose from this was then field tested by other men and found to result in an increased success in mating.

Over time, people developed a curiosity that went beyond simply, “how does it work?” and “What to do?“, and started working on “why does it work?“. This is what gave rise to the red pill. It is a work of research grounded very firmly in the empiricist tradition, of observing nature, formulating a theory, formulating hypotheses to test the theory and then adjusting the theory to fit with the results of the experiment. Secondly, in the rationalist tradition of extrapolating from the data, meaning creating logical arguments based on premises.

The bargaining stage requires that the man reject empiricism, much like Kant had to reject knowledge. This gives rise to “The God Pill“, which is a flippant term used to describe a man who either comes to bargaining from anger or regresses to bargaining from depression.

To be anecdotal for a minute, I’ve often seen men who were very successful with women and reached the acceptance stage where they were able to love and cherish women for what they are, rather than what they ought to be, only to face a new crucible, frequently a form of ad hoc gap analysis between their blue pilled dream world and their red pill reality. Where they find themselves regressing first into depression, then back into bargaining, where they find “The God Pill”.

The regression can be a result of many things, however it has one common denominator among all of them, which is the shift of focus from a materialist-empiricist world-view to one which is much more conceptual and abstract. This is a natural progression for most men, however there is a difference between progression and rejection.

Summary and Conclusions

The scope of Red Pill theory as it pertains to intersexual dynamics, has always been rooted in empiricism and analytic philosophy meaning observing a given problem or set of problems as removed from context, and viewing the world as is, rather than trying to change it. This does introduce some natural limitations, or gaps if you will, that men in the bargaining phase are apt at exploiting, and that unscrupulous persons may use to manipulate these men.

For instance, the “Uncle Ben” fallacy [2] can easily be exploited, as we have seen when women enter the red pill with the perspective “It’s all true dammit, but now that I admitted it, you have to use the Red PIll to improve the world for the Sisterhood“.

The Red Pill being focused on determining materialistic, empirical reality of intersexual dynamics is also greatly focused on evolutionary biology arguing that forces such as hypergamy and Briffault’s law, are innate adaptations in all animals. Further, that adaptations such as solipsism is a consequence of humans being the only species (that we know of) that both has the capacity to, and need to rationalize our behaviors.

The Red pill is concerned with the laws of nature, not the laws of man, and ideology, meaning, morality, religion, are all human inventions. If a man were to kill 6 billion humans and all the animals of the Earth, our human conceptualizations would without a doubt label such a man as wicked, if a virus or a comet does the same, that is neither wicked nor good, it just is.

The materialist-empirical view can appear quite bleek, Rollo Tomassi, ever the optimist is fond of saying “Hypergamy doesn’t care“, myself being more realistically inclined tend to say “The Universe doesn’t care”, this is the reddest pill to swallow, the universe does not care if you live or die. Most people don’t care either, most people do not give a shit about you.

This is the realization that sends men into the depression phase, and then running back to bargaining, as willing victims to anyone who can offer them an ideology, a world-view, a “God Pill” or some form of compromise that allows them to maintain the illusion that any one of us matter in the large scheme of things.

I’m hardly the world’s biggest fan of Jordan B. Peterson, but his paraphrasing of Nietzsche that when one removes religion, one leaves a void in a man that is then ripe to be filled by something else, is quite correct. It’s also supported by one of my favorite quotes by Karl Marx

“Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.” Karl Marx [3]

The Blue pill illusion offers men the belief that all their follies, failures, and experiences as related to intersexual dynamics have a greater meaning, that if they persevere they will be rewarded with the mythical “One” which will usher in a new era of their life where their life is complete. Which will grant their life meaning and make their suffering worth it. Much in the way religion told the starving, the hungry and sick that they are suffering now, but they will inherit the Earth in the end.

The Blue Pill illusion is there because men live in a condition that requires illusions, by removing the illusion before they have found the means and the purpose to rectify that condition, they are left with a gaping hole that they are bargaining with anyone to fill.

Join me next time when I’ll be talking about the Depression phase.

Sources and references:

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%BCbler-Ross_model

[2] “With great power comes great responsibility”

[3] http://marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/intro.htm