Six Observations About Redpill Overdose

At dinner last night, my two teenage daughters, neither of whom has ever been on an official date,  sat around making fun of alpha males, or rather men who say they’re alpha males.  

Not just alphas, sigma males too came in for a roasting. 

A sigma male, they told me, is an alpha who isn’t afraid to order a girly drink.

That conversation was a testament to just how mainstream manosphere and redpill ideas have become in the last twenty years. Concepts that once dwelt exclusively on private blogs and a few magazine-style websites now pop up in random YouTube recommendations and in conversations with 13-year-olds. 

Years ago, this content, while not wholesome, was, at least, practical. It consisted of core principles that boiled down to benign insights like “women are attracted to men they admire” and “a man should strive to be the best in order to attract women.” Over the years, what was once a practical guide focused on helping men level up their dating game has become a comprehensive worldview akin to a new religion.

As red pill content has grown more extreme and its adherents more doctrinaire, I have been critical of these excesses on X-that-used-to-be-Twitter and have witnessed their rage first hand. 

Here are a half dozen things I’ve noticed.

1. They have legitimate grievances

To be fair, redpill rage didn’t come from nowhere. The structure of our society has alienated young men. Widespread fatherlessness has left many with no real life role model. The social changes brought about by liberal feminism really have made dating and marriage harder for many men.

Men using the Internet to connect and seek solutions to these problems was inevitable, and while that development may, in the long run, only add damage to damage, denying that the movement arose as a reaction to legitimate problems would be a lie.

2. They think intersexual relationships are a team sports

If you read their comments, it doesn’t take long to see that redpillers are no longer just interested in attracting women or increasing their dating options. Adherence to redpill ideology is now barely about women at all. It’s about men bonding with men. 

The movement has become a way for fatherless men to feel connected and accepted by other men through engaging in a rite of passage. That rite of passage, unfortunately, is hating women.

Intersexual relationships for these guys are a team sport. Men and women have conflicting interests and there is no win-win solution. The teams don’t have to fight to the death, but in the end one must be conquered. This battle, they believe, recreates itself in the intimate life of each individual. You can play for team men or team women, but you must be on the field. Opting out is not an option.

3. They are angry at women and at men

Many men are drawn to the movement as a means for venting their rage. At the same time, their view of intersexual relations as pitched battle gives rise to even more anger.

Women are the main target. You can see it in their Twitter comments, read it in the articles they write, hear it on their podcasts. Women are the oppressor class who, through trickery, have manipulated government, the courts, and the media to stack the deck against men.  The only way to survive such a hostile and gynocentric culture is to take the red pill, to see how things really are, and to act accordingly. 

These guys are not, however, only angry at women. They also target men whom they perceive to be traitors to the cause. Even men who have some sympathy for the movement but who are critical of its excesses are hated because their call for balance and moderation is seen as treason.

4. They are the product of propaganda and cannot think with precision.

The red pill movement now is, like the worst parts of fundamentalist religion, motivated only by emotion and a deep sense of grievance.

I recently reposted a video of a social scientist saying the number one reason women stop having sex in marriage is that they lose a sense of emotional safety. This obvious and commonsensical truth drew in the redpill horde. 

They screeched. They screamed. They bellowed and swore. 

None of it amounted to anything. The chief counterargument they produced was that claiming women want emotional safety in marriage must be false because some women have sex with dangerous men.

The notion that men who are dangerous might, for a time, produce a feeling of emotional safety in a woman was lost on them.  Any ability to think in multidimensional ways has been squashed beneath the heavy weight of ideological conformity.

5. They are convinced women cannot talk about their own experiences

Their fallacious reasoning probably goes unchallenged in online redpilll spaces. Outside those ghettos, their arguments and behavior seem both ludicrous and juvenile. 

However, like all ideologues, they are trained more in dismissing critics than in engaging with them. 

The most important means of dismissal for these guys is simply to wave away any arguments or corrections because they come from a woman. Never believing women when they talk about what they need or want is bedrock red pill doctrine and these guys defend it fervently. 

The result is continual enslavement in their corrupt and immature worldview. Their ideas can never be refined, moderated or enhanced because all information that might prompt revision is, from the get go, considered enemy propaganda.  

This alone means there is little hope most of these guys will ever mature into decent, full grown men.

6. They can only be challenged to grow through experience

Any hope that the millions of men shaped by redpill content will grow into reasonable and steady men must be rooted in the hope that life itself will correct them.

Perhaps they will, against their better judgment, fall in love. Maybe they will meet older, more mature men to whom they will listen. Maybe they will have daughters.

Any of these things have the potential to crush the ideological shell they’ve built around themselves.

But, the thing most likely snap them out of their trance is suffering. I do not wish suffering on any of these guys. Most of them have probably had their share already. 

Life, however, is not always kind, and rarely is it merciful to the ideologies we indulge. Suffering and loss have a way of driving us out of our ideological camps in search of the truth. 

Let’s hope the redpillers, some of whom are not far from the truth now, find it in full without enduring much suffering and without causing more than they already have.