I appreciate Jared Trueheart taking the time to respond to my criticism of his new book, “The Red Pill Ideology.” If you haven’t read my review, you can see the original here and his response here. I find myself compelled to rebut this response as I don’t think Trueheart was able to really address the core of my concern.

Moralizing:

Trueheart once again fails to recognize the nature of moral philosophies: it cannot be assumed that all people adhere to one moral framework. When writing a book that appeals to a moral framework, it makes sense to first illustrate exactly what moral framework is being utilized and why.

Since the nature of Trueheart’s book is to change minds (presumably those who subscribe to TRP) it would behoove him to first make an argument to convince the readers to come along with him and view the arguments through the lens of said moral philosophy.

But it goes deeper than this. Because Trueheart isn’t asking his audience to analyze a belief system through the lens of a moral philosophy, he’s actively trying to convert his audience to his moral philosophy… without first stating what it is or why we might adopt it over our own.

He makes a very illogical assertion that because my forum bans appeals to a moral authority, that we outlaw the discussion or perspective of having morals, writing it off as simply because we “know [we] are performing immoral acts.”

It’s a most perplexing argument for him to make- doubling down on his moral philosophy and saying that the reason we aren’t swallowing it is because we’re immoral by his standard, begging the question and still doing nothing, absolutely nothing in the least, to convince his audience why his moral system is superior and should be considered as an alternative to TRP.

Ultimately, his point boils down to this circular argument: TRP is wrong because Trueheart’s moral system says so. Trueheart’s moral philosophy is right because Trueheart’s moral system says so. Why should you agree with this? Because Trueheart’s moral system says so.

It’s a lot like playing checkers with a toddler. He makes up the rules, and by those rules, he wins.

It’s funny to me that he mistakes my critique as misidentifying him a “religious zealot.” I suppose it’s a point that flew well over his head, but my point was not that he believes in god. My point was that he believes himself to be god.

Of course, that too is a metaphor, and for simplicity’s sake I suppose I should elaborate that I do not think he actually believes himself to have created the universe, but he DOES believe that his moral frame of reference is universal – and thus shared by all whether we admit it or not.

Lower-case “god” in this case is a literary stand in for whatever or wherever he believes his moral authority is derived from. I don’t know because he never addresses this in his book. I think he should.

This is the reason that “moralizing” is against the rules on TheRedPill forum. Not because people cannot act in moral ways, but because we come from different moral frameworks, so arguments from morality are akin to arguments from any other authority. They’re not convincing, and they operate as just-so arguments.

Don’t do X. Why not? Because X is wrong. Why is X wrong? Because X is wrong.

You can see how this circular reasoning does nothing to aid in the discussion.

And yet- when returning to the hypocrisy argument of men banging sluts while desiring virgins, Trueheart can’t help himself but again pose another moral argument while conveniently avoiding the many, many paragraphs I wrote explaining how it’s only hypocrisy from within his moral framework, and only if you view casual sex as immoral.

He once again makes the appeal, that “boning sluts” takes away “any power from men to shape the world” without once addressing why this is good or bad, and what incentives men have to even desire to be involved in any world shaping at all.

Once again, there is no internal hypocrisy in wanting to bang women, while simultaneously wanting to bag virgins. No, the only problem is that Trueheart doesn’t like it. And like any solipsist, he doesn’t understand that other people have different values than him.

To Trueheart, it is on the male collective to band together and teach women to behave. And any man who works against this violates his framework. But once again, no such framework has been discussed, and no convincing argument for it has been made.

Trueheart wants to create a cock consortium or penis cartel of some sort to collectively bargain with sloots. Good luck wrangling the Chads, my friend.

Biology

Trueheart makes a fundamental mistake when discussing biology and evolutionary instincts. He makes the final claim:

“How convenient that red pill guys forget that biology compels us to reproduce, not to have sterile, promiscuous relationships.”

If you paid attention in highschool biology, you’d probably remember that evolution has no set of goals. There are no purposes. Evolution is the effect of two main pressures against a population: natural selection (don’t die before you reproduce) and sexual selection (be attractive and fertile enough to reproduce).

This process iterates through every generation. Even today.

This does not follow that it gives us purpose. The drive evolution gives us is to satisfy certain urges. It does not necessarily drive us to mate successfully, let alone start families. That one may lead to another is the reason we are alive today. But it’s a retrospective. Evolutionary behaviors drive people to masturbate as well. So far, not a lot of children came from masturbation. (…phrasing) But it makes sense in perspective of evo psych.

In other words, pleasure from sex is literally the reason we have sex and the reason the human population is still here. If evolution programmed us with goals in mind, we’d be able to do it without the immediate pleasure reward, wouldn’t we?

But humans are far from goal oriented. We eat till we’re unhealthy, we fuck when we can’t afford kids, we spend when we need to save.

This is a very poorly understood idea of the mechanisms behind evolution.

Regarding feminism- I do not believe feminism to be the boogey man, nor have I really made any claims that feminism was the brainchild of some angry woman somewhere that put a wrench in the spokes of masculinity and families. Feminism is a cog in the machine, one that has had immediate and direct effects. To discuss the cause of feminism and the factors in the sexual revolution would require a much longer, more in depth conversation. I did, however, make the claim that the reaction is in part due to a feminist policy: no-fault divorce. I don’t see a refutation of this in the rebuttal.

Scientific Rigor and Pragmatism

This is probably the best and only argument that Trueheart has made thus far. But it still fails to fix the major failings of his book.

TRP, and the scientific world at large, has a dearth of well documented studies that might prove TRP’s collective observations because the conclusions fall outside of the overton window. Any studies that may point in the direction of TRP tend to be downplayed or re-contextualized to mean something that falls within the overton window.

But that does not change the nature of our collective observations.

While not to the standards of double-blind studies, it does still pass the test of hundreds of thousands of men sharing notes and checking each other’s works. This does not preclude empiricality. It simply fails to meet the bar of the overton-establishments.

That is why we are okay with the pragmatic approach. This also means that better solutions can be found as the theory gets refined. TRP is hardly settled, it’s an ongoing work crowd-sourced from hundreds of thousands of men.

I have not denied an objective truth through this, only suggested that we do not have the resources or the desire to bother with double blind studies. For most men, getting laid and having a happier life is good enough. That may not satisfy Trueheart, but TRP men don’t care. It is Trueheart who is trying to convince TRP men, not the other way around.

Manning Up

Again, without even a hint of irony, Trueheart says that he is not telling men to man-up and in the very same breath says but “men do have to behave like men in order to continue being men.”

He acknowledges that “man-up” is how society attempts to control men, and then he acknowledges that red pill men are sensitive to this. And then he follows it up with no, but really, man-up.

Sure, his version of “man-up” might not be identical to the feminist or mainstream versions of it. But he commits the very same crime he argues against, and expects the reader to accept it as-is with no justification or rationale for it.

In Trueheart’s world, in order to be a man, you must be his brand of man. You must have kids. You must embrace the family lifestyle. Otherwise you fail to be a man. No irony intended. Seriously, just man up.

In order to better make my argument, I’m just going to copy a paragraph from Trueheart’s response and let it make my argument for me:

“Red pill men unknowingly advocate for a subjective definition of manhood. This makes them exactly as manly as others who think this way, like male feminist and Vassar alumnist Michael Kimmel.”

At this point I struggle not to simply quit this rebuttal and call Trueheart an elaborate troll. According to him, we advocate for a subjective definition of manhood. Then he turns around and states his subjective definition of manhood. You can’t make this shit up.

Market place

“Redpillschool seems to think that the market in this context is a metaphor. It’s not.”

As stated in my original review, Trueheart continues to demonstrate he does not know what metaphors are. Does he think that you literally buy women with money? Perhaps Trueheart does, that would explain why he fails so terribly at his critique.

“And again, the red pill cannot fathom the cognitive dissonance of boning sluts and bemoaning sluts. In a closed market of five men and five women, every man wants four sluts and one non-slut to be the mother of his children. You do the math and when you come to the end you can tell me if those men will choose to have sluts or wives because they can’t have both. Red pill men choose sluts, what does that say about them?”

Trueheart still does not understand what a zero-sum game is. I don’t think it makes sense for me to simply re-type the exact same argument from my original review that Trueheart has yet to address, but I’ll shorten it here again: What’s good for me isn’t necessarily good for you. That’s not hypocritical, that’s competition, son.

“The red pill ideology claims that the sexual marketplace is everywhere. You walk down the street see a woman and you’re in the sexual market place. This is false. The red pill needs this belief in order to justify other beliefs; that any woman can be a slut on the right day, or that women cheat more than men.

The sexual market place is not everywhere just like an economic market place is not everywhere. There’s a farmer in Idaho living on a self-sustaining farm with his family right now. He’s not participating in any market place and dedicated husbands and wives likewise do not participate in the sexual marketplace.”

I’m struggling with this. Does Trueheart believe there’s some sort of auction house that you have to go to to bid on women? Like, on Main St. in some town somewhere?

Your participation in this market is not voluntary, unless you decide you are not interested in mating with somebody else. You do not exit the market if you get married. Ask the 50% of married men who are now divorcees if they (or their wives) actually got out of the market.

Donovan Sharpe Thinks you don’t need romance.

I can’t speak for Donovan Sharpe. I don’t know much about him. I know his affiliation with the 21 convention suggests he might be a cuckold or a lady-boy given what I know of others who have joined. I know the organizer is far from anything I would label “red pill.”

But what I do know is that I moderate the largest red-pill forum on the web (almost half a million subscribers at this point), and his name has come up about 5 times- all in reference to the 21 convention.

I won’t claim to be the authority on all that is red pill, but I think that an established forum such as ours, with half a million subscribers, is substantial enough to make a claim that fringe guys and hucksters who steal our nomenclature do not make them so. Trueheart, for instance, claims to be red pill yet has not demonstrated even an introductory level of understanding of the material.

“According to redpillschool:

“it isn’t hard to understand that, at the very least, the contradiction is resolved by the fact that what’s good for one man is not good for all men. There is no pretense to say that red pill theory or the actions subsequently taken by its followers are good for all men.”

This doesn’t resolve any contradiction. An individual man who bones sluts while bemoaning slutty women is still a hypocrite working against his own biology to create a world he loathes.”

Trueheart still fails to understand that he’s not the center of the universe. He says a man acting on his own accord is working against his own interests. He cannot hide the fact that he’s using this phrase interchangeably with “Trueheart’s interests.”

Trueheart just can’t handle the idea that if a guy wants to bone slutty women, he’s allowed to do it and enjoy it. And as much as Trueheart thinks it hurts him when other guys do it, that does not make an argument.

“I never claimed that men should deny their desires, only that they should control their desires.”

Oh. Okay.

Generalizations

“Here’s a generalization:

Women are like that.

Here’s a statement that is not a generalization:

All women are like that.”

Trueheart can’t handle that a generalization with the word “all” in front is still a generalization.

This makes sense, since Trueheart is an absolutist who doesn’t understand metaphors. Of course he would take hyperbole literally and discard the entire generalization. Because why not? Why would we, at this point, expect Trueheart to use critical thinking when applying red pill theory after what he’s written?

A convincing book, it is not. A convincing rebuttal, it also is not.

Tip redpillschool for their post.