Case Study: Cycles of Failure and the Degradation of Trust

I joke around and act flippant on social media about men who are working on having better relationships. It’s good entertainment and humor cuts to the core better than long winded soapbox sermons. However, I do take it seriously in my work, as for every collection of guys who flop around like fish, there’s one with real pain, real work, and real success; and I define success by the mans own terms, not mine or some universal standard (which doesn’t exist anyways.)

The man’s pseudonym was Persaeus, but I’ll call him Billy, short for Beta Billy, or the antithesis of Chad. This particular field report was from 2014, and it’s one of the hundreds I studied in order to deliver my first two Praxeology books, Frame and Dread. If you’ve read them, you’ll recognize a lot of the concepts in both books. When Billy screwed up you’ll see it in contrast to the Tetrahedron of Frame, or Active and Passive Dread, because these were the guys who made all the mistakes one can make which gave the next generation of guys, myself included, the information they needed (the Intellectual Pillar) to stop making mistakes in their own lives.

Good men can learn from their experience. Great men learn from others experience.

And he wouldn’t have gotten where he is without the experience of others to draw on. I’ve seen what happens when guys don’t have guidance like that. My own step father was one. When his life got hard, and it was entirely self inflicted, he didn’t have anyone, and so he defaulted to his instincts. Guys instincts don’t work in the modern world, in fact, they make things worse. His life got incredibly worse. Billy was better, he ended up having cycles of success and failure. I’ll get to his summary field report in a bit, but first.

Ghost of Odessa

Softbone

Guys will hit hard times, that’s life. They may be in a relationship with a good woman. When hard times hit, they also default to their instincts. Women’s default is to look for a Monkey Branch. They may hold onto the hope their man recovers longer than some, or less than others, but eventually they will all look out for themselves, and in extension, their children.

Evolutionarily, we are all functionally cavemen with cellphones and Birkenstocks. Women don’t have the strength to hunt or defend against aggressors, so they solve these problems differently. And like the monkeys that the reference refers to, they look for a soft landing before leaving.

This isn’t about that. Most guys can figure things out, eventually. The current divorce rate is hovering around a third; a third of marriages don’t make a decade. This is good news, it used to be half. This is also bad news, since the difference is largely that people don’t even bother getting married (and rightfully so.) This means that two thirds get it sorted out. Sure, it’s half of men relegated to loveless and sexless marriages of habit, but if it’s longevity you’re after, it counts as a win.

Billy didn’t want that. Most men with self respect don’t either. Why live in a comfortable misery? So they do things and get results. It creates something I call the degraded cycle of trust. The first time he gets his act together, the wife comes back to sanity and things move on. But a little bit of trust is gone. And the more cycles a guy has of failure, the stronger the feeling of ‘is this real this time, or is it like last time?’ becomes.

It means every time things get bad it gets harder to get back to normal. Ideally, I would love it if guys read the notes from every Billy out there, and only makes their mistakes once, but we didn’t have notes to share for a long time. Even now, the material in the Red Pill is dwarfed by pop-sci self help pablim like 12 Rules for Life. As a result, I have a ton of research to work with.

Men may succeed in their own individual way, but they fail in similar ways.

You’ll read about small failures, like Billy not being able to see future behavior from past behavior. His wife ditched a six year relationship after two months and expected he wouldn’t get the same e.g. he will double down on his comfort while ignoring the problems. Working more to provide more for his family, and avoid being present, which causes … problems e.g.

There’s more in there. Part of the value in reading this is discovering them for yourself.

It’s easy to see the fault in other guys actions than your own. Ones ego is too close to the situation to be objective, makes excuses, ignores things; The best we can do is practice the repetition of seeing the patterns and writing them down in our own lives. That delay between writing our problems down then reading them later gives some distance.

The other benefit is in seeing resolutions. It’s a skill I picked up in my time in the Royal Canadian Navy. Courses, preliminaries, deployments, sailing schedules … they can get rather grueling. The one skill that helped me and others get through them is to see that it’s all been done before. You’ll see people stupider and weaker and drunker than you get through them, which gives you the confidence to get through them. Psychologically, it’s much easier to accept short to medium term pain if you know what comes out the other end.

It’s the light at the end of the tunnel. In Billy’s case, he’s still with her, they are still having sex on the regular, and he has broken free from the cycle of failure and the degradation of trust.

And if you can learn nothing else from this, you can learn that these toxic cycles are born from easily observable behaviors, so long as you can take your ego out of the equation.

These are the Emotional Pillars of Frame. The human failings that make our lives harder than they need to be, the instincts that work against us. Like failing vestiges of a hunter-gatherer brain in modern times, we have to learn when our feelings are hurting us and let our frontal lobe take on the heavy lifting. It’s hard, our brains fight us to maintain the status who (ego) and we often have to sidestep the issue and attack it from a sideways angle.

I refer to Killology in Frame, where military research in the World Wars got around our instincts against killing in order to become a more effective fighting force. If these skills help us in combat, they can help us in the bedroom.

This is why the Red Pill space involves a lot of stories, which we call Mental Models. Narrative structures, that while mostly factual and accurate, don’t shy away from using parable in order to get us acting in the right way. It’s a joke I’ve often used, where if you could tell a man that the moon is made out of cheese and this got a man to hit the gym 3 days a week, then as far as we are concerned, the moon is made of cheese.

In other words, you’re not supposed to take this stuff literally, but you are to take it seriously.

The solution that gets me riled up is castrating activities. Billy will have one in his field report, but I’m still surprised by how many guys take a lackluster relationship, sexlife, fear of losing their kids etc. And resolve to castrate themselves as a solution. It’s not suicide, but it’s in the same stadium as suicide.

Some turn to drugs, alcoholism. In extreme cases you see men ‘transition’ into hideous ham beast looking women who barely pass. 5PM stubble and a wig. They don’t want to abandon their families, but the helplessness causes them to kill their own sexdrive. Instead of a solution, they kill the need. It’s not everyone, but it’s enough people to pay attention. Of course no one really cares about the plight of men. I’m watching a modern day hysteria over a woman who strangled her three children in the news this year, and seeing the outpouring of sympathy for ‘Christine Benoit’ is a good reminder that no one cares if men suffer, and everyone prefers women to men.

It’s also been the best recruitment tool for this space. It takes a certain desperation, a complete surrender to the situation to find the He-Man woman haters club at 3 in the morning and read through the material we have. Everything is counter intuitive, goes against all the social norms we hold, and gets nothing but derision from the first, second, third, and fourth estate.

It’s not as extreme as trooning out, but it’s in the same stadium. And luckily, it’s the one space that has: men who are in dire straights, and, men who don’t want to wallow in their misery together like victims.

So now. Billy. And afterwards, some more analysis and lessons to take home with you.

I have implemented various components of the red pill praxeology throughout my 25 year marriage; but in am incongruent manner that has proved unfulfilling. The cycles of failure got to the point I considered chemical self-castration coming here.

Me Before Marriage

Frame

Dread