Nash is a better listener than I am, and has a remarkable ability to learn from others, and synthesize various frames of reference and memes into a cohesive whole, then apply that to his real lived experience to further refine and synthesize, and then write down his ideas. He also comes up with new ideas from his experiences, contemplates and shares them.
This is more than merely scholarly; it’s practical application with skin in the game. It’s not keyboard jockeying.
He also applies his knowledge of game very diligently and cheerfully.
Oh, and he’s remarkably proficient in camaraderie and makes diplomacy seem normal, while at the same time not being Mr. Nice Guy about trying to appease wrong views or to fit in. He’s quite happy to disagree with anyone, no matter their social position.
I might be doing him a disservice to point him out, as power corrupts. If people start to look to him as an authority, that could:
- Give some people false hope to think that there are shortcuts and that all you have to do is listen to and emulate someone who has things more figured out. That can’t work because we all have to do the work of synthesizing other word views into our own, unique, lived experience. Your created embodied worldview will certainly be different than anyone else’s.
- Lead Nash to take on the role of teacher, which unfortunately usually makes people harden and settle into the views that they repeat while teaching. The whole reason people become teachers was by learning new things that were undiscovered, and by being open to change. Unfortunately being a teacher usually has the reverse effect. Possibly why new science discoveries are usually made by the young up and comers, who are not yet in any position of authority.
So some of his comments on other blogs are worth a read. Here is a comment where he disagrees that Blackdragon’s approach to relationships is as universally applicable to men with capability and interest to apply it as Blackragon assumes. Nash says that MOST men could not practically apply BDs system because most of us, and most women, are quite simply too jealous.
I agree with Nash about this, and have mentioned before it’s one reason I could never apply his system. The other reason is that I have no interest (and probably no ability) in limiting bonding with fuck buddies; I don’t think it’s in the least bit psychologically practical for me to DECIDE how much in love I will become with a girl that I really like and am having regular sex with, and who is desperately into me.
Nash says:
“With non-open, covert lovers on the side… With perhaps an “understanding.” What is that understanding? That she might fuck another guy on the side.
— BlackDragon
Let’s start at the beginning, where we agree. Do attempts at monogamy *often* lead to “cheating?” Yes, we agree there.
In my experience, an “open” relationship means it’s OVERT. If it’s not OVERT/VERBAL (=pre-approved), then affairs are considered “cheating.” “OPEN” means some kind of verbal agreement that one/both will see other people. That works for some people — and I assume it works 1000% for you (probably less than 1000% for some of the girls you date, but that’s irrelevant).
I argue that JEALOUSY is an unbeatable force for MOST people. YES, we should see the world through rationale analysis. Yes, yes. Agree again. But that doesn’t mean you’ll “feel” good if you have any evidence of your partner fucking someone else. (If you’re in a rel where you don’t feel good… you must have a strong motive to do so.) And it’s a step WORSE if they need to tell you about it… it’s dumb, and/or graceless. I’d argue (since there are more graceful solutions), that it’s insulting.
NEW CONCEPT: If you have some **vague suspicious**, you will suffer less than if you know for certain, and even less than if your partner is talking about it, and even less if you catch them in the act. This might be subtle for some people, but it is not for me. Lance Mason would say “if it’s far away, it has less of an impact.” Lance is a genius at this level. I agree with him… you don’t have to.
So… the UNDERSTANDING is essentially traditional wisdom. Imagine a grandmother, telling her married daughter… “yes, dear, he might take a girl on the side from time to time, and this too is part of marriage. He takes care of you. You have a family… don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.” Timeless solution. The best I’ve seen.
The UNDERSTANDING already exists. And I think you know it. Many reject this model. But that doesn’t mean that many married couples don’t know “something is going on,” but don’t probe (and certainly don’t brag about it)… as the marriage has value for them enough that they don’t want destroy is because “she fucked the pool boy” or “he banged a cocktail waitress on a business trip.” The reason those are “classic examples” is because… they are classic examples. Again, I think you (or at least some of your readers) know all this. This is what I mean by “an understanding.”
If my “wife” (again, I’m a player, I’m not married) said, “Honey, I love you so much… but I want to fuck Chad from work:” In some scenario (assuming we’re sexless), I might be okay with that… but I would think she was clueless cunt to announce it. And if she said it in front of my friends (making me a public cuck), I would congratulate her on becoming a divorcee. “Hey Chad, she’s all yours… good luck, pal.”
This ^ is SLEDGE HAMMER HONESTY, (c) me 2019. Some people like it… usually only 1/2 of a rel. The other 1/2 hates it… or may tolerate it (out of weakness, fear or other motives).
For most people… the more explicit it is… the more it’s intolerable.
FULL POLYAMORY (the saddest most ridiculous version of this, IMAO) is full of one-sided love for the VERBAL OPENNESS, the explicit open rel. I have watched this community try to survive jealousy and hurt… I have no evidence they have (beyond isolated examples). That community is full of fools trying to do “the impossible,” and they suffer for their insane liberal “openness.” Mostly the guys… as they think it sounds good, but can’t get dates of their own, and their pink-haired GF announces she has a date with “green hair boy,” and her primary tries to “be big” and hates every minute of it. Sad. “Openness” run a muck.
So… what I am pointing to, is something you already know exists. You’ve all seen it in the relationships around you… you’ve been out to dinner with a couple where you “had a hunch” that one/other was having an affair. So did they. So did everyone. There is that UNDERSTANDING again… we all know it. And it’s an ugly truth, but it works. It’s less insulting than other solutions.. so it works (better than most alternatives).
And the reason those relationships survive… is because it is NOT explicit. If it was, except for “swingers” (which do happily exist, but are rare), that would be a very uncomfortable dinner.
I’m not challenging your model, man. Have at it. I am sure it works… for you. And for other men. Many of which I respect.
But the JEALOUSY CRITIQUE is valid. I think it applies to MOST people. And the “French Marriage” addresses that. And I like it. It’s proven. It’s sophisticated. It’s respectful. It’s smooth.
I do a version of it as a single guy… I date multiple women… I have had several LTRs, and overlapping LTRs, with other dates happening as well… and I tell exactly NONE OF THIS to any of the girls. No promises… but no SLEDGE HAMMER HONESTY either. I think it’s smoother. The girls know, they have a hunch…
I like it better. You don’t have to.
And I’m going to copy some of his last post here.
Women CAN be “incrementally” better than others, in that “bigger tits” or a “better smile” can make us more interested and hustle a bit harder. The game of seduction is on us, so the primary drivers of making it work are on us, not the girls. So marginal gains by girls might inspire us. But as it’s on us to start the game, those bits about women aren’t essential. If a woman can follow a man’s lead, the game can begin… even if the surface rewards for a man are +/- a point or two in one direction or another.
But for a man, there are QUANTUM LEVEL skills that can’t be “almost-ed.” There is no “close” in masculinity. There is no “close” in being a leader. You can’t be “almost convincing” when it comes to her spreading her thighs.
This is why the classic Beta/Alpha thing is so persistent. Those “jumps” as Krauser calls it make the all the difference. They are distinct categories, not small tweaks. If you can make the jump… you can have the rewards.
This is why many very attractive men can get a girlfriend, but can’t create choice with women on the fly. They are surface hot, but lack the real drivers that really successful men possess. It is why men with money can find a girl that will spend time with them (sometimes), but it doesn’t at all mean they will “get what they want” from those women. Those men become cash-machines for gold diggers (some of them in the context of marriage) and get worked over.
An aside: lately I’ve been talking about how betas don’t have the reference experiences to be even able to know what it is that they don’t know. They have no idea and keep repeating over and over their clueless beta-viewpoint that a man with money that he shares with his women is just another category of beta. They can’t even begin to imagine having Top Guy frame of reference.
Hooking the girl – through good looks or cash – is a weak start, unless you have the skills to manage her psychology once you have her. Catching a snake is one thing. Enjoying it without being bitten is quite another.
This is rarely articulated. Unfortunately the red-pill/PUA/manosphere/androsphere/MGTOW/Men’s communities on the whole are at a basically grade 3 level of education. They imagine themselves as a university, with a full curriculum, but it’s still basically extremely chunky clunky cartoonishly oversimplified to the point of wrong memes that barely scratch the surface of what is required to maintain strong loving passionate relationships – yet alone strong loving passionate non-monogamous relationships. There is next to no conversation about this at all. And what there is is still very new and barely formed.
So back to Red Coco.
He does a great job of acknowledging some of the “side dishes” associated with wrangling women. How accumulating various kinds of value can make you more attractive on the front end, but also can add depth in the context of a long-term relationship.
I hear him saying that men that have been in the “boyfriend box” a few times know what it’s like to feel a girl chip away at a man’s frame. They can see the warning signs. They might have some skills in detection, if not control. A lot of that is true.
I know what that is like in my own life.
In the last 10 years I had two serious girlfriends where I lived with both of them (very briefly). They chipped away, despite my education in game. I could see it. I could deflect some of it, counter other parts, shock-and-awe her back into my frame… but the “betatization” of relationships is real. I wasn’t able to hold it back with those girls. And as I wasn’t that into them (and particularly that behavior), I chose to get out. My education and my frame weren’t quite what they needed to be… but I was wise enough to know I use boundaries to get back to a good place, a place I knew I could be happy(er)… which was single.
It wasn’t hard. I ended those relationships, got free, got happy. As the song goes… there are 50 ways to leave your lover.
But Red Coco is talking about a skillset that works within the context of an LTR. And I admire that investigation. Which is why I wrote this post.
Red Coco explores the idea that starting Beta can prepare you to function more successfully in longterm relationships. I was inspired by his thinking, but no… I don’t think that is true.
I don’t think being Beta helps, precisely because of the those QUANTUM LEAPS between categories. Those leaps are based on skills and qualities that the previous category fundamentally does not possess. The differences define the categories themselves.
Unfortunately this idea is directly applicable to Rollo and his readers. They are all stuck with the worldview of the underdog, and think that this is the real world.
It’s not the real world! It’s a worldview. That’s completely different.
Or as I put it before: ” He’s completely stuck inside a world that he himself created, and talks from that world, to people in that world.
That’s totally the wrong tactic.
That world is irrelevant.
Don’t be in that world.”
Beta’s learn a lot of bad habits that are hard to shake off. So starting there… will mean it takes years to get even middling success, as you “leak” Beta and girls can smell it, instantly disqualify you. Those Beta-tells push you down a quantum category… back to Beta… and barely fuckable, if fuckworthy at all.
We see this as otherwise “cool players” hook a girl, but they “like her too much,” and they stop running good game. That is a Beta-tell. That is a bad habit of a man that spent too much time in Beta Country and slips back into those patterns in moments of weakness. Once she see Beta… you don’t lose “a point,” you lose a whole leap of status. You’re busted from hero back down to Beta, and then… it’s gets worse and quickly.
For contrast, I’ll tell a story of an old friend of mine. We’ll call him The General.
The General is a piece of work (an imperfect man), but he is not the slightest bit Beta. He can’t imagine thinking that way. He is packed with flaws and many women would laugh at him, but he has always had tremendous control of women, access to women, he can make it happen (not with every woman, but with some girl) any time, any place. He is a proper Natural. He is the same way in business. This goes beyond surface level qualities of “catching” a prospect (be it a woman or a business client). The General is successful on the front end and also has the management skills and behavioral traits that cannot be faked, traits that hold together long-term success.
The General can display HONEST SIGNALS that are proof to many around him that he is in the category of ALPHA, even if he is not particularly Hot Guy. He is a bit short, bald, and kind of fat. But, he can pull with the volume of Hot Guy (if not the quality, but sometimes there too). And then he can run laps around guys that can only attract, as he is a natural Alpha and can control women via his own psychology and knowledge of theirs.
He is also a bit of tyrant. And I think that actually, totally serves his marriage. I have a side-theory that tyrants have the best marriages. Tyrant + restraint + benevolence, that’s the formula. I’m speculating, I’m not married… but that is how you keep the betatization process at bay. But I digress.
I don’t think most Beta’s will ever learn to be like my friend. Not even close. When they try, they will look like they are LARPing (= playacting and incongruent), and they’ll get rejected (rightfully so), or have short-terms gains that don’t serve them or their girls in the long-term.
Much better to start Alpha (which is not a choice for most guys, so this is theoretical) or… come from a family with an Alpha father (or an Alpha culture, etc) that instills this kind of Alpha thinking in you, so you default back to it (based on your upbringing)… even in hard times.
Now I’ll hat-tip to Yohami.
Yohami introduced the concept of TOP GUY to me here in this blog. Top Guy (as I see it) is a fourth category for male SMV I would add to Krauser’s totem pole. It’s above and beyond “hotness” (with that label, Krauser clouds the water a bit).
“Hotness” sounds like physical attractiveness, which is almost meaningless for a guy like me. He adds charisma, fame and lifestyle, but again, not good enough for what gives a man “hand” in a relationship. If you need to spend your time talking about how it’s all about hotness or looks, I think you’re a serious “junior leaguer” and I can’t be bothered to try to convince you otherwise (Full disclosure: I wasted some time doing that this week, and I’m bitter about it).
Looks help… yeah, yeah, yeah. Super boring, low-fidelity point. Swagger (an Alpha trait) trumps looks by a wide margin. A good looking Beta isn’t nearly as attractive as a less “hot” guy with serious swag. And above looks and swag is applied psychology. Mindset, yeah… which is byproduct of a man’s psychology. The player’s own psych (“inner game”) is crucial for Top Guy. And his knowledge of the intricacies of the minds of women.
Top Guy is all that. Looks are almost irrelevant for Top Guy. His swag and his insight into the churning gears of the SMP are what take him beyond hero (let’s say, a relatively successful PUA) into Super Hero – a man that not only has choice upfront with women, but can wrangle them once he has dragged them into his world.
I am no expert in Top Guy. I have had “Top Guy” moments, as I talked about above. When Krauser says he has fought his way into “Hot Guy” category, I think he is saying he has learned some aspects of the life of Top Guy (certainly more than me).
And I think most Top Guys are born, not made (most of them). Even if those skills lay dormant and never “activate their potential.”
Others are made. Like Yohami. I believe that he is Top Guy and wasn’t always. He says so.
I think I have had flashes of Top Guy… because Yohami schooled me so hard (he molded my psychology), and because I have APPLIED IT (this is not about memorizing theories). I have endlessly more to learn. But I make the jump up into Top Guy (always temporarily), particularly when I am working hard and have tons of options (and the Daygame Gods will it so). And then I slip back down into a productive Sigma lifestyle for most of the rest of the time.
Being Beta will never give you Top Guy insight. So you will essentially fight fires (or distract the girl from setting them), but never deal the root cause. She will fuck with a Beta. And fuck with him more aggressively every time he shows his “Bottom Guy” nature.
This was a big part of what Yohami was trying to teach. When you flash Bottom Guy at her… you drop down a quantum leap and you are really in trouble. A lot of the tools you learn in that phase of your life are half-baked recipes that highlight ingredients, but are really… nothing at all. And she knows it. So she works you out of your job (and her life).
It’s how nature intended it to be.
Being Beta may give you insight/motivation that will help you strive to actuate Top Guy… but anything remotely Beta, is the antithesis of Top Guy. Those worlds don’t coexist well at all.
To make it personal again… I don’t know that I could ever run a proper marriage. Perhaps as I have too much in my Beta past. I can run very solid relationships these days, full ROMANTIC REDPILL, but the best tool I have when things get rough is cut it off and start over. Short of that, I control a lot of the negotiation these days by controlling my time (I don’t give her too much), which means anything domestic is out.
I don’t want The General’s life, but I really admire the mettle of that man. He is a traditional guy, one that has had a ridiculously hedonistic backstory, but settled down, and now runs a business, raises two boys, and wrangles his wife (including keeping their sex life functional… which is almost all him, it’s amazing… no way a Beta could do what that man does).
And based on both genetics and his influence, I bet his son’s will have a better shot at Top Guy relationships than most. And certainly more than aspiring Beta’s can hope to know.
The game is played in psychology. And you learn each lesson via your own personal reference experiences. You can’t even begin to earn those reference experiences as an invisible Gamma (you can’t get girls to play). And Betas and The Dateables can earn reference experiences, but often the wrong ones. They learn what it is like to be seen as “high functioning” Beta. That is still a flavor of Bottom Guy.
No, I don’t think starting Beta has many advantages.
Alpha is the place to start (as Yohami would insist), as all of your incoming references are as a man that is seen and treated as Alpha. You learn the right habits… right from the beginning. You always see yourself from the right POV. And so do the girls.
May we all find the balance, the balls, and the boldness to inspire women to see us as Alpha (even if that is concentrated into the limited time we are with those girls). And if we’re good… tastes the fruit of the Top Guy lifestyle. It is from that “upward spiral” that the world opens up.
Update:
A comment I left on BD blog :
First off, about watch what a woman does instead of what she says, perhaps I deserved such an easy low blow from poor word choice, of “some girls will tell you upfront”. Or perhaps its dissimulation via red pill 101 obvious truths. Some girls will tell you before, during or after the fact. Some girls will communicate. Some girls believe. Some girls say and act such that. Ok, I think we can move past the “I’m more red pill than you” phase, and talk about the actual subject.
I get your point, BD, that ideally people can have open relationships where jealousy won’t get in the way of that.
I heard you say that if people are too jealous, they can work on that, and change, and therefore have more satisfying lives and relationships.
But I question if your theory of mind is accurate. I think you are making quite the big leap of faith, in regards to how psychology and neurology actually works.
For some people, regardless of how much experience of non-monogamy they have had, jealousy still happens, and there is no off switch. No counselling or meditation that makes it completely stop. They need to find ways to MANAGE it.
I believe that you have quite the simplistic theory of mind regarding the differences between people, and assume too much that others can be similar to you in their levels of jealousy, and their ability to keep fuck buddies at an emotional arms length.
And what about if a person does want to consciously change their level of jealousy? Should he just try to grit his teeth and bear it, until he just gets over it?
Again, I believe that does a disservice to what is, in favor of what could be. Start with what is, and work with that. For some peopl
e, don’t ask don’t tell is a good framework to start with what is. Jealousy is a hard wired evolved trait – it doesn’t disappear because of a world view or philosophy.
And sure, many people, especially here, will feel it less. Good for you! Don’t get cocky about it and assume that others can or will be able to have low jealousy.
And it’s not just about us men. It’s about managing the girls. You’d have to discard more women that you are into if you are strict about eventually being full disclosure about all details of who you fuck.
Blackdragon replied:
An entire page of text that says “I’m a really jealous guy and there’s nothing I can do about it.”
Good luck with that then. You’ll never be as happy as me though.
If you are not familiar with the term “dissimulation”, BD has been quite helpful in showing how that works throughout his replies.
I’m not going to reply to his last comment, as he’s obviously closed off from touching the idea of theory of mind, even with someone else’s ten foot pole.
Ok, fine. He’s got his head up his ass about his system. That’s completely normal and common; if you become a teacher and get followers, you run that risk. You stop learning, and start repeating yourself.
But such an extreme level of dissimulation tells us more than about his thinking or learning or argument style. It tell us about how he must therefore deal with women.
As his theory of mind about jealousy is so incredibly lacking, and as he lives a non-monogamous lifestyle, he will by necessity have to blow through a lot of girls, and only keep around those that fit with his view. He can’t keep around girls with differing minds and mindsets, because he won’t have the skill to wrangle them. Because he doesn’t care to even acknowledge that different mindsets have any use or validity.
So you get his system, built out of his worldview. It’s not the other way around.
But his system is not as red-pill as he thinks. I would have thought that others would have picked up on it. But again, it’s just as we’d expect. Wherever there are acolytes, there is group mind, and people self censor. They not only don’t want to be rude, but humans are evolved to never question authority, especially within the context of a group that they want to belong to.
So the teacher, and students, get these gigantic blind spots.
The blind spot is that BD gives authority over to his number one girl of who he can fuck or not.
He lets her decide how often he can see his other girls.
He limits his attachment to fuck buddies, and rotates through the fuck buddies if they ever want a deeper relationship or more time.
That’s nothing close to red-pill, in my view.
It’s a system, that works. BD has pretty good knowledge of women, and has one of the most in depth and detailed and well thought out blogs about basic 101 red-pill knowledge, and very simple forms of non-monogamy.
If you already have some experience with girls and non-monogamy and basic red-pill theory, you might not get much out of BD. Theredquest also practices non-monogamy, and was turned on to BDs blog, but said that he didn’t find anything new there to learn.
BD lack any interest in or need for theory of mind (that there are people who are not him and think differently than him), and his setup as a teacher from on high teaching to questioning students below, and his students gladly taking on that lower position, as is usual and to be expected, creates a situation where his head is stuck up his own ass.
That works perfectly well for him. He has a great system that will keep his head up his ass, and it works fine.
But if you have a psychological makeup even slightly different than BD has, his system won’t work for YOU.
I didn’t find BD/s responses to Nash to be adequately subtle.
If I were to try to paraphrase BD’s overarching view, it’s that he has created a system to maximize consistent low drama happiness, and anything that falls short of that is fine for you, but he’s not interested in it, and can explain how other systems fall short.
For instance serial monogamy falls short because you’ll have periods of heartbreak and drama and unhappiness during and for a time after breaking up.
He says that a “don’t ask don’t tell” policy that Nash advocates falls into same category as cheating, and therefore puts the man on edge, which is a type of stressful drama burden, and besides, he’ll eventually get caught and bigger drama will ensue. I think BD puts “don’t ask don’t tell” into the same category as cheating in a too facile way, with a brief hand-wave. They are not the same category. It’s a different thing. Even if it’s a matter of nuance, it requires a different category altogether, and requires dealing with on it’s own terms. There are DIFFERENT pitfalls and problems with a don’t ask don’t tell relationship as compared to an assumed monogamy with cheating relationship.