WillCameron

Ah my apologies. I use a proxy. I didn't realize it would link that.

I got into an exchange in my youtube comments. I was talking about the interaction of science and myth, and the commenter criticized that view. Their perspective was that science is an empirical process and attempting to talk about myths of science doesn't do justice to how the process actually comes to discover truths about the world. There view was that viewing science as a process is not a myth about science, as you'll see below I disagreed with this. I wanted to share what I said to get your perspective on whether or not my understanding is actually up to par. I appreciate the help! Here it is: The idea that myths are value-laden stories is not my original redefinition, but comes from the work of many from disparate fields that have converged on something to the effect of the following idea. We have to remember that the human mind is narratological, and so we construct meaning about the world in the form of narratives. Values are what arranges the landscape of things into a forum for action. If I am hungry I value food and so signals of food are going to be highlighted within the landscape of things so that it can become a forum for useful action. Whether through the use of images, tastes, and scents, or with actual language, the organism will then remember the trail and process applied in a narrative sequence so that it can get to that food again in the future. Myths then are not merely collections of allegorical and symbolic fantasy, but specific representations of a specific forum of action given a specific set of higher order values. I can have a myth involving the symbolism of the Hero, but the superficial features of that Hero can change drastically depending on the culture I'm in. From heroic dictator who uplifts our noble people through conquest of "barbarian" peoples to low-born rogue who steals from the rich oppressors. The purpose of such myths, or value-laden stories with symbolic representations, are again, to guide us through the landscape of things such that it becomes a useful forum for action toward the fulfilment of certain goals. If I seek a heroic dictator I am going to be inspired toward very different ends than if I seek a liberator from the dictator. What's more, the scientific process, however empirical, is going to be used for very different ends. Think about how that might change the funding of various areas of research. Sure our science is discovering provisional truths, but of the provisional truths it could discover, it has now been directed in a very different direction. With this definition then we can better understand how both science as absolute truth and as process are myths - value-laden stories with symbolic representations for transforming landscapes of things into useful forums for action. You've said that I am conflating myth and science, but I am differentiating and then re-integrating them. Yes, science is not myth, but the moment we begin to use science we have inevitably re-engaged science with myth. We need to distinguish between them if we want our science to work well, but my point is that they do inevitably interact. For example, if I value reliability, accuracy, and falsifiability then those are turning the landscape of empirically observable things into a forum for action as scientific inquiry. We then have not-entirely-true symbolic representations such as the atom as a solar system, we also have heroes as the humbly exploring scientist, villains as the plagiarizing data fabricator, and even god as the objective, material world that exists beyond our rational view-from-nowhere and can be accessed unmediated for the discovery of truth (not saying every scientist believes exactly that, but just making a point). However empirical, rational, and scientific that myth may seem, it is still a myth - a value-laden story containing symbolic representations meant to transform the landscape of things into a forum for useful action. And that's really my point in making this series - to highlight how we are a mythologizing species and however empirical our methods, our cognition is mythological. We have to reckon with those aspects of our mind if we want our science to work as intended because we inevitably shuttle our myths into the process of science. Even though they should be thought of as different things (notice the value statement there), you can never remove the scientific process from myth as long as humans are using it. Thanks again for reading. How could I be less wrong?

Somebody already talked about this today in this thread - actualized.org/forum/topic/103971-women-don’t-love-you-they-love-the-life-style-you-can-provide/?__cpo=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuYWN0dWFsaXplZC5vcmc My response to their post follows: I think the mistake that people often make when discovering tragedy is that they start thinking everything is "really" tragic. One of the ways that the neuropsychologist Iain McGilchrist has talked about the left brain hemisphere's dominance in our culture is in the left hemispheres need for perfection. So for example, the Platonic Forms are envisioning some metaphysically "more real than our reality" realm in which the perfect form of everything we see exist. All chairs we see are the baser instantiations of the perfect Platonic form of "chair". How this manifests in our culture can often be seen in terms of morality. People realize that perfect altruism can't exist because even in the case of self-sacrifice you do it because you believe it is a good thing to do, and so you feel good knowing you sacrificed yourself for a worthy cause. This realization makes them nihilistic because they think that at base everyone is selfish. The issue here is that we've become so hooked on the "perfect" altruism, that anything less is interpreted as being the worst opposite. We're either perfectly altruistic or we're all the basest form of selfish, which makes sense because it is the mirror image of perfect. It's like the anti-Platonic form or anti-perfection. The truth is that this perfection that the left hemisphere is focused on cannot exist and so comparing ourselves to an impossible perfection we can never reach is foolish. The reality is that true altruism cannot exist, but that doesn't take away from the very real ways in which people asymptotically approach altruism. If someone does something good for you they didn't just do it because they were selfish, but because they actually wanted to help you, even if they also benefitted from that. While selfishness is one motivator, reducing all of our motivators to mere selfishness is to deny the complex reality of all the various reasons we do things. Again, it is the left hemisphere that breaks the world down into parts and hyper-fixates on the one that it believes matters most. It is the right hemisphere that is able to hold reality at complexity, and see that just because one motivator is selfishness, doesn't mean there aren't other motivators that matter just as much and sometimes even more. We have to take in the gestalt, the whole, if we want to understand human motivation. So applying that to the question you have, yes women obviously have standards, but so do you. Are there women whose physical appearance would have you reject them no matter how good of a person they were? Does that mean you love the beautiful woman you marry any less? Our standards create the conditions by which we can create a good, satisfying relationship and it is within that context that "true love" can flower. However much there were standards that needed to be set, that love is no less real because what you consider "real true love" is a perfection that cannot exist. Why create resentful, bitter ideologies around non-existent realities?

It can't be forced, but it can be cultivated. Here's a simple exercise I did when I was recovering from body image issues. I'd stand in front of the mirror after weighing myself and say, "I love you no matter how much you weigh" or "I love you no matter what you look like". A negative thought would arise and rather than hating or rejecting that thought, I'd say, "thank you, I love you even if that's true. I appreciate you trying to help." You have to recognize that even the most hateful thoughts in your head are just trying to help. They have been splintered off and given self-negative or other-negative roles based on the experience that fragmented them. From that perspective then, they really do deserve your love, appreciation, and forgiveness. In some cases you must even ask them for forgiveness. We think we should respond to self-hate with hate, but that just becomes more self-hate. Love your self-hate and you are adding more love. That doesn't mean you agree with those parts, but you just calmly thank them and love them, and then continue to love whatever part you feel you can't love, whether that's weight, a lack of money, a lack of social skills, a lack of intelligence, a lack of whatever. One thing to be careful of is whether or not this exercise becomes overwhelmingly dysregulating for your body. If you find that this happens then take a break and go meditate, trying your best to recenter yourself and calm your agitated body down. It'll be hard work no matter what, but know and honour your limits. Self-love is a verb, so do the actions that make you feel more loving of yourself. One thing I do is take a hot bath with a book and relax as best as I can. Learning to love yourself won't make your dating struggles magically go away, but when done in tandem with nose to the grindstone action, this self-love will absolutely help you improve faster, and help you attract and be attracted to value-aligned, conscious women. By the way, I just wanted to commend you for your response to this thread. You put yourself out there to express your concerns and when people responded to you in sometimes hostile ways you kept your cool and took in their criticisms. Definitely feel proud and self-loving for that. Being assertive and standing up for your perspective is an indispensable tool in life, but so is knowing when to soften and integrate the perspectives of others. I think you've demonstrated that well here.

I feel like that would be spiritual bypassing. Not all problems can be solved through ego dissolution. Sometimes concrete solutions like going out and learning how to meet value-aligned women is the best approach.

For the past year I've been using the plus version of ChatGPT to have it measure short to long essays on their complexity using the Model of Hierarchical Complexity. You can find out more about that here - https://metamoderna.org/what-is-the-mhc/ The prompt I use is - Using the model of the hierarchical complexity, please identify the highest stage of performance that is demonstrated by the following: As to what it's reliability or accuracy is, I don't think it's the best. Unfortunately at this juncture you have to take its word with a grain of salt. However, it can give you a general sense of what you're looking for. Engage it in conversation to get a sense of what is missing, what could be added, and to argue with you about your position. The point is to increase the complexity of your reasoning by having more nuanced and well-thought out understandings of things. Another note is that this is only enhancing cognitive development in the form of essays. This may not necessarily track with "lived development", as in what you're able to produce on the fly or in other domains. I think there is slow crossover over time, but don't take this as gospel. It's one exercise among many that you should be engaging. I also recommend having an embodiment practice like yoga or something similar, along with other spiritual practices. Cognitive development is obviously important, but it is only one facet of development. The most effective development is holistic. You can have the biggest brain but be incapable of going out into the world and enacting that increased capacity. In that situation, what is the point of all that cognitive development? You may as well not have it.

You can't take everything any dating guru tells you as true, but someone like Todd V can help you get a better skillset at meeting women. Remember that cold approach advice is for the section of dating including "meeting and sleeping with" not "in a relationship with". That confuses a lot of guys. Once you have that skillset to a good enough degree it will not only help you meet a woman who aligns with your values, but also help you earn more money in pretty much any field that has even a tiniest sliver of a requirement for soft skills. A friend of mine was literally the first University student intern a company had ever hired after the internship because he had the soft skills. His starting wage is 80k immediately after graduation. Don't discount the power of rapidly connecting with people in a socially and emotionally intelligent way.

Great response, Marshall Rosenberg would be proud. To add to this point, I just released an article that goes into the psychology of the succubus and how it has defined a lot of how we think about sex. Myths are the stories cultures use to explain their reality and orient them through that reality, and even when that mythic language is gone the way they shaped our cognition remains. The manosphere is in many ways a response to the history of the Goddess being murdered by a male hero God, how that is reflected in agricultural societies becoming increasingly dominated by elite males, and the fertility Goddess being recast as a sexual demon. When viewing women through the lens of the succubus much of the manosphere's advice makes sense. For those interested you can read it here - https://metamasculine.substack.com/p/psychology-of-the-succubus

I'd like to hear your response to my own.

I think the mistake that people often make when discovering tragedy is that they start thinking everything is "really" tragic. One of the ways that the neuropsychologist Iain McGilchrist has talked about the left brain hemisphere's dominance in our culture is in the left hemispheres need for perfection. So for example, the Platonic Forms are envisioning some metaphysically "more real than our reality" realm in which the perfect form of everything we see exist. All chairs we see are the baser instantiations of the perfect Platonic form of "chair". How this manifests in our culture can often be seen in terms of morality. People realize that perfect altruism can't exist because even in the case of self-sacrifice you do it because you believe it is a good thing to do, and so you feel good knowing you sacrificed yourself for a worthy cause. This realization makes them nihilistic because they think that at base everyone is selfish. The issue here is that we've become so hooked on the "perfect" altruism, that anything less is interpreted as being the worst opposite. We're either perfectly altruistic or we're all the basest form of selfish, which makes sense because it is the mirror image of perfect. It's like the anti-Platonic form or anti-perfection. The truth is that this perfection that the left hemisphere is focused on cannot exist and so comparing ourselves to an impossible perfection we can never reach is foolish. The reality is that true altruism cannot exist, but that doesn't take away from the very real ways in which people asymptotically approach altruism. If someone does something good for you they didn't just do it because they were selfish, but because they actually wanted to help you, even if they also benefitted from that. While selfishness is one motivator, reducing all of our motivators to mere selfishness is to deny the complex reality of all the various reasons we do things. Again, it is the left hemisphere that breaks the world down into parts and hyper-fixates on the one that it believes matters most. It is the right hemisphere that is able to hold reality at complexity, and see that just because one motivator is selfishness, doesn't mean there aren't other motivators that matter just as much and sometimes even more. We have to take in the gestalt, the whole, if we want to understand human motivation. So applying that to the question you have, yes women obviously have standards, but so do you. Are there women whose physical appearance would have you reject them no matter how good of a person they were? Does that mean you love the beautiful woman you marry any less? Our standards create the conditions by which we can create a good, satisfying relationship and it is within that context that "true love" can flower. However much there were standards that needed to be set, that love is no less real because what you consider "real true love" is a perfection that cannot exist. Why create resentful, bitter ideologies around non-existent realities?

Yeah I would agree with that. I don't think that masculinity or attraction are purely socially constructed, and biology definitely matter. As I said in the third paragraph of the essay, there is evidence of biological causes for psychological sex differences and the final section on transperspectivalism also states that. However biological the definition of masculinity may be it is not purely biological, nor are our attractions. Sure there are biological constraints and affordances on what we might find attractive, but again, we can't reduce to the biological. Our attractions are the effect of a complex system of causes that can be described by Integral Theory's quadrants.

I think one of the mistakes of privilege discourse is that it wrapped privilege in a normative hierarchy where it became easy to think of those with privilege as bad people, especially if they refused to acknowledge their privileges. Part of accepting their frame means that you would be incentivized to climb the moral hierarchy by proving that you weren’t as privileged as you appeared to be, otherwise you were a bad person. If you wanted people to acknowledge their privileges so that they would be more empathetic for those who did not have such privileges, at least enough to be willing to invest in these groups, then it completely backfired. Again though, people were now incentivized to downplay their privileges and focus on their disprivileges as a means of demonstrating themselves a good person. “You don’t know how hard things were for me,” became a way to demonstrate one’s virtue, which unfortunately, prevents someone from acknowledging that others might have less privileges, which in turn prevents them from empathizing in the hoped for way. An expected rebuttal would be that privilege discourse was never about accusing people, but systems that afforded people privileges based on group identity. Fair enough, but in practice, people have difficulty understanding issues at a systemic level, and so what people heard (and were often told) was that it was the individuals that were responsible, rather than the system itself. Thanks for reading, in what ways could I be less wrong?

I welcome criticism that is specific and constructive, which is what you have provided, so thank you. I actually agree with what you're saying, as I stated here, "Masculinity is the way in which men see themselves, engage in the world, and are seen, in turn, by that world." I would include femininity in "world". Is this what you meant or am I missing something? Thanks again for engaging with my essay. I appreciate that very much.

Evolving the MetaMasculine To accomplish this goal I want to introduce a very powerful framework I have found for understanding masculinity, but also just life and reality in general. When applied to masculinity I call this framework the MetaMasculine. To begin understanding what that actually means we first have to look at the word “meta”, which, according to Jonathon Rowson, has at least three meanings. The first meaning is “with,” which means that no matter what we do as men we will always be with our masculinity. Masculinity is the way in which men see themselves, engage in the world, and are seen, in turn, by that world. Even if I were to wear a dress and makeup there are people who would literally take that as a challenge to continue to treat me as a man. So, as someone who is a man, I will always be with masculinity whether I want to be or not. There are games being played and so we must play them, change them for the better, but play them nonetheless. As such, I must take ownership of my masculinity so that I can improve it for myself and others. Secondly, we have meta as “beyond,” which means going beyond or above masculinity. To be able to change our masculinity for the better we have to be able to look at the elements we want to change and how they actually relate with one another, which of course, requires us to be able to see it from the outside. This is what I’ve done throughout this essay. I’ve taken a bird’s eye view of how masculinity developed in Mason’s life. We’ve learned that masculinity is about how we as men exercise our agency through the employment of power over ourselves and others, through competition with others to prove that we are worthy of love and positive attention, and through sexual conquest of women who are seen as inferior because they aren’t masculine. As such, this requires that we reject anything feminine within ourselves and use shame any time we are unable to effectively play the games of masculinity. From the vantage point we gain through the use of meta, we can begin challenging these narratives and changing them toward something better for ourselves and others Finally, we have meta as, “after,” which situates masculinity in a historical context, both personally and culturally. Again, I have done this throughout the essay by going over how masculinity developed for Mason personally. Your story may be different, although the general themes may be the same because of how masculinity has been defined for us culturally. This is where we get into how masculinity has been defined by the wider culture around us and how it has changed over the years based on the environmental pressures placed upon it. We have to understand that Modern masculinity isn’t the same as what was masculine 1000 years ago or even 100 years ago. The challenges that today’s men face are different and so the ideal vision of masculinity is going to be different. As men we need to be able to define for ourselves what vision of masculinity will actually be able to handle the complexity of our age so that we can create positive change for, you guessed it, ourselves and others. With this tripartite understanding we are afforded the best grasp of masculinity that we can currently muster. The MetaMasculine then, is not so much a definition of masculinity as such, but is a definition of a certain kind of relationship with masculinity. In that spirit then, we must be able to take what’s called a transperspectival view of masculinity. This has nothing to do with transgender, but is simply understanding that masculinity can be seen from various perspectives, whether traditional, Red Pill, feminist, biological, developmental, etc. This is important because we run into problem when we become too attached to any one lens and assume that all the answers can be found when we take that single lens as gospel and reject every other lens. For example, viewing masculinity through a feminist lens can help us see the ways in which patriarchal power has oppressed not just women, but also men. However…viewing it exclusively through the feminist lens would have us see masculinity as an oppressive force that must be deconstructed so that we can come to that utopian female future we’ve all heard so much about. The same can also be said of Red Pill that would have us liberated in many ways and yet in many ways simply reinforces the games of false agency, competition with other men, and the conquest of women. It is through challenging our own perspectives and properly integrating the perspectives of others that we are able to come to that transperspectival understanding. We’re able to go beyond our current understanding of masculinity in order to create something that can come after everything that masculinity has been up to this point, all the while being with our masculinity as men. Finally free, we are no longer forced to look for escape in addiction or asceticism, but can face ourselves and our lives with the strength, wisdom, and compassion of the MetaMasculine. Either way, that is enough for today. Thank you so much for your time and attention. Please consider following my account for more essays and conversations that go very deeply into masculinity, psychological development, and the cultivation of a meaningful personal mythology. Thanks again, and all the best to you.

Agency and Power Expressed Through Sexuality What’s very interesting about the haircutting experience is that one person completely changes his perspective. A girl approves of his haircut. Here everything we’ve discussed so far is recontextualized by how it becomes tied to approval from women. However the lessons of manhood were shaped by the pain of that haircut, they are now also tied to how good it feels to have a cute girl in your class tell you that you look cool. Having short hair is an expression of masculinity as agency, power, and dominance, and a girl has now approved of that masculinity. Here we finally come to how masculinity defines and is defined by sexuality. Up to this point in the movie, we have been given hints of how Mason is developing sexually. From lingerie magazines to suggestions of explicit material on a computer screen, what’s clear is that this is something to be hidden. When his sisters enter the room, the laptop is quickly shut. Why exactly do they do that? From early on we learn that sex is something taboo. Whether it’s hiding our body parts, or not being allowed to talk about it, or knowing adults are trying to keep it a secret, the thread that connects all of these things is that there is something about sex that is inappropriate and that’s not acceptable...it is simply something shameful. Okay…so we have something that is shameful, but also something that becomes a direct means through which we exercise our masculinity. At one point Mason is in the bathroom and two boys start bullying him, pushing him around and calling him gay. Notice how his agency is being challenged, once again calling forth its association with competition, power, and submission. Notice also how it is all now being associated with his sexuality, once again calling forth a vision of the ideal man. The ideal man is agentic, powerful, competitive, and exerts his power in the hierarchy through his sexual prowess with women. His masculinity is implicitly tied to women because his masculinity is defined by how he is attracted to women. It’s not stated outright, again, it’s implicit or connected indirectly. This implicit lesson is that if he’s not attracted to women he is immediately placed at the bottom of the hierarchy. Again, this connects his sexuality and how it’s expressed with shame, with not being enough, and with needing to climb a hierarchy in order to become enough. We see this same weaponization of sexuality when Mason is hanging out with some other boys, some of which are older than him. Because of their age the older boys are automatically higher up the hierarchy, and so the younger boys are naturally going to look up to them. Throughout this scene everything we’ve talked about already is reinforced. The younger boys are called pussies if they engage in certain behaviour, which connects these behaviours with femininity, which is again connected with inferiority. Additionally, not only is being gay inferior, but now the sexual conquest of women is explicitly, outrightly, tied with masculinity. The boy’s position in the hierarchy is defined by how many women they’ve slept with, but only when the woman hasn’t slept with anyone else. One of the boys is belittled for getting sloppy seconds. In other words, she’ll increase your social status, but by less if she’s also slept around. Fnally, agency over women is also reinforced with the statement, “it’s not what they want, it’s what you want.” We are agentic men who gain status through the sexual conquest of chaste women who must submit to us, and if we don’t operate effectively enough, we are shameful at the bottom of the hierarchy. All of this takes place within a backdrop of violence. They bond as they break things, connecting masculine camaraderie with aggression, power, and sexual competition. These demands of sexual competition are further reinforced by his first girlfriend, Sheena. While they’re still in High School, she leaves Mason for a guy from college. She forced him into competition with an older, better male and he lost. Mason’s biological father reinforces this message by telling him that women are never satisfied, they’re always looking to trade up. However, no one is responsible for you…but you! A man’s agency is tied back into this competition, and of course, once you exercise your agency, you will be surprised by how many women will line up. We have now finished the loop that started back at the little girl who approved of Mason’s haircut. Your agency and power as a man are defined by how well you compete with other men for the attention and approval of women you conquer and who must submit to your agency and power…unless of course you fail, in which case you must deal with the shame of being inadequate as a man. Within this framework one finds little room for genuine fulfillment or love. And that’s the issue. Within this framework, we seem trapped within sexual competition where we’re constantly fighting with other men, preventing us from truly connecting with them, and constantly looking for approval from women to prove just how masculine we really are, when all we really want is to live a good life with someone who will love us as much as we love them. Does it make anyone wonder why so many men seem to be checking out of sex, romance, and life altogether? Whether it’s through the use of adult videos and escorts, or through celibacy and asceticism, this lack of healthy masculine camaraderie and authentic, fulfilling love, simply leads many into the pathologies of sexual addiction or sexual anorexia. With our sexuality tied so tightly with shame, we either try desperately to numb ourselves to that shame with addiction, or desperately try to escape from that shame by cutting our sexuality away completely. This trap raises the important question about whether or not this definition of masculinity is really about agency and all its many expressions. Notice how this definition of masculinity creates a hierarchy in which men must compete with each other in order to secure their agency. In other words, you have to submit yourself to the rules of someone else’s game in order to be successful enough to have your own agency and power. But…how can we have agency when we are submitting ourselves to someone else’s definition of success? This is the paradox of our masculinity. We play at agency, at power, and at dominance, all the while ignoring that someone else has defined the terms of that agency, power, and dominance. Then, when we find ourselves overcome by the stress of constant competition and beat ourselves up when we fail, we act surprised when we run to the liquor store or type in an adult website we promised ourselves we wouldn’t go to anymore. We’ve been locked in a game given to us by our forbears and been taught that the only means of escape is addiction or asceticism. I don’t think I need to tell you that addiction is not a real means of escape, and asceticism often simply becomes a never-ending self-imprisonment fuelled by self-hatred. Instead, we must learn to deconstruct and then reconstruct our masculinity and all the elements we’ve discussed. Look out for the last part tomorrow!