Back in the Manosphere days there was an interesting transition in internet consciousness from Game to the Dark Enlightenment. Men were knocking heads together trying to figure out reality, predictably propelled forward by the urge to stick their dicks in women. As it turned out there was a good answer: be an asshole, or even better, be a serial killer. Thus man invented game and thus the puzzle of how to get laid was solved.
The problem was that game lead to dark implications, e.g. why are women naturally attracted to serial killers? Offline consciousness simply refuses to acknowledge such dark truths for offline consciousness strives to smile and nod, but truth once seen cannot be unseen. So men set out to reconcile online consciousness with offline consciousness.
Ricky Raw was such a blogger. One of his psychological insights was that humans project their identity as they see it. People do not want you to like them for who you are, people want you to like them for who they think they are. If who you are reflects who you think you are there is little problem, but if your projected self image is different from who you really are you are bound to get in trouble. No one likes a poser. This is the difference between the true self and the false self.
No where is this so obvious as in a narcisstic/co-dependent relationship dynamic. In such a relationship the narcissist lives as if he (or she) is the main character in his own movie and the co-dependent lives as if her (or his) only purpose is to serve in said narcissist’s movie. One wants to be admired, the other wants to be needed. Both pretend to love the other but both merely use each other to fulfil their own identity fantasy. Very emotionally draining.
Now Ricky had an extensive solution to resolve the problems created by the false self. Although he had lots of good advice, the fact that he had an extensive solution revealed his inability to completely come to terms with the darkness of reality. ‘There is a problem but no worry, we can fix it!’ Nope, some things you just can’t fix. The serial killer will remain a sexy narcissist and his fangirls will remain co-dependently in love with him, no matter how much psychoanalysis you throw at them. That is the dark part about the dark enlightenment.
Let me elaborate. I talked about prophets selling enlightenment. Why do they do it and why is it so successful? Because we crave optimism. We want a happy and meaningful narrative. When Ricky digs up this dark stuff about the many ways in which human nature is fucked up, his natural instinct is to spin it in such a way that gives hope. So like the famous psychologists he quotes he tells us we have a the false self and a the true self, which we might reconstruct as our unenlightened self and our enlightened self. Do you see where I’m going with this?
Ricky said that you may unlearn the behaviours of your false self and discover your true self. Shakespeare however said that all the worlds a stage and all the men and women merely players acting their part. I’m with Shakespeare: there is no false or true self; just the self. Sometimes the self is dysfunctional, sometimes it is functional, but the self always merely is.
The Last Psychiatrist was a blogger from the same era who really understood this point. He covered the same subject, narcissism in the modern era, but in contrast to Ricky he offered no solution, just a never-ending mindfuck. This is the world, this is our narcissism, you had better accept it. We all are main characters in our movie, we care only about ourselves. This is why TLP’s pseudonym was Alone and perhaps why despite his amazing penmanship he always read like he was on the brink of a cynical breakdown.
The problem with truth is that it is cold. You might respond: ‘Alf, truth is not cold! It is devoid of emotion!’ I disagree. Truth outside human experience is neutral, but truth from within human experience is cold as ice. We are sacks of meat waiting to die and we don’t like it. This is why we constantly lie lie lie, to ourselves and to others. We dislike coldness, we crave warmth. Christian God provided some warmth, but Christian God is dead.
I recently had some conversations with a friend on serious topics. He said he feels disturbances in the world and this moves him to search for truth. So I gave him truth, for instance on the ongoing Islamic invasion. To this he responded ad verbatim: ‘you are probably right but I just don’t want to think that way about Islam.’ The cold truth did not serve him, so he discarded it. His honest dishonesty made me laugh.
The truth is that life has an inherent friction which begets the daily need for balance and moderation. The lie is that we can solve this friction by melting into something greater than ourselves. Christianity was an functional lie, progressivism is a dysfunctional lie. We are but actors on a stage wanting to act out our part, but our parts are progressively (heh) falling apart. Dysfunctionality is easy, functionality is hard, so perhaps we ought not to be surprised by this turn of events.
A serial killer gets women wetter than you do. Such it is and such it will always be.