Weaponized nihilism
July 3, 2014 § 19 Comments
In the Marvel comics I read as a kid there was a superhero called The Vision. His super power (or one of them, I don’t really remember the details) was that he could change his density. When he was on the attack, his fists became harder than diamond. When he was being attacked he faded into etherial intangibility. His capacity to alternately assert tangibly and fade away into nothingness was a weapon.
Back here in the real world things don’t phase in and out of existence, but a lot of writers use a similar strategy. They adopt a selective nihilism in their polemics by selectively asserting the nonexistence of threatening things and of things they want to protect from criticism. So Game is nothing particularly concrete and definite when it is being criticized, but it is something every man needs to learn otherwise. Neoreaction is just an etherial collection of disparate bloggers with not much in common when it is being criticized, but it is the last great hope of preserving civilization otherwise. Racism has been dishonestly used against conservatives and reactionaries for so long that we cannot even admit that it exists anymore: it is an anti-concept, like torture. And capitalism is just the inarguable way everything is by nature unless it is being criticized, in which case it doesn’t even exist.
Once you’ve recognized weaponized nihilism for what it is, you will see it everywhere. And it is both as dense as a diamond and as etherial as air.
Zippy Catholic 
[…] Source: Zippy Catholic […]
Game is complicated.
It’s not *simply* male sexual incontinence, because there are a great many men in this world today whose most fervent wish is to express their sexual incontinence in condomistic sex and in ways that are even more demeaning towards women, but can not, because they have no Game.
Nor is it *simply* the understanding that men and women are different.
It is not simply social savviness, or the arrogant behavior of an inflated sense of self-esteem.
I think that Game refers to a phenomenon of the early 21st century sexual marketplace. Few men today consciously understand that men and women are different in a way that would enable them to act on their (sinful!) sexual urges. In fact, many of them lie to themselves about the nature of women because they wish for their sexual urges to be fulfilled and it’s enough to tell them something vaguely plausible but totally wrong, they will believe it because they want to, and at some level they know that means of seduction will always be forbidden knowledge (because sin!).
It is good for them to find out, because God hates lies most of all.
As to Neoreaction, the name says it all. You could say the same thing about conservatism, and would be just as right.
NRx adds Moldbug’s insights into the nature and history of USG and the Cathedral, and the caste system in the US, and the Donald Singularity Theory, a.k.a. “Cthulhu swims left”. Other than that, there are many voices who want to pull NRx in their particular direction, each of which claims to be the true NRx and that the others are commies, or Christians, or populists, or Nazis, or whatever.
The true NRx, exemplified by Nick B. Steves and James Donald, hasn’t decided how Christian it is, but figures that religion is important. The rest of the so-called NRx are communists, atheists, and Jews.
peppermint:
I agree with that. I think it is the male-equivalent term for ‘sluttiness’. It is just that we never needed a special word for it until the mass-effeminization of men.
peppermint:
Then it may still be salvageable, by becoming confessionally Catholic ;). It appears to be infected by a number of the more subtle errors of modernity, though, and not a few of the glaring ones. I only point them out because I care.
“The punch line for those who need a motivation to read my further rambling – or a reason not to – is that from an intersexual behavior standpoint, the male equivalent of a slut is the beta orbiter.” -Zippy
Now isn’t a beta orbiter pretty much the opposite of a gamester? One uses game, the other uses a full-on white knight perverted-chivalry.
So the question is how could they both be the male form of slut?
Patrick:
Think complementarity, not perfect correspondence. The intersexual dynamic is different from sexual attractiveness.
The slut gives away her sexuality in return for contempt; the beta orbiter gives away his provisioning and care in return for contempt. The beta orbiter fails to get the sexual attention he wants; the slut fails to get the commitment she wants. In that sense they correspond from the standpoint of intersexual behavior.
Separately, the things that sluts do to generate prurient interest in men we call sluttiness or slutty behavior. The things that players do to generate prurient interest in women we call game. So sluttiness and game correspond.
If that doesn’t make sense to you, the first bit is more theoretical and was part of my attempt to explore manosphere concepts to which I am not strongly committed myself: it was as much an attempt at description of theory as it was a statement of what I think is true. I’m not married to it. But I don’t think it is unreasonable, as those kinds of social models go.
@Excellent, pithy observation. And true.
(And Christians sometimes do something similar, don’t we?)
Bruce:
Thank you, and yes. As it turns out, most Christians tend to be a lot like other people.
In your comparison between “Game” and sluttiness you left out a salient, irreconcilable difference:
Men who are not naturals can immitate 95% of what makes a natural effective because female attraction is not singularly focused on appearance. Whereas an ugly woman no matter how successful, how charming, socially savvy, etc. is at the end of the day, un ugly woman and neurotypical men will not find any of that offsetting to her lack of beauty. Sluttiness is a defense mechanism employed to directly counter that by saying “if you lower your standards, I’ll give you whatever you want.” Whereas Game is intended to create a simulacrum of meeting or exceeding standards.
But hey, let’s not spoil a good analogy, even if it’s a false one.
@ Mike T:
Obviously you’ve never watched an ugly man try to pick up a woman.
[…] Because positivism is literally rationally incoherent, it is not something that anyone can believe consistently and still function as a human being outside of the asylum. So we get the usual sort of compensations: gnosticism, unprincipled exceptions and weaponized nihilism. […]
I have a question about Red Pill theory that I hope someone has an answer to. Feel free to kick it over to another venue, if this is not the best place for such a question.
Many Red Pill thinkers say that *attraction* is involuntary and unconscious. Other persons (not solely Red Pill folk) say that *desire* for sex on the part of women is a decision.
As regards the latter: one thinks of all the books by women for other women which try to engender a decision to be “sex positive” and to make it their personal penchant to enjoy sex, initiate it, and the like. Also, some people partial to Red Pill ideas have talked about working together with one’s woman to increase desire.
For many Red Pillers, the attraction issue is the end game and dependent solely on the Alpha/Beta dynamics (even if you are like Athol Kay and want to employ them both). Here, the woman contributes very little. You must retain your attractiveness or you’re doomed.
So, what is the truth here? Or, what is the reconciliation of the seeming opposites, if there is one.
This seems to me to be a very basic question with regard to the Red Pill/Married Attraction (LTR) thing that needs an answer.
I would be very grateful for people’s thoughts about this.
Minimus
Minimus – I don’t consider myself to be any kind of expert, but I would say that attraction is primarily involuntary. That doesn’t mean it can’t be altered by one’s will. Cops and surgeons can become accustomed (or jaded) to things that would make the average person retch. Attraction can be tamed in the same way, but it’s hard work and I would suspect most people aren’t up to the task. Rather than do the hard work of forming their will, they bail at the first sign of unhaaaapiness. It sucks if your husband is beta or your wife gains 75 pounds, but you gotta suck it up.
[…] peppermint: […]
Interesting, related story. This happened to me in college.
There was a girl who ended up being in two of my classes, and sat directly in front of me in one. She was nice and certainly not unattractive, but she had a certain awkward look to her that also didn’t engender any desire in me to ask her out. We were on friendly terms but never saw each other outside of class.
Then, one day, we were having a conversation immediately after class and I made a video game reference. She recognized it immediately, mentioned another game she had played, and we got into a conversation about that. Almost immediately for me her attraction level went way up, because I have met very few girls who are as interested in video games as guys are, and it’s a major point of shared interest.
In the end I decided not to ask her out for a few reasons, but I did consider it when previously I never would have.
Even in guys it’s not always about physical appearance, though if she was actually ugly there’d have been no interest there. I expect a lot of girls would say the same thing, though.
[…] “equality” and “freedom“. As with most of these terms in the context of weaponized nihilism, they aren’t always and necessarily used in a self contradictory way. Sometimes they just mean […]
[…] term “weaponized ambiguity” in the comments below, as a cognate of what I have called weaponized nihilism and of what others have referred to as the motte-and-bailey strategy. These are of course all […]