The Red Pill is a loose network of men focused on sexual dynamics, male self-improvement, and protection against exploitation.

It’s taught many guys useful lessons: dating strategies, status-building, and self-reliance.

But in practice, some threads of the movement drift into cynicism and adversarial thinking that limit growth.
This article explains what the Red Pill gets right, where it goes wrong, and how to upgrade those lessons into strategies that build real power.

Note: we analyze the red pill seen from its raw and real grassroots dynamics
Not just the more politically appealing view of its public-facing authors. We would agree more with some of its more moderate participants. But we highlight the more relevant grassroots dynamics.

Intro: What’s The Red Pill

This is a high-level definition of the Red Pill:

The Red Pill is a community of men, who congregate to learn, share and discuss social and sexual dynamics with takes that may be too politically incorrect to be discussed by society at large.

The Red Pill is a subset of the larger “manosphere” constellation, dealing with varied topics such as life strategies, power dynamics, male rights, and general self-development.

The popular expression “taking the red pill”, means opening up to the hidden truths of life that society hides from most people.

This website could be considered a red pill place.

Red Pill & TPM

The Power Moves was one of the first ones to be featured in The Red Pill Archive:

It makes sense that this website is there.
But at the same time, we differ in crucial aspects:

• We teach individual empowerment, and rather than group-based advancement (ie.: ‘men’s rights’)
• We conceive the possibility of smart win-win relationships with male leadership
• We believe in individual men’s power to win, no matter the context. So we care less about social trends, feminists, etc.

Let’s start with the biggest elephant in the room:

Is The Red Pill Misogynist?

Yes, the rare important sub-currents within the red pill that espouse misogynistic takes that we do not like, support, or regard as truthful.

That being said, there are also plenty of valid red pill insights.
Men’s and women’s interests diverge sometimes, and those divergences can create friction and chances for cheating.
Some red pill can be ‘positively Machiavellian‘. But it also turns cynical, and sometimes potentially toxic for two reasons:

1. Men VS Women focus: It focuses only on areas of friction, disregarding opportunities for win-win
2. Focus on women’s faults, rarely on the value women can add, and rarely on men’s faults

Let’s see some examples:

Men Are Good, Women Are Bad

The red pill sometimes portrays women as manipulative and underhanded.

Do women manipulate?

Sure.
Just like everyone else.

But the Red Pill wears distorted lenses. Aggressive or manipulative behavior in the “us” male ingroup is out of sight, while the faults of the “them” female outgroup are in full focus.

A quick sift among the most popular threads shows repeated confirmation of the “good men VS bad women” frame:

Red Pill author alpha male strategies also recommends men to “string women along” for as much as possible because, he says, that’s what women do to men.

Men Are Smart, Women Are Stupid

Misogyny and anger might be more hidden among popular Red Pill authors, but they are endemic of Red Pill communities.

This post has been upvoted more than two thousand times, by 88% of the readers, and received the moderator’s endorsement.

Here is what it says:

Basically, he claims unsurpassed experience to conclude that “all” women are “f*cking retarted”.

And most Red Pill redditors upvoted it.

AWALT: All Women Are All Like That (Bad)

The good old “they’re all alike”.

Again, no surprise for anyone schooled in group dynamics and psychology: this is a natural consequence of adversarial ingroup/outgroup dynamics.

These two group dynamics are particularly salient in communities like the Red Pill:

1. Self-Stereotyping: members strive to conform to the group (See Haslam, 2006)
2. Outgroup stereotyping: the outgroups is seen as “homogeneously bad” (see Baumeister, 1997)

Both of them can take some mental gymnastics, and the red pill groups help support the cognitive dissonance (Festinger, 1957).
Publish and upvote only information that supports our view until supporting information is all that’s available to see. And everyone can keep repeating “see? All women are bad”.

Free of any external interference, confirmation bias, groupthink, and group dynamics can maintain even the most unrealistic representations of reality.

Here are some distorted notions the red pill espouses about ‘all women are like that’:

• Women never really love a man
• Women dupe a beta provider to cheat with the alpha (alpha fucks, beta bucks)
• Women form no real attachment: hypergamy controls them

Again, there is a backdrop of truth in most of them. 
Just not the way the Red Pill presents them, because the Red Pill naturally distorts them.

P.S.:
One must truly lack experience to believe that women can’t love a man. See how to make women fall in love.

Women Control An Unfair System, Men Must Defend

The red pill sees women as controlling society and men as victims.

It’s true that different individuals try to sway the judicial system and cultural system to favor their interests, of course.
And individual effort congregates at the group level. This is basic social power dynamics.

However, once again, the red pill never reflects that men do the same, and have been winning at it for centuries.
It also exaggerates how bad it is for men today, leading to some disempowering victimhood mentality and frames.

This one-sided narrative is similar to how hate groups operate, recruit, and proselytize (Lee, 2002).
The “unfair system” against “us” is exactly how this former nazi was recruited into the organization.

Selective Attention: Their Faults, Our Values

This might be the red pill’s core issue: focusing on women’s faults, without an equivalent appreciation of one’s own.

When red pillers focus only on the “wrong” that women do and “what’s to lose”, they only see 1/4 of reality.
They miss:

1. The positives of women 
2. The negatives of men (also see “games men play“)
3. The potential for win-win (you find what you look for, as they say)

Read more on win-win:

• Fundamental strategies of power
• The enlightened collaborator

Life Strategy: The Enlightened Collaborator

Social Psychology of Intergroup Conflict

Writes social psychologist Roy Baumeister:

People do not generally need a great deal of urging to despise the groups that are arrayed against them (…)

Some Red Pill communities still provides plenty of urging, though.

In social psychology, the tendency to hate the outgroup is an offshoot of the “realistic conflict theory“.
Conflicts become more extreme when:

• Members are authoritarian, craving power, and control 
• Members engage in competition
• The competitions are zero-sum games

All three are true for the Red Pill.
The Red Pill attracts authoritarian men who crave more power and control, men high in Social Dominance Orientation, which in turn predicts sexism (Pratto et al., 2000), fueled by a view of gender relationships as social competitions.

These in-group vs out-group dynamics start benignly with a strong self-identification as men. Nothing wrong with thinking of yourself as a man, and it can be easily framed (and be) as healthy and good.
The problem is when it becomes the main or only source of self-identification, pride, and pitched within a competitive dynamic set against women.

These tendencies are either latent or openly embraced and encouraged:

Masculinity pride is Jack Donovan’s main focus, for example.
Donovan, author of “The Way of Men” and a respected author in the RP community, theorizes that society, weakened by feminization (the enemy), is on the verge of breaking up

Rollo Tomassi, possibly the most notorious voice of The Red Pill community, also offers a frame of ‘men against women’.
He writes:

(…) women inserting themselves into male space in order to enforce the dictates of feminine social primacy

In male bonding, Rollo Tomassi sees a bulwark against the feminine assault.
Criticizing the MGTOW movement, he says:

This only serves to cede power to the feminine imperative
-Rollo Tomassi, “Positive Masculinity“

At a deeper level, this is ego fusion (Swann et al., 2012), which is the merging of group and self-identity such that the two cannot be disentangled.
From a social-psychological perspective, the bigger the personal self-identification with the “we”, the higher the depersonalization.
At the extreme of depersonalization, the group becomes more important than the self (Turner, 1986) because, well… The group is the self.

This extreme sense of belonging, coupled with an adversarial attitude, leads to increasing anger and hatred towards the outgroup (in this case, women).

Collective Narcissism

These dynamics overlap with collective narcissism.
Psychology researcher de Zavala explains that collective narcissism is a fragile and defensive form of group belonging, where the group’s alleged superiority is used to bolster a fragile personal sense of self-worth.

We can clearly see this in some men in the manosphere.
For example:

NateSim latches his ego on the “men’s cart”, so he can feel good about himself when a man “beats” a woman. Low power behavior.

Collective narcissism is associated with vulnerable narcissism, the ‘low power’ form of narcissism, and defensiveness, thin-skin, and retaliatory aggression against perceived slights to the in-group (de Zavala, 2018).

The Power Dynamics of Hate Group Leadership

Hate groups need hate to stay alive.

Says Baumeister in his landmark work “Evil“:

The members with the firmest sense of hatred will end up being the ones that the others look to for support and guidance.

A moderate leader is dangerous.
He may build bridges, display cracks in the echochamber, or present an overly rosy view of the world. That puts the hate group at risk of dissolution, which the members who invested their ego in the group cannot tolerate.

Nobody speaks up against extreme leaders. The moderates will quit, raising the percentage of extremists in the group.

This is a general dynamic, and also applies to feminist dynamics.
For example, it’s exactly what happened to this former feminist when she tried to understand manosphere activists:

Former feminist: when you start to humanize your enemy, you in turn may be dehumanized by your community

Red Pill & Feminism: Two Sides Of The Same Coin

Read a few feminist and red pill books, and it’s hard not to see the same issues and patterns.
For example:

The Red Pill’s own bias may be a tad less bad than feminism, but I might be biased as a man myself.

Cynicism & “Zero-Sum Game”

At their core, some red-pillers look at relationships as zero-sum games.

Sometimes that zero-sum game thinking is obvious and easier to spot.
Some other times, it’s more hidden.

For example, this is what an active social media red pill poster says:

Red Pill Guru: They are using him for his money, and he is using them for their beauty

The keyword is calling ‘using’ what could be a win-win transaction, instead.
That’s the mindset of focusing on the loss, rather than on the mutual benefit.

And Rollo Tomassi writes in “Preventive Medicine“:

For one gender’s sexual strategy to succeed the other gender must compromise or abandon their own.

– Rollo Tomassi

Rollo Tomassi is not wholly wrong.
But he is wrong in generalizing to the whole population, because plenty of men gain with a long-term relationship (Buss, 1994).

I’d have to wonder why Rollo got married, then.
Because if you see relationships as zero-sum games, then the red pill approach to refuse relationships makes sense.

The Red Pill is at odds with women and relationships because it presupposes zero sum games relationships, playing against a cheating opponent, who successfuly rigged the system.

The only advice that can come out of that is to avoid relationships and play to win, but never cooperate.

In game theory, this is referred to as a “defector strategy”.
Sometimes, it hides fear, though. That fear motivates one to avoid the game altogether or approach it with a mindset of “I’ll cheat first”.

But this is not well-supported by evolution.
Humans developed pair-bonding and semi-monogamy because it was good for both (Luoto and Woodley of Menie, 2022).

This mindset can never allow for a healthy, collaborative, win-win relationship.

Again, the red pill does get something right.
A touch of cynicism is important; relationships do incur risks. And in committed relationships, high-value men give more (see our video here).

The virtue lies in looking at those dangers realistically and crafting effective strategies around them.
Read more here:

• The positive cynic mindset: growing past poisonous cynicism
• Self-defense in business and love, cooperating, while winning

Risk of Toxicity & Abuse

Let me start with the obvious:

Not all Red Pill men are abusive.

Yet, it would be naive to not see that some dynamics increase that risk, including:

1. Dehumanization process (common in all hate groups)
2. Dominance and control (“be alpha & dominate, or be a loser”)
3. Ultra-conservative social roles
4. Defensive, win-lose, & scarcity mindset (attack first to avoid losing, Forward, 1998)

Let’s review some of them:

Dehumanization Process

Social psychologist Philip Zimbardo, notable researcher on violence and abuse, lists four social causes responsible for evil:

1. Deindividuation (“I” merges with “red-piled men”)
2. Dehumanization (women are bad, so morals don’t apply to them)
3. Anonymity (most red pill communities are anonymous)
4. Diffusion of responsibility (the more of us, the safer it is to be extremists, thus the effort of recruitment)

Dehumanization (Kelman, 1976) is encouraged in some Red Pill communities.
This is what Esther Vilar, author of one of the most popular Red Pill books, writes:

Women live an animal existence. They like eating, drinking, sleeping – even sex, providing there is nothing to do and no real effort is required of them.

Esther Vilar

Vilar describes women as mindless, animal-like creatures who leech on men for their survival.
And her book is recommended reading in The Red Pill subreddit, finding a prominent spot right on the sidebar: 

Through dehumanization, even normally moral men stop feeling any bond and empathy with women.
See an example from a popular thread:

The toxic end game?

Once women are dehumanized, then it’s fair game to treat them as sub-humans.

See an example:

• Psychopath’s sexual strategy: active in the red pill subreddit

The Alpha Imperative: A Male Yoke

The Red Pill talks about the “feminine imperative”, but the true diktat Red Pill men are all under is the Red Pill “alpha imperative”.

Men who buy into the red pill build their self-esteem around semi-toxic and inherently fragile traits of ‘alphaness’.

This guy, for example, ended up in a relationship after having “taken the red pill”.
Here is what he writes:

See the pattern?

This man’s fragile fear can be boiled down to the possibility of someone more alpha than he is.

The fear of other alphas “branding” women has a name: “alpha widows”.
Alpha widows, or women who have been with an alpha, are supposedly “dangerous” to be with because they’re harder to control (again, a low-value mindset of controlling).

But true development and male power comes from not fearing anyone.

Learn better:

• How to lead relationships, with high-value
• Antifragile mind
• Why the alpha male game is limiting you

Political Conservatism

For a bunch of self-proclaimed alpha males, many of these guys spend a woeful amount of time demanding that a tough man rule them

Lucio Buffalmano – the authoritarian personality conundrum

The Red Pill started apolitical.
But it has become largely a congregation of conservatives, complaining of libertine dating, women’s sexuality, and general social dynamics.

See an example here, with Red Pill moderators officially endorsing Trump:

Nothing wrong with conservatism, of course.
But as a group that was also focused on dating success, chances are that conservatism and complaining may not help. And sure won’t help to be a lover and successful dater.

The psychology of a player is inherently different than current red pill social and sexual conservatism.

Beyond Red Pill: Men’s Empowerment

Here are some good steps:

• Focus on the self, less on social trends
• Embrace nuances and exceptions for a better understanding of reality
• Adopt more empowering mindsets: an empowered man can win, no matter the social trends
  • You can find plenty of feminine women to date
  • You can have win-win relationships

Please read more:

• Making of the ubermensch
• Growing beyond the red pill

And I will end with a quote from Robert Greene:

We belong to the human race. Anything else is backward and far too dangerous.

SUMMARY

The Red Pill presents itself as the place to get the uncomfortable truths of life.
And some of those uncomfortable truths are spot-on, and beginners need to learn them.

The next step is to turn that inquisitive mind towards, well… The Red Pill itself.

Several red pill communities also contain some bitterness, cynicism, and some disempowering mindsets.
They should be a phase in men’s empowerment, not the final step.

The next step is to embrace a more nuanced reality, more empowering mindsets and strategies, and the possibility for win-win relationships.

To transcend the group and win as a man, no matter where you are, check:

• Power University