Are the “5 stages of grief” – denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance – a good model of “red pill rage,” or are there problems using this model as predictive rather than descriptive? Furthermore, is there, as I believe, a further stage of grief beyond “acceptance”? In this article I will discuss the last stage of grief from a red-pill perspective and speculate on what lies beyond.
Paul Elam has a powerful video on the subject you should watch here:
Elisabeth Ross’s 1969 book, On Death and Dying, explains the 5 stages of grief as experienced by the terminally ill, and is a great gift to the world because it gave us a perspective on the behaviors and feelings of the dying, which allows thoughtful caregivers, friends and relatives an understanding that leads to greater compassion. I read the book in 1974 as a boy of 15 as my father was dying of leukemia, and as the pain and shoddy medical care of that era turned him from a loving dad into bedridden monster given to unpredictable and incomprehensible explosions of anger over even the kindnesses his confused and scared kids tried to bless him with. Ross’s work helped me greatly in coping with my dad’s outbursts.
Now, the utility of Ross’s work is so powerful that we are tempted to universalize it beyond the feelings of the terminally ill to all areas of rancorous human conflict – I have heard it applied to not only “red pill rage” but also romantic breakups, business failures, family members of the dying, and even those poor losers suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome – .as Ross’s website notes, “many of the ‘stages’ of the dying described in the book have been subsequently simplified and publicly caricatured beyond recognition.”
However, Ross’s work only purported to explore the experiences of the dying and efforts to generalize it further may backfire because, among other things, the dying die but other grieving people may have to live on for decades, calling into question the assumption of “acceptance” as the final stage of grief for the non-terminal.
Other stages
As almost 50 years of review have refined our perceptions, other putative stages of grief have been identified and put forward:
- Shock, perhaps the Zeroth stage of Grief before Denial, when one first is confronted with the knowledge of one’s impending death. In The Matrix this is perhaps when Neo, long before taking the Red Pill, sees the tattoo of the “White Rabbit” he has been told to follow “down the rabbit hole”.
- Hope, an overarching faith in salvation, whether explicitly religious or not. For Morpheus, Neo was the literal embodiment of that hope.
- Partial Denial – the sinking feeling of slow realization that one’s denials are futile. Neo’s partial denial is stoked by his encounters with the Oracle who tells him that he is, in fact, NOT “the One”, which Neo takes as a challenge.
- Decathexis – the final-final stage, sometimes known colloquially as “Closure”, wherein one’s energy and interest in dying is diminished or even withdrawn. Toward the end of The Matrix, Neo finds he can casually fend off the flying fists of Agent Smith, with an almost bored disinterest. Decathexis is, of course, the undoing of Cathexis, “the process of investment of mental or emotional energy in a person, object, or idea” such as personal death.
Stage 6 of Red Pill Rage: The Nexis of Revenge.
It is my contention that stage 6 of red pill rage is a nexis of cathexis, decathexis, and a new term, hypercathexis, characterized by anti-male psychotherapists as “excessive investment of interest in an object, person, or idea.” In the feminist-dominated mental health fields any extraordinary male commitment or achievement is demonized with terms like “hypercathexis” or “toxic masculinity”, ignoring the positive impact of men’s achievements on civilization.
As active agents, men feel a compulsion to engage and solve problems, not just passively seek the emotional closure of decathexis. This is perhaps the greatest weakness of Ross’s work – she could interview slowly expiring patients but could never practically study the sudden, violent deaths more common to men on the battlefields of war and industry. As a woman Ross had no insight nor understanding of men’s innate need to DO SOMETHING to address a problem.
For example, in the aftermath of my father’s wasting death, my younger brother not only became a physician, but he became a researcher into the leukemia that killed our father. This research bore fruit and the drug my brother investigated is now recognized as the cure for that type of leukemia. In short, my brother got revenge. The focus and determination of my brother to avenge our father’s death might well be called “hypercathexis.”
In stage 6 of red pill rage men chose between three paths:
- Decathexis – these are the MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way) who lose interest in pursuing relationships with women in favor of other personal interests. Various schools of MGTOW may also lose interest in engagement with gynocentric society to varying degrees.
- Cathexis – these are the PUAs (Pickup Artists) who recognize that society is doomed and settle for using their Red Pill insights to have as much sex with as many women as possible as society crumbles,
- Hypercathexis – these are the anti-feminists and/or MRAs (Men’s Rights Advocates) who work actively and against long odds to restore equal rights to men to forestall or even prevent the collapse of civil society as advocated by “smash patriarchy” feminists.
Of course, men in stage 6 may jump from one path to the next or devise hybrid paths of their own reckoning.
We are men. We do stuff. We get revenge.
