The Fritz Letter: December 29, 2024
Red Pill is a shallow pool of masculinity where lost men learn to swim
Many men are lost in the world, floating through their lives like rootless islands, battered by storms and scarred by trauma.
They can’t face their emotions.
They feel useless to their families and communities.
They feel like they have failed at life.
They feel alone, without any real friends or mentors to help them navigate challenges and obstacles in life.
This has led to the rise of Red Pill masculinity, which is like the idea of Fight Club applied to real life.
In a nutshell, Red Pill ideology insists that the western world has been dominated and corrupted by Feminism, western social systems serve women by oppressing men, men have been strategically isolated by the “system”, and masculinity has been under siege for decades in order to disempower men and keep them weak.
And they’re mostly correct.
However, for all the truth it exposes, the Red Pill is still incomplete.
It goes wrong in three key ways:
It misinterprets how and why feminism emerged
It misinterprets how and why social systems underserve and victimize men
It does not offer a full solution to the problems that men face in the modern world
Now, I want to add a bit of a caveat here: there is no single, unified Red Pill community. Different Red Pill influencers promote different ideas, and different Red Pill followers draw their own conclusions about how to live with the truths that Red Pill exposes.
I’ve also found that there tends to be a pretty significant difference between how prominent Red Pill influencers live and what they teach vs how many Red Pill followers live and what they share.
I think this is largely a result of the social media landscape. As with all movements and ideologies, certain ideas get pulled out of context and spread like wildfire, but a fuller version of the truth can only be found by deeply engaging with the material.
This essay is the beginning of a series that will continue for several weeks as I explore various Red Pill concepts, try to highlight the good and bad, and share ideas for where a man can turn once he has been “Red Pilled” but is ready for a new challenge as a man.
Red Pill Is A Shallow Pool Where Men Learn To Swim
Red Pill masculinity isn’t universally terrible, it’s simply immature and incomplete.
The most basic info a man needs to know is that some women are toxic and will ruin his life.
Ideally, he will learn this as a teenager, but men have been learning it later in life in recent generations.
However, toxic femininity is not universal to all women. There are great women literally everywhere. Most modern men just don’t know how to find them and win them over, because mind games and manipulation don’t work with strong, healthy women.
The things that Red Pill influencers often don’t teach are:
How to identify a good woman
How to attract a good woman
How to build and maintain a relationship with a good woman
These things are essential, though, because building and maintaining a relationship with a good woman unlocks many critical life and leadership skills that men will struggle to learn anywhere else.
How to negotiate with someone who doesn’t need you
How to communicate with someone who doesn’t share your worldview and experience
How to win the trust and loyalty of someone for many years
How to run your life as a business and delegate burdens fairly and effectively
These are skills that are essential for men who want to build strong families and businesses and then leave behind real legacies.
Learning to navigate conflict with your woman without nuking the relationship is essential if you ever want to win at a negotiating table with an investor for your business, or you want to compromise with a business partner who is on the verge of walking away, or you want to correct the behavior of an employee without making them double down on the behavior in a sneaky way or straight up quit on you when you need them.
Red Pill is the stuff that boys used to learn from older brothers and cousins when they were 12, but it is not a fully mature expression of masculinity — it is just a starting point.
Real masculinity isn’t pure dominance — it is leadership, which requires men to learn how to compromise, how to build alliances, and how to keep the peace with potential enemies for mutual benefit (Caesar and the Gauls; Regan and Gorbachev; Trump and Putin).
Red Pill Is Merely An Entry Ramp To The Pyramid of Power
In case you haven’t read the essay, I made a case in a previous work that Power rests on three foundations, stacked as a pyramid: Knowledge, Skills, and Service.
Red Pill in its current state helps men gain knowledge (one could argue, even forbidden knowledge), and it often helps them gain some basic skills (how to get insecure women to have sex with you), but it fails to transfer higher level leadership and decision-making skills or critical “people skills” like patience, active listening, and negotiating.
However, the most critical weakness of Red Pill at present is that it rebels explicitly against the concept of Service, and as a result, many “Red Pilled” men end up acting like teenagers who hate being told to clean their rooms or get home by curfew.
This is the Lion phase of Nietzschean personal growth.
Many angry Red Pill men resent the idea of serving others, but the fact is, part of the reason so many men and women grow up “blue pilled” in the first place is because strong men do not step up to lead.
Instead, many of them retreat from and antagonize society, picking fights and complaining from the outside, but refusing to step in and create real change.
As long as “red pilled” men retreat from the real masculine challenge of reforming society to better develop young boys into strong male leaders, the status quo – or the “Matrix” – will continue to get worse.
As little as 20 years ago, it was still common for men to be strong leaders in their families, neighborhoods, churches, communities, and schools.
Between the rise of the internet, advances in tech (especially video games), the financial crisis of 2008, and the rise of hardline liberal ideology in schools, that dynamic shifted.
But, the root of the problem is, in the face of these external forces, masculine men allowed the world to push them out.
Fathers stepped back from their families and allowed the world to raise their children.
Families bought into the idea that we must push our children out of the home at 18, reduce communication and familial involvement to nearly zero, and let higher education teach them how to function in the world.
The problem is, fatherless people who are unsure about how to find their footing in the world will always seek some authority to guide them. Masculine fathers stepped back and allowed the State, higher education, and media to become that authority in their children’s’ lives.
And now, men all over the world lament.
They say it’s not fair that masculinity is denigrated and men are underserved at a global level.
They blame the system. They blame the Feminists.
And then they perpetuate the cycle by:
living their lives “blue-pilled” for the sake of comfort
getting “red pilled” and living out their lives like frat boys who outsource their self-esteem to the attention they get from insecure women
turning their back on “the system” and living like islands, calling themselves Alpha or Sigma, and becoming sweaty, loud, pop-entrepreneurial male versions of the “strong, independent, Feminist girl bosses” they resent
This, in my opinion, is the ultimate psyop.
Many men who wake up from the “Blue Pill Matrix” either check out or make total fools of themselves, adding strength to the very system they despise.
A Blue Pill Matrix supervillain couldn’t have designed a better way to destroy masculinity in the modern world: make sure the majority of men who still value masculinity live out their lives in prison, or poor and underemployed, or isolated in their own private bubbles cosplaying as real men — online entertainers and clowns who make the very idea of masculinity look childish and deformed.
Fortunately, there’s a way out of this distorted manosphere.
The solution is an ancient playbook of male discipleship: young men learning about life from old men in one-on-one relationships and small groups.
Discipleship has a religious connotation, but it isn’t an inherently religious function. I define it as the transfer of a discipline from one mind to another.
Masculinity is not an attribute that men can stack like they’re playing a video game — it is a discipline that they must study, gain mastery in, and then use to sculpt society.
This is the dynamic that “the Matrix” really hates, because men who are strong, intelligent, and unified never fail to change the world.
If that’s something you’re interested in building or exploring, reply to this email.
Yeehamaste, folks 🤠
Upgrade To Paid
Support my work and unlock free ebooks, exclusive content, community perks, and my full post archive for only $5 per month. That’s cheaper than a decent beer, a nice coffee, or a bottle of fancy water, and it lasts way longer.
X Highlights
What I’m Working On This Week
For over a year, I have been running a private online small group for men’s growth.
In 2025, we want to expand our work and invite more men to get involved.
Many men don’t have men they respect that they can turn to in their daily lives or connect with on a regular basis. Even worse, most men don’t have older men in their lives who they can go to for advice when they face challenges in life, relationships, career, or business.
It is our goal to rebuild a culture of male mentorship and healthy, productive community in male-only spaces, with an end vision of contributing to a rise of healthy male leadership in families and local communities all over the world.
Wise, present fathers.
Honorable leaders.
Patriarchs.
Over the next several months, we will be actively expanding by launching content and an online community — all completely free.
We’re still laying the early foundations, but by summer of 2025 you can expect newsletters from our online magazine, a YouTube channel, a podcast, and a free community on X when men can gather to have discussions about life, leadership, and masculinity.
What I’m Listening To This Week
This week, my ears have been blessed by Antonín Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9, which he composed in 1893, and which went on to be a dominant force in music for nearly 100 years, and still impresses today.
A Piece Of Art To Inspire You
This classic piece is The Creation of Adam by Michelangelo, which he painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel circa 1508–1512.
Greek of the Week
Today’s Greek word and concept is οἶκος, transliterated as oikos, and which is loosely defined as house.
Contextually, this term often describes not simply a physical structure or dwelling place, but also the smallest unit of the community, often thought of as a family.
In philosophical terms, to be part of one oikos is to be unified at a metaphysical level as parts of a connected body, like a family, or a nation, or a movement.
One of the greatest goals of many philosophies and religions is to unify all people as one oikos — humanity — in order to foster peace and prosperity for all.
Buy My Book
The Testimony of Jacob Cohen is a cosmic horror story about an archeologist on an Antarctic expedition who discovers a mysterious ziggurat that hides terrifying secrets from a forgotten past.
It draws inspiration from the narrative style of Dracula, the real-life Endurance expedition led by Ernest Shackleton, and Dionysian cult mysticism, along with modern astronomy, astrobiology, and mycology.
The book is available for purchase on Amazon, and you can also enter to win a FREE signed copy.
Helpful Links: Official Website | Latest Book | Podcast | YouTube | LinkedIn | X
I really enjoyed reading this, thanks for braving this topic & conversation as well as sharing. I wish more people were talking about this topic.
This quote made me nod my head: “These things are essential, though, because building and maintaining a relationship with a good woman unlocks many critical life and leadership skills that men will struggle to learn anywhere else.” I believe it’s the *depth of love and spirit* that women bring to a relationship that *open* a man up to these lessons.
Great article.