In traditional social orders with thick kin mediation and tight reputation economies there are pretty dire consequences for acting niggerish and cockroachy: if you waste a chick’s twenties in a fake and gay forever engagement her brothers will rip your cock off; if you administer a seventeenth trimester abortion by way of exercise bands you’ll get stoned to death; if you repeatedly fail to deliver the goods you’ll starve in the street.
Then as we asymptotically approach post-scarcity that all seems very gauche.
Not when the other fella does it, of course; in that case we all still grumble about how the Old Ways were better. But when WE’RE the one who shat the bed at work or want to waste some bih’s time there are always Reasons—and meanwhile if Catie is allowed to say her gramps died to get out of going to that escape room / mayhaps gargling my jissum I’ll sure as shit not let my 15% more extraverted friend guilt me into putting on pants to follow through on my own promises. You want the nosy auntie around to shame your own sis for being a whore, but when she’s shaming that coed you’re trying to smash it acquires a rather different phenomenology, does it not?
So in aggregate you get a ratchet effect that all feels very tragic and dystopic when you’re Menelaus, but when you’re Hector kind of just looks like Menelaus being a contemptible loser who should be tortured to death (at least until some incel climbs on a roof and blows a hole in your windpipe). And nothing can stop the ratchet either, because as society grows more commercial / abstracted / procedural and we outsource trust to LexisNexis and MyLife.com George Costanza values scale a lot better than Tony Soprano values. Not letting your daughter get soft raped in the van means yourself having to fuck naught but the same cankled rectangle for forty years, and most men simply aren’t willing to take that bargain.
So honor collapses, and most people gradually equilibrate towards being precisely as flaky and incompetent as their local incentive gradient permits, opportunistically facefucking everyone else’s sister whenever they get a chance whilst churning out Menelaean fagstories about how it’s Different whenever it happens to them (and sincerely believing those stories as sincere moral belief is adaptively self-interested) and usually calling you Jewish should you ever describe the process accurately.
That said, it would also be very cringe and gay to say that no one is ever trustworthy.
Trust is different for men and women, and the reason is uncongenial to libtard sensibilities but fundamentally very simple: women have almost no autonomous diachronic agency and can’t reliably bind themselves through time except through inherited paternal authority or chosen affiliation with an institution or husband.
To the extent her judgment is subordinated to a man or institution, you are really negotiating with him or it. Otherwise her judgment is essentially rain, her opinions totalistically belonging to the ambient FemBorg, her primal cunthunger, and her amygdalic disgust impulse.
Both men and women obviously respond to incentives, but there’s a huge difference:
Women can’t meaningfully be held accountable, especially by men and especially especially in reputationally salient erotic / romantic conflict
Women have a higher floor for dignity and a lower ceiling for the same, because peepo tolerate less overtly agentic evil from them than sovereign men but also let them half-consciously diffuse their ambient evil and let low status roachmen eat it
Men are incentivized to cope and make shit up about the objective righteousness of their own status / incentive structure, whereas women aren’t sovereign moral poles and so instead cope and make shit up about either the man or institution they’re affiliated with or the general moral rectitude of womynkind
None of this is “socially trained” except to the extent everything is via feedback loops.
They are deeply engrained sexed differences cited in precisely every edition of Cosmo and Amy Schumer special, and persist across ecologies and circumstances even when heterogeneously mediated by proximate-level causes like race/class/status/smexiness.
Now obviously Late Modernity plays a role in this too, with the prime culprit as usual being that pestiferous Zoomer Oral Culture.
Essentially the feedification of modern life is making everyone act like a bitchy flaky solipsistic teenage girl who can just call you an incel if you ever expect her to do anything she doesn’t want to do right this moment.
Precisely everyone in modern life does this to whatever extent they have the power and status to get away with it, with ackshual teenage girls clearly being the worst offenders but even sixty year-old boomer men doing basically the same thing to whatever extent they’re permitted by late capitalist institutional liquefaction.
If you blame people for this individually you have Down Syndrome and should be raped to death. You can’t blame people for following incentives, especially at scale.
You can certainly spin a Menelaean yarn when it hurts you, but the more vital act is always just to go facefuck somebody else’s sister, which there are invariably many many more of—that and only affiliate with Myrmidons you can ackshully count on.
So who specifically can you trust?
In the executive sense i.e. ability to deliver the goods under sufficient motivation that’s mostly baked into somatic assessments of status, which serve as a pretty dece proxy for everything that locally matters in that realm: rising status generally tracks increased ability to deliver the goods, while sustained status loss updates you sharply downward on competence and reliability. There’s always some hysteresis obviously, but in the long run it tends to wash out which means as a loose heuristic status works increasingly well the less u know a guy (individually there’s always Reasons Reasons).
But the trust I care about here is conative—e.g. one’s precognitive impulse to side with you and experience your position as right, dignified, coo, deserving, etc.
Going by the teenage girl rule, that’s basically peepo who experience your wins as theirs.
Which again, I mean precognitively and somatically; not as fake and gay “beliefs” or “ideas” or “values” which are mostly all post-hoc epiphenomenal just-so stories.
The most obvious condition emerges from shared risk exposure—kids, family property, common projects, and so on—to whatever extent these things are ackshully conatively salient and tied to persistent long-term social position, which late modern conditions have thinned considerably but far from done away with.
More generally it breaks down by sex pretty concretely—if you’re a man you can trust women who are diachronically incorporated into your sovereign preference-set, and broadly any guy whose status position rises and falls with yours.
Dealing with women it’s hypercontextual; you can usually make a girl want to defend your interests just by turning her on or making her laugh or complimenting her hubs or something (this is why women destabilize institutions btw). But as a general rule from most to least trustworthy:
Your mom will experience your interests as literally hers—more so than even your dad’s since he is replaceable and your sister’s since she can be absorbed by society and men in a way you can’t. Your dad’s love is a bit more merit-indexed but your mom’s conative alignment with you as a son is if anything inversely correlated with your value as a human bean except to the extent you’re sabotaging better sons or e.g. actively raping your sister or something.
Any woman you have kids with and are financially supporting and can still make cum regularly (esp through vaginal orgasms) is almost as trustworthy as a mom, as is a daughter or younger sister who experiences you as high status and reliable.
Women who don’t experience you as reputationally damaging and you are giving vaginal orgasms semi-regularly are half a level below that. Elder sisters and close female cousins who are proud of you are also here.
Every other woman on earth is several steps below that and fundamentally untrustworthy in the male sense because she’ll constantly renarrate shit around you if it’s presently beneficial to her own sense of moral/reputational coherence and status position—expect “I didn’t know who I was then”, “that wasn’t a real relationship,” “I was fawning”, “you were reading into things”, etc. etc. etc. That said you can conditionally trust women to the extent:
She gets status / resources from you more easily than other niggas
Her own reputation for womanly dependability depends on not doing you reputational harm (easier if u yourself seem like a reliable aw shucks type)
You make her cum more than your rivals (ideally vaginally; clitorally is experienced by women as quasi-sapphic and masturbatory)
You make her husband or institutionhusband look good
You make her seem smexy, interesting, dignified, or Right
You improve her reputational position in the FemBorg or are a coalitional ally against non-FemBorg approved men
Your romantic/erotic/whatever dyad is instantly legible to other women and needn’t be flattened / massaged for the most and least fuckable chicks there
She has staked enough dignity on u publicly that deciding you’re ackshully a monster would make the margins of her friend circle call her a retarded slut
Enough of her circle independently thinks ur coo that renarrating you would complicate her own autonarrative (less reliable in BPD bihs)
You play a prominent role in a subculture she takes specific identitarian pride in (very heavy impulse for Millennielles; much less so for Zoomettes)
If none of those conditions obtain don’t trust a word that escapes that cockholster.
Dealing with men it’s a lot gayer because status is deeply intersectional.
With every other man you have multiple avenues of conative alignment / discord.
Some are obvious identitarian concerns: race, religion, nationality. These at this point are kind of boring to me because I’m an atheist who is very committed to saying nigger specifically to scandalize WASP women but otherwise doesn’t really have much ingroup sentiment if I’m honest besides e.g. cheering for the white boxer. Speaking just in terms of instinctive somatic affiliation: in a sketchy Slavic airport a black American guy who votes GOP = an UMC British suburbanite who votes Labour = a local skinhead, all of whom beat AOC who in turn beats Huey P Newton and fall under a moderately racist white American libertarian who himself falls under the corps of men who built Tortuga with me including the black / Indian / Jew / Gen X guys.
Beyond that you have also class and professional alignment which is similarly intersectional—e.g. I might get a dopamine burst hearing another actuary saying “write an exam” and feel affectively bound to him despite hating actuarial science, while also having loathed actuaries more credentialed than myself because they were making like $250k a year to force everyone to keep using the same old Excel models from the Bush Administration instead of learning SQL like a normal person.
Maybe the biggest force these days is sexual. Guys who relate to women in the same way sexually (and ESPECIALLY get pusspuss the same way) copacetically experience each other as more coo / virtuous while seeing guys who relate to women in a different way as simps/predators and experiencing their pussygetting vectors as contaminated. So the looksmaxxer calls the moneymaxxer a paypig and is called gay in return, the WASPy DINK calls the Passport Bro a creepy arbitrageur and gets called a cuck, etc.
More generally men can trust each other conatively due to similar humiliations and outsider experiences, similar status ascension routes, shared subcultural affiliation, and ESPECIALLY shared enemies—particularly when they’re not directly competing in any of the same lanes (this is why gays who aren’t faggots tend to punch above their weight in male status hierarchies and you get random brown guys in the elite ranks of racist white boy social circles).
Paradoxically, the guys you can trust the least are similarly status-elastic guys in the exact same subculture who are competing for the exact same opportunities, women, and audiences. But generally it’s most intense with dudes one or two levels below or above you; if you’re roughly comparable as sovereign actors men gravitate towards cordial friendly rivalry and selective collaboration, with intense resentment existing most acutely diagonally. Close friendships are typically arbitrageurial or sycophantic.
Again though it’s all intersectional; one day you feel similar ethnic alignment with a dude because you both don’t fit into WASP snowvalues, the next day you feel better than him because his girlfriend is fat or Asian and he thinks you’re a pedophile for dating a 23 year old. Everyone is constantly coping while experiencing it as muh morality muh values muh taste and calling you Jewish if you point this out.
I call this model Intersectional Identitarianism.
Alright so what about all my delectable sweetfeet chickie pusspuss readers?
Whomst can they trust?
When it comes to other women, you can’t deeply trust a bih who gets her dignity from a fundamentally different source. The girlboss and the housewife can’t ever be friends because womanly pusspusslogic is architectonically incapable of experiencing other women’s preferences as sovereign and dignified.
All women think women who choose something different are pathetic, coping, deluded, kidding themselves, or unserious. The girl who marries the roofer thinks her old roommate’s accountant husband is a pathetic faggot, and the roommate thinks the roofer is a retarded hick. The girl with five kids experiences her childless sister as a tragic old maid, and is in turn experienced as an enslaved broodmare.
>nooooo ackshully I’m not like that at aaaaaaall
Yes you are.
That said female friendships are like male ones most copacetically insulated if they’re competing in different lanes. The tall blonde and shortstack brunette are natural allies and can plausibly never experience conscious status competition so long as neither gets an autistic boyfriend who forces the issue. Meanwhile the tall blonde and slightly chubbier tall blonde aren’t stable comrades at all. Even the morbidly obese or black chick can fit in as a token with a hot girl friend group by being comic relief or moral anchor while playing a totally different minigame at gurls night without it necessarily feeling undignified, while the one moderately fatter than everyone else is less credible as comic relief / moralist because her liminality creates an uncanny valley jealous effect that functionally makes her mostly just cockblock and ruin shit.
That said those liminal gals are also the most sentient of womynkind usually and will write things like HBO Girls etc. because they have kind of a reverse Jonah Hill thing where they taste just enough of the wine and roses to hate Stacy and see the trvth.
Finally a woman can trust a man in proportion to a few things:
If he brings you to some gathering of his peer group do you enhance or diminish his standing with peepo he cares about? Be realistic.
Does treating you well raise or lower his relative standing among the men whose judgment he actually cares about?
If he (probs internally sincerely) inflates his commitment impulse or future prospects can you meaningfully punish him for it such that the threat of punishment makes him ackshully follow through?
Does he place an arbitragistic premium compared to other men on your particular qualities in a way that his social circle won’t call cope?
Can he rely on you to represent him in a dignified and non-flattening way to your own social circle without seeking easy validation for your own bad behavior by calling him a narc or rewriting him as neglectful/abusive/etc.?
Do you provide qualities that are relatively difficult for him to replace?
If the above factors don’t obtain he’ll use you for hole while minimizing the attention and resources directed your way and come up with a reason it’s okay you’ll probably accept because you’re a woman until he looks weak and you decide to ruin his life.
If they REALLY don’t obtain he’ll eroticize taking advantage of you.
If they do obtain he’ll sincerely feel obliged to take good care of you and will be an excellent boyfriend.
If they obtain too much you probably won’t feel attracted to him.
So, as a general heuristic: Trust rises with conative alignment, shared downside, and capacity to bind; it falls with substitutability and ecological incentive plasticity.
Anyway if you like this read my new book:
I really like this new direction you're going with just heavy, blunt and brutal psychologizing. I think you could write something that transcends your substack persona and has lasting cultural impact if The Orange Book is not already that, obviously still gotta read it. But what I mean is like, you could do it more than once, I feel like this is the beginning of something big. 21st century Adderall Nietszche with muscles who fucks
Cold hard truth, every word of it