For context:
This is a 20 minute O&A clip featuring Patrice O’Neal, Jimmy Norton, and the beloved and ill-attired Kevin Smith on a controversy that’s old news now and that I didn’t pay attention to at the time and don’t particularly care about now. I don’t care what Mel Gibson or Oksana Grigorieva did to each other or who was in the right. I’m interested in the elemental psychology we hear in the short excerpt above.
There’s countless hours of video on it on Youtube, with commentary from Opie and Anthony or any number of people. It’s probably worth listening to some of the raw audio yourself to see what it elicits in you, despite the fact that it’s ancient history now. But I’m going back even further, to the dawn of humanity and how men and women drive each other crazy.
Of men and monsters, of mounds and molehills
If you’re a man listening to this, your reaction is probably either shock or sympathy. Shock because you don’t think that you’re capable of this or that anyone but a maniac should be, or sympathy because you’ve gone nuclear on some blood-sucking harpy in that same sort of way that would be sure to get you institutionalized if you weren’t Mel Gibson.
My hot take is that we are all fundamentally capable of this, and if you’re a man who thinks otherwise, you’re either a liar, have never been pushed to this point (yet,) or you’re the quiet, deferential type who is poised to blow up one day and commit a murder-suicide. Which Disney prince are you?
The other side is that if you are a woman, or are man who doesn’t think your woman is capable of the sheer vitriole Mel lets loose here, or the conniving snakeishness that Oksana displays by taking a great man down from—as Jimmy put it, the comfort of her own home— then you too are naive or a liar.
When I say a great man, I mean a powerful man, but more importantly I mean a man. A man who works hard, achieves success, and ditches his wife to share it with this woman who, from what we know with scientific certainty about relationships in general, only had to hang around and suck his dick occasionally for it.
When they note that Mel sounds like a nine year old in his insults, the truth to that is more than surface level. He has let himself become so upset leading up to this conversation (you can’t call it an argument, since his lovely KGB agent of an ex-girlfriend has staged it perfectly to paint herself as all-American victim) that he has reverted to a primal fury so pure and real that is is almost beautiful, like watching a lion tear the innards out of a gazelle.
[It bears noting that the third party involved in this fiasco was alcohol, and you’d eliminate 90%+ of these fiery shitstorms if it was out of the equation. — Paid Advertisement by the American Teetotalers Association.]
Even these battle-hardened media personalities commentating have to take a step back and admit that Mel is acting outrageously. Of course I’m most interested in Patrice’s angle, and you can see him develop a reaction that doesn’t have to guess what’s going on or the basic reasons why, unlike Ope and Ant, that’s firmly rooted in his philosophy on women.
Jimmy admits he’s had blow-out arguments like this in every relationship he’s been in. I have to doubt Kevin when he says he couldn’t imagine being mad enough to call someone a pig. Come on, man, tell us the truth!
And while we’re at it, you tell us too.
Following your gut
That exact, primal, enraged, entrails-devouring gut feeling brought Mel into this unhappy situation, to become the subject of the whole world’s judgment on a thing that most people are fortunate enough to never have the rest of the world see, (unless you’ve been to family court,) but the twisteroo is that it it’s that gut energy that would have kept him out of this situation. And kept him happy. And his Russian whore too.
The biggest mistake Mel made wasn’t getting recorded, though that was a doozy especially for a man of his stature. It was allowing himself to get so angry that he broke down into this state at all. That may seem all too obvious, but for anyone who has something as embarrassing and damning as that captured to be used as evidence against them, they’re most often kicking themselves about the being-recorded part. You should act like you’re on camera at all times. God is watching and so is the audience.
The same gut-feeling which had him rocket-barraging insults so cartoonishly petty and heartfelt that it’s not hard to laugh admist the sirens-blaring discomfort, if applied in small doses consistently, would have trained Oksana to know that he wasn’t a man to be trifled with. A thousand little “I’m Mel Gibson, bitch!”-es works a lot better than a thunderous, raging diatribe essentially trying to state the same thing. In other words, avoid ever reaching the boiling point in yourself.
That’s the point of following your gut and checking your girl when she bugs you. Every time you eat your liver by letting something slide when you know you shouldn’t, it’s another little insult to your confidence and well-being. Eventually you will blow up.
This naturally confuses the hell out of your woman, who presumed that everything was okay because you were signaling to her that it was by avoiding or accepting her shit-tests instead of casually beating them with the righteous wisdom of a man who isn’t defeated by teenage boundary tests and isn’t afraid to assert himself. Jordan Peterson’s Rule 5: Don’t let snot-nosed brats make you blow a headgasket and smash their head through a wall, or worse, come to resent them.
Not a blessing or a curse, a challenge
The quote above may sound like mystical malarky, but it represents a profound shift in mindset from the usual rollercoaster of temporary pleasure juxtaposed with victimhood that defines most people’s lives. Things are what they are, and our only power is what we do with them. But what a power that is!
“For me the world is weird because it is stupendous, awesome, mysterious, unfathomable; my interest has been to convince you that you must assume responsibility for being here, in this marvelous world, in this marvelous desert, in this marvelous time. I want to convince you that you must learn to make every act count, since you are going to be here for only a short while, in fact, too short for witnessing all the marvels of it.”
One more Carlos Castaneda quote to demonstrate an intersection I’ve conceived here: what CC said about being a warrior, what Patrice said about following your gut and making it paramount that you’re happy, can also be seen as returning to a natural state of being and embracing an almost childlike splendor: tempering the reality of being an adult dealing with boring and miserable realities, but doing it in a way that connects with your style, your philosophy, your self. In other words, being the you that you choose to be.
In other words, the fourteen year old you would probably know when things sucked and when to take his ball and go home. But you’re much too advanced for that, which is why you’ll put up with a marriage you’ve made miserable until you feel the sweet relief of being broken up with— an inherently feminine strategy, by the way. Fourteen year old you would probably punch you in the face for being such a pussy, like you wanted to punch your parents for fighting over stupid stuff constantly.
It’s more complicated than that? No kidding. You’re the only one with the tools to de-complicate it. There’s no cure for autism, but there are remedies.
Pizazz and whimsy
It’s a redpill tenet to keep things lighthearted and fun. It’s also something fourteen year old you knew.
Small, quick, moving-right-along corrections (and the occasional stern, silent stare) work wonderfully within that framework, and help you gain a sense of mastery as you build on those corrections rather than turning every little issue into a Problem That Needs Discussed (TM).
No one on Earth wants to hear “We need to talk.” You’re embracing state lottery odds that that the “discussion” will lead to any real change, tossing out the whimsical play of small corrections and keeping it fun for everyone— for what?
Down that road leads the inevitable misguided missile barrage of demands, compromises, pleadings, insults and ultimatums that will produce nothing but will certainly diminish any form of respect or communication between you and your beloved. Humans don’t talk like that, and women certainly don’t.
They say in “text game,” (trying to text girls in a way that gets you better dating outcomes,) you should knock your reading level down a notch or two. There’s wider wisdom in that. Stop trying to explain everything like an autist, stop having so little confidene in your assertations that you think you’ll defend, explain, excuse and rationalize your way into intellectual victory.
Be straightforward, keep it simple, say what you mean to say and mean it, and then keep moving.
“Now you're looking for the secret. But you won't find it because of course, you're not really looking. You don't really want to work it out. You want to be fooled.”
The Prestige made a good point about magic shows. People go to be dazzled. Only a handful of autists actually want to see how the sausage is made. Unfortunately, a lot of the autists are us, (including me,) and we often suffer and make the people around us suffer under the delusion that they too want to see underneath the hood.
Whatever women say about wanting to communicate and understand each other and compromise is 99% just propaganda they absorbed that’s desperately trying to convince them that being feminine is horrible. And in a society so full of weak, immasculate men, you’d be hard-pressed to say that’s not a reasonably appealing defense mechanism. But it’s not a healthy one either.
Women enter a relationship wanting some basic things: to be taken care of by an attractive man who leads and does the things no one ever wants to do, just as you love her for the reverse, unless you’re both capable and inclined to suck your own dick, cook and clean, and raise your kids. This division of roles flowers from the natural contrast between the two very different sexes, and the proper balance and navigation of it is what charges relationships and make them more than just two roommates who occasionally have bad sex.
While you may have gone into it with a combination of fervent academic curiosity and feverish utilitarian notekeeping, she didn’t go into it wanting to study and understand you, because as Patrice put it, no woman ever needed to understand men deeply to get one. They can just hang around, be reasonably attractive and not-unenjoyable, and like that, she’s got her lottery ticket. You had to hunt, and thank God, they love to be hunted.
All of that is why your sterile, unsexy heartfelt sit-down talks never work. (If they did once, supposedly, provide proof to win the million dollar reward. I’ll give you, maybe she was so desperate she was willing to try anything, even listening to your latest passion-murdering speech.)
You’re a magician, and your task is to make mystifying things happen by building up on a small series of seemingly insigificant but interesting tricks till each next big stage of the act. Your “prestige” is whatever you want it to be, but respect and stability are probably on that list unless you’re blowing through two girls a week, in which case this blog isn’t for you— but it will be when you eventually give in and try to settle down with one and it turns out they liked you more before.
What the magician doesn’t do is explain the whole act, sit down and try to prompt the audience on how to receive the entertainment, or make it their fault when they mess up a part of the trick. It’s how we roll with the mistakes that define us, and when you drop your set of cards, it might be the perfect time to inject some humor and go to plan B. You did have a plan B, right?
Girls gone wild
The flipside of the card is that every woman on Earth is capable of the same childish cruelty, aggression, and maliciousness of Brother Mel, and it’s for similar reasons: being pushed into a state frenzy by so many minor and major microaggressions against their deepest seated nature that it literally transforms them into a demonic berserker.
You will see girls who everyone thinks are the sweetest turn into knock-down drag-out boxers, smashing furniture and throwing your Alienware laptop into your beloved collection of Funko Pops, spewing circuitry and overpriced plastic as it smashes through the new white Ikea shelf you bought because she said if you’re going to add another stupid shelf in the damn living room, it better be one she thinks looks good.
The man’s reaction in the situation is the stuff of a billion highly entertaining traumatic horror stories and many millions of ongoing domestic violence cases, but again, we’re only concerned with how it got there.
Guess what? It’s your fault too.
I know that precisely because I’ve made women go berserk, and in retrospect, I can see why. That doesn’t mean I wasn’t right, and it certainly doesn’t mean that they were right, but I can see how I didn’t act rightly. And when the demons start flying around like Raiders of the Lost Ark, it quickly stops mattering who was right.
As you get older, if you pay attention, you start noticing patterns, you see how a chain of events led to a big blow-up. And now you’re beat up and lawyered up.
That’s not to say that there aren’t violent and even psychopathic women out there, but they too were trained by men to think that was an acceptable way to blow off some steam or show how angry you made them.
The good book says it’s better to be on the corner of a rooftop than with a brawling woman. While everyone who knows that’s true knows that it’s literally true, it would behoove them to look at all the over bits in there— aimed at men— and think about what set her off to the point where he was drinking vinegar on his roof waiting for the indoor fire-tornado to stop. Did the Psalmist forget Valentine’s Day?
Flowers are what a girl thinks she wants. They’re cute. The floral industry convinced her great-great-great-great-great grandmother that they mean love. Her friends get them. Other girls get them. So they should too.
A strong man is what a girl needs. And a man can only be strong if he knows what he needs and knows how to get it. Then he can be happy, and the happiness trickles down.
So get her some flowers sometime if that’s what you want to do. But bring her home a strong man every day.
You, I mean. Not off Craigslist. Jeez.