It's your job to be the "asshole"
Your woman's happiness trickles down from you: Patrice O'Neal's philosophy marches on.
Prefacing the music
A big purpose of this blog is to hammer on the fundamentals of the philosophy on relationships and happiness that are embodied in the late comedian Patrice O’Neal, mostly on his Black Philip Show.
Today we’ll talk about a number of the key points he made. They should be required reading for every man out there. I don’t say that because every word Patrice said was the word of God, but because there’s a very real and destructive epidemic of male weakness and misery, and such a dearth of wisdom in men having a real, living, working philosophy they live by the works for them that it would be criminal not to draw the average joe’s attention to Patrice.
An underated deceased loudmouth fat black comedian gave some of the best, free, simplest, profoundest, controversialest, universally applicable advice on relationships that can be found on the whole web to this day.
That is a glaring monument to the seemingly hopeless state of modern relationships and the lack of support for men that just want themselves and their families to be happy in a world that gives them very conflicting and usually impotent answers on how to do just that, much locked behind a paywall.
It’s a testament to the power of these little gems of wisdom a big guy with a bigger personality dished out like it was nothing, all with a smile, for next to no compensation. It’s another testament that so many of the people that heard him took it so much to heart that they go out of their way to tell other hurting men to give an ear to our patron saint ol’ Patreeky.
Almost every day I talk to guys that are really going through it with their wives and women, divorces, cheating, sexlessness, and untold misery, and I know a little bit of Black Philip Show would have gone a long way. I know that because they come back to me and tell me themselves it did, because many of you have told me how happy you are to see someone writing about Patrice in this year, and I know because it helped me.
I invite you to comment which Patrice sayings helped you, your favorites, or even when you think he was off the mark or just some horrible misogynist. Make your voice heard — for Democracy!
The easiest way to give guys some “Patrice 101” is just have them listen to the show. It’s only twelve episodes freely available on Youtube and Soundcloud and there’s tons of laughs and different and dissenting viewpoints whether you’re there for “relationship advice” or just a fun show. Listen to it with your wife, she’s sure to love it!
There’s no substitute for listening to the show yourself, but we’re here to expound on those basics in the written format Patrice was too lazy to get around to typing, evolve the ideas and apply them to modern problems, and talk about what works and what didn’t and how we integrated it into our personal styles, something Patrice repeatedly told people to do.
The difference between the rigidity of a lot of men’s self-help / dating advice and Patrice’s advice is that he didn’t want an army of little Chad clones in Ferraris. He gave a combo of general advice and some usually hilarious examples and left it up to you to apply it organically.
But some of the core concepts from his philosophy are so simple, so seemingly obvious, so universal that it’s hard to think of a guy they don’t apply to once you hear them and decide for yourself the context he was relating them in.
Patrice’s philosophy, part 1
“It’s your fault”
Patrice’s core rule, a bitter medicine he dished out to many a caller on his show, and something we as men are duty-bound to dish out to each other.
Without acknowledging that you hold responsibility for yourself, your woman, your household— (and to a lesser degree that most people aren’t willing to confront, your friends and loved ones and all the people you come in contact with)— you choose to remain trapped in a cycle of reactivity and irresponsibility. No captain at the wheel.
If you don’t believe you’re the captain of your ship, whose ship are you on? Is it a 50/50 split with your wife? Very progressive of you, but nothing’s ever 50/50, no such thing as different and equal. Try steering with one hand while she steers with one from the passenger’s seat. Note that it’s called the passenger’s seat, not the “totally equal second driver’s seat.”
Modern men are hung up on delusions of equality while living through the destructive effects of futily attempting it being borne out before their very eyes. This is one part indoctrination and lack of education, but an equally large part avoiding the searing discomfort and soul-heavy loneliness of realizing you alone in life on a level that is unique to men. But it’s a lot less lonely than divorce and devastation.
The cool part about embracing your difficult destiny is it’ll force you to get to know yourself and find out what you’re really made of. Not the “knowing yourself,” of feminized consumerist society that deviously equates self-knowledge and self-control with preferences on which material and ideological products you’re buying. But real meetings with your nature. The ship might be messed up, full of holes, half-sinking, but it’s your ship to steer, share, and sail where you will.
You’re also never alone when you surround yourself with the counsel and support of good men.
“Happiness trickles down from you”
The positive flipside of “everything is your fault” is that the happiness trickles down from you.
As we discussed, “Happy wife, happy life” is a damaging truism handed down by beaten-down men and demon-possessed shills to further the gynocentric agenda. If you want proof it’s an agenda, try saying “If mom’s happy everyone’s happy” in one crowd, and “If I’m happy she’ll be happy to a different one” and document the reactions.
If you want proof it doesn’t work, look at any women who is handed everything they think they want. Like the permanent teenagers they mentally are, they will take and take with no end to their appetite, and come to take your trembling peace offerings for granted, which naturally means a nuclear meltdown when the gifts cease, like cutting off an addict’s dope.
That isn’t to say you want your woman unhappy, or that giving gifts is always a bad thing, but like so many things men do, the problem is doing it for the wrong reasons, (“unrighteously” in Patrice terms.)
Assuming you’re not a narcissistic maniac who would be better served reading guides on how to get whatever you want at all costs, you want your loved ones to be happy. The problem is the mentally (and sometimes physically) battered man who does it at his own expense as standard operation. Queue you stuffing every gut instinct you’ve had since you started “trying to do things right,” until a fiery torrent of hate and frustration explodes from dad. They just wanted to do burgers instead of Italian.
“Happiness trickles down from you,” isn’t an invitation to pure selfishness or self-interest, but a remembrance of the basic command structure in a family or relationship. It’s related to some of his other principles we won’t get into, but here’s some quotes from Patrice to give context:
“A good relationship is where a woman is just a little bit insecure.”
“Women’s power is in your fear of whatever it is they’re gonna do.”
It’s not a condemnation of manly sacrifice, but a call to sacrifice with purpose and care, because any person whittled down to only the wants (and they are usually wants) of others is of no use to anyone. And a man especially, in his pride and natural need to feel respected and heard, will take this sabotage of his self with a deep and special kind of self-perpetuating defeat.
You all know somebody like this. He lives the life of a beaten-down sitcom dad, the punching bag of the family, no one respects him, he is foolish and impotent. No matter how much he laughs it off, repeats the “Happy wife, happy life” mantra, this is no comedy, it’s a tragedy.
The canned laughter comes from onlookers who resent his weakness and ineptness. The applause roars as relationships and households fall to pieces and for a brief period, in the interest and excitement of “at least some kind of change happening,” the majority of onlookers, sympathetic only to the wife and kid’s story, (having been the only side of the story they heard, let alone cared to hear,) the audience praises the newfound freedom of change and action, brought on by some other actor who had to step in, having been witness to the abuse of the good-intentioned weak man’s people-pleasing and absenteeism.
Even his friends, supposedly on his side, offer him no real advice on why it happened or what to do. “That bitch,” “You can do better than her,” “It’s not your fault, man,” are the best they can offer, the types of hollow gestures a middleschooler gives their crying friend over the phone while boredly wondering whether they can get their shot in now.
All because they didn’t read this blog.
Because you didn’t share it.
“Listen to your gut”
If passivity and repression are the modern “good guy’s” essential problem, the missing ingredient is taking action, making choices, and living with it.
The key to doing this is getting in touch with the gut feelings you started pushing down at the various stages of “doing what (someone told me) I’m supposed to do.”
That’s not a condemnation of “doing what is right,” it’s a condemnation of doing what you accepted “is right,” after a cursory glance at the box. A few head turns in either direction, a shrug, “Well, everyone else is doing it.” With 50% divorce rates, you’re either a Cee-lo god or maybe you should have done a little more meditation on the kind of man you want to be.
If you’ve read this far, I don’t need to explain that listening to your gut doesn’t mean becoming a tyrant. If you’ve ever mistakenly tried that or watched someone try to go from zero to sixty after reading a few articles or hearing advice from their buddies at the bar, let us know how it worked out.
Think more like being a benevolent king.
It’s not about being a dick or not being a dick, it’s about understanding why you’re being a dick, or nice, or whatever it is.
But true, following your gut will mean stepping on some toes, “being an ass,” and a lot more often than you’re probably used to. The care-free, says what he means and means what he says ass your girl probably fell in love with before someone came by and convinced you that you are both wrong and she should have fallen in love with something you aren’t.
Because despite what we’ve been force-fed, while a little gallantry can be refreshing, women typically like men because we’re a little rough around the edges, otherwise they’d get with a woman not someone with ball sweat and a porn addiction. They want security and stability, sure. They also want to be challenged, told no, and to be led, not hand-fed every whim and fancy they ask for. Would you enjoy a video game with no difficulty, no challenge, no ability to lose? Don’t answer that.
If you could read your wife’s thoughts when she was thinking of you, which would be more hurtful, “asshole,” or “genuinely unstimulating?”
If you don’t follow your gut, you won’t act when it’s right. When you don’t do that, you becoming increasingly withdrawn, absent, less yourself. As that happens, the doomsday clock starts ticking.
“You gotta do things righteously.”
Another term with a special Patrice-specific angle is “righteousness.” He literally said “not righteous as in religion, but righteous to yourself.” For some, that righteousness be right in line with your faith. For some, that “righteousness” might mean talking her into a threesome. If you’re from Utah, it may be both.
The point is to act in a way that’s consistent with your values and not what the back of a milk carton told you was what good men do.
It goes without saying that means internalizing the right values, but that also means enacting those values effectively and regularly on the world around you, starting with yourself and at home. Reading it in a book only helps if it changes how you act, otherwise the knowledge is just a defense against change.
You might not view your relationship as a game, but women aren’t as autistic and boring as you are, and you don’t want them to be.
You might’ve heard me or my colleague Arthur Schopenhauer passingly mention that women are innately a bit childish, which is why they’re good at raising young kids, and why they’re frequently coming up with cute little zany ideas like moving to the other side of the country because they offer a better work schedule. Seattle’s a beautiful city and there’s lots of jobs there!
That lifelong child-at-heart nature is part of why we love them, and why you’re being arm-twisted into spending every spare dollar you earned this year for a second trip to Europe (oh, I love the culture!) instead of what you actually want to do, stay safely at home scratching your growing belly, watching football.
Their childishness is dangerous and destructive when it’s ignored or unbridled, but it’s endearing and beautiful when balanced with your calm and steady leadership.
Your tendency to seek to routine and safety will create boredom and stagnation if you let it, but it also prevents the family from financial ruin by maxing out the credit cards for the latest expensive hobby she’s going to abandon after a month, or telling her she can’t take herself and your kids to go camping three hundred miles away unarmed in a state full of meth heads. “I’m a grown woman, you can’t tell me what to do!”
“It’s my car and my kids, so yes I can, Susan!” you imagine having awesomely said, as you silently retreat to the bathroom, the only place in the house you feel is yours anymore, for forty minutes of contemplation scrolling TikTok.
Nevermind that the bank owns your car and the public education system owns your kids. Maybe you’d let her go if she’d practice with that Hello Kitty Glock 43 you bought her, but she’s not going to go to the range unless you make her. And go with her. Ah well, guess she’s going camping on her sister’s couch anyway.
My point isn’t to tell you whether it’s your responsibility to constantly entertain the teenage brained adult sitting in your living room with dark stormcloud thought bubbles full of why you’re a piece of shit yet violently rejecting the reality that you’d probably give her whatever she wanted if she gave a half-hearted blowjob for the first time in four years.
My point isn’t to tell you whether you should shell out money for her dreams of travel and culture sponsored by her shallow friends on her Facebook feed, whether you should propose to her because her friend just got engaged, (with a nice fat stone — better keep up!) or whether you should go the beach because it’s a beautiful day even though you hate the sand, water, seagulls and anywhere without central AC.
My point isn’t to tell you whether to get her flowers, take her out to dinner, participate in Valentine’s Day or the stress of a lavish anniversary celebration even though deep in your gut you feel it’s all for her and nothing for you. It’s not to tell you whether to involve her in this decision or that, to hold the door open for her, or to let her drug addict brother sleep on the couch in the house where you keep your money, electronics, and fiearm collection.
My point is to do whatever it is you’re going to do with a purpose and reason. That’s doing things righteously. And to stop real quick and consider everytime your gut fills up with hot bile when she says something, and whether you should say something that needs said even if she won’t respond with a kiss and a thank you for correcting her. That’s following you gut.
When you do things righteously, it suddenly stops mattering what you do so much as how (external) and why (internal) you do it.
Healing your gut
When you start following your gut, you’ll be shocked at how difficult something so theoretically simple is. Uncle Patreeky made it look so easy!
You’ll make mistakes. You’ll take a small correction too far and accidentally crank the meter up to max. You’ll overexplain something that should’ve been a half-second interaction. You’ll give a short correction on something that warranted an hour diatribe. You’ll gloss over bullshit you should’ve called out. You’ll feel the call to say what you feel, then hesitate in the moment of truth:
“The deadliest weapon in the world is a Marine and his rifle. It is your killer instinct which must be harnessed if you expect to survive in combat. Your rifle is only a tool. It is a hard heart that kills. If your killer instincts are not clean and strong you will hesitate at the moment of truth. You will not kill. You will become dead marines and then you will be in a world of shit because marines are not allowed to die without permission. Do you maggots understand?
—Gunnery Sergeant Hartman, Full Metal Jacket (1987)
“Women are the enemy”
I do not advocate shooting your wife with an M14 for all the mental abuse that you caused her to put you through—those moments of fantasizing are best left between you and the paid hitman the guy at the bar hooked you up with for the two hundred bucks in your pocket.
Patrice’s controversial statement “Women are the enemy” sums up the 24/7 seriousness of the responsibility you unwittingly took on by just wanting to get laid when you were a hormone-filled whippersnapper, or when you bent the knee to propose for the same reason.
It’s another Patrice saying that needs taken in context. It doesn’t literally mean they are a foe to be destroyed, it means they are 100% money-back-guaranteed to challenge you, pussy you up, tear you down, and if given the opportunity, to completely and utterly destroy you body and soul, all the while having everyone you know and half a thousand people you don’t— and the family court— convinced that it was 100% your fault. It was. See above.
Think of it as a sparring match or a game of sports… with someone who plays way too hard and tries to injure you but you’re not sure if they’re really trying. You want to win, you want both of you to learn something, but you also want to let them know you’re not going to let them mess you up.
Like the tagline on my favorite soft drink Caesar Soda, “Conquer lovingly.”
If you remember that scene from Master and Commander, the phrases “They are not your friend,” and “(Wo)men must be governed,” apply. You are a general training a soldier to be an effective part of your army so that the whole army can function. This isn’t starting an ice cream company with your best buddy since elementary school, this is a human being that is biologically designed to look for you to leadership and culturally brainwashed to believe that is a terrible, demeaning thing. If that is not a serious reality to you, the wakeup call will arrive, served by the sheriff in a manilla envelope.
Problematically, we too have been enculturized to reject the very real necessity of hierarchy (and it’s existence whether we like it or take our place in it or not.) On top of that, we spurn nuance when it counts and scour for exceptions when we shouldn’t.
A general doesn’t seek to demoralize his subordinates but to challenge them. He prioritizes the mission over convenience. He knows he must maintain respect before he can hope to be loved. A good general seeks to empower and delegate so that he can do his job and the other officers and soldiers can do their jobs. As the head of the mission, the general shares the fruits of his success and leadership down the line by keeping things in their rightful place, not by sharing the office of general.
He knows that like a parent, he too is only human, but that the knowledge and experience he earned, the career he chose, the talent God gave him, and the honor and importance of his position all bestow on him something more than his bare humanity, an unenviable responsibility both for himself and the souls of others, bestowed by a higher authority than himself that ultimately he is uniquely and directly responsible to.
It trickles down from him.
But he must keep things moving forward, and that requires a delicate act of both maintaining and carefully upsetting the balance, usually routinely and passingly and sometimes with deadly seriousness, of handing out punishment and reward, of knowing when to withold and when to give.
No book or voice (perhaps with one exception) can teach you step by step what to do and when to do it, but with the right spirit and a heart that seeks wisdom even when it sucks, you can learn from timeless advice and the experience of others around you, good and bad, and apply yourself to setting you and your household right.
But it all starts with and flows through you.
Use the Force. Follow your gut.
Conclusion: It’s your job to be the “asshole”
After all that candy-coated positivity, we’ll summarize with a new one that is a little bittersweet. This one isn’t from Patrice, but it’s the logical consequence of the progression of gold standard classic flavor deluxe size Patrice principles we just went over.
Accepting that it’s your fault is the fundamental prerequisite to accepting the responsibility to change and lead.
Taking that responsibility reveals that happiness trickles down from you, because you are the head of the relationship system. (“Trust is a routine you establish.” -P) If you avoid your God-given role, it falls apart and everyone suffers. If you accept the mantle, you can begin to affect things so that they function properly, which brings order and happiness.
To know what is right and wrong, you must follow your gut, because even if your redpill life coach is telling you what to do from the Bluetooth in your ear, what is right for him is not necessarily what is right for you.
And you must do things righteously to your values, because even God’s voice speaks through His Word which instills the correct values in your heart: “Romans 10:17 — So then faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.” Your values must be learned, then come through in your actions. That is not to confuse Godly righteousness with Patrice’s “personal” righteousness, but however you decide to act will be channeled through your human person, and taking the word of strangers will not absolve you of consequences, so you must know what you believe and also do it.
Doing what you believe is right will never come without challenge or inconvenience, even from inside the house, because for our purposes, women are the enemy. They will always seek to challenge your authority and put themselves above you, as will your children, your employees, anyone who you are charged with. However, if you accept this and take as a challenge rather than a curse, you will view it in the right spirit, constantly prepared for your authority to be challenged and dealing with it with the appropriate level of response, deftness and whimsy for the small things, and a firm hand for acts of extreme danger and outright sabotage. Because…
It’s your job to be the asshole. People are always looking upwards to complain and criticize— “Those damn evil corporations!”— and evil as those things are, harping on it is usually a psychological defense mechanism against blaming ourselves and actually changing the world around us, because most of us have the patience and self-responsibility of a child. I think that’s the dictionary definition of a millennial, I’ll look it up.
We fantasize about what we could do if we had the power to snap our fingers and change the abstract distant World at large, meanwhile ignoring the ability to effect change around us in the people and circumstances which actually matter to us, partly because acting on the scale of a simple human being feels lame compared to the delusion of leading armies and revolutions, but more so because taking responsibility and acting is scary because you might actually be held accountable for doing something, even making a mistake!
Better to live life afraid to move or act, content with receiving whatever you’re given by actual actors.
It’s your job to be the asshole, and if you want to get your system in shape, you’re going to get a lot of shit for it. No one likes change, especially when you’re pushing it. Asshole!
When you finally squeak out a timid check on your girl’s bullshit for the first time since she decided you’re official, don’t expect her to faint from pure sexual lust as she’s thunderstruck by the manliness she feels budding inside you. The fainting was the blood rushing to her head as she wound up to knock your teeth out.
It’s your lot to bear the burden of people who are emotionally weaker than you. Kiddo might hate Mommy because she took the iPad he’s used to having ten hours a day and you guys mustered up the courage to lower that to seven hours, but don’t think you’ll be safe from the fallout, because you’ll be the target of both Mommy and Kiddo’s ire.
So you smartly decide to take the iPad yourself and spare Mommy the tantrum. Good move, but the kid’s still squalling at her because she hasn’t graciously intervened on his behalf like she usually does, and you’re still getting it from all angles. Ah well. Back to the bathroom.
But a little light glows in you when you realize the point wasn’t actually not getting bitched at, but to have acted. Maybe. At least it can be next time. We’ll mark that as a point.
Hey, I acted. I’m getting bitched at, but I actually made a choice and did something.
This could be fun.
Better to be an asshole than a pussy.