Burgundy Pill: Plate Spinning — Chapter 2: Narcissist Edition
the case against plate spinning for the dark triad e-boy
In part one of this series, I provided a background on what plate spinning is and how it works, and then screeched for ten minutes about how it is bad for women and society. However, unless you’re some kind of low T white knight beta male, you should have found this annoying and a waste of time. Women and society should not be protected and cultivated, they should be used and exploited for sex and amusement and power, am I right!? Well, then Part 2: Narcissist Edition is for you. This piece ignores all those pesky externalities and makes the case against traditional plate spinning solely from the frame of your desires and what’s in your best interest.
Do note that even if you are a “low T white knight beta male” like me who cares about cringe like “civilization” and “the future”, you will still find this piece equally if not more valuable than part one.
The Problem: Narcissist Edition
If we ignore any potential damage done to plates or future men and women by having a zerosum frame around women, this frame can still be demonstrated as equally if not more harmful to you and your own personal goals than to these external things.
Plate Spinning fundamentally corrupts your “funnel” of female prospects. It repels intelligent women with self control and low time preference. And it attracts stupid, solipsistic, and vapid ones that provide little utility beyond sex. This is troublesome not only because it prevents you from meeting high quality women actually worth connecting or having children with, but also because it is a self-perpetuating cycle.
Every dumb, Machiavellian, solipsistic woman you interact with as a plate spinner increases your confidence that sexual availability is the only redeeming quality women possess. This then increases your confidence that commitment of any kind would only be a net negative to your life. This further reinforces your view that plate spinning is the optimal strategy. Which leads to only more interactions with low-quality women. Around and around, every experience reinforcing the previous.
The more you follow the traditional plate spinning framework, the more the truths of the original Burgundy Pill—the utility and value of intimacy, vulnerability, teamwork, family, etc with a high-quality woman and the positive impact they can have on your life—will elude you.
But before diving into that too deeply, let’s back up a bit and set up some first principles for why this is the case.
The Case Against Plate Spinning: Evolutionary Psychology Edition
A fundamental axiom, if not the fundamental axiom, of TRP is that of the value of maximizing sex with hot women. But what is this axiom based on?
I don’t think anyone would dispute that it comes from the obvious and clearly-apparent-to-anyone-with-functioning-testicles fact that we are incessantly thinking about bonking hot broads; we want to look at, engage with, and ultimately feed pipe to all the young zesty babes, and we think about them every single day (for some of us, more than we think about anything else).
But where does this drive come from? And further, how do we know we should pursue it unfettered? There’s a lot of things we “want” very strongly—like cocaine or to punch annoying people in the face or to stuff our own faces with chocolate candy for every meal—that we not only do not seek to maximize but instead actively suppress because they are destructive and hamper our deeper goals.
Are we certain that our desire to sleep with lots of women is not the same? If it were the case that this desire was, like many others, an error in our limbic programming brought on by a novel environment and ultimately a net negative on our lives, how would we know? What would the signs be?
I’ve tried making the case for such “limbic hijackings” of our sex drive by modernity a few times—directly in the original Burgundy Pill, and indirectly but in more depth in Politics Is Worse Than Video Games, Drugs, and Porn Combined and Simps, Sex, and The Masculine Revival—but I believe Making Maps puts it the most succinctly:
Sex is a transport protocol. a KPI. The reason you like fucking hot women is not because fucking women is in and of itself good for you, it’s because fucking hot women is (supposed to be) a lagging indicator that you are a valuable and powerful member of the tribe. And leading indicator that you will have family, love, connection, and healthy offspring likely to survive and themselves reproduce.
It’s the same as your desire for sugar. The reason you like sugar is not because sugar itself is good for you. It’s because fructose is a marker for edible, nutritious food full of fiber, vitamins, and other important health creating shit.
But, as often happens with these things, when nature devises a means to meet an end, eventually some process will find a way to man-in-the-middle that means, and divert it toward some (usually degenerative) alternative end. The modern world is mostly just humans optimizing toward KPIs that, like your sales goals at work, lead more to bullshit pseudo-goal attainment rather than the actual goals they were designed to meet.
I would contend that our desire for sex is similar to our desire for sugar or McDonalds or video games or Twitter likes or cocaine. It evolved as a means to an end. A means which has since been broken by a novel environment it is no longer adequately adapted toward.
Most TRP dudes get that our inbuilt limbic “want” to progress our skills or to feel like a hero who defeats evil was “hijacked” by video games, reducing our drive to grow and build in real life; or that our inbuilt limbic “want” to achieve maximum caloric density of food so we can pack on pounds for the winter was hijacked by infinite access to 2,000 calorie cheeseburgers making us fat and lazy. And they obviously see the issue with porn. But what if, even if to a lesser degree, this is happening with sex itself?
Let’s examine what causes these “limbic hijackings” in the first place to see if this might be the case.
Limbic Hijackings and Sexual Desire
The cause of limbic hijackings in many human drives—such as the female desire for a large state or safe spaces, the male desire for vidya or porn, or everyone’s desire for sugar, Micky D’s, or to sit around watching TV all day—occurs when:
A. the “cap” in this desire was, in our evolutionary past, mediated not internally through some kind of bodily process, but externally through scarcity in the environment. There was no selective pressure for us to develop some way to control it ourselves because the environment prevented over consumption for us.
B. this environmental scarcity has been, thanks to modern technology and industry, removed and replaced with mass abundance, leading to us and our lack of innate limiter consuming things far beyond what is healthy, productive, or in our long term best interest.
For example: Contrast our general desire to seek carbohydrates vs our specific desire to continue eating in any given meal. The latter has an inbuilt cap. Eventually you “get full” and won’t want to eat anymore. This is because animals without ghrelin (the hormone which elicits satiation) or something similar would have just been too engorged on food all the time that they wouldn’t be able to move quick enough to avoid predators. Or were spending too much time digesting that they couldn’t do other things necessary for survival. As a result, very early on in animal history, the beings which could modulate their appetite in a given sitting out-competed those that could not.
However, sugar and carbohydrates in our diet at large have no such cap. The “cap” was set externally by the environment of our evolutionary past. There were no grains of pastas or candies. And certainly no grocery stores every quarter mile with more naughty treats than we could eat in a lifetime. Just fruit (and some from vegetables), spread sparsely and available only in spurts over the seasons. For days at a time (if not weeks or months) your diet was paleo (duh) if not keto (meat, seeds, and vegetables, with occasional fruits when they were found or in season). And when you did get access to these rare carbohydrate, any negative impact of the sugar was offset by high nutritional density. A tiny piece of candy today packs far more sugar than an entire apple, the latter being not only much more filling but also full of fiber, minerals, and vitamins.
The external scarcity of these critical (in small quantities) nutrients ultimately led to our genetics being coded with something like “always be searching for carbohydrates and eat as much of them as humanly possible whenever you do find them”. And that worked great for hundreds of thousands of years.
Today however, such an environment might as well be another dimension. We now have functionally infinite access to the most calorie dense, sugar rich foods we can possibly imagine available practically anytime and anywhere.
And what happens when you combine our evolutionary programming of “always be searching for carbs and engorge yourself on them whenever you find them” with this new novel environment? You get a massive obesity and physical health crisis.
The Link Between Sugar and Sex
Okay. So what does this have to do with smashing lasses? Well the same kind of situation applies.
Your desire is infinite because scarcity in the environment mediated you from “overdoing it” for all of human history. Female sexuality was scarce. Likely even more scarce than carbohydrates. And thus you were biologically coded to pursue it unendingly.
I mean just think about it: could have plowed a hundred (or even ten) women ten thousand years ago? Women were protected by their fathers and the men in their tribe, as well as their culture and cultural practices. Not to mention that most were related to you.
Heck, even a hundred years ago before the invention of contraception, you had this massive limiting factor that sex produced children. If your only option was to raw dog or GTFO, how would that change your view around getting it on with as many dames as you can? Even if you were some kind of gigachad who could sleep with dozens of women back then, you’d eventually get bogged down by all the children you had to take care of. How many children with how many different women could even the top 10% of men have popped out before they would have no choice but to slow down and focus on the commitments they’d racked up? Condoms aren’t Paleo, bruh.
Every manosphere dude would agree that the problem with porn or sugar or vidya or doom scrolling social media is it’s broken effort to reward ratio; these things requiring functionally zero effort yet giving you a massive reward. And further that this issue arises from your brain being adapted for an environment which no longer exists.
But then the logical question we must ask becomes: does this same effect, even if less, apply to making el sexo with real life mamacitas? Obviously, real sex requires a whole lot more effort than playing Call of Duty or fapping on your ipad. But is it as hard as your brain expects it to be? If not, how much easier is it today than what your brain evolved for? Is it twice as easy? Five times as easy? Ten times as easy? A hundred times as easy? And is this mismatch, whatever the amount, causing unintended or unknown negative consequences to you? If it were, would you know?
I think it’s unarguable that it’s at least one order of magnitude easier than your brain is designed for it to be. But how much that’s actually impacts your quality of life is not clear. At least not from looking at the evolutionary reasoning alone. However, when we look pragmatically at what actually happens the picture clarity becomes at least a bit more crisp.
The Case Against Plate Spinning: Practical Edition
Coming back to the start of this article: plate spinning ultimately attracts lower quality women. Why?
Because while all women feel a limbic urge to lock down an “alpha”, only stupid ones with poor impulse control, a scarcity mindset, and generally low self esteem are willing to give up their greatest gift without anything in return. Let alone be reoccuringly part of a harem with zero promise of security.
Think for a moment: what would make you give your greatest gift away to someone you hardly know based on almost nothing? And further, to do it continually for months? Back when you were an Average Frustrated Chump who would thirst after any chick who even looked in your direction, willing to give away your commitment up like it’s nothing, what kind of person were you? Were you a high quality person with healthy relationship skills, boundaries, discernment, respecting of your own time and effort, and capable of being a powerful and capable parent? Or were you a loser with no prospects and nothing going for you, looking for anything or anyone to give you any sense of self worth to keep you from offing yourself?
Whether it’s men or women, it doesn’t matter: anyone who “gives it up easy” fundamentally communicates a value disparity. That they are low value compared to you. Yes, these same women withhold sex from the AFCs, and don’t from you, and that suggests you are worth something and that feels good. But it’s the same situation as if you were a heavy weight boxer it’d boost your self esteem to compete with all the lightweights and constantly dunk on them. Disregarding ethics (which, might i remind you, are gay), this quickly gets boring and pathetic. Or at least it should. If it doesn’t there is probably something deeper that is wrong with you. Because true self esteem, meaning, challenge, and ultimately a life you like, come from picking on someone your own size.
The type of women who tolerate being plates; the ones who pick men solely based on their alpha traits without consideration for any long term negative outcomes (the most extreme case being something like the chick who can’t leave the “bad boy” that beats her) are just like men who pick women solely based on their looks, not considering the fact she’s a BPD psychopath who will turn their kids against and divorce rape him, taking him for all he’s worth.
Yes, there is a minimum SMV threshold that must be met to be even considered as a prospect, but most intelligent men, men able to override their base animal instincts and map the long term future of their life with a woman, will ultimately pick a 7 or an 8 they can start a family with rather than blindly following their dicks chasing the BPD 10’s who will zero them out in the end.
Obviously, most plates won’t end up taking you from where you are to zero. But none will end up making you as wealthy (more than money) as you could be with a different breed.
How Plate Spinning Turns Away Quality Women
TRP dudes are making accurate observations that the women they plate tolerate being part of a harem, and some even like it. But what it fails to account for, is all the women who fell off early. Most everything TRP gets wrong is because TRPers, like most people, have no understanding of the concept of survivorship bias.
The truth is that just as how you and most intelligent men will reasonably say “yeah she’s a 10 and I would totally bang her (or continue to bang her) if she wasn’t insane, but she is insane and thus the trade off and effort isn’t worth it”, most intelligent women go through the same calculation of “yeah sure if I could lock him down, I would, but I know I can’t” and thus will dip out at the first signs of “fuckboy”ism.
“Super alpha” may be attractive to all women, but it only attracts a certain type of woman. In the same way that a candy store is attractive to all humans, but only a certain type of human actually goes in there and buys shit.
And this means that the type of functional and healthy women who you would want raising your children are the least likely to be spinnable in the first place. When TRP says “some of your plates will break early on. That’s okay. Let them go. There are many who will not” these are the women you are “losing”. Yes, it also includes many other women who you don’t want, like stuck up bitches or women who are just out of your league. But it also includes these hidden gems. Plate spinning fundamentally throws the baby out with the bath water on quality women who possess positive traits beyond sexual availability.
In contrast, the type of women who will tolerate being plated, those who are willing to take the risk to pursue a “full dark triad alpha”, are themselves far more dark triad. And this is literally the last thing you want raising your children.
Which brings me to the next important error in TRP canon:
The standard model for the “dualistic sexual strategy” in women—alpha fux, beta bux—is wrong.
Whether Rollo himself actually gets this “wrong”, or whether the community has simply run with only half the answer because they only care about half the question (sex) is not totally clear. But regardless, the truth is that to women it’s not a choice between “fucking alphas” or “marrying betas”. Or at least it’s not that way naturally. Women are sexually attracted to “alpha” traits and emotionally attracted to “beta” traits but are ultimately seeking one man who has the optimal balance of both. Each woman’s exact desires are specific to her temperament, but in broad strokes: every woman wants a man who is powerful, confident, strong, and high status (“alpha”) but also emotionally available, self-reflective, and empathetic enough to build a deep enough bond with her so she and her children won’t get left in the cold (“beta”).
Thinking about this from an evolutionary perspective for two minutes should make it obvious: the standard model of sexual dynamics for the last hundred thousand years was not women promiscuously fucking chad and then finding some beta man with resources to take care of them. “beta” men didn’t have resources nor status nor value. "Beta” men didn't even exist. If you weren't strong, powerful, and able to carry your weight of the tribal protection, you just fucking died.
I go into this in much more depth in Simps, Sex, and The Masculine Revival but the TLDR is that most women are ultimately seeking a man with a “middle class” SMV. Not some psychopathic world conqueror (“upper class”), nor some sad sap cuck who she can dominate (“lower class”), but a man who is a proper balance of strength and also empathy. However the modern world, as it has done with most things (because Pareto, not jews or globalists or something) has deleted this “middle class”, leaving only “upper class” SMV men who are just a bit too dark triad to ever commit and lower class SMV men who are just a bit too weak and pathetic to feel safe with. And this leaves women in a bind of no good choices for fathers. They don’t like either option. But if they have no other choice (most don’t), they are going to pursue “alphas” while they are young and hot, hoping to secure one with enough “beta” traits to commit to her, and only if they run out of SMV before they can do so will they settle for a true “beta”. 1
Or at least this is what the risk tolerant ones will do.
And here in lies a further problem. “Risk tolerance” is not a trait you want in a long term female partner. Risk tolerance means higher propensity for promiscuity, drug abuse, hypergamy, excessive spending, and a dozen other things that make for bad mothers and wives.
The modern sexual anarchy forces women to either take huge risk, burning up their sexual capital early to try and lock down an “alpha”, or pre-emptively “settle” for a “beta”. Given that women are biologically much more risk averse, most will (begrudgingly) choose the latter strategy. But this causes a huge additional problem in that the primary motivation women have to stay hot is to outcompete other women for access to high value men. When you remove the pool of men worth competing for, all you end up with is a similar hollowing out of the middle class in the female hierarchy. Now all the girls who actually take care of themselves and try to be attractive are crazy risk seeking thots and all the girls who’d actually make decent partners are fat, ugly, and poorly kempt (obligatory link). And given that the primary reason men become strong and powerful is to bang hot chicks, most of whom are now insane or near impossible to find, they lose motivation to hold up “their end”, the negative feedback loop spiraling downward and downward to where the only attractive men left are psychopaths, the only attractive women are BPD, and everyone else is a fat fucking loser.
And this brings us to the next point:
Men have a “dualistic sexual strategy” just like women do.
Men have a “dualistic sexual strategy” just like women. It’s just not as obvious because our current SMP is very new, and so few men ever achieve enough SMV to be “choosers” rather than “beggars” within it. However when we examine the top 20% men it stands out clearly: What we do is fuck “alpha” women (hot sluts) and marry “beta” women (good moms). But when you actually dive into our motivations it becomes clear that, just like women, what we really want is a hybrid—A lady in the streets but a freak in the sheets; a woman who is agreeable, pure, kind, and conscientious, but also beautiful, sexy, and our own personal slut. The problem is, just like is the case is for women with “middle class” men, it’s near impossible to find any.
So what the hell are you supposed to do with this information? Well look, if all you want to do is bump nasties with dimes and never commit, then sure, go for it spin away. But a question worth asking is: are you sure that’s really what you want? And further, how many women who you might actually like are you never even meeting because you’re optimizing so hard for sexual availability?
Contrary to any wishful thinking, optimizing for sexual availability and optimizing for LTR quality are largely mutually exclusive paths.
Only about half of the strategies that will attract thots translate over to attracting higher quality women. Frame, power, social status, etc all translate, sure. But where you spend your time, how disagreeable and Machiavellian you are, how much you dread her, how little emotion and vulnerability you show, etc are very different. In fact, the levels that attract one group are usually repulsive the the other.
I can assure you of this: the woman you want to marry is not in a bar, nor in Ibiza, nor on Tinder. and even if she were, there is basically zero chance she’d have such poor impulse control and social support that she’d end up in your bed the night you meet her.
She’s probably in a library, or her kitchen, or some other normal healthy social environment. She might not even know how to do her make up to accentuate her beauty yet. She has probably only ever had one long term boyfriend. And maybe has never even sucked a dick before. If you are optimizing for locations and temperaments and behaviors to attract and maximize sexual availability or “hot kinky sex” early in the relationship, you will probably never even know she, or other woman of similar quality, exist.
And this is likely the reason there aren’t more men talking about this. Because It’s not at all obvious what you are missing if you’ve never experienced it. The hardest part about this compared to something like vidya or sugar or porn is that excessive gluttony with those things manifests their damages much more clearly. Or at least they are much more clear to us. Perhaps because they become problems much sooner in our lives (starting in our early teens or even younger) and thus we see the long term consequences sooner as well. But being able to plow foxes en masse doesn’t start until late teens at the earliest, and more often in our late twenties. Perhaps this too will take a decade for most of us to see how it is harming us. Sad.
Ultimately, I can’t tell you what to do. Or at least I have no interest in doing so. But I can help you ask the right questions so you can figure out what makes the most sense for you. In part t̶h̶r̶e̶e̶ four of this series, I will lay out some questions, strategies, and ways of thinking to help you make decisions with both your heads (and, heck, maybe even your heart too).
edit: Chapter 3 here.
I am a newfag and just started Minor Dissent a few months ago. If you found this post valuable, interesting, or vaguely amusing, please like or share it so that others who may not otherwise find or give such verbose autism a chance will be more likely to do so and perhaps gain similar value. ty.
Something important TRP does not know: the entire epiphany phase is a byproduct of the failure to achieve her desired goal of locking down a quality man. It does not happen if she succeeds. It also does not happen if for some reason she never took the risk of chasing Chad in the first place.