Don't Eliminate Covert Contracts

Turn them into strategies instead. Or don't!

I often read “enlightened redpill” writers such as

Stripper

and

Archwinger

. A recurring theme in their writing is the elimination of covert contracts.

If you’re not familiar with the concept, check out

Stripper

’s great post introducing the concept of covert contracts:

Covert Contracts

If I do X, you'll do Y and neither of us will speak of this contract.

Typical examples included things like taking a woman out on a date and, in doing so, expecting the reciprocation of sex. Or conversely, if a woman drops subtle hints and gets agitated, then a man should know how to meet her needs. And while neither of these are incorrect, they are incomplete. The concept of Covert Contracts is reoccurring in Dr. Glover's book, but I would argue that this single quote encapsulates it best:

"If I am good, then I will be loved, get my needs met, and have a problem-free life”.

Redpill writers accurately point out that covert contracts are narcissistic fantasies. In reality you can’t control other people, or the random circumstances you operate in. So, when your covert contract fails (“I did X, but you didn’t do Y”), the cognitive dissonance bites you in the ass, possibly taking a toll on your sexual or social relationships.

They also note how the redpill advice often turns itself into a covert contract: “If I self-improve/hit the gym/approach women/be an alpha male/etc, then I will be loved, get my needs met, and have a problem-free life”.

The proposed solution to the covert contract problem is eliminating covert contracts - which can turn into a covert contract in itself: "If I eliminate covert contracts, then I will be loved, get my needs met, and have a problem-free life”.

This clearly makes sense for covert contracts based on bullshit conditions (i.e. normie/bluepill contracts, like “If I’m a nice guy, then I will be loved, get my needs met, and have a problem-free life”).

But for reasonable and actionable pieces of advice, like much of the redpill lore, the question is: Once I eliminate a redpill covert contract, what’s left?

---

Games people play

We like playing games. We especially like playing good games - games that have both features below:

1. The outcome is based on both skills and luck - The players’ choices matter, but there are also random factors involved.

2. A fair start - All players start with the same number of pieces on the board of cards in hand. Even if cards are shuffled and one player can randomly end up with a much better starting hand than the other, it doesn’t predetermine the outcome of the game, beause of #1.

People like playng good games, such as most board and card games.

Some also like playing bad games, but only if they, for some reason, believe they’re good. Examples of this are gambling (not based on skills but pure luck and/or rigged such that the house always wins - gamblers are delusional and refuse to believe this) and tic-tac-toe (a solved game - optimal strategies for both players are known, the game is rigged such that with perfect play, the first player can’t lose and the second can’t win - only kids who don’t know the optimal strategies like playing tic-tac-toe).

Most people believe that everything that matters in life - love, sex, friendship, work, art, business and such - is also a good game. For short, let’s call these “life games”.

It’s possible that people like playing good games so much because they remind them of life games. They believe that life games are good games - the outcome depends on both skill and luck, you can’t control the random events, or the moves of other players, but at least all players have a fair start: everyone is dealt the same number of cards.

But, as everyone familiar with the online redpill space knows, this is a lie. A cope. The normie, or bluepill position.

Those who chose to take the red pill see the life games as they really are: rigged. They are only half-good: the have feature #1 (outcome based on both skills and luck) but no feature #2 (a fair start).

Some people start with 6 cards. Some only have 2 cards. Some have 10 or more. Some are even allowed to browse the deck and pick the best cards, everyone else has to draw their cards randomly from the shuffled deck.

When you learn that the life games are rigged, you have a few options:

• People don’t like playing bad, rigged games, so you might be tempted to quit playing life games. This is the MGTOW position.

• You may reject the idea that life games are rigged and continue playing as if they weren’t. This is the bluepill position.

• You may stoically accept how the life games are rigged, and how this means that your chances of winning are low. This is the whitepill position.

• You may adopt a bitter, defeatist approach to the fact that the life games are rigged and your chances of winning are low, and become miserable in the process. This is the blackpill position.

• Finally, you can use the knowledge of how the life games are rigged to develop a strategy that will maximize your chances of winning. This is the redpill position.

---

The winning strategy

Good players try to improve their odds of winning games by developing, learning and executing strategies.

A strategy is a collection of if-then “rules” that tell you what should you do in specific conditions, or states of the game. Ideally, a strategy should cover all states of the game, possibly with some blanket “rules” that specify a default course of action if none of the conditions of other “rules” exist.

I use double quotes for “rules” to differentiate them from the actual rules of the game:

• A rule is a hard constraint: if you break the rules, other players will refuse to play with you, or you will be punished by the game master or some other powerful external entity.

• A “rule” is a soft constraint. You won’t be punished by anyone by breaking the “rules”, but doing so will simply decrease your chances of winning the game.

Following “rules” and executing strategies is how you can win in a good game. On the other hand, strategies don’t exist in random games - there’s no strategy for winning the lottery, roulette or snakes and ladders.

But importantly, “rules” and strategies are still important in half-good, rigged games such as life games.

As I wrote in the conclusion of my Dangerous Women essay:

If you can’t quit the game, change the rules, get saved by Hero or a divine intervention, the best thing you can do is understand the rules of the game and play your absolute best. The game might be rigged, but it doesn’t mean that you can’t win.

We can divide possible game strategies into three categories (with examples from the games of chess and sex & dating):

• Tier 3 - Clueless - Have no particular strategy. Make random moves or follow the path of least resistance, while following the rules of the game.
  Chess: Randomly move your pieces on the board.
  Sex & dating: Do nothing - just exist.

• Tier 2 - Bluepill - Use basic level common sense and try to follow the people around you.
  Chess: Move your pawns to allow charging forward with your queen, knights, bishops and rooks. Maybe castle your knight to hide him behind a line of pawns. Try to take as much enemy pieces as possible without loosing to many of your own. Once you gain an advantage on the board, try to corner the enemy king with your remaining pieces.
  Sex & dating: Smile and be nice. Ask out a mid normie you already know from work or school. Just be yourself, you will eventually find someone who accepts you as you are.

• Tier 1 - Redpill - Do your research. Find people who are really good at playing the game - the real practicioners, the experts - and learn from them. Find the hidden “rules” of the game and follow them.
  Chess: Study chess theory. Learn opening and endgame sequences. Practice solving chess problems. Analyze the great games of chess grandmasters.
  Sex & dating: Get jacked at the gym. Approach women. Don’t be afraid of rejection. Don’t be a simp. And so on.

Chess is an “almost good” game, since there is no randomnes built in - the player with a better strategy almost always wins. This is why most people (especially normies) prefer playing other, fully good games rather than chess.

The outcome of good games can be significantly affected by luck. But this doesn’t mean that strategies are useless. In fact, this is what makes strategies for good games more interesting: instead of optimizing purely for the outcome, you also have to consider robustness, or better, antifragility - “What doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger”.

With half-good, rigged games such as life games, it gets even more interesting. Some say that if a game is rigged, the strategy doesn’t matter, because it’s already decided whether you win or lose. But this kind of fatalist thinking is a fallacy: if the game is rigged against you, you can compensate for this by doubling up on your efforts in developing and executing an effective strategy.

But most importantly, in both good games and half-good, rigged games, there’s no “winning strategy” - a strategy that will guarantee victory. A “winning strategy” only exists in bad games, like tic-tac-toe - games solved by game theorists.

---

Back to covert contracts

If we rephrase the definition of a covert contract according to our game theory, we get this:

“If I do X, I will certainly win the game.”

You can see that this is basically the definition of a “winning strategy”.

Covert contracts usually exist within life games, which are half-good, rigged games. And as discussed above, there are no “winning strategies” in such games.

At first glance, everything checks out: There’s no place for “winning strategies” / covert contracts in life games. Hence, covert contracts should be eliminated.

We can see an example of this in a recent post from

Archwinger

:

The majority of the married Red Pill men were split into three camps:

1. “Don’t get married. I got married before I found The Red Pill. My marriage sucked and my wife was awful and The Red Pill helped me get my marriage to a livable, manageable place. Not perfect, but manageable. But if I could go back in time, I would definitely never get married.”

2. “Marriage is a bad deal for men. Do whatever you want with this info. The Red Pill tells you how things are, but if having kids in a married setting is critically important to your happiness and you can’t feel fulfilled in life without it, at least you’re going in with your eyes open.”

3. “Marriage is ‘Red Pill’ on hard mode! But if you vet the women you date thoroughly to make sure they have all of these good traits and none of these bad traits, and if you behave like an alpha male leader of your household and maintain your wife’s attraction while sprinkling in about X% of ‘beta traits’ to keep her comfortable, while smashing through all of her tests by acting in this perfect Red Pill way you learned on the internet, it’s totally possible to have a marriage that doesn’t end in divorce where your wife is respectful and has lots of sex with you! IT IS HARD MODE AND WE ARE AWESOME!”

I actually started out in that first camp but slowly shifted more toward the second because I wanted more kids, and the kind of woman who will have kids with you outside of a marital home isn’t usually the kind of woman you want to raise kids with.

I always found that third camp of men kind of funny. Also a little arrogant and annoying. Because at its core, that entire train of thought in Camp 3 is a really dumb covert contract.

The observation that the Camp 3 position is a covert contract is correct. However, I doubt that the approaches of Camps 1 and 2 - based on the “marriage is a bad deal for men” narrative often heard in the redpill space nowadays - are viable alternatives.

In fact, I think that “marriage is a bad deal for men” violates the core tenet of redpill, which is to learn about the true nature of how people and their social relationships work, and then use this knowledge to self-improve and win.

“Marriage is a bad deal for men” is not married redpill. It’s married blackpill.

If we only consider the 3 camps of married redpill men on Reddit, and then we eliminate the Camp 3 covert contract, the only thing that remains is the blackpill “marriage is a bad deal for men” approach. And blackpill is never a good solution for anything.

So, what is a good solution?

The solution is to create a valid strategy for the marriage life game.

A valid strategy is similar to a covert contract, but the final premise is different. A covert contract / “winning strategy” promises that you will certainly win. A strategy doesn’t promise winning, but it acknowledges that it increases your odds of winning:

“If I do X, my odds of winning the game will be higher than if I didn’t do X.”

For X, we can repurpose all of the good ideas of Camp 3, like:

“If I do <married redpill stuff>, my odds of winning the game of marriage will be higher than if I didn’t do <married redpill stuff>.”

Or:

“If I vet the women I date thoroughly to make sure they have all of these good traits and none of these bad traits, and if I behave like an alpha male leader of my household and maintain my wife’s attraction while sprinkling in about X% of ‘beta traits’ to keep her comfortable, while smashing through all of her tests by acting in this perfect Red Pill way you learned on the internet, my odds of winning the game of marriage will be higher than if I didn’t do any of this.”

That’s it. This is a good married redpill strategy.

I am following this strategy and it’s working out well so far. I know that despite that, I can still lose one day. But I don’t care - executing the best strategy I know is my best option anyway.

Everything I read about covert contracts so far ends with a call to eliminate them. But covert contracts are not equal: there are covert contracts built around bullshit or bluepill advice, and covert contract based on useful, or redpill advice.

Eliminating a covert contract based on useful, or redpill advice is basically throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

Instead, you should transform these contracts into strategies that do not promise winning but only increase your odds of success in your half-good, rigged life game.

---

You probably need a strategy - but not everyone does

Designing, learning and implementing a strategy is costly - it takes time, effort and resources.

Before deciding whether to go forward with your strategy, it’s good to do a cost vs benefit analysis.

In good games (and “almost good” games like chess), the benefit is corresponding to the stakes of the game you playing. If you’re a young aspiring chess player and you’re about to face a grandmaster in a World Championchip game, the stakes are pretty high. But if you just want to kill some time with a friend and you whip up a chessboard, the stakes are pretty low.

But life games are different: First, your social status is always what’s at stake - hence, life games are always high stakes. Second, life games are rigged. Thus, the benefit of a good strategy in life games is corresponding to the resulting increase of your chances of winning the game.

Typically, they ones the game is rigged against can increase their chances the most if they apply a good strategy, with the exception of the very most unfortunate ones - the game is rigged against them so much that even a good strategy won’t help.

For example, we can see this in everyone’s favorite life game: sex & dating.

This game is rigged extremely in favor of young hot girls. Their chances of winning are very high, even with a very poor strategy of “do nothing, just exist”. Applying a more effective strategy would barely improve their odds.

The game is not particularly rigged for normies. Their chances of winning are pretty high, thanks to applying the moderately effective normie/bluepill strategy. Have they applied the clueless “do nothing” strategy, the chances would be near zero for men and pretty low for women (in general, the sex & dating game is rigged in favor of women and against men - women are most attractive in their teens and 20s, which is when most of sex & dating occurs). Applying a more effective, redpill strategy would increase their chances from pretty high to really high, which is a little improvement considering the effort. Hence, most normies reject redpill strategies in favor of their default bluepill strategy - the juice is not worth the squeeze.

The game is rigged extremely against hideous people with genetic defects, serious medical issues and horrible injuries - think Elephant Man. Their chances of winning are near zero, and would remain such even with an effective strategy.

Finally, we have the lower middle area - the sub-normies: guys who are pretty much normal, but they have one or a couple weaknesses: a little too short, too skinny, too chubby, too shy, too nerdy, too autistic. Their chances, when using the normie strategy, are really low. However, an effective redpill strategy can boost their chances to pretty good, or even really good, with enough effort - to normie level, or even above-normie level (but still way below young hot girl level). This is the cohort that benefits from implementing an effective redpill strategy the most!¹

This also means that most likely, YOU need an effective strategy too. For some reason, you are now on Substack, reading various redpill-adjacent stuff, including my own personal selection of armchair evolutionary psychology. Normies don’t read this kind of stuff. Neither do hot girls and hideous people. More likely than not, YOU, my Dear Reader, are a sub-normie. Which means that YOU need an effective redpill strategy to win your game.

Is it similar in the life game of marriage? Kind of.

While it seems like most people eventually figure out the sex & dating game and achieve their desired outcome (for most is marriage, or some-casual-sex-and-then-marriage) by the time they’ve aged out of the dating pool, the marriage game - a sequel to the sex & dating game, seems to be way harder, judging by its outcomes: depending on the source and demographic, 30-50% marriages end in divorce, and as I presume, much (if not most) of the ones that don’t are also mutually resentful relationships who “stay together for the kids” or other social or economical pressures.

The marriage game must be harder than the sex & dating game. In terms of our game analysis, it means that the marriage game is rigged against most people.

But contrary to the “marriage is a bad deal for men” camp, I don’t think that the above means that most are in the equivalent of the “hideous people” cohort, and their marriage is doomed to fail regardless of their strategy. It’s not that bad.

What I believe though, is that most of us - even normies - are in the equivalent of the “sub-normie” cohort - their chances of winning the marriage, when using the normie/bluepill strategy are pretty low, but they could be substantially increased with a more effective strategy - the married redpill strategy.

---

Do you want to win, or be less upset if you lose?

There’s one more reason not to eliminate contracts, which is alsothe very reason covert contracts exist in the first place: they are better than strategies in terms of motivation.

Note that the covert contract becomes somewhat of a problem only if you don’t win.
“I did X, but I didn’t win! Why?”. The cognitive dissonance hits you in the face.

But if you do X and win, there is no problem. The covert contract obligation was met.

If X is viable (i.e. redpill) piece of advice, the covert contract rephrased into a more correct form of strategy becomes: “If I do X, my chances of winning will increase from Y% to Z%”.

The problem is that we never really know how what is Y and Z. We can only guess and estimate. If our estimate of Z is lower, or not much higher than the estimate of Y, it’s not worth to do X. But if the estimate of Z is much higher than the estimate of Y, we definitely need to do X.

Learning, developing and applying effective strategies is costly - it requires time, effort and resources. Allocating and spending them on a strategy requires motivation. And, frankly speaking, “you will win the game” is a lot better motivation than “you will increase your chances from Y% to Z%, where Y% and Z% are actually unknown and you can only really guess what it is”.

A player operating under the covert contract of “If I do X, I will win” will be fully motivated to apply X. Thus, he will realize the full gain of X and his odds of winning will increase from Y% to Z%.

Another equally capable player applying a strategy of “If I do X, I will increase my chances of winning from Y% to Z%, where both are unknown…” will be less than fully motivated to apply X. He will not realize the full gain of X, and his odds of winning will be somewhere between Y% and Z%.

The covert contract player will thus have an upper hand over the strategy player. ²

In other words, a covert contract meta-strategy is more effective than a strategy meta-strategy if your goal is winning. On the other hand, the strategy meta-strategy would be better if your goal is to feel less upset if you lose.

So, it comes downs to whether it’s more important for you to win, or to feel less upset if you lose.

Personally, I believe that a grown up man should care more about winning than feeling less upset if they lose. Instead of whining “I did X but I didn’t win!”, a grown up man should simply suck it up.

A more advanced solution is to apply both concepts in an Orwellian doublethink or . Scott Fitzgerald’s “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” kind of way. Or, to apply covert contracts to win, and then, in case of losing, use mental acrobatics to pivot to strategy - “Actually, this was never a covert contract anyway - I was never guaranteed to win.”

“All models are bad, but some are useful”.

Similarly, all covert contracts are bad, but some are useful.

---

1. Side note: Blackpill incels consider themselves hideous, like the Elephant Man tier. Most of them are wrong though - they are perfectly normal guys with minor flaws. They are sub-normies, and going redpill would be their best option.

2. In some games, you probably can’t win without a covert contract.

Imagine you’re one of the world’s top 10 100m runners and you’re going to the Olympics. You want to win, but so does everyone else. Everyone knows that their best bet is to apply a covert contract of “If I train very hard everyday, I will win the Olympics”. So they do.

Olympic competitions are zero-sum games, which means that someone must win. The winner will win partially thanks to training very hard everyday based on his covert contract. Everyone else who had this covert contract is very upset - not only did they lose, but their covert contract failed. But more importantly, none of the runners who, instead of the covert contract, applied a more relaxed strategy (like “I will train, and maybe I’ll win”) didn’t win, or even had any slightest shot at winning.