Gorilla Mindset is the Doctor Pepper Ten of Self Help Books

              You know that self-help bullshit that lines the walls of bookstores that will be used as kindling in the post apocalyptic wasteland? There’s one title called “The Gorilla Mindset” by a prolific asshole called Cernovich. You can find him @Cernovich if you want to catch his terrible opinions on twitter. I want to make a Cernobitch joke but it requires me saying it in a funny way and it’s a bit hard to get across via text. So as a reader please make one yourself. Trust me on this, it’ll be fantastic when you say it out loud. For the record, this isn’t slander. This is objective fact.

“I don’t believe in giving people second chances. I have always been burned. Poor choices reveal poor character. Unless there is evidence that there has been a change of character, the person is dead to me.”
“I don’t believe in fighting over money. If someone has a scarcity attitude about money, I just won’t deal with them ever again.”

“I had to learn how to downplay my intelligence, as it made peers resentful of me.”

 – Mike Cernovich

              All I can do is imagine him flipping the hair covering his eye and walking away from me to go hide in a Hot Topic. This isn’t the attitude of an adult, this is a goddamn teenager who realizes he is smarter than his peers and assumes that he’s better than everyone else too. I should know, I lived that life. Unlike Mike Cernovich, I grew up and realized there was a lot more to the world. You might note that there’s a bit of hypocrisy in me bitching about him bitching, but I’m doing this shit for fun. He does it because it’s his life. (Cernovich (A), 2014)

              I pirated his magnum opus The Gorilla Mindset to try to understand where he’s coming from. I’ll admit that wasn’t my primary choice of acquisition, I first attempted to borrow it from the library but too many pages were stuck together by the dried cum of some of his fans. I asked a librarian why they haven’t thrown it away yet and they said that no one dares touch it and I probably have Hepatitis from perusing it. Thankfully I have decent health insurance at the moment so that’s theoretically treatable. However I’m not sure if there’s any medication that can undo the damages the Gorilla Mindset did to my brain, and lobotomies aren’t much of a thing any more.

              The Gorilla Mindset can be summed up as an accumulation of those motivational phrases you see on the walls in your aunt’s house, except reframed in an masculine way and trying to imply that Gorillas live that way and you can too. Gorillas are mammals living in their stone age and they’re dying off. They see the world in an abundance mindset because they can’t comprehend something on a scale greater than themselves… and apparently neither can Mike Cernovich. The abundance mindset he promotes is effectively masturbation. There’s always more so you can keep doing it.

              His approach to Affirmations & Mantras is a bit uncomfortable. He quotes Apocalypse Now, ““I love the smell of Napalm in the morning. It smells like victory,” as an example of a positive affirmation. I know he’s seen Apocalypse Now, and how the rest of the scene goes. It talks about the death and annihilation napalm can cause. You can’t even find the corpses afterwards because of how they’re burnt to a crisp. That is the affirmation of a psychopath.

              Though this book isn’t all bad. There’s bits here and there that ring true, but it’s only because he took genuine advice and rephrased it like it was a college essay. It almost feels like bait to get you to believe in the more fucked up sections in the book. By putting objectively good ideas in with batshit insanity, it blurs the line for the reader. Especially if they’re in a vulnerable place in their life where reading a book called The Gorilla Mindset seems like a good idea. (Cernovich (B), 2015)

              Then you look at his other works and you realize this man is a fucking psychopath.

“A real man is a violent one, and masculinity is nothing if not restrained aggression.”

“A man must be able to go from zero to psycho in a split second.”

“During sex, most men gingerly pump away, praying that they don’t suffer from premature ejaculation. They feel like guests when instead a man knows that a woman in his bedroom is on his territory and will live on his terms.” (Cernovich (C), 2014)

              This too is part of his gorilla mindset. This shit is why women live in fear. This shit is why we can’t have peace.  If he was simply into BDSM and expressed this as part of what he wants his sex life to be, that’s one thing. But no, he’s saying that men need to be this way.

I’m going to go choke on my own vomit now.

@TylenolwithMDMA