Law 17
Keep Others in Suspended Terror: Cultivate an Air of Unpredictability
Humans are creatures of habit with an insatiable need to see familiarity in other people’s actions. Your predictability gives them a sense of control. Turn the tables: Be deliberately unpredictable. Behavior that seems to have no consistency or purpose will keep them off-balance, and they will wear themselves out trying to explain your moves. Taken to an extreme, this strategy can intimidate and terrorize.
In Law 17 Robert Greene hits upon a human dynamic that has much broader implications than a useful tool for power. Of course Dread – whether a passive acknowledgement or an overt display – is rooted in this principle, but the fundamental dynamic is that humans have an inherent ability to perceive patterns in nature.
It’s comforting for us to know what to expect in both people and our environments. It gives us a certain sense of security to have things remain consistent, but it also allows us to better pick out and isolate exceptions to that consistency. In a herd of brown cows we can better avoid or prefer the lone purple cow in the field.
It’s important to understand this basic need in humans because it’s both an aid and a hinderance to a Red Pill awareness. Dread works because when it’s applied, or even when it’s simply a new perception, what a woman is being forced to recognize is an inconsistency in what she’s come to expect about a man she’s familiar with. When a husband (or a wife) takes on an interest in hitting the gym where previously he’d had none before, the imaginings this prompts is the triggered result of seeing an inconsistency in a previously reliable behavior pattern.
We are creatures of habit, so when that habit is replaced by another behavior this then becomes the purple cow in a field of brown cows. I’ve stated this in many prior posts, but familiarity, comfort and rapport are anti-seductive elements in a man’s Game. This is one of the first areas I try to address with men trapped in a sexless LTR. Most Beta conditioned men believe that a woman needs to be comfortable with him before she’s willing to sleep with him and are then dumbfounded by how quickly she bangs the hot guy in the foam cannon party in Cancun on Spring Break.
These men believe that consistency in behavior will lead to their becoming intimate with a woman – this is a principle of Beta Game that’s reinforced by women with a ‘plan’ for him. However, it’s important to bear in mind that this comfort and familiarity is based on establishing a pattern of behavioral consistency; a pattern women really have no capacity to appreciate.
That’s not cut on women per se, but women’s lack of being able to appreciate a man’s consistency is founded in the same human want to experience security in the environment. Thus the anomaly is what’s appreciated; the ‘hawt’ guy in the right place at the right time who “she wouldn’t normally do this with”.
Bucking the Meta
Men’s unlearned, deductive Game derives from efforts to appear unique amongst the herd. This is the foundation of all Game really. Early PUAs identified the base utility in principles like Peacocking, being Cocky & Funny and mastering the art of Negging because their willingness to experiment with the boldness necessary to do so (often with women they perceived were above their SMV level) set them apart from the masses of men who’s Game was based on the comfort, rapport and familiarity women had told them would make them attractive all their lives.
These early PUA were bucking the meta game of the time. Women were (and mostly still are) accustomed to being pandered to by ‘Nice’ guys, ready and pre-programmed to defer to, respect and pedestalize them by virtue of their being a woman. Thus the anomaly, the man undisposed to that deference, who reverses her expectations of him qualifying to her becomes the purple cow.
Statistically Beta men are the common herd, but this isn’t what they believe of themselves. What that Beta believes his herd is is what makes his efforts fail and traps him in the plan of the Feminine Imperative. He believes he is the purple cow, but that belief is what makes him common.
That Beta man makes his efforts about adhering to what a fem-centric culture has convinced him will make him unique. He believes he’s bucking the meta; a meta environment he’s convinced is overwhelmingly populated with insensitive Alpha assholes. He believes the Alpha Men (women love to hate) are the common herd and the more he is alike with women and his behavior is more consistent than the Alpha ‘douchebags’ the more he will appear unique amongst them.
Archetypes
I’ve been asked on many occasions about my impressions of Vox Day’s now manosphere-common referencing of different sub-types of men as Alpha, Beta, Delta, Sigma, Omega, etc. I had Goldmund ask me about these classifications when we had dinner last week and I had to admit that I’m much more of a reductionist when it comes to delineating and Alpha mindset from a Beta mindset.
I’ve always been impressed with Vox’s thinking and observations, and I do think his classifications have a definite merit as useful models for abstract personality types, but I have to also temper that by saying these classifications are by no means absolutes. I say that because I know that humans have an insatiable desire to see consistency and familiarity in people. For the better part that want to interpret patterns is generally reliable in predicting behavior, but that isn’t to say personality is ever static.
Robert Greene works his own personality archetypes into the first half of his book The Art of Seduction. He too categorizes different seduction types in an effort to make their strategies more understandable – The Dandy, The Natural, The Rake, etc. And again, these are very useful archetypes upon which Greene builds and applies examples of how each uses various seduction strategies more or less effectively.
While generalizations are always a necessary tool in a broader understanding of a dynamic it’s important to grasp that the archetype you believe you embody are neither static nor deterministic. As I’ve stated before, Alpha and Beta are mindsets, not demographics. We’ve recently had an interesting debate about how uncommon it is for men to break their Beta cycle, and how rare it is for a man to change his stars. I’d like to address this by saying that personality is never static.
Over the years I’ve evolved from naive Beta high school chump to unwitting Alpha semi-pro rock star, to simpering Omega crushed by a BPD woman, to a lesser Alpha husband / father, to an Alpha businessman, artist, and successful brand owner – those are demographics. You could’ve placed me in many of Vox and Greene’s personality types along my progression to who I am today, and my Game evolved with what I adapted to and what proved successful (or so I thought) for me then.
But when I distill it down to an essence, what shifted for me in all these instances wasn’t the label I would’ve applied to myself, but rather what mindset I adopted at that time – Alpha or Beta. The results of my Alpha or Beta impression of myself became what I was. This is why I’m more of a reductionist in this respect. A want for consistency makes archetypes comforting, but there is never growth, there is never arousal or stimulation in comfort.
Equalism in the Meta
I should also address that the prevailing ideology of egalitarian equalism hates the idea of easy archetypes (even though it fluidly applies its own). The easy observation of course is that if all are equal blank slates then categorizing people by personality type smacks of profiling and denying the individual in a state of equality. However the real flaw in the equalist philosophy comes from an ego-investment in a blank slate state that doesn’t allow for ‘types’.
While critics in the manosphere see this categorization as deterministic and incapable of changing, the equalist chafes at the idea that people could be too predictably alike in type and behavior.
Preferences
In Women’s Physical Standards I briefly outlined the concept of men’s fetishization of their ‘type’ preferences when it comes to women:
You see, men will very readily cater their physical sexual “preferences” in accordance with what has proven sexually successful for them in past experiences. In other words, men tend to return to the same watering hole they found to be plentiful in the past. These preferences of convenience manifest themselves as ‘fetishes’ for men. And you don’t even need all that extensive research to prove this. All one need do is search the vast variety of porn available catering to the physical attributes that men will fetishize. Big boobs, small boobs, big ass, small ass, every hair color of the rainbow, shaved snatch, hairy snatch, teen girls to MILFs and older, tan, pale, ultra-thin to the ubiquitous BBWs (Big Beautiful women). Ladies, name the physical attribute(s), and there’s a fan-group just waiting to bang you. Rule 34 was never more provable than in men’s willingness to fuck damn near any physical demographic of women – just ask the female midgets catering to that fetish of porn.
Men tend to stick with the same breeding circumstances that proved successful in the past. Again, this is another function of the want of a predictability in pattern and behavior. It’s the Watering Hole Theory as I stated here; we go back to what worked for us before.
Men’s deductive, rational nature when it comes to problem solving is both a blessing and a curse in this respect. The problem inherent in repeating the pattern in order to extract a similar success runs the risk of a man being trapped by what he believes are his “natural ” preference for a certain ‘type’ of woman – the type who would eventually fuck him.
We may fetishize these preferences and thus men believe their only options for sex and intimacy with a woman get pared down to archetypes of women – Goths, Plain Janes, single mothers, big “beautiful” women, etc. become the ‘type’ that will fuck him. They become his ‘preference’, but in the same way men consider the deterministic nature of applying archetypes to themselves, rarely do they consider the archetype of woman their conditions and self-image predispose them to.
Most men don’t see the link between physical types and personality types. In other words they don’t really grasp why they like what they like. A fem-centric society, with the imperative of keeping a man ignorant of it, will offer him the easy answer that his desires, his very arousal cues, aren’t ‘natural’ at all. Rather they’re the result of a nebulous “society” programming him to only respond to what makes a woman less able to compete and consolidate on a man.
In reality physical and personality preferences can differ according to what was priorly successful for him, as well as what a man understands about himself (maturity, SMV peak potential) and what women have or lack in contrast to that.
Law 25
Re-Create Yourself
Do not accept the roles that society foists on you. Re-create yourself by forging a new identity, one that commands attention and never bores the audience. Be the master of your own image rather than letting others define if for you. Incorporate dramatic devices into your public gestures and actions – your power will be enhanced and your character will seem larger than life.
I began this essay with the truth that others will always want to see a consistency in your behavior. It’s interesting when you consider this and how flashes of Alpha tend to both shock and excite women expecting a Beta response from you in a confrontational instance.
Both men and women want what they expect from you consistently. Granted, the comfort of the pattern is part of human nature, but the categorization that comes from it is often a way to keep you trapped in the role others expect of you. One reason I advocate that there is no “Beta with a side of Alpha” is because the inconsistent side of that equation is never believable. Women want that consistency to keep you in the role they expect of you.
Men struggling in Dead Bedroom marriages, or ones in which the power/authority dynamic defaults to their wives fight an unenviable, uphill battle to reclaim the Alpha respect their wives really want from them. It’s a difficult situation because the believability of that change doesn’t happen in an instant, it takes the progressive establishment of consistent behavior changes. A sudden switch from Beta servitude to Alpha respect from a woman never happens. What’s necessary is a persistent, slow, believable change in the pattern she’s expecting.