Unplugging

The Blacksmith and the Woodsman

 

Once upon a time there was a woodsman who had an axe with a dull blade and a rough, black head. After a hard day of chopping he looked at the axe and swore to himself he would make it the sharpest blade with a head polished to a mirror of silver. The woodsman then promptly went to the blacksmith in the village and explained to him his plan. The smith then said, “Surely this axe can be as bright and sharp as you wish, if only you’ll turn the grindstone for me while I hone and polish it?” The woodsman agreed and for the next week he turned the stone for the smith.

Though it was harsh labor and the woodsman sweat enough to wet the very stone with which the smith ground the blade, he turned on. By the end of the first week the blade was a bit sharper and it’s shine still dull. “See me next week and we’ll have your beautiful axe glimmering.” said the smith.

And so the woodsman turned the stone for another week while the smith ground the axe. By this time the woodsman had grown weary, his back in stitches and his muscles aching, yet still the axe was sharper and it’s surface began to shine by the end of the second week. “I think I shall take my axe now” said the woodsman. The smith protested, “The blade is unfinished and it’s head only a bright silver, not mirror perfect as you wished. Turn the stone but a bit longer and we will have your axe bye and bye.” To which the woodsman replied “No, I am weary and besides, I think I prefer a silver axe to a polished one now.”

My apologies for going the fortune cookie route in this post, but I’d just read this story recently which was originally told by Benjamin Franklin. I began to think, how many men I know (myself included at one time) who’ve played, and yet still play, the role of the woodsman in this story. We become so fed up, weary, impatient or critical of our own failed attempts that we begin to prefer things that are inferior. In other words, we settle for less and convince ourselves that it’s what we really want.

When we do this it seems to us like success. It was still hard work, it was still character building, but not what we’d originally planned. A psychological experiment (about memory actually) once put a series of C and D student into a tutorial program to raise their grades, only the program was intentionally designed not to help them in any way over the course of 12 weeks. By the end of the 12th week all had completed the once a week tutorials and as expected none had grades any better than when they started (some even lower), but when asked if the class had helped them every one replied “Yes, it helped a lot.” The idea here is of course that we don’t like to think of our past efforts as being fruitless or a waste of time. Our own psyches will prevent us from accepting work for nothing so we’ll selectively forget the actual result against the perceived effort.

Now, to apply this to a Game mentality, how does this affect us? The easy comparison is the AFC who’s too afraid of rejection in the ‘outside’ world and withdraws into his own ‘inside’ world and “prefers” it. This is the guy who’ll readily supplicate to his GF because “that’s just how he is” or he “prefers strong willed women” while she psychologically and emotionally deconstructs him as a willing participant. The serial monogamist ‘prefers’ the safety of a relationship, any relationship, to having to confront this same rejection in the outside world. I can’t begin to count the times I’ve heard men in their 40’s and 50’s tell me that they got into a career to appease a woman or how they’d changed their majors in college to better facilitate a relationship. Their explanations are invariably, “I thought it’s what I wanted at the time”, but hindsight and the fallout from 10-15 years of ‘preferring’ one thing over another put them into the position of needing counseling.

Human beings have an amazing ability to normalize their own conditions. Anything can become normal. It’s how we normalize a condition that separates the reality of a situation from our perception of it. Now think for a bit of how this dynamic applies to yourself? What have you convinced yourself of for the wrong reasons? Are you in a situation now that began from your having settled for less that what you wanted? Do you struggle with an AFC who’s convinced himself that he prefers what he’s become?

It’s not enough to unplug from the Matrix. You have to unlearn what it’s taught you to master the new reality you find yourself in.

Compensation

One of the higher orders of physical standards women hold for men is height. There are countless threads in the community that address this, but I think that for the better part it’s not difficult to observe this in the ‘real world’. I should also add that this is one characteristic that is central to the Social Matching Theory in that human’s are sensitive to asymmetrics and imbalances.

Now, before I get told in so many ways that this isn’t always the case or the “not all girls are like that” exceptions to the rule, let me start by saying that this isn’t the point of this thread. I don’t want to debate the logistics of why women prefer a taller mate or the tendency for like to attract like in this respect. No, what I’m on about is really the root of the infamous “short man’s disease.” That’s right, you know who I’m talking about; the ultimate in compensation for inferiority, the dreaded ‘short man’s disease.’ You know the guy. About 5′ 6″, pounding out the weight on the bench press. Bad ass attitude, hangs with the bigger guys (which is pretty much all of them) and throws his ego around. What a tool, right?

But if you think this is only limited to short men (or women), you’re making a mistake. You see, in so many ways we all compensate for deficiencies. I recently read a thread on another “non-community” forum that saw fit to start a topic asking why men lie and it got me to thinking why any of us lie, man or woman. I’ve also been fielding a lot of questions regarding issues we kind of take for granted after having discussed them to death in the manosphere; one of those being the nature of personality and one’s ability to change their own or have it changed by circumstance, or often both. I think it’s a tragic miscalculation on our part to think of personality as static, unchangeable or to question the ingenuousness of that change, but more tragic is the doubting ourselves for that change.

One simple truism that a lot of people love to use as their convenient escape clause is the JBY (just be yourself) notion. This of course is just what ones says as advice when they really don’t know what else to say. Given that though, what is it that makes a personality shift ‘genuine’. Any number of us probably know an individual who began acting differently at some point in their life. This can be the result of some kind of tragedy or trauma (think PTSD) or it can be that the individual felt a need to change their fundamental way of thinking and made the change of their own accord. Usually in these cases we think of them as posers or try-hards, trying to be something they’re not. They reflect this change in their appearance, their regular practices, their friends or the people they associate with, attitudes, behaviors etc. And this is what’s jarring for people who knew their prior personality.

From the 48 Laws of Power:

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.

What makes us doubt the sincerity of a personal change is what’s at issue. If their change is something we agree with or generally think of as positive, we are less inclined to doubt the ingenuousness of this change. But when their change conflicts with our own interests, when it dramatically clashes with what we’ve come to expect of that individual, this is where we doubt their sincerity. We say “dude, stop trying to be something you’re not”, we tear it down, we fall back on JBY platitudes because it clashes with our interpretations. And in this doubt, we fish for reasons as to why a person would want that change; essentially, what are they compensating for? It may be funny to presume someone driving a monster truck down the highway is making up for a small penis, but the root of that ‘compensating’ is what makes us feel uncomfortable in our own internal compensating.

It’s a difficult enough task for an individual to critically assess their own personality, and even more so to effect a change in it, but the final insult is to have other’s doubt the veracity of it. What others fail to see is that at some point in the development of their own personalities, they themselves had to compensate for deficiencies, discontentments and prompts to grow and mature. This is a gigantic hurdle for most AFCs wanting to transition to being something more. On SoSuave we’ve always called that being a DJ (Don Juan), but that doesn’t encompass the entirety of maturing. I like the term positive masculinity, but the crux of all that is the ingenuousness of the actual change. Why are you changing?

There is a saying that AFCs are like a bunch of crabs in a barrel. As soon as one is about to climb out there are always half a dozen ready to pull him back in again. Add to this a self-doubt from societal conditionings that tell him to stay the same, not to aspire to more, he’s doing it right, and it’s amazing that any AFC becomes a DJ. This has been termed the ‘Societal Cockblock’; they tell him he’s compensating, and in a way they’re right, but for the wrong reason. PUA skills, DJ psychology, Positive Masculinity are all compensations for deficiencies. They go beyond behavior modification – that’s the easy answer. PUAs teach a set of behaviors and scripts to be aped in order to mask a deficit. These are easy pickings for the JBY apologists because they are actions that generally don’t match a person’s prior personality. They’re not “really” like that, so they’re posers, or worse, they’ve been duped by guys hawking the PUA brand of self-help tools. What they don’t see is the genuine desire to change and the reasons for it.

When we compensate, we improvise, we fake it till we make it; but who determines when we’ve stopped faking it? We do. I read all kinds of articles doubting the realized capacity a person has to adopt ‘natural Game’ into their personality. It’s an internalization process for sure, but there has to come a point of transition where a Man’s default response IS his Game response. That’s who he IS now.

Letting Go of Invisible Friends

I’m sorry to break this to you, but there is no such thing as a long distance relationship. That’s correct, you have no relationship. An LDR simply does not meet the criteria necessary for it to be considered a legitimate relationship. There is no reciprocity of anything more than words passing over a phone line or an IM text. Understand me here – you have no relationship. You have self-assumed accountability, self-assumed liability and internalized responsibilities to be loyal to this person. You are entertaining a commitment to fidelity with an idealization, and ignoring what everyone outside of your LDR will regularly tell you is insanity. LDRs are one of the more insidious forms of ONEitis.

LDRs are the most easily identifiable form of ONEitis, and it would be laughable if it weren’t so damaging to a guy’s life progression. The LDR man generally sacrifices years of his life in this pitiable effort to pursue his ‘soulmate’ across the planet or even a hundred miles away. The very thought of refuting the idea that an LDR can work is equatable to denying his belief this fantasized ONEitis fueled idealization that he’s swallowed for the better part of his life. It’s easy to criticize an LDR in the terms of questioning either party’s earnestness and fidelity in entertaining an LDR and this is usually the tact that most people giving advice on LDRs follow. One or both parties are or will ‘cheat’ on the other over the course of time, its true, but LDRs are far more telling of a mentality that results in much more damaging consequences as a result of deeply conditioned self-expectations and fears.

I can’t begin to list the number of otherwise intelligent and ambitious men I’ve known who’ve drastically altered the course of their lives to follow their ONE. Men who’ve changed their majors in college, who’ve selected or switched universities, men who’ve applied for jobs in states they would never have considered, accepted jobs that are sub-standard to their ambitions or qualifications, men who’ve renounced former religions and men who’ve moved across the planet all in an effort to better accommodate an idealized woman with whom they’ve played pseudo-boyfriend with over the course of an LDR; only to find that she wasn’t the person they thought she was and were depressive over the gravity that their decisions played in their lives.

An LDR is akin to a LJBF, but writ large and festering in a man’s life. You play surrogate boyfriend, voluntarily accepting and internalizing all of the responsibilities and accountabilities of being a woman’s exclusive, monogamous partner with no expectation of reciprocating intimacy or sexuality in the immediate future. However an LDR is worse than a LJBF arrangement since it pervasively locks a man into a success or failure mentality with regards to the relationship actually being legitimate. After all, she’s agreed to remain his girlfriend (from miles away) and if he’s the one to falter it’s his lack of perseverance in this  ONEitis ego-investment that dooms them. Once the LDR inevitably ends he’s the one left with the self-doubt, he’s the one beating himself up over wasting time, money and effort and he’s the one feeling guilty whether he or she is the true ‘cheater’.

An LDR is like having an invisible friend with whom you’re constantly considering the course of your actions with. Consider the personal, romantic, familial, educational, career, personal maturity and growth opportunities that you’ve limited yourself from or never had a chance to experience because of this invisible friend. When you finally divorce yourself from this invisible friend, will it have all been worth it? Guys cling to LDRs because they’ve yet to learn that Rejection is better than Regret. AFCs will nurse along an LDR for years because it seems the better option when compared with actually going out and meeting new women who represent a potential for real rejection. They think its better to stick with the ‘sure thing’, but it’s the long term regret that is the inevitable result of an LDR that is life damaging. Nothing reeks of desperation or verifies a lack of confidence more than a guy who self-righteously proclaims he’s in an LDR. Women see you coming a mile off, because you are a guy without options, clinging to his one previously realized option. In fact the only reason a man entertains an LDR is due to a lack of options. If you had more plates spinning an LDR would never look like a good idea.

And finally, it’s not uncommon to see the “not in my case” defense offered about how you actually DO see your invisible friend once every 4 or six months. To this I’ll say again, what opportunities are you censoring yourself from experiencing by playing house with a woman you only see this often? Do you honestly think you’re the exception to the rule? The truth is you’re molding your lifestyle around what you hope your relationship will be in the future – that’s no way to live.

Average Frustrated Chump

In the “community” there’s a lot of want for better terms. One of the major obstacles in the average guy’s path to unplugging is really coming to terms with the ‘terms’ we use. Somewhere on the net I’m sure there’s a glossary of the common acronyms used in the “manosphere” (I hate that term too) outlining the various shorthand we use. Some of these terms have gone mainstream and I’m beginning to see even “legitimate” online journalists use LTR (long term relationship) or ONS (one night stand) somewhat regularly, meaning there’s a common perception that others will already know what they mean.

The reason this is a hurdle for a lot of plugged-in guys is because it seems almost juvenile, like a treehouse club for preteen boys. For me to draw comparisons of an acculturated, feminine social paradigm to the central plot of the Matrix movies, admittedly, on the surface that seems kind of silly. It’s an apt comparison and a useful allegory when you understand the concepts behind it, but for a guy just coming to grasp it while being immersed in a feminine-primary socialization for his whole life, it dosen’t click. And predictably, women invested in that same socialization see the terminology as little more than little boys holed up in their treehouse, throwing rocks at the girls below.

However, like any new developing science or art or technology there is always going to be a need to codify abstract concepts. We lack better terms so we’re forced to create new ones to represent new concepts.

The AFC – average frustrated chump – was coined almost a decade ago with Mystery method. It’s seen a lot of modification over the years, becoming almost synonymous the use of the term Beta (beta male) or Herb (herbivorous male). In fact, although I use it often, I rarely read AFC in PUA blogs, forums or the ‘community’ at large. Regardless of the terminology, the concept is really the crux of the term. Most AFCs, most guys looking in from the outside, can relate to the idea of what an average frustrated chump is – they can identify with it. Once they begin unplugging, the AFC idea comes into better focus and, usually with some discomfort, they realize how that term applies to themselves:

Qualities of an AFC

  • ONEitis – First and foremost.
  • Subscribes to feminine idealizations.
  • Supplication is supportive. To comply with gender equalism she must increase, so he must decrease, regardless of how subtly this is realized.
  • The Savior Schema –reciprocation of intimacy for problems solved.
  • The Martyr Schema – the more you sacrifice the more it shows devotion.
  • The ‘Friends’ Debt – LJBF and the pseudo-friendship as a means to prospective intimacy.
  • Primarily relies on dating and social skills (or lack thereof) developed during adolescence and early adulthood
  • A behavioral history that illustrates a mental attitude of ‘serial monogamy’ and the related insecurities that accompany it.
  • A belief that women infallibly and consciously recognize what they want, and honestly convey this to them, irrespective of behaviors that contradict this. Uses deductive reasoning in determining intent and bases female motivations on statements rather than objectively observing behavior. Believes women’s natural propensity is for rational rather than emotional thought.
  • An over-reliance on rejection Buffers.
  • Believes in the Identification Myth. The more alike he is, or can make himself, with his idealized female the better able he will be to attract and secure her intimacy. Believes that shared common interests are the ONLY key to attraction and enduring intimacy.
  • Believes and practices the “not like other guys” doctrine of self-perceived uniqueness, even under the condition of anonymity.
  • Considers LDRs (long distance relationships)  a viable option for prolonged intimacy.
  • Maintains an internalized belief in the qualifications and characterizations of women that coincide with his ability (or inability) to attract them. Ergo, he self-confirms the “ she’s out of my league” and the “she’s a loose slut” mentalities on-the-fly to reinforce his position for his given conditions.
  • Harbors irrational (often socially reinforced) fears of long term solitude and alters his mind-set to accommodate or settle for a less than optimal short term relationship – often with life long consequences.
  • The AFC will confirm a belief in egalitarian equality between the genders without consideration for variance between the genders. Ergo, men make perfectly acceptable feminine models and women make perfectly acceptable masculine models. Due to societal pressures he unconsciously self-confirms androgyny as his goal state.

This is anything but a comprehensive list. There are far more, but my intent here isn’t to provide you with a list of criteria that qualifies an AFC (“you might be a chump if,..”), rather it’s to give you some basic understanding to clarify the term, and round out the idea of what an AFC is. Needless to say these mental schema are some of the impediments to unplugging, or helping another man unplug, from his old way of thinking. As I’m fond of repeating, unplugging chumps from the Matrix is dirty work. Expect to be met with a LOT of resistance, but understanding what dynamics you may harbor yourself or those that a friend might cling to will help you in moving past the years of social conditioning. It’s thankless work, and more often than not you’ll also be facing a constant barrage of shit tests (from both women and feminized men) and ridicule in your efforts. Be prepared for it. Unplugging chumps is triage – save those you can, read last rites to the dying.