neural software

Game and Circumstance

circumstance

“Don’t be mad E. It’s not our fault you were born without the sport fucking gene, come on.”

 

At the start of July, 2011 (a month before I began this blog in earnest) I took a backpacking trip through the Great Smokey Mountains in Tennessee and North Carolina. This was due to my desire to unplug, go off the grid and get back into the real face-to-face world. It was only for 10 days but well worth burning 10 days of PTO for.

It was an educational experience meeting people, most of whom have very little online presence beyond using Twitter or FaceBook occasionally. I didn’t have cell service for most of the hike. The people I met along the way, and I’ll put this politely, were “salt of the earth” people. Some were other hikers, others were people who lived and worked in the few surrounding communities. It was good to reaffirm my ability to survive on my own and realize that there is a whole world of Men out there who live well, far beyond the influence of “men” who’ve never mowed their own lawns, much less lived by their own wit in the country. Guys who build muscle by working outdoors, not in a gym. I met beautiful women who worked in small diners you’ll never hear of. I fished rivers and streams, for dinner some nights, and I saw fireflies for the first time (I grew up in southern California, it’s a novelty).

At some point I think Men need to get back to their primal natures, they need to embrace it fearlessly and without shame. We’re far too insulated by the Buffers of technology. Even the more belligerent rednecks I encountered still preferred to text their girlfriends and came off as pussified for doing so.

I guess what I’ve come to realize is that we tend to view what we ‘know’ about men and women from the experiences we have reported to us from all over the world on blogs, forums, the manosphere  – and I still endorse the purpose of it’s unwritten mission – however, this trip reaffirmed for me that there is no substitute for real interaction. Game will work equally well with the cute blonde serving coffee in a rural diner as it would with the club girl in NYC. Both are equally given to the same feminine fundamentals we’ve untangled about women in the ‘sphere for over a decade, but the one we tend to use as a female archetype is the typical club girl for our examples. Daisy Duke is still subject to hypergamy, she just applies it differently.

I’m not turning into Roosh, but I’m considering burning a couple months doing the entire Appalachian trail all the way to Maine.

In my day to day life I deal with a lot of rich men. Every patron or boss, every general manager I’ve dealt with for the past 15 years has been a millionaire. The primary owner of one of my liquor brand is that many times over. None of the “business friends” I shoot golf with have weeded their own lawns or installed a radiator in 20+ years. When I was on the trail I thought about how ridiculous it would be to see a guy like that or some PUA guru having to dig his own toilet and take a dump in the woods, or hoist his pack in a tree so the damn bears don’t eat the only food he’s got for the next 3 days. These guys are insulated.

I want to run, and fight, and fuck, as well as I deal with the ‘civilized’ things I do. Imagine a guy like Mystery wringing out the sweat and filth of his clothes in a stream somewhere. Now, that’s some funny shit.

Game and Circumstance

I start off with this today because this experience wasn’t just humbling, but it also taught me that what I experience day to day isn’t at all what a majority of men experience. My past, my N count, my 18 year marriage, and what I do professionally sets me apart in a way that I sometimes don’t appreciate or take into consideration when I’m advising men.

It’s also very humbling and affirming when I receive emails or comments from men living in countries I’ve only seen in pictures who nevertheless share a common male experience that reinforces many of the things I write about – but even within that commonality, I have to remember, my circumstance is not theirs.

I walk through a casino almost every day now and I see the same people. Not the fun glamour you see in commercials or ads about Las Vegas (that’s usually night promos), but the real people, the overweight, housekeeping and table crew, the geriatric spending their savings and social security on a hope they’ll win something significant, the desperate and the people just looking for distraction.

I walk by some of these men and think “how is Game going to help a guy like that?” While I do believe that Game is universally beneficial on many levels (primarily between the sexes, but not exclusively) there’s a point where that improvement is going to be limited by a guy’s circumstance, where he is in life and what he’s made of it so far. It’s a manosphere cliché now, but most men aren’t ready for the red pill. The red pill awareness is simply too much for them to accept within the context of their circumstances.

That circumstance isn’t based on age or a particular demographic, but Game is only going to be as liberating for a man in as far as he’s willing to accept it in terms of his own circumstance.

Not Just Sex

Game gets a lot of misconstrued criticism in that ignorant critics presume Game only ever equals PUA and that “those guys are only interested in fucking as many low self-esteem sluts as humanly possible.” It’s much more difficult for them to confront that Game is far more than this, and applicable within relationships, in the workplace (with women and men) and even in their family dealings.

That’s kind of a scary prospect for men comfortable in living within their own contexts and circumstance. Sport fucking isn’t what most men think it is because they’ve never experienced anything beyond serial monogamy, nor is it what most (80%+ Beta) men even have the capacity to actualize for themselves. But, as Game has evolved, it isn’t just about Spinning Plates, or sport fucking, it’s more encompassing than this.

Game is, or should be, for the everyman.

“He only wants me for sex” or “I need to be sure he’s interested in me and not just sex” are the admonishments of women who really have no introspective interest in how a majority of men really approach becoming intimate with women. Oh it makes for a good rationale when women finally “want to get things right” with a provider, but even the excuse belies a lack of how most men organize their lives to accommodate women’s schedules of mating.

Mostly to their detriment, the vast majority of men follow a deductive,but anti-seductive, Beta Game plan of comfort, identification, familiarity and patience with women in the hopes that what they hear women tell them is the way to their intimacy will eventually pan out for them. Their Beta Game plan is in fact to prove they “aren’t just in it for the sex” in order to get to a point of having sex with a particular woman.

I always find it ironic when men tell me that their deductive plan for getting after it with a woman is to prove he’s not actually trying to get after it with her. However, this is what most men’s Game amounts to; deductively attempting to move into a long term monogamy based on what women, saturated in a presumption of gender equalism, tell him he ought to expect from himself in order to align himself with her intimate interest.

I could use the term “appeasement”, but that’s not what most men want to call it. Most men call it being a better man (for her), better than “other guys” who wont align themselves accordingly. It becomes their point of pride in fact.

Male Long Term Security

Most men, average men – and I don’t mean that in a derogatory sense – want a form of security.

Most men are designed, perhaps bred, to be necessitous. To be sure , men need to be constant performers, constant qualifiers, in order to mitigate hypergamy. In the past, and to an extent now, this performance simply became a part of who he was as a man and didn’t require a constant effort, but increasingly, as male feminization has spread, men have been made to be necessitous of security.

I would say that desire for long term security differs significantly from women’s Beta Bucks side of hypergamy need since the drive to secure provisioning is an innate part of women’s firmware. The security average men need is rooted in a need for certainty in his ability to meet with a woman’s performance standards – and ultimately avoid feminine rejection.

In today’s feminine-centric social order, men are ceaselessly bombarded with masculine ridicule, ceaselessly reminded of their inadequacies, and endlessly conditioned to question and doubt any notion of how masculinity should be defined – in fact ridicule is the first response for any man attempting to objectively define it.

It’s this doubt, this constant consideration of his own adequacy to meet the shifting nature of women’s hypergamic drive, from which stems this need for security. The average man needs the certainty of knowing that he meets and exceeds a woman’s prerequisites in a social circumstance that constantly tells him he never will – and his just asking himself the question if he ever will makes him that much less of a man.

The average man will look for, or create his own rationales to salve this necessitousness. He’ll create his own ego in the image of what he thinks he embodies best as being “Alpha” or he’ll adopt the easy doctrines of equalism which tell him women and men are fundamentally the same rational actors and convince himself he’s not subject to the capricious whims of feminine hypergamy because men and women are more ‘evolved’ than that– but that nagging doubt will manifest when the right circumstances and right opportunities present themselves.

Changing Your Programming

I mention in the book that I am not a motivational speaker, I’m not anyone’s savior and I would rather men be the self-sustaining solutions to becoming the men they want and need to be – not Rollo Tomassi’s success stories, but their own success stories.

That said, let me add that I would not be writing what I do if I thought that biological determinism, circumstance and social conditioning were insurmountable factors in any Man’s life. Men can accomplish great things through acts of will, they can be masters of their circumstances and most importantly masters of themselves.

With a healthy understanding, respect and awareness of what influences his own condition, a Man can overcome and thrive within the context of them – but he must first be aware of, and accepting of, the conditions under which he operates and maneuvers.

You may not be able to control the actions of others, you may not be able to account for women’s hypergamy, but you can be prepared for them, you can protect yourself from the consequences of them and you can be ready to make educated decisions of your own based upon that knowledge.

You can unplug.

You can change your programming, and you can live a better life no matter your demographic, age, past regrets or present circumstances.

The Savior Schema

“Every time a man is being nice to you, he’s offering dick. That’s all it is. ‘Uh, can I get that for ya? How ’bout some dick? Can I help you with that? Can I help you with some dick? Do you need some dick?’ ” – Chris Rock

The Savior Schema – the beta male expectation of reciprocation of intimacy (usually sexual) for problems solved.

This is a learned/developed behavior that results from men’s natural push to deductively search for the most rational solution to a problem. It’s really a linear logic; I need sex + women have sex + I must discover what is required for me to get sex from women + I will perform/embody/identify with said requirements = woman will reciprocate with her intimacy. Needless to say this is simplistic at best, but men have a tendency to believe that women will respond as rationally as they themselves would in qualifying for her stated desires. The manosphere is full of men who can tell you this simply isn’t the case for any number of reasons, but sadly they still think that women ought to live up to their implied “agreement.”

The fundamental flaw of the Savior Schema (also, Captain Save a Ho) is that it is essentially negotiated intimacy, and negotiated intimacy is never genuine. You can fix a woman’s flat tire, help her out of a financial jam, fix her a nice lasagne, give her the perfect shoulder to cry on, take care of her kids and listen to her drone on for hours on the phone, and she’ll still go fuck her outlaw biker boyfriend because her intimacy with him is genuine, unnegotiated, unobligated desire. She wants to have sex with him, she doesn’t owe him sex.

What AFCs fail to understand is that all the financial, emotional, dependable support you could possibly offer a woman is no substitute for raw, unmitigated, chemical desire. Some of the most irresponsible, unreliable, poverty level washouts often get more sex than any dutiful AFC suffering from a Savior Schema, because there is no obligation.

Reciprocity

In the wild, the law of reciprocity and fair exchange is a fairly obvious one. Most high-order social animals have some innate understanding of exchanging resources. In fact you could argue that pair bonding, family structure and social collectives are for the most part based on this shared exchange arrangement. So it stands to reason that in the course of human evolution we too developed this innate psychological wiring, thus making men prone to seeing it as the shortest distance between what we have and what we want.

The difficulties arise when (perhaps cleverly) women learned to covertly use this  innate psychology of exchange within the context of a social framework that gives them a resource advantage for little or no exchange of their own. Thus women modeled a social norm, that mirrors men’s natural default position of disposability, and put their attentions and intimacies as unassailable resources so valuable that no effort on a man’s part can merit it. When a woman is appalled by the notion that she should be obligated to have sex with a man in exchange for a dinner and a movie (even over multiple occasions), this social convention is the root of that insult.

The Protector Dynamic

Of course the flip side to this argument is the Protector Dynamic which is the natural propensity for a man to want to provide protection for his mate. Over the course of our evolutionary history certain psycho-biological behaviors proved to be beneficial to the survival of our species. Specific hormonal releases prompt different emotions and behavioral reactions as a response to our environments. Women, for instance, produce higher volumes of oxytocin and estrogen thus prompting a natural instinctual feeling of wellbeing and nurturing her children (which also, interestingly enough, is released after female orgasm). The same is true for men. Being generally physically stronger and posessing 17 times the testosterone, men have evolved chemical cocktails of their own and thus feel a natural protection instinct when prompted.

The conflict comes when the AFC confuses this Protector Dynamic with a Savior Schema. The natural feelings derived from his biochemistry only serve to reinforce his Savior mentality and solidify it as part of his personality. Even when a woman’s repeated behavior directly contradicts this notion of reciprocating intimacy for help (or his idea of ‘protection’) the Savior Schema only rationalizes it as being inconsistent with a single, individual woman.

This then is the root of the White Knight schema; exchange protection for intimacy (i.e. sex). And, once again, women cleverly, almost subconsciously so, use this dynamic to arrange a beneficial, but unequal, exchange of resources.

The Tao of Game

There are a great many concepts in Game Theory that are difficult to accurately define. Understanding the intricacies of intergender dynamics is often a tough road to hoe due to individualized interpretations of what a particular term or concept should mean in a global sense. ‘Game Theory’ is even a term I’m kind of struggling with since people think it seems to exclude the actual practicing, or real world development of the same principles I explore on this blog. For the record, I believe it’s just as important to hone one’s PUA skills / tools as it is to understand why they work.

Ikigai

The concept of Alpha is another sticking point for a lot of men, both plugged-in or unplugged from the feminine Matrix – some even rejecting the concepts of alpha and beta wholesale. I find that for the most part people have a very tough time reconciling the unvarnished principles of Game Theory and, to a greater degree, the way Evolutionary Psychology compliments it, with a learned sense of moral or ethical justice they believe should be essential to human interactions. I think human beings, to varying degrees, have an in-born capacity for revulsion to ideas that reveal a very realistic, unavoidable nihilism existing in the fundamental nature of the world. By that I mean that we seem to have some feral-level refusal for what we think would be a hopeless situation. The Japanese have a term for this called “Ikigai“, loosely translated as “a reason for being”. It would not surprise me in the least if in the future we find that humans (and other higher order animals) have specific neural ‘software’ directly linked to this rejection of the hopeless. Obviously a neural wiring that promotes Ikigai would be a very valuable evolutionary survival asset for a species.

Paradoxically though, just in the suggesting of an evolved, biological root for rejecting nihilism, it confirms the validity of that hopeless condition. In other words, the same evo-psych-prompted root that grants us a capacity to desire justice or provides with us a sense of morality (however defined) is the same root that forces us to obstinately reject the reality of our situations. The same psyche that wants to reject environmentally valid concepts like alpha/beta, hypergamy, the SMP, or a plethora of other difficult to accept Game Theory ideas is the same psyche that wants to reject the hopelessness they may or may not represent.

Bear this in mind when you come across a new concept in Game. The reality we find ourselves in is very cruel when you approach it from a binary, right or wrong, absolutist standpoint. It may satisfy a need to feel self-righteous, but it’s never a good starting point for real understanding that may benefit you later. This is what detractors of evo-psych struggle with; factoring in a human element into environmental and biological determinants. We don’t call a cheetah running down a gazelle on the African savannah ‘evil’ or unjust, or the gazelle undeserving of death. It just is.

If I were to dangle a juicy raw steak in front of the nose of a hungry Doberman, could I blame the dog for taking a piece of my hand off with the steak when he bites at it? He’s just doing what a hungry dog does. When your wife’s vagina tingles in the presence of a Man displaying evolutionarily developed Alpha cues, or you get a hardon viewing the body of a beautiful naked woman, this is the biological imperative at work. It’s not right or wrong, it just is.

Biology Trumps Conviction

This position usually grates against the grain for people invested in the ideology of personal responsibility. They think it means biological determinism, and therefor grants a free pass for all sins. However, what I’m implying is that the overriding influence is that of our biology; there would be no need for convictions if it weren’t. The mistake lies in thinking that convictions are the measure and biology is the limiter. It’s not that you can resist temptation, but rather that the temptation exists in the first place. There is no temptation without motivation. What most people fail to grasp here is that no conviction to alter behavior, mindset, belief, etc. would be necessary for an individual if the operative state (biology in this instance) weren’t conflicting with what we perceive are in our overall best interests. Biology trumps conviction because it is the operative state for us.

Biology determines what convictions we need to construct in order to optimize our existences. We then compound this with progressively more complex layerings of “conviction” upon our state in order to address inconsistencies in our natural desires. And then, conversely, our natural impulses will prompt us to rationalize loopholes in the articles of our convictions which will allow for our biological imperatives to be expressed.

Take sex out of the equation for a moment. As an am-circuit bodybuilder I have to stay cut for an upcoming competition. So I effectively starve myself for the prior 6 weeks of all the food that my body instinctively wants. Every fiber in my body wants to pound down a slice of pizza, but my conviction to look good and be at my optimal best for the competition overwhelms that primal urge. You’d say “well, see, conviction trumps biology”, but the operative state is what my biology is prompting me to do; eat starchy / sugary foods in order to prevent starvation and maximize my survival capacity by retaining energy reserves in case of emergency. My hunger is the operative state; without it that conviction to repress it isn’t extraordinary. Conviction is subordinate to biology, because right after the pose-down I’m at the pizzaria eating 3 slices of suprema.

Because my biology is the operative state, inevitably conviction will be unsustainable to prevent it from manifesting in some form. Some of these are socially acceptable, some of these are socially forgivable, some of these will earn you a life in prison. Sometimes that means the girl gets drunk, he was cute and she bangs the guy in spite of herself. Sometimes it means celibate priests become pedophiles as their only means of sexual expression, and sometimes it means a homosexual comes out of the closet. There are social consequences for all these expressions to varying degree, but again, the motivator is  the biological imperative.

The sexual marketplace as we know it today is the result of biological opportunism intermingling with societal buffers that are in a constant state of flux. Religious convictions and appeals to moralism are no insulation against hypergamy and the sexual marketplace. In fact, often, the more ardent the conviction, the more influential the biological imperative.

I find it’s a much healthier position to accept a balance between our biologically derived impulses and our higher aspirations. It’s not one or the other. It’s OK to want to fuck just for the sake of fucking – it doesn’t have to be some source of existential meaning. It is as equally unhealthy to convince oneself that self-repressions are virtues as it is to think that unfettered indulgences are freedoms. There is a balance.