Don’t hit me, I’m a beta

That’s the message that comes through loud and clear from all of the ad hominem defenses of Game, e.g.

• You are just a “natural alpha” so you don’t understand, therefore Game is morally neutral ‘tools’ and unproblemmatic
• You have no empathy, therefore Game is morally neutral ‘tools’ and unproblemmatic
• You got yours and you are just trying to stop me from getting mine, therefore Game is morally neutral ‘tools’ and unproblemmatic
• You are too old to understand, therefore Game is morally neutral ‘tools’ and unproblemmatic
• You aren’t out there teaching men how to attract women,  therefore Game is morally neutral ‘tools’ and unproblemmatic
• You wouldn’t act like a simpering wimp toward your own wife,  therefore Game is morally neutral ‘tools’ and unproblemmatic

etc, etc.

That this is emotive and not rational is obvious.  But that it comes from men who insist that learning Game has made them more manly  — now that is irony.

Fabulous disasters and the men who love them

Real hierarchy with real authority isn’t allowed by liberalism. A modern corporation, for example, is not a real hierarchy. The relationship between employer and employee is at least formally one of mutual convenience, severable at any time by either party. That isn’t hierarchy: it is equality, hierarchy’s opposite.

Human beings are naturally hierarchical creatures, but because liberalism defines what is socially acceptable the only real hierarchy that emerges is sociopathic. Folks who don’t understand why sociopathic rock stars are sexy to women but respectable Bill Gates isn’t, when men determine the hierarchy that in significant part drives who women find attractive, have not grasped the nature of the situation.

That leads me to another common phenomenon, which is that many men seem to deliberately seek out and choose basket case women with lots of problems. You know you have seen it too: the girl with daddy issues and a troubled past, and the white knight who rides in to the rescue. Why do men do this when they must know that they are asking for trouble?

The short answer is that many men find themselves attracted to fabulous disasters for the same reason that many women find themselves attracted to sociopathic bad boys. Because feminine vulnerability is not socially acceptable under liberalism, the only real vulnerability that exists is sociopathic vulnerability.

“If you use their words, you will end up thinking their thoughts”

1992:

A couple of possibilities:

1. Suppose there really are innate differences between men and women, so that most men are now and always will be better suited for the traditional male role and most women for the traditional female role. Now suppose a society abolished the traditional female role and provided that the functions formerly performed by wives and mothers would be carried out by functionally rational hierarchical organizations of the sort men tend to act through. (For example, childcare would be provided by daycare centers rather than by Mom, who would be a fulltime paid worker like everyone else.) Then it would make sense to say that the society is unfair to women because of their sex, because the roles established by the society don’t give most women the opportunity to make use of their special capacities. (Compare Plato’s _Republic_, in which male and female Guardians had the same role — war, government and philosophy — but the men were usually better at it; contrast the matrilineal societies Loren Petrich recently mentioned, in which women are more prominent than in most societies because there is very little need for the activities belonging to the public sphere.)

2. Suppose most men and most women would be happiest in a society that had appropriately-defined sex roles, but some would not. Then a society with no sex roles would be unfair to the majority with respect to sex roles, because it would sacrifice the interests of the majority in favor of that of a minority.

1994:

Feminism is simply another strand of the subjectivism which characterises all modern philosophies and which was so roundly condemned in the Encyclical Humani Generis by Pope Pius XII in August 1950. It is of the character of all modern philosophy to deny that we can know natures and to assert that there are only collections of individuals which are similar. The only unity it will allow is a nominal one [nominalism]. In its efforts to force the populace to accept its so called “inclusive” language, feminism seeks to demonstrate that there is no such thing as the nature of man: there are only men; there are only women.

…

In the same way is feminism a false philosophy and its terminology a false terminology. And it is important that we should make a point of declining to use this false terminology because of the false presuppositions contained in it. The aphorism that Cardinal Mindszenty used against the Communists is appropriate here: “If you use their words, you will end up thinking their thoughts.” Therefore the correct answer to make to those who accuse us of being “sexist” or “paternalistic” or of “practising sex discrimination” is to say to them that their expressions are meaningless to anyone except those who accept their theories and that they contain no valid criticisms.

How positivism can get you killed

Better that patients should die than that medical science cop to ignorance:

The dangers of assigning a psychosomatic diagnosis are shown in a March 2013 article by Alice Philipson in the Telegraph of London. The title is: Professor Dies of Lung Cancer After Doctors Dismiss Illness as ‘Purely Psychological.’ If the DSM-5 SSD category is widely used in its present form, this patient fatality could be joined by many more. Rare disorders and chronic pain patients are already frequently dismissed or marginalized as “head cases.”  DSM-5 will only make this problem worse.

At least when the Aztecs sacrificed you to their gods you got to visit a nice ziggurat.  Modernity’s gods are so much more clinical.

Game’s essence

I’m an essentialist, which means that in my understanding things are what they are and can’t be changed into something else via language games, assertions of the will, analogies, or other rhetorical shenanigans.  All that those language games accomplish is to butcher our capacity to communicate with each other about reality: as the tower of babel is built toward the Heavens to try to be like little Gods, what actually happens is we just lose our ability to talk to each other. People can express varying loyalties to independently existent things like liberalism or game; but the thing remains what it is independent of their personal loyalties or limitations in their own understanding of the object of their loyalty.

So understanding what game really is in essence involves observing it as a social reality. I can’t just make it into what I want it to be by assertion of labels. I can’t “steal it” and repurpose it toward good ends if it isn’t already a good thing. I have to observe what it is and make as objectively honest an assessment of it as I can, independent of whatever implications may follow from accepting reality as it actually is rather than as I might like it to be. I can’t change the reality of what game actually is by shuffling around labels: calling a duck a tiger doesn’t put a bill and webbed feet on Tony.

A good definition can’t capture everything about a thing, but it will point us toward the essence of a thing; a bad definition will obfuscate essential aspects of what it purports to define.

Given that background, I’ve concluded for myself that the following are good definitions:

game (n): the male behavioral expression of inchastity

sluttiness (n) : the female behavioral expression of inchastity

Casting out demons, or, the modern god of the gaps

I’ve spoken before about positivism: about how the enlightened modern insists that everything meaningful about a given part of reality can be formally codified into communicable knowledge; and the postmodern, suspecting (correctly) that the modern project of banishing all mystery and codifying all meaningful knowledge in any sufficiently interesting domain is impossible, leaps to the conclusion that he definitely knows that no definite knowledge is possible and people who say such things are tyrants.  The one thing moderns and postmoderns agree upon is that if we cannot in principle become omniscient like God, then a pox on reality.

To the modern knowledge is like a sphere, the acquisition and codification of knowledge fills in the empty spaces in the sphere, and the remaining “gaps” in knowledge are closing all the time.  Benighted superstitious Christians fill in those “gaps” in knowledge with their “God”, and because those gaps are now filled in with “God” the Christian is inherently against acquiring more knowledge and specifically against Science[tm].  Acquiring more knowledge would, to the positivist, squeeze out any epistemic “room” left for God.  Har har har you superstitious Christians, once the sphere of knowledge is complete your God will disappear.

I’ve also discussed before that God is God of both the gaps and the non-gaps, and that in any case this picture of the relationship between knowledge and mystery is incoherent and irrational.  I won’t explain why in detail, but if you don’t understand why positivism (and its reflection in the mirror, postmodernism) is crap you should keep on exploring reality until you do.

That is all just preliminary background to the subject of the post.

I recently visited one of the top medical facilities in the world and spoke to some of the smartest doctors on the planet.  What I found interesting is that whenever a particular discipline is forced to look at a particular case and say “I don’t know what is going on”, the immediate (and appropriate) response is to refer to other disciplines.  That’s great as far as it goes.  But what is pertinent here is that medical science as a whole is very, very reluctant to admit when it has run out of explanations.  The neurology clinic at this facility sees many patients who present with the physiologic symptoms of seizures, for example.  Of these, one doctor estimated that a third do not have epilepsy; that the cause is unknown to neurology.  These are classified as “pseudoseizures” and are referred to … drum roll please … psychiatrists/psychologists.  He explained that the mind is much more complex than the brain and that, here is the punch line, because we know it isn’t caused by the brain it must be in the mind.

Got that?  We don’t know what caused it, so the cause must not be physiological.

Evolution makes the contrary assertion: we don’t know what caused it, but the cause must be physiological.

Watch those “gaps” close between the scylla of evolution and the charybdis of psychology, ladies and gentlemen, and make sure you remember to take your antidepressants!

Is it any wonder that the great last stop on the modern explanatory railway, the telos of modernity-as-religion, is evolutionary psychology?

The Good Shepherd of Fire

Sorry, I really did intend for the previous post to be my last on this subject for a bit.

Other folks are discussing what they think of my views here [1] (see the comments as well). I especially like how my views are explained by the fact that I am both autistic and a natural alpha. Everyone always thinks they know something about me, but I don’t share personal details about my life on line (for a number of reasons — but one good one is that it should keep things focused on the subject matter). The speculations are hilarious to anyone who knows me in person.

I think folks tend toward overly complex interpretations of my views because of positivism: because of an aversion to the large empty spaces between what is definite in our knowledge. The pragmatic man wants to grab a tool and get to work; but there are no easy and efficient tools around to repair destroyed fatherhood, and the tools that are around have gun barrels that point back at the user. It is a conceit of Christian Game supporters that, not only do they personally have the wisdom and discernment to separate the gold from the dross for themselves, but all the men they are evangelizing do too. Yet it really is better to end up not married at all than it is to end up married to a slut, etc.  And even that fate is better than getting pulled into the vortex of nihilism.  Game is less a way of embracing reality than it is of avoiding reality, and asking for an alternative to it is frequently just a rhetorical bluff.

Part of the problem is the idealization of life in modern society. The grass is always greener until you are the one facing down the cannons. On Facebook people only show the good and flattering stuff. The neighbors always have a nice lawn.  Marriage and family is hard, hard, hard, hard, harder than you can possibly imagine before you have been through it — especially when commonplace but terrible adversities, like the ones a commenter mentions, hit. It ends tragically, with death, every single time.  If you are married and it hasn’t gotten hard like that yet, it will.  If the person by your side is someone you have to manipulate like a child, you will wish you had never been born.

Scott’s observation that you can’t really Christianize Rock without it becoming something other than Rock – and not particularly good as an art form – is a pretty good analogy, but the consequences here are greater for the men who become caught up in Game. Folks say that they have become less awkward, more dominant, learned to take the female emotional roller coaster less seriously, etc through Game — but becoming less awkward, more dominant, etc is something that awkward men have had to do throughout all of history. That isn’t Game, and trying to make it Game in an act of the will results in the church choir going on tour with Avenged Sevenfold. The Church choir is going to end up drunk and with the groupies; Avenged isn’t going to start having daily Mass on the set. And the people who are attracted to that sort of solution are just the sort of people who aren’t equipped to deal with it.  Game has no part in Christian marriage because Christian marriage is sacred; and we don’t mix the sacred with the profane.  Sure, we all adopt secular and pagan practices in our day to day lives, more power to us.  And I realize that many modern Catholics actually do like profaning the Mass with banal secular music, though not nearly as much as Evangelical Protestants in the Church of Rock Band.

But they are wrong too.  It isn’t just that it doesn’t “work”: it is counterproductive to the work at hand.

—–

[1] For the record, Novaseeker is welcome to keep commenting here but I put him into moderation because he expressly announced his intention to play the troll in the thread.

Send in the clown

I have a few more or less random disjointed thoughts to wrap things up (for now — you know how blogging can be) on the subject of Game.

Something akin to Godwin’s Rule applies to discussions of Game.  As debate over Game proceeds the probability of some Christian Game proponent comparing PUA to the Greek philosophers, whose thought was selectively incorporated into Christianity by some of the greatest saints in history, approaches one.   This suggests to me that I am right that the spirit of Game inherently exalts perversion and perverts.

Dalrock is fond of suggesting (when he isn’t suggesting that I said something I didn’t) that if a woman isn’t looking for casual sex, she doesn’t really need to know how to spot a player. It is an excellent point worth repeating — something for women to keep in mind more than men, really.  But perhaps it is also true, complementarily, for men: if you aren’t looking for casual sex with a slut, you don’t need to know how to use PUA “tools” (to the extent that Game is well defined at all) to make yourself attractive to sluts.  And if you are using Game to attract a woman as part of your quest for a wife, chances are you are going to attract a woman like that.  As frustrating as it sounds, the wise (and even Biblical) answer is that it is better never to marry in the first place. I’ll let you find the Scriptural references yourself, as I am blogging from a smartphone.

That does leave men who happen to be married to sluts (as a matter of personal history, conversion after marriage, etc) in a bit of a conundrum, I suppose.  But it is far from clear that Game is the answer to that situation rather than just a temptation to go find a floozy.  The man who goes all Dread Game (in the sense of proving that other women find him attractive) on his wife is like the woman trolling for casual sex: their rationalization hamsters may not admit what they are doing, but we all know what they are doing.

For most of human history the practical (for both men and women) answer to the question “what turns women on sexually” was “who cares?” It is only in the context of the modern coddled-empowered strongindependent feminist that the question even becomes practically relevant.  It is therefore ironic but not surprising that modern men obsessing over what turns women on has the effect of turning them off.

And finally, there is certainly no problem with men giving each other advice about women. Because men have adopted liberalism and destroyed all non-sociopathic hierarchy, the “who cares?” practical answer above might not apply to your particular situation, if your life has been cozy and trouble-free enough that tingles actually sit somewhere high on your legitimate priority list.

But the Game which can be Christianized is not true Game. Game is the lying and manipulation of perverts in a quest for casual sex with other perverts. That is its essence.

The central paradox of “Christian Game”

If Game cannot be defined, it is tantamount to “just get it”.

If Game can be defined, it is the Sixteen Commandments (content warning).

Definition of a “natural alpha”

Natural alpha(n): any man who ever learned anything true about women from anyone other than a pickup artist.  (Note that the things the natural alpha learned are still Game, even though they came from ritually impure sources).