Tuesday, August 23, 2011

Why Game works and why that fact is so intolerable to the non-neurotypical mind

There exists quite a bit of overlap between the reactionary sphere, the HBD sphere, the 'Manosphere' and the Game sphere. I suppose that the common thread is that they're all based on the flaunting of certain truths that polite people agree not to talk about. Politeness is a good thing, but it should never be presumed to be the best thing, especially not when different groups are held to different standards of it.

There exists a certain irony that the fundamentals of Game are very reactionary indeed. Some of its exponents, Roissy, for instance, grok this. Boiled down to a few sentences, it is this:

Women in our society are attracted to the high status male. Men are attracted to the young and beautiful woman .

You can argue that these are universally true statements across all cultures, but such is not really necessary for the observations to be useful.

This of course is directly contrary to the line we push in our culture and absolutely contrary to the naive projection of the non-neurotypical mind. I mean----STATUS!? Such a fuzzily defined thing, so ridiculously vulnerable to being spoofed. But that is what women of the neurotypical variety react to, and it is in truth very subject to being spoofed. Spoofing the status game is something we do so commonly we even have tons of euphemisms for it, like 'putting one's best foot forward' and 'showing one's self in the best possible light'.

In much more reactionary times--which is to say, any time before the late 20th century, most societies had pretty strong disincentives for those who presumed to affect higher status than they officially possessed. Acting like a superior tough guy, for instance, would much more frequently draw you into actual physical fights than is the case today. The realities have changed, but the gut feeling of the woman really hasn't. Hell, if you go back further, you'll find that even spoofing the status signals involved in clothing was strictly verboten via sumptuary laws.

Now, the woman seeking to assess your status at a visceral level must frequently just fall back on what level of status you implicitly and explicitly take. Do you treat her as if you had higher status, the same, or lower status? Your luck will be the best if you treat her as if you had higher status, and this infuriates the non-neurotypical mind. This is why teasing her, making her qualify or prove herself to you, and generally not hanging on her every word or taking her very seriously works so damnably well on the neurotypical woman. Reactionary men, which is to say men before the 1960s, generally acted as if they understood this. Shakespeare's 'The Taming of the Shrew' is a pretty explicit treatment of this essential fact about men and women. You can mine it out of the Old Testament if you like, the more concentrated ore is to be had from the Bard. I've previously talked about how someone doing YOU a favor tends to make them like you better, a truth that I've seen first articulated explicitly by Ben Franklin. This works extremely well on both men and women. The more positive things you get her to do for you or with you, the more she will like you. This is so insanely contrary to reason that I can easily envision it driving the not so neurotypicals to distraction. But what must be remembered is that human beings are not, in the whole, very rational creatures. For whatever reason, 95% or more of us behave and react this way, and those that don't need to accomodate ourselves to that fact.

Yes, this is the reason why charities are always spamming you with more solicitations talking about the generous gifts you've already given them, why salesmen try to get you to do them some innocuous favor to 'get their foot in the door', and why political groups are always trying to get you to make some meaningless symbolic gesture. They're trying to trigger some of the subroutines (crazily ingrateful diplomatic model and faulty sunk cost processing) that you might not have as a non-neurotypical, but are nearly universal otherwise. Much effort over the centuries has been put into learning to exploit the neurotypical mind's nature. Studying some of the works in sales and propaganda can be very helpful there if you keep one thing in mind---generally these techniques work and work quite well.

7 comments:

In said...

Interesting article.

One niggle, just for fun. I don't like the term 'neurotypical' because it implies something innate and unchanging about 'neurotypicals'. I believe that at least most people can drastically change psychologically if the conditions are right. The difference between neurotypicals and non-neurotypicals may be simply that neurotypicals haven't transcended their neurotypicalness which may be what we ought to encourage.

Jehu said...

In,
You write like being neurotypical is a bad thing. It's not. It's just the way that 95-98% of the population thinks. Expecting the bulk of the population to change at that fundamental of a level is pretty futile, IMO. Drastically changing people psychologically usually is a destructive process. Being neurotypical is like running the Windows OS. It's extremely common and relatively compatible with whatever everyone else is running, but it has had the market dominated for so long that all kinds of hacks and malware have been developed for it--oh, and patches are extremely uncommon.

In said...

No, perhaps it isn't a bad thing. I think my problem with dividing people into neurotypical and non-neurotypical is that it masks the complexity and nuance of human nature. Its an over-simplification and I'm skeptical there is a clear innate, fixed aspect to a person.

Human nature is very complex and there is a lot of room for agnosticism about what humans can "be", individually and collectively. I don't believe in ideologies about human nature and I'm not particularly a progressive. However, I don't discount theories of human nature that posit (psychologically) growth beyond the normal level to an adult (e.g. saints and sages).

The obvious reason it may be a bad thing to be 'neurotypical' is if there are too many neurotypical in the society it can lead to collapse. The West is possibly an example of this.

In said...

Jehu
a more pithy way to state it, the reason the West is in decline is apparently because there are too many dumbasses. Perhaps its possible to turn some dubmassess into non-dumbassess. Just a possiblity.

Jehu said...

In,
Societies work just fine with 98% neurotypicals. They just need to organize themselves accordingly. In the past, they mostly did. I wrote more on this in a recent post (What Can Society do for the Neurotypical). I agree that it is possible for people to grow or change mentally and spiritually--to take on some of the aspects of heroes, saints, or even 'rational economic man'. But such changes happen in such a small fraction of the population that you can't meaningfully organize a society expecting such.

Anonymous said...

Jehu,

Neurotypicals require good leadership. The west has none. Reactionaries are all about leadership, and they recogize democracy (in all tis forms) is the opposite of leadership.

Jehu said...

Anonymous,
Carlyle, one of the godfathers of Reaction, would agree. The problem is the population is seriously infected with what he calls 'Valetism' (the idea that no actual heroes or heroism exists, as in no man is a hero in the eyes of his valet) and thus is governed by the Sham and the Quack. It is interesting how much of what he describes in 'Past and Present', about 1840s Britain, applies to us still today.