[Book Review] The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists
(Warning, this review gets tremendously off topic... and LONG!)
Yes, I've polished off another book. It's not a game. From this book, you can see:
- a narrative on the hamartia of apparently infallible idols.
- a warning of the devaluation of people resultant from the deconstruction of behaviours - viewing people not as "human" but as equations of various inputs and outputs to be solved.
- a lesson in evaluating changing goals and the goal fulfillment process.
- pointers to help you to "sarge".
- entertaining literary prose and laugh and smile along as you relate to AFC's, one-itis, and the desire to become a PUA.
The main theme I drew from this non-fiction book was as a warning to the dangers and temptations of becoming a social puppet rather than a unique person.
The narrator at one point comes to the realization that his desire to better himself, his friends, and his peers in his community never flourishes because their goals are all different. He wanted to learn so that he can pick up and sleep with any girl he wanted, yes, but also to bring that essence of confidence and execution to all other facets of his life. The others learning goals were aligned differently.
(And the off-topic-ness begins... feel free to stop reading here.)
edit: cut and moved to comments section. I didn't like what the length of the post did to the layout.
(Back on topic... resume reading.)
Oh, and as for the book? I liked it.
1 comment:
The following was cut and pasted from the original post
But what is "learning" really? Is it the ability to absorb information and repeat it at will? I would postulate that the goal of learning is to understand the "why" more so than the "what". When you understand the underlying "why", you can then apply it to many different circumstances.
So you've learned how to make a terrific tasting omelette. You've got all the steps written down and you can churn out great tasting omelettes like... great tasting omelette hotcakes. But do you know WHY it tastes so good? And no, the answer isn't "love". If you understand the why those ingredients in that process go together so well, you can transfer that to creating new dishes because you can understand what goes well together and what does not.
In the book, the would be PUA's all just adopted Style's lines and mannerisms, not really understanding WHY they worked so well. They just knew that it DID work. What ended up happening was hundreds of Style clones running around all over the place.
So should we always strive to not only learn the underlying "why", but to teach the why as well?
What's that saying? Give a man a fish; you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish; you feed him for a lifetime. However, I say teaching a man to fish without the giving the proper context may lead to lack of respect for the environment, an unchecked heightening of desires, over fishing, and the eventual downward spiral of that ecosystem, and starvation for the fisherman, his family, and his community. What's that other saying? Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
It's a stretch, I know, but I hope you get my point.
Take a look at this article from last summer. Valuable learning materials scrapped for the sake of standardized test scored and political correctness. Political correctness? Does anybody who preaches political correctness even know why they do it? To be polite? To not offend? The reason some words and phrases are offensive is because of the implications behind the words. You can't just pretty up the words and ignore the underlying issues.
It's like that lady who called me to apologize, claiming "I'm not racist!". In that case, she understood WHAT she was expected to do (apologize) but not why she should apologize. Sure, racist comments offended my parents, but WHY does racism offend people? Yes, it's a social taboo, but again, WHY? I would lean towards invalid discriminations yielding nonsensical performance measures and vast social inequities (but that's another story/rant).
Fuck people, to learn is to understand. It's not enough to know "what" you are doing; you should understand "why" you are doing it. Otherwise you're just treading water instead of swimming to shore.
Yes, I'm mixing metaphors and taking large leaps in thought. If you're still with me, colour me impressed... or disappointed that you had nothing better to do.
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