[skore]

I always wondered what bothered me about these 'The Game' approaches to "successfully influence people" and I think you really nailed it down.

OF COURSE people will find it easier to agree with you if they have agreed with you before - that should be obvious. The question is - what do you have to do to get that? 'The Game' seems to say - "well, anything that is necessary, of course", as though aping people into nodding was some kind of accomplishment and as though that accomplishment in itself was admirable and healthy.

I'd rather have people actually agree with me in small things that we both care about and then be happy to agree with me big time. If you need to bullshit, "warm up" or in some other ways mislead people (and yes, that includes "Weather is great, isn't it?" when you don't really care about the weather), you are building a pile of very tiny lies to make the jump to the big lie less noticeable. At some point, you will just cross the bullshit horizon, the point at which MOSTLY what you do is lie to and trick people - and have fun with your empty soul while you're at it.

It is indeed a cargo cult - you do achieve things with it, but then you sit there in your wooden mock-up flight control tower next to your empty dirt runway wearing your headphones made of straws and wonder why you never seem to actually be happy.

[temphn]

But it's not a cargo cult if it works, or even partially works.

[Radix]

It took me a second too. What the gp says is that the fake relationships are cargo too. The players are mistaking the thing for its description. Beautiful people are not beautiful relationships, and friendships built on lies and partial truths are trustless and empty.

[badclient]

Alright now, let's not oversimplify this. There are billion shades of gray in how truthful we are in our daily relationships. Most people hide stuff from those close to us on a daily basis. Does this render those relationships as fake or almost fake? I'd argue no.

Similarly, while some of the relationships formed from your pickup skills may be premised almost entirely on lies, that is not the norm. I'd actually say most relationships turn out to be much like normal relationships--and most certainly not a type where the other party is thinking you're a millionaire when in fact you are broke in reality.

[skore]

Actually, no. I think it's correct to oversimplify this - Either you care, deeply, about a relationship or you don't.

"I'd actually say most relationships turn out to be much like normal relationships"

I'm not sure you realize how extremely shady that sounds. Does that really sound satisfying to you? Real and honest? I understand that manipulating people into forming a relationship (of whatever kind) with you can somewhere in the end resemble something like a genuine relationship. But that still doesn't make it a genuine relationship. It either is a runway and you are a tower operator, or not.

If you define a relationship as one where two people occupy the same room and have frequent conversations then a lot of things are a relationship - all the way to a torture chamber. What I'm talking about is two people who really care about each other.

'The Game' is very particularly about getting women into bed. Being in bed together is usually related to a deep, emotional connection, but pickup artists just care about that last bit. To stay in the metaphor: They really, really do care about making those cargo planes appear. Boy do they ever love that cargo. They do everything they have seen others do to provoke the kind of reaction from the planes that they have observed. What they don't care so much about is what those planes are, why they usually care about ACTUAL runways and care about having a very good reason to drop off their cargo.

Because if they did care to understand, they'd very quickly see how pathetic it is to sit in that makeshift straw hut pretending to be an international airport.

So yes, Radix is correct - that's what I'm talking about. What ends up on the runway are either pilots who actually wanted to be somewhere else and try their best to take off as fast as possible, or are other islanders who push their own wooden boxes with straw wings onto the dirt road.

[edit] Maybe the easiest way to sum this up is: The fact that cargo arrives on your dirt runway doesn't make you a proper army radio tower operator. The fact that you score women or get people to do things that you want doesn't make you a good partner or friend.

[badclient]

What I'm talking about is two people who really care about each other.

That is only one type of relationship.

Every night thousands of men and women meet at bars and end up sharing a bed without necessarily the expectation that they each "really care" for the other. So this is the other extreme.

Between our two extremes lie all the other shades of gray.

[skore]

Well, that may be true (Millions! I would even say). But to be perfectly honest, I'm not sure why they bother. To me, that kind of behavior always seems very juvenile and ultimately not very fulfilling.

I totally get that people are into that, but I really don't see them very happy is what I'm trying to say. The ones that find that sort of behavior to be pure bliss very often turn out to be rather shallow.

I also understand that sort of hedonism to be, supposedly, very glamorous - they argue that you only have 80 years, so better squeeze the juice out of every second you get in as self-involved a fashion to satisfy your desires as possible. As long as caring so much about other people is not on your list of priorities, it's very hard for me to make a case against that. I suppose it also comes easy to you when you're very young - the world just automatically cares more about you. What happens after 40 or 50 is a different story. (And yes, I've heard the live-fast-die-young argument where people would rather go down that road and die in their late thirties. Sounds super.)

I would rather spend those 80 years as much as possible with people I intensely care about (and who care about me) and while that may be uncommon in your statistics, I think I'm still in my right to argue that it's healthier. And not just because it carries a much smaller risk of contracting various venereal diseases.