My novel: http://www.amazon.com/Walk-These-Broken-Roads-ebook/dp/B009RZYO2O/ My blog: http://www.staresattheworld.com/ My Twitter: http://twitter.com/Aurini Glorious Hat! http://www.commieobama.com/pages/hat_info.html http://donlak.wordpress.com/2013/02/08/there-is-no-game/ http://powerseductionandwar.com/ Robert Greene's blog.
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| A few days ago, Don Leck posted a brilliant post on his blog, Paradigm Shift, titled, There Is No Game. | |
| The premise being that once you've understood game, once you've practiced game, you've studied it and you've become an expert at it, you realize that the highest form of game is no game at all. | |
| That really there is no such thing, but that you can only know this by surpassing it. | |
| And it immediately called to mind a few other sayings. | |
| There is no spoon. | |
| Do or do not, there is no try. | |
| Have faith, and God will provide. | |
| And you know, that last one upsets atheist cult so much. | |
| And I can already hear their rejections of it. | |
| If God will provide, then why does evil exist in the world? | |
| And it all boils down to this complete misunderstanding of high strategy. | |
| Because strategy is this upper-level mathematical thing that governs our life. | |
| That is so true that when you stop trying is when you succeed. | |
| When the student is ready, the teacher appears. | |
| That life has a way of sorting itself out when you're doing what you need to be doing already. | |
| But see, all of this high-level strategy seems to contradict yourself if you only hear the surface level. | |
| If you try and apply it down at the dirt of your feet, crawling around in mud, it makes no sense. | |
| And yet there is this very real pattern that governs the lives of men. | |
| Now, this is my copy of Robert Green's 48 Laws of Power. | |
| I got it on sale for $10 way back in the day. | |
| I was fortunate enough to actually be an administrator on the Man's Forum back on the Rubius Media Board. | |
| I'm sure he doesn't remember me at all. | |
| An absolutely brilliant man, the modern-day Sunze. | |
| I am such a huge fan of his books. | |
| Although I will say that this one is my least favorite. | |
| You see, the 48 Laws of Power is about being a courtier or a politician, which is really the furthest thing from my interest. | |
| It's about how to accrue power within an organization. | |
| The art of seduction is absolutely amazing, and I do have a copy of that on my shelf, but that has become so internalized that I really can't tell you where that book ends and I begin. | |
| And as for the 33 Strategies of War, my favorite of the three that I've read, he does have a fourth book out, that disappeared into the list of books lent to friends who never returned them. | |
| But the 48 strategies, or the 48 laws of power, although not the book that most strongly applies to my personality type and what I'm doing with life, is still just as amazing as the rest of his works. | |
| And it's also the perfect example of how strategy, whether it's Sunze's Art of Warfare, the Haga Cure, which is, I suppose, more culture than warfare, or the Book of Five Rings. | |
| How none of these things make literal sense. | |
| These are not bits and pieces that can be diced up and analyzed. | |
| These are higher strategies, and they seem to contradict themselves constantly. | |
| So I was going through the 48 laws, and I want to find a few that were the most obvious contradictions for you. | |
| So, contradiction. | |
| The first one. | |
| Law number 26. | |
| Keep your hands clean. | |
| You must seem a paragon of civility and efficiency. | |
| Your hands are never soiled by mistakes and nasty deeds. | |
| Maintain such a spotless appearance by using others' scapegoats and cat's paws to disguise your involvement. | |
| And then, two laws later, we have 28 Enteraction with Boldness. | |
| If you are unsure of a course of action, do not attempt it. | |
| Your doubts and hesitations will infect your execution. | |
| Timidity is dangerous. | |
| Better to enter with boldness. | |
| Any mistake you commit through audacity are easily corrected with more audacity. | |
| Everyone admires the bold. | |
| No one honors the timid. | |
| The SAS will tell you all about that. | |
| But see, here you have these two laws that seemingly contradict one another. | |
| To keep your hands clean, to not get involved, but then to take decisive action. | |
| And on top of that, they both come along with reversals. | |
| Every law in this book, with one exception, do not associate with negative people. | |
| Every law has a reversal, a time when you need to do the opposite. | |
| And so these seemingly contradictory laws that have their own reversals, they're meant to be applied at different times for different reasons. | |
| And the full exploration of when and why those times are, you're not going to find that in a scientific manual. | |
| Now the second set of laws. | |
| Law number 41. | |
| Avoid stepping into the great man's shoes. | |
| What happens first always appears better and more original than what comes after. | |
| If you succeed a great man or have a famous parent, you will have to accomplish double their achievements to outshine them. | |
| Do not get lost in their shadows or stuck in the past, not of your own making. | |
| Establish your own name and identity by changing course. | |
| Slay the overbearing father, disparage his legacy, and gain power by shining in your own way. | |
| Trudeau's son could really benefit from hearing that. | |
| And Law 46. | |
| Never appear too perfect. | |
| Appearing better than others is always dangerous, but most dangerous of all is to appear to have no faults or weaknesses. | |
| Envy creates silent enemies. | |
| It is smart to occasionally display defects and admit to harmless vices in order to deflect envy and appear more human and approachable. | |
| Only gods and the dead can seem perfect with impunity. | |
| So here you have it. | |
| Your godlike father. | |
| That you have to do twice as much work to outshine him, and yet you should never outshine the master, which is law number one. | |
| And specifically not him, because in death he can be perfect, whereas you must always have frailties. | |
| And yet you can't have frailties. | |
| They'll be exploited. | |
| I trust that all of you can see the wisdom in these laws. | |
| A little bit sociopathic, perhaps. | |
| These are how to rise through the ranks of the corporation. | |
| Machiavelli, despite a deeply moral man, was quite blunt when he wrote The Prince. | |
| Discourses of Livy are a little bit more emotionally mature. | |
| So you can see the wisdom in these, and yet also the contradictions. | |
| To try and put these ideas in any sort of context where they would make sense, you're only going to find that in fiction. | |
| It's one of the funny things about the universe, or maybe just our way of approaching the universe, the particular unique way that the human mind works. | |
| Despite all our pretensions, we're not creatures of science or creatures of magic, of story, and narrative structure. | |
| And so long as we try and be pure creatures of science, we can never rise above it. | |
| This is what Don Luck was trying to say about game: that for the young man, you need to fake it until you make it. | |
| You need to walk around in your father's shoes. | |
| You need to use these artifices to bolster yourself to finally become the man that you will be. | |
| But when you become that man, when I was a child, I played with childlike things, childlike ideas. | |
| Now that I am a man, I have a man's ideals. | |
| It's no different than that. | |
| This isn't saying reject game or discredit game, but that by trying to fulfill that role of being a man, you're actually using the tools that the man won't use. | |
| Same way a child plays with toys to become an adult, but an adult does not play with toys. | |
| that there's this possibility for greatness in us but eventually we all need to put down a child's playthings i'm going to leave you with two quotes one from c.s lewis and one from a man whom he mistook for an enemy nietzsche C.S. Lewis. | |
| Already the new men are dotted here and there all over the earth. | |
| Some, as I have admitted, are still hardly recognizable, but others could be recognized. | |
| Every now and then one meets them. | |
| Their voices and faces are different from ours, stronger, quieter, happier, more radiant. | |
| They begin where most of us leave off. | |
| they are i say recognizable and from nietzsche the earth is free even now for great souls There are still many empty seats for the lonesome and the twosome, fanned by the fragrance of silent seas. | |
| Only in narrative do our lives really make any sense. | |
| Only by not looking for love do we find it only by not trying do we succeed. | |
| Hope for nothing, but the one or two things that you do know, those unknowable truths have faith in those. |