“When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one’s self, and one always ends by deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.” – Oscar Wilde

Contents:
1.) Introduction
2.) Ben’s Story, IM’s Analysis
3.) Ben’s Fate
4.) In Closing / Lessons Learned
5.) Relevant Reading

1.) Introduction:

If anybody needed the red pill, it was Ben. The tale of Ben is a cautionary tale, for men like Ben are the reason the red pill exists. Ben is, much to his detriment, a man completely clueless in matters of women. Ben’s tale highlights how a woman’s slow pervasive intrusion into a man’s emotional inner sanctum absent red pill awareness can prove deadly.

Ben’s ignorance to reality cost him an otherwise effortless and affable charm, his sense of well-being, money, time and the prospect of a good future. But let us not allow Ben’s suffering to be in vain, using Ben’s experiences, we can look at the relational dynamics between a blue pill man and his girlfriend, explicating how red pill principles play their part in, and ultimately define the success or failure of a relationship.

With Ben’s story in hand, my humble analysis, and your sharing of this article, maybe, just maybe, we’ll save a few more men from becoming Ben. Okay, enough of my talking, you haven’t even heard the story yet, so on we go.

2.) Ben’s Story, IM’s Analysis:

I have a friend (we’ll call him Ben) who was a stay-at-home dad. We knew each other since high school. In high school Ben was independent and fairly assertive, yet likewise he was one of the kindest people you’d know. Ben was very upstanding, everybody liked him. He wasn’t your stereotypical alpha, but he was the leader of his friends.

In high school, Ben met a girl called Julia. They dated, and were really into one another. Ben found it easy to get girls because of his easygoing personality, Julia was attracted to Ben’s popularity, so she asked Ben to be her boyfriend. Looking back I think that’s where things started to go wrong. It was his first girlfriend and he really, really loved her. He and I stopped going out together, and on the rare occasions we did go out, he would be worried his girlfriend was missing him so he’d incessantly text and call her.

I loved Ben to the core at the time, but it became unbearable to stay near him anymore. As a result, we ended up growing distant from one another.

Our tale starts with that of an extroverted young alpha male in a classic boy meets girl scenario. A tale so recognisable, it’s a cliched trope repeated in countless movies. Boy is popular, girl falls in love with boy’s popularity, so boy dates girl and quickly falls in love with her, only for girl to end up thinking he’s a loser when school’s over and the popularity that made him situationally attractive has evaporated.

Also note Ben’s constant need to check in with his woman, this is a classic beta male trait: anti-dread. Dread is the heightening and elicitation of attraction in a woman via a combination of emotional withdrawal and an implicit or explicit demonstration of social power. For example, being seen with other attractive women or high status people whilst simultaneously dialling down the degree and frequency of emotional validation a woman is given constitutes dread.

Both alpha and dark triad men use dread as a tool to keep a woman’s narcissism in check. Dread plays on a woman’s jealous disposition and group status anxiety to keep her ego in check and attraction high, dread communicates to a woman’s hypergamy “this man is hot”. Likewise, whether a woman is aware or unaware of the dynamic at hand has no bearing on the efficacy of this social mechanism, for it is immutable.

Naturally, anti-dread is the opposite of dread. Anti-dread is the constant validation of a woman’s concerns, be they pettily baseless or accurately rooted in reality. Anti-dread is the constant assuagement of a women’s ever-changing insecurity, addressing every little concern she has with servile like efficiency; it is the constant need to “make sure everything is ok” and is in general, a passive, pandering, supplicate behaviour which prioritises comfort and paranoia placation over attraction.

Where dread harnesses a woman’s paranoia and discomfort to create attraction, anti-dread looks only to assuage it, making the man in question appear boring, and thus in turn, unchallenging and unattractive. Women are not attracted to men who give them an easy life, they’re attracted to the jealousy of uncertainty and competition. Assuaging a woman once she teeters on the precipice of romantic uncertainty almost ensures a strong, passionate relationship.

Effectively for a woman to appreciate a man, she has to believe she can lose him. Anti-dread ensures high levels of comfort, which in turn cultivate a hubris so firm she believes her man to be incapable of leaving her. When a woman does not believe she needs to please a man in order to keep him, she cannot respect him, and thus in turn, cannot love him in the way a romantic partner should.

Fast forward a couple of years and Ben got Julia pregnant. She had the baby just after graduation, but her family didn’t accept it so they kicked her out of the house. Ben found a poorly paid job at a logistics firm, gave up on his dreams of college, left his family and went to live with her in the worst house you can imagine.

Already this early into the story we can see the painstaking decisions that will eventually lead to the demise of Ben. What is Ben’s crucial life-altering faux pas? He gave up his future for a girl. A man always needs a mission other than his woman, to put this mission first, and to entertain women solely as an accompaniment, never a goal.

A good woman is one who will not jeopardise the mission, an exemplary woman is one who will support it. A woman who expects to be treated with more importance than her man’s mission unwittingly condemns them both to a most sordid misery, for a woman’s conceit will destroy the relationship should it not be kept in check.

When a man has no mission other than to meet the needs of his woman, rest assured the woman in question will seek a man with a mission of his own. You see, women are so clueless and out of touch with what’s really good for them, that left to lead they will ruin every relationship with every man they ever have. The success of a relationship thus relies almost solely on how a man harnesses his ingenuity to safeguard the relational arrangement from the vacillation of his woman’s emotional impulses.

If you allow a woman to dictate the course of your life, she will, and no matter her demands beforehand, she’ll hate you for it. A woman is a creature who pesters, nags, undermines, demands and sabotages her man in a petty quest for power born of insecurity, and should you yield to her attempts of usurpation, she will hate you. The whole thing is nothing but a test to see if you’re “a real man”, a behaviour almost all women compulsively exhibit in a state devoid self-awareness or malice, yet nevertheless causes trouble.

A woman hates a man who won’t give her what she wants, but she absolutely detests a man who does, and without a fight. You see the typical woman spends all her time ensuring a man sees her as the most important thing in his life, and as soon as he behaves as if she is, she becomes “suffocated”, moving on unflinchingly. Women think they want to be worshipped, but they do not, they want to be dominated absent the insecurity of disrespect; few woman are self-aware enough to realise this, even fewer dare to admit it.

Ben worked 8 hours per day, whilst Julia went to college (college here is free, so she only had to study to enter). Ben paid the neighbour to look after their child whilst he worked and she studied. As Julia had no income, she was reliant on Ben as he paid both the rent and her college expenses. When Ben was home, Julia would be studying so he’d take more care of the child than she would. Ben’s family would assist them with money and childcare when Ben’s money ran out at the end of each month.

I didn’t know what was happening because we’d lost contact at the time, otherwise I would have helped him as much as possible. This insane routine went on for about 3 years, until Julia got a proper job at the end of college. She got an internship in a prestigious consulting firm, and as she used to say “got hired straight after college because she was too good.” Once she got this job she was she was making 3 times what Ben was making working the same number of hours.

Ben always hated leaving his child to be taken care of by a stranger, so he talked with Julia and came to the agreement he would look after their daughter at home whilst she worked. This worked to begin with, and Ben was happy. He contacted me and a few of his other old friends at this time, and kept in touch. He had changed a lot physically, it was shocking, he was pale, looked tired and appeared 10 years older than he was. I assumed it was because of the shitty job he had been doing over the years, but he was still noble, one of the greatest people I’ve ever known.

Without Ben, Julia would be a single mother. As a single mother, she would have very little opportunity to educate herself. Ben covering the bills whilst she studied was the fulcrum on which her study depended. Thus it stands to reason that were it not for Ben, Julia would not have had the opportunity to economically elevate herself. Thus it stands to reason that at this point, Ben has slipped from the position of schoolboy alpha to that of beta provider, a transition so insidious I doubt he was entirely aware of it himself.

The moment Julia got her job at the consultancy and was no longer reliant on Ben’s income was the moment Ben became obsolescent. At this point, he was neither the alpha that provided excitement nor the beta providing resources and security – he was redundant.

Perversely, Ben gave up his academic aspirations because he was becoming a father, yet his girlfriend who was actually conceiving the child did not. To ensure a fruitful and more lasting relationship, it would have made much more sense for Ben to have gone to college whilst his girlfriend stayed home and looked after the child, I will give you my reasoning in 4 words:

Briffault’s Law and Hypergamy

A man who arches his back to enable a woman to step onto it and climb higher, creates a woman who will look down on him once her ascension has been realised. The naive, romantic man expecting to have his loyalty honoured will extend his hand from below, clasping at the heel of her shoe in expectation she will reward his efforts – but she will not. She will kick him down, and scoff with nothing but disgust for what she views as inferior neediness.

In a miraculous state of compartmentalisation, she will forget everything the man did to assist her ascension, attributing all credit for her accomplishments to herself whilst allocating blame for her imperfections to her man. Just as a woman will not take responsibility for your losses, only your victories, she will refuse to deign a man she perceives as inferior with credit for her victories. This is precisely why an out of control female ego is so deleterious to a relationship, an egotistical woman believes she is above her man, and it is via this belief that attraction wanes, welcoming relational failure.

As we can see above, Ben’s lack of dominance allowed Julia’s hubris to become so strong that she began to believe in her innate superiority to Ben, illogically and deludely believing she had gotten to where she was single-handedly, rather than on the back of Ben’s selfless sacrifice.

Why does a woman suddenly betray the father of her child, the very man who worked tirelessly to give her a better life? Hypergamy, and more specifically, Briffault’s Law. Ben’s value was as a provider, the minute he enabled Julia to provide for herself more efficiently, he removed her dependency and thus became obsolete.

Had Ben been the one to go to college whilst Julia worked a job and stayed home with the child, Ben and Julia would still be together. Why? Because Ben would have the status and income of a better job that Julia would not have for herself, this in turn would allow Ben to satiate Julia’s hypergamy. By facilitating Julia’s social mobility at the expense of his own, Ben not only deprived himself economic opportunities, but has all but certainly ensured his love interest will lose interest in him.

Fast forward 2 years and Ben’s girlfriend Julia admitted to having an affair with her co-worker. (IM’s interjection: Who didn’t see that one coming?!) She told Ben she didn’t want to be with him anymore because she couldn’t live with herself for betraying him, after this they separated. Ben went back to his family’s house, he searched for a job, and after a few months he found one. He asked to live with me for a while because I lived closer to where he worked, naturally I obliged and we lived together for a few months.

The old “it’s not you, it’s me” rejection. As objective in tone as I endeavour to be in the penning of this literature, I’m at a point where I find it all but impossible not to laugh at how insanely ludicrous this gambit was. Here, Julia tries to save face (maintain her reputation as a wholesome woman and mother) by feigning she is so wrought with guilt for her disloyalty that she should leave as she is unworthy of Ben.

Of course being the wrongful party, it is not down to her to decide what the consequences for her actions should be, such a decision would rightfully belong to the injured party, Ben. However, just as naturally as she took control of the relationship, she took control of the breakup.

If Ben had been on top of things, the consequences and punishment for her behaviour would not be in her hands, but in his. Of course Julia didn’t respect Ben, which is the cause of her waning attraction and thus decision to cheat to begin with. This disrespect continues as she smears herself in a veneer of inauthentic righteousness, claiming her exit to be the self-imposed punishment she deserves rather than what it really is: convenient abandonment, a branch swing.

Here we see a woman’s Machiavellianism at its finest as she superficially condemns herself, only to suffer no real punishment as she simultaneously executes her whim’s desire. From one Machiavellian to another, I must say disguising an exit strategy as an unwanted but necessary exile is something of a stroke of genius – this is definitely something that would head fuck a lesser man, and I can say with almost unshakable veracity it would have been something that wrought monumental chaos on Ben’s young and fragile mind.

Meanwhile Julia moved to her coworker’s house and took their daughter with her. Ben can’t have guardianship of the girl because his job was unstable and he did not have a home. Julia made it difficult for him to see his daughter because seeing him reminded her of her betrayal. He lawyered up, and was permitted to see his daughter just once every 15 days.

Ben’s situation while living with me was as bad as you can imagine. He had no degree, a low paying and unstable job, little contact with his daughter, no future prospects, no wife and none of his classic charisma. He barely talked when he lived with me. I was paying for his lawyer because he wanted nothing more than to see his daughter. I offered him a psychologist, but he refused. I requested he went to college and offered to pay, but he refused me; I’m sure he was depressed. He moved out after a while and got his own shitty place, this would increase his chances of getting custody of his daughter.

Julia went insane when he did this. She tried to stop him from having contact with his daughter altogether. She poisoned his daughter and turned her against him. She filed false allegations to the police, claiming Ben had threatened her, invaded her home and tried to beat her; she made at least 30 of these complaints to the police. As a result, police enquiries begun and Ben had to get a better lawyer to defend himself from her accusations.

He had to sell his house, and once again went back to live with his family. He didn’t want to come and live with me again because I think his pride had been hurt and he was embarrassed. After one of Julia’s false allegations, the police made Ben wear an electronic tag around his ankle. When his boss saw his ankle tag, he lost his job and his life was destroyed in every way conceivable.

I have said it before but it bears saying again, when a woman leaves she takes everything that matters to her, possessions and children alike. Ben’s attempt to dispute what Julia rightfully believed to be hers (their daughter) resulted in her upping the ante. To defend her property, she went on the offensive, and as predictable as finding sand in a desert, leveraged the authorities to successfully criminalise her opponent in the absence of any sufficient evidence of wrongdoing.

The weaponisation of the state against Ben served two primary functions, the first being to ensure his continued prohibition of access to his daughter, the second being an economic attack upon his resources, to tie him up in so much legal trouble that whatever money he did have would dry up. Julia held all the trump cards, she had a much greater income (which if you remember, is the very income Ben was crucial in her acquisition of), her partner’s income, and the default assumed innocence and benefit of the doubt that comes with being female.

This continued legal pressure complemented the mental poisoning she had conducted upon their daughter, and would ensure Ben was firmly out of the picture once and for all.

The electronic tag was the final nail in the coffin, having the unintended yet tactically pleasant effect of causing Ben to lose his job, thus financially starving him and removing his ability to fight for custody of his child. At this point, Julia won, being penniless and thus powerless to fight back, Julia would automatically retain custody.

I do not believe these were the actions of a dark triad woman, but rather that of a representatively average woman in a state of scorn. If a man loves a woman too much, fails to maintain dominance and underestimates her purely on the superficial pleasantry of her femininity, like Ben he can be assured swift acquaintance with a world of most heinous pain.

3.) Ben’s Fate:

Last week Ben tried to kill himself by drinking cleaning products and pills in a hotel. The lady who cleaned his room found him, and he was taken to the hospital. He had his stomach pumped, he may survive but his interior was badly damaged, he is still in the hospital.

4.) In Closing / Lessons Learned:

– You should not rely on a woman’s moral compass (haha!) or emotions to override her hypergamous programming. If Ben is an example of anything, he’s an example of man’s total disposability should he allow himself to become obsolescent emotionally or financially. As such, a man must fight obsolescence by maintaining relevance.

– If you allow a woman’s motherly nature and good looks to conceal the great mental cruelty she is capable of, you will be in for a most revolting awakening the eve she opts to betray you.

– You may be unable to trust a woman, but you can trust her hypergamy – act accordingly.

– If you treat a woman too well, she will reward you with enough pain and betrayal to make suicide seem like a viable option – do not love too much.

– It is a man’s responsibility to ensure he maintains dominance in the relationship, he should employ dread to humble his woman and prevent an unchecked ego from encroaching on the stability of the relationship.

– Women are practical lovers by nature, whereas men are idealistic. As a man, your love should thus be better guarded, more scantily awarded and more quickly revoked. If a man loves too much and too wholly, he may find himself in a situation as dire as Ben’s.

– Never elevate a woman beyond your station, should you help a woman to improve herself, ensure it is not to the extent she surpasses you. Ben supported Julia with money for childcare, food and lodging whilst she studied. Without Ben, Julia would not be a professional earning three times what Ben does. As the late and great Patrice O’Neal would fondly assert, a king can make a woman queen, but a queen cannot make a king. Even as esteemed as the position of queen is, it’s still beneath that of king, and this dynamic plays out universally in male-female relationships.

– Being a weak and passive man is dangerous, it could cost you everything you hold dear, including your sanity. Next time you feel even a tinge of guilt for being a jerk to a woman, remember Ben. Remember how devoid of sympathy hypergamy is when a man is beneath rather than above it. If you are going to remember anything, remember this: don’t be like Ben, be anything but Ben, Ben is the ultimate example of what not to be. Ask yourself what would Ben do, then do the opposite.

– Dedicating your life to making a woman happy is a recipe for disaster. Women may say in their hubris that this is a commendable and advisable thing to do, but this line of thought is folly based on nothing but a woman’s conceit. As such, I will forever recommend any man’s interests I have at heart against such behaviour. Have a mission, do not base your life on a woman.

Don’t forget you can sign-up for notification of the book release here and learn about the upcoming dark triad forum here.

5.) Relevant Reading:

If you identify with Ben, or know somebody like Ben, I recommend you/they absorb the following materials in the order listed:

No More Mr. Nice Guy
The 48 Laws of Power
The Rational Male: Preventive Medicine
The Rational Male

“The great danger for family life, in the midst of any society whose idols are pleasure, comfort and independence, lies in the fact that people close their hearts and become selfish.” – Pope John Paul II

Contents:
1.) The Male Perspective – A Quandary
1a.) The Patriarch’s Problem
1b.) The Bachelor’s Problem
2.) The Female Perspective – A Prize
3.) The Differences Between Men & Women In Summary
4.) The Civilizational Perspective – A Crisis
5.) In Closing
6.) Relevant Reading

1.) The Male Perspective – A Quandary:

To enjoy the decline, or to start a family, that is the question. And of course this is a problem unique to man, particularly those conscious and critical of the paradigm we occupy, for it is not a consideration that even crosses the threshold of consciousness within the indoctrinated drone. And yet unlike the drone who knows no quandary, who idly autopilots his way into an unremarkable 5-10 year marriage that yields 2.1 children, the more enlightened man finds himself in the pivotal yet privileged position of making an informed choice about his future’s course.

Such a man is free to direct his fate absent the demands of religious indoctrination or self-serving women. After all, should one of the most important decisions of a man’s life be made by anyone other than the man himself? Does a man pressured and cajoled into starting a family do so on his own terms, or on the terms of those with a plan for him? With both reason of mind and heart of soul, the man free of spells and delusions can exercise his mental sovereignty by weighing up the risks and rewards of the lifestyle choices available to him, be that the life of a patriarch, or the life of a bachelor.

A self-respecting, free thinking and proud man should not be bullied into marrying, not by religion, nor by the woman manoeuvring to get a ring on her finger. A man should make this decision free of external devices and with full mental clarity, for a man should establish a serious relationship in much the way he would seek to maintain it. Therefore it stands to reason that should a man be cajoled or duped into marriage and babies, that although it may initially fill the dissimulating woman with nought but estrogenic rejoice and maternal glee, that such shadowy foundations do not bode well for said relationship’s success or longevity.

A strong man does not respond to shame, he acknowledges it for the manipulative transgression that it is, disregards it as folly, and continues to forge his path absent the mechanisations of such duplicity.

The free man wonders which lifestyle choice would be in his best interest, and is he, no matter what he does, condemned to an unforgivable degree of heartache either way? If marriage leads to divorce and bachelorhood lead to childless loneliness, what is a man to do? A choice between misery or loneliness is hardly palatable.

1a.) The Patriarch’s Problem:

If a man is to marry, there is reasonable fear the fresh legal supremacy enjoyed by his woman will disrupt the balance of power the relationship’s smooth functionality was established upon. The informed man is all too aware the legal privilege of the modern wife can be used to force him into domestic servitude, and that legally speaking, the marriage hangs on a thread tied to a hovering sword that follows him wherever he goes.

From the moment he has said “I do”, a looming sword of Damocles stalks him, scrutinising his every action. Too many mistakes and the sword falls, divorce will be initiated, and financial and emotional chaos is wrought.

Now of course there is an imbecilic, ignorant argument to be made that “not all women are like that“, and indeed this is true, not all women will whimsically detonate the divorce bomb. And yet a wise man in his prudence must ask himself “is my woman like that?” and then follow up this question with “if my woman is not like that, is it likely she could become like that?” in which case the resounding answer is “easily”.

If too much comfort is indulged, if too much is neglected or too much left to chance – the ruination of marital union is all but a certainty. A marriage is like a car hanging off a cliff, it requires the man driving to accelerate now and again to ensure the car does not tilt and fall into the ocean below. Like courting, in marriage the burden of performance is man’s to bear.

If man fails as a husband or is perceived to have failed, easily he loses everything; if his woman is an abysmal failure of a wife on the other hand, she gets a pay day and a fresh chance. In today’s society a woman’s marriage risk is minimal, and of course, this comes at the expense of man’s being astronomical. Women do not fear marriage because they have not a single reason to, men do because they have every reason to.

A marriage’s odds of success are merely improved, but still mightily unfavourable for man even when the potential wife is of considerable quality. And so although it is not impossible to become a patriarch, it is a dangerous affair regardless of who is involved. This danger is neither explicitly the man nor the woman involved’s fault, but rather, the judicial system that makes marriage so costly to men.

The success of a marriage is of course dependent solely on the parties involved, but what was once merely a monumental investment on the part of man has been perverted by the misandry of feminism into a monumental gamble. A sensible man is not a gambling man, he does not wager half his assets and his emotional stability on the odds of a woman’s whim remaining pretty. No matter who is involved, this aspect remains the same: a man has no assurances nor protection from the state, in a worst case scenario, the woman is protected and the man is all but vulnerable. Idiots will marry blindly and gamblers will marry brazenly, whilst sensible men will abstain and the intelligently romantic delay.

As such, it is a lazy and ill-cultured wife’s prerogative to “cash in” the marriage whenever she deems fit, for if she and her husband are at odds, and it is too difficult, too cumbersome and too taxing for her to compromise, she can force the man to leave, keep the home he laboured for, and make off with much of his present and future wealth.

1b.) The Bachelor’s Problem:

The opposing side of the quandary is of course the lust for family and lineage, for one to not die childless and alone. The informed man wishes not to be ravaged by the effects of feminist marriage, and yet neither does he wish to be wrecked by the absence of companionship or children in his elder years.

Where the patriarch fears divorce, the bachelor fears childlessness and loneliness. Although men are not as dependent on family as women for sanity, success and happiness, they still value family. The reluctance to marry is thus an amalgamation of distrust of women unionised with a distrust of the legal system that will hang them out to dry should things go south.

The bachelor is a man who values his freedom more than most, and thus the constraints, demands and expectations inappreciatively thrust upon him by a wife do not appeal. This does not mean such a man would not enjoy being a father, but rather that, becoming one would mean giving up a violable degree of his freedom to the mother.

For the bachelor, a rat pack is his family replacement. Through the formation of a rat pack, a bachelor can assuage his loneliness and need for tribe. A rat pack is a small tribe of cohabiting, single and childless men. Such an arrangement allows the group to fully indulge in the wealth and freedom of childless singledom without any of its accompanying loneliness. However, the want to reproduce is not so easily assuaged.

Men sensitive to, and aware of the nature of evolution feel they have a genetic imperative to reproduce, and thus the quandary presents itself: is a man to enter an institution hostile to him so that he may build a family, or is he to enjoy the full succulence of his fruits but leave no worldly legacy once he’s gone? The artistic man may leave his creations and the academic man may leave his research, but what of the layman, and are achievements even comparable to children in matters of legacy?

This is a choice all informed men must make, and there is no right or wrong answer. It is my presupposition that most informed men will take full advantage of their extended fertility window and opt to settle down with a younger woman in middle-age. I believe most informed men are willing to risk divorce in their elder years if it means they got to lead a good life before becoming a father.

2.) The Female Perspective – A Prize:

Women do not face the quandary that idiotic men shirk and informed men face. Women’s marriage risk is minimal, and unlike man’s, their fertility window is short. The nature of a woman’s limited fertility is precisely why once women have decided they want to settle down, they’re in a rush to do so. As opposed to men who are happy to take their time and more rigorously vet their mate, especially with older women who by merit of their availability are immediately suspect.

Of course, fertility is only part of the equation – men hold the keys to commitment, and women to sex. If commitment, attention and provision is what women value most, then men are the gatekeepers of this and marriage is a jackpot in which a woman is bestowed an endless supply of these things.

If a 50-year-old woman had the charm, sex appeal and mental stability of her 20-year-old self, she’d be as leisurely as the men her age in regard to the rate the relationships grows. Yet whether a woman can admit it to herself or not, she is intuitively aware that as she ages her capacity to attract a top-tier mate decreases. Each passing year a woman’s power erodes, and thus like anybody all too aware of their depreciation, the cleverest women will attempt to capitalise on their power whilst it’s still potent.

The question of marriage is always a no-brainer for a woman, as I previously state, this quandary is in the sole jurisdiction of man. If a woman asked me, “IM, should I get married? I’d say “Yes, as soon as you can, ideally no later than 25” because marriage is a really good deal for women. For women, marriage represents the things it scarcely does for men – financial security and psychological sanity.

And although I do not write much in a manner conducive to a woman’s viewpoint or need, it does not mean that I do not understand the importance of marriage and babies to a woman. It is the life goal of all intelligent and sensible women to become wives and mothers, scarcely can a woman achieve the happiness in business that her man can, for being a mother buzzing in the embrace of family is a woman’s highest calling. It’s where they draw their emotional nourishment, it gives them a sense of internal completion, and to honour her husband whilst suckling her young is in and of itself, a noble goal.

3.) The Differences Between Men & Women In Summary:

Men get purpose from art and business, whereas women get purpose from the family, not all men and not all women, but generally speaking this is accurate. This doesn’t mean men don’t want family, it just means they need it less, and a longer fertility window means they can sensibly delay it too.

Testosterone needs challenge, estrogen needs comfort, this is why women are more relationship orientated than men, for it provides the apex of their happiness, their very reason for being, to be admired and feel important and necessary as a matriarch in a family rich in love and abundance.

Family is important to men, but so are aspects irrespective of it. A man’s priorities are more evenly weighted than a woman’s. If his family does not have an immediate need, rather than manufacture a need to fill (as a woman wanting to feel relevant will do) he will busy himself with commerce (resource acquisition) or art (an outlet for his masculine creativity that the wonderful yet splendid mundanity of family life does not provide).

A woman on the other hand is lost without family, no matter how much she attempts to fill the void with art, business or pets, she cannot help but feel a most profound sense of absence strike the core of her being. Whether she knows it or not, the very core of her fiber yearns to be a wife and mother, no matter her opinion of that, she is powerless to escape this most visceral of compulsion.

4.) The Civilizational Perspective – A Crisis:

“The heart has its reasons which reason knows not.” ― Blaise Pascal

Contents:
1.) Introduction
2.) My Philosophical Position
3.) How Female Emotivity Manifests In Disagreement
4.) How Women Form Opinion
5.) In Closing / Relevant Reading

1.) Introduction:

The claim that woman’s capacity for reason matches man’s is humorous, and yet be it espoused by radical feminists or well-intentioned humanists, the “equality of reason” myth persists.

It was only the other week I observed two men debating woman’s logical capacity, one man insisted women were less reasonable, whilst the other disagreed whilst conceding “all women are like that“. Yet in spite of this concession, said man went to the lengthy effort of recalling instances where he had observed women exercising reason. It was as if this particular man wasn’t quite willing to accept women are the less reasonable sex, which ironically is an unreasonable position in and of itself.

There is of course a discrepancy here, a gentle person can get angry and a frugal man can make a large purchase in the same way that an unreasonable person can demonstrate logic; a capacity for something does not equate to a propensity for it. The man who could not believe women are less reasonable is naive, the claim was not that women never make logical decisions, even a broken clock is right twice per day, the claim was that women are governed so strongly by emotion that their capacity and proclivity for reason is greatly vitiated, ergo, their reason is inferior to man’s.

Even in the comments section of this very publication, the notion women are just as logical as men is oft dispelled, for women are quick to offend and be offended by nature of their volatile reactivity. Now of course the same principle applies to man, an angry man cannot reason too well either, but here is my contention: the average woman becomes emotional far more easily than the average man, and thus whatever reason she does possess is quickly lost when even a modicum of pressure is applied.

I believe less intelligent women are simply incapable of reasoning to any elaborate degree, whilst smarter women can only do so whilst their emotions are in check, eg: they have managed to encounter something unsettling without taking offence to it. Nevertheless, I do not believe smarter women are any less emotional than their lower IQ counterparts, but only that they have better impulse control. This is why although smart women can exercise reason, they often do so with less frequency than even the average man.

2.) My Philosophical Position:

In my analysis of women’s behaviour I try to minimise my sexism as much as possible, for I do not wish my weaker expectations of women to sustain an untrue personal delusion, but rather, I wish for my view of man as the primary sex to be grounded in sound observation and empirical evidence. For example, I observe men making sounder judgements more often than women, debating better, skewing more to the right on the IQ bell curve, as well as making the majority of discoveries and inventions that elevated us out of the stone age.

In my inquiry into male and female differences I have discovered women’s sole biological reason for existing is to reproduce and nurture the young, whilst man’s is to reproduce, protect his mate (oft dying in wars in an attempt to do so) and contributing to the grand project known as civilization.

In case any wish to contest the point on civilization, do so bearing in mind you contend the point with a machine invented by a man, using a power source discovered and refined by a man, in a house designed and built by a man. As women are and have historically been preoccupied with child rearing and maintaining social ties, the elevation of the human condition can thus be credited almost solely to man.

Even since half a century of woman’s emancipation, women have done little but accrue more money, in terms of major intellectual and civilizational achievements, few have achieved anything of significance. Yes, women have entered highly prestigious professions such as medicine and law, but do the majority of women make major contributions to their fields, or do they just teach and practice the work of men who came before them, rather than endeavouring to truly excel in, innovate and push the boundaries of their chosen disciplines?

In case it is not clear, my intent is to make a philosophical inquiry into man and woman’s complementing nature as to allow for the refinement of my view, the goal is not to arbitrarily denounce one sex whilst heralding the other. If women are thereby described as being secondary or lesser in some form, it is because this is what reality is indicating to me, not because I want it to be so.

3.) How Female Emotivity Manifests In Disagreement:

As somebody who likes to be proven wrong by reason and empiricism (because I can learn from this) it is disappointing but nevertheless predictable the majority of comments women have made in my time writing have been subpar. If it is disjointed emotional babbling, I hastily remove it to prevent an explosion of vitriolic derailment from occurring in the comments section.

Despite my desire for an open forum and strong ethical appreciation for freedom of speech, not all speech is equal in its reason or value and thus I do not permit the dregs of human thought to manifest and take root within my comments section, censorship be damned. Offending comments are not removed on the basis of whether they agree or disagree, but rather, whether they are well argued or not. If you disagree but make a compelling argument, I won’t remove a comment. But if the person knows no better than to try to play mind games with me on my own blog, I will vibrantly dispose of their trite.

The women who are offended and disagree with the content here oft do so on a profusely emotional basis, with typically little in the way of cogent reasoning in their attempts at refutation. I imagine due to the choice of topic and depth of language, my comments section attracts a higher IQ female than average, and even from this pool of women, 3 kinds of comment tend to be made:

– “I agree with what you’re saying because I’m a traditional woman (usually she is Christian or highly conservative) and my emotions/upbringing agree with your world view. I arrived at similar conclusions I couldn’t verbalise, reading what you’ve deduced has confirmed my intuitive beliefs and suspicions.”

– “I disagree with what you’re saying because I cling to the interpretations of reality indoctrinated into me by feminism, your criticism of women is misogynistic and what you say represents everything that is wrong with society.”

– “I disagree with what you’re saying because my solipsistic point of reference is more valid to me than your reason, I don’t fit neatly into your world view because I’m different from most women and thus your world view cannot possibly apply to most women, you must be wrong.”

A woman who makes a very well-reasoned comment is a rarity, but when it happens it is a welcomed delight regardless of whether there is consensus, nevertheless, such a thing is rare enough that one does not hold their breath waiting for it to occur.

If Illimitable Men was contingent on women making reasonable comments for sound discourse and new topic ideas, as a platform for unorthodox ideas it’d die with much haste. Now I am not going out of my way to be offensive here, but I am emphasising a point: women just aren’t all that reasonable, logic is not their primary mode of function and this shows emphatically in their contributions.

In case you think this site is read exclusively by men, you would be mistaken, I receive enough page views that if even a meagre percentage of my readers are female, that’s a good few thousand women.

4.) How Women Form Opinion:

Time and time again, be it a televised debate, a private argument or even in universities where the female IQ skews higher, I see little in the way of reason espoused by women. This does not mean women do not say correct or truthful things, but rather that they do not rationally deduce truth so much as they intuit it, intuition being the vague sensation that something feels or sounds right.

Likewise women will hold untrue and irrational beliefs because said irrational thing feels good to believe. You should begin to see a pattern emerging here, whether a woman holds an opinion based in truth or an opinion that isn’t, this opinion is almost always held because it feels good to believe, or her peer group believes it and thus she adopts their view. Scarcely does she hold a view because she has rigorously investigated a topic with reason and come to a conclusion she believes to be true; this is not impossible but I believe it improbable.

Often when the veracity of a woman’s viewpoint is being challenged, if she believes her opinion to be true out of no more than an intuitive emotional conviction, she feels the validity of her emotion is being disputed rather than the credibility of her reasoning.

When a woman’s reasoning is disputed, she oft perceives this as the invalidation of her emotion, the deprivation of her “right to feel” because her opinion and its hasty conclusion is oft founded upon an instinct or feeling rather than a deduction or investigation.

Women have a tendency to defensively double down on their position when they feel bad, employing Machiavellian fallacy such as shaming (eg: reductio ad absurdum) rather than opening themselves to greater scrutiny and taking the time to step back and re-evaluate their opinion.

Essentially, women trust their emotions far too much, they act on their emotions almost entirely without restraint, and often fail to question, analyse, check and hold their emotions to account. For a woman if it feels right then it is right, a woman does not consider that perhaps although some things feel good to hear or believe, they may be logically unsound, false, outright incorrect or otherwise verifiably false.

One can make such discernments by comparing how men and women back up their arguments, for example, an incorrect man is generally able to devise a chain of reasoning to explain his thinking, whilst a woman is scarcely capable of producing any such evidence of reasoning. Why? Because even when a man is wrong he’s thinking in a way that is logically congruent even should his conclusion prove to be false. A woman on the other hand merely felt the thing to be true, so has no cogent basis for communicating why she believes her opinion to be correct, “it just is!”.

5.) In Closing / Relevant Reading:

It appears to me that women just hold opinions, and that they have these opinions because they feel intuitively correct, and if anybody presents them with evidence counter to what they feel to be correct, rather than accept the evidence presented to them and adopt a world view more aligned with reality, they lash out and refuse to internalise the uncomfortable truth.

Women would appear prone to correcting emotional inconsistencies rather than logical ones, that is rather, women are better adapted to coping with things than understanding them. Of course woman can understand things, it would be idiotic to claim otherwise, but an underlying ability to understand does not always translate to a desire to understand. Generally, a woman won’t even make the attempt to understand something if she believes the truthfulness pertaining to it will upset her emotionally.

In accordance with AWALT theory, I believe this to be true of all women but to differing frequencies, that is to say, some women are like this most of the time, whilst others are only some of the time. I’m not saying men are infallible and do not do blunder or even indulge in the exact same ignorance either, I believe they do, just with less frequency, reckless abandon and fervour than do women.

I have a lot of thoughts on this topic, so in part 2 expect me to explain how conformity, shame and female evolutionary psychology almost compel women into Machiavellian/emotive responses rather than honest or logical ones. It should be noted this article has been designed as an introductory piece for a more substantive follow up, expect a sequel very shortly.

Books:

The Manipulated Man
The Rational Male
The Rational Male: Preventive Medicine

Blog:

A Most Solipsistic Nature
How Women Argue
Solipsism, Emotion & Arguments
The Nature of Women
The AWALT Misconception

“If someone doesn’t value logic, what logical argument could you provide to show the importance of logic?” – Sam Harris

Contents:
1.) Introduction
2.) Herd Dynamics – Needily Conformist
3.) Evolutionary Theory of Feminine Emotional Dominance
3a.) Logic vs. Emotion Based Interpretations of Good & Bad
4.) Herd Dynamics – Shame & Approval
5.) On Solipsism
6.) Distinguishing Logical Ability From Logical Propensity
7.) In Closing / Relevant Reading

1.) Introduction:

In part 1 I speculated on the way women reason and adopt opinions, concluding they typically form conclusions based upon intuition (“what feels right”) and mimicry (copying others) rather than deduction (analysis). I highly recommend reading part 1 before getting into the meat of this article, so if you haven’t done that, please do before proceeding.

2.) Herd Dynamics – Needily Conformist:

Women are innately Machiavellian and thus superficially concerned with “fitting in” and appearing agreeable in order to be liked enough to enjoy the fruits of the groups they occupy. There are perfectly sound evolutionary arguments for why this is so (which I will get into later) but nevertheless to begin I shall explore “the what” rather than “the why.”

A woman’s most pressing concern in spite of what she says to the contrary, is how she is perceived and how this translates into whether she holds favour or not. Being liked and desired is far more important to women than it is to men, men requiring respect rather than intimate emotion validation to function.

In fact, acceptance from others is so vitally important to women that they will change an entire wardrobe, religion, sexual or political orientation in order to be and feel accepted. If you observe rates of religious conversion (from one religion to another) you will find women will convert from one religion to another more often than men.

As we say on the red pill, fickleness is a strong trait of the feminine, and it manifests in all matters of importance from apostasy to divorce. The most common reason for religious conversion is to marry a man of another religion (and thus be accepted and enjoy his economic resources) whilst the most common reason for shedding religion is to find a socially acceptable way to be promiscuous (basically denounce one’s faith and become a fertility-negative atheist-feminist.)

In the UK this is native British women converting to Islam so they can have more victim credibility, as well as a politically correct reason to be feminine rather than feminist. It also serves as a way to increase the perception of their purity and respectability, as Muslim women are not reputed for promiscuity in the way that atheist and Christian women are. When one realises this, it becomes obvious why many western women embrace Islam so enthusiastically.

In the US this is Mormon and Christian girls becoming atheist via feminist support groups so they can whore it up in their prime without feeling retroactively impure. These women are almost always completely insane because they do not entirely remove their religious programming, yet in spite of this they conflict themselves by attempting to supplant the religion they were taught as a child with a fundamentally irreconcilable belief system. This, quite predictably, leads to a spiritually dysfunctional individual torn between two conflicting sets of dogma.

Nevertheless, they appear to be able to defy the religion they were raised with so long as they have a gaggle of feminist whores to cheer them on and validate their poor life decisions. Again, this is the female proclivity for groupthink and a desire to be validated overriding incisive and cogent analysis.

Women in and of themselves rarely stand for something because they have deduced it to be true and correct, but rather they believe what they do due to prolonged proximity. So they believe what their teacher believes, or what their mother believes, or what their friends believe, rather than really analyse something and see if it is true with their own minds.

No, it seems a woman’s instinctual need to be accepted is so strong that she indulges conformity rather than ingenuity to scratch the irksome validation itch, and that so long as this itch is scratched, she is content enough to submit to authority and not ask questions.

3.) Evolutionary Theory of Feminine Emotional Dominance:

So why are women like this? Why do women care more about approval, attention, validation, fitting-in and being liked, whereas men like these things, but do not crave nor depend on them so emphatically to healthily function? It is my speculative contention that in the ancestral environment women were dependent on the herd for their provisioning, and that a woman cast out of the herd would in all likelihood – die.

Women have less stamina, less muscle mass and are physically less capable of successfully hunting animals equipped with any sufficient defence, thus they make for poor hunters. Without a tribe’s hunters sharing their food (and weapons to hunt for food) with a group in which women were members, said women would in all likelihood subsist on berries, or perish.

Assuming this is the case, it partially explains women’s strong herd-orientation and extroversion, because ensuring acceptance by the group is what a woman’s maternal ancestors had to do to survive. I believe it is because of this that women have developed a keen social intuition based on “feelings” and “vibes” that allows them to better detect whether somebody likes or dislikes them.

If one’s survival is contingent on successfully hunting animals for nourishment (men were the hunters), it makes sense one would develop a propensity for deduction. Whereas if one’s survival is more dependent on being liked than it is being innovative, it makes sense one would develop a sensitivity toward the mood and disposition of others.

I believe female emotional dominance to be no more than a survival instinct, an instinct oft so strong that it utterly dominates the feminine consciousness utterly. It would appear woman’s instincts in tandem with menstruation thus greatly inhibit her ability to think abstractly. This idea, particularly that of hormones, perhaps gives credence to the idea that the most rational of womankind tend to be post, rather than pre-menopausal.

Seeing as a post-menopausal woman is no longer an evolutionary asset (either already having served her purpose of having children, or being a dead-end) the sensitive neuroticism typical of younger females may quell the “sensitive need to be accepted instinct” enough to permit a strong preference for rationality.

3a.) Logic vs. Emotion Based Interpretations of Good & Bad:

Good to a man is that which sounds truthful and reasonable, bad to a man is that which sounds untruthful or unreasonable. Reasonability to a man is based on plausibility and deduction, reasonability to a woman is based on whether something provides or punishes. Rather simplistically, good to a woman is what feels good, bad to a woman is what feels bad.

A woman’s definition of good and bad bear little logical merit, for a woman rather be told pretty lies that charm her than be saved from colossal error that rouses ill-feeling. In fact, chances are if you give women wisdom that will save them, should it happen to feel bad they will ignore it, hate you for eliciting negative feeling, and defy you in the hasty deduction you’re an enemy.

Women are not known for living harmoniously with reality, they have a propensity to weave and work with delusion because they have a blind trust for emotion and value the convenience that such rapidly attained certainty provides. Of course, the cunning can easily manipulate emotion for less than noble purposes, are pick-up artists not the perfect proof of this?

So if women are so impervious to logic and reasoned discussion, how do you persuade them into a particular course of action? Well of course, one must speak in the language of emotion, of which there are two primary mechanisms of influence: shame/guilt and approval/validation.

Whatever is validated, approved of and praised is that which “feels right” to women, regardless of whether the thing being promoted or praised is a toxic value of a declining and degenerate culture. Toxic here is not meant as a value judgement, but is rather meant in the sense “sure that feels good right now, indulge it, go right ahead, but in the long run you will regret what you just did, it will make you feel horrible, and you won’t be able to take it back because it’s done and all you’re left with is self-delusion in an attempt to cope.”

4.) Herd Dynamics – Shame & Approval:

A women’s beliefs and behaviours are like water, they reflect whatever the culture and immediate group around her tell her. Women do not defy, they conform. Today’s unruly women who defy men do not do so because they are mavericks of great ingenuity and critical thinking defying the natural order, no, they defy man to conform with the pervasive feminist indoctrination that dominates our public institutions, contemporary academia being of particular note.

Even traditional women, women who value house and child over corporations and careers are under constant attack from shrill feminist harpies, shamed and derided for their maternal instinct and bombarded by ideological vomit such as “you’ve internalised the patriarchy’s misogyny!”. These women are the real mavericks going against the grain, those who follow in the footsteps of their grand mothers and their mothers before them. Yet the vast majority of today’s women are neither traditional nor respectful of men, and I will tell you why.

She cannot see through the deception because she needs approval more than the truth. She defies man because she was told to, not because she can think for herself and has deduced after much philosophising that denouncing men is in her best interest (hint: it isn’t). She does not possess a reasoning faculty strong enough to ascertain whether the denunciations of man she was inculcated with are fact, the sexual sabotage of women with dried up ovaries, or nothing more than fictional lesbianic hate porn designed to convince heterosexual women to service the lusting loins of aposematic lesbian predators.

No, she absorbs it all hook, line and sinker. High status female celebrities such as Beyonce are feminists, her college professors are feminists, her mother is probably a feminist, who after fucking around in the slutty 70’s & 80’s settled down in the 80’s or 90’s with a less than top-tier man so devoid of masculine energy that nobody in the house respects him, her mother and brother included.

So is today’s woman really a freethinker, an ideological maverick, an innovator, or inventor? Of course not, and it is the grand and perverse irony of feminism that women have become lesser rather than greater in their misguided quest for emancipation from men.

Scarcely has any woman ever been a maverick or inventor, for they are the conformists, even the bulk of them vote for socialists, open your eyes! This is why matters of ingenuity have always been the almost sole purview of man, being that the faculty of reason comes more easily to man, and that the primitive instincts we know as emotion do not compel man quite so emphatically as they do women. Man is not infallible, no, but he is far less sensitive to the vast array of conceivable emotional manipulations one can be targeted by.

There’s a reason marketers target women and not men, they’re more profitable because despite their Machiavellianism, their lack of reason and need for approval makes them more manipulable. Women’s self-conscious preoccupation with appearing “clean” and “pure” is an instinctual need not apparent in men. This is perhaps not rooted solely in evolutionary psychology, but could be an intuitive observation of social market value, the inarticulable emotional knowledge that a woman’s power is eroded rather than enhanced by promiscuity and ageing.

5.) On Solipsism:

The reason feminism even exists is because men possess the capacity to emphasise with the female viewpoint at the sacrifice of their own, did feminism not come to power by appealing to the sympathies of reasonable and loving men rather than through a bloody coup? Well of course, for women could never win a direct military conflict against the sex evolved for combat.

Of course being a man my viewpoint is biased, and it would be easy to egotistically dismiss my philosophising on the basis of said fallibility, however I believe as imperfect as my views are, that among my speculation there is a spirit of truth to be gleaned. For as biased as man can be, a logician such as I can at least abstract into the female viewpoint in an attempt to comprehend what they cannot even articulate.

For those unfamiliar with what solipsism is, explained in the simplest way it’s women’s tendency to see things solely from a personal/feminine viewpoint, and an inability to detach and abstractly comprehend something they haven’t personally felt or experienced. As such, they struggle to understand things that run contrary to their personal experience.

The capacity for feminism to understand the plight of men is impossible, for gynocentrism is inherently devoid of abstraction by merit of its collective solipsism. Feminism is thus no more than a resoundingly negative variant of female solipsism repackaged at the ideological level.

Realise a woman’s solipsism is why she makes no sense in saying whatever the fuck it is she wants when you ask her, and why you always have to make the decisions. Said solipsism manifests politically on the macro scale, as even feminists are oft unable to interpret their monotheistic dogma in the same way. This is the problem with feelings and emotions you see, they are not objective, verifiable or empirical, everyone just sort of “does feminism” in whatever way “feels right” to them.

So because the women have different degrees of sentimentality attached to situations which produce a specific emotion, when a question is asked that rouses said emotion, they all have a different answer. And this lack of consistency only further serves to reduce the credibility of women, reinforcing the belief that women are less logical. Weak logic means no corroboration meaning no credibility, I think the only group taken less seriously than women are feminists, for at least some women make an effort to combat their solipsistic disposition, whereas feminists are entirely reliant on the wishy-washy lunacy of emotive subjectivity in order to prop up their narrative.

Feminism embodies the very worst of female instinct and is an abhorrent weaponisation of all the feminine’s worst qualities, I believe with the right cultivation a woman can be far more enlightened than a feminist, albeit, not more so than an erudite man.

Women think they want to lead but hate when they have to, they fear being powerless but cannot handle power. Women are man’s burden, a constant storm that needs grounding. Her infantile narcissistic need to be treated with the respect of a man, yet simultaneous need to be led means she’s conflicted in “what she wants”, this swirling chaos of self-centred indecisive confusion embodying the very spirit indicative of the female mind – solipsism.

6.) Distinguishing Logical Ability From Logical Propensity:

A capacity for logic and being logical are distinct. Men have a capacity for emotion, but because most men prefer to (and often do) act on reason instead of emotion, they are considered logical, not emotional.

To be emotional 10% of the time is not to be an emotional person, it is to be a person who is capable of emotion that is rational the majority of the time. Just because men are more rational, does not mean they are robots incapable of emotion. People see a very black/white pluralism toward emotion and logic, that a logical person is never emotional (men) and that an emotional person is never logical (women).

Most men will act upon logic more often than women, so men as a group are seen as logical. For women, it’s the opposite, a capacity for logic but with a preference for emotion, and hence a propensity to act upon emotional volition. Women will act on emotion more often than men, so women as a group are seen as emotional. Maxims don’t need to be “perfectly true” to be correct, they need only be “accurate most of the time.”

One need not be right all the time, for it is wiser to operate from generalisations that lead one to be right most of the time than it is to reject said generalisation on the basis it is wrong some of the time. The prior believes in an imperfect statement on the basis it is usually right, the latter rejects an imperfect statement on the basis it is fallible. Rejecting the veracity of something on the basis it is fallible and not correct 100% of the time has to be one of the grandest forms of ignorance conceivable, yet sadly it is fairly common.

Women have a capacity for logic, but because most of the time they cannot segregate emotion from logic, their capacity for logic does not equate to possession of a logical nature. A person that possess logic who is ill-equipped to segregate it from emotion is not as logical as someone who possess the same logic but can better segregate it from their emotion.

Having a capacity for something does not make you the thing you can sometimes do, to be characterised as something, that part of yourself has to be dominant, a capacity preferred and used often. On the logic-emotion spectrum, you have to err more towards logic than you do emotion to be considered logical, the fact you possess an ability to think logically doesn’t matter if you’re oft overridden by the visceral impulses we know as emotion.

Don’t cling to the idea that just because a woman can have a logical thought, that she is a logical being ruled by logic, this is a false equivalency. If women were logical rather than emotional beings, it would be glaringly obvious, so obvious this essay would probably not exist. Hence pointing to women’s capacity for logic and then saying they are just as logical as men is a preposterous if not idealistic notion that cherry picks only what it wants to see.

7.) In Closing / Relevant Reading:

The rationalisation hamster may be good at speaking the language of logic, for the well-trained hamster is an eloquent sophist. It is believed you should “ignore what they say and watch what they do” because women, particularly the higher IQ ones, are great at speaking the language of logic without actually operating by it. They can adorn it, wear its clothes, and go into verbal combat waving its flag all without actually changing their innate decision-making processes.

They’ll act emotively, and then rationalise the reason for behaving emotionally with something that is plausible yet factually false. Some women are so proficient in doublethink (is this intelligence or a lack of self-awareness? I’m undecided) that they actually believe they’re logical because they deludedly believe their own rationalisations!

Women use logic to rationalise emotional decisions, and occasionally they make choices based on logic, but their preference and mechanism for action is overwhelmingly emotional in nature. To believe otherwise is not merely naive, but resoundingly idiotic.

Books:

The Manipulated Man
The Rational Male
The Rational Male: Preventive Medicine

Blog:

A Most Solipsistic Nature
How Women Argue
Solipsism, Emotion & Arguments
The Nature of Women
The AWALT Misconception

“Negotiation is not a policy. It’s a technique. It’s something you use when it’s to your advantage, and something that you don’t use when it’s not to your advantage.” – John Bolton

Contents:
1.) Introduction – Defining A Negotiation
2.) Perceptions In Negotiation – Friend or Foe?
3.) The Narcissism of Negotiation
4.) The Discount Generosity Gambit – Retention, “Fairness” & Discount
5.) Opening Offers
6.) General Maxims
7.) In Closing / Relevant Reading

1.) Introduction – Defining A Negotiation:

Negotiation is a Machiavellian ordeal, and yet many absent of cognisant or honed Machiavellian ability are required to engage in it, for the avoidance of negotiation is unavoidable in a world of competing wills and finite resources. Sure, one could go out of their way to avoid negotiations and survive, but survive is about all they would manage as ineptness in the art of negotiation is the trait of a loser, not a winner.

Let’s begin by defining the essence of a negotiation; a negotiation is effectively a quid pro quo trade discussion where two or more parties offer terms until each is satisfied with the position of the other. Anybody with even rudimentary Law study under their belt knows I am describing the essence of a contract here. The objective is to come to a deal, a deal is a mutually desired and agreed upon outcome and the fulfilment of these conditions makes the deal equitable.

Most deals at the individualised micro rather than the corporate macro level occur between two people, when larger organisations are involved the number of people party to the deal expectedly increases.

A successful deal in the truest sense of the word is no more than two or more distinct parties (be they people representing either themselves or organisations) who believe they’re getting what they want on terms not too injurious.

This is opposed to a heavily biased deal (better characterised as blackmail, although often euphemised as a “deal”) which is an agreement that takes place under the enforcement of economic duress, leverage or aggressive inequitable ironclad legal bullying. So what is Machiavellian negotiation? In the simplest terms it’s the most effective way to get the most resources or best conditions with the least amount of capital or responsibility necessary.

2.) Perceptions In Negotiation – Friend or Foe?:

Negotiation is fundamentally a dispute of disparate desires, influenced heavily by perception in the determination of what constitutes an agreement. Each party attempts to manage the perceptions of the other in order to come to an agreement both deem sufficiently equitable. Although in negotiation it is certainly the acquisition of specific objectives that underpins the reason for negotiation, perception is equally important in affecting what kind of deal, or if a deal is even struck at all.

For example, say you have two men, one named Harry and the other Bill. Harry grows an exotic grape that only he can source in the continent, his client Bill has no commodity, but has deep pockets. Money is not as rare as Harry’s grapes assuming enough wineries and consumers value his grapes. This is a seller’s market, so Harry can charge whatever he likes so long as his price to the customer works out cheaper than importation of the grape via freight from an overseas grower.

When Harry goes into a negotiation, he knows his buyer Bill needs his grapes more than he needs Bill’s money, Bill is not his only client, and clients prefer local produce rather than waiting for things to arrive on a plane which may be damaged in transit. Harry knows if the other person cannot provide a sufficient sum of money or otherwise incentivise him, that failing to come to a deal with Bill would not harm him. In a seller’s market, the pool of customers (buyers) demanding a specific quality is plentiful, whilst the pool of sellers able to provide said quality is minimal.

Conversely in a buyer’s market, Harry’s produce would not be worth much because he either has so many competitors he has to sell cheaply and operate at a loss (market saturation), or simply nobody is interested in what Harry’s selling and thus there’s no viable business operation to be had.

In our fictional scenario here, we’re in a seller’s market. This means Harry has tighter control over his pricing and can force the consumer to cough up higher sums without damaging his business’ profitability. Harry used to sell a vine of grapes for £0.90 each to his customers, but since the local competition went out of business he hiked his prices to £1.80, selling a marginally lower volume than he used to at a more profitable operating cost.

In simpler language: Harry sells less quantity but makes more money because his price per unit has increased enough to offset the reduction in sales volume the price hike caused. If Harry’s sales dropped to the point where the price per unit did not offset the reduction in volume, he’d have to decrease his prices in order to increase volume to a profitable margin. In this scenario, Harry would be experimenting with price points in order to find “the profitable zone”, the perfect price where the highest price per unit is found, the precipice on which a subsequent price increase results in overpricing as indicated by a sharp decline in sales.

Harry finds his perfect price, and thus begins to make so much extra money that he can afford to keep his “grape bubble” inflated whilst still giving some of his favourite customers the old £0.90 rate. Being in a strong position, Harry is able to economically implement his prejudice into his pricing system. Friends and old clients he has favourable relationships with get the £0.90 rate, strangers get the £1.80 rate, and he is able to outright refuse to sell to those he doesn’t like.

In a seller’s market the buyer has the privilege of buying, the seller is not privileged to sell because demand for the seller’s goods are high. Simplistically, in a seller’s market the seller is the most valuable party, in a buyer’s market the buyer is most valuable.

Bill on the other hand is a winemaker and desperately needs Harry’s rare locally sourced organic grapes to help him make a very expensive wine. Bill was a charming Machiavellian and befriended Harry awhile back by taking him out to dinner and paying for his food, gaining favour with Harry whilst he was satiated by steak and slightly inebriated on the very wine Bill needed Harry to source grapes for. Bill was clever, figuratively as well as literally giving Harry a taste of the business he was in.

As they got along so well, Harry begun selling Bill grapes at the “friend rate” of £0.90 per vine, increasing the profitability of Bill’s winery. Bill was satisfied with himself that all those restaurant dinners and well-timed jokes had paid off. However, disaster struck. One time Harry brought his daughter along to the restaurant not realising Bill was a sexually predacious yet shredded 45-year-old pick-up artist. Harry’s daughter full of daddy issues because he’s a workaholic, later matches with Bill on Tinder. From here she begins enthusiastically fucking Daddy’s “totally hot and rich” business associate as a textbook act of sordid female rebellion.

Eventually she falls for Bill, but because he failed to commit to her, she in her inevitable upset tells her father of their liaisons. Upon discovery of Bill’s adultery with his daughter, Harry refuses to continue selling Bill the grapes he sorely needs for his company’s leading product. Bill desperate for the grapes then offers Harry £10.00 per vine, far above the inflated market value Harry usually commands, yet Harry refuses to accept. Why? Because at this point Harry is more interested in hurting Bill than in making a profit from him. The perception of the other party has become so negative that a want for destruction has become greater than a love of profit.

Moral of the story: It doesn’t matter if two people want something from one another if either party disdains the other too greatly. In the absence of respect, a desperate party accepts extremely inequitable terms, or it’s simply impossible to reach consensus. In the presence of hatred or a need for revenge, otherwise logical and desirable outcomes are rejected in favour of schadenfreude. Secondary lesson: do not shit where you eat, girls related to high-value business interests aren’t worth the hassle they can cause, income is more important than sex.

3.) The Narcissism of Negotiation:

Feelings of entitlement heavily influence the outcome of a negotiation, a person with a strong sense of pride or entitlement will get as much as, or more than they’re worth; whilst a person with low self-esteem (and thus sense of entitlement) will get as much as, or less than they’re worth.

People with low self-esteem are exploited by people with high-esteem for profit, those with high self-esteem are so compelling in their conviction to those with low self-esteem, that in awe of the egotist’s confidence the one with low self-esteem will pay extra, do more work, or generally agree to a predacious deal.

In a self-perpetuating feedback cycle, this reaffirms to the narcissist they’re worth more than they really are because they’re good at making weak people agree to bad deals, and this reaffirms to the unconfident that they aren’t worth much because they’re not very good at getting what they deserve. The ancient Chinese philosopher Confucius said “Whether you think you can or think you can’t, you‘re right.”

Confucius was right. If you don’t value yourself or believe you deserve adequate compensation for your work, you will be a poor negotiator who is not adequately compensated. In feeling this way you unwittingly and disadvantageously assign higher value to the other party, causing you to give them more than they deserve, or to accept less than you deserve.

Somebody who value themselves excessively (a grandiose narcissist) is the opposite, they assign less value to the other party by actively devaluing them, and if said person accepts this devaluation the narcissist exploits this weakness and leverages it for everything it’s worth. The highly narcissistic are as such prone to giving people less than they deserve, because their intrinsic devaluation of others means they’re always undervaluing people, making them great hagglers.

Often a successful businessman is simply a person with high self-esteem that is skilled at finding people with money and low self-esteem, insecurity being an incredibly profitable emotion.

An example of such a relationship would be a ripped personal trainer on steroids in San Francisco targeting obese silicon valley programmers and basement dwelling World of Warcraft players. All the trainer needs to do is convince a loser to sign a contract to get his juicy commission.

He knows the loser is throwing their money away because they won’t even turn up to workout, but as far as he’s concerned if these people want to bootstrap his lifestyle by subsidising his gym and increasing his income, that’s their loss and his gain, he feels no guilt at all. He will gravitate between this demographic and any other low self-esteem and lazy demography, such as the over 50’s cat lady who wishes to feel like she’s doing something about her weight without actually putting the effort in.

When you have two people with low self-perceived value negotiating, the people will get what they’re worth and negotiations won’t last long. When you have two people with high self-perceived value negotiating, the people will get what they’re worth but negotiations will be more aggressive, there will be more shit testing (eg: narcissistic dismissals, negs and pressure flips) and things will last a little longer.

Whoever fails a shit test loses credibility, and this is leveraged by the winning party for better terms. If nobody fails a shit test then narcissistic party A has won the respect of narcissistic party B, and party B will feel like party A is worthy of what he actually deserves, rather than the lesser amount he normally assigns through his default devaluations.

Know the other person’s options, do they have alternatives, are they dependent on you? If they have no alternatives, you can ask for whatever you want and extract as much as they can feasibly afford. If they do have alternatives, you can tell them the alternatives are inferior and play to their ego by telling them if an inferior service is what they’re after, they can save a buck and visit your competitor!

By referring them to the competitor you subtextually communicate you’re in a seller’s market, demonstrating your elite status and lack of neediness in one fell swoop. This lets them know you’re not dependent on their custom and thus dispels the common “entitled customer mindset”, in turn increasing their likelihood to purchase at the highest possible price point on the terms most agreeable to yourself.

This reverse psychology will likewise lightly offend anybody who considers their need or problem serious, and thus is likely to convince them it worth paying more to get a quality of service equal to the seriousness of their problem, after all, big problems require elite solutions.

4.) The Discount Generosity Gambit – Retention, “Fairness” & Discount:

If they pay up but cannot afford your services in the future, offer a tactical discount in an attempt to retain their business (say 10%, no more than 20%). Do not offer a steep discount as it damages the perception you provide an elite service, elite services are not cheap services, everybody innately knows this. In fact, people often become suspicious of self-touting elite brands that go on sale, as it harms the perception of their value to the point people believe the sale items are bogus, inauthentic or otherwise somehow diminished in quality.

If you offer the correct discount, you may not only retain the custom of your client as your service is now within budget, but they’ll feel special they get a discounted rate and perceive it to be charity because you usually charge so much. Your tactical generosity plays on their ego, and increases their affinity for you.

If you are in a position to set your own rates, this is of course nonsense as your rate is what you’re willing to accept intersected with what the market is willing to pay, there is no “rate set in stone” because you pull the figure out of your ass after morning coffee. When one sets their own rate, they do so by being in a seller’s market (or at least leading the buyer to believe it’s a seller market), getting as much as they can via the exploitation of said mechanism.

When a customer is about to walk (honestly or as a bluff) the idea is to re-entice them into continuing their business with you for the new maximum amount they’re comfortable with. You deploy the discount gambit to feed their ego, feeling warm, fuzzy and proud of themselves, they like you more and keep doing business at the newer marginally reduced rate. This makes sense to a seller in a buyer’s market, as new buyers are difficult to acquire and the profit sacrificed from the loss of a customer is greater than the amount lost from lowering price.

A customer who keeps trying to get discounts is an administrative pest, only offer the discount if you’re in a buyer’s market, if you’re in a seller’s market you can easily replace the customer and thus there’s little point in trying to retain them.

5.) Opening Offers:

If they make the first offer, do not try to renegotiate for the highest price possible if they open with an amount you are happy to receive. Likewise if the other party is incredibly narcissistic, this is a risky endeavour that can easily backfire. The reason for this is if you try to get more, they may feel you are being unreasonable, get outraged you are trying to rip them off and then lower their initial opening offer, or even refuse to do business with you. This is of course not a probable outcome when dealing with the low self-esteem, but should be considered when dealing with the powerful.

If you don’t particularly covet their opening offer or are highly confident you can get more, you should haggle. If you’re happy with their offer, indulging greed risks a devaluation of the opening offer making it is wiser to accept rather than haggle. People who are serious about wanting your product or service will make a strong opening offer, the exact kind of customer you don’t want is the one who tries to nickel and dime you, as one must consider the opportunity cost incurred from all the administrative back and forth.

Exemption: if the person you’re dealing with is very powerful, agree to do something for free and be owed a favour (be overt you’d prefer a favour later, no covert contracts). If they refuse to owe you a favour, give it to them cheaply so you can leverage your generosity later on. When dealing with the powerful, it is better to be paid in favour rather than money, as their favour is more effective at getting you out of a tight spot than their money. You can get money from anybody, but it’s not everyday you have the opportunity to gain favour from the powerful. Favour with the powerful always trumps money as even losers have money, even if it’s not much, they still have some!

A lot of people will want you to make the first offer because they want to see how much you value your services, this is basically a probe to see how narcissistic you are and how much they can lower your price. To get the maximum amount, you must always demonstrate you value yourself highly. Start with a very high price and they will offer you the highest price they are willing to pay.

Generally speaking, people like to offer you 50-75% of what you asked for to feel like they got a bargain, so you can pre-empt this expectation with your opening offer. Ask for 3 times what you value yourself, if you value yourself at $50 an hour/or product ask for $150. Then if they offer half at $75 an hour you got 50% more than what you value you or your product at. If they offer $100, you got 100% more than you value you or your product at.

Of course the other party don’t know what you really value yourself at, this is what they’re trying to ascertain whilst refusing to make an offer until you state an opening figure. When you are asked to “go first”, the other is trying to undercut you, overvaluing yourself makes you immune to this as it conceals this crucial information, and overwhelmed by the exorbitant amount you quote, they offer the most they can afford, which is a typically generous yet far lower sum than the astronomical figure you quoted.

6.) General Maxims:

If you are surprised someone has made you a really great offer, do not let on. Hide your excitement, act entitled, even slightly offended to see if you cannot squeeze the other party for a little more. Should faux offence not gain you more, drop it and retain a decorum of entitled agreement, eg: “Yes, I find this agreeable” sounds far more composed than “that’s so awesome!” Adopt the decorum of the prior rather than the latter.

If you feel you are taking more than you deserve, do not let on. Hide your guilt, remain stern, but be friendly. Remember Confucius, those who think they can’t, can’t, meaning those who think they do not deserve – don’t.

7.) In Closing / Relevant Reading:

As you have probably intuited in your reading, buyer/seller marketing principles can be transferred to dating. Always remember negotiating is psychological, the rates, the time allotted, whether a deal is made, and whether it will be repeat or one-off is almost entirely psychological. There are no firm rules, everything is open to the manipulation of perception in the quest to get the most favourable terms. Work out if you’re at an advantage or not by deducing if you’re in a buyer’s or seller’s market, then calculate the external party’s degree of narcissism and negotiate accordingly.

Blog:

How To Apply The 48 Laws of Power: Machiavellian Social Competencies
Machiavellian Maxims

Books:

How To Win Friends & Influence People
The 48 Laws of Power
Trump: The Art of the Deal

“The sadistic narcissist perceives himself as Godlike, ruthless and devoid of scruples, capricious and unfathomable, emotionless and non-sexual, omniscient, omnipotent and omni-present, a plague, a devastation, an inescapable verdict.” – Sam Vaknin

Contents:
1.) Introduction – Narcissistic Personality Disorder
2.) Rational Narcissism aka Achievement-Based Narcissism
3.) The Birth of the Narcopath
4.) Dealing With A Narcopath
5.) In Closing / Relevant Reading

1.) Introduction – Narcissistic Personality Disorder:

All people with narcissistic personality disorder are narcissists, but not all narcissists
have a personality disorder. A healthy dose of narcissism is a performance-enhancer, for it improves one’s effectiveness by amplifying their self-love, confidence and boldness. However, it seems to be a common misconception that the promotion of narcissism is tantamount to the promotion of narcissistic personality disorder. This is false, and nought but an ignorant layman’s understanding of narcissism fallaciously manifesting as a false equivalence.

Narcissistic personality disorder is a coping mechanism developed in childhood to deal with neglect, rejection or cruelty (eg: bullying) from one’s parents. Narcissistic personality disorder is superlative to the nth degree, the most extreme version of narcissism, rather than the healthy self-assured confidence that comes as a by-product of talent and achievement.

Narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) is a developmental disorder ingrained into a child by the inability of a parent to validate them, or reward their accomplishments. Everything the child does is scrutinised and rejected, the child is constantly berated and denied their basic need for love.

The child’s accomplishments are typically deemed insufficient, for example if the child achieves a perfect score on an exam or comes first place in a race, this perfection is apathetically expected rather than emotionally rewarded. In a narcopath’s childhood achievement was met by indifference, with anything other than exceptionalism being seized by the parent as an opportunity to degrade them. The parental approval and joy quintessential to achievement was absent, whilst degradation and indifference reigned supreme – this is the crucible in which a narcopath is forged.

This is further exacerbated when the narcopath has a sibling who is incessantly rewarded whilst they are incessantly punished, this is narcopathy on the part of the parent exercising this behaviour, an NPD strategy known as triangulation.

What sets the NPD apart from the narcissist is that the rejection caused by the parent at a young age leaves them incapable of forming pair-bonds, this inability to pair-bond from there on becomes an empathy disorder dressed in ego. The narcopath is effectively a synthetic psychopath, narcopathy is always socialised. Had their parents been good people, they would not have developed an empathy disorder, which is really no more than a coping mechanism developed by a helpless creature that the needs the resources of an abusive one.

2.) Rational Narcissism aka Achievement-Based Narcissism:

Achievement-based narcissism is distinct from narcissistic personality disorder in much the way stoicism is distinct from psychopathy. Although a stoic and a psychopath may both seem cold, one can pair bond and the other cannot. Likewise despite the NPD and narcissist demonstrating a penchant for egotism, one can pair bond whilst the other cannot.

Successful people with the self-esteem that comes with it, are to one degree or another, narcissistic. And it is precisely this which distinguishes them from NPDs, they are narcissistic by degree – not in totality. If one attained a ridiculous amount of success, it is feasible they could become as narcissistic as the NPD – but this is uncommon and thus unrepresentative of achievement-based narcissism.

Unlike the NPD, your typical narcissist does not deify themselves as infallible, indubitable or indissoluble, but rather, they see themselves as above average, superior. And if they earn more than most people, are smarter than most people, and are in better health than most people, is this not true? Narcissism and elitism go hand in hand, for narcissism is a natural byproduct of success.

Much unlike the NPD, the successful are narcissistic because they have worked intelligently, and by the trial of their mettle they have achieved. NPDs are delusional individuals who deified themselves to cope with the onslaught of emotional abuse they received from their parents in childhood. Already now you should be beginning to understand the different shades of narcissism; you have the tangibly successful who are narcissistic by recognition of their superiority, and the delusionally damaged who have lived in a self-inculcated fantasy since youth.

Achievement-based narcissism is healthy and comes from a positive place, whilst narcissistic personality disorder is a coping mechanism born from a negative place. Unlike the achievement-based narcissist, the NPD is oft sadistic. The power that comes from sadistic exploitation is quick and dirty junk food for the insatiable vacuum that represents the NPD’s horrible childhood.

People like to use the term “narcissist” as a throwaway insult, but know this – not all narcissism is equal. Some is healthy, born of superior performance and achievement, the other is dysfunctional, born of a terrible and abusive childhood. To combine these distinctions under one umbrella would be to disingenuously misrepresent the spectrum of narcissism, and anybody interested in narcissism would as such do well to ingrain this distinction into their cranium.

3.) The Birth of The Narcopath:

The NPD constructs a false sense of self to counteract the heartbreaking treatment they received from their parent. In truth the NPD is a victim, but a dangerous one at that. It is unwise to show the NPD the pity and sympathy customarily doted to a victim, for the NPD will see this as weakness and exploit it duly.

The vacuum left by unbetrothed love in the NPD’s formative years is insatiable and unfillable. NPDs tend to be the offspring of other NPDs, or individuals with affective empathy disorders (of which there is a numerous and colourful range of diagnoses). Any love or sympathy the NPD receives as an adult serves merely as a form of ego validation, it is not sentimentally received or appreciated in the way the empath intended.

An NPD is a narcopath (a comorbid psychopathic grandiose narcissist), narcopaths do not feel empathy. A narcissist on the other hand merely has an elevated sense of self, a lack of humility if you will, but this alone does not signify an inability to sympathise. I refer to NPDs as narcopaths, for the absence of empathy customary to the NPD is tantamount to psychopathy, albeit, an egotistical variation on the phenomenon. All narcopaths are egotists, but not all psychopaths are egotists.

The narcopath cannot love for they bare no sentimental appreciation for vulnerability, perceiving only weakness in that which they cannot emote. Like a destructive child they cannot enjoy the flutter of a butterfly, but rather, the butterfly drawing people’s attention away from them would cause anger, compelling them to crush it.

And yet if you were to tell the narcopath they could not love, you would be met by nothing but narcissistic injury. Indignance, histrionics, victim playing and gaslighting, a grand display of anger where they highlight their best points whilst contrasting them with your worst. The narcopath is not above bringing out their highlight reel with your skeleton closet, making comparisons, and then trying to sell this as a fair and accurate interpretation of reality.

The narcopath would deny their inability to love, because to tell a narcopath they are incapable of something is to harm the very pride they subsist on. Narcopaths are broken people due to the mental abuse inflicted on them by their parent(s), yet at the same time they are dangerous people – I will repeat myself for clarity’s sake: narcopaths do not sentimentally appreciate sympathy, they desire it only so they can use it as a way to malignantly exploit the sucker naive enough to care.

4.) Dealing With A Narcopath:

Narcopaths are very unemotional and unconcerned with others, their emotional capacity is restricted to a solipsistic viewpoint.

For example, they do not feel concern for others – but rather they become bothered if someone useful to them is unavailable. To be concerned would be to emotionally care for the missing person, to be bothered is to be annoyed by the absence of a person. This is a subtle yet distinct variation, and people uneducated in these matters oft mistake this bothersomeness for caring, which the narcopath predictably exploits in their feeble attempt to appear empathic. Narcopaths are emotional people, but only when they are bothered by something, not when you are.

Typically the narcopath is angry, or feeding their narcissistic supply by ridiculing people. Narcopaths can be funny people, and this makes sense in so much as humour is based upon the ridicule and degradation of an out-group in order to amuse an audience. You will see here on a non-sexual level that this penchant for schadenfreude is a form of soft-sadism (and is typically, likewise mirrored in the bedroom).

Ridicule makes the narcopath feel superior to the out-group whilst feeding them the validation of the in-group, further bolstering feelings of superiority. Because the narcopath is conflict-seeking rather than conflict averse, they are destructive personalities that feed on the chaos and misery of others, again a manifestation of their latent sadism.

Realise when dealing with a narcopath that everything goes through a filter of ego – this is both the narcopath’s greatest strength and weakness – a double-edged sword if you will. The narcopath is psychologically high in attack, but low in defence. Unlike a stoic who is immovable, the narcopath is easily moved – although they will typically attempt to shut you down before you can damage them too much.

If you were to observe a battlefield with a narcopathic combatant, you would see their strategy is to achieve a quick victory by overwhelming their adversary. By merit of their strong attack they often manage this, although it should be noted this strategy is as much a form of defence as it is an attack. If you mirror the narcopath’s strategy by overwhelming them, they will lose all sense of sanity and allow themselves to be carried off by childish rage rather than maintain the elitist decorum typical of a well-fed narcopath.

Unlike psychopaths, narcopaths excel at destroying but are inept at enduring, such is their achille’s heel – their susceptibility to narcissistic injury. The propensity for lèse-majesté in the narcopath is pronounced and profound. Narcopaths do not respond to reason once the ego fires up, although they have no qualms with exploiting yours.

The best way to deal with a narcopath in their manic phase is to insult and undermine them, amplify their thirst for conflict, question their credibility, mock them and generally degrade their very essence. Although this sounds extreme, literally nothing else will allow you to permeate the raw power of their childish stubbornness.

To get through to them you must resort to narcissistically injuring them. They won’t like you for this, but they probably don’t really like you anyway – so who cares? And although they may not like you for this, they will respect it, and perversely what a narcopath can respect, they can like. If you cannot offend a narcopath, they cannot respect you. This is extreme yet necessary, as at their core these individuals are bullies, and the only way to win the respect of a bully is to degrade them by showing them you’re better at being them than they are.

5.) In Closing / Relevant Reading:

Curious to see how narcissistic you are? You can take this test to get a rough idea. A high narcissism score on this test is not indicative of narcopathy, merely narcissism, but a high narcissism score combined with a high psychopathy score is. This test does not seek to measure sadism, but if you get a high psychopathy and narcissism score, I can infer with 99% confidence that due to comorbidity you are sadistic.

Do you wish to talk with me and my humble followers on this topic in a private and exclusive space? There are currently 4 slots remaining for entry into the dark triad forum. More slots will be added in time, but if you subscribe after the 29th you will have to wait until early April to get access – access is not instant, but granted between the 3rd and the 6th of each month.

Relevant Books:

Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited
The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty

“Mastery of the self is, really, the ultimate form of mastery.” – Robert Greene

Contents:
1.) Introduction
2.) Monk Mode Recap
3.) Consume Less, Produce More
4.) Enjoying Work
5.) Escape The Crab Bucket & Avoid Victim Mentality
6.) On Losers
7.) Quality Beats Quantity
8.) Applying Quality Over Quantity To Sales
9.) Loser’s Entitlement Mentality – Give It To Me Now!
10.) Don’t Take Advice From Losers & Victims
11.) In Closing / Relevant Reading

1.) Introduction:

When I wrote monk mode, my intent was to communicate on a practical level to losers “how to stop being a loser”. I used to be a loser, I personally devised and tested monk mode, and it helped me massively, so I shared my findings with others.

Now there is some controversy surrounding monk mode, mainly concerning “when one should use monk mode” and “if monk mode is being used by introverts as an excuse not to socialise”. Although I will address these questions and concerns eventually, they fall outside the purview of this article.

If you are broke and have no friends, your first port of call is not to make friends. It’s to get enough to discipline to master a hobby, and then flip this skill into making some money – this is monk mode. You can’t focus on others when you need to build yourself up from nothing. People who aren’t losers and rely on networking to do business don’t understand this, but monk mode was never written with them in mind – it was written for losers.

If you lack discipline, don’t have much going for yourself, and are distracted by nonsense social activities rather than building yourself, I highly recommend monk mode.

That being said, monk mode is not for everyone. Monk mode is life support for losers who need to prevent themselves from drowning in an abyss devoid of discipline, and dominated by depression. Monk mode is a route out of the gutters of hell, a long and winding path of redemption for the mediocre who’ve decided enough is enough.

So what’s the next step after Monk Mode? Let’s assume you have used monk mode, are no longer a complete loser, but still aren’t killing it in life. What key ingredient are you missing, what do you need to give you that extra edge? You need a champion’s mentality – this article will tell you how to get one, as well as demonstrate its attitude.

Champion mentality is about optimising your life and relationships so that you continuously win, improve and raise your value. Inevitably by merit of accomplishment and the achievement-based narcissism that accompanies it, such a lifestyle leads to a higher quality of life spiritually, socially and financially.

2.) Monk Mode Recap:

People who create are more interesting than people who don’t because they apply their essence to an art form. In doing this they add value to themselves, they are more developed human-beings and thus more interesting.

People who do nothing but consume are basic people who have no real value, most of their interests (and thus what they talk about) is vicarious and based on the achievement of others. Losers live through other people, winners live through themselves; losers invest in nothing, winners don’t stop investing. Winners invest in themselves before investing in others, losers are interested in everything, but have no actual value to invest.

So how does a loser stop losing? Minimise hobbies that are consumptive and acquire hobbies that are productive. It’s really that simple. Switch Netflix for reading, writing or coding. I’m not going to babysit you with examples and brainstorm a 100 different hobbies that are productive so you can lazily pick one you like the sound of. Part of being a winner is doing the mental legwork. However, if you’re ailed by the creative capacity of a damp towel, I will note some generalised examples to get you started: martial arts, musical instruments and languages.

Assess your life by looking at the activities you engage in. Now categorise which activities create value, and which feel good but don’t really enhance your value as a person. Now cut out/reduce the things in the consumption category, and replace these activities with those that build value.

3.) Consume Less, Produce More:

It’s funny average people blame the rich for their problems instead of becoming more like them – this is why they keep losing.

If you are poor and have no marketable skills or value, rather than waste time whining online about how 1%ers need taxing more to subsidise your pathetic existence, how do you take responsibility for yourself and become more like them? It’s incredibly simple:

Get a hobby, get good at it, monetise it, and as it scales up you will find yourself succeeding. All of a sudden you’re the winner who doesn’t want to be taxed more, rather than the loser expecting the state to steal from the rich for you.

If you don’t have your own business, you don’t have as much freedom as somebody who does. You probably don’t enjoy what you do either. Some people enjoy their jobs, but this is besides the point. You don’t get rich on a salary, you get rich by having a successful business idea and scaling it up. It’s not the only way to get rich, but it’s the most common way.

Developing a hobby for X number of years, and then monetising it into a product or service once you’re competent is how businesses are built and rat races are escaped.

If you don’t spend your spare time developing a skill that you can master enough to monetise, you won’t start a business and thus you’ll always be massaging another man’s balls for a living.

Taking a monthly salary from another man is horrible. When you make another man rich, you are undervalued and only one person pays you. When you make yourself rich, you get what you’re worth and hundreds or even thousands of people are paying you by buying your product or service. If you are in the prior category you’re a slave, if you’re in the latter you’re a free man.

Common sense isn’t common because average people never got the memo. When you read the words on this page, intuitively it will sound like common sense that should go without saying. I should be preaching to the choir and in doing so stating the obvious and making myself look like a resounding idiot.

And yet, if people actually applied this wisdom, we’d have more winners than losers in this life. Most people you pass on a day-to-day basis are losers. They are everywhere, it’s an epidemic!

What do you think they do when they get home? Sit down, watch Netflix, bash one out and laze around being mediocre. They piss all their time away on nonsense, but then believe the reason they’re failing at life is because they’re unlucky – pathetic!

They are losers because they don’t invest in themselves, it’s that simple.

Hobbies where you consume rather than produce are junk hobbies, much like pizza and red bull they should be used in moderation.

– Gaming? Consuming
– Shopping? Consuming
– Baking? Producing
– Writing? Producing

This doesn’t mean never game, shop or have fun. Basic binary thinkers miss the point and think all this focus on self-improvement and productivity is advocating a boring type A personality that never has fun. It isn’t. It means if you want to be a winner, you have to do consumptive things far less than productive things. Make this a habit and a way of life, and you will see both your quality of life and bank balance rise. It’s this simple, yet most find it difficult to achieve.

To apply the Pareto principle to having fun, 80% of your time should be spent on producing, whilst 20% is spent on consumption.

As a bonus, when you actually become good at the thing you produce you will have fun doing it. This allows you to have fun and produce simultaneously!

4.) Enjoying Work:

Losers without any skills need to consume to have fun because they lack the value necessary to enjoy life without indulging in someone else’s value.

A talented coder for instance has his own value, when he “works” on an app, he has a lot of fun doing it despite the challenge it represents. He can work and have fun at the same time, this is the hallmark of a winner, losers can’t do this so they don’t understand it.

Whilst a loser could never conceive of the fun inherent to producing (to a loser, all work is equally soul-crushing), winners know exactly what I’m talking about – work can be fun!

Work stops being work when you love what you do and you’re good at it. This is why it pays dividends in happiness and general quality of life to monetise a hobby. There’s no point being rich if you’re too miserable to enjoy it.

There’s no point to money you can’t enjoy, so if you want to be rich and happy – achieving it via a hobby is the way to go. Become an expert pianist, fighter, writer or whatever.

When you find something you absolutely love, you work hard without feeling exhausted from the undertaking. You enjoy your work so much that your work does not feel like work, it feels like something you’d do anyway, but just so happen to get paid for.

Because your work is a hobby you’ve monetised, you will work hard and not feel like you’re working, which means low stress, high happiness and a well fed wallet. For people with the necessary work ethic, this is highly attainable. To losers it sounds like a myth, because they can’t imagine a life that doesn’t consist of being miserable.

5.) Escape The Crab Bucket & Avoid Victim Mentality:

If you’re born in a crab bucket, the first thing you must do is escape and seek lessons from winners. To losers nothing’s their fault, they rationalise their inferiority by shifting blame to those they’re jealous of, they’re pathetic. Losers are socialists and people who think the world owes them something. Nothing is their fault, everything bad that happens to these people is the fault of people more successful than them, these people must be avoided at all costs.

The thing that keeps people poor the most is other poor people filling their minds with shit, you must detach. If you’re born to losers they teach you how to be a loser, not a winner. You must detach and reprogram yourself.

Losers keep you down with misinformation, then when by your own defiance you make it out, they try to take the credit for your successes. Pathetic! The very people who hold you back are the same people who want you to “remember them when you make it”. The people who doubt you are the same people who have their hand out when you make it, they are disloyal, pathetic and do not belong in your life.

If you were born a loser, were surrounded by losers and made it out, it isn’t the losers that got you out, it was you. You don’t owe them a cent.

Losers always try to guilt trip you, because if you are foolish enough to fall for it, they can pillage you.

Losers complain “once he made it he forgot about us and never came back, he betrayed his roots!”

Why did he do that? Because associating with losers is dumb, the people saying this will try to drag him down once he’s made it, and it’s his awareness of this that prevents him from continued association. Of course being the losers that they are, these people are completely ignorant to this, they just think the escaped crab is an asshole. Let them think that, for their opinions are as worthless as they are.

6.) On Losers:

Poverty is just turning the difficulty up on the game, you know why the poor stay poor? Scarcity mindset. The truly worthy always get what they deserve, but plenty of people get less than they feel they deserve, do you know why?

Because they’re not Machiavellian enough.

Those illiterate in matters of power idiotically work hard for another man their entire lives, so all they have to show for their effort when the curtain calls is a mountain of debt. This is incredibly sad, and is not the mark of a life well lived.

If you work hard but not intelligently, you can still be broke. Clever people don’t just work hard, they also work intelligently. They know they need to work for themselves as soon as they can, and that working for somebody else is just a means to an end until that time comes. Rather than rest on their laurels, they develop a skill in their “spare” time and have it monetised by yesterday!

Losers see your ambition and they shit on it because have a scarcity mindset, people in a state of scarcity are excessively selfish and have no capacity to be magnanimous. Losers seek obstacles (why something isn’t possible), whilst winners seek solutions (how can I achieve this?)

Edgy losers are the funniest, they have the energy to “call bullshit” but don’t direct that energy into elevating themselves. Being angry doesn’t make you respectable, powerful or a winner, if you don’t channel your anger correctly you’re just an idiot other people laugh at.

Anger is a powerful emotion, winners channel it into productive endeavours, losers squander it like they do everything and use it to bicker with irrelevant people on social media.

Losers take more because they need more. Wherever a loser is and whatever he’s doing, he takes more than he gives if he even gives at all. The loser is a needy personality, he always wants help, be it emotional or financial. Losers are not self-sufficient and don’t even try to be, they are perpetual children. Women are more comfortable being losers than men as they more easily internalise a victim mentality, but it is prevalent to both sexes and is attractive in neither.

Winners surround themselves with superiors so they can up their game, losers surround themselves with inferiors so they can pad their ego. Why do losers become and stay losers? Because once they internalise they’re oppressed and that nothing’s their fault, it’s more comfortable for them to blame reality for their shortcomings instead of humbling up, realising they aren’t squat, and doing something about it.

This is another thing about losers, they don’t move towards pain and struggle in order to improve themselves, they indulge in comfort, this is why they are weak.

It’s easier to internalise your inferiority and blame your appointed enemy for your mediocrity than to introspect, improve and compete.

Only people with skill actually like meritocracy because they have a chance of winning. Unremarkable people want handouts, they don’t want to compete. Of course if you had a bad start in life you will have to deprogram a lot of the nonsense you were taught, but it’s better to bloom late than never at all.

7.) Quality Beats Quantity:

Want to bypass the mediocre majority? Most people are quantity focused, so do the opposite and be quality focused.

This entire blog is built on this mantra, quality over quantity. I get more views, more followers and more money than people who have been doing this longer than I have because my focus is always on quality, never on quantity.

If you copy other people or produce content for the sake of producing it, you will never amount to much. Why will somebody settle for an imitation when they can get the original? You are basically broadcasting you’re a bootleg imitator when you do this. People are not blind, you may think you’re clever, but it is foolish to underestimate the intelligence of your readers.

Why would somebody read your nonsense when there are tens of thousands of publications vying for their attention? If you want people to read you, you have to be worth reading – this means being as original as possible and saying something because you have something to say, rather than saying something because you feel you must to remain relevant and seen.

I have never written an essay for the sake of writing it, I write because I have something to say. I genuinely love writing and sharing my ideas, writing is not a secondary objective to me, it’s the primary objective.

Ask any regular reader what they think of this blog, they will affirm I may not post as much as others, but that generally speaking my content is superior to everything else they come across, if not equal to it. Whatever I do turns to gold, otherwise I don’t bother doing it.

Whilst other people think they’re better than you because they outdo you in volume, you and anybody with an eye for quality knows you’re superior because you outdo them in quality. I use writing as an example because it’s what I do, but you can apply this to anything.

8.) Applying Quality Over Quantity To Sales:

The counterargument I often hear as to why quantity beats quality is “more sales is better than less sales as you’ll make more money”.

People who think this are obvious small fish, they must need to make numerous low ticket sales to masses of mediocre people because they’re thinking like lemonade stand owners!

The quality over quantity mantra applied to sales is simple, it is better for you to have one big contract or one big client (quality) than it is to have ten average or mediocre clients. Having more clients at a lower rate means more stress and work for less money. Even if the cumulative sum is higher for ten average clients than one good client, get two good clients and you’re still doing less work and earning more than you would from ten average clients. Winners optimise their time, losers squander it.

Losers will tell you that you need to get as many clients as possible and rush them in and out so you can move on to the next one, winners will tell you that you need to find the right clients and do your very best for them.

Quality over quantity does not mean “just the one, just the best” it means “only work with quality, cultivate quality and focus on quality.” If you want to be the best or be considered the best, you have to obsess over quality. Kim Kardashian for example may be very popular with losers, but nobody considers her the best at anything because she is utterly talentless.

Aim for superiority in all things, combine the best product with a network consisting of nothing but the best people. Again, quality over quantity does not mean “I cannot sell the best product to as many people as possible” this is stupid. If you have the best product, anybody that can afford it will buy it because it will be popular.

For example with writing, it’s better for you to have one good book than five mediocre ones. My book isn’t even out yet and I’ve been writing for two and a half years. There are third-rate writers who have three books out in twelve months that make less than I do from Patreon on all their books combined. Hilarious, yet somewhat sad. I’m not going out of my way to ridicule anyone here, but I want my point to hit home as profoundly as possible: quality always trumps quantity.

One really good book can make more money than five crappy uninspiring books. Better to have your readers chomping at the bit for your book to come out, than releasing something for an unpacked theatre.

I am convinced being focused on quantity rather than quality is the path to mediocrity, and that greatness lies in innovation and the pursuit of the apex.

I apply this mantra to everything, I desire the best form, not the most reps and the best friends rather than the most friends.

Losers prefer to do a lot of mediocre things and call it success, rather than do one thing really well and become an expert at it. If you ask someone “what are you good at?” and they don’t have an answer, the answer is nothing. Because someone who doesn’t know what they’re good at has not obsessed enough in any one area to discover themselves and foster mastery – they are mediocre.

9.) Loser’s Entitlement Mentality – Give It To Me Now!:

People want to be on top the instant they set their mind to something, but progression is incremental, not exponential. People who consume copiously without counterbalancing via creation tend to be boring.

Low value people take value from others and do not build value. High value people give value to others and are constantly building it. People who pretend to be busy are low value, because if they were high value they’d actually be busy producing something.

If someone is expecting instant quick and effortless change, I already know they’re a loser. That’s not how life works. Marketing targets losers with bullshit promises of “easy, instant results” because it plays to the fantasy that greatness isn’t a matter of skill and dedication, but rather something that is monopolised and can be bought. It cannot, and this is false.

The only thing such marketing achieves is the monetisation of losers to the profit a private company, it does not stop losers from losing. If the advice on this blog was disseminated on TV, half of these companies would stop making money, especially sectors like the fitness industry.

Why is this? Because only losers buy into false promises and pump money into gimmicky equipment that promises to make your workout easier, these are the same people who pay for gym subscriptions they don’t even use – losers!

The fitness industry is entirely dependent on the finance of losers to remain profitable, it’s hilarious, yet somewhat sad to see a section of the economy operate in this manner.

Winners get more for less money because they have the work ethic, dedication and subsequent skill that comes from this not to fall for the bogus promises of flashy, bottom-feeding salesmen.

10.) Don’t Take Advice From Losers & Victims:

Reality is politically incorrect, winners embrace this, losers don’t; sensibility is an expensive prison. Sensitive people tell you one thing straight from the get go without even intending to: they’re losers. Avoid sensitive people, not only do you have to waste energy watching what you do and don’t say, but seeing as they’re losers they have less to offer you.

Losers don’t have any form of narcissistic supply other than “giving advice”, their “advice” is terrible, ignore all of it. The people whose advice you really want aren’t lining up to give it to you, those who are lining up are losers nine out of ten times.

Losers have no achievements to get high off because they haven’t achieved anything, so their way of feeling big is misinforming you with nonsense they pulled out of their ass. They achieve this by telling you how to live your life when they’re not even on top of their own.

Whiners don’t want to win they just want to be pitied, pity is pathetic. Nobody worth a damn identifies as a loser even if they come from garbage. The more you try to talk sense to somebody determined to be a victim, the more they dig their heels in about how unfair life is. Pathetic.

Anybody who has read this blog has probably deduced I have the capacity to be dangerous if I wanted to be. But instead of endeavouring to destroy people, I don’t, I help them instead.

I’m about contributing to the world, adding value, and ultimately as a higher goal: rebuilding the masculinity of western civilization brick by brick.

I have a goal higher than myself, which means I go further in providing for today’s men than the companies who don’t care but are just looking to make a buck by exploiting masculine insecurities (height, dick size, earnings etc.) Winners need a goal higher than themselves. You don’t become great if you can’t see past yourself. You should be selfish, and you should seek to better yourself, but once you have momentum do not limit yourself to greed, have a higher goal, preferably something noble, and you will excel more than those motivated solely by money.

Winners have a positive mentality and wish to create, losers have a negative mentality and wish to destroy.

My life is proof to me you can have absolutely fuck all and nobody there for you and still become a winner. I’ve had to overcome more than most to get where I am, and this is why I don’t have time for whiners. You can whine all you like about patriarchy or white privilege, but this is all fake nonsense. People who whine about this fiction do so because they have no real hardships to complain of. People who’ve actually had to endure hardship recognise the people who whine about these things for the phonies that they are.

I’ve been a loser, I grew up with nothing and nobody. Nobody gave a shit about me growing up, virtually nobody. I didn’t become the man I am today because I had an easy life, I forged myself from a crucible of both spiritual and material deprivation.

I’ve been homeless, I’ve slept in a park under a tree in the rain because I had nowhere to go. I was in care as a kid and I’ve never known my father. By this description I should be a snivelling loser, a weakling, somebody going nowhere, a crumbled and torn piece of paper tumbling in the winds of an icy English street, and yet I’m stronger than almost everybody I meet. I’m strong enough to announce this on a website read by hundreds of thousands and not give a crap if anybody tries to use it against me.

I don’t milk the misfortunes life handed me to monetise people’s pity, because I’m not a loser. I don’t need people’s pity to get ahead, I can get ahead on my own merit, and this is what I encourage others to do. I got where I am in life by providing value, not by selling a sob story. Follow this example, be a winner, be someone worth something, there is no dignity nor honour in monetising misfortune.

I know how to help the helpless because I’ve been helpless.

Now you know part of my story, you know why I’m emotionally invested in helping men. I had a tough life devoid of guidance, I now offer what I never had to those afflicted by these very maladies.

11.) In Closing / Relevant Reading:

Stand on your own two feet and take life by the balls, expecting good things to happen because you want them to is how a loser thinks, winners make it happen. If neither sex nor dignity inspires you to improve, fear of our impending civilizational collapse should do the trick.

People can help you for money, and you can read these blogs as much as you like, but people can’t fill the void that is a non-existent work ethic. If you think you’re a loser, you are. Don’t wish for a better life, make one.

Book(s):

Mastery
More Books

Blog:

How To Be Happy
Monk Mode

 
“The lion cannot protect himself from traps, and the fox cannot defend himself from wolves. One must therefore be a fox to recognize traps, and a lion to frighten wolves.” – Niccolo Machiavelli

Contents:
1.) Introduction
2.) The Maxims
3.) Relevant Reading / In Closing

1.) Introduction:

Back in December I published a collection of Machiavellian Maxims that precede the assortment here. If you missed that, you can find it here. As for the creation of yet more maxims? Only time will tell. With that said, I present the latest set of Machiavellian maxims for your reading pleasure.

2.) The Maxims:

1. – Hijacking is a special kind of Machiavellianism, for it wears the agenda of another whilst pursuing its own, like a metaphorical Russian doll, it hides an agenda within an agenda.

2. – Read between the lines, if you can deduce why somebody is asking a question and you do not like the reasoning for their question, do not deign an answer. Ignore or dismiss traps, do not fall into them.

3. – When someone attempts to undermine rather than refute you, they’re the enemy.

4. – Undermining is personal, refutation isn’t. Refutation communicates “I believe you’re wrong due to the findings of the available evidence”. Undermining communicates “I’m going to humiliate you because your opinions invoke my disdain.” Refutations are logical retorts, undermining is interrelational violence. Learn to distinguish between the two, for they oft appear similar.

5. – Bending the rules is no more than the abuse of technicality to circumvent the spirit of the rule without violating its letter.

6. – Love doesn’t conquer psychopathy.

7. – Only pick fights that’ll yield profit; pettiness will erode your credibility, fighting on many fronts will exhaust you.

8. – The crab bucket mentality is pervasive, a jealous friend is a betrayal waiting to happen. Know when to cut the gangrenous limb, do not allow the sentimental nostalgia to sustain poisonous ties.

9. – If you are drawn into something emotionally, the odds of damaging your reputation and engaging in regrettable acts exponentially increases.

10. – Many arrogant men believe anger is the safe emotion they can display without real consequence, this belief is folly. Man should endeavour to be mindful, for this will allow him to rein in unruly emotion.

11. – He who does not control his emotions is puppeteered by them. Strict adherence to emotional data is tactical death, whilst ignoring emotion idiotic, and suppressing it tiresome. As such, emotion should be channelled, not ignored or obeyed.

12. – On national anniversaries of loss or celebration, people are at their most vulnerable. It is at times of heightened cultural emotivity that reflection takes root in the mediocre, and filled with regret, the populace is at their most manipulable.

13. – Self-deprecation builds trust, when people see even minor imperfections, they’re endeared by the transparency.

14. – People are susceptible to negativity bias, if something is negative, it is more likely to be believed without rigorous investigation. Acts of virtue come with a burden of proof, acts of unvirtue do not.

15. – Appear easily provoked, then ignore those who see it as an opportunity to attack; this is good for enticing the lurking foe to reveal himself. Present an illusion of disordered vulnerability, seduce an attack, and by the time your foe realises the ruse it is too late, he has revealed himself.

16. – An effective strategist knows when to utilise counterintuitive gambits to get a better view of the battlefield. For example, if you are strong in one area, make your enemy think you are weak. If you are weak in an area, make your enemy think you are strong. If you confuse the enemy’s data points, he cannot successfully analyse you. If he cannot analyse you, he cannot defeat you.

17. – Be wary the plausible deniability of jokes, “it’s just a joke” is the most common phrase used to disguise a transgression. All good jokes contain truth, as such if one crosses your boundaries under the guise of humour, they are still trespassing, humour but smoke and mirrors for such trespass.

18. – He who acts boldly under the cloak of sadistic humour is not to be trusted, for humour is the jester’s shield and sword.

19. – People who get caught doing something they shouldn’t do not reveal the complete truth at once. they opt to reveal the least self-incriminating aspects first.

20. – The objective of trickle truth is damage control, to minimise the damage done to one’s reputation when a loss of reputation is all but unavoidable.

21. – As lies compound, trust erodes, and the more difficult it becomes to lie. The more it is perceived that you lie, the better you must be at lying to successfully do so. As such, compulsive lying is tactically unsound – lie only when necessary.

22. – Trust can be earned and spent, but if you spend too much too quickly, your account with the betrayed individual is permanently closed, no matter what you do, you will always be spent.

23. – People love to be seduced, but they do not like to know how. Honesty doesn’t pay when transparency compromises the beauty of the illusion that sustains you. Like any magic trick, people enjoy the perception of mystery, not what creates it.

24. – Apply seduction to romance or sales, never reveal your tricks. Give your pitch, not your essence.

25. – Effortlessness and dismissiveness foster an appearance of strength.

26. – If people feel judged by you, they hate you. In diplomacy, suggest via statement, do not undermine with command or overt dispute.

27. – Honesty is ugly, most people want their opinions validated, not disproved. It is but a minority of intellectuals who enjoy being disproved.

28. – Manufacture a threat and you can sell its solution.

29. – Control both sides and simulate a conflict, monitor organic responses for potential allies and enemies.

30. – Utilise counterintuitive strategies, it pays to create a group to undermine your interests. By creating a group to threaten your interests, you prevent a concealed threat from mobilising. Those interested in undermining your interests will join your artificial opposition rather than form their own.

31. – The truly best deceivers begin with themselves, and therefore tend to be more emotional than rational in disposition.

32. – Environments come with varying expectations and codes of behaviour, environments define expectation unless you are bigger than your environment.

33. – It is better to define what will be expected of you, than allow others to define their expectations. If you do not define what people expect of you, they will define it for you.

34. – He who defines his role has more freedom, for people become their roles.

35. – Your benefactors should overestimate you and your enemies should underestimate you.

36. – The lower the average intellect of a man’s company, the more he must show aggression to be respected, more intelligent company demands the inverse.

37. – As a Machiavellian, it is always pertinent to ascertain the intellect of one’s company, and then adjust one’s demeanour as relevant. A person who cannot dial-up their personality up or down is unfit to wield power.

38. Intelligent narcissists require consistent displays of histrionic aggression in order to respect somebody.

39. – Acting is necessary. Just as one key cannot open every lock to every door, a single disposition cannot unlock every favour from every person, as such, adaptability.

40. – People are like safes with combinations, by correctly calibrating your traits to align with their values, you unlock their trust, desire, and respect. Incorrect calibrations create apathy and disdain.

41. – Disagreement is acceptable for it can teach, but sabotage is never. A leader’s task is to discern the prior from the latter. When in doubt, assume sabotage.

42. – It is important to work smarter than harder, but better to be seen as dumb and hard-working. Few like a rich man who earns more in a less arduous condition, for jealousy of his privileged position is rife. A smart man earns more than a hard-working man, yet a smart, hard-working man who appears average outearns both.

43. – It’s easy not to outshine the brilliant, but it’s difficult not to outshine the incompetent. Regardless, know your place and behave accordingly.

44. – Ignore powerless idiots, ridicule powerful ones. Powerless idiocy is an annoyance, powerful idiocy is a problem. Relevance and status shall determine classification.

45. – The man confined to reason will be humiliated by psychic warfare, whilst the man confined to cunning will have his sophistry undressed. Logic and cunning are the most powerful psychological tools, therefore you would do well to cultivate them both. To cultivate neither is to be weak and to cultivate one is to be average, but to cultivate both – this is to be dangerous. [Read More Here]

46. – Logicians look for reasons, Machiavellians look for loopholes.

47. – Incentive is the most persuasive use of soft power, with fear its hard power counterpart. Those who can’t be bribed can be threatened, whilst those who can’t be threatened can be bribed – very few are immune to both.

48. – Be egotistical only when necessary.

49. – You bond with people over the things they hold dear, pets, media franchises, hobbies – this is how you gain trust. In matters of trust one should appeal to emotion, never to reason. Give plenty of reasons you should be trusted, give nonsense reasons for why you shouldn’t.

50. – In social matters, people do not reward he who is most logical, but rather he who is most impressive.

51. – Cunning and rhetoric almost always triumph over logic, fact and statistic in matters of persuasion.

52. – Despair in the moment is tantamount to forfeiture.

53. – Most are foolish, instead of befriending power, they hate on it. These people aren’t cut out for the game, for one does not acquire power by hating the powerful.

54. – A champion must always defend his crown, for as much as he is admired, there is always a man who lusts to take the powerful’s wealth and status for himself.

55. – The least patriotic leader’s one who so utterly dominates his kingdom, that he does not allow it to flourish out of the insecurity that permitting so would remove him from power.

56. – All abusable systems are abused, and so it is folly to expect any system not to be abused. Systems should be designed on the assumption they will be abused, and where less than infallible, retroactively amended to be so.

57. – Absolute dignity is rare, most pride is no more than resistance that can be removed for a price. The weaker the ego, the lower the price. For the right price, fantasies of all persuasions find manifestation.

58. – In matters of effective sophistry, one must calibrate language to the discerned intelligence of their listener.

59. – Disdain precarious alliances, it is better to have no alliance than a precarious one, for weak alliances foreshadow betrayal.

60. – Taste isn’t just a matter of food or scent, but likewise of personality. One man’s annoyance is another’s joy, delicate tastes require finesse. And yet if is a taste is too demanding, specific or exacting, one may wish to wholly reject the fetishist notion and cease all association.

61. – Don’t become the slave of another man’s tastes. Exercise prerogative with association. If you know the taste you can leverage its fantasy, but if the taste is concealed and used as a benchmark for invalidating you, leave.

62. – People decide quickly who they do and do not like. When factions form, anybody not on your side should be assumed to collaborate with the enemy. As for those who do join your cause, analyse their motives.

63. – Whilst punishment should be swift, reward should be gradual.

64. – It is far more profitable to see things from your point of view than from the opposition’s. The more you acknowledge the opposition’s point of view, the more power you give it. Therefore for your point of view to dominate, you must dismiss your enemy’s.

65. – Displays of agility typically indicate one of two things: you’re being mesmerised by a diversion, or you’re witnessing mastery.

66. – Don’t play cards you don’t need to play. Holding all the cards does not make you indestructible, you may still lose if you play your cards poorly. Execution is everything, a poorly played card is worse than one not played.

67. – Tailor your approach to the personality you’re dealing with.

68. – Nothing is more compelling than fantasy, do not underestimate it’s power to convince or exploit.

3.) Relevant Reading / In Closing:

If you enjoyed these maxims, I wholeheartedly recommend these texts, which embody the kind of wisdom and format similar to what you see here.

The Art of Worldly Wisdom,
Rochefoucauld’s Maxims

Additionally, I’ve opened some $5 slots on my Patreon page that grant dark triad forum access, however I must stress these slots are promotional and limited to new patrons. Any existing patrons who downgrade their pledge to fill one of the newly opened slots will be removed from the dark triad forum without hesitation.

That aside, which maxims are your favourites and why? Let me know in the comments.

“One ought to hold on to one’s heart; for if one lets it go, one soon loses control of the head too.” – Friedrich Nietzsche

Contents:
1.) Introduction
2.) The Cultural Battle of the Sexes
3.) Solipsism’s Role In Femininity
4.) The Role of Rationalisation & Sophistry
5.) In Closing/Relevant Reading

1.) Introduction:

As I write this, I cast my mind back to a time I did not understand women. It is surreal to write on “how women work” when one so vividly remembers being a man clueless in such matters.

As a clueless man bereft of the knowledge my sanity demanded, I would ask men to explain women, I would ask women to explain women, and I would ask Google to explain women. Nobody really knew what they were talking about. The only answers I would get were gynocentric inanities mixed with general rhetorical platitudes such as “be yourself” and “be confident”.

The problem with the gynocentric viewpoint that dominates the status quo, is it teaches men how to be a good slave, rather than how to be a good master. It teaches men how to cater to women, rather than how to inspire a woman’s desire to cater to them. It actively suppresses truths related to women, whilst spreading vitriolic untruth about men. At this point it seems the system would prefer men are useful but ignorant, rather than enlightened and sovereign.

Men yearn to understand women, for they wish to attract them, as well as protect themselves from womanly predations. This knowledge is essential paramount sustenance all but crucial for the preservation of man’s sanity. And yet quite sadistically, this wisdom eludes most men no matter how earnestly they seek it.

Today, life changing truth is only readily available should a man happen upon a site such as this. Most men are unaware of women’s true nature, and the minority who are dare not discuss the elephant in the room, for doing so may come at incredible cost.

2.) The Cultural Battle of the Sexes:

The number of men aware of the realities inherent to female nature continues to dwindle, whilst the cultural hysteria touting “men are evil and women can do no wrong” reigns pervasively.

Men are taught to worship women, whilst women are taught to distrust men. Men are taught to serve women, whilst women are taught to deceive men. Society believes it morally reprehensible for a man to dupe a woman, and yet bares no such disdain when the polarity is reversed, often going to extreme lengths to rationalise superficially pleasing justifications for immoral female behaviour.

Before the emergence of red pill philosophy, no meaningful infrastructure existed to support and educate men on matters of women, and this is why what we do is crucial.

We educate boys and men on matters nobody else is capable of, and support them where nobody else cares. There is a cultural power imbalance where the masculine has become so weak and the feminine has gotten out of control, that she threatens to destabilise civilization’s very core with a tyrannic power she is not fit to wield. The red pill (as well as this very publication) does to the extent of its reach, attempt to redress this imbalance by giving men the tools they need to exercise power and remain sovereign.

Red pill philosophy is effective, it thoroughly details female behaviour from numerous perspectives (sociological, evolutionarily and occasionally, economically) to form a rich and comprehensive philosophy.

However, having internalised much of this “forbidden knowledge” over the years, I wish to do something I do not believe has been done before: unify the red pill understanding of women into a framework that depicts the relationships between the mechanisms that embody the feminine.

When I was clueless about women, I’d have killed for an article like this, so if that sounds like you, strap yourself in because you’re in for a treat. You’re going to learn what many men never learnt, and what many others paid in pain and poverty to merely intuit.

3.) Solipsism’s Role In Femininity:

One cannot deny that women are vigorously interested in themselves and how men perceive them, yet regardless, this passion does not translate into a meaningful philosophical enquiry on womankind by herself. As such, a woman’s opinion of her sex is inseparably tied up with how she sees herself. To simplify: whatever a woman believes to be true of women, is 99 out of 100 times, something she believes to be true of herself.

Solipsism leads women to believe the opinions they hold of themselves accurately represent the behaviours generalisable to their sex. Naturally most women are oblivious to their flaws, and are as a matter of ego, unwilling to even ponder the possibility they’re not intrinsically wonderful.

Most women do not realise the negative traits they possess should be rectified where possible or otherwise mitigated, because they do not recognise themselves as having said undesirable qualities to begin with. Simply put, women lack self-awareness, they tend to deny their shortcomings rather than fix them, and this is why there is a substantial lack of body’s within the women’s online self-improvement community.

If you talk about the general nature of women to a woman, but you do not distinguish between her and “most women”, then she will lump herself in with “most women” and fail to make the distinction between herself and women as a whole. This leads her to constantly miss the forest for trees, stating that “she was in a similar situation and she was never like that” when you generalise her sex.

Now, whilst it is certainly possible the woman you’re talking to may be the exception to something, it is more likely that she is not but believes in all delusional earnest that she is. Because she follows her feelings, and it feels better for her to believe she’s different than to be aware of her shortcomings, she will believe an aspect of her behaviour immune to generalisation even when her behaviours confirm the generalisation!

You may even remember a time when the woman you’re talking to embodied the exact generalisation you’re asserting, and yet like a crazy person with amnesia, she will claim to be nothing like that. This is another “function” of solipsism, a woman’s pre-occupation with the self is mirrored by an utter lack of self-awareness of what said self consists of.

And so it is only in the grand denial of a woman’s solipsism that if she believes there’s nothing “wrong” with her, then there’s nothing “wrong” with women either. If she believes she’s not like that (regardless of whether she actually is or not) then she incorrectly concludes that most women aren’t like that.

It is the observation that nearly all women will unironically say “not all women are like that” that gives away the feminine’s solipsistic point of reference, that a woman will attempt to differentiate herself as superior when in competition, but should you criticise women in general, suddenly her ability to make distinctions between herself and her group vanishes.

In juxtaposition, if something negative is said about men, most men can simultaneously weigh up whether the generalisation applies to men as a group, and if it does, if it applies to them. They do not instantly conflate opinions of their sex with opinions of themselves, and so unlike women, are not reflexively offended by negative statements made about their sex if an element of that statement is based in reality.

Naive men believe “women must be experts on women, because being women themselves they must know all about women!” such a belief is folly, and no more than a reflection of a man’s naivety, for it assumes women are abstractive rather than solipsistic, that is, more interested in the truth than being purposefully ignorant in order to maintain an optimum level of happiness. This couldn’t be further from the truth.

When women talk about women, they project rather than investigate because they’re prone to emotional solipsism, not rational investigation. Solipsism is the core base of all female behaviour, it is the intrinsic way of being, the very foundation on which the female’s other psychological aspects spawn.

Women with little power and low self-esteem are solipsistic and prone to infantile narcissism, whilst those with high self-esteem and great power are grandiosely narcissistic, the latter meaning they possess a characteristically masculine air of arrogant detachment.

Where solipsism is her internal dialogue and mode of thought, its external counterpart is infantile narcissism, women’s insecurity of her relative inferiority to man, and dependence on men. If one analyses the thinking of the feminist movement for a second, a great part of it fixates on “empowering women by granting them independence.”

This suggests a few things, that firstly, women do not possess the ability or desire to take independence for themselves and so need powerful politicians to legally mandate it. And secondly, that the feminist fixation with independence is a macro manifestation of female insecurity. This to say, that women are all too aware of their reliance on men for both economic and emotional support, and that collectively, rather than be grateful for man’s magnanimity, a great deal despise it and thus seek to usurp him. The saying “no good deed goes unpunished” seems apt here.

Women are deadly, yet needy. They have always needed men, still do, and most likely always will. And yet it is in the infantile stubbornness of femininity that a resentment brews for this biologically ordained neediness.

Even the women who do well to provide for themselves end up requiring a man who earns more than they, who is mentally stronger than they, and so on. A woman is hypergamous by her very nature, and thus much to the disdain of her insecurity, requires male superiority in order to even find men attractive.

The topic of feminine infantile narcissism presents the perfect opportunity to explore why women are more inherently cunning than are men. It is because women are so incredibly aware of their heightened neediness relative to men that they develop an intrinsic penchant for cunning. They are all too aware the depth and breadth of assistance they require from the opposite sex is greater than the inverse, and so it is this position in large part which fuels their motive for manipulating as a way of life.

Women are in a position of neediness, and yet they cannot fully trust men to give them what they need, so they manipulate men in order to give them what they want, but then resent the men who fall prey to such devices. This phenomenon alone should explain to you the mental hell women occupy, and explain much of their external craziness.

Even the sweetest, kindest, best raised woman is a cunning creature, for it is in the insecurity inherent to reliance that a woman protects herself via the impassioned practice of cunning. I believe that where nature gave man superior strength, women were bestowed pathological cunning. Unfortunately, what was granted to be used as a means of defence, is often in practice used for anything but.

Infantile as they are, women are ill-equipped to handle power, and that which is born out of the insecurity that a man may do her wrong, turns into an exploitative, predatory misuse of power that fuels grandiose narcissism, and thus masculinises her. The aforementioned relationships between the different aspects of the female psyche do not explain it in its entirety, but nonetheless, should accurately depict its root and core.

4.) The Role of Rationalisation & Sophistry:

In contrast to the prior section, this section will be quite short as many of the mechanisms relevant to this behaviour are aptly described in my distillation of solipsism. Whilst solipsism requires greater explanation because of its breadth as “something she is”, rationalisation requires less explanation because it’s merely “something she does.”

Rationalisation is the grand act of seeking justification or explanation for something that has occurred in order to flatter/benefit the person who performed the behaviour. It is not an honest attempt to to understand what causes a behaviour.

Women often do not understand why they feel what they feel, because rationally verbalising primal impulses is difficult if not impossible. She cannot acknowledge that she doesn’t even know why she said or did something as she’ll look stupid. So to save face she will come up with persuasive nonsense to reconcile the irrationality of her behaviour with the aestheticism of something that sounds convincing.

To simplify, she will find something that sounds reasonable to explain her behaviour, regardless of whether this is the true cause of said behaviour. As long as it makes her look and feel good, it is a sufficient rationalisation that serves the purpose she needs it to. Women are far less concerned with communicating the truth about themselves than they are maintaining an acceptable image. Again, this is why it is folly to ask women about women. They’re less interested, capable and incentivised to understand themselves than you are.

5.) In Closing / Relevant Reading:

Here before you lies just a few of the aspects inherent to the operating system of female psychology. It is incomplete, as a complete treatise on the topic is not merely substantial in depth, but likewise of breadth. Time permitting, it is my desire to pen a follow up piece that details other aspects inherent to female nature, linking them in with the aspects previously described in order to create a coherent framework.

Blog:

Fifty Shades of Red
Fifty Shades Redder
The AWALT Misconception
The Myth of Female Rationality – [Part 1] – [Part 2]
The Nature of Women

“The true man wants two things: danger and play. For that reason he wants woman, as the most dangerous plaything.” – Friedrich Nietzsche

Contents:
1.) Introduction
2.) The Maxims
3.) Relevant Reading

1.) Introduction:

The maxims that comprise the bulk of this article are designed to educate men on the nature of women, as well as the nature of themselves in relation to women. Being a loose collection of maxims, the article is easy-to-read by merit of its broken down format. I’ve likewise adopted brevity here in the hope that the most prominent points will stick more easily.

The maxims listed are inclusive, but not exhaustive. As such, these maxims do not compromise the totality of wisdom available on this topic. This is part 3 in a continuing series, you can find part 2 here, and part 1 here.

2.) The Maxims:

IM MAXIM #101 – A woman’s charm comes from her happiness, a man’s, from his confidence. An inconsolable woman’s as unattractive as a timid man.

IM MAXIM #102 – Men must earn value, women must preserve it. It is because of this very reason a woman’s age is taboo whilst a man’s is not. The passage of time fares man better than woman.

IM MAXIM #103 – If you’re pining for a girl, next her. You’ve already lost, for it is she who should be pining for you. Be the prize, not the contestant, prizes never lose, contestants often do.

IM MAXIM #104 – Women play men like Mozart played piano. Men manipulate nature, women manipulate men. Civilization is man’s project, man is woman’s.

IM MAXIM #105 – Narcissism is a suit well-worn by a man, but one ill-fitting on a woman. Male narcissism is attractive to women, but female narcissism is not to man. Corollary: men with dark triad mothers are attracted to narcissistic women.

IM MAXIM #106 – A man must be more narcissistic than a women to attract her. In cultures which worship women, the average woman is more narcissistic than her male counterpart, where this occurs, great swathes of men are found unattractive.

IM MAXIM #107 – A difference in narcissism (female gratitude and male arrogance) is the great equaliser between the beauty of the feminine form, and the lack thereof common to men. When women are equally if not more narcissistic than men, such an equaliser vanishes. Being grandiose never hindered a man’s chances of getting laid.

IM MAXIM #108 – Give a woman less attention than she wants, and she will desire it. Give her as much of it as she wants, and she will not. Women quickly devalue the attention of a man who would attend to her every whim, so be frugal; it is easy for a man to be too generous, but near impossible for him to be too frugal.

IM MAXIM #109 – In matters of women, entitlement and worthiness is a matter of false equivalence; her level of entitlement almost always exceeds what she is worth.

IM MAXIM #110 – If she can find a way to blame a man for her decisions, she will. If she can find a way to avoid guilt, she will. Oft these two intertwine, for women are allergic to responsibility and loathe to be held accountable.

IM MAXIM #111 – Women have a propensity to distract you from your mission, do not permit this.

IM MAXIM #112 – The difference between girls and women is not so great as the difference between boys and men.

IM MAXIM #113 – A woman’s uppity moral facade is no more than a shaming mechanism designed to manipulate men into deference. Be shameless in your convictions, lest you allow her to co-opt you with guilt.

IM MAXIM #114 – Women cannot negotiate attraction with male weakness, but man is attracted to the vulnerability of the feminine. As such, sexually there can be no equality, for the very basis of female attraction necessitates the burden of strength falls squarely on man.

IM MAXIM #115 – Whenever there is a problem between a man and woman, the fault is always assumed to lie with the man and never the woman. And so because of this, the onus to fix the problem lies on the man, not the woman. Even when it is obvious that all if not most the blame lies with a woman, polite society will reject all good sense and insist that liability is man’s to bear. Would it then be a stretch to presuppose that even on the most subconscious of levels, people believe it easier to coerce a man than reason with a woman?

IM MAXIM #116 – Women define themselves by their relationships, men by their achievements. Refer to Maxim #104

IM MAXIM #117 – Female helplessness is an asset prompting charity and sympathy, male helplessness is a liability prompting disgust and aversion. Women are independent by choice, men have no choice.

IM MAXIM #118 – Any man who needs a woman is not a man she’d want. Women want to feel wanted, not needed, they can’t handle being needed. Needing a woman is tantamount to forfeiting her, women are repelled by desire that has transformed into need.

IM MAXIM #119 – Women are the needier sex and hence the deadlier sex; great need necessitates great duplicity.

IM MAXIM #120 – Logic is the realm of men, cunning is the realm of women, whilst strategy is the realm of male ingenuity.

IM MAXIM #121 – A woman’s sex appeal is the fulcrum on which she obtains everything, hence the misery of ugly women. It is woman’s instinct to leverage man’s desire to fulfil her material and emotional needs. Conversely, men merely leverage female desire for their sexual needs. Refer to Maxim #119

IM MAXIM #122 – Women loathe being sexual objectified by lesser men, crafting their disgust for the unworthy into a veneer of moral superiority. Yet hidden within this guise of upright disgust is a depraved desire to be objectified by powerful men. Weak men get nothing, powerful men get perversions.

IM MAXIM #123 – Snagging a high value man is women’s entire purpose for being, although she’s never quite sure she got the best deal possible. Refer to Maxim #116

IM MAXIM #124 – The balcony looks more impressive seen from the street than when stood on, hypergamy doesn’t realise this. Refer to Maxim #123

IM MAXIM #125 – Today’s women don’t believe men are manly enough, and today’s men don’t believe women are womanly enough. Both are correct, androgyny plagues our time.

IM MAXIM #126 – If a woman accuses you of cheating when you haven’t done anything, there’s a high chance she’s projecting her infidelity onto you – abandon her.

IM MAXIM #127 – The reason women set up their sons to be failures is because they can only see things from a female point of view. A son left in the sole care of his mother with no external masculine influence is being set up for failure. The most loving mother cannot adequately guide her son, for she lacks the abstraction necessary to understand or empathise with the male existential viewpoint. These are the limitations of her nature, not a choice.

IM MAXIM #128 – Women need their ex’s to be losers to feel like they made the right choice. If even one is a winner, her hypergamy will realise a glitch in its optimisation and thus the afflicted woman becomes awash with regret.

IM MAXIM #129 – If you place your trust on a woman’s conscience to compel her to do the right thing, then you are a fool by definition.

IM MAXIM #130 – The smarter the woman, the more nimble the rationalisation of her emotion. [See here for more.]

IM MAXIM #131 – Soul mates are top-tier fantasy men women have pedestalised in their collective subconscious. Men don’t have soul mates, they have women they like and women they don’t.

IM MAXIM #132 – As a man, win or lose, you have to take risks; being complacent and passive is a female privilege – men have the burden of performance. Taking risks is core to the personality of masculinity, when nature gave you XY chromosomes, this was ordained. Meek and lazy men get nothing.

IM MAXIM #133 – Masculine women are a poor simulacrum of man, for they capture a man’s fierceness absent his reason or accountability.

IM MAXIM #134 – A woman hates a man who won’t give her what she wants, but she absolutely detests a man who does, and without a fight.

IM MAXIM #135 – As a woman ages, her capacity to attract a top-tier mate decreases, as a man ages, his capacity to attract a top-tier mate increases. In the relationship game women are smarter than men, for they settle as their value is dropping whilst men will settle as their value continues to rise.

IM MAXIM #136 – In matters of fertility and desirability, time is on man’s side, not women’s. From the male viewpoint, women appear to be in a rush to reach ever greater heights of commitment; the truth is, women are in a hurry because they more keenly experience depreciation. Refer to Maxim #102

IM MAXIM #137 – In relationships, an alpha male will give false opportunities for exercising power (like picking curtain colours) whilst subjugating firmly when needed. The feminine ego necessitates an illusion of inconsequential power.

IM MAXIM #138 – If you’re winning, women care about your tiniest grievances, when you’re losing, you’re dead to them.

IM MAXIM #139 – When you’re winning you can be rude and unruly and she will apologise for your mistakes. When you’re losing, she will blame you for her mistakes. Refer to Maxim #138

IM MAXIM #140 – Much like the weak parent gives in to the child to both their eventual detriment, the weak man does the same with his woman.

IM MAXIM #141 – In much the way a man cannot take sex, a woman cannot take commitment. Men seduce women into sex, women seduce men into commitment. Women pitch, men invest.

IM MAXIM #142 – The less emotionally available you are, the more emotionally available she is – the inverse is also true.

IM MAXIM #143 – The trick to defending male space from female influence is to shock 99% of female amygdalae. The remaining 1% will be a: smart, b: psychopaths, c: masochists.

IM MAXIM #144 – Innocence is women’s favoured illusion, and when seemingly present is almost always just that – an illusion.

IM MAXIM #145 – Don’t be honest with women you wish to admire you, if you are too truthful your honesty will offend, and in this offence a woman’s scorn knows no greater enemy than the trifling man who dared connect her with a less comfortable reality.

IM MAXIM #146 – Post break-up women move on quicker than men, they can do this because it’s easier for them to find a replacement, they invest less, and they’re good at rewriting their memories to dismiss everything that was ever good about you.

IM MAXIM #147 – Women make great servants, but poor masters. It is ill-advised to give a woman power should you want the thing she has power over to flourish, or even remain intact and functional.

IM MAXIM #148 – Women are loyal to power at all costs, have it, and you have them, lack it, and they will betray you. Refer to Maxim #139

IM MAXIM #149 – If you are not a high energy dominant man, you’re unlovable to women. Women only love men more ruthless than they are. Any arrangement made in absent of such a personality is one of economic convenience, not love.

IM MAXIM #150 – A single woman is one who cannot secure investment, a single man is one who will not provide it. Refer to Maxim #141

3.) Relevant Reading:

Buy “The Art of Seduction” in the USA
Buy “The Art of Seduction” in the UK
Buy “The Art of Seduction” in Canada
Buy “The Art of Wordly Wisdom” in the USA
Buy “The Art of Wordly Wisdom” in the UK
Buy “The Art of Wordly Wisdom” in Canada
Buy “The Manipulated Man” in the USA
Buy “The Manipulated Man” in the UK
Buy “The Manipulated Man” in Canada
Buy “The Rational Male” in the USA
Buy “The Rational Male” in the UK
Buy “The Rational Male” in Canada

“It is natural for a feeling of mere indifference to exist between men, but between women it is actual enmity. This is due perhaps to the fact that odium figulinum in the case of men, is limited to their everyday affairs, but with women embraces the whole sex; since they have only one kind of business.” – Arthur Schopenhauer

Contents:
1.) Introduction
2.) Mission Before Woman
3.) Man Is Her Mission
4.) Compromise & Womanly Worthiness
5.) In Closing / Relevant Reading

1.) Introduction:

Where testosterone coalesces with creativity, the engine of civilization hums on the fuel of male ambition. Civilization is man’s grand project, an expression of his thought form and aspiration, and although from time to time atypical women will make spontaneous contributions, its distinctly masculine texture remains dominant.

Man has a mission beyond the scope of the home, it is merely the scale of vision and ability to actualise that differs among men. Indeed, we owe modern civilization to men who kept firm to their life’s work and executed their vision, for it is women who bring us into this existence, but men who make said existence glorious. All men have missions, but it is within the provision for humanity through the development of civilization that the greats illuminate the depth and scale of said ambition.

Women are concerned with matters of people, people are women’s business, reproduction with a powerful man is their life goal – they are simple. Where woman’s ambitions are concrete, some may even say mundane, man’s potential is infinite. This is not to say that men do not seek to reproduce, but rather that babies and hearth do not constitute success for a man in the way they do for a woman. A woman who achieves these goals actualises her femininity, her mission is complete, and so rarely will she aspire for greater.

Men on the other hand do not find completion in family life, it is important to them, but it does not encompass the sum of their being. Men do not live for relationships, family and people in quite the way that women do. Whilst the social fabric is the beating heart of all that matters to women, it is but a puzzle piece in a grander picture for men. Being the architects and providers of humanity, man’s focus is expectedly different; the scope of his existence is wider, and thus the extent he must be willing to go more extreme.

To play it safe as a woman brings success, but for a man it elicits nought but failure. A woman married with children is the apotheosis of feminine success, but a married man with children is not. Even should a man not marry nor reproduce the need for a mission persists, for whilst a woman defines herself by her relationships, a man defines himself by his achievements.

2.) Mission Before Woman:

Because woman’s sex drive is far weaker than man’s, on appearance it seems the pursuant man is needier. Being more lustful, he demonstrates greater interest – bestowing woman the power of choice through function of her lower libido. However, the female relies on man’s greater sex drive for every iota of power she has, the great bluff being that because she lusts less, she needs less. In reality, because she lusts less, she is able to extract what she really needs: a man’s emotional and material support.

A man should marry a craft before even thinking to marry a woman, she should be his second love, lest he ruin her with obsessive worship. For women the opposite is healthy, a woman undedicated to her man is an unworthy partner, and so should she emulate man in dedication to the abstract she will assuredly make a poor lover and mother. Men are not women and women are not men, this difference is reflected in all things. The man who worships his wife mimics the feminine, whilst the woman who worships business mimics the masculine.

A successful man is a man who makes something of himself, whereas a successful woman is a woman who manages to secure said man; and so it is from within this dynamic we see the differences between the male and female agenda. Because the female is more dependent, her preoccupation is with the male, whereas because the male is more independent, his preoccupation is with creation.

3.) Man Is Her Mission:

It is unhealthy for a man to live his life in dedication to a woman, for better and more stable dividends are reaped from creation and commerce. It is within the busyness of productivity a man acquires the distance necessary to be more craved by his woman, a boon rather than detriment to the relationship despite her protestations of the contrary.

A woman will always complain when a man has a mission greater than her, for it deprives her the flow of attention she requires to optimally function. Yet in the presence of an indentured man, she will complain of a lack of ambition, an absence of mission. A woman’s complaints bear little if any merit, for in much the way crying is the way of babies, complaining is the way of women. An unambitious man elicits complaint just as much as an ambitious one, for dissatisfaction is emphatic and characteristic of the feminine psyche.

Where man works the world, woman works man; there is not necessarily pre-meditation nor malice in this regard, but rather simply to use men is woman’s nature. A woman need not work the world when she can work a man, and so where woman is man’s desire, man is less commonly a desire than he is a tool.

Truly then the commitment of a powerful man is a woman’s greatest objective, for whether she engages in business or academia, nothing external serves as an effective substitute in the absence of such. A woman who rejects this and plays the game of men past her peak years, is either an unsuccessful woman unable to accomplish her mission, or an outlier with masculine yearnings.

“This is what you deserve. You could be good today. But instead you choose tomorrow.”
– Marcus Aurelius

Contents:
1.) The Philosophy of Time
2.) Drama Avoidance
3.) Create An Elitist Bubble
4.) Love The Grind
5.) In Closing / Relevant Reading

1.) The Philosophy of Time:

An ambitious man feels like he never quite has enough time, for vision is vast and time brief. A man who lives to achieve must thus do so constantly, for considerable gaps in productivity lead to self-loathing. A man who respects time disrespects himself for wasting it, his very reason for being tied inextricably to his productivity.

If an ambitious man is productive, he is happy, if he’s not, he isn’t; he doesn’t achieve because he wants to, but rather, because he has to. Such a man has no choice in the matter, but rather this is the way his life must be, for if his happiness were not tied to his productivity, his life would not be a life worth living.

Only a man without an appreciation for time is content to waste it, for absent ambition he is ignorant of the path forfeited. If the unambitious man could peek into the life of his productive self, he’d believe the greatness strewn in front of him were a con. Consumed by ignorance and unable to appreciate the relationship between greatness and productivity, the mundane man does not even dream dreams, let alone build them.

An actualised man bereft present or future achievement is a shadow of his former self, for achievement is addictive and ambition cruel. A man who’s given up is not really a man, he doesn’t feel like one and nobody sees him as one, for expectations of men are great and the achievements of such men, poor. Many struggle to optimise their time and few master the endeavour, but he who does not try or no longer tries is held in contempt by those who retain a respect for time.

To be an actualised man is not merely to have achieved, but to continue to do so; actualisation does not entail retirement, for a man’s work is not done until his time’s spent. Time is limited and ambition gluttonous, and so a man must separate the worthy from the unworthy, make firm choices, and live with them regardless of their retrospective efficacy.

A man cannot choose to spend time like he can money, for time answers to no man, spending itself until spent. Armed with the knowledge that time is spent regardless of one’s will, the wise man endeavours to spend it as wisely as possible. It is from this knowledge that the productivity obsession is born, born from the realisation that although one’s quantity of time is fixed, its quality need not be.

The ambitious man is all too aware of mortality’s brevity, and with a scope of mind that can tap into the infinite, he is compelled to lead life in the knowledge that nothing he does will ever be enough, but that to not even make the attempt is an act of self-betrayal.

If a man can optimise his time but his competition can’t, he beats the competition. If he and his competition have equal time, but he can do more with less of it, he beats the competition. We are all allocated an amount of time to do with as we see fit, but not all time is of equal quality. It is the man himself who determines the quality of his time, whilst chance determines its quantity.

The quality of time is determined by three core factors: vision, energy and focus. Absent energy a man cannot act, absent vision he cannot strive, and absent focus he cannot actualise. Master all three facets and the quality of one’s time vastly improves, lack even one facet and one’s potential escapes them. Vision alone is inadequate, and this is why many men dream but do not achieve. Vision bereft energy lacks the impetus to manifest, whilst vision bereft focus lacks the discipline to implement.

An underachieving man should pay particular attention to the three facets, and take the time to honestly introspect with himself. He should identify which aspect of his character is lacking, and form a plan of attack for rectifying the dysfunction.

2.) Drama Avoidance:

The internet contains a volume of knowledge beyond even one’s wildest dreams, and yet it is a sea of theatricism full of people violently competing for your attention. The average person’s self-discipline is inferior to the average narcissist’s lust for attention, and so in light of such a reality, one must exercise great care in who they apportion their time.

To be used effectively, the internet requires great discipline. The internet is an attention economy, and so histrionic narcissism sells, and sells big time. This is fine for average people, but a man who wants to become great has no time for such trivialities.

Drama is attention porn and junk information, it psychically robs a man of his focus and time the same way junk food robs it physically. People who create drama do not care about your struggle to be a better man, they are all too happy to take the time you need to build yourself to build their brand. Do not let them.

A man’s time is valuable not only to him, but likewise to those who would prey on his emotions to monopolise his attention. Fortunes are built on capturing attention, and the easiest way to do this is through drama. Everything costs a man time, but not everything gives him value for his time. If productivity is about enhancing the value of time by doing things that enhance the practitioner, then drama at best gives a man nothing for something, and at worst ruins his mental state with no pay-off.

Drama creates hysteria, and hysteria’s real value is to serve its master, not the pawns that it consumes and controls. As such, the optimisation of one’s time all but necessitates the avoidance of drama, great men create drama as a strategic gambit, but they are not pulled into the webs of others.

3.) Create An Elitist Bubble:

It is important for a man to filter the information he consumes, for he becomes what he exposes himself to. If he watches mediocrity, reads mediocrity and discusses mediocrity, then he is destined to be mediocre. When stated so plainly it seems obvious, but in practice it is typically anything but.

A man should not only avoid the dramatic, but likewise the low value. Average people are a drain because the average are mediocre, they have no thirst for greatness nor vision, and thus an aspirational man has not even the slightest hope of relating to them.

Average people aren’t going anywhere in life, so they deify trivia to keep themselves distracted. When a man is not building a life, he is busy commenting on how other’s run theirs; this is a manifestation of the consumer/producer mentality that distinguishes winners from losers and these are the type of people you want to avoid.

The average are fuelled by triviality, but the great do all they can to avoid it. The reason it is so difficult to avoid the trivial is because the average are numerous, and triviality is their prime interest. To become great you must avoid triviality, and in order to achieve this you will find yourself becoming more elitist in your associations. As the standards you hold yourself to rise, so do your standards of others, those who no longer meet the bar must be left behind, lest they drag you back.

4.) Love The Grind:

Unaccomplished men have a tendency to complain about how difficult it is to improve instead of using the energy spent complaining on improving. The trick to grinding is to enjoy the grind. If a man enjoys doing something productive, it doesn’t feel like work and thus he perform better than if he looked at it as work. A man should always go into something with the idea it better completes him to do it, that in doing it he gains, and that gains require effort and effort is normal.

It should be a man’s goal to mentally reach a place where he’s so in love with the game he can’t imagine doing anything but playing it. This is in contrast to those who avoid the game because they fear it, a full conversion from escaping into the mediocrity of pop culture and entertainment, to reading, lifting, networking and creating.

Emotions dictate a lot of what a man does and doesn’t do regardless of how weak or strong his logic is. A negative perception of a task makes it subjectively difficult regardless of whether said task is objectively difficult, as such a man should construct positive perceptions for difficult tasks if he seeks greatness.

5.) In Closing / Relevant Reading:

A man can build himself a great life only if he pursues the difficult and relishes the pain of challenge. He should not waste time on regret, as although one should not aspire to squander time, they should forgive themselves for doing so; punishing one’s self for past frivolity is an act of present frivolity – carpe diem.

Book(s):

Mastery

Blog:

Champion’s Mentality
Monk Mode

“One who deceives will always find those who allow themselves to be deceived.” – Niccolo Machiavelli

Contents:
1.) Introduction
2.) The Maxims
3.) Relevant Reading / In Closing

1.) Introduction:

Welcome to part 3 in my series of Machiavellian maxims, you know the drill by now, contained within is a pithy collection of Machiavellian wisdom. If you’ve not read anything in this series before, you can find part 1 here, and part 2 here.

2.) The Maxims:

1. – In matters of persuasion one should appeal to emotion, not reason. Where this fails, use sophistry.

2. – Logical fallacies double as effective Machiavellian power plays, for logic is antithetical to cunning.

3. – Anticipate your opponent’s moves, preempting where possible and implementing contingencies where not.

4. – An intellectual more than anybody must become Machiavellian, for it is this and this alone that will save them from predacious egos. [See More Here.]

5. – Delivery is more persuasive than substance, optimise appearance and strike when the time is right, for masterful delivery can make even the mundane into magic.

6. – In matters of defection it is more effective to offer revenge than money.

7. – It is foolish to sentimentally gauge the chance of betrayal, but rather, one should assess the incentive and capacity for doing so. Offer disincentives to maximise loyalty.

8. – Your most intimate enemies will admire you, copy you and take all your advice only to use it for an agenda that undermines yours.

9. – Each personality is a puzzle in which favour can be unlocked by demonstrating the traits desired by the personality, learn a personality and complement it to influence it.

10. – Apologies are oft ineffectual, for they stir up resentment and exacerbate matters by highlighting wrongdoing. A leader should not show regret, he should ignore, deny acknowledgement, or spin a negative into a positive. To regret is to show weakness and invite belittlement.

11. – Appear unappealing to those who don’t appeal to you, for it is better to be undesired than to be desired by the undesirable.

12. – To permit insolence from one is to court it from all; crush the insolent or deprive them a platform, lest you earn a reputation for timidity.

13. – The most terrible action can be bred from the best of intention. Be mindful of bad advice from the well intended, they may mean well but unintentional or not, their misinformation will destroy you.

14. – The power players have learned to harness the zealous delusions of their pawns to dress unvirtuous agendas in the clothing of
nobility.

15. – Anybody who can conceive of evil can enact it.

16. – Conceal your intentions whilst ascertaining the competition’s, he who has the most correct data wins; always be mindful of misinformation.

17. – Most believe one should never be ruthless (because it’s evil) or that one should always be ruthless (because otherwise you’re weak). Both are wrong.

18. – Provocation is an invitation to act in a way that reduce’s one’s power; as such, ignoring is a skill any would-be Machiavellian would do well to master.

19. – Mastery of interpersonal psychology is micro Machiavellianism, mastery of military strategy is macro Machiavellianism and business strategy is both.

20. – Transactional analysis: Every time somebody asks you a question, they want you to give them value, or they’re looking to sabotage you. Be mindful of the blur between curiosity and inquisition.

21. – Strive for success but be cautious of it, for one who knows not how to handle it will be robbed of the qualities that made them great; rampant success introduces an overconfidence that diminishes reason and a complacency that destroys drive – do not be a victim of your success.

22. – The histrionic weaponises their storytelling talent on the slightest whim, for blackmail is how they obtain and chaos is how they indulge. Be wary the histrionic, for they take root and disrupt venomously like a toxin.

23. – Should you see the trifecta of: confrontation, dismissiveness and attention seeking – you have yourself a histrionic. Tread on their egg shells and succumb to aggressive sensitivity, or reject them by refusing to deign acknowledgement.

24. – Absence increases respect only when the absence is legitimate. If you ignore somebody but are observed by the ignored engaging others, you are not absent, and so elicit disrespect rather than respect. True absence is in disappearance, not observable silence.

25. – It’s subtler to deprive than to inflict. Inflict to make a statement, deprive to attack with the stealth of plausible deniability.

26. – If you don’t know how to play the game, people do not respect you, if you play the game, people think you’re untrustworthy. If one must choose, it is always better to be distrusted than disrespected.

27. – The unfocused and the stupid are easily made the puppets and pawns of those who manufacture controversy for nothing but their own advantage.

28. – When dealing with a troublesome women, a man must realise the presumption of innocence works in her favour. Reframe her presumed innocence, keep the focus on her and make veiled threats with pleasant language.

29. – Neither cuteness nor beauty translates into virtue, but the charm of such things leads the idiot to believe it does.

30. – Not addressing the concerns of lieutenants is one of the gravest mistakes a general can make. Dismissal will cost morale, loyalty and cohesion.

31. – The paranoid assume predation, and so in their lack of finesse make their distrust obvious eliciting nought but disdain.

32. – If you want power you have to become highly resistant to provocation, the weak will always try to provoke you to siphon your
credibility.

33. – Do not reward insolence, it is far more efficient to silently dismiss than loudly dispute. Shows of force are only necessary should one wish to set an example.

34. – Never reward passive aggressiveness, for it is merely a precursor to insolence.

35. – The fewer words you need to explain, the likelier you are believed. This is why honest justification is intuited as dishonest – it doth protest too much.

36. – It is pointless to explain why you’re rejecting somebody because they will disdain the rejection more than they appreciate the reasoning behind your decision.

37. – The rejected will use your reason for denying them as ammunition for a smear campaign; it is wiser to deprive them data than fuel their fire. Concealment trumps transparency in matters of rejection.

38. – You may be tempted to gloat about why you’re rejecting a person, but as a matter of class and concealment, know when to stop.

39. – Cost-benefit hassle to reward ratio, where hassle exceeds reward, association or investment is unprofitable.

40. – Be very suspicious of neutral people, but be as neutral as feasible yourself; polarise only when necessary.

41. – As a scientist tests his hypotheses a Machiavellian should test his strategies.

42. – Utilise ambiguity as bait to ascertain interest.

43. – You should be civil to strangers but it should not be easy to become your friend, only lower the drawbridge for the worthy. A man who welcomes everybody into his kingdom will soon enough have no kingdom to speak of; what is true of countries is likewise of men. Pick your friends carefully.

44. – The most common way people inadvertently reveal their hand is through projection.

45. – People’s assumptions normally stem from the opinions they hold of themselves, the more emotional the individual, the more likely they are projecting.

46. – The more people want to believe, the easier it is to sell; the less people want to believe, the easier it is to hide.

47. – Use finesse when asking questions, lest you grant the impression you’re interrogating and arouse suspicions.

48. – Do not quibble over small sums or tiny favours, for the pettier you are, the smaller you seem.

49. – Misdirection is superior to omission in matters of concealment.

50. – The quickest way to make an ally is to pay up, and the quickest way to make an enemy? Not paying up.

51. – In matters of negotiation, once you identify the insecurities of the other party you have the power. If they are timid, identify their insecurities and spontaneously demonstrate qualities that assuage their fears. If they are ruthless, leverage their insecurities to degrade their ability to negotiate for more favourable terms.

52. – Find out what a person wants and you’re a step closer to knowing what they need. From here discern what they fear losing, and what they want but can’t get. Wherever there is dependence there is fear, and wherever there is fear there is leverage. Find the fear and acquire leverage.

53. – Regardless of who you deal with, be he virtuous or unvirtuous, it always pays to know a man’s fears.

54. – Whoever is willing to go further will invariably win, for he who denies a winning strategy on moral grounds forfeits victory.

3.) Relevant Reading / In Closing:

To promote growth of the the dark triad forum, I shall keep $5 Patreon slots open for the month of May. You can join here, but you should be aware that you will not get access to the forum until the beginning of June.

If you enjoyed these maxims, check out the following.

Blog:

Machiavellian Maxims (Part 1)
Machiavellian Maxims (Part 2)

Books:

The Art of War
The Art of Worldly Wisdom
Rochefoucauld’s Maxims

Which maxims are your favourites? Let me know in the comments.

“Do not leave your reputation to chance or gossip; it is your life’s artwork, and you must craft it, hone it, and display it with the care of an artist.” – Robert Greene

Contents:
1.) Introduction
2.) What The Book Lacks
3.) The Spectral Nature of The Laws
4.) Perfecting The Learning Process
5.) In Closing

1.) Introduction:

The 48 Laws of Power is the modern man’s Machiavellian bible; based on the incisive strategic thought of prominent classical thinkers Niccolo Machiavelli and Baltasar Gracian, Robert Greene sets out to elucidate the reader on the nature of power. He explores power by dissecting its elements, explaining each element’s uses, and exemplifying its manifestation through regaling historic tales of Europe’s elite.

The 48 Laws of Power is so thoroughly potent in its capacity to teach cunning, that it is not only a bestseller, but likewise the most loaned book in U.S prison libraries. In some prisons the book is even banned, as such one is almost certain that if the text had been released in an earlier era, it would have ended up on the Vatican’s list of forbidden texts in the same way Machiavelli’s “The Prince” did.

2.) What The Book Lacks:

It’s important for the aspiring Machiavellian to know what The 48 Laws of Power lacks in order to compensate for the gap in understanding they will be left with. Some of the things left unsaid in the text will be outlined within the confines of this essay, whilst others will require further reading.

The 48 Laws of Power is not a complete treatise on power. Although a detailed set of in-depth maxims, it focuses predominantly on the micro and omits near all mention of the macro. It focuses on the optimisation of personal affects to enhance social power, but does not offer strategic models or blueprints.

Realising The 48 Laws of Power was an incomplete treatise, Greene released The 33 Strategies of War. The 33 Strategies is the The 48 Law’s complementary sister text, because where the 48 Laws focuses on the micro, The 33 Strategies focuses on the macro. Only once an individual has studied both texts will they possess a complete understanding of the Machiavellian world that Greene elucidates, neither book is sufficient in and of itself.

To expound on what I mean by this, The 48 Laws of Power will make you shrewder with people, but it won’t help you formulate effective business strategies. Whilst the 33 Strategies of War will arm a man with the understanding necessary to engage in corporate warfare, it will do little to assist him interpersonally. As such, neither is a comprehensive education in power, but together they form a complete and unassailable treatise. Combine these texts with Machiavelli’s “The Prince”, and one has both the psychological tools and philosophical understanding to develop a masterful competency in cunning.

The examples used to illustrate the book’s laws take place among a social class most cannot relate to in an era alien to all who live today. As such, it is necessary to transfer the elements of power represented in a classical paradigm into a contemporary one. Whilst competent abstract thinkers will have no problem doing this, the average person will find it challenging to translate some of the laws into a modern context and will as such struggle to truly understand the precepts of the text.

Greene exposes the granular building blocks of power, but that’s where he stops. The book does not provide methodological instruction to help the reader implement the laws. And likewise, it does not teach the reader which law takes precedence when two contradicting laws are relevant to one’s situation. It is down to the reader to work these things out for themselves, and if they cannot, they will be unable to derive the entirety of what the book has to offer.

3.) The Spectral Nature of The Laws:

A common erroneous tendency I have noticed in those studying The 48 Laws is to treat the laws too rigidly, ironic, considering law 48 is “assume formlessness”, the advocation of adaptability as a strategem. In so much as one should adapt their strategy based on the ever-changing nature of the battlefield, one should likewise tailor each stratagem to suit the situation they find themselves in.

Generally one should not outshine the master, but it is important to remember that “generally” does not equate to “never.” There will come a time when defying a law is necessary to maximise your options.

Say your boss takes the credit for all your hard work and does not properly respect or compensate you. This makes you want to leave, and you suspect your boss wants to fire you anyway. In a meeting with your boss and your bosses’ boss, it would pay to outshine your boss. By impressing your bosses’ boss, you gain the favour of somebody more important and become less disposable. Double this up with an anonymous smear campaign of your boss, and perhaps your boss will be fired by his boss and you will retain your job.

After all it was your boss that was the problem, not the job. If the gambit fails, your already anticipated exit will likely hasten, but with little to lose the gamble is worth it.

The laws are generalised aspects of power, moldable to the dynamics of the situation in hand. When applying a law, one should generally consider two things: is the timing right? (law 35) and is the current strategy working? (law 48). If the answer to the first question is yes and the second no, one should use a law reversal. If the answer to the first and second questions is no, continue as you are, mindful to execute a law reversal at an opportune moment.

“Assume formlessness” was specifically chosen as the final law because it is the single stratagem that encompasses and concludes all others. There is no one specific way of perceiving or using a law, and although not specifically and explicitly communicating this, Robert Greene demonstrates the dual nature of laws by exploring their reversals. In the same way that an organism must adapt to its environment for natural selection to favour it, the changing tides of power demand the same of the Machiavellian.

Do not see the laws as monolithic entities, but rather as stratagems that encompass a contradicting and varied nature. Each law falls on a spectrum between 0 and 100, the law in its default form is the law at 100, whilst the reversal is the law at 0. You may employ the law at different gradations and still effectively utilise the power of said law. Although a law at 0 will utilise the same element of power as a law at 100, it will be completely antithetical to it.

With the law “always say less than necessary” for example, 100 would be the default interpretation of the law, meaning one would say as little as necessary to communicate. The reversal would be the same law of power at 0 on the spectrum, meaning the individual would speak verbosely without revealing any substance. This bombards the victim with excess information, which is not merely concealment, but likewise distractive. That which is typically a defensive move gains a subtle attacking component when reversed.

The mid-point at 50 would be to reveal information, but keep your trump card hidden. Essentially, the individual would say less than necessary whilst appearing open. Each law thus falls on a spectrum and can be rotated and rendered in any way one’s imagination deems fit, to know when and how to apply a law is to know the art of finesse. I cannot teach you how to do this through essays, essay reading will only make you aware of the possibility. To teach the skill would require one-on-one tutelage and some practice.

4.) Perfecting The Learning Process:

If one simply reads The 48 Laws of Power as quickly as possible, they do themselves a disservice. It is a book that should be read at one’s pace and savoured. My recommendation for learning the text is as follows:

– Read a law and do your best to understand it. See if you can transfer the historical example into a contemporary one, this will allow you to better relate to the aspect of power being discussed.

– Read the law again, this time taking notes on what you think are the key points which make up the crux of the law. Write down any hypothetical examples relevant to the law you can come up with.

– Listen to the law in question narrated on YouTube (or buy the audiobook) to promote further internalisation. If I’ve written an essay on the law in question, you can glean understanding from my insights. My essays on the laws will appear on this page. Eventually I’ll have a write-up on all the laws.

– Analyse present and past situations for examples of where the law took place (efficacy of this step is obviously limited by the strength of your memory) – this will compound your understanding of a law’s applicability on top of any hypothetical examples you came up with.

– Practice exercising the laws defensively with your social groups.

– Join a disposable social group (a club of some sort you don’t really care about) where you can practice a more aggressive use of the laws without any meaningful or lasting consequence.

– Utilise the laws aggressively with your main social groups should you deem it necessary.

5.) In Closing:

The 48 Laws of Power, The 33 Strategies of War and The Prince are the three principal books on which an aspiring Machiavellian should base their understanding of cunning. As a recommended reading order, I advise first reading The Prince in order to acquaint yourself with the holistic philosophical and ethical viewpoint of the Machiavellian. This should be followed up with a reading on The 48 Laws of Power, as the text will acquaint the reader with people’s personal affects and teach them how to handle these.

The third and final book that makes up the core foundation of Machiavellian knowledge is The 33 Strategies of War. If you are an entrepreneur or businessman, you will find the strategies outlined in The 33 Strategies of War to be invaluable. Essentially the text teaches one how to wage warfare on a military scale, and being on the institutional scale, that which applies to the military is likewise transferable to the corporate.

Each foundational text will expand and change the way you think about people and power. Machiavelli’s The Prince will encourage you to critically examine the Judeo-Christian view of morality and how it relates to political power – this is why the Vatican originally banned it. The 48 Laws of Power will teach you to behave in a way that elicits respect from your peers, whilst enhancing your perception of their manipulations. And The 33 Strategies of War will open your eyes to strategy on a larger scale, highlighting the relationship between human and institutional behaviour.

These three texts form the foundational fulcrum necessary to make a Machiavellian of a man. Additional texts on power are out there, but they are merely additive rather than necessitative for the power and strategy aficionado.

NOTE: $5 patron slots for dark triad forum access are open until the end of the month.

Blog:

How To Apply The 48 Laws of Power: Machiavellian Social Competencies
Machiavellian Thinking vs. Conventional Logic

Book(s):

The Prince
The 48 Laws of Power
The 33 Strategies of War

“Don’t lower your expectations to meet your performance. Raise your level of performance to meet your expectations.” – Ralph Marston

Contents:
1.) Introduction
2.) The Risks of Modafinil
3.) How To Start Using Modafinil Safely
4.) The Benefits of Modafinil
5.) In Closing / Relevant Reading

1.) Introduction:

So you’re in Monk Mode, but you find yourself regularly lacking the energy and focus you need to complete all the tasks you assign yourself. You find it hard to concentrate when reading books, and your workouts suck because you get tired quickly. What do you do about it? Other than getting your testosterone, estrogen and thyroid checked, you start taking modafinil.

Some of the most influential people throughout mankind’s history have done drugs. Freud developed his psychoanalytic theory under the influence of pharmaceutical grade cocaine, Winston Churchill took nitrous oxide and Francis Crick, was supposedly (it’s disputed) high on LSD when he discovered DNA. Like it or not and irrespective of stigma, sourced well and dosed correctly chemical compounds can help an individual think in new ways and perform at an elite level.

Now whilst I shan’t ever be advocating the consumption of outlawed narcotics here at Illimitable Men, there are a class of substances known as nootropics that can greatly enhance a whole range of things. Effects vary from the enhancement of creativity and memory, to the alleviation of depression and fatigue.

In fact, you probably unknowingly take at least one nootropic everyday: caffeine. Caffeine is the world’s most famous nootropic, relied upon and consumed by millions day in, day out. Many people will shamelessly admit to a caffeine addiction because it’s socially acceptable and carries no stigma, but at its essence caffeine addiction is a biological addiction.

The main problem with caffeine is that tolerance is developed quickly. It’s a diuretic (you keep needing to go to the toilet, which interrupts your productive phases) and positive effects only last for a few hours (at most) before another dose is needed, and so when caffeine wears off, the individual experiences a horrible crash. Take it for too long and you become dependent, caffeine is habit-forming.

Modafinil is one of the strongest nootropics on the market, in truth I’d say its potency puts it somewhere between a drug and a nootropic, as it’s too weak to be a drug but too strong to be a nootropic. Luckily for you, the powers that be disagree with my assessment and classify modafinil as a nootropic off-label and a prescription medicine on-label. As such getting hold of the stuff is simple, and to my knowledge there is no penalty for possessing it (but this may vary by jurisdiction, so do research on the laws in your country before ordering anything.)

In the US under the controlled substances act, modafinil is categorised as a schedule IV drug, meaning to legally purchase the compound you need a prescription for narcolepsy or shift work sleep disorder, however in some instances it is given for sleep apnea. Most people cannot get a prescription from their doctor for modafinil, or even if they can, find it is cheaper to buy it online than with medical insurance. I’ll tell you exactly where you can source it from a reputable supplier further in.

2.) The Risks of Modafinil:

When one first takes modafinil they must exercise extreme caution, because before you start taking it you don’t know how high or low your body’s natural tolerance is.

According to my research, there are effectively three types of responders: non-responders, standard responders and sensitive responders. Most of the advice on “getting started with modafinil” out there is aimed at standard responders, and so if you’re a sensitive responder and take the conventional advice on dosing, you’re going to have a horrible, frightening experience with it. Nobody else will tell you this, you’ve heard it here first.

The reason you won’t hear this anywhere else is because either A: the blogger/vlogger discussing their experience with modafinil is a standard responder and so didn’t need to be cautious or B: the site you’re on actually sells modafinil and doesn’t want to persuade you out of a purchase, so they’ll omit if not play down the compound’s potential risks.

I’m not a standard responder (I’m a sensitive responder) and I don’t sell modafinil, so I can speak from a prudentialist perspective and guide you on how to use modafinil off-label in the safest way possible.

When you’ve never taken a substance before and want to try it for the first time, it is in your interest to assume you are a sensitive responder. If you’re not, you can scale up your dosage to obtain the desired effects. If you are, you save yourself from experiencing a long list of adverse side effects. So if you’ve never taken modafinil before, but want to try it, assume you’re a sensitive responder.

If you assume you are a standard responder and you’re not, you can experience any combination of the following side effects:

– Loss of consciousness
– Dizziness (a focus so strong it feels too intense to look at things or make sudden movements)
– Cardiac arrhythmia (irregular heartbeat)
– Heart palpitations (stronger heartbeat)
– Complete loss of appetite (you try to eat, take two mouthfuls and feel as if you’re full)
– Migraines
– Increased anxiety/paranoia
– A tight throbbing sensation in the throat

I have experienced all of the above side effects (yes, I even blacked out), and yet I still recommend this substance. Why? Because it obliterates fatigue, increases concentration and improves your motivation and sense of well-being. That is of course assuming, you take it correctly.

All the adverse effects I experienced were due to being a sensitive responder who didn’t know how to take it correctly, I didn’t know how to take it correctly because there was a lack of pre-existing information on how sensitive responders should dose. I had to single-handedly figure out how to take modafinil safely as a sensitive responder, and having suffered as a guinea pig on your behalf, you can avoid the negative effects by learning from my mistakes.

The first time I ordered modafinil I was told to take 100mg of modalert (that’s half a tablet) on an empty stomach. This will do absolutely nothing if you’re a non-responder, and the effects will kick in very quickly (within a minute) if you’re a standard responder.

However this is what nobody else will tell you: if you’re a sensitive responder, you will black out and then feel extremely dizzy for anywhere up to 2 hours, because 100mg on an empty stomach constitutes an overdose due to your naturally low tolerance level. The first time I took modafinil was the one time I blacked out on it. I blacked out because the instructions provided were bogus, they were bogus because they assumed a base level tolerance that was too high. As I said earlier, for the sake of one’s safety it should be assumed you are a sensitive responder until proven otherwise.

3.) How To Start Using Modafinil Safely:

The first time you take modafinil should not be on an empty stomach, because taking it on an empty stomach leads to vastly increased potency of the compound and can completely overwhelm you with dizziness.

As for dose, do not take any more than 50mg. Assuming you possess the modalert 200 variant, the pill is 200mg and thus a quarter of a pill is 50mg. Use a sharp knife or pill cutter to cut the pill in half (pill cutters are better as they are more precise), then cut it in half again. If you are sensitive, this will stop you from blacking out because less pill equals lower dosage. 200mg (an entire pill) is far too high a dose for sensitive responders.

You should eat at least 3 large eggs or 5 regular eggs before taking modafinil, the choline will prevent you from getting migraines, and if you combine this with ample hydration, you won’t experience any headaches.

To minimise the risk of heart palpitations or cardiac issues, you should supplement with 200mg of L-Theanine. If you still experience cardiac issues after taking modafinil, try upping your L-Theanine supplementation to 400mg. If you have no luck there, try upping to 600mg. If you continue to have problems, do not increase your L-Theanine supplementation any further. Modafinil is no good for you and you should avoid it, it is not worth hurting your heart to enjoy a nootropic.

Modafinil requires timing if you do not want to upset your sleeping pattern. The substance has a half-life of 16 hours, but sleep should be attainable 9-12 hours after ingestion. Assuming you sleep 8 hours a day, you should take it within the first 4 hours of being awake. If you woke up at 11am and took it at 3pm, you’d be able to go to sleep by 3am. If you woke up at 5am and took it at 8am, you’d be able to sleep by 8pm. Time your dose correctly to avoid a sleepless night.

You hear a lot of nonsense about people suffering from modafinil-induced insomnia, but this is because they have stupidly popped an entire pill at a party late in the evening, mixed it with alcohol, and now idiotically wonder whilst they’re shivering in a stranger’s bed blacking out over and over again at 8am the next day.

The simple fact of the matter is if you take modafinil like an idiotic infant at a college party, it will harm you. If you take it sensibly, it will enhance you.

You should not drink tea, coffee or alcohol when taking modafinil. Caffeine interacts with modafinil, significantly increasing the chances you experience heart palpitations and anxiety. Despite it’s L-Theanine content, even green tea can cause these problems due to its caffeine content. This is why when on modafinil, I recommend supplementing with L-Theanine rather than drinking green tea; this way you get the L-Theanine you need to balance yourself without bringing caffeine into the mix.

Personally I haven’t noticed any tolerance build-up, and like initial sensitivity, whether one builds a tolerance will vary from individual to individual. Nonetheless, if you’re a sensitive responder taking a quarter of a pill a day, 40 pills will last you just over 5 months. Of course if you do build tolerance, you will get through more quicker. Those who build tolerance have reported being able to keep tolerance down by cycling modafinil 5 days on and 2 days off, so if you do build tolerance, this is worth trying.

As a final note, you should plan your day out before taking modafinil, and then immediately set to enacting your plan once you’ve taken it. If you do not, you may find yourself wasting your enhanced energy and focus on nonsense. Whilst modafinil most certainly does give you focus, it does not give you discipline. If you choose to read clickbait or have conversations on social media, this is precisely what you’ll waste hours upon hours doing. Be mindful, and use this time of enhanced faculty to do the things that really matter.

In summary:

– Take no more than 50mg – this is a low dose that will prevent dizziness/fainting
– Take modafinil shortly AFTER food, not before or with – this will reduce its potency
– Drink lots of water to prevents headaches
– Eat at least 3 large eggs or 5 regular ones before taking modafinil – this prevents migraines
– Supplement with 200mg of L-Theanine – this prevents heart palpitations and anxiety
– Do not drink any tea or coffee, as caffeine will interact with the modafinil and potentiate it
– Do not drink alcohol with modafinil, it can lead to blackouts and memory loss

4.) The Benefits of Modafinil:

On modafinil, you will stop being lazy and become motivated, things that normally feel like a chore won’t feel like one. If you are constantly tired, you will stop feeling tired. If you have problems concentrating, concentrating will become easy. Modafinil allows you to unlock your full potential and properly seize the day, there is nothing else quite like it to reliably boost productivity.

Many people’s general fatigue stems from low dopamine, and modafinil fixes this by prohibiting dopamine transportation, allowing greater dopamine to accrue in the brain.

Many people report elevated mood when taking modafinil, which is probably an effect of increased dopamine resulting in the alleviation of sub-clinical depression. That is to say, the person in question unknowingly suffers from sub-clinical depression due to low dopamine, and the dopamine increase caused by modafinil has alleviated this, resulting in a greater sense of well-being.

– Increased aggressiveness:

Conventional sites classify this as an adverse side effect and I can see situations in which it could prove unhelpful, but considering the vast majority of men are meek and unassertive nowadays, I think it’s more of a benefit than a detriment. Men looking to reclaim their masculinity will probably agree with me on this.

Modafinil will make you bolder and more short with people. When I’m on modafinil, I’m less conflict avoidant. It’s not so bad it sends you into a neurotic rage, but it certainly lowers your tolerance for nonsense. Let’s put it another way: if you are the kind of person who is normally too scared to ask for things, you won’t feel that way when you’re on modafinil.

– Reduced appetite/weight loss:

On low doses of modafinil there is a greater disinterest in eating, you may eat if you desire it, but you won’t actually feel hungry. If you want to reduce calorie consumption in order to lose body fat, or you wish to keep to a certain feeding window because you’re fasting, this aspect is incredibly useful. Many people report weight loss after consuming modafinil for some time.

– Addiction suppression:

People seek dopamine from unhealthy consumption, such as eating junk food, smoking or doing drugs. As modafinil boosts dopamine, unhealthy addictions will fall to the wayside. There are reports of smoker giving up cigarettes, and even preliminary research looking at whether modafinil can be used to cure cocaine addiction.

Modafinil bonds to the same receptor sites in the brain as cocaine by increasing dopamine, except unlike cocaine the effects last significantly longer and it does not make the user feel high. You could probably use modafinil to beat a cocaine addiction, although as someone who’s never been addicted to cocaine, I’m unable to test this hypothesis for myself.

– Enhanced cognition:

Greater focus and clearer thoughts, improved short-term memory recall and superior concentration. It may increase or decrease your creativity, but this factor seems to vary from individual to individual. According to the twitter poll I conducted on self-reported modafinil users, it is more likely to increase rather than decrease creativity, but will most likely have no bearing on it.

– Fatigue alleviation:

Modafinil does not come on suddenly and intensely unless you take a dose your body can’t handle. It is not like other stimulants such as caffeine or cocaine where you will feel immediately wired, quickly reach a peak and then crash. Modafinil does not wire you, but rather it will imbue you with an increased sense of effortless concentration. Any sense of fatigue that was bogging you down will immediately clear up, and you will feel more energetic.

5.) In Closing / Relevant Reading:

What kind of people take modafinil? Winners take modafinil, be they students at ivy league colleges, high-powered lawyers or top finance execs. Winners take modafinil because they’re ambitious, driven, and want to perform at their best. There are few other substances out there that can give you a kick in the ass the way modafinil does, and as long as you use it intelligently you can get an edge without paying in pain.

As for sourcing Modafinil, there are many different vendors of modafinil on the internet, some sell fake products, others sell generics rather than the branded stuff. I got my modafinil from Modafinil Cat. Modafinil Cat has a great tracking service and the modafinil they sell is 100% legit pharmaceutical grade straight from the manufacturers in India, if you want good stuff they’re your guys.

PLEASE NOTE: I am not a medical professional and thus the information contained herein does not constitute medical advice and should not be construed as such. This information is purely for educational purposes.

You can buy L-Theanine here, and Modafinil here.

Other articles you may be interested in:

Champion’s Mentality
Monk Mode
How To Be Happy

“The only difference between a cult and a religion is the amount of real estate they own.” – Frank Zappa

Contents:
1.) Introduction – Summarising The Law
2.) Notes On The Law
3.) Relevant Reading

1.) Introduction – Summarising The Law:

Law 27 is a particularly important law, for the need to believe is a universal aspect of the human character that can be leveraged into acquiring great wealth and fame. The need to believe in the mysterious, the beautiful, and the ideal is a source of great passion and comfort, and yet it is only by exploitation of this very mechanism that influence can be achieved.

Law 27 touches upon the single aspect of the human psyche that dictates the form of all human thought and action, as well as the movement of capital that accompanies it. This is why ideology, marketing, subculture and religion all frenetically compete to influence the people with their various interpretations of reality, for those who buy into their views reward them politically and financially.

Belief and gullibility are inextricably intertwined, for gullibility finds its root in greed, escape, and the want of happiness, things which exist in all minds. All minds are suggestible, it is just that some are convinced to a greater degree and with less effort than others. The purview of this law is to exploit the aforementioned needs by building belief systems from them that will act as a funnel for personal success.

Remember, to form a cult is not to merely impress a mind, but rather, to capture it by defining the very filter with which it interprets its surrounding reality.

2.) Notes On The Law:

• A following is the cultural embodiment of an army, your most zealous followers will preserve your reputation by fighting your detractors.

• With a following in tow, the enforcement of your will becomes automated. Your followers will act as relays for your ideas, pushing your agenda and converting others to your cause. Like any good business, a successful faith outsources proselytisation to its most fervent pawns.

• People are blessed with the ability to adapt to a harsh reality, but cursed with a need to believe in delightful implausibilities.

• The allure of the unreal is the grace of transcendence, fantasy bestows escape from mediocrity, and it is in this desire gullibility finds partial form.

• Cult creation relies on a central point of worship, a person or thing that symbolises a group’s shared values. Cult leaders appear to be the living personification of the ideals, norms and values that the wider group holds dear.

• In the absence of religion there is a power vacuum, the people’s need to believe remains, but the cult which previously sustained the need is absent. As such, people turn to smaller and less ancient cults, swapping religion for ideology in the unending quest to understand a cold world and experience a better tomorrow.

• The gullible outsource their agency to faith, rationalising failure as fate.

• The greater your number of followers, the easier it becomes to acquire new ones; this is preselection at work.

• A sophistic charlatan is infallible to his cult, misfortunes are rationalised around him rather than attributed to him.

• In groups, people are more emotional and less capable of reasoning – see mob mentality.

• In the midst of a mob, passion is contagious and a naysayer’s doubt is quickly dispelled by riled up sycophants.

• Crowds can be molded into followers, and followers can be molded into cultists. It is in a cult leader’s interests to have stupid followers, because they are more passionate and contagious in their conversion of non-believers, incapable of thinking critically they are less likely to question the leadership. [See Law 21 – Play a Sucker to Catch a Sucker.]

• Real power is garnered by appealing to the wishes, opinions and preferences of the uneducated masses; it is not earned by appealing to the reason of an intellectual minority.

• Inculcate an optimism bias by conflating desire with probability of outcome. It is easier to misrepresent probability when the objective is desired and the want to believe is present, one only need invent a rhetorically plausible methodology to sway the gullible.

• By rationalising backwards from a desire, optimism bias can be created by customising a narrative to fit desire as opposed to observing the material facts and planning in harmony with them. The prior form of reasoning is a top-down approach driven by dogma and unconcerned with probability, the latter is a bottom-up approach driven by a cost-benefit risk/reward analysis pegged to probability. The gullible reason with the prior, the rational with the latter.

• To create a cult you need to bring attention to yourself, the best way to gain attention is to make large but vague promises.

• Emphasise the sensual over the intellectual, make your ambiguity attractive by using invigorating and passionate language, you can even make up new words to explain vague concepts. Employing language in this way makes people think you’re a type of sage full of insight and expertise. Be elaborate, visual and descriptive in your language, for this is far more compelling than explaining the mundanities of a thing.

• A Machiavellian uses science to manipulate rather than educate, borrowing the authenticity of scientific factuality and perverting it to lend plausibility to the bogus. Such a thing can be achieved through the employ of falsified data, the deliberate misinterpretation of findings and statistical misrepresentation.

• One must balance ambiguity against specificity, being careful not to utilise too much of either. Too much ambiguity makes you untrustworthy, whilst too much specificity will obligate you to promises and expectations that run counter to your interests. To condense the idea into a maxim: be vague, but not empty. [See Law 20 – Do Not Commit To Anyone.]

• Keep your ambiguous promises simple, most lack the patience to try to understand something and want a simple solution for their problems. Promise a simple solution without being too specific, and you will appear revolutionary, greatly bolstering the numbers who join your ranks. [See Law 21 – and Law 08]

• Boredom and scepticism are a threat to the narrative you peddle, sceptics will expose you and the bored will desert you.

• To prevent abandonment and clear thinking, overwhelm the senses. Attack smell, sight and sound, using theatricism to bewilder and entice.

• Emulate the form and structure of religion to give your cult power, create rituals and ranks with religious overtones and be sure to require sacrifices from your followers. You must be careful with how you ask for sacrifice, as you do not want to seem greedy. Offer your service for free, but require a type of emotional sacrifice or point to a grand social cause that will inevitably necessitate the donation of money or possessions. By asking for nothing directly, you only seem more magnificent.

• Behave like a prophet, speak in proverbs and quote profound observations to give yourself an air of authority and mysticism.

• No matter how rich you become from your cult, you must be careful not to seem greedy.

• When you become rich from your follower’s contributions, surround yourself with luxury, but disguise how your income was earned. Attribute your wealth to the beliefs your cult espouses, rather than the donations it receives from it members. Surrounded by opulence, your followers will naively believe they can be as prosperous as you if only they believe more fervently and do as you do.

• Utilise the polarisation strategy, create a very strong us-vs-them mentality, promote the benefits of the cult whilst warning your followers of the deviousness of those who do not follow the same path. By feeling like they’re part of an exclusive group, the bonds between your followers will be strengthened whilst outsiders who could expose the cult will be dismissed because they’re distrusted. This is vital to retaining followers and preventing competing ideologies from encroaching on your power base.

• The importance of the polarisation strategy cannot be emphasised enough, if you have no enemies, invent a fictional one. If anybody causes you trouble, accuse them of being said fictional enemy.

• Leverage mystery and imagination (1) – hint at a grand achievement or difficulty indifferently and without fully explaining it; this will provoke people into thinking you’re better than you really are. People will think you’re special as your nonchalance to the spectacular implies great fortitude. As they ask for greater detail, refuse or redirect, let their imaginations take control, and hyperbolic tales of your exploits will be concocted by your follower’s awe.

• Leverage mystery and imagination (2) – Think of it like this: initially you garner a following with grand and outlandish claims. With a following built, you switch from outrageous to humble, leaving breadcrumbs for the awestruck who inflate your deeds and regale grand tales of your exploits. When the people are promoting and defending you, you need do neither to any great degree. For now you enjoy the luxury of elitist humility, minimally affirming questions about your successes with a quaint and sophisticated dignity. – [See Law 34 – Be Royal In Your Own Fashion.]

• Granting your followers one of their wishes by having them engage in a ritual first only furthers their belief in your cult, attributing success to the ritual rather than the mundanity of human action.

• Your beliefs and practices should provide comfort to your followers in an uncomfortable world, in doing so, you augment their desire to believe in you and your ideas.

• Appeal to emotion rather than reason and you will be justly rewarded, appeal to reason rather than emotion and you will be unjustly punished.

• Identify something that makes a person believe with passion, and they will rationalise a framework around it, crediting you as a prophet or genius for initially introducing them to it.

• Generally speaking, women’s need to believe is greater than man’s, as through mechanism of vitiated reason there is greater gullibility.

3.) In Closing / Relevant Reading:

If you have any additional questions or suggestions, leave a comment. You can read more articles like this here.

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“Stupidity combined with arrogance and a huge ego will get you a long way.” – Chris Lowe

Contents:
1.) The Building Blocks of Reinvention
2.) Of Ego & Humility
3.) Of Adaptability & Authenticity
4.) Of Learning
5.) In Closing

1.) The Building Blocks of Reinvention:

Whether they’re aware of it or not, everyone has an opinion on narcissism, and a value system based on a preference for its presence or absence. Some respect only the boldness of grandiosity, whereas others are repelled by the lack of grace exhibited by unadulterated id. As such, those looking to reinvent themselves are typically confused about the degree of ego they should aspire toward in the pursuit of their idealised self. Is ego good, or is it bad? This is a context dependent question, but in the grand scheme of things it is neither, rather it is a tool.

One’s mental visualisation of their ideal persona changes in accordance with their life experience. The arrogant self-aware intellectual can see where arrogance has cost him, and may as such aspire to a more stoic life. Should a man’s failure be associated with passivity on the other hand, he will view egotism as the answer.

It is a fallacy of instinct to believe embodiment of the egotistical opposite is a solution to the floundering personality of current. Balance is necessary in all things, and ego is no exception. To maximise one’s success, you must be plural rather than singular, not the stoic OR the narcissist, but rather the stoic AND the narcissist. Many, many people disagree with this premise out of distaste, but nonetheless, its utility is incontestable.

The egotistical should practice humility, as the humble should egotism. Each is necessary and neither is sufficient, for finesse requires the ability to wield both. The ability to exercise finesse is more a product of trial-and-error than it is an innate competency, and so the area you’re weak in is the one that requires the most focus. In short, do not pick a side, develop your weaker one.

2.) Of Ego & Humility:

Some scenarios require ego where others necessitate humility, finesse is an awareness of the ego-humility spectrum, and the ability to be as humble or egotistical as a given situation demands. Expressing anger or ingratitude when you win at something demonstrates hubris, which in turn detracts from the beauty of your accomplishment by infecting it with crudeness. Be humble in success and egotistical in struggle, for ego is attractive in struggle, but redundant in achievement. Context is of course key to this maxim, and a man of the nuanced competency necessary to practice finesse understands this.

In matters of women ego always pays, women admire dominance and thus reward ego irrespective of their protestations. In sales, whether or not ego pays is contingent on who you’re selling to. If you’re targeting the lower end of the market, it pays well. If you’re targeting the upper end, it will not. At the upper end you need passion devoid insolence and servility, a single-minded belief in the thing you’re pitching rather than an overt desire to persuade; the exact gradient of finesse you’re looking to embody here is one of passionate humility.

The influential are viscerally repulsed by the forceful crudeness with which a less accomplished egotist proclaims and dismisses. They want to see vision shining through struggle, enough ego to get the job done, but not so much you act like you’re better than they are. To understand the level of ego necessary to get what you want from a person and adjust your behaviour accordingly is ultimately to exercise finesse. Finesse is both diplomacy and narcissism, sophistication when diplomacy pays and arrogance when it doesn’t; an effective strategist puts neither off the table.

A man adept at wielding power is a man of finesse, he is neither stoic nor egotistical, but a compartmentalisation of each, a dual personality proficient in recognising the needs of a situation and unleashing or restraining his ego as necessary. To be able to summon egotism or humility at will rather than embody one or the other is an abnormal state. Most are confined to an identity rooted in one or the other, unable to adapt as required and thusly suffering because of it. As such, like most things the average person cannot do, learn this and you gain a distinct edge.

The constrat of ego and humility is incredibly attractive, and together blurs into a kind of “humble confidence” that makes you difficult to read. The difference between the confident man and the arrogant one is the arrogant lacks the civility to express humility. Confident people can make very narcissistic remarks, but their sporadic demonstrations of humility dissuade people from shunning them as egotists. People make value judgements based on your level of overt egocentrism, and so by switching between overt narcissism and thoughtful humility, your inconsistent complexity fascinates them.

3.) Of Adaptability & Authenticity:

Learning people and adapting to them is fundamental to the practice of effective Machiavellianism. In the pursuit of finesse, almost everything you do will come down to getting better at understanding people from scarce information. As you learn more about them, you adapt to them, conducting yourself in a manner they’ll appreciate.

You do not talk to the egotistical in the way you do the reserved, nor the intelligent in the way you do the dim. By being able to correctly identify personalities and their attendant traits (eg: egocentrism for narcissists, scepticism for rationals and simplicity for dumb people) you learn to talk to people in the way that makes them most receptive.

The foolish and uncontrollably vainglorious are big on the idea of authenticity, that a person should always behave in the way most natural to them irrespective of all else. Strategically speaking, this advice is complete hogwash. It implies artifice is quintessentially negative, unnecessary and that simply “being yourself” is enough to succeed.

This is a lie that everybody wants to believe, that they are innately enough, and that they don’t need to behave in ways that don’t suit them in order to succeed. Be yourself only if you’ve given up on life, or are already a highly developed person and thus “being you” entails a capacity for finesse. Otherwise, whatever you do, do not be yourself, this is the worst advice anyone could give you.

For those of you interested in logic, “be yourself” is a social personification of the naturalistic fallacy, the assumption that the artificial is bad and the natural is good. This assumption is amusing, considering we spent thousands of years developing the unnatural indoors in order to escape the perfectly natural outdoors, however, I digress.

If “being yourself” means the self can adapt to a multitude of various personalities, I’m all for it, but if it means “behave in the way that comes easiest rather than the way that’ll improve your chances of winning” then I am not. Mark my words, authenticity is an indulgence of the accomplished narcissist trying to build rapport by sharing his struggles. This inspires people, quells jealousy and ultimately, makes money. It’s a good strategy – for him, but for you, it’s misinformation. There is authenticity in dedication, but beyond that, everything is political.

Those who tout the horn of authenticity are often some of the smoothest social chameleons you’ll ever meet; they had to be to get where they are. They are playing the game, they are exercising finesse, and in buying into the romance of their struggle and taking their advice on authenticity to heart, you severely cripple yourself.

One does not grow and build relationships with diverse people without trying on styles unnatural to them. People are told to be themselves even when their selves are insufficient, because supposedly artifice is so undesirable it’s better to be a natural loser than an artificial winner. Yes, you should accept yourself, but no, this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use social finesse. Most who convincingly endorse authenticity do so from a position of power, power is rarely obtained, and is never sustained in the absence of finesse.

If you talk to everybody in the same way, your inability to tailor your attitude and speech stylistic will leave many doors closed. This is not so much “being fake” as it is “being dynamic”, a person able to converse with a multitude of people rather than a mere subset is vastly more effective than one who cannot.

Caveat: if you cannot convincingly tailor your demeanour to a person and the stakes are high, do not emulate them at all. Your inability to convincingly complement them will be seen as an affront, and rather than be respected for being alike, you will be disrespected for appearing false. In this instance, your go to strategy should be to employ passionate humility. Flexibility is only falsity when its unsuccessful, falsity is no more than the failure of finesse, an inadequate attempt at mimicry that results in ostracisation.

4.) Of Learning:

If you are not very good at something and want to get better at it, ego is your worst enemy. It will render you impervious to constructive criticism, robbing you the introspection necessary to fix your flaws. If you want to develop your knowledge or refine a methodology, take the position you are clueless and seek feedback from observers to discover what you did wrong.

The key reason people don’t alter failing strategies is because they’re prone to personifying them. If you become too ego invested in how you do something rather than see your actions as tools, you won’t want to change method as it’ll hurt too much to acknowledge your failure. When you see your actions as a means to an end rather than as a value judgement against yourself, you’re able to do what must be done. By being humble in learning you not only become adaptive, but you escape your worst critic – yourself.

In short, when you’re trying to improve, humility is the path to competence and ego will cause you to suffer. Do not trust your ego when you’re struggling to get something right, it’ll deceive you; be rigorous and ask yourself “is this logical?” followed by “is it true?”

5.) In Closing:

Always use the least amount of power necessary to convince or destroy, never excess. Excessive use of power is sloppy, indicative of one who knows not how to wield it. An overuse of power can result in unforeseen consequences detrimental to the wielder, hence law 47’s “in victory, know when to stop.”

As a final note, heed this: the stoic is a bore and the narcissist but a fool, the wise man knows what he must be, and is what he must be when he must be it.

Summary Notes:

– Fine tune your ego to complement the person you’re dealing with.

– Use stereotypes to form a baseline assumption of a person’s expectations, and if they disprove the assumption (eg: you thought they’d respect a humble person, but they only respect the egotistical) then switch.

– Passionate humility is more effective than supplication or arrogance when they have the upper hand. Supplication is transparently manipulative, arrogance is grating and insolent.

– You can go all in with ego, bluff, and try to reverse value perceptions in negotiation, but ultimately if they’re the one taking on the risk, you need them more than they need you.

– Authenticity is how the accomplished build rapport with the unaccomplished, it does not mean they don’t play the game. All successful people are playing the game.

– Humility and ego are not binary, passionate humility aka “nice narcissism” is the mid-point.

– Passionate humility defined: you’re obsessed with what you do and you talk it up, but you credit others and defend with passion rather than attack with vitriol.

– Ego is a tool to be used when beneficial and put away when it is not. If you want to attract a woman, be egotistical. If you wish to learn a thing, be humble.

– “Be yourself” is an empty nonsensical platitude, be what you must be to maximise your chances of success.

– Sporadic demonstrations of humility and grandiosity make you appealing and difficult to morally judge.

– And ultimately: don’t identify with either ego or humility, both are tools, use them.

“Feminine virtue is nothing but a convenient masculine invention.” – Ninon de L’Enclos

Contents:
1.) The Paradox of Cunning Naivety
2.) The Double Edged Sword of Rationalisation
3.) Her Deficit of Loyalty
4.) On The Duplicity of Beauty
5.) In Closing / Relevant Reading

1.) The Paradox of Cunning Naivety:

Why are women so manipulative? Know that firstly in matters of people, manipulation is as natural to a woman as stinging is to a scorpion. Woman herself needs no education in wielding her sexual powers to exert undue influence on man, for nature has equipped man to covet her sexuality, and woman herself to abuse it. This intersexual blend of Machiavellianism is thus as automatic as it is instinctive, it is less so a product of conscious higher thinking, and more so an inevitability of the selection pressures that bred her.

From here we discover a curiously enigmatic piece of the feminine puzzle, one that leaves many a man dumbfounded in its seemingly paradoxical juxtaposition. If we are to presuppose that woman is intrinsically cunning, then how can we simultaneously assert her propensity for fantastical gullibility? If women are so manipulative, why is it that they are more susceptible to propaganda and given to believe more fervently in the supernatural, the religious, and other such unsubstantiable things? After all, the cunning are known not for their epitomisation of gullibility, but for their deficit of it. So if they are to be mutually exclusive, should one not the preclude the other? And if so, how can she be cunning if she is likewise gullible?

It is my contention that in neither man nor woman is gullibility mutually exclusive from cunning, and I shall endeavour to explain why this is hence forth.

As I alluded previously, a woman’s cunning is a byproduct of her instinct, not a premeditated affair. Her ability to seduce is more nature than it is nurture, her manipulations no more than mechanisms of her biological wiring than they are conscious exertions. Her spasmodic capriciousness, penchant for blame shifting and affinity to the plausibly deniable are evolutionarily adapted survival traits, as is her propensity for rationalisation and its subsequent supplantation of her reason.

And yet the very capacity for rationalisation that makes her manipulations so powerful is the very thing which confers her gullibility in matters of the esoteric and abstract. Effectively, her ability to rationalise makes her most effective in the manipulation of people, but the very deficit of reason such rationalisation causes is what leads to her gullibility in the abstract.

As an additional factor, one must note women’s unconditional loyalty to authority. She is obedient in much the way a child is, and it is this obedience which makes her prone to foolishness.

If a person of repute is to tell her something, she will evaluate the thing based on the importance of the person who told her it rather than dissect the elements of what she was told. It is in this way that lesbianic upper class women duped the common woman into working; by playing on the innate victim complex characteristic of woman’s infantile narcissism, they were able to convince her that labour was a freedom women were denied rather than a burden from which they were saved. Womankind subsequently rationalised away her position of relative comfort unencumbered by the harshnesses of labour, and bought into the idea she was born into an oppressed class. As such it becomes quite clear, interpersonally she is cunning, but ideologically she is the very fool she manipulates relationally.

Be she cunning mindfully or instinctually, she is innately predisposed to a degree of cunning one way or the other. This is not to suggest that women are incapable of consciously premeditating their manipulations for such a thing is possible if not commonplace, but rather it is testament to the baseline of duplicity present in women even when conscious effort is absent. Even then, I make this distinction only to emphasise the intrinsicality with which cunning exists in women, I by no means believe the typical woman lacks either the interest or inclination to more mindfully develop the instincts that nature bestowed her. Likewise it is in tangential relevance to this I find it important to note that women’s profound interest in, and domination of academic psychology is no more than an effect of her intrinsic Machiavellian propensity.

Women who are instinctively cunning rather than mindfully cunning will often succumb to gullibility in spite of themselves. For you see, their instincts equip them solely to seduce and petition man, not to engage in the strategisation of complex, abstract mental work. Women with a flair for the strategic are either learned or dark triad and are therefore by definition outliers, the base of the female population’s Machiavellian instinct scantly extends beyond the interpersonal and the intersexual.

And so when it comes to things outside of this arena, she is as naive as the dictation of her emotions and the deficit of her reason allows. Combine this deficit in logic with her evolutionary propensity to rationalise away the undesirable, and the strength of her need to believe is laid bare.

2.) The Double Edged Sword of Rationalisation:

The very thing that makes her manipulations so notoriously effective is the same thing that leads her to be so easily misled – her tendency to rationalise rather than reason. Whilst the average woman is more manipulating than the average man, she is likewise more manipulable than him. Where the typical woman is manipulating in relationships but manipulable in matters of reality, the average man is manipulable in relationships and more finely astute of the abstract.

The gift of reason that lends a man his astuteness in matters of reality is thus absent in his estimation of women, the deficit of reason experienced by women abstractly is equivalent to the deficit of cunning man experiences intersexually. In a relationship, man is behaviourally idealistic whilst she is behaviourally pragmatic, although one should note that such a thing does not prevent her from amassing unrealistic expectations of what being a man should consist of in relation to her self-interest.

Where beauty is the primary cornerstone of feminine power, the capacity for pronounced rationalisation is its secondary cornerstone. Where a man’s reason prohibits him from employing the mental gymnastics necessary to effectively execute a manipulation, a woman faces no such obstacle. Sanity as we think of it is an assessment of one’s ability to demonstrate cogency in their methods and consistency in their beliefs, women are hard pressed to demonstrate either, which is why we often think of them as crazy.

One should not also forget that womankind has been evolutionarily equipped to rationalise the undesirable through her maternal line’s history as a spoil of war. Before civilization legislated against, and effectively nullified the power of man’s physical strength, a woman’s ability to deceive man was her only defence against his encroachments.

3.) Her Deficit of Loyalty:

Where traditional masculinity is rigid, based on systems of honour and loyalty and reliant on force to punish transgressions of these, femininity has no such concerns and is therefore more fluid in the fickleness of its alliances. Where men want their team to win, women simply want to be on the winning team. The men who are similar to women in this way tend to be dark triad in their personality makeup.

Women’s inherent amorality leaves her capable of showing loyalty to whoever exerts the most dominance over her. A woman never completely rules out betrayal, for women are creatures of opportunity; instead she hedges her bets by playing both sides and betraying as is financially or emotionally necessary.

Betrayal is the spark that ignites the match when a woman moves on and adapts herself to a new man in the face of what she deemed to be insufficiency in the previous. Loyalty is symptomatic of honour, an inherently masculine behaviour. Don’t believe me? Look at the divorce rates. The majority of divorces are initiated by women, a true testament to their disloyalty. Likewise men report a light switch effect when breaking up with a woman, a 180 degree change in her personality as she effortlessly gets over him whilst he continues to pine for her.

When a rival tribe would kidnap a woman, her ability to rationalise was the only thing that allowed her to cope, adapt, and continue to lead a rewarding and prosperous life. I believe it is this evolutionary history that is the foundation of women’s intrinsic loyalty deficit. Women who were inferior rationalisers would have expressed loyalty to their birth tribe in the presence of their captors, consequently causing themselves inordinate grief.

Inevitably, such women would’ve been culled to the point where only women with a more fluid sense of loyalty would survive such a prevalence of kidnapping, henceforth selecting for women who were loyal to the powerful and disloyal to the weak, the losses and gains of power imitating the ebbs and flows in her retraction and pledging of loyalty.

Where men adopt their own principles, women adopt the principles of the most powerful people in their lives. Where men fight enemy tribes and die in war, women fall in love with their captors using their innate capacity for cunning to completely remould themselves and even thrive – a feat even the most objectively talented man would be hard pressed to perform.

4.) On The Duplicity of Beauty:

Nature has armed womankind with dissimulation and aesthetic appeal, in which the latter vastly complements and lends itself to the former. Beauty is the fulcrum on which many a successful deception is predicated, for its inviting allure baits with desire whilst falsely associating itself with virtue. To enhance one’s beauty is therefore to augment one’s influence, to appear more noble, more capable, and therefore more trustworthy. Women know this intuitively.

Beauty is not only disarming but enticing, its presence aiding in the signalling of women’s most favoured illusion – innocence. Man’s most foolish visceralism is his propensity to conflate the beautiful with the virtuous, for in doing so, he invariably sees woman for who he’d like her to be rather than for who she is. It is this flaw of instinct in which man perceives virtue as an attendant characteristic of beauty that he inflicts on himself the self-detriment of intersexual naivety.

The duplicity of beauty is predicated on a presumption of innocence that only women and children enjoy, for beauty connotes its virtue through an aesthetic of infantilism. As Leo Tolstoy rather famously said, “It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.” Beauty is as such feminine rather than masculine in its aesthetic, for handsomeness neither connotes nor confers onto its possessor the same illusion of virtue that beauty does.

Handsomeness lacks the visual childlike innocence signatory of beauty that leads the observer to infer virtue. Effectively the visual cues that lead us to believe in the innocence of children is the exact mechanism from which women’s beauty takes a degree of its power; that degree pertaining to the conflation of beauty with virtue and the presumption of innocence that results from it rather than woman’s sexual power per se. This phenomenon alone serves as further proof of women’s immaturity relative to man, if further proof were even necessary; greater neoteny is a biological marker of lesser maturity. In summary of this section’s thought, I leave you with this concluding statement: her first concern is her appearance, her second concern her cunning, but both serve the same ends.

5.) In Closing / Relevant Reading:

Woman’s desire to remain blameless forever and always plays a significant role in her desire to cultivate an innocent visage. Defensively, a woman’s primary method of manipulation is her presumption of innocence, offensively it is the seductiveness of her physicality; both rely on her beauty, the prior to a mere lesser degree than the latter.

The weaponisation of sex, the falsification of tears, the feigning of innocence and the allergy to blame, know the tools of womanly deception and recognise them for what they are when they rear their ugly heads. And remember, I do not convey such displeasurable truths in order to dissuade you from interacting with women, but rather, so that you may act with shrewdness when you do interact with them.

Blog:

Lucifer’s Daughter
Machiavellian Thinking vs. Conventional Logic

Books:

The Anatomy of Female Power (this book is incredibly expensive in the US, the first reason being it is out of print, and the second reason being feminists got it banned in the US – google for a PDF if this is too rich for your blood)

The Art of Seduction
The Manipulated Man

“The court jester had the right to say the most outrageous things to the king. Everything was permitted during carnival, even the songs that the Roman legionnaires would sing, calling Julius Caesar ‘queen,’ alluding, in a very transparent way, to his real, or presumed, homosexual escapades.” – Umberto Eco

Contents:
1.) Introduction
2.) Leadership Destabilisation Through Character Assassination
3.) How To Handle Jesters
4.) In Closing / Relevant Reading

1.) Introduction:

The jester’s humour can take on either an attack or defence posture, with humiliation acting as his weapon, and plausible deniability his shield. And I say ‘he’, for of the few jesters I have encountered, not one has been female. Likewise if I am to put my personal experiences to one side and observe the wider culture, I remain at a loss in the attempt to identify a female jester.

The wit inherent to the mechanisms of the jester are intrinsically masculine in their nature, for the jester employs a type of verbal gladiatorship of which I have little doubt is fuelled in great part by the ordination that the male must prove his fitness to the female as opposed to the inverse. As the dearly departed Christopher Hitchens stated in simpler terms, women aren’t funny because they don’t need to be; and such a truism does not find any particular exception within the expression of one’s Machiavellian interpersonal style either.

Of course a high functioning dark triad woman is wittier than her neurotypical counterpart by effect of her reduced emotional sensitivity, but this does not lend itself to becoming the dominant function which underpins and subsequently characterises her interpersonal style. The feminine Machiavellian archetype is almost always that of the seductress, favouring the weaponisation of sex and all the attendant traits this implies, she presupposes the virginity of enemy men and the promiscuity of enemy women whilst overtly oozing innuendo and sensualism in her bid to entrance allies.

Think of a Machiavellian archetype as a flavour of cunning, all Machiavellians are cunning, but the way in which that cunning is expressed differs vastly in its style and execution. Different archetypes use different stylistic mediums to exert their influence. Be it to charm or humiliate, jesters use humour, seductresses use sexuality whereas fault finders use rules and malicious compliance. Cunning may be universal, but the asset utilised and the way in which it is personified vastly differs. The jester’s power stems from a quick wit and their ability to employ said wit humouristically, for it is their ability to verbally destroy an enemy to a chorus of laughter that makes their otherwise unacceptable aggressiveness permissible.

The jester is a master of reframing perception through humour, and so of all the various styles of cunning found manifest, his persuasion goes unmatched. His ability to sway group opinion is second to none, for hilarity always brings great popularity, and seductiveness cannot target as large an audience as hilarity. Irrespective of environment, be it the royal courts of Europe or a television talk show, the jester’s subtle albeit inextricable control of public perception goes indomitably unchallenged.

When people on the internet say “trolling is a skill”, they unknowingly nod gently to this Machiavellian interpersonal style. To give an example of what a jester looks like, Milo Yiannopoulos epitomically embodies the form of a jester. Stylish, cunning, witty and highly narcissistic, the jester’s ability to theatrically employ wit and word to persuade, entertain and humiliate is incontestable.

2.) Leadership Destabilisation Through Character Assassination:

The jester is as facetious as he is daring, incredibly individualist, he views himself as an underdog possessing an innate albeit under-recognised superiority. He is not usually of noble birth or high social rank, but owing to his bold and fearless employment of humour he is given to finding himself brush shoulders with those connected and of means.

Humour aside, he is scornful of authority and extremely power hungry. In much the way he seeks to inconsequentially violate people’s boundaries via ruthless and humiliating utilisations of comedy, he seeks to remove all boundaries and expectations imposed on himself. He is a freedom loving man, so much so that he not only shuns the leadership, but shuns the role for himself, as the responsibilities that come with it impose on his carnal desire for a freedom so absolute that tolerance for even a slither of responsibility is amiss.

And yet the poetic irony in the jester’s loathing of authority lies in how his employ of humour sets him up as an informal authority. Due to his aversion to responsibility the jester is rarely an official leader in any meaningful capacity, and yet due to the affinity he earns from grandiosely entertaining the people, he is looked to as one. And it is because of this the jester has a propensity to outshine the formal leadership, unbeheld to the responsibilities that they are, whilst enjoying an equal if not superior level of influence to them. Alas the jester is not the squad captain, but rather the private that makes jokes at the captain’s expense and gets away with it; he is the one people look to despite a lack of formalised institutional rank, he is a leader absent the acknowledgement of title.

One of the jester’s seemingly counterintuitive strategies is to delegitimise the leadership by ruthlessly mocking their method of rule. This gambit serves two purposes, firstly, it brings him acclaim, fans and followers – people who will line his pockets and defend his reputation from his enemies.

Secondly, it serves as a warning shot to the leadership that subtextually communicates “If I wanted to, I could turn your people against you; I don’t answer to you and shall not ever. But you need me. So you should officially endorse me as an ally for as long as it benefits me, and you should not attempt to control me, for I am uncontrollable. If you try, I will see to it you lose favour with the people, and in making your rule that much more difficult I will single-handedly hasten your downfall, and I’ll do it with the blessing of the people to a chorus of hearty and mocking laughter – much to your chagrin.”

Intuitively this sounds dangerous; but emblazoned with a flair for the bold and dangerous, loyal to nothing but his own self-interest, the jester knows he need not win the master because he owns the crowd, and so by having control of the crowd it is the master who needs him more than the inverse. Drawing his power from the crowd is what makes the jester independent from the master, for by drawing his power from the people, he draws it of his own volition on the condition he can perform, rather than because the master’s whim proves favourable. It is the sheer terror of this subtext that will cause many a leader to buckle, to seek to befriend and ally with the jester, with the jester in turn feigning loyalty, only for his mocking of the leader to continue under a veneer of well-intentioned banter.

A jester is only as good as his last performance, but a leader loses effectiveness when the people love his funny man more than they do him. As such, a leader is given to the idea he might have his kingdom’s most cunning clown harmed, for intuitively it seems the best way to deal with a problem is to remove it. The flaw with such a measure is the jester is too well known and too well loved by the people to be removed quietly.

The people’s love acts as an armour for the jester, and should he be harmed, said love will transmute into a hate seeking the destruction of his destroyer. And so the leader finds himself in a bind, is he to tolerate the undermining of his leadership and lose respect, or is he to eradicate the upstart and risk the people’s ire?

The clever leader has him removed by mercenaries untraceable to himself, frames a common enemy for the crime, and feigns upset at news of the jester’s peril. The untameable jester should always be dealt with in this manner, the exception to this being the cooperative jester. A jester willing to show overt deference to the leadership can prove useful for morale as an entertainer, but even more importantly, he doubles as an effective character assassin for delegitimising the leadership’s enemies.

3.) How To Handle Jesters:

Engaging in battle with a jester requires an inordinate amount of energy, if one can avoid the affair altogether, such a thing is strategically preferable. However, I am inclined to think any soul reading this who does so in resonance with what they hear is probably beyond the point of evasion, and instead seeks practical tips to help them neutralise such a troublesome individual. In light of this, I will now speak a little on the ways in which one should best handle a jester.

In my essay Machiavellian Thinking vs. Conventional Thinking, I coined the maxim “justification is a Machiavellian fallacy”. This can be simplified and distilled as “justifying yourself is anti-cunning and weakens one’s social power” – internalising this idea deeply is key to effectively battling a jester. Never take a jester’s questions seriously, assume every question to be nought but an insincere trap, and you will do well to avoid the pitfalls the jester so effortlessly and ravenously sets.

So what is one to do specifically in order to avoid said pitfalls? Answer questions with questions, use pressure flips, question the sincerity of his questions, and reframe even the slightest twinge of insincerity as immaturity. Whoever answers the most questions loses, for questioning is not utilised here to gain information, but rather to overwhelm the individual targeted by the questions. The jester has no interest in receiving straightforward answers to any of the questions he may posit, but rather, he uses them as nothing more than psychological pressure points to dominate and humiliate his target into disorientation and self-flagellating submission.

The jester is dependent on humour to draw his social power, and thus by establishing his humour as immature you may nullify the essence of his social dominance. To do this effectively however, the way in which you deliver your criticism of his lack of maturity is key. If you sound offended or upset, the tactic will have no effect and will only serve as fuel for his ridicule, whereas if you sound aggressive and candidly passionate about the core topic, it will. One should sound like a narcissistic man putting someone down for a lack of sophistication, not a whiny woman passing judgement on a thing that annoys her. The key with this tactic is to use the jester’s inappropriate flippancy as a way to frame him as uncredible and unimportant.

If you are bold, you should consider insulting the jester before he can invariably self-deprecate. Jesters are prone to self-deprecating as a means of preemptively blocking you from hitting their vulnerabilities. If all else fails, seek to intimidate the jester until he loses his blase frame and becomes fearful. You can achieve this by bombarding them with insult upon insult delivered in an animated and aggressive manner. The objective here is to make the jester uncomfortable, for if they are uncomfortable, they can be dominated.

This is easier said than done as the jester has supreme social confidence and possesses a certain “anti-social anxiety” about them, however, and this is the key to circumventing this supreme social confidence, they are usually ill-equipped to physically defend themselves. Having wielded wit and words as weapons all their lives, they have not learned to fight, and are not confident in their ability to do so. The jester will almost always try to keep the conflict mental rather than physical because of this, and will quickly lose frame if they believe they cannot prevent the conflict from escalating to fisticuffs.

If the jester believes there is a credible threat of violence, their frame will fall like the Berlin wall. They may not fear psychological violence, but they have dedicated themselves to it so much so that they have become wholly incompetent in violence that is physical. Of course, one need not actually escalate things to physical violence, they only need cause the jester to believe that physical violence is imminent. When the jester loses frame and their fear becomes evident, you may poetically question why they appear scared. For of course you were only joking in much the way they do, and you thought them to be an individual of sophisticated humour, their newfound timidity serving as no more than a testament to your strong disappointment in them.

As stated at the beginning of this passage, conquering a jester requires a ridiculous amount of energy. It is thus preferable to avoid conflict if possible, but should it not be, then the tips and tactics presented here are your blueprint for fighting an undesirable war. Effectively, you will play the game as the jester plays, only with greater intensity and more pointed technique. This is a game of energy, and you will need lots of it to win.

4.) In Closing / Relevant Reading:

Never trust the court jester, for he is the least trustworthy funny man. He wields humour as a weapon of self-aggrandisement, and as a ruthless self-promoter he is eager to boost his profile at the expense of others. There is no comedy too cold nor too ruthless for him, for the fires of chaos gleam brightly in his anarchistic eyes in their lust for the next conflict. He needs conflict so that he may humiliate, he must humiliate to feel powerful, such is his nature, unchangeable, irredeemable.

Extremity is typical and expected of the jester, the norms of social conduct imposed on the majority do not apply to him, which in turn frees him to act with further impropriety simply because scandalousness has come to be expected.

Jesters love bringing down sensible authority figures (the very antithesis of what they are) because they know that should such a person dignify their provocations their credibility will go up whilst the sensible target’s will go down. The sensible cannot fight the jester with his own weaponry, for in doing so they lose power by appearing uncontrolled to their fans. The jester on the other hand is free to continue in such an outrageous and belligerent manner, for indecency is his reputational essence, in turn giving him an unfair advantage over those who do not possess the same antifragile reputational foundation.

There is an insidiousness to the humour symbolic of the jester, for he concurrently amuses and destroys in a display of the most theatrical and perverse sadomasochism, bringing greater and greater pleasure to his audience as he proceeds to strip layer upon layer of dignity from the unfortunate soul he has designated ripe for ridicule.

And because humour is entertaining irrespective of the person paying its expense, it always retains the favour and endorsement of the crowd in the absence of appropriateness or moral integrity. The naive presume humour is innocent and incorruptible due to its superficial nonthreatening pleasantry, “a bit of fun never hurt anybody” they say, au contraire, it has and it can.

Book(s):

The Book of the Courtier

NOTE: I left room to develop “dark triad archetypes” into a series, but as of present I’m not committed to making that a reality. We’ll see!

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.” ― Marcus Tullius Cicero

Contents:
1.) Introduction
2.) Experience vs. Reading
3.) Refining Reading – The Art of Summarising
4.) In Closing / Relevant Reading

1.) Introduction:

Contrary to what may be impressed upon the reader by the length and intricacy of my essays, I greatly value simplification, especially when it comes to learning something. There are so many great books to read and so many interesting topics to discover, that there simply isn’t enough time to absorb it all. As such, when one is voracious for knowledge they must make choices in what they learn, and then strive to absorb what they have deemed worthy of learning as quickly as they can humanly learn it.

Knowledge is not power but power potential, and rather it is the application of knowledge and not knowledge itself that constitutes power as we think of it. As such, it is in one’s interest to accrue as much knowledge as possible in order to increase their power potential. Time however is as equally pressing as it is finite, if not because it is finite, and thus the net maximum potential power accumulable decreases in direct proportion to the amount of time expended on things extraneous of one’s current learning objective.

To simplify this statement: the more time one spends learning any specific thing, the less time they have left on the Earth to learn other things. And those things you’re not learning could be, unbeknownst to you, more conducive to your personal power than the things you have chosen to learn.

Cost-benefit analyses are our friends, but whatever we choose to learn incurs a sunk cost, and thereby it is in our interest to choose both wisely (to make the most informed decisions we’re capable of in choosing what we learn) and to choose quickly (to avoid the unproductive inertia of indecision and procrastination).

Naturally, the accuracy of a choice tends to increase with the slowness with which it is decided, and thus there’s an argument to be made that slower more accurate choices are superior to quicker and more sloppily made ones. Regardless, momentum is the achieving man’s friend, procrastination but his foe. And so in light of this there’s an even greater argument to be made: that in the pursuit of growth, it is better to simply make a decision than it is to make none at all, for even in failure there is education, whilst in stagnation there is little besides regret and the illusion of safety.

Ultimately, the goal of the most ambitious self-actualiser is to make smart learning choices in as little time as possible, whilst learning the chosen thing with maximum depth and understanding in the shortest time possible.

Most outwardly agree learning is important, fewer actually expend the effort necessary to actively learn, whilst even fewer seek to tinker with their learning methodology in order to optimise it. I of course am of the belief that in order to truly be the best that one can be, that simply doing is insufficient, doing is necessary, but more importantly one must seek to refine how they do. Learning is no exception to this need, and rather, I actually think of it to be the thing that epitomises this sentiment.

2.) Experience vs. Reading:

“But IM, is knowledge even important to the accumulation of power? Surely experience is superior to reading?”

There is indisputably great value to knowledge, but knowledge bereft a means of implementation is unactualised of purpose in much the way raw materials owned by nations without the means to refine them see the potential of said materials wasted.

Experience is vital in matters of the heart and the body, but it’s not the be-all and end-all. Simply put, experience is overrated, for there’s not enough time in this life to experience everything to the degree sufficient enough to master it. This is why we have specialisation, for it is better to be a master of one trade than a layman in all.

This is also why we compress time in the form of books, for they allow us to derive the core lessons of a thing without requiring us to invest the time necessary to fully experience it. Life is literally too short to experience everything to the degree necessary for a man to truly understand and master it, for beyond a certain level of proficiency, one falls victim to the law of diminishing returns.

The power of books lies in their ability to have us learn from those who have already invested the time to become an expert at a thing, they are almost like surrogate mentors if you will. And so in the grander picture, they are time-saving devices, although in the heat of immediacy many do not view books as such because they can take considerable time to ingest. Nonetheless, irrespective of the time it takes a man to read a particularly lengthy and intricate book, it would take him even longer to live the things the writer did in order to form a conclusion of equal authority.

By the time you become a wall street trader, a pro wrestler, or whatever it is that will teach you the lessons you want to learn, you could’ve read hundreds of books that would’ve taught you more than you would’ve learned from investing an equal or greater amount of time actually trying the thing for yourself.

Personal experience is inefficient because you do a lot of things that don’t work in order to discover what does, whereas the success derived from the experience of others can be distilled into knowledge that saves you from making the mistakes necessary to arrive at the same conclusion.

Books that draw knowledge from a wide data pool can pattern recognise trends to derive principles, and these principles can in turn be used by the uninitiated to increase their odds of success. It is this macro approach to knowledge which allows a person to draw inferences with a level of accuracy that would be simply impossible to derive were they reliant solely on personal experience.

Take The Bell Curve for instance, the employ of statistics garnered from thousands of studies allowed this book to make conclusions with a level of accuracy beyond that which any single person is capable of achieving. How is this so? Quite simply, more data. Anyone with even a basic understanding of statistics realises that absent wilful falsification, greater sample sizes lead to more accurate findings.

People trust experience more because it can’t be faked, and lord knows academics fabricate all kinds of data to support their ideological agendas, and yet irrespective of this, experience is most certainly overrated.

I’m not trying to debase the necessity of experience for it certainly has value, undoubtedly a great many thing requires experience in order to be truly understood. However, there are only so many experiences a person can have, and one’s experiences are often incomplete in the sense that they’re the byproducts of inability rather than achievement.

Likewise, people of greater mind can teach us things we don’t notice, or struggle to articulate and consciously understand. And so reading not only saves us time, but more importantly it allows us to pierce the universe more deeply than if we were to remain unlettered. It is this quality of the book that makes it irreplaceably additive to one’s time on this Earth.

This is the value of secondhand knowledge, and unlike experience, it is often undervalued owing to its indirect and vicarious nature. I think this to be incorrect, and rather that it is the unread experience junkie who is the fool rather than the individual who complements their living with the wisdom and discoveries of men greater than they.

To give an example I’m sure most of you will relate to, a divorced man knows enough about marriage to accurately forewarn younger men of the risks inherent to the endeavour. One need not actually go and get married and undergo the same pains, trials and tribulations that millions of other men have in order to validate the finding.

This would not only be extremely deleterious to one’s mental health, but likewise a terrible use of their time. This notion really exemplifies how knowledge can trump experience in educating one on “what not to do”, for when a person has internalised a long list of what they shouldn’t be doing, the number of mistakes necessary to get where they want to go is reduced exponentially. Yes, often to find the answers on how to specifically do a thing, a person need merely repeatedly attempt a thing whilst altering their approach with each iteration. But to discover what not to do and decrease the odds of failure from the get go, this is where reading provides quite the boon.

3.) Refining Reading – The Art of Summarising:

“Ok IM, I understand reading is necessary to augment my success, but if reading is the default state of learning, how do I optimise my learning process to learn even quicker?”

So in the paragraphs prior I detailed my philosophy on learning, now I will detail the steps I’ve taken in light of it.

Effective businessmen know that in order to scale up and earn truly ludicrous sums of money they must learn to delegate. Things they became accustomed to doing when they were small should be assigned to others in order to free up their time for grander tasks. I apply this idea to learning.

If a person can reduce the time taken to learn a thing without compromising on the depth with which they understand the thing, they can gain a huge edge over the competition.

So rather than constantly read books, I look for people who have gone to the effort of fully understanding a book, plucking out its gems and explaining what they mean in a summarised manner. This way, I can profit from their time investment and learn exactly what they’ve learned in only a fraction of the time.

Books condense life, but summaries condense books, and thus pound for pound I believe reading or at least actively listening to summaries given by people who have already fully read a text is something that will provide me with the greatest intellectual return in the shortest amount of time. I believe very few people are doing this, and that yet this one thing alone can give a man a great edge in this game we call life.

This is the beauty of the digital age, if you know where to look, you can find time-saving services that would simply not have been possible before the advent of the internet. Podcasts are an obvious place to begin streamlining the learning process, I particularly enjoy the Tim Ferriss podcast. The only drawback with podcasts is the advertising and predominance of socialising acts as no more than fluff to the budding learner. Podcasts are as such in my view, more semi-educational easy listening than they are concentrated catalysts for self-growth.

A step-up from podcasts are audio summaries, an audio summary is a person summarising the key points of a text they’ve read and articulating these findings to the listener. I particularly enjoy illacertus’s YouTube channel for this purpose. The advantage audio summaries have over podcasts is how the speaker directly delivers the information absent the fluff of banter or social observation you can expect from podcasts.

Finally, we have text summaries. The main reason I believe text summaries to be superior to audio summaries is because audio can play in the background, allowing you to tune them out whilst you do other things. Text on the other hand demands your full attention to be imbibed, and thus cannot fall victim to your need to check social media. It’s actually quite difficult to find anyone going through the hassle of summarising books into text summaries, however I managed to find an online bookclub which is doing exactly this.

4.) In Closing / Relevant Reading:

I wouldn’t listen to a podcast in lieu of reading an actual book, however, if you’re reading to grow rather than for self-pleasure, I highly recommend integrating audio, and particularly text summaries into your autodidactic toolkit.

If you’re not improving, you’re not growing and if you’re not growing, you’re losing. By speeding up your rate of learning, you vastly increase your chances of success. Don’t hold yourself back.

Books:

The Art of Learning

Blog:

Monk Mode