The Audacious Truth of Pick Up

This is a guest post from one of my Padawans. He took my mentorship program one year ago. It’s a long one. Enjoy.

Culture is powerful. It’s transmitted from person to person in any and every social situation where one person is able to observe another, regardless of circumstance or intent. It has its own momentum. It transmits personal values to an entire group and has the capacity to pervade an entire society.

Each of us is a vessel of culture transmission, and our prevailing culture is the sum of all of our social transmissions and receptions weighed against our personal values.

Because culture is inherently social, it is inherently infectious and its acceptance is ultimately judged by the sheer volume of its expression, rather than its true value. In other words, the more we see others doing a behaviour, the more we will adapt to accept it, even if it is against our personal values. Culture shapes values. Culture is strong enough to even completely transform values, and over time it works on us subconsciously. It has been working on you ever since you were a child.

Culture does not care about right or wrong. Culture does not care about whether it is good for your personal development or not, and its judgments are King- to most people. Culture says it’s okay for police to shoot a bike thief in the head in Brazil, but not in the United States. Culture says over here it’s okay for strangers to comfortably talk to each other, but over there don’t you dare. Culture says over here you are the boss, but over there you are nothing. Maybe culture is telling you that you are nothing far more often than you would like.

There is societal culture and there is local culture. Societal culture takes decades to develop and your influence there is a drop in the bucket. Your local culture is what is happening between you and the other people around you, right now. The beauty of local culture is this: By default those people will generally follow the script of societal culture, but locally the culture is susceptible to absolute determination by whatever that small number of people accept according to the dominant frame.

There are a few things that make pick up artistry especially beautiful, and they are all wrapped around the audacious truth that the practice of pick up is not just good for men seeking sex.

• It is good for personal development and social and emotional maturity on all levels.
• It is good for everyone on the receiving end of pick up attempts.
• It is good for society in general and as a prevailing culture.

It only does not seem good when you are getting an incomplete understanding of what it really is. That’s because the as-yet-unrealized seduction practitioner resembles an unrelenting social train wreck, exploding every few minutes with hamfisted insults and awkward invasions of personal spaces. But this catastrophic facade, bane of feminists and well-adjusted individuals alike, belies the depth and maturity of the path this practitioner has undertaken.

Here’s the thing. So much of our original cultural programming was not our choice, and it did not serve us or others well at all. It only served to protect our fragile egos. It was defensive and passive. This is the culture I was brought up with, like so many socially maladapted males:

Don’t talk to strangers, you don’t know them. Don’t take risks. Do things that give you comfort, avoid things that give you anxiety. Rely on others to determine whether some action is okay or not. You’re not good enough to talk to that girl. Since she is most likely to blow you off it’s not worth trying anyway.

The problem is that this culture of passivity creeps into all other areas of your life, ego and psyche whether you want it to or not. Because at every turn you are strengthening this passivity by practicing it. So the microcosm of how you confront or avoid the opposite sex insidiously has now become how you confront or avoid every single thing in your life: Your waitress who got the order wrong, your neighbor that blasts music too loud, your boss who doesn’t pay you enough and runs roughshod over all your contributions. You live in a reality of avoidance and fear and lies, and you cannot even realize it because your ego does not hesitate for one second to cloud your perception at every turn to protect your current comfortable world view.

How you interact with stranger girls is in fact a precise mirror of how you handle your entire life, because all of those things are reflections of the same aspect of your attitude and values.

Incidentally, that girl is most likely to blow you off because she can sense right away how you have been handling your entire life, passively and defensively. Who wants to get to know someone like that?

Consider instead the pursuit of the pick up artist. He might be afraid of confrontation, or making mistakes, but that doesn’t stop him from taking action, because he knows that he will learn from the process, however painful. His attitude when confronted with uncertainty is to try anyway. He talks to everyone, sometimes without result or with disastrous result, because he knows that sometimes too, wonderful unexpected things happen when you talk to everyone and try things that you have never tried before.

Over the span of years, he has forced himself to take action at moments of uncertainty so many thousands of times that it creeps back into the rest of his life inexorably. It has reprogrammed him, not only for the better of his self-development, but for everyone around him, owing to the infectious nature of culture. The fully realized seduction practitioner is socially powerful, graceful, and attractive to both sexes.

He has become a highly functioning vehicle that transmits openness, connections, joy, possibility, and confidence to everyone around him, and by the nature of culture his values are usually more strongly transmitted and received than most others. He lives in a reality of seeing things for what they really are. His ego has no need to manipulate his judgment for protection any longer. Fear is a tiny remnant of the past, and he finds that he neither resists “real” situations like confronting his macho bosses, annoying neighbors and inept waitresses. He is able to operate comfortably in any social situation.

He is a scientist of the highest order, because he wills himself to deeply explore and evaluate social interactions without limitation, regardless of how much his ego or social conditioning may resist. His experience in this practice enables him to transfer these values toward all other pursuits that gentle society would consider meaningful. He has learned how to learn, and knows how to know. He is a better, more accomplished, and more self-efficacious person in all aspects, and that is infectious too.

That is my kind of culture.