It looks like I was right about George Sodini knowing about the seduction community (or a niche of it, at any rate). He was at an R. Don Steele seminar for “picking up women” called “The Right Attitude Workshop“. (Hat tip: reader Thras.) I put “picking up women” in quotes because R. Don Steele is widely held to be something of a buffoon in the pickup community.
R. Don is the “PUA” that older guys with little knowledge of real game turn to, lured by his cheesy marketing claiming success at teaching older men how to pick up younger women. Ross Jeffries, a pioneer of game based on “neurolinguistic programming”, used to have it out with Steele on usenet back in the day. The end result of their spastic internet bickering was to make both men look like tools (Jeffries should have maintained more state control) and to serve as evidence that Steele is a poseur out of step with mainstream seduction science. That Sodini went to a Steele workshop for help in picking up women shows that Sodini was unaware of Steele’s poor reputation and the legitimate (and more effective) alternatives in the seduction community that were available to him. Whatever Sodini learned at Steele’s workshop, it wasn’t anything that would have helped him get laid or given him the tools to gradually shed his crippling betatude.
I stand by my claim that learning real game, not the breathlessly marketed cheeseball “techniques” for picking up younger women that one would find at a Steele workshop, would have helped Sodini find a woman who would love him, and thus avert the killings that he felt compelled by his demons to carry out.
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Commenter Zdeno wrote:
Sodini definitely counts as a data point against the hypothesis that “every man can save himself, if only he knows GAME.” He was obviously aware of the seduction community, but the tools available to him weren’t enough.
This blog’s readership is generally accepting of HBD, right? We admit that intelligence, not to mention almost every psychological trait worth measuring, are all primarily genetically determined. Physical traits and athletic ability follow the same pattern. Why do we assume that game is uniquely malleable? It’s like as soon as we start talking about success with women, everyone’s a Gladwell-reading Blank Slatist.
I thus submit the following to the list pretty lies: Game is to a large extent genetically determined. In a polygamous society, some men will be left out of the sexual marketplace regardless of how many negs they memorize.
Define “save”. If by “save” you mean that every man can land a supermodel with expert level game, then yes, I would agree that is a flawed hypothesis. But if you mean, more realistically and less misleadingly of what the seduction community actually claims, that the great majority of men can improve their lot with women by learning game, then the hypothesis is true: The great majority of men in need of saving *can* save themselves with game. A guy similar to Sodini, with a years-long pussy drought weighing down his psyche and his balls, can go from involuntary celibacy to getting laid with chicks one to two points higher than what he is used to banging just by learning game. And by “game”, I mean the whole panoply of male mate value increasing strategies and tactics; from negs to wardrobe upgrades to avoiding the worst beta impulses when interactions with women don’t proceed smoothly.
As most of my readers are probably aware, I believe that genetic predisposition plays a large role in shaping our personalities and fate in life, and in limiting what we can achieve. At least, it plays a much larger role than what the current prevailing mis-wisdom would have you believe. This is why I am not a dyed-in-the-wool libertarian. However, neither am I a determinist. If genetic determinism were the be-all and end-all of human existence, then game would not work at all. You’d either “have the knack”, or you wouldn’t. But years of success with game by thousands of men of varying genetic blessings has proven that game is teachable, it is learn-able, and it will improve the love lives of, and the quality of women available to, the majority of men who make a serious effort to understand game and the nature of women.
There will always be those wretched omega outliers, those psychologically stripped betas, and those congenitally desperate losers in life who will not benefit from game. These pitiable shadows of men in our midst serve to remind us of the cruel indifference of the natural world, and the ultimate pointlessness of everything we do. And, yes, what this means is that some men, because of their inherent natural gifts, will find success with game sooner, and easier, than other men.
But does it follow from such a truth that game is a Blank Slatist wolf in womanizer’s clothing? Should we instead tell the left side of the desireability bell curve to hang up their cleats and go home to rot until the end of their days? No. Tell them the truth: Game will help you find sex and love. It won’t help you as much as, or as effortlessly as, better looking men, or richer men, or smarter men, or more charming men, or more adaptable men, but it will help. And that is the choice before you: To learn the art of seduction and at least give yourself a fighting chance to score more often and with women better looking and more personable than what you are accustomed to scoring, or to give up all hope and masturbate your life away to the gloomy flicker of an LCD while your fat cow American wife thrashes you to within an inch of your pride.
Really, isn’t the choice obvious?
