Denying the utility of Power, vilifying it’s usages, is in itself a a means of using Power.
Real change works from the inside out. If you don’t change your mind about yourself you wont change anything else. Women can change their hair color, their makeup, clothes, breast size, and any number of cosmetic alteration on a whim or as they can afford them, but the constant discontent, the constant inadequecies they complain of are rooted in their self-perceptions, not how others perceive them.
This is an outside-in mentality; hoping the external will change the internal, and it’s just this mentality that lesser men apply to themselves – the only difference being the application. The AFC (for lack of a better term) has the same problem as the vain woman (OK, really any woman) – a lack of true self-understanding of their own problem. It’s very difficult to do self-analysis and self-criticism, particularly when it comes to questioning our own beliefs and the reasons our personalities are what they are. It’s akin to telling someone they’re not living their lives ‘correctly’ or that they’re raising their children ‘wrong’; only it’s more difficult because we’re doing the telling about ourselves to ourselves. Self-estimation (not self-esteem) NEVER happens spontaneously, there always has to be some crisis to prompt it. Anxiety, trauma and crisis are necessary catalysts to stimulate self-consciousness. A breakup, a death, a betrayal; tragically, it’s at these points in our lives that we do our best introspection, we have our ‘moments of clarity’ and yes, discover what abysmal, simpering chumps we’ve allowed ourselves to be molded into.
Denial
The first step to really unplugging from our preconditioning (i.e the feminine Matrix) is recognizing that this conditioning has led to the beliefs we think are integral to our personalities. The psychological term for this is called ‘ego-investment’. When a person internalizes a mental schema so thoroughly, and has become conditioned to it for so long, it becomes an integral part of their personality. So to attack the belief is to, literally, attack the person. This is why we see such a violent reaction to people’s political, religious, inter-social/inter-sexual, inter-gender, etc. expressions of belief – they perceive it as a personal attack, even when presented with irrefutable, empirical evidence that challenges the veracity of those beliefs.
One common frustration that Game-aware Men express is how dificult it is to open an AFCs eyes as to why he’s not hooking up, why he’s not getting dates (or 2nd dates if he is), why he’s constantly getting LJBF rejections, etc., and all the flaws in what is really ego-investment internalizations. As I’m fond of saying, it’s dirty work unplugging chumps from the Matrix, and this is made all the more difficult when a person is in a catagorical state of denial.
People resort to denial when recognizing that the truth would destroy something they hold dear. In the case of a cheating partner, denial lets you avoid acknowledging evidence of your own humiliation. Short of catching a spouse in bed with your best friend, evidence of infidelity is usually ambiguous. It’s motivated skepticism. You’re more skeptical of things you don’t want to believe and demand a higher level of proof. Denial is unconscious, or it wouldn’t work: if you know you’re closing your eyes to the truth, some part of you knows what the truth is and denial can’t perform its protective function.
One thing we all struggle to protect is a positive self-image. The more important the aspect of your self-image that’s challenged by the truth, the more likely you are to go into denial. If you have a strong sense of self-worth and competence, your self-image can take hits but remain largely intact; if you’re beset by self-doubt (a hallmark of self-righteous AFC thinking), however, any acknowledgment of failure can be devastating and any admission of error painful to the point of being unthinkable. Self-justification and denial arise from the dissonance between believing you’re competent, and making a mistake, which clashes with that image. Solution: deny the mistake. Attribute it to an outside element (women won’t play by “the rules”) rather than resort to introspection (maybe I’m wrong about “the rules”?).
Therefore we see AFCs tenaciously cling to a moralistic sense of purpose in their methods which is only reinforced by popular culture in our media, our music, eHarmony, our religion, etc.
Articles of Power
The term Power has a lot of misapplied connotations to it. When we think of Powerful people, we think of influence, wealth, prestige, status and the ability to have others do our bidding – all of these are not Power. And as much as we’d like to convince ourselves that women are attracted to this Power, this is false. Because what I’ve described as aspects of Power here are really manifestations of Power. Here’s a cosmic secret revealed for you:
Real Power is the degree to which a person has control over their own circumstances. Real Power is the degree to which we control the directions of our lives.
When we allow our thinking, our personality disorders and our mental schemas, combined with their accompanying behaviors, to determine the course of our decisions, we relenquish real Power. The man who succumbs, by force or by will, to the responsibilities, liabilities and accountabilities that are required of him by society, marriage, committment, family, fatherhood, career choice, etc. leaves him very little influence over the course of his own life.
The painter Paul Gaugin is one of history’s most powerful men. At middle age Paul was a “successful” banker, with a wife and children and by all appearances, a man of great merit and considerable wealth. Then one day Paul decided he’d had enough and wanted to paint. He left his wife, children and his money, and decided he would become a painter. He cast off his former life to live the life he chose, he had the power to assume control of it. Eventually he died in Tahiti, but not after having one of the most interesting of lives and becoming a world renowned painter. You may think, what a horrible man he was to abandon his responsibilities to selfishly pursue his own desires, but the fact remains that he had the Power within himself to do so that most men would shudder to even consider. So entrapped are we in our self-expectation and self-imposed limitations that we fail to see that we have always had the keys to our own prisons – we’re just scared shitless to use them.
This Power is the root of that all important ‘confidence’ we toss out every time we tell a 19 y.o. chump what women really want so he can get laid. It’s this ability to make our own decisions, right or wrong, and to confidently own them that separate us from “other guys.” It’s this self-guided Power that evokes a seemingly irrational confidence to Spin Plates, to assert ourselves and to be unafraid to make ourselves the PRIZE, and it’s just this Power that women want to be associated with.
Lack of this Power is exactly what makes master PUAs revert to some of the most pathetic AFCs once they become involved in an LTR. They sell women on this idealization and the perception that they possess this Power only to discover the AFC insecurities these behaviors were meant to cover up once they’ve bought the act. This isn’t to devalue PUA skills as effective behavior sets, rather it’s meant to illustrate the behaviors that should be manifest as a result of effecting a real personal change. It should be that adopting a positive-masculine mental schema prompts these PUA skills as a result. Instead we have the cart before the horse in a mad rush to get that all important pussy we’ve been deprived of for so long, by masking our deficit in real Power and understanding with rote memorized PUA techniques hoping that by practicing them they’ll turn into “natural game” and we’ll mature enough to initiate a lasting personal change.
