Every generation has to re-learn the past’s lessons.
Two books that are really just post compendiums keep reappearing, The Book of Pook and The Book of Bonecrker (PDF download),and they were both written by guys in the late ’90s or early ’00s. They could have been written yesterday and seem eternal… though they don’t discuss social media and the modern attention economy, their male-female fundamentals are on point and I wish I had come across both when they were fresh (this: “You cannot obtain love by giving yours away for free” is a good summary of the modern attention economy). The information was out there but back in 2004 I didn’t have access to it.
If I can try to go meta on both books, I think they really argue that to achieve the best relationships, you need to be a complete human being. Many people are not complete. You can be incomplete and not get laid; you can be incomplete and be very good at the game and getting laid, however strange that may seem at first. But your medium- and long-term relationships will likely fail. If you are a guy who is solely interested in notch count and casual sex, that may not matter, and you can succeed while being incomplete. If you are a guy who has never experienced a wide array of sex with a wide array of women, you may not care about developing yourself into a complete human being, but you likely will at some point in your life. But many game failures start from within.
I pick out this, about attitude,
Are you ugly? Are you beautiful? It doesnât matter. Women do not see beauty; they see only sexuality. So how does a sexual male LOOK?
To put it bluntly, it is the bad@ss. This guy has the look of power be it a shaved head, leather coat, professional corporate suit, backwards cap, a well toned body, spiky hair, or whatever else. This person looks like a guy. He is not androgynous. He knows what his sexuality is and embraces it.
How is a guy supposed to look? To be male is to drive against Nature, to pierce her. He is not a pretty boy (though, this might get some girls too). It is almost a âroughâ look. A guy has a look of some masculinity about him.
It does matter how a guy looks, but weak looks can also be overcome. A guy should be polarizing. He should do the opposite of what many chicks do. Many guys are trained not to embrace masculine identity and it hurts. Part of the masculine identity is understand pain, suffering, and rejection. Guys who can tolerate and even thrive under those conditions will thrive.
I hadn’t realized how long ago Pook was writing. Yet most of what he writes is still relevant, and the crisis in masculinity is if anything worse today than it was in the early 2000s. We seem to have learned little, retained less, and failed to help the next generation of guys learn how to be guys. Pretty depressing, overall. The conversations on seduction boards are almost exactly the same today as they were then, with the addition of smartphones and social media questions, but both those things seem to have only retarded guys’s social skills. The fundamentals of masculinity and femininity have not changed. Guys who cultivate their masculinity, strength, humor, fortitude, courage, etc. will thrive. Guys who do not cultivate these traits will often not thrive. The older you get, the more apparent these fundamental truths will become. Like, “Life is much more enjoyable as a masculine figure than a nerdy androgynous.” We live in a society that discourages us from becoming masculine, to our detriment. To live is to struggle, something that I didn’t believe when I was younger. I thought that to live was to try and minimize struggle as best I could.
The Book of Pook cannot be absorbed all at once, so I recommend that you read it at different points in your player journey. I don’t agree with everything in it. All guys have to find our own way. In some ways this book is dispiriting because I realize that a lot of what I am writing has already been said.
ADDED LATER: Nash found a book, How to Pickup Girls by Eric Weber, that was published in 1970 and is a precursor to modern pickup, game, London Daygame Model, etc. We are all reinventing the wheel. The terrible thing, though, is that schools will never teach us this material (and most schools are actively hostile to men and male teachers), so guys have to re-learn it all on our own, unless we have good fathers / older male relatives / male mentors. Most of us don’t. I am trying to be that guy, somewhat, right now, and that is why I like books like What Women Want by Geoffrey Miller and Tucker Max… while you can say it is not full Red Pill like Rollo Tomassi and others, it is also socially acceptable enough to give it to younger male teenagers you might know, whereas a socially intelligent person will NOT do that with a lot of other Red Pill and game lit.
