Tactics Tuesdays: Don't Tell Her Why Not to Sleep with You

Sure, don't mind you asking. I don't get to talk about this stuff so much (somewhat tangential to the website's content), but it's a major interest of mine! So I'll give some details.

I've swallowed my pride at various times. I think this is necessary to not be a fight-robot. e.g., all someone has to do to get you to do what they want you to do is push the right pride button, and off you go like a mindless automaton, shouting and swinging.

Whether I would swallow my pride to live is highly context dependent. It's also easy to speculate but hard to know for sure. e.g., imagine a scenario where some guy has you in a scenario you cannot get out of and he says, "Do X super humiliating thing and I let you live, or don't do it and you die," very easy to be a keyboard jockey and say, "Of course I would die rather than do X super humiliating thing!" but history tells us most men, particularly if they are isolated / feel like no one is watching, will comply. It's only when men have their comrades around, think there is social accountability, etc., that they are most willing to die for pride.

Anyway, I'm headstrong, high defiance/rebellion, and have been close to death several times and had it not worry me / have already made my peace with death. So my strong-ish feeling is that if it was something that stronlgy went against what I believe, my reaction would be, "Just go ahead and shoot me." But then impossible to know for sure. Until I've actually gone through it I wouldn't trust my pre-judgment of what I'd do in a situation I haven't experienced.

Life purpose is also a big factor here. For me and my belief set, life is a brief test on a greater spiritual journey. But I have friends for whom life is all there is, and when they die, that's it. The light goes out. Before life, there was nothing; after life, there is nothing. These friends fear death to great extent; they fear growing old, as growing old is the march toward death; they would, I believe, go to great lengths to preserve their own lives, and would be dangerous people to rely on in deadly situations because of this. I'd much prefer to go to war with men who believe in some kind of greater post-life existence than men who think this life is all they've got and they must preserve their lives at all costs, including any costs to anyone else.

A mission I have had is to remove as many possible pride-impugning things as possible from my life. Things that would lead to loss of pride for other men I can do in ways that don't affect, or even amplify my pride. This is something most defiant/rebellious types do. e.g., Tyler Durden in Fight Club does things like get beat up or live in a condemned building and it doesn't impact his pride, even though for some men these things would be pride killers. Instead, he is freer, because no one can hold that over him. When I find something I have too much pride attached to, often I will look for ways to de-pride myself around that thing. Pride is an excellent way for others to gain leverage over you. If someone can figure out what you pride yourself on, he has figured out what to squeeze you on to make you do what he wants. Pride isn't totally escapable (e.g., we need to preserve a certain amount of pride in our public appearances to not be socially ostracized or totally discredited by various attackers and critics), but you can limit its power to a degree.

One last thing. How do you go about determining what you'd do in certain scenarios. What drives you? Self interest? Interest of the group? Your code?

So, this is not exactly what you asked, but you mentioned guidelines on panic scenarios. I have since my teenaged years followed the rule from Hagakure, the Book of the Samurai, to "think always of death, so that you are prepared to meet it." I do this with not just death but all kinds of bad / dangerous / risky / inconvenient situations.

By mentally rehearsing how you'd deal with them, you give yourself an automatic behavior pattern to use when/if you encounter them. Most I will never encounter, but I've had various situations where some crazy thing happens, I react, and everyone goes, "Whoa! That was amazing how you stopped that person from falling!" or whatever it was. But when it happened, it was just me running an autopilot response I'd rehearsed at an earlier time. Additionally, any time I'm in dangerous situations, I start planning and rehearsing pretty much subconsciously. Usually this isn't needed, but when it is I've often already calculcated the risks and can make sure they're avoided by everyone I'm responsible for as best as possible.

On "what drives you", I think this is formed in either early childhood, or is genetic. Everyone likes to attribute their actions to some kind of rational, logical deduction, but I haven't seen any evidence of that. So far as I can tell, people do what genes or early childhood environment (probably both), plus to a far lesser extent later life experiences and environment, program them to do.

In my case, I do not care about 'code', and only care about self-interest insofar as my self-interest serves my aims. I am perfectly content to take superficially worse positions if I think it's in the long-term best interest of whatever I'm pursuing. e.g., I had a very nice, very comfortable job, in very comfortable California, and left that to go traveling the world and an uncertain future as an entrepreneur. I had some people who thought I was taking off for a wonderful life of great wealth running my own businesses and tremendous freedom, but at the time I was constantly on the verge of panic thinking I was throwing my entire career away, would fail at business, would never get hired in my industry again, and was going to end up back working in a tire shop for near-minimum wage at the end of it. However, I embarked on that path because I felt like I had to do it, and there was never any question about me doing it. I had to do it to know if I could do it. If I tried and failed, then I would have to figure out another path later.

My drivers seem to be, from what I can tell, expanding personal power by expanding skills, abilities, knowledge bases, and resources, while removing weaknesses (like insufficient financial power, inability to get desired women, inability to communicate effectively, etc.), to be used in ways that I judge serve mankind. This website is an example; the goal is to have more enlightened men who can more easily meet the women they want, give those women incredible experiences and relationships, and elevate their minds to things like advancing their societies, instead of obsessing over how they're going to get that girl in the next cubicle (don't need to obsess, because they've already got her; or they're already dating two girls way hotter than her). At the same time, this site also affords me the ability to hone a variety of different skills it'd be hard for me to hone otherwise; so it both serves the overall goal outright, while also allowing me to build skill sets I can use in the future in bigger ways to serve the overall goal.

Those last two paragraphs are probably of limited value, since they're about me exclusively, and probably not trainable. They're also, I feel, incomplete; but there is a certain veil I don't feel I'm able to look beyond, to identify why the things that drive me do, and what it is I ultimately hope to do with them. I have ideas, goals, visions, etc., of course; but the question is always, "Why these particular objects?" and that question I cannot answer. Perhaps a genes / early childhood thing; it seems to just be hardwired in.

Chase