Tactics Tuesdays: Expect Women to Approach You (or Signal)

Cid-

Glad you like these sorts of pieces!

Re: my mindsets:

1. Do you personally adopt the mindsets of "I'm the most desirable man in town and every woman knows it and wants a piece of me" and "Women appear out of nowhere and hover around me waiting to talk to me" or are these just examples for us?

Yes, I think this way.

Sounds kind of full of yourself to say it, I know.

Considering that women do routinely appear out of nowhere and hover/parade around in front of me though, that one in particular is an easy mindset to just automatically have.

2. Why is it that you "less often" adopt the mindset of "Women want to approach me. They can't keep their distance from me. Something draws them toward me, and they have to surround me and open me."?

Because it happens infequently that women proactively open me.

When I'm in a very good head space and I focus on this, it happens.

Actually right after I wrote this article, I went out telling myself I'd get approached by a woman that day, and I did (I ended up working late at a bar/café, and picked a seat near a table of rowdy college girls playing truth or dare. They ended up daring one of their number to come introduce herself me).

The thing is, there's a certain element of "magical thinking" here, where (at least for me) you are thinking that just because you're thinking this, you are influencing the universe in some way.

If I try it when I am not really "on" though, it doesn't work, which makes me less likely to be able to believe it will really work the next time I try it, which affects my success rates.

If I look at how I got approached the other day, I deliberately looked for and put myself in an optimal position to get approached. I scouted around town and found a venue different from the one I usually go to, I scoured the whole venue until I found a group of girls who were having fun, and I picked a seat in plain view of them where I knew they'd see me and be able to check me out. If I was less confident of getting opened, I wouldn't bother to do those things, so there is this feedback loop between believing it will happen, then having the energy to put yourself in situations where it will happen, position yourself in ways for it to happen, and so on.

And if I am not feeling it on a given day, I don't want to throw a monkey wrench into that whole system and try to tell myself something will happen that I'm not going to follow through and position to make happen. That just kicks off a negative feedback cycle.

3. Do you repeat these mindsets over and over in your head like an affirmation while you're out?

For me, just a couple of times.

I don't know how/why, but if I tell myself something a couple of times at the start of an outing, then completely forget about it, very often it'll have come to pass by the end of that outing. And I will remember, "Oh, wow, yeah, I forgot, I said that would happen today!"

Probably what is happening is I say it a few times, start to really feel it, and then it is in my subconscious running in the background.

Chase

Neal-

Well, you can do this if you want to. But what is the reason for wanting to do it?

I have a question I like to ask women deeper into interactions, where I ask them what they think about me. That'll get you part/most of the way there.

You could also just do it as a tease: "So when did you decide you were attracted to me?"

If I really wanted to get that specifically coming out of a woman's mouth, that'd usually be how I'd do it.

Then praise her for admitting she is, of course ("Good choice!").

Chase

Anon-

Well, it seems clear at this point that the people in positions of influence are responding how they're responding consciously, and not due to some kind of mass panic. At this point they have abandoned the "flatten the curve" mantra and have switched to a "stay safe" / "zero deaths" mantra. And all talk of pandemic deaths has largely been sidelined while the drums of pandemic infections has come front and center, even though they barely mentioned the huge increase in testing, the earlier forecasts that around 15% of the population already had the disease, and they don't compare the plummeting death rate to the rocketing infection rate and draw the obvious conclusion from that.

From there it's just guessing at what the motives are for that though. Clearly part of it is to remake society. In America, the kind of talk the Founding Fathers engaged in ("Give me liberty, or give me death!") is now labeled 'dangerous' by large swaths of the population. People willingly giving up their liberty in exchange for safety has been a gradual trend in the West over the past several decades. There was nary a peep over the Patriot Act, and just a low grade murmur over Snowden's PRISM. As Benjamin Franklin put it, "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." It seems we have reached the moment he was talking about, something he was obviously disgusted over seeing with people in his own time, and that we are now seeing in ours.

From a systems perspective, complex systems become increasingly coercive and authoritarian internally as their ability to extract resources externally wanes. The Western system has pivoted around the United States since World War II, with the U.S. setting up highly favorable economic deals in third world countries via regime change operations (under the auspices of 'human rights and democracy') which led to puppet regimes that gave U.S. corporations carte blanche. This led to wealth being funneled into the U.S., and the broader Western European / Western civilization system. You can read the book Confessions of an Economic Hitman to understand a bit about that process.

But basically the Western system is centered on the Western fiat system, which as an economic system competes with other economic systems (both non-Western fiat systems, like the Soviet Union's now-defunct fiat, and others, like the miraculously successful Libyan economic system, the now-nationalized banking system of Russia, or the Chinese, North Korean, Iranian, etc. systems -- all of which Western fiat competes against directly, and seeks to supplant in their host countries via color revolutions and regime change). The trouble is that the Western system has of late been less and less effective in effecting regime change. It failed in Syria. Failed in Venezuela. Failed at starting things with Iran and in Hong Kong. Its actions in Libya and Iraq were a mess and while they increased short-term profits for the banks and corporations (at the cost of the middle class) they did not lead to any kind of long-term resource gain. The West has more control now than it did before of Iraqi and Libyan oil, but there are warring factions in Libya that have seriously damaged oil production, and Iraq is increasingly turning toward Iran. So the gains may not last.

There's an excellent article here on how empires behave as their ability to extract resources from outside places comes undone. I recommend it to anyone who wants to understand what is happening to the Western system right now.

But basically, as the West becomes less and less able to extract resources from abroad, and other competing systems put up more fight, and push it out of places it is trying to extract from (the way Russia pushed it out in Syria), the more the system is going to need to cannibalize the resources of its own populace to survive.

The people won't like this (they never do), and they respond to it by becoming increasingly rebellious, turning to populism (Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Marine Le Pen, Mateo Salvini, etc.), and attempting to buck the system.

Systems care about their own self-preservation above all else though, and the greatest threat to the Western system now comes from within, from rebellious populations that are trying to throw off an increasingly burdensome yoke.

The system needs to regain control.

Tainter in his book explains that elites are simply a part of the system, both benefiting from the system and used by the system, same as everyone else. Rather than focus on them (and they are just going to push whatever is best for the system, really), I think it makes the most sense to think about things from a system perspective: when the system is dependent on resource extraction from its populace to survive, and that populace becomes increasingly fractious and rebellious, what does the system need to do to maintain control of that populace, and keep the resource flow from people to system going?

By some measures there are 40 million people working for the U.S. government. Those people are all direct parts of the system who are dependent on enough money coming into the system to pay them to continue executing their roles in upholding the system. This is a big system, and it needs a lot of inputs.

As more and more of that input needs to come from the populace, the populace will become more and more rebellious, and require greater and greater degrees of control to keep in line.

Chase