“Self-love is not so great a sin as self-neglect.” - Henry V
Pride is one thing that people get very confused about. It’s a healthy thing to have pride of oneself, to be proud of our accomplishments; it’s a very real source of self-confidence.
Humility is an admirable quality too, don’t get me wrong, but humility is only genuine when you’re confident of your own abilities. It takes a humble Man to walk away from a fight that he knows he could win, but chooses not to engage in. Generally humility is only self-gratifying, because only rarely will others appreciate it as humility (those familiar with your abilities) and not view it as cowardice, or at best a lack of confidence.
Pride often appears arrogant because people of lesser accomplishments become envious, and people of better accomplishments think less of them than you do. It’s very important not to appear too perfect, but it’s equally important not to seem spineless.
It’s quite another thing to be “prideful”and this is where the disconnect comes for a lot of AFCs, particularly ones with strong ego-investments in morality, chivalry, honor, etc. My old AFC self used to struggle with this as well. The AFC sublimates himself; he self-deprecates because he believes, erroneously, that this ideology will separate him from the herd and make him,“not-like-other-guys”. He mistakenly believes that he’s unique in this when actually his thinking is the mindset of the
majority.
Why? For the answer all you need do is look at the most common responses in the blog/ forum comment threads from guys just recently discovering the community.
I have no doubt that there are some guys who go from zero to PUA and then parlay that into some kind of seducer-hood. I would also argue that they are the rare exceptions.
Guys don’t search out community forums or blogs like mine because they’re getting too much pussy. They search it out on Google because what they’ve been doing isn’t producing the results they want. They’ve been doing exactly what most plug-ins criticize Game for – they’re working from a script. They like to point out the flaws in autonomously adhering to a script with regards to PUA techniques;
you become a social robot, not “yourself”; but from an opposite side, what you’re doing now, or have done, as an AFC is equally as scripted. The only difference, and far more insidious, is that they’ve internalized these AFC “scripts” that society on whole has conditioned into them as personal
investments over the course of a lifetime.
After dropping your AFC mindset for a one based on self-interest, what happens? You probably began to see results. You can hook up with women the caliber of which were previously unavailable to you, and all it took was replacing your chump behavior and mentality with one of self-concern and self-priority. You might feel like an asshole, people may say you’ve changed or accuse you of
becoming bitter, or you’re being someone you’re not, but you couldn’t argue with the results. One of the biggest dangers of the PUA ideal is that it does nothing to address the root problem of AFCism (for lack of a better term). AFCs don’t want to stop being AFCs. Largely, they just want their ONEitis (or their “dream girl”) to hook up with them longterm and then drift back into a comfortable state of ‘just being themselves’. According to The Game ,by Neil Strauss even the Godfather of pickup, Mystery, with all his PUA prowess, degenerates into a simpering, borderline suicidal chump when he realizes that his PUA scripts do nothing for him in a monogamous LTR with Katya (his ONEitis). The most notorious PUA in modern history was still an AFC, because he hadn’t killed that mentality, that AFC internalization – he hadn’t killed his inner AFC.
Another very common occurrence is the “reformed” AFC who makes progress toward becoming more Game savvy, and as a result gets his “dream girl”, only to lose her after reverting back to a Beta frame once he’s in an LTR with her. I’m not a big fan of PUA founding father Ross Jefferies, but he did say something very profound once, he said “teaching PUA skills to these chumps is like giving dynamite to children.” This is probably truer than he realized, because the potential for disaster is much higher. Most guys want that silver bullet, the magic formula that will get them the girl, but it does nothing to prepare them for the idyllic LTR their Beta nature has fantasized about for so very long.
They don’t become Men, they become children with dynamite. So are we really surprised when the guy who finally gets his Dream Girl as a result of learning Game becomes despondent and suicidal when he loses the “best thing he’ll ever have” when she leaves him? Are we shocked when his ONEitis turns out to be a BPD (borderline personality disorder) girl and his life’s ambitions pitch into a death-spiral because he was unprepared to deal with a post-Game LTR?
The problem with just employing PUA skills to get any woman is that sometimes it actually gets you
any woman. There’s no vetting process, no discernment, taught as part of technique. AFCs get so
zone girl interested, or getting women at all, that they have no motivation to think about who they should get involved with. They’re unprepared for emotionally manipulative women, and particularly when they’re more attractive than anything they’d ever had before. They obsess. They predictably get ONEitis, but they develop a ONEitis in such an extreme case that they can be suicidal about a woman they’d previously never been able to attain.
Remember this, PUA skills are tools, and valuable ones, but adopting a positive masculine mindset prepares you for more. An AFC needs to divorce himself from deep set social and psychological schema – he needs to unlearn the self-delusions that a lifetime has conditioned him to internalize into his personality. Giving an AFC Game skills before this transition will only condemn him to
disappointment and despair in an LTR. The more important lesson is learned in the discarding of that old, Beta, way of thinking, while understanding the tools and techniques to apply your new, confident, positive masculine mindset.