Futuristic Words

Ah, back to my special blogging keyboard, the one that’s been in the corner of my room, covered in dust. Welcome back to my little haven of overblown prose and pontification. It’s been quite a year. Some of you might remember I left Love Systems in 2007 with deep reservations about my work there, about my behavior and legacy as a pick-up artist.

From 23 November 2007:
“The way that the community writes is inherently objective of women, inherently objective of a full half of the species. We depersonalize the interaction because we have to, because personalizing it means being people, and we’re too damned insecure to be people… in reviewing the tone of my blog, I realized I was too far down the rabbit hole to see the extent to which I was objectifying the girls in my life. My potential wife. My potential daughter. My mother.”

That’s a heavy indictment of the Secret Underground Internet Seduction Community and my part in it. Unfortunately, nothing I’ve seen during my sabbatical has done anything to change my opinion of the majority of what passes for dating advice, either by members of the SUISC or by those people who choose to stand apart and guide their fellow men through the brambles of sexual social dynamics. Grown men continue to run around in a state of arrested development and shriek about their lack of power in the face of the mighty, mighty vagina. Misogyny runs rampant in the subtext if not the text of forum post after blog entry after DVD after e-book. So why return to such an environment? With a fancy degree and a mountain of real-world experience that could find me employed in any range of possible careers, what did I have to gain by returning? Besides money.

The answer is simple: we do good work. Noble work.

In the last couple weeks, as I’ve made contact with various LS instructors, I have been reminded time and time again how much I enjoyed their company on programs and what a bright, resourceful, inspiration group of men my fellow instructors are. Even when we disagree on finer points, these are the people I want on my side. They are without exception the most fun gentlemen with whom I’ve had the pleasure of carousing, and as I’ve refreshed my knowledge of their respective bodies of work, I am thrilled that I have so much to learn from all of them, and I hope they feel the same way about my return to the company.

My charges from November 2007 reflect aspects of the community, certainly. They are an accurate assessment of some of the luminaries propagating wares that are more harmful than not for the students and customers. Harmful is a loaded word but apt in this case; to wit, if you’re teaching men how to bed women without context, you are giving a loaded gun to a toddler. However, helping men understand themselves, better themselves through the microcosm of male-female social dynamics is not merely helpful; it can be life-changing. Those who teach dating science are shouldering a solemn responsibility, whether they choose to acknowledge it or not. We shepherd men to whom society neglected to explain its abstruse and occasionally absurd rules, and we guide these souls toward a place of satisfaction and contentment. If you’ve never been socially awkward, if you’ve never pounded your head against a wall and whispered to the darkness, “Why don’t girls like me?” you might not understand how powerful this transformation can be. As instructors it’s our duty to make sure we don’t merely create a legion of libertines, but a community of exceptional men, answers to the female conundrum of where all the good men have gone. (Answer: they’re all around you, but they might not know how to talk you.) We can empower our students to viciously take from other people or we can help them reach out and truly connect with other human beings at levels they didn’t even understand they were missing before their tutelage. This is the real value of what we teach at Love Systems. The metric of sexual attraction and sexual “success” are a handy shorthands for the whole enchilada of psychological composition.

I needed to go when I did. During the course of my employment with Love Systems, I lost sight of the man behind Future, and while I had a lot of fun (a LOT of fun), when I grew intimate with a woman, I saw no way to maintain that closeness without sacrificing truth, an ironic position, no doubt. I lied, and I hurt some women I loved very much. I needed to re-experience the world behind the mask of a chump, I suppose, to live in the Matrix again, before I could reconcile my two selves. In so doing, I discovered a crucial oversight in my assessment of my work when I wrote the passage above. I was operating under the assmuption that working with an active knowledge of social dynamics somehow disenfranchises one party,that knowledge of what’s going to happen somehow robs a romantic or sexual experience of its beauty.

What garbage.

Knowing about light and shadow and NLE and compositing and narrative structure have only enhanced my love of film and the way I interface with them since I attended film school. As I discover guitar, as I learn more about music, I am finding a reverence for the things I’ve always loved that I could not have accessed before because I did not have the knowledge or the vocabulary. Physicists can conceive the upper and lower limits of everything in view. A lump of dogshit is actually a complex network of protons and neutrons and electrons, quarks and leptons. The same glory of creation applies equally to lightning bolts, mountain vistas, or car exhaust fumes. Sometimes information enhances an experience, and through greater knowledge we are able to actually understand what we see or hear or feel or do, instead of being transfixed by the easiest or most accessible pleasures we encounter. Does this mean that it’s crazy to think knowing how the game is played can stultify the soul the seducer in question? Of course that can happen. But that dragging the spirit through muck is no more inevitable than any man’s status as a perpetual loser to women. Knowledge doesn’t preclude access to the engine of love that drives the universe, doesn’t cut you off from the best part of yourself. Only the individual can make that choice. Speaking the language of social dynamics can be burdensome, yes. It can lead to cynicism, yes (and insidious solipsism, oh!), but a soul yearning for beauty always has an uphill battle, and I’d rather be Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied.

It’s good to be back.