You're Not Spock

No one is immune from emotional manipulation

As anyone familiar with Aristotle’s Rhetoric knows, humanity is divided into two classes, those who can be persuaded by information and those who cannot. Those who cannot be persuaded by information are limited to communication by small-r rhetoric, the distinction being necessary since Aristotle rather unhelpfully defines capital-R Rhetoric as being the set of dialectic and rhetoric.

One of the more important books Castalia Library has ever published.

Rhetoric is emotional communication. It is intended to influence and to manipulate rather than to inform. Memes, with which you are all familiar, are nothing more than visual rhetoric, and a particularly powerful form of visual rhetoric at that. And there is no informational substance or value to rhetoric, its sole purpose is to persuade through its various forms such as amphiboly, sophistry, and the other methods defined by Aristotle, with which I will not belabor the reader here today.

Now, for some reason, people whose communication is strictly limited to the rhetorical often incorrectly believe that they are operating entirely at the dialectical level. This is because one common modern rhetorical technique is an appeal to the pseudo-dialectical. Hence the spurious demands for SOURCE? and “I fucking love Science!” and many of the other aspects of what passes for Internet debate these days.

But remember, the persuasive power of rhetoric is in its appeal to the emotions. And emotions are very closely connected to one’s self-perception. Which is the reason it is very common for observably-sensitive Gamma males to proclaim that they operate by logic alone, and for women with hair-trigger tempers to insist that they are impervious to the various dark arts of the pickup artists.

Consider the discussion of the tactic of “the neg” from a few days ago. As always, both the Reddit list and the comments of the female readers here insisted that a) it doesn’t work, b) it’s a turn-off, c) it might work on women with less self-esteem, but it certainly wouldn’t work on ME.

A reminder, yet again, that one should never pay any attention to anything that women say about intersexual relations.

For what we wish others believed, we first are always self-deceived.

This failure to understand their own susceptibility to having their emotions manipulated through rhetoric is initially rooted in a complete failure to even understand the technique being discussed. As one male commenter helpfully explained, a neg is an advanced technique used for initial approaches to women of equal or higher status to the proactive man, it’s not a psychological assault intended to sufficiently tear down a woman’s self-confidence to make her settle for a loser.

Proper negging has always been misunderstood and always will be. It's an advanced technique, requiring strong social intuition. Mystery, who analyzed and explained negging better than anybody, always emphasized that you only neg 8s, 9s, or 10s. If you neg a 7, she'll likely hate you forever. Of course, Mystery was an attractive, stylish, 6'6" man; he probably overqualified himself when he negged 7's. Perhaps negging a 7 could work for a less attractive man.

Mystery says you neg an 8 once, a 9 twice, a 10 three times. Even 10's can be overnegged. You don't neg anybody all evening long. If you have much resentment of women in your heart, the woman will sense it and the neg will fall flat. I'm not saying that no gamma has ever successfully negged a woman, but most gammas shouldn't try it. They're not ready for advanced technique and probably never will be.

Of course, the most common misunderstanding is that many people assume any insult is a "neg". Mystery's canonical example neg was "Nice nails; are they real?" Not an insult; closer to a compliment.

So, what women were asserting doesn’t work on them isn’t what works on them at all. As I pointed out, attractive women are so accustomed to having men kowtowing to them all the time that the few men who don’t tends to fascinate them. That’s why Mystery chose his self-appellation, because women are curious creatures who are naturally drawn to anyone they cannot easily explain away or fit into their canonical categories.

The reality is that few women would even realize she’d been negged by a man who was any good at it. But for some reason she couldn’t quite articulate, he’d stand out from the rest and she’d be tempted to qualify herself to him by “proving him wrong”.

It doesn’t matter what a woman’s values and priorities are. Every woman’s emotional triggers will vary somewhat. But the buttons are still there to be pushed. No pretty woman is going to be affected by some Gamma asserting that she’s only mid. But anything that you project about yourself, be it your religious faith, your appearance, your social class, or your fashion sense, can be grist for the mill.

Few women have any idea how easily their emotions can be manipulated, or how easily they can be jerked around as if they're on puppet strings by a man who is sufficiently skilled in rhetoric. The Gammas aren't Spock and neither are women. Only the woman who is devoid of all feeling and emotion, who is a passionless creature of pure dialectic, cannot be successfully negged, because most women naturally engage in communications at a rhetorical level.