Created
December 29, 2009 03:04
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When a self-help book urges you to bend reality, I | |
think what it boils down to is that people can | |
take a lot of a abuse. But most of us are not | |
psychopathic enough to take advantage of | |
people. Unfortunately for us individually, | |
fortunately for us as a society. | |
It's really a phenomenon of the modern world. In | |
prehistoric time, I suppose, if you fuck somebody, | |
you'd get a bad rep in your tribe, and become | |
shunned. That is obviously bad. You'd die, | |
literally, of loneliness. So there's a strong | |
psychological resistance to doing anything that | |
seems like cheating. | |
But in the modern world, for every lesson learned, | |
there's always a new sucker born. There is no | |
social cost in cheating a stranger. | |
If you can overcome your sense of conscience (not | |
so much your sense of reality), then it's should | |
be easy to win by the sheer quantity of | |
opportunity. You spam enough people, you can always | |
find enough suckers. | |
Economic activity is a social activity. Economic | |
reality, then, is a social reality. If you are can | |
bend people's social perception (lying, cajoling), | |
you can effectively bend their economic reality, | |
to your advantage. | |
It is revealing that while most self-help gurus | |
would point to "fear" as the obstacle in our | |
willingness to break the rules, but for most of | |
us, the problem is that there's always a sense of | |
"cheating" in breaking the rules. | |
Gaming women, it feels immoral. But my | |
unwillingness to do it is, I don't think, an | |
unshakable respect, or unconscious fear. Nor is it | |
adherence to habit, or some entrenched sense of | |
reality, delineating what can or cannot be | |
done. It is my social upbringing, my sense of | |
moral decency. | |
If you are willing to violate the implicit social | |
agreements, you can find exploits to get youself | |
very far very quickly. | |
In the end, it's not about overcoming fear or | |
convention. It's about to tricking yourself into | |
doing the effective but distasteful ("immoral"). | |
It's probably quite hard to do that. |
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