gistfile1.txt

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.