gwax's rumblings

I have just fin­ished read­ing The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists by Neill Strauss and I can safely say that it was an enlight­en­ing read. I would like to highly rec­om­mend this book to any­one and every­one, women espe­cially. Although the book is, osten­si­bly, an auto­bi­o­graphic nar­ra­tive about one man’s jour­ney into the soci­ety of male pickup artists, it says an awful lot about human nature, inter­ac­tions and frailties.

I found the book enlight­en­ing because it has opened up my per­cep­tion to a new way of look­ing at social inter­ac­tions and manip­u­la­tions. Sadly, since being so enlight­ened, I have seen quite a few exam­ples of how pathet­i­cally weak-willed and eas­ily manip­u­lated peo­ple can be. The Game also has a fair amount of com­men­tary on the robot nature of many people’s social inter­ac­tions. Having recently seen some strong exam­ples of peo­ple giv­ing in to their robotic reac­tions, I find myself very dis­ap­pointed in some peo­ple specif­i­cally and human­ity in gen­eral. It will likely take me a bit of time to re-equilibrate my per­cep­tions and moral­ity but until that hap­pens, I’m going to stick with a gen­eral sense of dis­ap­point­ment for a while.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 29th, 2007 at 3:29 pm and is filed under books, musings, waksman. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.