Intro
This article aims at investigating differences between cultures and their predisposition to engage with strangers in win-win situations. This is fundamental for any form of cold approach pickup as it requires the girl to be willing to engage with you. And do so with full belief that you hitting on her can lead to a better time for both of you.
Essentially, to trust a stranger, that something you can create together, is better than not engaging with each other. That is the basis of the concept of Social Trust. Well then… take it away!
Game, at its core, is a negotiation.
It involves a frame that needs to be moved. From meeting all the way to sex, there is a constant negotiation on what the relationship between the Player and the girl is. Is it friendly? Do you fancy each other? Is it going for an LTR? It is essentially the meta-frame of the relationship itself that is being constantly pushed and re-evaluated.
The Red Pill takes this one step further by using terms such as Sexual Marketplace and value to draw the parallel closer to home. The seduction version of negotiation and value exchange is meant to work like modern marketplaces. This comes with all the apparatus of modern advertising and business practices.
The topic of this essay is to highlight the biases of this theory and make it adjustable across broader cultures. Western economics is inherently strange. It describes social situations in the West, but the theory is limited when we try to universalize it. This is the highlight of the so-called WEIRD theory.
WEIRD theory explores the unique traits of these societies: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. It is even more relevant when we try to combine sexual dynamics with economics. Let’s trace over history to understand this.
West vs History
Hunter-gatherers don’t care about money. They don’t even have money. In fact, they don’t even own anything; everything is collective. They don’t care about value either. Value matters when it is exchanged; it is a guide for “fair deals”. Instead, hunter-gatherers think in binary: survival or not, the nuances are irrelevant.
This keeps on as we progress through the ages, from prehistory to civilization to today. The universal monetary unit that we trade for value (i.e., money) is indifferent to most of the world. Up to the Industrial Revolution and the emergence of the big city, most peasants didn’t need money to survive. They had their plot, and all their subsistence needs were guaranteed from that. They barely saw any money and if so, only used it for luxury goods.
Luxury goods themselves were not viewed as they are now; they were totally optional. The modern viewpoint that obsesses over them is the distorted one! This is an outcome of the effect of advertisement and the ultra-connectivity of social media. Past societies had very different relationship with technology and luxury. They were happy to stay static both materially and hierarchically; therefore, there was no practical need for them.
This is all condensed in the concept of Personal vs Impersonal markets. To the modern mind, price is a function of costs, value, and scarcity. But in the past, it was a function of relationships and need. Shops routinely had vastly different prices even when they were geographically close. People simply didn’t care or complain about being ripped off. The pricing itself was individualized and usually haggled over.
We don’t need to argue which variation is better or optimal. Personal and Impersonal markets, as a concept, simply by existing, point to something fundamental: the subjectivity of value. In his base form, the man doesn’t see value objectively, homo economicus he is not. This concept, spelled clearly like this, is enough to shake the foundation of modern economics and the seduction theory built on those foundations.
Social Trust
We will focus on the concept of social trust. Because social trust is the glue that made modern economics come together. Social trust is the ability to cooperate with strangers. It reflects a society’s answer to the question: Do people come in good faith? It is a measure of the probability that people will engage in win-win situations regardless of personal factors. These win-win situations can span from business, social projects, and even seduction.
I will reiterate: humans are territorial and tribalistic. Co-operation is not a natural inclination. However, it was achieved in the West! And on a high level, that is. The history behind this unusual concept goes as follows.
The road to social trust
During the High Middle Ages, the Catholic Church made a decision that echoed in centuries to come. The Pope decided to… wait for it… ban cousin marriage. For the pre-existing clan-based society (i.e., the default of human nature), this broke all social norms.
Europe went nuclear. This rule, at its peak, included cousins of six degrees. In perspective:
- Related by your parents is first degree.
- Related by grandparents is second degree.
- Related by great-grandparents is third degree.
People had to move 2 or 3 cities away from their hometown to find a marriage partner. Family bonds and clan mentality cannot foster like this. People are forced to be (geographically) separated from their original family, to create a new family with descendants. Social trust was born from exactly this dynamic: the total destruction of the clan society.
By breaking up the clan, the Catholic Church forced men and women to “get out there” and find a mate. By widespread relocation and population mixing, they had to make do in unknown environments, both for their survival and for their marriage prospects. This allowed cooperation between strangers to foster. It was born out of necessity from rapidly changing social norms.
This change needed tremendous effort and energy. It required the complete dismantling of prior social norms by a dominant Catholic Church. This is no joke; the Church could only pull this off by holding immense power. And this was the case: at its peak, the Catholic Church owned a third of all European land. This ownership meant even more because it coincided with the advent of Feudalism, so land ownership meant strict control over the tenants. Let us finish this historical tangent and get back to Game.
Social trust and Game
For our purposes as Players, social trust is the glue that makes cold approach work. In simple terms, it translates as “although we might not know each other, we can make something of value together.
This is the basis of the win-win view of seduction. Both the male and the female participants are of good faith. More importantly, the shared experience is superior to their individual ones. And far superior to artificial and arranged ones, such as arranged marriages. Then, from this logic, cold approach is the logical outcome.
But how can we use the academic concept in Game? We will start from the official literature and extrapolate. Social trust in its academic form already measures the local clan/tribe’s strength as a social force. A “clan” here can be either of: 1) a predetermined social circle, 2) the friend group, or 3) the family. Usually it is all together. In short, a country that has low social trust will have the following attributes, and a high one leans towards the opposite traits:
- People live within their friend groups and are suspicious of outsiders.
- Family is strong, with less individual autonomy and decision-making.
- Less meritocratic. Instead, connections dominate career advancement.
These trends have been measured over and over again, in different countries and different parts of the world. The correlation between social trust and the patterns above is strong and systematic. Let us now put this in perspective for practical purposes.
Practical insight
Low social trust implies that girls are deeply entrenched in their social circle. Therefore, indicates a colder reaction to strangers. This significantly increases the barrier to entry for successful interactions. If the girl fundamentally distrusts you, you are already starting on the back foot. At its worst, this can even mandate a full shift from cold approach to social-circle or ecosystem-based Game.
Based on Players’ observations, this holds true. It is nearly an epistemic fact that some countries are harder to Game in than others. Especially true for Mediterranean (Greece, Italy) and some SE Asian countries (Indonesia, Malaysia, India). Girls are less willing to engage with cold approaches. Let us investigate the actual social trust data to see if they overlap infield observations:
- High social trust: Western and Nordic countries, as well as China.
- Medium: US, Argentina, Russia.
- Low: Mediterranean, Latin America, Malaysia, Indonesia.
We therefore have strong empirical backing to make the following theory:
Social trust, in its academic measurement and form, can be used to predict the reactions of No and Maybe girls. No girls will blow you out harder, and Maybe girls might respond less warmly in direct relation to the culture’s social trust.
This doesn’t mean that cold approach is impossible in low-trust societies; it just means it will feel harder, more volatile, and less pleasant. Social trust is the dividing line where we transition from modern era Daygame theory to old school social dynamics-based pick up theory. Simply put, for such societies, preselection, social proof, and (perceived) leadership mean more because people are less capable of cooperating on equal footing.
Caveats:
- This is an academic measurement, done by a questionnaire on the street.
- In particular, it includes demographics that are not of interest (i.e., not hot, young women).
- Social trust might vary within a country. For example, London vs the rest of the UK.
- Yes girls react positively regardless of culture.
- Low social trust, i.e., clan social dominance, will spark reactionary sentiments. For example, the country might have strong goth/hippy subcultures, which are prime for Daygame.
