In Manosphere, terms get confused and perplexed. The biggest victim is the change in the meaning of the word frame. In early PUA theory, frame was a term to describe combative worldviews. In the modern manosphere, frame is a mythical term to express self-delusion. We all know this, right?
Bro,… you don’t get it, you need to not care about what she says. You need Frame. It’s your way or the highway!
No shit. Advice that asks nothing of the reader is popular… If the above phrasing doesn’t reek of self-delusion, re-evaluate your premises.
The second victim of terminology is the word Courage. This will be a study of this post. Courage is assumed to be a mythical force that people have or don’t have. It is meant to imply that the Player takes incredible risks and succeeds regardless. It is a symbol of status. Well… all of this is wrong.
What is Courage?
Staying consistent with the theme of this blog, we need to clearly define terms and then see how we can use them to our advantage. That is the essence of tactical Game and strategy in general.
Courage is more fundamental to seduction than most people realise. Courage is Inner Game itself. Here is our working definition:
The emotional acceptance of a situation during adversity. Meaning both the positive and the negative outcomes.
Every action has an impact both on the real world and on our emotional world. Different actions might lean more on one than the other. For example, chopping wood is an entirely physical action. On the other hand, calling someone an idiot lives entirely on the emotional plane.
If the action has an unpredictable result in the real world, it is also unpredictable in the emotional plane. For example, when we run up to the girl, her physical reaction (sparks, laughs, or rejects) will have a different impact on the Player’s emotional state (happy, sad). Therefore, before the approach, your Ego is in a strange position. It doesn’t know which state to anticipate.
Here is where Courage comes in. Courage is the Ego maturity to accept both outcomes. This disentangles the Ego so as to allow the Player to navigate the situation optimally. In short, Courage is about:
- Seeing reality clearly.
- Understanding potential outcomes.
- Emotional maturity, control, and alignment.
Courage is not about:
- Not analysing reality and situation in context.
- Expecting only the best outcome.
- Taking unnecessary risks without analyzing the situation.
- Especially doing the above without even acknowledging the situation.
Courage vs Confidence
Let us delve more into the discussion of why Courage is misunderstood. This will help clear the confusion and set definitions straight. Courage is misunderstood because it is confused with Confidence.
Let us re-summarize the recent blogpost that we defined Confidence. Every social setting, for every participant, has a set of behaviors that is within the expectations of the other participants. We called this acceptable behaviour.
Confidence in this setting was the smart limit testing of acceptable behaviour. With the core insight that Confidence is grounded in the social setting and perception.
In light of this discussion, Courage is the meta-level understanding of acceptable behaviour in the face of uncertainty. Courage is being able to model potential future states of acceptable behaviour and mentally digest them. This lets us Calibrate our Confidence. There is no true Confidence without Courage; it is fake Confidence.
In a sense, Courage is social fair play. We accept outcomes because the other participants are also free to play the social game. Their game plan might align with our goals or be contradictory. But they have the fundamental right to pursue their plan. We have to accept and respect this.
How to develop Courage – Mathematics of emotions
The breakthrough is to understand that Courage is grounded in reality and the understanding of the social setting. Same as Confide, Calibration, and Social Intelligence. It operates according to the laws of the universe, no different than gravity.
The first step of mentally digesting an uncertain action, for example, a Daygame approach, is understanding the potential outcomes. Here is a high-level metaphor. You go to the supermarket, you fill your basket, but when you reach the counter, you are forced into the following scenario:
- You have to guess the cost of your items and pay a machine that amount.
- If the number is correct, you get to keep your basket and leave Scott free.
- If you pay less, you will be immediately arrested.
In this scenario, you can only showcase Courage by accepting the very realistic scenario that you will be arrested. There are only two potential outcomes: either walk out or get arrested. The second is much more likely. Accepting it would require emotional control equivalent to a Buddhist monk or a Stoic. It is a fundamentally hard proposition.
But… what if you had been smarter? What if you had a notebook and wrote the prices of every item before putting them in your basket? This task then becomes significantly easier. It is about doing a simple addition. The emotional maturity required in the “blind guess” scenario could have simply been avoided by due diligence, of keeping track of item prices.
Here is the insight: we don’t need Buddhist monk enlightenment to showcase courage; we need planning and analysis of the setting. This is how Courage is developed in Daygame. By constant friction with uncertainty, we eventually map out the terrain and learn to accept it.
The remainder of this section is about developing heuristics to help us showcase Courage more easily. It is literally emotional mathematics, emotional calculus!
Courage mathematics: worst-case analysis
Analyzing acceptable behaviour under uncertainty reduces to risk analysis. It would require a supercomputer to analyze every nuance and social cue. For our simple human brains, we will make do with approximation. That is just enough information to make educated guesses, but not too much to lead to analysis paralysis.
The first idea is about grouping similar scenarios. If you run up to the girl and she blows you off, there are gradations: she can be nice, polite, or totally ignore you. In practice, however, these gradations don’t matter. What matters is staying in set or getting blown out. All these can be grouped together as a worst-case scenario, i.e., the blowout, and analyzed as such.
This reduces mental gymnastics quite a bit. Essentially, our decision-making as Players is about minimizing worst-case scenarios. Here is the analogy:
You see a big red button. If you press it, there is:
- 90% chance to win 100$
- 10% for your bank account to empty out
Go on, showcase Courage by pressing it. Accept the probability that your bank account goes bye-bye.
In contrast, consider this scenario:
- 80% chance to win 5$
- 20% chance to lose 5$
This scenario is much more manageable for all its outcomes. It is easy to accept a 5$ gain and a 5$ loss. This decreases the mental effort required to showcase Courage.
Courage mathematics: variance
This is another insight from decision theory and strategy. Reduction of variance helps the planning process quite a bit. Think of it like this:
You are presented again with the big red button and also a blue button:
- If you press the red button, you might win anywhere from 0 to 1000$. Totally random.
- If you press the blue button, you will win 450$.
- However, before you even press any button, you can buy a vacation plan for 400$. You are very willing to go on that vacation if the cost is covered from your winnings. Otherwise, it is a net loss in terms of satisfaction.
- What do you do?
Here is the value of reducing variance. It helps shrink the range of possible outcomes, similar to the worst-case analysis. Pressing the red button, on average, nets an extra 50$, but it has a 40% chance of a catastrophic outcome (netting less than the trip cost). Pressing the blue button has a single outcome: 50$ and a vacation plan.
Once we take the emotional costs of our decision into account, the blue button is a far superior option in terms of presenting Courage. It simply requires us less to emotionally digest.
What we tried to explain in mathematical terms is a model of emotional cost transactions. Theory like this has its basis in the works of Daniel Kahneman, for example, Thinking fast and Slow.
Counter-intuitively, the math does indeed work out. Our Ego is not a machine: using it optimally by adjusting how much work it has to handle, we essentially help it help us. That is the punchline.
The meta level
Why is Courage crucial in Seduction? Courage ties directly to the concepts that have been verbalised as aloofness, outcome independence, and Inner Game.
In particular, the realisation that Courage is the Inner Game itself is the most crucial one. Inner Game is about being emotionally able to handle the real-world outcomes and requirements of Seduction. This is exactly the definition of Courage we gave earlier. Not adjacent, not similar, it is exactly the same.
Aloofness and outcome independence
Let us now do a full circle and tie Courage with Power. This is what makes concepts such as aloofness and outcome independence valuable in seduction. This is also what makes those terms so nuanced and easy to misunderstand and misapply. First, let us remind the reader of the definition of Power from a recent post:
Power is measured by how much Party A has to adopt or change his behaviour in the presence of Party B.
Aloofness and outcome independence aim to reduce the influence of Party B. They do so by emotional detachment: if you don’t care, then she cannot affect you. Kind of… because emotional detachment is a defensive strategy.
Detachment requires distance to pull off. Distance is only achieved by negativity, emotionally speaking. Think about it, positivity and warmth naturally close distance and bring people together, so distance can only be the opposite. Hence, here is the catch: the Player tunnel-visions on the terms (aloofness, outcome independence) and forgets their original purpose.
The aim is to reduce the imaginary power of the girl or the social setting to the Player, but not at the expense of our own Soul. That is why these terms are so nuanced. Undershoot it, and the girls’ power over you increases more than it should. Overshoot it and you hurt yourself by creating unhealthy distance from the world.
Both aloofness and outcome independence are derivatives of our Courage. Their application is only correct by digesting the emotional outcomes, not by creating defensive distance. This is what squares the circle: reducing girls’ unnecessary power without damage to our own Soul. The concepts are derivatives of our inner world, and they need to be addressed there first. They are derived from Courage!
The bottom line
Courage is not mystical. It can be clearly defined and analyzed in Mathematical and decision-making terms. There is a limit to what we can ask our Souls to withstand. If we overdo it, it can hurt us more than it can help us. The skill lies in calculated risks and actions, not blind improvisation.
This analysis also seals the connection between Inner Game and Technique. They are not standalone Pillars of Daygame. They are operating under the same roof and interact with each other. Technique regulates the input we let Inner Game handle. Emotional calculus is the bridge between the two!
