Seenstr - Hacking Human Nature

I was just thinking about something brought up in the interview with Matador I posted a few hours ago. The question was raised: “won’t the show expose the secrets of PUAs and kill the scene?”

Matador’s answer was something along the lines of “we aren’t giving away any secrets”. Perhaps they won’t. But they very well could.

I cannot tell you how many people I have talked to, and who I have shared really powerful secrets with, who just flat out refused to believe what I was telling them. I have come to the conclusion that evolution, in its infinite and seemingly random wisdom, has seen fit to not only embed all manner of psychological switches into the human mind, but also provided a sort of failsafe, a firewall of sorts, which prevents the vast majority of people from accepting any outside knowledge relating to those switches. This applies to men as well as women, and in fact it very well might apply more to men than women.

Human nature is indeed a very powerful thing. Although it has numerous loopholes and exploits, it is incredibly well guarded.

When I was younger I tried several experiments to see just deep some of the techniques and secrets I was learning went. When I would stumble upon a new bit of knowledge, I would not only repeatedly apply the knowledge to convince myself that it was fact, but I would also switch it up. Notably, I would often walk up to a target, tell him or her exactly what I was about to do to them, and then do it.

I kid you not, the numbers were exactly the same. The same number of people would take the bait whether I alerted them ahead of time, or if I did it on the sly.

Would revealing the secrets of a PUA, or human-nature hacking in general, ruin it? Would having that knowledge floating around out there make the techniques any less effective? The answer is no. And the reason is simple: in order for them not to work, the whole of human nature would have to change. These techniques don’t work because they are secret, they work because they are devised with a solid understanding about how human beings operate.

This is kind of a callous example, but it would be like training a dog, while the next dog to be trained watches. Will the second dog see the ruse? Will he not fall for the techniques the trainer is about to employ against him? Of course not. And the reason is that they are devised to work on a dog, according to normal, typical dog behavior. Alerting the dog to the techniques is meaningless. One would have to re-engineer the dog’s brain in order for those techniques not to work.

A more simple example is one we can all relate to. Take pain for example. You stick a pin in your arm, and it hurts. But what if someone were to explain to you exactly what is happening? That “pain” is simply an electronic impulse which is transmitted from the nerves, through the spine, up into the brain, where it is interpreted as a highly unpleasant experience? Does knowing this make it hurt any less when you jam a needle in your arm? Absolutely not (although some can do this, and this is precisely the “mind over matter” method of pain tolerance you’ve probably seen at a circus or carnival).

All of human nature is like this. Yes, you can overcome it. But in order to do so, you need to make a concentrated effort to reprogram yourself. And how likely are the 6.4 billion inhabitants of this planet to do such a thing?

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