Is Game A Lie?

Editor’s Note: Here is another from our friend Didact. Read more over at his site.

Our Mountain Man Roosh has been very busy renouncing pretty much every aspect of his past life as a pickup artist and smooth-talking fornicator, and good for him. However, it is possible that he might have gone a bit too far with his latest piece on the subject of relationships and game:

If you find a woman who doesn’t have God in her life, no matter how beautiful or moral she may be, her thoughts, words, and deeds are being driven by a secular and materialistic foundation. She may give you pleasure in the here and now, and she may even give you children, but what happens when she inevitably gets bored of you or tired of being your wife? What happens when another man offers her a better deal that makes her believe she will be happier? Besides, how loyal can a secular woman really be? Outside of our loyalty to Christ, there is no loyalty among man, and what may seem like loyalty to you is really a feeling of resignation that you’re the best she could get from sampling all the other goods on the sexual market. She stays with you just like how I stay with the car I’m driving—it would be too arduous and perhaps too expensive to swap it out for another. I’ll deal with it until it completely breaks down, which in the secular female mind means “I’m not happy” or “I’m bored.”
[…]

“But Roosh, game really does work! I started using it and I got a girl!” Tell me about that girl. Tell me about her lack of faith, her lack of daily prayer rule, her lack of desire to serve as the Body of Christ in his Church. Are you sure your game reward is not a punishment? Are you sure that the social moves and tricks you learned didn’t thrust you into bed with a woman who knows even more tricks than you? Game is simply the exercise of becoming a bad actor to attract a bad actress—you will receive exactly what you are. So what if you lack confidence or are socially awkward. So what if you’re nervous around women and don’t know what to say. As a Christian man, put your faith in God to match you with a woman who is suitable for you and all your flaws instead of acting like a clown for the short entirety of any union you create through your own power.

When I meet a woman today, I’m nice, perhaps excessively so. I may slouch my body, smile in meekness, and not use any of the game tricks I’ve spent nearly two decades mastering. If she is a worldly woman, she will be turned off immediately and run into the arms of a man who spends more time at the bench press than bowing before the Holy Altar, who knew that she needed entertaining stories, a cocky attitude, and a t-shirt one size too small, but a Christian woman would not be turned off by me, for she will see me as a faithful servant of Christ. “He is like Christ; he is a man who will bring me closer to Him. Lord, if this man is for me, let your will be known.” And if there is no woman like this then I will exist in my little church of one, and serve Him alone instead of a worldly woman who, through ignorance or pride, serves Satan.
[…]

The less game you know and have to use, the better. You’ll still have to embrace your God-given masculinity, and you must possess the basic confidence and strength to keep your wife and future family safe, but you don’t need to be outgoing, cocky, or smooth. You don’t even need to be attractive beyond maintaining basic hygiene and refraining from sloth and gluttony when it concerns your bodily physique. I can’t stress that the more secular methods you use to “improve” yourself—and we must take self-improvement to mean “being prideful and falling out of God’s grace”—the more you will get a secular woman.

I can’t remember who it was that wrote about Roosh’s repudiation of his previous writings. It might have been our beloved and dreaded Supreme Dark Lord (PBUH) Vox Day, or it might have been my friend and brother in Christ, Adam Piggott, the Gentleman Adventurer. Whoever it was, as I recall, the article in question talked about how Roosh’s renunciation of game and fornication and his fiery rhetoric against his former field of expertise is basically the zeal of the newly converted, the result of a man given to extremes, going to extremes.

You will find similar attitudes with other really sinful men who bent the knee and accepted the Holy Spirit into their hearts. They always find themselves strongly denouncing the very sins to which they were the most addicted in the past, and with good reason. There is nothing wrong with this. It is important for other men to understand how sin devastates and demoralises men, while making them feel “good”, if only in a very temporary way.

However, in my humble opinion, Roosh goes too far in denouncing game as purely a secular tool. He also mistakes the “overly nice man” posture that he adopts as an image of Jesus Christ. Moreover, he looks at happy long-term relationships and game through a purely Christian lens, and this is a bit of a mistake – it’s not like happy monogamous relationships didn’t exist before Christianity came along and codified the means and ways in which men can be happy with women.

First, Roosh’s definition of “game” is far too narrow. He has basically reduced it down to the canned routines and lines that he and many other pickup artists have used, very successfully it must be said, on countless thousands of women. That kind of game is, indeed, purely secular and reduces a man to the role of a performing monkey, a clown, a tool for the amusement of women.

That is not game.

True game – inner game – is about confidence, strength, and masculinity. It is about being an adult and not a child. An adult is not governed or ruled primarily by emotion. He understands his emotions, he accepts his emotions, but he is not ruled by them. He simply lets the tempests and storms of the world pass over him.

That kind of unshakable confidence does not necessarily come from faith in Christ.

Do not misunderstand me here. I am not rejecting the power of the Holy Spirit and its ability to lend calmness, strength, and power in the face of the storm. Quite the contrary – I believe, as a Christian, that the Holy Spirit is the only way to successfully stand firm in the face of unholy wrath. Which is to say, a woman when she is in the grips of madness, to which all women inevitably succumb one way or another.

There are, however, other ways to get it.

You can get inner confidence and strength from learning how to be good at being a man. You can get it from creating a rock-solid philosophy that is tailored to your life and your strengths. One of the ways to get to it is entirely secular. It is called “Stoicism”, and I call it the “almost solution” to the eternal Problem of Evil with very good reason.

Stoicism provides a foundation of strength and virtue and rightness of conduct that will see a man through much of the madness of the world. It will allow a man to endure the vicissitudes and tyrannies of a woman without losing his mind.

Will it make a man happy? Probably. But it won’t result in a strong spiritual union of the kind that Christians aspire towards, because Stoicism takes no strong position on the existence and importance of the Divine. Stoicism is a philosophy that can be used by atheists and Christians alike, and should be.

It is with very good reason that the early Church fathers regarded the Romans as “virtuous pagans” and argued that the ancient Roman republican qualities of austerity, hard work, stoic strength, and self-abnegation were entirely compatible with Christ’s commandments to His followers.

Second, when Roosh says that a smiling, meek, overly polite man is the very image of Jesus, who will lead a woman back to God, I can only shake my head and ask where he got that idea.

That is not the Jesus Christ depicted in the Gospels. Jesus, as shown in the Gospels, is the very image of a great King – strong, upright, confident, and yet compassionate, wise, and humble.

The only way you could make the argument that weakness is strength is if you look at, maybe, the Gospel of Luke, and only in isolation from the others, especially the Gospel of John. The Gospel of John is particularly important because it, uniquely among the Gospels, presents an incontrovertible image of Christ as King and Lord. The Gospel of Luke presents a much more analytical and calm Jesus, and the Gospels of Matthew and Mark tend to focus a lot more on Christ’s messages of peace and humility.

But the Gospel of John is all about Jesus as Lord – strong, commanding, noble, and stoic in the face of terrible suffering.

Furthermore, Roosh contradicts himself later on when he talks about how a man can and must embrace his own God-given masculinity and strength, and put his faith in God to point him toward a woman who will be his wife without using game.

Again, this only works if you stick to game as a very narrow set of secular tools designed to turn a man into a performing monkey. That is not game. That is merely one logical aspect and extension of game.

What game really comes down to is inner confidence. And the fact is that most men don’t have it.

How do you get it? By doing things that make you stronger as a man.

Too many Christians think that there is no need to go to the gym, because that is all about vanity. And that is nonsense. Strong faith needs a strong mind, and a strong mind needs a strong body. You can quibble and prevaricate and come up with as many exceptions as you like, but the FACT is that strength of mind needs strength of body. As long as you’re not standing in front of a mirror snapping selfies and pictures of yourself posing, like a damn girl, then there is nothing vain about showing up at the gym and learning how to lift.

Our beloved and dreaded Supreme Dark Lord (PBUH) Vox Day once wrote about the sign on the door above his old gym. It read, very simply:

“This room is for the weak, that they may learn to become strong. This room is for the strong, that they may learn to become humble.”

That is the true purpose of the gym. There is nothing more strengthening than picking up a chromed-steel bar loaded with plates and deadlifting it, or squatting it, or pressing it. And there is nothing more humbling than getting pinned under that bar, or failing to lift it, in front of an entire crowd of people, including women and weaker men.

Too many Christians also think that it is wrong to learn how to fight, because Jesus preached against violence. This is a sorely mistaken interpretation of the Gospels. Jesus didn’t say, “don’t fight back”. What He actually said was, “stand defiant before your persecutors, and give them a chance to repent their stupidity”.

Learning how to fight gives you strength and humility even faster than the iron can. Getting your ass kicked by men (and women) much smaller and weaker than you is extremely humbling, and you have to endure it repeatedly for months before you have any idea what you’re doing. It’s even worse if you’re in a grappling art like BJJ – you’ll get submitted by girls who weigh 100lbs dripping wet.

These trials make you more confident, more outgoing, and more thoroughly decent. It makes you automatically more attractive to women – and eventually you might just get to the point where you don’t need their attention. You’re just happy to be yourself.

The ancient Greeks believed in balance between strength, philosophy, and dancing. At least one major Greek philosopher – I can’t remember his name, because I’m an Olde Pharte now – argued in favour of spending a third of the day wrestling, a third reading, and a third dancing. (Or something along those lines.) Why? Because this set of activities made a man complete. And remember, the Greeks were, by Christian standards, either secular or idolaters.

Can we seriously argue and claim that older civilisations did not have happy monogamous marriages? Can we truly claim that the Greeks, the Romans, the Babylonians, the Jews, the Japanese, the Chinese, and so on, of ancient times, did not understand how to enforce the social contract of marriage?

That, too, is an aspect that Roosh is missing. It simply isn’t enough just to pursue and marry a Christian woman. A Christian may well have God in her heart – but you always have to go back to Genesis 3 and look at the curse that God put upon Eve:

Then he said to the woman,
“I will sharpen the pain of your pregnancy,
and in pain you will give birth.
And you will desire to control your husband,
but he will rule over you.

— Genesis 3:16, New Living Translation

(The NLT isn’t my choice of translation for most of the Bible, but for that specific passage, it is easily the best one out there.)

That hasn’t changed, at all. That curse endures to this day. Nothing in the Gospels or Epistles contradicts it, at all. That curse might be lifted when the Millennial Reign kicks in, but that’s a discussion for another time.

A Christian woman will still desire to dominate and control her husband. The only way that a husband is going to be able to stop her from doing that, is to have unshakable confidence in himself. And this is, trust me, very very very hard to do.

It requires becoming an adult. That is a very difficult and painful and unpleasant process. You simply have to do it.

My take on Roosh is that he is now going through some of the transformation required to become more of an adult than he already was. There were aspects of his personality that plainly were, and are, those of an adult. But there were other aspects, such as the constant pursuit of worldly pleasures, that were not. And in the process of becoming an adult, he’s going too far in certain directions to denounce parts of his previous life.

In so doing, he is missing the wood for the trees, so to speak. Yes, “clown game” is pointless and stupid. But that is not to say that game in and of itself is wrong, or broken, or untruthful.

In fact, game is merely an extension of what we men these days call “the red pill”.

What is the red pill? It is an extremely harsh and painful dose of the truth.

Game is derived from the truths about women and men. As such, it is not a lie. It is itself true. That does not mean that applying it will necessarily make you feel good. Possessing game is merely a necessary but not sufficient condition for attracting a good woman. Even Christian men can benefit from it, because learning the truths about game are absolutely necessary to avoid repelling the women that we’re with.

Consider: would a Christian woman be attracted to a man who slouches, is nice and polite and never raises his voice, and never asserts himself?

To ask that question is to answer it.

In reality, to walk in the path of Christ requires a man to stand up for himself and his rights. It requires a man to take risks – huge ones. It requires a man to be strong in the face of a world that hates and misunderstands him. It requires him to find solace within himself and to be alone for very large parts of his life. And it requires a man to be stoic and humble in a world that will offer him every possible temptation in exchange for his soul.

That is the truth of game – it is a tool rooted in truth that helps a man get what he wants in life. And if that tool leads him to God and Christ, so much the better.

To summarise, then: Roosh is absolutely right to reject and repudiate clown game. This was always a corruption of the understanding and insight provided by the red pill. But I do not believe that he is right to denounce game in general. This is merely an extension of the red pill concepts, built on truths, and is therefore itself true. And there is no incompatibility whatsoever between the red pill and Christianity. In fact, acknowledging the Fallen and broken nature of women is critical to understanding how to fix the problem, and for that you need both Christianity and the red pill.

The red pill is crucial for ripping away the all-too-optimistic and foolishly naive expectations that far too many Christian men have of and for women. And Christianity is crucial for helping men get past the rage that we always feel when we see and truly understand the kinds of lies that we’ve been marinated in, even as Christians, for most of our lives.