Notes on the Art of Seduction: Conclusions (2023)

Low Society Book Club has read the remaining chapters since the last installment of the techniques of seduction and came to some sad conclusions.

I am sad that we started repeating ourselves, and by we, I mean the author. We collectively decided that it was getting repetitive and it was time to accept that we have learned what we can learn here and move on in our literary endeavors. The chapters moving forward on seductive techniques after my last installment in the series tended to run together with the same manipulative concepts enumerated before. Feed people’s narcissism, play the coquette, investigate your target, manufacture dissonance, keep it vague and emotional, etc. It’s all so much work and it’s really something, on a romantic level, that is for the aristocratic upper crust who can afford the time. Understanding that leads one to also understand that The Art of Seduction isn’t about romance at all (though I hear that Greene is doing some marriage counseling), it’s about power and how to manipulate people. This is the natural playground of other forces: mass market media, consumer marketing and sales, influencer economics and culture, political partisans and propagandists. How this plays out in those areas is where the application of technique from this book is interesting.

I am sad that as much as I might seem sometimes to be shitting on him, Robert Greene is absolutely right about so much in this book. I can’t stress this enough, please don’t miss this. There is a massive amount of filler material (it’s over 800 pages long) between his actual observations and conclusions but that filler material is not unpleasant, and he draws from some really fantastic literary and biographical sources. The legendary and mythic illustrate parts of our consciousness on deep levels, regardless of their veracity, so I really don’t have a lot of serious concerns about drawing his observations about human behavior and nature from art, lit and bio rather than boring scientific studies. He uses these accounts and artistic examples to, I think, correctly identify deep psychological traits and tendencies throughout the work. He describes flaws and failings everyone has to some degree or another and he is not wrong about much at all even if some of his sources and conclusions are a bit of a reach and at times hilariously corny. I think that Greene’s observations and methods in influencing people through exploiting these inherent vulnerabilities is probably overall both accurate and demonstrably effective provided one has the time to set the stage and figure out what buttons to push.

I am not sad that I read the book, as much as I may have complained about the colossal bulk of expositional material that bloated it to over 800 pages, saying mostly the same and even contradictory things about the same people over and over and over again. The Art of Seduction has really been a great learning experience for self reflection, identifying negative aspects of past behavior, or at least somewhat explaining what one may have been doing unconsciously when influencing or, yes, seducing others in our generally clueless and usually good-hearted lives. What he is teaching in this book is absolutely amoral, but it is also not objectively incorrect and thus I do not fault Robert Greene at all for writing it. I do not fault him for it because any and all knowledge is useful — what you do with it tests your character and principles provided one possesses such things. Thank you, Robert Greene. I have learned things.

I am pleased that we have two more closing details to share from the book to conclude our seductive studies, namely Appendix A & B: Seductive Time and Place, and How to Sell Anything to the Masses.

Seductive Time andPlace

Festivals. Facilitate or create an environment where people lower their social inhibitions. Easy if you’re talking about a concert festival or other bacchanalian event, but not everyone is into that kind of thing. Still, simulate a similar experience and you can open someone up to manipulation. This is course works interpersonally as evidenced by likely billions of people who have had sex before, during or after a festival type event. On a mass scale we have some interesting modern concerns.

Saturnalia. Mardi Gras. Other festival periods the world over in variation. The ritual loss of inhibition formed over time in human societies, where there are rules, forms that must be followed, social mores and expectations and a very human desire to be freed from them for a while. I believe we increasingly lack a shared culture in which these values are more organically understood, and the “id” has no routine shared experience to periodically be free of these healthy social constraints that make a functioning human society possible. The more atomized the culture and the more distant the culture is from its fundamental traditions, the easier it is to construct a synthetic form to express this outlet, preferably one in which the target audience can engage in the place of pleasure and validation, the free expression of the id, as often as possible. This is the quest of those that would take the culture into some kind of “safe” virtual world for the user to take residence in.

Already the people are like addicts to the pleasures this world, offered as an escape, losing themselves, consumed whilst consuming an endless controlled procession of pretty playthings and novel forms of self-improvement—That is where humanity is spiraling. The Metaverse will probably fail, but it is still getting humankind closer to promised hyperrealities inside the machine to allow the user to have Saturnalia all the time. The festival, where your guard is down, your inhibitions lost, vulnerable to seduction by savvy actors.

See Also

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Soft-Seduction: How to Sell Anything to theMasses

This is really where Robert Greene sums up how his work can be applied to mass media and marketing. This is an application we of course observed some time ago in past conversations about the book. I think Greene’s work either is being used, or could be used, as at least an inspiration in many of more or less sultry corners of mass media, including political movements and the influencer economy including the marketing and commodification of same.

Seduction is the ultimate form of power.

No small claim there, but I’ll allow it.

Seduction is a powerful idea, to be sure. The knowledge and tools to resist it would seem to be more powerful still, but I think that Greene would disagree. He would say that rather seduction and allowing oneself to be seduced is what people do when they are at their best.

This section is about appealing to a mass of people, it has nothing to do with the content at all. Don’t inform, instead entertain and influence indirectly. Speak the people’s language and echo their sentiments. Appear as news, never as publicity. A rather cryptic statement, but it makes a sort of sense. Don’t look like you’re trying, get them talking about you. If people get the sense that you’re pushing yourself out there too hard you’ll come off as inauthentic.

Stir basic emotions. Basic emotions include anger/fear, covetousness or envy, the erotic, and all manner of combined permutations of these things. You know, good things we see everywhere we look all the time. It’s the most effective of ways to manipulate people. Appeal to their base emotions and drives. Create and exploit their sense of guilt. Make them a little horny.

Make the medium the message. Interesting, also fun as I write this on Medium. Form over content. A repeated mantra throughout some part of the book is to not waste time on real information. Image is always more powerful than word. Pay attention to pacing, connotation, innuendo, shock value, symbols, erotic potential. This is why memes and short videos are so popular and effective. It doesn’t matter if the underlying message is on the level, and it doesn’t matter if the numbers are correct. What matters is the image and the influence it has. Only idiots are obsessed with numbers, numbers are a poor way to inform people who aren’t piled high and deep in theory and hip to all the fancy jargon. Numbers are only useful if they can be used in such a way as to evoke a visceral reaction in a simple and elegant way without bogging your audience down with details and nuance.

Speak the target’s language — be chummy. Ever notice the way Donald Trump hangs on to the podium? What comes out of his mouth has absolutely nothing to do with his charm. He will just babble incoherently but the way he hangs on to the podium, one or the other arm slung over one side like he’s sharing a secret with the audience, the other a bit cocked like he’s ready to share the world with you right here, right now. If you can create that chummy just-like-you feeling you can say any kind of dumb shit you want and people will believe every single thing you say if you do it with confidence. It’s the image, the delivery, the meandering punchline, sometimes just the hint of a punchline. It doesn’t matter. You’re a chameleon, you speak and act as they do and that’s enough to win their hearts.

Start a chain reaction — Everyone is doing it. As stated many times, everyone covets what everyone seems to want. The competitive drive to achieve the hunted prize. If everyone wants it, there must be something to it. Spread your image. Keep it simple but evocative. Logos are great, people love logos and special symbols and as we’ve observed many times, people like to see themselves as special. Put a bumper sticker on your car to show you’re part of the club. See my logo? We hold like values like all the good people do. Look at all of my merchandise, I bought it for the privilege of advertising for the club. My virtue is plain for all to see in symbols on my clothing and by the pithy bullshit on the bumper of my Chevy/Hummer/Prius. One of us. One of us.

Tell people who they are. Be the voice of the people. Change people’s identity, change their reality. Tell people what’s going on, paint an unflattering picture of who they are and what they will and must become, then tell them what they need to do to be who they really are. Create a total environment to validate their new reality. Don’t think that’s real, right now on this here internet? Really? The algorithm of myth and legend would beg to disagree: the machine is always studying you, it never sleeps, and it is very patient. You don’t even need to know who you are anymore, it knows you very very well indeed and is pleased to show you who you are.

A terrifying thought, given what we’ve learned here.

THAT IS IT for The Art of Seduction, it has been a surprisingly revealing and interesting time. I’ll be continuing series like these over time as well as other reviews, commentary and poetics on this page, though I’m considering relocating it elsewhere, I haven’t decided. Regardless of where I publish things, I will remain completely free of any and all monetization, including all of my live streaming when I can be bothered to do it.

You can always catch me on Twitter, and you can sometimes catch me on Twitch listening to crazy shit while I slay monsters and robots and babble with any random person about anything at all. I don’t publish past vods there.

Next Low Society Book Club is Cosmic Trigger by Robert Anton Wilson hosted by Jake, and we’re all really looking forward to it. We will go from the madness of amoral power games to a more honest, relatable, wholesome madness the whole family can enjoy. Well, maybe not the whole family. Your crazy hermit cousin may look a little less crazy, though.