The Rawness

This one is long, but if I may toot my own horn, it’s so damn good and important that I suggest you take the time and read it all.

This is the final part of a 3-part series. Part 1 is here. And here’s part 2.

This series has been all about compliance, or getting people to do the shit you want. Earlier I discussed the first two parts of the three part formula: believable authority and Earn-Reward Method. Now for the third and most powerful element: intermittent rewards. Intermittent reward strategy is just some crazy ass shit. It’s probably the second most powerful motivator out there next to avoidance of death. And out of the three elements of compliance, it’s also the most manipulative.

You see, the first two steps in gaining compliance, which were believable authority and Earn-Reward method, can get great results on their own. But when you add in intermittent rewards, the compliance gets taken to higher, more extreme levels. It can escalate the compliance to obsessive, even self-destructive levels.

Continuing from this post.

The 3 steps to building compliance, as mentioned before, are:

1. Cred
2. Earn-Reward Method
3. Intermittent Rewards

To get compliance, you first need to establish cred, which is short for credibility, or more specifically, credible authority.  There are many ways to do this, but the easiest way is to just have an authoritative title and position. Owner. President. CEO. Of course that’s not always enough. If you have an authoritative position and title but are known as a pushover, for example, you still lack credible authority because no one believes you will follow through on your threats. It’s the equivalent of pulling out a gun on the streets when everyone knows you’re too much of a pussy to actually use it. People end up testing and challenging you even worse than if you didn’t have the gun at all.

You see this all the time in toxic organizations that have weak management. The subordinates will test and challenge the weak management constantly and you’ll end up with the inmates running the asylum. On the flip side, if you lack any official status or authoritative title yet exude a ton of confidence and charisma, you can still convey credible authority just by the way you carry yourself. Even a violent criminal can exude credible authority just by showing a reckless disregard for rules and societal norms and displaying a willingness to fight or kill you. (This type of credibility is called street cred).  Credible authority boils down to displaying confidence, having the ability to punish and demonstrating a willingness to follow through on said punishment. Punishment can range from anything from simple social snubbing to employment termination to outright violence.

Once you have established some cred, then you have to move on to step 2, which is the Earn-Reward method. I got the term from Tariq Nasheed’s The Mack Within book. What it basically boils down to is that you make someone earn ever reward before you give it to them. The opposite would be Reward-Earn, where you reward someone first in hopes that they’ll work to earn the reward afterwards.

It seems like a ridiculously common sense principle, and we all practice it to a degree, but thanks to compartmentalized thinking we often forget to transfer this principle into every area of our lives and end up getting frustrated. For example, with a child most of us know not to reward the child first and hope for good behavior later because what you end up with is a spoiled, uncooperative child with a sense of entitlement who views such rewards as a birthright. They don’t even feel they need to earn the reward anymore. Same with training dogs, if you reward the dog with a ton of treats first and then try to get it to do tricks and behave afterwards, it’s not going to work. With both children and dogs, good parents and trainers practice Earn-Reward.

Yet many of the same people who grasp this principle when applied to kids and animals won’t transfer this principle elsewhere. For example a guy will buy a girl a drink when they first meet and wonder why he’s not getting the instant cooperation he expected. Or a woman will give a guy sex way too soon and wonder why she’s not getting wined and dined and romanced afterward in the way she expected. Some hippie teacher will give ever kid in class a gold star and give them all an A to boost their self-esteem, then wonder why they aren’t motivated to excel.

A good illustration of Earn-Reward is federal entitlements. Regardless of how you feel about entitlements in general, most people, both liberal and conservative, can at least agree that older entitlements from the New Deal era like the G.I. Bill, Social Security and Unemployment Insurance have been more successful than Lydon Johnson’s Great Society welfare entitlements that came about in the ’60s. What was the difference between the two sets of entitlements? The first set were in accordance with the Earn-Reward method. G.I. Bill: you serve in the army first (earn) and you get money for school later (reward). Social Security: you work at a job for years and pay a small part of your salary (earn) and you get retirement money later (reward). Unemployment insurance: you have a job first and pay a portion of your salary regularly (earn) and you get money during periods of unemployment later (reward). Later benefits were created in accordance with the Reward-Earn method. We’ll give you a welfare check now (reward) and expect you to look for work later (earn). We’ll give you housing for next to nothing now (reward) and expect you to value and improve the property later (earn). And so forth. The problem with Reward-Earn is that it’s in our human nature to both devalue and feel entitled to things that we get without earning, and as a result, we’re less motivated to alter our behavior and try to prove ourselves worthy of said reward. If anything, we start demanding more rewards.

I touched on this principle during pimp week, when I described how a pimp won’t have sex with one of his prostitutes unless she pays him first. It’s a cardinal rule of pimping. If he breaks it, he’s moved into the Reward-Earn method and the whole dynamic will begin to slowly unravel. If you want any type of compliance in any relationship, whether it’s boss/employee, boyfriend/girlfriend, parent/child, donor/beneficiary or just plain friends, you have to demand the correct behavior first and only then can you reward. If you get in the habit of rewarding first and expecting compliance later, you are screwed. In fact, once you set a reward-earn dynamic, it’s almost impossible to reverse the sense of entitlement you’ve created, and your chances of fixing the damage are close to zero. At that point you’re better off just terminating the old relationship and establishing a fresh one under the right dynamic.

Another crucial element to the Earn-Reward method is to punish disrespect. It’s not enough to just reward cooperation, you also have to clearly punish lack of cooperation and disrespect. Otherwise you send a message to the person that such behavior is tolerable. Avoiding negative results is an even more powerful motivator to people than gaining positive rewards, so it’s crucial that you punish bad behavior as well as reward good behavior. Even if the punishment is something small in response to a trivial transgression, you have to do something and not just let it slide. If you get stood up on a date for example, don’t just pick up the phone and act business as usual the next day like nothing happened. Avoid the person for a while, or briefly, but clearly, mention that you didn’t appreciate being stood up, and then move on to another topic. Maybe make the person work a little harder to get you back out again. Or if it was done in an extremely disrespectful or cavalier way, never go out with them again. Just always do something. Never let any form of disrespect go unchecked. It sends a subconscious signal to the transgressor, to obsevers, and most importantly to yourself that it is okay to disrespect you. And that’s a message you do not want to internalize.

Next time is the final component of the compliance recipe, intermittent rewards.

Recommended Reading:

One of the things I like to encourage people to do when analyzing human nature is to avoid compartmentalizing their insights. To compartmentalize an insight means that you have learned a specific insight but are only able to understand and apply it in the original context in which it was taught to you.

For example, let’s take a guy who is good at his career and knows how to advance. He may understand how to knock out job interviews perfectly. He takes care in his presentation. He researches the company thoroughly before approaching it. He anticipates every question he’s likely to hear and has a prepared response. He projects confidence, tries not to seem too eager to please, knows and communicates his value and shows just enough of his fun side to seem enjoyable but not so much as to communicate that he’s a clown. This is a result of specific job interview advice he’s solicited and received. This exact same guy may go to a club or bar that night and try to pick up a woman by doing all the exact opposite behaviors: approaching meekly, showing eagerness by offering to buy things, displaying low value and messing up the humor by joking too hard (thereby becoming an entertainment monkey) or too little (boring).

Why does he do all the right social techniques in one setting, the job interview, yet doesn’t transfer the same social techniques into the other setting, the bar pickup? Because he’s a compartmentalized thinker and need someone to explicitly tell him to use those same social techniques in the new setting. On his own, he can’t pull back, see the bigger picture and notice the general, transferable principles that link seemingly different scenarios. He needs every specific scenario and piece of advice specifically laid out for him. He may be great at memorizing, but he’s horrible as improvising and innovating because his mind is lazy or untrained. He is incapable of great leaps in logic.

You need to be a big picture thinker and not a compartmentalizer. I think that is my great gift, actually. Not the amount that I know, which really isn’t that much, but rather the common threads that I see in seemingly unrelated things and my ability to find unifying principles behind them. I see connections.

Which leads to this post about compliance. I see tons of articles about getting compliance in different areas of one’s life: getting cooperative kids, winning over a mate, motivating employees, etc. Instead of being compartmentalized and focusing on teaching how to get compliance in one specific situation, I’m going to show the basic elements of building compliance that apply to every situation one may encounter.

The ultimate recipe for compliance comes down to just three ingredients:

1. Cred
2. Earn-Reward Method
3. Intermittent Rewards

I’ll break down each element in the next two parts. Click here to move on to part 2.

This is the final installment of Pimp Week. For this, it’ll be a straightforward post. I’ll be finishing the story I started in these two posts here and here.

When last we saw the pimp Iceberg Slim, he was being tested by his newest, prettiest whore in front of the rest of his stable of older, more experienced whores. He held his ground, passed the test, impressed his existing stable and called the new whore’s bluff and told her she could leave, making her whole grandstand play blow up in her face.

Here’s what happened next:

I went back for Kim. She was packed and silent. On the way to the station, I riffled the pages in that pimp’s book in head for an angle to hold her without kissing her ass.

I couldn’t find a line in it for an out like that. As it turned out the bitch was testing and bluffing right down the line.

We had pulled into the station parking lot when the bitch fell to pieces. Her eyes were misty when she yelped, “Daddy, are you really going to let me split? Daddy, I love you!?

It’s important to note that Iceberg was ready to ride the bluff all the way to the end if he had to. No matter how much he wanted her to stay, he was only willing to do so if he could keep from kissing her ass in the process. This is a good lesson to learn for both men and women: do not be outcome driven. Outcome driven people just care about what they get in the end and don’t care how they get there. Process driven people care more about doing something the right way, even if it gets them a bad result once or twice.  In the long run process driven people end up better off.

For example an outcome driven person may just know that she wants to get her boyfriend back. She will grovel, beg, threaten to commit suicide, let him disrespect her and walk all over her, maybe buy him expensive gifts as a way to bribe him to stay, or maybe even allow him to cheat on her in exchange for her staying…basically, so long as she gets the outcome of him staying, she doesn’t care what damage she has to take to her self-respect, ego, character or reputation along the way. Not only is what she gives up way more valuable than what she gains, buy chances are she’s too stupid to even realize that she did give anything up. A process driven woman on the other hand may approach it the same situation like this: “I want to resolve my relationship with my boyfriend, but I’m not tied to any particular outcome. All I care about is that no matter what happens, I speak my mind, hold my ground and don’t compromise my ideals or values. If he knows what I want and is willing to respect that and stay, then we’ll stay together. If not, then we’ll split up. But either way, the important thing I stick to my guns all the way through.”  In the short run, she may lose this particular boyfriend, but in the long run by sticking to her principles, she will definitely end up with a good man sooner or later.

A person who would drop out of school and strip for a whole lot of cash now rather than get a low-paying internship teaching valuable skills that will lead to a real career down the line? Outcome driven. A person who would is willing to just work hard and be honest and risk not getting promoted right away rather than kiss ass, lie and backstab his way to to the top? Process driven. You get the picture.

Now in some ways pimps are outcome driven because they choose the glamour, excitement and fast money of pimping over the slow grinding climb of a “square” job. But on the other hand, within their chosen profession pimps are notoriously process driven, to the point where they even have a phrase for it: “pimping by the book.” Everything has to be by the book. Rules and standards within the pimp game are rigorously followed and enforced, and a good pimp would rather pimp by the book and risk losing a whore here and there in the short run rather than become outcome driven and not pimp by the book in order to get some immediate benefit.

Take for example how pimps deal with what is called a Choosy Suzie. A Choosy Suzie is a whore who keeps jumping from pimp to pimp, always looking to trade up for a better deal or to pit pimps against each other. Pimps have very specific rules about what to do in this situation when they do it by the book. First, the whore must pay a choosing fee to the new pimp, a large sum of money for the right to be his whore. Next, the new pimp must then go to the old pimp and let him know in a civilized fashion that his whore has now chosen him. No hard feelings. Then the new pimp and the whore pick up the whore’s possessions from the old pimp. Now this process serves a few purposes.

First, it makes it pricey for a whore to jump from pimp to pimp. In the regular dating world where the average man has no rules and standards and is often outcome driven, a girl can jump from guy to guy to guy without repercussions, and the guy who has her at any given moment will just celebrate because he is getting some new ass and doesn’t really think of the big picture. Not only will the average guy not make a woman jump hurdles in order to leave her old man for him, he will actually reward her for her disloyalty to him with gifts or affection. He rewards bad behavior and thinks that he is getting out ahead…that is until he gets burned later on in the same way. And of course he can’t figure out why it happened to him. This is the outcome driven thinking and low standards of the typical guy that allowed professional groupie Karrine “Supahead” Steffans to make life hell for so many shortsighted celebrity men with her antics and expose books. By giving the whore a price to pay for jumping ship to him in the form of a monetary investment, the new pimp is making the woman prove that she will not quickly jump ship again like she did with the last pimp. Since she is committing a disloyal act by leaving the last pimp, the only way the new pimp will take her on is if she gives him a display of extra loyalty. What the pimp has effectively done with the choosing fee is create what economists call a sunk cost fallacy, where someone has a greater tendency to stick to an endeavor and ride it out after they have already made a significant investment in time, money or effort. Sometimes a whore also has to pay a leaving fee as well to her old pimp, which further reinforces loyalty.

The second aspect of the “by the book” method of dealing with a Choosy Suzy is that it forces the two pimps to talk face to face. This is very important. Men, think of all the times when you’ve allowed a woman to pit you against another man, whether it’s a stalker ex or another suitor trying to take her from you or just some guy that tried to holler at her in a nightclub. Especially when the woman is the intermediary feeding both sides lines about what the other guy said rather than letting them hear it from each other. There are a lot of women out there that get an ego boost over men fighting over them, and will deliberately escalate a beef between two guys and let the testosterone take over. Not only does it provide her an ego boost but it also makes her the center of competition, thereby raising her value over both suitors. Pimps recognize this aspect of human nature and as a result created the rule of one pimp going over to the other pimp face to face to eliminate the middleman, in this case the whore. This keeps the whore from using exaggeration or “he say, she say” to get two pimps to fight over her, stroke her ego, raise her value and possibly injure each other. And it keeps the power dynamic squarely with the pimps.

The valuable life lessons to take from this are (1) make disloyalty or bad behavior costly, even when you’re the beneficiary of it, or you risk being a victim of the same behavior down the line, and (2) be aware of when you’re being made to dance to someone else’s tune. A lot of people, from bosses to spouses to friends will try to goad you into unnecessary, fruitless battles for their own entertainment or benefit, all the while making you believe you’re in charge of the situation.

Now back to Iceberg:

I started [to game her] when I said, “Bitch, I don’t want a whore with rabbit in her. I want a bitch who wants me for life. You have got to go after that bullshit earlier this morning, you are not that bitch.”

That [game] butchered her and she collapsed into my lap crying and begging to stay. I had a theory about splitting whores. I think they seldom split without a bankroll’.

So, I cracked on her, “Give me that scratch you held, out and maybe I will give you another chance.”

Sure enough she reached into her bosom and drew out close to five bills and handed it to me. No pimp with a brain in his head cuts loose a young beautiful whore with lots of mileage left in her. I let her come back.

Note that Iceberg didn’t just let her come back without jumping a hurdle. It’s a good practice when forgiving someone or taking them back to make them give something up or make a costly gesture. If you let someone do wrong against you and keep forgiving them just for the price of an apology, you send a message about how much bad treatment you will gladly tolerate, and you are guaranteeing that that person will continue to disrespect you again in the future because they realize there will be no repercussions for doing so.

When at long last I was driving toward my hotel I remembered what “Baby” Jones, the master pimp who turned me out, had said about whores like Kim.

“Slim,” he had said, “A pretty Nigger bitch and a white whore are just alike. They both will get in a stable to wreck it and leave the pimp on his ass with no whore. You gotta make ‘em hump hard and fast to stick ‘em for [their money] quick. Slim, pimping ain’t no game of love, so [game] ‘em and keep your [dick] outta ‘em. Any sucker who believe a whore loves him shouldn’t a fell outta his mammy’s ass.”

?..

“Slim, a pimp is really a whore who has reversed the game on whores. So Slim, be as sweet as the scratch, no sweeter, and always stick a whore for a bundle [of money] before you sex her. A whore ain’t nothing but a trick to a pimp. Don’t let ‘em [game] you. Always get your money in front just like a whore.

Now here one of the biggest misconceptions about pimps gets set straight. People think pimps are all about getting as much sex as possible. Guys go around having sex with anything that moves and brag “I’m a pimp” or “I’m pimping.” Pimps actually have a high amount of sexual discipline and try to keep sex with the whores to a minimum. What the john is to the whore, the whore is to the pimp: a customer. Using economic terms again, the pimp creates a scarcity mindset when it comes to letting whores having sex with him: he makes himself the commodity and raises his own value by having sex with the whores as little as possible. At times in the book Pimp, Iceberg describes how excruciating it can be to resist the urge to have sex with his whores at times, but he realizes that the bigger picture is to maintain his high value at all costs. And additionally, just like the whore won’t have sex with a john unless he pays her first, a pimp will not have sex with his whore under any circumstances unless she pays him first.

And sometimes not even then. Sometimes even when a whore behaves and follows orders there is no guarantee she will be rewarded each time. This is called the intermittent reward method, or random reinforcement method, pioneered by famed psychologist B.F. Skinner with his Skinner Box, and it’s one of the most potent methods of influencing behavior out there, and is the psychological reason why slot machines are so addictive, as described in this NY Times article:

The makers of slot machines may rely on the lure of life-changing jackpots to attract customers, but the machines’ ability to hook so deeply into a player’s cerebral cortex derives from one of the more powerful human feedback mechanisms, a phenomenon behavioral scientists call infrequent random reinforcement, or ”intermittent reward.” Children whose parents consistently shower them with love and attention tend to take that devotion for granted. Those who know they’ll never be rewarded by their parents stop trying after a while. But those who are rewarded only intermittently ? in the fashion of a slot machine ? will often pursue positive outcomes with a persistent tenacity.

Random, unpredictable intermittent rewards are a far better motivator for behavior than consistent, predictable rewards. (By the way, managers are also increasingly experimenting with intermittent reward systems in the workplace to motivate workers, so don’t think you’re immune from this type of brainwashing just because you’re not a lab rat, dog, child or a whore.) By using the powerful behavioral tools of scarcity and intermittent rewards, pimps create a mindset in their women where having sex with the pimp and being deemed worthy by him is the most valuable thing on earth to them. (A lot of men who are “whipped” by their wives are also commonly victims of scarcity and intermittent rewards, so don’t believe it’s just a tool used by misogynists.)

How valuable to the whore is the pimp’s affection, love and, if she’s “lucky,” sex? Well that leads to one last myth about pimps and whores that I’m going to dispel. A whore does not receive a cut of the money she makes. A lot of people assume she does, but she doesn’t. She gives it all to the pimp. Every last cent. His cut is 100%.

Now that is some serious brainwashing.

BONUS EXCERPTS: MALCOLM X ON PIMPS AND PROSTITUTES

The bonus excerpts below are from The Autobiography of Malcolm X : As Told to Alex Haley.

Malcolm X On Wives And Prostitutes:

Domineering, complaining, demanding wives who had just about psychologically castrated their husbands were responsible for the early [client rush to the brothel]. These wives were so disagreeable and had made their man so tense that they were robbed of the satisfaction of being men. To escape this tension and the chance of being ridiculed by his own wife, each of these men had gotten up early and come to a prostitute.The prostitutes had to make it their business to be students of men. They said that after most men passed their virile twenties, they went to bed mainly to satisfy their egos, and because a lot of women don?t understand it that way, they damage and wreck a man?s ego. No matter how little virility a man has to offer, prostitutes make him feel for a time that he is the greatest man in the world. That?s why these prostitutes had that morning rush of business. More wives could keep their husbands if they realized their greatest urge is to be men…

I mean, I?d had so much experience. I had talked to too many prostitutes and mistresses. They knew more about a whole lot of husbands than the wives of those husbands did. The wives always filled their husband?s ears so full of wife complaints that it wasn?t the wives, it was the prostitutes and mistresses who heard the husbands? innermost problems and secrets. They thought of him, and comforted him, and that included listening to him, and so he would tell them everything.

Malcolm X On Pimps vs. Husbands:

Most men, the prostitutes felt, were too easy to push around. Every day these prostitutes heard their customers complaining that they never heard anything but griping from women who were being taken care of and given everything. The prostitutes said that most men needed to know what the pimps knew. A woman should occasionally be babied enough to show her the man had affection, but beyond that she should be treated firmly. These tough women said that it worked with them. All women, by their nature, are fragile and weak: they are attracted to the male in whom they see strength.

Recommended Reading:

The books below all played a role in this piece, with some specifically discussing pimp behavior and philosophies, and others discussing the general human behavior principles that pimps end up exploiting.

Every now and then I come across something that I wish I wrote. This piece from Craiglist’s “Best Of” section is a perfect example. It’s called “Myths and Truths,” and I’ve reproduced it in full below. I’m sure a few people will call it jaded and cynical, and it probably is, but that in no way negates how astute and accurate it is:

Myths and Truths

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Date: 2006-04-18, 11:09PM PDT

Some rants and accumulated experience about women. Men in happy marriages or stable relationships don’t need to read this; neither do men who get laid every week (or even every month). The “truth” I’m putting out here is for all of those men who, like me, worship women and can’t figure out why they keep getting screwed over and dumped. The myths are things that I used to believe before I wised up.

MYTH: Women want love and affection. Women want to be treated well. If you treat a woman well, she’ll treat you well.