The Rawness

Click here for Part 1.

The nightclub we were at was on the second floor of the building, with different landings in multiple directions that allowed you to lean on a railing and look downward at people entering from the ground floor and heading upstairs. I was spending my time at the club people watching rather than actively socializing.  As I saw one unremarkable person after another enter, my eyes began to glaze over with boredom.  I was just counting down the hours, no minutes, before I’d be heading home.

Suddenly my vision sharpened. I saw a man enter that caught my attention. Let’s call him CR Alpha.  On the surface there was nothing really impressive about him. He wasn’t remarkably fit. He wasn’t remarkably unfit. He was slim but not muscular. He wasn’t tall but wasn’t particularly short either. He wasn’t incredibly handsome although he wasn’t ugly. He wasn’t especially well dressed. He definitely wasn’t peacocking. He just had a basketball jersey, some track pants and some sneakers. He had a slight swagger but it was understated and not a godzilla-stomping-out-tokyo badass strut or anything like that; he had no chip on his shoulder or attitude that he was looking for trouble. He had some tattoos, but not the outrageous amount guys get when they’re blatantly overselling the bad boy image. But I could tell there was something about him.  He exuded maximum confidence and control of his domain with a bare minimum of cocky displays or overt exertion.

As I described before, the streets of Jaco were filled with a lot of crash test dummy criminal types. The kind of petty crooks who would try to sell you drugs or steal your stuff in a heartbeat if you left it unattended. They walked around trying to look as grimy and hard as possible all the time. I classified them immediately as opportunist punks, dangerous in that if they saw a moment of weakness, like you were drunk and outnumbered and a herb, they may try something, but if you were street smart and willing to show some heart they wouldn’t consider you worth the trouble of bothering. But this guy was different. I immediately identified him as a different class of criminal: a player.

I tapped my partner in crime Beethoven and pointed at the dude with my chin. “This fucking guy.”

Beethoven took notice and immediately knew who I was talking about. “Yeah, I see him.  He’s all business. He carries it.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. Like if anything goes down, he’ll have the last word. But he’s not obnoxious about it. Like he’ll never go looking for trouble or causing unnecessary shit. Like he’s just chill as shit unless you come at him sideways. And then that’s that. No extra talk, no prolonged “man dance” where you argue and puff your chest out for 45 minutes straight but no one makes a move. He just handles his shit.”

Beethoven’s eyes stuck with the guy. “Yeah, yeah that sounds about right.”

The guy makes his way upstairs. We forget about him for a while. When I look at the beautiful girl from part 1 of this tale again, she is with him. Until he arrived, she was aloof and her expression was somewhat blank. She wasn’t acting stuck up or standoffish anything, just not particularly emotional one way or the other. But now that he was here, she was smiling, gregarious and warmer. She and her friend were only talking to him. But more important was the body language between him, the girl and her friend, who was also female. He would smile approvingly whenever they addressed him, speak a few words, but otherwise just lean back against the railing and stare at an undetermined spot in the room rather than at them. He wasn’t hugged up on the girl and she wasn’t attached at his hip. She and her friend would dance in his vicinity, almost for his benefit, but rarely directly in his line of sight. More like within his peripheral vision, so that he could keep his eye on them without having to look preoccupied with them. It was almost like there was an invisible semicircle area of personal space around him, a force field of unspoken protection, and they happily occupied the area within it, never going beyong the outer perimeter, held within his orbit by the invisible gravity of his quiet charisma much like a moon predictably orbits a planet and is content to never go beyond that orbit. He just leaned back, surveyed his domain and held these two girls in his sway with minimal maintenance.

Now you can always tell a winner mentality from a loser mentality by how they react to viewing situational winners. Losers see winners in a situation and try to visualize either how it should be the losers winning instead or try to think about how the winner doesn’t really deserve to be winning and got his gains unfairly. A man with a winner mentality sees someone winning in a situation and thinks, “Why is he a winner right now, and what can I learn from this?”  That was my attitude when seeing this guy.  I couldn’t hate, I had to congratulate.  A lot of square guys, especially from developed Western nations, would have seen this dude and say “What does he have? Why is that chick with his third-world criminal thug ass and not a classy civilized nice guy like me? The world is unfair.  After all, doesn’t she realize I’m smart, have a high IQ, am from the West, have American dollars, would treat her like a queen the way she deserves instead of ignoring her like this alpha thug does?  She must be brainwashed or low IQ trash to be content with a third-world badboy asshole like him instead of jumping through hoops for a good guy going places like me.” Even worse is the guy who puts a chick like that on a pedestal and imagines how all she needs is his nice treatment and exposure to his worldly ways to see the errors of her dating choices. That’s sucka mentality.

But there’s a saying in the hood, “game recognizes game.” Any guy with real game, I’m talking truly internalized game that comes from years in the game and not a bunch of barely tested scripts and gimmicks, would recognize that this guy deserved what he got, because he was giving her what she needed in that harsh environment. He was an alpha in the purest sense, and in an environment like that pure alphaness mattered more than anything else.  He was alpha in the way a middle class man could never be, especially in the West. The more primal and dog-eat-dog the environment, the scarcer the available resources for both the average man and woman, the harder the everyday grind, the weaker the property rights, the weaker the governmental representation, the more corrupt and powerless the police force and most importantly the more powerless and more nonexistent the middle class population, then the more women in said environment will select for pure, true alphas.

Here in the modernized West where there is a strong middle class and the average woman has more and more self-reliance thanks to feminism and doesn’t need a man as much for survival, a woman doesn’t need to select for pure alphadom as much, and probably won’t.  She may still be primally drawn to such alphas due to her genetic hard-wiring, a holdover from the more primal Pleistocene era, but she has enough counterprogramming from Western culture to ultimately balance it out.  What women in our modernized western societies are screening for, contrary to popular belief, are not the most purely alpha men but the most relatively alpha men within reasonable limits, or what I dub the Renaissance Man (credit for originally coining the term though goes to Tariq Nasheed).

To a chick surviving in the bleak, primal grind of a Jaco, Costa Rica, does she have time to seriously entertain this as an alpha male?

Is that really the pure essence of an alpha male in traditional evolutionary terms?  Or this frat guy?

No offense to any of the guys up there (Mystery, Style, Tucker Max), but most middle class men that are successful with women aren’t true alphas in the historical evolutionary sense.  They’re alphas in a relative sense, when compared to other middle-class men in their social circles.  Not only are most middle-class men not alpha males in the pure sense, but it would be stupid for them to even aspire to true pure alphadom.  Because true alphadom is a pointless goal for middle-class men in the West.

The successful middle-class alpha male is a mythical figure that can’t exist for any significant amount of time.  Our society is specifically built to put most alpha behavior in check.  The only types of men who can pull off any semblance of true alpha behavior in the West are men at the extreme lower end of the socioeconomic scale because they feel they have nothing to lose and men at the extremely high end of the socioeconomic scale because despite having something to lose they have more resources with which to get away with alpha behavior.  This is a society that keeps the peace and maintains the status quo by keeping alpha behavior in check through various disincentives and punishments.

Middle-class men in the West especially feel the pressure of these disincentives and punishments because on one hand they have enough resources and civility that they feel they have too much to lose by receiving these disincentives and punishment.  They have enough property and status and career that it will hurt them to lose any of it.  And if they end up in jail, they’re so civilized and genteel that they aren’t built for that setting the way a man from the lower end of the socioeconomic scale is.  Yet on the flip side they don’t have so much resources that they can shield themselves from the consequences of alpha behavior either, either buy buying themselves out of punishment or getting afforded a cushy punishment in the form of a country club prison stretch the way a man from the higher end of the socioeconomic scale can. For these reasons lower class and upper class men have much more freedom to push the envelope in pure alpha male behavior than middle class men do. And even for these groups in America there are limits to how alpha they can be, for various reasons.  I touched on limitations on the alpha status of the lower class already.  One of these days I’ll do the Myth of the Upper-Class Alpha Male as well.

Western middle class women are willing to enjoy these middle-class Western men because they have grown up conditioned to aspire to self-sufficient career woman status and expect to have two-income households when they marry.  So they don’t have to select mates with enough extreme wealth that can support a family singlehandedly.  Thanks to their own careers and middle-class status, they can still get a great quality of life from combining their own middle-class income with the income of a middle-class man, as opposed to the woman of the past with few big career opportunities who needed to rely totally on her prospective mate’s income and resources to improve her socioeconomic status.  Also, because of the higher expectations of monogamy in the modern West, even if a bunch of Western women wanted to effectively share a powerhouse alpha’s resources, it would be logistically too hard to pull off.  Rich men in America and the developed West are expected to be and actually are much more monogamous than rich men elsewhere in the world or throughout history because polygamy is very frowned upon here and the financial consequences to the rich man for engaging in it if caught can be very high.  Not to mention the social shaming (ask Tiger Woods).

Also, two more factors.  Rich people have less leisure time than ever, which is an important part of philandering.  They work more than ever nowadays, limiting the time they can spend on building and maintaining a harem.  Second, the cost of a decent standard of living in urban environments and big cities, the places that offer the most opportunity for rising in socioeconomic class these days, becomes a natural obstacle in harem building as well.  For a rich guy in a small town or the third world or a less expensive bygone era, maintaining a harem of extramarital women is a much less economically draining proposition than for a rich man in New York or Tokyo.  That’s why in America it takes a man of Tiger Woods’s flexible schedule and exorbitant wealth to pull off a harem of 14 women (not all simultaneously) throughout the years while a successful businessman in some parts of the world can accomplish the same feat with ease.

So rich men in America get monopolized by one lucky wife and may have one or two long-term mistresses with assorted quickies and escorts here and there.  The most access the average lower and middle-class woman can get to one of these high powered alpha men is the parting gift of occasional fling or quickie, and not the first prize of marriage or second prize of kept mistress status.  Societies like ours that strongly enforce monogamy shrink the supply of powerful alpha men women can choose from since they aren’t allowed to share these men amongst each other the way they could in a society that allows, explicitly or implicitly, long-term polygamous arrangements.  But as I pointed out, this shortage of powerful rich men available for long-term pair bonding is irrelevant because Western women don’t need such men for their survival like women in the past did.

In addition, thanks to a strong police force, strong property rights and strong paternalistic democratic government to offer physical protection and entitlement benefits if needed, thanks to feminism altering gender role expectations and giving women equal representational votes, thanks to a strong court system to provide retribution and justice if a man tries to violate them in any way, thanks to their own careers that allow them to be self-sufficient enough to provide their own sustenance and resources, thanks to birth control and abortions, thanks to the conveniences offered by appliance technology like washing machines, food processors, blenders and trash compactors, they are free to engage in sexual escapades and mating arrangements their female predecessors never dreamed of.  Or as I like to call it, “sport fucking” or “fun fucking” whoever she wants, be it bad boy alphas, metrosexual artfag hipsters, starving artists, ad account executives, Starbucks employees, and all types of middle class and working class guys who would have normally died without reproducing in the old dog-eat-dog primal eras of the past.  Choosing non-committing alpha males for flings or weak betas with little to moderate resources, while not the optimal choice of her genetic hard-wiring, doesn’t have the same dire consequences her in the Western world that it had for humans in the primal environments of the Pleistocene era or in modern third world hellholes.

In the West, a powerful resource-rich alpha isn’t a necessity thanks to the factors I described above, and in addition such an alpha isn’t widely available thanks to strongly enforced monogamy (only one women for each man) keeping the supply low.  This is why middle-class men are able to thrive in Western society.  They are a luxury only Western women can afford.  And the ideal middle class man is alpha enough to be a prize, but due to his circumstances there are natural ceilings to how alpha he can be.  A middle-class alpha who aims to have any longevity and reproductive success can’t exercise pure alpha status.  Sure he can work hard until he moves into a higher socioeconomic status and becomes rich, and at that point become more of a true, pure alpha, but so long as he remains in the middle-class status he won’t be able to pull off true, pure alpha status.  It’s for these reasons I specifically called my self-improvement series The Renaissance Man series and not The Alpha Male series.  The choice of terms was very deliberate and the two concepts are not interchangeable.  Because I think telling the average middle class man that alphadom is attainable or even desirable while remaining in middle class status is the biggest crock of shit going on today.  The best thing for a middle-class man to be in today’s society is not a true, pure alpha but a blend of the best aspects of an alpha male and the best aspects of a beta male, with the trappings of neither. A Renaissance Man.

Back to the Costa Rican Alpha Female I described in Part 1.  If you came up to her using some cheezy negs and magic tricks, she’d look at you like you were a joke.  The first thing she’d think is, if some crazy dude came up to me and tried to attack me or force me into prostitution or some drunk tourist tried to rape me, this dancing monkey couldn’t do shit. Can he guarantee that I’ll never have to resort to prostituting myself to get big bucks or slaving away at a shitty service or hospitality job for peanuts just to barely keep above grinding poverty level and stay at the same class level? This middle-class guy with his check-to-check existence, his meager 401(k) plan, his Netflix queue that he updates religiously, his mirthless materialism that he uses to convince himself he has more status than he actually has ans he works like a dog to maintain, his DVD box sets and encyclopedic knowledge of sports stats trivia, fantasy basketball league and collection of Bill Simmons Sports Guy columns, his 367 facebook friends, his witty repartee of popular movie quotes, his blog following, his X-Box 360 or whatever other middle-class trappings he has?  He’d be utterly useless to her.

“Fun-fucking” men like that for sport the way Western women can is a luxury not afforded to women who don’t come from the same environment.  For these women, choosing the right man is a decision so critical that it means the difference between surviving and thriving or wasting away in poverty, shame and degradation.  A woman like this may view such a middle class guy as as a trick or a simp and use him for some short term material gain like some free drinks or quick cash, but that’s it.  She may maintain a correspondence with him in hopes he’s a Captain Save-A-Ho type so that she can hit him up later with some sob story about her sick babies and get him to wire money to her if he’s enough of a big-hearted sap to go for it.  And if he’s a that type of jackpot middle-class sucker who can be used for a real long-term benefit like getting immigration to the West then she may really entertain him seriously, usually by playing to his emasculated Western male ego in a way American women would never do.  This type of treatment usually blows the  middle class Western man’s mind and he’s immediately sprung and wrapped around her finger.  But she’ll never respect him fully due to the type of men she’s grown up exposed to and once she immigrates and gets a foothold in her new country to the point where she no longer needs him anymore, she’ll leave him and get with the type of alpha male she’s been conditioned to be turned on by. Oftentimes she’ll even cheat with such an alpha behind her beta husband’s back soon after arriving in her new country.  Such stories are common.

Most of the time, what the average woman in a primal dog-eat-dog environment need in their immediate future is a lower-class guy who is so badass he can physically protect her from the dangers of the ghetto, or a guy uber-rich and uber-powerful enough to immediately lift her far away from the ghetto, so far in fact that she feels she is never in danger of going back.  In the specific case of Costa Rican Alpha Female, she is so top notch, even by the standards of the world stage, she can get the best of both worlds in Jaco: the guy who is both badass and tough enough to offer physical protection and powerful and rich enough to lift her far away from her poor beginnings.  A guy like CR Alpha.

So who exactly was CR Alpha?

The next day I discussed this with our guide for the trip.  This guy knew was a street-smart American expat who now lived in Costa Rica and functioned as both our concierge and tour guide.  He had been there for years and knew the ins and outs very well, from the seedy underbelly to the well-to-do parts.  We described the guy to him to see what he could tell us.  He immediately knew who we were talking about.  “He’s a lieutenant for the Colombians here.”  I can’t remember the full details because I was pretty wasted, but he was a ranking member of a Colombian organization known as either the White Colombians or the Black Colombians, I forget which.  He was their representative and highest ranking member in CR.  He ranked pretty high in the gang’s heirarchy, and of their members stationed in Costa Rica there was none higher.  Our concierge also said things that echoed the speculations Beethoven and I made the night before.  That he carried himself as a really cool guy and didn’t walk around acting like he had something to prove, but if there was ever a problem (which there rarely was because few were willing to cross him), he handled it in a definitive, unambiguous fashion.  He was no joke, and our concierge said over the years he even used him to handle some of his own “problems” that our concierge didn’t have the clout or muscle to handle on his own (presumably for a fee or in exchange for a favor, I didn’t ask for elaboration).

But that’s true alpha.  Not a fuzzy hat and black nail polish.  Not a cubicle job or middle management office. Not blog stardom.  None of this shit is true alpha.  And that’s fine.  For reasons I’ll explain in the next installment.

Next installment, how and why modern Western Society keeps alphadom in check and penalizes any excess of it.  And the pros and cons of such a system.

Click Here for Part 3

[Last week I promised a post that would go up on Monday and be controversial. As I started writing it, it kept getting longer and longer and was taking too much time to complete. So I decided to break it up instead, it will probably end up being three parts in total. Here's part 1:]

Last summer I was in Jaco, Costa Rica. It was one hell of a poor and cutthroat place. It was very much a crime and vice-infested town with a Wild West, anything goes feel and where the cops were basically a joke, except when it comes to harassing drunk tourists. It was incredibly grimy and bleak. I spent most of the vacation sitting by a pool in our house getting twisted and barbecuing.

There was a lot of petty crime and vice going on in Jaco. Drugs and other vices were everywhere out in the open, in daylight and nighttime. Lots of hustlers and crumbsnatchers. It was touristy in some densely trafficked areas but there were a lot of isolated spots where you could get got if you weren’t careful. But for the most part it wasn’t dangerous if you had even a hint of street smarts.

Most of the criminals I saw were local crash test dummies. Little dirt-poor young knucklehead locals who seemed influenced by too many gangsta rap images from America and too much reggaeton and ended up dressing and acting like bad parodies of a hip-hop stereotype. Punks trying to look hard and practice their ice grills, but as I said earlier nothing to worry about if you had even a hint of common sense or street smarts. But if you were careless and gave them an opening, they’d rob you blind.

At one nightclub we went to, I saw one girl who had to be the most beautiful creature I saw in my whole time down there. She was head and shoulders above every woman I had seen in the town. She had this style of dress that I can only describe as a modern haute couture/old world gypsy/bohemian/WWII European refugee chic/space age futuristic Paris runway mashup with lots of costume jewelry and gaudy accessories that she played straight yet managed to pull off without looking camp, kitschy, she somehow got all those disparate elements to blend together seamlessly and become more than the sum of their parts. For physical appearance picture Ava Gardner in Barefoot Contessa meets Shakira meets Dorothy Dandrige in Carmen Jones meets Jessica Alba…but with just a light sprinkling of light brown freckles on the olive skin of the bridge of her nose and upper cheeks, almost unnoticeable on first glance. The kind of appearance that’s so subtly exotic that she could conceivably belong to every race on the planet. And finally, she had a very seductive but classy body language that worked to maximum effect but without looking at all try-hard or desperate for attention. Ultrasexual but not slutty. Restrained but not prudish or icy. Great poise, posture and movement. Yet the final coup de grace was that despite all of this…she looked friendly, interesting and approachable. She somehow managed not to be intimidating at all, and didn’t put out the bitch shield unapproachable vibe that a comparatively hot women would if she were in America. My friend had a conversation with her and found her very pleasant and charming.

She wasn’t just hot by the relative standards of the uninspiring local talent. She would turn heads in the trendiest bar in Hollywood filled with aspiring starlets and models. It was the combination of her physical assets, her unique and well-conceived fashion style and her demeanor that would make her stand out in any room in any country in the world.

She was on the balcony of the club standing next to me, and I thought to myself In a third world shithole like this, who does this chick fuck with? See, in a Vegas, Los Angeles or a New York, a chick with looks and game like this girl would be fucking with straight moguls. She could golddig with the best of them if she wanted, without much effort. I’m not talking the glorified groupie chicks who mistakenly call themselves golddiggers and waste their time being jumpoffs for athletes and rappers and B-list actors for occasional shopping spree money or a free bottle here and there in a nightclub. I’m talking the type of chick who skips all the bullshit athletes, rappers and actors and gets wifed up by the team owner, the record label owner or entertainment mogul. The kind of chick dudes would be courting not with expensive dinners, vacations and jewels but by buying her a home, a car or a business. She’d get a new promise to make her famous every day. I totally would know her story and her type in the type of urban metropolis I’m from. But here, in Jaco, Costa Rica, in this almost primal, dog-eat-dog grimy town that is dirt poor and virtually lawless, who does an alpha female like this fuck with?

I was about to find out.

Click Here For Part 2

This is hilarious, and the life lesson #1 at the end about the perils of dating passionate people is so true. I learned that lesson from times I dated Eastern European women.

This video has become such a phenomenon that it’s even spawned a new term, The Europe Test.

It reminds me of a story that happened to a friend of mine. He went to a nightclub and met this really hot girl. They seemed to hit it off and he got her email address. He sent her an email and got no response. After a while, he got pissed and rattled off a really angry, spiteful email telling her off for being rude and a tease in pretty harsh language. A week later he got a long, sweet, lengthy email from her. It turned out she was out of town in Europe for the week, so she just got home and just finished reading the first email he sent. Turned out she was a really sweet girl and her response email showed a lot of interest. She obviously wrote this nice response email before she got to his scathingly insulting follow-up email. She never did write again, he never bothered trying to salvage it. The lessons here are obvious, I hope.

Semi-related: VK’s own Europe Test

Last year I did a series of posts about a social maneuver call the Rearden that you can use against passive aggressive pricks. It was generally well-received, but there was one installment of it that got mixed reviews, and that’s the part where I gave a specific example where I used it myself. The anecdote was about an exchange with a passive-aggressive Eurodouche.

It got some good feedback but also some negative feedback from commenters like

I don’t know man…

I see where you are coming from, and I agree with the analyses of conversational dynamics you post here, but something about the way you handled this rubbed me the wrong way. Felt too defensive. I would have handled it in one of two ways:

1) Early in the conversation you could have opened up an interesting discussion comparing the relative merits of the more isolated, atomic nature of American life versus the more friendly vibe you felt in AMS (you do agree that there is a qualitative difference, right? I myself found the open vibe in AMS to be refreshing).

2) If you you honestly felt the guy was trying to ho you up, better to go for the throat right away instead of psychoanalyzing and nitpicking. If it’s a “fight”, go on the offensive and start talking trash about what you think about the Dutch. That’s fun. But squirming around about what you think his motives are strikes me as ever so slightly bitchassed.

I like the idea of The Rearden in theory, but I don’t like this example.

All IMHO, of course.

Mu’Min/Obsidian also chimed in with:

Hey T,
Been awhile since we last chatted. So, I see I have some reading to do! I like “The Rearden” but I’m w/TC on this one: in any situation, Mu prefers the North/South approach, straightup, straight line, let’s have it.

Now, if I had been in your shoes w/dude, I would have cut him right off at the knees, cut the ring off on him and made him duke it rhetorically right there. I would have put him back on his heels in a very dominant way, because that’s my nature anyhow. And he would either have to bring it, or stand down. Kinda what you’ve been saying about drawing them out into the open.

On the other hand, people who have been to Europe or other cultures where confrontation tends to be indirect like Japan all agreed with me to some degree. Wade Nichols said:

Good post!

I’ve had a few experiences similar to yours when dealing with Europeans and/or Brits.

One was when I was in New Zealand, hiking the Kepler Track, during Christmas/New Years. In one of the huts, 2 Brits basically started ganging up on my wife and I when they learned we were Americans. They played many of the same games you described, as they were bitching about Iraq, how Tony Blair’s “basically a poodle of the U.S.”, etc. etc. They tried to cast the U.S. as hypocrites since there’s a photo of Dick Cheney with Sadaam Hussein from the 1980’s, and that was somehow indicative that the U.S. was once cozy with him. I didn’t think of it at the time, but later on realized I should have mentioned to these 2 clowns that Britain also once went to war with a certain bunch of people, and that Britain is now friends with the descendents of those people. Today we’re called Americans!

Another time I’ve experienced the same also with a Dutchman. This guy was playing the not-too-subtle “Americans are idiots” game by asking me, “How come you Americans always go to McDonald’s when you’re overseas?” I should have countered him by asking him about the stereotype of Europeans all being a bunch of wimps that “swing both ways”, and ask him how many guys he’s slept with!

Joshua Herring wrote:

What a great post! I spent 6 years abroad, one of which was in Germany, so this sort of thing happened to me all the time. I disagree with other commenters that going for the jugular early on is the right approach. That was always my initial instinct too, but it doesn’t work because (as this encounter demonstrates) they can easily fall back on the faux “OH, I didn’t mean to offend.” It’s true that Rawness calls him on it eventually, but first you have to give the guy enough rope to hang himself. Sitting there and calmly letting him build up a bit belies any impression that you’re easily offended or closed-minded, or simplistic or whatever. Love the Rearden and will definitely plan on using it next time I’m in one of these situations.

Several blogs also linked to it favorably, but the blog articles were always written by someone who actually experienced what I was talking about firsthand. But I had a nagging curiosity about why the reaction was so mixed, and in particular why only people who experienced it firsthand supported my prescription of how to respond. But after a while, I just moved on to new topics.

The other day I came across the old post and suddenly it hit me. It was so obvious. When I was recalling the encounter the first time around, the memory was incredibly fresh in my mind. So mentally, I added all the necessary accompanying details like the vibrant vocal inflection, smiling facial expressions, soothing intonation and friendly body language. But in writing it down I left all those extra details out and related almost nothing but the text of the discussion. And when all you see is the pure text without all those other details that tend to soften the impact, the insults look much more direct to readers than it seemed to me at the time I was experiencing it. Similarly, the readers who visited or lived in Europe and had similar experiences with the people there when reading the text, thanks to their own experiences, were probably able to totally fill in those extra details and put the words more into the context needed to understand why going nuclear in response would have come off badly.

Realizing this gave me some more insight on passive aggressors. People who are really good at passive aggression have a talent of making their behavior, body language and voices so incongruous with the insulting nature of their words that you experience a slightly disorienting cognitive dissonance that causes you to doubt your own instincts. However just focusing on the words alone totally makes the insulting intention jump out at you clear as day, just like the Eurodouche’s insulting nature was much more apparent to those readers who were strictly focused on the content of his dialogue as opposed to the other readers who filled in a more vivid total picture of the encounter.

So in the future if you have what you think may have been an encounter with a passive aggressor laced with veiled insults and are doubting your instincts, focus on just the words and nothing else. Write it out if you have to and read it to yourself. Better yet, have someone else who wasn’t there and can’t fill in the extra details of the encounter themselves read it to give you their impression of what’s going on. Chances are that regardless of how the person was acting, if it looks like a blatant insult on paper, it was meant to be insulting.

Good news, Costa Rica is awesome. Jaco is a nice enough place but not really my cup of tea personally, but the rest of the country is sweet. Or maybe my expectations were just too high following last year’s vacation. I might dedicate a longer post to it at some point.

Bad news, the heat here overheated my laptop. As in, it was so hot that even with the computer off and screen closed, the laptop totally overheated and shut down. I’ve never seen anything like it. Motherboard is fried. Utterly shot.

Since blogging at work is a no-no, I’m going to be down until I get a new laptop in a few weeks. I have to use a friend’s computer just to make this post.

Since my computer access is going to be extremely limited, I propose this: A while back, I asked you guys to give me ideas on what type of book I should write. The most popular suggestion was a collection of essays, so that is what I am going with. My next question is, what subject matters would you suggest I write about? Which topics do you like to read from me the most? It will help me get an idea of what the range of topics should be. I am currently at the stage of outlining it and the subject matter needs a little more focusing.

Also, tell me what you would least like to see. For example many of you say the political stuff is too divisive, so I’m going light on that. One essay at most.

Thanks.

UPDATE: Doesn’t have to be a topic or even subject area I’ve already covered. It could be something I’ve never discussed in the past ever but you still want to hear my take on.

I’ll be there five days. Anyone ever been there? If so, please share your experiences. Am going to try to know out on

Also, I have a Twitter account, I used it for a little bit last year and couldn’t quite see the point and lost interest. Plus I had phone updates and my phone was always blowing up with texts. I’m going to try again and see if I like it any better this time around. All those trendspotting magazines always try to call it the next form of blogging or miniblogging or the thing that’s going to make real blogging obsolete…maybe I’m just following the wrong people but it always just seems like a bunch of blast text messages from bored people.

Anyway, it’s http://twitter.com/ricky_raw. I’m prepared to give it another shot.

A round-up of vacation thoughts that were interesting, but not interesting enough to warrant individual blog posts:

The Illusion of Soft Culture:

In some ways, visiting a culture that is blatantly and outrageously different on the surface is probably better than going to some cultures in that seem to only have superficial surface differences from America. In the former, you get a really extreme and intense culture shock up front, which causes you to tread carefully and pay close attention throughout because you’re always hyper-aware and conscious of cultural differences.

Places like Amsterdam and Stockholm, on the other hand, are very superficially similar to America.  You’re surrounded by trendy clothing, hip-hop music at all the clubs, guys and girls rapping along to all the lyrics and grinding on the dance floor like they’re in a hip-hop video, lots of American slang and sitcom catchphrases (“How you doing?”), Chuck Taylor All-Star sneakers everywhere, Coca Cola and McDonald’s everywhere you turn, posters everywhere for the latest American movie blockbusters.  So you feel familiar right away, become careless and don’t pay attention to cultural differences as much as you should.  This underestimation of cultural differences makes accidentally offending people and crossing boundaries actually more likely than they would be in a culture radically different than America because you get really comfortable, stop walking on eggshells and start assuming that everything that’s okay at home in America is acceptable abroad.

I found something off in a lot of conversations I had abroad at first before I figured this out. Great conversations would turn stale and then weird, and I didn’t realize until later that cultural misunderstanding was responsible. What helped was when I met some Europeans who spent significant time in America, and thus knew not just the soft culture of America, but also its hard internal culture too. These people were the ones who helped explain to me the little things I couldn’t figure out.

You should always be wary of countries that have a long history of being culturally and racially homogenous (which basically covers almost every country out there except America probably). These are particularly hard to penetrate because so many aspects of their social dynamics are intuitive and unspoken. As an analogy, think of interactions with your family versus interactions with new roommates. With your family, you’ve had years developing common context, you grew up with each other, and the background to every interaction doesn’t need to be spelled out and fully explained. You develop various communication shorthands because you share so much background and have so many shared experiences.  There’s a lot of implicit understanding that can be exchanged just through a look or a gesture that would totally fly over an outsider’s head if you tried it on them. Compared to an outsider, you can read between the lines with each other more, finish each others’ sentences and seemingly read each others’ minds. You instinctively know when the other is joking or not.

Now picture times of your life when you’ve had new roommates.  You’ve shared much less common experiences and background. Suddenly explicit explanation becomes more important. There’s no implicit understanding of boundaries and personal space, there are less shared habits and attitudes, a lot of lines need to be clearly drawn in the sand, and a lot of concerns need to be clearly voiced in order to peacefully coexist. You have to tread carefully to avoid misunderstandings. There is also less patience with putting up with roommates because you are not tied to them like you are to family. Idiosyncracies that your family would either share with you or have learned to ignore from you now become an issue.

America is the country of “new roommates.” Because we’re such a mix of cultures, and have been from almost the beginning, and that mix of culture keeps changing with the constant addition of new immigrant groups, we don’t have quite the same level of implicit familiarity you find in countries where cultural and racial homogeneity where the norm for most their existence. For many countries outside of the U.S., diversity is still a new relatively concept, an experiment if you will.

European countries are countries that have been “families” for most of their existence that have only recently started allowing new roommates to move in with them. And the more culturally and racially homogenous a country remains, the more it is like a close-knit family. People are used to being implicitly understood. People are not used to explaining everything in explicit terms as possible. People are used to reading between the lines and understanding each other’s motivations for doing things, as they all come from similar backgrounds, races and shared cultural experiences.

I had lunch with some people in Stockholm and they explained to me all the differences in culture I wasn’t picking up on. I consider myself pretty good at spotting social dynamics, and even I was shocked at how much social nuances I was missing. They also explained that Scandinavians were not as used to explaining their culture to people because they didn’t have to until recently. Immigration was not as widespread as it had become recently, and it was not as popular with tourists as some other countries where the tourism industry is so huge that tourists become part of the fabric of the country’s daily life. On the flipside, American culture seems easier for outsiders to understand because we talk, dissect and explain our culture constantly and openly, in our opinion news articles, our movies and TV shows, our documentaries, and our social science books. Because we don’t assume the existence of shared backgrounds and experiences as much as most other countries, we unconsciously have become used to dissecting and explaining and learning about our cultural idiosyncracies.

The “roommates” dynamic is what is called “low-context communication,” the “family” dynamic is what is called “high-context communication.”  Americans are used to low-context communication, while most other cultures are more used to high-context communication.  In fact, this is a big reason as to why Hollywood movies and foreign films are traditionally so different.  The films of Hollywood are traditionally extremely low-context, which is why they have such broad appeal, domestically and abroad.  European films however have always been high-context, requiring the viewer to pay more attention to subtext, implication, body language and subtle facial expressions.

The Americanization of popular culture throughout the developed Western world makes Americans believe that the similarities between all cultures in the west are much deeper and more profound than they actually are, leaving them oblivious to just how different values can be from country to country in the West. (On a side note, this is also starting to happen in other places as well.  The Westernization of much of the Eastern hemisphere is starting to create the same fallacy, which is why western leaders often make mistakes in assessing the cultures and governments found in places like China, North Korea, Russia and Muslim countries. Samuel Huntington’s book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order talks about this problem, for example how a young Muslim may put on a pair of Levis’ jeans, put on an Ipod playing pop music, drink a Coca-Cola and take off to bomb an embassy. His superficial appearances and habits imply a total acceptance of Western lifestyle, but his core internal values are still fundamentally those of his home culture. The post-9/11 world really made this problem apparent.)

Flip-Flops

My whole time there, I did not see that fashion scourge popular among American women, the dreaded flip-flops. Not a single girl was wearing flip-flops outdoors, even to Sunday brunch. This post is a scathing critique of flip-flops. Flip-flops have even become acceptable for reporters to wear on the national news. Flip-flops have become so socially acceptable among the 20-something and younger set that members of the Northwestern University female lacrosse team wore flip-flops when meeting the President at the White House in 2005! The last straw was when a friend of mind told me he saw a young douche on the subway headed to work in a dress suit and…flip-flops!!! My friend asked what was up with the flip-flops and the guy said he just wore them on the commute for comfort. What the fuck?! Just the sound of hearing the clop-clop-clop sound of heel slapping plastic all around you as you walk around New York is enough to drive you crazy. The sight of the accumulated black dirt on a girl’s heels make it even worse.

In Stockholm and Amsterdam, I never saw flip-flops. Not once.  Also although I didn’t go to Eastern Europe, I met many Eastern Europeans while in Western Europe and not only did they never wear flip-flops, they never even seemed to even wear flats. I asked a woman, a Latvian, about whether my observation about Eastern Europeans was on point or not, and she said it was true. She said she actually didn’t even own any flats (and saw no reason to), except for one pair of sneakers she used if she had to hike or exercise. I shed a tear.

Part of me thought she was exaggerating or pulling my leg until someone showed me these two videos out of Russia:

Rules:

You can see evidence of a country’s overall national character very much in the little things that country’s people do. For example, in Stockholm no one would cross against a traffic light. Even if there were no cars coming from either direction as far as the eye could see, no one would cross unless the traffic signal gave them the okay. In NY, people are itching for any break in the traffic to exploit in order to cross the street, regardless of what the traffic signal displays. I think it speaks a lot about each country’s attitude toward symbols of authority. This country, after all, was founded on resistance to authority figures if you think about it.

Legs

The legs on women in Stockholm and Amsterdam were great. I don’t think I saw a pair of bad legs or cankles at all while there. It’s got to be all the walking and biking.

In Stockholm you walk all the time. Unless it’s an impractical distance to walk or you are in danger of being late, you are going to be walking to where you have to go. Even if you have a long distance to cover to go home, you’ll probably walk. Going to the afterparty while drunk and in your club clothes? You’ll probably still do the walk, even if it’s 15 or 20 minutes. Drunk off your ass and a twenty minutes or a half hour from home? You may still walk.

Distances that most Americans would call a taxi for are totally natural to walk for Swedish people. I walked everywhere all the time, and no matter what time it was there were plenty of other people taking long walks too. I could be walking back to my hotel at 5 AM and see someone else taking a long walk at 5 AM too, walking in front of me for 20 minutes.

I love walking, so I was right at home. While there though I thought about all my friends back home, some of whom are even gym rats and exercise freaks that will kill the cardio machine, that absolutely hate real world walking. I can have friends that crush the stairmaster daily but bitch if we have to walk a block too far from the car to the bar. Even as a gym cardio lover myself, I’ve got to say that I never got weight loss results as drastic as what I got from walking everywhere I needed to go in Europe. I would just add an extra 15-20 minutes for everywhere I had to go and instead of taking a train or bus or taxi I’d walk. Over the course of a day I must have covered miles. I also spent my mornings and afternoons doing walking tours from my guidebook and inviting total strangers along.

I hate to sound like a typical American Europhile snob (and anyone who reads this blog knows I hate that type), but even I have to admit: I totally see why Americans are so much fatter than Europeans. Gyms aren’t even fashionable there as they are here in America yet people looked great and were on average in better shape just by being less lazy and incorporating more activity in their every day lives. Cumulatively all that walking really adds up over time.

In Amsterdam, it’s not just walking but bikes also. People bike everywhere. The whole city is built to be bike-friendly, and there are actually more bikes than people, estimated at 1.5-2 bikes per person. You see businessmen in suits commuting to work on bikes, hot girls made up and dressed to the nines in eveningwear headed to and from the supertrendy club on bikes, stumbling drunk guys and girls getting on bikes and cycling groggily home. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 in the morning and you will see people biking around. Apparently bike theft is so common people don’t want to invest too much in a nice bike, so you won’t see much of those multithousand dollar bikes that are popular with yuppies here. Bikes are the hot commodity there.

There is no bicycle stigma. I didn’t meet a single person there who owned a car, and you can even show up on a date with a bicycle and not be labeled a loser if you are a guy. A woman can get made up and look glamorous yet show up to her date on a bicycle too. No expectations of the guy showing up in a nice car like in America.

Anyway, it’s no wonder that great legs are so common there. No homo, but even a lot of the guys had great legs too. Guess that’s why so many of them can get away with those skinny jeans. I met one chubby, Seth Rogen sized guy there, the only fat guy I met on the whole trip. Life sucked for him, he said. I told him to come to America where he’d be “average.”

True Stereotypes:

I did my research for this trip backwards. Rather than study the cultures beforehand, I did no research on cultural etiquette. I didn’t want to be biased and arrive with prejudgments. I wanted all my conclusions to be made from firsthand experience or from things I learned directly from natives. After I came back, though, I did a lot of cultural research to see if the conclusions I made matched what the accepted stereotypes were.

Even though I was only in two cities, Stockholm and Amsterdam, I met tourists and transplanted Europeans from a lot of different countries, to the point I feel comfortable in making generalizations about more than just two European countries. Based on what I experienced myself, I think this series of links below from the site Daily Candor are the most accurate descriptions I’ve seen of European stereotypes that are true:

• What Americans Think About Europeans – Great piece, first goes into what insular white Americans thnk about Europe, then discusses what American subgroups like blacks, latinos, Asians, Indians, gays and hipsters think of Europe. Uncannily accurate.
• What Europeans Think About Each Other
• 10 things you probably didn?t know about the Dutch and the Netherlands

Muslims

Based on my readings before I arrived in Europe, I expected the political correctness in day-to-day life there to be utterly oppressive and stifling. So I was quite surprised to see how open people were about Muslim-bashing there.

It seems that in public discourse, in political speeches and initiatives and in the mass media, political correctness and avoidance of offending Muslims is the norm. The political correctness of our media has nothing on what goes on there. It’s so bad that you can basically tell when a crime story there is about a Muslim because they’ll conveniently omit any hint of name, race or religion.

So it caught me quite off-guard when I found the people on the street to be incredibly blunt about their frustration or outright dislike of Muslims. Once people felt you out and could tell you wouln’t be offended, they’d cut loose in one-on-one interactions, especially when liquor was involved. People there seem sick of the political correctness, of the refusal of Muslims to assimilate, and the supposedly disrespectful way Africans and Muslims approached the white European women.

Apparently Muslims hear so much about the hedonism of the West that they expect European women to be total whores that require minimum effort to bed, and often approach them in such a way. They then get disappointed when the reality turns out to not be true, or a total media-fueld exaggeration. I heard about the frustration Muslim immgrants experience over this disconnect is even worse in Eastern Europe. I heard many Europeans in these supposedly open and egalitarian cities making approving remarks when a bouncer would refuse a “ghetto” African entry, saying things like “Thank goodness.” One girl even told me “We’re not racist, they just don’t know how to act civil or treat women with decency. You’re black, but you’re classy, handsome and well-mannered. If they could be the same as you, they wouldn’t have the problems they do.” I didn’t know if I should be offended or not. It’s like when I was growing up and white kids would tell me I was one of the “good blacks” like it was supposed to be a compliment (hated that).

That being said, I began to understand their dilemma. First off, multiculturalims is quite new for them. It’s that “family” vs. “neighbor” dynamic I described earlier in the post. We in American have always had a low-context “neighbor” dynamic. Getting new “neighbors” in the form of immigrants is not as big a deal for us. For them, they are going from a longtime high-context “family” dynamic to an open door unlimited “neighbors” dynamic overnight. And to make it worse, the “neighbors” don’t want to learn any of the family’s rules or traditions or customs yet still want to take advantage of everything the family has to offer.

You can definitely feel the tension betwen Muslims (both the Middle Eastern and black African variety) and Europeans all over. I even found myself starting to experiencing some of the same discomfort. I started understanding why even in simple encounters they can be off-putting. A lot of it stems from different social customs and body language rules. For example eye contact is much more intense and off-putting from the Middle Eastern muslims I met, and the acceptable personal space was very different. A guy would have no problem standing inches from my face with an intense, eye-to-eye stare while asking me for directions or where the bathroom was. I’d unconsciously take a step back to reintroduce distance and they’d just keep closing the gap automatically, oblivious to the fact that they were too close. It wasn’t done deliberately to make me uncomfortable, they guy was just socially clueless until I put my hand up to stop him from closing the distance again.

If it made me uncomfortable and I’m a big guy who can take care of himself, I can only imagine how it made women feel. Women have to constantly keep in mind that they are physically weaker than men and can be in danger at any time, so they are extra sensitive to sensations of creepiness and personal space.

I predict a strong, grassroots opposition movement of conservatism from Scandinavia and the rest of Western Europe that will blindside the sitting politicians and the mainstream obnoxiously liberal media totally off-guard in the next few years. I heard similar things have happened in Finland recently as conservatives won major election victories there last Sunday that no one saw coming.

Male Fashion

It’s harder to be a high-fashion guy in Europe. In America, the average man is so afraid of being bold and sexual in any way that he is constantly thinking in terms of what he is unwilling to wear rather than what he is willing to try. American men dress thinking how not to offend, how not to stand out and how not to be mistaken as a fag due to tight fit or bold colors. Grey, blue, khaki, repeat. Dullsville. Thus, over here, a guy like me who actually wears clothes that fit, takes a little risk with color selection and is willing to wear pointy shoes or shop at someplace other than the Gap is considered a top-notch dresser. I get complimented here as having a “European” style of dressing.

Over there every person has a European style of dressing. It’s Europe! I was told that I had to dress nice to get into the exclusive clubs there without being on the guestlist. I put on my best outfits, the ones that get me to skip lines and get into top clubs here in NY, and door people were utterly unimpressed. An outfit that an American guy would find risky was just tame and boring there. You have to dress at another level to have above-average style there.

I’m not sure if I want to ever be that metrosexual though, especially at the Stockholm level of male fashion. I’m 34 years old, fuck that. I accept defeat in that department.

Recommended Reading:

I described the Rearden recently. Here’s an example where I tested it out in Europe (I’m reciting to the best of my memory, but I think this captures the gist of the conversation pretty well).

I’m sitting at an outdoor bar called L’Toosje in Amsterdam right outside of the red light district, drinking a beer at a sidewalk chair. I was using the messenger function on my Blackberry to talk to a friend back in the US. Since I had limited internet access and my cell phone cost $1 a minute to use, I found the free Messenger service to be the best option for keeping in touch with people back home and letting them know I was doing okay. I felt letting people know i was okay was especially important given the amount of time I was all alone abroad.

A guy walked over to me. “How are you doing?” he said with a mischievous grin.

ME: I’m okay. How are you?

DUTCH GUY: I see that you are…American, yes?

ME: (Oh brother, here it comes) Yes, I am.

DUTCH GUY: I find you Americans so…interesting. Do you mind if I sit?

ME: Go ahead.

He sits.

DUTCH GUY: I find it fascinating how Americans are never able to just relax and enjoy what is around them. I was an exchange student in American for a while in high school. I ran track. The whole team was black guys. I was the only white person on the team. I learned a lot about American people. It was the first time I really understood what being white was.

ME: How so?

DUTCH GUY: I just judge people as individuals. But I did not understand race and how things work until I got there. For example, my team told me to go up to this other black guy on the field and say “What’s up nigger?” I had no idea that was a bad thing to say. And they stood in the back and laughed as I did what they said and got into trouble with the guy. He almost killed me and I had no idea why! Then they came our and saved me.

ME: Were you mad?

DUTCH GUY: (Grinning) No, but I learned about how I’d never fully be one of them. They were my brothers, my team, at the end of my time there I considered them my family. I never considered myself a racist at all, but I realized there that because of the history of America, when I walked around there I was automatically assumed to be racist by the black people there. Do you think that’s fair?

ME: What does it matter what I think? It’s your problem. All that matters is how you think.

DUTCH GUY: (Still smirking) I think you Americans are naturally divided, neurotic…you disconnect from things. You isolate yourselves, even in a crowd. That’s how I knew you were American. And the worst thing, I can’t hold it against you because I know you can’t help it. (What he did here was a very subtle trick. He is subtly “forgiving” me for a trait that I never even apologized for. He’s also giving me permission to be myself, when I never even asked for him permission. The general vibe is that he’s toying with me slyly and placing himself above me with subtle power plays in conversation. His sentences place him in a position of judgment. He’s in the driver’s seat, trying to steer the conversation in a way that’s subtly condescending. But he hasn’t said anything blatantly insulting yet, so i can’t call him on it too harshly. Time for the Rearden)

ME: What are you getting at?

DUTCH GUY: I’m not trying to get at anything.

ME: You’ve come to sit with me, tell me your life story, and a bunch of negative things about Americans and then say these negative things are the reason you knew I was American. I’m impatient. Just get to the point of where you’re trying to go with this. I tend to be a very direct guy.

DUTCH GUY: (Speechless, pauses for a bit) I just feel that Americans isolate themselves and live in their own world like no one else exists. A very, how do you say, self-focused…

ME: Is that a nice way of saying narcissistic?

DUTCH GUY: No, I wasn’t saying that, I was…um…

ME: No, you weren’t saying it. You were implying it. I’m the one explicitly saying it.

DUTCH GUY: I’m sorry…I’m not trying to offend, I…uh…

ME: No, you weren’t trying to offend, you were trying to insult me without offending. That’s even worse because it’s almost dishonest.   Anyway, what are you sorry about, that you tried to insult me or that I called you on it?

DUTCH GUY: I feel like…like you misunderstand me.

ME: (laughing) I think I understand you perfectly. You saw me on a Blackberry, so you knew right away I had to be an American. [Blackberry use is a red flag that you are an American, or maybe a Brit or Canadian, when overseas. But most assume American. I only saw another Blackberry once in my whole time abroad] So you decided that me, being the American stereotype that I am, disconnected from the world, needed to be lectured by you, right? For my own enlightenment?  And I wouldn’t be sharp enough to catch on to the condescension?

DUTCH GUY: (Realizing this conversation is not going at all like he expected it to be, he doesn’t seem to be enjoying himself anymore. HIs smirk has long faded.) Yes, well, I saw you on the Blackberry just messaging and messaging and messaging and you know…I felt sorry for you, that you are so unable to just turn it off and enjoy where you are?

ME: Who exactly are you to feel sorry for me?

DUTCH GUY: No, I don’t mean to get you mad.

ME: I’m not mad. (calm smile.) But seriously, who are you to feel sorry for me? Aren’t you Europeans always going on about Americans and how we don’t respect or understand other people’s cultures and traditions?

DUTCH GUY: ….

ME: Well I’m from New York City. Talking on Blackberries all day is my culture. Why isn’t that worth respecting? Right?

DUTCH GUY: Well, you have to understand, I just wanted to talk about things, my time in America. My best friend, he was a black guy named Darrell, and when I was there we were so close. And sometimes I think back, and I wish I could find him and get back in touch with him. On the surface, we were so different, different backgrounds, different cultures, different races, yet we ended up being great friends, almost brothers by the time I left. And I always wish I could find him again.

ME: So what is this? You have a lot of unresolved issues with America in general and black Americans in particular and now that you see me, a Black American , and this is your chance to work out all your nostalgia and issues with Americans and black Americans all at once right? I’m like a stand-in for America, for the black guys you remember in the States, for whatever? I don’t care about your issues.

DUTCH GUY: You….you’re really honest.

After that, all the smirking and passive-aggressiveness left. He magically turned into a normal person and we had a normal conversation.  He invited me to a fashion show he was throwing and gave me invite.  But I knew I would never go to the show because, let’s face it, he was a dick.  This exchange went on longer than I wanted as it is, and if he continued on the same track even one more time I’d just have told him to leave me alone, but thankfully he gave up.

There were several other exchanges in Europe where I had to use the Rearden, but that was the longest conversation, and my favorite. Overall though most of the Europeans I met were wonderful, and showed me a great time. But when Europeans do condescension, they do it on a whole other level of assholery.

Also see: Clarification on the Rearden

I’ve been talking about dealing with passive-aggressive people, or as I’ll call them from this point forward, Passive Aggressors, and the technique I’ve been working on to deal with them called The Rearden, based on the character Hank Rearden from the Ayn Rand novel Atlas Shrugged.

In this installment I described the dilemma in detail.  I also described how Europe was filled with intellectual men who were very skilled at this type of subtly acidic interaction.

In this next installment, I described the excerpt from Atlas Shrugged, a scene of Hank Rearden’s trial, that inspired me to come up with The Rearden, my strategy for dealing with Passive-Aggressors. If you haven’t done so already, I suggest you click the link and read the excerpt of the Trial of Hank Rearden for yourself.

This is how The Rearden works.

Passive Aggressors have a weakness that you can exploit. They desperately want to engage in confrontation for whatever reason. Maybe they feel powerless in general and have typically felt this way since adolescence and winning conflicts are a major ego boost for them. Maybe they are trapped in middle management hell. Maybe they have unresolved issues about something, and you remind them of those unresolved issues. In some form you are the embodiment of whatever it is they have issues with, be it because of your race, your culture, your personality, your archetype (maybe you remind them of the big jocks that pushed them around in high school, the cool guy that got all the girls they couldn’t, the hot chick that never gave them a time of day growing up, the optimist they always envied, the smart guy who always did better in school). For some reason, they have a need for conflict and victory in general, and something about you in particular especially triggers that need for victory.

But on the flipside, they are deathly afraid of conflict, specifically the risk of losing because losing a conflict would just reinforce their unresolved issues and sense of powerlessness. They will only do open conflict if they feel 100% sure they can win it. Open conflict, where both sides know they are in a conflict and go head to head openly, is high risk. It leads to a definitive winner and a definitive loser. It is the sign of a mature man to not only be willing to risk losing, but also, if he does indeed lose, to lose gracefully (this is a big reason why sports are considered to build character, and also why so many beta males resent athletes). Since they are immature men, they do not know how to lose gracefully without having their whole ego and self-worth shattered by the loss.

Also, an open conflict, whether you win or lose, often gives you closure. That’s why you often see two guys get into a fight or an argument or a competition, have it out, and regardless of who wins or loses they can squash the beef and put it behind them afterwards and move on. And even become friends. Meanwhile women and especially teenage girls, because fighting or having an all-out throwdown with a woman is unladylike, spend a lot of time with doing passive-aggressive and catty conflict with each other below the surface, using cutting remarks, double entendres, reading between the lines, subtle social cues, cheap shots, etc. (think of the popular girl and Queen Bee conflicts you see in high schools). Because these conflicts are never open, they never get a definite winner or loser, just a vague sense of getting over on someone or a vague sense of having lost. This lack of open conflict and closure is why women often hold grudges so much longer than men. Since male Passive Aggressors approach conflict like teenage women, they too never have a definite winner or loser, never experience conflict closure, and thus are never satisfied, which is why ignoring them doesn’t work as far as making them stop. The beta bully never stops because he never really feels the satisfaction and closure that can only be attained from earning a solid win. They keep laying on the sarcastic and snarky cheap shots in hopes of scratching that itch to dominate and win, but the irony is that the weak, ambiguous nature of the “wins” one receives from such beta male behavior are too weak to ever successfully scratch that itch, so it never ends no matter how you try to ignore it and hope it will pass.

As an analogy, think of it like the guy who tries to get girls by being a “nice guy” rather than just putting his balls on the line and asking a girl out. He does this because he’s afraid of rejection, so using a “nice guy” approach gives him the psychological satisfaction of saying he’s actually in the game, but the inconclusive nature and mixed signals that come from never clearly scoring with the women nor clearly getting rejected by the woman keeps him in a “friend zone” that never offers any resolution. This lack of resolution keeps him sticking to his ineffective strategy and tolerating this friend zone placement for an uncomfortably long time, whereas if he just put his balls on the line he’d risk more anguish in the short run but at least he would get immediate closure by scoring or getting rejected right away.

Likewise, Passive Aggressors fear open conflict for the same reason Nice Guys fear approaching a woman honestly about their sexual interest: their fear of losing (and thereby losing face) outweighs their nagging desire to win. This is the weakness the Rearden exploits.

This is the same mentality that can be seen in the looters in Atlas Shrugged. They want to be powerful and rich and have the status and profits of a Hank Rearden, but they would never take the risks of losing by openly competing in the harsh, brutal free market that Rearden embraces because the fear of trying and losing is stronger in them than the desire to win. The sight of Rearden’s success infuriates them because he gets the gratification of being a winner, which they never experience, and he gets it through prevailing in open competition, which just reminds them of how much they’re afraid to (or lack the skill to) openly compete themselves. They want all the glory with none of the risk of losing, and since that’s not possible they resent everyone who does succeed by risking loss. Using the Nice Guy as an example again, you often see him bashing the “player” who is successful with women, calling him an asshole or acting like he is using some trickery or exploiting the poor women he sleeps with, because to admit that the player won fair and square is to admit that they, the Nice Guys, lost fair and square either through lack of courage or skill, which just hurts their self-image even more.

So what’s the solution of these ambitious cowards? They disdain that which they are afraid to do, and use subtle smokescreens to demonize and humiliate those who are willing and capable of doing it. The looters going against Ayn Rand in Atlas Shrugged make being an unrepentant, free-market capitalist into something to be ashamed of, into something evil, , much like the Nice Guy portrays the act of being a ladies’ man, someone who is open and unrepentant about what he wants from women and is proud of achieving it, an evil exploiter of innocent women. Similarly, the intellectual Passive Aggressor creates an environment where being in open conflict or punching a guy in the face for being a dick is shameful, evil and barbaric while sarcasm and snarkiness are the most admirable, mature way to engage in conflict. This intellectual smokescreen that disguises the true nature of the conflict is what I call The Reframing Area.

So here’s how the Rearden works:

First, do not get mad or show any negative emotion as long as you are in the Reframing Area of the conflict. This is important. If you react negatively and strongly, the person will backtrack or smirk and keep picking the scab. They may deny they were being dickish, accuse you of being too sensitive, keep “innocently” repeating the annoying behavior or even escalating it, and/or keep doing whatever it takes to keep you on the defensive while pretending to be taking the high road. They may feel a victory in getting you upset or losing your cool. Throughout the whole interaction, maintain the bemused demeanor of a much older brother dealing with an annoying little sister or a wise teacher dealing with a bratty first grader. Don’t get outright condescending, but give off the air that this whole thing is beneath you but just this once you’ll humor the situation and play along to teach the child a lesson for its own good. Once you force the Passive Aggressor into open aggression, you no longer have to follow this rule and can get as openly angry or hostile as you feel is necessary. This air is only necessary for so long as the conflict is in the conflict is not clear yet and the Passive Aggressor still has plausible deniability regarding his intentions to insult you.

Second, exercise the Three Strikes rule. The three strikes rule simply means don’t let more than three comments go by without checking the offender.  You can check the offender as soon as one strike if you want, but you definitely don’t want to let it go as far as four strikes.

Third, don’t let the true nature of the conflict be disguised. Force them out of the Reframing Area. Make them be frank about what they mean. As long as you let the nature of the conflict be defined by them, they will have the upper hand. Every chance you get, you must force them to be frank about what they are trying to say. Remember, they dread open conflict. If they didn’t, their default mode of dealing with conflict wouldn’t be passive aggression to begin with. Your goal is to force them to explicitly say in a frank manner whatever it was they were trying to say passive aggressively, to make them openly commit to the insult. This puts them in a tenuous position.

If they openly commit to the insult and their intent to insult gets put out in the open, you now have grounds to retaliate and escalate without fear of looking like you are overreacting. If they unambiguously commit to the insult now you can get mad or show negative emotion.  Their main weapon is the vagueness of the insults and the conflict, and if you take that cover away from them and lay they conflict bare, they now feel unprotected and exposed. They can now lose the conflict, and in turn, lose face.

They may be caught off-guard, backtrack, and try to catch you off-guard later by returning to the behavior again later in the conversation. One tactic they may use is to be extra-charming and friendly in order to disarm you first so that they can catch you off-guard with the verbal cheap shot later. This works both to get your defenses down and also to make you doubt your instincts by giving you mixed signals. After all, if the Passive Aggressor was just being so nice and charming to you, you may think that maybe you are just imagining the perceived insult. Do not be fooled. If the Passive Aggressor tries to go back to the sarcastic and snarky stealth insults after a period of good behavior, go right back to exposing the true nature of his statement no matter how nice he was to you previously.

Fourth, don’t let the Passive Aggressor off the hook. Passive Aggressors need your help in maintaining the illusion of civility surrounding their behavior. This can be shown in the Trial of Hank Rearden from Atlas Shrugged. Remember the scene I described in my last installment, and pay special attention to the parts I put in bold:

“It is completely irregular,” said the second judge. “The law requires you submit to a plea in your own defence. Your only alternative is to state for the record that you throw yourself upon the mercy of the court.”

“I do not.”

“But you have to.”

“Do you mean that what you expect from me is some sort of voluntary action?”

“Yes.”

“I volunteer nothing.”

“But the law demands that the defendant’s side be represented on the record.”

“Do you mean that you need my help to make this procedure legal?”

“Well, no – yes – that is, to complete the form.”

“I will not help you.”

The third and youngest judge, who had acted as prosecutor snapped impatiently, “This is ridiculous and unfair! Do you want to let it look as if a man of your prominence had been railroaded without a -” He cut himself off short. Somebody at the back of the courtroom emitted a long whistle.

“I want,” said Rearden gravely, “to let the nature of this procedure appear exactly for what it is. If you need my help to disguise it – I will not help you.”

“But we are giving you a chance to defend yourself – and it is you who are rejecting it.”

“I will not help you to pretend that I have a chance. I will not help you to preserve an appearance of righteousness where rights are not recognised. I will not help you to preserve an appearance of rationality by entering a debate in which a gun is the final argument. I will not help you to pretend that you are administering justice.”

Like Rearden, don’t help them reframe sarcastic snarkiness as a legitimate or harmlessly benign way of communication. Don’t validate it as such by responding back with more sarcastic snarkiness. Let the nature of the statements appear exactly for what they are. Do not help them pretend that it’s just harmless conversation. Do not help them preserve an appearance of innocent jesting. Do not help them pretend that no malice is meant or no chronic toxicity exists in the Passive Aggressor when it is apparent to anyone who is intellectually honest that that is not the case.

Another way Passive Aggressors get themselves off the hook is by surrounding themselves with a social circle of enablers, people who either validate their behavior by escalating it with their own passive aggression or by never calling them out on their bullshit. Be prepared for these people in a group. The Passive Aggressor is counting on and expecting the need of other people to be polite or the tendency of other people to believe the best in others or doubt their instincts to get them off the hook. They are expecting you to think you may be overreacting. They are counting on other people to change the topic to safer areas out of discomfort when things get awkward. Basically, they expect to be “bailed out” and usually surround themselves with people who they can count on to bail them out of hairy situations, usually by engaging in the same behavior, excusing their behavior as harmless or by changing the subject for them in sticky spots.

For example if the Passive Aggressor makes a backhanded compliment toward you with a smirk like “That’s pretty good, I suppose, all things considering…” and you catch them off-guard by saying politely and without any apprehension “I’m sorry, what exactly do you mean by all things considering? I don’t quite understand. I’ve always sucked at reading between the lines.” The Passive Aggressor may respond with something like “Well, you know…I’m just saying, all things considering.” And you respond politely, “No, honestly, I don’t know. Come on, just spit it out. Are you trying to say x, y and z?”

At this point, one of the enablers may jump in and try to defuse with something irrelevant like “Isn’t this guacamole great? I love it!” Turn and respond and say something like “Yeah, it sure is.”  After addressing the attempted bailout, simply turn back to the Passive Aggressor and pick up right where you left off without a hint of malice: “So as I was saying, were you trying to say x, y and z? I just want to be clear.”

Fifth, force the Passive Aggressor to either back down or escalate the conflict to open, naked aggression. The point of not letting the Passive-Aggressor off the hook in the previous step is to force him into one of these two scenarios. You must force him into one of these two choices or it’s all for naught. The point of forcing him into one of these choices is that no matter which one he chooses, he loses. If he backs down and pretends he didn’t mean anything bad by it when at this point to everyone watching it becomes apparent that he actually did, he reveals himself as a petty coward, someone who can dish it out when he thinks its a safe target but crumbles when he gets called on his bullshit. He ends up realizing his worst fear, he loses face. You must realize that usually whenever your instincts are telling you disrespect is occurring, you are not alone and other people vaguely sense it too. Once you hit the Passive Aggressor with the Rearden, any lingering doubts they had will disappear and they will realize you are on the right side of the conflict. This is why the crowd in the Trial of Hank Rearden scene ended up laughing at the judges by the end of the scene, even if they weren’t necessarily on the side of Hank Rearden initially.

And if they aren’t on your side when the dust clears, then fuck ‘em, you don’t need enablers like that as friends. When you get the Passive Aggressor to back down, if he does so by trying to backtrack with a long-winded, disingenuous explanation of what he supposedly really meant, let him talk and talk. Don’t cut him off. Let him embarrass and bury himself with the obvious backing down. The longer he talks and tries to explain it away, the more obvious, cowardly and dishonest and petty he makes himself look. At this point if he’s smart he’ll probably be too self-conscious to try it again and the rest of the conversation should go smoothly. After that, do your best never to hang out socially with that toxic person again.

If you get the Passive Aggressor to go to the other route and escalate the conflict (which is rare because if they were comfortable with this option they would not be Passive Aggressors to begin with) then you are perfectly justified in insulting them back, laying a verbal smackdown on them, punching them in the face, or whatever you want without looking like you are overreacting to harmless behavior. At this point, you can resort to whatever your preferred method of dealing with open conflict is.

If you do get them to openly cop to trying to insult you, you now have the added option of shaming them to the group for their bitchiness and their sneaky attempts to conceal it. You can laugh and say “Oh, so that’s what you meant? I wasn’t sure, I don’t speak passive-aggressive. I’m old school, I was raised to think type of shit was only okay for my sisters.” with a wink and a smile. You can even go for the shame nuclear option with this line: Shake your head and smile slightly like you are dealing with an annoying little sister or a petulant child and slowly state “If you’re going to be a dog, be a rottweiller. If you’re going to be a bitch, wear a skirt.” This may be overkill, but if you really want to devastate, add the following two sentences to the nuclear option: “But no matter what, don’t be a weasel. No one respects a weasel.” But that’s just cruel.

Keep in mind, if this does not shut the Passive Aggressor down and he’s still trying to save face by yapping back and forth after you expose and embarrass them with the Rearden, you have to either beat their ass or laugh at them and leave. Sticking around to keep trading barbs after you succeed with the Rearden just starts looking bitchy and catty and is an easy way to turn your victory into a loss and place yourself on the Passive Aggressors level. Either say you are not going to sit around and bicker like a woman, and invite him to fight. If the Passive Aggressor tries to use this as proof that you are barbaric or put you down for choosing this option, just say “Spoken like a true coward. I expected no less.” And walk away. If you do end up fighting, make sure you fucking win. If there’s any doubt, don’t go that route. If you choose the route of leaving, simply get up and say “I don’t know when you threw in the towel and gave up on living life as a man, but I do know bitchassness is contagious. I’m out.”

Now I’m going to illustrate how I used the Rearden in Europe during my vacation with a few examples.

Recommended Reading:

Yesterday I discussed the current phenomenon of beta male confrontation, where we live in a society of passive-aggressive men whose default mode for dealing with conflict, no, the world in general, is through a constant stream of snark and sarcasm. And like I mentioned yesterday, the ways most people choose to deal with it are all less than satisfactory.

The guy I described yesterday who was full of backhanded compliments and subliminal insults I just chose to stop hanging out with because it was so annoying and toxic, but I realized I needed to find a way to deal with that type of behavior because in big cities like NY you’re always going to encounter it again. What makes it so tricky is that it’s barely aggressive enough to leave a sting, but passive enough that if you react to it you look like you’re blowing things out of proportion and he can always plausibly deny guilt. I find no shortage of advice on how to deal with tough guys, but nowadays they’re becoming a dying breed, especially in the big, civilized yuppified city so the advice doesn’t come in handy as often as you’d think.

There’s a theory that if you pose a problem to your subconscious mind and sincerely want to solve it, you’re subconscious mind will work on it in the background until it comes up with a solution. It’s a theory I’ve subscribed to since first hearing it (can’t remember where though). But I think that was the mechanism at play when I was rereading one of my favorite books Atlas Shrugged and everything clicked. It was during one of the most pivotal scenes of the book, The Trial of Hank Rearden. Hank Rearden is a successful businessman who has become a victim of class warfare and is subjected to a sham kangaroo court trial by the government, which is determined to punish him for defying their excessive restrictions and socialist efforts to redistribute his wealth (parts in bold emphasized by me are the parts most relevant to the Rearden technique):

JUDGE: “Are we to understand,” asked the judge, “that you hold your own interests above the interests of the public?”

REARDEN: “I hold that such a question can never arise except in a society of cannibals.”

“What … do you mean?”

“I hold that there is no clash of interests among men who do not demand the unearned and do not practice human sacrifices.”

“Are we to understand that if the public deems it necessary to curtail your profits, you do not recognise its right to do so?”

“Why, yes, I do. The public may curtail my profits any time it wishes – by refusing to buy my product.”

“We are speaking of … other methods.”

“Any other method of curtailing profits is the method of looters – and I recognise it as such.”

“Mr. Rearden, this is hardly the way to defend yourself.”

“I said that I would not defend myself.”

“But this is unheard of! Do you realise the gravity of the charge against you?”

“I do not care to consider it.”

“Do you realise the possible consequences of your stand?”

“Fully.”

“It is the opinion of this court that the facts presented by the prosecution seem to warrant no leniency. The penalty which this court has the power to impose on you is extremely severe.”

“Go ahead.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Impose it.”

The three judges looked at one another. Then their spokesman turned back to Rearden. “This is unprecedented,” he said.

“It is completely irregular,” said the second judge. “The law requires you submit to a plea in your own defence. Your only alternative is to state for the record that you throw yourself upon the mercy of the court.”

“I do not.”

“But you have to.”

“Do you mean that what you expect from me is some sort of voluntary action?”

“Yes.”

“I volunteer nothing.”

“But the law demands that the defendant’s side be represented on the record.”

“Do you mean that you need my help to make this procedure legal?”

“Well, no … yes … that is, to complete the form.”

“I will not help you.”

The third and youngest judge, who had acted as prosecutor snapped impatiently, “This is ridiculous and unfair! Do you want to let it look as if a man of your prominence had been railroaded without a –” He cut himself off short. Somebody at the back of the courtroom emitted a long whistle.

“I want,” said Rearden gravely, “to let the nature of this procedure appear exactly for what it is. If you need my help to disguise it – I will not help you.”

“But we are giving you a chance to defend yourself – and it is you who are rejecting it.”

“I will not help you to pretend that I have a chance. I will not help you to preserve an appearance of righteousness where rights are not recognised. I will not help you to preserve an appearance of rationality by entering a debate in which a gun is the final argument. I will not help you to pretend that you are administering justice.”

“But the law compels you to volunteer a defence!”

There was laughter at the back of the courtroom.

“That is the flaw in your theory, gentlemen,” said Rearden gravely, “and I will not help you out of it. If you choose to deal with men by means of compulsion, do so. But you will discover that you need the voluntary co-operation of your victims, in many more ways than you can see at present. And your victims should discover that it is their own volition – which you cannot force – that makes you possible. I choose to be consistent and I will obey you in the manner you demand. Whatever you wish me to do, I will do it at the point of a gun. If you sentence me to jail, you will have to send armed men to carry me there – I will not volunteer to move. If you fine me, you will have to seize my property to collect the fine – I will not volunteer to pay it. If you believe that you have the right to force me – use your guns openly. I will not help you to disguise the nature of your action.”

Rather than just spell it out for people, I’d rather let it marinate in your heads for a bit before describing it in action.

Next: The Rearden in Action

Recommended Reading:

I was supposed to make this the final part of my European trip posts, but it was taking too long to write. Not only would it be inhumanly long and earn me my usual complaints about writing lengthy posts, it was creating a long gap in my posting. So I’m breaking up what was supposed to be my final post on this topic into 3 parts.

The BMOG (Beta Male Other Guy)

I’ve always had a problem with two social scenarios. Friends acting dickish to me and confrontation of a passive-aggressive, snarky, sarcastic variety. When a stranger acts overtly dickish to me, calling them on it is not a problem, but when it’s a friend it always used to catch me off-guard or make me doubt what was happening because I would often refuse to believe what my senses were telling me. This was especially true the closer I was to the person. As for the passive-aggressive confrontation, this used to be a problem for me because people who are really skilled at it know how to be just aggressive enough to let a sting be felt by their words, but passive enough that they could deny malicious intent if you call them on it and make you look like you’re the one overreacting. And if they’re really good at being passive-aggressive or you doubt your instincts in the slightest way, they can honestly make you wonder if you are imagining insults and being too sensitive. Or maybe you are overreacting.

[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="191" caption="Stephen Colbert: Basic Snarky Sarcasm = "Brilliant Political Commentary""][/caption]

I always hear other men complain about having to watch out for alpha males in social situations, but I think in our feminized society this is an outdated concern. You have more to worry about from a beta male sneakily chipping away at you in a social situation with subtle, cutting remarks calculated to make you look bad while looking somewhat innocent in nature. These people have spent a lifetime honing these bitch skills, and to compete with them on it when you are not used to being in that mindset is suicide, similar to being a weekend warrior who picks up a basketball once a month at the playground going up against an NBA player. People like this, the Mo Roccas and Stephen Colberts of the world, usually spend just about every waking moment looking for an opportunity to be sarcastic or snarky, and have also gotten the balance between passive and aggressive just right to the point they can always deny having done anything wrong.

There was a guy I knew that was filled with these subliminal cheap shots, backhanded compliments and stealth insults, and it drove me crazy for several reasons. First, that type of behavior is catty and not unlike a teenage girl. It’s true beta male behavior. Second, if you return in kind and start responding with your own sarcastic comments, backhanded compliments and stealth insults, you just end up with two people looking like bitches rather than one. Both of you lose, and neither of you impress anyone, or at least anyone worth impressing. It’s a race to the bottom. Third, if you let it slide, you get a gnawing feeling of being punked and having let a person get over on you. Fourth, if you call them on the carpet, you look like an overreacting brute in a society that penalizes a man for doing real man shit.

The more intellectual a person deems himself to be, and the more arrogant he is about his own perceived intellect (doesn’t matter if the person is actually smart, just that he believes himself to be exceptionally so), the more likely he is to engage in this beta behavior. In Europe, particular Amsterdam, I found there were a lot more intellectual people there. And I mean sincerely intellectual, not the Stuff White People Like type of intellectual you find in big, American cities where people think they are brilliant freethinkers just for listening to NPR, pretending to like soccer, eating organic produce from Whole Foods and working Bush-bashing into every conversation they can. The intellectuals I found in Europe really had some interesting things to say about a wide variety of topics and showed some real intellectual curiosity.

The probing conversations I had with some of these types were a big plus of my trip. We discussed philosophy, world history, race, gender roles, happiness, great thinkers, Americas soft culture, and a host of other topics. Unfortunately, there was also a negative: having to deal with a small group of these intellectuals who were very arrogant about their European superiority and would look to engage in the beta confrontation I described above, especially once they discovered I was American.

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="181" caption="Mo Rocca - Ultimate Embodiment of Snarky Beta Male"][/caption]

I found with the European variety of beta jerk, there are two stereotypes they would have about Americans. They either would think you were a stupid, testosterone fueled neanderthal that was too crude and unrefined to grasp the subtle nuances of irony and sarcasm and they could insult you to your face on all the reasons why America was evil and stupid and you wouldn’t get it. Or you were the type of intellectual American that was savvy and nuanced enough to grasp irony and sarcasm, in which case they expected you to be a Europhile and a self-hating American, a latte liberal from a big city that would agree with all the America-bashing he had to share, lament at your misfortune at being born in such a stupid, evil country and would bend over backwards to prove how much more enlightened you were than the average American neanderthal.

Little did these types know that although I was an American who was savvy and nuanced enough to grasp irony and sarcasm, thereby knowing when they were trying to put me down, I still refused to beg forgiveness for being American or apologize for my country in any way. I was as pro-American as the stereotypical neanderthal cowboy they loved to mock. This lead to some interesting confrontations.

But best of all, it gave me a chance to test out the new response I had been working on for dealing with the sneaky sarcasm and snarkiness of beta male confrontation: The Rearden.

Next: The Rearden