His piece on neediness in dating does not look good. I mean, pretty much everything in it is wrong or incoherent. He starts off:
There have been a number of discussions on the forums in recent weeks on the subject of neediness. In my book, I formulate a theory that defines non-neediness as the source of all attractive behavior in men. Unfortunately, I think some readers (judging by the threads on the board) are making one of two mistakes: 1) misunderstanding what non-neediness is and how to attain it and 2) trying to use it as yet another measuring stick for success (i.e., treating it as yet another “magic pill” for their problems — I will get into the ironies of this in a minute).
Let’s keep these criteria in mind when we’re reading the rest of this article – for this article to have not been worthless Manson needs to: clearly outline what non-neediness is and how to attain it, and explain why it shouldn’t be used as a measuring stick for success. However the problems already start here – the first mistake is in fact two separate mistakes (misunderstanding what non-neediness is and misunderstanding how to attain non-neediness are two separate mistakes), and he incorrectly says that the using of non-neediness as a measuring stick for success either entails or is conceptually identical to the treating of non-neediness as a quick fix for problems – but neither of these are true, because it is logically possible for the criteria used to assess the results the method produces and the method itself to be both conceptually different and not logically linked in the way described (the criteria for success might be number of girls slept with, and the method might be ‘show vulnerability’ – these aren’t conceptually identical and of course doing one does not entail the other – even if the criteria for success were ‘amount of vulnerability shown’).
So Manson continues:
In Models, I define neediness within romantic and social relationships as prioritizing another person’s perception of you over your perception of yourself, and that this prioritization leads to all unattractive behavior in men, whether directly or indirectly. So, when talking to an attractive woman, a needy man will expend his effort trying to piece together what her perception of him is and cater his behavior to what he thinks she wants, whereas a non-needy man will focus on what his perception of her is.
Jesus Christ. I mean, sorry, but how can Mark actually bring himself to publish this shit? The glaring contradiction is painful. In the first sentence, Mark says that neediness is prioritising another person’s perception of you over your perception of yourself, and presumably non-neediness is the opposite, prioritising your perception of yourself over another person’s perception of you. In the second sentence, Mark says that a non-needy man will prioritise his perception of another person over another person’s perception of him. So he is defining non-neediness differently here; he can’t even stay consistent over the course of two sentences!
It doesn’t stop there:
There are two ways in which men can become needy: by undervaluing themselves or by overvaluing the person with whom they’re interacting.
When people write they really must think about the argumentative support the claims they make will need. Manson is claiming that undervaluing oneself or overvaluing the other person causes a prioritisation of the other person’s perception of yourself over your own perception of yourself (let’s take the first definition, why don’t we; the second would still do). Issues abound. What is prioritisation in the sense he means it? He never explains. Could prioritising A over B mean that one is valuing A more than B? Could it mean thinking more about A than B? Both seem like plausible views to attribute to Mark here, but he never explains what kind of prioritising we’re talking about. Another problem – what kind of value are we talking about here? Intrinsic value? Extrinsic value? Final or nonfinal value?* We need to know this, but Mark is keeping quiet. How do we know he’s not equivocating between different types of value? And even if not, the strength of his argument here is dependent on which type of value he’s talking about; if we’re talking about nonfinal instrumental value, then it certainly doesn’t follow that because I perceive my instrumental value to be lower than it actually is, I prioritise another person’s perception of myself (whatever this means) over my own perception of myself. This is an glaringly obvious non-sequitur. We run into further difficulties if we define ‘perception of oneself’ as ‘view of one’s own value (however characterised)’; how, exactly, could my view of my own instrumental (for instance) value as being lower than it actually is necessarily lead to a rejection of views of my own value in favour of another’s views of my own value? This isn’t at all obvious. For someone whose stated aim with regards to this article is to clarify what non-neediness is, there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot (actually, none at all) of clarification concerning the terms Manson uses to explain his concept of neediness.
But wait… there’s more:
An example of [becoming needy by undervaluing oneself] would be a man with low self-esteem who feels a severe lack of confidence interacting with women (or anybody, really), and therefore has developed bizarre beliefs about why people would or would not like him. As such, he believes he needs to impress them with money or accomplishments, make fun of others, or pretend like he’s too cool for anyone else. As a result, these beliefs manifest themselves as needy behaviors and turn off many women.
It seems odd that Manson is calling beliefs about the reasons why people do or do not like you ‘bizarre’. Beliefs about why people like you aren’t necessarily irrational – Mark has beliefs about why people like others but he would surely not call them bizarre. But maybe it’s not the holding of a belief per se but the specific beliefs that “[you need] to impress [people] with money or accomplishments, make fun of others, or pretend like [you are] too cool for anyone else” that are bizarre (which in this sense probably just means ‘incorrect’). I disagree – accomplishments surely do impress people in the relevant fields; if I am Usain Bolt and run 100m in 9.5 seconds, then surely that would impress many people, even those with only a weak interest in running. Perhaps one could rescue Mark’s argument somewhat by distinguishing between being impressed with the person qua achiever and valuing the person qua achiever, and claiming that the latter isn’t entailed by the former. I’m not sure how separate they are though – to say that they are separate would require the possibility of being positively affected by something and as a result not coming to value that thing in any way. But the worst thing in this paragraph of Mark’s is that there is yet another non sequitur – it doesn’t follow that undervaluing oneself would lead to these behaviours, in whichever sense of the term ‘value’. I could perceive myself as having lower instrumental value as a ‘dating catch’ than I actually am, but it doesn’t follow that I think my own instrumental value as a ‘dating catch’, abstracted from things like my accomplishments or the amount of money I earn, is not high enough to convince a particular woman to have sex with me.
So now that we’ve got kind of a better understanding of neediness and how it relates to men’s behavior
Just… lol.
We all look for validation from those around us. We all care about what other people think to a certain degree. And barring sociopaths, we always will. The goal here is NOT to ELIMINATE neediness from our lives — it’s impossible to do this without completely gutting ourselves of all emotions or empathy — the goal here is to re-prioritize our perception of ourselves vis-a-vis the perceptions of the women we interact with.
At this point Mark is making life difficult for himself. Elsewhere Mark defines validation as:
Validation is the information we receive about our identities or who we are as a person. We all adopt identities and beliefs about ourselves and then we seek validation to reinforce and prove those identities and beliefs to ourselves. We all do it. And there’s nothing necessarily wrong with it.
… and ‘external validation’ (which is what he’s talking about in this neediness post) as:
External Validation – The approval and admiration of others.
On the overall definition of validation given there’s no reason to believe that validation received from external sources would be positive forms of information like ‘approval’ and ‘admiration’ – ‘information we receive about our identities’ might take negative form; that people do not approve of our identity and we are not admired for it, so Manson’s definition of external validation seems off. It certainly isn’t the fact the information is received externally which makes the information take a positive form.
So Manson’s definitions of ‘validation’ and ‘external validation’, taken together, don’t make sense. To return to the neediness article, we are then treated with another gargantuan non-sequitur; eliminating ‘neediness’ (in Manson’s view misprioritisation) from our lives requires “gutting ourselves of all emotions and empathy”? I don’t see how this follows. Perhaps we could save Manson here and grant him a few implicit premises – perhaps this is the work that the concept of ‘validation’ is doing here; neediness means seeking validation (so… nothing to do with prioritising, then?), and you can’t have emotions or empathy without validation-seeking, so getting rid of neediness means not having emotions or empathy. But this sounds totally off the wall – how does having emotions or empathy require seeking approval and admiration from others? I simply don’t see any link between the two. Anyway, Manson never bothers to delve into this link, so the premise (‘you can’t have emotions or empathy without validation-seeking’) is unsound until he can explain how there is a link here.
I can barely bring myself to go on here, but:
But here’s the irony, and something that may blow your mind: The act of analyzing one’s own neediness while talking to a woman is, in itself, a needy behavior. Stop it.
Erm… doesn’t this follow the exact standard of non-neediness which Manson prescribes, that one should prioritise one’s perception of oneself over others’ perceptions of yourself? Surely if you weren’t in this case, you wouldn’t care whether you were being ‘needy’, because that would be up to the other person to decide. So the act of analysing one’s own neediness while talking to a woman is actually non-needy behaviour by Manson’s definition.
It gets worse:
Stop trying to quantify and maximize everything.
What? What relevance does this have to anything else Manson wrote?
Practicing the proper behaviors reduces your neediness. It’s not a coincidence that I dedicated the majority of the book to it.
??? Practicing non-needy behaviours reduces mispriortisation. Didn’t he just say that proper valuation causes reduced neediness, not the practicing of behaviours (by which Manson surely means ‘being honest’, ‘escalating confidently’ etc.)? Maybe we have an instance of multiple causality, with two sufficient conditions for (non-)neediness. Unfortunately, Manson never mentioned this further cause earlier on in the article, so the implication is that he doesn’t regard it as a further cause, and this is stupid.
Non-neediness is an experience, a feeling, a perspective. It’s not something you can maximize or measure.
Surely it is measureable – otherwise how can you compare levels of neediness within the same agent? I could maximise it by (under the Mansonian definition) prioritising my own perception of myself as much as possible over the woman’s perception of me. I couldn’t quantify neediness levels, perhaps, but I could measure it relative to other situations where I felt more or less needy.
That simple change in mindset and self-perception silently seeps into all of your actions and words, affecting everything, without thought or effort.
One must necessarily have thoughts to have a mindset.
It’s no coincidence that soon after having that experience, he landed a hot girlfriend.
Here’s to anecdotal evidence.
Any action or behavior can be needy or non-needy. What determines the degree of neediness is the intention behind the behavior. I can go out and approach 20 hot women for the sheer joy of it and not be needy with any of them. Or I can sit in a nightclub at a VIP table with $500 bottles of vodka and have 20 women approach me that night and be exhibiting extremely needy behavior the entire night.
These two examples are so different in ways which don’t concern intentions that they just don’t support the claim that any action or behaviour can be (non-)needy. Furthermore, ‘any behaviour can be (non-)needy’ contradicts what Manson said earlier – he thinks there are determinate ‘non-needy behaviours’ to practice, regardless of the intention behind those behaviours (otherwise they wouldn’t necessarily be non-needy behaviours, and it would only be practicing the intention behind them that mattered).
And if that doesn’t make sense to you, then you really need to read the damn book.
It doesn’t make sense to me, and I doubt that there will be much, if anything, in the book which corrects these errors.
*See G.E. Moore’s Principia Ethica (1903) for the Intrinsic/Extrinsic distinction, and Korsgaard’s ‘Two Distinctions in Goodness’ (1983) for more on that distinction and the Final/Nonfinal distinction. Also see the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy’s entry on ‘Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic Value’ for an introduction on the ways philosophers talk about ‘value’.
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