“The Devil is easy to identify. He appears when you’re terribly tired and makes a very reasonable request which you know you shouldn’t grant.”

Fiorello La Guardia, former mayor of New York City

Life isn’t meant to be easy. Who the fuck thought it was a good idea to bring any child up thinking that they should expect a smooth ride? Once you accept life is meant to be hard, everything gets a lot easier. When you think about it, the notion of expecting anything and everything to be easy is patently absurd and utterly ridiculous. Its also incredibly damaging in some cases. Sheltering someone can be tantamount to murder by compassion, aka killing with kindness.

You can never please everyone. In fact the likelihood is that almost anything you do is likely to piss someone off. Its stupid, naive, a total waste of time and energy, not to mention childish, to go around trying to keep everyone happy. You’ll collapse before you get 30% of the way through. There are always vested interests and people who don’t want to see you succeed in even the smallest ventures, for so many different reasons. The silly thing is our shock and surprise when we finally clock it. Its easier to accept how disruptive you putting your head over the edge is going to be and doing it anyway, regardless of how many get put out of joint because of it. In short, fuck them. Fuck everyone.

It seems the very mention of my name is disruptive. I can’t go near a girl without a hundred other guys rushing straight in afterwards or having the ex turn up and go mental. People read this website, see the confidence shining out of it and are automatically unsettled. I’m different to the norm, and that makes a lot of people very uncomfortable as they don’t quite know how to take it. It could be incredibly threatening, or just something they don’t understand. The other side of that coin is how many girls email me thinking i have the answer to their problems or can fix them somehow.

I’ll never forget the day when the importance of vested interests was impressed on me. It was a cold bitter day in Mayfair, which suited the whole atmosphere of the few months i’d been living in. I was having coffee with a mentor of mine who was punching into me for being so wet behind the ears, and naturally i thought i knew it all. He asked me who i was pissing off with what i was doing, and who would try to stop me succeeding. I drew back slightly as i hadn’t thought about - the idea of someone going out of their way to fuck up what i was on course for hasn’t entered my mind, and up until that point i had never thought i was particularly innocent.

Understanding the whys and hows of vested interests is important. In many cases, its in someone’s self-interest to deliberately keep you weak or ignorant. When all the men dating the girls around you are bastards, ambitionless losers and/or allegedly crap in bed, you don’t educate or help them. The more of them there are around, the more special and unique you seem. Helping them to be better is effectively shitting on your own doorstep and poisoning your own lunch when you could be using it to your own advantage. Bullying people and keeping them down is a very convenient way of putting yourself up in the limelight. Your success can be dependent on the failure of everyone else, as so much in this life is determined by perception.

Knowing there are people out there who don’t want you to succeed, or who will actively seek to stop you from succeeding is a hard pill to swallow. But not swallowing it is a lot more dangerous. They are there, and you have enemies whether you like it or not. Often they are those who are closest to you or the people you call your friends. You can’t fight a battle or resist nefarious scheming when it can’t be seen or doesn’t appear to exist. Jealousy, envy, resentment or just plain malice stalk you looking for an opportunity to drive the knife in when you are at your weakest. Your success highlights their failures and casts you in the limelight instead of them.

A vector, in biological terms, is a an organism that carries a disease but is not affected or infected by it. It simply acts to transport the source of the illness with immunity to it. The malarial parasite is carried by female Anopheles mosquitoes but the insects themselves do not suffer malaria. An attack vector is a way to attack someone, a method, strategy, back door or angle that a payload of hurt or suffering can be delivered through. In human terms, that vector tends to be a person, but it can be a number of others things.

Sun Tzu’s advice for aspiring generals is to both know thy enemy and know thyself, as you will then be successful in 100 battles. The question you have to ask is where exactly is your weakest point, and if there were one thing an enemy of yours could attack. where would it hurt the most? There you will find the target for an attack vector. The next thing to do is work out who or what the vector could be. In my case, the answer is pretty obvious. She’s female, batshit insane and lives in Scunthorpe. If you want to fuck me up, you would use her to do it. This isn’t a case of knowing your strengths and weaknesses, as that is a passive cause and DIY repair job. Knowing your attack points is understanding your death triggers.

Once you see where you are weakest and identify the continuous stream of attack vectors, then you are supreme. Every day a new one appears, so it is perpetual process that can be very hard. Your words will be used against you, your identity and integrity will be attacked, and this world is full of bitter inferiority-complexed impotent failures who would like nothing more than to pull you down into the pit they stew in to keep them company. Love has no place here when it comes to survival, only ruthlessness. Human parasites and spiritual vampires roam around looking for others to feed off just to satiate their longing for recognition and validation. And if they can’t generate it themselves, they will suck it out of the people who are most visible.

I go out to anger those people now. For me, the backlash leveled at me is a quasi-barometer of how successful i am. The more they whinge, the more vocal they get, the more they fear me and the more resistance i encounter is a great measure of just how well think i’m doing. I curse them with utter contempt simply as armchair critics are hilariously narcissistic and have nothing to show for themselves apart from their sewer mouths, slimy dispositions and weakened minds. You don’t give up just because the nasty man told you he didn’t like it. As Oscar Wilde once said so wisely, a critic is someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

I know my enemies, but i can’t see all of them as much as i try and as much as friends try to point them out to me, only to suffer my righteous indignation. Sometimes the scheming around me gets so bad i eventually strike out and do my best to teach the offending parties exactly why they shouldn’t try to out-flank or strip me of what i am. One notorious example was earlier in the year, when one girl was doing her best to bring me to my knees, and another was taking advantage of the situation to have me to herself. They both learned very painfully, and suffered for it. One got thrown out of my life very unceremoniously to her surprise, and the other got used and again thrown out.

The moral of the story is to never assume i’m weaker just because my heart’s in pieces. I came out on top as i recognised what they were doing and set them on each other instead of me. I will never apologise for being fiercesome in that regard - if you want to inflict emotional violence and manipulative schemes, i will act. I’ve bankrupted people, humiliated them in public, torn them to pieces emotionally and caused abject chaos more times than i care to remember simply to burn a path to my own salvation past the carnage. I learned to defend myself from 20 years of continuous argument and destructive hell in the place that was supposed to be my home. You don’t have the same training or resilience, neither does anyone else you know.

The vector is almost always something that is either unaware or complicit in someone’s game or attack, but rarely both. The payload is a message of some kind that they want to adsorb, or evidence they want you to see to back up their case. It’s designed to have an effect and de-rail you for their own reasons. Most frequently it attacks your heart - that you’re not good enough, it won’t work, they don’t care etc. The vector approach is so visceral and deadly as they use the middleman carrier that you love and trust to deliver the message, when whereas if it came from them directly your guard and emotional armour would be on to deflect it. Not only do you have to be on guard against your enemies, but your friends and loved ones. The devastation is far worse when its the latter.

One technique i teach those i care about in the art of defending themselves is learning to recognise someone’s internal dialogue when they are insulting you, and it earned me the nickname “One Killer” in college due to me being able to effectively silence anyone in one sentence. The secret is absurdly simple. When someone is furious, they are deeply vulnerable as they are being ruled by uncontrollable emotions so can’t think properly. Because they only have themselves as a reference point for the rest of the world, when they insult you they throw the words at you that would hurt them the most. As soon as you hear what that worst thing is, they’ve betrayed their weakness - the thing that would hurt them the most to hear.

Let’s say that some obnoxious moron is shouting abuse at you during a rather vicious argument, and in their anger they call you “ugly” and denigrate your looks as much as they can, despite it being very little to do with what you’re arguing about. You know from that point on that they going out of their way to hurt you in spite. Unfortunately for them, they’ve just told you what hurts the most - criticism of the way they look. Throw it straight back to them 10x harder with painful details, and they’re fucked. Watch for this, and you’ll win every time. Just take a twist of their insult and make it more damaging. Use your enemies and profit from your mistakes.

Wisdom brings with it the end of innocence, and the price of freedom, as they say, is eternal vigilance - vigilance against those threatening you and stealing from you, and from people ahead of you doing their best to erect barriers for you to crash into and even just simply making it impossible to get what you want. Only the naive fall alongside the path as they refuse to accept the dark side of their own nature, and the rest of the human race’s nature. If you want to win, you have to learn to fight and be dispassionate enough that you can be ruthless when you need to be, against those who deserve it because they’ve behaved themselves into something they can’t talk their way out of. Anyone who has to prove something doesn’t believe it themselves. Anyone who is bluffing will over-compensate. That is how you spot lies and a message that is not reflecting the truth.

Dealing with your enemies and their vectors is not easy, as the whole process is malignant and knotted. In the case of those whose tactics are blunt and obvious (e.g. jealousy), you must dismantle their apparatus by separating the sender from the carrier. In cases where the emotional violence is more subtle, you have to lay a trap with compelling bait, draw them out into the light and cast out the demon by identifying it for what it is, humiliating it in the process with the same degree of malevolence that was thrown at you. After that, its time to again take away the scaffolding that gives them the route and foothold to hurt you. Fighting fire with fire rarely works.

Vectors are used to deliver your enemy’s message, and meant to leave you with the burning anger of having being wronged. They are a sick and deadly tactic invoked by adult children who know no better, have very little empathy with others and have never forgiven those who first used them against them in the same way. And they are very, very effective. The game deals marked cards from stacked decks, hands us loaded dice, and then urges us to gamble. Indulging in an evil way of life opens us up to an inner anarchy which (like all anarchies) eventually turns in on itself - to crave authoritarian rule from the one who most wants that kind of absolute power.

“Those who are their own god will end up consigning themselves to the Hell they built for their enemies.”

Anonymous