Why do people bother to post here??

I feel like the point that Style was trying to get at in the book was that something miraculous DID happen. He initially had remorse and blamed himself for not seeing it coming, yet eventually he realized Mystery was kinda on a self destructive course even before Durden, and that that house was more of a vehicle than a destination, and that in the end, despite the amazing story that came of it, getting the fark out of that house was ultimately the best thing for both himself and Mystery.

Project Hollywood may have failed to be what Mystery thought it would turn out to be, and ints understandable how someone can be bitter about something like that, but we can't say it actually failed to accomplish some miraculous things. Hell, it's mere existence, no matter how brief was a miracle alone. Now Mystery has had a major TV show, Style has had a bestselling book, and there's other Project houses like Project Hollywood all over the world.

As for the false Durdens of the world, well theres a lot of those...not just in PUA, but in evereything. d1ck Cheney may be a false Durden. Mark Zuckerberg is definitely a farking Durden. I think if you look back to some of the records on crowd control, you can confidently say Hitler and his ministers were some sort of Durdens. I don't mean this to be political, it's just there's a lot of people who look at people as rats in a maze the way Durden did.

I think the first line of defense is to know their tricks. There's a great book called How To Lie With Statistics, whose sole purpose as stated isn't really to teach you how to lie for the purpose of lying, but rather for the purpose of protecting everyone from being lied to.

If this forum is full of Durden-esque material, then it could serve a similar purpose. Anyone can come read how to be a Durden, so they can understand how to avoid that very fate.

Actually, Bruce Lee did formulate much of his ideas about what was right and wrong in traditional martial arts, and he formalized it as Jeet Kun Do. Mind you, his theories were simple-- for example, Be Formless-- but they were undoubtably theories, and his refinement of them throughout his career is almost certainly the root of his success and changed martial arts forever.

In fact, some of the Master PUAs, such as Juggler, would argue Jeet Kun Do is very applicable to pick up, especially Being Formless. I'd even go so far to argue if you're here and not just a fanatic for one school of pickup, then you are already practicing it by using the forums to garner knowledge from many different styles of pickup and put it together into your own style.