Shallowness

This post by Master Dogen touches on a lot of issues: authenticity vs phoniness, feeling versus thinking, manipulation vs "real." And while he is addressing them in defense of Game, it is important to understand that these tensions come up for every person in any meaningful interaction with others, courtship being just one facet of human existence.

The key issue is not whether you approach the world mainly from a thinking, rational perspective or a feeling, authentic perspective. The tension is about shallowness vs. depth:

What is shallowness:

Shallowness, for purposes of this page, is interest in the lowest common denominator of human concerns, especially social status. The shallow side of life comprises: concern with looking beautiful or attractive to others, physical stimulation and pleasure (hedonism), winning at competition, one-upmanship, being an important person (i.e. more important than other people), social dominance and power over others, accumulating material wealth far beyond what you need for physical well-being, being thought intelligent/deep/insightful by others, getting your way right now simply because it's what you want (and so not listening to objections), keeping up with the Joneses, being a slave to fashion, saying politically correct things that you don't believe in for fear of losing the loyalty of your friends, getting away with unethical things as long as you're sure you won't get caught or you're sure that your friends will approve or wink in admiration (using social approval as a substitute for your own ethical judgement), sacrificing everything for the sake of a higher salary, making legalistic arguments that technically make sense and "win" in some recognized court but disregard the matters of real concern in a conflict, refusing to change your mind for fear that others will stop perceiving you as an authority, narrow-mindedness, limiting your company to people who agree with you, conspicuous consumption, judging people on the basis of things like whether they're wearing a brown belt with black shoes, vanity in general.

We can all accept that these things are shallow, even if we engage in them regularly and pretend that they have real depth.

But just because things are shallow does not mean they are unimportant. Why? Because to have any meaningful communication and interaction between people we must use really basic, trivial things as a basis i.e. the lowest common denominator. Consider a flower. When you think of a flower, you conception of it might include:
-the sense of beauty just looking at it
-the mirad species and hues of flowers you have encountered throughout life
-the emotions associated with events involving flowers: your undying love on Valentine's Day, your loneliness and depression at your father's funeral, the awkwardness and thrill of giving your homecoming date a corsage, the tranquility of working in your garden
-your knowledge of it anatomy, how bees pollinate the flowers and make honey

But to assign a word "flower" destroys this depth of knowledge that you have and reduces it to simple scratches of ink on paper or a few audible grunts strung together. No word can do justice to this depth.

Yet without accepting some shallowness, you can't even begin to start communicating this depth to another person. You start building up your language: you assign words to colors, even though a few letters does not due "blue" or "violet" justice. You make up words for "death" "love" "bee" and as you build your vocabulary up you can start to communicate complex ideas. Eventually, you can say very complex things but even these sentences, poems and novels cannot completely capture the depth you hold inside your head.

Understanding that language is incomplete does not invalidate its use. If you were to reject it, you would be dead in the water before you can even start. The point is that the only way to get the circuits of your brain matter and the circuits of someone else's brain matter in any sort of union is to embrace some shallowness. And this shallowness extends to everything you do with another person.

Which brings us to Game. People want to believe that their relationships have depth, that they have "true love". Such people feel a deep emotional attachment and they want to believe that this is shared, in the exact same form, between them and their partner. Then they come into contact with game and they learn that the interaction between boy and girl is somewhat shallow, that things dont "just happen." That one person might be more attached than the other. And this is immensely scary. But that's how it is.