The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it.
—Oscar Wilde
What people want is not temptation; temptation happens every day. What people want is to give in to temptation, to yield. That is the only way to get rid of the tension in their lives. It costs much more to resist temptation than to surrender. Your task, then, is to create a temptation that is stronger than the daily variety. It has to be focused on them, aimed at them as individuals—at their weakness. Understand: everyone has a principal weakness, from which others stem. Find that childhood insecurity, that lack in their life, and you hold the key to tempting them. Their weakness may be greed, vanity, boredom, some deeply repressed desire, a hunger for forbidden fruit. They signal it in little details that elude their conscious control: their style of clothing, an offhand comment. Their past, and particularly their past romances, will be littered with clues. Give them a potent temptation, tailored to their weakness, and you can make the hope of pleasure that you stir in them figure more prominently than the doubts and anxieties that accompany it.
Daily Law: Find that weakness of theirs, that fantasy that has yet to be realized, and hint that you can lead them toward it. It could be wealth, it could be adventure, it could be forbidden and guilty pleasures; the key is to keep it vague.
The Art of Seduction: Create Temptation
Most of us have known the power of having someone fall in love with us.
Our actions, gestures, the things we say, all have positive effects on this person; we may not completely understand what we have done right, but this feeling of power is intoxicating. It gives us confidence, which makes us more seductive. We may also experience this in a social or work setting—one day we are in an elevated mood and people seem more responsive, more charmed by us. These moments of power are fleeting, but they resonate in the memory with great intensity. We want them back. Nobody likes to feel awkward or unable to reach people. The siren call of seduction is irresistible because power is irresistible, and nothing will bring you more power in the modern world than the ability to seduce. Repressing the desire to seduce is a kind of hysterical reaction, revealing your deep-down fascination with the process; you are only making your desires stronger. Some day they will come to the surface. To have such power does not require a total transformation in your character or any kind of physical improvement in your looks. Seduction is a game of psychology, not beauty, and it is within the grasp of any person to become a master at the game. The month of July will arm you with weapons of charm, so that those around you will slowly lose their ability to resist without knowing how or why it has happened. It is an art of war for delicate times.
I want to take you away from thinking of seduction as just the sort of thing that men do to women or women do to men. It’s something that permeates our culture. It’s in advertising. It’s in marketing. It’s on the internet. It’s in politics.
It’s slightly different in each case. Of course, a sexual seduction is not exactly the same as a politician seducing the American public or an influencer seducing her followers. But the dynamics, the casting of the spell, the enchantment, the process is similar.
I tell people it’s like when you’re watching a movie and you feel like the movie is casting a spell on you. It’s drawing you into the story. It’s having an emotional impact on you. It’s taking you out of your life, out of the banal day-to-day work, and on a ride of enchantment. By the end of the movie, you’re moved to tears or laughter or whatever it is. That is a form of seduction. Your psychology has been penetrated by the director, the writer, the actors, and actresses.
People are dying for more of this kind of seduction in their lives. They want some enchantment. They want some drama. They want pleasure. They want to be taken on a ride, an adventure.
It’s a desire cemented in childhood. Seduction is like reaching the child in a person. When you were a child, what was the greatest pleasure? It was being picked up by your mother or father and being whirled around and taken through the air and twisting and turning. The sense that someone was taking you somewhere, that you were under their control—it made you laugh, it gave you this incredible joy. That’s what’s happening when you’re watching that movie: it’s taking you on this journey where you don’t exactly where you’re going or what’s happening.
People don’t have enough of that in their lives. It’s an amazing power that you could have.
It starts with the desire to be a seducer. You might be tempted to think, “Oh, I don’t want to be a seducer, I’m not interested in seduction.” Yes, you do. Yes, you are. Think of the walls that people normally have up—you can’t get through to your kids, you can’t get through to your spouse, that employee, those coworkers. They’re closed off to you. It makes you so frustrated. Now think of a time in your life where you sensed that you had power over another person, that someone was under your spell, that the things you said excited them and interested them. There’s electricity in your back and forth. It’s amazing. It’s powerful. You want more of that. You want to be able to seduce. You want to penetrate the walls people typically keep around their hearts and minds.
That’s the first thing: you want seduction in your life.
The next thing is: you have a misconception about seduction. Most people do. It’s not about figuring out these very cold, calculating strategies. There’s got to be a naturalness to it. If you’re someone that does too much calculation in the seduction process—this is what I’m going to do, step A then B then C —it’s not seductive. People can smell your coldness. We sense that the other person is trying too hard, that they’ve read The Art of Seduction, that they’re applying the twenty-four strategies. It doesn’t work.
You must bring out natural qualities that you have. And I maintain that every person has natural qualities that make him or her authentically seductive. It’s in you. It’s latent. It wants to come out. And that’s what will make you an interesting and good seducer.
That, and adopting the seducer’s approach to life: It is all a game, an arena for play. Knowing that the moralists, the crabbed repressed types who croak about the evils of the seducer, secretly envy their power, they do not concern themselves with other people’s opinions. They do not deal in moral judgments—nothing could be less seductive.
Everything is pliant, fluid, like life itself. Seduction is a form of deception, but people want to be led astray, they yearn to be seduced.
Get rid of any moralizing tendencies, adopt the seducer’s playful philosophy, and you will find the rest of the process easy and natural.