Understanding Manipulation
—The total victory of a manipulator is to make the individual feel and believe that the ideas arise from their own reasoning.
THE HUMAN BEING shows a natural tendency to emulate. We actually feel a need to be socially accepted. Needless to say, without the power of emulation and mass media, industries like fashion for example would never be so profitable. This apply to politics, and basically any form of marketing/propaganda. When emulating what he sees in media such as television, social networks, magazines... the individual does not reason about the convenience of emulating, instead he justify his emulation.
People do not tend to reason their future behaviors, but to justify their past ones.
Knowing this important principle, manipulators will invite you as soon as possible to participate in their activities, campaigns, etc. leaving the most important job to your own brain: to justify your participation. This way you will believe that the reasoning is yours, when in reality your reasoning would have justified any action you had taken. This principle that we will call "self conclusion" is reinforced by social emulation.
Manipulation is all around you in every ad, in every campaign and in every line you read in the news. Good manipulators make effective use of exaggeration and ambiguity (such things as "we will do better" or "there will be less unemployment" if you think it just a bit are mere ambiguities), thus creating false emotional expectations that do not present concrete and measurable goals, but abstract aspirations.
The mass of individuals is less intelligent than the individual, reasoning on its own.
To make people more enthusiastic, the manipulator must gather, squeeze and confuse their listeners so that they become less and less individual and more mass. The closer the listeners are to each other, the less their ability to discern and the greater their receptivity to suggestion and emotional contagion.
Relying on extreme simplification as a resource, the listener easily finds someone to blame and has the feeling that a specific person or group is enough to solve the problem. Such persuasion techniques are permanently used to limit the intelligence and vision of the public, as it is much cheaper and easier to manipulate the individual whose intelligence has been limited (thank the mass media for being mostly dedicated to our idiotization).
The repressed desires of the mass are stimulated. They tell us about the money we can earn, the comforts, the couples we can get, while distracting our attention from what matters and deliberately hiding the facts from us; in this way they make people get closer to the beast than to the intelligent human being.
When your audience is overcrowded, their own self-righteous behaviors arise driving them away from reasoning. Manipulators know that if you feel part of a group and accepted by its members, it will be easier to adhere to their "cause."
The right thing to do should be follow your principles even if society avoids you, but most people have a real fear of social avoidance, which of course has a biological basis that goes back thousands of years in the past when belonging to a certain group was critical to survival.
By becoming part of "their group" a manipulator will know how to find or invent enemies or opponents, which only strengthens unity and a sense of belonging. This is very evident in politics for example, but even in sports it is widely seen: the fans who hate each other are the ones who spend the most money on tickets to matches and on shirts.
An idea placed in the minds of enough people will eventually rub off on others in the group. This is easily accomplished when panic-generating news is used, or when we are convinced that we are being unfairly deprived of some benefit that corresponds to us. No matter the veracity of the idea being spread (it may be a lie repeated a thousand times), psychic contagion occurs subconsciously anyway.
This simple blog entry can only scratch the surface of what manipulation is and how it works, but hopefully it gets you interested in reading more about the topic.
📒 Fifty Shades of Manipulation⬇️
It is impressive that this occurs in all aspects of life, as a society, even in the musical genre that you tend to listen to. But the important thing is to belong or not to a group and to do it from your vision, maybe take some aspects and learn or just belong to fit in. many times it is done to please another and not for pleasure . however the good things are not followed example learning to invest, read, breathe. We do it out of inertia but not conscientiously.