Manipulation

Intro

 I want to make an argument that:

All manipulation can be broken down into 3 methods: putting people down, lying, and distorting facts or truth.

I think society has an unhealthy obsession with manipulation. They try to claim narcissism on everyone, they blame other people for tricking them or they make other people into the bad guy, but I don't think that 100% of the time that someone calls another person out for being a manipulator that they are being accurate. I've tried to stress my whole life that being accurate is very important because if you approach a problem with a person from the perspective that they are a master manipulator and they aren't, then you won't accomplish anything, you won't make headway. On the other hand, if you approach them as what they are, maybe selfish, maybe an asshole, you'll be able to work on that. 

So again, I think we should be accurate and I think there's a lot of fluff out there about manipulation. Doing a google search you'll pull up countless websites on how to determine if someone is manipulating you, but you will be hard to find any articles explaining how to tell if someone else is being manipulated. These two aren't the same thing. The signs that someone is being manipulated are different from the signs that someone is manipulating you, and the signs that someone is manipulating someone else are different from the signs that you are being manipulated. Hence why I propose this new method of thinking about manipulation.

Before I explain it, let me make a preface: I became preoccupied with manipulation a long time ago and have spent at least 10 years of my life trying to avoid being manipulative. Before that 10 years, I think I fell into the trap of toxic masculinity and in my teenage years I learned how to manipulate without realizing I was learning how to manipulate people. When I got into university, I learned through studying English how to write persuasive papers and how to twist claims in a way to always win, but I also learned that it is wrong to do this and I've read plenty of literature that explores why it is wrong to manipulate, a few good examples are Shakespeare's work, Macbeth, Othello, even King Leer. At the same time that I was learning about what are called fallacies in argument, I was taking a course on ethics and I learned the philosopher's path to being ethical, Kant, Utilitarianism, etc. The arguments presented by people like Aristotle and Plato for why we should focus on an ethical life I could not find any fallacies in them and believe them to be genuine and logically sound, so I choose to follow an ethical life and by combining the two: understanding manipulative speech and being ethical, I have spent at least 10 years of my life (since I was 18) trying not to manipulate people. 
I also served an LDS mission following my university instruction on the matter and I had some serious problems with the way the religion is spread and preached. I struggled on my mission and went home 4 months early because I had a huge "crisis of faith" or "moral dilemma" or "ethical quandary." I eventually left the religion because I believe I found too many fallacies and unexplained ethical dilemmas in the way the religion is conducted. In short, I believe 99% of the Mormon religion utilizes manipulation to get people to join, contribute, and stay in the church, and if the basis of the organization is that a solely benevolent (always good and ethical) god runs the church, then it makes no sense why even 5% of the religion would focus on manipulative tactics.

So that's my claim of why I feel I am qualified to speak about this topic. I've devoted my life to it, I have experience and have witnessed it on both ends, and the longer I devote to it the more I recognize manipulation.

The Argument

The claim I am making is that all manipulation comes down to 3 forms: 

1. Lying
2. Distorting facts and truth
3. Putting down

I have a hard time combining lying and distorting facts because I think there is enough difference between them that they should be separate.

Lying is telling falsehoods or failing to tell the truth when prompted. I feel as though there needs to be a criterion here to say that there is a difference between knowingly lying and unwittingly lying. I think it's hard to unwittingly lie, so maybe these should be thrown out, because if you don't know something is true and you act as if it is or believe that it is, I don't think you are necessarily manipulating people, I think you yourself have been deceived. If you tell someone something as if it were a fact even when you know it is not a fact, you are lying. If someone asks you a question and you knowingly tell them something else, you are lying. Most people understand lying and understand some of the problems with it. When it comes to manipulation, lying is manipulation because you can get people to act in your favor simply because they trust you. 

I should maybe take a step back and say that I believe there are two types of manipulation: manipulation that brings the manipulator benefit, and manipulation that brings someone else negative side effects. In other words, if you get a thrill from convincing people to do things contrary to what they would do, you are manipulating them because you gain from it psychologically, even if they benefit from the manipulation as well. Or, if you cause someone harm by convincing them to take certain actions, you are manipulating them. --Of course, both of these examples are prefaced by whether you are using one of the three forms of manipulation. For a good example, lets imagine you convince a friend to invest in the stock market believing that it will benefit them. You do so with no ulterior motives, you don't stand to gain from it in any way personally, and you're doing it to help them. If somehow the gamble does not pan out and they lose a lot of money, I don't think you are manipulating them because it doesn't meet one of the three form criterion, even if it meets the type criterion. 

Distorting facts is a little different from lying though if you obsess over nuances I suppose you could say it is a form of lying. Distorting facts occurs when you purposefully change past facts, or you cause another person to doubt those facts. Lawyers do this all the time, and it often does not pass ethical standards, even though they claim that it is unethical to punish an innocent person and they see letting a guilty person go free as less unethical than punishing that innocent person. We can all think of a few cases where a guilty person went free and the long-standing consequences of letting that person go free has touched so many people that I think it breaks utilitarian ethics. You don't necessarily have to lie to distort a fact, you can merely cause a person to question what they believe, or you can present them with things to think about that have no solution. A good example that comes to mind is when religions tell you to act on faith even though there is no way to prove that your faith leads to positive outcomes, they merely want you to believe and trust in hopes that one day things will work out. This is manipulative because it causes people to disregard negative outcomes in their life and in many cases it never brings positive outcomes--the understanding is that after death those positive outcomes will come, but no one can argue about what happens after death because no one has been there and come back from it--except for me, I drowned when I was a toddler and they brought me back to life in the hospital. And No, I can't tell you what it was like. 

There isn't a problem with faith based arguments, the problem is when those arguments are used to cause people to ignore problems in the present. If you convince someone that they need to break up with their partner because their partner is causing them to sin, and your argument is that they just need to have faith--then you are being manipulative (this really happened to a good friend of mine.) 

Putting down seems to be one of the ultimate means for manipulating people. I don't claim to understand completely why it works, but I do claim to know how it works. When you put someone down, it is a direct assault on their self confidence. Self confidence is what we rely on most to make decisions. If you lack self confidence, self trust, or self worth, you doubt your decision making ability. They are directly related: trusting in your self and decision making, believing you have value and decision making, and "going with your gut" or your instincts and decision making. When enough people put you down, or someone you trust immensely puts you down, you start to believe it, it impacts your self esteem, and then you struggle to make decisions. Once you are weak in that way, the manipulator can convince you to take actions. A former U.S. President was notorious for manipulating in this way. He would convince people that they were inadequate and blame it on certain oppressions by the government or by certain laws that favored minority groups. He would then build those groups up using false statements about how "beautiful" they were, or how great they are or how great they will be, that had no logical standing--it was a distortion of truth manipulation because there was no way to argue simply because they weren't specific enough or because they were opinion. He then would issue a target to these people: "The other party is trying to take away your guns!" and sometimes outright lie to do so, "These people are coming across the border and taking your jobs." And in that way he manipulated the masses into doing atrocious things that make me question my own patriotism. His method of putting down started with saying that America isn't great or wasn't great at the time, when if you look at the statistics and you look at key moments in American history, America was probably at its greatest just before he took office. But he caused us to doubt ourselves. He tore down our confidence and our trust in ourselves and in our government, and then he convinced us to act in a way that brought about a lot of negative outcomes and benefited him personally (financially*, emotionally, etc.) 

Final Thoughts

Just as a final note, I wanted to test out my argument using a common term that people agree is manipulaiton: Gaslighting. 

Gas lighting falls under the #2 form of manipulation though it usually encompasses all 3. Gas lighting is lying about facts or distorting past events and denying denying denying. It causes you to mistrust your ability to perceive and think about past events. And Yes, gas lighters knowingly lie about the past in order to manipulate you. I think there are probably a lot of manipulation terms that we use that can be applied to this framework of what manipulation is and I trust that this framework is adequate for defining manipulation in all forms.

One drawback I see to this framework of recognizing manipulation is that it doesn't speak to anything about how a manipulator can build you up with false confidence.--I think that falls more under the category of distorting the truth, or lying, but I can foresee people reading this and wanting to put that in its own category.

The benefit to this framework is that you can apply it to yourself "Am I being manipulated?" as well as other people "Is he/she being manipulated?" Just watch the suspected manipulator carefully and if they are doing any of these three things, then you merely decide if they are benefiting or if the person being manipulated is suffering negatively from those methods and if so, then yes they are being manipulated.