The Theory of Manipulation

*DISCLAIMER: This blog is to be read in a purely technical point of view since it's written for the purpose of analysis and not to promote any harmful activity*

Accountability of a person can only be attributed to his words and actions and not to his thoughts. Like there's nothing wrong in judging a person without any reason if you’re behaving nicely with that person, right? Now let's talk about it on a higher level. Imagine a leader who leads very well. If all of his words and actions are directed towards fulfilling his role and helping the people then even if his primary intention isn't doing good for the people but is actually to gain profit of the title and position, he can’t be considered guilty because at the end of the day he's helping the people. In his rallies if he says, “I want to help people” he's not lying since he also wants to do that. He’s not obliged to express his primary intention and say “I want to help people also because I like to get paid for it” because intentions are after all just thoughts which are personal. Some might call this- ‘lying by omission’ about his main intentions but how can you call that wrong if it's not harming anyone. Don’t we all say some white lies every now and then?

For example, A can hide something that is unrelated to B from B if he/she doesn't trust B's interpretation on it. Here me out: People can claim that they deserve to know the truth only if it's related to them. Also, one has to understand that ‘truth’ is not always absolute. It can be relative to every person, every perspective. For example, suppose you see a woman handing a 2000 Rs note to a man, you'd think that she is paying him for something, that's your truth but in reality, the man had dropped that note earlier and the woman just picked it up and handed it to him. Therefore, not every truth is a fact although every fact is the truth. Actions or interactions can be held accountable to a person but intentions can’t. You can't sue someone for having thoughts about killing you unless that person expresses them in some way and you feel threatened by it. It is not illegal to think about committing illegal acts as any law that would criminalize the mere thought or suggestion of committing an illegal act would be a free speech violation. Conspiracy laws can only be enforced after individuals take an initial step beyond planning and towards the execution of an illegal deed. {Some may argue that an intention is a character of an action and can’t be talked about as an individual entity but in my opinion if two things can exist without each other then, they can be considered independent as there has been evidence of unintentional actions and lack of actions with the best of intentions.} Although moralism and ethics would state otherwise, technically thoughts are private. They’re something that's literally inside one’s head and the rules of the society applies only to what happens in the physical world. So yes, you can think about even the darkest of things like murdering someone or fucking your cousin’s dead body without any obligation to feel guilty about it. As John twelve Hawks said “Without private thoughts and actions, we can never truly be free.” If a person knowingly lets you go into a loss (of money or feelings) by yourself i.e., through your own mistakes by merely not warning you against it then you can't in any way blame that person unless he had an obligation to prevent you to go into that loss (in case of family where one has moral obligation or C.A where there’s legal obligation etc.) If people were to be held accountable for their lack of unobligated actions, then the rich would been in jail, the majority would be condemned to not save the minorities and all the smart people in the world would be charged guilty of not putting some common sense into stupid people’s heads. Now let's talk about influence. What percentage of responsibility in a wrongdoing do you ascribe to the person who influenced the criminal to commit the crime where the criminal was mature enough to understand the nature and consequences of the crime and was well aware and in his senses while performing the crime? I think after attaining a certain age or mental maturity, a person should be completely held responsible for all his actions unless he wasn't in his senses or was being fed some kind of lies and was kept unaware of the reality. One can influence others but one can't control them. If a boy gets influenced about playing chess by Viswanathan Anand and wins a chess championship then we obviously give the credit to the boy and not his idol so why can’t we do the same about negative acts too instead of trying to justify the person who screwed up. What I mean to convey here is that the influencer cannot always be blamed.

Manipulation is nothing but a type of ‘intentional influence’ one has over the other. We all have that one friend who got screwed over by the person they liked because that person didn't want anything more than a hook-up but your friend did. Even if that person knew about your friend’s feelings they can’t be blamed if they didn't lie about having feelings themselves or didn’t make false promises but just went with the flow. After all it was consented from both the sides. However, they're still termed as fuckboy or playgirl and said to have ‘taken advantage' of the situation which they did but there is still no way to technically blame them for it because their interaction with your friend didn't reflect any pseudo intention of reciprocating feelings even if they made the first physical move because in today’s time, we all are aware that physical intimacy can be separated from emotional intimacy. Manipulation has various forms like guilt tripping, gaslighting, peer pressure, negging, emotional blackmail, trickery etc. Since I believe that lying to a person about something that's affecting them or directly related to them is wrong, I would condemn gaslighting and trickery. I would also condemn peer pressure or emotional blackmail where there's harmful interaction involved as you’re threatening to socially and mentally harm the person by making that person an outcast of the social circle or withdrawing your relationship with the person.

There do exist cleaner forms of manipulation where one isn't completely honest about their intentions but they aren't dishonest either. Here comes the grey zone, as one isn’t lying (no wrong action) and as one’s thoughts is one’s business (intention being private in nature). In this form, there is no consequence imposed on the person if the person fails to perform the task. Even if the manipulator exaggerates the advantages of the task and downside of not performing it or doing the opposite it's still not technically unfair as he/she is always allowed to express their opinions and exaggeration without lying is nothing but emphasizing on a point which is also a form of opinion that they consider it to be of a higher value.

For example, you want to have a chocolate and you’re confused between a perk and KitKat and you ask your friend for her opinion. Now your friend had her eyes on the KitKat since some time now and doesn’t want you to have it so she tells you that the perk is very tasty and says that the chocolate layer on the KitKat is too superficial. Here your friend does believe that perk is tasty too so she’s not lying but because she’s in the mood of having the KitKat, she’s trying to persuade you to have the perk. This can be called a ‘clean manipulation’.

Then there is something known as ‘passive manipulation’. If a person is acting stupidly and has high potential of ending up in a bad situation then a manipulator who merely provides certain circumstances, that could've been coincidental as well, that leads the person into that bad situation is called a passive manipulator. For example, if A is walking on a path made up of logs of wood with a blindfold on for fun and if B goes far ahead and removes few logs then he wouldn't be blamed for A’s fall as A wasn't obligated to walk on that path with the blindfold but he chose to do so and while making that choice he also accepted the associated risks. Another example would be of a woman cheating on her husband and a third person gets to know about it. If that third person simply creates a situation where the husband is called for some work in the place where his wife is with her lover then the wife can't accuse that third person for exposing her. So yeah, passive or clean manipulation is even harder to perform than the other forms. It is a very powerful skill which not many possess. It can be used for the good as mentioned in the last example or of course for the bad and selfish purposes too. Let’s hope that it’s used for the best.