Over the course of this sequence I've been building up to the non-obvious idea that when you know[1] the truth you can basically just point at it and people will believe you -- even if they think they "can't" because "it's subconscious" or "it's irrational and won't listen to reason!" or whatever.
First, we showed how when people already respect you, you can signal "I'm serious, just trust me on this and follow my lead" and get results that they wouldn't have thought possible, like getting burned without pain, constricting blood vessels to stop bleeding, etc. Say things like you expect to be followed, and when the prerequisite of respect is there, people will.
Then we showed how respect is actually really simple to earn, provided that people don't flinch from engagement. Basically, don't flinch from engagement yourself, and don't change your mind. The examples I gave weren't any more complicated than "Let me know when you're ready" and simply waiting for a few seconds without additional input.
Finally, we showed that the security needed for people to engage with reality can also be built by simply engaging with reality oneself, while caring about them. Or appearing to, at least. We can only go by how things as they appear to us, so what if it's faked?
This raises the question for the post today:
If security can be built as simply as "Oh yeah, that's really scary" while smiling...
And if respect can be built as simply as saying nothing instead of rushing to say "It's okay, I don't respect me either!"
And if attention can then be directed by just telling people what will be true...
Then how is this not trivially abusable? Or is it? What's to stop someone from just putting on the body language and saying the words?
The superficial answer is that non-pychopaths have a "psychological block" against this kind of manipulation. It's superficial because the whole point of this sequence is that "psychological blocks" dissolve once you recognize them to be embodied beliefs about the world which respond to evidence. If you actually knew that faking things is in your best interest, you'd do it no problem. In other words, you almost certainly recognize that simply faking these things would be a poor bet for you, even if you don't also recognize what you're picking up on.
So what are you picking up on? What happens if you try to fake it? Why doesn't that lead to good outcomes -- for the person who does it at least?
Well, the thing you'd be faking first, is security. If you're sailing in dark murky waters with no knowledge about the location of submerged rocks, there's technically nothing stopping you from going full steam ahead with a smile on your face. The only potential problem with that is that you might sink. So long as you'd prefer strongly not to sink, you'll probably feel tentative navigating these unfamiliar waters - and that's a good thing.
So long as we can see the threats, or lack thereof, then we can steer around them and go full steam ahead. If someone is angry and threatening violence, we have a choice whether to keep our defenses up and threaten them in return. If we reflect and amplify these "violent neutrons", we might not de-escalate, but we'll at least be prepared for the battle.
Our other option is to lay down our spears and our shields, and open ourselves to cooperation by attending to the invitation to cooperate to the exclusion of the threat of conflict. This can be a powerful de-escalation technique, and it leaves us vulnerable if things turn confrontational. Not "but", "and". That's how it works. It works because it is a credible display that we don't expect or intend conflict.[2]
We get to act with security when we accept these risks, and we want to accept these risks when we can see that it is a good deal. When it's your toddler who is angry, it's easy because the rocks are pretty small and pretty soft; it's clear the kid can't hurt you. When it's a full grown man, whether it makes sense to act with security depends a lot on whether we know if the person is armed, how far they will escalate and in which specific cases, whether we know how to handle ourselves should it get physical, etc. If we know how to see a punch coming, and slip to the side before it gets there, getting punched at is less concern. Some people can see this so clearly that they keep their guard down in professional boxing matches. Seeing what it's like to be the other person allows security to pay off for a deeper reason. Instead of dancing around just out of range of physical punches, and slipping to the outside when we do provoke them, we get to dance around the sensitive topics without provoking outbursts in the first place.
Clarity enables security, which opens the path to cooperation and agreement over the direction of attention. The reason we can't just bid strongly out of stubbornness is because without clarity about what will actually happen, we don't know where we will end up. And that's a problem.
I'll illustrate with a few stories.
My friend told me of a man her friend group referred to as "The Wizard". He had such a way with words, and would captivate attention so magically, that he earned the nickname of "The Wizard" and people would always find themselves doing exactly has he intended[3]. On the surface, this sounds great! What's not to like about people doing exactly what you want? This man will never have to go through the heartbreak of a breakup, because he can persuade her to stay with him and be happy about it. Even if his girlfriend did break up with him, he could always persuade her to take him back. And who wouldn't want to avoid the pain of heartbreak?
Except it didn't work out that way for him. It was true that he would have been able to talk her into taking him back, and that's exactly why she broke up with him over E-mail. His impressive skill in bidding for attention without provoking respect or security issues brought him great results, until it didn't. And when it didn't, it cost him the opportunity to correct his mistakes and repair his relationships. He got the attention, but not the respect and security needed to believe he was right to get the attention.
This is the cost of bidding effectively without backing clarity. It works until it doesn't, and the question is over how far you get before it doesn't.
David Koresh, and cult leaders in general, show a similar pattern. They claim to speak for God which is about as high of a level as respect as can be claimed, and sometimes some people buy it. Then he gets to make bids for absurd things like their wives. Which, again, can be superficially appealing but remember how his story ends. At 33, in flames, along with his wives and children. If people around him hadn't granted him such absurd bids for request, or if he had been wise enough to not make them without better grounding, he might be alive today, telling his grandchildren about how he could have been the next Jim Jones -- and how he's glad that he chose not to be.
Donald Trump is an interesting and culturally important figure of today[4]. Back in 2016 when he was working his way up the Republican primaries it stood out to me that he was bidding hard in this respect game, provoking insecurity left and right and then using this to elevate himself. I didn't know if this would work, or if the defense mechanisms of the political system had a way of shutting it down, but I knew that it seemed to be working and that people didn't understand or appreciate what he was doing or why it was working. Scott Adams, another "trained hypnotist", spotted the same thing and got loud about it. Adams made the point that Trump was showing skill, and this is what he's supposed to do, and once he wins he will transition to a unifying stance and the whole country will love him and everyone will clap.
And then that didn't happen.
In my terms, Adams was predicting[5] that Trump would transition from bidding on respect when he needed respect to bidding on security when he needed security. That would have been the wise thing to do, and he's correct that provocation for respect to the detriment of security was what he needed to be doing earlier on and therefore can't actually be used as evidence of incompetence -- as evidenced by the fact that it worked.
The trick is that it's also consistent with another hypothesis, which is that Trump knows how to play the respect game well because at the end of the day, he knows which bluffs he can get away with -- but not what to do when he gets to the end of that road. Bidding for respect, without the clarity to back it up, can lead to situations where no matter what Trump walks away thinking he's great, and either other people believe it or they don't. Before 2016 some people close to him believed it, lots of people didn't take him that seriously, and he would just write them off like they would write him off. As president, we can't just "walk away from him", so we're pressured to resolve this, and so instead of ending with "agree to disagree" it provokes very real insecurities.
And for good reason! People really don't know how to orient to the things he's saying without accepting things that seem harmful and false to them, so of course they're not going to take him on face value. He could just be bluffing, and granting those bids legitimacy would be a mistake, in expectation. Without negotiating security, without showing people that his stances really do resolve to something that is knowably good, so that they can feel secure, they can't know that they do and as a result they can't do security and agree on the terms for honest engagement.
And neither can he, really. Because how can you know that you're on the right side if you don't understand the validity behind your oppositions objections? And if you do see it clearly, why not show it? No one thinks that Trump wouldn't love to be loved and respected by the whole country instead of just enough to win an election, when combined with those who are willing to hold their nose so as to not elect the opposition who seems even worse to them -- so it's in his best interest to do so. In absence of doing it, we can only conclude that he doesn't see how, and that leaves us as a country split on whether he's a force for good or a force for evil. But because he played the respect game effectively, both the left and the right agree that what Trump says is super important and the 2024 election determines the fate of our democracy.
Navigating without clarity about how things ground out can get you far. It can get you to the presidency, even. But it will be a controversial one, and if the things you're missing turn out to be important, maybe a horrible one. Maybe those things won't turn out to be important, or maybe they will. Isn't this exciting?[6]
Things are better in expectation if we don't disconnect ourselves from feedback to the point where can bid without bound. Maybe not in the myopic short term, but definitely in the longer term. And we tend to sense that, so we generally don't.
But that's the easy part. The importance of clarity in one's map of the rocks is as obvious as "Hitting rock bad. Must see rock".
The importance in clarity in our maps of our maps gets much more tricky. When we lack clarity about what our own maps contain, we end up completely flummoxed by simple problems like getting out of cars and looking up from phones, thinking instead we've proved that looking up doesn't work, after all, we empirically tested [our own understanding], and found that it was incorrect.
This will be the topic of the next post.
Truly know, not just "Have a narrative that you're very very attached to, and which proclaims itself to be obviously right and well evidenced"!
This is a much much higher bar than we usually hold ourselves to.
If you're afraid of a dog that's growling at you, the last thing you probably do is lie down on your back and offer it the back of your outstretched hand for it to come up and put its mouth to -- because that gives it a chance to bite your hand when you're in a position where you can't do anything to fight back. Which is why it's such an effective way of getting dogs comfortable with you.
He's a natural hypnotist, essentially.
Let's see if I can side step the laser beams myself, saying only things that both sides will agree with yet are also illuminating.
I don't buy for a second that Adams actually believed it, just that he was overextending his own bets for whatever reasons.
I understand that most people do not see it as a fun exciting thing, but as I write it I do. It is an invitation to come have fun, and tune in to reality to find out which is right. Obviously it's better to figure these out at lower stakes, and perhaps we could have sorted out our security issues before the elections if we had clear thinking on what insecurity means. And we didn't, so this is the reality that exists for us to play with.