Hitler’s picture courtesy of his Wiki page

[Art(?)] The Art of Manipulation

Since I had a lot of free time during the holidays, I decided to do this for fun. When I speak of manipulation, I am meaning to say that it is concerning people rather than anything else (or maybe data, or the likes, but they mostly pertain to manipulation of the human kind). Manipulating people is an art. Not only that, it’s a subtle art that not many can do well, if at all. The ones that you’re manipulating should never realize that they’re being manipulated. Truly skilled manipulators can manipulate people without them realizing it until the very end. The only way for them to know that they were being manipulated is for them to be told that they were manipulated.

“How might one start?”, you might ask. Now, a good start to manipulating people is to have a large vocabulary (and if you don’t, at least have one or two dictionaries at hand [read: semantics]). Also, if you’re one of the lucky ones, the internet is the best resource that you can possibly have. You should really learn semantics, or at least, have a good knowledge of what you’re saying, as well as what they’re saying. There’re people who can subconsciously manipulate others, but there aren’t that many people who can do that (if there were even any to begin with). To manipulate is “to control or influence cleverly or unscrupulously”. Big words, I assure you, I had to look through a few dictionaries to know what they meant.

Moving on, it’s very easy to escape from being manipulated. It’s called, thinking. If you would just think hard enough, or know enough about manipulation, it would be very difficult to be manipulated, which brings me to the very reason as to why I wrote this piece in the first place; to share the knowledge of the art that I am very much fond of (but is in no way good at).

If you’ve read my profile (as I’m sure no one does), you’ll see that I have stated that I have ‘expertise in manipulating the human mind’. I can’t manipulate you if you didn’t let me manipulate you in the first place, but in saying that, I am meaning to say that you trust my words. Yes, trust. It is the very core of manipulation. However, without it, nothing can be accomplished, but with it, much harm can be done. Common sense is very much high in demand in these cases of trust, but what is common to one, may be strange and unheard of to another.

A society is built upon many kinds of trust; trust in one another, trust in the systems that comprise it, trust in religion, trust in the common customs of the people, and perhaps other kinds of trust that I do not know of. Upon societies, governments and countries make up the world, in which people live their day to day lives. Some countries claim to be communists, when they’re actually more of a dictatorship than communism (if you do a lot of read into what communism is about, you’ll see my point), while there are some that claims to be a democracy, while in fact, they’re being more of a monarchy than an actual democracy, republics that claim to be democracy (if you’ve read my piece on democracy, you’ll know that an actual democracy is impossible unless there is less centralization, but with less centralization, implementation becomes more difficult), and many other things that are simply not true uttered by the many countries that make up the world.

But, enough of that. I could go on all day without actually furthering the art of manipulation. What they all have in common is that, they all manipulate their people into believing things that aren’t true. Some of the people know, some think they know, while some are completely ignorant. Some are happy to be ignorant, but the true thinkers are not ones to be satisfied by lies. Though, as Adolf Hitler once said, “The great masses of the people are more likely to fall for a big lie, than a small one.” Speaking of Hitler, he’s probably one of the most successful manipulator that history ever knew (or at least, the most notorious of them all. There were many others that I could not mention, but hey, history is, his (or her) story).

To those who understood my points, congrats, and to those who didn’t (assuming that there’s anyone who’s been on the internet not long enough to do so), don’t fret; stay on the internet long enough and you’ll know enough.

An unrelated picture that’s completely unrelated and shamelessly put here without proper attribution or permission