To begin with, they have a greater command of the
rhetoric of persuasion and the art of deception and propaganda. They are more
sophisticated, more verbal, and generally have greater status, prestige and
control.
On average, they have more 'schooling' and achieve more 'material success', than uncritical persons. They typically acquire more power and occupy positions of rigid authority and celebratory auspiciousness. They are too often sadistic -- accustomed to playing the dominant role in relationships -- and feed off hierarchies, control, and power over people. They know how to use the established configuration of power to advance their own personal interests and desires at the expense of others. They are deliberate abortionists of morality and ethics.
Since they are fundamentally concerned not with advancing rational or moral values, but with getting what they want through irrational and immoral appeals, they are careful to present themselves as sharing the values of those they manipulate. And this is what Machiavelli urged that rulers do (ibid.).
Proficient manipulators are rarely insightful dissenters, rebels or critics of society. Instead, they work to maintain hierarchies of thought, wealth and dominance through subjective subterfuge and the engineering of material reality for their own egocentricities. They are both sadistic and masochistic and the reason is simple: they cannot effectively manipulate members of a mass audience if they appear to that mass to be invalidating their world views, their systems of thoughts and their calcified beliefs. So they will play on crisis and misfortune while practicing domination and servitude.
Proficient manipulators do not use their
intelligence for the public good; rather, they use their intelligence to get
what they want in alliance with those who they think share their vested
interests, their material ambitions and their communal beliefs. Manipulation,
domination, demagoguery, and control are the tools of sophists or
Machiavellians.
Persons proficient in the osteopathy of the mind seek to influence the beliefs and behavior of others without any regard for morals, without values, and in total contempt for independent thinking. They are true nihilists and, unfortunately, they have insight into what makes many people vulnerable to mental forgery.
As a result, they strive to appear before others in a way that associates themselves with power, authority, and conventional morality -- all such actions that Machiavelli advocated. This impetus is evident, for example, when politicians appear before mass audiences with well-polished but intellectually empty speeches; a homogenized rhetoric of vacuous ambiguity with a clear intent towards duplicity.
"Anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit injustices." --- Voltaire
There are a number of alternative labels for the roles that 'proficient manipulators' play, including: the spin master, the con-artist, the sophist, the noble deceivers and the liars, the propagandists, the indoctrinators, the demagogues, eventually collapsing into, the 'politician'. Their goal is to always control what others think and they do so by controlling the way information is presented to people.
This is key; and this is where and why the corporate media have such a powerful capacity in shaping and managing perceptions. The corporate press use 'rational' means only when such means can be used to create the appearance of objectivity and reason. The key is that they are always trying to keep some information and some points of view from being given a fair hearing. They are the suppressors of truth; they are the asphyxiates of reason, the harbingers of irrationality and thus the assassins of honest debate and democratic thinking.
The Uncritical Mind: Prey for the Machiavellians
On average, they have more 'schooling' and achieve more 'material success', than uncritical persons. They typically acquire more power and occupy positions of rigid authority and celebratory auspiciousness. They are too often sadistic -- accustomed to playing the dominant role in relationships -- and feed off hierarchies, control, and power over people. They know how to use the established configuration of power to advance their own personal interests and desires at the expense of others. They are deliberate abortionists of morality and ethics.
Since they are fundamentally concerned not with advancing rational or moral values, but with getting what they want through irrational and immoral appeals, they are careful to present themselves as sharing the values of those they manipulate. And this is what Machiavelli urged that rulers do (ibid.).
Proficient manipulators are rarely insightful dissenters, rebels or critics of society. Instead, they work to maintain hierarchies of thought, wealth and dominance through subjective subterfuge and the engineering of material reality for their own egocentricities. They are both sadistic and masochistic and the reason is simple: they cannot effectively manipulate members of a mass audience if they appear to that mass to be invalidating their world views, their systems of thoughts and their calcified beliefs. So they will play on crisis and misfortune while practicing domination and servitude.
Persons proficient in the osteopathy of the mind seek to influence the beliefs and behavior of others without any regard for morals, without values, and in total contempt for independent thinking. They are true nihilists and, unfortunately, they have insight into what makes many people vulnerable to mental forgery.
As a result, they strive to appear before others in a way that associates themselves with power, authority, and conventional morality -- all such actions that Machiavelli advocated. This impetus is evident, for example, when politicians appear before mass audiences with well-polished but intellectually empty speeches; a homogenized rhetoric of vacuous ambiguity with a clear intent towards duplicity.
"Anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit injustices." --- Voltaire
There are a number of alternative labels for the roles that 'proficient manipulators' play, including: the spin master, the con-artist, the sophist, the noble deceivers and the liars, the propagandists, the indoctrinators, the demagogues, eventually collapsing into, the 'politician'. Their goal is to always control what others think and they do so by controlling the way information is presented to people.
This is key; and this is where and why the corporate media have such a powerful capacity in shaping and managing perceptions. The corporate press use 'rational' means only when such means can be used to create the appearance of objectivity and reason. The key is that they are always trying to keep some information and some points of view from being given a fair hearing. They are the suppressors of truth; they are the asphyxiates of reason, the harbingers of irrationality and thus the assassins of honest debate and democratic thinking.
The Uncritical Mind: Prey for the Machiavellians
"The principle of historical specificity holds for psychology as well as the social sciences. Even quite intimate features of man's inner life are best formulated as problems within historical contexts. To realize that this is an entirely reasonable assumption, one has only to reflect for a moment upon the wide variety of men and women that is displayed in the course of human history. The human variety is such that no 'elemental' psychologies, no theory of 'instincts,' no principles of 'basic human nature' of which we know, enable us to account for the enormous human variety of types and individuals. The very idea of some 'human nature' common to man as man is a violation of the social and historical specificity that careful work in the human studies requires; at the very least, it is abstraction that social students have not earned the right to make. Surely we ought to occasionally remember that in truth we do not know much about man, and that all the knowledge we do have does not entirely remove the element of mystery that surrounds his variety as it is revealed in history and in biography." -- C. Wright Mills, "Psychology and Social Science," Monthly Review, October 1958.
The overwhelming preponderance of people haven't freely decided what to believe or think, but rather have been socially conditioned (indoctrinated) into their belief systems by a culture devoid of reasoning, where ideas and thought are commodified and thinking itself is subversive. They are un-reflective thinkers; their minds are products of social and personal forces they neither understand nor control, nor concern themselves with. Their personal beliefs are often based on prejudices they have no idea they harbor, beliefs of which they have no idea of their origins. Their thinking is largely composed of conscious or unconscious fallacies, stereotypes, caricatures, over-simplifications, over-generalizations, necessary illusions, delusions, rationalizations, false dilemmas, and begged questions.
Their motivations are often traceable to irrational fear, discontent with their material and psychological conditions and attachments, personal vanity and envy, intellectual arrogance, indoctrination and feeble-mindedness. These mental constructs then become debauched mental habits, part of their identity, and they circle the wagons around this uncritical individuality, protecting it at any cost. Their arrogance has cost them their humility and they are unable to purchase or learn or profit from any other points of view.
Such persons are focused on what immediately affects them; they are short-term thinkers whose idea of short term is promulgated by a culture of morbidity and a historically amnesiac cycle of despair. They see the world through ethnocentric and nationalistic eyes. They stereotype people from other cultures, races, gender and then believe themselves superior.
When their beliefs are questioned -- however unjustified those beliefs may be -- they feel personally attacked, they feel fear and often lash out at others with hostile rhetoric or worse, with violence and intimidation. When they feel threatened, they typically revert to infantile thinking and emotional counterattacks made up of personal attacks, but rarely or reasonably do they challenge alternative claims or assumptions.
When 'their' prejudices are questioned, they often feel offended and stereotype their questioners as 'intolerant' and 'prejudiced' or 'unfair and unbalanced'. They rely on sweeping over-generalizations to support their beliefs, such as 'those people', 'all people' and other such over-simplifications. They resent being 'corrected', disagreed with or criticized. Instead they want to be reinforced, flattered and made to feel important and they want their beliefs to be coddled, accepted and condoned without critical questioning.
In short, they want to be presented with a simple-minded, black-white, good-evil world where the perpetrator is 'the other', and they are the victims. They have little or no understanding of nuances, fine distinctions, or subtle points nor do they care.
"Many people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so." --Bertrand Russell
These uncritical thinkers want to be told who is 'evil' and who is 'good' -- what to believe and what not to believe. They see themselves as 'good' and those who do not agree with them as 'evil'. They perceive all their enemies as 'evil', and they want all problems to admit to a simple solution, and the solution to be one they are familiar and comfortable with -- one that does not challenge what they think they know in light of what others claim they know. They confuse knowledge with belief, appearance with reality.
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