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How to Control People and Be an A**

How to Control People and Be an A**

If you want to control someone, it’s an easy process. People from earlier generations knew how to do it instinctively, but most of them were raised to be better than that. Today, I am worried that young people don’t completely understand how to manipulate others to get everything they want. Please allow me to point out ways to succeed in life at the expense of others. As long as you win, it doesn’t matter what happens to anyone else, right?

4 simple steps

The first step is to see or hear some slight and blow it completely out of proportion. If you are a man, it might be something along the lines of screaming at the top of your lungs when your girlfriend says something critical about your mother. If you are a woman, you might try having an emotional breakdown when your husband stops to chat with an attractive female coworker. The situation should be serious enough to warrant some reaction, but innocuous enough that you have plenty of room to overreact.

Condition your target to react negatively to everything a disapproved person says…

Second, gauge the reaction. You want your target to apologize, attempt to console you, and try to calm you down. If instead, your target blows you off or refuses to play the game, then you need to be patient and wait until he has more time and emotion invested in you. And, be on the lookout for a bigger mistake to which you can overreact even more! It will surely come if you look hard enough. Analyze and use every situation until you break your target down

Third, give a reward. Praise your target for any signs of submission, whether it is an apology or just an acknowledgment of your feelings. If your target is a romantic partner, add a physical reward such as a favorite meal or intimacy. You want to raise serotonin levels to reinforce the behavior.

marionette

‘Girl’ marionette

Fourth, isolate your target. Isolation should be both physical and emotional. To physically isolate your target, do things like prevent him from getting a job or forbid her family from visiting. To emotionally separate someone, destroy the character of anyone you don’t want them interacting with. Constantly insult the people you don’t approve of with horrible names. Condition your target to react negatively to everything a disapproved person says and blow up every time your target communicates with the unapproved person. Reward your target for telling you about anyone who says something negative about you or your relationship. Don’t forget to overreact!

Keep up the pressure

Finally, escalate and repeat. If your target is your romantic partner, never use violence more than once. That is enough to plant fear into their mind for life, but more than that can land you in jail. And after all, it is much harder to control people from jail. Make a bigger scene and react more extremely to smaller and smaller things. Embarrass him in public. Start making it harder to get a reward and increase the isolation. A fun thing to try at this stage is “gas-lighting”, where you start accusing your target of manipulating you and other ridiculous things. At some point, your target may move out. This is normal, and temporary if you did a good job with the fear and reward cycle.

A fun thing to try at this stage is “gas-lighting”…

Pretty soon, your target’s friends and family will no longer recognize him. No matter how hard they try, they will not be able to talk sense into him. The more logic your target hears, the more bizarre and outlandish excuses he will make for your behavior. Even better, knowing how crazy his reasons sound to everyone else, he will scream at and push away anyone who tries to help. Now you are on the right track. Complete dependence on you!

Don’t worry, this will work on anyone … housewives, engineers, and even doctors and lawyers. Intelligence does not matter. It is all brain chemistry. Try it, and let me know how it goes!

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When Cultures Clash

When Cultures Clash–

Divorce, Remarriage, and Children.

When a parent remarries, the new spouse is often the source of alienation between the children and one of the parents. This is especially true when there is a clash of cultures. Mixing cultures can be a recipe for disaster between divorced parents and their children. Watch this one hour video by Stefan Molyneux for an example of the problems it can cause.

Unfortunately, you cannot know when you are experiencing cognitive dissonance. Everyone else seems just as wrong either way.

Cognitive Dissonance

The first thing we need to cover is “cognitive dissonance”. Cognitive dissonance happens when new information clashes with our own realities. If you see a flying pig your mind will rationalize that it must have been shot out of a cannon or launched from a trebuchet. Your mind has to come up with something to rationalize the absurdity of the situation because in your reality pigs cannot fly.

DILBERT © 1992 Scott Adams. Used By permission of ANDREWS MCMEEL SYNDICATION. All rights reserved.

Everyone wants to marry a soul mate. We want, and hopefully think we have found the most wonderful perfect person to share our lives with. In our reality, this new wonderful person could not possibly be the cause of a child hating us or hating the other parent. In order to deal with this absurdity, our minds will rationalize that either the other parent is causing the alienation or the child is the problem. In the video you can hear at about the 60 minute mark where the father says he respects and admires Stefan Molyneux. He deals with the absurdity of disregarding the opinion of someone he highly respects by hallucinating that the reality is more nuanced than even Mr. Molyneux can understand.

Unfortunately, you cannot know when you are experiencing cognitive dissonance. Everyone else seems just as wrong either way.

Our culture informs our reality

Mixing cultures is also a recipe for cognitive dissonance. Culture and values are intimately tied up with who we are. By the time you marry someone, you’ve negotiated those differences. You look past them to see the person you love and rationalize and adjust to the differences. This is all well and good, but your ex spouse and children are not going through the same process in the same way. It’s like you’ve gone to the personality tailor and swapped out a chunk of who you are. To you, you are the same person, but to those closest to you, you are not. Moreover, anything your ex or your children do not like, they are going to blame on the new spouse. And because some of those changes involve new culture and values, you can bet there are going to be some things they do not like.

The best thing you can do is focus on the children and not the fault.

If you divorce from a conservative culture and marry into one that is more permissive, your ex may see you as becoming immoral and teaching the children bad values. If you go the other way, your ex will see you as becoming oppressive and authoritarian.

In either case, the children are likely to be caught up in the middle of the culture war and be forced to choose sides. Both parents are going to want to teach their values to their children. When they were married, the parents had already worked through those issues, so in divorce they likely co-parented well to start with. When the culture of one household changes, it throws everything out of balance.

Alienating a parent

Alienating a parent is never good for the child. Because of cognitive dissonance, people never think that they or their new spouses are part of the problem. It’s always going to be entirely the other parent’s fault. And remember, nobody knows when they are in cognitive dissonance. Everyone else is just being crazy and acting absurdly.

In some cases, the goal of the new spouse is alienation. Because of the cultural differences, the step-parent simply sees the other parent though the cultural lens he was born into and wants the other parent gone for the good of the children. In other cases alienation is the goal of the ex-spouse for the same reasons. Either or both of these could be the reality, or it could be completely accidental. Regardless, everyone will believe it is the other parent’s fault. Worse, everyone will have all the evidence they need to prove it is the other person’s fault because of confirmation bias (the nearly inescapable tendency to only look at evidence that supports one’s beliefs and disregard or minimize other evidence.)

What should I do?

The best thing you can do is focus on the children and not the fault. Understand that no matter what you think of the other parent or how much you want to think otherwise, alienation is bad for the child. If you think alienating the other parent in your special case is the right thing to do, you are experiencing cognitive dissonance.

If the relationship between either parent and the children deteriorates after a re-marriage, start family counseling before you start blaming. Don’t put your children’s emotional health at risk, even if it is not your fault.