Posts Tagged ‘professional manipulation’

In today’s go-go, time is money world, graciousness and style have all but disappeared. We simply do not have time for them. On those rare occasions when we do encounter them, they seem so archaic and out of step with how the others conduct themselves, it can appear almost cartoonish. The reader might say to themselves: well this is all very sad, but time moves forward and really why should we really care? Kurt Vonnegut, in his book Slaughterhouse Five, provides an answer to this question.

American and British POW’s were interred together in a POW camp situated in a former slaughterhouse in Dresden Germany, near the end of the war, just prior to the major firebombing that wiped out the entire city. The British officers made a regular practice of putting on plays –the men playing both the male and the female parts as was done in Shakespearean Times.

The main character, Billy Budd, asks one of the British officers why they observe this seemingly absurd ritual. The officer repied by recounting an anecdote related to one of his fellow officers. He told Billy, that one day this officer came to see the theatre as an absurd, pointless exercise, and he subsequently bowed out of the acting troupe. A few weeks later he stopped participating in the morning exercises with the rest of the officers. After another few weeks he ceased brushing his teeth and observing personal hygiene. A few weeks on he just stopped getting out of bed. A few weeks later he was dead!

As time passed in the prison camp the British maintained their decorum, the plays went on as scheduled, the British remaining defiantly indifferent to the deprivation that surrounded them. Meanwhile the situation with the American troops was quite different. Discipline became progressively more lax. The prisoners began to steal from one another, fights broke out, morale plummeted.

Life can be thought of as a box of chocolates or as a fickle mistress – we never know what we’ll get it. One day you can be on top of the world, the next day you can be down in the gutter. Sometimes you have only yourself to blame for your misfortune, sometimes you’re just swept along by the tide of events around you. Perhaps the only things we really do have under your control is whether you maintain your standards, or descend to the behavior of the mob. The choice is yours!

“The greatest track to the devil ever played was making us believe he does not exist.”- The motion picture All the Usual Suspects.

In the sanitized, politically correct world of corporate coaching everything gets a positive spin. Through the alchemy of political correctness anything negative is turned into a euphemism. Conflict is translated into disagreement. Lies are transformed into misunderstandings. Manipulators are turned into persuaders. To say otherwise, immediately conveys the impression that the speaker is either immature, or simple minded.

One reason for this could be that the corporate world is so deeply permeated by narcissists that they simply see this as the way it is, always has been, and always will be. The point being that if you buy into this nonsense you are severely restricting your vision in dealing with the jungle you inhabit. The odds of your being blindsided will then multiply. Most coaches, for a number of reasons, cannot violate this taboo. Some of them are listed below:

1. It will jeopardize business – corporate training is one of the best sources of income for coaches. Few organizations are likely to support a “negative” approach to in-house training.

2. It will alienate them from their peers within their own profession –each profession as its own groups think if which then generates a kind of orthodoxy. Any realpolitik approach to the corporate environment is considered heresy by a world dominated by Pollyannas.

3. It is not a cookie cutter approach –once we open the Pandora’s box of the shadow of the corporate jungle, it introduces new variables into the equation which complicate the issue of how to get ahead. It is disquieting to think that instead of being engaged in a orderly process with a predictable outcome, we are instead in a game where success is no longer guaranteed if we work hard, do our job brilliantly, and follow the rules. Quite the contrary.

As in every sphere of life in corporations there is the Hidden Game and the inner circle of Players who enjoy the inside track to success. So now you are thrust into the cold reality: life makes no promises. You can do all the right things and still lose. But at least now you’re in the game!

It is not difficult to make the case that religion, particularly fundamentalist religion, is one of the greatest negative forces in human history. How many wars, how many tortures, how much suppression, how much sadism, has been created by religion? Christianity, despite being based upon the preaching of a messiah who emphasized compassion and tolerance above else, is unsurpassed in the number of people it persecuted in Gods, Mary’s, and Jesus’ name. it is a sin to take the Lord’s name in vain, yet who has done so more than the Church itself?

All of this notwithstanding, if this still continues to be a seed of truth in each of the great religions. The problem lies in attempting to weed out the truth from the fiction. The four gospels that communicate the story of Jesus to us today themselves have major discrepancies. In the centuries immediately following Christ’s death, there were as many as 50 gospels. At this point it is impossible to determine which of these were the most faithful to the true story.

Manipulators and deceivers are not creative; their lies are not pulled out of thin air. Instead they find it much easier to take the facts, shuffle them and then rework them into a pattern that best suits their purpose. They are the “knaves who twist your words to make a trap for fools”. There is no better way for Satan, if he does indeed exist, to undo God’s work than by bending and twisting it until it bears only the vaguest resemblance to the original.

Looking at the story of Jesus – what if Judas was not the villain, but the fall guy? Peter denied Christ’s name no less than three times before the cock crowed. What if it was he who was the true villain of the story? When one stands beneath the dome of Saint Peter’s basilica, it is hard to imagine that its pomp and splendour are what Jesus had in mind when he sacrificed himself on the Cross for our sins.

The movie, The Passion of Christ, is yet another example of how the intent of Christ’s sacrifice is manipulated to serve the intentions of his persecutors. By focusing the attention upon the act of the crucifixion and the enmity of the Jewish Elders towards him, it incites rage on our part, instead of forgiveness. Pontius Pilate, a conspicuously cruel and incompetent Roman magistrate, who was not shy to crucify anyone who challenged Roman rule, a governor who lined the road to Jerusalem with crucifixes to send a strong message to all who traveled there, is miraculously recast as a soulful, contemplative intellectual upon whose conscience Jesus’ death weighed heavily.

This story could not have been interpreted in a more flattering way to the Roman occupiers if it was the Romans who are the authors. Indeed we are the Romans. we seek power, status and comfort if not forgiveness. We as a culture esteem those who win, not those who play by the rules, or are good sports. in some sense we are in fact worse than the Romans – at least there was a certain brutal honesty in their hedonism, while we need to shroud ours in moral rectitude.

At the liquor store I got into the elevator with my bag of liquor. In a couple of seconds or another passenger joined me. “You should be more careful should be careful not to trip on your shoelace” he said with a smile. “When I leave the house and make an important decision-whether or not to tie up the laces of my shoes. Then I keep to that position if for nothing else of sheer spite.”

I replied. “It’s an act of bravado then?” he said and smiled. “Exactly!” I said returning his smile. Within a few seconds the short a liberator ride was over. We said goodbye in each of us went our own way. This is the magic of the game has no way to counter. If no matter what they do if it will always find a way through the cracks.

In the end it is all that we have. Styles, graciousness, the twinkle in the eyes, are those quintessential traits that make us human- that make us bearable to ourselves. Moments like these, and the memory of them stay with us always. Any attempt to capture what such moments truly represent can only fail and diminish them in the process.

It defies compartmentalization and analysis. It is as ephemeral as life itself.

Let us celebrate these moments and leave out all the rest. Such a philosophy will not help drive the economic engine of the economy. Such an approach to life will not sustain us producing more, faster drives technological progress. But in the end it is the only force that can endure.

As mentioned in book one in order for the game to work it needs to be concealed. A mechanism employed to achieve this result is what Plato referred to as a noble lie. Is a settlement which induces everyone in the society to believe that the social order, the laws, the caste system, the customs are all divinely ordained to be so. The Middle Ages this was done by teaching the people that the tamed ruled the population by divine right in. Therefore, to go against the King’s wishes, or his judgments, was tantamount to going against God himself. Defying authority was not only regarded as treason but as sacrilege. In the home this translates to father knows best. On the American dollar can read the inscription in god we trust?

Now the question remains as to how this myth can be sold to the entire population in other words how can you ensure that your fool all the people all the time? If you try to sell it by appealing to reason, some might buy in, but others will not. Also even those who are gullible enough to fall for the ruse will not stay fooled forever. So then how can people be made to wholeheartedly except the noble lie and then regardless of what happens stay faithful? There’s only one way: hypnosis!

If the people need to be entranced, brain watched, so thoroughly that becomes part of who they are and is simply seen as the way it is. Current example of this Barrett the phenomenon is the big risk, almost hysterical, debate over Medicare medical reform in the United States. The Unites states is a democracy that a lot each individual man and woman happened equal vote in deciding the destiny of the nation. the vast majority of the population stand to benefit from the socialization of medicine. Over 30,000,000 people are currently without coverage of any kind. Almost half the bankruptcies in the country are related to the inability to pay medical costs there is a mountain of documented evidence supporting the fact that the HMO and drug companies are in collusion of is that there is not only corrupt but extremely inefficient as well.

Yet, despite this, the president is going to have an uphill battle to get the law passed. Even if he is successful in passing some sort of legislation, by the time it goes through both the Congress and the senate it also be so diluted, that it will lack the essence which was needed to make it work. Therefore in the long run, the likelihood of the entire process them into a positive conclusion with universal Health Care provided to everyone in the United States is extremely low.

If someone were to tell you that they could help you to reclaim your life, what would be the first thing that came to mind? Would it be your work, your family, or your friends who you would like to free yourselves from? Would it be ex spells, present girlfriend, or the social clique you belong to?

Would it be this silly notions of what the world should be that were fed to us growing up? All that duel a stick nonsense – this is good, that is bad. All of black and white with very little gray. We were all sold a bunch of myths. The first was that your parents know best. Next was that you have to be good and kind to have a others like you. Another was good guys always win in the end. And we all remember how we are told to follow the rules and you’ll get ahead.

Those of us were stupid enough or virtuous enough to buy into all of this became the big losers in life. They became the ones left holding the hot potato of blame as their last virtuous peers happily passed it their way.

As we pass through the course of our lives number of things that lay claim to us keeps accumulating. Eventually we look in the mirror and we no longer recognize the base booking back at us. A childhood dreams and fantasies are only the vaguest man race, or worse still, forgotten.

How can we begin to reclaim our lives and save our children from a similar fate? Isn’t it time we all will, as a society? If not for our own sake, for the sake of our children. AB we can save them from wasting the past years of their lives chasing things that don’t really matter, while being completely deluded in their sense of the world and their place in it.

When you look at this world on the surface any sane person cannot but come to the conclusion that the gods must be crazy. People’s obsession with how they look, what they own, and with others people think of them keeps them fully preoccupied.

Talk about man’s inhumanity to man while wearing clothes, sitting on furniture, walking on arrived, admiring flowers in a buzz, which are all fruits of the most abusive labor practices. Everyone feel entitled to what they have envies envious of what others have. Perhaps the greatest tragedy is that though the people we abuse are no less abusive to those beneath them. It seems that when we suffer, most of us instead of learning empathy, only wish to pass it on – paid forward.

As much as this madness seems random there’s a thread which runs through it all and ties it together. All the religions present us with explanations for all of this. While all of these do contain a germ of wisdom partially explain the craziness when it comes to the question of why a good things happen to bad people they all full mute.

In the question of why bad things happen to good people have to be worked into some theory of a continuum of life which extends beyond this one – whether it be a reincarnation or some other migration of the soul. Why is it these bad people, not only escape punishment they seem to thrive in this world. And when they have infiltrated every other organization in civilization why do the faithful continue to believe that their own church should be exempt?

Imagine a video game in which some clever players manage to break the code. While everyone else was playing the outer game, they were playing an entirely different game; an inner game, so to speak. They would have to keep this game secret between themselves. So, while everyone was busy trying to win, it would appear as if they had a real chance to win. The fact is that the outcome was already fixed.

In real life perhaps the most immediate example of this that comes to mind is the stock mark. The regulations and the brokerages go to great pains to create the impression that the market is a kind of scientific mechanism that impartially rewards excellence and perseverance in business. Companies that produce good products treat their customers well and do not overextend themselves financially thrive, while those who do not perish. As we all know from recent events, there is more to the puzzle than this. Manipulation and fraud are so pervasive, they have become systemic. They are now part of the equation. This does not imply that business acumen counts for nothing, but in and of itself it is not enough to succeed.

Now let’s take it a step further imagine that the game was set up in such a way in the first place, only with one a further twist: players, who saw through the charade, were themselves being played as well. As they played the game, it changed them, slowly, steadily and imperceptibly. They were seduced into seeing themselves as superior beings. They began to see themselves as being divinely ordained for the wealth and power they had acquired. They were completely oblivious, meanwhile, to the fact that they had indeed made a pact with the devil. While they were enjoying their ride, unbeknownst to themselves, their fall from grace had already begun.

After all, it is of little challenge or amusement to keep playing a game you know with certainty you cannot lose. It is not long before a deep, unabating boredom sets in. The only way to escape it is to come up with newer and increasingly bizarre ways to liven up the game. At first these are amusing, but it is not long before they descended into the perverse. They eventually turn into strange sadomasochistic scenarios in which the victims are made to suffer in newer and more intricate ways.

All one need do is turn on the television to get ample proof that we have long passed this threshold. Shows such as WWF wrestling, Cribs, Entertainment Tonight, American idol all celebrate celebrity. The people on these shows seem to be oblivious to what fools they are making of themselves so long as somebody, anybody, is watching them.

We all respect those who all own up to their mistakes take responsibility for their actions. Conversely, we take a dim view of those who seek to blame their failures and misfortunes on others – be it their parents, their spouse, or their employees. After all, someone must be to blame. The implication is that if it is not us, it must be them.

What if there was no one to blame? What if it was like a play in which each of the characters plays a part in the drama? Winners, losers, oppressors, victims were all just playing their part –following the dictates of their own nature and circumstances.

Let us consider for a moment the possibility that our natures interact with the conditioning of our parents in a certain way. Fairly early on in our lives, each of us comes to some core conclusions about the world and our relation to it. This then becomes reinforced by repetition. Soon, we have a mountain of empirical evidence to support our view of the world. None of us choose our parents, our circumstances, or our basic nature for that matter. That means that we have no control over the elements that combined to create our worldview. Therefore, seeking to lay blame on either ourselves or those around us is nonsensical. Certain characters with preset predispositions interact with one another and essentially preset patterns. These interactions set off a chain of events to which each character will respond in their own way that is, once again, predetermined by the conclusions they came to in the early years of their lives.

Does knowing this make us any wiser? In the sense that we cannot change our role nor our destiny… perhaps not. However, the one thing we can do, the one element we do have control over, is how we play our part. Do we play it graciously and with panache, or reluctantly and resentfully? In the end that is all that is under our control. Fate takes care of the rest.

It was my little girl’s 6th birthday. Among her gifts was a beautiful Thumbelina Barbie. I asked my wife how many Barbies Juliette had, and the answer was around 10. I posed the same question to my 14-year-old niece, who was playing mother’s helper during our stay at the cottage; she said she had over 50!

I couldn’t resist asking her if she had a Barbie house for them to sleep in. Her reply was that she had two. Apparently squabbles were breaking out between the dolls because of the overcrowded conditions in the first home, requiring her to purchase a second. It seemed that the situation had stabilized and that the dolls were all getting along just fine.

Wow! 50 Barbies – a whole village’s worth. When we were children each child had one Barbie, and that was it. Now we have Barbies of every description, black, white, red head, and blond haired ones too. No longer do children have to suffer with the Dresden doll – Aryan archetype – now each child, regardless of creed or race, can have equal representation in Barbie world.

The company that produces Barbie is, no doubt, very pleased with this result. I can imagine there are legions of employees, quite possibly entire divisions, devoted to discovering new ways in which we can consume more Barbies, moreBarbie clothes, more Barbie furniture, more Barbie whatever.

Now there are even Barbie films. All the classic fairy tales are sanitized and Barbie-ized. Now the children no longer read the original, as it is being supplanted by an ersatz version. When they do encounter the original, the tone is too dark, the text to difficult, to hold their attention. Why eat porridge when you can have a fruit loops instead? Each one of these films is accompanied by a host of new Barbies, together with their accessories. The film itself is little more than a thinly veiled message: Buy Barbie!

Barbie’s investors are no doubt pleased with all these additional sales as it increases profit, which then drives up their share price. It would seem that in Barbieworld everyone is indeed a winner.

Each year the executives receive their bonuses for a job well done. Years later, when they retire, they will receive a nice settlement with which they can securely golf out the rest of their lives. When they read the papers and discover news of the economy, strikes, foreclosures, bankruptcies; they sadly nod their heads and lament: People are simply living beyond their means these days!