The Goal

 I talked about people follow their programming, and how some of the time some of us are more alert, awake, and aware than at others.

Which brings me back to the goal - helping people be more conscious of their choices, so that they are free to choose who they want to be.

This all sounds simpler in my head, or rather it feels obvious. Now that I'm trying to write about it, though, it's not so easy.

Let's start with conscious choice. That means I don't want to trick people into doing what I think is best. I want them to be aware of their own mind, their own wants and needs, so that they can choose what they think is best.

Which is not to say I don't have my own thoughts or preferences. Rather, it gets back to my personal distinction between persuasion and manipulation.

I can talk all I want about what I think is best, try to come up with logical arguments (and perhaps not so logical) but at the end of the day the other person always has a choice. That's persuasion.

Once you start trying to ensure the other person can only make the choice you want them to, that's when it gets into manipulation. Trying to hide alternatives? Cover up information that doesn't suit your goals? Make them feel afraid and defensive? Lie about your own motives?

Those are all tactics of someone who is afraid that the other person won't choose 'correctly' on their own. You don't trust them to choose the way you want them to on their own, and you're trying to control them so you can force them to make that choice anyway.

And the thing of it is, manipulation might seem to work for a time, but I think in the long run it will always fail. Like car salespeople - the ones who manipulate people into buying cars they don't really want (or that are lemons that don't really work like they should) may make a sale... but their customers are not likely to be repeat customers, nor are they likely to encourage their friends and family to use that salesperson for their next car purchase.

The salespeople who are honest and straightforward with their customers tend to do better in the long run.

That conscious choice also should be free from fear, because people don't really think straight when they're afraid. This is part of why interrogators have a 'fear up' approach. And it also applies to making people afraid by lying about immigrants eating dogs, or the level of crime among immigrants, or the level of crime in general.

That dissonance between the actual crime rates and the perception of crime? Yeah... that's some basic political manipulation going on, and it really annoys me that making people afraid like that has been 'working', if by 'working' you mean that the people doing so have won elections.

In addition, conscious choice means working to fix any cognitive dissonance. That gap between what you say and what you do? That's generally a sign that you're not fully aware, and it's hard to make good choices.

Shadow policies? Where a company says they oppose bullying and sexual harassment, but don't actually address it when employees bring such issues forward? That's cognitive dissonance on an organizational scale, and getting angry at the employees who step forward just exacerbates the issue.

Which is not to say that you have to respond in any particular way. This is all about how people think and organizations decide, it's not telling them what to do when faced with cognitive dissonance, fear, or any of these other things I'm pointing out as signs that people aren't consciously making choices.

And that's because my belief is that when people are free from manipulation, are unafraid, and are fully aware and in control of themselves, that we all benefit.

That God didn't make life a zero-sum game, and the choices other people would make when they're fully free to do so are no threat to me, but rather will make it easier for us to find a win-win.

Everything that gets in the way of that - the fear mongering, the cognitive dissonance, the reality manipulation and attempts to discredit anything you don't want to hear?

Those all are unnecessary, and just make everything harder than it has to be.