Aggressive Authenticity: Be wary of those that wield vulnerability as a weapon.
Manipulative Monday
Manipulative Monday
Hi there, welcome to Engineering Our Social Vehicles. I’m your host, Paul Logan. Today is Manipulative Monday. If you’re new around here, that means we spend mondays talking about manipulation. Today we’re going to talk about a form of emotional manipulation I call aggressive authenticity.
Winning Friends and Influencing People
Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People is a bit of a meme in any circle that reads for self improvement. Besides addressing people by name and cautioning against criticism, HtWFaIP repetitively coaches readers through what I like to call aggressive authenticity.
The goal of the book is to get you to genuinely connect and interact with conversation partners by asking about themselves until you uncover a topic they are passionate about that you can get interested in. This is an approach that tricks the reader into having normal conversations by letting them think they are doing something particularly insightful or sneaky.
When I notice someone is digging particularly ungracefully for something interesting about me in conversation, I like to ask if they’ve read Carnegie. People with a naturally refined sense of empathy do all of the conscientious things suggested in the book pretty naturally. People who’ve read the book recently are clumsy in their initial attempts to recreate the structure of natural conversation. Eventually, however, they learn to lean into that natural flow and find the authentic interest that drives good chat.
This belongs to a broader set of social manipulation strategies that function by triggering authentic emotion in the manipulating party. Raising the emotional stakes of a situation to to point where logic has no bearing is something individuals with BPD and NPD do organically and without prompt. They aren’t calculated in their manipulation, but they are a lot more experienced at getting what they want while throwing a tantrum. It calls to mind an old adage:
“Never wrestle with pigs. You both get dirty and the pig likes it.”
Aggressive authenticity is a persistent social strategy because it works on the basis of catching those around you off guard. People are pleasantly surprised when a stranger takes genuine interest in them and divines their passions. People are pushed far out of their comfort zone when a seemingly normal interaction elicits a nuclear emotional meltdown. From the manipulator’s perspective, they proceed through life with the upper hand in every social interaction they experience. They leave in their wake bamboozled conversation partners.
Another example is brutal honesty. Those that dish it out live in a world in which they are a font of wisdom whose revelations are so cuttingly true they leave people speechless. Those that receive it often experience individuals who are more interested in brutality than honesty, and are unsure how to react to someone who considers insults favors.
Chaos strategy
In Messy: How to Be Creative and Resilient in a Tidy-Minded World, Tim Hartford relates OODA loops to Trump’s 2016 debate strategy: create chaos to entangle your opponents, who came prepared for order.
OODA stands for Observe-Orient-Decide-Act. 1 It was developed by John Boyd. Boyd believed in social adaptation and described the decision making process as the adaptive mechanism for social organisms. Boyd was a fighter pilot before he was a military strategist, and it showed in his theory- he believed the key to dogfighting was the ability to change speed and direction faster than the opponent. Interpersonally, some referred to him as “Genghis John” for his confrontational conversation style (see: brutal honesty).
Boyd posited that decision-making as a whole was a continuous OODA loop, and that iterating faster than an opponent allows a combatant (he thought of almost everything as combat) to get inside the decision loop of an opponent, and take control of the situation with that advantage.
Hartford applied this reasoning to the way in which Trump manipulated both the news cycle and his debate opponents in 2016- spitting out controversy after controversy faster than the conventional media apparatus was fit to respond to. By the time the op-eds and responses came out two days later, he was already three controversies removed. In this way he was constantly inside the decision loop of his opponents- outmaneuvering them in debate and running loops around a traditional media apparatus that left untruths festering for days.
Strategies that function through the creation of chaos operate on a principle similar to Brandolini’s law, or the bullshit asymmetry principle:
"The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it."
Building is always harder than breaking. Caring about asserting order and truth is a disadvantage when your opponent has no similar concerns.
Toxic Vulnerability
All aggressive vulnerability strategies thrive to some degree on manufactured chaos. Out of all of them, the most insidious is toxic vulnerability.
Do any of the following scenarios sound familiar to you?
An acquaintance tell you about their history of abuse three hours into your relationship.
Someone you consider barely more than a stranger breaks down crying to you.
A new person joins your group and immediately relates a vivid story of their sexual assault.
Someone uses a past trauma as an excuse for current misbehavior.
If you’ve experienced any of this, congratulations, you’re a toxic vulnerability survivor. You may have heard of this behavior in relation to the term “softboi”. The queer community has its own version in the “tenderqueer:”
Typically a queer white hipster who uses identity politics to avoid accountability. Competitive oppression & self victimization. Centralizes themselves and their feelings in social / political movements that aren’t about them.
— Urban Dictionary
Defensive though it may seem, toxic vulnerability is an offensive, diversionary social tactic. Like every other aggressive authenticity technique, it serves as an emotional smokescreen- making a mess of the whole situation so that the bad actor is free to act while you clear things up. The danger of toxic vulnerability is that, like Dale Carnegie’s tactics, it is much more subtle and innocuous than emotional explosions and brutal honesty.
Why might someone do these things? As addressed in the Urban Dictionary entry, good motivators are avoiding accountability and shifting focus to the vulnerable via sympathy. The latter provides insight into the the darker proactive side of toxic vulnerability: people use it as a shortcut to social capital. I’m inherently suspicious of anyone who overshares early because I think they may be trying to fast-track our relationship.
Conclusions, environmental learning
This boils down to learned morality. Upbringing does not change our innate behaviors, it teaches us the correct contexts in which to display them. E.g. killing someone in cold blood is wrong, killing them in self defense is not. Aggressive authenticity strategies are disarming because they display incorrectly placed behavior that toes the line of social acceptability. If one behavior is improperly contextualized, it’s a marker that others are as well.
Willingly disarming others via this method is a form of psychohacking, and it’s generally not kosher. None of the emotions self-provoked in aggressive authenticity techniques are genuine because they’ve been stimulated out of context. Be wary of everything discussed today, especially toxic vulnerability.
The diagram has a little pentagram in it just so you know it was developed by deepstate satanists.