The Strongest and Most Current Technique for Manipulating the Masses 🧠
You are familiar with the situation of a clash between mutually exclusive, extreme views, some of which are absurd, but have nevertheless found passionate defenders. Even if they are only speculative and polemical, many views are defended as absolute truth and are drawn into fierce disputes with alternative claims.
💡 Example: During the COVID-19 pandemic, many people saw chips in vaccines, and in the “QAnon” movement in the US, they believe they “discover” hidden truths themselves, while repeating pre-packaged narratives word for word.
The conflicts have different levels. For example, conservatives and liberals seem to see a completely different reality and are outraged by the blindness of their opponents. The funny thing is that both sides in the argument about the truth make mutual accusations that they are defending views that have been instilled in them through manipulation, with evil intentions to mislead and falsify the truth.
Such accusations do not diminish the confidence and passions of the defenders of these absurdities.
The “I Came Up with This” Syndrome 🤔
This is the “I came up with this” syndrome. It is not due to a lack of information or education. Sometimes even educated people fall under the spell of this syndrome.
It involves a self-suggestion that holds us most firmly and cunningly in the trap of our beliefs, even if they are the most backward and wrong views. This self-suggestion is cunning and dangerous because it creates an irrefutable alibi for authenticity and a shield against sound judgment.
The formula “I came up with this” is simple, but it works on several levels at once. It sounds so harmless, so why are we so harsh on it?
The Details 🔬
“I came up with this” means that a certain view occurred to us, that we personally formulated the nuances, the depth, or its evidence. Even if this is not exactly the case, something makes us feel that way.
And it is extremely difficult for a sea of authorities and arguments to shake our “I came up with this”.
Even if we have noticed similar ideas in other people, we are convinced that we are the original source of the idea, because:
- we remember how we ourselves completed the main thought behind the view;
- how we ourselves played it out or launched it;
- we remember how we at least added key elements or even a whole logical chain of our own.
This is enough for us. From then on, there is no way we will allow anyone to convince us that we caught the idea from someone else, that someone is manipulating us by using it to instill in us frivolous, harmful, or wrong public positions.
Almost all people think they are difficult to influence and have a strong character that does not accept every foreign thought lightly and on trust. This conviction is strengthened precisely by the belief that no one has instilled certain ideas in us because we know how and even when we arrived at them ourselves, through persistent reasoning.
Even if we meet other people with our positions, we accept them either as followers or as like-minded people. Nothing can shake our confidence that we have reached these unique reasonings on our own; we sometimes even accept them as our discovery because we have discovered our own path to them and have deeply realized the underlying view.
What Exactly Is Happening? 🤯
“I came up with this” is an incomparably strong manipulative technique and is especially relevant in our time. It is now the primary brainwashing technique in terms of impact. Its philosophy is:
Make a group of people think they are making a discovery themselves; get this target group of yours to complete all the suggested ideas in their heads on their own.
Just start certain reasonings, hint at them, but let people develop them on their own. Start with basic, elementary, repetitive statements, and their imagination and their own stream of thoughts will develop the impulse on their own. Your target group will use the cyclical, underdeveloped, even meaningless phrases as a crutch for almost everything, as a prerequisite and conclusion in many other topics.
Thus, the target group will believe that it is leading and revealing, rather than being led and directed. This way you can hint and suggest without it being understood or realized.
- Many Britons are convinced that they reached the idea of Brexit on their own, despite the multitude of evidence of a funded, targeted media and political campaign with hidden tools and selected messages.
- In Nazi Germany, people believed they understood the “truth” about the menacing enemies of the state themselves, while they were constantly subjected to subliminal or overt systematic suggestion through the media, education, and culture.
- During the Cold War in the Eastern Bloc, citizens were convinced that they were on the good, pacifist side and that their views were the result of personal judgment, not ideological processing.
The method is to only say “A and B” so that your target group finishes the rest of the alphabet on its own, and you do not bear the blame for their “discoveries.” This way, your suggestions will become natural group certainties, even if they are absurd claims.
How Is This Possible? 😱
When something is spoken and thought about for the first time by ourselves, we have already seen the world and its mechanisms in its light, we have completed an entire working cycle that illuminates the problems, it works in reality, even if it is only according to our logic.
The irrefutability and persuasiveness to ourselves come precisely because we believe that we have seen its self-origin, understood and thought out the main thing independently, and have “evidence” that nothing was thrown at us or imposed on us; we discovered it – “I came up with this”.
This is a tragic example of a cruel self-deception. Those affected by the syndrome are the most unwavering defenders of the claim that their opponents, the proponents of the opposite thesis, are the ones who are manipulated, deceived, and processed. Why?
Because those who are subject to the “I came up with this” syndrome already “know and are witnesses” of how they discovered their view themselves, without suggestions, they know how they found the truth with effort while it was unwanted by anyone or simply had not found those capable of seeing it until the arrival of the discoverer – them.
Therefore, they have the right to doubt and accuse their opponents of being subjected to manipulation and lies, because they do not know the inner world of others, nor the history of the conceptual emergence in other people, nor, to put it bluntly, are they so interested in factual comparison and a critical, objective view.
Thus, society is gripped by a cacophony and chaos.
What Is the Antidote to This? 🧪
Step 1: Question Your Views 🧐
The first step, if we have views in a serious public conflict, is to question them – is there anyone who has an interest in influencing society through our extreme, polemical views? Especially if our views are trying to break through some traditionally established understandings.
Step 2: Analyze Your Motivation 🤔
Analyze whether you enjoy the position of being a rebel, an innovator, of opposing some majority or status quo. Do you feel a vain excitement to see yourself as a revolutionary who overcomes difficulties to improve the world and discover some hidden truth?
The danger is not in such feelings in themselves, but in them being an end in themselves and an unconscious motivation. In a democracy, where you cannot be persecuted by the authorities with particularly severe consequences, many are tempted to present themselves to others as part of a rebellious minority of the insightful, while losing their objective attitude toward reality.
Step 3: Carefully Assess the Scientific Consensus 🎓
The third step that is good to take is to carefully assess whether we are defending and echoing views that hinder social development and contradict the claims of the majority of the scientific and highly educated community?
Eccentric scientists and educated, unusual opinions may support us, but this is not confirmation, because eccentricity is very tempting for all kinds of people.
Step 4: Examine the Origin of Your Position 🕵️♂️
We must thoroughly examine the emergence and strengthening of our own position and remember if there were parallel events, statements, or hints that provoked it, precisely when we realized it was our own firm position?
Were there not interested people, political leaders, or influencers who somehow spoke with dissatisfaction about similar things when we discovered clarity and certainty on the topic in ourselves?
Here is the place to mention the phenomenon of cryptomnesia. This is when you have a belief from a “false memory,” in which you believe that you personally created an idea, thought, or joke, but in fact, you had encountered or heard something like it earlier and remembered it unconsciously. When the memory surfaces, there is no feeling that it is a theft, a borrowing, a suggestion, and therefore a person perceives it as their own original creation.
M. Twain tells amusing stories about people who unknowingly plagiarize, convinced that they are the authors of something that has already been invented by someone else.
Step 5: Honestly Weigh Your Interest ⚖️
The fifth step is to honestly weigh whether we have any current or future, real or supposed interest in defending this view?
The interest that binds us to be passionately and persistently involved in the defense of something can be of a material or ideal nature, with a professional, emotional, family, or religious character.
As the American writer Upton Sinclair says:
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
Conclusion 🕊️
The “I came up with this” syndrome is a dangerous and addictive self-deception that radicalizes society and undermines the possibilities for dialogue, tolerance, and bringing understandings closer together. A society made up of many people who are subject to it is at great risk.
With such a syndrome, people do not realize that they are living in an ocean where they are also fish caught in huge nets, precisely while they think of themselves as freely and keenly observing falcons from the heavens.
In fact, we are all susceptible little fish in someone else’s ocean, target groups for some manipulators. And for our own sake and for the interests of society, we must be aware of this, and not insist that this cannot happen to us smart ones…
Author: Ivan Sapundzhiev
