Stoking, gaslighting and other useful terms

A glossary for discussing these times is helpful, especially for our young people.

Credit: https://jodyhorton.com/

Stoking / Stoker

Somebody who makes a mountain out of a molehill, finds division when there isn’t any, etc in order to get power. Often Stokers will create a problem (without people knowing) and then claim to be a solution to that problem. Here are some examples:

• Demonizing the other party
• Using terms like “killing babies”, “pro life” and creating a “Pro Life” vs “Pro Choice” narrative when in reality most people are largely in agreement (e.g. women who have been raped or have a serious medical condition should clearly have the right to have an abortion)

Often stokers are people who have little or no leadership talent, are isolated, emotionally unstable, etc and have to resort to stoking tactics to get power, have a sense of purpose and in some cases survive. Stokers most often really believe in what they’re doing — that’s what makes them so effective.

Gaslighting / Gaslighter

Somebody who uses emotional abuse to control a person or a conversation. Examples:

• A CEO commits fraud and when asked by his CFO about the activity, the CEO will tell the CFO that he is incompetent, nobody likes him, he doesn’t know how to run a business, he’s naive, etc. He may also tell the CFO how powerful he (the CEO is), or threaten to fire him.
• A child asks a teacher an interesting and complex question, and the teacher tells the child that he/she is breaking the rules, speaks too much, etc.
• A child asked their parents a question the parent doesn’t want to hear, and the child is shamed and/or punished.

Gaslighting is one of the most common techniques people use to control others across all aspects of our lives. It’s often inflicted upon children to shut them down emotionally and intellectually early in their life. Gaslighting is so common because it comes so naturally to people, especially when they feel they are backed into a corner or being asked something they don’t want to deal with.

It’s so common and natural, that it ends up being one of the most powerful and useful tools in business and politics as those who use it have been seeing it and/or doing it their whole lives yet are not consciously aware of it’s presence and power. To them, it’s just normal.

Gaslighting is a critical tool for financial success and power for many people. It’s so natural, so effective, and so commonly accepted, that many mediocre people cannot afford to not use it, otherwise they couldn’t compete.

Troll

Somebody who uses techniques such as Stoking and Gaslighting on a regular basis, instead of a more collaborative technique. Trolls are very common on the Internet, because our social media platforms are designed to accelerate troll behavior in order to generate clicks and revenue. Some clever folks use trolling selectively as a conscious tactic, but most trolls do this all the time and are unaware of their behavior and think they know everything and are infallible.

Trolls are one of the key backbones of the amazing financial returns of certain social media networks.

THS — Troll Hypersensitivity Syndrome

A mental illness where a troll/stoker will Cherry Pick points in a person’s social media point in order to criticize, raise the temperature and thus get attention and make the post about themselves. They are not interested in the other person’s opinion and experience, it is only a mechanism for them to get attention.

Usually such trolls are depressed, isolated, angry, and feel like their life has no direction. Unfortunately, they feel like they have no other choice but to troll others or that deserve to do so. They are largely unaware of the wave of hate and vomit they are injecting into the system and the resulting amplification of bad energy and hurting other people indirectly.

Some, however are professional trolls and are only using this technique to get power. However, the most effective professional troll is also one who has THS.

Cherry Picking

As described above, a person who quotes something out of context, cleverly edits a video, picks a little point about another post and focuses demonization activity on that one point, ignoring the other points in the post in order to control the conversation and make it about them, or to discredit the other person. A common tactic is to use Cherry Picking to make other readers believe the person who made the post is exactly the opposite of who they are.

Other terms for cherry picking are “Contextomy” and “Quote Mining”

Demonizing

The process of considering somebody who has a different opinion or agenda from you to be evil instead of another human being who is simply different. The problem is that under certain cultural conditions, Demonization is a very effective tool to get and maintain attention & power. It’s much more powerful than love and logic. The cultural conditions that enable demonization are becoming more prevalent over time (e.g. global economic competition and stress, vapid cultural memes, and technology enabled echo chambers at mass scale).

Demonizing goes all the way back to our prehistoric days when we genetically evolved to demonize those outside our clan in order to naturally protect ourselves against possible threats.

However, we haven’t had enough time to genetically evolve to our new global environment where if we start demonizing entire groups of people, we will eventually cause our own destruction and the environment around us. Some argue that the presence of Demonization is evidence to support one of the Fermi Paradox’s explanations which is that intelligent life will always destroy itself, hence the lack of any evidence of extra terrestrial life.

Echo Chamber

An environment where people believe they are all knowing about the “truth” of the world, and can avoid having to deal with the world’s complexity and understand people who are different from them. Examples are:

• Certain social media environments/platforms
• Circles of friends
• Isolated towns

Other terms are “Media Bubble”, “Internet Bubble”

Echo chambers are extremely powerful and effective tools to galvanize groups across the internet, often with “Conspiracy Theories” in order to give many people meaning in their lives, and/or give them opportunity for power. They also generate a lot of profits for social media platforms as the members of the groups will spend more and more of their time clicking on the platform. They are very similar to drug addiction and certain social media platforms are the drug dealers.

Blame Shifting and Victimhood

It’s infinitely easier to blame others for your problems vs. taking care of them yourself. And it’s often hard for somebody to prove that you are blame shifting, thus it’s very effective.

In addition, blame shifting is a habit that typically starts when one is a child. It’s very common for the punishment that is inflicted upon children to be excessive (e.g. having a different opinion — see “Gaslighting” above). Thus children naturally blame others because that is largely true at the time. When this happens over and over again to a child, they become natural blame shifters in order to protect themselves. Unfortunately, this becomes a habit, and when they enter a more healthy adult environment, they don’t realize this has become their normal mode of operation.

Addiction

Something that:

1. Creates life damaging consequences
2. You want to stop
3. AND you can’t

Examples are:

• Excessive drinking and drugs
• Excessive sex
• Trolling
• Reading conspiracy theories and not listening to anybody else

Addictions typically are caused by a trauma, depression, abuse. They often start as a useful coping mechanism, but once the hell that started it is removed, the psychological effects are still present and the addictive victim oriented coping mechanism becomes the hell.

Confirmation Bias

Wanting to believe something so badly that if you look at 100 facts, you’ll cherry pick the one or two that confirm your belief and ignore the others. Even if others point out the other facts, they are ignored or casually sloughed off.

Most confirmation bias is subconscious, so those practicing it are not aware of what they are doing and really believe their distorted observations. Others (e.g. Marketing & Sales professionals), are totally aware of what they are doing and are using it only as a tactic to further their business interests. However, often professional managers will chose Marketing & Sales people who have a room temperature IQ because such people will typically believe their own lies and will more effective in doing their jobs.

Lip Service & Rhetoric

This is one of most common and nefarious tactics used by business managers and politicians. It’s using Rhetoric (clever use of language) to tell a lie without most people thinking you are lying. A simple example is making a promise, but not providing any specific details on when you are going to do something and how success is going to be measured. When metrics are demanded, simple ones are used like how much money was spent on something, not actually delivering results.

The reason why Lip Service is so effective, is that as children we have a certain innocence that people are basically good. It’s hard to for us to even conceive that adults (most of whom are parents) could possibly be such bold face liars. However, what really makes this nefarious that the lower your intelligence is, the easier it is for you to make lip service, because again you believe your own lies. We live in a very complex world and it’s simply easier to lie by focusing on false metrics. An example is lobbying (I used to be a lobbyist). It’s simply easier to focus on the false metric (looking good with rhetoric) vs. the real metric (making a measurable difference that benefits our country overall). And the rewards are greater. Furthermore, if you focus on the real metrics, you will be ignored, have no power, get nothing done, and eventually get pushed out. If you’re lucky, you’ll get support from a citizen activist group, but that’s a tall order. The problem is explained well with this quote:

Organized greed is more effective than disorganized democracy

Ironically, this will help us avoid a civil war at this time because unlike the Civil War of the 1860’s, there doesn’t appear to be a dominant economic incentive for it right now.

Emotional Intelligence

The term “smart” or “intelligence” is very misleading. There is a big difference between a “smart” person on Jeopardy vs. a “smart” person who is able to grow a business (i.e. knowledge vs. broad skill set and determination).

What’s most important is to understand that humans vast raw intelligence is superseded by one thing:

Our capacity for delusion when it comes to putting ourselves at the center of attention or power

There are many definitions of intelligence. Emotional intelligence is the most important because it tempers our natural inclination to delude ourselves. This includes empathy, considering many options without emotions getting in the way, etc.

That schools don’t teach emotional intelligence is crystal clear. Why they don’t teach is it not clear. Here are examples of possible explanations:

• School is controlled by Corporate America (through lobbying) and they want good worker-bees who don’t think too much and can’t band together
• It’s hard to teach and hard to grade & measure results
• The school system itself isn’t intelligent, and by it’s very nature isn’t capable of teaching something that is outside it’s field of view (eg. like asking a Polar Bear if she would like to take a trip to the moon).

Work for hire

It’s important to always remember that most jobs are 99% work for hire, even if it doesn’t seem that should be the case. For example, we tend to think of politicians as those who are providing service to the country. Nothing could be further from the truth. But this is complex, so let’s dig in a little here:

• Politicians have to spend so much time getting elected and raising money, they really don’t have time to think through much. It’s more important for them to be a good actor. Intelligence, knowledge, integrity are largely irrelevant — they are actually an impediment to getting elected and keeping a relationship with your sponsors.
• Thus the congressional aides do most of the work and have the most knowledge. But similar to the politicians, they self-select to adapt to their environment which is to be very focused on the needs of their corporate sponsors. The details of a bill (eg. will an environmental bill actually help the environment, or education, or what-have-you), are just plain irrelevant.
• Lobbyists are like lawyers. They are paid to do a job. (e.g. a lawyer must represent their client’s interests regardless of what the lawyer personally prefers). The lobbyists work in conjunction with the aides to push for what their sponsors want. The politician is largely irrelevant in this process, they just read scripts, smile, and shake hands. (Every once in a while they get to stand up for something like a attempted coup. It’s hard to lie and obfuscate that).

Thus the whole political system should be viewed as people just doing the job they were hired to do by their customers — big money. The populace are largely irrelevant, they are to be handled with Machiavellian tactics.

Machiavellian tactics

The process of using Rhetoric to to tell the public one thing, but do something else (often the opposite). Some simply refer to this as “lying”. This term comes from Niccolò Machiavelli’s book “The Prince” written in the early 1500’s. The book represent the first time somebody actually wrote down how difficult it is to control large groups of people. People are generally smart as individuals, but herds are stupid. (I wish we could learn from the birds).

This is a term used to describe systematically planned and highly organized efforts to lie to the population in order to govern — using most of the tactics describe herein. There are two schools of though on this:

• There is NO choice: Large groups by their very nature have to be lied to because the people we are governing also use these same tactics of trolling, stoking, gaslighting, etc to put a monkey wrench in the efforts of even the politicians with the most integrity. So everybody has to lie at least a little bit. Better to put those in power who are at least in alignment with the economic health of our nation vs. a bunch of idealistic disorganized people who would cause nothing but chaos despite their best intentions.
• We HAVE a choice: Absolutely power corrupts absolutely, and Machiavellian tactics will be our downfall. But the $64K question is WHO makes this choice. Hint: It’s NOT the politicians, aides and lobbyists.

Decoy

A most common Machiavellian tactic to distract people from the real issues by focusing their emotion energies on a single issue that will absorb huge amount of attention, drain people of their energies, and emotionally lock people into a particular brand (e.g. Democrat, Republican), often for their rest of their lives. A good decoy is something that is a legitimate issue and is complex and sensitive, so when it is hijacked and used as a decoy, it’s like teflon — nobody dares to speak out and say it’s being used as a decoy. They can’t prove it and will most likely be lambasted by cherry picking trolls if they open their mouth (e.g. talking out against the shameless use of the abortion narrative to divide people).

Examples of decoys:

• Abortion
• Gay Marriage
• “Family Values”

Examples of past decoys:

• Capital punishment
• Flag Burning
• Gays in the military

New presidents often use decoys (e.g. George H Bush with Flag Burning and Bill Clinton with Gays in the Military) to make it look like they’re doing something. George W Bush used the decoy of Gay Marriage to get elected in his second term. He had no choice otherwise he would have been a one term president.

And the issues that the decoys are trying to distract us from include:

• Economic policy
• Educational policy
• Politician’s platform
• Politician’s relationship with big business
• The list goes on…

Narrative

We all know what this is, but so many of us are not consciously aware of it. Pretty much all of us have a certain belief about what’s going on in this world based off what we read, what people tell us, what our parents and friends tell us about the world. A narrative is a story that helps us to simplify our concept of the complex world around us. Narrative’s often stay with us for the rest of our lives.

An example is for example that the Democratic party is for the people and the Republic party is (or WAS) about big business. Another competing narrative is that BOTH parties are about big business and most of us, on both sides, are getting hoodwinked. Or that the Democratic party is about big business and the Republic party is about one mans ego. Or that the Republic party is now a warning sign that the Democratic party is largely a tool for the 1% and that almost half of our country is being ruthlessly ignored (Think Walmart effect and globalization) and we need to listen (which few people are doing these days).

I couldn’t possibly know which one of these narratives is really true. But I do know that most narratives are structured as an “Us” vs. “Them”. And that is the crux of the problem, because the real problem is usually a hidden third party.

The 1% machine

We all know the problem of the 1% (1% most wealthy people). Here are the aspects of this that often aren’t clear:

• The 1% has traditionally given money to both parties. They are always buying influence. They are spreading their chips around, they have no ideology other than making as much money as possible and looking good regardless of the facts. They also want to distract the rest of the population and have them fight each other, instead of the 1%.
• A large portion of our Middle Class/Upper Middle Class, supports the 1% directly or indirectly. They really don’t have a choice. They work for the Machine (sometimes referred to as “The Man”), they have huge mortgages and debts, the’ve bought into the narrative about spending $250K+ on an overpriced, bloated, and often useless college education. They also have to buy lots of shiny objects to feel good in order to fill the emptiness caused by working too hard (sound like an addictive vicious cycle?)…

Making any change to this system is very difficult. And if we tried, we might screw the whole thing up and destroy or economy. Or maybe not. Who really knows? I do know that often: The road to hell is paved with good intentions

But at some point, the whole thing is so clearly screwed up, that we have no choice but to at least try. But who is going to run this new operation: Just a bunch of other trolls and gaslighters? Sigh. Capitalism works better than anything else…sort of. And what does socialism really mean….there’s a definition for every person or every subgroup. Another term often used as a decoy.

Plausible Deniability and Asymmetric Returns

The simplest example of this is when the mob boss wants to wack somebody, here’s what happens:

• He calls in his right-hand man and says, “Joey is a pain, take care of it”.
• The right-hand man calls in one of his hit men and has him wack Joey
• The moss boss didn’t specifically ask for Joey to be wacked. He can claim he didn’t know that was going to happen

In the political environment, it’s not as egregious, but the idea is the same. The dumber you are, the easier it is to ask somebody to do something that looks good, when in reality it’s going to be a train wreck often creating the opposite of the stated intention (which is the intention from those above). Most often, any reasonably intelligent person would know the fallacy of the plan, but any such person would typically be marginalized because doing something “right” is much more complicated than just doing it to look good. And when the train-wreck happens, you can just claim you didn’t know — which is many cases is sort of true, because the dumber you are and the more other people are involving you in groupthink the more you can claim this with a clear conscious.

Plausible deniability is a critical tool of the Machiavellian’s practitioner in today’s modern world. So many people use it, you cannot afford to not participate in certain reals. A good example is Wall Street. The idea is to have private gains and public losses. (i.e. take big risks to make money, and if things come crashing down, claim you didn’t know you were over-levered and have the government bail you out).

Obfuscation

This has been indirectly described previously, but it’s the process of hiding important facts by creating confusion with a decoy, gaslighting, etc in order to create plausible deniability to go after something and then if you fail, scurry like a rat with the expectation that your obfuscation will protect you and the blame will fall on somebody else who wasn’t involved in your nefarious schemes.

Worship

Many people equate worship only with religion. But worship is the condition where you believe so strongly in something (anything) that:

• It consumes your life
• It fundamentally drives much of your behavior
• You will do immoral or illegal things in the name of your “god”
• You will follow a creed or set of orders without questioning it, even if it does harm
• You are willing to destroy relationships and people, even your own children over it
• You will not let go, possibly for life
• You recruit other people

People can worship many things, for example:

• Religions, religions symbols
• Money and power (This is a BIG one)
• Demigods (i.e. individuals)
• Organizations
• Social movements, social networking hashtags

People often worship things because they are isolated, their life is empty, they are dealing with a trauma, etc. The problem with worship is that people often view it as a panacea to all their problems, and they are so consumed with it that they can’t live without it. Giving up their “God” would not only leave their life empty, they will feel like a fool to themselves and other people. And the longer it goes on, and the more emotionally intense it is, the harder it is to give it up. Many of the above problems of gaslighting, trolling, cherry picking, demonizing, etc are a result of worship, often by a conman or an organization of conmen, who put the subject into such a horrible state of servitude that the subject burns their bridges and as a result doesn’t receive compassion from the people they love who might otherwise be able to help them recover from the infection.

I hope this was helpful or amusing and thanks for letting me vent!

If you made it this far, cheers and have a good 2021 and please spread positive energy and either let the negative energy dissipate or find the compassion when it’s needed the most (but be careful.)

Love Maria….