Episode 157 - Manipulation Transcript

[00:00:00] David: Hello and welcome to Overthink.

[00:00:18] Ellie: The podcast where two professors explore the relevance of philosophy to daily life.

[00:00:23] David: I am David Peña Guzmán,

[00:00:25] Ellie: And I'm Ellie Anderson.

[00:00:27] David: As always, for an extended version of this episode, community discussion and more, subscribe to Overthink on Substack. Ellie, today we're doing an episode on a topic that was recommended to us by our listener, Isabella Oliveira Mellows. So we are really excited to be talking about manipulation, which seems to be something people wanna hear about.

[00:00:47] Ellie: Yeah, thank you for the great recommendation, Isabella. I actually wanna start by talking about a book that I first came across in high school. That has had an outsized impact in certain sectors of the public sphere since namely like Manosphere YouTube, let's say, and that is Robert Green's book, the 48 Laws of Power.

Like there are so many videos about this, so many articles written about this.

[00:01:18] David: So many listicles.

[00:01:19] Ellie: Yeah, many listicles. Actually, the book is kind of like a glorified listicle itself

[00:01:24] David: It's a longsticle.

[00:01:26] Ellie: Yeah, no, it's really just a bunch of stories about people who successfully manipulate others and gain power as a result. So I guess a listicle connotes, like short and pithy little entries. This is more, I was gonna say more substantive than that, but I'm actually not sure. It is longer than that,

[00:01:41] David: Yeah, hence the longsticle, since I assume it focuses mostly on men. It's a combination of long and testicle energy.

[00:01:48] Ellie: Oh my god. Sorry, I missed that, David. Alright, so I will say when I was in high school, I found other people very challenging to understand and I didn't quite know how to behave in the world. As you know, many teenagers often feel in particular, I had a lot of unrequited crushes on people, and so I actually first came across Robert Green's work through another book he wrote that's about seduction.

And I basically like tried to model my life after that book to very little success. Let's say. I was curious about this book, 48 Laws of Power. I bought it and then I was just like, what even is this, like this book again? It's just sort of a collection of stories about people who manipulated others and, you know, I did have a moral compass and I found this book like a little bit alarming as a result, but so for those who may or may not be familiar with this book, yeah, he basically in, he basically canvases 48 laws of power mainly through anecdotes and says like this is kind of what you need to learn if you wanna really be powerful in the present day.

So he is kind of a self-styled neo-Machiavelli let's say. And I recently came across his interview with Jordan Peterson where he says that the book's reputation for being a handbook for manipulation is actually wrong because the majority of the laws are not about manipulation, but rather just about common sense ideas about power.

And he even says that he thinks it's manipulative when people describe the book as manipulative. And he says he got the original idea from Nietzsche's will to power, essentially as he describes it, the idea that every organism desires not only itself preservation, but its expansion. So I thought maybe David, we would just open to a random page and have a look at one of the 48 laws of power, and you can tell me whether it's actually an expression of Nietzsche's will to power, or whether it's like straight up manipulation.

[00:03:52] David: Great, and I will want you to just like list one or two apart from whichever one we do a close look at. Because I am curious about all these laws of power that I am unfamiliar with that could come in really handy in my social interactions 'cause I am ready to start manipulating people.

[00:04:08] Ellie: Well maybe we can actually start there and then you can either choose whether you want me to then open to a random page or like you want me to actually just read from one of the chapters.

[00:04:16] David: So give me a few.

[00:04:17] Ellie: Okay. Number one is never outshine the master. Number five is so much depends on reputation. Guide it with your life.

Number 15, crush your enemy totally. Which one should we look at next? Number 30, make your accomplishments seem effortless. And number 26, keep your hands clean.

[00:04:45] David: Ooh, I like 26. Keep your hands clean.

[00:04:49] Ellie: Wait, I'm just browsing through and I have to just add quickly one more, which is number 42, strike the shepherd and the sheep will scatter.

[00:04:56] David: Oh

[00:04:58] Ellie: But so you wanna hear a little bit about 26, keep your hands clean?

[00:05:01] David: Yeah. I like that.

[00:05:03] Ellie: Alright. So one of the weird things about just turning to a random page, I'm realizing is that there's like all of these long stories, which we don't need. So let me say, there's a judgment, just a short, pithy, little takeaway. You must seem a paragon of civility and deficiency. Your hands are never soiled by mistakes and nasty deeds.

Maintain such a spotless appearance by using others as scapegoats and cats paws to disguise your involvement.

[00:05:30] David: Oh my goodness. The animal metaphors I've never heard the expression as cat paw to conceal.

[00:05:37] Ellie: I've actually never heard that either.

[00:05:38] David: Yeah, but I mean, this is so common in the literature on manipulation, the emphasis on appearing a particular way as opposed to the way you really are. A classic philosophical distinction, of course, between appearance and reality.

And the main concern,, is about the instrumentalization of other people, right? Treating other people as means to your ends rather than as ends in themselves like the quintessentially anti-Kantian position.

[00:06:04] Ellie: Yeah. And to that point, the reason we hadn't heard the phrase cat's paw is because it actually comes out of one of the stories that he writes about in this chapter I'm seeing. So there's a fable where the monkey grabs the paw of the cat and uses the cat's paws to fish chestnuts out of the fire. That gives the monkey the nuts he craves, but he doesn't hurt himself.

The cat's paws are the ones that get burned.

[00:06:25] David: wow. Maintain your hands clean and unburned.

[00:06:29] Ellie: Mm-hmm.

[00:06:30] David: Ellie, I'm gonna use your hands to like put them in the fire to get whatever I want moving forward.

[00:06:36] Ellie: Good luck with that, David.

[00:06:37] David: I know, I think my hands have been burned.

[00:06:39] Ellie: I mean, I know, I know your ways. But I think one thing we see from this is that the manipulative person usually is manipulating somebody else, right? They're using that person as a pawn, which you mentioned is sort of anti-Kantian in the sense that Kantian ethics is all about not using people as means, but rather as treating them as ends in themselves.

And yeah, the manipulative person is instrumentalizing others in order to achieve their goals.

[00:07:08] David: So I haven't read this book, the 48 Laws of Power, but I actually have a lot of experience with it because as you know, Ellie, I worked in a bookstore when I was in undergrad and we sold both of the books. And it's really funny 'cause I remember that the people who bought that book, the second one the most, were always new, like freshly minted, business majors who are like these, like 19 year olds wearing suits.

And I feel like it still gives that energy very much. I also wanna point out that I suspect there is very little consideration of the consistency of the 48 loss of power as a system because they seem contradictory, right? You just read a couple, but I noticed that two of the ones that you mentioned don't jive very well.

One of them, law number one was something like you can never outshine your master, right? So be subservient to those above you. Show deference and maybe respect to those who have more power than you. But then rule or law number 15 was crush your enemy totally. And what happens when your enemy is your master, which is usually the case if you have a master.

[00:08:17] Ellie: You can't outshine them while they're your master. Right? And this goes back to the central idea of the book, which is that you can't be too overt in your power moves because if you do, you will be excluded from power. And that's where manipulation comes in.

[00:08:34] David: Today we are talking about manipulation.

[00:08:37] Ellie: What does it mean to manipulate something or somebody,

[00:08:41] David: How do strategies of persuasion lead people to do things that aren't in their best interest?

[00:08:47] Ellie: And how can we resist being manipulated by others?

[00:08:57] David: I want to begin as we often maybe all too often do here on overthink with the etymology of the term manipulate. The word manipulate comes from the Latin manipulis, meaning handful, which is a combination of Manus, meaning hand and implere, which means to fill. So it's a reference to handling objects inside the palm of your hand, maybe because of the peculiarities of the evolution of the human hand.

You know, the fact that we have fingers that have, we have an opposable thumb, and so we have this skill that a lot of other animals don't have of performing highly sophisticated, detailed movements that allow us to manipulate the natural world. And so the idea is that in manipulating objects, we use those objects to achieve our ends.

[00:09:50] Ellie: Yeah, and the opposable thumbs mention is really interesting, David, because that shows. On a physical level that humans are manipulative creatures, right? We can grab a handful of something in a much easier fashion than most other animals because of our opposable thumbs. I wanna just mention that because in a moment we'll come back to the ways that humans are manipulative in less obvious fashions.

So when we think about manipulation, we mentioned a little bit ago in talking about the Green Book, that we tend to think about it as people manipulating other people. But as you've just mentioned, it is technically much broader than that. And so we might think about manipulation just, as a simple handling of things, but also manipulation can be thought of in other sorts of ways, like the manipulation of a natural forces.

This is essentially what magic is. Manipulation of natural forces, right? You might think of harnessing the wind or harnessing gravity or whatever it might be. This is also how something that, you know involves its own kind of magical thinking is said to work, and that is manifestation. Manifestation being this kind of popular pseudo-psychological idea associated with the law of attraction that you get what you put into the world.

And I have a lot to say about manifestation. I've been trying to get David to do a manifestation episode for years, but he is not as LA pilled as I am, and so he just doesn't think it's a particularly important topic to discuss.

[00:11:23] David: Well, you got one of your manis. You don't get manifestation, but you do get

[00:11:27] Ellie: manipulation. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:11:28] David: Count your blessings, Ellie.

[00:11:30] Ellie: But basically manifestation, if you're not as LA pilled as I am, is the sort of belief that what you envision, what kinds of thoughts you have, what sort of energy you cultivate, determines what you're going to receive, whether that's like a beautiful apartment that you desire or financial success and so on and so forth.

And it was particularly popularized in sort of previous form, this law of attraction form through the very popular book The Secret. So we've gone from like the Robert Green Stoicism Bros 48 Laws of Power to the La Maha Girlies' passion for Manifestation. Some people might say that focusing only on the manipulation of other people is an example of a sort of narrow idea about the natural world that we tend to have today, A modern disenchantment of the natural world. We are going to follow that. In this episode, we will be focusing specifically on interpersonal manipulation. Maybe we have taken too seriously the modern disenchantment of the world, but I think there's just already so much to say about how we manipulate other people that we will be leaving that aside punting, perhaps magic, if not manifestation for another time.

[00:12:49] David: Yeah, and it's because otherwise this episode would blow up. It would have no boundaries, right? There are so many ways in which we manipulate things. You mentioned manifestation and magic. I mean, science is how we also manipulate the natural world.

[00:13:01] Ellie: Well, we actually manipulate the natural word through science. Whether we effectively do so through magic or manifestation is a story for another time.

[00:13:08] David: Yeah, but I have to say that even if we stick to interpersonal manipulation, which is what interests philosophers and psychologists who work in this domain, it turns out that the concept is still really broad and there's a lot of disagreement about how to put parameters around it. So most people agree that manipulation can be defined as a form of exerting influence on others for the sake of our own advantage and for pursuing our self-interest.

Like at base interpersonal manipulation is that, but how broadly does that definition really apply? Because once you take that definition, literally it applies to a lot more than just, the art of seduction and the 48 laws of power.

[00:13:54] Ellie: Yeah, I mean, it seems like we're exerting influence on others to our advantage in a sense. All the time. And so one thing we see here is manipulation is not defined based on your intention, right? But I think a lot of times when we think about manipulation in colloquial context, we do associate it with intentions slightly narrower than the definition that you just gave, but still quite broad is the definition of the scholar, Douglas Parker, who describes manipulation as any attempt to influence a person or audience to adhere to your view or adjust their feelings, wishes and attitudes. So here we have a bit more of a mental content around manipulation than just like exerting influence on others to our own advantage. We're thinking here about views, feelings, wishes, and attitudes.

But, it still seems hard to say on this definition that all human relationships aren't in some way manipulative, and if that's the case, we would just have to say manipulation is neither good nor bad. It's rather an ethically neutral feature of social life because we're always attempting to influence each other through a huge variety of techniques.

This definition would include everything from the wielding of political power, kind of the cat's paw type of approach to politics that we got with Green, as well as physical force to the fact that when we're deciding on an episode, David, I'm gonna try and convince you to do a episode on such and such a topic, right?

[00:15:23] David: Yeah, so you can see how on this view we are, as you said earlier, manipulative creatures through and through. You know, maybe we should go back to the biology and evolutionary theory textbooks and redefine humans as homo manipulatus, going back to the root. And I have to say that although I do prefer precise and maybe narrower definition in this case, there is something really appealing for me about this broad understanding of manipulation that has to do with altering the world view of one another, that has to do with epistemology and with internal mental states. Because there are a lot of ways in which we are indeed manipulated that, again, don't fit the typical image we have of interpersonal manipulation, right? So think about advertisement, think about propaganda. Think about something I've been reading about recently, hypnosis, right?

When you enter into a hypnotic state and you are fully under the manipulative control of an analyst, perhaps like to the highest degree that you can be manipulated, right? Where your behaviors are not under your willful rational control. Or on a more subtle end, think about the phenomenon that's been quite common in behavioral economics in the last like 20 years, which is nudging, which is when you basically make certain options more appealing in ways that are not obvious in order for people to choose them and think that it was their choice. So like when companies pay a lot more money to put their products at eye level in the supermarket, because we know just from research on human psychology that people are more likely to choose the toothpaste that's like right in front of their eyes rather than the one that's a little bit below.

And so are we being manipulated or are we being nudged? And is there a difference between those? And so there is this whole space of intersubjective interaction that I do think merits the term manipulation, which is where I do want to save some space for a broad and maybe less precise definition. 'cause I think it reflects the phenomenon.

[00:17:29] Ellie: Now, I want an evolutionary psychology book that draws just a clear line between our opposable thumbs and the advertisements and a phenomenon of nudging. It is just like homo manipulatus. This is like, it all comes from the opposable thumbs.

[00:17:46] David: Yeah. And the cover for that is just like a thumbs up, you know? Like that captures the overlap

[00:17:51] Ellie: No, I think it's like grabbing a handful of something. But anyway, we'll leave that aside. And when we're thinking about it back on the level of discourse as well, every time a politician gives a speech, every time a child tries to convince their parents that they really need to adopt a dog, there are some elements of rhetorical manipulation being used.

And so I'm not sure that philosophers get a full pass here, but, you know, well, that's maybe a topic for another time

[00:18:19] David: yeah. No, but I also wanna remind us all that this is based on a very broad definition of manipulation as interpersonal influence and psychologists who work on manipulation often operate with a much narrower definition because they do want to pick out those individuals that are, you know, like particularly manipulative, right?

To be a manipulative personality is not just to be like a child who wants a dog, because then we're all manipulators in the technical sense, and that

[00:18:49] Ellie: Except for the philosophers. Yeah. That way of construing the distinction not particularly helpful in the, you know, in everyday life.

[00:18:56] David: And so if we want to do something that is interesting in our analysis of manipulation, we have to be able to separate what is the, the expression, the wheat from the chaff, is that the agricultural reference? In this regard, I read a book called In Sheep's Clothing Understanding and Dealing with Manipulative People by the psychologist George Simon.

This is a book from the 1990s,

[00:19:21] Ellie: The manipulators love to talk about sheep. We had that sheep chapter the Green book too.

[00:19:25] David: Yeah, I told you a lot of animal references, and also a lot of references as we will see in Machiavelli, but that's neither here nor there

[00:19:32] Ellie: Perhaps ironic, because we have said that what might distinguish us from non-human animals is our capacity for manipulation.

[00:19:38] David: That's true. And so Simon specifically says that we need to differentiate manipulators from even other people that are traditionally associated with manipulators, or that we think are manipulators, but really aren't like passive aggressive people, sociopaths, perverse characters. And he has a definition of manipulation that I really, really like.

And that is that manipulators are people who are constantly engaged in acts of what he calls covert aggression. So a manipulator is somebody who is always battling it out with other people. So every social interaction for them is a competition that they have to win independently of what the interaction is.

But the problem is that they don't want to reveal that they are approaching the interaction in combative terms, and so they actively conceal the fact that they're actually fighting with you when they interact with you. And what this translates into interpersonally is a situation where some people think that they're in a battle and other people don't know that they're in a battle.

And so the manipulator is somebody who ends up fighting dirty and using hidden tricks, which is why the phenomenology of being manipulated is always a retroactive realization. It's like, oh my gosh, you've been doing this to me this whole time. I didn't realize that that's the kind of interaction we were having.

[00:21:06] Ellie: totally. That can be such a disorienting experience. You mentioned covert aggression, and I think I'm struggling to understand how that's different from passive aggression, not knowing the technical differences between the two.

[00:21:19] David: Yeah, because the passive aggressiveness is not as aggressive as manipulation, and the passive aggressive person will let you know that they're fighting with you, just that they don't want to confront it in the flesh, right? Like they'll leave a post-it note for you to read about their feelings. Whereas the manipulator is actively trying to conceal, they're trying to manipulate that dimension of appearance that we talked about earlier.

So they don't want you to know that they're mad at you, but they will do things behind your back to get back at you and pull the rule over your eyes. And that's one of the difference between the manipulator and the passive aggressive,

[00:21:57] Ellie: I have a lot of faults, but I don't think this is one of them. I think I just like, don't really, at least on this definition, have a manipulative bone in my body. Like, for better or for worse, people know where they stand with me.

[00:22:08] David: I mean, I would say that's for better. Ellie not, not like, oh, is it good? Is it bad?

[00:22:13] Ellie: Well, I have sometimes been accused of not having sufficient tact, but

[00:22:17] David: Well, that is also true, but I think that's why we're such good friends. 'cause I think both of us are direct and we don't conceal a lot. The real important question theoretically here is then what are the characteristics of that manipulative personality that is not the passive aggressive, that is not the sociopath, so on and so forth.

In this book, Simon talks about a number of features that define this personality type. These include self-centered thinking, excessive confidence, a desire to always be on top. So everything is about winning and losing. A lack of guilt over the methods that they employ in order to win an active disdain for those that they perceive to be on the bottom.

I found this really interesting that the manipulator, despises, quote unquote, losers, just losers in life, losers in the market, losers in politics independently of who they are, they become despicable by virtue of not having won. And in the end, all of this adds up to a combo of egomania and aggression towards others, and that's the core of the manipulative personality.

[00:23:29] Ellie: This is really interesting to hear about the aggressive tendencies of manipulators while specifying that what is unique about them is the mode of fighting, which is covert. Because certainly when we get to actual Machiavelli, we will see that something similar is at work there, which I'm sure is not coincidental.

It's like Machiavelli kind of wrote the book on manipulation and if we apply this to something like the realm of intimate relationships, you know, there are certainly. Abusive partners whose abuse is overt, right? They're overtly aggressive, especially if we're thinking about things like physical abuse.

But there can also be this sort of covert aggression, which would be that of the manipulating partner. That's the mode that they're using, right? And this is why manipulators are less likely to rely on physical violence and more on covert tactics, such as lying, denial, what we now call gaslighting. We have our whole episode about that kind of rationalization because then they can really cover their tracks, which is very important for the manipulator because like you said, their aggression has to be covert in order for it to be manipulative, in order for it to succeed and even count.

[00:24:38] David: Yeah, and Simon has a lot to say actually about some of the things that you mentioned, like the reliance on lying, the rationalization. You know, there's always a reason why they did the things that they did, and they're never at fault. And he has a long list of these features of the manipulative personality, but it also includes some other ones that we haven't yet talked about.

And I just wanna make sure that we cover them because they do illuminate how manipulation rears its head, not just in intimate relationships, but in other aspects of our interpersonal lives. So think about the strategy of feigning ignorance, where it's like, oh, I didn't know that I was doing this this whole time.

It's your fault for not having informed me. So I could have changed my behavior sooner. Or think also about feigned confusion. You know, when you raise a concern with a friend or with a parent or with a lover, they're like, oh, I just don't really understand what you're saying. Sorry, that is manipulative, and it's something that. He says, we see in psychological studies of manipulative characters.

Another one is branding anger. So the first time that you have a run in with another person, they will be explosive in their anger, a kind of disproportionate expression of anger, because they're hoping that down the road you'll be afraid of that disproportionate reaction.

Right? I think this happens a lot in relationships between men and women in an intimate setting.

George Simon, the psychologist whose work on manipulation I mentioned earlier, makes the observation that living with a manipulator can be extremely difficult and resisting their manipulation can be even harder. Now, the reason for that is because our tactics usually are covered rather than overt. We don't see them coming.

They are subtle, so you can't really interpret them well, and because of that, they're also really difficult to call out even when you become aware of them. Right? He says you can never point to concrete examples as clear evidence when you're dealing with a manipulator because they will always say, that thing that I did is not what you think it was.

You are just interpreting it in that way because it was, you know, clouded and hidden and behind all sorts of veils.

[00:26:55] Ellie: Yeah, and in moving here back to the interpersonal domain, away from the political domain that Machiavelli is talking about, because as you noted, David, Machiavelli is not writing about how to manipulate people in intimate relationships. He's writing about how to manipulate people from a state level and whether or not you agree with his politics.

We can say that there is definitely something amiss when we try and adopt his approach to intimate relationships, unless you like really go all in on the idea that love is war, which I might encourage us not to do. Something I'm wondering about here, and this is also something that came up in our gaslighting episode, is whether or not this requires intention on the part of the manipulator.

And so I guess I'm just wondering like does the manipulator need to be aware of what they're doing? Do they need to be aware of the way that they're viewing a relationship as warlike, as combative, or can this just be a sort of unconscious set of patterns that people carry out?

[00:27:55] David: I see. So it depends on, I wasn't sure where your question was heading because when you said, is it, are they aware that they are manipulating? So obviously you are aware that you are trying to manipulate somebody when you do something and then hide it, right? The hiding and the covertness it, the lying and the prevaricating indicates awareness.

Now, the second version of your question is, are they aware that that's how they approach interpersonal relationships? That's a little bit more tricky because one of the things that came up in my research on the psychological end of things is that most manipulators don't take themselves to be fighting against people who are not fighting against them.

They see all social interaction as combative, and so they think that other people are trying to manipulate them, and so they're just defending themselves. And in fact, it goes even further than that because in surveys of the attitudes of manipulators, most of them see themselves as the victims of circumstance, as like the play thing of circumstance.

They think that they have drawn the short end of the stick and that they find themselves in these unfortunate situations where they have no option but to be like that. And so that could point to, you know, problems in childhood, traumatic experiences. There's a lot of debate about how much manipulative personality is a result of like early childhood experiences versus not.

But it is clear that they wouldn't be aware that they are seeing the interaction differently than the other person. They think we both agree that we're fighting. I'm just trying to fight better than you, which is why I hide it and because I hide it, I tend to win.

[00:29:49] Ellie: What a way to live. That's really tough. I'm trying to think. We mentioned earlier that we don't think that we are manipulators,

[00:29:58] David: That's how good we are at hiding it.

[00:29:58] Ellie: Right. But I'm trying to think about other people I've met and whether I would consider them manipulative or not. I actually don't think I've been in a really, really close relationship with somebody who meets these criteria. I don't know. How about you? Like I mean, other, other psychopathologies Sure. Or other vices, depending on how we're defining it, but

[00:30:20] David: I mean, I've had friendships for sure where there has been a tendency to conceal and sometimes a tit for tat kind of competitive spirit that seems out of place.

[00:30:32] Ellie: Ooh, is this anybody I know?

[00:30:35] David: Maybe, no comment. But, the point here being that I think, you know, there's a whole spectrum of manipulation that has a lot of gray areas.

And so I do think we should have some sympathy for people who are manipulators to some extent, because they do experience the social world as a constant source of stress. And they experience, especially human contact and human interaction as something that gears them up for battle. And so there is no sense of rest, no sense of peace.

Much like Machiavelli's the Prince who must think about war, especially in times of peace.

[00:31:12] Ellie: Yeah, and I think what you're saying there suggests that even if manipulation is intentional in the sense that you have to be aware of your aggression in order to keep it hidden, it might not be intentional in the sense of wanting to be like mean or evil to somebody wanting to inflict a kind of unfair punishment on somebody.

And so of course then we can say, well, yeah, but the intent is not the impact. And the impact is negative thing.

[00:31:40] David: But, now going back to the question of why we are vulnerable to this kind of manipulative predation, you know, part of it is the manipulator themselves. Like they're very smart and they are very good at what they do and they beat us with experience, you know, 'cause they've been manipulating for a long time.

But Simon points out that part of the problem is also us, the quote unquote victims of the manipulators. Because most of us tend to have certain views about human nature that make us easy pickings for seasoned manipulators. And one of these views is this idea that you often hear, you know, when I think you especially find it in intimate relationships, when you find out that your partner is a manipulator.

Often we tell ourselves, well, the reason that they're a manipulator is because they're deep down a good person, but they're in so much pain and suffering for whatever reason, you know, because of what happened to them or because of the hand of cards that was given to them at the beginning of their lives.

And as a result, we justify their comportment. And moreover, we convince ourselves that if we individually love them the right way, support them the right way and learn not to trigger their manipulative outbursts, maybe we could fix them.

And so he says that is a death sentence really, for people in close relationships with manipulators.

Whether that is an intimate relationship, a family relationship, a business relationship, or some other kind of relationship that's important for your wellbeing.

[00:33:14] Ellie: And when you first use the phrase manipulative outbursts, just then, I first had the thought, well, isn't that in contradiction with the fact that these strategies are covert? But actually, I think a lot of manipulative behavior can constitute outbursts. It's just that the aggression there is covert, right?

It could be an outburst of sort of self victimization or suggesting that the other person has wronged you. And it actually is very aggressive, but doesn't appear as such.

[00:33:42] David: Or an outburst of seduction, you know? Or an outburst. Well, yeah. Like outburst of seduction or an outburst

[00:33:48] Ellie: Sorry, outbursts of seduction just sounds kind of silly, but I'm not trying to minimize the severity and intensity

[00:33:54] David: Yeah. No, the thing about manipulation is that what is hidden is not the behavior, but is the function of the behavior, right? Like, I could shower you with love, but the function is for you to do what I want, right? So there's a difference between the thing and what it's supposed to achieve.

Now the question then becomes, what can you do when you find yourself and your life entangled without of a manipulator? And George Simon gives some concrete advice for how to think about this. He says, the first thing that you have to do if you are living with a manipulator is you have to become a better judge of character.

And that means you have to stop doing something that maybe you've been doing for a long time, which is learning to actively overlook, quote unquote minor red flags where you see something, and then you tell yourself, it's not a big deal. I'll let it go. And you do that over and over again. And he says, you need to start putting those dots together. And interpret them in light of what they tell you about the character of the person that you're with. So that's one.

A second is not about the other person, it's about yourself. And that is you need to know yourself better. You know, maybe going back to that ancient Greek motto, philosopher, know thyself. What is it about you that attracted this person? What is it about your patterns, your judgment, your tendencies or dispositions that maybe contributed to making you an easy target? It's not that it's your fault, it's just that maybe you have certain aspects to your personality that made that manipulator really go after you.

Are you hyper empathic? Are you somewhat gullible and naive? Do you have low self-confidence? Do you tend to be emotionally dependent? And that can be really difficult to confront about ourselves, but you won't be able to disentangle your life from these manipulators until you take a sober look in the mirror and, you know, again, that sounds like victim blaming, but it's not.

It's trying to figure out if there are aspects to your personality that are increasing your vulnerability to this kind of social predation.

[00:36:16] Ellie: Sorry. Now I'm just thinking about, I might wanna take back my answer that I haven't been close to a manipulator now as I'm hearing more and more about this. It can be really hard though, to know, I think I'm still getting hung up on the question of to what extent they need to know what they're doing which is again something that we were thinking a lot about when we touched on gaslighting now years ago, and I just still feel like I haven't quite sorted out. Okay. So becoming a better judge of character, that's the sort of like figure out who they are, type of approach. Then there's knowing yourself better.

That's a figure out who you are type of approach.

[00:36:56] David: Yeah.

[00:36:57] Ellie: And what's the third one?

[00:36:58] David: The third one is between you and them, and that is learn how to change your mode of relating to them. As he says, put your energy where your power is, and that means learning how to call out problematic behavior when it appears. But that can be really difficult because the manipulator is really good with words, is really good at appearance rather than reality.

And so Simon says, when you're sure that you've noticed a pattern, never accept an excuse no matter what it is. Never judge the intention. Always only judge the behavior, you know, because the intention is very difficult to assess and finally set very clear limits and make very clear demands about how you want to move forward and do not accept anything less than clear answers from a manipulator.

So, you know, like he gives the example of like a couple where the manipulator manipulates their romantic partner by constantly talking to their mother about them and changing the mother's perception of what's happening. And so if you're the person on the other side, you have to just say, from here on out, you may not speak to my mother without me, period.

No excuses, no exceptions. Also, he gives the example of somebody saying, you may not read my diary. You need to stop doing that. There is no situation in which this can happen. And so it's about establishing boundaries.

[00:38:26] Ellie: Okay. This is reminding me of something very different, but that I looked it in preparation for this episode, and that is an edited volume called the Philosophy of Online Manipulation. And although it's about something totally different, namely online manipulation, especially in political online spaces, the reason that it came to mind for me here is because strikingly absent from what you just said, is the idea that in this third strategy of setting better boundaries with the manipulator, et cetera, et cetera, I would also wonder like under what circumstances we should just cut off contact with the manipulator altogether, of course. What wasn't part of that is confronting the manipulator about their own manipulation, and I think already a rationale for why that might not be so helpful is implicit in something you said even earlier, which is about how manipulators are always gonna deny their manipulative tactics and, Anne Barnhill, who has an article in this book on the philosophy of online manipulation, says something similar about manipulation online.

She says one of the great things that philosophy can do is help give us tools for being able to recognize manipulation, including in online spaces, whether, you know, I'm, I'm thinking about like propaganda and the political sphere or whatever it might be. But she says that attacking manipulation head on is not effective.

They just don't do much work and that means that actually for her, we shouldn't even worry that much about drawing the line of what counts as manipulation or not. We should instead ask what the concerns are behind any given charge of manipulation that ultimately then leads her to advocate a systems view of manipulation, thinking about how manipulation works not just at the individual level, but at the system level through like democracy, public opinion, et cetera. And that while far afield of what we're talking about, I think does, just kind of interestingly connect to the extent that it seems like whether we're talking about online political manipulation or manipulation in intimate partnerships, directly accusing someone of manipulation isn't gonna get us very far.

[00:40:39] David: Yes. And that's why, and it's partly because manipulation is both a behavior and an intent. And if you accuse somebody of being a manipulator, they feel as if their intentions are being called into question and they feel cornered. And for a manipulator who sees everything as a battle, being cornered is the absolutely worst case scenario.

And that's what can lead to a really unideal slash dangerous reaction from them. And so in the case of Simon, that's why he says you, you need to focus on the behaviors that you're pointing out on the behaviors that you want corrected, and in particular on establishing those clear boundaries, which I think we're so bad at.

You know, all of us, even those of us who think that we're good at establishing boundaries, are not actually that good. And I think that's true both in like IRL spaces and also in online spaces. Although, of course, online spaces raise all kinds of difficulties, you know, partly because of the anonymity of these spaces, partly because it's not a one-on-one, partly because the rules for appropriate engagement are not entirely clear, we don't know what is appropriate and not appropriate in these environments. But I do agree that calling out a manipulator, a manipulator can be quite risky. And that's why it's so hard to live

with one.

[00:42:02] Ellie: The time has come to talk about the most famous text about manipulation in the history of philosophy, and that is Niccolo Machiavelli's book, the Prince.

[00:42:13] David: Not the Italian accent. No.

[00:42:16] Ellie: Get ready for it. I'm gonna be doing a lot of accent al Italiano today in the episode, we need to lighten the topic a little bit. Okay. So Machiavelli, 16th century Italian diplomat and philosopher.

This text was published after his death in 1532 and was written, it was dedicated to Loren Lorenzo de' Medici, the famous member of the Medici family who is in power during this time. This was a time of warring city states, tons of drama in Italy and Machiavelli's book, which yes, was only posthumously published, is basically a guide to state craft that has come to be known as manipulative, to the point that Machiavellian is pretty much a synonym for manipulative, for reasons.

So we will start talking about those reasons today.

[00:43:10] David: Even though as we will show, I hope it's quite a nuanced treatment of statecraft politics and power.

[00:43:19] Ellie: And also even Machiavelli scholars will say, and perhaps above all Machiavelli scholars will say, Machiavelli himself doesn't seem to have been Machiavellian. And like the introduction to the Chicago Edition of the Prince, which I'm using for this episode, specifies that a lot of Machiavelli scholars find themselves having to be kind of apologists for the man.

[00:43:38] David: Well, you know, at some point I considered writing a dissertation on Machiavelli and Hobbes together, 'cause I thought I was going to become a full-time political philosopher. I moved in a different direction, but one of my interests was to compare the Machiavelli that has become the most public image of the man from this book, the Prince versus the Machiavelli that we find in other published texts.

[00:43:59] Ellie: Oh my God, I didn't know that. So it's almost like we have an expert here, except that you

didn't actually become an expert on that topic.

[00:44:06] David: Yes, but I'm about to manipulate my way through. No, but I wanna begin just with a little bit of a warning about how we ought to read this book, because a lot of people have read Machiavelli's The Prince, as if it were a work of psychology, like a description of the way the human mind works, and a description of human nature or as a work of ethics that's a sort of defense of the most manipulative strategies for dealing with other people and advancing one's own goals. And that's not quite right.

For starters, this is a book, as you said, Ellie, about statecraft. It's about how rulers should rule in order to be good rulers. And of course, the highest objective in government is to maintain power, right? The worst thing that can happen to a king or a prince or a president is if the political entity that they're governing collapses while they're at the top. And so this is a work about political strategizing and about how to maintain the integrity of the republic really, or the city state, or whatever political unit we're dealing with.

And that might require those who are at the top of the political chain to learn. And this is an important word, as Machiavelli says, those at the top of power must learn how to be bad. And so he takes himself to be educating rulers on how to rule, which is why he's basically positioning himself in this book as the advisor to a ruler.

[00:45:38] Ellie: Okay. Yeah. So I wanna lay a few things out that then will culminate in a return to your point now that the ruler needs to learn how to be bad. So one of the things that really struck me upon rereading this text in preparation for this episode is Machiavelli's claim that a prince's soul art and object is war.

The art of war is what a prince really needs to concern themselves with. Machiavelli basically thinks that. A prince needs to be armed, otherwise they're contemptible.

And so he's conceiving of political power in pretty literal terms of your ability to wage and wage war and be victorious. And he says that the art of war especially has to be practiced during times of peace. And they do that through reading histories of battles, through reading the stories of previous rulers who've been victorious and so on and so forth.

So that's a sort of background. I wanna then say something about why the prince whose object is war, whose art is war, shouldn't be good. And the reason for that is basically the consolidation and preservation of their power to be good is not necessarily to be powerful. He doesn't go so far, at least in my reading of it, I'm curious what you think, David, but as to equate goodness with weakness, it's rather just that goodness doesn't bear a direct relation to power. And so the Prince, in order to achieve their objectives, has to give the appearance of having virtues, but it actually doesn't really matter whether they're virtuous or not.

And so I would say maybe he even equivocates on whether or not it matters that the prince has virtues versus like whether they should actually. Not be virtuous, but be bad. There's definitely places in the text where he verges on that second point, and so I think you're right to point that out. But there's also places where he is like, yeah, actually, you could have the virtue.

Just sort of be careful with it.

[00:47:41] David: So let me begin with your first point about always being sort of like in a mental state of preparation for war, because this puts Machiavelli in very close dialogue with the contemporary psychological research on manipulation, right? Especially the work that I mentioned that defines a manipulator as somebody who is covertly fighting, fighting all the time, even when there is no battle.

And so the prince must always think about war, as you pointed out, especially in times of peace. So there is no rest for those whose head bears the crown. And that means that their interactions with their subjects with other leaders is always mediated by the possibility and sort of like the inevitability of conflict.

So that's what makes manipulations so important because the wheels are always turning now concerning whether the prince is virtuous or not virtuous, or learns not to be virtuous. Part of the difficulty here is that the Italian word for virtù is practically untranslatable into English. Now it can be translated as virtue, and that is how it's almost universally translated.

The problem is that in English, the word virtue has a uniquely moral connotation, right? Virtues are always good, but in fact, Machiavelli is using the term virtue almost in its Greek sense. So the Greeks use the term arete for virtue.

[00:49:09] Ellie: And then that goes into Latin as virtus, and then that is what we have in Italian where we get the  Italian.

[00:49:15] David: And in the Greek, the term can refer to the virtues of a good person, but it really means being good at the function that you're supposed to perform. So the Greeks would say, this pen has the arete, the virtue of a pen. If it writes well, a knife is virtuous if it cuts well.

And so when Machiavelli is invoking virtue, he's invoking it in this kind of dual sense of moral virtues that are appearances that you project to others as well as you being efficacious at fulfilling the role that's expected of you. And so the king is virtuous to the extent that the king is kingly, and that means maintaining and consolidating power.

[00:50:00] Ellie: I was looking for a passage in chapter 19 where Machiavelli says that a prince has to take great care to appear to have five different qualities, mercy, faith, honesty, humanity, and religion.

But, it really just needs to be an appearance of that, right? And so you have to have the ability to give off that impression, but it doesn't actually really matter that you have them. Then he does go a bit further and he says, well, actually I dare say that by having them and always observing them, they are harmful. Whereas by appearing to have them, they are useful. There is this ultimate requirement for a prince to measure any virtue that they might have virtue, as we usually understand it, against the standard of utility for their own function or role.

[00:50:54] David: Yeah. And I think what is happening here is an inverse of the metaphysical hierarchy between appearance and reality. Philosophers will always say reality is better than appearance. Appearance is at one removed. It's, you know, this kind of like echo of reality. And Machiavelli is saying that might be true except in the realm of governance.

Because what do we expect of a leader? We want a leader to hold it together, right? To hold the state in place. And what you need for that is the appearance of being virtuous, not the possession of virtue, however you define that. And so that's why he says the worst thing for the prince is to be hated and despised because that's how you create rebellion. That's how you create revolt. There is a sudden threat to the integrity of the community.

And in order to avoid that, you should be willing to do things like delegate responsibility for unpopular actions. You should take credit for good things that you didn't do, not because you're a bad person, but that's because that's your job as leader.

It is to put up a front, and that's why government is fundamentally different. Maybe from like general human psychology, it's different from morality, it's different from many other things where, you know, many of us would say, Ugh, this sounds really rough. And there is no sense in Machiavelli that he wants to extend it beyond this particular domain.

And that's where he introduces those animal metaphors that earlier I alluded to where he says, look, humans typically interact with one another vis-a-vis rules. Animals don't have law. And in a way, the ruler is more like an animal than a human because the ruler has to sort of act by the laws of nature, and it has to be in this constant state of war, which is what on his view, animals are always doing. It's kill or be killed.

And specifically he says in chapter 18 that a good ruler should be like two animals at once. He should be like a fox in the sense that he has to be lying and cunning and manipulative and must be able to navigate that fine line between appearing X and being X. But at the same time, he must also be like a lion, and he must have the force and the brutality and just like the savage ness of a top predator.

But he has to be a lion. That is also a fox, insofar as it's a lion that can conceals its own power. So it's like a lion hidden inside a fox that is like pretending to be a sheep.

[00:53:38] Ellie: Yeah, absolutely. And lemme just clarify, David, so you said that. Machiavelli thinks that the prince has to use their animal power more than their humanity.

[00:53:49] David: That at bottom, the, the ruler must remember that the role requires them to be animals.

[00:53:57] Ellie: Because I think Machiavelli is still a humanist. He thinks that what humans have that non-human animals don't is law. So he described in chapter 18 there being two kinds of combat. One with laws, the other with force. And laws are proper to man and force is proper to beasts. But, and I think this coheres with what you were saying, because the first is often not enough, he suggests one must have recourse to the second. So ideally we can war just through laws, but when that fails, then we have recourse to our status as beasts.

[00:54:31] David: Of course. But I would say now, you know, putting on my hat as philosopher and interpreter that this actually put some pressure on his humanism. That the highest expression of our human nature, which is politics, is s rendered legible through the analogy of animals. Right? That like at the top of our humanity, we find ity in its most like brutal form making possible human life.

[00:54:57] Ellie: I don't see it that way. I just see it more as an admission that sometimes our, what we would typically call, what he certainly would call like a higher faculty, is not gonna succeed. And so we need to sort of like regress. I'm not defending his version of humanism, but I actually see it as like pretty standard in that way.

[00:55:15] David: Yeah, but a lot depends on how we interpret this quote unquote bat nature that appears and reappears in his writings. Is it something that we all have because we are animals, but then we transcend it with our higher faculties? Or is it actually something that we don't have, but we have to learn? That's what's really interesting about his famous expression.

The Prince must learn to be bad. That suggests that it's not in our nature to be bad and manipulative. It's something, it's an art that we have to master in order to govern.

[00:55:47] Ellie: Well, and it's actually even a bit more nuanced than that because it's not that the Prince must learn to be bad, it's that the Prince must learn to be able to be bad. And so that, I think it implies that it's not even the Prince is necessarily acting bad, it's just that they are learning the skill of potentially being bad, right?

And then they can choose whether or not to be bad, depending on what their needs of the situation demand.

[00:56:11] David: Yeah, and I mean there's so much to say about Machiavelli's the Prince. It's a wonderful little read. You know, philosophically it's very important because it plays with the appearance/reality distinction. It has been highly influential for thinking about the difference between idealism and realism in political theory.

There's a lot here about the role of luck, especially that I think is important, for politics, but also for moral theory. But what we can agree upon is that this text gives us a way of understanding the inevitability of resorting to modes of interaction that are fundamentally aggressive, and that those are not always an expression of a perverse personality.

They might be necessary preconditions for the rule of law.

[00:57:02] Ellie: We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please consider subscribing to our Substack for extended episodes, community chats, and other additional overthink content.

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And to our listeners, thanks so much for overthinking with us.