political manipulation

So in the end, you say it in a few ways.

What we're going to talk, what is manipulation? It's a sort of a subversive, sneaky, undermining power, one where you harness the person's own psychology.

and it's compulsive, but it's non-coercive.

In your own words, how would you say, sum up, what is manipulation then after this?

Manipulation is the non-coercive imposition of one person's will over another, typically by means of exploiting mental vulnerabilities.

These can be emotional, they can be mental, cognitive, they can be the imagination.

a host of mental vulnerabilities that people have by virtue of sometimes circumstance, like ignorance, you don't know something and I can deceive you and lie to you, or by virtue of mental weaknesses we all have, our tendency to rationalize, which is something we go into at some length in the book.

confirmation bias, we're all subject to, you know, these kinds of biases.

All these are vulnerabilities that expert manipulators know how to exploit.

And the way in which they are being exploited is in order to subject the victim's will to the manipulator's will, to get you to do what they want to do and not what you want to do.

Right.

And the

image that's very helpful for me was a puppet on a string.

Yes, that would be kind of the paradigm model of what a manipulator or a manipulated person is like.

So they move, their own body parts move, but somebody else is controlling their movements.

Okay.

Still pulling the strings is still the idiom that we retain.

Pulling strings.

Right.

Oh, good point.

I hadn't thought about that.

Yeah.

We juxtapose this notion of a puppet on strings to a dog on a leash.

Right.

Right.