Dark Psychology Secrets:

The Hidden Powers Of Dark Psychology

Table of Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1: What Is Dark Psychology
Chapter 2: Techniques Of Dark Psychology
Chapter 3: Manipulation In Dark Psychology
Chapter 4: Dark Persuasion
Chapter 5: Mind Control
Chapter 6: Empathy And Dark Psychology
Chapter 7: Dark Psychology And You
Conclusion
Introduction
Congratulations on downloading Dark Psychology Secrets and thank you for
doing so! As you will see, it covers a topic well worth your time.

To start, I'd like you to imagine a world where every person around you bent to
your whims, desires, and demands. Imagine a world where success, love,
friendship, and power came easily to you, where that big promotion, or even that
massive seed investment in your new business, was handed over to you on a
silver platter. Imagine that all of this came from what others perceived as your
charisma, your ability to charm. The world I'm asking you to imagine is not some
far off fantasy. It's the world as it actually exists for some, those few who are
brazen and amoral enough to take part in the methods of dark psychology, which
is the topic of this book.

For reasons that will soon become apparent, dark psychology has remained
opaque and inaccessible to the average person for most of its history. A history
that, looked at broadly, goes as far back as most of human history. That is
because dark psychology, at its core, is the application of psychology, the study of
the human mind, to a wide variety of nefarious and self-interested ends. And, to
put it mildly, human history is littered with powerful people who psychologically
manipulated and controlled their way to the top. In a sense, dark psychology is
and has been for all recorded time one of the main tools of the powerful and the
wealthy, the movers and the shakers of the world, the men behind the scenes
pulling strings and the presidents and prime ministers in front of them. All of
them put the methods of dark psychology to use in their pursuits and defenses of
power.

So, of course, they have to protect it. This is why, by and large, you will find that
there is very little information about dark psychology available to your average
person. Most of it is tucked away in books that take years of schooling to parse,
and some of it is even hidden in plain sight, billed as “hypnotism” and passed off
as a party trick instead of the powerful method of social control that it actually is.
In fact, the techniques of dark psychology are so obscured in day-to-day life that
it the term “dark psychology” has only recently picked up steam. That is, people
have only recently begun to recognize the traits and techniques of the dark
psychology practitioner as being connected in the last five or so years, and this is
despite the fact that dark psychology, in one form or another, has been present in
human civilization for as long as there has been human civilization.

In this book, you will learn the ins and outs of all these generally hidden
techniques. It will give you, in clear and transparent language, the methods of the
Dark Psychologist. It will break down all the steps powerful people use to secretly
control their surroundings for their own purposes, and it will give you practical
examples of their application in the real world. For instance, did you know that
the current President of The United States, Donald J. Trump Jr., is a master of a
form of hypnotism known as suggestion? And he is not alone in this. His
predecessor, Barrack H. Obama, is renowned worldwide for his charisma, but, as
you will see in a later chapter, “charisma” may not be the best word for the skills
that brought him to the top of the world. In fact, most heads of state are in one
way or another versed in some of the crafts that, together, comprise the world of
dark psychology, and they are not alone.

Now, you can be a part of that group, too, if you so choose. Of course, there are
drawbacks. We'll cover them at length later on, but it bears out from dark
psychology's premise that it takes a toll on its practitioner's own emotional well-
being. After all, it brings with it a fundamentally cynical worldview in which
others are means to ends more than they are people; a way of thinking that
undoubtedly can lead to loneliness and, in extreme cases, a cold, paranoid, and
distant, schizoid perspective that sticks around for the rest of your life. If you
want an example of this end result in the extreme, look at Richard Nixon and the
tapes that led to his downfall.

This book will also show you methods for detecting Dark Psychologists in your
everyday life. Have you ever wondered if your charismatic and charming co-
worker, for example, was actually manipulating you into liking him or her? It's a
more common occurrence than you might think. But not all applications of dark
psychology or this sinister or nefarious. Think about a time when you've gone
into a negotiation, perhaps with a salesman of some kind, and left having gotten a
terrible deal. In the moment, maybe, you were fine with that deal, or even happy
with it, but after you went home and thought about it you realized that you had
been ripped off and taken advantage of. This, too, is an example of dark
psychology. In that instance, you were manipulated via one or another of the
techniques that you will read about in this book into thinking you had succeeded
at bargaining, or – and this we will cover in the chapter on dark persuasion – that
there was no negotiation or bargaining to begin with. This is the power of the
everyday application of dark psychology. Quiet, secretive, and powerful. If you
read on, you will learn how to spot and defend against these techniques. This
book will give you the tools needed to recognize practitioners of dark psychology
out in the world.

That being said, please enjoy what follows! There are many books that purport to
cover the topic of dark psychology these days, so thank you again for choosing
this one. Every effort went into making it comprehensive and educational, in
hopes that you leave this experience knowing that you made the right choice.
Chapter 1: What Is Dark Psychology?
When first exposed to the concept of dark psychology, it's natural to be both
confused, uncomfortable and afraid. There's an imposing feel to the words that
make up the phrase, and with just the dictionary-style definition that imposing
feeling seems well earned. This can make regular people uncomfortable, and it's
okay if you are! You shouldn't be uncomfortable with it, though, because
knowledge, as they say, is power. This is as true for the average, well-intentioned
person looking to understand dark psychology as it is for the amoral student of
dark psychology, for whom knowledge of the human mind is the power to control
it.

Whatever ends you mean to put this book to, it stands that the best place to start
is in de-mystifying the concept itself. What, when it comes down to it, is dark
psychology? What is it made up of, and how does it function?

Defining the basics

Dark psychology, as its words imply, is the application of psychological
principals and concepts to dark ends. “Dark,” in this case, means unethical,
immoral, bad, wrong, or evil. From this basic definition, you can see that dark
psychology is less the shadowy, evil twin of psychology and more an atypical
application of psychology. This is significant, because it means that dark
psychology is not as all encompassing and time-consuming a subject of study as
psychology is. It is, in point of fact, a comparatively small field, where knowledge
is, like people, a means to an end, not an end in itself. Because of this, counter-
intuitively, dark psychology can further be defined as a set of practical actions
more than as a topic of study. In this way, it is somewhat like the engineering to
psychology's science.

To keep this understanding of dark psychology in mind, it helps to think of the

methods of dark psychology as “tools” rather than concepts. Tools get things
done. They do not exist to be contemplated like the contents of academic books,
the uses of which are abstract and indefinite at best; they exist to assist in getting
things done. Namely, in the case of dark psychology's toolbox, they exist to assist
their master in exerting control and influence over other people. The particulars
of these peculiar tools will be covered in the second chapter, but it bears
repeating succinctly that dark psychology is a set of methods or tools based in
psychological knowledge for exerting influence and control over other people.

But there is still ambiguity in that definition. What, after all, does “exerting
influence and control over other people” actually look like? And how are the tools
“based in” psychological knowledge?

In answer to the first, it is incumbent upon us to break down the difference

between a free action and an unfree one. When a child plays a video game or
stands at a cookie jar eating cookies, this child would be considered by anyone to
be acting freely. That is, he or she chooses to play that video game, to eat those
sweets. On the other hand, if that child's parents yell at him or her to stop playing
that video game or eating cookies and the child stops, his or her actions would no
longer be considered free, because they're based on control exerted by another
person. Imagine, though, if, after a while, that child stopped playing video games
or eating cookies because he or she had been stopped from doing those things
many times in the past. Would that child's actions still be considered unfree,
despite the fact that they chose on their own not to play or to snack?

This example is less emotionally loaded than one that deals directly with control
in the dark psychological sense, but in both cases the object of control, the both
free and unfree person being controlled, is not aware that they are being acted
upon by another person when they make decisions. Where these two cases differ,
however, is in their beginnings. When a person is under the control of a master of
dark psychology, they are never aware of the other person's voice leading them in
their decision making process.. Think about the negotiation hypothetical from the
introduction; you go through an interaction, make decisions in it, maybe even
make a major purchase, and never once realize that you are not fully in control of
your own decisions. Gaining control over another person's will without his or
her knowledge of it is a core goal of the practice of dark psychology.

This answer leads directly into the answer to the second question. In what ways is
dark psychology rooted in psychological knowledge? Well, from the above answer
at very least it's clear that dark psychology must employ psychological knowledge,
since, in trying to influence or control a person without his or her awareness,
dark psychology has to work against its targets on a subconscious level. The
particular ways that dark psychology is rooted in psychology comes down to
those tools dark psychology employs. All of them are psychological tools in that
they manipulate the will of their victims. They're covered in more depth in the
next four chapters, but for now suffice it to say that they are roughly comprised
of manipulation, persuasion, deception, and out and out mind control.

The power of dark psychology

You may already be catching on to the immense potential power of dark
psychological methods. Any method of control that limits the possibility of
getting caught is powerful. After all, if the master, the one that controls, is out of
the sights and minds of those that might disagree with their actions, they're free
from consequences, and free to go on controlling! That being said, the true scale
of strength that can be achieved through dark psychology deserves attention. It
has quite a bit of potential.

Note, first, how dark psychology has the potential for far greater protection from
consequences than almost any other method of control. In most other schools of
thought regarding control of another, even with ironclad defenses in place, there
are at least two people who know the identity of the string puller or controller:
the controller him- or herself, and the person being controlled. There is always a
chance, even if you have incentivized continuing to act under your will incredibly
well, that the person being controlled opts out of your control, or, worse, begins
spreading the word to others that you are manipulative or controlling. If this
word spreads, than controlling or manipulating others becomes quite a bit more
difficult. In comparison, dark psychological methods rarely lead to discovery in
this way when carried out correctly. How could they? They are, after all, by all
appearances more similar to freely taken action than they are manipulation and
control.

This is not the only reason dark psychology has the capacity to generate immense
power for its practitioners, though. It has been said several times already that
dark psychology operates on the subconscious. In fact, this is why the previous
paragraph is true, but that fact bears repeating here, because it is the source of
what might be dark psychology's greatest latent capability, the sheer force of the
drives that dark psychology can create in the people on which it is used.

Think about it. Throughout your life, what has been the greatest force driving you
toward or away from something? Chances are, whatever you were being driven to
or away from, you were being driven by a complicated and messy set of directives,
or feelings, of which you couldn't really give a whole explanation. This is just how
the human mind works. Through some combination of biology, upbringing, and
experience, people are driven and moved by desires and feelings for which they
genuinely lack an adequate explanation. This fact is at the basis of all
psychological practice. It is the fact of the subconscious, irreducible and
mysterious. Freud talked about it all the way back in the nineteenth century, the
opaque depths of the mind of which everyone, by definition, is unaware. People
are not only unaware of their subconscious, though, they are also by and large
tied to it and controlled by it. Our desires are powerful forces in our lives. We can
re-direct or repress them, but they can not be destroyed.

Unlike all other forms of control or influence, dark psychology operates directly
on the subconscious and the desires contained within it. This point can not be
overstated. Dark psychology seeks to have an effect on the source of the major
drivers of human behavior, so, when it is used competently, it is exceedingly
successful. Chances are, you've met someone and felt an immediate connection to
them, or a force pulling you toward them, in the past. Perhaps they were
physically attractive, perhaps not, but regardless, it is likely that you have found
yourself inexplicably drawn, as if by emotional magnet, to a person, such that you
wanted to get to know them, spend time with them, and form a relationship.
Imagine, if you will, placing that kind of yearning inside a person's brain when
you first meet them. Imagine knowing for a certainty that this person's mind and
will are re-directed toward you and, as a result, malleable and susceptible to your
own will.

Not only would that person be under your sway, he or she would perceive your
sway as his or her own desires, thus making your ability to control him or her all
the stronger. This is one of the fundamental reasons for dark psychology's power,
the reception of the dark psychologist's power as a naturally occurring, internal
drive. Beyond concealing the dark psychologist's actions from his or her targets, it
replaces the negative and overwhelming ideas of “control” and “manipulation”
with ideas like “desire” and “free choice” in the target's mind, forces that drive
people forward with more intensity than external forces ever could.

Consider the child eating cookies and playing video games again. After he or she
ceases to play video games and eat cookies at the behest of his or her parents, the
intensity of his or her actions diminishes. The decision not to eat sweets and not
to play games, even if it is maintained over time, holds less sway and force over
his or her mind than the desire-oriented previous decision to engage in those
activities. He or she, especially in the early days of kowtowing to his or her
parents' wishes, would be incredibly susceptible to the arcane, subterranean pull
of his or her still existing desires to eat cookies and play video games. Imagine,
instead, if his or her parents had given him or her a substitute activity that he or
she desired as much or more than playing video games and eating cookies. In this
version of the scenario, he or she is much less likely to fall back into his or her old
video game playing, cookie eating habits, because his or her subconscious will has
been shifted from those activities to others, likely without him or her ever
becoming aware that a shift has taken place. For the child, his or her mind has
simply “changed” in that way minds seem to change all the time. There was no
external manipulation at play at all.

Dark psychology plays out as this scenario on speed. Imagine if the child were in
fact an adult, and that adult were in what he or she assumed was an equal, which
is to say “not parental,” social relationship with another adult. He or she would
not be on the lookout for signs of control from the other person the way a child is
when relating with his or her parents, and, as a result, he or she would be even
less likely to have defenses up against methods of psychological control. Then,
imagine that the replacement desire was not put in opposition to another strong
desire, but simply in a void of non-desirous space in that adult's mind, such that
there was nothing working against it, and it was allowed, simply, to spread and
bloom through his or her head. You can see how powerful that externally placed
desire would be in its unaware target.

Dark psychology in the world

This book has already hinted at real world uses of dark psychology from the
vaulted ceilings of the halls of power to the offices of a used car lot, but, as you
will see, it will continue to touch on this aspect throughout. This is because dark
psychology, again, is first and foremost a social practice meant to accrue powers
for those that practice it. It can not exist in the abstract alone, and the best way to
convey this is to show you again and again how it manifests in the flesh and blood
world of real social relations. In the introduction, several American presidents
were briefly mentioned as likely practitioners of dark psychology in the context of
an off-handed remark about how most if not all heads of state are, in one way or
another, practitioners of this dark social art form.

In lieu of re-iterating those statements directly, we will look at other famous

historical figures who were almost certainly powerful dark psychologists in their
own way. This is in part because, as was also hinted at in the introduction, dark
psychology is as much the friend of the secretly powerful as it is the friend of
those who are actually in power. What this means is that dark psychology lends
itself, by its very nature, to the expression and accruing of indirect power.
Throughout history and into the present day, there have been many, many people
discretely controlling the person nominally in control. Even today, we can look at
figures like Henry Kissinger and Roger Stone as paragons of indirect power, men
who never held political office but whispered in the ears of presidents and kings,
who played no small part in working the world into its current post Cold War
configuration. How is it that these men maintained their power without ever
putting it on record? The answer, more often than not, lies in dark psychology.

The first person we'll look at in depth is Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin, a Russian
peasant and the court healer and mystic for the Romanov family in the years
directly preceding the Soviet revolution and the dissolution of the Czardom.
Known most widely simply by his last name, Rasputin managed, despite his birth
as a commoner, to work his way to the highest heights of Russian statecraft and
power through his incredible mental influence on the royal family. This should
already sound familiar.

After a tumultuous early life and a conversion, Rasputin began to develop a

following as a holy man in the area of his birth. Details about his life are not as
forthcoming as one might hope, but it is known that, from the jump, he was an
unconventional spiritual leader. Locals not under his sway complained that there
was a heretical air to the worship sessions he presided over, with hymns being
sung that people had not heard before, and constant rumors of sexual behavior
and ritual baths between Rasputin and some of his female followers. Despite this
lack of convention, which could carry with it severe trouble in conservative,
Czarist Russia, he built his following up and up until he had the Czar and Czarina
themselves under his control. From this, we have to assume that he was a man
who knew how to control others and implant himself into their desires. We have
to assume, in other words, that he practiced dark psychology. We'll talk about
him more later.

For a more modern example, look back at Roger Stone. Like Rasputin, he is a
king whisperer lacking in all conventionality, which, as you continue, you will
note is a common thread among masters of dark psychology. Unlike Rasputin, he
is still alive, and he is American. As a result, he is not so much a holy man as he is
a professional political insider. He tells an anecdote about learning in elementary
school about the power of “misinformation,” which is a political subcategory of
“deception” one of the fundamental tenants of dark psychology. Understanding
how to use deception and other “dirty tricks” in the pursuit of political power,
always ultimately playing the subconsciouses of the masses like a puppet master,
Stone managed to not only work his way into the background of several
presidencies, he managed to make hundreds of millions of dollars doing it.
As you can see, dark psychology's reach extends limitlessly throughout the world,
and this includes the most intimate parts of individual human minds. That is to
say that dark psychologists employ power on a very close, person-to-person level.
Despite this, true masters of the craft are able to extend out their powers from the
personal realm to social, governmental, and even global realms by way of
extended technique and careful target selection. This will all be covered in more
depth in the next chapter, where we dive into the nuts and bolts of dark
psychology's practice.
Chapter 2: Techniques Of Dark Psychology
Now that you have a suitable baseline for understanding dark psychology's nature
and practice, remembering that practice is at the core of dark psychology's
nature, that it exists to be used more than studied, you are ready to start learning
about the tools employed by dark psychology practitioners the world over. You
will additionally remember that, while the terms “tools,” “techniques,” and
“methods” will be used interchangeably throughout, it is best to think of these
sub-crafts of dark psychology as first and foremost tools, because tools, again, are
objects meant to be used. If it helps, imagine dark psychology as a kind of
carpentry, wherein you use these tools to build something. In the case of dark
psychology, instead of a house or a table, that something the dark psychology
practitioner is building is a subservient or otherwise personally beneficial social
relationship based, like a house is based on a concrete foundation, on his or her
target's (manipulated) desires.

Keep a metaphor like this in the back of your mind while you read the next
section. It will help to convey the ways that the previous chapter feeds into this
one. With that established, you are ready to dive in to the particulars of dark
psychology. In chapter one, we briefly acknowledged the main tools of the trade.
To re-iterate, they are manipulation, deception, persuasion, and mind control.
In many ways, however, deception, which is still a key component of the dark
psychology worldview and method, is simply a part of manipulation, which is by
far the tool with the most widespread and powerful uses, so deception will be
dealt with in the section on manipulation, which is up first.

Manipulation
In many ways, beyond containing within it deception, manipulation hints at and
implies the existence of the other tools of dark psychology. In many ways, dark
psychology is ultimately itself a method for better manipulation. For reasons that
will become clear by the end of this chapter, however, it is still worthwhile to treat
manipulation as its own category in trying to taxonomize the different techniques
of dark psychology.

If you google “dark psychology” and click through the first few articles, you will
see immediately that almost every source on dark psychology uses manipulation
several to many times, and that in most cases it is a subheading within the article,
or even in the subtitle to the article itself! This illustrates how significant
manipulation is to dark psychology, and how broadly the two are connected. In
fact, as was hinted at above, manipulation could itself be split into several
subcategories. Obviously, one would be deception, which was already covered.
Otherwise, there is Machiavellianism, reverse psychology, semantics, all of
which could be described to some extent or another as kinds of covert-
aggression.

All forms of manipulation could be described as covert-aggression because

manipulation is inherently an aggressive social tactic. The proof of this is in the
word “aggression” itself. Forms of aggression are, at their core, about exerting
power over another person or animal. If a driver shouts aggressively at another
car to “MOVE!” or because that driver of that other car cut him or her off, that
driver is being aggressive because he or she wants his or her will to take
precedence over the other driver's will. He or she shouts “MOVE!” because he or
she wants the other driver to move, in other words, and manipulation functions
the same way. Unlike other forms of aggression, though, it has a secondary aim:
to avoid detection.

This also speaks to the dark or sinister core of manipulation; it is always about
power, and power is always, on some level, angry and forceful. This is as true for
semantic manipulation, a technique that can seem not just easy-going but even
agreeable, as it is for Machiavellianism, a worldview named for a famously
cynical and power hungry author and politician.

To slow it down so as not to miss anything, we will unpack the concept of

semantic manipulation. Chances are, you have experienced this method of
manipulation in your life a number of times. It is, stated simply, when a person
insists that he or she understands words to mean something other than what they
normally mean as a means of re-framing and controlling social interactions. Say,
for example, a couple has a conversation where one, a man, tells his partner, a
woman, that he really doesn't think very highly of her mother. Perhaps this was
already an attempt at dark persuasion, which is coming up next, but perhaps not.
Either way, the woman, understandably, gets upset with him for saying such a
cruel thing out of nowhere. His response to her anger, however, disarms her
immediately. He, calmly, tells her he didn't mean it in a negative way. “Thinking
highly,” he explains, means to him thinking that a person is imposing and scary.
By “not thinking highly” of her mother, he meant that he saw her as a friendly
and welcoming person with whom he could speak openly. In response, if he is
successful, his partner becomes immediately less angry, believing herself to have
misinterpreted his words. You can see how this can be useful on a basic level, but
consider also how, applied repeatedly, it creates a pattern wherein the
practitioner is free from all criticism and looked at as a flawless, golden kind of
person.

This desire, to be viewed as flawless or golden, is ultimately about getting others

to put all of their trust into you, which could be considered an attribute common
to a Machiavellian worldview. As was said above, Machiavellianism's namesake
was a famously cynical politician and writer. He is famous for writing the cynical
statecraft how-to guide The Prince, a book where he breaks down the necessity of
building loyalty by being seen to be perfect, and he coined the phrase, “The ends
justify the means.” This phrase gets at the core of the logic manipulation employs
to function. Ultimately, manipulation is about using social tactics (means)
cynically and knowingly, no matter how underhanded, in order to improve your
social station (ends).
As you can see, deception is all-over the above methods. It is fundamental to
most practices of manipulation, in fact. It is important to note, however, that
deception is not synonymous with telling lies. In fact, telling lies is just one
subcategory of deception, which contains all manners of withholding, skewing or
twisting of the truth along with the outright telling of falsehoods. This distinction
is important, because in many instances telling lies is not the most efficient nor
the most useful form of deception. Lies are often easier to detect and harder to
pass-off than forms of deception that meld the truth with lies, or that function
only as an absence of truth.

In a sense, the final kind of manipulation we'll cover in this chapter, reverse
psychology, has a close relationship to deception. You probably have a passing
understanding of reverse psychology, namely that it is telling a person to do one
thing so they do another. Well, it does run deeper than that, which seems to
imply that people make decisions on a binary. This is not the case normally. In
fact, one of the most brilliant things about reverse psychology is that, when
deployed correctly, it is, itself, the impetus for limiting another's thought to a “yes
or no” question. Say a skilled dark psychology practitioner decides he or she
wants his or her friend to come along to the beach, but he or she knows that that
friend hates going outside. In order to make that friend come along, he or she
says, as if a normal statement, “You probably don't want to go. You're not really
into fun like that.” In that scenario, the dark psychologist is using reverse
psychology, clearly, but what he or she is also doing is turning the question of
whether or not to go to the beach into a question of whether or not that friend is
fun. So, of course the friend decides to go to the beach!

Hopefully, you're starting to get a picture of the varieties and permutations of

manipulation as they function on people in the world. From the above, you
should also get the idea that, while there are distinct words for different kinds of
manipulation, ultimately they blend together and can be used in tandem with one
another. There is no reason why an attempt at semantic manipulation can't be
employed along with reverse psychology, perhaps as a means of framing the
yes/no dichotomy through which the target of the manipulation is meant to
think. Likewise, it is impossible to imagine Machiavellianism without covert-
aggression, and fairly difficult to imagine the reverse. That is all to say that
manipulation is ultimately a fluid thing, as you will see with the rest of the tools
laid out in this chapter and, admittedly, with most ideas you engage with
everyday. Despite the fact that these things are “dark,” they function like anything
else. Taken in reality, in their actual use, these concepts all blend together.

Persuasion
A note before diving in to the skill set known as persuasion – persuasion, in fact,
exists in two varieties. There is, on the one hand, regular everyday
persuasiveness. This is the persuasion people are talking about when they, for
instance, reference persuasive writing techniques. It can also contain social
pressure of the ethically or morally-minded variety. On the other hand, though,
and more in line with the topic of this book, is dark persuasion. This is the kind
of persuasion that has more to do with personal gain than ethics or morality, the
kind of persuasion that has no scruples about negatively affecting people's lives.
It is the persuasiveness of con men, corrupt politicians, and amoral attorneys. All
groups of people who are, you guessed it, routinely practitioners of dark
psychology. This distinction will be covered in more depth in chapter 4, because,
as you might have already surmised, as is the case with most things this
distinction is not as clean and clear cut as it might initially appear, but for the
purposes of this chapter, the distinction is sufficient.

As was said above, manipulation can be viewed in a sense as a partial umbrella

term for all of dark psychology. This is true, but in another sense, dark
persuasion can itself be viewed as an umbrella term for all of dark psychology,
which would mean that manipulation is itself contained in it. How, you ask, can
manipulation and persuasion both contain each other? The answer, of course, is
that categorizations are contingent and incomplete things a lot of the time. This
ambiguity, however, is productive for the practitioner of dark psychology. Think
back to the introduction, where the link between the powerful of the world and
dark psychology was laid out. You will recall that knowledge of dark psychology
has remained for elite eyes only – that is to say, obscured to your average person
– for most of its history. Well, this ambiguity or confusion surrounding terms
speaks to that secret history, where practice and not scholarly taxonomies or
categorizations determined the shape of the world of dark psychology. Because it
is shaped like this now, it is important to not smooth over the complexities it
presents too much, lest you miss out on fully grasping, and perhaps taking part
in, dark psychology.

That being said, look at dark persuasion and ask yourself how it could differ from
manipulation. To start, persuasion, even of the dark variety, is much less
aggressive than manipulation. This is not to say that it is wholly nonaggressive,
because, as was said before, dark psychology is an inherently aggressive style of
engaging with the social world. However, dark persuasion's aggressiveness is by
and large more deeply concealed than manipulation's aggressiveness.

This is because of a simple, but also fundamental, difference in tactic. Persuasion

could be considered a better first step in trying to bend the will of another person
than manipulation, because it is more subtle, and even in the unlikely event of
detection it can be passed off as socially acceptable behavior.

How does dark persuasion work, though? In order to answer that, first look to the
fundamentals of dark psychology. What is it? It is an intensely intimate method
of control predicated on the subconscious of another person. With manipulation,
there are shortcuts to accessing the subconscious of another person based on the
basic nature of the human psyche. People are generally, even overwhelmingly,
susceptible to at least some methods of manipulation, and those methods work
even if you know very little about the person on which you are trying to use them.
This is not so with dark persuasion. Dark persuasion, instead, is predicated on a
certain kind of dark intimacy with your target. You have to know and understand
his or her drives, interests, and dislikes. The more you know, the more effective
the persuasion of your subject will be. In dark persuasion, unlike in
manipulation, the dark psychology practitioner comes to understand the mind of
the target in the old-fashioned way, by way of study, observation, and time spent
around the target.

Note the term dark intimacy used above. It will come back later. For the time
being, however, it warrants some unpacking. How, exactly, does dark intimacy
differ from regular intimacy? The answer, as always, lies in intent. For the
average person, intimacy is an end in itself. When the average person is
emotionally intimate with another person, he or she feels seen, heard,
appreciated, and generally good. Emotional intimacy is the bedrock upon which
normal relationships, be they platonic, romantic, sexual, or familial, are based.
None of this is the case in the dark psychology worldview, though. When you
practice dark psychology, social relationships, no matter their type, are never an
end in and of themselves. They are always a means to an end. Refer back to the
section on Machiavellianism about this. It is a necessary component of the dark
psychology methodology of control.

Therefore, intimacy in the context of dark psychology, what you would call dark
intimacy, could not be further from its normal, not dark counterpart. It can take
many forms. Dark intimacy may be based solely in study of its target's inner
workings. From Freud we have the insight that, with enough observation and
study, the subconscious of any person can become legible to others. Freud didn't
have control of the other in mind, but the principle remains the same. That is to
say, dark intimacy does not necessarily imply a real relationship of any kind. That
being said, it can. Another form of dark intimacy, darker still than that clinical
dark intimacy, is dark intimacy developed the old-fashioned way. It comes from
entering into a relationship with another person and feigning normalcy,
pretending that you are in the relationship for all the normal reasons, while
secretly maintaining that relationship for self-interested, anti-social ends. This is
a very potent set up for practicing dark persuasion. Only after you have
established what the other person perceives as real, mutual trust will you be able
to enact your dark persuasion, but it will be very effective. Once you understand
the target of your dark persuasion inside and out by way of dark intimacy, you
can begin.

You already know the importance of deception to all practices of dark psychology.
It comes out in full force here, because what underpins the differences between
dark and regular persuasion is that, unlike regular persuasion, dark persuasion
has no fidelity to the truth or the world. It has fidelity only to success in
persuading its target and to the whims and wishes of the person deploying it. So,
once you, the dark psychology practitioner, have developed a suitably intimate,
which is to say close, understanding of your target, such that you understand as
many of his or her wishes, insecurities, drives, and desires as you can, you deploy
persuasion techniques as needed without any heed to the truth. If your target
wants to be beautiful, and you want your target to make a large purchase on your
behalf, for instance, you may be able to find a way to convince him or her that he
or she will be more physically attracted to you if he or she makes that purchase
for you. When you are practicing dark persuasion, it does not matter if this could
not be further from the truth. Even if you knew that never in a million years
would you find that target physically attractive.

These are the fundamental attributes of persuasion, or, more specifically, dark
persuasion. The detour into dark intimacy was necessary, because without dark
intimacy of some kind or another dark persuasion simply can not work. Unlike
manipulation, which has a higher success rate on strangers, dark persuasion
must be predicated on some knowledge of the target's inner workings, or at very
least in depth knowledge of how and what most people desire. This will be
covered with more depth in the fourth chapter.

Mind control
You may think that mind control is something fake, that hypnosis is only the
mainstay of entertainers, Vegas showmen, and charlatans. Or, maybe you think
that it has some real power, but that that power is only used by cult leaders and
others who are, generally, too violent or anti-social to maintain their real power
over others. You might think that mind control is, for lack of a better word,
unimportant in the halls of power, where the movers and shakers are, and
wherever else true control, charisma, and influence rule the day. If you thought
those things, though, you would be wrong.

In the introduction, Donald J. Trump, the current President of The United States,
was highlighted as an example of a master of suggestion. Suggestion, which
wasn't explored in depth in the introduction, is actually a form of mind control, in
particular a form of hypnotism, itself. That's right, the current President of The
United States practices a form of influence that could be described as mind
control! You can see already how untrue it is that “mind control” is simply
fictional or just for fun. It is a series technique of interpersonal control, and one
that we have not covered in as much depth as the others up to this point. This is
because it is significantly different than most forms of manipulation and
persuasion in that it has a more particular set of behaviors built into it.

Remember the ambiguities regarding where persuasion stopped and

manipulation started, or the ambiguities regarding the limits of just different
kinds of manipulation and persuasion, such that all terms, while useful,
ultimately resolve into one indefinite set of tools? Well, with mind control, that is
not the case! There are particular things you need to do in order to be a successful
practitioner of mind control, hypnotism, or suggestion, and all three words mean
hyper-specific things.

So, what is meant by the term mind control? You already know it is not like it is
depicted in the movies, but, what is it actually like? For one, you should know
that oftentimes “brainwashing” is used as a stand-in term for mind control, but,
interestingly enough, the emergence of this term can be viewed itself as a form of
mass mind control exercised by government authorities in the 1950s. More on
this after we define the terms. Mind control itself refers to the production of
subservient individuals across a longer amount of time through the use of long
term techniques to break down and rebuild their psyches in a way that is more
beneficial to the mind control practitioner. On the flip side, hypnotism and
suggestion refer to incredibly particular techniques for short-circuiting and re-
routing a person's brain in a very short amount of time, in order to make that
person act according to your will for that short amount of time.

Already, the specificity of mind control should be clear, but let's refer back to the
anecdote about the emergence of the term “brainwashing,” because it will help to
illustrate what I mean. Everyone these days accepts that cults, enemy
governments, and other “bad” groups of people are capable of brainwashing their
captives by way of torture or other intense forms of interaction. This was not
always the case, however. In fact, the phrase first entered the popular
consciousness by way of American fighter pilots who had been returned from
North Korean prisoner of war camps. What happened was, while in those prison
camps, these American pilots swore, in taped and then televised interviews, that
the government of the United States had ordered them to drop biological
weapons on the North Korean people during the opening days of the war. What
was striking about these videos is that some of the pilots seemed to show genuine
remorse at having been involved with the chemical weapons. The statements did
not seem like they were extracted by way of torture.

Anyway, when the pilots were returned home, after the newly formed Democratic
People's Republic of Korea had successfully disseminated the damaging
interviews, the United States government immediately put them back on the air
to recant their testimony and claim – one by one, and in the same exact language
every time – that during their tenure as prisoners of war they were
“brainwashed” into saying and believing what they said about chemical weapons.
This was, in fact, the first time that “brainwashing” as a term and concept became
popular, and, to the discerning eye, it was clearly a pre-written concept by
whoever had coached those pilots in their interviews.

So, why is the creation of brainwashing and example of mind control? Well, as it
turns out, The United States did use biological weapons against the people of the
DPRK, so the pilots were telling the truth the first time. This means that, after
they came back, the government of the United States needed to find a way to
discredit its own soldiers. Low and behold, they invented the concept of
brainwashing and allowed it to disseminate among the public. By disseminating
this idea, in a sense, they allowed for a future in which any worldview that ran
counter to the normal, American worldview could be immediately discounted as
not genuine but based in brainwashing and manipulation. This is, in itself, a
prime example of mind control in itself. Now, Americans are incapable of
believing, by and large, in the veracity of other ideologies!
On the other hand, let's look at hypnotism and suggestion. The way it works in
the real world is different than the way it works in media. For the most part,
people have to be willing to let it work on them for it to work. This is important.
While it may be a more specific and easy to follow technique than manipulation
or persuasion, it requires a certain amount of belief on the part of the target, so
consider combining it with dark persuasive or manipulative techniques to ensure
that your target is already pliable and willing when the time to hypnotize or
suggest comes.

The specifics of how to do it will be covered in more depth in a later chapter, but
suffice it to say that suggestion is not a synonym of hypnosis, that it is, in actual
fact, more a category of hypnosis, a category that, as you will see later, as more
applications than most. This is in large part because it can be deployed without
announcing itself in some situations. It has to do with repetition of key concepts
and performing a kind of juggling with the targets' expectations and beliefs.

If you want to know more about the specifics of mind control techniques, go
directly to chapter five. If you are reading straight through, however, buckle in,
because next is an incredibly comprehensive look at the dark psychology
practitioner's most wide-reaching tool, manipulation.
Chapter 3: Manipulation In Dark Psychology

Now that you have had all of the basics broken down and explained for you, the
rest of this book will be comprised of in depth elaborations of those basics, so that
they can be put to any use that you see fit. Whether those uses are defensive or
offensive is up to you. This chapter will cover manipulation, the most
fundamental and necessary component of dark psychology. No matter what way a
practitioner of dark psychology chooses to go about his or her work, he or she will
always employ manipulation in one way or another, so it is important that you
read this section carefully. If you want to defend against dark psychology, you
have to know the signs of manipulation like the back of your hand, and, if you
want to practice dark psychology, you likewise have to know all the functions of
manipulation so you can put them to use.

That being said, make sure to pay attention as we begin with an in depth look at
the history manipulation.

A history of manipulation
We can trace the beginnings of manipulation all the way back, almost assuredly,
to the beginnings of primitive accumulation, wherein people accrued power in
their communities by first gaining land and surplus goods by way of old-
fashioned physical force and then translated that surplus of land and material
into power and influence with the people around them. This is a great place to
start with manipulation, because it highlights how manipulation generally has
some kind of material basis, even nowadays, when most practitioners are people
who pride themselves on their cunning and their ability to produce power from
nothing.

You can see this perspective, that manipulation is the production of influence
from simply the ability to impose upon others, in primitive accumulation's
transition from tribal fiefdoms into first Feudalism and then Absolute Monarchy.
In other words, across generations, as those surpluses, the basis of the
manipulations carried out by those in power, grew and grew, the owners' of those
surpluses converted their brute force manipulation into systems of manipulation
and control over the people who relied on their material surplus to survive.

This may sound too abstract. At its basis, however, the power inherent in this
relation functions the same way power does now. Because the manipulators had
gained power, they were able to bend the wills of the people around them to their
own wills. Being good manipulators, (and in some cases even dark psychology
practitioners!) over time they developed long term thought patterns of
justification, often through religion. That is, they billed themselves not as lucky to
have received that surplus (most likely from their familial lines), but as ordained
by God to have more. They then could spread these justifications easily, because,
by virtue of their roles as purveyors and owners of goods, services and land, they
already had an excess of influence over the thoughts of other people.
This speaks to the significance of manipulation on a fundamental level.
Manipulation may be a method for accruing power, but it must also be predicated
on an already existing power in order to be truly potent. So, their manipulations
by which everyone around them, out of necessity, came to believe that they
simply deserved more of the surplus production of the community developed
across the centuries into a complex system of belief, such that, all still based in
the fluke of whose ancestors were capable of retaining a surplus of basic
resources, some people were worshipped like gods and many others lived on the
streets and begged for scrapes of food.

You can see from this how significant the power of manipulation can be. It is only
through manipulation that history can generate, across about a thousand years, a
figure like Louie XIV, The Sun King who built Versailles. In the introduction,
when dark psychology's long subterranean past as a driver and mover of human
history was covered, this is what was meant. In other words, on some level, the
systems that built into monarchy must have started with intentional, proto-
Machiavellian falsehoods and cynical actors. There is no other way for massive
swaths of people to all begin believing in the divine rights of people who got
lucky.

This, of course, does not speak directly to manipulation as it has been covered in
the book in previous chapters. This speaks to manipulation on a level much larger
than the interpersonal, which is where most of this book's explorations have been
located so far, but primitive accumulation, Feudalism, and Monarchy are not
wholly unrelated to smaller kinds of manipulation. In fact, as with all things,
what one might call structural manipulation is made up of many, many instances
of individual, interpersonal manipulation in a sense. Because of this, the history
of structural manipulation warrants study for anyone eager to learn more about
the craft in general. Which is to say, no, in the modern world you probably can
not establish a territory for your great great grand children to rule over by way of
accumulating excess water and land, but in understanding how primitive
accumulators turned their resources into power by way of myth, you could
theoretically begin to create your own myths on an interpersonal level.

In other words, understanding manipulation to the fullest can be looked at as the

carrying out, by way of action, of a purely Machiavellian perspective. Look
around you with cynicism of some kind or another in your mind while forgetting
about ethics, morality, or any pesky limits to human behavior; what do you see?
Chances are, if you give this exercise enough time and attention, you will find that
social relationships that seemed just before to be purely non-coercive are in fact
predicated on subtle, but endless, manipulations. The word “endless” means
stable in the preceding sentence, which should convey to you what manipulation
aims to do. Manipulation always aims to replace non-manipulative social
patterns with itself in perpetuity. Even short term manipulations are (or should
be) a part of long term goals to morph the world around you, the manipulator, to
your whims, will, and desires.
Manipulation In Dark Psychology
So, how does manipulation, which seems to be simultaneously an individual
action or set of actions and a way of thinking or even a system of thought, relate
to dark psychology, which, you will remember, is always predicated on doing and
action. How does such a multifaceted thing function as a tool in service of dark
psychology?

Well, some of that tool, especially the more abstract or long-spanning parts of it
that were just covered, really shouldn't be in your mind when you're on the look
out for manipulators or for people to manipulate. Those ideas work better in
study, as a means of better understanding the phenomenon of manipulation. This
is not to say that they turn manipulation into an object of study in the staid, dull
way that dark psychology is always in opposition to. Much to the contrary, study
of another variety can be, in itself, an active, tool and use oriented activity. Think
about it, with that background, or history, of manipulation under your belt, you
have a fuller picture of manipulation as a whole. That, in itself, would help
anyone in practicing manipulation, either by way of imagining how exactly
primitive accumulators developed such wide-reaching manipulations in service of
protecting their surpluses, or by way of seeking to understand what that
primitive manipulation looked like, such that you can better avoid manipulation
in the present tense.

In other words, dark psychology is not averse to study as a whole, it is averse to

study for its own sake. Any information that is practically applicable is itself a
tool that should be used ruthlessly and without compunction when you are
dealing with the world of dark psychology, because, more than anything, the
world of dark psychology is rooted in practicality without exceptions.

These facts should speak to why manipulation is so useful in the context of

practicing dark psychology. Manipulation is, after all, an incredibly practical way
of getting things from other people. Provided one is willing to treat others as
either obstacles or paths to getting what one wants, manipulation is exceedingly
practical.

Let's look at an example. Imagine, for instance, there are three people who need
money for some reason or another. One of the people, who we will call Number 1,
is a moralist and empathic. Another of the people, who we will call Number 2, is
pragmatic and somewhat amoral but does not practice dark psychology. The last
of the people, who we will call Number 3, is one hundred percent pragmatic,
unfettered by morality, ethics, or principles, and well versed in dark psychology.

Imagine that Person 1 meets, at a coffee shop or in a restaurant, an older, lonely

person who talks to him or her for quite a while. After that while, the two of them
sit down together and continue talking, maybe ordering more food in the process.
Person 1, in the midst of the conversation, learns that, on top of being lonely and
old, the person he or she is talking to is also struggling financially. After an hour
or so has passed, Person 1 realizes he or she is late for a job interview and gets up
to pay and then go. The older person, because he or she is so grateful for the
conversation and the personal attention, offers, despite his or her own lack of
resources, to pay for Person 1's items. Person 1, being a moralist, politely tells this
older person that he or she could not possibly accept money from him or her in
good conscience, then pays for his or her own meal and goes.

Imagine this same scenario, but with Person 2 in place of Person 1. He or she
meets the sad, old wastrel and, begrudgingly, sits down to talk with him or her.
Perhaps the conversation is not nearly as generous, because Person 2, as a
pragmatist, can not be bothered to show as much compassion to the wretch as
Person 1 did. Nonetheless, when Person 2 gets up to go, the old, lonely person
offers, still grateful for any kind of attention at all, to pay. Person 2, being a
straightforward pragmatist, accepts. Then he or she goes off, satisfied at having
saved some money.

Now, imagine Person 3 in the same scenario. He or she meets this sad, older,
lonely, poor person in passing at a restaurant, and notes immediately that he or
she is easily susceptible to manipulation because he or she is in want of human
contact. Immediately, Person 3 sits down with the crone and delights him or her
with his or her wit, kindness, and generosity of spirit. Two hours pass. Person 3,
in passing, mentions to this wretch that he or she has neglected to go to a job
interview because he or she feels such a connection with him or her. The older
lonely person feels immediate guilt, but Person 3 assuages all of it with a wave of
the hand. What is more, Person 3 offers to pay for the older person's food and
drink. Afterward, the two exchange numbers. Already, Person 3 knows what he or
she will do next. The two develop a friendship, meeting multiple times at the
same place. In about the span of a month, Person 3 has established a pattern of
paying for the food when they are together, then asking later in the week for some
kind of small “loan” from the older person because of his or her money troubles.
Within three months time, Person 3 has received, piecemeal, thousands of dollars
from the older, lonely person.

What this hypothetical is meant to illustrate is the kind of lateral, unexpected

thinking that dark psychology can bring out. Person 3 displayed care and
generosity from the jump because he or she wanted something from the older,
lonely person, knowing full well from the jump that he or she would have a
massive return on investment, provided he or she put in enough time and energy.
Where the pragmatic but ultimately not clever Person 2 gained only a free meal
on the way to a job interview, Person 3 gained thousands and thousands of
dollars and the promise of however much more he or she might need or want in
the future. This is the power of manipulation while thinking through the lens of
dark psychology.

How to detect and avoid manipulation

Imagine, for a moment, that, in the above hypothetical, you are not Person 1, 2, or
3, but rather the older, lonely person. Maybe you are not so wantonly lonely,
needy, broke, or obviously susceptible to manipulation from strangers. This does
not matter. You could still be the target of a manipulator's plans, even if you
yourself are interested in taking up the study and implementation of
manipulation to better your own life. Everyone is susceptible to manipulation on
some level. This is true because manipulation plays on universal human
attributes, namely, as was covered in the introduction and the first and second
chapters, the human attribute of desire and the subconscious. We all want things,
which means that, without the proper mindset, we are all viable prey for those
that wish to use and contort our wants to their own ends.

Perhaps you always want to believe your friends or loved ones when they tell you
things, even if you have a feeling they are either lying or skewing the facts.
Perhaps you have the opposite problem, and you always disbelieve people. In
either case, you are susceptible to manipulation if the manipulator is skilled
enough. This may seem counterintuitive. After all, isn't distrust a catch all
defense against potential manipulators? The answer to that question is,
emphatically, no! Manipulation can take many, many forms.

As an example, Imagine two people you know are having an incredibly heated,
drawn out fight. For about a month now, they have not talked to each other.
Then, one day, one of them tells you that, before the fight, the other one told him
or her that, despite what that other friend had told you, he or she actually hated
an object of yours that you had always been slightly self conscious of, of which
your other friend had insisted to you up and down multiple times that he or she
was a fan. In that moment, if you are too un-trusting a character, especially with
you insecurities regarding that object, you are more than likely to believe the
friend you are talking to, and, as a result, to take his or her side in the argument.
You might even wind up cutting off that other friend. Now imagine that the friend
who came to you with that information was, in fact, manipulating you. Imagine
that he or she actually planted the idea that your other friend was dishonest in
your mind because he or she knew you were both distrustful and insecure about
the object in question. That friend did a very good job manipulating you!

If you want to avoid a situation like that from ever happening to you, the first step
is in learning your own insecurities and weaknesses. Of course, this is an
exceedingly daunting task. Remember, the subconscious is, by definition, out of
the realm of things of which we are aware. That being said, it is not impossible to
become cognizant of these limitations or weaknesses. One way to become aware,
though it can be very expensive, is to go to therapy. It may sound too basic to
work, but, in actuality, therapy may be the best way to protect yourself against
manipulation. Through the process of therapy – especially psychoanalysis,
though Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, or any
other variation of “the talking cure” could be useful here – you not only learn
quite a bit about yourself, you also, occasionally, learn to overcome weaknesses
and insecurities that a manipulator could exploit. Even if you don't lose those
weaknesses entirely, the process of learning about them, becoming aware of
them, is itself a defense. Imagine if the scenario above happened, but you knew
yourself to be slightly too distrustful and too insecure about your object. It may
very well wind up going differently!

Let's assume, however, that therapy either is not an option for you or would not
work. How do you protect yourself against becoming the target of manipulation?
While any full answer still must involve gaining self awareness about your faults,
perhaps through downloading a therapy workbook from the Internet or thinking
critically about your own behavior, the answer can also lie in distinguishing the
patterns that manipulators often use. For instance, does this person vacillate
between being incredibly kind, forthcoming, and generous on the one hand and
exceedingly needy and controlling on the other? Does it seem like this person is
always expecting something of you, and are those expectations predicated on him
or her having helped you out in a way that hits close to home? Did they give you
something you are always in need or want of, like validation, an ear, or attention?
The underlying question, here, is, does it seem like, when you are with them, you
always come away feeling like you either have to do what they say or what they
say is somehow always what you want? These are the kinds of questions you have
to ask yourself if you want to sniff out manipulators before they have you under
their control.

Though, admittedly, without increased, even impeccable, knowledge of your own

self and weaknesses and desires, you will never have a full defense against
manipulators. This is because masters of manipulation know how to conceal what
they are doing. Remember, dark psychology is better than all other forms of
social control at keeping itself hidden from view. When a person is good enough
at manipulating, no one ever knows what that person has done.

How to use manipulation

Of course, protection against manipulation is one thing, but there is a good
chance that you also want to know how to use manipulation. Even if you are on
the fence about whether or not utilizing dark psychology is right for you, you may
want to know, just to be sure, how manipulation can be utilized in your day-to-
day life. Even for some moralists, it is a worthwhile skill to know! After all,
manipulation can take on many forms, some of which are just good sense in
today's hyper-professional and fast paced world.

Imagine, for instance, that you work under an incompetent boss who just makes
your job more difficult without giving you anything in return to make the
difficulty worthwhile. Maybe, when you run things by him in the straightforward,
honest way, he routinely becomes a roadblock to getting things done. Maybe he is
so incompetent and forceful that he requires you to do your job in a way that is
tedious, inefficient, and unnecessary. If you could somehow change the way you
relate with him, wouldn't you take it?

Well, with the right kind of manipulation applied, you absolute can change your
boss's and your relationship. Think about it. If he does not listen to
straightforward reason and logic, or if he actively rebuffs those things from a
place of absolute stupidity, if you want things to get better you have no choice but
to act dishonestly, or in a Machiavellian way, with him. So, how do you go about
doing it?

First thing first, you have to study him. This was covered in the previous chapter,
but we'll dive deeper into how that works. Ask yourself, when you endeavor to
study his psyche, what is it that he wants in life? Bosses routinely like to feel
powerful, so consider appealing to his sense of authority by complimenting his
ability to run meetings or do other boss things. Act like a good employee for him.
This, in itself, is a form of manipulation. With that little bit of study done,
however, you can take it further. Find ways, in conversation with him, to make
him think that streamlined, more efficient work strategies you have been trying
to work through for months are not only good ideas, but his good ideas. This can
be tricky, but with enough forethought, chances are you will be able to find a way
to make any person, especially an idiot, believe that your ideas are theirs.

Maybe, instead, you realize that on top of being an incompetent oaf he is

incredibly lonely. As a result, you could take him out for drinks, listen to him talk
about his life, then ask him updates about the non-work things he's up to later on
when you are both on the clock. What you are doing here is replacing his mental
image of you as an employee with a new mental image of you, as a friend or
confidant, as someone who sates a need or desire he has. This gives you more
power in the relationship and allows you to push, in a straightforward way, for
the things you want from it. Alternately, it gives you the opportunity to get more
directly from him. With enough time logged as one of his good friends you will be
first up for every promotion and the ideal schedule on top of having increased
freedom and the ability to control him to some extent.

In any case, this is just an example. You can use manipulation both in and outside
of the professional world, on basically anyone provided you are willing to put the
time necessary into manipulating them. Remember Person 3 from the
hypothetical scenario involving the older, lonely wretch? Well, if you tune your
perception to a manipulation-minded channel, you too could manipulate even
people you have just met, provided they are susceptible to specifically your skill
set.

This actually speaks to another thing you should keep in mind. It is very
important to know your limits when you are manipulating someone. Knowing
your own mind is probably just as important for practicing manipulation as it is
for defending against manipulation. This is because manipulation is
fundamentally about giving people what they want, and no one can offer up
everything for any one person, let alone for everyone. In other words, know what
you can offer up (and then withhold) from others before you start poking around
in their psyche. If you offer something you can't give then you have blown the
illusion, and that person may stop relying on you for the things you can give. You
need your targets to feel that you in particular are a very beneficial person to have
around so that you can benefit from them.
Manipulation in the world today
To close out this section on manipulation, it is worth re-iterating how widespread
the practice of manipulation is in the world of dark psychology and the world in
general. With that in mind, here are several anecdotes that reveal even more of
the power of manipulation, particularly on the level of very powerful individuals.

It has been mentioned twice already that the current President of the United
States, Donald J. Trump, is a master of suggestion, which is a form of hypnotism,
but his past as a manipulator has not been discussed. It should be, because it is
long, varied, and impressive. With a baseline of material wealth inherited from
his father – because, remember, all massively successful manipulators start with
a surplus of material as the basis for their manipulations – Donald Trump
managed to project an unheard of level of confidence in meetings with very
powerful people, convincing them again and again to work with his real estate
company to transform the island of Manhattan in his image. Interestingly,
though, quite a lot of the time this image he projected, and even his prowess as a
real estate mogul, amounted to smoke and mirrors. He was a master of the
deceptive manipulation in his heyday, capable of turning several rented cranes
and a lot of busywork into the image of intense building in investors' eyes, such
that he could always put off promised results for years and years after they were
expected and collect money for work that no one was doing all the while.

So, what was his method? For one, he always had good friends who were willing
to go to bat for him. Were these friends direct targets of his manipulation? Were
they bribed? Or were they in on the scheme with points in the project? Probably,
it was a mix of all three, because, like any good manipulator, Donald Trump does
not pay any heed to how he gets what he wants. Anything that works is sufficient
for him, which is the hallmark of any good dark psychology practitioner. Note, for
instance, how willing he is to support and pal around with communist dictators
like Kim Jong Un, leader of The Democratic People's Republic Of Korea, while
decrying the rise of socialism at home! This is not a man who has any strong
relationship with the truth. He does and believes what is necessary in the
moment to push through whatever deal on which he is working. This, ultimately,
is what his book, The Art of the Deal, is about!

Interestingly enough, The Art of the Deal is itself, apart from being a masterclass
in how to behave amorally and succeed as a result, a prime example of the dark
psychology mindset in action. Everyone, to this day, refers to it as his book, but
he didn't write a word of it. It was written by another person and then published
under his name before becoming a massive bestseller. Trump, being the genius of
manipulation that he is, openly admits to having had someone else write the book
but still claims it as his own, as a collection of his ideas. It is not the process of
hiring a ghostwriter, here, that is so devious, but the second decision, to
acknowledge having used one but claim, nonetheless, that you are still owed one
hundred percent of the credit for the contents of the book. What is more, as a
testament to his prowess as a manipulator, a majority of people still consider this
book to convey a classic Trump mindset and still consider it to be basically one
hundred percent a book by Donald Trump, despite the fact that they know he did
not write it.

This conveys the essential power and nature of manipulation, that, when done
well enough and with no scruples whatsoever, one can maintain a deception
through manipulation even past the point where the “truth” about that deception
comes to light.

In the next chapter you will see this is not strictly the case with persuasion, but,
as you will also see, it is not wholly unrelated either.
Chapter 4: Dark Persuasion

Now that you have reached the chapter on dark persuasion, it would be in your
best interest to ensure that you read the preceding chapter as carefully as possible
before continuing. This is because, as was noted in passing in the second chapter,
persuasion, and especially dark persuasion, share a lot in common with
manipulation. Looked at a certain way, persuasion could even be considered the
younger sister to manipulation. This is because persuasion, as you will soon see,
is a slightly newer discipline, and as such more refined and less outwardly
aggressive. Nonetheless, make sure that you have a sufficient understanding of
manipulation before you continue so that your understandings of persuasion and
dark persuasion are as complete and multifaceted as possible.

That being said, your deep dive into the world of persuasion will begin with a look
at the history of persuasion in a way reminiscent to the previous chapter's look at
the history of manipulation. It is recommended that you read this in the context
of the section on the history of manipulation.

A history of persuasion
Unlike manipulation, the practice of persuasion must be firmly rooted in an
already existing civilized society. What this means is that the art of winning
people over with impeccable speech, argumentation, and a strong ability to
prefigure and know their beliefs, which is a succinct definition of persuasion in
general but not dark persuasion, requires several things that do not exist outside
of a society.

The first thing required for persuasion to propagate as a means of accruing

influence is a certain amount of freedom from violence. Obviously, even without a
society, people would not spend all day murdering each other; they would be too
busy hunting for food, but specifically conflict outside of a civilized society is
more plagued by physical violence. This is common sense. Without a state or
organized structure of people from whom a person could be removed if he or she
acted wantonly violent toward others, what is there to stop heated, fundamental
disagreements from falling to bloodshed? There is not much there, to be clear,
and, in this context, persuasion is not that appealing.

Even so, the capacity for persuasion, and perhaps even individual instances of
innately very gifted persuaders, almost certainly has a history as old as spoken
language. That being said, the birth of persuasion as a form of art or a craft
probably came about some time during the European Middle Ages, where the
world's first colleges developed and systematized a method of argumentation
called dialectical argumentation.

Now, dialectical argumentation is a far cry from dark persuasion, having been an
activity that only clergy in training – namely: monks, priests, and friars – were
allowed to partake in, it was exclusively about the minutiae of theological texts of
the day. That being said, you can see within it the beginnings of the serious,
systemic approach to convincing other people that you are right and they are
wrong. Dialectical argumentation, in its heyday, blossomed into a set of rules and
techniques for arguing your case that was mind-blowing in its variation and its
shape. They devised rules of engagement for all manner of arguments and, in the
process, showed that a convincing argument was convincing for its shape and
structure as much as for its content.

This is not meant to short the significance of an argument's content. To be clear,

content still reigned. Abelard, one of the most talented and famous dialectical
arguers of the Middle Ages, was incredibly witty and capable of finding the holes
in the logic of his opponents with ease.

You may be asking yourself what, exactly, this has to do with persuasiveness
today, especially considering the fact that, generally, the great persuaders of
today don't persuade or argue using facts and logic nearly as much as they
persuade or argue using emotional appeals. This is not a trifling difference. In
fact, a lot has changed from the Middle Ages to today, especially when it comes to
persuasiveness, but Medieval dialectical argumentation still has something to
teach you if you are interested in learning the arts of persuasion.

What it has to teach you, of course, is that context matters just as much as
content. In the second chapter, you read about the necessity of knowing a person
to some degree if you sought to persuade that person. Well, in a sense, the
process of dialectical argumentation shows that you can design your
persuasiveness around a general person.

This approach has its limits, but it is true that most people, especially in a society
that displays some degree of civic-mindedness of even the lowest level, share
traits, hopes, dreams and desires. That is the significance of dialectical
argumentation. By standardizing the structures of persuasions and debates, they
showed that some kinds of thinking were more standard than others and,
therefore, more likely to work. Being less knowledgable than us, they believed
these standards to be eternal, transcendent constants given to humankind by God
on high. Obviously, this was not the case. All values, virtues, and beliefs are
contingent on culture, but they are still overwhelmingly important to know if you
intend on mastering the persuasive arts. You must speak the language of the
people you seek to persuade from top to bottom. The only thing you should
disagree on is the topic about which you are arguing.

This is to say that, from Medieval dialectical argumentation, you can learn the
significance and necessity of a shared culture in the context of persuasion.
Imagine the opposite situation unfolding, wherein you have found yourself trying
to persuade a person in another country, with different customs and a different
way of life, that you are right and he or she is absolutely wrong. Imagine, to drive
the point home, that he or she actually speaks impeccable english, that there are
no language barriers between the two of you. How, despite that, can you convince
him or her of anything significant? What if it is something small, like about
whether or not grilling in the Summer is worth it when it gets too hot, but he or
she has never once in his or her life even seen a grill? What if he or she comes
from a culture where everyone is vegetarian? Your first goal in persuasion should
be to smooth over superfluous differences between yourself and your target or, at
very least, to commit significant differences to memory, such that you never run
into the wrong territory unaware. This you can see from Medieval monks.

Dark persuasion versus regular persuasion

In the second chapter the differences between regular and dark persuasion were
covered in brief. At their core, these differences came down to intention. Unlike
regular persuasion, which always contains on some level an ethically minded
actor who is unwilling to break with what he or she believes to be true when he or
she is attempting to persuade, dark persuasion is absolutely unfettered. The ideal
practitioner of dark persuasion has exactly zero compunctions about stretching
or breaking the truth in service of his or her goal, which is convincing his or her
target of the veracity of his or her position.

This, however, could give a slightly skewed view of the differences between the
two kinds of persuasion. It would be understandable if, so far, you believed dark
persuasion to be strictly about deception in service of persuasiveness, if you
understood dark persuasion as being wholly a kind of deception. You would,
however, be wrong. Dark persuasion does not lack truth in totality. In fact, dark
persuasion can make just as much use of the truth as any other kind of
persuasion. The key difference, the thing that sets dark persuasion apart from, for
instance, the kind of persuasion that one could trace all the way back to the
Middle Ages, is that dark persuasion has no fundamental link to the truth. Put
another way, one could say that the master of dark persuasion only cares about
the truth when the truth is in service to his or her end goals.

For the dark persuasion artist, the truth can, in fact, be exceedingly valuable.
Nothing is more convincing than something that is demonstrably true, after all.
So, again, the true key difference between dark persuasion and its normal cousin
is that, for dark persuasion, the truth is just another brush stroke or color to be
mixed and applied to the painting that is the persuasion as a whole. This is what
dark persuasion has a different, less causal relationship to the truth means,
ultimately.

More so than pretty much everything else in this book, this way of thinking is
incredibly liberating and creative. Friedrich Nietzsche talks about the increase in
creative and active potentials that goes along with tossing aside the yoke of truth.
Without being subjected by the idea of the objectively right or wrong, creation
and vitality take precedence over fidelity to any moral limits. In this sense, dark
persuasion is a wonderful example of the Nietzschean ideal of the active life,
which is opposed in all ways to the inactive life of the non-creative and cowardly
moralists of the world who are, in fewer words, only fine with regular
persuasiveness. If you follow this metaphor through all the way, however, you
will discover a flip side that is well worth heeding. In order to maintain the drives
necessary to excel as an unfettered, amoral, dark persuasion artist, you must
always have a goal. This is because, lacking an objective moral authority or truth,
you need something to fix you in place and give you a direction, lest you lose your
footing and wind up overwhelmed by freedom and bored. This direction,
however, is subjective. It is whatever you desire it to be, so it can be as simple as
the goal of getting something from another person. This is why, again, focus, a
can-do attitude, and time are all tantamount to learning and carrying out the
skills of dark persuasion, even more so than persuasion in general.

That being said, dark persuasion still does have a lot in common with its everyday
counterpart. This is because, at the end of the day, their methods are very similar.
In both cases, they involve using cunning, wit, intelligence, sensitivity, and speed
to convince another person that you are right. In these ways, they could barely be
more similar. But where does this leave the dark persuasion artist? It lives him or
her with a world of background literature to read, to be quite honest! This is a
short book that has to cover a lot of ground, so there is no way you'll be able to
learn about everything the world of persuasion has to offer, but those resources
are out there.

More to the point, however, the best resource for learning the actual nuts and
bolts of persuasion as it actually exists, in both the dark and regular varieties, is
to go out and observe people. This has been said already, but it is one of the most
significant ideas in the book; dark psychology is a practice, and its techniques
are meant to be used. The best way to learn how to do dark persuasion is to go
out and actually do it. The same is true for regular persuasion, but that has
slightly more resources available for study. Whatever the case may be, there is no
substitute for action.

That being said, it is important to remember the idea of dark intimacy and how it
relates to dark persuasion. It was defined in the second chapter, but, apart from
an unconventional relationship to the truth, dark intimacy is the most
fundamental and significant difference between dark persuasion and regular
persuasion. In fact, dark intimacy helps to re-frame one's relationship to the
truth for the purposes of dark persuasion in that it radically re-imagines how one
person can relate to another. If used without an abundance of caution, it can, in
fact, limit the extent to which you are able to have a normal relationship. With
enough dark intimacy, no amount of human connection will ever feel wholly
genuine, because it turns intimacy itself, that self-evident joy for so many people,
into just another tool, just another brush stroke or color on a pallet. This is not to
say it should not be used. In fact, it is quite a necessary component of dark
persuasion, which is predicated on exploiting the deepest, most sensitive parts of
another person when needed.

How to detect and avoid dark persuasion

By now, you may have already recognized that persuasiveness is a very pervasive
form of social interaction. There is no way to avoid facing persuasion in general,
and, in fact, it is very easy to identify. Usually, people do not try to conceal the
fact that they are trying to persuade you of something when they try to persuade
you.

Dark persuasion, on the other hand, is an entirely different story. Dark

persuasion, to at least the same extent as manipulation, if not an even greater
extent, is almost always concealed. This is because it is not even remotely socially
acceptable to do. It is, to be very clear, an exceedingly unacceptable thing to do,
because people are afraid of being controlled in this way. If more people knew
what dark persuasion was, being labelled as a person who uses dark persuasion
techniques would be justification enough to be immediately socially ostracized.

In other words, it is still important to be able to recognize when someone is using

dark persuasion. One of the first tells you should be looking for, if you suspect
that someone is capable of this sinister and subtle art, is whether or not this
person has taken a bizarre or otherwise abnormal amount of interest in you after
learning some new fact about you. This fact may be something small, and
insignificant. For instance, it may be that you are looking to sell your car.

This is unlikely, given the fact that most adequately skilled dark persuasion
craftsmen are also skilled in regular persuasion, and in the case of a simple
transaction, he or she would most likely not take the risk or waste the extra time
involved in employing dark techniques, when just haggling with tenacity and
confidence would do the trick. For the sake of argument, however, say that this
person decides to employ dark persuasion techniques on you after finding out
that you want to get rid of a car, but you don't know yet that he or she is capable
of this kind of behavior. What do you do?

First thing first, take note of what kinds of new attention this person is paying to
you. Is he or she trying to develop an exceedingly close relationship with you, or
does he or she just seem to be paying an extra amount of attention to your traits
whenever he or she is around you? This is a crucial distinction, because in the
former case, he or she is willing to go the full length of establishing a real bond
with you as a person by using what was formerly defined as the more sinister and
amoral kind of dark intimacy, wherein the practitioner goes out of his or her way
to establish real closeness between him- or herself and his or her victim. If this is
the case, proceed with extreme caution or cut of contact entirely if you want to be
certain that you will not be persuaded into giving away your car. Even with full
awareness, facing off with a dark persuasion practitioner who is willing to go to
those lengths is still likely to end in defeat.

In the latter case, however, the solution is similar to defenses against

manipulation, which is to say that, first and foremost, you must have exceedingly
strong self-awareness regarding your own psyche. What are your weak spots?
What in you would a psychological predator seek to exploit were he or she to find
it? Again, the best way to do this is to see a therapist, especially a psychoanalyst if
you can find and afford one. With enough time and work with an analyst, you will
be almost impervious to the machinations of dark psychology practitioners,
because you will be more confident in your own mind, and capable of recognizing
and de-emphasizing your neuroses in your own life even if you fall short of
outright ridding yourself of them.

Of course, a semi-viable alternate option, if you lack the funds or the will
necessary to go to a therapist of some kind, is to do research on the human
psyche yourself. There have been jokes about the Oedipal Complex, wherein, the
joke goes, Freud insists that every male wants to make love to his mother, but in
actuality the Oedipal Complex, just as an example, is an incredibly potent tool for
understanding human behavior, even your own. So, read up and understand
yourself better, because it may protect you from some of the darkest, most
insidious behavior. If you are worried that you are susceptible to this kind of
attack, self-knowledge is the best way to gird yourself against it!

That being said, you can always elect to protect yourself in another way, one that
does not work for manipulation. You will recall that the previous chapter said,
unequivocally, that distrustfulness is not a worthwhile defense against
manipulation. This is basically true for dark persuasion, too, because most of the
time it functions without your knowledge no matter how girded you are against it,
but a healthy dose of skepticism around fair weather friends may serve you well
in your pursuit of freedom from fear of the dark persuasion master. This is said
with caution, though, because distrustfulness to an excessive extent is still more
harmful than helpful.

How to use dark persuasion

The uses of dark persuasion are not unlike the uses of manipulation in that both
require a strong will and commitment to the task at hand no matter what. That
being said, there is one key difference between the two practices, notably the
addition of dark intimacy.

Dark intimacy is a game changer as far as practice goes, because there is nothing
within manipulation that requires such a charged and long term commitment to
emotional deceit. Dark intimacy requires an almost Herculean level of either
removal from one's own emotional life or steel-eyed resolve in one's actions. Dark
intimacy involves taking a long look in the mirror and trying, as hard as possible,
to fake a smile. You can't just fake a smile, though, you have to fake frowns, tears,
anger, even those subtle gestures that communicate care in the eyes of normal
people. Dark intimacy requires that you become two people: the perfect friend
upon whom all your target's can trust and in whom they can confide on the on
hand, and the true self, for whom everything is a mirage or a fiction save those
few moments when you are alone and able to breath.

In a certain sense, the real power of dark intimacy comes from knowing of what
you are capable. Having successfully persuaded a person with whom you have
become the picture perfect model of close friends, for whom you have done many
things in service of rending some or another thing, is one of the most powerful
and intoxicating affirmations of the self attainable in our modern world. You
were born too late to become a feudal lord by way of sheer wit, charisma, and
luck, but you were born just in time to master other people with ruthless cunning.

One question, however, is whether or not there is a suitable target for so much
effort. Yes, the feeling of success will be marvelous regardless, but without a
suitably significant target, the efforts needed to take you all the way will
undoubtedly knock you off your axis and fling you into nihilism without the
guiding light of a goal. Remember the significance of belief and direction after
you have tossed aside the safety of truth and objectivity; you will always need a
guiding light, and the best guiding light is a goal you truly believe is worth the
work. So, what will work for you? Only you can answer this question. You must
be able to search your heart and know for certain before you embark. Perhaps it
is that dream career-making position at a company. Perhaps it is just simple
respect from your father, your mother, your brother, or your boss. Whatever the
answer is, you must know without any doubt that it is worth the efforts you put
in, no matter how much time, sweat, and struggle those efforts amount to by the
end.

One way to try and zero in on an objective is to ask yourself what it is you have
always wanted and never had. Alternately, you can ask yourself what it is
someone around you has that you have always envied. This can not be normal
envy, though. It must be all consuming, debilitating envy that you have never
been able to get over. The kind of envy that makes you feel weak and small.
Ultimately, the use of dark intimacy, particularly of the more intense and
involved variety, is the most harrowing method of both dark persuasion in
particular and dark psychology in general. It is really the refuge of the truly
committed, the truly broken, and the truly amoral.

Maybe you are one of those things. Maybe you are not, but you still think you
would like to try for some reason or another. In either of those cases, after
determining what it is you want and who it is you want that thing from, your
course is more or less set. Be absolutely sure you understand three things,
though, in the following order: the human psyche in general, your psyche, and
your target's psyche. This order, which may seem counter-intuitive, is actually
tantamount to your eventual success. Obviously, you need to be well versed in the
functioning of the human psyche before you become a passable dark psychology
practitioner anyway, but it is especially important in this scenario, where
overwhelmingly in depth knowledge of a particular human's psyche is central to
your success. The next part, however, may seem counterintuitive to you. Why is
your psyche significant here? With techniques of manipulation, knowing your
own psyche is not nearly as important. Here, however, because you have to spend
so much time building a relationship on false pretenses, you have to know
yourself in order to ensure that you convey the right messages at all points in
time. Chances are, if you are the type of person who is at all interested in this
kind of behavior, there will be parts of your inner workings that you will have to
conceal like leprosy from your target. It is important that you are aware of these
parts of yourself before you begin, so you can prepare accordingly. The target's
psyche is an obvious portion. You must always understand how your target
functions. In this case, however, it is even more important.

Dark persuasion in the world today

As was discussed before, the standard, not dark version of persuasion is
incredibly pervasive in the world. You could not feasibly enter into any significant
professional or social realm without occasionally coming into contact with it, and
this is even more true when discussing the true halls of power and influence or
any industry that routinely makes history. There is no history without persuasion.
What this means is that the history of all hitherto existing industry, society,
culture, and humanity is the history of persuasion on a certain level.

You have already learned how and why persuasion is less likely to be encountered
out in the wild, away from civilization, than manipulation, but it is important to
specify that, despite this, persuasion still has its roots in fundamental human
nature. Think about it. It is only natural, with our intelligent nature as animals,
that we endeavor to convince others of our own correctness, which is often what
persuasion is about. When it is about something else, something perhaps more
tangible, the same fact maintains. It is an exceedingly human thing to delight in
using only words and interaction to pull another person into your orbit. The only
reason why persuasion can only proliferate on a more systematized or significant
level within the context of a society is because there are too many risks in
persuasion outside of that context. Though, in a certain sense, the formation of
society itself was a persuasion played out on a massive scale. For more
information on this, look at the introduction to the chapter on manipulation.

So, yes, you can expect to find it everywhere in the world today. It is locatable
everywhere from the used car lot down the street to business board rooms, from
the street corner where you have had the misfortune of running into a beggar to a
family Christmas dinner, the examples are quite possibly limitless.

Dark persuasion, on the other hand, is a rarified pattern of behavior. A good

famous example may actually again be Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin. Remember
his rise to power, from anonymous Russian peasantry to the ears of the Czar and
Czarina. The move from one to the other required him to cultivate countless
relationships for his own self-interested ends. This includes his followers, to be
certain, but to an even greater extent it includes everyone he grew up with,
because, remember, he started his rise while still living in his father's house. This
meant that he had to convince the people closest to him that he was a holy man
who did not desire but deserved outsized influence over not only his own world
but, ultimately, the entire country of Russia. What is more, his resolve and focus
was so steely that he never once erred in controlling even the royal family.

We know now, for example, that faith healing does not work. Prayer has no effect
on a person's physical health. Despite this fact, which on some level Rasputin
himself must have known, he successfully persuaded the heads of an empire – in
fact, the largest empire on Earth at the time – to allow him to heal their son, who
was sickly with hemophilia. What is more, having not healed that son's
hemophilia, he still persuaded them to allow him drastically increasing influence
over their lives. This is because he knew all the correct buttons to push to curry
their favor and stay inside their inner circle. It happened too long ago for anyone
to know how he did this for certain, but dark persuasion of some or another kind
is the only method that makes his story viable. Only a master of this dark craft
could command the attention and belief necessary from his target's for such a
long amount of time.

That concludes this chapter on persuasion, but you are encouraged, if you have
not yet, to read the manipulation chapter again now that you know more about its
counterpart, persuasion. Ultimately, these two methods exist on a continuum
with each other far more than with the third and final method, mind control,
which is the subject of the next chapter and, as was noted previously, quite
distinct from these first two methods.
Chapter 5: Mind Control
Mind control, without a doubt, is the most complex of the primary tools of dark
psychology. It functions on a fundamentally different level than the other two
primary tools, and as a result has very little in comparison with them. For that
reason, the first section of this chapter will cover the techniques required to use
mind control rather than a history of the phenomenon. That being said, the
history of mind control is briefer, as far as we know, than the histories of both
manipulation and persuasion, because mind control is a specialized practice that
had to be developed at length before it could be deployed on others. It is not,
unlike persuasion and manipulation, a natural tendency of the human condition.
Instead, it is a process-oriented practice that could only be developed after years
of other dark psychology methods were used, re-used, and studied by their
practitioners. It is, in this sense, a kind of culmination of proto-dark psychology,
the result of developing a dark psychology mindset across cultures for thousands
of years, against the tide of normal, empathic mindsets. It comes, in other words,
from the purely cynical, purely Machiavellian, and purely self-interested
worldview spreading and stretching out across time.

A deep dive into mind control

In the second chapter, mind control was split into two main constituent parts:
hypnosis and suggestion. To some degree, these two are related to each other.
This is because suggestion is often looked at as a kind of hypnosis, in that both
involve the use of particular body-regulating, externally-oriented techniques to
draw a target into your control. That being said, this book will always hold them
as two separate techniques because their applications are so distinctly different.
This is the case because, for instance, while the timespan for both is indefinite,
suggestion lends itself more readily, as a more ambient, less noticeable
technique, to longer spans of time, whereas hypnosis, often defined around
individual words, phrases, and actions, must have a certain level of externality in
its functioning. What this means for the dark psychology practitioner's purposes
is that hypnosis requires him or her to expose herself, if even for the briefest
instant, by acting directly as a controller to the person they are attempting to
control.

This perhaps will take some unpacking. It seems worthwhile to begin with a
breakdown of what basic hypnosis entails. Hypnosis is comprised, primarily, of
inducing a hypnotic trance in your subject. One of the easiest ways to induce this
is by way of something called the CEO method, the letters of which stand for
Control attention, Eliminate the analytical element, and Overwrite the
subconscious. As a side note, observe that the acronym is shared in common with
“Chief Executive Officer.” This indicates the amount of control and ownership
successful practitioners of this method have over their subjects. Anyway, let's
look at what those three letters really entail.

The first part of the method, C for control attention, is all about gaining a major
foothold in your subject's attention. Hypnotists who do not practice dark
psychology generally use methods like small pendulums held in front of their
subject's face (imagine, here, the media cliché of a mustachioed hypnotist telling
someone, “Look deeply at,” a pocket watch, for instance, “as it waves back and
forth,” or something to that effect), but dark psychology practitioner's are not
limited to such paltry tricks. They may be sufficient to your purposes, in which
case you are advised to use them as they have an innocuous look, but remember
that the dark psychology practitioner has many methods at his or her disposal for
gaining the attention of a target or subject. This process, of gaining your subject's
attention, primes them for your influence.

Once your subject is paying attention to you, the next step is E, eliminating the
analytical element. What this means, in brief, is turning of or stopping, which
ever makes more sense to you, the part of your subject's brain that is at all
analytical. You don't want him or her second-guessing or understanding what it
is your saying on the conscious level at all, and a shortcut to the conscious level of
thought and perception is analytical thinking. Remember, it is only in the
conscious world where things are required to make sense. Instead, you want him
or her to be absolutely thoughtless in his or her following of your commands, like
a robot. In order to make this break from the world of analytic thought, you are
going to want to speak to them, perhaps telling them an involved story with a lot
to pay attention to, that somehow contains classic themes of hypnosis like
relaxation, deep breathing, and focus or attention. While telling your story, you
also want to use emotionally loaded words and a lot of words that bridge together
sentences and concepts. The goal here is to affect the emotional portion of the
brain only, so that he or she does not have to use any analysis or analytic thought
to follow along, and so that his or her brain wants to follow along.

With all of this work done, you will be able to commune directly with your
subject's subconscious mind, and overwrite, which is what the O in CEO stands
for, what was present there beforehand. This portion of the process is perhaps the
easiest, because you have already done the work necessary to make it work in the
previous portions of the process. It is also the last part of the process. With all of
this done, you have already hypnotized a subject, and you are free to insert
whatever you always planned to insert into his or her mind. It is actually quite
easy and takes relatively little time compared to, for instance, dark persuasion or
long term manipulation.

That is a basic layout for how to practice hypnotism, but what about scenarios
where it would be impossible to carry out that work? How do you make a subject
susceptible to your prowess when you do not have the time nor the freedom from
scrutiny necessary to lull them into this subconscious, controllable state? Well,
that is where suggestion comes in. The next section will layout the process of
suggestion with more detail, but, in order to introduce it and to hammer home
the differences between it and hypnosis, an example of it in practice will be given
first.
Imagine, if you will, a scenario wherein a dark psychology practitioner seeks to
influence someone via mind control but he or she only ever sees his or her subject
when the two of them are in public. That is, he or she only sees the subject when
other people are around and likely to notice the hypnosis process. What is the
dark psychology practitioner to do? Well, if the dark psychology practitioner is
versed in suggestion, he or she need not worry. He or she can use a more hidden
version of hypnosis known as suggestion, which is so subtle it is a viable option
even in the middle of a crowded mall.

Suggestion
The reason why this is the case, that suggestion could take place even in a
crowded mall, is because it fundamentally converts the key attributes of hypnosis
into small and easily concealable elements. Consider the CEO method again;
there is no reason why those techniques must be visible to others. Remember
when the difference between a normal hypnosis and a hypnosis who also
practices dark psychology came up, in the examples of methods one could use to
gain his or her subject's attention? Well, that is actually quite significant. Where a
hypnotist who has fidelity to acting ethically or who just has qualms about doing
immoral things might go out of his or her way to ensure that the person being
hypnotized consents to the hypnotism, the dark hypnotist –which, by the way, is
a shorter way of saying “the hypnotist who practices or has an interest in dark
psychology” – would have no problems with secretly bringing a person into a
hypnotic state, under which that person would be susceptible to influence.

So, assume that you start with the CEO method as a basis for suggestion. Why do
we label it differently from hypnotism? Why not just call it “concealed”
hypnotism or something else to that effect? The answer is that suggestion is
ultimately a more open-ended process. Because you are concealing your
behavior, the process has less to do with specific commands, and the subject can
be left in a suggestible state for a considerably longer amount of time. In other
words, it is a lighter but longer lasting form of hypnotism. “Lighter” may not be
that appealing a descriptor for you if you are interested in maximizing control
over your subject, and that is certainly something to be taken into consideration,
but that other descriptor should not be taken lightly.

That is to say, a longer lasting period of control should be very appealing to you
as a dark psychology practitioner. Recall the significance of long time spans in the
anecdote about Person 3 and the older, lonely wretched wastrel in the third
chapter. Were Person 3 only able to manipulate the older, lonely, wretched
person for a limited amount of time, he or she would be able to eek thousands of
dollars out of his or her target. Obviously, that scenario is slightly different in that
Person 3 was practicing manipulation, which, as you know, is distinct from mind
control, but in dark psychology in general the time span of control is always
worth taking into account. Maximizing control over time maximizes results
because it leaves supplicants, or subjects, in your back pocket for later use at the
very least. Consider, also, the history of manipulation across primitive
accumulation and Feudalism from the third chapter. The message is the same;
you should always seek out longer time spans of control in your work in dark
psychology.

Notably, in fact, the lesser intensity of suggestion compared to full hypnosis is

what allows it to work for longer spans of time. This is because a state of full
hypnosis is too noticeable and too nonfunctional to continue on indefinitely.
Imagine a person with his or her consciousness fully unplugged going about his
or her daily life, day in and day out! Even if it were possible for the analytical, and
conscious, part of a person's brain to stay completely off for an indefinite span of
time, it would be too noticeable. Someone would notice, whether it be that
person's boss, or that person's coworkers, or that person's family, or that person's
friends. It would be kind of like if the character Dougie Jones from Twin Peaks:
The Return were a real person, as if a kind of husk or shell were walking around,
unaware that it was not a full person, but drawing quite a lot of attention
nonetheless.

Avoiding this scenario is one major benefit of suggestion, in other words. But
how does suggestion work if it is not a fully hypnotic state? In answer to that
question, consider the most gullible person you know. That person is conscious
for most of his or her waking hours, right? Despite the fact that he or she is quite
easy to focus on one or another idea and that he or she lacks analytical fortitude,
he or she is still a conscious adult capable, more or less, of making it through his
or her daily life. Well, consider suggestion to be the process of making a person
much more gullible, in a sense. With cue words and a mastery over a person's
attention, you can turn him or her into someone who is always willing to heed
your call, no matter the direction, tone, or content. What you are doing
essentially, in lieu of exposing his or her inner non-analytical, subconscious child,
is short-circuiting his or her capacity for analytical or critical thought in the
context of his or her contact with you. This may require re-iterating certain
methods of suggestion every time you meet with him or her. For instance, you
may need to always tell a story with cue words to control his or her attention from
the jump, but the end result can be counted on consistently once you have found
it to work once or twice. They will be susceptible to your influence, but not
generally susceptible or non-conscious as they would be under full hypnotism.

With these definitions out of the way, it is worth taking a look at how instances of
mind control work in reality, as opposed to in popular culture and media, in part
so you remember that practice and use are always tantamount in the world of
dark psychology and in part so you understand how suggestion and hypnosis
compare and contrast to make up the entirety of mind control itself.

Mind control in popular culture versus mind control in reality

In the second chapter and in the introduction, there were references to the
difference between mind control as it exists as a cultural phenomenon and mind
control as it actually exists. This is significant, because the cultural image of mind
control gives a distinctly wrong impression of the reality of mind control. As a
result, it is important to understand both and the differences between them so
you don't enter into the practice with the wrong idea in mind.

One early example of mind control on the screen, which these days has such a
great hold on people and such a great potential for control on its own, comes in
the early German Expressionist film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. In this film, the
eponymous doctor, Dr. Caligari, is a hypnotist who works for a low rent circus.
What no one knows, however, is that he has a constantly hypnotized man that he
keeps in a box. Very graciously, he makes the man remain asleep when he is not
being used so that he doesn't lose his mind in the box out of boredom. As the
movie progresses, Dr. Caligari has the man commit various crimes, including
murder and theft, all while the people around him have no idea that this man
even exists. Because he sleeps most of the time, the man is known as a
“somnambulist.”

At very most, you can view this depiction of mind control as a fantasy of the ideal
deployment of the practice. In the previous section, you were given several
reasons why it would be impossible to keep someone in a perfectly hypnotic state
for an extended amount of time. This film suggests, tantalizingly, a means of
skipping over those issues and keeping, in a form of extreme slavery, a person in
such a state forever, but when confronted with reality it becomes exceedingly
clear that this would never work. For one, the feeding and waste scheduling for
your own somnambulist would be incredibly daunting and would arguably make
it not worth it from the jump. This consideration, however, does not matter
nearly as much as the fact that there are few, if any, people alive with the prowess
as a mind control artist or hypnotist and the mental control necessary to contain
another person's psyche to such an extreme level for a limitless amount of time.
Remember, the whole time that you have someone in a hypnotic state, whether it
be a full hypnotic state or just one built around suggestion, that person's
consciousness still exists, it has just been blocked from the surface. That means,
in order to play out the Caligari scenario, you would have to hypnotize your
subject so well, and so vehemently, that his or her consciousness remained
submerged no matter what. Chances are, even if you could do this, that person
would probably die within a couple weeks from psychic stress.

In contrast, look at one of the most prominent, real world examples of mind
control that is not a part of a stage show. You should avoid studying stage shows
because these kinds of hypnotism or mind control are very limited and they can
not teach you much about the real process of controlling, containing, and owning
another person's mind. You should also avoid looking at hypnosis-oriented
therapists, as you, as someone interested in dark psychology's version of mind
control, would gain less than you might expect from studying a non-dark
hypnotist's practice. In fact, you would likely gain no more than the CEO method
that was laid out in the previous section. No, instead, you should look at that
perennial boogie man of polite society, the cult. As everyone knows, cults are a
hotbed for mind control. As most people do not know, however, they are,
specifically, good resources for understanding the finer points of hypnotism
without all that ridiculous morality tacked on. Think about it. Cults shape their
members' minds by way of often bizarre rituals. These rituals or activities
demand an ungodly amount of attention from their participants, then proceed,
often, in a non-logical and emotionally loaded fashion that opens up the mind to
suggestion and closes out the analytical or critical faculties of the brain. The
process of cult indoctrination is a classic example of hypnotic mind control in
action. Remember when you were warned not to limit your thinking regarding
methods of gaining your subjects' attention to those suggested by normal, non-
dark hypnotists? Well, cults are a very good source for alternate options.
Consider, for instance, the wide array of cults that use self-criticism to break
down their members. The process of demanding something so intense from
someone simultaneously pulls his or her whole self, attention included, front and
center, and then, by way of negative emotional charge, limits and then blocks out
first only the rational and then all of the analytic portions of the brain. All of this
from one action on the part of the hypnotist! It is quite impressive, and absolutely
worthy of study from someone curious about giving mind control a try on his or
her own.

From the above examples, it is easy to see how far flung mind control represented
in popular culture is from mind control as it actually exists in the real world.
Additionally, from the example of cult behavior, it is easy to see how suggestion,
which uses some of the same techniques as hypnotism, can work on a much
deeper, more useful, and insidious level than hypnotism proper. With these facts
in mind, however, you may want to know some details about how to avoid falling
prey to hypnotism or mind control yourself. After all, if you're interested in
learning how, certainly there are others who are interested, too.

As a bonus example before moving on to the next section, think about another
real life example of suggestion. You will recall that in the introduction to this
book Donald J. Trump, the President of The United States was named as a secret
and powerful suggestion artist. Well, you now have the tools to unpack that claim
some. Think about it, Donald Trump is a master of controlling people's focus or
attention. He often does this by intentionally saying things that are absolutely,
necessarily wrong. Think of all the different people, if you are aware of the goings
on of American politics, that he has referred to as “the absolute best guy” or “the
absolute worst guy.” There can not be multiple people who are all the best, nor
multiple people who are all the worst, yet still he does it. Through this process, he
pulls in our attention like any good suggestion craftsmen. Then, with our
attention, he demands, through that same lie, that people continue to argue
against his original, obviously exaggerated point. Generally, people argue against
or for that point with intense anger, a non-analytical response, and they continue
to argue against it for quite a while. This whole process winds up supplanting not
the specific falsehoods but his underlying position, the baseline of those
falsehoods, in everyone's mind, thereby working them into everyone's
subconscious and short-circuiting the public's ability to think critically and have a
response to and opinion about him that is predicated on actual logic. It's quite
brilliant, actually, and it lends itself to unexpected kinds of social control.
How to detect and avoid mind control
The differences between mind control on the one hand and dark persuasion and
manipulation on the other really come to the front when discussing how to avoid
these different techniques of dark psychology. This is the case because dark
persuasion and manipulation can and in some cases must be deployed in an
exceedingly casual way while the practitioner goes about his or her daily life. The
practices, to put it another way, are very often ambient ones, or at very least
semi-ambient, such that identification of them can be problematic. This,
however, is not the case with suggestion or hypnotism.

As you can probably tell from the two preceding sections, real world mind
control, hypnotism and suggestion, all require some or another degree of actual,
focused activity. This makes detecting them in order to avoid becoming the
subject or victim of them somewhat easier, but this is not to say easy. You should
recall that suggestion, when deployed subtly enough, can resemble in most ways
a normal interaction when deployed interpersonally, or business as usual with
maybe a little chaos thrown on top when deployed on a mass scale. This means
that you still need to learn to identify it.

The best way to learn to identify it is to look for the tells. Do interactions with a
person always begin or initiate with an authoritative or assertive demand for
attention? Does that person use emotionally loaded language in his or her
dealings with you as opposed to neutral, rational language? Does it seem like he
or she uses an excessive amount of link words and prepositional phrases, such
that the connections between concepts are incredibly easy to grasp and hard to
think critically about? These are the real signs a person should look for if he or
she is worried that he or she is being manipulated by way of suggestion or any
other kind of mind control. This is because, as you have probably noticed by now,
pretty much every form of mind control is predicated on breaking down your
conscious faculties and engaging directly with your subconscious.

Given the slightly shorter length of this section and the clear cut solution
presented for identifying dark psychology mind control practitioners, you might
think that it is easier to avoid mind control. This is not the case. It is merely
simpler to detect it, but, unlike dark persuasion and manipulation, detection of
mind control does not guarantee or imply safety from it. In point of fact, mind
control, especially suggestion, can work on you even if you know that it is
happening. The best way to avoid falling prey to it is to practice your responses to
overly assertive calls for attention and resisting the allure of emotional baiting.
Even this is not perfect, but it will improve your chances considerably!

How to use mind control

A lot of this chapter has already alluded heavily to different ways one can use
mind control in the real world. This is probably because mind control, as has
already been mentioned a couple of times, has more specific, active requirements
than manipulation and dark persuasion. In learning about the fundamentals and
nature of mind control you necessarily learn something about its uses in the real
world. That being said, you can still benefit from imagining some real life
scenarios and how you might negotiate carrying out your mind control practice
within them successfully.

First up, picture yourself on a beach with twenty or so other people. Say you're at
a party. Then, imagine a dog running along side you on the beach. Imagine that
that dog has a stick in his mouth, and he is running toward a woman and a man
who are a ways away, in front of a setting Sun. Ask yourself, what do you want in
this moment? You probably feel a deep calm, sitting on that beach, watching that
happy couple and their dog laugh in the setting Sun, listening to the waves
gingerly go in and out. Is there anything you want in this moment? No, there is
nothing you want in this moment. This moment is all you want, and you already
have it, so there is nothing you want in this moment, right? Or, do you want
something after all? What is it that you want? I know what it is you want. You
want to continue reading, right? You want to come back to the book and leave
behind the beach, because what you want is to learn more about hypnotism and
dark psychology.

Okay, you have probably noticed by now that the above was not a real world
scenario set up for you to learn about mind control. In fact, it was itself an
example of textual mind control enacted upon you. Of course, it probably wasn't
too effective, given the fact that it was just text on a page, but it should serve to
show you the kind of tone you will want to strike when practicing hypnotic mind
control techniques. Notice, for instance, that there was no signage that that was
what was happening before it happened. This is significant. Catching people
unaware can assist in mind control, especially when you are new to it and have
less confidence, which is key to your success if your subjects know what you are
doing. If you feel that you lack confidence, you should absolutely avoid any tells
that signal to your subject what you intend to do.

Notice, also, the amount of repetition in the hypnotic attempt above. Many of the
sentences are followed by sentences that share their exact syntactic construction,
and what is more, specific image words are repeated again and again.
Additionally, there are many positional words, and most objects that travel
through have a clear path and location in the story. This is what is meant by
designing your hypnotism such that the person's analytical brain becomes
superfluous and gets eliminated. You want to make following the line of thought
overwhelmingly simple and almost dull, while you also establish a rhythm that
the subject's unconscious brain can easily grasp and follow. Notice, also, that
there were calls to action throughout, like the sentences containing the command
to “imagine.” This is a classic technique of suggestion, hypnotism, and mind
control.

Hopefully, this chapter (and the two preceding ones!) have been useful for you.
With the close of this chapter, there is no more specific elaborations on the
fundamental tools of dark psychology, but the rest of the book is predicated on a
somewhat firm grasp of these tools, so if you feel that you are missing anything,
or that anything you have already read did not stick as well as it could have, you
should reread the sections that were difficult for you before continuing. That
being said, enjoy the rest of the book, which explores some of the not yet talked
about attributes of dark psychology, while also taking a more “big picture”
approach to the craft as a whole.
Chapter 6: Empathy and Dark Psychology
This book, so far, has multiple times framed in passing the dark psychology
worldview as being in opposition to the normal worldview. Well, that normal
view of things, the one held by most people you will meet, could be called an
“empathetic” worldview. That is another way of saying that, for most people,
empathy and its related emotions are the main guiding force in their daily
interactions with other people. This may not always be the case, in that often
people act selfishly in an unaware kind of way, but when it comes time to think
through a decision that effects other people, people generally tend to put at least
a fair amount of thought into the thoughts and feelings of the other people
involved in particular. Otherwise, they will ask themselves, before they embark
on a course of action, whether or not that course of action would effect other
people in a way that they themselves would not like were it to happen to them. All
of this is indicative of an empathetic or empathic worldview, which is opposed to
dark psychology in that it considers more than just the ego, or self, in its
calculations and determinations.

Because dark psychology has so much to do with the inner workings of other
people's psyches and brains, it is incredibly significant that you gain a strong
understanding of other people's empathy driven worldview. By that logic, this
chapter will break down the functioning of the normative, empathic or
empathetic worldview while also paying special attention to the extreme opposite
of the dark psychology practitioner, those people that can be considered limit
cases of empathy called empaths. Additionally, it will explore how empathy not
only differs from the dark psychology worldview but can, in its own way, feed into
it. Ultimately, the goal for the dark psychology practitioner when it comes to
understanding the empathetic worldview is to gain as much actionable or
exploitable knowledge as possible. This is because the content with which dark
psychology practitioners work always comes down to being another human's
psyche, which is itself almost always affected by empathy to some degree or
another. That being said, first you should know about empathy and the empath
on their own terms, which the section below will explore at length.

Empathy and the empath

So, what is empathy at its core? This is the central question of this, the first
section of the chapter on empathy. Empathy is defined, generally, as that emotion
which allows people to feel the emotions of others and act accordingly. On an
individual level, this is often the main experience of empathy, as that feeling that
demands one take into consideration others in ones actions. On an individual
level, it is actually quite narrow, definitionally. It only obtains for those instances
in which people see or experience secondhand another person's emotions,
whether they be good or bad emotions, and those same emotions come out in the
person who is only witnessing or experiencing secondhand. People actually make
the majority of their decisions without ever once consulting empathy or any
empathy-like feeling. So, why all the ado about defining and delineating
empathy? The answer to this is that “empathy” has more than just an individual
meaning based in brain chemistry. For reason or another, it seems that empathy
always winds up playing an outsized role in the shape and structure of not only
social organization but whole societal structures and shapes. Ethics and morality,
when one looks closely enough, both appear clearly to be in no small part shaped
with empathy as a major organizing principle. In fact, the very existence of
certain other emotions seems the result of or secondary to the existence of
empathy. Think of sympathy as a major example of this; sympathy is the feeling
of sadness or disappointment at the sight of someone else's misfortune. Everyone
knows this, even if they do not experience it themselves. It is an exceedingly basic
feeling. It is also, however, absolutely the result of empathy, and secondary to
empathy as a result. Think about it; sympathy is predicated on the guttural,
primal, or visceral feeling that another person does not feel well, yet it does not
involve having any insight into how that person actually feels.

Why, as naturally self-interested animals, is it so widespread for humans to have

a strong emotional reaction to suffering that does not directly effect them? The
answer, of course, is that humans are reminded just enough by the workings of
empathy to always have in their minds the reality of shared experience and
shared suffering, as well as shared joy, shared anxiety, and all other possible
emotions or affects. In short, the brain-based, chemical reality of empathy primes
almost every single population that has ever existed into forming a group identity
built around mutual understanding and recognition of each other as somehow of
a kind with each other and not separate. Of course, empathy has its limits. After
all, the world does not exactly live in harmony with itself: there are still borders,
there are still murders, there is quite a lot of conflict between people, often
predicated on those same self-interested, anti-social sentiments that empathy
seems to work against. Despite all this, though, empathy helps to organize almost
every community on earth. Humanity at its most “noble” seems often
synonymous with humanity at its most empathetic.

This is actually not as correct as you might think, however. Absolute empathy
does not equal absolute goodness. In fact, it is far from absolute goodness, or,
rather, absolute empathy is far from the ability to perform absolute goodness in
the moral sense. This is rather abstract, so it warrants unpacking. In order to do
so, look first at the figure of the empath. The empath is one extreme on the
empathy spectrum, with the other end being taken up by natural dark psychology
practitioners like sociopaths. Empaths can not help but feel all of the emotions of
everyone around them all the time. This, as one might expect, makes them
incredibly nonfunctional in difficult or even just challenging situations. They are
never able to help in crises. Crises are, by the way, the locations of most
opportunities for heroic or massively good acts. By virtue of their ability to feel
the emotions of others, empaths actually limit their ability to make the world
better.

This reveals a queer or strange aspect of the empathy phenomenon. Empathy,

many people with a normative worldview would argue, is one of the saving graces
of humanity, that thing which reveals humankind's capacity for good and
incentives the production of moral and ethically goodness. It is, however, just a
spark in the engine that generates goodness. On its own, and without limits, it
acts against many significant kinds of goodness. This is why one of its products,
sympathy, winds up taking on quite a bit of the societal heavy lifting. Still,
though, as the impetus for so much of the moral world that people currently live
in, it is still adequate to describe that moral world or moral point of view as
empathetic.

It is important to remember, however, the actually limited use that the chemical
brain reaction known as empathy has on the average person's day-to-day
functioning. Empaths are, in actuality, quite rare compared to the general
population. New, drastically higher numbers still put the percentage of the
population that could be termed as empaths at only one to two percent. The
majority of people experience empathy as a rarer, yet still potentially very
intense, emotion. So, how is it that an empathy-oriented worldview winds up so
strongly situated in the majority of people's minds?

The answer is situated deep down in the roots of most cultures' value systems. To
unpack that, look first at all of the cultures that have, either currently or
historically, strong links to the Christian faith. Now, obviously christians for the
most part do not act with overwhelming or unexpected empathy compared to the
rest of the population, but remember, this discussion has to do with values and
beliefs more than it does with actions, though obviously the two have a
relationship that will be covered in more depth later on in the chapter. Take
cultures that have been influenced by the Christian faith, though, and ask
yourself how stories those cultures tell themselves about themselves incorporate
iterations of the Christian phrase, “Do unto others as you would have done unto
you.” In other iterations, this phrase is referred to as The Golden Rule. Whatever
you call it, however, it is clear that it seeks to be the cornerstone in its adherents'
ethics. It is general enough that it is hard not to take it as a universal constant. It
is also, very obviously, rooted in empathy. Why else would ethical concerns be
based in projecting your subjective experience into the body of another? It is clear
this functions as a less limiting substitute for empathy. Because it is neither
possible nor that beneficial to constantly, actually feel the feelings of those
around you, it is better to act with the knowledge that the people around you are
feeling feelings in the same way that you would. Look at most culture's that do
not have a basis in Christianity and you find similar sentiments. The Christian
sentiment itself seems to have been taken in part or in whole from some Buddhist
aphorisms. The short version of this explanation, however, is that empathetic
value systems are designed around more workable or functional substitutes for
empathy rather than empathy itself. This act of substitution limits the negative
effects of empathy and allows it to reproduce culturally again and again for
optimal co-operation between people. This is why all major cultures wind up
being empathetic to some extent or another.

How to use empathy to get what you want

You, however, are not a culture, and you, as a wholly self-interested individual,
do not have to worry about optimizing for co-operation or co-habitation. In fact,
as someone who is to some extent or another enlightened on the trade offs and
drawbacks of the empathetic worldview, you know that the drawbacks outweigh
the benefits and can only outweigh them, since living with care for other people
foremost or significant in your mind disallows the endless and pure pursuit of
desired things, experiences, people, and material advantages when that pursuit
limits or hurts other people. Therefore, you understand that, especially in a world
where most people are to some extent or another driven or influenced
predominantly by empathy, it is most beneficial to reject empathy's influence on
all levels, even levels wherein it is not empathy proper but in fact an empathy
substitute. As an unfettered individual, you need not concern yourself at all with
the goings on of groups or societies of people, nor need you consider yourself a
part of any groups or societies to the extent that your behavior is limited by your
inclusion.

That being said, everyone else's understanding of society and all of its parts as de
facto functioning under the same rules as they do can work to your benefit. That
sentence may be somewhat dense, so, before moving on, let's break down its core
concept. Note that the argument goes that everyone else understands society to
be made up of equal parts, those would be the other members of that society, who
operate under the same rules. The logic present in this kind of worldview was
actually first introduced in the previous section, in the guise of The Golden Rule,
“Do unto others as you would have done unto you.” Underlying this, other than
empathy, is the belief that all subjectivities are the same and, therefore, require
and desire the same things. It is not simply, “Treat people fairly,” but, “Treat
people like you are those people and they are you.” The implications of this are
wide reaching. It predicates society, and empathy, on absolute sameness from
everyone's perspective, and makes everyone look for, and love by virtue of the
fact that these people themselves desire love, specifically that which is the same
as them. It cancels out and limits difference, asking people to be the same by
implying that in their perfect states they already are the same. This also plants
the seeds of anti-empathetic thought in an interesting turn and self-abnegation,
but, more importantly, it solidifies and naturalizes the belief that trust can be
predicated on recognition of one's self in others.

The opening this creates for dark psychology's exploitations is quite simple. If
you act externally as if you function by the rules of empathetic society, you will,
by virtue of the logic governing that society, be accepted as one of its members,
and your behavior will fall under less scrutiny. This is what it means to use
empathy against the empathetic on a societal level. Understanding how and why
people do what they do and emulating it to external social forces all but
guarantees that you are free to act without scrutiny. Dressing like everyone else,
appearing to be interested in the same things, appearing to desire the same
things as everyone else, these are but three examples of behaviors to limit
scrutiny of your actions. Of course, you must avoid the alternate option at all
costs, the option wherein by virtue of exposing yourself as different you become
the victim of the corollary to The Golden Rule, which, to formulate it here for the
first time, goes something like, “Those others that would not have done unto
them what you would have done unto you are not to be trusted, nor are they to
have anything done unto them.” The short version of this, for your purposes, is
that the different are to be avoided, at best, with suspicious eyes. The goal, if you
want to operate amorally with impunity, is to solicit with your actions, speech,
and appearance as much recognition as the same as possible from the majority
that operates under normative, empathetic value systems.

This, however, is on the societal level. There is another level, obviously, that
functions much more simply, and that is the level of the interpersonal. On the
level of the interpersonal, eliciting and exploiting empathy (and it's more
widespread but less intense sibling, sympathy) is as easy as making a connection.
What is meant by “Making a connection,” though? This means more or less the
same as a lot of the work laid out in the chapter on manipulation. Recall the
relationship the third hypothetical person, the one who practiced dark
psychology, developed with the sad, septuagenarian pensioner he or she met at a
coffee shop? This relationship was one based on basic care and compassion. The
dark psychology practitioner demonstrated care and consideration to the sad, old
person, and in return, with time, he or she received thousands of dollars. Basic
care and compassion, for certain, elicit the kind of recognition and love you may
want from your targets in order to exploit them later, but they are not
synonymous with empathy.

While they may lead to empathy, if you want to elicit an empathetic response
from the jump, your best chance at success is working immediate pathos into
your dealings with your target. Instead of acting as the dark psychology
practitioner did in that anecdote, which is to say, as a high status but kind person,
consider immediately assuming a more low status posture. In this case, low
status, more than anything, means a posture or relational position wherein the
person that assumes it seems kind, human, deserving of dignity, but also sad. The
goal here is not to spray sob stories at your target, because that actually creates
pity more than empathy. You do not want to be taken as someone adjacent to or
the same as a beggar, you want to appear to be a fellow traveller of your
conversational partner who also happens to be having some kind of difficulty.
The difficulty doesn't even necessarily have to be linked directly to what you want
from your target, it just has to be present so that your target has the opportunity
to feel the feelings you are describing feeling (or to feel sad that you are feeling
them otherwise) such that his or her bond with you feels strengthened. It is
important that you seem similar to them, though, because of the significance of
recognition that was covered earlier in this section. Despite the fact that this is
the interpersonal and not the societal level you are operating at here, empathy
still has culturally contingent limits.

As with all of the techniques and finer points that have been gone over in this
book so far, it is important to note that the uses of empathy are not limited to the
more or less specific cases that are elaborated upon in the above paragraphs.
These function less as exhaustive words on the subject and more as jumping off
points for more contemplation. Empathy, as with all normative human behaviors,
has many multifaceted and even contradictory attributes. You could, for instance,
exploit the very include/exclude function that comes from empathy's culturally
contingent nature. The possibilities, in this case, are endless.

The dark psychology worldview compared to empathetic worldviews

The previous section should have established that the empathetic worldview is
the hegemonic favorite in the world as it currently exists. That is to say, it is a part
of the compulsory ideology in most every location on Earth, and this is a result of
material power dynamics that are, to some extent, beyond the scope of this book.
Suffice it to say, one would be struggle and struggle in vain in search of a civilized
place where empathetic reasoning was not in some way or another at the core of
the cultural logic. No matter how much searching you do, you will not find any
substantial or easily exploitable population that does not operate under the
axioms, assumptions, and rules of empathy extrapolated values systems in one
way or another. This is, for reasons that should have been made clear in the
previous section as well, a good thing. It means that wherever you go, provided
you are capable of communicating with the people, you should have some
amount of foreknowledge that will be useful in manipulating or exploiting those
people.

What this is meant to hint at is that there is a basically unchanging, more or less
fundamentally stable relationship between the dark psychology worldview and all
empathetic ones. A subtle but very important distinction in the preceding
sentence is that there are several empathetic ways to view the world but only one
way to view the world that by way of dark psychology. This is because dark
psychology is a more or less marginal way of seeing things, and, while it may
change somewhat from society to society, it is defined not by its individual details
but by its opposition to the hegemony of empathetic reasoning. Empathetic
reasoning, on the other hand, is built around and defined by inclusion and
exclusion. This has the unexpected side effect of emphasizing difference between
its individual iterations, thereby rapidly making them into distinct things. As a
result, your ability to carry out exploitations based on your knowledge of an
empathetic worldview changes dependent on where you are in the world and
which empathetic view of the world is in power in that location.

This means that the ideal technique for exploiting empathy by way of dark
psychology is in flux despite the fact that the relationship between individual
empathetic values systems and dark psychology's value system remain stable.
The best way to work around this trap is to have genuine, concrete, and wide-
spanning knowledge of the values system of the area in which you are located.
What this means, most of the time, is ensuring that your base of operations is
your actual home, or a place in which you are more than comfortable relating
with people, in which you know all the customs, rules, and dictates. Notably,
values systems do not necessarily change just by country or ethnicity. There is a
world of difference, relatively, between the functioning of empathetic values in
New York City and the functioning of empathetic values in the deep south. This is
despite the fact that the former and the latter both contain mainly American
white people, with, again in the cases of both the former and the latter, a hefty
dose of people of color who are discriminated against thrown into the mix. There
is no real way to know for certain what values will change, how they will change,
or where they will change without observing both locations to the point that you
have a genuine, sturdy feel for both the tangible and intangible differences
between the two. For this reason, there is no reason to go into exhaustive detail
about the different values of different places. Your best bet for success if you do
change location is to work very cautiously and slowly until you are sure that you
have changed your mind to acclimate to the new climate of values.

Once you have a good grasp of what is different and what is the same, however,
you are free to assume that the empathetic values system with which you are
working, cynically as ever, is unchanging, and that you can operate as you fit.
Only you, once you are comfortable going about your business, will know that you
are secretly an ideological outsider, playing with other people's values without
ever internalizing them. This, interestingly enough, is the crux of the relationship
dark psychology has with all values systems, no matter the diversity of
differences they have from one another. This is because, on top of being a
marginal way of seeing the world, dark psychology is one that is, strangely
enough, bereft of all external values. This bears repeating, because it is an
aberration among ways of seeing the world. The only hard rule of the dark
psychology system is rejecting the concept of transcendent social, cultural, moral,
or ethical truth and value. Recall, again, the comparison between the Nietzschean
concepts of an active, powerful life and a reactive, disempowered life. Among
ways of seeing the world, dark psychology alone holds the torch of active vitality
against a dark sea of reactivity. It is only when you are free from all forms of
external morality that you are able to commune with and uphold the creative
potential of your individual, self-interested desires.

So much of understanding the empathetic view of the world and existence comes
down to understanding that you must view yourself as an outsider and an
exception in order to function at your highest level as a practitioner of dark
psychology. At the same time, however, you must live the duality of being
separate but a part of the world, because your success also hinges on maintaining
the facade of sameness and normalcy. In other words, no matter how you
conceive it, you must become very comfortable living a life of contradictions. You
must never quite believe the things you tell other people and quite possibly
yourself all day long in order to pass, instead holding them as half-truths that are
held for as long as they are useful before being traded out for the next in a long
line of insignificant beliefs. Ultimately, what makes dark psychology, the system
without values, so compelling and rewarding is that it is everywhere forced to
constantly sharpen itself in its practitioner's lives against the scourge of external
values, those that come from the empathetic.
Chapter 7: Dark Psychology and You
Now that you have learned all the significant details of the practice of dark
psychology, you have enough information for a strictly useful, not just
informational, chapter. What this means is, now that you have received so much
information about how dark psychology functions and how it might be used with
enough practice and skill, you are ready for a chapter made specifically for you
where you are now in your learning process, whether you already feel confident
in your dark abilities or you are still relatively unsure of yourself. If you are
unsure of yourself, in fact, this chapter should give you the confidence needed to
work through the ideas and exercises in the rest of the book again so that you
will, ultimately, be on your way to a comprehensive mastery of dark psychology.

There is one more fact you should know that has not been said outright in this
book, though you may have picked up on it from other details in previous
chapters. That fact is, quite simply, that being dark, amoral, and self-interested in
all of your pursuits, being fully of the dark psychology mindset and worldview, in
other words, not only does not necessarily but should not preclude you being an
easygoing and well-liked person. Should is emphasized above because it is
actually very useful, as a practitioner of dark psychology, to avoid the attention
that the overtly conniving and the socially untalented face. If you get too much
attention of the wrong kind, people will realize the ways that you are thinking and
the things you are endeavoring to do, and, because most people are not as
enlightened as dark psychology practitioners when it comes to things like
morality, truth, and empathy, they will not look kindly on you if they discover you
for who you are.

You do not have to worry too much about this, though, even if you are,
personally, not the best at being likable, because the methods of dark psychology
can make anyone likable. That's right, despite their inherently sinister and dark
nature, dark psychology applied correctly can make you super-likable, and that's
exactly what this chapter will show you. In other words, here are 10 ways to
become a super-likable person using the tools and techniques of dark psychology
laid out previously in this book.

10 ways to become a super-likable person using dark psychology

What exactly does dark psychology have to do with being likable, though? In one
sense of the term, dark psychology has a lot more to do with being hated than
being liked. People, by and large, do not like dark things, especially things that
can easily affect them negatively if they come in too close a contact with them. In
another sense, however, dark psychology is a more straightforward path to being
liked, or even loved, than traditional, moral and empathic based lifestyles. This is
because with dark psychology, if being liked is your goal, then nothing need stand
in the way of achieving it. This kind of thinking stands in marked relief from the
normal way of going about life, in which one has goals but only follows them
when ethics, morals, and emotions allow one to do so. You will see from the
following set of instructions how incredibly useful dark psychology can be for the
aspiring socialite or climber. If you follow these ideas closely, all your dreams of
social prominence will come true!

You can use dark psychology to become the life of the party, for starters. Have
you ever languished in the corner of a crowded party for hours, struggling in vain
to work up the courage to talk to strangers, worried that you might put your foot
in your mouth, stutter, or have nothing to say? Many if not most people share in
this experience at least once or twice in their lives. It is not spoken about often,
and generally not covered at length when it is spoken about, but it is, nonetheless,
a very common human experience. Most likely, it will continue to be just that,
because people, as a group, struggle to change all that much. You, however, as an
individual, can absolutely change, and you can change in a way that takes into
account the fact that everyone else will stay the same. What does this mean? It
means that you can harness your past awkwardness as another bit of information
to be analyzed and understood using a dark psychology perspective. If you
already know that most people feel somewhat awkward at parties, what do you
do? You project what you know they want back onto them, and you determine
what they want because you yourself have wanted it in the past. Think about it,
have you not wanted a charismatic person to initiate conversation with you at a
party before? Don't you appreciate it when that happens? Well, forget about your
own insecurities and become that person for other people! This is a scenario
where “Fake it till you make it” is actually incredibly apt advice. The more you
become what others want, which is the charismatic, boisterous partygoer, the
more people will flock to you, thereby giving you the confidence to take it even
further. Don't be afraid to bully people into fun to a certain degree. The real win
here comes from building a number of followers at the party, such that any new
person who walks in sees that you are the center of attention. If you follow this
concept for long enough, you truly will become the life of the party, and it will be
because you were smart enough to use dark psychology and push aside your
foolish insecurities in order to win.

You can stand out at work using dark psychology. This one was actually covered
in passing in the first half of the book. It actually makes quite a bit of
straightforward sense if you have been able to follow everything in the book so
far. Basically, dark psychology requires in almost all situations that its
practitioners focus and spend a large or at least sizable amount of time studying
and coming to understand their subjects. Well, this skill is almost always useful
in an office or work setting, provided you have coworkers and you do not give
them attention in a socially incorrect or uncomfortable way. What it comes down
to is splitting your focus and attention between the tasks that make up the job
you are paid to do and the tasks that make up interrelating with the people with
whom you work. If you pay them the right kind of attention, and the right
amount, not only will you get the positive byproduct of having more friends at the
office, if that is something you want, but, more importantly, you will have
collected enough information on these coworkers of yours to start to manipulate
or influence social situations to your own benefit. Perhaps you realize that one of
your “friends” a couple cubicles over is a massive geek for Marvel movies. What
do you do? You start up a couple conversations with him about his favorite topic.
You mention how super excited you are for the next installation of whatever
movie is coming out next. Then, you go down the hall and you talk about cooking
shows, or Patti Smith's music, or whatever it is that the person who works down
the hall likes to do on his or her off time. You get the general idea. The important
thing is to find common ground with as many people as possible, such that
everyone or almost everyone likes you. Then, your boss, and quite possibly your
boss's boss, will start to notice you as an outlier. That is, they will start to notice
you as an outlier in the most positive sense of the word. This process may take
some time but you can rest assured it will end in your benefit very squarely.

You can use dark psychology to project confidence wherever you need more
confidence in your life. This one goes back to the first way to become a super-
likable person, the one in which the best way to become the life of the party by
way of dark psychology methodology was faking confidence and exuberance until
those behaviors became natural by virtue of the fact that you had attracted the
attention necessary from other people to actually have those behaviors. The
scenario may be different, but the central principle is the same. In this case, in
which you may not be in a situation that calls for drawing attention to yourself,
your first objective should be analyzing whatever situation you want to master to
figure out what it is that you need in that situation to maximize your own
confidence. Maximizing confidence, despite what many normal people might tell
you about internal worth, is all about your status relative the other people
involved in the situation. If you are alone and still feel a lack of confidence, ask
yourself why, and then ask yourself if there are any people on whom you feel
fixated or to whom you feel inferior. Then, ask yourself how you can reframe your
relationship with those people to reorient the power dynamic to your benefit.
This is the arithmetic you must use in place of normal human decision making
based around morality. If the situation involves other people directly, the same
question applies: why is it that your relationship with those people is such that
you feel unconfident? This is the only question you should ask yourself, and the
answer should be built around data that is changeable by way of action and not
introspection. Self knowledge is key to many, many tools in the dark psychology
toolbox, but it is not the solution in most cases. It is something that aids in
finding a solution, which should always be rooted in interpersonal action. If you
find yourself unable to find confidence no matter what you do to improve your
standing in the social hierarchy of a given situation, what you actually need is
therapy of some kind or another, most likely Lacanian analysis. Lacanian analysis
allows for introspection without the indoctrination of most forms of
psychotherapy, wherein you will be required to accept certain false premises
about the importance of having a firm, or even an unbreakable sense of self. This
kind of thinking will not assist you in becoming the Father – to use a Lacanian
term – of all those over whom you wish to be in a given social hierarchy.

You can make sure you do not put up with people you do not like every again
through dark psychology. This one has a lot to do with the vision of hierarchy
and confidence that was spelled out in the last one. That is to say, not having to
put up with people you do not like has a lot to do with having the social station
necessary to reject interactions you would rather not have. Think about it; if you
are emotionally or socially not at the top of the hierarchy in a given social
situation, say the hierarchy at your place of employment, it doesn't matter what
official role you play. You could be the supervisor of five employees, or even the
boss in charge of the whole business, but if you have not established dominance
or your place at the top of the pecking order, then you can still theoretically be
beholden to others around you and forced to engage with them despite the fact
that you do not like them. Of course, gaining the upper hand hierarchically while
you are the boss is much easier than gaining it while you are not, to continue the
workplace example. You can always fire someone to establish dominance over the
rest, or fire someone because you plainly do not like them, thereby arriving at the
desired situation anyway. Say you are not the boss, though, or say that you are
not at work. What do you do? You have to apply methods of dark psychology
directly, most likely methods of manipulation will do. You may be wondering,
“How will this make me a super-likable person? People like this are absolutely
insufferable.” The answer is that this is only a cultural perception. People like
confidence quite a bit because it makes them feel safe, and with enough
confidence, charisma, that natural draw of positive attention and likability, flows
like water from a waterfall into your affect and posture. So, no, maximizing status
and confidence will not and does not negatively effect others' opinions of you.

You can make as much money as you want to make with dark psychology, all
the time! This one is less a question of confidence and more a question of
minimizing normal human morality in the way you organize and run your life.
Recall, again, the example of the older, lonely person in the coffee shop and how a
dark psychology practitioner would deal with him or her compared to a normal
person, even a normal person who was less moral yet still not amoral in his or her
dealings. The way that hypothetical went, wherein the dark psychology
practitioner Person 3 managed to gain indefinite thousands from his or her work
manipulating this older lonely poor person, shows you how significant the full
dark psychology worldview is to your success in dark psychology, especially when
it comes to finances. Person 2, who existed as a stand in for the not overly
empathetic or moral but still normal, pragmatic worldview, only managed to get
the price of a meal out of the older person. To zero in on self-interest and the fact
that other people's emotional and subconscious lives are also aspects of self-
interest is key, here. Recognize that all situations are potential opportunities to
make money off of others, that all people with enough attention paid and
analyses made are susceptible to your influence. Whether you enact that
influence through manipulation, dark persuasion, mind control, or some other
dark psychology derived technique is no matter. The important thing is that, if
you want the money trees of the world to bloom for you, you have to know how to
look for them, and you can only see them in the first place if you tap into the dark
psychology mindset and start seeing other people as means to ends, methods for
succeeding in your own life, tools. Again, the endlessly reiterated point returns,
but this time with a slight addition. Dark psychology is a set of tools, but it is a set
of tools that means to, in part, turn everything else into tools, too. Without truth
or morally, emotionally-motivated mindsets to organize your mind, in other
words, you should start to view all other people and things as things that can, if
necessary, be manipulated, as tools. Completing the process of taking on this
dark psychology mindset will undoubtedly turn gaining money into a simple,
simple task. Improve your job whenever you want by being exactly the kind of
person your new employer needs, or at least projecting the image of the exact
kind of person your new employer needs. Or, manipulate and darkly persuade
your way through life. The important thing is, with correct and intense enough
application, you will never want for money again. And this, again, is a likable
trait. Everyone loves someone who can pay his or her own way, no matter the
circumstance, and a fast track to alienating people and losing friends is being
broke.

You can charm your way into any event with dark psychology. Maybe you want
to be the life of the party what, first, you have to get into the party! It may sound
some what cartoonish, or like a movie, but you, too, can schmooze and sneak
your way into social events or situations without having been invited if you are
shrewd enough dark psychology practitioner. This one comes down to identifying
the needs and weaknesses of the few people who have the power to get you in. If
you have some time to pre-plan, if the event is at least a couple days off in other
words, this process is as simple as figuring out who is running the party and
deploying a short term manipulation strategy against them. Ask yourself, in that
case, what that person seems to want. What does he or she seem insecure about,
or what does he or she lack emotionally? Once you have that answer, you can
figure out how to provide that thing, or at least the impression of that thing, for
him or her. Alternately, you could play on his or her sense of empathy by
expressing some kind of negative emotion at them. This would work by claiming
he or she had slighted you emotionally. You do not want the emotional slight to
be about the event you want to get into, because this is too transparent. Instead,
it should be about something else, or, even better, it should be an exposure of
some so-called moral shortcoming that that person has. No matter what, make
sure to very subtly guide the interaction, after the negativity has been deployed,
to the party, but wait for that person to invite you. If, on the other hand, you are
trying to get into an event that is already in progress, you are going to have to use
suggestion. Remember, suggestion can be very powerful, even when used against
a stranger in a short amount of time. Make sure, if you attempt this, that you
have learned two things well: target selection and conversational suggestion.
Make sure your target has direct access to the space, and make sure you are
capable of deploying suggestion without drawing undue attention to your social
interaction. Re-read the section on selection in the chapter on mind control for a
refresher if you must. Regardless, if you are persistent, you will get into social
events with dark psychology. It is only a matter of time.

You can use dark psychology to take that beautiful object of your desires out
whenever you want! This should be clear by now, but thinking in a self-interested
and amoral way does not limit or eliminate your human desire. Far from it, it
frees desire up and allows it flourish and reign in your life as nature intended In a
sense, living by the dark psychology creed is all about being honest in your self-
interested pursuit of your own desires. That being said, it is only natural that you
will still be physically, romantically, and sexually attracted to particular people,
which is to say that you will still see some relationships as ends in themselves.
The difference, however, will come in what and how you are willing to turn those
desired relationships into actual ones. So, how can you use dark psychology to be
super-likable to that person you have had feelings for as long as you can
remember? Well, if you have been working to maximize your status in all
situations and groups as well as working to maximize your money, then that
person may very well already have feelings for you! If not, though, the solution is
quite simple. You must zero in on his or her wavelength in order to exploit it. It is
basic, and classic, manipulation based in knowledge of his or her psyche. With
enough expertise in dark psychology in general this should be a walk in the park.

You can get your coworkers' respect and keep it with dark psychology no matter
what. This one is in some ways a variation of standing out at work, but it zeroes in
more on the concept of understanding that the official pecking order at work is
not the same as the subterranean, subconscious one that nonetheless exists in
everyone's mind including your own. That is to say, there is a hierarchy that has
nothing to do with bosses, assistant managers, clerks, or janitors, and it comes
down to the kind of energy you project. Remember the Nietzschean concept of
the active and unfettered individual put in opposition to the reactive, controlled
individual? No amount of power can make a person into an active and unfettered
individual if they are too cowardly and weak, and this includes your boss. So, how
do you get everyone's respect? By displaying your assertiveness, of course. In this
case, very little individual analysis and attention is actually necessary, because a
part of that group or mass psychology that was covered in the chapter on
persuasion is at work in any workplace, which is to say that there are certain rules
and group mentalities that pretty much all modern workplaces have. So, a certain
kind of easy-going assertiveness that contains some kindness but just as much
self-defense and brusqueness, as needs be, should turn you into the most
respected and high status member of any office or break room. It is important to
highlight the emphasis, here, of the variations between easy-going and assertive.
You can not simply maintain a middle level between the two attitudes, both must
be present at different times in your day-to-day demeanor. You do not, after all,
want to blend into the furniture, nor do you want to come across as bitter or rude.
The amount of each necessary will change workplace by workplace, but in the end
you want to find the right amount of both easy-going-ness and assertiveness such
that everyone understands you to be a simultaneously calm or “chill” on the one
hand and confident or no nonsense on the other kind of person.

You can have the best kids around with dark psychology. This one is a good
litmus test for how committed you actually are to the dark psychology worldview
and thinking process. If you understand it for what it is, which is a more honest
and productive all encompassing worldview than the normative one, than you
will be more than willing to apply its lessons to your relationship with your
children. The way this works, rather than manipulating your children, is in
bringing them into the fold. So many of the problems of childhood come from a
lack of literacy when it comes to other human beings' psyches and the child's
inability to control his or her own psyche. If you have children, do you not think it
would benefit them to learn from the jump how to exercise control over
themselves and practice analysis of others' subconscious states? It benefits your
children directly to think about the world this way, and it benefits you by way of
association. If you have children, you will be thought of more positively, and you
will be more likable, if you those children are the best and super-likable
themselves. It just makes sense! What is more, it will make your children more
likely to excel in life and business, thereby becoming the conniving, amoral
apples of their parents' eyes as well as their parents' community's eyes.

In conclusion, you can basically excel at whatever, wherever, whenever with

dark psychology. The summation of all these examples of ways to become super-
likable through dark psychology is this: dark psychology is an excellent means of
not just becoming super-likable, but being exactly who you want to be wherever
you happen to be at the time! Of course, the kind of confidence and self-
assuredness this brings out in you will, without a doubt, make you super-likable
no matter what else you are pursuing, and this is because people respect and
highly value those traits. So, start to establish dark psychology tools in your day-
to-day life, and you will undoubtedly find that you are attracting positive
attention from people wherever you go. In most cases, you will know, coldly and
cynically, that liking does not entail all that much more than projection and self-
interest, but that is okay provided you are still benefiting from the positive energy
being projected at you, from which you will absolutely benefit. It is a kind of
feedback loop that, if done correctly, can only generate positive results.
Conclusion
Thank you for making it through to the end of Dark Psychology Secrets. Let’s
hope it was informative and able to provide you with all of the tools you need to
achieve your goals whatever they may be.

The next step is to remember all of the key tenets of dark psychology. First and
foremost, that dark psychology is about use and not study, and that no amount of
reading will turn you into a master of the crafts that comprise dark psychology
over night. The only way to become a fully competent manipulator, a fully
competent dark persuasion artist, or a fully competent user of mind control, you
have to put these practices to use. A good precursor, however, is to run through
some of the exercises and hypotheticals in the book, imagining yourself inside of
them. After that, practice, if you can, in low stake scenarios. Consider, for
instance, trying to use suggestion on a waiter or waitress. Do not try to get
anything excessive in these first few attempts, maybe just an extra side for free or
something of that variety. The important thing is that you try it out and start to
build the muscles necessary to really make use of the techniques from this book
later.

If, on the other hand, you purchased this book only as a means of learning how to
protect yourself against these practices in your day-to-day life, you should
commit as many of the key attributes of a dark psychology practitioner to your
mind as is possible for you. Make sure that you have a passing knowledge of all
the warning signs so that you do not get taken advantage of in your life. This, in
its own way, is a kind of practice or use. With this book as a guide, you can
practice trying to spot manipulative, darkly persuasive, and hypnotic social cues
wherever you go. This practice will ensure that you remain free from the sway of
those techniques' practitioners. It should also be said that, if you purchased this
book for purely defensive purposes, that it would not hurt to run through the
exercises while taking on the persona of a dark psychology practitioner. Sun Tzu
said, “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.” Well, if you are
convinced that the dark psychology worldview is something about which to
worry, then dark psychology is functionally an enemy for you, and it would be
endlessly beneficial for you to imagine yourself in your enemy's shoes to gain a
better understanding of him or her. What is the harm in reading all of this book
closely, including the parts that are more about using dark psychology than
defending against it? The worst that could happen is you waste some time, but
the best that could happen is you develop an even deeper understanding of dark
psychology, thereby ensuring that you are even less likely to fall prey to it.

Finally, if you found this book useful in any way, a review on Amazon is always
appreciated!