Superficial manipulations :
The world is a rigged place like the stock market (Pump and dump, false breakouts, false news, market operators ….) (Video 313), ((Video 127a) – Market manipulations), (Video 127c). The whole system is developed that way and not the doing of one single person. It is rigged with human desire.
Hidden manipulations :
[ Few examples from ‘INFLUENCE The Psychology of Persuasion’ by Robert B. Cialdini :
(Turquoise Jewelry example : An owner of a shop failed to sell turquoise jewelry (a blue color gemstone) to tourists. One day, he messaged his assistant to reduce its price by 1/2 (half) to increase the sale. The assistant mistakenly read it as 2 and doubled the price of the jewelry. To the owner’s surprise, all the turquoise items were sold instantly (Video 311)).
What do you think happened …?
A real-estate company maintained a couple of undesirable houses at inflated prices to which they called ‘setup’ properties. Whenever prospective home buyers came, they were first presented with slightly undesirable ‘setup’ properties, so when they were presented with the actual houses to be sold, they appeared more elegant in comparison.
OR
(An equally good and competent service was under-appreciated because of human irrationality. Can people or societies admiration of anything be trusted blindly …? (applicable for their admiration of a person, an art, sports (Video 268a), (Video 268b), tradition, …). (Video 264 – Observe who stole the show).
We might miss something far more important while being focused on what others consider to be ‘worthy or right’ (Video 32a).
Anything that moves steals our attention, but simultaneously, it also distracts us from something that is stationary and far more important.
Often we don’t realize our attitude toward something has been influenced by the number of times we have been exposed to it.” (Video 187).
How sure am I that me, my family & friends are free from such biases …?
(and many more ….)
[ From ‘Understanding Human Nature’ by Alfred Adler :
We all are irrational all the time (individually and socially). We don’t hate manipulations as long as they don’t come to our notice (Video 236). These things are not visible to the naked eyes, they happen in subtle ways.
( Take a pause …. )
((Video 163a), (Video 163b), (Video 163c) – are our fears really ours …?) A crawling baby doesn’t mind eating ants (a biological instinct). Would an adult eat them …? What stops us from doing it …? Unless one is taught not to eat them, there is no reason to stop eating them (like chimpanzee’s). (Lets not go into the question of ‘Whether one should eat ants or not …?’ from a moral/ethical or health perspective for now).
If I were born in a Christian family, I would believe in Christianity, If I were born in the Hindu family, then I would believe in Hinduism. If I were born in any other religion, I would have faith in those beliefs. And if the culture or tradition of my people is that powerful, then people who belong to other cultures/religions are screwed for their life. Even if there is a ‘God’ (I see him, he sees me), but if he has no impact/influence on me or anyone else around me, then anyway his/her/its presence is irrelevant (unless they meant something totally different by ‘God’).
Similar is the case with my loyalty (mostly a blind faith) towards a group of people, sport, family (something that we don’t want to question), country, race, religion, food choices, eating habits, certain way of doing something … . Our surroundings have decided everything for us. Hardly we had any choice.
(Video 27), (Video 236) If the same events are staged naturally, then who would we blame …? This is how (so called) decisions are being made (at individual and group (social/ national) level, in all segments of life). Events are being staged by the people unintentionally all the time (including this very moment) and they are affecting every single decision of ours and everyone around us (including our family, friends, artists, politicians, ….). We just don’t always get to find out how and as long as we don’t know how we are being fooled, it doesn’t bother us.
Irrationality of Judges :
It also means judges were (/are) biased all along. They (& we) just didn’t know it until the study was conducted. And they (and all of us) probably are biased (or wrong) in all other segments of life too, just one experiment away from knowing about it (as seen in above examples). (From a prisoners’ perspective, their individual lives are being dictated by the randomness and irrationality of judges, and there is nothing anyone can do about it).
Result :
(This equals a 43.3% decrease)
12 months and 1 year are equivalent. The number 12 feels more extreme than the number 1. The judges had an average of 13 years of experience. Males and females suffered from the anchoring bias equally.
Also, the same judges (normal humans), when at home, might be advising their kids about ‘Right and Wrong OR Good and Bad’, but are they themselves right …?
And if judges are irrational, so is everyone.
(Take a pause ….)
Our presence might be necessary for physical survival of our own self and people around us and we can still be biased as an individual (Video 325). (Or just because we are helpful to someone does not necessarily mean we are right (not wrong either) and the same goes for them. We are their ‘lack of options’ and they are our’s). Technical / Non-technical skillset and human irrationality are two different things. People may need our help, but that does not give us the right to impose our irrationality on them.
Not everyone knows everything. We can use a doctor’s medicine skill to cure a disease, a software developer’s skill to build an app, a farmer’s skill to grow vegetables,, a mother’s skill to know how to feed and raise a baby, a lawyer’s skill to deal with a legal issue, a mechanic knows a car engine very well, …… . They cannot do other one’s job but they can use one another. Also, if being a mother makes someone great or right, then why does one mother dislike another …?.
People’s experiences make them useful in a specific direction, but their interpretations & judgements of events or people can still be biased and irrational (Video 100), (Video 187), (Video 238), …. .
When we say, ‘My life my rules’ or ‘I will do as I want’, how sure are we that what we want is not just the product of our surroundings (or false/ limited experience) …?. What if we are getting out of one pit just to get into another …?
Our life is affected by the irrationality of our own self and the people around us and there is nothing we can do about it (Video 262), (Video 266).
(Take a pause ….)
(Video 4a), (Video 4b) What we think is right today may turn out wrong a few hours/ days/ years later. We all think we are right (or doing the most right things) until proven otherwise. A 25 yrs old me thinks 20yrs me was wrong, a 35 year old me thinks 25 yrs me was wrong and so on. What if we are wrong at this very moment but not yet proven so. We might go through our entire life living in illusion not knowing what it is. Are we trying to justify ourselves right based on inadequate facts …?, because the time doesn’t come back.
Let’s say there are 100 people in the world. Fifty (50) of them say eating dog meat is right and the other fifty (50) say it is wrong. If the entire second group is wiped-out of some natural cause, ‘eating dog meat’ becomes a false reality and a new-comer will completely fail to question/ doubt it and it may still be wrong.
Similarly, our entire life is one big false reality, we just have no way of knowing about it (and we cannot go beyond our limited experiences). How can we know if something is right or wrong independent of what opinion other people hold about it …?
Another argument : How can a person choose an education stream for himself or what to specialize in …? How can we choose something without having knowledge of it …? We can try to collect some information about that stream (there is nothing wrong with it, but we may be fooling ourselves) because we can hardly know what the actual thing is. Many of us just do these things just because everyone else does the same and it feels right (and there is nothing else to consider as well and no time to stop and think, else we will be left behind). The very disappointment at the latter stage in itself is the indicator that we were wrong earlier (except in a few cases, maybe they were coincidentally right). And we are down 10-15 years of our life (or may be stuck in it forever) on what the world had to say or presented in front of us. How does one know what is the next right step (in any segment of life) …?
We are less interested in actual things and more interested in the feeling that we think we will get when we get there (especially something that is admired by others) OR we are more interested in the idea/ imagination of having or not having (/ doing or not doing) something than the actual thing. Is it possible for an imaginary feeling (born of the past) to represent an actual thing in the future …?
Someone wants to know whether he should invest in real estate or mutual funds …? How does one find out which is the best option …? If one option was really better than the other, then everyone would be doing the same, but that is not the case. Should we just accept ‘That’s how things are’ ..? Are these even real questions …?
Learning lessons at the end doesn’t make a lot of sense, as the irreversible cost is paid in advance (either at personal level or at the level of society).
( will those 15 years come back …?)
OR King Ashoka adopted Buddhism after hundreds of thousands of people were killed in the war of Kalinga in 216 BC but not before the war. He won the war and he was still wrong. OR
How meaningful ‘learning lessons at the end’ is …?
(Take a pause ….)
Also there is ‘Priming Effect’ (Video 158), (Video 247) :
What set of words precede “events that catch attention” dictates its interpretation (termed as ‘Priming effect’). And that’s how we interpret people and situations around us (Video 159). We all are primed with something (24 x 7 x 365). When we don’t know what it is that we are primed with, we think we are rational. Also, when a certain priming is shared by a large number of people, it may create a false reality. How can we know our own true opinion that is not affected by the surrounding …? OR are our opinions really ours …? ((Video 213) – cultural priming).
Can I assure that me, my family or friends are not irrational & biased …? Can we trust the interpretations of people close to us or the ones we admire (artists, singers, sportspersons, business owners, politicians, …) …?
These facts may not make us feel good, but they were never supposed to make us comfortable anyway.
Our physical sensations are irrational (eg. Moving from AC room to ambient temp. room or Real estate company example). Similarly, our emotional sensations are also irrational. Their intensities vary based on prior experiences. There is no absoluteness in them.
– Certainty is the mother of fools –
Just because things don’t come to our notice doesn’t mean they are not working in the background. Lack of that awareness gives us a false sense of affirmation that ‘We have control over our decisions’ (especially when it is working well for us). I can only imagine how nature must be smirking at us when we say ‘we are the decision maker’ (Video 173) (that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t react but it is still a reaction. And our reaction is confined to a small set of reactions we have gathered from our surroundings (Video 49). Eg. if we face a situation that we haven’t experienced before (not even a similar event), we utterly fail to react to it because that reaction is not there in our set (Video 194). Are our reactions really ours …?). Decisions are made through us, not by us. Shall people be held responsible for the decisions they don’t make …? (Video 174).
—-> We are being fooled by our own senses and limited experiences (Video 27). Our psyche is being invaded by the irrationality of everyone around us (including self). Our own body and mind disrespects us. We hate others when they manipulate us. But do we hate our body equally as we do others …? Is it really worth it to blame something or someone on the outside for their little manipulations …? Sometimes we act as “if the person we blame had not been there, all of our problems in the world wouldn’t have existed”. But that’s not the case.
<—- (Take a pause ….)
(Most people use rituals, temples/ churches, traditions, culture, religion as an escape to avoid the real facts)
(Note : Whenever we say ‘People’, we unconsciously tend to exclude the ones in our family and others close to us. We may wish to ignore them but nature don’t neglect anyone)
People may have good intentions and they can still be biased/ wrong. There is nothing they (or we) can do about it. We are logically incompetent to trust ourselves, the question of having faith in someone else doesn’t arise (not out of hostility but the lack of his and our own awareness of the impact of our environment) (Video 141). An individual (no matter the age, relation, power or knowledge they possess) can never be rational. Such an option doesn’t exist in nature.
We can see our elevated needs (our food, shelter, clothes, lifestyle, …) interfering in our analysis and sometimes they throw the entire argument away, but that doesn’t make it wrong. We may still listen/ observe someone/ something outside or do some things out of temporary necessity at that moment (ranging from a few minutes to years) but we shall not accept them or learn from them blindly. If we want to make right decisions, we cannot wait for others or circumstances outside to prove us wrong. We must do it for ourselves. Life is short.
(We may temporarily believe something or do some necessary things, but that’s because we don’t have any other choice.)
Other biases :
For an action (/ mistake), I (& people close to me) are good people from whom mistakes may happen (or that mistakes may go completely unnoticed (Video 187)) while for the same action (or mistake) people who are distant are evil (or not good enough) ((Video 21a) – do we hate ourselves equally ..?), (Video 325) (And when we interpret situation like these, the cumulative mistakes committed by others are far more than no. of our own mistakes). [ eg. when we or a person close to keeps the fridge open versus a person we dislike keeps the fridge open. Such a person may appear ten folds more wrong than he/she actually is (Video 157), ((Video 270) – Damage done to us Vs damage done to others) ].
(OR – a boy who studies in 5th Std. cannot point out the mistakes of the one who is in 10th Std. That doesn’t mean the one studying in 10th Std. don’t make mistakes (Video 325)).
If someone we are attached to argues with us (Video 240), we are willing to forgive them at some point (mostly because our future needs are associated with them (Video 263)). But if someone distant makes the same argument, we treat them as ungrateful or disrespectful and grow resentful towards them. ]
Also, when someone points out mistakes in us, based on whether we like them or dislike them, we take their criticism in two different ways.
OR
In situations with people, where attachments are pre-defined, arguments about such situations are meaningless. Our experiences and emotions, in such events, take the shape of our predefined opinions (Video 238), (Video 174).
All of our anger, hatred towards others fall apart instantly when we make the same mistake but until that point we are completely blind to what we are feeling (e.g. (Video 288) or we buy something expensive VERSUS a person we dislike buying an expensive thing). The intensity of anger, hatred, and grudge that we had earlier, was just an illusion and hence such an emotional chaos cannot be trusted (no matter how small or intense they are).
Opinions are always based on inadequate facts. Once all the facts are known (individual, social, natural), opinions cease to exist.
(Video 343) – Physical accidents and diseases are bad, but not if they make us a genius. We would line up to get our heads banged against the wall if it made us smart.
((Video 65) – not interested in military anymore), (Video 185), (Video 238) People are always one incident away from changing their opinion about someone or something (a person, tradition, culture, ….), from Good to Bad OR Bad to Good, we just don’t see it until it happens.
(Why else would a mother agree to such a strange request …?)
The only question is ‘What kind of incident would that be and when is that incident going to happen …?’. The more important question is ‘Why do we (humans) give more power to events outside to control our interpretations …?, why do we have to fall for illusions …?’. We shall never trust our emotional reactions (Video 141). Anything that comes with an external stimulation goes away with another stimulation. It also means, we had no clue what was happening in the background earlier. Things and opinions that do not stand on their own, don’t last longer.
Can you look beyond the experiences …?
We go through all those things every single day, we just don’t notice them.
What is trust …?
Why should we ask anyone to trust us …? What we call trust is nothing but a ‘lack of options’ or the product of a well established result (like someone’s ability to do something). Almost all the kids trust their parents, maybe because he/ she has no other option (Video 143a).
OR Do patients trust doctors …?. They don’t have much of a choice, do they …? Whenever people have the option of 2nd opinion, they take it (Video 143c).
OR Do employers trust employees…? They have to depend on people, because they lack the options. And when they find the cheaper option (let’s say machines, Artificial Intelligence), employees will be replaced with it.
OR Divorce rates are high in industries or countries where women are more independent. Just because certain cultures have low divorce rates, does not necessarily mean they are good at maintaining relations. Maybe they just don’t have any other option when taking into account the physical and psychological security. (Try going in the opposite direction) (Video 143a) (Video 263), (Video 271).
OR
OR Considering human irrationality, we are not equipped to trust ourselves and the people & system around us. But we have no choice (Video 143b).
[ That does not necessarily mean people hate one another, but is there such a thing as trust …? ]
Our generally accepted definitions of Trust, Responsibility, Sacrifice, Faith, Belief, Morals/Ethics, Good/ Bad, Right/ Wrong, Virtues, Respect/ Disrespect …… are all wrong. It is not the words/ actions but the illusions (/lies) associated with them that cause the problems. We cannot allow ‘Irrational Common experience’ (Video 236), (Video 8) to override the objectivity while defining something.
(Video 29) Also, we don’t have the right to offer someone something that is not in our hands. These things give birth to problems that should not have existed in the first place. And if someone offers us something that is not in their hands or if someone makes an over-promise, the primary responsibility is always on ourselves to take it the way things are and not the way they are being presented to us (because we are the one who has to pay the price for it).
[ We can be dead at any point of time and hence we do not have the right to offer long lasting companionship to anyone (we are living in that state at this very moment with people around us, we just haven’t pointed it out to one another yet. Every single moment passing by is ‘lack of options’.). By giving someone a false sense of dependence, we might interfere in something that we are not aware of (especially getting in others’ way of becoming strong (not the generic definition of strong/success and independence). And for the same reason, we shall take the least possible dependence, only if needed, but there is no need for trust. We will be committing a crime by allowing someone to trust us. ]
What matters is the knowledge of the facts and not their interpretations. Sometimes we blame people for not helping us (Video 295). But maybe they don’t have the specific skill set to help us. Maybe it’s beyond their capabilities and there is nothing they can do about it. It doesn’t make them wrong.
The only reason we trust people is because we want partial control over their psyche (as it is difficult to use someone if we tell them that ‘we don’t trust them’). And if someone trusts you blindly, you shall make every possible effort to break that trust and you can still help them. By doing that we set others and ourselves free (Video 123a), (Video 123b), (Video 246), (Video 285).
We are here to get used by someone or something anyway (either physically or psychologically), it’s not optional. (That’s the reason we learn certain technical/ non-tech skill-sets (being a doctor, an engineer, software. developer, a nurse, cooking, …) so that others can use us). The only thing that we get to decide is how we allow ourselves to be exploited (and how we exploit others). Trust isn’t necessary in that exchange.
Leave a Reply