in m's case you have
- the suit
- the 'please don't clap, i'm just talking' thing
- the confidence (smile, pauses, open body language in seating)
- the absurdly high production values

Check out Fast Seduction for a wicked overview of how you can learn how to be charismatic in order to manipulate people using neurolinguistic programming.

Anyways, this is a post I made to my weblog about this.

Tonight I went along to a Landmark Forum introduction night. My parents, the easily-convinced darlings that they are, paid up their $525 (each) to do one a couple of weekends ago, and came away dripping platitudes, believing it was the greatest thing in the universe, and that everyone else should do it. Unfortunately, it's just like the Maharaji cult.

The way the introduction works is that they have someone there who, for free, on their own time, because they believe the Landmark Forum has something to offer everyone and that they can help by doing so, spent three hours telling me about it and fielding all my questions.

Now, if I'm uncertain about something, especially about a sale, I'll question very, very hard. Every time she used a neurolinguistic programming technique on me, I would stop her and point it out. I called her up multiple times on the ideas behind it, on the language in the pamphlets, on the unquestioned assumptions she was throwing me.

At the end she hard-sold me the course, and I called her up on that, on the ethics of hard-selling an idealogy that is so slippery. We went through an anarchist-informed power analysis of the situation - she had her formal clothes and her whiteboard and her podium with her clipboard, and I had my place on the little circle of seats, and I pointed all this out. I'd spend five minutes actively defusing the power relationship created therein ('look, see, you've got a podium, and you're standing up, and it's all creating this "listen to me because I have authority" atmosphere'), and yet she insisted on sticking to it anyway.

In the end, she was almost in tears. I was continually trying to find some way that she could show me how it could work for me somehow (and failing), and she was unable to satisfy me, and as a result, was becoming more and more upset. I was challenging something that she believed in, dearly, and just wouldn't budge on that; there was no room in her idealogy for me to disagree with her and still be 'right'.

This made me very upset in turn. And it got me thinking about power, again. I think that, as a culture, we aren't well equipped to deal with power. We believe we are free of it, we believe we will be able to tell when we are being manipulated; but that just means that we let ourselves become less aware: it makes us more open to manipulation and influence through charisma (trained, of course), and the construction of contexts in which the person in the position of authority is clear.

This is scary stuff. Given the right environment, and the right treatment, and a charismatic authority figure with a nice smile, people will do, say, or think anything. Why? Because we have relegated the concept 'belief' to religion. It's too hard to deal with, it's too scary, and so we talk about 'belief' solely in the context of religion, and talk instead in terms of 'facts' and 'knowledge' [lower case k], not realising that 'facts' and 'knowledge' are nothing more than 'beliefs' with evidence to support them.

That hasn't come out as clear as I'd like it - try this. A fact is a belief that is supported by evidence. Let's look at the first half of that. A fact is a belief. Knowledge [lower case k] is, in philosophical terms, justified true belief. That is, when I say that I know that the cat is black, what I mean is that I believe that the cat is black, my belief that the cat is black is justified (I saw it with my own eyes), and moreover, the belief is true (the cat is black).

So it's a belief. My 'knowledge' that the cat is black also turns out to be a belief. The 'fact' that the cat is black is a belief built on the reliability of our visual system (which is demonstrably not reliable). There are no facts, just beliefs.