Tips for the Dark Art of Manipulation: The Sociopath's Guide to Getting Ahead
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About this ebook
Can you be manipulative or reckless? Do you occasionally experience a lack of guilt or empathy? Can you be impulsive, lack responsibility, and feel a need for excitement? Well, these traits are the hallmarks of the sociopath inside you, and it’s time to embrace it! The time to unleash your inner sociopath has never been more right—just look at today’s world leaders and most popular personalities.
Shoot up the promotional ladder and become the predator at the top of the corporate food chain with Tips for the Dark Art of Manipulation. Find the perfect job for the sociopath in you, fabricate your resume to perfection, and manufacture the perfect first impression to ace those interviews. Prey on the biases and manipulate the psychology of your coworkers to break them down. Engineer conflict, manipulate the flow of attention, and seize power for yourself. Play the office party to perfection. Learn how to fake naturalness, make the right allies, and take down your enemies. And take it all the way to the bank.
A scathing, tongue-in-cheek take on the self-help industry, and our world today, featuring cameos by Dostoyevsky, Plato, Robert Greene, Malcolm Gladwell, and many others, Tips for the Dark Art of Manipulation is the practical satire we need.
P. T. Elliott
P. T. Elliott is currently surviving the film industry in Los Angeles. She is the author of 100 Proof: Tips and Tales for Spirited Drinkers Everywhere and, with E. M. Lowry, Cracker Ingenuity.
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Tips for the Dark Art of Manipulation - P. T. Elliott
INTRODUCTION
I’m resourceful … I’m creative, I’m young, unscrupulous, highly motivated, highly skilled. In essence what I’m saying is that society cannot afford to lose me. I am an asset.
—Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho
If you are a sociopath and not in jail, it’s because at a young age you realized you are someone special who needs to tread carefully and hide your true nature in order to survive. Even so, since writing the first edition of this book, there has been an explosion of openly accepted sociopathic behavior across the social landscape. You are more famous and popular than ever.
It’s good to be you.
People want to be like you because you’re not afraid to take what you want. The fact that sociopathic tactics can help you succeed has recently been showcased in spectacular ways. Many of the methods and behaviors covered in this book have been used with jaw-dropping effectiveness by those in power. Donald Trump became president of the United States, Elon Musk became the world’s richest man, Harvey Weinstein had his way as a mega movie mogul.
But it’s also dangerous to be you.
Clearly, not knowing when to stop
is a real problem. The ex-president is facing possible charges for assisting an insurrection, sedition, and election fraud. The ex-richest man tanked his own fortune and is facing charges for securities fraud. The ex-mogul is doing twenty-three years in maximum security prison. They should have read this book.
Because more than 80 percent of US jobs are now service jobs which require repeated customer interaction¹ and satisfaction, consumers can hold you hostage and destroy your business with unfair ease if you don’t play nice.
Social scientists bent on exposing the dark side of charisma² put you at greater risk of being exposed. And the proliferation of administrators, anti-sexual harassment policies, and the increased power of human resource departments threaten your natural, simple, greed is good
approach to business and can leave you feeling trapped and vulnerable. This book is here to help.
Dale Carnegie pioneered the self-help book, promoting the art of how to get what you want
with his famous book How to Win Friends and Influence People. Widely read and admired by millions, Carnegie offered his advice in the nicest possible way. Even so, maybe his most arresting pupil was Charles Manson. Manson studied Carnegie in prison at a self-help class and took away the simple idea that the most effective way to get someone to do something you want them to do is to make them think it’s something they wanted to do themselves.³ Armed with this bit of powerful knowledge, Manson was able to overcome his fate of petty crime and carjacking to become leader of insanely dark and influential sex-death cult, the Manson Family—the love child of the self-help industry and the US penal system.
In fact, you could argue the entire how to get ahead
branch of the self-help industry is designed to enable normal
people to behave like sociopaths, even while claiming that it can all be done while still being a good person. Your secret coping and manipulation mechanisms are constantly being studied and copied move for move. The new scientifically grounded
insights these books cite in abundance are in reality, fantastic tips for perfecting the art of manipulation—and that’s your territory. This book will help hone your natural skills and innate understanding to beat out those who are trying this behavior on for size but lack your amoral fortitude and preternatural calm under pressure.
Unfettered by fear or a sense of guilt, you can use these tools in order to get in on the secret these books always promise, the dark beating heart at the core of the self-help movement: How to get want you want because you want it … no matter what (or who) stands in your way.
These writers attempt to put a prosocial spin on antisocial behavior, but it’s time to tell the truth. It’s impossible for everyone to get what they want, just because they want it. As soon as two people want the same thing, there’s an intractable problem. Luckily, you’re not weighed down by a conscience which might stop others from doing crummy things to people to get what they want. Advantage, sociopath. Just like the con who understands that he can work a mark by lending his own confidence, you too can manipulate the emotions and motivations of others in order to get what you want, instead of what they want. Using the latest in social psychology, cognitive science, and social economics, you will be manipulating like a champ in no time.
Focused on business, this book will help you get ahead and become a winner while navigating the tightrope between prison and promotion. It is designed to help you manipulate the current work environment in a way that is maximally beneficial to you. While directed at the sociopath’s unique gifts, this book supports neurodiversity so even normal
people can get the hang of it. Don’t get left behind!
Once you’ve mastered these techniques in the business environment you can apply these tactics broadly to manipulate people in all sorts of ways, and not just your friends, family, and lovers. Get creative! One great example is sociopathic architecture—many casinos are designed in a diagonal chevron pattern instead of a straightforward grid in order to disorient people and obscure the exit door. That, plus the lack of windows and clocks helps manipulate people into staying inside and losing money longer. Smart!
It’s time for you to up your game and take your evolutionary advantage one step further. Whether running an honest business or looking to become a criminal mastermind, this book will help you find ways of getting ahead without getting caught.
P A R T O N E
GETTING IN
CHAPTER 1
WHAT THEY THINK ABOUT YOU
If that’s true—if you don’t know who I am—then maybe your best course would be to tread lightly.
—Walter White, Breaking Bad
You’re familiar with the terms. Employed frequently and freely, their popular meanings are sloppy yet evocative: sociopath, psychopath, narcissist, Machiavellian, antisocial, maladjusted, disordered, pathological, incorrigible, malevolent, amoral asshole, con, degenerate, bad seed, blackhearted, rogue, creeper, psycho. Dark, nasty words they don’t teach at charm school. Even the ancient Greeks named you the unscrupulous.
¹ You’ve been called many things, but let’s face it, you don’t actually care.
You don’t naturally waste time with feelings except when trying to fathom the feelings of others in order to take control. Being called names doesn’t really hurt your feelings, because you don’t really have any serious feelings to begin with. To be a successful sociopath, you need to know who people imagine you are in order to effectively conceal yourself. You are not safe unless you learn to be a master deceiver. This is why we will start here: with you, and the telltale indicators used by shrinks, neuroscientists, journalists, and other nosy jerks to sniff you out.
If nothing else, always remember this: better things come to he who remains hidden.
Over the past twenty years, both the American population at large and corporate culture in particular have grown increasingly sociopathic.² Narcissism is up and empathy is down, which means you are in style. People are fascinated by you. Your darkest kind are like criminal rock stars, populating the television waves in endless crime dramas and historical reenactments with mesmeric, chilling verve. People believe your brightest kind are fearless creatures who run countries, command billions, and carelessly snort coke and chant heartily while beating their chests in crowded Wall Street restaurants. Everyone is obsessed with you.³ Now get over it. While it may be flattering that so many people have taken an interest in you, it also draws unwanted attention and scrutiny. Never bring up sociopaths, never compare yourself to one, even if in the moment it will make you seem cool.
It’s not worth it.
That said, the most famous and notorious of your kind—ruthless despots, serial killers, cult leaders—are in fact working in your favor. The more visible and outlandish these sociopaths are, the more their behavior provides cover for you. Their extreme, brutal, and exotic nature will seem so very different from yours. You seem to be a relative bore and should keep it that way.
Many estimate one in a hundred Americans is a sociopath, while others put the number closer to one in twenty-five and much more common
in men than women.⁴ On this front, a reasonably accepted figure is one woman to every three men.⁵ We’ll talk about why there is so much discrepancy in these numbers later, but based on any of these accounts, you are legion. Your top members are extremely successful, some reports show 3 to 4 percent of senior business positions are held by psychopaths⁶ while others show a massively skewed 20 percent of CEOs are psychopaths.⁷ Before you say I told you so, also understand your percentage of the population in the criminal justice system is similarly skewed to at least sixteen percent sociopath.⁸ Given the massive number of people in the penal system, that suggests that as many as 93 percent of male sociopaths are in prison or on parole.⁹ That’s a shit-ton of you guys. Your success window is small, so you really do need to learn to play your cards right. It’s a dangerous world for you.
We’re the one percenters, man—the one percent that don’t fit and don’t care.
—A Hell’s Angel speaking for the permanent record.
—Hunter S. Thompson, Hell’s Angels
If you want to be difficult and go rooting through all the available statistics, you’ll be able to find studies crunching out different results, because here’s the genius behind the sociopath label: no one can agree on exactly who you are. Some argue "psychopaths don’t exist at all and asking them to define psychopath [is] like asking them to define a nervous breakdown."¹⁰ Jon Ronson, author of The Psychopath Test, says, You shouldn’t define people by their maddest edges. And what Tony is, is he’s a semi-psychopath. He’s a gray area in a world that doesn’t like gray areas. But the gray areas are where you find the complexity. It’s where you find the humanity, and it’s where you find the truth.
¹¹ So what is a sociopath, exactly? Inexactitude and disagreement regarding your temperament provides a perfect alibi should you ever be accused of being a fucking psycho
and need to defend yourself. Two words will do: Prove it.
Amid this confusion is the million-dollar question: Are sociopaths really becoming more prevalent? Are our breeding habits and capitalistic culture spawning more of you? Or are we diluting the brand by calling people sociopaths more easily and letting them into the club?
ACCORDING TO THE EXPERTS
Psychologists, neuroscientists, and others have been attempting to describe and diagnose your mercurial inner state with more precision for years. Psychopath is derived from the Greek words psyche or mind
and pathos or suffering,
a pan-directional screwed-up-in-the-head term that’s so general it’s practically meaningless. All humans are screwed up in the head in one way or another. In the late 1800s, French doctor Philippe Pinel renamed your condition
manie sans delire, or mania without delusion,
meaning to describe you as being without moral restraint or emotionally insane, yet able conduct yourself without shouting at shadows and gibbering at walls. Intellectually sound, yet emotionally damaged. Now it’s getting interesting.
In England, the Victorians blamed the perceived increase of this condition on industrialization, capitalism, and the decline of religion. In America during the temperance and moral-hygiene movements, psychopathy was seen as a vice caused by degeneracy—a kind of societal disease or moral depravity. Today, the without delusion
portion of Pinel’s description is considered a proper definition of being sane, and criminals who are deemed psychopaths by the court generally cannot plead not guilty by reason of insanity. Psychopathic killers … are not mad, according to accepted legal and psychiatric standards.
¹²
OPEN A CAN OF WORMS
If you need to get a runaway conversation back under your control, there’s nothing like the little prick of expansive questioning to deflate some lecturing know-it-all full of hot air and certitude. In this case, a fun line of questioning might go something like this:
You: Ha, yeah, it’s always fun to see how accepted norms of proper and illegal behavior have slid all around over time. I mean, cocaine used to be legal and whores had no right to vote. What exactly is a
societal disease anyway? What does it mean? And who decides? And who chooses those deciders? Is it a government thing, a church thing, a jail thing, or a hospital thing? Does this mean society gets to call behavior it doesn’t like a disease? Clearly it has in the past …
In 1928, Sigmund Freud circled around a pretty modern description of yourself:
Two traits are essential in a criminal: boundless egoism and a strong destructive urge. Common to both of these, and a necessary condition for their expression, is absence of love, lack of an emotional appreciation of (human) objects.¹³
But he left it at that. In the 1930s people started calling you sociopaths, just to mix it up a bit. In 1941, psychiatrist Hervey Cleckley rerouted the concept of psychopath
toward defining you as having an aggressive mindset intent on pursuing vivid patterns of maladjustment
which inevitably lead to criminality and disorder. In his book Mask of Sanity he describes a psychopath as a biologic organism outwardly intact, showing excellent peripheral function, but centrally deficient or disabled in such a way that abilities … cannot be utilized consistently for sane purposes or prevented from regularly working toward self-destructive and other seriously pathologic results.
¹⁴ We’ll keep excellent peripheral function,
thank you. But Cleckley was apparently unaware of the large numbers of successful sociopaths in society. He underestimated the breadth and versatility of his subject.
Cleckley clarified his position in 1964, describing you as having:
… superficial charm and good intelligence: absence of delusions and other signs of irrational thinking; absence of nervousness
or other psychoneurotic manifestations; unreliability, untruthfulness, and insincerity; lack of remorse or shame; inadequately motivated antisocial behavior; poor judgement and failure to learn by experience; pathologic egocentricity and incapacity for love; general poverty in major affective reactions; specific loss of insight; unresponsiveness in general interpersonal relations; fantastic and uninviting behavior with drink and sometimes without; suicide rarely carried out; sex life impersonal, trivial, and poorly integrated; and failure to follow any life plan.¹⁵
In 1993, psychologist Robert D. Hare got more precise in his book Without Conscience where he identified six emotional/interpersonal traits often present in psychopaths:
•glib and superficial (charm)
•egocentric and grandiose
•lack of remorse or guilt
•lack of empathy
•deceitful and manipulative
•shallow emotions
And six expressions of social deviance:
•impulsive
•poor behavior controls
•need for excitement
•lack of responsibility
•early behavior problems
•adult antisocial behavior ¹⁶
If you don’t live in a cave and have ever surfed the net for articles about yourself, you already know this. So I’ll keep it brief. Hare created the Psychopathy Checklist or PCL-R
to score a person’s level or degree of psychopathy. In addition to these traits, the twenty-part checklist includes:
•Pathological lying
•Parasitic lifestyle
•Promiscuous sexual behavior
•Early behavior problems
•Lack of realistic long-term goals
•Many short-term marital relationships
•Revocation of conditional release
•Criminal versatility ¹⁷
Typically used by law enforcement shrinks, the Psychopathy Checklist requires a licensed professional to understand how to read
a person’s character. Your score is based on their ranking of each trait. Zero: does not apply. One: applies somewhat. Two: applies fully. Meaning the possible scores range from zero to forty. Clearly, scoring a two on many of these would not look good for you. But once again, Hare has focused on the criminal subgroup. His test may work great in prison once you’ve already been busted, and don’t have as much at stake in hiding yourself. But if you are still on the outside, you know how to be more careful. Hare himself said "If I