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Reformed.Faithweb.com

The manipulation of people is a very serious business. It must be performed without them realising they are being manipulated, otherwise they would naturally rebel against it. All management training courses or schemes (and there are plenty of them around today) has this as its primary element. Good management is taught as being the art of manipulating people into doing what you want them to do, whether they want to do it or not.

But we must ask ourselves, is this right? We must look at the moral value involved in this process and we must not just blindly accept what our managers say, necessarily. This is not a manifesto for anarchy. Of course we need good leaders, but rather we must be aware of when people are manipulating us, so that we can think for ourselves and then decide whether we want to take a particular course of action or not.

We are being manipulated all the time. We may not admit to being manipulated, but the fact is that advertising, for example, works. People do buy products they see in advertisements, and they do pass by others which may be better in an objective sense but which are not advertised. This is very wrong and we must get to the heart of how the human mind works if we are to understand the many ways in which we are all manipulated.

The Christian church is not exempt from this phenomenon by any means. So many times have I seen people voting with the majority in a church meeting just because the "managers" of the church have drummed it into them that the external unity of the church is far greater than anything else. Because of this, dissent is seen as a great evil and agreeing with everything the church agrees with without thinking (no matter what it is) is seen as being the highest good. By this, the church (i.e. the "organisation") usurps the place of God. Indeed, external unity is so important to these people that ignorance is seen as a virtue in the church (they call it "childlikeness!"). This is because if we are ignorant of facts, then there are no differences between us and so we can be seen to love each other more - that is the philosophy. The big problem with this is that if there are problems, people dare not speak up about them for fear of rocking the boat and being deemed a "troublemaker". Also, one thing they are not allowed to talk about in the church is the only thing they all supposedly have in common - i.e. their faith! We mustn't talk about Christ because if we do, very soon the differences amongst us will become apparent, and this would upset the visible unity of the church, so we must keep the people ignorant of doctrine and just concentrate on telling them to love one another! Such is how most people in the churches are manipulated. Truth and righteousness are cast to the ground at the expense of a false visible unity, which people are emotionally blackmailed into believing is love. This is wickedness. See how you get on behaving that way in a marriage! The right, good, clean and honest thing to do is to acknowledge that there is a problem, only then can you go about trying to solve it. This is true love.

Ways that we are manipulated:

There are several ways by which people attempt to manipulate us, and it is a good thing to learn some of them.

The gap theory.

In this means of manipulation, there is a steady, logical, correct progression of argument in the discourse which no-one can fault and which is absolutely sound. This carries the audience along with the speaker for a while. Then, when the speaker is sure that the audience are with him and hanging on his every word, he introduces a "gap" in the logic and quickly, with sleight of hand, jumps across it and continues his logical progression on the other side of it, hoping that no-one has noticed. After the speech, everyone will agree what a marvellous speech it was, but upon closer examination of the text or of a tape of the address, the logic "gap" can be clearly seen. Not only that, but it can also be clearly seen that the "gap" has been deliberately down-played and skimmed over quickly by the speaker because he knows himself that his argument is weak at that point.

The straw man theory.

In this type of manipulation, the speaker sets up a caricature of the thing he is trying to shoot down, then he shoots it down. The caricature is given in such a way that it is simple to shoot it down using correct logic, then the speaker suddenly generalises to bring his point home. A classic example of this I heard from Prof. Herman Hanko of the Protestant Reformed Churches. He was wanting to refute pre-millenialism. He therefore set up a caricature by telling us all about the dispensationalist pre-millenialism common in Brethren circles, then he quite easily, and quite rightly and correctly, shot it down. So far, so good. But then he immediately jumped to his conclusion that "therefore all pre-millenialism is wrong." This is a generalisation, and one lady immediately cornered him at that point by telling him that of course the Brethren view was wrong and was easy to refute, but there are other more sober pre-millenial views that are nowhere near as wild as the one that he shot down and he said nothing about them! Prof. Hanko was duly put in his place! (Please note that I am not here arguing for or against any form of pre-millenialism, I am merely using this as an example of the use of the straw man theory).

The humble worm tactic.

When a preacher is cornered and can find no logical way out of the position that he has been put in, he will suddenly change tack. He will suddenly tell us how "humble" he is and how great God is and that we should not go into things too high for us. Something along those lines anyway. This is deliberately done to make the opponent feel small and guilty for trying to dispute with him, whereas in fact the opposite is the case - the opponent has actually won the argument, but he is never allowed the satisfaction of being told he is right!

Blind people with Bible references.

This technique is the technique of giving lots of Bible references just as references (usually in a written paper or article). This gives a veneer of scriptural authority, but if one actually takes the time to look up all the verses referred to, one sees the problem. A lot of verses are taken out of context and/or do not say what the writer is trying to tell people at all! Of course, the writer relies on the fact that people will not bother to look the references up properly because there are so many of them. It is always good to look up every verse, no matter how tedious this is, in order to ascertain if the writer is correct or not.

Listen, then pound to death.

This technique is used not so much by preachers or speakers in an address but rather in cases of one-to-one contact., particularly if there is a dispute. The person spoken to is allowed freely to present his point and given an opportunity to say everything he wants to say with no opposition from the manipulator. Then once he has said his piece (and thereby given the false sense of security that he is getting a fair hearing for his grievance), he is harangued by the manipulator into the ground for a long period of time, typically up to half an hour, wherein he is made to feel guilty, small and pathetic. The elongated harangue is not stopped until the manipulator is sure that the person has become a quivering heap on the floor. Then it is assumed that he is broken and will not cause trouble again. This is very common with dominating personalities on weak people. They are twisted around their little finger until they are strangled (metaphorically speaking) and then they are spat out. Most people crack under this pressure. However, there is one golden way of never succumbing to it. That is to realise at the outset that it is purely a technique of manipulation. If you actually start believing what is being said in the harangue, you stand no chance, but if you realise from the outset that it is purely a manipulation technique, you will have no problems in being able to overcome it.

Sound bites.

An assertive use of a dominating phrase, particularly if it is repeated several times, can sound so good and so right on listening to it, especially if it is spoken by a dominating, assertive personality. However, on actually going away and thinking about it, the phrase used is actually meaningless! "The media is the message," or as I heard the pope say once, "We must hope against hope!" These are simple examples which sound so good and swish at first hearing, but if you think about it they mean nothing!

Emotive language.

The use of emotive language is always brought in by manipulators when their logic is defective in order to try and bring their point home. The theory is that if you stir the hearts of the audience emotionally, they will believe anything you have to say. If however they should go away and think of what was actually said in the cold light of day they would find that what was actually said wasn't very much, or worse, was very wrong! The right way of preaching is as Nehemiah teaches us (Neh. 8:8): "So they read in the book in the law of God distinctly, and gave the sense, and caused them to understand the reading." Pure logical deduction is the only way we are to come to a knowledge of the truth, never by emotional appeals or emotive language. It seems to me that most preachers use emotion in their sermons simply to try to get the people to believe the Bible forcibly, A kind of emotional manipulation or blackmail if you like. I can't help thinking that people who like this sort of preaching do not really believe at all because they have to have this emotional crutch all the time to keep them going, whereas the true believer really does believe the truth, he simply would like it to be explained logically to him and opened up in the preaching. Proper preaching is not trying to persuade people that the Bible is true, it begins at assuming the Bible to be true and explains the meaning from there.

So we see some of the techniques that are used in the manipulation of the people in the churches. True religion is far from any of this kind of activity. Manipulation is very, very wrong, and anyone who calls himself a pastor of the flock is going wildly astray if he thinks he can use techniques such as those outlined here in order to manipulate his flock into doing what he wants them to do, and into believing what he wants them to believe. We must be aware of these tricks if we are not to be taken in by them and used by the many unscrupulous ministers there are in the church today.