Manipulation

The last three chapters laid out the bitter struggle we all face with insecurity.

We define ourselves using a story that only includes the best, worst and final parts of our experiences. And because we still instinctively feel like our lives are in danger if other people don’t like us, we use this story to try and guess how other people see us. To make matters worse, we directly compare our story to countless others, including billionaires and movie stars who seem infinitely better than us in every way.

But there’s other powerful forces at play here that, believe it or not, actually makes this whole nightmare even worse for us than it already is.

Those forces are the huge industries and organisations exploiting our insecurities for profit and actively trying to keep us feeling bad about ourselves.

They do it for the simple reason that you can’t sell people solutions to their problems if they don’t have any. You can’t promise someone a better life if they already love their life. And you can’t get people to vote for you by promising to make their lives better if they already like their lives exactly the way they are.

Unhappy people are the best consumers and the easiest to manipulate, and since most of us live in consumerist societies with self-serving governments, keeping the majority of people feeling insecure about themselves is just good business.

Why we Buy

It’s long been accepted that people don’t buy products, they buy feelings.

The feeling of walking away with something new and exciting. The promise of a positive change to your life. Pride, comfort, satisfaction, joy, and every other positive feeling out there. This is what we really see when we browse online stores or walk through shopping malls.

But how do you sell these feelings to people who already feel them?

It’s simple, you don’t. If you want to keep consumerism the driving force behind the world’s economy, the best strategy is to keep the majority of people feeling insecure about themselves and their lives, so that you can keep selling them the “solution” they need.

And it works incredibly well.

The best part of this plan is that the modern world already has most of us feeling so insecure that all companies really need to do is keep reminding us about it.

They pose beautiful celebrities with their products, everything from designer clothes to sports cars, because nothing will make you feel insecure faster than seeing one of the world’s most attractive people posing in Armani underwear.

Everywhere we look we see marketing messages saying things like “just do it,” “think different,” “open happiness,” “belong anywhere,” “because you’re worth it,” and countless others, all designed to remind us how much better we’d feel if only we had that new product.

The somatic marker hypothesis explains how our emotions are the key to making fast decisions in complex situations.^{Note 1} You might not consider shopping a complex situation, but with the huge amount of products out there and the attachment most of us feel towards our hard-earned money, it’s a much more complex situation than we think. If a company can make us associate their product with a positive outcome, that emotional response will motivate us to buy.^{Note 2}

This also works in the opposite direction. Ads can associate negative outcomes with not buying their products, and that fear also motivates us to buy.

The stronger the emotion they make us feel, the more likely we are to act on that feeling. And thanks to a powerful trick our minds play on us called “choice blindness”, we convince ourselves that it was our choice all along, and that we got exactly what we wanted.

The experiments used to test choice blindness are simple enough, but what they tell us about ourselves is nothing short of terrifying.

They prove that the reasons behind the choices we make often happen after we’ve already made them. It takes the idea of humans as logical, reasonable thinkers, and throws it right out the window.

In one experiment participants were given two photos of different people and asked to choose the one they found most attractive. They were then given a closer look at their chosen photo and asked to explain why they made that choice.

Almost all of the participants were happy enough to give a detailed explanation about why they found that person more attractive than the other one. Except, they were describing the wrong photo. The experimenters had switched the two using sleight of hand, and only a few of them realised that the photo they were given was not actually the one they had chosen in the first place.^{Note 3} The participants were giving detailed reasons for why they made a choice that they never actually made.

A similar study used real shoppers in their local supermarket. They were offered a tasting of different jams, and then asked to explain which one was their favourite while having a second taste of it. Except once again, they were given the wrong jam, and still went ahead and justified why it was the best one anyway.^{Note 4} Another study tried this with different teas and found the same thing happening, and another used PowerPoint slides.

Choice blindness is everywhere. All we really need to justify one of our choices is the belief that we made it. Whether we actually did or not doesn’t seem to matter.

When you combine choice blindness with the somatic marker hypothesis, you can see why consumerism is so easy for us to accept. We are manipulated emotionally into buying things because they are sold as the answer to our insecurities, and then we instantly rationalise that choice and claim it as our own.

Insecurity also plays a leading role in why we connect so strongly to our favourite brands.

The more material a person you are, someone who tries to define themselves by the things they own, the more comfort you get from brands you know and trust, and the more you will identify with that brand.^{Note 5}

When we feel insecure about ourselves, it’s logical to look outward and merge our identity with something that feels much more stable. This is how brands like Apple can make being an iPhone user a genuine part of someone’s identity, something that makes that person feel less insecure about themselves and their lives.

I wish I could say that this starts and ends with consumerism, that all we need to worry about is companies taking advantage of our insecurity to make us buy things we don’t need, but sadly this is only the beginning.

It’ll soon be very easy to see why the rarest thing there is, is a person who feels truly confident.

Attention Is Profit

Next up on our roster of villains is the mainstream media. Tightly monopolised, and a multi-trillion dollar industry, the media is a powerful enemy against those seeking confidence.

The media makes its money by capturing as much of our attention as possible, for as long as possible. The more we’re looking at our phones, TVs, newspapers, or magazines, the more media outlets can sell our attention to advertisers.

And what sort of content do you think captures people’s attention the most?

Could it be the positive, feel-good stories of people out in the world doing their bit to make it a better place for everyone? Or do you think it’s the stories of doom and gloom, the things that scare us and anger us?

To be fair, we all have to take a bit of responsibility for how the media ended up the way it is. It’s showing us what we want to see most, and it turns out what we want to see is all the worst, most frightening things going on around us. This isn’t because we’re all disturbed people, or because we enjoy seeing this sort of thing. The unfortunate reality is that we’re programmed to pay attention to all the worst things around us because it’s a really useful survival strategy. For our hunter-gatherer ancestors, paying more attention to all the dangerous things around you was a very good idea if you want to keep living.

Traumatic events have become the norm for any headline news, without any thought about the damage this might be doing to society and the individuals it’s made of.

A study conducted in Israel showed that being exposed to brutal news coverage of the war in Gaza increased your risk of developing distress and even post-traumatic psychopathology.^{Note 6} Not only was the news dangerous, it was also addictive, with over 75% of people surveyed admitting they watched more of it than usual while it was broadcasting the war. The more they watched, the more likely they were to report higher anxiety, sleeping difficulties, and fearful thoughts.

While an ongoing war right on your doorstep is obviously going to be stressful, the media is happy to make it much worse as long as it means more people are glued to their screens watching.

Ignoring the darkest events taking place around the world is not going to help fix them. But neither is profiting off our instincts to look out for danger. The news is supposed to keep us informed, not manipulate us into watching more of it.

There’s probably no better example of this than the media exposure during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

How did we get to the point where people were hoarding hundreds of rolls of toilet paper, leaving shelves completely empty around the world, even though there wasn’t any shortage of toilet paper at all?

All it took was a couple of news stories about a few people panic buying things they didn’t need to stir up a media frenzy and cause one of the most embarrassing mass panic moves in modern history.

The rate of cyberchondria, which is basically when you freak yourself out over Google searching your symptoms, also shot up with all the fear-mongering in the news.^{Note 7} At a time when people needed a sense of certainty and reassurance, what they got instead was a hefty dose of anxiety-inducing news stories, and instructions on what to panic buy.

We’re at a disadvantage. The instinct to look when something bad is happening is buried deep within us, cultivated over millions of years of evolution in a world full of danger. We can’t be expected to just switch it off because the news is giving us anxiety. It’s the multi-trillion dollar media industry that needs to take responsibility for the harm it’s causing. To take back some dignity and be the source of information that gives the people what they need to know, without taking advantage of them for profit.

The irony is that young people are losing all faith in mainstream media, and refusing to view it anymore. By manipulating us into watching more often, they’ve ended up killing themselves off in the long run. If they’d kept the integrity of being a public service, contributing to the world in a positive way, perhaps they could’ve survived the coming decades. As it stands, the industry is facing extinction, with the rise of social media taking over as our primary source of information about world events.

This of course comes with its own dangers, many of which it inherited from the media industry. But we’ll come back to that later. For now, let’s explore the last great barrier keeping us all from overcoming our insecurity. The way it works is more subtle than the others, but that only makes it even more dangerous.

Ungovernable

A democratic government, voted in by the people to represent their interests and safeguard their futures is one of the best things humans have ever come up with. But it’s got one, gigantic, unavoidable flaw. Governments are made up of people, and people aren’t very good at governing other people because their first and most important priority is always going to be themselves and the people closest to them.

Again, this isn’t anyone’s fault really, we needed this sort of behaviour to keep ourselves and our tribes safe from enemies competing for the same resources, and even though we live in societies of millions these days, it’s very hard to shake the urge to make sure you and your family and friends have all the best things possible. So people in power inevitably prioritise using that power for their own benefit, even when that power was specifically given to them to make sure everyone in society benefits together.

It’s not evil, but it’s definitely a problem. Governments are ripe for corruption, and very hard to regulate since the only thing governing them is themselves.

So we have these very powerful organisations, built to protect us, but made up of people who will always protect themselves first, and the obvious first step they’ll take is to make sure they never lose this position of power over the rest of society. And the unfortunate truth is that low confidence populations are the easiest to manipulate and control.

Oppression has been used as far back as our recorded history allows us to look, and probably a lot longer than that. It’s an incredibly powerful way to make a group of people do what you want them to. It’s been shown that oppression causes people to develop learned helplessness, self-rejecting views, and makes us more obedient to authority.^{Note 8} Whether it’s oppression at its most extreme like slavery, or the subtler, more pervasive oppression of systemic prejudice and disadvantage, all oppression is about control, and it works by making the oppressed as insecure as possible.

Any government that wants to maintain a strong upper hand over its population is incentivised to keep people poor and disadvantaged. Economic oppression is arguably the most widespread form of manipulation on Earth. It’s easy to spot direct economic oppression, it hides in plain sight, and sometimes it doesn’t even bother trying to hide at all. These are all the things that hold people back from opportunities to improve their lives, like employment discrimination, group-based harassment, and gender inequality,^{Note 9} just to name a few. They’re still hurting people today because we allow them to. They may not be right in our faces anymore but they’re still there, blending into the background of society, relying on social welfare reports to highlight just how bad it all really is.

And yet, indirect economic oppression is so much worse.

This is manipulation at its darkest, where people are tricked into making choices they think are good for them but actually just make them even more oppressed. It’s a growing strategy in extremist governments to convince an already oppressed voter base that the answer to all their problems is more oppression.

The way they do this is by giving people a choice that makes it seem like voting against the good of everyone in the long term is the obvious thing to do.

They make people choose between giving up something they really care about and believe in, or allowing changes that ultimately give more control to those in power.

This is why so many political campaigns these days focus on one highly emotional issue that large groups of people have strong beliefs about. Then all they have to do is promise to uphold that belief, to protect the people against that one thing they fear, whether it’s too much immigration, gun control laws, rising counter-cultures, legal abortions, sexual and gender fluidity, you name it. If a large enough group of people have a strong enough hate for something, they’re ripe for this sort of manipulation. They’ll support you for protecting this one powerful freedom, while letting you take every other freedom right out from under them.

And how do you encourage large groups of these people? By increasing the rates of insecurity.

A recent study looked at the connection between low self-esteem and discriminatory attitudes, finding that people with a fragile self-esteem, particularly those with a discordant view of self who aren’t fully aware of their own insecurity, are more likely to have hostile sexist views.^{Note 10} They were also more likely to be supporters of Donald Trump.

The more insecure people we have in our societies, the more prejudice we have as well, and the easier it is for politicians to gather large amounts of votes simply by attacking the target of that prejudice. And people will clap, cheer, and call them heroes.

We’ve reached the end of the first part of this book. It may seem like a lot of doom and gloom, but the first step to solving any problem is understanding what the problem is in the first place.

We’ve looked at all the damage insecurity can do to us, as individuals and as a society. How it can twist us into becoming cruel and selfish people, only interested in protecting our own identities at all costs, even if that means hurting others in the process. We’ve looked at how it can be used as a weapon, manipulating us into buying things, watching things, and making bad choices for our future. And we’ve learned the simple reason why we’re all insecure in the first place.

We build a story of who we are based on our memories, and use it to compare ourselves with everyone else, because it’s the best way to tell how well we’re actually doing in life. If we judge that we’re doing well, we feel confident that our life is not in any danger. If not, we lose that sense of security and feel that our life is at risk. In the modern world, where it’s so easy to compare ourselves to countless other people, including some of the most successful people that have ever lived, it’s harder and harder to feel like our own story is good enough.

To change this, and take back the confidence that we’re born to have, we must fix the cause of the problem.

At its heart, the problem is the fear of falling behind, of not having enough and not being protected. The fear of death. The only real fear there is.

So how do we fight back against the oldest, most powerful instinct in nature?

Well, the same way all of life has, since it first began some 3.7 billion years ago.

The goal of all living things is to stay living long enough to make a worthwhile contribution to others. In nature, that usually means successful reproduction, giving a new generation the best chance at life as possible. But for our much more complex species, that contribution can be whatever we want it to be, and it can survive far longer than our blood line does.

Before we dive into why this will rid us of our deepest fear, we need to look at how to contribute in the best way possible.

And that starts with who we are, right here and now.