The research began by learning from the psychopathic manipulation of children. Just-born human beings cannot develop psychopathic behaviors because they have no ethical intelligence and use their instincts to survive. Their actions are just instinctive and they do not search for any secondary benefit.

Children begin their psychopathic manipulation when they already have integrated some ethical rules and want to profit from the environment satisfying needs that are beyond their basic ones.

The objective of this research, led by Peter Belohlavek, which included experiences with psychopathic manipulators and psychopaths from 1976 until 2012, was to discover the ontological structure of psychopathic manipulation and detect the signs and symptoms that allow for an early diagnosis of the existence of a manipulator.

Manipulation has three components, the manipulator, the manipulated, and the benefit (object) that the manipulator is trying to appropriate.

The active role of psychopathic manipulation is the action of the manipulator who has to apprehend the purpose of the manipulation in order to change her/his perception to appropriate the benefit.

The Psychopathic Manipulation

Psychopathic manipulation is based on the greed and envy the candidate to be manipulated feels and the manipulator exploits. Therefore manipulation only works when a person cannot elaborate on her/his greed and envy.

That is why mature people cannot be manipulated. Manipulation needs to take advantage of the unsolved weaknesses a person has.

A psychopathic manipulation is a process in which one of the participants develops the necessary actions to create a dominant relationship with the manipulated in order to take advantage of the dependence s/he builds.

This process includes an emotional manipulation that transforms the dependence into a rational manipulation process that generates the perception that the manipulated will receive the benefits her/his greed is aiming at.

The Unicist Ontogenetic Algorithm

The first step a manipulator does in a more or less conscious way is establishing the basics to see if a manipulation is possible. Psychopaths have the “gift” of doing this process without feeling guilty for their actions. Non-psychopaths are able to limit their abuse based on the social responsibility they might have.

Greed allows manipulating people. That is why the first action of a manipulator is to build a rational approach that is believable based on the greed s/he has found in the psyche of the manipulated.

An individual who has an assumed role in life is not subject to manipulations. The first action manipulators do is to destroy the role of the individual. To do so they separate the person from her/his structural positioning.

To destroy the role of the manipulated, manipulators use subjectivism trying to convince the manipulated one that s/he is superior to the role s/he socially has. This is what adulation is about. They use a cynical approach to sustain the rationalization of the greed of the candidate. This cynicism needs to install disbelief in all those aspects that hinder the execution of greedy actions by the manipulated.

A manipulation can begin when the hope to obtain a “special prize” has been installed in the mind of the greedy. Hope suffices to start.

The Creation of Dependence

The creation of dependence is one of the steps of any brainwashing process. Manipulation is a brainwashing process based on the greed of the manipulated.

Dependence is created by rotating the roles of savior, pursuer, and victim which generates a state of confusion in the mind of the manipulated. This confusion can be used by the manipulator to assume the role of savior to apparently materialize the hope the manipulated has.

This process begins with finding some aspect in which the manipulator can act as a savior, giving something that makes her/him reliable. Usually, manipulators generate an inexistent problem and then take the role of saviors for the problem they have created.

Then a self-victimization process begins. The self-victimization of the manipulator implies pursuing the manipulated with the prices s/he has to pay to do what s/he is doing for the manipulated.

The goal of this prosecution is to generate the necessary empathy with the manipulated in order to establish a complicity in the field where the manipulator wants to obtain her/his profit. This complicity needs to be perceived by the manipulated as a favor the manipulator is doing.

The Emotional Manipulation

Emotional manipulation is based on the existence of subjective dependence and is materialized by the envy the manipulated feels because of what s/he thinks the manipulator has. The individual can be manipulated if s/he thinks that the manipulator has something s/he is unable to achieve.

To ensure the dependence that needs to be achieved a subtle disqualification of the authoritative roles has to be done. The authoritative roles the manipulated has in her/his mind hinder the acceptance of the dependence from the manipulator.

The projection of suspicion, doubt, skepticism, and fallacious myths suffices to degrade authoritative roles if it is done in a polite way by the manipulator who has been positioned as a savior.

After this degradation has succeeded, subjective dependence becomes mature and only depends on managing the emotional hope and illusions of the manipulated. The process needs to be recycled if a subjective dependence has not been achieved.

The Operational Manipulation Process

There are four stages of any manipulation process that follow the ontogenesis of an individual’s evolution: childhood, adolescence, youth, and maturity.

These stages are:

1. Personal Adulation
2. Stimulation of Greed
3. Idealization of the Future
4. Sacrifice for the Good

Personal Adulation

Personal adulation works when the manipulated feels flattered in fields that increase her/his omnipotence because it provides the necessary fallacies to avoid needing to deal with the weaknesses the individual has.

Active seduction, whatever its kind, works as a personal adulation process. It has to be considered that adulation needs to be focused on the childish aspects of any person.

Adulation works when it fits the daydreams an individual has and allows him/her to think that s/he can make them come true.

Stimulation of Greed

The stimulation of greed is focused on the adolescent aspect any person has to find a very special and unique opportunity that shows that s/he overcomes the adults that surround her/him.

It includes the preexistence of an adulation process. The stimulation of greed needs to make the manipulated ones feel that they are accessing an opportunity others can not see and that they can achieve it because they are smarter and can take advantage of the opportunity the manipulator is opening.

Idealization of the Future

The idealization of the future is focused on the use of the energy young people have.

The youth of a person can be measured by the plans the individual has for the future. It includes the preexistence of the stimulation of her/his greed.

The future has to be ideal and based on the self-perception the manipulated has of her/his gifts. It needs to deal with the ideal the individual imagines for her/his life.

Sacrifice for the Good

It is the sacrifice the manipulator is making for both. The sacrifice for the good is focused on the acceptance that there is no benefit without a price that has to be paid. It includes the preexistence of the idealization of the future.

The sacrifice includes prices both parties will have to pay to achieve the dreams that are being promised.

In order to accept this sacrifice for the good, the manipulated needs to have bought the idea of complicity with the manipulator and consider that they are both in the same boat.

Conclusions

Manipulators are greedy people who use their anti-intelligence to take advantage of the greed of others.

A metaphor can provide the guiding idea of the conclusions:

A swindler was in a luxurious hotel and approached an apparently rich person in the casino and proposed him to buy a lottery ticket that had won the first prize in Detroit.

He argued that he had to avoid his identification because of tax reasons. He was an extremely nice and polite guy who was able to seduce people based on his charm.

Finally, the swindler convinced him to buy it for 20% of the value of the “prize”.

Of course, as you can imagine, it was a fraud, and the seller disappeared from the Hotel. But one year later, when he was talking with someone in the Casino of another Hotel, his previous victim, who happened to be there, identified him and gave notice to the police.

He didn’t confess his action but asked the officer: Hypothetically, if this were true, who is the swindler, the one who sells a prize or the one who pretends to obtain a benefit paying 20% of its true value?

The manipulator is still free on the streets.

It has to be considered that greed might affect the materialistic, emotional, or spiritual aspects of human behavior.

The action of manipulators is based on their inferiority/superiority complex and driven by the Oedipus complex. That is why they can abuse and destroy without being conscious of their actions.

Manipulators use the manipulated as an object to appropriate the benefit they are searching for, without caring about him/her as a person. That is why they change the victim as soon as they see they cannot manipulate him/her anymore.

Manipulators’ behavior is compulsive without any conscious strategy for their actions. Every manipulator has a recipe to use to manipulate others. This recipe is based on the successful experience s/he had and what s/he learns from their psychopathic role models. Manipulators are specialized in some fields because their recipes only work in specific environments.

Paradoxically, manipulators are socially accepted in involving or stagnant environments (countries, institutions, or groups), where people are expecting a messiah, winning the lottery, or any supernatural solution, as the expected savior.

Psychopathic manipulators are marginalized in evolving environments because of their destructive influence on the structure of values.

The Unicist Research Institute

NOTE: The Unicist Research Institute was the pioneer in complexity science research and became a private global decentralized leading research organization in the field of human adaptive systems. http://www.unicist.org