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Title: Manipulation As Withholding
Author: William Gillis
Date: 19th February 2016
Language: en
Topics: abuse, anti-authoritarianism
Source: http://humaniterations.net/2016/02/19/manipulation-as-withholding/

William Gillis

Manipulation As Withholding

One of the most disappointing things about the anarchist community is

that while we’ve widely recognized that our critique of power relations

extends to interpersonal dynamics we’ve — so far — largely shied away

from addressing such in concrete terms. One-on-one we often repeat

accusations and condemnations of manipulation, but we’ve never sorted

out precisely what manipulation is. Even in the tumblr renaissance

there’s a marked tendency for the heroic young folk decrying power

structures within various scenes or milieus to suddenly shy away when it

comes to identifying and arguing against manipulation itself. Instead we

generally mutter about how such and such example of manipulation rhymes

with aspects of certain widely recognized systems of oppression. But

interpersonal power dynamics are not bad merely because they reflect

currently widespread shitty systems. Bespoke patterns of abuse are still

abusive, regardless of whether or not we can easily shove them into

categories like “racist” or “patriarchal”.

In one of the blessed signs that we are trying to work some of this out

there’s been an increasing amount of explicit and sharp disagreement

over what constitutes “gaslighting.” When one side argues that

gaslighting is not treating someone’s beliefs as innately valid and the

other side argues that it’s making/letting someone become disconnected

from objective reality it’s quite clear that there’s a deep divide in

philosophical foundations going on. The sort of hugely substantive split

that we absolutely cannot afford to paper over but desperately need to

drag into the light and hash out.

I’ve applauded these debates, but I want to go further and argue that

there’s a grave philosophical chasm to be found in our definition of

“manipulation” itself.

I think this Metafilter exchange teases the fracture apart quite well:

Person 1:

Please do not so as I request if there is any taint of fear or

punishment if you don’t.

Please do not do as I request to buy my love, that is, hoping I will

love you more if you do.

Please do not do as I request if you will feel guilty or shameful if you

don’t.

And certainly do not do as I request out of any sense of duty or

obligation.

Person 2:

I don’t think I’d ever do much of anything without these motivating

factors.

I want to be absolutely clear: I am not advocating a nihilism on the

subject of manipulation; I think that there exists a clear and concrete

definition of manipulation that is quite aggressively expansive and

deserves unqualified condemnation and resistance from anarchists. Person

2’s response can be read in a very nihilistic manner about motivation,

and I’m certain many sociopaths & social capitalists would instinctively

read it as agreeing with them that “literally everything is

manipulation, it’s just that some people consider some random types of

it objectionable.” I am not taking that position, but I do think the

response correctly highlights just how extreme the first person’s

framework is.

What’s implicit in the above list of proclamations is a condemnation of

anything that’s not a direct and immediate personal desire. All the

motivations presented as invalid or to be avoided — fear of negative

reactions, hope to deepen love, guilt, obligation — are united by

involving higher-order desires or considerations. Sure you may happen to

sometimes feel an immediate desire, but these desires are often

overruled or outweighed, upon rumination, by other more deeply rooted

desires.

In a direct reading of this philosophy if I make a rational and honest

argument appealing to your conscience — telling you that if you don’t

stop playing video games and call an ambulance for me you’ll feel guilty

for going against a more underlying desire when I bleed out — that would

be classified as “manipulation.” But surely if you actually do deeply

care about whether I live or die it’s hardly manipulative for me to help

you remember that while you happen to lie in a temporary video game

coma. The other terms have equally absurd implications under this frame

of mind, and the reductios for them should be obvious. Are we never to

act in ways we hope will deepen someone’s love for us?

You might find this a particularly uncharitable read, but there’s a long

tradition of thought in the Left that breaks in this direction. An

example would be the recurring claim by many Foucauldians that

persuasion of any kind — including rational appeals to one’s underlying

desires or values and the ramifications from them — is coercion. This

syncs up well with a current of immediatism found within the ‘radical’

milieu and many youth subcultures that instinctively takes a very

hands-off approach to the roots and ramifications of one’s feelings and

calls that ‘autonomy.’ This is the “Thinking About One’s Desires Is Bad”

philosophy that idealizes desires (like love, etc) as mere magical

weather patterns that just happen to strike us whenever, and that we

dare not examine closer or seek to clarify lest our understanding and

agency in them diminish their ‘wildness.’ It’s closely tied to the

notion that thinking about shit is dangerous because it leads to

sociopathy and what differentiates us from sociopaths is not knowing,

treating other people’s minds (and our own) as black boxes.

There is a very profound question here that professional philosophy as a

whole has unfortunately largely ducked: which is what if you can

actually map and predict someone’s responses with great accuracy, what

are your ethical obligations? If you come to understand someone to the

point where they cease being a black box? If interactions with them are

functionally deterministic on a certain scale or within a certain

context (however limited)? At that point whatever action (or inaction)

you take, you’re determining what ends they move towards. This is the

sort shit that creates nihilists/fascists — and non-anarchists more

generally — because they instinctively define power relations /

manipulation in terms of causal interplay, and since you can’t get

outside causality you can’t get outside power / manipulation.

A prototypical liberal response is to react by clinging to ignorance. To

say “well you don’t know!” but also “you shouldn’t know!” To basically

forbid exploration. In this light “manipulation” is taken to be any

situation where one person doesn’t treat the other’s thoughts or

feelings as a black box. In the extreme limit this ends up rejecting

things like, “hey, I know that you like baseball cards so you should

probably go to the baseball card festival they’re putting on.” Or, “I

feel safer with partners who are honest [and thus being honest with me

will likely heighten my capacity to love you].” Both actions leverage

knowledge of a person’s internal desires and contextual ramifications to

change their likely behavior, even their desires. If this is

manipulation then rejecting it means rejecting knowing people and/or any

deduction of ramifications from desires, much less prioritization of

desires.

I want to be fair: such an expansive notion of “manipulation” wouldn’t

necessarily forbid literally all human interactions, but it would

obviously dramatically constrain them. Far more than I think our natural

concept of and objection to “manipulation” can defend.

This is usually where the average person stops in their private

analysis. And it provides a good representation of the

ignorance-as-egalitarianism vs intelligence-as-sociopathy assumed

dichotomy that I’ve long been emphasizing underpins so damn much of

people’s philosophies and our world’s institutions and ideologies. But

no, I think there’s a perfectly functional way to define manipulation

that doesn’t go to such absurd lengths, rejection of which is perfectly

compatible — even convergent — with at the same time valuing

intelligence and understanding.

Manipulation is withholding information from people in order to

constrain — and thus presumably channel — their choices.

For example if you have an argument that (alone) would persuade someone

to do B, but you also have an argument that might persuade them to do A,

and yet you only provide them with one of the arguments then you have

manipulated them. Similarly even if you haven’t found another argument

beyond the one you’re presenting, if you’re working off an array of

remotely relevant context that they’re not privy to and you fail to

present the full context you have (so they might search within it for

new or better arguments), you’re manipulating them.

Under this definition a condemnation of manipulation is straightforward

in its prescription: if you can model someone in a given context quite

well the way to respect their agency is to elevate them to whatever

level you’re on (at least in all relevant respects).

Let’s quickly state this more rigorously for the nerds:

Take for instance two AIs that are exactly equal, if one reaches a

computational conclusion earlier than the other it should be free to

transmit that proof to the other, even though such a transmission

utterly determines the result / course of action the other AI will take.

However if one AI is larger than the other AI and can thus model it

internally, the extra bits of that AI functionally represent an oracle.

The ethical obligation on the AI is to augment the lesser AI with said

oracle. It doesn’t matter what these extra bits are — an extra level of

recursion, extra information about the environment, etc. The course of

action by the bigger AI that doesn’t count as manipulation of power

dynamics is to help the smaller AI enhance itself. In short: to expand

agency.

Of course living breathing human beings are incredibly complicated and

messy, with all kinds of subjective barriers to personal experience. No

one can ever perfectly simulate another human within their own head.

However there clearly are situations where this is possible to some

degree — and the course of action that isn’t manipulative is the one

that shares whatever information that might be relevant to another

person’s life and thoughts and decisions. Which applies just as strongly

for two people of more or less equal intelligence but unequal sets of

knowledge.

This has been my guiding philosophy for over a decade.

Some context might be illustrative as an example (and perhaps fend off

accusations of disconnect or ressentiment):

I tried to navigate high school with a moral code, refusing to do a huge

array of things, and yet I accumulated some fair amount of social power

and standing nonetheless. My prohibitions were far more restrictive than

anyone else’s I’ve ever met. And yet I still found myself functionally

manipulating people to vast degrees. One easy to explain mechanism is

that I was a lot of people’s counselor and confidant — in part because I

was compassionate and helpful but also because I kept their secrets. Now

I never spilled people’s secrets to hurt them or discredit them or make

power plays — and I wouldn’t have. But I nevertheless had said secrets.

This means two things, 1) a number of people still had some lurking

concern that I might spill them if they pulled shit with me, but more

importantly 2) I had in many respects a better map of the world than

everyone else. I knew the social landscape.

If I know that person A’s crush on person B is reciprocated, I suddenly

know a lot more about the possible ramifications of normal casual

actions that I might take. I may be sworn to secrecy and non-meddling by

both, but when picking who to invite along with a group skipping class I

can’t pretend that I’m not either increasing their likelihood of hooking

up or decreasing it. I am functionally in control whether or not I want

to be. The only thing that reduces my control over the situation is to

increase the operating knowledge both of them have.

One quickly realizes that more obtuse manipulation through for example

lying is but a subset of withholding. Lying that is immediately revealed

as lying is merely joking. It is the one-two punch of changing the

landscape by introducing new data (“Jane says she wants you to go”) but

not the relevant completion of that data (the single extra bit that

clarifies “this is a lie”) that effects manipulation. And joking that

depends on a persistent lack of clarity over whether or not someone is

joking can be easily seen to replicate power through differentials of

awareness. For example teasing that’s harmless or convivial between bros

who are in on the unseriousness can become functionally abusive when

directed at someone who isn’t on the “in”. Even if the bro doesn’t

consciously mean to leverage power or ignorantly assumes the person on

the out will get it, the information differential creates a power

dynamic anyway. A much more evolved form of this is visible in meme

ecosystems online today, where the function of in-jokes has been

stripped bare and weaponized. New memes — in the sense of in-jokes — are

constantly created and dispersed to reveal the lines of association and

reinforce hierarchies of information access (that overlap in complex

meshes and constantly shift). Similarly, exploiting someone’s

subrational instincts or cognitive fallacies is almost always a matter

of withholding your awareness of such processes and what you consider

the likely impact of your actions.

Of course actual manipulation in the real world typically involves a

vast contextual network built from the sort of primitive dynamics

described here, and often interweaves in subtle ways with contexts of

physical coercion, and we might want to classify hardwired processes

like some forms of PTSD that one has no conscious agency in as directly

physical forms of control, but the point remains that proactive honesty

would make manipulation itself impossible, even if other forms of

control remain to be tackled.

Now I’m not suggesting that our world isn’t a complicated place — or

less euphemistically a horrific dystopia — where utilizing power

relations isn’t sometimes called for, even by those of us committed to

their ultimate abolition. Punching a cop in the face is, obviously, a

power relation. And privacy, secrecy, etc are quite often functionally

necessary, especially in movements of resistance. There can be good

reason to avoid letting our boss know about our politics or even our

friends know about all our kinks, if only for politeness’ sake.

Similarly while the hierarchies of information access that drive

ingroup/outgroup dynamics are corrosive to rationality or intellectual

vigilance, they can be quite useful for the oppressed or in defensive

situations more broadly. There are thousands of diverse ways in which

navigating even basic human interactions involve manipulation. But

anarchists are not marxists, enthusiastic or untroubled by embracing

power as a means, we believe in ferreting out even the most subtle of

power dynamics, and that while ends and means are deeply interconnected

and we cannot and should not act entirely as saints, we should

nevertheless strive to build as best we can an image of the ends we

would like to see. Namely, a world without power relations.

While strategy and pragmatism are surely called for, our lives must be

coherent with that ultimate goal or value. And that means a pressure or

general tendency against manipulation in any form, barring limited and

painfully necessary exceptions. But yes, as a default, you can freely

persuade, you can freely argue, you can freely influence other people.

But you have to be proactively honest. Telling them not just the stuff

that cuts in your direction, but — where possible — the stuff that goes

against, and generally all the stuff that might be remotely relevant to

them. You have to push back against any common cognitive fallacies they

might be otherwise subject to — including the influence of often

unconscious dynamics like your own social standing or creeping halo

effect.

The world is a complicated messy place, we never know anything

absolutely, much less precisely what others would be better informed and

empowered with greater agency by knowing, but the complexity of the

world is no excuse for failing to engage with it. And in many situations

we can judge or know these things quite well.