How to Coach Yourself and Others Beware of Manipulation | Page 124

PORTRAY WRONGDOING AND HIGHLIGHT EMBARRASSING MOMENTS AND FACTS.
Simple, elegant, often unchallengeable. Manipulators simply show or describe their victims engaging
in actions that are deemed by many to be wrong, and then they wait for their victims to be attacked by
others, and to desperately try to explain themselves. They describe the offending remarks or dubious
decision, and then sit back and enjoy the reaction. (and start thinking about a follow-up move).
Justification: “everybody concerned has a right to know”. Or “a big error may have been committed.”
REPEAT ATTACKS BY OTHERS AND INVITE ATTACKS.
Manipulators are good in collecting garbage. They almost always have a pool of discrediting attacks
by one party against another, available for their own personal purposes. Either the parties to some
dispute are already savaging each other or they can quickly be inspired to do so with a few well-placed
questions. As part of this system, there are growing pools of official and professional denouncers who
can be called on for a quote.
In fact in order to “prove their own neutral position” manipulators claim they are obliged to carry these
attacks. To not repeat one side's attacks on the other is to fail to tell the truth. To not repeat the other
side’s attacks is to fail to offer a balanced story in which each side has its say.
The favorite game, which has helped bring all this about is the time honored game "Let’s you and him
fight." "So what is your response to your opponents recent claims of questionable financial dealings?"
the manipulator asks pseudo-innocently, and then lets the sparks fly where they will.
Justification – just wanting to hear both sides’ story or to give each side its say.
THE OUTRAGE STORY.
A brilliant creation, one that uses the best devices of fiction and drama to arouse an audience to anger.
Outrage stories are those in which a person or institution engages in an action which is so blatantly
unfair or such a blatant violation of the moral order, that the story will inevitably arouse righteous
indignation on the part of all who hear about it, causing them to identify with “the victim” and seek
vengeance against “the perpetrators”.
The best victims are those who are not only treated in a way that is blatantly unfair, but who are
helpless or weak and/or innocent and ethical, the more so the better. These make the best outrage
stories because that increases the pathos and also creates an ideal contrast, with sharply defined
characters embodying good and evil. It also makes the audience more willing to identify with the
victim. The more imperfect the victim, the more morally ambiguous the situation may become, and the
less effective an outrage story is likely to be. After all, who wants to identify with damaged goods.
Outrage stories are a variation on a basic justification for attacks, which is based on the idea that the
recipient of the attack deserves it. Evil doers, persecutors, hypocrites, give us someone and something
to hate. We need them so much that we constantly invent them in fiction, just so we can enjoy the
pleasure of hating them and watching them get their just deserts.
If we expand our definition, we can see that, to some degree, all stories or attacks by journalists,
politicians and others, which claim the attack is justified because the recipient deserves it, are outrage
stories. Many of the falls from grace of public persons, for example, involve somewhat more
complicated outrage stories – "famous role model guilty of assault", and so on. Here, the outrage is
against not only the obvious victim, but also the millions of innocent fans who trusted the public figure
and now feel betrayed.
As in all of the kinds of stories described here, outrage stories are often about real outrages. There
really are terrible and stupid things that are done every day and many perpetrators really do deserve to
be discredited and exposed. But usually the misdeeds of the alleged perpetrator are used as an excuse

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