Fools Bargaining
Chapter Four
THE MATH:
If we don’t participate by thinking it through we remain unprotected for the next assault.
+ The powerful force of the PR campaign can disconnect us from our own survival instincts and our allegiance to Natural Law.
+ Their Pattern of deception and concealment of harm leads to addiction, disease and death.
+ We must understand and memorize Their Playbook.
+
Most of us feel like there’s been an escalation of deceit and treachery in this lifetime, that we’ve entered into a noticeably darker period. Apt students of history might argue against any singularity in our current era. That position being that the lies we’ve been told are in fact the same old lies told throughout antiquity and the liars are of a common lineage. At least the patterns we’ve laid out are similar enough to track. The motivations to deceive may range from selfishness and greed to a spiritual evil, but those suffering the consequences can’t usually afford to dwell upon those distinctions.
A common yet core piece of wisdom, the saying “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me”, is as much as we need to contemplate initially. If we embrace that reflection with any humility, it is impossible to deny where the shame rests now. I repeat—the Bad Companies have not modified any of their behavior yet. They have not repented, they have not been jailed, and few have ever acknowledged their crimes.
George W. Bush symbolically misremembered the shame-on-me quote yet concluded “you can’t get fooled again” in a speech he ironically gave six months before starting the Iraq War based on lies about non-existent weapons of mass destruction. The proven fact which could stand as the motto of our modern society is: “You can get fooled again, and again, and again.” Unless...what? Precisely what needs to happen to alter this pattern, which has not yet happened? The question sounds simplistic, but it obviously has not been addressed sufficiently.
If we only got fooled once, in one fraudulent campaign or one reckless war of choice, then we could assign the share of shame to the deceivers. But since these Bad Actors have never for one minute of one day stopped trying to fool us, instead filled our world with an unceasing succession of lies, masterfully manipulated our minds with so little push back—we can hardly blame them for continuing such a winning strategy. The zero attempts to change any component of their formula can only suggest their full confidence that any opposition to their agendas is inconsequential. They see us as fools, their sustenance relies on our foolishness, and we have to live with this label until we as a people can show where and how we are no longer duped by century-old tricks. I’m not saying that when this happens they won’t up their game and switch strategies. I’m saying first and foremost and at the very least we have to stop getting played in the exact same way.
If you get played in a personal relationship, once you discover your partner is lying to you, the only sensical and healthy reaction is to call out the lie, express how it hurt you and refuse to participate in a relationship based on deceit. If the partner admits the deceit, acknowledges the harm, and asks to be forgiven, you can then decide whether or not to believe them, grant a second chance, or walk away. Forgiveness is the ultimate expression of love and the key to humanity’s evolution. Personally, I’m a big fan. But if there is no acknowledgement, no apology, but instead more lies and psychological tactics to manipulate you to endure more suffering—including making you feel wrong for not believing their lies—this is a gaslight and an advancement into a different realm of willful depravity.
This is a relationship, let’s refer to it as “Bad Boyfriend”, where your own perception of events and your feelings about them don’t count for anything. Your only recourse in this situation is to turn your back completely and get the hell away. If you can’t get away, if you are forced to continuously legitimize their lies and live in their version of reality, you will eventually break with your own sense of truth and fairness and will be driven into some psychosis.
It should be technically easier to get the hell away from a Bad Company who lies to you, by just declining to buy their product. When you try to decline the Bad Boyfriend’s “product”—himself, with the false claim that he would make your life better—he pulls out his own sinister playbook of fighting dirty: minimizing and trivializing your feelings, making you feel like you’re overreacting, boldly insisting that your facts are wrong, making you seem like the crazy one for having any of this perspective… The only way for him to sustain the relationship and continue to satisfy his needs would be to obscure the existence of his antisocial flaws, deny it, then go full gaslight to the bitter end.
In this Bad Boyfriend reference, I’m describing a true blue gaslighting psychopath. (I just found out the term psychopath is considered stigmatizing. Umm...yeah it is! Not sure why we should try to avoid assigning stigma to psychopaths, but there’s so much I still don’t understand about this world and its labels!) It is now referred to only as antisocial personality disorder (ASPD). This being the mental health condition characterized by a persistent pattern of disregard for social norms, laws, and the rights and feelings of others. ASPDs are motivated by personal gain—for power, the desire or need to be in control; for money, the desire for personal financial gain; for social status, the desire to be well-regarded by others. All this stems from a sense of entitlement—to act out any way they choose in order to meet these gains. Exploiting others and playing all kinds of psychological, financial, or political games is the way they get through life.
You won’t know they have this disorder until they lie to you, and even then you still won’t know enough, if it’s your first encounter with this type. If they misrepresent themselves or hide some major information from you, or blatantly lie, you’ll likely be hurt and angry and react in the same way you have in seemingly similar situations. It’s not until you realize that this person didn’t just lie about something—they are a liar—that you get firm and attempt to break it off. This is where the real games begin. This is where you see how incomparably different this person, Bad Boyfriend, is from the others, and most specifically how different he is from you. You’ve lied before. You’ve probably stolen something before. You’ve hurt another person in a variety of ways. We’re all sinners. You proceed through life under the assumption, however subliminal, that you are dealing with other persons like yourself, imperfect but at least playing by the same rules. But Bad Boyfriend isn’t functioning within the same system. His system is the lying. He has no other means to get what he wants; he can’t get what he wants without lying. Because you don’t possess these antisocial traits, you can hardly fathom them, much less instinctively recognize them in another human. It’s that foreign. Until you know.
Breaking up with Bad Boyfriend might be emotionally harder and more confrontational on the front end, but the payoff on the back end is that he’s finally out of your life and now you have a chance to heal. With the Bad Company, sometimes you have to wait for everyone else to be convinced this guy sucks before you’re able to get them out of your life. And if this can’t happen, or if it takes forever for it to happen, the abused society gets driven further and further into psychosis and the necessary healing gets detrimentally delayed.
If we were dealt a lasting trauma by a partner or parent, we might be eternally struggling to feel at peace or to have any success in our life after that experience. These wounds, which entrenched themselves into our own psyche and personality, block us from the essential healing. We shove the thoughts of this painful chapter down into the darkness of our unconscious where it festers instead of being disinfected in the light.
In a mature civilization, we understand that we must eventually face these wounds, get that therapy, do that work. We make the brave decision to “take power back” from those who abused us, to overcome our avoidance, any of the coping mechanisms that postpone the intimidating endeavor of dealing with it. We finally take a long enough look at the injustice and call it what it is—BAD. Regardless of the complicated emotions, the extenuating circumstances, even the empathy we might feel for the motivations, we define it properly and stop all the bypassing. We do this so we don’t find ourselves in abusive situations over and over throughout our life because we fail to recognize and evade them. We face the truth about what happened, so that we now have a clear picture, as traumatic as it is, so we can call it out when it comes at us next.
Our society got rolled over on a lot of products from Bad Companies and warmongers, because the truth was kept from us. And once there was disclosure, they tried to rewrite the reality of what we were experiencing. We got addicted to cigarettes long before we knew of the resulting death and disease; we used all the Dupont products with fluorocarbons long before we understood the dangers of “forever chemicals”; we sprayed Monsanto’s Round Up on all the food and switched everything to their GMO crops long before we knew the harm of glyphosate and the damage to our ecosystems and biodiversity; we allowed Purdue Pharma to decimate our population with OxyContin because we believed their false claims for far too long; and we were persuaded into feeling a moral obligation to support foreign allies despite their immoral and deadly actions.
If the Bad Boyfriend caused this much havoc in your life—death and disease!—you would have kicked him to the curb. He would then have utilized his playbook to convince you that breaking up was not the answer, that it was actually the least favorable thing you could do. There could be threats of wreckage far worse if you don’t comply with his arguments. The hardships of leaving would be worse than staying. He would try very very hard to woo you back, presenting different suggestions for ways that you could improve or change to make things work, and offer many more arguments that leaving him makes you a bad person. Any of these ploys can actually work on you because you’ve been gaslit so now you doubt your instincts and even likely blame yourself instead of him, at least partially because you did technically go along with a lot of the craziness. But eventually you will reach your limit, gather your strength, or your circle of friends and family will come to your aid, and you will finally get this menace out of your life. And once free, you emerge from the dark fog of their turbulent manipulated reality, and the truth of what you actually went through comes rushing in. Not always a good rush!
He’s probably already out there again spewing falsehoods to another unsuspecting girl, but at least you are free. At least the dishonesty has ceased. Though as mentioned, the psychological effects and regret will linger.
The Playbook is a successive gaslight, whether from Bad Boyfriend or Bad Company or War Machine. Through a methodical strategy of offensive strikes, the victim’s perceptions are confused and impaired. If the victim can be made to feel unsure about what they are seeing, they will lack the confidence to defend the truth as they see it.
It is a heartbreaker to realize that there are victimizers like this in our midst, in any scenario. The reality that some psycho (sorry, some anti-social disordered person) could take advantage of your love and generosity, and the reality that some corporate evil-doer (sorry, titan of industry) only puts profit over people, and the reality that warmongers (sorry, defenders of democracy) continue sending or dropping bombs on innocent civilians—breaks your heart.
But this also reveals some very positive information. It tells you that your heart still works. It’s broken but it’s alive—it’s broken because it’s alive. It is still feeling things, you are still connected to it. It feels a kinship to the people of the world, and so feels their pain. You recognize what is bad yet you are still rooting for love and justice. And because of this you wish you could do something about the darkness. But you don’t know how to affect all the suffering and injustice you see and that is giving you great anxiety. What you want is to do something for the GREATER GOOD. And what this proclaims to the world and to your own self is that you still possess a vital ingredient necessary to activation—a true living heart united with Natural Law!
It has been proving extremely exhausting to navigate such an imperfect fallen world. You get hurt and you want to hide and safeguard your heart from getting broken again. But this realm is about relationships, so we’ve got to keep on living and striving. We can’t let the broken ones break us. To not give up on the world completely, and not live in a perpetual state of fear or resentment, we re-enter, we get back out there. To do this, we often subconsciously tell ourselves the wrongdoing against us was just an isolated situation, one bad apple, and we convince ourself it’s safe to go back out.
But—is it safe? Is it suddenly safe just because we‘ve moved on and put this last malicious relationship behind us? No, the world is not safe. There are Bad Boyfriends and Bad Companies and War Hawks. They exist, they really truly do. The only positive that comes from a bad experience with one is the wisdom gleaned. And that’s what makes you safer. Not just a thicker skin to endure the punishment more competently, but more the evolutionary aspect where we learn from our experience, adapt and grow smarter and stronger from it. With our keener eyes and a new insight about these types of liars, their snares and traps, we are better prepared to survive the reality of our environment. After we’ve been burned we don’t just grab the pot on the stove with our bare hand anymore. We now check first to see if the burner is on and if it is we use a protective mitt to touch the pot.
There has also been a counter-development in our evolutionary adaptation—the ability to use our reason to rationalize the heat of the flame that burns us. Using psychological or semantic maneuvers we might say to ourselves: “Yes it’s hot, but it needs to be hot because we need the water to boil”. Or, “It’s actually less hot if you compare it to molten lava”. Or, “The whole damn world is heating up and I’m expected to wear this mitt everywhere I go???”
We might succeed at the rationalization exercise, but the flame will still burn us just the same. We can add any nuance we like to describing “hot flame” but it won’t change its fundamental reality. We can only protect ourselves from the actual reality, once we accept what that is, and not any lesser, kinder version of burning heat.
+ We must use the wisdom gained from past mistakes =
We are all in this together! I’m not the first to say it! See you next chapter….
Yeah, I think it's a very practical comparison because it's going to take the same kind of humility to accept our abused and weakened position, which will be very necessary if we want to heal that up properly and regain strength to fight back. If pride or denial won't let us admit to this reality and dig into the psychological ramifications, we can't really ever comprehend the very incomprehensible phenomenon of the more abuse you experience, the harder it is to defend or leave, and that's where you begin gaslighting yourself...
Love where this is going! I always felt like after the first Trump admin that now the country knows what it feels like to be an abused wife or girlfriend. I guess now we’re in the very precarious stage of going back to him to get really beat up.
Identifying the etymology of this to modern pr is pretty brilliant L.E. Thanks!