About self-blocking in self-persuasion

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Here I would like to very briefly share an important observation that will later form the basis of a more serious study. Thus, this note is needed rather for the future. It will be about the self-blocking of thinking through self-conviction in the possession of a certain property or quality of the psyche.

Let me first give you 3 of the most striking examples for me personally. Why bright? Because these are the things that I meet with people in the overwhelming majority of cases. Almost all blockages of thinking are precisely these variations, while others personally to me are extremely rare. Go.

1 The conviction that one has critical thinking immediately leads a person to a state in which his critical thinking becomes less critical than that of a mentally healthy person. As soon as a person declares that he, unlike other people, just possesses critical thinking, then in fact he does not have this property, and you can not even doubt it, it simply does NOT, from the word “absolutely”. As a rule, you can even go to his page, for example, VK, and make sure that there will necessarily be either a flat Earth, or Kapanadze's fuelless generators, or any quasi-historical nonsense, in general, something like that. It happens, however, that a person blindly believes in science, and therefore drags academic nonsense onto his page, usually containing the same set of logical errors as anti-scientific or pseudoscientific nonsense. We will talk about such people separately someday. In my opinion, healthy critical thinking will never allow a person to consider themselves more critical thinking than most. Such self-conviction, announced publicly, turns into self-exposure.

2 The conviction that a person cannot be manipulated makes him an excellent object for manipulation. As soon as a person has declared that it is impossible to manipulate him, right from that moment you can start hanging any noodles on his ears, he will eat it - and not choke. Rest assured, it works. The main thing is to adhere to a number of rules that allow you to "ride" on his inflated ideas about himself. For example, when imposing a certain point of view on him, one can say that if this point of view were false, he would easily feel it, because they cannot be manipulated, but other people, they say, easily fall for the bait of, say, consumer happiness and TV advertising: "You are not like everyone else, I immediately understood this, so only you and only now will I say something that no other of my acquaintances is simply not worthy of knowing." That's it, the fuse is blown … Of course, it won't work for you, dear reader.

But the same can be said in about fifty different ways, all of which I have met in real life. Believe me, as soon as you think for a second that you are somehow better than others in terms of your tendency to manipulate, you are already being manipulated, and if you don’t see this, then you are in the hands of professionals. Hmm … this paragraph is also a manipulation, I hope you noticed it.

3 The conviction that a person does not have the "philistine" problems inherent in "the majority of unreasonable people" does not save him from a huge cart of such. If, as he believes, he does not have the cognitive distortions and other violations of common sense inherent in other people for the sake of the apparent integrity of the prevailing ideas and some kind of stability, then in fact he has them, and he is even in a certain sense "worse" than the layman, because he at least knows and does not hide his problems from himself, and our patient does it. Here, the Dunning-Kruger effect can manifest itself, expressed in the fact that such people consider themselves smarter, because they see the situation very superficially and do not imagine the whole plot as well as the “layman” living inside the situation. As they say, everyone imagines himself to be a strategist, seeing the battle from the side. As a result, it turns out that these people in similar conditions do EVERYTHING the same. For example, they lie or testify when it suits them, or they even ask someone to tell a lie in their favor, say, in court. At the same time, in their sofa conditions, these people criticize others for the same actions … obviously the case, because they are trembling creatures, and these - have the right!

Some readers are very uncomfortable when they think that the author writes such things apart from himself. I have a reassuring phrase for them: guys, I am also a carrier of the indicated shortcomings, and all three of them. That is, I was probably even less fortunate than yours. I hope you feel calmer, you breathe a sigh of relief and now take the article more correctly?

In general terms, the problem looks like this: as soon as a person believes that he, unlike other people, has the quality X or such a quality is better developed for him than for the majority, we can definitely say that the qualities X a person does not, or it is underdeveloped. At the same time, I noticed an important feature: the quality disappears exactly AFTER the person becomes proud of him. Until a person fell into pride, he really possessed such a quality. To show pride, you just need to think that you are different from others. X … And that's all, a number of life circumstances in which you will be in the place of “other people”, who, in your opinion, are “worse” than you in this sense, have already been formed and await you in the near future.

There are two reasons I have found for this. The first depends on the subject himself. In fact, from the very beginning, he did not have any quality X, but would very much like, for whatever reason, he appointed it to himself. The second depends on the observer. When someone tries to convince you of their ability X, you will probably somehow unknowingly test it more thoroughly than another person who is nothing about you X did not tell. Thus, your urge to "overwhelm" a person will force you to think about him initially worse, and therefore it will seem that he has quality X worse developed. That is, your cognitive distortion leads to the fact that you underestimate the quality of a person X, although he may have the same as most of your friends.

We can talk about the third reason, about the nature of which I can NOT express myself quite reliably. This reason can be described in different ways, but here, for example, in Christianity it is called "spiritual delusion", which, of course, has negative consequences for the deceived. One of the consequences can be just the deliverance of a person from certain qualities. Judging by the description on the link, this is just the first case: a person initially did not have what he imagined, but a number of mental disorders made him think that it is. The result is predictable: when meeting with practice, everything becomes clear.

Of course, what has been said does not necessarily apply to a person's developed culturally determined skills. For example, if a boiler installation professional declares that he is a professional, and the others are not standing by, then this may indeed be the case. The only thing is that sooner or later a better professional is in such situations, but this does not diminish the coolness of the former. However, it seems to me that I still met situations when such qualities were taken away from a person, these situations are described somewhere in the second half of the article "What should not be said?"But when it comes to mental characteristics of a person such as critical thinking, immunity to manipulation or the ability to see a holistic picture of the world, competently including in it the surrounding circumstances (including seeing the truth), these qualities are blocked immediately, as soon as the person is talking about thinks to himself, or even announces. If it does, then most likely this ability will be lost for a very long time, or even forever.

Conclusion. Fact ITSELFproclaiming oneself special removes this feature or generates a series of events that can convince others that a person does not have such an ability (at least in a publicized capacity), and in rare cases this is enough for the patient himself. But very rare. Judging by itself, it may take several years before the "opening of the eyes", and it is not a fact that the discovery turned out to be quite complete. I hope when I study in more detail the activities of sects and help people answer a question like "how to understand that I am in a sect?" (as you know, a sectarian is often fundamentally unable to understand this), I can find the right words, but for now let it be as it is written.

In addition to the three specified features, you can talk about others in the same context, but the reader can do it himself, he can even add it in the comments. It's just that I rarely see them personally, and my statistics are clearly not enough … but for the three points described, there is more than enough of it. On one condition: if I interpreted my observations correctly.