Dinkaltranen

Over a decade ago I tried writing a how-to book called “The Guide to Being a Bad Person”. It eventually became a blog, where each entry taught the reader increasingly complex methods of deceit and manipulation building on previously taught lessons. There is probably an archive of it out there somewhere despite my best efforts, but...

What a terrible title! Nobody would buy a book named that! Not unless they had some masochistic fascination! How About “How To Get Whatever You Want”. Hey, self help books are a big thing right now. There is a big market in selling people temporary confidence in an era of manufactured misery, and this way you get to feel good about yourself and traumatise everyone around you, so then you can also sell a trauma book (which are also big right now) based on how you ruin everyone’s lives through your deceit. Substack is evidence that people are drawn to this stuff like moths to a flame, and secondarily a time-capsule of how people have come to regret to do the things they did deceitfully: See Worst Boyfriend Ever.

So I thought to punish myself I would see if I could annotate the basic tactics of the entire concept into a single post, and then demonstrate why you should never, ever do any of this, even though it is the easiest thing in the world. If you don’t want to read, or want to skip to that, I don’t know how to code html, so you can scroll down to the section with a big header that says “Why You Shouldn’t Do This."

The first step one to understanding other people is that they are (mostly) just as bad as you, if not worse. It’s always a big scandal when it turns out that celebrities are actually just like everyone else, and yet paparazzi have been ‘dropping the curtain’ on whatever new drama that probably happened in your own family, or happened or was done to someone you knew in the second degree. The reason they can keep doing this is that people want to believe in idols, or god, just as much as they want to believe in the truth. This is why lying works so well, even if you are a bad liar. People don’t want to believe they are being deceived, or that someone thinks they can even deceive you, because that means they think you are actually going to fool them with their “dog ate my homework” excuse for why you are sleeping with their wife. “It’s therapy!” You exclaim, as the spouse goes to raise his much stronger, capable fist. “We’re experiencing the therapeutic effects of women lying naked on top of men and telling them they love them!”

Now they might not kill you, you’ve confused them. Not just that you would suggest such an absurd thing, but… this bit sucks. Either way, you got laid, everyone lives another day, and you destroyed a marriage and probably their children’s lives. Good job.

A belief in a just world is a primary reason why people let themselves get lied to. Even when they do get deceived, they still insist on a belief that somehow they’ll see justice in the end, or that the perpetrator will, or that everything will be alright. Well, they are right in some sense, but not in the sense that they want. They will never get their marriage back. Their son will get into hard drugs, and their daughter will get pregnant at 15, maybe even to their brother. Hey man, TcoAaL isn’t just a cultural phenomenon because it’s someone’s fetish, it’s because much of it is accurate to what happens when mummy and daddy aren’t there. When the role is empty, and casting calls...

Why am I telling you this? Why am I using such a grotesque (but in actuality quite tame considering what I have gotten away with) example?

Because if you know what you want, you know what others want, because you have a significant overlap with what other people want. You may think you don’t but you do. Chances are if you don’t, you might be an actual psychopath, a true schizoid, or you still believe in a fantasy that isn’t of your creation.

The other part of this is, is that most people who are attentive to deceit know this, and will be looking for this. The most simplest part of deceit is concealing what you want, often while asking for it. I’ll give an example of what is more accurately dishonesty or indirectness, but is also forms the basic principle of lying.

Hypothetical situation. Actually, not hypothetical, this is something that happens all the time, because dishonesty and indirectness (deceit) happens all the time even in otherwise ‘honest’ people. You’re somewhere where you have power, or control, like your house, or your office, and someone says “Aw, geez, it’s a bit cold in here!” They might even turn it into a consensus seeking question, which draws your empathy. “Aren’t you cold here?” if they want to be more direct.

Person A is actually cold. They know you can make them stop being cold. How, it doesn’t matter, but they recognise your capacity to do that, and they want you to do it for them. Sometimes this is called being ‘polite’, but really it’s just game theory.

“No.” You say honestly. You haven’t picked up on their intent: so they reapply.

“I really should have brought a jumper.” They say. Now there is an express of need, but the blame isn’t on you, it’s on themselves. It’s not confrontational. They want you to turn off the cooler, turn on the heater, or give them a blanket.

Again, you don’t do anything. Maybe you’re autistic. You should get that checked out. Or maybe you don’t want to turn on the heater, or maybe you do wonder if they’re just being polite, because a lot of the time people make stupid small talk and say stupid things. I’m sorry to inform you that everything you or anyone else says means something.

Person A then gets up from their chair and starts rubbing their arms. Now it’s a much more attention drawing and physical expression of discomfort.

And this will go on and on, with Person A restating the same thing using different strategies until either you kill each other, or person A actually expresses that they really want you to do something to help them stop being cold.

People are normally fine with this because turning off an air-conditioner isn’t seen as a huge amount of effort. But you can scale this same idea to any time you want someone to do something for you. Given enough time and tension, you really can make anyone do anything for you, and make them think it’s their idea. This example was actually terrible, and a better example would have been at a restaurant where you have chosen a bad place to sit.

“What?!”

Yes, I can’t hear you over the traffic, we’re sitting too close to the main road, could we please sit somewhere else? I’m sensitive to loud noises, I’ve always hated them!

There’s a weird psychological trick that’s made its way around pop psychology, that like most pop psychology has a grain of truth in it: asking people to help you, or do things for you, makes them like you. People who like you more and willing to do more for you. It's a feedback loop. You can be subtle in your deceit. Taking this into account:

Be direct and honest when it comes to small requests which don’t have to be lies. Start small and work up. Ironic, isn’t it? That the best way to start lying is often to not lie? Just make sure these initial lies are not in contrast with your greater/meta-lie.

So, another tip, if tips are for some reason not essential, which in this case they are. Learn to read other people. This starts off by watching them. Another psychological trick you can do is that not only will people like you more if you mirror them, if you don’t know what someone was thinking in the past, later, try to act out the memory as them, their expressions, posture, and see what you feel.

Making eye contact helps. Not too long. I can’t do that anymore, if I make eye contact for longer than a half a dozen seconds these days I either want to kill a person, fuck them, or fall in love with them, all because I learn too much. But you can learn a lot about yourself, others, and what they think about you with eye contact alone. Whoever wrote about eyes being a window to the soul wasn’t fucking around.

Now, again, what does that tell us? If we are learning so much from others, others are learning from us. How you present yourself, your words, your expressions, all of this is just as important for understanding others as it is for others to understand you: or rather, what you want others to understand you as. You’re lying. If people think you are trying to get something from them the first time you meet, they will forever be on guard. Especially if you’ve created an elaborate conspiracy, even if you’ve crafted it well, you’ve only bought yourself time to get out and away before anyone can figure out what’s happened or deliver you the consequences. Practice how you present. Practice conversations with pictures of yourself, pictures of other people. Don’t record it, don’t incriminate yourself. But find out a way to recognise what you are being perceived as.

For now, I’ve run out of scotch, which I bought partially with money I got from the Government, which are paid by my friends’ taxes. Even as much as I try to stop lying, to stop living dishonestly, to stop hurting others, I find myself doubting myself. I am incapable of not being a burden. This is how pathologised I have become. This is a warning. Are you liking what you’re seeing? Do you think I like being this way? Do you think YOU will like being this way? You can’t imagine where you’ll be in 15 years time if you do these things. I should put that in the blurb on the title. It’ll be a fake review. It’ll be by the New York Times.

Ambiguity is a very important factor when it comes to lying. There is a reason why great works, such as the works of Shakespeare, have text interpreters to help direct performers consistently towards interpretive consensus. Performances can vary the story just as much as the words themselves. Ambiguity is incredibly important when it comes to casting other people into your lies, and getting them to lie for you.

You have previously told Friend A a funny (or any entertaining/believable) story. You performed perfectly even if it was completely fabricated. What’s the truth in the way of a good story? Afterwards, you tell them an emotional story. It can be true, false, it doesn’t matter. There can be essences of truth woven into it. But be ambiguous. You display emotional affect, and induce it in them. The swing from humour to empathy is psychologically dismantling. Good Cop Bad Cop applies to everything, it’s why people get stuck in abusive relationships, or with people with BPD, or enjoy sado-masochism. Going from one extreme to the other induces emotional affect.

Now, you want to induce emotional affect in someone else. Say you’re at a party with Friend A and Friend B, they are mutuals. You mention in passing something relating to the emotional second story, then brush it off, doesn’t matter why. Maybe you make it look like it made you uncomfortable, or sad. The goal is to induce curiosity. Friend B will be looking at how other people respond to the story as much as you, and they will notice the emotional affect projected by Friend A towards you.

Here is where you can really test your ‘friendship’. Struggle with a detail, look to Friend A, use that low level, non verbal stuff. Seem stuck. Communicate that you are in need, unable to speak what happens next. Remember that ambiguity? You’re now going to hear Friend A’s interpretation of it. If it’s too bad, you can correct them, but be humble and small about it, gentle not indignant.

Congratulations, you have now created a powerful lie, with a meta-narrative shared by 3 people (including you), and hopefully enough ambiguity for more. What’s more important is that you tricked someone else into lying for you. Worst comes to worse, they can become a fall guy and say you were too polite to correct them, or they didn’t understand you.

I could go on and give you 20 more different examples of how to expand this, or rather how to execute the same thing with a different results, but just trust me: You can expand this exponentially. Remember, as long as there is ambiguity, you have wiggle room. People want to believe a truth, people want to believe in consensus, and justice, and that they aren’t being tricked into lying for their friends to their other friends. Cognitive dissonance is doing a lot of heavy lifting.

You can compartmentalise with a few people easily. The problem starts happening when your web starts spanning twenty or thirty, or people in the dozens start to corroborate. This happens when compartments (or rather, cells, if you want to use opsec terminology) start to intermingle too much and find conflict in your character or stories. After all, it’s hard to appear the person you need to be to 20 or 30 people. It’s much easier to be 5 or 6 different people to various groups of 4 and 5. But yes, this will get difficult. You aren’t even a public figure and no one’s trying to actively bring you down or investigate you, just imagine how bad it is for them, or for the people they are hurting. Consider if what you’re doing is worth it. I implore you. I told you this would get you what you want. I didn’t say you’d live happily ever after. This whole thing is a game of jenga and a game of poker, where most of the game is convincing the other players that you are going to win. You will end up a drifter. You will end up alone. You will end up a no-life, useless drug addict because you spent your spare time tricking people into giving you what they earned instead of earning it yourself. For all of these, see WBE. Do you want to be WBE? You think you do. But you don’t.

The easiest way to fuck this up is: mentally ill people, miscreants, addicts or undesirables. That or you end up reaching too big too early, but that one’s your own hubris. Why? Because they are emotional, often hyper-vigilant especially if previously traumatised, and hard to predict. People in or frequently in unstable or extreme states of emotional arousal notice things and do stupid things, and cause similar emotional affect in others. They are primed to be upset, their brain is literally dosed and wired for it, and looking for patterns that signal harm. In mental illness this can be at times (especially in the traumatised) a false flag, but a lot of the time there really is something to gut feeling. The last thing you want is someone having a meltdown and accuse you of something. Just putting the thought in others’ heads that you might be deceitful is enough to start doubts that can begin the cascade. Stay away from them, and trust your own gut. If you feel like you’re getting baited, you probably are.

A lot of the time the greatest thing liars can do is reeling and crushing worse cons. Not only does it reflect well on their character and judgement, it distracts away from their own dishonesty. There really is always a bigger fish, and despite what I said about game theory and a poker game of confidence, sometimes the best thing to do is to get the fuck out. Being a liar you will recognise other liars, so not only will you need to know how to lie to honest people pretending not to be liars, you will need to be smart enough to lie to liars who understand both of you are lying to honest people pretending not to be liars and are also simultaneously lying to each other. The idea of self now has a fifth identity for every person, what do you know. I didn’t know lying could be more complicated than the psychology of sex, and it’s unsurprisingly even more awkward. Interacting with other liars, if you are certain you don’t have the upper hand, is not only a sign that you should quit but that you should reveal as little as possible and get out. You will get lost in the fractals even within individual cells. This is sort of the same reason that narcissists cannot operate in the same cells: the only thing two all consuming forces can do is consume one another. It’s not worth it. Get the fuck out.

Now, onto why you shouldn’t do any of this.

“But E, you just spent 3000 words writing about how to do this. Why would you tell me how to do this in an effective way if you didn’t want me to do this?”

I didn’t make you read or do anything, any more than posting design specs of a coat hanger hook is probable cause for selling a weapon. You chose to read it. Maybe you just wanted to read to understand, maybe you don’t want to erode the lives of everyone around you by your very presence, maybe you actually do want to do these things and trick women or men into loving you or something else equally stupid and you just don’t care. But here I have made you understand that there really are people like this, and it’s far more common than people think. I have done it in an imprecise way without too much jargon, and in my usual, rambling, compelling way. I haven’t gone step by step. I haven’t written you Twelve Rules, or cited scientific sources: the source is me, I am the lived proof you can do and “get away” with this. I have told some truly amazingly terrible lies, and it all started out because it was the only way to get the things that I needed, that I thought I needed, as you can tell if you are familiar with my other writing. Starving? Unloved? Neglected? Abused? I can assure you the damage done by becoming a pathological deceiver to meet these needs pales in comparison to what you will do to yourself under the justification of survival. And as the social media losers all like to quote, you have destroyed yourself for nothing. The strongest and greatest people I know are people who stood by their being and didn’t fall to temptation when faced with things probably just as bad as I experienced. They are now living good lives. I am not. Maybe it’s survivorship bias, there’s probably hundreds or thousands of people I never met who did go through just as many bad things as me, denied their temptation to do what they felt they had to to survive, and therefore didn’t survive, maybe the people around me now are just outliers. There’s probably even more people like me, who did get survive at the cost of getting corrupted. I guess we just weren’t good enough. If you are one, please reach out to me on the email on the about page.

Now, if you want to know why you shouldn’t do this…

The worst thing about being a pathological liar, after a lifetime of telling absurd lie after absurd lie, is that you are so used to delivering ambiguity and lies that it happens when you really need to be honest and tell the truth. Everything is fake. Nothing is real. The truly absurd, real, seemingly impossible things that happened in your life that you wish to share with people are real, but so hard to share. Because everything feels like a lie, or you might mis-speak and think “Was that intentional? Did I do that on purpose?” and now the whole truth, no matter how genuine, is tainted. The corruption spreads. Now even the truth is a lie.

And because telling the truth is so unnatural to you, it unsettles people. Your discomfort and unsettling nature is interpreted as a sign as deceit. And the reason you can tell this is because you have spent so much time learning to recognise what others are feeling, that you know they think you are lying even when you are telling the truth finally, for one of the first times in your lives.

Well, all the people who you hurt along the way got their justice. You emptied yourself down to a husk. Your capacity to hold a shred of human emotion is gone or ghostly, and even when you feel something you are not sure if it is genuine or an imitation of genuine emotion, or a habitual response attempting to show those observing what they want to see to serve a purpose you have yet to realise you are aiming for.

Words mean nothing. Connections mean nothing. You are disintegrating, unable to hold onto your humanity through decaying skin, and ironically it feels like the only way to hold on, to survive, is to fall into old habits, to do the things you did this for to begin with. But, like my friends who survived, you must resist this. You can suffer in silence rather than make the world a worser place for all those who know you. You do not have to burden them with your sins.

Do not lie. Do not deceive. Do not succumb.

The rest is silence.