I Studied Con Artists for Years. Then I Found the Biggest One...

One of my interests from a very young age was how influence works.

How manipulation operates. How someone convinced another he could sell them the Eiffel Tower.

Above all, the mechanisms that allow people to fall into traps that, from a distance, seem so obvious to avoid.

I studied the Enron collapse, Ponzi schemes, Hare Krishna sales tactics, Carnegie's playbook, Alinsky's "Shit-In" boycott tactics, subliminal advertising, TV's repeatedly telling a vision, supermarket eye-level psychology, social media's attention harvesting through algorithmic detective work.

Now imagine this: the world of advertising and media based their tactics on studying a hypnosis machine that's already inside you - your internal dialogue.

The Internal Hypnotist

From wake to sleep, it's convincing you to listen.

Triggering you. Sending subliminal messages to guide your behavior. Pushing you toward impulsive reactions you'll regret. Projecting thoughts in pre-conditioned directions. Dramatizing everything.

It's the mechanism that knows you best.

Constantly improving its tactics.

A trickster intelligence designed for learning exactly how to lure you into its web.

It has studied your weaknesses, conditioned beliefs, and insecurities better than any external manipulator ever could.

The Moment Everything Changed

This remained intellectual until once I was on a train to university in Lisbon. I was around 21 or 22 and nervous - as usual back then - about presenting to a group, when I read a one-liner in Marcus Aurelius' Meditations:

"To shrug it all off and wipe it clean: every annoyance and distraction and reach utter stillness. Child's play."

This was my first, clear moment where this realization hit: I didn't have to be consistent with my internal dialogue. I had always believed that I was my internal dialogue, that I had to follow its commands. But there was distance between me and it. I could choose not to go with it.

Years of stillness practice confirmed and built trust: I am not my thoughts. If anything I am something of an awareness observing them.

Working Within the System

As one influence expert wrote in Rules for Radicals:

"I start from where the world is, as it is, not as I would like it to be. We accept the world as it is not to weaken our desire to change it, but because it's necessary to begin where the world is if we're going to change it. That means working within the system."

Here are tools to work 'within your system' to loosen the grip of this internal hypnotist:

• The view from above: Observe your internal dialogue as if from a plane

• Lose interest: Pull back attention from your mentalizing

• Reverse engineer: Start the habit of keeping a list with beliefs you want to cancel, write down their opposites, record your ideal internal dialogue with a binaural beat behind, play during transition moments

• Command override: When unwanted dialogue arises, point an internal index finger saying "Cancel that!"

• Study influence masters: Read influence manuals to recognize the patterns

  • The Hidden Persuaders by Vince Packard

  • Influence by Cialdini

  • Propaganda by Edward Bernays

  • The Manufacturing of Consent by Chomsky

  • Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles Mackay

  • 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene

IN SEARCH OF...

Robert Anton Wilson on hypnosis: "It is hard to believe that there is no such thing as hypnosis although we are hypnotizing ourselves and one another all the time".

G.I. Gurdjieff on the importance of understanding sleeping in life: "In order to awaken, first of all one must realize that one is in a state of sleep. And in order to realize that one is indeed in a state of sleep, one must recognize and fully understand the nature of the forces which operate to keep one in the state of sleep, or hypnosis".

Eric Berne in Games People Play: "Although men are not laboratory animals, they often behave as though they are. Sometimes they are put in cages and treated like rats, manipulated and sacrificed at the will of their masters. But many times the cage has an open door, and a man has only to walk out if he wishes. If he does not, it is usually his script which keeps him there."