Why is power so often used for evil rather than good? Because power is most easily exercised upon the person who has integrity.
"It is not intelligence but integrity which determines whether or not a man is a good mark." - David W. Maurer, professor of linguistics and student of the criminal underworld.
Con men are students of psychology but only that element of psychology which they can use to gain wealth or status. Thus they only explore the negative aspects of power, the pernicious, tending to evil. Are people ever manipulated for good? I suppose Lenin, Mao and Pol Pot thought so. The British government has a Behavioural Insights Team that developed the idea of "nudges" what allow bureaucrats to modify the actions of the public in everyday life. As Event Covid has shown, that has been used to promote public shaming, fear and panic.
Once you experience power you realize how easy it is to control people. Either it’s very profitable or, as author Jerry Day says, it bestows the beguiling power of the priest. The masses are hard wired to fall for the priest who says he’s obtained THE KNOWLEDGE, whether it be religious or scientific, by means of revelation or alchemy.
There are other features of power: secrecy tending towards evil; psychology's potential to deceive; but ultimately power has its own morality. This is as old as the yin and the yang: if the target is good, power will tend towards evil.
One could say power seeks its prey among the best people, those with integrity. Woah! Let me introduce our character Mr Sayit Aintso, who is beginning to feel uncomfortable. And well he might, because this word recalls a British government attempt to "counter disinformation" in the press, a unit called the Integrity Initiative. Yet here we see a whole new implication: that people with integrity are easier to mislead. That the integrity of the best people becomes merely a vector for evil.
Evil, like power, requires a story be told: a script. In turn, the script requires an intelligent reader. In order to be duped by a script and willingly suspend disbelief, the audience must be able to understand it on a deep enough level.
"Big-time confidence games are in reality only carefully rehearsed plays in which every member of the cast except the mark knows his part perfectly. The insideman is the star of the cast; while the minor participants are competent actors and can learn their lines perfectly, they must look to the inside man for their cues; he must be not only a fine actor, but a playwright extempore as well. And he must be able to retain the confidence of an intelligent man even after that man has been swindled at his hands."- David W. Maurer
Power requires a cast of supporting actors. Yet in the face of this evidence Mr Sayit Aintso shelters, mentally, in place: if so many people were involved, he reassures himself, someone would have talked.
Trust The Plan -- No! Appraise the plan.
Mr Sayit Aintso is an Intellectual Yet Idiot, to borrow from Nassim Taleb. He is intellectual enough to realize that much of what passes for reality in our human hierarchical society is in fact a morality play and that we are all like the "poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage".
But he was schooled to swallow what comes next, that "it is [merely] a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." Such is the power of iambic pentameter, Marlowe's Mighty Line, the devastating innovation of the Elizabethan propagandist, playwright and spy.
“Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships,
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium
-- Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss."
After such a line, I defy your legs not turn to jelly and your mind open to anything that I tell you: that feckless youth drove their flying machines into the twin towers of Babel, while a glover's son with small Latin and less Greek wrote the greatest works in history while minding mules in obscurity, but that's a horse to beat another time.
From a young age, school and religion has taught Mr Sayit Aintso that there is, indeed, a play and that we, God's children, Earth's children, are the performers. But because we were given free will, he is convinced there can be no director, much less a producer, pulling the strings.
Mr Sayit Aintso forgets that in every nation since time began, the king has rewritten religious texts to insert a narrative that protects or bolsters his power: 'free will means that your fate is your fault. To blame anyone else is a conspiracy theory'.
As Jerry Day writes of the ancient caste of scientist priests. Wearing a white robe: God gave me the secrets of life; give me your money and time, and I will tell you how to survive God's wrath.
Wearing a white lab coat: Science gave me the secrets of life; give me your money and time, and I will tell you how to survive Nature's wrath.
Secrecy becomes essential to the power structure when they refuse to share with you the science statistics or the religious rituals. Trust their recommendation! As with any class of priests, knowledge is power, secrecy is greater power.
Leaving morality aside, just look at the consequences of secrecy vs openness. The scientist is looking at a tiny amoeba under a microscope. He may want a little temporary secrecy to protect his discovery but he is not seeking to control society. It is the technocrat who keeps the scientists' research secret, who is using it to develop political control. Few have the money to fund research (only those with government, military and corporate agendas) and it is they who pursue science with an agenda and then conceal that agenda.
Secrecy tends towards evil; the "repugnance" of which John F. Kennedy spoke.
Mr Sayit Aintso is now defending secrecy and power. "They wouldn't do that," he cries; power is used for good, he insists. Only in the rare and unlikely event that power should fall in to the wrong hands would there be a reason to doubt the good intentions of those with power.
He is drifting into circular reasoning here: power must be good unless it falls into evil hands; that doesn't tend to happen so don't worry, be happy.
Of course you can use power for good (in the open). It is not power that is evil. It is secrecy that tends to evil. Sometimes you need secrecy, just as sometimes you need privacy.
The first act of good governance is to throw open the windows and to use the "Top Secret" stamp as little as possible. Yet secrecy and evil fights back. Privacy is condemned (have you something to hide?) and used to justify secrecy (States need secrets).
Total openness, like the drapes-free Dutch Calvinist taking down his curtains because he must show his neighbours that he has nothing to hide from God, can be taken to extremes.
So we have power that tends towards evil. And power requires a script, 1) to justify or explain the action, 2) to manoeuvre the victim into position and to convince him of his role in the play according to justice and or fate 3) also to get away with the crime. The script and the power are inseparable. There is no power without the script.
Chicken or the egg - which came first, the power or the script? The priest and king tell you their power derives from divine authority. The power came first. Or the script was handed down at the same time and the script and the power are one.
It has to be power before script! If you suspected the king had written the script from which he derived his power you would kick him off his throne.
Is this script very different to the "carefully rehearsed plays in which every member of the cast except the mark knows his part perfectly" as David Maurer describes?
Manipulating people is just an elevated form of gossip but with a specific goal and thus more methodical: to control or neutralize people by gas lighting, misleading, misdirecting, and phishing for information, in turn requires collusion, whispers, conspiracy and untruths. It needs a cast of players (which is why control of the media is key).
The script and the morality play, with the cast of goodies and baddies, is as old as the world. As Paul Craig Roberts and P.W. Laurie explain, in every operation the intel agencies always have several scripts ready to go, as events on the ground change.
Don't Be Evil - once a motto
In fighting evil we must fight secrecy. Yet there’s an obvious problem: you can’t fight what you don’t know. You cannot search for information when the very existence of that information is disputed.
There is a scene in another play in which the King cries “Let us never tolerate outrageous conspiracy theories ”. He knows that without a grasp of their conspiracy, we have no chance of knowing what needle to look for, in what haystack. We need to know their script.
It is simply not valid to say, that we should not speculate about the King’s motives and intentions - that “this sort of evidence-free making up of explanations only serves to provide the elite with further ammunition”.
The Powers That Be work with scripts. Sometimes it is as simple as anticipating outcomes and priming the press to portray those events in a certain light: some people/interests as the bad guys, others as our guys. Other times it is rewriting history after the event to cover up an inconvenient truth, as President Lyndon Johnson did with the attack on the USS Liberty in 1967. Other times entire 'happenings' are scripted, such as the Gulf of Tonkin Incident in 1964.
More important to know, intelligence agencies use scripts today. Covid is a script, changing in real time, but with politicians closely following choreographed parts. Many religious texts are scripts. The attacks of 9/11 formed a very intricate script, even if you blame cave-dwelling terrorists for putting all the elements together. The Skripal poisoning is a script - it’s been written up by the BBC as a television script which differs from the script that was handed out at the time to the press. Sergei Skripal’s handlers were working on a script that we call the pee-pee, or dirty, dossier. Their scripts are integral to their actions.
Governments have always employed script writers. It is no coincidence that lots of bestselling authors have come out of the intelligence services and their books have helped form the public's world view: Graham Greene, Ian Fleming, John le Carré, or those tightly associated with the agencies like Tom Clancy. Hollywood is even more important in forming the public mind, known as cultural programming or predictive programming. Usually these rewrite the authorized history of an event after it has happened (Argo, American Made or pretty much any WWII movie) but sometimes they introduce an idea to the public mind like Arnon Milchan's Lone Gunman, Medusa Touch and Fight Club movies all anticipated 9/11.
Politicians and oligarchs have changed little through the ages. Read the plays of Aristophanes and Aeschylus. Joseph Campbell showed there are only a few basic plots. Political biographers and military historians reveal that leaders are far more likely to employ the same techniques than to strike out on their own.
That's our advantage. We, the People, have seen their kind before.
Work with narratives, ideas, and perceive their scripts and plans. Do not be misled too early into a hunt for information, counting bullet cases on the Grassy Knoll, except in so far as it supports ideas.
Ideas generate information - not the other way around
As Theodore Roszak said:
"Even great discoveries start as observations and insights and theories not by putting bits of information together. Later they may find information that corroborates the idea. Information is the lowest level at which the mind functions: looking up a telephone number, buying a plane ticket. That is why these functions have been computerized...The essence of education is to teach students how to deal with ideas, especially big ideas. Because not all ideas are good. Some are toxic. Ideas of a master race, for example... We fancy ourselves an age of information. Our forbears thought of themselves as an Age of Reason."
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