Lesson 5

Lesson 5

Law of conservation of group rational attitude.

One of the most powerful lessons, the law of conservation of group rational attitude is also one of the hardest to explain to those that have not experienced it in action. On the other hand, for those that have experienced it in action, this will be very easy to grasp. Bear with me if you haven’t, this lesson is extremely useful in social interactions.

Have you ever participated in a debate? I suppose many of you have, and I’m sure you have experienced that no matter who wins the argument, both parties leave the debate even more convinced of their point of view than before.

Author Dale Carnegie, in his self-help classic ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People’ teaches that one should never say ‘you are wrong’ ¹. Why? Because that’s the most effective way of putting someone in a defensive position, and defending his point of view ‘till the end, as being right is now attached to his sense of self-worth, and his ego.

This principle is what lesson 5 lays upon, but it extends Carnegie’s teaching to a wider spectrum of social interactions. Just as saying ‘you are wrong’ puts the other person in a defensive position, when you are interacting with a group of people, taking an extreme position on any subject will make the rest of the group take an equally strong, but opposite position in that same subject.

Let’s take politics as an example subject. Let’s say I decide to take a very aggressive position over a particular subject. For example the politics of abortion. Even though people might agree with my position if I skillfully let them build interest in my point of view, and only then voice my opinion (lesson 1. Never answer a question that hasn’t been asked), if I decide to try to push my believes into them and voice my opinion with enough strength and extremism, no matter what the rest of the people in that group believe, all of them combined will develop an equally extreme and strong position in opposition to my own opinion.

That being said, this doesn’t mean that nobody will agree with me. Careful now, because here is the tricky part that makes this extremely powerful. This law states that the sum of all rational attitudes (opinions) of the group in question will remain constant:

 

Let’s say we have a way of measuring the extremeness of an opinion, and we have a group of 5 people, one of which has a very strong position against abortion. One day they are talking, and the subject comes up. 

Now if we could graph the group’s position on the subject while it’s taking place, we would see something like this:

 

Were 5 is the neutral position, as time goes on and Julia starts to get more and more extreme in her argument, john, peter and Kathy stop being neutral. John starts to take a very strong pro-abortion position, Kathy agrees with Julia, very strongly at first but a bit weaker later, and peter fluctuates, keeping a more or less balanced negative opinion about abortion. Robert, on the other hand, remains indifferent to the discussion and decides not to participate.

With 10 being the extreme pro-abortion side, and 0 being the extreme anti-abortion side, the sum of the intensity of the opinions in the group remains at a constant 25. (This is to say that the average opinion in the group is always 5, even though the individual opinions vary greatly.

This dynamic is typical of strongly rational based debates. This is a simplified version, and complications start to appear when the initial intensity of the opinions of the individual people is not neutral, for example, or when there is an emotional connection between two of the participants, which we will analyze in lesson 6: the law of emotional transference, and its relation with lesson 5 and the practical applications it has on social dynamics.

I will leave you with an example of practical application of this knowledge to influence the behavior of groups of people. But first you need to understand that by taking an extreme position over any particular subject you are creating a disconnection between yourself and everyone else in that group, and this will have a negative effect in people’s opinions of your persona. This is to say if you take extreme positions over subjects all the time people won’t like you.

So if you don’t mind people not liking you in a particular group, and you want that group to take a particular position on a subject, infiltrate that group and voice a very extreme position, opposite to the one you want the group to take. Make it impossible to relate to for them, by presenting an argument that will make them feel disconnected from you and feel compelled to argue with you.

For example if you are talking to a group of woman about the ethics of being easy (a slut) and you want them to take the position that being a slut is not wrong, present a very rational argument on why being slutty is wrong. Get crazy with it, to the point you want to argue with yourself, and that’s when you know you are fucking with their heads.

“First of all, there´s a 70% chance increase of catching diseases by having sex with more than one partner, and to be honest you shouldn’t even be having sex until you are married”

Dude that statement is so annoying if some guy came to me and started with that shit I would even get angry and punch the guy, and that’s exactly what you want to accomplish. Make them relate the idea and the position with that negative feeling, and then let them reply, and let them elaborate. Challenge them, don’t let them win, make them think and elaborate, develop a full idea. Then you have inception.

A note on the ethics of this knowledge: manipulation is wrong and not only that, but it also is a very dark knowledge, and using dark knowledge will not make you happy. Also it will always, and I mean every time, have side effects that you didn’t expect. This can be counterproductive. But that’s not even the worse part. Using this kind of knowledge fucks with your self-worth, and will make you have a temporary sense of power from an ego validation provided by the fact that you could manipulate and control an intelligent person, making you feel more intelligent than them. This will soon wear away, as what makes people happy is not ego validation, but doing the right thing, as a habit. Also, ego validation as a source of feeling good is addictive.

This post is meant for you to understand the dynamics involved in rational debates, and I personally use it to avoid getting extreme in any argument, as I know I won’t accomplish anything by doing so, except making people resent be and creating an opposite reaction to the one intended, as by debating you never convince anyone of anything.

Just know that there’s a dark side to social dynamics. A very powerful, but soul destroying part, which you have to be very careful to avoid.

Hope you find value in this,

Jason.