Manipulation is common. People do it all the time. You bring up a lot of
implicitly negative examples but what about "I Love You" or "You've done a
great job". Now, any manipulation can be negative and it depends on the
context, but it can't all be negative, can it? Why do we put up with it?
Is the world really painted in such dark tones? A lot of really great work
gets done. It isn't (by a long long shot) a perfect world, but hey, it has it
bright spots. Most of those bright spots are a result of cooperation and
consensus...which is manipulation, I guess.
One kind of has to accept the good with the bad, and hope that reason will
allows to seperation of the two, more or less. I don't know.
It's kind of hard, you see, becuase anything I say can be taken as an attempt
to manipulate you...and in a sense it's true. But that very fact makes it
recursive upon itself.
As Freud is attribiuted to have said: "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar."
Reed
konsler@ascat.harvard.edu