Thursday 5 January 2012

Circumventing Being Challenged

I was reading a very humorously written article titled Bullshitting: Lessons From the Masters. 6 "bullshitting techniques" were identified by the author, and I thought points 3 and 4 were fascinating in and of themselves, regardless whether in this context of bullshitting or not:

3. Act arrogant - keep it up. Although arrogance might seem to work against you by offending people, it is the supreme intimidation technique - people are readily cowed when someone acts like he is better, smarter, more powerful than they are (ergo, the Donald Trump phenomenon). The only danger is if you act modestly or question yourself, because people WILL attack weakness. In fact, even when you are being arrested (as in Stanford's case), attack your accusers.

4. Claim esoteric knowledge or techniques. It doesn't matter if the formula you use to explain your success makes no sense - people aren't secure enough to challenge something they can't understand. In fact, it pays to make the secret to your success as incomprehensible as possible while linking it to something beyond questioning, like say relativity, quantum physics, evolution or, for the old fashioned, God.

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