Buffman, you make excellent points.
Especially the part about how Dave Lakhani deliberately tries to create controversy as part of his marketing. For example, his book Subliminal Persuasion
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opens up with Dave Lakhani constantly beating the drum of FEAR, DANGER, how his publisher wanted to censor his book as it was TOO DANGEROUS for your virginal eyes!!!
(of course in this day and age, that is absolute bullshit, as they will publish anything these days if they think it will sell and its legal. So its just a tactic being used by Lakhani to upsell you later).
And he sells his DVD's saying its going to be a FRIGHTENING EXPERIENCE, more fear. [
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This is all just part of manipulative persuasion, using FEAR to attract attention and try to move emotions, and create interest in the forbidden fruit. (he'll sell you the forbidden fruit later in his expensive seminars, if you join his EXCLUSIVE in-group, which he says he might REJECT you from even though you are begging him to take your money).
That is all FACTUAL. Its in his books, in more flowery language.
No worries, he won't reject you, that is a tactic of Exclusivity and Scarcity. Maybe a journalist should send 5 people to join his group covertly, and see if Dave Lakhani refuses to takes $3,000 from anyone? (insert chuckle)
Why do the professional persuaders flip-out so much when their ACTUAL techniques are exposed?
And not the techniques they are telling you to look at, but the techniques they are REALLY DOING which you are not supposed to notice.
They freak-out, as it kills the sales process dead.
For example, take any bigshot persuader, like Tony Robbins. Tony Robbins has banned not just criticism of Tony Robbins.
But far more importantly, on the Tony Robbins web-forums where his customers are, and in the live seminars, all analysis of the persuasion techniques of Tony Robbbins are BANNED. They will not allow it. Online they will delete it, in person they will not allow it.
Why? Because they know if the customers start to learn the precise techniques being used on them, it SCREWS THE SALES PROCESS UP, and it doesn't work.
This is why every LGAT leader misdirects away from the persuasion tech they are using, and DISTRACTS the audience with some "content".
Of course, that content can be New Agey, or Angels, or NLP, or TaoOfDating.com or hundreds of things, and it can also be persuasion.
The more sophisticated, embed advanced persuasion inside the persuasion seminars, to upsell people to more seminars, coachings, and whatever they can sell.
When the public gets educated, REALLY educated, the sales process falls apart.
And this is not the faux-educated, that some persuasion salesmen want to sell you. They want to control the game.
For example, Dave Lakhani says there is a big difference between Persuasion and Manipulation, and does a huge tap-dance to persuade you to believe what he wants you to believe on that subject. But its just a straw-man and semantics.
As for example, Tony Robbins and who is much more advanced than Dave Lakhani, says that to MANIPULATE means to MOVE WITH PURPOSE, and that everyone is doing it to you, so you better do it back 10x better, and make some serious coin at it while you are doing it.
So Tony Robbins actually invalidates Dave Lakhani's entire smokescreen...uh...thesis.
The fact of reality, is that the professional mass persuaders and manipulators, the guys/gals making the big bucks, they don't waste any time on these childish questions of "ethics". To them, ethics is bounded by "is it legal", and those are the "good guys". You can learn that the hard way, or the easy way.
The "good guys" push right up to the edge of what is legal, and just beyond, that is their ethics. This includes every trick contract in the book, every tactic of extreme peer pressure, manipulation, and the dozens and hundreds of tactics used in mainstream LGAT's. To them its unethical for them to NOT take your money if they can.
Just ask them sometime, and they will usually answer YES, that its unethical to NOT take people's money if they can.
The bad guys just try to see how far they can go without getting caught, and they don't care about the law, and those are the ones that make it into the newspapers, or onto 60 Minutes, if they get caught.
So the WARNING stands.
Beware the professional persuader, who does conversational hypno-persuasion for a living. They want to manage how you think, what are the bounds of permissable thought, to set-up double-binds, forced choices, and to decide for you what "ethics" is, and what it is not, and who is good, and who is bad.
(Hint: if they are their colleagues/buddies and are on their affiliate referral lists and they make money together...then they are GOOD.)
If people die and get terribly injured at many of their seminars, one after another, then their "intent" was good, as it was an "accident". Just ignore the photos of their sales material telling them exactly how to target and exploit their customers WOUNDS. [
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Lets get real.
The professional persuaders, those who do it fulltime for a living for years, are experts in managing other people's perceptions, beliefs and behaviors, without those people even being aware it is happening.
When you have enough training to see exactly what they are doing, and to point out exactly what they are doing, as they are doing it, without exception their first response is to freak-out and try to turn-it-around, and make the person doubt their rational thinking. They aim for the core beliefs, and even for the core processes of the mind itself.
This is why the real expert persuaders, like Byron Katie and others, design their system from the ground up, to eliminate any form of analysis and critical thought from the "mind".
They know that once people are using their critical faculties and have training in advanced persuasion, then their system is not going to work on them.