My friends had been manipulating their child since the age of one. Why and how?
Because neither of them liked going to preschool, yet they had to send their child there and feared similar problems to those they themselves had experienced in childhood. To spare the child the trauma of being forcibly confined in a disliked place, as soon as the little one began to understand anything, the parents started manipulating the child. Whenever the toddler saw another child crying or unhappy, the parents hurried to explain that the baby was crying because they could not go to preschool. And so today, when asked whether their child likes preschool, they smile with triumphant, mysterious smiles and confirm it.
Manipulation is a fashionable word these days. Once, in the good old communist times, television merely lied; now it manipulates, because that sounds more sophisticated and modern.
A lie in communist times was something black. Visible to the naked eye against the white background of truth. There was only vinegar in the shops; if they said there was a shop somewhere fully stocked with foodstuffs and it was not a PEWEX, that was a lie.
Now it is more difficult. The mass media are more devious and mean. Now it is no longer about whether there is vinegar or not. Now they want us to go somewhere, like someone, or do something against our convictions and will, but they present it to us in such a way that sometimes we do it eagerly. To hell with us! But what about the others, the poor manipulated ones, like the unfortunate child of my friends? And we have a moral obligation to warn them that it is manipulation, yet they think what they think and want to rush into the manipulator’s arms like sheep.
Manipulation is frightening because how can we be sure that the child does not really like preschool, but goes there happily only because the bad parents have messed with their head? Perhaps this manipulation permanently changes our preferences, so that we are no longer ourselves and do not think the way we want to think? To hell with us! But what about them! Those silent little lambs being led to slaughter!
On the Istotne Informacje portal, accusations of manipulation are made very often. Here, manipulation most commonly takes place through editing. It is a very specific and particularly mean form. A journalist films some local politician or city official, then cuts one fragment from the victim’s entire beautiful statement, and unfortunately, most often, in that fragment the person says something that is, at best, amusingly foolish, and at worst, simply foolish.
The question is: even if it has been abridged, is it not still that person’s statement?
Taken out of context, say the voices of those harmed by manipulation. If the material is, for example, about tourism, and the official is speaking on precisely that subject, only more briefly than in reality, then it is rather difficult to speak of a lack of context.
What the official fears and cannot accept is the possibility that his intentions or incompetence may be exposed. What manipulation threatens us with is being forced to look at ourselves in a mirror in which, on our flawless—portrait-worthy—image, we may notice a couple of blackheads and wrinkles or a crooked nose. Our words are used by someone else to prove their point and, to our misfortune, fit it perfectly. It turns out that we cannot express ourselves in a way that puts us in the right, we cannot choose the right words, our nerves serve up amusing slips and verbal blunders, especially in front of a camera. And that is precisely when we feel the stinking breath of manipulation. We immediately crush it, calling its perpetrators the worst liars and hypocrites, saving the world from it, demanding heads for using its weapon against us, and, in our complete helplessness, sounding the moral alarm. It is like Russia’s and Hitler’s Germany’s attack on Our Homeland in 1939! It is like an atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, like Judas’s kiss!
And my friends’ child crosses the preschool doorway with a smile on their face, feels no fear of what is foreign and unknown, while their happy parents work calmly so that everyone may live better and more prosperously.
Grażyna Hanaf