Psychology of Power: Hazardous Shifts

Psychology of Power. (Excerpted from doctoral candidate's dissertation, do not copy)

Leaders operate in an arena of known and unknown players as well as shifting factors. Allies, opponents, rivals and neutral parties shift. High priority is placed on shaping information and establishing status.

Resources, legal systems, political systems, investigatory power and information dispersal are in the hands of authority.

Reward and penalty, safety and precariousness, predictability and chaos- these are conditions that are tools of those in authority.

The more authority that is gained the more a leader runs hazards which render the leader and the systems ineffective.

Hazardous Authority Shifts

• Defense to destabilization to offensive conflict, to coups to assassinations to acute social intimidation and violence

• Information manipulation to disinformation to a lack of real information
  

• Research to group profiling to personal spying

• Propaganda to group manipulation to group think to mental programming

• Psychological pressure to torture to mental control of individuals

• Received notions substitute for discovery

• Search for truth (which is often exhausting and unproductive) to adversarial quest and short term competitions to ‘win’ (producing short lived satisfaction and shifting goal lines)

• Set rules and norms to internal predictability to exploitable calculability

• Unpredictability becomes chaos and disorder

Hazardous Mental Shifts

• Blurring the line between self serving accounts and self delusion

• Semio-linguistic manipulation, code words, meaningless platitudes, double talk, become the basis for rationalizing

• Semio-linguistic manipulation, code words, platitudes, double talk create a trench of miscommunication
  

• Isolation from social segments become a divorced reality

• Facile justification becomes a moral void

• Rigidity in cultural, educational and ideological prisms become blindness

• Rejection of received knowledge becomes nihilism

• Empathy with competitors becomes sympathy

• Personal-egoism becomes 'schizophrenia'- Failure to distinguish what is self-serving and what 'should' occur by other moral approaches
  

• Blurred separation in 'accounts' of events and 'most likely reality'- Failure to distinguish lies and truth, information and disinformation

• Fear of others does not allow one to recognize fear in others

• Respect of one's own ability causes a lack of respect for ability of others
  

• (Reported or) media created reality assumes the uncontested accounting of reality