Be Your Own Person

by James Hudson

  If anyone else is taking credit for what you do then you decide what to do, if anything. If you are involved with anything of a for-profit nature, then you can have a lawyer look over the deal points without you needing to mention it to anybody else.

  The history of the electronics industry is filled with people who took somebody else’s expectations seriously enough to do the lion’s share of the work only to later find out that the guy who promised them the moon only to find that optimistic assurances by the guy with loads of performance expectations never delivers anything that fills their wallets. Once the dirty work is done, they walk away with the end products of somebody’s week go out the door with no forwarding address.

  This is particularly common in religious cults that are experts in stringing people along at working like beasts of burden for room and board while the charismatic leader profits off of their sweat. The bigger the promises, the greater the expectations and the worse the payoff for those who actually do the work. Lawyers exist in part because there is a universe of unfulfilled promises out there, and they have heard it all before. If anyone ever tells you that it is against their policy to allow a lawyer to intrude into their business, that means they are engaged in something they do not want a third party to become aware of, meaning criminal fraud of some sort. Anything that involves you doing any sort of work is always fair game for your lawyer. The world is full of con men who will work you to death for nothing because they never had any intention of paying you beyond patting you on the back before vanishing with the fruits of your efforts.

  The world is full of people who will lie to you with a straight face, a big smile and a well-practiced reassuring tone of voice. They don’t want to work, they want you to do the work, possibly in conjunction with a group of other victims who uncomplainingly do the dirty work. Lying to liars is always acceptable and is the preferred method of dealing with liars. Never give an inch. If so, what for? They don’t have anything you need. If they do, what is it?

  Spell it out. The only thing con men have to offer are purely emotional manipulation and completely misleading. A pat on the back, false assurances, and no compensation at all. They are not legitimate in any way, so it does no matter what you say to them. If a criminal fraud does not like your attitude because he expects you to accept him and whatever he says as gospel truth, that is always okay. He has probably been deceiving people with similar scans for many years, so being ejected is good for him. Nobody needs him, period. The only thing he has to offer is expectations that others allow themselves to be under his control and do his bidding without compensation. Working for yourself in any capacity is always a better deal. When you work for yourself you know what the boss is capable of and you know what is actually going on in their business. Don’t be conned by the expectations of anyone else.

  What are expectations? Expectations go on inside somebody’s head. Some portion of what goes on in the mind gets expressed in speech, gestures, facial expression and so on. This does not imply in any way that what gets expressed is true in any way. What other people see and hear of us is known as our personal front. Personal front is expressed in everyday life in terms of clothing, speech and so on. Anyone who has experienced a con man’s personal front and line of patter knows it is both completely convincing and completely false. It is designed to separate the mark from his money and effort. It is no more truthful that a circus sideshow barker’s line of patter. They expect you to listen to them because their smoothly mannered presentation is put together in a way that creates feelings of emotional reassurance in the minds of the marks. Expectation are thus things that somebody wants you to believe. They manifest as emotional messages we understand in the amygdala part of the brain that understands emotions. Emotional messages may not even have enough objective content to analyze intellectually, as in the case of an emotionally inflamed speech by a street preacher. He attempts to appeal to people and never explain what he is talking about.

  Expectations go on inside somebody’s head. Some portion of what goes on in the mind gets expressed in speech, gestures, facial expressions and so on. This does not imply in any way that what is expressed is true in any way. What other people see and hear of us is known as our personal front, according to Erving Goffman. Personal front is expressed in everyday life in terms of clothing, speech and so on. Anyone who has experienced a con man’s personal front and line of patter knows it is both convincing and completely false. It is designed to separate the mark from his money. It is no more truthful that a circus sideshow barker’s line of patter. They expect you to listen to them because their smoothly mannered presentation, if assembled properly, creates feelings of reassurance in the minds of the marks. Expectations have a high degree of emotional content and almost zero rational content. Personal front is symbolic in nature, but what you think it means may not correspond to reality.

  Personal front refers to what is physical and objective, but may not be issues that are of interest or of consequence. The reality is that the issues of concern may be hard to uncover, even over the course of time. People work hard to cultivate personal fronts that are totally untrue because they find people have cultivated personal fronts that induce others to think of them as trustworthy. Con artists’ trustworthiness is the sort of thing which is at issue here.

  People manage their expectations. This means that they tailor what they say to meet the understanding of their audience for their own ends. They change their mode of speech to suit the audience. They also change the way they dress. Lawyers dress and talk differently depending upon whether they are dealing with a rural farm community’s jurors or a big city’s more sophisticated jurors. They expect their jurors to agree with whatever they are saying and adjust their speech and manner to get agreement from the audience of jurors. If it doesn’t produce results, they change it.

  Expectations And Manipulation

  Anybody who attempts to manipulate and deceive you by emotional means using their expectations is a liar of some sort. Their lies may be implicit instead of explicit. Be aware that they will never tell you all of the facts behind what they tell you. Whatever the details of what they tell you, they will never tell you the truth about what they get if you do what they expect of you. They always set things up so that they get the lion’s share of what you produce while deceiving you. Most people are generally aware that the wages they get from an employer are less than half of what the employer starts with, for example.

  People with expectations are simply parasites who slip into the cracks in the system which has no doubt been created by their political counterparts. After all they produce nothing, they simply lie, mispresent and manipulate others into producing for them without producing anything themselves. Being a supposed leader produces nothing of any value for you. It is largely manipulation and concealment. It is thus the case that their opinions have no value to you. Lies are worthless because they produce nothing but losses for you. Their opinions are thus nothing that you need to dwell upon.

  People with expectations of others have to lie because they are inherently worthless middlemen at best. They should be laughed at or ignored and need to support themselves by doing what they tell others to do. The people they want to control and manipulate are always free to go on strike if they do not lie what their overseers expect of them. What they think is inherently nonproductive. Their job should be to do what you expect of them, meaning work for a living to support themselves. Others need to be totally distrustful of them.

  There are plenty of concrete examples of their thinking. Lots of parents tell their offspring to do things they would never do themselves. One such expectation on the part of parents might be to tell you to study six hours a night and go to medical school. If your parents did not do this themselves when they were younger, you should automatically question why they tell you to do that sort of thing. The reality is that most parents are not half as smart as they pretend to be. They want their children to work like pack mules and become doctors
so as to provide their parents with money from those jobs. Women are especially good at this. They want unearned income, period. They never go back to school and do what they tell their pack-mule children to do. If their children do not feel like studying six hours a night, that is not a problem for the children. Overseer parents never do the actual work, they just expect someone else to do the dirty work they have laid out for them in their minds. There is no reward at all for doing what other people expect of you, as Robert Heinlein noted. They need to go out and do the dirty work themselves.

  Other people’s expectations are inherently mismatched with your own. They know nothing about you. They know nothing about your likes and dislikes. More to the point, they do not have your permission to run your life. It is simply an overseer mentality in action. Doing what they expect is about as rational as a expecting a corn-field slave to accept the overseer’s demands and like it. You need not like something because somebody who wants to control your mind and actions tell you so. They just want to dupe you and control you.

  Expectations are simply a subset of the mindlessly childish category of imitation. Adults often expect children to do as they are told because they were told that the person espousing expectations told them that it is good idea. They never tell their targets that there is a down side to anything they say. What they say is similar to a prescription drug. Prescription drugs have both positive and negative effects. The negative effects are known as side effects. People’s expectations, including those of parents, do not come with warning labels talking about the down side. People peddling bad products never do this, but the down side is very real. Just ask their victims.

  People who manipulate by means of expectations have no sense of justice. They will do anything to fill their pockets with money earned by others’ efforts and will do anything to exert control over you and your coworkers. Without expectations expressed in various ways, they are nothing and nobody. Some people have nothing to offer but their parasitical inclinations and expectations. Since they have no sense of justice, as Schopenhauer noted, you can never expect anything good to come out of contact with them. Even if you do benefit from working overtime for them on a job or sports team, they always set things up so that they get paid twenty times what you get for doing one tenth of the work you do. Develop your own expectations and you will always do a lot better.

  Social Roles

  And Conformity

  Most people are known to others primarily in terms of the framework of the roles they take on before others. For example, parents are known to their children primarily in terms of their parent roles. Few children see the parents in terms of the other roles they take on, such as office clerk, factory worker and so, meaning roles taken on outside of the homes where children spend most of their time.

  Social roles are practiced and tried out. Actors sometimes say that they “grow into” a role by taking it on every night on a stage. The more they take on a given role, the better they get at it. The same applies to fraudulent roles, meaning a role that is taken on for the explicit purpose of theft and deception. They definitely do not want their marks, meaning their audiences, to know the truth about them, which disrupts their presentations. If they act something like they are telling the truth, they are assumed to be so until something disrupts that impression and the expectation that they should be believed because they speak in a well-rehearsed, silky voice.

  A typical example is the professor in “The Music Man,” a play and movie by Meredith Wilson. A con man travels from town to town soliciting money to create bands for the children of townspeople. Everything he says is an outright lie. He commits theft by deception and leaves town under the cover of night with their money. He slowly builds the expectations of his marks and provides just enough detail to get away with it. He is perfect at projecting expectations and a total zero at delivering on his promises. Eventually, one of his previous groups of victims from a previously victimized town finds him to tar and feather him and disrupt his ongoing performance in a new town. This sort of thing happens all the time in real life. The perpetrators are just careful to keep things quiet until they can leave the crime scene. They do best in perpetrating crimes against those who are not used to challenging those in authority who claim to have authority over them. They never do well with suspicious, hyper-suspicious rational people who refuse to put faith in them. Frederick Nietzsche said that “faith is for people who don’t want to know the truth.” The more smoothly they talk, the greater the chances that they are lying, and their zeal-loaded smoothness is the result of not having been challenged plenty and regular. You can be absolutely sure that real businesses and teams were never very smooth at all it their inception. There’s a lot of things they didn’t know when they developed new computers or software, a lot of things they couldn’t explain and a lot of things that had to be done on an ad hoc basis. The real world is nothing like a sales pitch by a con man. Reality requires rationality. Emotional people always lie.

  Most people are not used to critical thinking, meaning demanding hard and real evidence for what is presented to them. This is a serious problems for many people, and pretending that critical thinking is not an issue of concern can destroy lives. Someone who does not think critically is unprepared to maximize his potential by blocking out and criticizing the intellectual garbage they get from parents, neighbors, schools and employers. All of them silently conspire to make us into passively obedient slugs.

  Doing what others expect of you is the road to nowhere. Remember that sales pitchmen are pitching for their own way of life, which is probably not your way of life. Yes, all of them are allowed to lie to at every turn. None of them offer anything real, all they want out of life is marks whom they can lead along by the nose as a result of societal passive obedience training. You are not really equipped to do much of anything else by society, let alone anything that pays well. Anything useful you picked up from society was purely incidental and unintentional. Most parents, clergy, employees and teachers could not support themselves, let alone flourish, if they suddenly lost their passively obedient jobs. Manipulating others produces no skills. Their sale pitches, lies and more, don’t work when they are the ones on the receiving end of their own expectations and lies. Their social position allows them to lie to you without consequences, until the shoe is on the other foot and they are looking for a new job because things fell apart because they lied at every turn.

  You will never hear the founder of a software company say that his uncritical passive obedience training by his parents, teachers and prior employers helped him. If so, what was it about his life that actually helped him get something done? Critical thinking was a major component of getting anywhere, whatever the details might be.

  The opinions and expectations of other people are not important because they come from other people and are not tailored to your personal interests. It is always up to them to prove what they say and it is always up to you to use your rational thinking abilities to critically analyze and pass judgment on them and what they say. We have way too much practice doing what we are told and complying with others’ expectations. Nothing is important because it originates with other people, and their opinions are simply throwaway fluff. You should always be totally judgmental regarding other people’s opinions. They may be lying, and there is no reward to be derived from living up to the expectations of anyone or any group who lies to you about anything to any degree. Throwaway fluff opinions and lies are never binding on us, because you have the unlimited right to pass judgement on everybody and everything at all times. Other people’s opinions can be ignored simply because they come from other people instead of your own mind.

  One thing you must take notice of. When someone issues an opinion, he expects you to defer to his opinion and ignore your own opinions. This means that he devalues you and your opinions in return for you turning off your critical judgment. Again, he is not important because he is someone other than yourself. There is no reason to care about
his opinion. He simply wants to control you by steamrollering you using standard con man tactics – lies and repetition.

  One of the sayings written on the walls of the ancient Greek Delphic oracle was “Know Thyself.” Lysander took this one step further and said that this was a good saying, but in many cases it is better to say “Know Others.” It is easy for someone to tell others what to do precisely because they are other people and they know nothing and do not care about your best interests. What they say is simply their spur-of-the-moment subjectively instinctual opinions, meaning whims. Anyone can have an opinion about anything, but having an opinion does not make it correct, let alone worth acting upon. Their lack of information does not bind anyone else to follow their expectations, because their uninformed opinions are not proven to be useful to anyone besides themselves. Conforming to another person’s lies and expectations rarely works out for anyone after childhood, so all adults should think for themselves at all times. There are no good reasons to turn off your critical judgment.

  It is worth noting that deferring to someone else’s expectations is a symptom of having an external locus of control, a psychological disorder. People who spend a major part of their lives deferring to others, meaning most people, tend to think that life in general is under the control of outsiders, meaning people other than themselves. They uncritically accept what others tell them and expect of them without doing any real thinking. As a result, their lives always go wrong on major issues. Again, other people are not right about because they are other people. Everything must be proven all through life. Some of them may be lying to you to manipulate you for their own purposes. If you waste your life doing what other people expect of you, your life will simply rust apart on the lowest common denominator level that suits other people in general. You have to be a nonconformist because other people do not know what is best for you. If they claim to do so, it is up to you to pass judgment on them. Nobody gets a free ride simply because they tell you that “everybody does it” in claiming you should follow their expectations or the expectations of some amorphous mass of people other than yourself. Appeals to conformity are meaningless anti-intellectualism.