A User's Guide to Neuro-Linguistic Defense
Defending Yourself From Word Magic
My motivation for writing this today is a note by
who posted: “It’s good when people understand that they're being manipulated through having it pointed out to them - but it’s better when people notice it themselves. We need some sort of educational approach where people learn to pick up the patterns on their own.Teach a man to fish…”
After researching NLP for several years, I conclude that that’s the whole point of NLP. To train operators in language warfare in a few days.
Start with the idea of the meta-model: deletion, distortion, and generalization of linguistic patterns.
Introduce the easiest ones like “universal quantifiers.”
Scaffold up to “cause-effect,” “complex equivalence,” “double-binds,” “thought-terminating clichés,“ and “nominalizations.”
Set the table for hypnotic induction with mere-agreement frames (or yes-ladders).
Finish off with an understanding that all non-experiential belief is based on a faith in “experts”.
The main advantage of learning the fundamentals of NLP is that it becomes hard not to think critically once you understand them.
None of this is new.
In fact, the methods are thousands of years old.
What is new is that NLP as a public practice has been delegated to practitioners who use it to support their psychology businesses. At the same time, the military and corporations deploy weaponized versions on a mass level that operate well outside the bounds of so-called marketing and advertising, and none of this is taught to eighth-graders, who are all capable of understanding the basics.
What is required is a way for the lay person on the street to recognize and understand how words are weaponized, and how they can defend themselves from attack and protect themselves and their loved ones in the future.
“Experts,” on persuasion like Dr. Robert Cialdini, usually include a final chapter of their books on the “ethics” of using techniques described in their books. These chapters often feel like an afterthought, suggested by some lawyer who thinks (rightfully) that misuse of the information might lead to some actionable circumstance.
What follows is my best first attempt at laying out the principles of how “transformational grammar” has been weaponized and how to defend yourself.
What is Neurolinguistic Programming?
The word Neurolinguistic is a jumble of syllables that can cause people to shudder and turn away. Neurolinguistic refers to how language interacts with the mind — how words shape our thinking, how speech reflects our mental patterns, and how communication influences our perception and behavior.
Neurolinguistic programming (NLP) is a psychological method that utilizes language in a conversational style to reframe people’s beliefs and change their minds.
In short, using words to change beliefs.
This is accomplished by recognizing specific word patterns, and how those word patterns reveal belief, and a tactical pathway to reframing the belief.
The primary difference between NLP and traditional logic, reason, and rhetoric is that NLP1 relies on the structure of language, specifically the patterns in which phrases and sentences are constructed.
Linguistic pattern recognition is fundamentally different from reason, logic, and rhetoric.
It is much simpler and easier to understand.
That’s why people can be trained in it so quickly.
Think of it as sentences put together with different colored Legos. Specific patterns reveal how a person thinks and their frame of reality. By learning how to spot the Lego patterns, you not only can understand how the person is thinking, but you can also develop specific tactics for changing their belief system, based on the patterns.
The primary advantage of NLP is that neither the practitioner nor the target audience requires domain-specific knowledge. In other words, you can influence the beliefs of an individual or group without a deep understanding of the specific subject. It’s possible to change people’s minds and beliefs even if you aren’t well-versed in the topic.
The simplest example of a linguistic pattern is a “universal quantifier,” a word such as “any,” “all,” “none,” “every,” “never,” “always,” etc.
Universal quantifiers take any topic and move it to an extreme.
For more information on how this is used in NLP, read on, but first, some background:
Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky is famous for all the wrong reasons.
He is most famous for his collaboration with Edward S. Herman, the book “Manufacturing Consent,” which examines how American mass media functions as a propaganda system, advancing the interests of corporate and political elites, and he serves as the token fountainhead of “liberal wisdom”.
However, his linguistic work, starting with his original publication “Syntactic Structures,” on “deep structures,” supplied the very military-industrial complex he often criticizes with the fundamental linguistic framework to transform language into a weapons system.
Noam Chomsky’s idea of “deep structure” refers to the underlying, basic form of a sentence that carries its core meaning. He argues that every sentence in a language has a hidden structure beneath its surface form, which reveals the main idea and relationships between elements, even if the actual sentence looks different on the surface.
For example, “The cat chased the mouse” and “The mouse was chased by the cat” look different on the surface, but share the same deep structure because they describe the same abstract relationship between the cat and the mouse. The deep structure exists in your mind before you put a sentence into words. Chomsky uses this idea to explain how people can generate and understand countless sentences they’ve never heard before2, because our minds use deep structures as a template for language.
The deep structure is extensive. It holds all of our memories, feelings, and experiences. It is so vast that, to fit our ideas into a sentence or conversation, we must condense everything we know into just a few words.
For example, if I asked you to describe everything you did today, from the moment you woke up until you read or listened to these words, in the greatest detail possible, it would take you longer to recount the events than it took you actually to live through them.
Chomsky, like most materialists, believes the deep structure lives in some undiscovered organ. I could digress here, but will leave that to another post/chapter.
Special Forces Psychology
In the 1970s, John Grinder, a US Army Special Forces Intelligence officer, retired, and his partner, Richard Bandler, then took Chomsky’s deep structure idea and modeled exactly how we condense our deep structure into language, calling it the “meta-model.”
In Bandler’s Meta-Model formulation, we take the deep structure of memory and condense what we know and understand by deleting, distorting, or generalizing the words we form to make sentences.
We do this because we have more ideas in our minds than can fit into a conversational sentence3.
I’m deleting, distorting, and generalizing as I type this article.
We are all deleting, distorting, and generalizing our deep structure whenever we speak or write.
As mentioned earlier, the deletions, distortions, and generalizations all have patterns that can be recognized.
By learning to recognize the linguistic patterns, we can then formulate questions that have the effect of “digging deeper” into a person’s deep structure.
By employing this questioning tactic, NLP practitioners (AKA hypnotists) can prompt a person to second-guess themselves, thereby inducing a mental state known as “cognitive dissonance.”
The difference between a hypnotist and someone who is just exploring conversational NLP techniques is intent. Hypnotists, with good intent, are trying to help you lose weight or stop smoking. Hypnotists with evil intent may be trying to get you into bed, sell you something you don’t need, or vote for something that is against your best interest.
That Icky Feeling
Because we all delete, distort, and generalize while we are communicating, someone trained to listen/read for these Meta-Model patterns can ask us uncomfortable questions about practically anything.
If they ask us the right question that challenges something that we have deleted, distorted, or generalized, it can trigger a response in us known as “cognitive dissonance.”
Cognitive dissonance happens when you feel uncomfortable because you have two thoughts or beliefs that don’t fit together, or when what you do doesn’t match what you believe. (Orwell, anyone?)
For example, you might say something like “all women are fickle.”
The universal quantifier, “all,” is a door wide enough to drive a truck through.
Without knowing anything about “women” or what “fickle” actually means, someone might respond, “All of them?”
This question has the impact of forcing an unexpected reconciliation between the spoken words and the knowledge retained in the person’s deep structure.
They don’t match.
The figure of speech does not match the new reality revealed by the question.
In this case, several things might happen. You might restate, by saying something like, “Well, not all of them, but many of them,” or you might double down, “Yes, all of them.” In either case, there is a forced reconciliation between the words and the deep structure.
In conversational hypnosis, asking specific questions that invoke cognitive dissonance is the conversational equivalent of putting someone into a somnambulant trance (sleep) in traditional hypnosis.
People in a state of cognitive dissonance are highly susceptible to a “suggestion,” an idea or belief that is readily at hand, to replace the existing belief with one that the hypnotist suggests.
Cognitive dissonance can be induced, like a momentary trance, by asking questions that challenge spoken (or written) deletions, distortions, or generalizations. Once in that suggestive state, a hypnotist can introduce new ideas that replace the old ones.
Often, these suggestions are framed as a new question.
“Doesn’t that fickleness make them more interesting?” or “Fickleness makes them more interesting, is it more accurate to say ‘all women are interesting?’”
In this example, the person who said “all women are fickle” may have been reframed to believe that “fickleness makes all women interesting,” or “all women are interesting.”
The purpose of this article is not to instruct readers on how to do this, how to use NLP to manipulate others. There are many books and programs available elsewhere. For people who have the temerity to get through the salacious and rank immorality in the book “The Game,” by Neil Strauss, it is an excellent how-to book on NLP, with a great syllabus. I also highly recommend the work of Matteo Morelli.
You Don’t Need to Play the Game to Recognize the Game.
Like sports fans, you do not need to be an NLP player to recognize the game. That is, you do not need to be a hypnotist to recognize hypnotism. You do not need to be Tom Brady to recognize a down-and-out play, or to be LeBron James to understand a slam-dunk. If you can learn to recognize the patterns, you can see hypnosis happening in real-time.
Rapport
One of the first things the NLP inventors discovered was that, to benefit from induced cognitive dissonance, the subject needed to be in a state of rapport. Rapport means a sense of connection or trust between people. When you have rapport with someone, you feel at ease together, and the conversation flows smoothly. People with rapport tend to listen to each other, pick up on each other’s signals, and feel understood. This creates a foundation where cooperation, influence, or learning can happen more easily.
One of the easiest and most efficient ways to build rapport is the “yes ladder,” also known as the “mere-agreement” frame.
The yes ladder, or mere-agreement frame, is a method for getting someone to agree to something bigger by starting with small questions that are easy to answer “yes” to. Each time the person says “yes,” it builds a pattern of agreement. As the questions progress, the requests or statements become a little more specific or closer to the real goal. Because the person has already said “yes” several times, they are more likely to keep agreeing, even when the final request is much larger. This technique uses the human tendency to stay consistent with earlier answers.
Likewise, talking-head pundits often start their shows with monologues, where they begin by stating several ideas that they assume their audience already agrees with. This is the tell-a-vision version of a “yes ladder”. By saturating a viewer’s attention with ideas that they are already aligned with, they become open to whatever suggestions the pundit may make later.
This is easy to check for yourself. If you are still a tell-a-vision watcher, try this: When the show opens, and the talking-head starts their monologue, count the number of times they say something that you agree with, and count out loud, one, two, three… If you are an American on the “right,” Tucker Carlson, on the “left,” Rachel Maddow.
Very quickly, you will discover that this form of mind control is so formulaic as to be laughable.
The Patterns
I’m not going to burden you with all of the patterns here, because it’s easier to learn to recognize them one at a time, anyway.
Here are the categorizations of the patterns:
Deletions occur when someone leaves out important information, forcing the listener to fill in the gaps or make assumptions about missing details. For example, a person might say, “They made a mistake,” without specifying who “they” are or what the mistake was.
Distortions happen when someone alters reality through their language, presenting an interpretation or assumption as a fact. Statements like “She’s ignoring me because she’s angry” twist the situation, projecting internal assumptions onto someone else’s actions.
Generalizations take a specific event or limited set of examples and stretch them to cover a broader scope, such as saying, “People always let me down,” based on one or two negative experiences.
These three pattern categories — deletions, distortions, and generalizations — shape communication by omitting, twisting, or overextending meaning, which can lead to misunderstandings or reinforce limiting beliefs.
In practice, hypnotists need to understand all of them, like ball players understanding plays, but spectators, who are just trying to understand the game, can manage by learning one at a time.
I already covered the easiest, the “universal quantifier,” previously, so let’s move on to the mother of all mind-control patterns, the cause-effect pattern used in conjunction with the complex equivalence pattern.
I call this the mother of all patterns because when I was first researching NLP, hypnotism instructor Matteo Morelli explained to me that politicians and talking-heads on tell-a-vision use the same patterns, the cause-effect complex equivalence.
Cause-Effect (AKA if/then)
A “Cause-Effect” pattern is a distortion that happens when someone says that one thing makes another thing happen. For me, I see this every day, on brain-dead social media, where I see “The Palisades Fire was caused by climate change,” which assigns the source of the fire to large-scale environmental changes, or “The Palisades Fire was caused by kids with fireworks,” which assigns the source to specific human action.
Each version establishes a direct connection between a single cause and the event, influencing how responsibility and meaning are attributed. But neither addresses the very real possibility that the fires were started on purpose by persons with big agendas.
Complex Equivalencies (AKA “because”)
A “Complex Equivalence” is a distortion that happens when someone says two things mean the same thing, even though they are different. For example, protesting against genocide in Gaza makes someone anti-Semitic, voting for someone means that you hate a specific group of people, or calling for border security equals being anti-immigrant.
Cause-effect statements link an action to an outcome.
Complex equivalence statements claim that one thing means another.
Both patterns shape how people interpret political events and assign meaning or responsibility.
Putting Them Together
A cause-effect complex equivalence mixes two patterns. It claims one action causes an outcome and, at the same time, says the action means something about you or your values.
For example: “Get the vaccine because it will prevent you from getting the disease, stop you from spreading it to others, and you don’t want to be responsible for killing your grandmother.”
This statement links getting the vaccine to health outcomes (cause-effect). It also claims that getting or refusing the vaccine means you care about your grandmother or that you are responsible for her safety (complex equivalence). The message ties an action to both a result and a moral or personal meaning.
Generalization
Covid-19 messaging was generalized into “safe and effective,” “safe” meaning the very complex biomedical process has no dangerous consequences, and “effective”, meaning the effect of contracting and spreading disease is eliminated by the injection.
We are bombarded with cause-and-effect complex equivalencies by politics and media. From
Darwin’s theory of “Evolution of the Species.”
Anthropogenic Climate Change is caused by excess human-generated carbon dioxide.
Hydrocarbons (oil and gas) come from dinosaurs (hence “fossil fuels”).
These are all examples of cause-and-effect, complex equivalence, and often, their combination.
Stopping Our Thinking
Knowing is the enemy of thinking.
The war on our minds is a psychological bait-and-switch.
We are all born with the ability to think.
More accurately, we are all born with the ability to use language, words, and sounds to communicate, measure, discuss, argue, and figure out what is true.
The Greek word for this God-given ability is logos (λόγος).
Knowing something is a convenient substitution for thinking.
By way of example, we don’t always want to think about what happens when we need to use a key to unlock a door. We don’t need to think about how the tumblers work, the mechanism that prevents the bolt from moving, and the shape of the key.
We want to unlock the door.
We know that if we put the right key in the lock, we should be able to unlock the door.
Knowing that if we have the right key, we can open the door is a way we optimize our lives.
We can’t think about everything, all the time (two universal quantifiers), because if we did, it would be more difficult to get anything done (yet another universal quantifier).
Thinking is an active process of using logos and discernment to determine truth.
Knowing is an efficient method of storing pre-thought ideas.
You can know a lot of things without thinking.
People make entire careers out of knowing things, without much thinking at all.
The game show contestant memorizes trivia, the bureaucrat and police officer enforce rules by the book, and the academic repeats canonical theories. Journalists recycle official statements, clergy recite doctrine, and trainers deliver pre-approved content.
Physicians and lawyers follow established protocols, routines, and precedents.
In each case, the emphasis falls on knowing and repeating what has already been decided, rather than thinking critically or questioning foundational assumptions.
Militaries depend on an "aye-aye" mentality — an orientation toward received knowledge and unquestioned commands — to maintain cohesion and operational discipline. Soldiers drill procedures and memorize protocols until these patterns become instinctive. The chain of command relies on immediate obedience, not on critical inquiry or independent judgment in the ranks. This structure enables large groups to act as a single organism, responding instantly to orders and carrying out complex maneuvers without hesitation. The success of military operations rests on this cultivated certainty, which transforms knowledge into routine and suppresses individual acts of thinking in favor of coordinated action.
For the past 200 years, so-called modern educational institutions focus students on knowing, rather than thinking. The reason (or complex equivalence) for this is that thinking populations are much harder to mind control than knowing populations.
It’s much easier to get a group of strong, healthy, young men to fly around the world and fight strangers if some cause-effect complex equivalence has convinced them they are fighting for a noble cause. Likewise, many are inspired by knowing, will willingly sacrifice themselves for the knowledge of some “greater good,” whether or not that greater good is real. (As a bonus, they will get a shiny piece of metal, with a ribbon if they are effective enough killers, or get blown up in the process.)
People find it easier to believe that paying taxes to a government spending money it doesn't have is okay because they know that Congress is representing them. It’s much easier to accept that a political candidate they dislike is in office when they know that elections are fair and not rigged.
People who know are good for the status quo power dynamic.
People who think, not so much.
There is a cliché for people who think: “Conspiracy Theorist.”
Thought-Terminating Clichés
“Conspiracy Theorist” is a Thought-Terminating Cliché.
A thought-terminating cliché is a short phrase people use to shut down further thinking or discussion. It acts like a mental stop sign. When someone says a phrase like “it is what it is” or “that’s just the way things are,” they use it to avoid considering other ideas, asking questions, or dealing with uncomfortable facts. The phrase signals that the conversation should end, so nobody has to think any deeper or challenge the issue.
Weaponized versions of thought-terminating clichés include epithets, like: racist, homophobic, anti-Semitic, any “denier,” climate-denier, and holocaust-denier are the most used.
All of these phrases have the effect of shutting down thinking, which is why they are best thought of as linguistic weapons.
My favorite thought-terminating cliché is “Occam’s Razor.” Occam’s Razor can be used as a thought-terminating cliché when someone invokes it to shut down further inquiry or debate by declaring the simplest explanation “wins” by default.
Instead of weighing evidence or considering complexities, the phrase “Occam’s Razor” gets used as a rhetorical device to silence competing explanations.
When this happens, the actual process of critical thinking stops. The phrase stands in for an argument: “Occam’s Razor” becomes a slogan that signals the discussion is over and discourages further questions. The user of the cliché sidesteps substantive analysis by asserting that complexity itself is suspect.
This rhetorical move interrupts examination and collapses nuance into a rule-of-thumb, dismissing any account that appears “too complicated,” regardless of the facts. The appeal to Occam’s Razor, when used this way, operates less as a principle of reasoning and more as a conversational stop sign.
Nominalizations
A nominalization is a word that turns an action or process into a thing or idea, often by adding endings like “-tion,” “-ment,” or “-ness.”
For example, the verb “decide” becomes the noun “decision.”
When someone uses a nominalization, they take something that people do (like deciding, relating, or understanding) and turn it into an object or a fixed concept.
People often use nominalizations to shut down thinking because they make actions seem finished, permanent, or out of anyone’s control.
For example, saying “That’s the policy” hides who created the rule and why, making it seem unchangeable. Instead of asking who decided, how it works, or if it still makes sense, people accept “the policy” as a given. This move blocks questions and deeper discussion, stopping critical thinking in its tracks.
Dialectics, Dichotomies, and Double-Binds
There are often multiple ways to do most things, but we’re constantly faced with “either-or” choices. This is not an accident; it is the fundamental linguistic weapon in the arsenal of epistemological warfare.
In a world ruled by a divide-and-conquer approach, highlighting differences and fueling frustration becomes the main way to get people to do what the oligarchy needs to grow more powerful and control the population.
The simplest way to do that is to break down a problem into two parts and then persuade people that they must be on one “side” of an issue or the other.
By reducing a problem to two parts, these “dichotomies” incorporate all three meta-model modes: deletion, distortion, and generalization.
Examples of these dichotomies are ubiquitous and are incorporated into command and control structures from political parties to sportsball games. Democrat v. Republican, Liberal v. Conservative, Cowboys v. Redskins, the pattern is everywhere.
Materialists, knowers, non-thinkers, and propagandists often contend that when something is ubiquitous, it must be something like an “emergent” property, or something that just happens naturally.
This is the core of epistemological warfare.
Things don’t just happen.
Russian peasants didn’t emerge to overthrow the Czar for injustice.
The Federal Reserve Bank did not emerge to fix a broken economy.
WWI was not an accident of history that was caused when some random terrorists assassinated the Archduke.
Adolf Hitler did not emerge to fix yet another broken economy.
Israel did not emerge as a result of the so-called “Holocaust,”
And yet most people walking around today “know” these ideas to be truisms.
This parsing of ideas into two parts, and then directing people’s behavior accordingly, is a technique that is thousands of years old.
It’s not “emergent,” it’s the system.
Karl Marx (or his handlers) made up Capitalists and Communists; they didn’t exist before he conjured them into existence. The two-party system is not the best way to run a Democratic Republic, but it is the best way for the oligarchy to maintain control.
Creating two opposing sides and proving that both are incapable of delivering on the expectation of the constituent members is a fantastic way to implode that system and introduce a “third way.”
Giving people two choices, both of which are bad, is called a double-bind and can result in societal schizophrenia. Hence, the “voting for the lesser of two evils” concept always leads to a vote for evil.
Breaking issues into two sides is the fundamental tool in a divide-and-conquer strategy for controlling the public mind.
Axiomatic Knowing
Axioms are chunks of knowing packaged as wisdom. Often, they are the quoted thoughts (nominalized thinking) of famous philosophers, religious stalwarts, and Roman emperors.
There is a functional command and control element to axiomatic training. Ryan Holiday celebrates Stoic axiomatic thinking in his book “The Obstacle is the Way,” and promotes the idea that coaches and teams in the NFL often give copies to players. If the name of the game is getting people to sacrifice themselves for the greater cause – the gladiatorial contest that is the NFL – then axiomatic behavior is the way to go. It’s the best method for emperors to train slaves and soldiers. Do what you’re told, execute, don’t think.
Marcus Aurelius and the Stoics treat a challenge as the path forward. When someone meets resistance, the Stoic trains himself to accept it, face it, and use it as a tool for building strength. This mindset sets a pattern: see a problem, move through it, and treat it as the only road. The thinking process can stop at acceptance. The Stoic may repeat the phrase and follow the formula, taking comfort in the certainty it provides. While this offers psychological stability, it can also halt further inquiry and innovation.
Military strategist B.H. Liddell Hart, on the other hand, looked at a problem and asked questions. He studies the situation, changes his perspective, and searches for ways to move around or bypass the obstacle. The strategist keeps thinking. He refuses to settle for one answer. Instead, he creates options and tests new approaches until he finds a way forward. The strategist treats a problem as a starting point for inquiry, not a signal to submit or endure. This approach encourages fresh thinking and creative action in every situation.
While many axioms are convenient shortcuts, following them as universal can cause some issues.
Axioms fill ordinary language with packaged conclusions that feel self-evident. People often say, “Nice guys finish last,” reducing the complexities of human interaction to a simple equation between kindness and failure. “Money talks” distills social influence into the singular language of wealth. When someone repeats, “What goes around comes around,” the open question of justice collapses into a closed cycle. Phrases like “Kids will be kids” and “Rules are rules” transform dynamic processes and institutional power into fixed identities.
“It is what it is” blocks analysis by freezing circumstances into a settled state. “Fake it till you make it” merges pretending with achieving, while “The customer is always right” equates status with truth. Everyday advice such as “Boys don’t cry,” “Time heals all wounds,” or “Old habits die hard” assigns outcomes and identities without room for variation. “Laughter is the best medicine,” “Practice makes perfect,” tie experience, effort, or consumption to identity or success, while “Seeing is believing” asserts that perception alone guarantees truth.
These phrases bypass context, compress experience into simple formulas, and shape knowing by presenting assumptions as settled facts.
You can live your life based on axioms, but don’t kid yourself, this isn’t thinking.
Thinking Our Way Out of the Black-Pilled Mind-Space
It’s difficult to comprehend the scope of the state of things today, with open honesty, and not become overwhelmed by a sense of doom.
But there is good news.
If the oligarchy were so sure of success, they would not have spent trillions of dollars on redundant programs to make sure that we were destined to be their slaves forever.
They understand, better than most of us, that what they are up against is the ubiquitous ability for people to think. Every single person is born with that God-given ability, and the oligarchy has to spend enormous amounts of treasure and toil to convince us that we don’t.
The key to ending our slavery is to wake everyone up to their ability to think, and it costs nothing and requires only one thing: the ability to ask ourselves the right questions.
What to do? Neurolinguistic Defense Techniques
The First Move: Define Every Term
Philosophers learned early that the first act of defense is definition. Socrates refused to argue until his interlocutors clarified their terms. In neuro-linguistic defense, the same rule applies. Every argument rests on the words chosen, and manipulation begins where meaning blurs.
Learn How to Listen.
We take words for granted, like fish in water, or birds in the air. If you’ve made it this far, you know what a universal quantifier is.
Listen (or read), looking for deletions, distortions, and generalizations. Understand that they are always there, in your speech, and in others.
We do it all the time (yes, I used a universal quantifier).
Reinvent yourself as a listener who is calm, patient, and ready to hear. Observe, reflect, and ask questions. Notice what others miss. Once you understand the Meta-model, you’ll realize that there is always a deletion, a distortion, or a generalization happening.
Remember that if you are not in rapport with someone, they may not be receptive to questions that reveal too much about the cognitive dissonance your questions may create, so establish rapport first, before asking any tough questions.
By listening for patterns, we can teach ourselves how to restrain the impulse to react angrily to words that upset us and seek perspective through rational discourse. Wisdom comes to those who are ready to listen.
Re-adopt Childlike Curiosity
Kids ask questions because they are not afraid to admit that they do not know something. By the time most adults have finished high school, they have been thoroughly trained in the misconception that “knowledge is power” and that admitting that you do not know something indicates weakness.
Please stop it. There is nothing wrong with admitting you don’t know something, and then doing what you can to find out. This might mean asking someone, or reading something from an “expert.” But for heaven’s sake, don’t stop there.
Depending on experts is how humanity is in the mess it’s in.
Once we learn to identify deletions, distortions, and generalizations, we can start asking “experts” questions they are not accustomed to answering.
A Note about LLMs: I rarely ask LLM’s like Chat-GPT encyclopedic questions, as their answers are slavishly attached to their training data, but I do use LLMs to fact-check myself. Likewise, if I think I’ve come up with an original idea, I’ll drop it into GPT and ask if anyone has ever said the same thing. It’s agreat way to keep yourself grounded.4
The most powerful words in any language are the interrogatives: how, what, who, when, where, and why.
Dichotomies, Dialectics and Double-Binds
A dichotomy divides something into two distinct and opposing categories. A dialectic is a structured conversation or process where two opposing ideas interact to reveal a deeper understanding or new insight. A double-bind traps someone by presenting two choices or demands that both lead to conflict or failure, so any response appears wrong or impossible.
Rigging ideas into two (often imaginary) parts is a great way to “divide and rule.”
Like the resolution in the 1970s movie, “War Games,” the best way to win a rigged game is not to play, but that doesn’t mean to give up.
We must not play the game they want us to play; we have to go meta, to level up and step out of the game itself.
I still believe in the idea of the Democratic Republic, but I cannot emphasize in stronger terms the mindset shift in my worldview when I opted out of the official voting system in the United States of America.
That mindset shift delivered the gift of perspective that the entire system is rigged and manipulated.
As long as we believe the current system is real, we won’t look for another or be open to it. Voting needs fixing, but you can't fix voting without improving how the electorate is informed about the decisions they face. This is the primary method for controlling the whole society, and it doesn’t matter if it’s a democracy, republic, dictatorship, oligarchy, or cryptocracy. If the public isn't aware of what’s happening or how decisions are truly made, voting merely provides social proof that the rigged system is “real.”
If we are going to change it, we need to step out of that system.
In NLP terms, the words “chunking” and “meta” describe two distinct but related ways of thinking about information and communication, about how people navigate and organize meaning.
Chunking describes the process of shifting focus up or down between levels of abstraction — moving from specific examples to broader categories or vice versa.
For example, when someone chunks up, they move to a broader or more general category: a conversation about apples and oranges leads up to the shared category “fruit.”
Chunking down moves toward greater specificity: starting from “fruit” and chunking down yields “apples,” then “Granny Smith apples.”
In a dichotomy such as “freedom versus control,” chunking up shifts attention to a larger category like “governance” or “social organization,” which includes both freedom and control as aspects.
Chunking down from “freedom” might focus on “freedom of speech” or “freedom of movement.”
The act of chunking makes it possible to change perspective, reframe problems, or see patterns that remain hidden at other levels.
“Meta” refers to stepping outside the content to observe or discuss the structure, process, or relationship between these levels.
When you take a meta position, you are no longer just discussing the examples or categories themselves; you examine how the categories are chosen, how abstraction operates, or how people shift between specifics and generalities.
Meta-level thinking analyzes the process behind movement in conversation — how arguments are constructed, what assumptions drive abstraction, or why a conversation shifts from big-picture ideas to granular details.
By applying meta-thinking and moving through chunking up and down, we can shift or reframe our own perspective, as well as the frames of others, based on the perspective changes that become evident in the process.
This higher-order awareness helps reveal patterns in reasoning and communication that shape beliefs, distinctions, and the structure of arguments themselves.
In most cases, we can move up or down and take any concept to a different level, reframing it in ways that get people to think differently about how things work.
The Tell
The “tell” in dichotomies is who you are supposed to dislike or oppose. It’s the Blacks, the Jews, the Whites, the Muslims, the Catholics, the Protestants, the Communists, the Capitalists.
With enough research, you’ll find that the core issues with any of these groups are centuries of epistemological warfare and mind control. But research takes a lot of time. Many issues of our day can be simply reframed.
My cause-effect, complex equivalence, universally qualified opinion is that no group of people ever slaughtered another group of people without being told a big lie.
Loving your enemies and neighbors destroys the efficacy of false dichotomies.
By attempting to understand the people you dislike and recognizing with compassion and love that they are likely victims of epistemological warfare and mind control, we can see their humanity and build bridges.
Step out of the dichotomy and level up.
Be Precise in Language
Most people do not know the difference between the words liberty and freedom. Many languages don’t even have a word for “freedom.” Likewise, consciousness, love, crises, faith, meek, hope, justice, judgement, mercy, charity, science, and many other words have what I think of as “squishy” definitions.
Squishy definitions are dangerous because people tend to fill in their own definitions. Think about how politicians use words like “hope” and “change,” or slogans like “make America great again,” and how different people fill in their own meanings. For some people, MAGA means a “Leave it to Beaver” return to an imaginary version of America, to others, it means racism or sexism.
Manipulating how people interpret language, the words or expressions we use is epistemological warfare. The meanings of words are changed, or deliberately and hermeneutically confused by institutions like monarchies, secret societies, roundtable groups, non-governmental organizations, universities (especially Oxford and Cambridge), and the Vatican, to maintain confusion and frame control over entire populations.
Magic is a method of wrapping a self-evident truth in a mystery, and introducing “experts” (magicians) to interpret the mystery for the uninitiated and the “profane.”
The simplest way of doing this is word-play, or playing with the meaning of how words are understood.
As I have written several times, most people do not have a good understanding that the word “liberty” means freedom that has been bestowed on you by someone or something that has power over you.
Try this: ask people to define the difference between the words “freedom” and “liberty.” The answers will be squishy.
Liberty is the freedom to do something that can be given to you or taken away.
This understanding implies an unasked question: “Who gets that authority?” or “When do they get to do that?”
People may answer “the government,” but in a world where unelected bureaucrats are making the decisions, the question then becomes, “how did this happen without anyone voting on it?” as happened with Covid-19.
Asking people to define the words they are using (if you have rapport) is a great way to encourage them to use their critical thinking skills. We all have these skills; they just need to be awakened.
Bafflegab
There is a great deal of language floating around, used by politicians, experts, and academics, that is just bullshit.
Bafflegab is a technique of using complex language to make people believe you have knowledge that they don’t have, and will never put in the effort to understand. (So you’ll never check).
For all the critics out there, GPT levels the playing field on proponents of bafflegab. I dropped the transcript for this video into GPT 4.1 with the prompt “Is this bafflegab?” and got this response.
The problem is that without domain experience or a professional understanding of the subject, a lay person has a difficult time determining if something is bullshit. This is why learning to understand meta-model deletions, distortions, and generalizations is such a powerful tool.
By identifying the markers, the “ifs,” the “thens,” and the “because’s, we can detect BS without knowing much about the subject.
My critiqué of Isaiah Berlin’s essay on Liberty started with my assumption that liberty is a well-defined word that needs no nuanced reinterpretation. At that point, I was compelled to question the motivations behind imposing an abstraction on something self-evident.
How did Berlin think this essay would impact the reader?
My conclusion was that the purpose of his essay was to impose magic, deliberate confusion on something well-defined and self-evident — a wizard’s spell.
Neurolinguistic Defense: Spelling Our Way Out of Slavery
The fixable problems of the world are constructed with language. Laws and other guiding ideas are created with words, and until we acknowledge the self-evident truth that things defined by words can be redefined with words, we will remain slaves to the wizards who manipulate us through language.
There are ways to fix our current societal problems, but voting our way out, when the majority of the population believes that “knowing” is thinking, is like believing you can drive an automobile with a blown engine to the mechanic to get it fixed.
It ain’t gonna happen.
We need to use these tools to start asking questions that get people out of their “knowing” comfort zones, and into their God-given thinking abilities, their logos (λόγος).
We can think our way out of not knowing, but we cannot know our way out of not thinking.
We can save the world by asking the right questions.
What questions are you going to ask?
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Not to be confused with Natural Language Processing (the other NLP). Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a type of computer science that helps computers understand and work with natural languages, such as English or Spanish. With NLP, computers can read, listen to, and even talk or write in ways that people do. For example, NLP is what lets your phone’s voice assistant answer questions, or helps programs translate between languages, check grammar, or pull out information from large blocks of text. In simple terms, NLP teaches computers to understand and use language like people do.
This is fundamentally different from the way “AI” works.
I hypothesize that people who are on the autism spectrum have difficulty managing their delition, distortion, and generalization schemes, which manifests as an inability to sense social cues and stop talking.
This was the method I used to check myself when I suspected that Isaiah Berlin’s essay on Liberty was bafflegab. I wrote my critique and asked if anyone else had ever said the same thing, and bingo! Wittgenstein. I thought, “Well, that’s good company!”
Hello Peter,
Much appreciation. I have been following along on each of your posts on neuro-linguistic programming since last fall. I want to thank you again for your presentations ( but I cant listen to the bots talking at all, I m with Jessica ) You are defining exactly what happens when your BS meter goes off . You can feel it on some level and now I can interpret it . I had a Philosophy 101 Class in Critical Thinking decades ago. I was in my twenties then. I still use the principles of premises and conclusion in my life in a natural way, when I have the presence of mind to not panic.
Today I was watching this on a youtube from a gentleman, that I actually quite like . But in just the intro I felt my meter pegging. Emotionally I want to get to the same endpoint as him but am I being baffle-gabbed?
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