A TM “Bob” writes:
I view myself as honest, but others have often called me “manipulative”. I often was frustrated, what the heck are they talking about? I’m not manipulative! Can you describe a bit of the manipulativeness? I’m guessing it would come from the M front, and the T backend doesn’t have the firepower to conceal the manipulation, because T is honest by default. Sort of like a magician who does his tricks so poorly that everyone sees how they’re done. An unintentional Penn and Teller.
Bob views himself as honest because he has high emotional genuineness and honestly believes the ideas he promotes. He has no internal dissonance to alert him that anything he’s doing is manipulative. Or at least, the signal is too weak for him to notice.
Here’s my first reply to Bob (this was a Neanderhall forum discussion):
It’s good that you’re attempting to reconcile the difference between your self conception and others’ descriptions. This is essential for meditative practice and directed self improvement.
Here’s what I would summarize as the MT / MM perspective. With the MT being more suspicious and the MM being more impatient.
Keep in mind this is just the negative description of traits. It can also be positive. Like calling MT’s zealots (positive) or ambitious blunt assholes (negative).
So, the negative description of a TM would be:
Cheesy – overexaggerated emotes designed to be picked up by emotionally stunted Thals.
Manipulative – constant angling to get the other to adopt one’s concepts, to “see” things your way.
Visual – the occipital bun is visual. Things are seen in black and white, visual terms. Whole systems are adopted uncritically. Understanding (“seeing”) is believing.
This visual ideology is then promoted via cheeseball melon manipulativeness.
And lastly, Impractical – the Thal visual center is concerned with visual truth, not self interest. However the obsessive error checking, self-doubt and focus and contradiction resolution provided by deep sockets are not present. Thus Melon influencing seems suspicious to others in that it is neither justified by evidence nor by self-interest. Eventually people tire of the seemingly irrational game.
The positive version of TM is someone whose visual conception of truth is in line with reality (from the perspective of the observer). When the TM speaks he generates a tendency in others to intellectually “chase” for more insight. Often times less is more, and modest self-doubt and hinting produce best results. Only when someone chases for the rest of the system should a conversion attempt be made.
Or, the TM may go full specious cheeseball, but succeed at it by appealing to a a gullible and emotionally stunted Thallish audience, and get in front of some cause / model that has a chance of being popular. Then they successfully act as a Thal lubricant and add value thereby.
I then followed up with this post:
After I wrote this, I felt a glow of satisfaction at a riddle well solved. I was sorely tempted to make an additional one-line post, “Fuck I’m good at this,” with no explanation. Simply because the thought put a wolfish grin on my face.
If I do this, I know it will be perceived with amusement by MM’s, and horror by TT’s.
Fundamentally, I want to do this because MT’s are an odd mix of cause/ambition-driven ego and self ego-lessness. Therefore the statement is funny to me, because it self-critically exaggerates my own egotism (but only slightly), yet also expresses genuine rejoicing over a job well done and a cause advanced.
It has zero to do with what an MT would consider true egotism – dominance assertion and self-centric ego satisfaction preening; except as a half-serious biting self-critique.
However, a TT will simply read it and think, “What an asshole.” The more feminized or the deeper the Thal, the stronger this reaction will be, for different reasons.
The moral of the story is that outside perception and inward intention/interpretation are always different when speaking to people with mental hardware different than your own. Yet their perceptions nevertheless provide valuable feedback on the quality of one’s internal state.