6 Signs You're Dealing With A Machiavellian & What To Do

Machiavellians generally share the following behaviors and traits:

1. Manipulation

Machiavellians lie, cheat, and flatter to get their way. They are long-term planners and calculated strategists, able to read people and to use their fears or weaknesses against them. They will bend rules, trick people, and fake sympathy to gain favors, McIntosh says. They can be charming at first but later resort to more aggressive tactics like bullying. Overall, they lack morals and are more than willing to cause harm to get what they want. (Here is how to recognize manipulation, for what it's worth.)

2. Self-interest

Ever the cynic, Machiavellians believe that everyone is acting in their own self-interest, so they do not form close relationships and do not trust easily. Money and power mean more to them than relationships with people. They can be incredibly disloyal, as their determination can lead them to ignore social pacts or bonds of trust. This trait also distinguishes them from the other two Dark Triad types (narcissists and psychopaths), as they do not necessarily have to be the center of attention. (yes, money, control, and power that all they care about)

3. Deceit 

Machiavellians understand that having information is useful. They often do not share information with others unless it is in their favor to do so. They may manipulate otherwise innocuous information and can be very crafty about taking information out of context. (Now I see that all these years she follow me around was just to take information from me and not to learn from me and become a more compassionate and understanding person. What makes me most sad is that she uses all the information she got from me to give her an advantage in the games people play) 

https://sylvieshene.blogspot.com/2017/10/the-games-people-play.html

4. Unemotional

Machiavellians lack empathy and compassion. Generally, they are neither able to identify their own emotions nor recognize those of others, which is part of what enables them to be so willing to do truly anything they deem necessary to achieve their goals, even at other people's expense. Despite their strength in manipulating others, past research suggests Machiavellians actually tend to be less emotionally intelligent.

5. Ambition

Machiavellians are highly ambitious, and they'll use control and manipulation to achieve those ambitions. A 2016 study evaluating Machiavellianism among supervisors found these personality types make abusive and aloof managers, with the abuse becoming most prevalent when in a perceived position of power in the workplace. The researchers consider that power may be an amplifier that draws out the Machiavellian's preexisting behavioral predispositions, emotions, and beliefs. 

6. Competition

Machiavellians are highly competitive, so they view everyone as adversaries. They are willing to take a back seat or be a team player at times when doing so is to their advantage. Machiavellians are sensitive to the power dynamics in social contexts and can switch between cooperative and competitive tactics.

Read more in the link below:

https://www.mindbodygreen.com/articles/machiavellianism

Sacred Wars

 AM: Thank you for expounding your vision. Yes, it would be wonderful if we could initiate a powerful movement towards more awareness. In fact, by understanding the emotional needs of children we would come to understand OURSELVES too, the basis of our existence, of our own Being as responsible adults. But this is impossible without liberating the strong bitterness of the abused child we hide deep in our bodies because of the fears of our parents. Unfortunately, ALL religions FORBID this emotional liberation, they rather allow wars, some of them even consider wars as sacred because they have never understood that feeling the legitimate rage PROTECTS us from acting out in wars and criminality. The last is organized exactly by people who DON’T feel.

https://www.alice-miller.com/en/the-sacred-wars/

"I am also glad that you have the hope that we can pass on our knowledge to the masses. I had this hope 30 years ago when I wrote the Drama. I thought that showing the truth can change so much. Meanwhile, I became more skeptic or just more impatient after I discovered the fear of the beaten child in all of us that built up the omnipresent resistance against the truth." Alice Miller

(Me too like Alice Miller had the hope that the writing of my book would help pass this knowledge to the masses, but like Alice Miller, I have become skeptical, and with the writing of my book I too learned that people's repressed fears at the parents builds omnipresent resistance against the truth. People rather destroy others than face and consciously feel their own repressed fears to see the truth. This is why I have been harassed, prosecuted, and ostracized in the workplace since I published my book. I understand people's fears of their childhood pain that have been trying to keep repressed all of their lives, but it is still disappointing that pretty much everyone I meet doesn't have the courage to face their fears and become real and grow into a mature conscious adult)   

https://sylvieshene.blogspot.com/2017/11/spirituality-blinder-that-hides-truth.html?m=1

Intelligence Alone is not Enough

"I wonder how the high colleges managed to produce so many high asses." Paracelsus

As long as people's childhood repression goes unresolved -- they will be shackled into the chains of compulsive repetition -- and it doesn't matter how well anyone articulates very nice ideas... The problem is not a lack of knowledge and educated people, there are plenty of educated people with intellectual knowledge, the problem is an emotional blockage with the so-called “professionals” or “educated people” hiding behind their rationalizations and seductive theories to protect themselves from having to face and feel their own emotional pain.  It takes courage to see, face, and feel our painful truths, intelligence alone is not enough --- intelligence alone just helps create seductive rationalizations, theories, illusions, and lies. 

Alice Miller explains beautifully  in her book For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in child-rearing and the Roots of Violence pages 42 and 43: 

"Just as in the symbiosis of the "diaper stage," there is no separation here of subject and object. If the child learns to view corporal punishment as "a necessary measure" against "wrongdoers," then as an adult he will attempt to protect himself from punishment by being obedient and will not hesitate to cooperate with the penal system. In a totalitarian state, which is a mirror of his upbringing, this citizen can also carry out any form of torture or persecution without having a guilty conscience. His "will" is completely identical with that of the government.

Now that we have seen how easy it is for intellectuals in a dictatorship to be corrupted, it would be a vestige of aristocratic snobbery to think that only "the uneducated masses" are susceptible to propaganda. Both Hitler and Stalin had a surprisingly large number of enthusiastic followers among intellectuals. 

Our capacity to resist has nothing to do with our intelligence but with the degree of access to our true self. Indeed, intelligence is capable of innumerable rationalizations when it comes to the matter of adaptation.

Educators have always known this and have exploited it for their own purposes, as the following proverb suggests: "The clever person gives in, the stupid one balks." For example, we read in a work on child raising by Grünwald (1899): "I have never yet found willfulness in an intellectually advanced or exceptionally gifted child" (quoted in Rutschky). Such a child can, in later life, exhibit extraordinary acuity in criticizing the ideologies of his opponents--and in puberty even the views by his own parents-- because in these cases his intellectual powers can function without impairment. 

Only within a group--such as one consisting of adherents of an ideology or a theoretical school--that represents the early family situation will this person on occasion still display a naïve submissiveness and uncritical attitude that completely believe his brilliance in other situations. Here, tragically, his early dependence upon tyrannical parents is preserved, a dependence that--in keeping with the program of "poisonous pedagogy"--goes undetected. 

This explains why Martin Heidegger, for example, who had no trouble in breaking with traditional philosophy and leaving behind the teachers of his adolescence, was not able to see the contradictions in Hitler's ideology that should have been obvious to someone of his intelligence. He responded to this ideology with an infantile fascination and devotion that brooked no criticism.”

https://sylvieshene.blogspot.com/2016/05/education-alone-is-just-another-illusion.html?m=1

These Crimes Committed by Russia Cannot Ever be Forgiven

These crimes committed by Russia against humanity cannot ever be forgiven. 

Putin is showing the world how he was terrorised as a defenseless little child -- by unconsciously and compulsively reenacting in the stage of the world his unresolved  childhood repression -- and is terrorizing a whole nation --  making others feel what he cannot feel, coward. 

Unfortunately humanity  everywhere is full of dangerously repressed people that have grown into full blown sociopaths psychopaths and are a bunch of cowards monsters like Putin. 

But before he dies he will be forced to feel the hell he has been transferring into others all of his life!

https://sylvieshene.blogspot.com/2017/12/the-narcissist-punishment-is-living-all.html?m=1

" . . . the anger felt by every individual person stems from the primary justified anger of the small child at the blows inflicted on it by the parents. The immediate expression of that anger is suppressed, but at a later stage this suppressed fury will be directed at innocent victims with uninhibited savagery." -- Alice Miller, "Free From Lies"

“If we hate hypocrisy, insincerity, and mendacity, then we grant ourselves the right to fight them wherever we can, or to withdraw from people who only trust in lies. But if we pretend that we are impervious to these things, then we are betraying ourselves.” Alice Miller  Free from Lies: Discovering Your True Needs page 55

“It is not true that evil, destructiveness,
and perversion inevitably form part of
human existence, no matter how often this
is maintained. But it is true that we are
daily producing more evil and, with it, an
ocean of suffering for millions that is
absolutely avoidable. When one day the
ignorance arising from childhood
repression is eliminated and humanity
has awakened, an end can be put to the
production of evil.”
— Alice Miller, Banished Knowledge, p. 143

The conversation about the effects of childhood repression in our society needs to start happening in the stage of the world, sooner rather than later, if we want to save ourselves and humanity from falling off the cliff and committing mass suicide. 

https://sylvieshene.blogspot.com/2016/07/the-conversation-about-effects-of.html?m=1

"The unconscious compulsion to revenge repressed injuries is more powerful than reason. That is the lesson that all tyrants teach us. One should not expect judiciousness from a mad person motivated by compulsive panic. One should, however, protect oneself from such a person." Alice Miller -- Breaking Down the Wall of Silence page 82

“Humiliations, spankings, and beatings, slaps in the face, betrayal, sexual exploitation, derision, neglect, etc. are all forms of mistreatment, because they injure the integrity and dignity of a child, even if their consequences are not visible right away. 

However, as adults, most abused children will suffer, and let others suffer, from these injuries. This dynamic of violence can deform some victims into hangmen who take revenge even on whole nations and become willing executors to dictators as unutterably appalling as Hitler and other cruel leaders.

Dictators and the dynamics of cruelty

Every dictator torments his people in the same way he was tormented as a child. The humiliations inflicted on these dictators in adult life had nothing like the same influence on their actions as the emotional experiences they went through in their early years. 

Those years are “formative” in the truest sense: in this period the brain records or “encodes” emotions without (usually) being able to recall them at will. 

As almost every dictator denies his sufferings (his former total helplessness in the face of brutality) there is no way that he can truly come to terms with them. 

Instead, he will have a limitless craving for scapegoats on whom he can avenge himself for the fears and anxieties of childhood without having to re-experience those fears."

https://sylvieshene.blogspot.com/2022/02/the-root-cause-of-war.html?m=1

“A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate. Behind the need to communicate is the need to share. Behind the need to share is the need to be understood. The writer wants to be understood much more than he wants to be respected or praised or even loved.” ― Leo Rosten 

I have to agree, at least in my case is true. 

I'm Short but I Stand Taller

The game we witness being played on the stage of the world is being played all over the world to a degree. So ask yourself in a symbolic way where are you positioned in your life right now?! 

At my last job of nine and a half years, I was symbolically in the position of Ukraine between two great forces. 

The security company that employed me was symbolizing Russia and the Community where I was working was symbolizing NATO! 

For nine years I had NATO on my side and Russia could not touch me and I was safe, but after I published my book A Dance to Freedom: Your Guide to Liberation from Lies and Illusions, both sides saw me as a threat, and the enemy number one that needed to be eliminated and destroyed --- my book triggered their fears of exposure -- and both sides joined forces against me to have me eliminated and destroyed so they could keep their own repression intact and go on with their lies and illusions as usual --- and that's when all hell broke loose. 

Just as I wrote in my book on page 173 “It really is a powerful feeling, and you’re likely to find yourself possessing a power that will be threatening to a lot of people. Society is on the side of the status quo, so be prepared. As Alice Miller writes in Free from Lies, going against the parents “is a source of major alarm for others … They will sometimes mobilize all the forces at their command to discredit the former victim and thus keep their own repression intact.”

I survived two great forces and both sides had casualties. And I'm standing taller than ever! I hope Ukraine too will survive and stand taller between the two great forces -- Russia and NATO. 

Stop the War in Ukraine

 "You know, the very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common.

They don't alter their views to fit the facts.

They alter the facts to fit their views." Doctor Who (1977)

Altering the facts - lying and false reporting -- to fit their views is the fuel fuelling the wars around the world. 

What happens in families happens in the countries; what happens in the countries it happens in the stage of the world.  Everyone in this world is responsible to a degree in one form or another for the violence and the wars we are witnessing erupting around the world.

Stop lying and enabling the lies to spread like wildfires. If we are living a lie and we lie to ourselves and others and allow the lies to spread we are helping to fuel the wars around the world. 

"Children who are told the truth and are not brought up to tolerate lies and cruelty can develop as freely as a plant whose roots have not been attacked by pests (in our case, lies)" Alice Miller https://sylvieshene.blogspot.com/2017/07/terrorism-is-war-of-poor-and-war-is.html?m=1

You might be right in a lot of things but the moment you throw the first punch and resort to violence you lose the argument completely. Putin and all his enablers are the aggressors NOW and a bunch of cowards for killing and destroying the livelihood of innocent beings. 

Stop the war -- look in the mirror -- and take responsibility for your part in this madness and start behaving like mature conscious adults.

"He who does not know the truth is simply ignorant, but he who knows it and says it is a lie is a criminal." Bertolt Brecht

“If we hate hypocrisy, insincerity, and mendacity, then we grant ourselves the right to fight them wherever we can, or to withdraw from people who only trust in lies. But if we pretend that we are impervious to these things, then we are betraying ourselves.” Alice Miller

Free from Lies: Discovering Your True Needs page 55

The goal of abusive individual

 "The goal of abusive individual is to gain or maintain power by whatever means possible or else to mask his own incompetence. 

In order to accomplish this, he must get rid of anyone who impedes his progress or sees through him."  

Stalking the Soul: Emotional Abuse and Erosion of Identity by Marie-France Hirigoyen page 71

https://sylvieshene.blogspot.com/2015/02/stalking-soul.html?m=1