Harnessing the Irrational, Doing the Impossible

Persuasion, bias, and manipulation, we are all intrigued by these things. Moreover, how do “they” get intelligent people to do what they want?

I’m not overstating things when I say, my entire life’s work has been driven by a single question:

Why do people do what they do, even when what they do doesn’t make sense?

Over decades of multi-disciplinary study and research, what I’ve discovered is that we run our lives based on our own private, subjective, anatomy of meaning or in the simplest understanding our own emotional logic. That is, our mind is filled with experiences, stories, and myths that have become our filters for reality. Anything new that we experience must pass through these filters first.

I call this anatomy of meaning our Emotional Source Code© (ESC). Whether we realize it or not, we all have such a code. The code allows us to reason in a way that makes perfect sense to us, even if it doesn’t make any sense to others. This code guarantees that, despite what we may tell ourselves and others, the foundation for all our decisions is first and foremost emotional.

At this point you may be wondering, are we victims of our ESC? Or can we harness it and transmute it for good? There are of course specific strategies to harness our ESC. However, once we do…