"Dark history—a secret weapon for quickly drawing closer to others, but also a dangerous double-edged sword. For most people, revealing their genuine dark history to others would only backfire. But if used well, it was a sure-fire move for early-stage psychological manipulation."
Everyone looked at Nick. Not everyone wanted to psychologically manipulate others, but no one wanted to be manipulated either. Listening to this lesson and improving their awareness was still worthwhile.
"To establish your dominant position in someone else's mind and make them unconsciously grow dependent on you, the key is to make them accept you from the bottom of their heart. But they cannot merely accept your strengths and power."
"Admiration for strength was a natural human emotion. People preferred others' virtues, and their acceptance of flaws merely came from their willingness to be tolerant because of those virtues."
"Under normal circumstances, people could recognize another person's flaws. Those flaws either conflicted with morality or clashed with their own personality. Most of the time, they knew about them but could tolerate them."
"But psychological manipulation was not about making someone accept your flaws. It was about making them believe you had no flaws, making them sincerely feel that those were virtues rather than defects."
"To achieve that, the way you introduced those flaws became especially important. If you made the other person feel extreme disgust toward the flaw the first time they heard of it, then reversing their perception afterward would not go smoothly."
"I said before that disguising virtues as flaws was one method, but it was not particularly clever. Especially when dealing with smart people, they could easily tell that you had invented a flaw just to praise yourself."
"To deal with people like that, you could only use genuine flaws, and they had to be