Schiller had always believed that people were born with a talent for mental manipulation. It was a human instinct.
When people were still infants, they reminded their parents to care for them by crying. This was the most primitive form of manipulation, though usually neither side realized it.
There was also a kind of child produced by failed education who displayed similar tendencies. At an age when they could still cry, they used tears to coerce their parents into satisfying their desires; at an age when they could no longer cry, they threw tantrums and rolled on the floor to coerce coworkers and friends into satisfying them. This too was the lowest form of manipulation, and usually neither side realized it.
But if one looked for what they had in common, it was easy to discover that the intense emotions displayed by these manipulators could produce pain-like reactions in others. People had to find a way to stop that pain, and if the person in the stronger position lacked the resolve to stop it, they would end up satisfying the manipulator's needs.
Emotions were, of course, the key to manipulation, but normal emotional release and using emotions to manipulate others were actually distinctly different. Schiller had once published two or three monographs demonstrating their connections and differences.
The easiest distinction for ordinary people was that, in most cases, emotional release had no very clear target. When someone was seized by intense emotion, their mind went blank. They cried until they could barely speak, grew so angry their words became incoherent, or laughed as though they were about to stop breathing.
The human brain had limited regions. When some intense emotion erupted, the rational part was compressed to its minimum. They usually could not coexist.
But if a person's emotions had