People are likely to believe false or inaccurate information about people they fear or who they don’t know very well, according to the writers at Scientific American magazine. That means Xenophobia — as a harnessed survival instinct — is used by people smear campaigning like a weapon to control other people’s sensory impressions of reality.
How do smear campaigns work? A social predator hijacks other people’s impression of reality using Narcissist Abuse tactics to do everyone harm while the gaslighter covertly gloats.
Denial of reality is more than Magical Thinking manifesting in someone’s biopsychology. Denying reality exists or that things that traumatized others happened in order to avoid accountability is an abuse of human hospitality.
It’s a regression of social evolution to do things like gaslight or to lie. Neuroplasticity in the anatomical mind of the prevaricator is frozen and bodies are groomed to derive pleasure from conning in people who are successful at manipulating other people’s thoughts and behavior.
Projection is what it is — a mind seeing in others what the person doing the projecting is outwardly reflecting. People who smear campaign often reveal insulting keywords or keyphrases used to do the most harm to them based on their own insecurities.
Personalization of ad hominem attacks or name-calling used to bait, provoke, and to offend is what a body with an undereducated social mind leaps to do when and if it hears caustic words or commentary being hefted around that is smear campaign material by nature.
Resist the urge to emotionally interact with an abuser’s toxic assertions and remain gray rock! What does whatever insult or gaslighting spin that they blurted reveal about their own life history, forensic psychology, or insecurities?
Smear Campaigns work when an Abuser’s words get into targeted listening marks and preferred scapegoat’s heads.
Ever listen to a group of ballplayers standing around on the field heckling the batter from the other team in order to biologically and socially undermine his performance and personal sense of self-esteem, social worth, and emotional self-confidence? If you have not, do. But only long enough to understand the Narcissistic Abuse tactic being used by people who are groomed to be socially competitive to mind – fawk their targeted rivals in life and their social competitors.
See: Head-Fake, Mind Games, Trash Talking, Womanizing
Make their blurts about you by personalizing, undermine your own mind and biopsychology. See their impulsive inability to control their own mouths as their Achilles Heel — revealing with each projection or assertion things they themselves are likely to focus on late at night while they are alone and likely to be consumed with feelings of shame, social inadequacy, and fear.
Dehumanizing, demeaning, deriding, and undermining not only the social and emotional confidence of a target but to completely mislead anyone and everyone about who that person is in actual life is the common goal of people who smear campaign other humans for fun, for sport, or for personal impressions of social gain or individual profit.
The sabotage and triangulating of other people’s affection leaves most smear campaigners feeling like they — not their victims — are on top of the socially competitive mountain.
Triangulation and alienation of other people is a form of social as well as moral crime. Coveting the affection or esteem other people may show to a rival, the more narcissistic and anti-social the Smear Campaigner is, the more hateful and brutally dishonest the lies and ad hominem attacks Social Predators who smear campaign and abuse the social hospitality of their own Enablers Alpha — or smear campaign initiating predators — are likely to daydream up.
Resist the urge to reverse project and to see good in people that is not there.
Smear campaigns work when people make the mistake of believing that utterly fickle people, non-emotionally committed Sadistic Voyeurs and pot-stirring, meddlesome people who like seeing other human beings in pain are being neutral Good Samaritans by remaining friends — for instance — with someone who claims to have done harm to another human being because their victim “deserved it”.
Smear campaigns work when people stay friends with individuals who use words to assault others, claiming it’s okay to do because that person shows them social favor.
They work when people believe that in order to win in life they need to treat Social Predators like necessary Hobbesian Leviathans to include in their personal and professional social circles when they don’t.
Smear Campaigns work when someone sees another bad-mouthing, mocking, ridiculing, and dehumanizing others online… and they read right past the anti-social commentary. Or worse — they themselves jump on the bandwagon or click some form of public like on the mean-spirited and socially abusive material.
And when and if someone dares to talk smack about someone else in public when that person is not there to object or to defend.
Smear Campaigns work when mean people are allowed to say whatever hateful and untrue things they want claiming they are entitled to do so as part of their first amendment rights while telling everyone that whoever they traumatize or violate is not even allowed to seek social support or to dare tell anyone anything about what the social predator did to them, failed to do at an appropriate time, or said to or about them that was sinister, callously inhumane, or abusive.
When do smear campaigns stop working? When people are educated about the red flags and warning signs that they are being socially manipulated by a competitive speaker with a covert or overt Machiavellian agenda to cause one person or peer group to mistreat another in order to please and reward a grandiose, self-serving, and ultimately profoundly anti-social and emotionally hedonistic monster.
Smear campaigns stop being effective when the people who are targeted for social abuse and mistreatment stop lending Cluster B people any form of social, emotional, or (ultimately) spiritual credibility.
Reconsider why someone’s trolling of you is something that matters in the short or long term in order to keep hateful people’s remarks and social gyrations in the proper big picture context to put an end to shame spiraling in your mind and personal body.
See what they blurt or deliberately release as part of their disinformation campaign a deliberate act of social terrorism against you as revealing nothing whatsoever about you and everything about them. Then, realize that knowing that someone is a troll and abusing others says about the people who say nothing to encourage that person to reconsider their behavior as well as about people who consider that person “a friend” or person who they esteem as a connection.
Do you need to know them in the present or to spend more time with them in the future? If not, let people who smear campaign and who actively seem to enjoy participating in or spectating in relation to mobbing be people who you used to know in the past.
It’s perfectly okay to unknow hospitality abusers you knew in the past who you have nothing socially in common with anymore in the present. It’s a smart social decision to treat other humans as ends in and of themselves, not remaining connected to toxic people because of social utility or because there’s a chance that you might be able to use them for something in the future.
Notice someone smear campaigning?
Note the red flag and respond accordingly. Sometimes that might mean saying something polite and simple to the troll in a public venue, such as by leaving a comment under an abusive remark or graphic and traumatizing image that whatever was said was caustic or unnecessary… while other times it might mean publicly unfriending a person and pulling the plug on a relationship whether that person is someone you have known forever, who you are related to, or they are a person of social use to you.
Enabling anyone to gaslight or to use words to harm others is making a deliberate moral choice to become a PASSIVE Abuser. Decide to be a better human being than that when and if you think it’s time to let things like reality and your own time and emotional experiences in life matter.
Once you value being able to feel and process emotion, it gets harder to tolerate people who are prone to using words to harm or to triangulate others. That’s when the effects of smear campaigning start to settle and people can grieve whatever they lost socially or physically as a result.
