Dark psychology: The open loop problem

 In our lives, we seldom face a painful problem that we don't try to solve either immediately, or by putting some general steps in place that can solve it in future.. One way or the other, and sometimes to the detriment of the long term game, we get rid of the problem so it's off our plate. Anything's better than nothing, right? We are angry when left leaning and strung up from the pillars of limbo with the problem like death staring us deep into our eyes. Picture this: You're a superhero suspended in magneto's forcefield. A giant titanium dagger is about to rip through your brains if you don't do something and fast. So we act, not always with the right action, but we do our best. We try to make sense of things and move forward.(By the way I don't know what you'd do in that situation other than blinking impotently at a nearby person who you may not like for help, and hence you're indebted to them for life. Better not to end up in such a situation...) 

So you get the picture. We try. But often not with the best results. We make a move in chess because it's the only move we can think of at the time and the clock's running, but never looking 10 moves ahead. That's too anxiety-provoking. If we had such abilities, we'd be in a far better space to make a decision. To do the best with the time we have. We'd plan more. We'd leave less to chance. There is probably more we could do to make our lives better if we really look back. I bet we all wish we were better planners. 

Suffice it to say that no one likes to be kept in an open loop. This hails back to our need for certainty. I recall one of the dirtiest psychological tricks anyone played on me. It was the immature gambit of a guy who had scrimped and scraped and broken noses to get into a position where he owned a plant nursery on the side of a farmer's Agricultural co-operative. I had stupidly decided to work for the narcissist. 

Anyway, it soon became clear that this guy hated my guts. Anything and everything I thought, said or did was wrong. One day we were getting some clivias ready for display. They were top-heavy and the stalks of the flowers kept falling over. So, equipment being scarce, I grabbed for any stick I could find in the tree area which was quite a distance away. (I'd rather not ask him for any help because he'd demolish my self-confidence with such expressions as: "What are you asking me for? Didn't I hire you"")

Anyway, so I hadn't tied up these goddamn clivia flowers. Just gotten a stick to hold them up. Which was beyond my paygrade anyway. Warren, my employer didn't see it that way. It was an open loop. The guy couldn't handle it. He went nuts. The clivia flowers were hoisted up but not in a way that made any sense. He wanted them tied up, which was fair enough, but at least I'd not let them just fall on the ground and break. But that wasn't good enough for him. 

That's when he decided to throw an open loop at me of his own: "I want to talk to you later!" He boomed. Which was a big thing coming from the boss; Akin to being fired or something along those lines. 

The thing is, he never talked to me about anything later. It was all a ruse. I was kept on edge for weeks. He was an abusive employer. Never physically, but certainly in terms of emotional abuse. He'd used both his position of power and his knowledge of open-loop psychology to absolutely crush me. A very intentional barb placed there by him. I felt crushed most days working there. And not in any way that I could place either. It was all subconscious. He'd planted the seed of my demise and I was unable to function there. Eventually I asked to leave. He'd won. I was out of a job.

 But it taught me a valuable lesson. Throwing out open loops is abusive practice. Never keep people dangling. They can't handle it. Everyone craves some level of certainty in a world that's less and less certain. If you're really going to nail someone in the heart, do it in a way that they don't fully understand. These are like the alien stories we hear now. People are literally caught in sleep paralysis when they don't understand what these creatures are but find they are face to face with them. They can't move and can't think. Anything we don't fully understand is ripe ground for manipulation. Be careful that the powers that be don't work this dark magic on you!