Manipulation to Average
Manipulation to average shrinks people through “reasonableness,” shame, and fear of conflict. Without a clear moral framework, “good” becomes “inoffensive”—and society rots.
Most manipulation is easy to spot because it’s trying to get something from you.
Someone wants money, status, attention, compliance. They push. You resist. There’s a visible tug-of-war.
The more interesting kind of manipulation doesn’t look like manipulation at all, because no one appears to be pulling.
It’s the kind that makes you smaller.
I’ll call it manipulation to average: the social force that nudges (and sometimes shoves) people toward being unremarkable—less clear, less brave, less ambitious, less morally explicit—until they become conveniently predictable.
You can live your whole life under it without ever naming it. Most people do.
The “reasonable” trap
The most effective manipulation is the kind that flatters your self-image.
Manipulation to average does this by presenting itself as reasonableness.
It sounds like:
“Don’t take it so seriously.”
“Be realistic.”
“It’s complicated.”
“Who are you to judge?”
“Why are you making trouble?”
Notice the move: it never argues about what’s true. It argues about what’s socially acceptable to say.
In other words, it turns the question from “Is this right?” into “Will people dislike you?”
Once you accept that substitution, the game is over.
Because the average is not a moral position. It’s a social shelter.
Why it works so well
A lot of manipulation works by exploiting a simple fact: humans are herd animals with big brains.
We can reason, but we also want to belong. And belonging isn’t optional. For most of our evolutionary history, not belonging meant dying.
So the fear of social friction is old and powerful. It sits deeper than many people’s rational beliefs.
Manipulation to average doesn’t need to threaten you explicitly. It only needs to create the feeling that you’re drifting outside the herd.
And it can do that with a laugh.
This is why it often shows up as humor: jokes about someone being “intense,” “too much,” “trying hard,” “making a big deal,” “acting like a hero.”
Humor is a great weapon because it can hurt you while pretending it’s harmless.
If you object, you prove the point: you really are intense.
The country-shaped version
In places with recent authoritarian memory, the pressure to average has extra fuel.
Under regimes that punish deviation, people learn a very specific survival strategy: be indistinguishable.
Not just silent. Indistinguishable.
You don’t only fear the authorities. You fear the neighbor who can create trouble. You fear the coworker who repeats your words. You fear attention itself.
That kind of culture doesn’t even need active oppression to keep working. It becomes a reflex passed down as “common sense.”
The slogan version is something like: keep your head down.
The moral version is worse: being good means not causing conflict.
That is where things get warped. Because then ethical action becomes confused with social smoothness.
And “goodness” becomes a synonym for “inoffensive.”
The central trick: turning morality into etiquette
Manipulation to average thrives when people lack a clear framework for what “doing good” means.
If you can’t articulate what good is, you can be steered by whatever emotion is currently being invoked—guilt, shame, fear, the desire to be liked.
In that state, the easiest definition of good is the one everyone quietly agrees on:
Good = not upsetting anyone.
But that’s not morality. That’s etiquette.
Etiquette is useful. It prevents pointless friction.
But a society that replaces morality with etiquette becomes a society where real wrongdoing can persist indefinitely, as long as it stays polite.
And where anyone who names the wrongdoing becomes the problem, because naming it is “uncomfortable.”
This is how you get the bizarre situation where people will tolerate unfairness, corruption, or cruelty—yet be outraged by a blunt sentence describing it.
How average is enforced
What’s interesting is that manipulation to average is rarely done by the most powerful people directly.
It’s usually enforced by the people closest to you.
Not because they’re evil, but because your deviation makes them feel exposed.
If you speak clearly, it highlights their vagueness.
If you take responsibility, it highlights their passivity.
If you try, it highlights their excuses.
So they reach for the easiest equalizer: social pressure.
The tactics are simple:
Pathologize intensity.
Make caring look like instability.Confuse judgment with arrogance.
If you say something is wrong, you’re “acting superior.”Use “nuance” as a fog machine.
Nuance is real, but it’s also a perfect hiding place for people who don’t want to choose.Weaponize empathy.
“You don’t know what they’re going through” becomes “you’re not allowed to have standards.”Make conflict the highest sin.
Once conflict is treated as inherently bad, anyone willing to create conflict has unlimited power—because they can do wrong things while everyone else is busy avoiding tension.
The result is not harmony. It’s a hostage situation.
A surprising thing: average is not neutral
People talk about “being average” like it’s just a preference, like choosing vanilla ice cream.
But the average isn’t neutral. It’s a direction.
If you consistently pull the high end down, the whole distribution shifts.
That’s why manipulation to average is so destructive in organizations and countries: it doesn’t merely keep things calm. It slowly removes the people who could fix things.
The people who call problems early.
The people who insist on quality.
The people who are willing to be disliked for being right.
The people who do the uncomfortable repair before the crisis.
If you punish those people, you don’t end up with a stable middle.
You end up with rot.
The difference between being good and being liked
Here’s a mental distinction that cures a lot of this:
Avoiding harm is good. Avoiding discomfort is not the same thing.
A truthful statement can discomfort someone.
A fair boundary can discomfort someone.
A refusal to participate in something wrong can discomfort someone.
Discomfort is often the price of reality.
If you define “good” as “no one feels discomfort,” then the best people become villains and the worst people become untouchable.
Because the worst people are usually very good at manufacturing discomfort to protect themselves.
They’ll act offended. They’ll imply you’re cruel. They’ll shift the topic to your tone.
And if your moral system is actually a social system, you’ll retreat.
What a real “good” framework looks like
If you want immunity to manipulation to average, you need a definition of “good” that doesn’t depend on the crowd’s mood.
Here’s a compact one:
Good = truth + fairness + responsibility, applied consistently.
Truth: You don’t lie to yourself to preserve comfort.
Fairness: You apply the same standards to friends and enemies.
Responsibility: You act when action is required, even if it’s inconvenient.
What’s important here is that this definition is operational.
It lets you decide what to do when you’re under pressure.
You can ask:
Is what I’m saying true?
Is the standard fair if applied universally?
Am I avoiding action because it’s wrong, or because it’s socially costly?
This is what most people are missing: not courage, but criteria.
Without criteria, you can’t tell the difference between arrogance and clarity, between cruelty and boundaries, between kindness and cowardice.
So you default to the safest move.
A tiny self-defense algorithm
When people fail to resist manipulation to average, it’s usually not because they agree with it intellectually.
It’s because the pressure is fast.
So the defense has to be fast too.
When you feel that familiar pull—“don’t say it,” “don’t be that person,” “don’t stand out”—run this:
Pause.
Pressure thrives on speed.Name the move.
“This is ‘be average’ pressure.”Swap the audience.
“If no one could see my choice, what would I do?”Check the standard.
“If everyone did what I’m about to do, would things improve or decay?”
Then do the smallest courageous thing that fits the truth.
Often that’s just a clean sentence:
“I don’t agree.”
“That’s not fair.”
“I need evidence.”
“I won’t participate.”
No drama. No moral theater. Just a boundary.
Why values matter, and what “values” actually means
People say “we need values” and it becomes a slogan.
Values aren’t slogans. Values are decision rules.
A real value is something that can predict your behavior under cost.
If your values disappear the moment they become inconvenient, they were never values. They were branding.
Setting “true values in place” means making a small set of principles socially normal to follow, even when it’s awkward:
Truth outranks comfort.
Standards outrank popularity.
Responsibility outranks plausible deniability.
Courage outranks reputation.
When a culture internalizes those, manipulation to average loses its leverage.
Because the crowd is no longer the highest authority.
The quiet upside of resisting average
People think resisting the pull to average will make their life harder.
In the short term, it might. Because you’ll be less convenient.
But in the long term, it’s the opposite.
A life optimized for being liked by everyone ends up being owned by everyone.
A life optimized for truth and responsibility ends up being yours.
And the strange thing is: it also ends up helping others more.
Because the people who keep systems healthy are not the ones who avoid discomfort.
They’re the ones who create the right discomfort early—so the wrong discomfort doesn’t arrive later as disaster.
That’s what “good” often looks like in practice: a willingness to be briefly unpopular in order to be permanently useful.
Manipulation to average asks you to trade that away.
The only real antidote is to decide—explicitly—that you won’t.
 | A guest post by
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