Finally, there is an even smaller group of people who, though intellectually skilled, do not want to manipulate and control others. These are the people who combine critical thought, fairmindedness, self-insight, and a genuine desire to serve the public good. They are sophisticated enough to recognize how self-serving people use their knowledge of human nature and command of rhetoric to pursue selfish ends. They are acutely aware of the phenomenon of mass society and of the machinery of mass persuasion and social control. Consequently, they are too insightful to be manipulated and too ethical to enjoy manipulating others.
They have a vision of a better, more ethical, world, which includes a realistic knowledge of how far we are from that world. They are practical in their effort to encourage movement from “what is” to “what might be.” They gain this insight by struggling with their own egocentric nature and coming to see (in deeper and deeper ways) their own involvement in irrational processes.
No one becomes a fairminded thinker first and a selfish person later. Selfish thinking is instinctive. It is an in-born state. We are all initially focused on ourselves: our own pain, desires, concerns. In the first instance, we pay attention to the needs of others only to the extent that we are forced to do so. Only through a commitment to our own intellectual and ethical development can we develop the intellectual traits characteristic of fairmindedness. The key is that fairminded people consistently strive to achieve the widest, most informed viewpoint. Fairminded persons want no point of view to be suppressed. They want public discussion to include equal coverage of dissenting as well as dominant points of view. They want people to learn how to detect when someone is trying to manipulate them into believing or doing what they would not believe or do had they access to more information or further reasoning from dissenting points of view. They want everyone to see-through the “dirty tricks” of manipulative persuasion. They want to publicly disclose situations in which people of wealth and power are manipulating people
with little wealth and power. They want to help people recognize how the wealthy and powerful often prey on the credulity, gullibility, and vulnerability of the poor or poorly schooled.
It should be noted that those we call the “manipulators” are often the victims of their own propaganda and devices. Caught up in their own propaganda and narrowness of vision, they sometimes fail as a result. Many businesses fail because of their inability to critique their own illusions. Nations often fail to act successfully because their leaders are caught up in their own unrealistic descriptions of the world (and of their enemies). Manipulators are not usually grand conspirators. Their one-sidedness is obvious only to those who can appreciate the difference between “self-serving” and “fairminded” thinking. Only those capable of self-critique and self-insight can accurately assess the extent to which they are involved in the social, psychological, and intellectual manipulation of others.