Projective deceit and its mechanisms
Strategies manipulative people use to “get away with it”
Even the most common crims know that, in a society of laws, they need to conceal and deny committing the crime. But murders and other serious crimes happen. So, there is a connection between “bad action” and deceit which might bear further investigation. As parents know, one sign a person is behaving badly is that they cloak the deed in lies of different kinds: “she started it … I didn’t hit him, he hit me”, etc.
As religious anthropologist Rene Girard has explored in his work, I Saw Satan Fall Like Lightning, the biblical figure of Satan — very different from his Hollywood parodies — is both the “father of lies” (John) and “the accuser” (from Old Testament Job on). His principal means is, interestingly, the mechanism a leading US survey suggests is the most common instrument of workplace or adult bullies: that of the false accusation against the target. Some things stay the same.
But what shape do the false accusations usually take? In psychological terms, they tend to involve “mimesis”, mirroring, imitation, and projection.
The principal means manipulative folk use to avoid accountability for their harmful actions…