The puppet master is the shadowy figure or entity that is actually controlling the entire debacle, even if this control is designed to be utter chaos.
The face tends to remain anonymous.
On my book Authoritarianism & Propaganda the Puppet Master Tools, I help you discover this Puppet Master. And spoiler alert, it might be a bunch of puppet masters behind the scenes competing for power. The catch is that most people will never really get to know who it is actually pulling the strings. It is designed to be that way.
Every authoritarian in history has one thing in common, they are all insecure. They disguise themselves as strong leaders. If they are men, they will actually be wimps, and winers, and thin skinned pedantic loud creatures who far from being a “man version” – are really very insecure children trapped in a larger often loud-mouthed body. These are perfect vehicles for the puppet masters to enact their agenda. Why?
Let’s use for example a grown man who is a victim of toxic masculinity. Anyone who thinks that being the loudest and foul-mouthed person is a sign of masculinity already lacks awareness to function as a person who enacts critical thinking and intellectual honesty. In other words, it is very easy to portrait themselves as an aggressive asshole, or a fantastical macho-version. In reality, it actually takes self-control to be able to maintain temperance. You can call that maturity. But maturity its inconvenient to a puppet master.
Authoritarians tend to lack that level of maturity – even if they are very calculating, and they gravitate towards others who follow suit. Which it is an oxymoron, because they think they are in charge, yet they are perfectly okay to even pay money for someday to insult them – making them think that it is what makes a tough person. Trust me, if your life is indeed complex and challenging, you don’t need to pay somebody to artificially induce more drama in your life. If you do, then your life is already too shallow and meaningless.
That’s what the Puppet Master seeks.
The puppet master needs people who are shallow enough to be pretentious, loud, aggressive, obedient, and likely violent – but too dumb to realize they are actually puppets for somebody else. The funny thing is that their ego will make it impossible for them to realize they are being manipulated. And that it is also by design.
Whenever you see any movement in history where men and some women who were convinced that they were in charge under the clout of a dear leader, they will also be prompted to obediently follow directives that are incredibly disgusting and often criminal in nature. However, since it was enacted “against another” group, they felt vindicated to perpetrate these crimes without thinking much about it, or the victims.
The problem is that we are seeing a rise on these toxic personalities who are actually very vulnerable, but in their minds, they think they are the strongest and most alpha type of vindicators, following a quest that it is bigger than themselves. They are right it is bigger than themselves, because they are being manipulated. And guess what? They are disposable when they become inconvenient.
It is easy to fall for this trap, because sometimes these victims will act as though they have it all figure it out – and even persuade others to follow the same “lessons.” But once you dig a bit – and I mean it won’t take long because they tend to be very shallow – you’ll realize that all the spewed bravado it is more of a mechanism of defense, because no matter how “good they are” – they never like themselves, because they are not being themselves, they are just being the version they think was acceptable. The result is that they are always chasing that higher high.
What does that mean? It means that if a person is shallow, it does not matter what they achieve it will never be enough. Because they have never actually become the person they are meant to be, the puppet master’s mission is to prevent them from figuring out WHO they were actually meant to be, and keep them obedient to an agenda that it is not even on their best interest. But perpetually convince them it very much is. HLC