Aella makes frame control sound like manipulation. But frame control is A) natural and good, and B) is manipulation if you do it wrong.
Frame control is almost all there is. Our entire world is built on frames. Religion is a frame. The American Constitution is a frame. Axioms are frames. Math is built on axioms. Games are frames.
So if everything is a frame, should we ignore Aella? No.
If someone can make you adopt their frame, then they’ve got you. They’re effectively mind controlling you. Who cares about controlling your behavior when they can go upstream to what generates behavior.
I had a pastor squeeze the back of my elbow. It was so weird — nobody’s ever done anything like that to me before. It was simultaneously a sign of compassion and a subtle form of aggression. Sometimes Christians will give me a book to take home and make it very difficult for me to say no, or to give the book back.
Family
Frame control is simultaneously the most superficial expression of power and the most intimate. And it mirrors a lot of my experiences with my own Christian parents.
Their frame is the only correct one. They refuse to consider another frame. So if you agree with them, then it’s a sign that you’re a good person. If you don’t agree, then something is wrong with you.
What makes you feel crazy is when your frame is stronger, but they refuse to acknowledge this in any way. So you feel insane in their world. You might as well be talking to a wall. And because they refuse to inhabit your world, they project bad motivations on you.
When my dad met my ex, he felt she was totally cool because she quietly listened to him. The reality is she wasn’t. She gave him the impression that she bought into his frame — and that’s all he wanted.
Romance
Men who frame control can also be the worst kind of simps. If he’s too insistent on getting into her head, she might just let him talk at her. She might be fine if this also means he breaks his back appealing to her whims. He has someone to hear him out, and she gets a faithful lap dog that she doesn’t respect.
Imagine being Aella and submitting to some dude’s frame. If the guy isn’t loyal, you’re effectively accepting him mind controlling you. You’re signing up to his little religion. This is especially true if he takes pride in thinking for himself. In order to be with him, you need to understand him, and to understand him requires a great deal of work. Once that work has been put in, his presuppositions can become your own. You are no longer questioning, but calculating from an agreed-upon starting point. If you break up, it can be difficult to make sense of anything after that point. Did you just think that thought because it’s your own thought?
Pickup artistry is obsessed with holding the frame of a conversation. The goal of seduction is to be “smooth” — to have your frame adopted without triggering any kind of alarm. I’m making pickup arts sound like manipulators, but a lot of them get into it out of loneliness. When you’re spitting game, you’re creating a world for the woman to mentally inhabit. A frame and a game are the same thing. You have a system of logic that rewards and punishes you.
Good frames
Good frame control isn’t coercive. Good frames don’t need to be forced on people. One way to know if someone has a good frame is to defect against them to see at which point they give up on their “principles” in favor of self preservation.
I haven’t heard of anyone having a problem with Jesus. But there are plenty of people who have a problem with Christians. Jesus faithfully took his principles with him to the cross. Martin Luther pinned his principles to a door (weak). Martin Luther King got pinned with a bullet for his principles.
The best Christians I’ve met understand full well that what they believe isn’t merely rational. They understand that there’s no winning argument for their faith.
So even if the discussion is about something as important as the existence of God, moralizing, making friend/enemy distinctions, and doling out reward and punishment for agreement and disagreement, and generally trying to be manipulative are terrible ways to go. If you’re going to do that, you might as well hand the victory over to the lizard people. Temptation will win every time.
seems like frame-as-manipulation recapitulates the post-modern argument against master narratives, that there are always power dynamics embedded in how we construct our knowledge of the world.
i agree framing is inevitable; we have to order our perceptions of the world *somehow*. accepting that there can be multiple valid frames at the same time has been a big help for me, though it can be a slippery slope towards accepting a uselessly large number of frames.
i'm curious how you're relating one's frames to one's principles when you write about defecting and self-preservation. i assume one's frame carries with it one's principles but i am not 100% sure what you mean.