Control: The Stories We Tell to Manipulate

We tell stories to manipulate, I said to a fellow book lover.

She was slightly offended. Understandable. As a wannabe writer, if you hear that your choice of profession is essentially a manipulator’s tool, you would not like it either. Especially over coffee, which is too early in the day for an existential crisis about your creative calling.

But then I explained. All writing is ultimately manipulation. You tell facts from a point of view. You tell fiction from a belief system, a societal construct. Biases seep in, experiences colour the commentary. It happens subconsciously sometimes, deliberately at others.

She thought about it. Then said, but that’s not the same as manipulation. That’s just perspective.

And that’s exactly where it starts.

Perspective is just a kinder word for choosing which part of the truth survives.

We learn this before we learn anything else. Be good or Father Christmas won’t come. Behave, or the boogeyman will. Every culture builds its own version of this. In Russia, it’s Babay, the one who comes at night if you’re still awake. In parts of the Middle East, it’s Lulu Khor-Khore, something waiting just outside the door after dark. In South India, it’s Poochaandi, Boochodu, Kokkachi. In parts of Africa, it’s Zimwi. In North India, it’s Kaala Baba or Laal Mai. Names you grow up with before you know what they mean. And then there’s Gabbar Singh, who crossed over from Bollywood into actual parenting strategy, which says something about both Bollywood and parents. The names change. The instruction doesn’t. You want a particular behaviour, so you build a world around it. A world the listener now has to live inside. It doesn’t arrive as a rule. It arrives as reality. And the child doesn’t resist it. How can they? When they were inside the story before they were old enough to question it.

That’s the thing about a story told with intent. It doesn’t feel like pressure.

It feels like how things are.

In George Orwell’s Animal Farm we see animals overthrow the humans and decide to govern a farm themselves. It sounds simple. It isn’t. Because what follows isn’t a revolution. It’s a slow, almost invisible transfer of control from one kind of power to another. The pigs take charge, and they don’t do it through force alone. They use manipulation very cleverly. The commandments the animals agreed on get rewritten all the time, slightly, just enough to still sound familiar but mean something different. The past gets retold in a way that supports whatever the pigs need it to support right now. And the animals don’t question it, because the story feels consistent enough to accept. A version that works for the storyteller, which is the only version that ever gets told. Orwell was writing about Stalin. But he was also writing about every room where someone controls the story and calls it the truth.

What makes it so effective is that it doesn’t ask you to believe something new. It just quietly adjusts what you already believe.

Once you see it, you start noticing the shape of it everywhere.

It shows up when a relative is unwell, and somehow, depending on who is in the room and what decision is being made, the illness changes shape. Timed to shift the conversation away from the argument and toward the person. You can’t fight someone who is suffering. You can’t even bring it up without sounding like a monster, which is, of course, the point.

It shows up in headlines, where the same event can feel like protest or violence depending on which word comes first. No facts change. The word does. And the word brings an entire story with it.

It shows up in offices, where overwork is called ownership and silence is called alignment. Where five hundred people losing their jobs gets described as rightsizing for the future. Nobody has ever been rightsized and felt good about it, but somebody in a boardroom decided that was the word, and so that became the story.

It shows up in families, in the guilt that moves through generations like inherited furniture. “After everything I’ve done for you” is not a statement. It’s a narrative with a predetermined ending. It places the listener inside a debt they didn’t agree to carry, and it works because it’s wrapped in love, or at least something that looks like it.

I’ve done versions of this. I think most people have, if they’re being honest. Which, as it turns out, is the hard part.

The argument I’ve retold to a friend, where I arrived at the other person’s reaction without quite explaining what led to it. A shape that made sense. A version that made me easier to sympathise with. A version where I was hurt, but not unkind. Which wasn’t entirely true.

And the friend, who only ever heard my version, adjusted how they saw the other person accordingly. I didn’t ask them to. I just told them a story. Very tragic. Very one-sided. Remarkably well-structured for something I claimed to be recounting spontaneously.

That’s where it gets uncomfortable. Because you don’t always notice you’re doing it.

Or sometimes you do, and you do it anyway.

The version you tell yourself is the quietest manipulation of all. You replay it alone, and each time it gets a little cleaner. A little more justified. The other person’s tone gets sharper in memory. Your own response gets more reasonable. And after enough tellings, even in your own head, it stops feeling like a version. It starts feeling like what happened.

Memory doesn’t just hold what happened. It holds the last version you were able to live with.

My friend, the writer, sat with this for a moment.

Then she said, okay, but that’s not manipulation. That’s just how people cope.

Which is, I think, exactly what the pigs would have said.

---

This post is a part of Blogchatter A2Z Challenge 2026 .

This is a series about storytelling beyond a craft. As something we live inside. In memory, in conversation, and in the way we understand what happens to us. Read all posts here.

I’ve done A2ZChallenge in 2017, where I collected 26 quotes by people whose names started with the letter of the day. In 2015, the theme was professional life.