It's kinda mindblowingly interesting
Similar roots as this idea, but at the societal level instead of individual:
Discussion
This hierarchy is necessary because of limited cognitive bandwidth (it's about compute efficiency). But it comes with many subtle vulnerabilities and weaknesses to manipulation (magick being one name for the practice of this manipulation). Societally and individually.
Is this approximately how you see it?
`Limited cognitive bandwidth`
Agents want to save compute, and malicious agents take advantage of this in their game.
Faith ~ acting when there's no input data available
Call to authority ~ choosing to trust the compute of another.
Evil ~ saving compute by acting regardless of known nuances and details that call for more compute
Framing/Narrative Control - only allowing a paradigm under which the processing conclusions I want are arrived at.
Framing is necessary to pre-order the world before an agent has perceptions, or else the compute required to process the infinitude of raw reality into meaning is overwhelming.
Self-perception, ie Identity, is the most fundamental framing mechanism that I'm aware of. So bids to change someone's self-perception should be recognized as very powerful, for better or worse.
The unsophisticated versions of this, like ad-hominem attacks, are easily recognized, but with more sophisticated approaches, like recalling elements of an individual's or a society's past to get them to re-identify with an identity they had already trancended, it's harder to recognize what's happening.
Other subtle examples -
-overuse of the term "consumer" for individuals: frames people as more economic than sovereign
-left v right framing in politics makes it more mentally taxing to have a real opinion that doesn't collapse into one of two orthodoxies. Because it comes with the (for some, insurmountable) task of surrendering some of the identity that came with holding the more standard opinion