Manipulation is violence.
Only, it’s the violence of the weak, masked and unseen. Its effectiveness depends upon deception, robbing its victim of those most sacred of rights: human agency, free will, choice.
In Kantian terms, human beings are ‘ends in themselves’, and their right to make free and informed choices over their lives is paramount in maintaining this. The only way of ethically ‘influencing’ them under this schema, therefore, is to supply them with facts, with evidence, with truths; to raise the level of ‘truth’ they’re able to utilise in making those free and informed choices.
In other words, what you’re attempting to do is not ‘influence’ them at all but rather to grant them ever greater personal sovereignty, such that, if one is confident of the inherent ‘rightness’ or ‘correctness’ of one’s own choices, it would be hoped that those choices would be made by others too if only they had access to sufficient ‘truth’.
The alternative condition – of manipulation – is utilised either by those who understand that their goals are to the detriment of their subjects, or those who believe that ‘manipulation’ might simply expedite a choice which would have been made under the ‘personal sovereignty’ condition as described above, if only given enough time.
However, this assumes that the immediate ‘goal’ or objective is superior to any higher value like ‘human beings are ends in themselves’, and its use is thus only advocated for by those who do not understand either why or how to operate within an internally accordant and consistent hierarchy of values, where each value is a goal in itself, the undermining of which compromises the integrity of the whole structure.
In this case, whatever immediate goals one is trying to achieve would be considered subordinate to the ‘higher principle’ of supporting the human sovereignty encoded within the subject’s capacity to make free, informed choices.
Of course, part of the difficulty of doing this is that people are not free of manipulation even if they are free of your manipulation – they are locked within webs of social influence and the calculus of self-interest within their current circumstances, among other pressures. Hence, part of the process of attempting to have an influence that is properly ‘righteous’ (and ‘righteous’ in a sort of technical rather than rhetorical sense) is in also attempting to unlock individuals from their dependence upon these pressures. This, however, is unfortunately very difficult for those ultimately marching with herd moralities fuelled by ressentiment, since those pressures represent their safety in the world, however corrupt or unethical they may be.
So no, if one maintains a functional hierarchy of values where the universal principle of ‘human sovereignty’ is superordinate to one’s immediate personal goals, then manipulation is never justified. However, if one does not have any such hierarchy of values (that is, if one is a psychopath, narcissist, &c.), or a hierarchy of values in which immediate personal goals are considered superordinate to any such consideration of ‘human sovereignty’, then it is justified. The answer in either direction is the output of a simple logical calculus resulting from whatever hierarchy of values is operant – lower values supervene upon higher ones in the functional moral agent, just as molecular properties supervene upon atomic properties in the physical laws of the universe.
Are INFJs inherently manipulative? The diplomatic, influence-seeking and, ironically, ‘manipulative’ answer is ‘no’, but the true answer is probably ‘yes’, since the function of Extroverted Feeling (Fe) is fundamentally concerned with having influence upon the world (as a judging function) by mobilising social forces. For instance, one will often find INFJs engaging in ad hominems – some more subtle than others – in an attempt to reduce the credibility of their subjects in the eyes of others. Their favourite strategy – and this seems to be quite universal – is to make claims against the social competence of their targets. They’ll call them retarded, or unhealthy, or mentally ill; they’ll say they need therapy or insinuate that they have character flaws which will make them unsuccessful with the opposite sex.
Their lack of a sense of righteousness forces them to engage with the world in a way in which ‘truth’ is not a consideration; that their immediate personal goals trump any ‘higher values’. Their lack of Fi means that they often do not even have a vision of any such hierarchy of values, leading to a general ‘ends justify the means’ approach to life, as has already been mentioned. That is, they are forced to resort to curses and hexes based upon some fictitious notion of their own ‘intuition’; an emblem of their own powerlessness to the same degree as the ancient crone was forced to rely upon the same strategies.
