Dale Carnegie wrote the multi-million bestseller, How to Win Friends and Influence People. Advocates would say that Carnegie taught a method of manipulating people that created “win-win” scenarios, where both the manipulated and manipulators benefited. The detractors would say Carnegie’s methods can be used to screw people. Any kind of indirect manipulation is problematic, as it arguably violates free will, especially if used to encourage “uninformed” decisions. Hypnotist and Researcher Dick Sutphen wrote of Carnegie in his book, Radical Spirituality, “The Carnegie Course teaches you to say what will work to get what you want. Isn’t that being phony or a hypocrite? Forget sincerity, forget honesty. Forget being real. Carnegie teaches you to be a diplomat and wear a mask. Masks are the fear that who and what you are isn’t adequate, so you pretend to be somebody else.” What is Creator’s perspective?

We would agree that, based on this description, a slippery slope is being created that will make it harder and harder for someone manipulating others, through adopting a kind of false persona, to return to divine alignment. Carnegie's prescription is, in essence, a way to achieve personal power, and that always carries with it a risk of transgression where one becomes out of balance, through serving the self at the expense of others being manipulated, to create an advantage for self-reward. The fact that someone else might not know the difference is used as a justification, that it doesn't really hurt anyone, but that is a false conclusion because a lie is a lie, and serving the self by making someone happy through a falsehood, in effect, cheats them because it is promoting the self as an answer to a situation or problem, in some respect, by commanding attention and action of some sort. The fact you might convince someone you are what they need and you can offer your services, or just friendship, because you are a person of sufficient substance, capability, talent, and accomplishment, for example, short-circuits things because if they see you as worthy and are content for you to occupy their time and energy, based on a false representation of your talents, it cheats them of the opportunity to engage with others and find something more rewarding for them. So we see this approach that Carnegie promotes as a self-serving exercise that is a kind of manipulation and unworthy of a divine human because it departs from the truth in a deliberate fashion and, in the doing, becomes a kind of inner corruption that is training you to assume things about yourself that are an exaggeration or a distortion, in some respect, you cannot live up to if challenged and really subjected to scrutiny. So in the short-term, it is taking risks of being found out to be an imposter, and in the long-term creates a situation where, to some extent, you are indeed living a lie, and that will take a toll on you karmically. Even though people around you might be satisfied with your efforts, that is not the same thing as giving them the full measure of what they want and need. By fooling them into settling for less, a kind of illusion you create through stretching the truth, you are also cheating yourself because you are gaining something not truly and fully deserved, and we can tell you that anything you acquire through personal power to manipulate others will someday be taken away from you, and it might be further magnified to the extent others were losers because of what they lost being diverted by your false front to engage with you and not others who might serve them better.