Persuasion techniques are an alternative to the violent use of power.
The main function of persuasive activities are the formation and alteration of values, beliefs, attitudes and behavior of others, in an attempt at controlling human behavior, whose final aim is creating a being called the psychological illiterate or the predictable man, an automaton that has to be stuffed with content. The change brought by the behavioral trend to the previous introspective psychology is what moves it from description to manipulation, based on a reduction that sees human behavior as a chain of associative links between sensitive and motor processes, confining the psychic and socio-historic aspects to the physical and biological spheres, casting aside, as mere metaphysics, all values attached to human behavior. Given the need for a behavior technology, it is a short step to claim that it has to be applied to the task of intentionally designing a culture, a task which is performed by power and its servants. These are the authoritarian conjunctions whose ideological core emphasizes an external agent as the determining factor of behavior. In both cases, individuals and masses are regarded as mere puppets of an external manipulator.