Testing to See If Someone Is a Pretending Person

If they:

• Make fun of you for not knowing things that there is no way you could have known about.
• Get upset when you don’t know things that there is no way you could have known about.
• Are happy to see you suffer how they once suffered.
• Get mad at you for not automatically knowing about their weaknesses or negative qualities, and being able to work around them.
• Treat you like you are not smart if you don’t know about their negative qualities.
• Accepting, and believing they deserve, the respect of an Everything Knower, without being one.
• Are good at remembering and recalling moments when you weren’t at your best.
• Think they know exactly how you feel, what you are, and what you like.
• Tell you that you didn’t try your best to be good, when you did.
• Get mad at you (instead of themselves) when they fail your Wise Leader tests.



• Are unprepared for the things you do when you are young and predictable (like if they put a bucket of gold in the middle of the room when you are a baby, and are surprised if you knock it over).

You can be more and more sure that this person is a Pretending Person.

If they are very uncomfortable when you act like a Learner sometimes acts to communicate they are still a Learner, you can be even more sure they are a Pretending Person. Examples include: being confused when you are working with something you aren't familiar with, like a lock or a wrench, or being very hesitant when entering a new situation, like going into a room full of strangers.

You can pretend to be fearful or worried about being a person with qualities you don’t want. You can act like you are worried about being uninteresting, boring, not smart, unable to help the world be better, or unpleasant to be around. A Pretending Person or Misguided Person will pick up on your worry and try to treat you like that anyway, even if they don’t know you well.

You can do something that you know is wrong (but you intend to fix once you are more capable) just to hear from them why it is wrong. If they say you are bad after you do it and are unable to explain why, you know they might be a Pretending Person. If they can explain why and give you guidance on how to correct it, they might be a Self Guider. (You should not trust most people to know what to do or say when you do something wrong on purpose, so only use this test if you have to.)

Finding Out They Are a Pretending Person

Now you know you should not use their ways on most people (especially large groups of people). You should not talk with the leaders of groups of people the same way a Pretending Person talks with you. You should not expect good leaders to act like them.

Now you know you should not copy how they feel in many situations. They might get mad at the world when something goes wrong when, if they thought about it hard enough, they might realize was their fault.

Now you know they may never feel bad about how they responded to an action. They might believe it was right for the rest of their life.

Now you know it’s OK to try ways that are opposite to theirs. But which ways are good and worth keeping, and which ways are bad and worth doing the opposite? (And which ways should you still support or go against, but not so strongly?) You could try to pay attention to what type of advice they give you and categorize it that way. If you divide their advice into “Advice for the Mind” and “Advice for the Body,” for example, you might notice that the advice they give you for the body is usually correct and the advice for the mind is usually incorrect. (Currently, in this world, it's more well known what is beneficial for the body. In terms of the mind, however, there are still many unknowns. Even one person's mind might work differently from another!)

You might need to be alone when you are learning new skills. They probably follow the way of, “If someone does something that doesn't work, it’s proof they are not smart,” so they will make fun of you for making a mistake. You will need to make mistakes in order to get more skilled at something. They will continue to treat you like you are unskilled if they watch you practice.

Now you know you can’t trust them in certain ways. They might have a very simplified view of how you think about things. They might not think you can handle certain concepts, and they think that, since they know the proper way to do things, you do not need to understand how it could work in different ways. To be a Wise Leader someday, you need to understand as much as possible. Unfortunately, you might have to take time away from figuring out how to do the most good, and spend some time figuring out what information you can share with a Pretending Person and what you cannot. Example: If you played with something harmless at school, but the Pretending Person thought it was bad, they might punish you if you told them.

There may have been a point in their life where they were asking for help in some way, but didn’t get it, so they gave up. They might try some very unconventional ways to ask for help now. They will probably do things to try to prevent you from helping them, or do things to you that hurt your ability to help them. It may be the case that the more they hurt you, the more help they may need. You might not have learned enough to be able to help them yet, so you might have to forget about that Pretending Person for now and move on.