As part of my writing and love of working with words, I will often look up concepts and phrases that come to me from past memory, or that I’ve heard recently, in order to assess relative accuracy of traditional vs currently applied meaning.
Today, one of those terms was “honeypotting” because I remembered how it was mirthfully used in the movie, The Interview, featuring actors James Franco, Seth Rogen, and Randall Park, where two journalists are hired by the CIA to assassinate the Korean dictator, Kim John-un, while giving him an interview.
Watching this comedy first introduced me to the concept of honeypotting. (Spoiler Alert) Dave Skylark, the main journalist, gets lured into helping the CIA by Lacey, a female agent who dresses, behaves in ways, and wears glasses to match his type of attraction in order to gain his desire to help the agency. Later in the film, Skylark is lured into feeling he is best buddies with the North Korean dictator who shares with him the fun of firing a tank, singing to Katy Perry’s music together, and even gifts him with a puppy.
The term honeypotting is used to describe these key moments of comedic impact that were fun and witty, so I wanted to be sure I would be using the term properly before I shared a joke using the word with a dear friend.
As I began my normally blissfully-curious internet search for engaging life’s meaning, I found this article, Honeypotting is the new technique to catch a cheater | Daily Mail – and felt an immediate sense of outrage.
The term honeypotting in the article noted above currently defines the word as when “clients” now hire “detectives” whose job it is to attempt to lure the client’s significant other into having an affair. It is a deviously methodical attempt to test a supposed loved one by temptation’s persuasion to see if they are “strong enough” or “true enough” to resist having the affair – thus proving or disproving fealty to the couple’s relationship.
I feel that there’s a natural order and flow to a human life’s energy, right timing, etc., that may affect who we meet in our lives, when, and where – including circumstances we somehow find ourselves in – for worse or for better. Human instincts have been evolving over millennia, honed to observe and track social cues and trends to ensure our survival as a species.
Our brain and body receptors are highly tuned into picking up vast streams of perceptual data that we are not always aware of: our instincts sense the ebb and flow of this data which results in the ability to recognize patterns – much like how we perceive the weather getting warmer when spring is coming – except on more subtle levels. Our subconscious perception of this data will, at times, trigger us to consciously notice environmental factors as they shift, or when opportunities for self advancement appear suddenly out of the blue. Our systems are designed to hit us with a jolt of “pay attention” to ensure maximum success in survival strategies.
Add to this the hypothesis posed by such New Age concepts as The Law of Attraction promoting the idea that as we change our attention and focus, different sets of opportunities and circumstances then seem to be drawn toward us because we shift the conscious paths we are taking into a state where we are receptive for alternative beneficience that we’d like to achieve. Whether or not humans have an energetic connection to “cosmic energy” and that we can “tap into unlimited abundance” is something that remains to be seen by intensive, over time proven trial and error results. The relevant component is that as humans shift what we focus on in our lives, our subconscious shifts what it pays attention to and brings to our awareness.
The point I am trying to make here is that human consciousness has a sense on some level at all times of where we are in our lives relative to the lives of others around us, and it knows if something rare or unusual comes into the scene. We are wired to pick up and interpret this information as “danger” or “opportunity.” The more intense either messaging, the more extreme we are prompted by brain and body processes to react. Corporations and social media have designed their target marketing to access and manipulate subconscious responses. By using data gathered about us over time, they’ve developed ways to attract our interests to gain ratings and buy products.
I believe that when you artificially insert a honeypotter – a person of magnetic attraction designed by clothing, looks, and behavior to grab the attention of our subconscious data receptors – outside the normal sequencing flow of a person’s life patterning, the “target” is triggered more powerfully than they would normally be to “pay attention and react” than had they met such a person through natural life circumstances.
When something is “out of the norm,” the signal we receive to pay attention can be triggered to blare even louder to cause us to have an incredibly powerful reaction – which is actually our system trying to warn us of a type of “danger” – but because honeypotters are guised to overly appeal to our senses, the “danger” they pose is hidden by “attractiveness.” This is called misattribution of arrousal, where the physical response to danger is misperceived as a “thrill of excitement” in response to the honeypotter.
The honeypotter’s highly calculated sensual overstimulation presentation causes the “danger” signal to become confused and misdirected while manipulated inhibitions fall prey to suddenly making us feel out of control of our emotions as hormones ramp into now exacerbated responses. This effect can hijack a person’s normal internal stability, causing inability to respond with control and/or to experience a lapse in judgement.
Honeypotters, like corporations and social media, know exactly what they’re doing when they use strategies to tap into our hindbrain reactions and hormonal responses to manipulate us into irregular behavior: It’s their job.
The type of responses they initiate in us are what we’d feel naturally when we come across someone that we are prospectively “designed” to recognize as a possible mate to bond with. The human body realizes the honeypotter’s placement in our life’s time continuum is out of the norm – but because of the intensity of reactions through the art of crafted seduction, our systems respond poorly to increased pressure.
It could also be argued that if a client hires a honeypotter, their relationship with their significant other has been having issues to begin with. This sense of mistrust and needing to find out if their partner can be basically entrapped into adultery may be based upon imbalance in the relationship, and placing such pressure on their partner may push the “victim” into thinking and feeling, “You know what? Maybe I do need an escape!”
Furthermore, do we really think that if a honeypotter were able to get our partner to commit “untoward acts” that once our partner realizes they’ve been deceived, they’ll come crawling to the negotiating table with their arms open wide and beg for forgiveness? Why would any self-respecting person wish to reconcile after such actions from someone they’re supposed to be able to trust – but who, instead, set them up and did not initiate open, honest, and direct communication?
Who, at this point, is really to blame for the victim’s indiscretions? Methinks that it’s the untrusting partner – and the honeypotter, who carries no blame for their own actions under the guise of following their “job description.”
Candid Corvid Productions 