Manson is a sociopath, so when it comes to his particular method of conning, the thing to look at is his cognition. He's a possibilities guy. he could even see his vision of helter skelter reflected in something as trite as a Beatles track. reality is never set in stone with manson. the 'what is' never 'is'....you can pick up on this in his interview with Geraldo as he echoes constant contempt for reality. He describes reality as the true prison and himself as the free one. He has little grasp for the facts of his case and his thought process is all over the map. It's just an overlap of intuitions and an orgy of possibility. Se creative works in the realm of reality. A LSI would have been pulled into making their defense on factual grounds, even if they're using spin, manson would have shown some inkling of having built up a case, arguable on a rational ground. Manson makes no pretension for being rational. Instead he's spitting out grandiose visions....and because it was true Ne his intuitions had the capacity to command reflexive submission from people in search of a sidewalk 'guru.' In other words, he excelled at something almost exclusively the domain of Fe, Ne, and Ni. In the self-mythology he cultivates, it went that, after a race war, he and his followers would emerge out of the desert with him as the world's leader....that's some expansive cognition. a sociopathic don quixote.