Don’t trust 'em (2 / 2)

Don’t trust 'em (2 / 2)

Jay Heinrichs, author of Thank You For Arguing, compares modern politics with eighteenth-century politics and concludes that Americans have ceased to value disinterest: a reputation for being selfless and unbiased.

 “Hamilton and colleagues would have wondered at our preference for billionaires” (p.72). True enough, some eighteenth-century politicians went bankrupt on purpose so as to increase their popularity.

 Why, then, has being rich become accepted in the 21st Century?

 I believe the answer to be a combination of two things. 

In the first place, the “American dream” has been marketized to the point that people believe that being rich is simply an American success and a question of choice. The truth is – this is not the case. 

 Income inequality is measured through the GINI Index, an indicator that ranks a country from 0 (100% of income is distributed equally among all households) to 1 (one household has 100% of income). With a GINI Index of 0.45, the USA ranks 74th from lowest (best) to highest. In comparison, Sweden has 0.23, Germany has 0.27, Canada has 0.32 and the average for the European Union is 0.30. 

 The second reason people like the wealthy is because of corporate publicity. In the modern American culture, multimillionaires have made sure they are seen as benefactors. There have been cases of “philanthropists” that spend more on advertizing their donations than the amount of money they actually donated. In addition, any opposition is labeled as “cynical”, “communist” and the increasingly popular, “European”. 

Again, my advice would be: don’t trust 'em. Forgive me for the idiocy of making a generalization but, if they’re rich: it’s because they are the most (eighteenth-century definition) “interested” of them all.

Don’t trust 'em (1 / 2)

Don’t trust 'em   (1 / 2)

In Thank You For Arguing, Jay Heinrichs gives a series of tricks that can make people more persuasive. These tricks work by deceiving the audience in favor of the speaker. In other words, the author teaches the art of manipulation. When Heinrichs writes about selflessness, honesty, and rationality, he does not advocate them as important traits that a leader should have, but rather as important traits for a leader to seem to have. For the author, it’s all about the illusion.

As I read further into the book, its purpose seems to be crafting western 21st Century politicians that fully adapt themselves to their audiences, neglecting their own beliefs. These politicians can be excellent candidates, in office however, dangerously unpredictable.

Just look at some of the tittles and subtitles and you’ll understand what I mean:

Chapter 4: “Soften Them Up”

Chapter 5: “Get Them to Like You”

Chapter 6: “Make Them Listen”, Subtitle: “Converting character into a tool of persuasion”.

Chapter 8: “Win Their Trust”, (my favorite) Subtitle: “Using selflessness for personal gain”.

Chapter seven is about practical wisdom, the second major element of ethos. When a speaker portrays practical wisdom, the audience will be more likely to agree with whatever he says. So, does Heinrich teach us how to be streetwise? No. What he does is teach readers to seem streetwise, namely, by bragging on experience, bending the rules, and appearing to take the middle course in polemical issues. Interestingly, he starts the chapter by quoting Aristotle saying, “they should rule who are able to rule best”. Perhaps he should make a personal adaptation to the quote, making it something like: “they should rule who can fake the ability to rule”.

The problem with teaching manipulation is that it can empower dangerous manipulators.

This guy, for example.

Most shocking of all is the number of YouTube likes on this video (10560) and the top comments: “I can't LIKE this enough! I listen to this to keep me pumped up! I wish some of the weak United States politicians spoke like this. With such passion! HE is amazing!”, “Hitler did nothing wrong” and “he’s better than obama”.

This speech is so powerful that it can clearly make modern people leave behind what is logical and morally good, in favor of, arguably, the most repudiated person of all time.

Nowadays, you don’t have to be Alexander the Great to learn rhetoric from Aristotle. Knowledge has become so accessible that millions of people can make use of rhetorical guidebooks (such as the book which I now hold in my hands). Nevertheless, this knowledge has not been extended to the majority, making much of the audience for, say, politics, susceptible to be manipulated by a large number of people.

In politics, the form has overridden the content. The American democratic system favors people with dubious intentions who excel in the usage of rhetoric.

Lets remember what really matters.

Doing What it Takes

Ethos, pathos and logos, the Aristotelian tools or argumentation, are three great powers equal in strength. The key for success is to learn how to use them effectively and, more importantly, when to use each one of them. Depending on the circumstances, it might be most useful to put all the weight of your argument on or two of these tools and maybe, omit the third. Also, it can be convenient to make transitions that will let you fight your war on three fronts. One option to do this is via quick adjustments as part of an intervention in a debate. President Barack Obama, an excellent orator, frequently hops between ethos, pathos, and logos. In the third 2012 presidential debate, being accused by contender Mitt Romney of neglecting allies in the Middle East, Obama effectively did a transition from logos to pathos by saying that when he had gone to Israel, the first thing that he did was to visit the Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Switching between the three tools can also be done systematically through long periods. In this case, the argumentator changes his methods in response to changes in the audience. An example of this can be seen in the Catholic Church in Colombia. Some decades ago, the church relied almost completely on ethos. Obviously there was still logos in religious scholars and pathos in hell threats, but the religious institution mainly relied on ethos. People attended mass in Latin, with a preacher that was standing opposite to them. How could this be anything but what Jay Heinrichs says of ethos: “argument by character”.

Now, when you see the Catholic Church in its maximum effectiveness, it is by performing “miraculous healings” and having tele-curas
vividly preaching in front of thousands. The reason behind this change in the Catholic Church is that Colombia, once a solid Catholic monopoly, has opened its doors to a set of new religions. This new competition, especially in the form of Catholicism’s more modern cousin Protestantism, has forced the church to change up their game.

I like what has happened to religion in Colombia. Being a Capitalist and an Agnostic, I am all for competition and a wealth of options.

A Night in The Theatre

The third presidential debate was focused on National Security. Although this debate was not much of a game changer because important domestic economical issues are prioritized this year, the national security debate could have a relatively important effect in the public image of both candidates.

For Obama, being seen as firm-handed and decisive is crucial because he is sometimes perceived as weak in handling foreign relations. Obama’s economical policies towards China, nuclear reduction negotiations with Russia, and his ineffective sanctions on Iran are examples of overly feeble postures. Romney took advantage of this by forensically criticizing the president’s early actions in Iran, repeating the catch phrase “four years closer to a nuclear weapon” in regards to the Iranian nuclear program.

For Mitt Romney, the usage of future-tense deliberative arguments was essential because the audience was evaluating his ability as a commander in chief. It was important for Romney not to appear as a republican warmonger to detach himself from hawks like George Bush. Romney did this effectively by talking incessantly about peace, even attacking Obama from the left in saying that “we can’t kill our way out of this mess”.

Obama had a clear win in the Logos department of this debate. This can be easily explained because Obama is currently president and has to deal with national security issues on a very regular basis. Nevertheless, Mitt Romney was also on guard, being careful to be extremely clear in explaining his proposals in clutter-free lists, examples of this where his five simple steps fo r bettering the economy and his four essentials for development in the Middle East.

Both candidates used Pathos recurrently throughout the debate, as usually happens when discussing national security. 9/11, the Holocaust, and unemployed veterans were all pulled out. Obama made an extremely effective transition from ethos to pathos when, being incriminated by Romney of speaking negatively about America in the Middle East, he started talking about his visit to a genocide museum in Israel. Also, both candidates had a story in which a young woman approached them with consternation, an obvious attempt to persuade the audience by their emotions that could have backfired.

In this third debate, nothing was more important than Ethos. It is clear that the votes are going to be swayed by the economical policies presented by the candidates, so everything relating to national security goes to finding the candidate to be a sensible, trustworthy man who can excel as a commander in chief. In this aspect, I believe that Mitt Romney took the lead because he was able to portray himself as a moderate republican that will take conscious decisions. Obama, well, he was very constricted by the actual decisions he had taken in office.

Experimenting on Myself

Jay Heinrichs, author of Thank You For Arguing, decided to experiment the pervasiveness of arguments by attempting to spend a whole day without being persuaded or persuading anybody . Heinrichs fails miserably as he is inevitably persuaded by his son, his wife, and even his wristwatch. I understood the point being made by Heinrichs but seriously doubted that he had conducted the experiment at all. After all, steering clear out of persuasion should be easy enough if you are mind is fixed on it, right?

I decided to test the experiment by putting myself through it. It is now 7:am, from now to 7:pm. I shall become immune to persuasion. As Heinrichs put it, I wont take any crap from anyone.

Later that day…

After spending many hours sans persuasion, I’m pretty sure that the author was telling the truth. The challenge proved to be much harder than I expected. Here is what happened:

Right after I finished writing the first two paragraphs of this blog, I moved on to a Sociales essay. I worked at a good pace and was nearly done in forty minutes. However, I could not find a good ending for it so I called my father up and asked him for a suggestion. My father gave me two suggestions that I did not like. Not wanting to agree to something bad but trying to avoid hurting his feelings in order to be able to ask him  to help me in the future,  I told him that his ideas were great  but that they should be tweaked in a different direction. Once he received my positive reinforcement, he gave me a better idea, which I used to finish my essay. As soon as he left the room, it hit me. Damn! I had used persuasion. Realizing that the experiment was going to be a little harder than previously thought, I decided to cheat, isolating myself in front of a television for more than four hours.

Finally, lunch was served. After we finished eating, my mother told me to do the dishes. On hearing this  I realized that it would be hard to get out helping in the kitchen  without persuasion, and having already faltered, bit my tongue and started scrubbing. Being only half done, I felt the need to quit.   Once my mother saw me leaving the kitchen she started shouting something about the dirty dishes. Without uttering a syllable, I went down the stairs to fetch the newspaper, handing it to her so she would forget about my undone chore. Was this persuasion? I think not.  

A bit later, my ten-year-old brother persuaded my mother to ask me to take him to the park. Handling my brother is extremely hard and not my idea of a chilled Sunday. I knew it would take the best of my persuasive abilities to avoid this. By then  it was only 2pm and I still had five more hours until the experiment ended. I decided that I wouldn't sacrifice my peace for science. And in any case, the result of my experiment was already clear: persuasion is inescapable. Seeing how uncomfortable it is to become a persuasion anarchist, I will now try the opposite and become and expert in manipulating persuasion to my own advantage.

A Kaleidoscope of Audiences

The Colombian government will, for the third time, try to make peace with the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC), a belligerent guerilla group that has fought the established government for more than fifty years. Many talks were held during the previous tries to establish an armistice, evidently, none were fruitful.

This time, it seems to be different. I believe this set of peace talks will be successful because “all the forces in the world are not so powerful as an idea whose time has come” (Victor Hugo). The idea of peace is ripe. Colombia is economically, politically, socially, and psychologically ready for the end of this issue that boils down to a Cold War conflict between capitalism and communism.

As a Colombian, I feel that it is a great time to learn about rhetoric. This is why I have been devouring Jay Heinrichs’s Thank You For Arguing, a rhetoric guidebook that is excellent at showing the average reader how to apply most of the theory developed by the great classical thinkers.

Using what I have being learning by reading   Thank Your For Arguing, I shall make a series of blogs in which I will analyze different aspects of the peace talks, but always  applying what is taught by Heinrich in my blogs. In this first one, I will start by examining the first thing Heinrich says that has to be done when entering a debate: determining the audience.

So, who is the audience in the peace talks?

First of all, I would say that there is no one audience. The whole negotiation process implies that the parties will be trying to convince several  audiences at the same time,  and each member in the negotiating teams will be looking to convince the audience that he-she considers to be the most important  one while cheating the other audiences involved. Also, the negotiators will be using different kind of arguments depending on who they are trying to convince.

Here is the diagram from general to specific:

Dirty John

John Perkins’s story is somewhat fantastical. The author portrays himself as a kind of evil James Bond that does all kinds of dirty work to protect the interests of America and its companies in the international scenario.

For Perkins, it is essential that readers believe him. To achieve a good ethos, he always gives great importance to his activities, setting himself in the center of the action by saying things like: “that is what we EHMs do best: we build a global empire” (prologue p.20).

Perkins’s view on American foreign policy is very radical, therefore his tone is accusatory. This can be evidenced by the use of words like “elite”, “corporatocracy”, and “empire”.

Building Credibility

However, the author does not want to be viewed as an opinionated journalist who believes in conspiracy theories, but rather as a knowledgeable insider who has decided to come out and reveal his secrets. For creating this impression, Perkins does two things. The first is that he talks about many private aspects of his life including sex, personal thoughts, and uncomfortable experiences. This gives him a frank and honest charisma that is very effective in gaining the readers trust. At one point he writes that he “craved female companionship – sex; the idea of a slut was most alluring” (p. 5). The story reads, as many memoirs do, like a confession.


The second thing that Perkins does to better his ethos is to make every detailed observations filled with factual evidence and figures, making his arguments and point of view seem very solid and credible.



For now, I will believe the things he says.  

Both Sides of Everything

In a section of the opinion pages called Room for Debate, The New York Times hosted a debate between two rival linguists representing contending schools of thought: the descriptivist and the prescriptivist. The discussion was about the rules that regulate proper written English and whether they should be adapted to suit changes in the spoken tongue. Descriptivists describe language as it is used, believing that cumbersome grammatical rules that are not consistent with the regular English used by most native speakers should be eliminated. On the other side, prescriptivist linguists make emphasis on how language should be used.

I began reading the article with a prescriptivist point of view, believing that all rules make the ideas being expressed in writing clearer. Obviously, I did not advocate an unchanging language, archaic and inconsistent with the vernacular. More so, it can be said that I agreed with Bryan Garner in supporting a “nonstandard, but rule-bound, dialect.”

Robert Lane Greene made me change my mind. I understood that making the rulebook more comprehensive could be a social equalizer, by extending written expression to those who, in the words of Lane, were “just unlucky not to get a great education”.

Nevertheless, I also understand Garners’ point of view. If language rules become too elastic, language becomes a hot mess in which the effectiveness of writing is compromised. Lane suggests a worthy solution to this problem with his “meta-rule”, stating that when a rule is in conflict with the actual usage of many great writers and the majority of native speakers, the rule should be expunged in favor of the actual usage. Unless these conditions arise, Garner suggests that rules be followed.

CNG Diction/ary

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