by Daniel Yim
Adams went to work for Crocker National Bank and became a bank teller (twice held up at gunpoint), computer programmer, budget analyst, commercial lender, product manager, and supervisor, meanwhile working for his MBA degree from UC Berkeley, and creating Dilbert, which he couldn’t persuade anyone to publish.
He then moved to Pacific Bell, and at last sold his Dilbert cartoon to United Media, who managed to place it in a few publications, giving Adams a small addition to his income. He would get up at 4:00 A.M. to draw his cartoons, and then work a full day at Pacific Bell. Slowly, Dilbert became more popular, partly because Adams included his email address in the strip and paid close attention to feedback from fans, modifying the strip to give readers what they most appreciated.
Eventually Scott devoted himself full time to Dilbert and in 1996 published The Dilbert Principle, his first of several best-selling business books, applying the lessons of Dilbert to practical management.
In one irreverent experiment, by arrangement with the CEO of Logitech, Adams wore a wig and a false mustache to impersonate a topnotch business consultant. In this persona, he met with the company’s managers and persuaded them to adopt a mission statement that was so impossibly complicated it (quite deliberately) amounted to gibberish.
Scott Adams has written two fiction books on religion, God’s Debris (2001) and The Religion War (2004), followed by selections from his blog wisdom in Stick to Drawing Comics, Monkey Brain! (2007) and his how-to-succeed masterpiece How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big (2013).
In Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don’t Matter (2017), Scott provides his own account of the 2016 election, his part in it, and his ideas on persuasion. He delivers interactive presentations on Periscope every day, and these are made available on YouTube.
Scott Adams is a provocative and challenging gadfly of popular culture, with a huge and curiously diverse fan following. His work and his ideas are worth examining and criticizing—through the filter of philosophy.
I
In Front of Your Eyes
1
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Tolerate the Master Persuader Hypothesis
IVAN WOLFE
WARNING: this essay discusses Scott Adams, Donald Trump, Socrates, Ancient Greek Sophists, Derren Brown, and some other random items of cultural significance. Try to keep up, and try not to let your own political views cause you to ignore, or otherwise taint, the very serious ideas here. Adams argues that we live in a world where facts don’t matter. If you feel they should, you really need to know why they currently don’t, and writing Adams off because you think he supports Trump’s policies (he mostly doesn’t) won’t help the current political and rhetorical situation.
Forget All You Know or Think You Know
Far too many of my more progressive friends think Scott Adams is some sort of far-right, alt-right Trump supporter. In fact, too many Trump supporters think the same thing. I have been a semi-fan of Adams since Dilbert first appeared, and I have read nearly all his published works, in addition to seeing that he is a witty, clear, and entertaining writer (even when I find his thinking muddled, off base, or outright bizarre). Because of that, when I heard he predicted a landslide victory for Trump (the “Master Persuader hypothesis”), I had two thoughts: 1. He’s clearly not predicting this because he supports Trump’s policies, and 2. He’s crazy wrong.
I thought the first because I had read plenty of Adams’s political/religious/philosophical/whatever thoughts, and it seems clear that even Bernie Sanders is somewhere to the right of Adams (there might be specific issues, such as certain types of taxation, where that’s not the case, but overall that seems clear). I thought the second because Adams had made some crazy predictions before that have yet to pan out. For example, in The Dilbert Future he seriously predicted (based on a somewhat simplistic reading of Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions) that the theory of evolution would be proven false (though he’s somewhat vague on when, implying it would be sometime within the lifetime of the reader; I’m not dead yet, so I guess there’s still time). While the prediction was made somewhat humorously, he had a serious point. He meant it as an extreme claim intended to make a point about how science constantly changes and updates ideas, concepts, and theories. But—still, evolution proven false? Sounds like a Trump supporter after all, right?
I will admit, I was one of those out of touch elites (I have a PhD after all) who thought Trump had no chance, wouldn’t even make it out of the Republican primaries, let alone win (or even come close) in the general election. Well, Adams turned out to be more correct than I was—even modifying his thesis as more scandals and revelations about Trump came out in the media—whereas I stuck firmly to my belief that Trump had no solid chance of winning.
In the interests of full disclosure, I will state that I did not vote for Trump, but I’m going to try to make this chapter as apolitical as possible (at least until the conclusion), since Adams’s reasoning was itself mostly apolitical. He gained a lot of support from the Trump wing and a lot of hate from the Clinton wing (and the anti-Trump wing on the right), but if you follow his blog or read his recent book Win Bigly (on persuasion in the era of Trump), you can see he finds both the pro- and anti-Trump crowds fundamentally deceiving themselves, while his own (quite progressive) views are ignored in favor of merely treating him as a pro-Trumpist by all sides.
But, enough on that background. If you want the full story, either go back and read the archives on Adams’s blog, or read Win Bigly, which is a good summary of his thought process and reasoning on Trump as a “Master Persuader.”
From Derren Brown to Socrates
Since this chapter is in a book on Popular Culture and Philosophy, I need to tie it to philosophy somehow. Luckily, I already had, soon after the election. Rather than give in to cognitive dissonance and try to explain away why I was really right and Trump had really lost—something many on the anti-Trump sides did and still do (and which Adams uses as a good example of how cognitive dissonance works), I had to re-evaluate my own reasoning to see why I was wrong and Adams was correct (or, at least, more correct than I was). I have a PhD in Rhetoric (the art of persuasion) after all. Adams’s only stated qualifications came from a hypnosis class he took and a general life-long interest in persuasion.
This served as my first hint at where to go. Adams constantly touts his study of hypnosis as the main reason he sees Trump as a “Master Persuader.” In Win Bigly, he discusses his hypnosis studies in some detail, but still glosses over most of it, merely stating that studying hypnosis gives him insight into how to persuasion works.
Well, this move made me think of the brilliant British magician/hypnotist/mentalist Derren Brown. In his book, Tricks of the Mind, he discusses his experiences with hypnosis, especially as a famous hypnotist himself. He concludes, surprisingly, that hypnosis doesn’t really exist, despite some famous examples of him hypnotizing people. He believes hypnosis really just comes from a dominant personality asserting itself on a less dominant one, essentially persuading the other person to behave a certain way or believe a certain thing. The hypnotic state comes more from someone assuming a passive, submissive role (even if they don’t realize it) rather than any special hypnotic state of mind.
While Adams does seem to think there is a true hypnotic state, much of what he says about hypnosis fits Brown’s ideas: certain people don’t make good candidates, the person must be willing to undergo the process, and the hypnotist has to project utter confidence and authority.
So, how did this line of reasoning get me to Socrates? Through Gorgias, an ancient Greek Sophist who dueled (verbally) with Socrates, of course! My mind went from the idea of “hypnosis as persuasion” to “persuasion as magic” that comes from Gorgias. The Sophist Gorgias gave a speech (“The Encomium of Helen”—the title refers to Helen of Troy) where he argued that persuasive words were like magic or powerful drugs, that they could steal someone’s free will and cause them
to behave in ways they normally wouldn’t—and they couldn’t be blamed for their behavior because the power of persuasion compelled them to act that way.
Sophistic Sophists who Sophistically Sophistize
So, who was Gorgias? A Sophist, as stated above. Who were the Sophists and how did they relate to Socrates? Well, basically all our modern ideas about rhetoric and persuasion fall into either a Socratic or Sophistic camp. You might be familiar with the term “sophistry,” but if not, the Oxford English Dictionary defines it as the “employment of arguments which are intentionally deceptive.” We get that term from the Sophists, though it’s a bit unfair and mostly due to how Plato portrays them in his Socratic dialogues.
The Sophists—the term itself comes from the Greek word for wisdom; compare how “philosopher” comes from “love” (philo) and “wisdom” (soph) to mean “lover of wisdom”—were traveling teachers in ancient Greece who taught people how to speak and argue well in exchange for money. Basically traveling tutors, they were very popular in city-states such as Athens, because in order to fully participate in society as a citizen, you needed to know how to speak well in public and persuade others, since all citizens (at least in theory) debated about and voted on all issues. The Sophists would travel to an area, give speeches to show off their skill, and then take on paying students.
The main Socratic criticism of them came from the claim that they merely taught outward forms of persuasion, with little care about the underlying truth. A common phrase used to describe them went something like “They make the weaker argument seem the stronger.” One ancient play (that calls Socrates a Sophist, despite his opposition to them in Plato’s dialogues), The Clouds, deals with a son whose Sophistic studies ruins him morally, features a scene where personifications of the Weaker Argument (incorrect) debates the Stronger Argument (the correct) and the Weaker Argument wins through the use of persuasive moves that were clearly logically invalid and ethically questionable—yet were still creatively effective.
In Plato’s dialogue The Sophist, a character named The Eleatic Stranger spends much of the dialogue trying to define Sophistry, and finally comes up with a somewhat complicated definition; the gist of it is that Sophistry imitates real life but is hollow, empty, insincere, and uninformed. In the Gorgias, Gorgias himself admits this, somewhat.
Now, it’s hard to say how much of what the character “Gorgias” in the Gorgias resembles the actual Gorgias (try not to get lost in all the Gorgias-ing here), but when compared with the fragments of writing we do have from and about Gorgias in other sources, it appears that Plato at least tried to be fair. In the dialogue, Socrates confronts Gorgias and two of his disciples, Polus and Calicles.
Socrates questions Gorgias about rhetoric, and Gorgias admits rhetoric could be used for immoral ends, though he defends rhetoric by likening it to wrestling; sure, someone could learn wrestling so he could go beat up other people more effectively, but that’s not the teacher’s fault. If a student of Gorgias uses rhetoric for unethical or immoral ends, the teacher shouldn’t be blamed. Gorgias hopes his students would be ethical and moral, but it is not something he teaches. He just teaches persuasion.
Socrates argues that studying rhetoric seems unnecessary, because if you are an expert in something, you should already be persuasive about that subject. Gorgias makes the bold claim that he could win a debate with a doctor, despite knowing nothing about medicine. (And now we start getting closer to Adams’s Master Persuader hypothesis, that we live in a world where facts don’t really matter, all that matters is persuasive power.)
Socrates declares this means rhetoric makes you persuasive to ignorant audiences. (Adams argues that we’re all basically ignorant on most issues, so persuasive ability matters more than knowledge.) Rhetoric thus functions like cosmetics that makes a sickly person look well, instead of exercise that makes a person healthy, or like “cookery” that makes unhealthy food attractive vs. actually making healthy, free-range, organic, gluten-free, paleo-friendly meals (okay—Socrates make not have used any of the qualifiers between “healthy” and “meals”).
Of course, Gorgias’s hope that his students would still behave ethically and morally with their persuasive power seem somewhat dashed when his disciple Polus interjects. According to Polus, rhetoric is awesome because it gives you the power to become a tyrant. With enough persuasive ability, you can rule over people and get them to follow your will.
In the end, Socrates argues that rhetoric, the study of persuasion, is bankrupt in several senses. It has no real subject matter, since the topics must always come from some other area. It preys on the ignorant by dazzling them with grand eloquence while teaching them nothing, and its practitioners often misuse it to gain power. Rhetoricians tell people what they want to hear, rather than what they need to hear, and this corrupts both the audience and the persuader. (Compare this with Scott Adams’s claim that the most persuasive move is to play on the fears of an audience, regardless of whether those fears have any real basis.)
In a later dialogue, the Phaedrus, Socrates takes a slightly more positive view of rhetoric. While still feeling people too easily and too often misuse it to flatter others and tell them what they want to hear, a more noble version of rhetoric is possible. If used to enlighten others and improve the soul, persuasive techniques serve a useful and important function. The true rhetorician will study people and learn not just how to persuade them, but what they need to become better, improving their souls and enriching their lives.
And, while this is a somewhat simplistic binary, these two versions of rhetoric, the Sophistic (where only persuasive ability matters) and the Socratic (where the moral and ethical improvement of the audience matters most) has dominated and controlled discussion of rhetoric and persuasion since those times (at least in Western culture). When you hear people complain about “mere rhetoric” or declare “let’s cut through all the rhetoric,” they implicitly refer to the idea of rhetoric as sophistry—that persuasion consists of verbal tricks, clever writing, or other obfuscations of the actual truth. However, the basic academic requirement at pretty much every college or university in Western civilization of a basic writing class (usually with a focus on persuasive writing) is something of an artifact from the Socratic ideal, the idea that good people need to learn persuasion because otherwise only evil people will learn effective persuasion and thus corrupt society.
Theorists of rhetoric—from Aristotle to Cicero to St. Augustine, from Thomas Wilson to Thomas Hobbes to Hugh Blair, from Richard Weaver to Kenneth Burke to Wayne Booth—have all struggled with this dichotomy (don’t worry if you don’t recognize those names—consider them good names to Google if you want to learn more). St. Augustine, after converting to Christianity, briefly toyed with abandoning the pagan (and thus likely corrupt) arts of rhetoric he had learned as a youth, but he ultimately decided to use rhetoric to help spread the truth of Christ’s work, so he developed a type of rhetoric for sermons (known as homiletics).
Thomas Hobbes preferred a short, simple, direct style rather than using the florid, elaborate language favored by many others. Both operated somewhat Socratically, using principles of persuasion to argue for ideas they felt would improve people and society, rather than merely for show or pleasure. However, at the same time, many manuals of rhetoric all through the ages basically taught Sophistic principles (while paying some lip service to Socratic ideals) of florid eloquence and the masterful use of tropes and figures to move and delight audiences, regardless of subject matter.
Okay, Okay—What about Trump and Scott Adams?
I mentioned Adams in a few remarks above, mostly to make sure we didn’t forget what this chapter is really about. So, where does Trump and Adams’s “Master Persuader” hypothesis fit?
For those knowledgeable about the Sophists, it might seem that Trump doesn’t fit. Regardless of whether you support Trump or not, his extemporaneous speech and social media postings don’t fit the eloquent phrasings and obsession with style
that the Sophists had. However, the Sophists used that style because eloquent speeches with well-constructed sentences and phrases proved persuasive to ancient Greek audiences.
Today, that kind of eloquence is only persuasive to certain audiences. Trump’s brand of “eloquence” (if we can call it that) seems fairly persuasive to a very different audience. Often those who support Trump actually like his style, claiming it makes Trump seem down to earth, plain spoken, normal, and otherwise in touch with the common folk.
You don’t have to persuade everyone, just enough people. Aristotle (the student of Plato, who studied under and wrote about Socrates) defined rhetoric as the art of finding the available means of persuasion in a given instance. For some situations and audiences, flowery eloquence and grand styles work. In others, plain speech and direct styles work. For Trump, doing whatever it was he did worked to win the Electoral College.
Scott Adams’s main contention is that humans are not rational beings. He uses the term “moist robots” for humans, meaning that we basically are biologically programmed to act irrationally, but that someone with the right persuasive skill set can reprogram people, re-wiring them to change beliefs and behaviors. He’s using scientific terminology, but Adams is making the same argument as Gorgias: the right set of words—a programming code or a magic spell—can rewire a person, robbing them of free will.
In Win Bigly, Adams cites several scientific studies, from psychology to neuroscience, to make his case, and he seems to be mostly right. As Adams often states, we like to think we’re rational, but we very rarely are. This idea bothered Socrates, because he felt the Sophists took advantage of our irrational natures. Socrates wanted to use rhetoric to help humans become more rational, whereas the Sophists basically decided to “go with it,” embrace irrationality if that’s what it took to “win” the argument. Adams, likewise, isn’t bothered by our irrational ways because he feels that’s just how we are and we need to learn to live with it.