Argument Tool
EMULATION: Provide only the kind of role model your audience already admires.
While patriotism often gets triggered by something negative—you get patriotic when your group is under threat—emulation works the opposite way. We find it hard to see emulation as an emotion; the ancients were much bigger on imitation than we are. But emulation makes sense in modern times when we view it as an emotional response to a role model. A kid sees the Three Stooges on cable and gives his younger brother a noogie: that’s emulation. It also comes out of our atavistic need to belong.
TRY THIS WITH PUBLICATIONS
If you publish a newsletter or run a website that has reader participation, edit brutally. People will imitate what they see, and soon you won’t have to edit much at all. I learned this in magazines: when readers see short, witty letters to the editor, they write short, witty letters.
Unfortunately, parents and children tend to choose different role models. For emulation to work, you need to start with a model the audience already looks up to, which is not always easy. A mother wants her daughter to emulate the head of the honor society, while the daughter dreams of wearing a leather jacket and riding a Suzuki motorcycle like her older cousin. Imagine a nineteen-year-old who wants to see the world, views a documentary about the World Trade Center attack, and watches his high school quarterback enlist; that kid will be especially susceptible to an army recruiter.
All of the most persuasive emotions—humor, anger, patriotism, and emulation—work best in a group setting. TV sitcoms invented that marvel of rhetorical humor, the laugh track, for this very reason. Aristotle noted that a big crowd expects big drama in a speech.
When your audience is only one person, though, you had better know your logos. And you don’t want to overplay your emotions.
That goes for announcing them as well as projecting them. Emotions should sneak up on people, especially if your audience doesn’t already feel them. For that reason, never announce the mood you foster. Anyone who has ever told a joke knows not to proclaim its humor in advance. As they say in writing classes, show, don’t tell. Yet people still hype emotions before they introduce them. My son was guilty of this just the other day, when he came home in a bad mood and found me in a perverse one.
Argument Tool
THE UNANNOUNCED EMOTION: Don’t advertise a mood. Invoke it.
GEORGE: I heard something today that’s going to make you really mad.
ME: No it won’t.
GEORGE: How do you know?
ME: It won’t make me mad if I’m prepared for it.
GEORGE: Will you let me talk?
ME: Sure. I just won’t get mad.
GEORGE: Dad, just shut up!
DOROTHY SR.: Don’t speak to your father that way.
By giving me advance warning of an emotion, George inoculated me from it. But he was unprepared to get mad himself. It’s amazing how much fun it is to manipulate emotions.
Argument Tool
NOSTALGIA: Promise a return to a perfect past.
Good Old Nostalgia
A more pernicious emotion is nostalgia. It played a huge factor in the 2016 election and in the United Kingdom’s Brexit vote. Trump’s “Make America Great Again” recalled some superior past he could bring the nation back to. The “leave” side of the UK’s vote over the European Union used the slogan “Take Back Control,” implying that something—a vague notion of power—had been lost. Nostalgia is a yearning for a lost past. It shines a rosy light on days gone by, while gently smothering all the evils of that same past. While there’s nothing wrong with fond memories, nostalgia can lead to genuine delusion. This makes it a first-rate dark-art tool of rhetoric.
No institution does nostalgia better than a college or university, where students are eternally young, the lawns are freshly mown for alumni, and the beer on St. Patrick’s Day is ever green. My first visit to Dartmouth College, when I came up to be interviewed for a job, happened to be during homecoming. Students had built a huge bonfire, and dignitaries got up to give speeches. One prominent alum, his nose bright red from the cold, the emotion, and possibly some other cause, got notably nostalgic. “I just want all you young people to know,” he said, “that these four years at Dartmouth will be the happiest years of your life.”
A young man standing next to me gave a sigh that could be heard over the crowd. I imagined him having problems with his love life, his finances, suffering sleepless nights wondering what he was supposed to do with his life. Maybe someday advancing age and a fine bourbon will erase all memory of his troubles and turn that student’s years at Dartmouth a golden shade. The memory will be false, of course. But nostalgia will do him, and the college’s fundraisers, good.
TRY THIS WITH A PARENT
To get an oldster to let you stay out longer, remind him of his own not-so-misspent youth, when the world was full of promise. Then show him statistics proving (as they do) that the crime rate is much lower than it was when he was a kid. Remind him further that you’re better behaved and get better grades—but only if that’s true.
It’s no accident that nostalgic campus events are called “homecoming.” A Swiss doctor coined the term nostalgia to describe an ailment suffered by seventeenth-century Swiss mercenaries when they were far from home. The word comes from the Greek nostos (to return home) and algia (pain). The good doctor determined the cause to be “the quite continuous vibration of animal spirits through those fibers of the middle brain in which impressed traces of ideas of the Fatherland still cling.”
When it comes to current politics, his description of the disease seems familiar. Many citizens vibrate with ideas of the nation’s glorious past—whenever that was. The problem is, nostalgia not only distorts reality, turning the college years into halcyon days and the sixties South into Mayberry; the emotion also focuses on the wrong tense. As Aristotle said, political speech has to do with the future, not the past. Politics should be about choices, and choices deal with the problems we face now that affect our lives to come. As the wise man said, you can’t go home again.
On the other hand, there is one way to use nostalgia for deliberative argument: call up the future past. One of my clients, an aerospace company, hired me to construct arguments spurring excitement about the space program. Among the arguments I proposed was to remind Americans of the era when we all couldn’t wait for the future. Flying cars, automatic doors, TV wristwatches, and going to the Moon: all of these things lay agonizingly in the years and decades to come. For every kid, the future couldn’t come soon enough. A revived space program, with its asteroid mining and zero-gravity factories and hotels, could bring back the future the way it used to be. You know, the one we couldn’t wait for.
Say It with Flower Porn
Your newfound pathetic tools aren’t all about the pleasure of emotional torture. Emotion also has to do with seduction. Emotions let you change a person’s mood, which in turn greases the pathetic wheels to help change someone’s mind—the spoonful of sugar that sweetens your logic. Emotional tools can also help you achieve the hardest goal of all, getting action. It’s what gets the horse to drink.
Argument Tool
DESIRE: Exploiting your audience’s lust for something (flowers, bikinis) can push them from changing their mind to taking action.
So let’s introduce one more tool: desire. Cruder souls over the centuries have called it “lust.” And for good reason. Put a woman in a bikini next to some software display at a trade show, and a great many heterosexual men will lust after…not the software, necessarily. If that woman happens to be the developer who wrote the code to that software, then we may be employing just the right kind of desire. The point is to apply the emotion to the action you want—in this case, buying the product.
Desire isn’t all about sex, as we discussed before. Some gardeners lus
t after the perfect deep-purple rose. My wife loves a BBC mystery series called Rosemary and Thyme, which has to do with gardening and crime. (Honestly, I’m not sure what it’s about. That show puts me to sleep within five minutes.) One thing I love about the series: Dorothy calls it “flower porn.” Just hearing my straight-arrow, upright, sweet wife talking about watching “porn” makes me smile.
Which is exactly the point here. People have different desires, and different desires apply to different actions. But let’s stick with flowers for a moment. A couple of weeks ago, I had some airline miles to use up before they expired. Snow already sprinkled the ground, the days had grown depressingly short, and a pre-holiday trip seemed like a good idea. “Let’s go to Hawaii,” I said. Neither of us had ever been.
“Who will take care of things at home?”
“The kids. They’re capable.” I threw in one of Dorothy’s favorite topics: letting nothing go to waste. “The miles will go to waste if we don’t use them.”
This swayed her just enough to change her mind about the sin of indulging in a winter vacation.
“Let me think about it,” she said. Translation: Let me think about a nice way to say no.
We were at an impasse. That’s French for “dead end,” but I prefer to think of it as a gap—a bridgeable gap. That’s the space between changing someone’s mind and getting her to act. And what’s the best way to bridge the gap between mind and action? Dangle the carrot of desire and watch your audience move.
In Dorothy’s case, the obvious carrot was her desire for flowers—a desire that blooms into sheer lust in wintertime. Hawaii and flowers…the carrot was sitting right there.
That evening during cocktails I showed her pictures on her iPad of the flowers at the Maui resort I’d chosen. “Hibiscus,” I said, smacking my lips. “Amaryllis. Bird of paradise. Bougainvillea.” I’d memorized a list from Wikipedia, hoping she didn’t notice the alphabetical order.
“Stop.” But she was smiling.
“Fuchsia,” I breathed. “Gardenia. Uh, hibiscus…” Had I said hibiscus already?
“Maui,” she said. And I knew I had her.
“I’ll book it tomorrow.”
Seduction achieved. I’d taken the gap and bridged it with desire. I’d grabbed the carrot and dangled it right out there. (We had a great time, by the way. Flowers galore.)
The same technique works in just about every human endeavor, including business. Much of my persuasion consulting work has to do with finding the gaps and filling them with desire. Take one of my former clients, Beachbody, makers of P90X and Insanity. A customer buys a workout program. Now what? Beachbody wants the customer to complete the program, which makes her much more likely to buy more of the company’s nutrition products, workout DVDs, and gear. That’s a persuasion gap. What’s the desire to dangle? I helped Beachbody increase completion rates by studying customer desires: a hottie in the mirror, a man she wants to attract, an event like a wedding where she wants to shine.
Suppose that customer completes the program but balks at buying another. That’s the next persuasion gap, to be filled with the same or a different desire. It could be the customer’s dream to run in a charity 5K. But that’s not exactly a lust, is it? Maybe her true desire is to be a superhero, the hyperfit woman who rescues the needy through her athletic awesomeness.
Say she buys another program and successfully runs the 5K. Now she’s a fan of the product—but Beachbody has a system in which customers become “coaches,” selling products for commission. How can they persuade this customer to join that program and start selling for them? Another gap, to be bridged with a different desire. Maybe she lusts for independence, the chance to work at home. Maybe she lusts after a new car.
Everyone lusts after something. If you can suss out the desire, exploit the lust, dangle the carrot, then you can bridge the gap. Back in the introduction, I mentioned the car salesman who sold me a lemon by showing me P. T. Barnum’s grave. He spotted my desire from the get-go: I lust after American history the way Dorothy desires botany. And so, with the magic of rhetoric, the salesman turned P. T. Barnum into a carrot.
The Tools
Rhetorical tradition has it that when Cicero spoke, people said, “What a great speech.” When the fiery Athenian orator Demosthenes spoke, people said, “Let’s march!” The Greek spoke more pathetically than the Roman; emotion makes the difference between agreement and commitment. Use the tools of pathos to rouse your audience to action.
Belief. To stir an emotion, use what your audience has experienced and what it expects to happen.
Storytelling. A well-told narrative gives the audience a virtual experience—especially if it calls on their own past experiences, and if you tell it in the first person.
Volume control. You can often portray an emotion most effectively by underplaying it, in an apparent struggle to contain yourself. Even screaming demagogues like Hitler almost invariably began a speech quietly and then turned up the volume.
Simple speech. Don’t use fancy language when you get emotional. Ornate speech belongs to ethos and logos; plain speaking is more pathetic.
Anger often arises from a sense of belittlement. You can direct an audience’s fury at someone by portraying his lack of concern over their problems.
Patriotism attaches a choice or action to the audience’s sense of group identity. You can stir it by comparing the audience with a successful rival.
Emulation responds emotionally to a role model. The greater your ethos, the more the audience will imitate you.
Unannounced emotion lets you sneak up on your audience’s mood. Don’t tip them off in advance. They’ll resist the emotion.
Nostalgia uses a yearning for the past—especially for those days when the future seemed bright.
Desire or lust helps get your audience to move from decision to action.
Persuasion gaps. First, find them. Then fill them with desire.
10. Turn the Volume Down
THE SCIENTIST’S LIE
Transforming anger into receptiveness
Even if you persuade me, you won’t persuade me. —ARISTOPHANES
This talk of pathetic manipulation will make the argument-squeamish uncomfortable. If only the world could follow formulas and conduct its affairs scientifically. But in actuality, even scientists regularly employ a pathetic trick. Their writing uses a millennia-old rhetorical device to calm the passions, the passive voice. “The experiment was conducted upon thirty domestic rhesus monkeys,” says the researcher who did the experiment on monkeys. When you think about it, scientists seem almost childish pretending their work somehow just happened. They behave like the golfer who looks away innocently as he nudges his ball toward the hole. The technique works to calm the emotions because it disembodies the speaker and removes the actors, as if whatever happened was what insurers piously call an “act of God.” Of course, it also can serve as a political subterfuge.
Argument Tool
THE PASSIVE VOICE: Pretend that things happened on their own. You didn’t track mud across the living room floor. Mud was tracked across the living room floor.
TRY THIS WITH AN ANGRY BOARD
The passive voice can help you describe wrongdoing by a friend or coworker while calming the audience: “The account got fouled up,” not “Marcia fouled up the account.” Just don’t use the passive voice when you are the culprit. If your audience sees through your ruse, you want them thinking you’re just defending a coworker, not weaseling out of something yourself. Elected officials who say “Mistakes were made” don’t win votes.
The passive voice encourages passivity. It calms the audience, which makes it a great pathos trick. That hardly argues for its users’ objectivity. Still, you have to applaud scientists for at le
ast trying to be objective. Science determines facts, and emotions would only get in the way. But as we have seen, deliberative argument has a touchier relationship with the facts. When President Obama talked about drones killing civilians in the Middle East, he took a rhetorical sidestep into the passive voice: “There is no doubt that civilians were killed that shouldn’t have been.” Similarly, Donald Trump liked to use the same voice in spreading rumors about a Mexican American federal judge: “Questions were raised,” Trump said, about the judge’s ability to rule in a lawsuit against Trump.
While the passive voice inserts a blank space where responsibility should lie, the technique can serve to take emotion out of an argument. After all, it’s hard to get mad at nobody. But there are better, more active ways to lower the anger.
Homer Battles the Thinker
Suppose your audience has already worked itself into an emotional state, and that state happens to be raging anger—against you. The passive voice may not be enough here. At this point I need to stray a couple of thousand years beyond Aristotle to wield a tool from modern neuroscience. It’s called comfort. You may have heard of it. Scientists call it “cognitive ease.” It’s that happy state where the brain is on autopilot and your audience is most open to your persuasion, least likely to challenge you, and, most important, most likely to calm down.
Thank You for Arguing (Revised and Updated) Page 12