M: Oh look, this isn’t an argument.
A: Yes it is.
M: No it isn’t. It’s just contradiction.
A: No it isn’t.
M: It is!
A: It is not.
M: Look, you just contradicted me.
A: I did not.
M: Oh, you did!
A: No, no, no.
M: You did just then.
A: Nonsense!
M: Oh, this is futile!
A: No it isn’t.
Similarly, there is no way to reach a successful conclusion to an exchange that goes:
“That’s a fallacy.”
“No it isn’t.”
“Yes it is. Look, your premise doesn’t lead to your conclusion.”
“Yes it does.”
TRY THIS WITH A MORON
Again, if the two of you are alone, walk away. If you have an audience, consider throwing the fallacy back at your opponent. “I see. Purple is a fruit. So, since your skin is tan, that makes you a pair of khakis.”
Anyone who had a younger sibling during childhood has had bitter experience with the rhetorical foul of stupidity. When you find yourself back in the realm of the inarguable, get out of there. Or if you’re four years old, try really hard not to hit him. Not only is that a foul, the kid could grow bigger than you. Besides, if you’re reading this at the age of four, you’re probably much, much smarter.
Or maybe you didn’t have a younger sibling. Instead you could simply watch a rerun of the third presidential debate in 2016. Donald Trump said Russian president Vladimir Putin had no respect for Hillary Clinton. She shot back: “That’s because he’d rather have a puppet as president.”
TRUMP: No puppet! No puppet!
CLINTON: It’s pretty clear you won’t admit—
TRUMP: You’re the puppet. No, you’re the puppet!
Mature lovers of formal debate were saddened by this exchange. I went and ordered a T-shirt that read, “You’re the Puppet.”
Foul: Truthiness
I saved this one for last because it’s the foulest of the foul. The comedian Stephen Colbert came up with the term truthiness to describe our tendency to believe only those “facts” that feel right. Instead of relying on such boring, outdated sources of truth as journalism, science, or statistics, we trust only what feels truthy.
Meanings
Truthy actually appears in the Oxford English Dictionary as an old term that spawned another old term: truthiness. In other words, Stephen Colbert didn’t originate it.
Take climate change. The data couldn’t be clearer: the Earth warmed at least one and a half degrees between 1880 and 2012, and the warming has continued. The warmest years on record are, in order of the hottest to less hot, 2016, 2019, 2015, 2017, and 2018. The data for these facts come from thousands of instruments measuring ocean and land temperatures and funded by a diverse set of government and private organizations. Ninety-seven percent of all “actively publishing” climate scientists—meaning actual scientists who conduct research—say that the warming over the past century is caused mostly by humans, according to NASA. And yet, almost half of Americans feel no urgency to do anything about the problem right now. We lead the world in climate-change denial. When I have written about this subject in the past, I’ve been accused of being left-wing. But if a majority of conservatives believed in climate change and a majority of liberals didn’t, people on the left would call me right-wing for espousing the same “belief.”
A near-unanimity of epidemiologists, physicians, and pharmacists say that immunizing children against diseases like polio, whooping cough, diphtheria, and tetanus greatly increases the chance of kids growing to adulthood. Yet vaccination rates have dropped in areas around the world, including some affluent communities in the United States. I’ve talked to frustrated pediatricians who meet vaccination-resistant parents. The parents don’t lack facts. They come in with armfuls of printouts from the Web, full of horrifying anecdotes, theories, rumors, and data from various nonstandard sources. Not anything like what the medical community would call true facts but alternative facts. The truthiness of some parental networks has caused local populations to dip below what physicians charmingly call “herd immunity”—the minimum rate of vaccinations that prevent disease outbreaks.
Here’s a history lesson. There was a time, not that long ago—including my childhood—when science wasn’t something to “believe” in. Science was science.
We have developed a similarly truthy attitude toward news and trends. A single incident that confirms our belief is truthy. A long-term trend, backed by carefully gathered statistics, is untruthy, unless it backs up our opinion. A few years ago I was having dinner with several women on a restaurant patio in Dallas, Texas. Over our margaritas and burritos, one of the women mentioned that a little girl had been kidnapped in Oklahoma while walking to school.
They all shook their heads. “Her parents share some of the blame,” one of them said.
I made the mistake of mentioning that crime is actually much lower than it was when I was a kid in the sixties. Not one of them believed me. The story on cable news trumped any stupid statistic I could throw at them.
Truthiness washes over the truth on every politicized topic, and it infects both the left and the right. Try telling an anti-gun voter that gun homicides have declined by half since the 1990s. (This comes not from the National Rifle Association but from the Pew Research Center.) Try telling a gun nut that if his gun kills someone, the odds are that it will be aimed at his own head. (Two-thirds of gun deaths are suicides, according to the Centers for Disease Control.)
Okay, now I’m starting to sound more like the dreaded news media than a trustworthy rhetorical manipulator. But I had a reason for bringing up climate change, crime, and guns. Earlier in the book we talked about Aristotle’s notion that logos follows the audience’s beliefs and expectations. If everyone understands science and we all place some trust in a scientific consensus, then you have a bigger audience believing and expecting the same things. And you can persuade that audience with actual facts. The problem with truthiness is that its logos is based on pathos, on how people feel about the facts. We try on reality the way we try on clothing, to see if it matches our political complexion.
The good news for us manipulators is, truthiness gives us open season. If our ethos is strong enough, we can make up facts as we go!
The bad news is, if a significant number of Americans don’t believe the “media” (of which I guess my writer’s cabin and I form a vital part), or scientists, or statistics, or any authority whose opinion isn’t truthy, then all we have left is rhetoric. Which makes the persuasion detectors in Chapter 17 all the more important.
The Tools
You now have the fallacies of formal logic, and the rhetorical argument breakers. Strangely enough, I came up with seven deadly sins—plus one. But these rhetorical fouls aren’t “wrong,” since rhetoric has no real rules. They simply make deliberative argument impossible; that’s why I call them fouls, in the sense that they lie out of bounds. The game cannot continue until you’re back in bounds. (Grant me the annoying sports metaphor; I haven’t used one in a while.) Rhetoric allows occasional sins against logic, but it can’t argue the inarguable.
The eight rhetorical out-of-bounds include
Switching tenses away from the future.
Inflexible insistence on the rules—using the voice of God, sticking to your guns, refusing to hear the other side.
Humiliation—an argument that sets out only to debase someone, not to make a choice.
Innuendo.
Threats.
Nasty language or signs, like flipping the bird.
Utter stupidity
.
Truthiness—the refusal to believe anything that fails to match your opinion.
17. Know Whom to Trust
PERSUASION DETECTORS
Use ethos to spot manipulation
Virtue is a state of character concerned with choice, lying in a mean.
—ARISTOTLE
You want the truth! You can’t handle the truth! No truth-handler you! Bah! I deride your truth-handling abilities! —THE SIMPSONS
I wish I had been with my mother when she bought a pool table. It was the single worst gift she could have given my father. He hated playing games and was something of a cheapskate. He never wasted time knocking balls around; his idea of fun was to invent things. Our basement—the only room that could fit a pool table—was the envy of the neighborhood kids. It had fake palm trees, a volcano that lit up, and a waterfall that splashed into a pool with real goldfish. The place also flooded regularly and smelled like a sponge.
Mom found the table in a department store when she went shopping for a shirt to give Dad on Father’s Day. She got the pool table instead, and presented it to him after dinner, leading him down the steep basement steps with his eyes closed. The pool table sat where the ping-pong table used to be.
MOM: Surprise!
DAD: What the hell is that doing there?
MOM: It’s a pool table.
I considered it the best Father’s Day ever. It was like reality TV. They weren’t really fighting. They were just mutually bewildered. I sat on the basement steps, enjoying the exchange.
DAD: Well, I guess I could turn it into something.
MOM: You’re supposed to play pool on it!
DAD: I don’t play pool.
The table was gone the next day.
TRY THIS ON SALESPEOPLE
Doctors insist that the many gifts pharma salespeople bring have no influence on them; in reality, a doctor who receives gifts is four times more likely to prescribe that salesperson’s drug. The technique works like this: the salesperson makes it clear she expects nothing in exchange for the gift—just friendship. The doctor thinks he separates the gifts from his drug decisions, but his relationship with the salesperson makes him more easily persuaded by her “information.” Do you receive gifts at work? Don’t worry about the gifts. Worry about the relationship. Refuse to discuss business face-to-face with any gift giver. Insist on getting all information by mail—snail mail and email. Those media are more rational than face-to-face, as you’ll see in a later chapter.
Why she got it in the first place remained a mystery for years. The salesman must have been brilliant. He worked with practically nothing but Mom’s vulnerability to a good pitch. She was a bit of a sucker, invariably agreeing with the person who went last in an argument. But Mom wasn’t stupid, nor was she an impulsive shopper. Years later, I asked her what had happened.
MOM: There was something about that salesman. He made me think that a pool table would be perfect for your dad.
ME: But he didn’t know Dad.
MOM: Well, he seemed to.
That sounds like some sort of ethos technique, so we return to its basic principles: disinterest, virtue, and practical wisdom. The same ethical tools that a persuader uses to sway his audience can serve you as a ready-made gauge of trustworthiness.
Mom’s Heart’s Desire
The salesman must have laid some major disinterest on Mom. According to the rhetorician Kenneth Burke, ethos starts with what the audience needs. The persuader makes you believe he can meet those needs better than you or anyone else. Advertisers and salespeople have a reputation for creating needs where they do not exist, but that is rarely true in a literal sense. In rhetoric, you start with needs; the manipulation part happens when the salesman or marketer makes you believe that his solution will meet those needs. A man responds to a beautiful woman in a car ad out of his need for—well, out of his need for a woman. But that was hardly the case with my mom. She simply wanted to please my dad. And she surely knew that a pool table wasn’t the ticket.
ME: What exactly did the salesman say?
MOM: He didn’t say anything particular that I can remember. He was very well-spoken, though. I do remember that.
ME: You mean good-looking?
MOM: No, I mean well-spoken.
ME: So you don’t remember what he said, but you liked the way he said it?
MOM: I don’t know. Why are you asking me all this? I felt an instant connection, as if he really understood what I wanted.
TRY THIS AT WORK
Watch the best presenters in your company. What material do they start with—which audience resources do they use? If the talk is mostly rational, the foundation will be what the audience knows and believes. If it’s emotional, the pitch will start with what the audience expects. If the speaker relies on her character, you’ll hear about the audience’s needs, and how she can meet them.
Similarly, branding is an ethos strategy, and it relies on needs.
Now we get to the bottom of it. Because the salesman understood what Mom wanted, he had no need to know what Dad wanted. He knew Mom needed to feel a connection with a person, such as a well-spoken, polite salesman who seemed to understand her. They connected because he made her feel as if the two were Father’s Day collaborators, sharing the same interest. My guess is, Dad was forgotten for a while. I imagine that eventually the salesman delivered the classic line “I have just the thing.” He seemed to sympathize with her needs, and he knew how to meet them. So how do you detect when this happens to you?
Here’s a secret that applies to all kinds of rhetorical defense: look for the disconnects. You already saw how logical short circuits can help you spot fallacies. When somebody tries to manipulate you through disinterest, look for a short circuit between his needs and yours (or, if you’re buying a gift, your needs and the recipient’s). There was a three-way disconnect over the pool table: what Mom wanted and what Dad wanted were very different, and what the salesman wanted differed from what Mom and Dad each wanted. The salesman used his temporary warm relationship with Mom to cover up the disconnects in their needs. He didn’t give a fig about the commission! He just wanted to make Mom—I mean Dad—happy.
Argument Tool
THE DISINTEREST DISCONNECT: Is there a gap between your interests and the persuader’s? Then don’t trust without verifying.
Disinterest can simply be the merger of your needs and the persuader’s. Suppose the salesman were my mother’s cousin. Then the two may indeed share the same needs—the guy might actually be disinterested. If he were my mother’s ex-boyfriend, however, then things could get complicated. His interests might be split among making my mother happy, earning a commission, and getting revenge on my father.
TRY THIS BEFORE YOU VOTE
Cicero would ask, “Cui bono?” meaning, “Who benefits?” In modern political terms, the question is: Does the politician go after votes or money? Access her voting record on votesmart.org, and get her list of campaign donors from fec.gov. Does she consistently vote her donors’ interest? Is she bucking public opinion when she does? Then when she says, “I don’t just vote the opinion polls,” what she really means is, “I prefer special interests to voters’ interests.” I’d vote for her opponent.
Disinterest is one of the easiest rhetorical tricks to spot, because most of the time, interest lies close to the surface of a choice. Politicians will often couch brazen selfishness in terms of disinterest. South Dakota senator John Thune voted for a project that benefited a railroad he had lobbied for before he was elected. Thune defended himself piously:
THUNE: If you start banning elected officials from using their working knowledge on behalf of constituents, I think it would greatly erode our representative form of government.
You can see a red herring here: a
politician accused of ethical sins will speak out against theoretical legislation that would ban it. You can also see the ethos disconnect. It is hard to know whether the railroad extension is good for the nation, but we certainly see where Thune’s interest lies. He brazenly fails the disinterest test, and gets away with it. A constituency ignorant of the meaning of “disinterest” will hardly make it a political issue.
TRY THIS WHEN YOU BUY A CAR
Ask for references. While she makes you wait for the contract to be drawn up, call them—or pretend to. If she doesn’t have a list ready to hand, walk away. A salesperson who maintains contact with customers has an interest in long-term profit that helps to balance out the desire for a quick buck.
Rhetorical defense is all about the disconnects. If someone pitches a logical argument, you do a quick mental inspection to find the short circuits in the argument’s examples or commonplaces and the choices. If the argument lays some heavy disinterest on you—your salesman acts as if his only desire is to make you or your loved ones happy—then look for the disconnects between his needs and yours.
If my mother had been more rhetorically inclined, she could have spotted the salesman’s goodwill disconnect and called him on it. Let’s start their conversation over.
Thank You for Arguing (Revised and Updated) Page 24