Who Knows?

             You’re so pathetic. It’s a compliment. Really. Let's face it. If someone calls me pathetic, I get the urge to gauge their eyeballs out so they can see for themselves just how pathetic I am. I am not pathetic. Or at least in today’s terms I’m not. And yet, the word “pathetic” in argumentative rhetorical language is actually quite good. It means you manage to invoke certain emotions in other people by the successful use of pathos. Sure, pathos should not be used in the beginning of an argument, but they make for drastic changes in the end.

            Belief is key in pathos. “To stir an emotion, use what your audience has experienced and what it expects to happen.” By appealing to experience, what the audience has felt and is close to, you are heightening the amount of emotion that you can arouse. People react more to things that they relate to. If I were trying to get my friend mad at a certain person, it would be preferable if I didn’t just rant and bicker about how annoying the latter is. Rather, it would be ideal if I could come up with something that my friend could relate to:

            Me: She’s an awful person.

            Friend: Stop being so over-dramatic.

            Me: What? She came up to me during lunch and told be that I was retarded and that I was never going to get anywhere in life.

            Let’s say my friend happens to have a brother who suffers from a severe mental disorder and ergo hates the word “retarted” and anyone who looks down on someone because of such a disease. By saying this, I am appealing to her experience and a cause that is very close to her heart, and so that would be a successful way of riling her up. Just for the sake of clarifying, I would like to say that I hate the word that denotes mental slowness and the example was just a means to make a point.

            Storytelling is also another way that gives the audience a “virtual experience”, and if done well, makes an emotional impact almost as if they where in the actual story. Volume control is also important. It’s better to begin quietly and then turn up the volume almost as if you’re revved up and the topic of your argument is reaching its peak. It slowly builds to make your escalation towards emotion more believable and touching. If you begin outright screaming, then you won’t be able to make emphasis on the important aspects of your speech because everything else is said in the same strong, screaming tone. That’s fine and all, but in small doses. Nobody wants to listen to your ear-bleeding vocal chords pounding words into the fragile air. People are sensitive. People get distracted. If you talk constantly in the same high volume, don’t be surprised if everyone tunes out after the first five minutes.

            Simple speech is also a necessity. Less is more. If my boyfriend (which I don’t have, but that’s beside the point) were to mess up in some way and hurt me, screeching at him, bantering about his carelessness, and ranting in an endless monologue would not help my case. If anything, it would just annoy him or make him tune me out. If I were to, on the other hand, react in a simpler way and subtly demonstrate the pain he caused me, that would invoke his pity and emotion even more:

            Him: What’s the matter?

            Me: I just can’t believe you did that.

            Him: I’m sorry.

            Me: Me too. (And then let a tear gracefully graze my countenance, along with disbelief and pain, of course).

            Is so much more effective than:

            Him: What’s the matter?

            Me: What’s the matter?? I can’t believe you dare even ask that. Do you know how much pain you’ve caused me? Do you understand the meaning of                             trust? Do you? Because it seems to me that you don’t even know the                          meaning of the word. I hope you’re happy.

            Which one makes you actually feel bad for me? The first one. The second one is just downright annoying. Less is more and “plain speaking is more pathetic.” Also, when trying to convince someone to act, always aim for their anger, usually inspired by a sense of belittlement. Patriotism also attaches a choice to the audience’s sense of group identity, and these two are key emotions if you want the audience to take action. Emulation and not warning your audience about the emotion you want them to feel (unannounced emotion) is crucial. Although the former seemed to be quite obvious. Why would you tell someone you want to anger that you will make him or her feel anger? I just don’t see the logic. And if you were to do such a stupid thing and tell a person that you’re going to make them sob with the story you are about to tell them, they will resist that emotion even more. So, just use some common sense and don’t do it.

            Pathos is something we use every day. We might not know it, or we might not even do it intentionally, but we do. We manipulate. Well, technically, when you think about it, this book’s topic is basically the art of manipulation. Yes,  it  teaches the art of educated manipulation, albeit, with all its fancy Aristotle terms of ethos, pathos, and logos, but still. And I love it. Maybe I’m just naturally evil. Maybe I’m planning on rounding up masses to follow me as I lead the world into chaos and I become Queen of Earth after the upcoming apocalypse. Who knows.

            

Helplessness is the New Confidence

            Sometimes, too much confidence can be bad. Don’t get me wrong, high self-esteem and self-love is great and all, and please do keep having faith in your future. But maybe too much confidence, when dealing with ethos, is not entirely helpful. I, for one, happen to hold a huge distrust for people that seem too confident to the point that they breach supercilious. If I’m going to really trust someone and not have to question their values, I have to know that they themselves know they aren’t perfect. They should have good points and all but also display some type of humility, some margin of error. Because no one is perfect. And if a person understands that, it will be so much easier trust them because that means they are realistic, and they deal with obstacles because they expect them. This brings us to Heinrichs’ tools for selfless goodwill: The reluctant conclusion, the personal sacrifice, and dubitation.

            All of these deal with having, or at least pretending to have, your audience’s best interests at heart. The reluctant conclusion uses the idea of “disinterest” as it appears as if you reached your conclusion only because of its overwhelming rightness. This leads people to think about what could be so amazingly correct that you, even though you were so against it before, have changed your mind. It adds importance and more impact to your decision and it gives the reasoning behind your decision more weight. It’s almost if I were to say, after someone talks about Justin Bieber’s failure as an artist,  “Yes, I used to dislike him so much, but then I realized that he has a unique color to his voice and he happens to be a good guitarist.” By saying that I used to dislike Justin Bieber a lot, it makes my reasons all the more powerful because they seem to have managed to change my very own once-concrete opinion.

            The personal sacrifice serves to show that your choice will help the audience more than it will help you, and, even better, “maintain that you’ll actually suffer from the decision.” Play the good Samaritan. Who cares if you’re actually planning to create mass homicide on all of God’s lovely creatures? If you pretend like you’re doing everything for the sake of your people, and it actually kind of ruins your benefits, people will fall for it. In the following situation, I would be using this technique:

            Me: I really think it would be better to study for the SATs. It’s my future on the line. Fine, I kinda feel bad about you going alone to Andres Chia. I’ll go.

            Friend: Aw, thank you! And don’t feel bad about my paying for the ticket. That’s my payment for your awesomeness.

            She called me awesome. Isn’t it great? Okay, that didn’t really happen, but it is totally possible. In this situation, I actually wanted to go to Andres in the first place but I couldn’t come up with the money. By saying I preferred to study for the SATs and that my future depended on it, it’s almost as if going would be bad for me. But then, when my friend offered to pay, which is what I wanted all along, it seems as if I’m the one doing the favor and she’s just being gracious. It worked. But just to clear things up, I would never do such a thing. Trust me. Or can you trust me, when I’m such a master at ethos? Tun, tun, tun. And the plot thickens.

            The last tool Heinrichs mentions is dubitatio. Just saying it an Italian accent is enough for me. But there’s more to it. Dubitatio is what the Romans called the following technique:

            “A speaker might choose to feign helplessness by pretending to be uncertain how to begin or proceed with his speech. This makes him appear, not so much as a skilled master of rhetoric, but as an honest man.”

            The former definition was explained by the Spaniard, Quintilian. Dubitatio basically means dubious. By showing doubt in your rhetorical skill, you seem more vulnerable, more honest. And it is the honest man that earns people’s trust.

            Confidence isn’t always key. Pretending to be disinterested, reluctant, sacrificial, and helpless, you’re appealing to your audience with ethos. You’re showing them a trustworthy character. And that’s what matters. 

Virtues and Jesus

            People can lie with their words. That sounds like a pretty obvious statement, but there’s more to it than the average person might think. Heinrichs starts chapter six with the Isocrates quotation that says, “The argument which is made by a man’s life is of more weight than that which is furnished by words.” Isocrates is referring to character. An audience will truly know a person’s true ideals and valor if said person chooses to die for a cause, while some people who might express certain values via words are more able to mask up their true intentions. In other words, an audience is most likely to trust an argument if the source of the argument seems foolproof and earnest. This brings us to the key of obtaining a strong relationship with your audience. Cicero mentions that for starters, your audience has to be receptive and attentive. This makes sense because in order to even have a chance at making a point and appealing to people, people should want to be there in the first place and willing to hear you out. Your audience should also be well disposed towards you, in other words, like and trust you. All these delve into a deeper technique of ethos.

            Being a good person is not enough. If only Jesus could here that. Here, here. I’m not saying that being a good person isn’t enough to pass through those golden gates of Heaven or reincarnate into an Egyptian God. I’m just saying that, if your purpose is to successfully persuade and claim a role of leadership, being a good person will not get you anywhere. I could be the Mother Theresa in all her innocent and pious existence. But what if Mother Theresa is actually an antisocial hermit who’s scared of the mere thought of touching another person’s flesh? What if oxygen makes her go into cardiac arrest and the thought of speaking her mind makes her gag-reflex work overtime? Mother Theresa is a social misfit who is scared of standing out. Yes, she helps orphan kids and plants programs that help the growth of the Amazon rainforest. But would you trust her to lead you to rebel against a communist government? Does she really look like the type that would know what to do if a man put a gun to her forehead on a subway? No. Oh, she cares. I just wouldn’t trust her with my life if the world was about to burn and she led a rebellion against an a-class serial killer president. But I think it’s pretty obvious that Mother Theresa wouldn’t lead people to a massacre in a future dystopian society.

            All of this boils down to the actual factors that affect your credibility and skill for attaining leadership. Aristotle’s three essential qualities of a persuasive ethos are: virtue, practical wisdom, and selflessness/disinterest. For people to follow your advice, to follow you, period, they need to know that you actually care about their well-being. An example of this would be if I were to be in love with a certain male counterpart and in need advice as to how to approach a certain subject with him (Although, if I’m being completely honest, If I were to love someone, I’d ensure myself that the feeling is mutual and if that were the case, the trust between us would be sufficient as to my broaching any subject with him—just clarifying. I know how it deeply interests you to know how I handle my love life. Isa Love 101.) If this was the case though, I would certainly not accept advice from a girl who happens to obsessed with the certain guy. I’d be even more suspicious if the only time she has ever spoken to me is a year ago when she told me I had split ends. That is just not a source that is out for my well-being. Her interests are not purely selfless and so she makes for a persuasive-less ethos. This explains the three traits of persuasive leadership. The audience must believe you share their values, that you appear to know the right thing to do on every occasion, and that their interest is your sole concern.

            We have to share their values. We have to be virtuous. By virtuous I don’t mean necessarily good at heart like my former example of Mother Theresa. A person’s virtuous-ness is based on their audience. Let’s say a female tells the pope, “I think I like girl.” The pope would see that as virtuous-less seeing as the Catholic religion is so against that. If she were to tell the same thing to a group of teenagers in liberal San Francisco, they’d congratulate her for being independent and highlighting her identity. An example Hienrischs gives is Julius Caesar. “While Jesus had a pure kind of virtue, Julius Caesar’s was decidedly rhetorical.” When you think about it, most of the people nowadays that uphold values of a group are rhetorically virtuous; they don’t actually do what their heart knows is right, they simply must be seen to have the “right” values. Of course, the “right” values are relative. This is why values and ethics are a part of ethos. Values change depending on your audience, on what they regard as morally correct. A good arguer knows how to appeal to their audience’s values. Basically, you just have to pretend to care. You have to be a good actor. Period.

            It is only expected that you would like to “pump up your rhetorical virtue for a particular audience.” But while bragging helps pump up your rhetorical virtue, character references beats it in that it is a less supercilious way of raising your standing. The “tactical flaw” is the rainbow at the end of the ethos tunnel. By revealing some defect that shows your dedication to the audience’s values, you subtly earn some points with them. An example Heinrichs uses is a man who sends a memo to everyone in his office and later figures out that he screwed up his figures by a decimal point or two. And he says, “Sorry, my bad. I wrote it late last night and didn’t want to wake the others to check the facts.” Here, he is placing his mistake on the very caring aspect of his personality.

            Appealing to a specific audience, using ethos to its full extent, is not just a matter of actually feeling specific virtues. You have to be really good at seeming to obtain those virtues. Seeming versus being. Uh-oh, I’m feeling a Hamlet discussion coming on. He always does manage to bring himself into the conversation.

            

Manipulation at it's Best

I never new Aristotle was the one who invented pathos, logos, and ethos. Does that make me ignorant? I hope not. Basically, Aristotle has the three mechanisms with which to accomplish Heinrichs’s second “step” of persuasion: changing the person’s mind. In order to do this, you have to appeal to them in one way or another. Your arguments have to include character, logic, or emotion. Of course, whichever one you choose has to have inner ties with the person’s persona, it has to mean something to the person’s goals and priorities. In other words, If I were trying to persuade Opera to go pick up dog crap in a cemetery, well, my argument would probably use ethos because she seems like the type of person that places a lot of importance on her character, on how moral she is as a person. If I were trying to convince a Physics teacher whose life is based on logic and facts to do the same thing, I’d probably go with logos and argue that doing such a thing would be preferable to the looming dinner with his in laws. He’d logically assert that said in law dinners were brain-cell killers that left his ears bleeding, and choose to go to the former. If I was trying to appeal to a love-struck teenage girl with an eerie obsession with Justin Bieber, I’d probably tell her that Justin Bieber has a penchant for girls who pick up dog defecate in a cemetery. If my overall observing skills are anything to judge by, I wouldn’t even need to say that Justin Bieber would somehow know she did such a thing, most crazed fans just do whatever their perfect stars like, hoping that they will somehow know. The gist of this whole concept is that you have to know what type of argument to use that will be most effective in the person you are trying to convince. Knowing the person really will, knowing their values and their aspirations, will make this a lot easier.

The one thing that has to be the same for all of these is that you do them in a very subtle manner. Use these to appeal to the person, to convince them it is what they want. Apparently, Cicero hinted that “the great orator transforms himself into an emotional role model, showing the audience how it should feel.” To do this, you have to firstly sympathize with them, “align yourself with the listener’s pathos.” Heinrichs clarifies that “you don’t have to share the mood”; in other words, if an angry old salesman is in a bad mood with his eyes bleeding red and his veins practically bursting from the seams of his flesh, don’t share his mood and become Hulk personified. Use “rhetorical sympathy”. Show them, in whatever way you please, that you care, and try to slowly mold their emotions into those that make them liable to change. Logos, pathos, and ethos are the “megatools of rhetoric.” So if you’re ever in dire need of manipulating someone, you have all the resources you need. You’re welcome.

Follow It

I read the title “How to Seduce a Cop,” and I can’t deny that I was interested. No, I did not in a way plan to learn how to bat my eyelashes or bare some skin in a blatant attempt to satiate my fetish for cops. Because I can assure you that I have no such fetish. Thank you. It just happened to intrigue me. If there is a foolproof system of getting out of a parking ticket, who’s stupid enough to turn down such expertise? And so Jay Heinrichs delves into the art of persuasion.

Heinrichs plants his idea by telling a joke about how a psychologist screws a light bulb and the punch line is “ First, the light bulb has to want to change.” Of course. Because light bulbs have feelings, or didn’t you know? Seriously though, it is actually a very plausible and logical answer. Everything that changes in this life has to want to change. Unless it is a pregnant teenager, in which case I’m pretty sure she didn’t actually want or plan on having a growing fetus obstructing her otherwise flat stomach. But that’s a rare exception that takes into account causes of actions.

To get people to do something, they have to want to do it themselves, unless you hold a gun to their head. Heinrich explains how to attain this change of attitude in the first place: mood, mind and desire to act. First, you have to change the person’s mood to one that will be most amiable and easygoing (ie. More accepting). It is by doing this that you are making them more prone to manipulation, more malleable to understand your arguments. In other words, this is how you get them to change their mind.  The last is probably the most difficult of all which to spurting them with the desire to act. Here is where you have to resort to appealing to their emotions to convincing them they are doing what they want to do. Changing the mood is where seduction comes in. To seduce is, by definition, to lead away from duty, accepted principles, or proper conduct. It’s not only about sex, the concept we usually relate it to, it’s about being subtle and cunning enough to change someone’s concrete views. Changing a person’s perspectives and judgment is not easy, and that is why persuasion is not as easy as it looks. But with the given tools, it can be quite useful.

Arguing doesn’t always necessarily mean you’re going to win. The difference between fighting and arguing is that in fighting you can win, but in arguing you can get what you want. It is all a matter of subtlety, of manipulating your adversary very casually to the point where they think they are the ones making the decisions, when really, they’re doing what you want them to do. But you don’t only want to convince them that it’s what they want to do. “Besides using desire to motivate an audience, you need to convince it that an action is no big deal-that whatever you want them to do won’t make them sweat.”

The goal is to change another person’s mindset. You don’t always have to win, you just have to get them to concede, reach consensus. This is Heinrichs advice. Follow it.