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.