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.