Welcome ladies and gentlemen to Encyclopedia
Hermetica: A Big History (part 32).
Today we’re going to do things a little
differently and I’m going to give you all
a more practical lesson today; this will be
on our third part of the Trivium: Rhetoric
– that is, the art of speaking well and
convincingly.
This is a very heady topic with all manner
of technical jargon which comes down to us
from antiquity, and as such I will label this
talk as another one of our quote-unquote “seminars”
(just like my talk about the Trivium), as
opposed to another purely historical talk.
This lecture has far more practical applications
than just mere intellectual stimulation, and
so you may need to pay extra careful attention
and possibly even take notes.
What I want out of this talk is not that you
go away with a handful of fancy jargon or
technical labels (though if you can internalize
these, you’ll be better off for it) – no,
what I want is that you begin to use these
tools to critically analyze the speech of
those around you: politicians, news anchors,
the management at work, self-help gurus, religious
leaders, university professors, conspiracy
theorists, activists, or whatever.
I’m not doing this to make you cynical,
but I’m definitely doing it to make you
more sceptical (which to some is a bad thing,
but to me it’s the key that unlocks free-thought)
– It seems that in this day and age we tend
to use skepticism and cynicism interchangeably;
you need not become a cynic, it just so happens
that skepticism leads that way much of the
time.
What you DO need to begin doing is to start
thinking with a blank slate (or at least as
blank a slate as possible) in order to think
clearly and rationally.
We are born from silence, but definitely not
born into silence.
It’s all too easy to get bogged down by
that pesky “voice inside your head” – that
voice which we often confuse as being our
“selves.”
In reality, however, this voice isn’t you,
or God, or anything like that.
This voice is entirely the collection of imprints
you’ve accumulated over the course of your
life – it is the sum total of everything
you’ve ever heard, truths and lies all thrown
in without distinction.
That voice in your head is the voice of everyone
around you, and when it arises in that subjective
field we call ‘consciousness’, you need
to be able to dissect it, take it apart, lay
it out, and observe it with some degree feigned
objectivity.
If you don’t develop the skills to do this,
you’ll be just like an absent-minded scientist
working in a sterile laboratory who drags
in all sorts of exogenous microorganisms and
then wonders why all his samples are contaminated
with unusual specimens from other environments.
When we talk about “The Truth”, we need
to ask ourselves “The Truth about what?”
and work from there.
The Trivium, with rhetoric as the last but
not least of its components, is a sort of
‘decontamination chamber’ for your mind.
The blanker your slate, or the cleaner your
body (to keep the metaphor), the less likely
you are to let a few little rapidly-reproducing
foreign microorganisms to flood the petri-dish
that is your mind.
Like lock-picking, ceremonial magic, or martial
arts, rhetoric is a skill – morally neutral
through and through.
In the same way we’ve broken down logic
into manageable categories to some extent,
rhetoric can also be broken down into categories
(which is one of the favourite pastimes of
the linguistically-infected man); here are
our four sub-categories of rhetoric… think
of each of these as heart strings.
A good rhetorician pulls on all of these,
and doesn’t put one before the others – they’re
like the four humours of good rhetoric:
• Logos (reason) comprises the use of logical
ideas to appeal to an audience’s own reason.
If I’m reasonable, and I speak reasonably,
and you are reasonable, chances are we’ll
do just fine sharing information.
• Pathos is an appeal to the audience's
emotions.
This, in large part, is what people call “acting.”
You’re coaxing emotions out of people who
may or may not have come to see you for that.
Tone, facial expression, hand gestures, emphasis,
all these and more contribute to the ‘pathos’
of a given speech.
• Ethos, however, is all about the appeal
to the guiding tenets that characterize a
community or ideology (whether religious,
political, nationalistic, or what have you).
This can also take the form as an appeal to
the author's credibility.
It’s an appeal based on the character of
the speaker more so than general circumstances.
• Lastly, we have Kairos (which is Greek
for “the right time” or “timeliness”)
and it’s an appeal to the right-place-and-the-right-time-ness
of the argument.
This one is a bit harder to put a finger on
since it’s so circumstantial, but it’s
definitely as important as any of the other
three ‘rhetorical humours’ or ‘heartstrings’
Alright, so it’s time for us to get into
some nitty-gritty details to get an actual
coherent idea of how one might analyze rhetoric.
The following list (with some of its examples)
was drawn from the Dutch classicist Anton
D. Leeman’s Orationis Ratio, which in turn
was based off the Rhetorica ad Herennium,
a rhetorical handbook written in the first
century BC – now, let’s also remember
that rhetorical handbooks like these are in
the vein of a much older Greek tradition (from
guys like Demosthenes), and that’s the reason
all these technical words are in Greek.
In as much as the Latins were concerned with
good rhetoric and oratory, they got their
love from the Greeks at quite an early age.
Rhetoric flourished as a science in so-called
‘democracies’ and ‘republics’, because
these systems of governance are all about
persuading others for votes in your favour.
Though persuasion is obviously not unique
to the Western world, the Greeks and Romans
were definitely the cultures responsible for
establishing the canons of style we find tasteful
today.
What dictated good style back then is still
what dictates good style now.
Our rhetorical DNA – what we naturally find
convincing, euphonic or whatever – all this
comes down to us from these great ancient
rhetoricians.
Now, I’m obviously not going to cover all
the figures of rhetoric, given that there
are over 200 and it would be extremely tedious
for us both to go through the catalogue, but
hopefully this can ignite some interest into
this subject which has long been thought to
be only relevant to Ivy-League debate teams,
political propagandists, media outlets, and
marketing teams.
So without further ado, here’s our meat
and potatoes – see if you can think up some
of your own examples as we go along (whether
from your favourite songs, presidential addresses,
TED talks, sermons, university lectures, pre-epic-battle
Hollywood speeches, or whatever); this should
help you solidify these concepts and anchor
them to your own reality.
As I always like to say, the way out is through.
Always try to employ these rhetorical strategies,
and if you do, you’ll manage to catch on
when people around you are using them too.
So if you ever watch a particularly persuasive
commercial or political address, before you
run out and buy that product or give your
support to that talking head, run these lists
through your head and see if someone really
is giving you an honest picture, or if they’re
serving you up a polished turd.
In the same way that pearls trod upon by swine
are still pearls, turds polished to a shine
are still turds.
Don’t let fancy words blind you to someone
else’s bullshit.
Alright so, #1:
Anaphora: So this is one of the most common
devices in speech-making and good poetry.
Anaphora in greek literally means “a carrying
back” (from ana [up] + phero (to carry).
And what it is is when a word is repeated
at the beginning, middle or end of a series
of clauses or sentences…
This creates a parallelism and a rhythm, which
can intensify the meaning of the piece.
Repetition also makes things easy to remember,
so if you’re some slimy politician and you’d
like to persuade the masses, you might want
to employ this tactic at public addresses.
Generally, it’s used to appeal to the audience’s
emotions so as to persuade, inspire, and motivate
them.
Here’s some examples:
• Shakespeare’s “Mad world!
Mad kings!
Mad composition!” is a good short example.
• Martin Luther King Junior’s “I have
a dream” speech uses the line “I HAVE
A DREAM” eight times, and that makes it
the textbook example for a good use of anaphora.
• A good example from a poem I’ve read
here before is taken from William Blake’s
“London”: In every cry of every man, in
every infant’s cry of fear, in every voice,
in every ban, the mind-forged manacles I hear.
Climax: This is the repetition of words that
works like climbing steps (that’s what climax
literally means in Greek, “ladder”).
Climax is often used in persuasion (predominantly
in advertising) to create false dichotomies
and then to focus attention upon the side
which they want you to err.
A good example comes from the letters of St.
Paul to the Corinthians, "There are three
things that will endure: faith, hope, and
love.
But the greatest of these is love.”
Another Climax can be found in these famous
words from the American declaration of Independence:
"...they are endowed by their creator with
certain unalienable rights... and among these
are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."
So, hopefully you can see how the initial
inferior options (faith and hope, or life
and liberty) make the final terms (love or
the pursuit of happiness) seem better by comparison
than they might appear in isolation: "X is
good, Y is better, Z is best" is a standard
format – hence the “ladder” concept
– it’s a figure of rhetoric concerned
with slipping in value judgements which (generally)
are arbitrarily those of the speaker.
This tactic can also be used in reverse to
make the list “go down the ladder”, such
that an initial term seems better by comparison:
"A isn't perfect, but B is worse, and C is
worst.”
So that’s climax – keep an eye and ear
out for this, because what it’s doing is
subconsciously slipping in a value judgement
for you, and that’s something to be aware
of (albeit not intrinsically hostile towards).
Antithesis: Alright so antithesis, in short,
is a pair of comparisons: “si la jeunesse
savait, si la viellesse pouvait” (if only
the youth knew, if only the elderly could).
This is done to achieve some contrast – “one
small step for a man but a giant step for
mankind;” “Speech is silver, but silence
is gold”, “Money is the root of all evils:
poverty is the fruit of all goodness” – and
so on and so forth.
Again, as in climax, we can be led (though
not necessarily) to value judgements through
antitheses which we may not share, so watch
for this pitfall.
False dichotomies or false dilemmas are one
of the most common problems in the use of
antitheses… and if you know anything about
my work, you’ll find that I love collapsing
false dichotomies wherever I find them (though
obviously I’m not immune to producing them
myself).
White implies black, wealth implies poverty,
good implies evil, and so forth – we’ve
got to be more Daoist in our thinking to get
ourselves out of potential pitfalls.
The world is holographic – cut a piece out
of it and you’ll see how every other part
of the world is implied by that little piece.
Try it as an intellectual exercise sometime:
pick an object and make a mental list of all
the things which that object imply – then
all the things which those implications do
not imply – once you’ve done this thoroughly
enough, you’ve created a map of the entire
universe.
In any case, I digress…
I’ll give one more great example of this
climax device by one of history’s greatest
hypocrites, Richard Nixon, who said at his
inaugural address: “We find ourselves rich
in goods but ragged in spirit, reaching with
magnificent precision for the moon but falling
into raucous discord on earth.
We are caught in war, wanting peace.
We're torn by division, wanting unity.”
See if you can poke some holes into this without
taking into consideration whose venomous mouth
these lines come from… you’ll see it’s
fairly easy.
But anyhow, moving on.
Parison: Ok, so this one arises when two clauses
in a sentence line up if we were to stack
them one on top of the other.
Obviously this is much easier to see when
you have the sentences written out in front
of you, but a good example is the sentence
I just used: “Si la jeunesse savait/Si la
vieillesse pouvait” (if only the youth knew,
if only the elderly could).
A more simple example you might recognize
is from Dickens’ “It was the best of times/it
was the worst of times.”
Now there’s nothing terribly manipulative
here, all a parison does is ensure that a
sentence is balanced and not skewed toward
one clause or another.
It’s a sort of application of Pythagorean
proportion and balance to a sentence.
This makes things catchy or hook-like, making
them easy to remember – great for headlines:
“The bigger they are, the harder they fall”;
“melts in your mouth--not in your hand”;
and lastly, to use the words of a slightly
less evil man than Nixon: "Let every nation
know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that
we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet
any hardship, support any friend, oppose any
foe, to assure the survival and the success
of liberty."
Now an isocolon is a lot like this, it’s
a similar idea, but it necessitates that parallel
clauses have the exact same number of syllables
– it’s like a tighter parison (some of
the examples I’ve just given are isocolonic).
Now there are a few examples on my list (like
the homoioptoton or homoioteleuton) which
are only relevant to Greek, Latin or other
inflected languages (that is, language with
cases).
English doesn’t really have these, except
in archaisms like “Thou, Thy, Thine, etc.”
so I’ll just pass over this very briefly:
it’s when you string together words with
the same case endings: “O fortunatam natam
me consule Romam!”
(O fortunate date for the Roman State was
the date of my great consulate!)… but again,
this translation is but an attempt to give
the sense, and not an exact approximation
of what’s going on more concisely in the
Latin.
Alright so next we have alliteration, which
surprisingly enough wasn’t in these old
rhetorical handbooks.
This was actually a stylistic error, best
avoided, but for one reason or another the
Romans loved it, and they passed that love
onto us.
It’s for this very reason that the word
itself, “alliteration” comes from a Latin
word and not a Greek word.
An example in Latin would be “O Tite tute
Tati, tibi tanta, tyranne, tulisti!”
I don’t think I need to explain this terribly
much given that every high school student
of English learns about alliteration in their
poetry units; It’s a stylistic device in
which a number of words with the same first
consonant sound occur close together in a
series.
But here, let me give you a few more examples
so you can get a sense of how powerful alliteration
is: Dunkin’ Donuts, PayPal, Best Buy, Coca-Cola,
American Apparel, Chuckee Cheese’s, Bed
Bath & Beyond, Krispy Kreme, Lulu Lemon, Ted
Talks, Weight Watchers, Black Berry, Teatly
Teas, Tater Tots, Tonka Toys, KitKat, TicTac,
… now you see how prevalent and effective
this type of word sorcery is… not bad when
we consider that this was a faux pas over
two millennia ago.
Ok – moving on – next we have your dad’s
favourite figure of rhetoric: paranomasia
which is a nice and complicated sounding word
for wordplay or puns (though not necessarily
meant to be funny): e.g. “a little more
than kin, and less than kind”; “Atheism
is a non-prophet institution”; “this breakfast
is egg-celent” and so forth…
I’m sure you can think of all sorts of puns
off the top of your head, and if you can’t,
go ask your dad.
Puns have a long history in human writing,
and Sumerian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs
were actually originally based on complex
systems punning.
For this reason, punning has been credited
by some as fundamental to all alphabets, all
writing, and even human civilization as a
whole.
Civilization itself is the greatest pun in
history, meaning everything except itself.
If ever you hear Terence McKenna give a good
explanation of what he means by “visual
language”, he tries to stress how it consists
of a sort of 4-dimensional pun which is visual,
linguistic, holographic, and reveals nothing
but pure intention… so perhaps if puns created
language and civilization, puns will also
save us from their limitations once we’ve
learned to properly employ them.
Now, there’s a sort of special pun called
the Figura Etymologica and it’s really my
favourite type of paranomasia.
This is a pun based on etymology which makes
it extremely subtle, and usually only funny
to linguists, classicists, etymologists, and
so forth.
It’s a cross linguistic pun, it spans over
more than one language, and in order to catch
it, the listener must understand both languages
and how they’re historically connected.
And again, not all puns need to be funny.
An example of a figura etymologica can be
found in Romans (1:25) - "Who changed the
truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and
served the creature more than the Creator";
both creature and creator stem from the same
word – another by Tennyson might be “There
hath he lain for ages, and will lie.”
Both lain and lie stem from the same verb.
A more subtle Figura Etymologica might be
something like this (and I’ve taken this
from the lyrics of the polish death metal
band Behemoth’s “Blow Your Trumpets Gabriel”),
wherein it’s said “Root ov David, eradicate.”
In English, eradicate simply means to destroy,
but in Latin, it means to uproot (from the
Latin radix, root) – so in English, to ‘eradicate’
a root, is an etymological pun.
Given the fact that the composer Adam Darski
has an MA in classics, it would surprise me
that this was not intentional.
Anyhow, moving on: the next figure of rhetoric
on my list is the polyptoton, which might
best be rendered as “a variety of choices.”
This again is more relevant to ancient languages
than it is to modern, non-inflected ones,
since it’s a play on case use.
In Latin, an example might be “vim vi repellere
licet” (it is lawful/permitted to repel
force [vim] with force [vi]) a sentiment I
certainly agree with.
An English example of a polyoptoton is something
like “a man’s man” (using man twice,
once in the nominative, once in the genitive).
Another example would be “in the morning
when the morning bird sings.”
It isn’t really a very strong device in
English, but it’s certainly one to keep
an ear out for… since just because something
sounds catchy or jingly doesn’t mean it’s
true.
People often let their guards down in the
presence of pretty words and catchy slogans,
and that’s exactly what I’m trying to
get everyone to avoid.
Alright, next up we’ve got the zeugma.
Zeugma is a Greek word for yoke, as in the
thing with which you put on oxen (and it might
interest you to know that this word is etymologically
related with Yoga in Sanskrit and the latin
verb iungo, to join, in Latin).
This is basically a strategy for being pithy
and concise, since it involves using one verb
for many different ideas in a sentence.
Tennyson’s Ulysses has “He works his work,
I mine” (so, to point out the obvious, you’re
supposed to resupply the verb “work” in
your head).
From the point of a prescriptive grammarian
(and really, who cares what these dinosaurs
have to say), this is ungrammatical since
“I work” and “He works” are separate
conjugations – it’s not “I works.”
But anyhow, this is nitpicking.
A 
more specific use of this technique is called
“syllepsis” and it pertains to ironic
or amusing zeugmas, so for example…
“At that moment, would the maiden stain
her honour, or her dress?”
Here, a stain on one’s honour is figurative,
whereas the other kind of stain is quite literal…
it’s just fun to apply the two-fold meaning
of the word “stain.”
Another good example is from Commander Riker
"You are free to execute your laws and your
citizens as you see fit” (so… obviously,
executing laws and executing people are two
totally different kinds of execution… but
this kind of fun ambiguity is what makes for
great rhetoric.)
Perfection is not achieved when there’s
nothing left to add, it’s achieved when
there’s nothing left to take away, and zeugmas/syllepses
are great for this very reason.
Next up we have anadiplosis – this is the
repetition of the same word twice, especially
to evoke a feeling of grief or seriousness:
“Lies, lies!
I can’t believe a word you say!” or “Rage,
rage against the dying of the light!”
– I suppose it’s a more specific kind
of anaphora, but the effect is similar.
This is a favourite of public speakers who
want to pull on your heartstrings.
I don’t know what it is, but there’s something
about anadiplosis that is very convincing,
and really, all you have to do is repeat a
word twice…
I know I do it all the time to affect emotion.
Another example of an anadiplosis is when
a sentence ends with a word, and then the
sentence after it picks up with that same
word, so for example: Yoda’s “Fear leads
to anger.
Anger leads to hate.
Hate leads to suffering” or St. Paul’s
"We rejoice in suffering, because we know
that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance,
character; and character, hope.
And hope does not disappoint us."
(Romans 5:3-5).
It’s a real favourite of preachers: “NO
REDEMPTION!
NO REDEMPTION EXCEPT THROUGH THE BLOOD OF
CHEESES – NOW PLANT THAT SEED AND PUT A
DOLLAR IN THE BASKET…”
I think you get the point.
Let’s move on to synonymia (from the greek
syn, together, and onoma, name) which is a
sort of stylized tautology.
It’s the repetition of one idea with different
words which adds emotional force or intellectual
clarity.
So for example in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar,
the plebs are reproached with several different
pejorative names: "You blocks, you stones,
you worse than senseless things!"
Another example is “That’s worthless,
useless and of no value.”
So yeh, it’s an emphatic tautology.
Next up we have an antimetabole, a personal
favourite of mine, and this is when you switch
around an idea and it works both ways: last
lecture I gave I said “Everything is in
your head, your head is in everything”;
the Emerald Tablet has “That which is above
is just as that which is below, and that which
is below is just as that which is above”;
a good classical example of this would be
“Esse oportet ut vivas, non vivere ut edas!”
– “You should eat to live, not live to
eat!”
Tmesis is next up on the list, and this is
what you get when someone says “Un-fucking-believable”
– Tmesis comes from the Greek word ‘to
cut’, and it arises when you cut a word
in two parts and stick a new word in between.
A popular usage of tmesis is “a(n) whole
other”, which requires cutting up “another”
to provide emphasis.
Next we have praeteritio, which politicians
are notorious for doing: this is when you
end up emphasizing something by pretending
to leave it out “I’m not going to say
anything about Mr. Ford’s crack problem,
but his public policy is downright mad.”
“Far be it from me to tell you how much
of a fool you were being yesterday.”
“I’m not one for gossip, but did you see
that slutty dress Amber was wearing to the
wedding?”
It’s this sort of thing.
It’s very disingenuous and should set off
as many red flags in your mind as “I’m
not racist but… insert something racist
here.”
Metaphor, allegory, irony, you know all these
so I won’t mention them (see what I did
there?).
Onomatopoeia, this is not just words that
imitate sounds like “boom” “kablam”
and “pow” – it’s just any made up
word, like supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.
I make up words (and use made up words) all
the time if I feel that the sense is clear.
Don’t hesitate to use them, just be aware
when made up words are being liberally thrown
around in public discourse.
Why couldn’t that person use a word that
already exists?
Are they too stupid to know those words?
Are they masking what they actually mean with
ambiguity because they don’t actually know
what they’re talking about?
These are the kinds of questions which may
come to mind (in addition to less suspicious
questions like “is that word just an import
from another language I don’t speak?”)
Uhh, I will just go through the last of these
quickly: metonymy is calling a thing by a
word associated with that thing (“my ride”
for “my car”); synecdoche is calling a
thing by a word which only denotes a part
of it (“my wheels” for “my car”; calling
a girl “toots” or “sugar lips” – not
recommended; that sort of thing); antonomasia
is calling a person by a phrase that says
something about them (“The Blind Bard”
for Homer, “The Philosopher” for Aristotle,
the “Man of Many Pains” for Odysseus,
“Der Fuhrer” for Hitler, and so on).
Lastly, we have hyperbole which is a fancy
way of saying exaggeration – the Greek means
something like “throwing above and beyond”,
and I doubt you need any examples for that,
just be aware that there’s all sorts of
people who use hyperbole in contexts where
it’s totally inappropriate… like in news
casting or political debates – People will
seldom call you out on it, and that’s actually
quite sad, because the number one problem
we face is that the words we use most often
don’t reflect the reality around us.
We get lost in these maps, and then we base
our lives on grossly over-exaggerated (or
grossly under-exaggerated, “litotical”)
information.
Not good, to say the least.
So… that about does it for figures of speech
– like I said – there are far more than
just these, but this gives you an idea of
what the science of rhetoric actually entails.
I just pray I’m not boring you to death,
because some of this is rather dry.
I promise you, however, that however dry rhetoric
is, it can be that much more useful to you.
Before moving on to my conclusion, I want
to quickly go over some “figures of thought”,
most of which you already know.
Among these we have tropes (i.e. literary
or I guess media stereotypes), I’m sure
you can think of thousands of these (they
are most often used by people who have no
idea what they are talking about on any given
subject, since they had to resort to epistemological
cartoons instead of concrete information or
data).
Among these figures of thought we have things
like “emphasis”, making a strong impression
by markedly leaving something out (this is
how a damnatio memoriae often does the inverse
of what its meant to do).
In something like a Cicero speech, we’d
get him referring to Cataline as “iste”
(a pejorative form of “that man”) instead
of using the guy’s actual name.
Well what is it about this guy that’s so
unspeakable?
Now I wanna know!
Anyone named “He who will not be named”
is bound to attract some attention.
So yeh, that’s what emphasis actually means
in terms of figures of thought (as opposed
to its sense as verbal stress).
Ok, quickly, we have enargeia, making a strong
impression with a vivid description – I
think ekphrases fall into this category, these
are detailed literary descriptions of objects
like Achilles shield.
We have ethopoeia, which is painting a word
picture for someone.
We have a slightly more advanced version of
ethopoeia which is actually quite common in
court rooms, and that’s prosopopoeia which
is like painting a word picture of a person,
but then pretending to actually have a conversation
with this made up entity.
When this happens, you can guarantee someone
is setting up a straw-man to burn down.
We only know our own ideas about other people’s
ideas, so be cautious of anyone who you suspect
isn’t aware of that great schism between
us all.
Last but not least, we have the exemplum,
which is when you bring up an example of a
famous person’s famous moments: George Washington
cutting down a cherry tree; Julius Caesar
crossing the Rubicon; or whatever.
It’s a moral anecdote, real or fictitious,
which is used to drive home a point.
More often than not, it’s building castles
in the sky.
Beware of those who use exempla at the drop
of a hat, they’re often red herrings or
totally irrelevant outside of their original
context.
Hang out with any hard-core fundamentalists
for any length of time and you’ll see how
easy it is for them to apply biblical exempla
out of context to situations which really
have nothing in common with the given stories.
I don’t want to right this exempla thing
off entirely, just be aware of their often
all too facile usage.
 
So…
I suppose you’re wondering why I’ve decided
to go through all this with you, and I suppose
you’ve also realized it isn’t to improve
your poetry or business presentations.
Now the reason is this: I’ve noticed that
recently (and this really is recently, given
that it is contingent on the existence of
the internet), but I’ve noticed that politics
and media have become more or less inseparable
from one another.
Politics have always been rhetorically oriented
– this is what made the sophists so popular
in ancient Athens – the truth didn’t matter,
all that mattered was convincing people to
act according to your will.
It’s this issue which prompted Plato’s
philosophical campaign against guys like Protagoras
and Gorgias.
Slick rhetoric has always and always will
be a sine qua non of politics, but today there’s
far more trickery afoot than there ever has
been (and on the flipside, there’s also
far more information available to people,
were they not all trapped in artificial echo-chambers).
You would think that with all the information
available to people they should be able to
make clear headed and impartial decisions,
but unfortunately, it’s not the case.
Now days political campaigning has become
a sort of all out multi-media assault, replete
with music, film, art, and so forth – there’s
heartstrings being pulled at every corner,
it’s inescapable.
For the undiscerning eye, it’s business
as usual, but that’s hardly the case.
The problem is that so many people are so
desensitized to human subtlety and critical
thinking from having most of their lives produced
for and beamed in through a telescreen.
This degree of removal between those broadcasting
information and those receiving it widens
and widens every year, and as a result people
get more and more gullible...
I assume this has some sort of evolutionary
reasons behind it (perhaps people feel safer
at home than in public, and thus are more
receptive to ideas; perhaps we perceive that
getting screwed over by a man on TV can only
screw us up so bad, as opposed to someone
in our faces; I really don’t know).
Propaganda is everywhere you look, not just
on the radio and in the newspapers (sources
which, back in the day, were easily avoided),
and PR or marketing groups are getting better
and better at getting in your face.
Nowadays you can hardly go anywhere in a populated
area without being bombarded by bullshit:
you’re too poor, you’re too ugly, you’re
too fat, you’re too stupid, you’re too
lazy, you’re not patriotic enough, your
partner will leave you for someone better,
you will suffer, you will get robbed, you
will get infected, you will die an agonizing
death, and so on and so forth.
What makes it bullshit is that it stifles
the imagination – it drives us like herds
of sheep into rigid artificial categories
(which are ultimately two sides of the same
coin) – it tells us what to feel is important,
and obviously it’s not a game based on statistics:
it’s a game of fear.
It manipulates and controls the discourse,
the set of words we are allowed and not allowed
to use.
Now, faced with this, we have two options
– both of which are valid, only one of which
is realistic for most people.
These are 1) unplug, retreat into the wilderness,
and 2) hone your critical thinking skills.
No amount of brainwashing propaganda in the
world should be able to rattle a critical
thinker.
If someone tells a critical thinker a lie
a thousand times, it remains a lie.
The person who thought otherwise was not a
critical thinker.
Now, in order to be a so-called “critical
thinker”, you need to have some categories
with which to criticize, this is why I say
the way out is through.
If you don’t have a decent grasp of what
good rhetoric is, then how would you know
you’ve been conned by someone purely through
glittering generalities and buzzwords?
How would you know the difference between
an actually deep and provocative paper, versus
a word-salad of academic or political buzzwords?
In academia, so many things said in 10,000
words can be said in 10; and in politics,
so many things said in 10 words should be
said in 10,000.
There is only one cure to this problem, and
that is what I’ve discussed earlier in lecture
21: The Trivium (grammar, logic, and rhetoric).
You have to know what it is people are saying
– what the words they are using actually
mean (that’s grammar); you have to know
if what they mean is actually internally consistent
and makes sense (that’s logic); then lastly,
and most relevant to today’s lecture: you
have to make sure you’re not just being
dazzled by old formulas which have fooled
people into going off to war, giving up their
rights, or even forfeiting their souls, purely
on account of someone else’s smooth talking
(that’s rhetoric).
What better way to fight a conman than to
know the con?
What better way to win in a fight than to
know how to fight?
To fight propaganda, we must make propaganda.
To fight bad art, we must make good art – and
I’m sorry to tell you, but when it comes
to aesthetics, there are rules.
You’re not going to build a building more
beautiful than the Pantheon without using
the Vitruvian cannons of architecture.
You’re not going to write a fugue more beautifully
than Bach if you don’t know the rules of
what makes a fugue.
You could, of course, go off and play your
own game, but then you always risk falling
into extreme individualism, and therefore
solipsism.
If you want to go give a lecture in purely
glossolalia, knock yourself out, but don’t
expect to make any changes in the world with
it.
If you want to shit on a canvas and call it
art, that’s fine too, but don’t be surprised
when nobody wants it on their wall.
You can make your town look like something
out of a Dr. Seuss book, but don’t expect
anyone to take care of it for centuries to
come.
You must learn the underlying principles.
I’m not saying you can’t break the rules,
but if you don’t know the rules before you
break them, you’re already lost.
The way out is through.
This has been part 32 of Encyclopedia Hermetica:
A Big History, and 
as always I’d like to thank you 
for joining me, Dan Attrell.
Cheers!
