Lies, Damned Lies, and Sophistry
Or: a brief taxonomy of semantic structures the MSM will bend over backwards to not call lies (unless it’s Clinton).
The concept behind this series was inspired by a general irritation with Machiavelli’s The Prince and the methods of Rovian politics, which prompted me to write “What I Want.” Although that is a good introduction, the series properly takes on its work with “Baseball, Kenjutsu, and Telling the Truth” and is continued with “Our Tribe” and “A Dudely Introduction to Feminism.”
Lies, Damned Lies and Sophistry is an obvious twisting of a Samuel Clemens quote, and it itself is somewhat misleading. This article is not entirely about lies, it’s about bypassing rational thought (which often works out to the same thing, surprisingly enough). There is a note of caution with which one must approach the study of sophistry, even when the study is for the purposes of recognizing it and disabling its effects. Due to the fact that we understand things emotionally before we do intellectually, arguing to win the argument rather than find the truth is a natural tendency, especially when faced with aggression or derision. I do feel there is a need for people to be able to put a finger on why an argument sounds good but just feels sketchy, in a way that a text on logic just doesn’t address. Other people have done this I’m sure, but I’m one of those whackos who sees digging into how people communicate as Much Fun.
You can read a book on logic in the way you’d read a locksmith’s book “backwards” to learn how to pick locks, and I strongly suspect that many people do this with lists of logical fallacies in order to more carefully craft their spin. I’d like to turn this on its head, in the same spirit of examining the actions of someone who is doing Bad Stuff to make it easier to defend against them in the future. An important caveat is that unlike the other articles in this series, the subject matter here has nothing to do with the truth; it is entirely an examination of the techniques of persuasion, which may or may not be used in conformance to actual facts. The very basic taxonomy here is my own, and this is a rough draft which may be expanded upon as I think about it more.
I hope you find it useful, and without further delay, venture into my catalogue of how not to argue rationally:
Creativity in Spontaneity and Setting:
In 1994, when Bill Clinton was in France for the 50th anniversary of the Normandy invasion, he and a group of aides were walking along the beach, stopping at one point. Later, one of those aides was seen scattering stones at that same point. On the anniversary itself, when Clinton was on camera, he stopped at that exact point and arranged the stones he found there in a cross, in what was, through implication, presented as a spontaneous gesture.
In April of 2003, we were treated to scenes of jubilant Iraqis surrounding U.S. soldiers as the statue of Saddam Hussein in Fardus Square was toppled after an U.S. flag was tied about “his” head. It turns out that this event was staged with the assistance of Army Psyops, and was much smaller than represented.
In 2005, Michelle Kosinski was reporting from New Jersey on flooding in the Northeastern United States for the Today Show on NBC. She was in a canoe, when the water at the location she was actually filming in was ankle-deep, revealed when two people walked past the canoe during the live segment. The implication that she was in a deeply flooded area was turned on its head, which would have been supported by either shooting in deeper water, or doing away with the canoe entirely.
In a triumph for irony, a news piece later that day contained footage of Allison Barber, deputy assistant defense secretary, preparing members of the Army’s 42nd Infantry Division and one Iraqi soldier for a live teleconference with the President.
Point for point, not only the general scope of the answers expected, but who would answer them was meticulously charted out in advance. This is a much more elaborate version of the cross of stones that is the first example here.
Logically this is known as equivocation, where you either use the same word twice, but with two different meanings, or use the same word as the person you are speaking with, but with a differing definition than it is implicitly or explicitly presented to you as having.
Probably the gold standard of Definition Limbo is the parsing of “sexual relations” by Clinton in which his reply was technically true if the listener took the term to exclusively mean sexual intercourse (not an unreasonable supposition, but definitely an evasion). A more complicated example of this would be in this statement by George W. Bush in an interview on Fox News, in which he uses one word but refers to two different groups of people at the same time:
That’s an interesting question, because you know I’m a man of peace. And obviously I would hope that we wouldn’t have combat. I also live in a real world of being the president during a war on terror. So I guess I would rather fight them there than here. I know I would rather fight them there than here, and I know would rather fight them there than in other remote parts of the world, where it may be more difficult to find them.
The use of the word “them” to conflate terrorists wishing to attack the U.S. with those people fighting us in Iraq makes this statement more destructive, if not as smoothly executed. Beware unreferenced pronouns.
This is where you portray a certain thing or group in such emotional terms in order to make those terms become emblematic of the thing itself: Fox’s use of “homicide bombers” instead of “suicide bombers”, or the old tension between “terrorists” and “freedom-fighters” (this is a really hard one to phrase neutrally, perhaps “guerrillas?”). Also, for management faced with a strike, appealing to the larger population and gaining the support of people outside the union by talking about the harm to “consumers” caused by the strike neatly ignores the fact that just about everyone is also worker (or is trying to be).
A simple and devastating technique, but only if the liar can control the general scope of information available to the victim(s). All that’s necessary is to present the facts you want presented, and don’t mention the ones that counter your argument. We went to war with Iraq because of this one – all intelligence pointing away from Iraq having WMD was omitted from the administration’s arguments.
This category relies upon either an official-sounding presentation by exactly the wrong people to be speaking authoritatively on whatever subject is at hand, or a straight-up appeal to authority. Powell’s contention that experts had determined that the tubes were for use in a centrifuge (when the Department of Energy experts had something entirely different to say) is one example of this.
A better and more recent one comes from Attorney General Gonzales:
Fourth, this program is administered by career professionals at NSA. Expert intelligence analysts and their senior supervisors with access to the best available information make the decision to initiate surveillance. The operation of the program is reviewed by NSA lawyers, and rigorous oversight is provided by the NSA Inspector General. I have been personally assured that no other foreign intelligence program in the history of NSA has received a more thorough review.
Gonzales’ assertions sidestep the entire question of whether a self-regulating oversight is legal and sufficient, instead encouraging you to “trust us.”
This comes in one of two forms: simple name-calling, such as The Shrub, Scottie McNoComment, and the Clenis, or disparaging someone because of their appearance or other ad hominem attacks. The many comparisons of George W. Bush to a chimpanzee fall into this category.
Very simple: if you say something often enough, people will start to believe it. The best response? Do not suffer fools who regurgitate the words of others, and don’t get worked up about it. There are more important things to be upset about. If this is consistent and determined behavior from someone you’re in a relationship with, then I would put my foot down – this is a blatant control technique, and even if it’s not being used as such, it’s disrespectful as hell.
An outgrowth of The Experts above, this is the implication that either one or both of the following conditions are true: that the person being spoken to is being unreasonably suspicious, or that there are burdens of proof which are impossible to meet, and a degree of faith is therefore required. Most of TV on Sunday is devoted to the expression of this idea.
Inflated or Diminished Consequences
The slippery slope fallacy is made for this one, where extreme consequences of dubious relation to the question under discussion are presented as necessarily following from acting in the “wrong” way. This is best exemplified by Rick Santorum saying that if homosexual sex is protected by a right to privacy, then the courts must also necessarily find bigamy, polygamy, incest, and adultery so protected. The man-on-child and man-on-dog references were in a way backpedaling from the stance that same-sex foolin’ around might be considered equivalent to these two things, but his argument by implication necessarily connected protection of these things as a consequence of protection of gay sex.
Condoleeza Rice will probably wind up being famous for this one as well:
The problem here is that there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly [Saddam Hussein] can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don’t what the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.
A depressing and all too common one. It ranges from “she had it coming,” to ultimatums such as “If you don’t do [something], I’ll be forced to do [something vicious in response].” Jim Brady’s use of “It is a shame it’s come to this” is a passive-aggressive and after-the-fact use of this technique, in which he assigns no blame to the Washington Post for the uproar and the paper’s subsequent deletion of comments and shutting down comments on the blogs.
In it’s simplest form, Cheney making rhetorical ties between the attacks of September 11th and Saddam Hussein were a direct attempt to evoke the reaction to the 9/11 attacks, and transfer some of the anger about them to the cause of invading Iraq. It was also was Big in its untruthiness.
Another example is the particularly chilling, tearful testimony of “Nayirah” which was used to swing public sympathy in favor of the Gulf War.
In fact, the most emotionally moving testimony on October 10 came from a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl, known only by her first name of Nayirah. According to the Caucus, Nayirah’s full name was being kept confidential to prevent Iraqi reprisals against her family in occupied Kuwait. Sobbing, she described what she had seen with her own eyes in a hospital in Kuwait City. Her written testimony was passed out in a media kit prepared by Citizens for a Free Kuwait. “I volunteered at the al-Addan hospital,” Nayirah said. “While I was there, I saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns, and go into the room where . . . babies were in incubators. They took the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators, and left the babies on the cold floor to die.”83
Three months passed between Nayirah’s testimony and the start of the war. During those months, the story of babies torn from their incubators was repeated over and over again. President Bush told the story. It was recited as fact in Congressional testimony, on TV and radio talk shows, and at the UN Security Council. “Of all the accusations made against the dictator,” MacArthur observed, “none had more impact on American public opinion than the one about Iraqi soldiers removing 312 babies from their incubators and leaving them to die on the cold hospital floors of Kuwait City.”84
At the Human Rights Caucus, however, Hill & Knowlton and Congressman Lantos had failed to reveal that Nayirah was a member of the Kuwaiti Royal Family. Her father, in fact, was Saud Nasir al-Sabah, Kuwait’s Ambassador to the US, who sat listening in the hearing room during her testimony. The Caucus also failed to reveal that H&K vice-president Lauri Fitz-Pegado had coached Nayirah in what even the Kuwaitis’ own investigators later confirmed was false testimony.
It never happened, but just the testimony itself was powerful enough to have an emotional impact. It is not possible to change the world with a lie, but it is possible to distort the decision-making process people use as they move forward.
This is accomplished by throwing an emotional hand grenade into a discussion at the same moment you are presenting someone or something you wish to either demonize or enshrine – it’s also the easiest way to get someone to swallow a “Big Lie”, but just because there’s emotional arm-twisting going on does not mean it is a “Big Lie.” “Emotive Definition” is the from-the-hip version.
The Max Cleland commercial in which his face is shown next to OBL’s is a non-Big Lie example of how this works. I will note to advanced students that the commercial could have easily been directed the other way with a different audio track presenting it as an either-or choice, rather than an unspoken association, and it would still be “Emotional Blinding.”
One more example. Proof that the strategy of race-baiting is alive and well, Limbaugh felt it necessary to point out that Sherrod Brown is black. Which makes the charge that the Democratic party is silent on his race an interesting one… because Mr. Brown isn’t black. I leave the reader in peace for a moment of bemusement.
This is a simple one, usually a visual or single-sentence version of “Emotional Blinding,” but with no structure or argument made at all. By relying on the intuitive need most people have for simple explanations, a proposition is implicitly crafted with the statement or image which has one clear, seemingly uncomplicated answer. The listener is allowed to draw whatever conclusions they like, the important part of this one is that the argument is overwhelmingly an emotional one.
This is named for one dramatic moment in Geraldo Rivera’s coverage of the Katrina survivors in the Superdome. After a tear-filled, halting, and near-hysterical description of the conditions the people in the building were living in, and the acute lack of aid they had received, he took a quiet and somewhat dazed-looking child from the arms of a woman he had been speaking to, and through barely controlled sobs said “look at this baby… look at this baby!” The point here is not that his allegations were true. The toddler (like all children) seemed much more interested in the lights and commotion than the larger domestic and social implications of the scene around her. The command to “look at this baby” was irrelevant – the image would not nearly have been as powerful if had been wholly her in the shot. The point is that the juxtaposition of Geraldo’s face (streaming with tears and twisted in agony) with the face of a young black child who he was holding in a single shot is emblematic of the Katrina coverage of the very real consequences of social injustice.
An example is the case of the bug found in Karl Rove’s office (no, not Rove himself).
It requires only that you use an overly-simplistic argument to draw an unspoken conclusion, then leaving you free to deny that you encouraged anyone to make the conclusion at all.
In 1991, Rove was undergoing State Senate confirmation hearings for an appointment to the East Texas State University Board of Regents. Senator Bob Glasgow was questioning Rove about his work for Governor Bill Clements in the 1986 campaign against Governor Mark White, the Democratic incumbent. A now-forgotten incident of that campaign involved a listening device allegedly found in Rove’s office by a private security firm, a few days before a televised debate. The case made headlines around the state. It was investigated by Rampton, who never found the alleged perpetrator.
Glasgow: “Ah, Mr. Rove, would you now tell us publicly who bugged your office that you blamed upon Mark White publicly and the press statewide?”
Rove: “Ah, first of all, I did not blame it on Mark White. If, ah, if you’ll recall I specifically said at the time that we disclosed the bugging that we did not know who did it, but we knew who might benefit from it. And no, I do not know. …”
Glasgow: “And are you now satisfied that Mark White and the Democratic Party did not bug your office as you – as you released, ah, to the newspapers?”
Rove: “Senator, I never said Mark White bugged my office, I’m not certain he has an electronic background. I never said the Democratic Party bugged it either…. As to who bugged it, Senator, I do not know – and the F.B.I. does not know….”
Ari Fleischer shows us another example in which what he claims was not said was never said, but it certainly has been presented as an implicit result of inaction all along (see Inflated Consequences):
Let me explain to you the President’s thinking on this. A greater, more important truth is being lost in the flap over whether or not Iraq was seeking uranium from Africa. The greater truth is that nobody, but nobody, denies that Saddam Hussein was seeking nuclear weapons. He was pursuing numerous ways to obtain nuclear weapons. The United States never said that he had nuclear weapons. We have said that he was pursuing them. It should surprise nobody that Saddam Hussein was seeking to acquire the means to produce from a variety of sources and a variety of ways.
This is taking a larger, nuanced statement and simplifying it in order to mean something completely different. Al Gore was beaten over the head with this again and again, both with Love Story and his massive political contributions to the Internet’s creation. This is often connected with “You’re So Silly!”
This category relies on a lot of hard work by the person being lied to, and that the speaker has a considerably greater knowledge of what is actually going on than the victim. Something is pointed out to the victim, a lead towards something that will overshadow anything which the speaker wishes to conceal. The victim can also be “primed” to reach a certain conclusion upon discovering whatever information the speaker is hinting at, but this is not the way of the true Master. Usually this is accomplished by a combination of careful phrasing, and by some unrelated fact which is sure to draw the attention of the victim away from any ambiguities in the conclusion he or she is supposed to draw. Not for beginners.
In the same press gaggle above, the very next paragraph:
He had previously obtained yellow cake from Africa. In fact, in one of the least known parts of this story, which is now, for the first time, public — and you find this in Director Tenet’s statement last night — the official that — lower-level official sent from the CIA to Niger to look into whether or not Saddam Hussein had sought yellow cake from Niger, Wilson, he — and Director Tenet’s statement last night states the same former official, Wilson, also said that in June 1999 a businessman approached him and insisted that the former official, Wilson, meet an Iraqi delegation to discuss expanding commercial relations between Iraq and Niger. The former official interpreted the overture as an attempt to discuss uranium sales.
Now what’s buried here is the implicit question “who sent that official,” and the answer is irrelevant considering that Valerie Plame, who suggested Wilson’s name, is married to him. This startling detail overshadows the fact that Valerie did not do the sending, leaving the couple open to charges of collusion against George W. Bush. By “letting” the media trip over that one for themselves, it makes it much more sensational, and easier to spin negatively, as well as leaving open the opportunity for an “I Never Said That” in the future.
As an aside, I’d like to say this: Scottie, your Kung Fu is weak – go to the feet of Master Ari, and petition him to continue your training.
This is a deliberate attempt to bypass someone’s reasoning ability with the proposition that something must immediately be done, even if the thing to be done has nothing to do with the sense of duty you are evoking.
A very good example of this can be found when Yours Truly was at a camping trip, and a slightly drunk and particularly nice and agreeable friend was holding a bottle of very old mezcal. The bottle was of hand-blown Mexican green glass, with a little worm made out of marbles affixed to the bottom (complete with little smile and hat). With a totally straight face, I walked up to him and said “[Name]! Look at the bottle? Can’t you see what you’re doing?! The worm is drowning! You must. Save. The worm.” This was delivered over the course of at most three to five seconds, and with all the seriousness of a funeral. I note with pride that by the time he stopped drinking and turned the bottle back upright, the worm’s head was safely above the tequila. He is still a friend, and I am still a bastard.
A less humorous example would be the call to “Support the Troops, Finish the Mission,” which sidesteps both whether or not the mission needed to be started (or needs to be “finished”) in the first place, and whether or not pushing the mission to a “finish” is really supporting “the troops.”
This is denigration of someone’s authoritative position in order to lessen the credibility of their words. While it’s usually in reference to education, it can also be attached to rank, social status, or position. In the previous paragraph cited from Master Ari, referring to Joseph Wilson as a “lower-level official” when he has held the post of Ambassador and at the time was not even attached to the government makes it doubly misleading.
Any argument which contains “well men/women/blacks/those people are just that way” falls decisively into this category. Appeal to a common standard without proof, and rely on “common sense” (which is neither) to draw your conclusions for you. Examples abound everywhere you look.
Drawing a line around the speaker and the victim in order to define some third party as an outsider, or in any way putting someone into an ‘out’ group in order to disparage them. Examples: “she’s just upset because she’s a woman,” or “the terrorists hate our freedoms.”
A multi-layered and popular attack (and defense), this is easily confused or combined with The Natural Order – it can either be a fundamental cutting-off-at-the-knees which attempts to subvert a rational argument by an accusation of emotional bias (such as “How can I talk to you? You’re completely irrational!” or it can be a direct attack on the emotional state (whether presumed, actual, or alleged) of the target. Dean is a popular target for the latter, especially since the “Dean Scream” fiasco where audio from a directional microphone was used to portray him as wildly ranting, when he was struggling to be heard in the room.
An attempt to subvert the hostility of a listener to whatever you’re proposing by finding some form of common ground. The danger comes in whatever proposition is attached to this. Liberals are all about this, including Yours Truly. For example, from Depeche Mode:
People are people
So why should it be
You and I should get along so awfully
Now what’s interesting here is that there may be some very, very good reasons why the person being spoken to is quite angry at the speaker, but there is an important philosophical point in the lyrics above, perhaps only answered by “because people are people.”
A disingenuous example of the use of this technique is from George W. Bush’s commencement address at Notre Dame:
Our task is clear, and it’s difficult: we must build our country’s unity by extending our country’s blessings. We make that commitment because we are Americans.
It is asserted without proof or definition that the task is to extend our country’s blessings, conflated with the necessity of the task because of our national identity. Never mind that without an enumeration of what these “blessings” are, we can’t even begin to approach the question as to whether we should, or even can attempt to extend them without making the situation worse.
This is usually the Hail Mary pass version of the “Big Lie” or “Emotive Definition.” The best example ever is right here, in which Nixon attempts to use Emotive Definition to evoke the physical theft connotations of the word “crook” in contrast to his very reasonable demeanor during the interview:
“People have got to know whether or not their President is a crook. Well, I’m not a crook. I’ve earned everything I’ve got.”
That would be former President Nixon, who was, indeed, a crook.
Making Shit Up As You Go Along (MSUAYGA)
This is sort of a catch-all category for any time you write your own definition for a word, or write your own historical account. From Mary Sanchez of the Kansas City Star:
People are not racist if they simply dislike you. People are not racist if they note the negatives about a group of people, but refuse to see examples that contradict their view. This could qualify as pig-headed, simplistic thinking. But it is not inherently racist.
Racism is using a race or ethnicity-based belief to hurt someone economically. Like deciding that because someone is Latino, that is cause to deny them a job, a bank loan or a promotion. Everything else is simply bias or prejudice. And we all do that.
As far as the dictionary is concerned, racism means exactly what she says it doesn’t mean.
A less clear-cut example would be “he voted against the war before he voted for it” (about John Kerry, in which what was being voted on and why were vastly oversimplified), and that Big Lie tying 9/11 and Saddam Hussein.
Willful and Malicious Abuse of Connotation
“Emotive Definition” crossed with “Geraldo Gone Wild” with a touch of irrelevancy, nothing touches this category’s examples better than the use of the word “war” in The War on Poverty, the War on Drugs, and The War on Terror. It is not possible in any rational sense to declare “war” on these three things, but in order to evoke the image of total commitment and national resolve, the word is used anyway – even though the approach the word evokes (and that is usually used) is not appropriate.
This is where you speak for someone who generally would not speak for themselves. The CIA and the military are favorite candidates for this, because usually they have very little to say about their internal workings to the outside world. Usually they will neither confirm nor deny your allegations, since what is really going on inside is a closely held secret. It didn’t work out that way for Woodward:
On the October 27 edition of CNN’s Larry King Live, Washington Post assistant managing editor Bob Woodward claimed that the CIA has completed a damage assessment related to the outing of agency operative Valerie Plame and found its detrimental effects to be “quite minimal.” However, two days later, Woodward’s own newspaper reported that the CIA initially found the damage “serious enough to warrant an investigation,” and stated that the agency typically waits until the conclusion of criminal investigations to launch formal damage assessments.
Unstated (or Unsupported) Connections
This is modern advertising in action. The logical fallacy here is False Analogy, where you conflate two things which have some similarity in order to underscore (or create the illusion of) a desirable property in whatever you’re pointing at. A TV commercial for Nestle’s white chocolate showed milk being poured over an irregular surface, forming shifting patterns that were intermingled through the magic of video effects with the diaphanous, loose, and almost translucent silks worn by a slender woman whose expression can only be described as “satiated.” In a classic example of “I Never Said That,” I leave the connections for you to draw.
This is where a law or principle which has been unused in a situation where it would be inconvenient to do so is brought up as a shield at a later time. Attorney General Gonzales using the national security excuse to essentially state that he is unable to say anything that hasn’t been said already:
Before going any further, I should make clear what I can discuss today. I am here to explain the Department’s assessment that the President’s terrorist surveillance program is consistent with our laws and Constitution. I am not here to discuss the operational details of that program, or any other classified activity. The President has described the terrorist surveillance program in response to certain leaks, and my discussion in this open forum must be limited to those facts the President has publicly confirmed – nothing more. Many operational details of our intelligence activities remain classified and unknown to our enemy – and it is vital they remain that way.
This is classified as a lie of conveniece primarily because Valerie Plame’s status as a NOC, which certainly would qualify as an operational detail of our intelligence activities, was not protected in a like manner.
For a truly sterling example of “Convenient Principles,” there is no substitute for a White House press secretary (there is also Abuse of Context here):
QUESTION: Does the president stand by his pledge to fire anyone involved in a leak of the name of a CIA operative?
MCCLELLAN: I appreciate your question. I think your question is being asked related to some reports that are in reference to an ongoing criminal investigation. The criminal investigation that you reference is something that continues at this point.
And as I’ve previously stated, while that investigation is ongoing, the White House is not going to comment on it.
The president directed the White House to cooperate fully with the investigation. And as part of cooperating fully with the investigation, we made a decision that we weren’t going to comment on it while it is ongoing.
QUESTION: I actually wasn’t talking about any investigation.
But in June of 2004, the president said that he would fire anybody who was involved in this leak to the press about information. I just wanted to know: Is that still his position?
MCCLELLAN: Yes, but this question is coming up in the context of this ongoing investigation, and that’s why I said that our policy continues to be that we’re not going to get into commenting on an ongoing criminal investigation from this podium.
The prosecutors overseeing the investigation had expressed a preference to us that one way to help the investigation is not to be commenting on it from this podium.
MCCLELLAN: And so that’s why we are not going to get into commenting on it while it is an ongoing investigation — or questions related to it.
QUESTION: Scott, if I could point out: Contradictory to that statement, on September 29th of 2003, while the investigation was ongoing, you clearly commented on it. You were the first one to have said that if anybody from the White House was involved, they would be fired.
And then, on June 10th of 2004, at Sea Island Plantation, in the midst of this investigation, when the president made his comments that, yes, he would fire anybody from the White House who was involved, so why have you commented on this during the process of the investigation in the past, but now you’ve suddenly drawn a curtain around it under the statement of, “We’re not going to comment on an ongoing investigation?”
MCCLELLAN: Again, John, I appreciate the question. I know you want to get to the bottom of this. No one wants to get to the bottom of it more than the president of the United States.
And I think the way to be most helpful is to not get into commenting on it while it is an ongoing investigation. And that’s something that the people overseeing the investigation have expressed a preference that we follow.
And that’s why we’re continuing to follow that approach and that policy.
Now, I remember very well what was previously said. And, at some point, I will be glad to talk about it, but not until after the investigation is complete.
Scottie’s Kung Fu may be weak, but what he does know, he knows well.
We’ll close with another advanced technique. The idea here is to quietly drop what would otherwise be a conversational land mine in a set of contentions that otherwise would be greeted with enthusiastic agreement by almost everyone. This is not so much a technique of persuasion as part of the process of manufacturing consent. An insidious example of how this can be turned around in even the most well-meaning of people is how Tucker Carlson approached the idea of democracy in the Middle East:
MATTHEWS: Tucker, you`re (sic) thoughts on the speech tonight. We haven`t gotten to you yet.
TUCKER CARLSON, HOST, MSNBC`S “THE SITUATION”: Well, you know, I love the fact that Bush is proud of America. I think it`s–the problem with some of his adversaries, I think, they`re instinctively embarrassed of a lot of things America does. And Bush isn`t. I mean, he is just proud of the country and that`s really appealing.
Where I part with Bush and where I think he (sic) policies become really problematic is when he becomes proud of spreading democracy abroad and makes that kind of the end of, you know, the purpose of America. And democracy is a mechanism. It`s a means. It`s not an end, right?
And so, when Bush gets up and says, you know, “Democracy is good for its own sake.” And then the next sentence says, you know, “Hamas need to disarm.” He doesn`t see the contradiction between the two.
Democracy produced Hamas, right? And so, you know, I`m not an Isolationist, but I think that`s troubling and inconsistent.
…
CARLSON: Hold on and I`ll tell you why I felt that way. Bush could…
MATTHEWS: … whatever his name is. The guy from–I did memorize the pronunciation. I`ve lost it now, the one that`s heading up Iran. He was elected.
CARLSON: Well, that`s exactly–I mean, look, when tonight–and I`m not [knocking] democracy obviously, you know. It`s a marvelous system, however…
SCARBOROUGH: Oh, Tucker, you know you all [are?].
CARLSON: Democracy reflects the nature of the people who participate in it. Stable cultures produce stable governments.
When Bush gets up and he says to the people of Iran, look, you know, “We want you to determine your future and we`re good with whatever you determine, but that doesn`t include your nuclear program.”
Let`s be totally honest. The president`s job is to protect America and protect American interests. It`s not to make other cultures or other nations happy or prosperous. It`s to protect this culture and this nation and I just wish he would say that. That`s my complaint.
SCARBOROUGH: You know, before the war–and I agree completely with Tucker. I was just joking with him. Before the war, you know, we`re all talking about democracies in the Middle East and everybody got angry when Turkey opposed us going into Iraq…
MATTHEWS: Right.
SCARBOROUGH: …A democracy of sort in the Middle East. And it just shows time and time again you`ve got to be careful what you wish for because it`s going to come back and bite you.
In this exchange, Carlson has neatly and implicitly framed an argument of “The Natural Order” within what can be considered a very liberal statement: that our values are not for everyone. Set under this is the fact that MSNBC is the second-biggest flag-waver in television, and that democracy is a charged word which is synonymous with good for most of the country. Add to that the specters of violence and nuclear weapons raised in the conversation, and you come up with “maybe the Arabs need to stick with childhood things, since they don’t seem to be ready for proper government.”
And there you have it. How can you defend against the many shapes and sizes that rhetorical feces comes packaged in? By remaining calm, and really thinking about what people say, even if it’s later on. Get into the habit of taking apart what people say, especially if it evokes deep feeling in you. Being suspicious of feelings in general is a sure route to paranoia, but using your more irrational moments as a proverbial canary in the coal mine will take you a long way towards recognizing and deconstructing the daily attempts to push our buttons. As a side note: getting angry actually increases the impact of these statements, while probably not altering the kind of impact they have as much as you’d like, unless it’s the rage from total rejection, and that can be worn down through the process of Repetition and Mutual Identification. Once that burning ire cools, the feeling of being unable to sustain that ire is hard to distinguish from a perceived weakening of the ability to sustain disagreement.
This is how converts are made.
So calm down, relax, and remember the words of Mr. Clemens:
“Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand.”
August 18th, 2007 at 14:43
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