The archetype for each person's default rhetorical situation might be the family they were born into.
We don't get to choose what family we are born into. We simply arrive completely dependent on the ministrations of others and quickly we learn to manipulate the people around us to meet our needs. We don't know we are manipulating because we are pre-conscious. We cry out and if we are fortunate someone interprets our cries correctly and our needs are met. As we become more aware we are still dependent on our caregivers and we still cry when we can't express our needs. A bit later perhaps we begin to want things our caregivers would deny us, because they should in the case of poisons found under the kitchen sink or probably should in the case of cookies from an unlocked pantry. When we can't get the cookies, and crying get's us nowhere, we become a bit more savvy and start trying to figure out what we might say or do to get our felt needs met. Our more childish rhetorical strategies, the weakest and therefore the most manipulative strategies, grow into bargaining and then negotiating and, in some families, into reasoning -- offering arguments for why we should be given what we are asking for. We might rely on humor or fawning or other forms of rhetorical performance that might work on the person standing in front of the pantry. Our caregivers teach us how to be rhetorical, how to use our words to get our needs met. They also offer us our early paradigms for what is appropriate and inappropriate rhetorical practice, paradigms that we refine and in some cases completely redesign as we encounter people from outside our family unit. Most of this learning happens outside conscious awareness and by the time we are capable of intention and planning and strategy, our sense of what is right and wrong rhetorically is already pretty well formed. I don't have any evidence to support this narrative. I'm offering it as place to start thinking about how we come be believe and how we come to influence others' beliefs.
In a sense, then, if you will, we first learn manipulation (crying or fussing till we get our needs met) and then persuasion, begging, bargaining, reasoning (using evidence and inference) in order to get our way. As we grow up and encounter people outside the family unit who we can't rely on but nevertheless believe we depend on, we are constantly adding to our rhetorical storehouse of strategies and tactics. We develop a rhetorical practice that, ideally, suits our character and temperment and needs but which also fits into the rhetorical situations we find ourselves in. Rhetorical practices are conextual, not autonamous. Who controls the context dictates the rules of rhetorical practice and while that context is shared, often there will be a few people who want to compete for control. If there is no external structure in place to control how control gets implemented, and in some cases even so, the dominant personality types will seek to dominate while the unarmed, disarmed, and clueless will become dominated if they can't step up or step out.
Ideally, a family will encourage its children to become autonomous selves and find belief systems and ways of life and larger communities they can assent to whether or not consistent with their family's aspirations or expectations. But some families try to maintain control of their children, to get them to accept the rules as dictated by the family and to surrender their personal desires to whomever controls the family unit. Fit in or get pushed out. Growing up in the sense of growing away is not an option let alone a goal. In such a world an independantly minded person might learn how to manipulate the guardians or they might run away. Worse outcomes are also possible. Teenagers tend to struggle to assert themselves, to achieve autonomy while the guardians try to keep them safe (dependant?) until they deem them capable of making their own decisions. For some families, that moment only arrives when the young person makes decisions the guardians approve. In other families, disappointment is tolerated, or accepted, or perceived as independence rather than disappointment. Unconditional love.
In an ideal family unit and by extension in all other ideal rhetorical situations, unconditional love, openness to different ideas, willingness to learn, insight into how others think, and the ability to make taste/value distinctions I like ≠ is good leads to ideal rhetorical interaction -- discussion, open but not antagonistic disagreements, negotiations, equitable bargains, and so on. The goal is what's best for each member of the family, and thus the family since the family is the whole composed of each individual's part.
If "the family" supersedes all individual members of it, then each member has to learn their place in the hierarchy and stay in line. They do as they are told or they are punished and if they fail even then to conform they are ostracized or worse. In such a dark rhetorical situation, the only alternative to submission or defiance is manipulation, dark rhetoric.
So "dark rhetoric" in the sense of childish (weak) strategies might be savvy choices and their rejection a sign of self-oppression rather than a sign of innate decency. Silent endurance is the rhetoric of a beast of burden. It may be that you need to, as Thick Black Theory suggests, thicken your skin, silence your inner voice of shame and cultivate your killer instinct. I'm not suggesting you try to emulate a dark triad personality. That's probably not possible and certainly antisocial advice if it is possible. If you grew up with a narch or a mach or a psycho you probably have a sense of their kind of rhetoric and perhaps have struggled against using it yourself because you were a victim of it. Or perhaps not. Regardless, you might benefit from reassessing your assumed equation between virtue and conformity, just as conspiracists need to reassess their equation between non-conformity and virtue. It is worth remembering in this context that "virtue" comes from "vir" which is the Latin word for "man" and thus to be a virtuous woman is to be a manly woman. The correlative, of course, is to be a womanly man, an effeminate, the worst insult a Roman could throw at a fellow citizen. Virtue, from the perspective of sophisticated skepticism, isn't a matter of personal choice but of prejudices, expectations, and perceived intentions, all of the unspoken assumptions that are built into a word that would seem to be innocent of subterfuge.
Reality testing is the process of deciding if what you are thinking/feeling is consistent with what other people are thinking/feeling. I'm assuming reality is a social construct and not a reality that is independent of perception or psychology. Because we tend to live or strive to live among people who affirm our preferred identity and therefore tend to think like us, we can have our prejudices confirmed when we seek to test a reality. If you use news sources, your social media feeds, etc., then your distortions might again be confirmed. What we all need is a much wider range of realities, a greater number and more diverse sources of information, a more dynamic, probabilistic reality, and a willingness to embrace differences without the impulse to conform.
We should also strive to know a wider range of people, people from different socio-economic backgrounds, cultures, languages and so on. For introverts this is harder than for extraverts but it's not easy for anyone becuase most of us don't recognize our default settings as arbitrary. Chicken is supposed to be spicy! This crap's bland. How can you drink Coke? It's sickeningly sweet! You painted a marble statue? Kitch! How can you possibly prefer beer to marlot? The default settings for human beings are exclusionary. We think we know what's up and anyone who disagrees with us is a problem. That will prove disasterous now that we are all living in an inter-connected world.
At any rate, if you want to achieve more than an average existence, more than say a job that you can get with little more than a few contacts and some luck and keep with little more than showing up and not egregiously screwing up, then you can be as kind and open and carefree as you like. But if you want to make a living doing something thousands of people want but only a few dozen can have, then you have to devote your entire being to that pursuit. If you want to be an academic, for example, you need the PhD, of course, but if you want a tenure track job you also need grants and citation generating publications and keynote speaker invitations. You don't have time for anything or anyone that doesn't contribute to your vita. For some people, tunnel vision is natural, but everyone else has either to create it or find an alternative dream.
If you become enthralled with something (or someone) that requires devotion, you will sacrifice a great deal before you even realize you have, and you will sacrifice even more before you even start to fight the rational urge to abandon the gambler's fallacy, good money after bad. For a junkie there are a dozen reasons to get high for every reason not to.
If as you read about cons and cults and conspiracy theories and wonder how people can be so gullible, remember what you just read. Anyone who can't imagine alternatives is a potential mark and quite possibly already a victim.
I mentioned Thick Face Black Heart above. I'd like to highlight some of that work here so that you don't miss it among the too many books on our bibliography. Thick Face Black Heart Theory was published by Li Zongwu (1879–1943) in 1911. It caused such outrage that the planned second installment was never published. It was banned from publication but it was resurrected when it was said that Mao Zidung had studied it before the Cultural Revolution. (wiki) We have his work in English today thanks to Chin-Ning Chu's translation and interpretation. She offers a succinct summary of the original in an appendix which I am reproducing for you below. You should read more of it than this if you have time, but you need to read what follows here because it sets the paradoxical tone of this class -- 🤢 🤔 💡. Li Zongwu may have had a messianic complex. Or he may have just used irony to say and then immediately take back something he suspected might be construed as having gone too far. A classic rhetorical technique of dark rhetors is to see how far they can go by constantly pushing boundaries, testing people, ready to advance further or withdraw based on the reaction they inspire in a given potential target. It is also worth pointing out, as Chin-Ning Chu does, that Li Zongwu was a failed civil servant (wiki refers to him as "a disgruntled politician and scholar" !) who refused to do as he advises in the text printed below, which either suggests that bitterness rather than insight motivated his advice or perhaps it proves that not everyone has the stomach for the kinds of things one has to do to succeed in a hyper competitive environment. Those who can do while those who can't write manuals about how it's done. And then there are those people who enjoy the schadenfreude of watching would-be power rhetors getting caught doing unscrupulous things, like Anna Sorokin and Adam Neumann and Elizabeth Holmes and Billy McFarland, just to name a couple of the people currently highlighted on streaming video services.
Success isn't a sign of virtue. And signs of success are often "borrowed" on credit.
The writings of Lee Zhong Chang are obscure. His examples are drawn from the world of provincial China at the turn of the last century. In many ways they are not relevant or even completely understandable to the modern western reader. Placed in the body of this work, they would have served no purpose. Still Lee's observations are touched by genius, even if it is a genius that is difficult to convey across the twin barriers of language and culture.
In this appendix, I will attempt to give the interested reader the flavor of Lee's thought by discussing a few of his writings.
In Chinese society, holding a position in the government bureaucracy is the only prestigious occupation. A high-ranking government bureaucrat is at the top of the social and economic order. Consequently, almost everyone is constantly trying to obtain an appointment to some official position. Lee discusses the six steps involved in getting appointed to an official government position as an example of the practical application of Thick Black Theory. His discussion is set in the context of Imperial China, but human nature has not changed since then, and the same principles apply today.
The first requirement is to empty your mind of everything that does not pertain to your appointment to the position you seek. You must have no other goals, no other thoughts. You must concentrate on the desired appointment and meditate on it daily.
Your time must also be empty. You must have the ability to wait however long it takes. You must see yourself in the post you desire and nowhere else. You are not going to take another job. If the appointment does not come today, you will wait until tomorrow. If you don't get the position this year, you will wait until next year.
You must seize every little opportunity to advance your prospects. When you find such an opportunity you must try to enlarge it. If there are no opportunities, you must focus your thoughts on creating an opportunity. The image Lee uses is of some hard object pushing, probing and boring away relentlessly.
You must constantly seek to bring your qualifications and importance to the attention of those who are in a position to help you.
You must ingratiate yourself to those who can help you. Flatter them to their faces. Praise them to others who will carry your words back to them.
You must be very subtle with your threats, because you may unknowingly threaten people with a great ability to do you harm. The threats should develop naturally out of your selfpraise. Let your listener draw the conclusion that if you are so talented, it would be unfortunate if you were to end up in a rival ministry or even be appointed to a position of authority over him. If you are so well-connected to important people, you might have the ability to make trouble for him if you are not accommodated.
There are two kinds of bribery. The first involves small gifts, meals, drinks. Often these small gifts create a sense of obligation far exceeding their cost. They should be given not only to the man who has the power to appoint you, but also to his relatives and friends.
Large bribes are used to seal the appointment. They should also be given to those who have great influence with the official who has the power to appoint you.
If your objective is to be a government official, then you need to act virtuously (according to the standards of your time). You should smear yourself with a layer of false benevolence and pretend to be a religious, moral man. You should walk around with a pious book under your arm that exhibits your lily-white inner state -- a book such as The Thin White Theory.
You should say and do nothing. Talk about everything, but say nothing. Make an appearance of being very active, but do nothing. You should never take a definite position because it might turn out to be wrong or might offend some powerful person. Never do anything for which you could be held accountable. Hold yourself apart from action, but in a position where you can claim credit for anything that might go well and disown responsibility for anything that might go wrong.
You must bow and scrape before your superiors. The word that Lee uses means to be loose-jointed, a reference to all the bending, bowing and nodding you must do. You must seek every opportunity to ingratiate yourself, not only to your superiors but to their relatives and friends. Lee notes especially that if your boss has a mistress, or "second wife," you must take great care that she likes you because she will have the greatest influence over your boss.
You must cultivate a haughty and disdainful attitude toward your inferiors. You must seem unapproachable. This attitude is also manifested in two ways. The first is the outer appearance. You must carry yourself with self-importance, discouraging anyone from offending you. The second is to show off your learning in your speech and writing.
You must be ruthless in pursuing your objectives. But, in order to make others more vulnerable to your will, you must maintain a virtuous image. The words of Confucius must always be on your lips. You must join organizations that have virtuous purposes so that people will not believe you capable of ruthless actions.
You must not hear criticism. You must not see the disapproving looks of others. Reproaches should pass by you like "the Spring wind blowing across a mule's ear." The mule does not care about the Spring wind. He is a stubborn, self-centered creature who is concerned only with his own interests.
Now you have come to the last step. Everything that has gone before has been just to help you attain a worthy position. The purpose of getting your post in the first place was to put you into a situation where others would pay for your favors, just as you previously paid for the favors of others. You did not expend all this effort simply to acquire a job; you did it to enable you to sell your influence.
In discussing Emptiness, the first step toward keeping your post, Lee briefly touched on the importance of avoiding accountability for your actions and making your actions seem much more important than they really were. Lee later elaborated on this and illustrated his point with two stories. The first concerned avoiding responsibility for your actions, the second was about making your actions seem more impressive than they actually are.
Chinese medicine is divided into two domains; Outer Practice and Inner Practice. They roughly correspond to the divisions between surgery and internal medicine in the West. A man who had been hit by an arrow was brought to a doctor of Outer Practice. The doctor sawed off the arrow's shaft but did not remove the arrowhead. Nevertheless, he told the patient that he was done. The startled patient asked the doctor, "Why don't you remove the arrowhead inside my body?" The doctor replied, "Because that is a job for a doctor of Inner Practice."
Many people defer accountability by sawing off the arrow. They do as little as possible and always try to leave someone else to finish the job. They do not care if something goes wrong, so long as the blame can be laid on whoever gave the final approval or finished the job.
When a housewife discovered that her wok had developed a crack, she summoned a repairman. The repairman asked the woman to go build a fire so that he could burn off the soot and examine the wok more closely. After she had left the room, the repairman took his hammer and tapped the wok lightly until the crack had enlarged almost to the point where it could not be repaired. When the soot had been burned off, the woman said,"The crack is much worse than I thought." The repairman agreed, "It will be a difficult job. You're lucky that I am such an excellent craftsman." "You are right," she said. "It probably would be impossible to repair if it got any worse."
Oftentimes it is necessary to make the situation a little worse than it actually is in order to insure the proper level of appreciation for your efforts. But you must be very careful not to make the problem so bad that you can't remedy it. Hitting the wok is an art. If it is hit too softly, the crack will not increase. It is hit too hard, the crack will become too large for repair. It the wok is made of clay, the whole thing might break into pieces.
Lee discussed the two guises under which nations conduct their foreign policy: the thug and the prostitute. The prostitute has a thick face. The thug has a black heart.
In the Orient, when a man is with a prostitute, she flatters him. She tells him how handsome he is; what a great lover he is. She swears before the moon and the stars that her love for him will endure to eternity. Of course she does not mean any of it.
By example, Lee said that Japanese foreign policy prior to World War II was based on the principles of Thick Face, Black Heart. Japanese diplomats took on the role of the prostitute in their negotiations with other countries. They flattered the leaders. They extolled the friendship that existed between them. They rhapsodized about how powerful a force the two nations could be as allies. They did not necessarily mean what they said any more than the prostitute does.
Whenever it became expedient for them to do so, they would break their treaties and make the same promises to another country.
The thug is a brute without a conscience who will use whatever weapons are available to him in order to beat his victims into submission. The Japanese Imperial Army behaved as a common thug, beating and robbing its neighbors after their suspicions were disarmed by the sweet lies of the prostitute.
Lee Zhong Chang died in 1943 with the Japanese army still in control of much of his homeland. Lee's theory of foreign policy still rings true today.
A more recent example is George Bush's Japan visit in January of 1992. In the Japanese's eyes George Bush and his team are behaving like thugs in demanding that Japan open its market. In reality, the Japanese are practicing prostitute foreign policy with the Americans as a counter strategy. Meanwhile, the Japanese government keeps on reassuring the bond of friendship between the U.S. and Japan, even stating that Japan is indebted to the U.S. because of their generous aid after the World War II. However, the words "friendship" and "compassion" expressed by the Japanese bear a strong resemblance to the prostitute's oath of eternal love to their paying clients. In a less dramatic, subtle manner, all nations utilize a combination of strategies—both as a prostitute and a thug— during their sophisticated international negotiations.
In Korea, Japan and many Asian countries, it is the woman's fate to be subservient to her husband. Among the Chinese peasants it is also true that a woman is treated as an inferior being, but among the educated classes in China it has always been understood that men of real worth respect and fear their wives. It is also true that the higher you go in the social order, the more prevalent is this attitude.
Lee maintains that this no accident. He says that a man rises in the world exactly to the same degree that he fears his wife. The peasant treats his wife like a dog or a horse. As a consequence he is little more than a beast himself. A man who fears his wife will conduct his life properly in order to please her. By conducting his life properly, he will rise in the world. To such a man, his wife becomes a source of strength and a refuge to him from the misfortunes of the world. Lee attaches an almost mystical significance to wife fearing. A man's wife is the person to whom he entrusts his whole life. Out of love for her and fear of her, he goes out into the world to make a name for himself. Lee maintains that fear of one's wife is the greatest virtue. He believed that if everyone were afraid of his wife, a truly beneficent social order would once more come about and the virtue of the Chinese nation would be restored.
Lee was a man with unique insight into human nature. He possessed the ability to totally disregard others' criticism, and therefore was able to proclaim Thick Black Theory a religion and himself as the pope of this religion.
As the founder of a new religion, he claimed he was equal to the Catholic Pope in Rome. This assertion alone brought strong opposition, especially in religious circles, from many Chinese at the turn of the twentieth century. I am not quite sure how serious Lee was about his Popeship. However he was deadly serious about his Thick Black Theory. Against all odds, he dedicated his life in promoting this theory. I salute Lee for his courage and willingness to march to the beat of a different drum in a time and a place when nothing was valued higher than conformity.