Rhetoric and Power: The Dark Side of Persuasion
The Class The Professor The Truth The Power The Books The Website You?
Assignments Bibliography Definitions
Enter the Dark Side
Dark Practices Sometimes Persuasion is Just Permission Exploit Cognitive Biases Encourage Faith Based Reasoning Isolate Your Target Build Yourself Up Keep Everyone Else Down Find Your Next Victim Create a Cover Story Create Submission and Dependence Confession, Contrition, and Blackmail Create the Illusion of Free Will Propaganda and PR: Instagram the shit out of reality Play Language Games Name and Rename Create a Parlance Antidotes
The Secret Recipe Red Flags
Resources Techniques


Assignments

Page 47 How do you read a poll? Actually, it's not all that hard, but the problem is that most poll results don't give you enough information to tell whether the poll is worth anything. In order to evaluate the results of a poll, you need to know the wording of the question or questions asked by the poll taker, when the poll was taken, how many people responded, how the poll was conducted, who was polled, how many people were polled, and how they were selected. That's a lot of information, and rarely does a poll ever give you more than just the results.

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Summer Session: June 6 - July 30

Please familiarize yourself with this website. This is where you will access nearly everything you will read and where you will turn in your assignments. To turn in assignments, you need to create an identity [start by clicking the blue login button top right]. If you have problems, please email me at gpullman@gsu.edu.

  1. Weekly reading journal (60% of final grade):
    1. Week 1, read the website. Comment on what you read using quotations when appropriate. Feel free to argue with anything you read there. Also, if you have time and access to HBO, watch Nightmare Alley. You might like to follow that with Terry Gross's Fresh Air interview with Guillermo del Toro, the director. The movie is tragic noir that also offers a very accurate explanation (not just representation) of cold reading and grifting in general. The movie also entertains some interesting thoughts about how narrative, lies, cons, and life are intertwined.
    2. Week 2, read the excerpts from as many of the books in our bibliography as you can. Copy and paste excerpts that struck you as interesting and or important and comment on each. The more the better.
    3. Weeks 3, 4, 5, and 6, read one of the recommended books and comment on it.
      You might want to suppliment each book you read with one or more of the documentaries or docudrammas that seem relevant.
  2. Contributions to the Resources section of this website (20% of final grade): find some relevant podcasts, websites, discussion lists, documentaries, videos, movies, songs, anything digital that will contribute to our understanding of the rhetorics of power. How many contributions? 5 at least.
  3. Final essay: Ten page first draft -- not something you write in a single sitting but not something ready for publication either; include an aspirational bibliography and an apendix with a revision plan [Answer the question: If I had two more months to work on this I would....] . Below are a couple of possible topics. You can always work out an alternative with me in advance (20% of final grade):
    1. Explain the use of dark techniques in an advertising campaign (multiple instances across different platforms).
    2. There's something called "dark patterns" in web design. What are they? Where did the expression come from? What are some examples, perhaps on a continuum from shaddy to dasterdly? To what extent are they and/or are they not consistent with dark rhetoric as we discuss it here?
    3. Discuss a FaceBook or Reddit thread or other social media feed as a propaganda campaign.
    4. Write an essay about an organized disinformation campaign, tobacco, Oxycontin, global warming, whatever repulses you.
    5. Explain a propaganda campaign for good, like the "Don't Mess with Texas" campaign.
    6. Is the diamond industry a scam? There's a Daimond Council orchestrating PR. There's an arbitrary financial burden imposed in the name of committment and fueled by desire for status in the guise of love and faith. No intrinsic value to ornamental diamonds. Danger in mining the diamonds. Colonialism?
    7. Write an invesitigative report about a cult or a long con (like a Ponzi scheme) or a multi level marketing scheme. How did it start, who was affected, what's up with it now? And so on.

NOTE: If you have not read Plato's Gorgias, you should. If you have read it, you might want to re-visit it. The underlying premise of this class is that the version of Socrates who is in Gorgias can be read as a con man in the sense that he created "rhetoric" as a foil in order to promote "dialectic", not unlike how the Sackler's created "break through pain" to justify toxic doses of Oxycontin. In other words, he made up a word, "rhetoric," to name a set of practices that he could make look shady by comparison to dialectic and then accused his rivals of selling that inferior product in order to steal (seduce, poach, harvest?) their students. From our perspective, Callicles, the ultimate interlocutor, the rich, successful, politically astute man who warns Socrates that his teaching will lead to personal disaster, is the voice of Athenian reality. Socrates, as we all know, chose his own dialectically-enhanced reality and ultimately suicide over Athenian reality. And so, for people who have a naïve understanding of rhetoric -- the (mis)understanding sold by Plato all those years ago -- rhetoric distorts the appearance of reality to the rhetor's advantage, and all right-thinking people ("philosophers") are duty-bound to dispel the spell-binder's spells. While I will admit that a better rhetoric can sometimes debunk a lesser rhetoric, such is not the triumph of reason over rhetoric.

From the perspective of sophisticated skepticism, rhetoric is not the enemy of reality because all realities are socially constructed via language, strategic, inadvertent, latent, and otherwise. The Gorgias, in other words, offers dialectic as an antidote to a placebo.