Definitions

To attack the "man," discredit an argument by discrediting the person making it. While this can happen on the spot, in the case of debates or cross examinations, it can be part of a sustained rhetorical effort, as when a company makes sport of its competition (Apple vs PC) or a political party derides specific members of the opposition as a way of undermining the credibility of the whole party. If you took Philosophy 101, this was probably the first "fallacy" you were warned off. In Rhetoric 101, of course, you learned about ethos and how the speaker's apparent credibility lends credence to an argument. There revers, as in all things rhetorical, is also effective.

"In the most general terms, an antisocial personality is characterized by absolute disregard to others and by violation of their fundamental rights. People with antisocial personality disorder ignore social obligations and norms, refuse to follow rules, despise authority and exhibit cold indifference towards others' feelings. Although they mostly know that their conduct goes against general social expectations and norms, they remain unconcerned. As the saying goes: the antisocial personality does not love, does not fear and does not learn. Of course, antisocial behavior is not necessarily equal to violence and physical abuse, although this also occurs frequently. The repertoire includes harassing and threatening others, recurrent conflicts with the authorities (e.g. document forgery), ceaseless involvement in illegal practices (e.g. marriage swindle) and so forth" (Tamás Bereczkei, Machiavellianism: The Psychology of Manipulation, p. 38)

While not directly relevant to dark rhetors per se, this sort of person is related to Machs and Narcs and Psychos in the sense that when those kinds of people have impulse control problems they fall hard towards ASPD.

In a world where the knowable is known, arguments from authority are unnecessary. Each person can test the evidence for themselves. But once you need to rest a decision on knowledge you don't possess, you have to consider the authority of the person offering the advice. Do they know what they are talking about? How do you know? We believe Drs., if we do, because we beleive their training and professional ethics give them the knowledge to properly diagnose and treat what ails us. Even still we will seek a second opinion if the diagnosis is threatening.

But once we accord a person authority, we will tend to do what they tell us to do and think what they tell us to think. And if they're advice is based solely on their charism and will to power, we are subordinating our selves to them.

It's not that you should reject arguments from authority but first question the authority of the authority, much easier said than done.

"Come on! Everyone else is doing it." If you took Philosophy 101 you were told that bandwagon appeals are fallacious. They are. But there's far more to getting on board with everyone around you than mere fallacious thinking. Conformity is a natural human instinct. It takes a very different way of seeing the world to just say, "Yeah, that's all well and good but I'm going over here to do my own (lonely) thing." Conformity is so ingrained that if you put a group of randomly selected people in a room and tell them they have to reach a unanimous conclusion, one strong-willed member of the group can quickly skew the discussion and soon everyone will fall in line, even if they aren't convinced. (Asch conformity effect), and this will happen even if the original inclination is toward an opposite conclusion. Conformity is a human trait that domineering, antagonistic people exploit to garner power. Many of us are raised not to cause trouble or assert our will and that means we have to work especially hard to dissent whenever a group we identify with tells us to follow along. A group we reject, has the opposite effect. We won't listen no matter how reasonable they are and since we aren't one of them, we find it just as hard to go along here as we would to dissent at home. People think what they think has to be consistent with who they think they are and they come to believe who they are by collecting beliefs and opinions from the people who they grew up with and later with those people they find themselves amongst, typically the same kinds of people if not the very same people.

a method of psychological and physical restraint conditioning used to force prisoners of war to defect, to abandon their former ways of thinking and way of life. The effects aren't typically long lasting. Usually if a person is returned to their home country they will revert to their old beliefs. The typical procedure is good cop / bad cop, strenuous labor, punishment, pressure (compression, contortion), starvation, sleep deprivation, followed by brief, unexpected, relief. The process is repeated unpredictably, so the target is in a constant state of exhausted, terrified uncertainty. The stress leads a person to question their sanity, making them question their original beliefs. When they are given a brief rest, a bit of food, or shown some small token of humanity, their immense gratitude will make them want to comply, to seek acceptance and relief from their abject misery. The process is often said to have been derived from Pavlovian positive and negative reinforcement conditioning.

"Brainwashing" is a neologism coined by a journalist named Edward Hunter who used it to help make a name for himself in the aftermath of the Korean war. He claimed that the Chinese and Koreans had discovered a method of mind control so powerful that it caused American POWs to defect after the war. (Joel Dimsdale, Dark Persuasion p. 98). As far as psychologists and other serious students of persuasion are concerned, you can't be "brainwashed," but the techniques associated with "brainwashing" can indeed have a profound, if typically impermanent, effects on a person's belief systems. Cults often use a version of "brainwashing" as part of their onboarding process.

The word "brainwashing" is often used as a devil term, a negative epithet like "cult." If you don't like what a person has learned, you might accuse them of having been brainwashed. Fear of "brainwashing" is what makes some people reject certain kinds of education, whether public or "private", i.e. religious.

The ability to make people feel seen and heard as they wish to be seen and heard, not necessarily as they are, to make people feel understood, appreciated, needed, even loved. Related skills are: a good memory for names and roles and places; a network of helpful and influential acquaintances -- to attract new-comers by offering resources; a good sense of humor; quick to understand a situation and make use of it for the cause; a compelling back story; a relatable goal (often a slogan or catch phrase) that others can readily read themselves into. It helps to have a symmetrical face, straight, white teeth, smooth skin, and a penetrating gaze. Your eyes are a spot light.

There's an unverified phenomenon known as the psychopath's stare, an unblinking, unmoving, "penetrating," mesmerizing, gaze. Looking someone in the eyes is considered in almost all cultures as an important form of non-verbal communication. Different cultures have different expected durations for looking and looking away. In America, a person who won't look you in the eye is generally considered shifty or perhaps shy (or in some cases neurologically different). A person who stares is considered rude, but in the right context that "rudeness" can be perceived in as a display of dominance. Cops stare at you when they are listening to an answer you give them and remain silent and staring to try to make you uncomfortable, so you will keep talking and eventually trip yourself up. In the context of courtship, staring becomes gazing into each other's eyes -- soul gazing. When a psychopath stares at you, supposedly, you feel the weight of that gaze so intensely that you freeze and the hair on the back of your neck stands up. Again, never verified as far as I know, but eye-contact is a powerful in nearly all settings. This gaze might easily be discovered a fantasy because it lends itself to the idea that psychos are soulless, an abyss into which one fears falling.

Human brains are hardwired to think in particular ways that careful reflection might restrain, but because we like to feel confident and mistake speed for competence, we let our default ways of thinking override our more careful thought processes. Basically we believe what we want to believe without much in the way of second thoughts. There is an excellent wiki entry on cognitive biases you should read. You should also read Thinking Fast and Slow. I highlight the cognitive biases I think contribute the most to dark rhetoric on the practices screen.

collusion to keep an inconvenient fact or idea hidden or discredited.

Profound belief that reality is being hidden by a cabal of people working behind the scenes. Those to blame are shadowy figures, "the deep state", the Hollywood elites, tech moguls, global banking, alien beings, "the government" with no specific reference to a particular agency, but also sometimes a specific agency is blamed, the CIA is a favorite. Conspiracy theories are inspired by feeling duped by those in power. Bernay's once wrote "Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. 1" He was speaking of propaganda and in fact offering his services as a "Public Relations" professional, a term he coined for his service of planting stories, creating consulting boards of experts to sign editorials he wrote promoting the health benefits of whatever product his retainers were selling. Add to this confirmed suspicion the many instances of government and corporate cover-ups as well as conspiracies to influence foreign governments and trade agreements (Banana Republics) and it's not hard to see how people come to be deeply suspicious of any explanation they can't understand or which conflicts with their sense of reality. It is easier for some people to make something up than to live with the unknown.

What separates the suspicious from conspiracists is the level of commitment to the alternate reality. They are willing to abandon family and friends in pursuit of proof of what hey are absolutely already convinced is true but denied by special interests, even to risk their lives if necessary or to committ public suicide to ensure the public knows.

Self-sealing arguments -- the absence of evidence is evidence of a coverup, that no one else believes if proof that people are sheep and the conspiricy is real.

regressive empiricism, if I can't experience it directly, I don't believe it and anyone who says different is delusional or complicit in keeping the truth hidden.

Wiki offers a List of Conspiracie Theories

Here are a couple of examples

A rhetorical technique used to create the illusion of insight, to make a target feel seen, understood, and appreciated. Charismatic people are often good a cold reading, but the idea comes from psychic grifters, mentalists, clairvoyants. You should read the wiki article. Basically you observe a person closely, their dress, accessories, demeanor, the context, make an inference or two about who they want the world to see them as, and then you strike up a conversation to test the accuracy and utility of your inferences. By getting them to talk about themselves, you gain insight into who they are and what they want and you can use that information to bait subsequent hooks.

Someone who makes a living at other people's expense without them realizing they are being exploited. If they are willingly exploited, then that's not a con; it's just a bargain no one else is willing (or has) to accept. Con artists are callous, manipulative, pragmatic, narcissistic, and self-righteous. They think there's nothing wrong with what they are doing as long as they can get away with it. Sheep need fleecing. They are profoundly persuasive people. They know how to bait a psychological trap (figure out what a person wants and promise it in return for what looks like a better than average deal but which is actually the opposite. Jade for bricks), string the victim along until they have paid as much as they can or are willing to, and skip out on the consequences. Cons are persuasive because they know how to leverage desire.

to pay for something that doesn't exist or is never delivered or is delivered but isn't what you thought it would be. The question becomes, why did you think what you did? Did someone mislead you or did you misinterpret what they said or both? You live in hope until your hopes are dashed, which is why despair is the greatest sin. You can't control someone who no longer imagines a better life.

To question the given, the assumed, the traditional, the received wisdom, to recognize "self-evident truths" as part of the arsenal or rhetorics of power. People thinking critically seek to base decisions on data, evidence, valid inferences free from biases or untenable assumptions. Uncritical thinking happens whenever a person assumes an assumption is a fact and infers from it whatever he or she wants to infer. We hold these facts to be self-evident... where these "facts" are cherished but unexamined beliefs and "fact" is assumed a phenomenon rather than the consequence of agreement, a thing rather than an idea (see reification). If everyone in an isolated space believes the sky is falling, then for them the sky is falling even though for everyone outside that space the sky is not falling. Critical thinking recognizes that context influences what passes for reason and that fantasy and perception frame a person's perspective on "reality" while shared realities are more durable but not necessarily more empirically valid (real) because they too are socially constructed. Just because the map is not the territory doesn't man the map isn't useful, only that it must not be mistaken for real, else you might follow your GPS's advice down the Spanish Steps.

is a group of people who gather around a set of ideas and rituals that dictate a way of life. Because the word "cult" has come to be a pejorative, we tend to forget that many accepted organizations (religions, businesses, schools, communities, etc.) have cult-like tendencies, use rhetorical techniques designed to distinguish (or literally separate in the worst cases) their adherents from all other groups. Any organization that cultivates a fan base is cultish. Any organization that tries to keep it's members enthralled by impoverishing them, narrowing their frames of reference, limiting their sources of information, and subordinating all desires to the desires of a single individual (or idea) deserves the pejorative "cult", in my opinion, but that doesn't mean that organizations that don't go that far aren't using the same techniques or that they can't develop in the wrong direction over time. No one joins a cult. They find a home where their enthusiasms are shared, their hopes encouraged, their fears allayed, and their doubts vaporized. By the time they suspect they have joined a cult they are deep in and it takes a great deal of psychological energy to get out. Most people do get out. The churn or turn over rate is typically high with such organizations. But not everyone does get out and not everyone who stays is content with the bed they help make.

Cult, which shares an origin with culture and cultivate, comes from the Latin cultus, a noun with meanings ranging from "tilling, cultivation" to "training or education" to "adoration." In English, cult has evolved a number of meanings following a fairly logical path. The earliest known uses of the word, recorded in the 17th century, broadly denoted "worship." From here cult came to refer to a specific branch of a religion or the rites and practices of that branch, as in "the cult of Dionysus." By the early 18th century, cult could refer to a non-religious admiration or devotion, such as to a person, idea, or fad ("the cult of success"). Finally, by the 19th century, the word came to be used of "a religion regarded as unorthodox or spurious." (Merriam-Webster)

is a person who manages to subordinate other's will to their own -- clarity of vision, suppleness of narrative (several different kinds of people need to read themselves into it), charisma (a presence that makes people feel seen and valued for who they want to be not necessarily who they are), the ability to create a parlance, invent rituals, engender trance states, extract confessions and promises of reform, disrupt alternative ways of thinking, exploit weaknesses, replace old identities with one new identity, get people to dress alike, talk alike, think alike -- draw the same conclusions from any evidence presented -- even look alike because every member is expendable and ideally interchangeable. The leader is like everyone else only more so. They exempt themselves from the restrictions or burdens they place on others and the others are happy to exempt them because they see them as supernaturally superior.

All cults are discourse communities but not all discourse communities are cults.

antagonistic will to power, dominant, controlling, covert, clandestine, surreptitious, devious, disingenuous, frowned on, indirect, manipulative.

Narcissism, Machiavellianism, and Psychopathy combined, the character traits of people with a superior will to power, cold empathy, an amoral approach to living, and therefore, quite possibly, a superior rhetorical skill set.

covert primarily linguistic efforts at domination.

Acronym for Deny, Attach, Reverse Victim and Offender. A strategy used to deflect an accusation by accusing the victim of victimizing the abuser. Think "religious freedom" or "reverse racism." Certain uses of the expression "free speech" fall under this heading as well.

finding the truth hidden by "rhetoric" in the Platonic Gorgias sense (lies, spin) Adam Ruins Everything is a great good example, Season 3, Episode 12 is particularly relevant.

reversing the indoctrination performed by cults, a process of returning a person to their original ways of thinking, inferring

a network (people in different places living in different wider communities) of people involved in a common enterprise that uses a specialized vocabulary.

The practice of planting forged or faked documents in order to generate buzz and trace the flow of information. The goal isn't to spread lies but sow doubt, destabilize beliefs, get people to ask specific questions and so look in one direction instead of another, to distract people and waste resources. Unlike subterfuge where the goal is to leave no trace, disinformation is about leaving an erroneous bewildering trail that distracts and confuses the victims.

Benevolent example, packing a diamond ring or a car key in a toaster oven box. A malevolent example, a Russian doll of boxes in which a worthless trinket is ultimately wrapped in tissue paper 20 boxes down. While the victim patiently and carefully opens each box, you rob them.

A word coined by George Orwell in the 1948 dystopian novel 1984, doublespeak was the official language of the authoritarian government. The word has become an epithet often hurled at any expression deemed intentionally obscure or misleading or downright disengenous. People who are good at it sound like they know what they are talking about and can be convincing, but if anyone stops to look closely at what was said, one discovers that very little if anything was said and much was hidden.

In Doublespeak, which is solid if dated, William Luntz offers this definition:

Doublespeak is language that pretends to communicate but really doesn't. It is language that makes the bad seem good, the negative appear positive, the unpleasant appear attractive or at least tolerable. Doublespeak is language that avoids or shifts responsibility, language that is at variance with its real or purported meaning. It is language that conceals or prevents thought; rather than extending thought, doublespeak limits it. Doublespeak is not a matter of subjects and verbs agreeing; it is a matter of words and facts agreeing. Basic to doublespeak is incongruity, the incongruity between what is said or left unsaid, and what really is. It is the incongruity between the word and the referent, between seem and be, between the essential function of language--communication--and what doublespeak does--mislead, distort, deceive, inflate, circumvent, obfuscate. William Lutz, Doublespeak p. 1.

Here is one of his examples.

Getting a job with the CIA is no easy task. In its help-wanted ads, the CIA never uses words like "spying," "wiretapping,""breaking and entering," or "killing," nor do its ads mention illegally over-throwing governments, recruiting mercenaries, bribing foreign officials, lying to Congress, or all those other exciting things the CIA does. What the ads do stress is "intercultural sophistication,""communication skills," and "solid ethical standards," plus "a gift for dealing with people" and "integrity of performance." Best of all is the doublespeak used to describe the major function of the CIA, which is spying. The ads say that "Prudent foreign policy decisions depend on solid knowledge. The most important decisions depend on information our adversaries seek to conceal. A truly extraordinary group of men and women serve abroad as the key players in our national effort to fill these critical information gaps." You won't be spying; you'll just be "filling critical information gaps." p. 229.

Encouraging people to take a positive or negative view of something or someone based entirely on the way you name them, name calling. The best are memorable (rhyming, alliteration, puns) and visualizable. Prince Andrew = Randy Andy. Sleepy Joe Biden. Orange Cheeto. It is possible to use an epithet without realizing you are and there are "culture wars" over what is considered a conventional expression vs an epithet. The word "gypsy" for example, was until recently considered just a name because the Romania people who were called that were not consulted about what it meant to them to be called in that way. Now that their feelings are acknowledged, the word is recognized as a slur and not used in polite discourse. (Much more about this)

Akin to God and Devil terms, essentialisms are words that are said to have one and only one referent in the "real" world. Often essentials come in non-binary pairs. People who insist that a given word has only one referent want to differentiate "reality" (what they ardently believe) from any thing they don't want to believe. Any ambiguous word -- one that might refer to different but similar objects -- is held in contempt, as are any of its potential referents. Such words and their referents will be censored if they can't be eradicated. From an essentialist's perspective, better to force the ambiguous to conform than to question an essentialism. The words "man" and "woman" are two examples. Any person who can't be or refuses to be labeled either a man or a woman will be ridiculed, violated, and if necessary legislated against. Insisting that a word has a single referent, and that only examples possessing the qualities of that referent can be labeled by that word, while legislating against ambiguous words and non-conforming examples, is a way of trying to use language to control people's perceptions and behaviors. Essentialist thinking works like this: There are two kinds of human beings: men and women. If you are a human being, you are either a man or a woman. Therefore, if you are neither a man nor a woman, you are either not a human being or you are a delusional man or a delusional woman. The logic of this thinking is impeccable but of course for it to make any sense at all you have to accept the essentialist definitions. See "critical thinking" and "reification".

People who get censored for expressing essentialist beliefs are offended and feel victimized but they do because their rhetoric of power (essentialism) has run up against a currently more powerful rhetoric of power (inclusivity), though as with all "culture wars" the jury is bribable and any given verdict reversible.

A shared delusion. As a psychological diagnosis, one hears this phrase when two people get into some kind of extravagant trouble because they have created a world different from the one they are actually operating in. This condition leads couples to abandon the world they were living in to go on a mad spree of some kind. Think Bad Vegan, perhaps. Here is a full explanation. In a sense, all immature love can be described as a shared delusion. Especially when we are young, we don't know exactly who we are and can't always tell who someone else is (to say nothing of what they may become in time) but confirmation bias and projection let us hang our desires on someone who we desperately want to be the person of our fantasy. If they reciprocate, BANG! If not, of course, a painful let down. When they reciprocate for a while and then don't, HEART BREAK! But hopefully no jail time.

In a sense, heart break is the condition created when an illusion is dispelled. We conned our self into believing something we desperately wanted to believe and no longer can. If we persist, then what was an illusion becomes a delusion. A person who is conned suffers a similar kind of psychological pain with the same symptoms, replaying it over and over again, looking for the clues they missed, recrimination, resolution, over and over again.

If we initiated the break up, then we realized the person isn't who we wanted them to be or we had a new fantasy or found a better fit for our existing fantasy. We have simply refined our delusion and projected it a new. The risk is the same. Most people eventually realize that people are independent of our imagining about who they are and learn to live with the difference between who we want them to be and who they seem to be (to say we can know who they are is to make a bunch of assumptions about how minds work that are untenable -- see Strangers to Ourselves). This may be why people say marriage is hard work. It is definitely why people feel ashamed when they realize they have been conned and some people feel guilt when they no longer want the relationship they created when they projected their fantasy onto a real human being.

To undermine a person's sense of reality by lying to them constantly, by providing false evidence which contradicts the evidence they used to draw an earlier conclusion. The goal is to make the victim feel like they are losing their mind. Once they are no longer sure of what is real or imaginary, right or wrong, you can more readily exploit them because they no longer have any self-confidence.

A word with absolutely positive or negative value and no referent in the real world. They are all social constructs that emphasize affect and retard thinking. Communism, authoritarianism, motherhood, patriot, freedom, justice, family, the economy, unemployment, 2nd amendment, religion, free speech, happiness, progress, mental illness, and rights are some common examples. Even better if you can demonize a word perceived as neutral by those who don't agree with you. Liberal used to mean magnanimous, then educated, but only people who identify as American Conservative use the word in the United States now because they have demonized it, turned it into a Devil term, and so most other people simply avoid it. G/D terms are undefined and for the dogmatic unquestionable. Consequently, they are the perfect rhetorical tool for people who want to retard critical thinking and promote either/or us/them thinking.

You can learn a great deal about how a person thinks (or doesn't) and what they value by noticing their god and devil terms. If you want to pick a fight, try to get them to define their words or use one of their god terms as though it is a devil term or vice versa. Anyone who gets defensive or sarcastic or aggressive when asked to define "family" or "insane" is someone who has been trained to think uncritically, lives inside a rhetoric of power.

A trigger, a phrase supposedly connected to public policy that sets partisans off on an untutored but passionate rant. These "buttons" are used to distract and inflame people, to keep them focused on largely irrelevant and unresolvable issues so that what matters can happen unnoticed. Pressing a hot-button is a bit like ringing a false fire alarm in order to get out of a test.

the process of getting a neophyte to accept a set of beliefs, practices, definitions, and the parlance -- vocabulary, metaphors, allusions, tropes -- that reinforces the set of beliefs. Indoctrination differs from education in that the latter isn't targeted at any particular belief system. Teachers teach people how to read; trainers teach people how to decode messages in particular ways, so that the student learns to arrive at the conclusions necessary to further the organization's goals. The effects of indoctrination are longer lasting than brainwashing and the process is generally much less hostile and violent, although the testing processes can be rigorous and draining, leaving the initiate feeling both exhausted and elated at having "passed." The ardor required to succeed increases the subjects' appreciation for their accomplishment and their gratitude to the group for having accepted them. These feelings keep doubt at bay.

A belief system consisting of unspoken premises, patterns of inference, and tropes, that leads people to mistake their opinions for conclusions derived from data or experience or information presented without bias. Another word for the way I use the word "rhetoric."

Character type motivated primarily by success, in control but avoiding the spot light. Machs can be very persuasive because they are keen to get their way, cunning, calculating, and unencumbered by conventional morality. They are good liars and dissemblers but they are subtle and inventive and will choose the least destructive path to their objectives simply because the less suspicion you raise and the less trouble you cause, the less likely you are to encounter resistance or have to do objectionable things. They tend to by cynical and anxious people, always expecting the worst behavior from everyone and anxious to do unto others before the others do unto them.

Getting someone to do something without them understanding why or what they are doing: anything a weak person might do to overcome a strong one, whether strength is physical, financial, social, emotional or even cognitive. In a sense, manipulation is just the overarching term for all dark rhetorical techniques and practices. If you know what motivates a person, you can use that inclination to get them to do something that's out of the ordinary but feels natural to them: you can goad an arrogant person into attempting something beyond their real capacity in order to humiliate or make them harm themselves; flatter a rich person into spending more for something than they need to, a vain person into doing something that seems to affirm their feeling of physical superiority, a greedy person into making a pig of themselves, trick an inattentive person into "losing" something, a foolish person into mistaking something of lesser value for a greater one, confuse a chore with a challenge (like Tom Sawyer getting Ben to paint Aunt Polly's fence), inebriate a sober person, and so on. One can also manipulate emotions: frighten people so they will cede some autonomy in exchange for imaginary safety; make someone fear missing out and so acting without further thinking; make someone value something more by making them work harder for it, getting someone to comply by making them feel guilty about not complying, flatter someone in order to get them to give or do something they wouldn't have if you hadn't made them feel good about themselves and so positively disposed towards you, exploit inertia or procrastination by setting as a default something a person wouldn't choose to do but can't be bothered to undo later, like automatic payments being taken after a five day "free" trial. And of course you can also get someone to do something they don't want to do if they don't realize that is what they are doing, like asking to borrow their watch without ever intending to give it back, borrowing someone's password and then changing it, getting them to exchange something of value for something they don't realize is of lesser value, and so on. Basically, if someone is trying to sell you something you don't need, they are trying to manipulate you by creating desire and then trick you into mistaking want for need. Consumerism is a scam, by that definition, by the way.

It is important to realize that if you become sensitive to being manipulated, you can quickly start to feel manipulated even when you aren't being so, to get angry and oppositional when someone else is just trying to get you to cooperate or even participate. Sometimes people are just nice to strangers.

People can't actually read other people's minds despite the illusion most of us have from time to time. Often context will dictate what a person will feel or think and so you can create that context and then astound them when you know what they are thinking or feeling. You can also make a person think something just by saying it with confidence or in a slightly distracting way and then changing the subject. The person might later express that idea as if it had just occurred to them, as though it were there's. You can also get someone to think in a certain way by making a statement about who they whish they were and so imagine they are that kind of person: you look like a nice guy....

See Ponzi scheme below. LuLaRich is a vivid explanation.