Enter the Dark Side

Contemporary Psychological research into heuristic thinking, (Thinking Fast and Slow, for example) suggests we may be hard-wired to form opinions in the absence of valid evidence. Our cognitive biases lead us into default patterns of thinking that can be easily exploited and unscrupulous people intuitively understand how to exploit our defaults. We also have trouble understanding complex arguments and evidence outside our realms of expertise which for most people is an area that covers 99% of our decision making. We also have multiple examples of moral and epistemic scientific failures as well as some suspicions of conspiracy that keep us from fully embracing what might be the best epistemic methods we have to go on, and we also have Artificial Intelligence making pretty much all information gathering and sifting even more difficult for us to understand. By "us" in this case I mean all of us. There are corporations using AI to make decisions that don't understand how the AI works. As AI becomes more and more adept at using it's own machine learning processes to build algorithms, our lives will more and more become dependent on black-box decisions. There will be no transparency because know one will know how to see inside the box. I anticipate a whole industry of people trying to divine how a given black-box thinks. You probably know that a great deal of online interaction is bot-created, artificial intelligence passing itself off as real people providing convincing information, product reviews, requests for financial support, "news" to share and like. These bots can have artificially created "faces," which can be more charismatic than human faces, and thus you can be "talking" with a very trustworthy person who isn't even a person: a full blown AI invented hallucination. (link). Is this necessarily a problem? What if the bot is trained in medical diagnosis and you are honestly asking relevant questions and receive a diagnosis that can be corroborated by a human Dr.? What if the bot is soliciting donations for a cause but will make sure the money you send goes into an account the bot creator will drain for his or her own purposes? Etc. I'm not being apocalyptic. I'm just saying that our pursuit of technology is not necessarily improving our knowledge of our socially constructed worlds. Epistemic certainty is harder and harder to come by and thus more and more we derive certainty -- intellectual comfort -- not from knowledge but from opinion, from trust and desire, i.e.., faith. It might therefore be beneficial to give up certainty in favor of probability, but thinking statistically is as difficult for most people as thinking scientifically, and thus probability becomes what we think is probably true -- what our prejudices and social commitments and financial circumstances and cognitive biases lead us to affirm without due epistemic process. Just because the evidence is clearly visible and the inferences impeccable doesn't mean we've discovered the truth. Certainty is not truth. Certainty is a sign of conviction not evidence of the truth.

The fundamental problem here is that most people find not knowing extremely uncomfortable and would rather make something up or accept someone else's fantasy for truth than simply shrug and admit they just don't know. People have opinions about everything, even about non-existent things. We also have value judgments about things we don't understand and can't even define accurately or be bothered to try. Given the mass shooting in Buffalo yesterday I feel compelled to say something that while not exactly off topic I haven't yet figured out how to seamlessly integrate. Gun violence is greater in America than any other country that isn't currently at war. We have access to guns no other country provides (link) because the people in power and the gun industry lobby believe safety from invasion requires armed citizens. Thus some of us believe that we should have personal arsenals to protect us from invasion by foreign troupes, Russia or China perhaps. Some of us also think we need to arm ourselves against our Federal Government since we can't trust elected officials to do what is right by us and not do what is right by others at our expense. Those of us with these beliefs or beliefs akin to them insist on having military grade weapons and body armor and some of that group of us will interpret what happened yesterday in Buffalo as a false flag, yet another orchestrated attempt to offer "evidence" to confiscate our guns. Others of us will see it as just more evidence of why every citizen needs to be armed. A good guy with a gun will stop a bad guy. The cops are incapable of protecting us. Within this group there are some that believe mass shooter events are irrelevant to the gun discussion because they are about mental illness, not guns. Others of us can't imagine foreign or Federal invasion, see guns as crimes waiting to happen, and don't understand why we can't fix whatever it is that makes America Mass Shooter Central. Where is the common ground here? I don't have an answer to that question and not being a dark rhetor can't pretend to have one. I'm bringing gun violence in America up simply because it is a vivid example of how "rational debate" appears to be impossible with us these days because we think there are just two sides and each side thinks it has a corner on reason. I'm not picking a side here. The asystatic framing of the issue is the problem that I want to underscore, that and the fact that as such events unfold in the media (briefly live-streamed as in this and other cases), we see conspiracy theories on parade and "rational" debate completely disarmed. I'm resisting the urge to write about why a "peaceful surrender" is possible in cases such as this. Here is an excellent and directly relevant article on how language covertly and perhaps inadvertently supports ideology. Rhetoric, in other words, not mental illness.

Post-truth, like fake news, is just a new label for an old can of worms. We only ever imagined we lived in a truth world (rhetoricians of the sophistic persuasion never did), and thus we don't now live in a post-truth world. We live in a post-consensus world. Not only do we distrust elected officials, we don't universally trust election results and we have literally thousands of channels instead of three like in the days of network broadcast. Truth has become "truths" and "rational debate" is becoming incapable of resolving disputes because we lack the common ground, or unified community standards, "rational" debate requires. Indeed many leaders rely on generating asystatic controversies Asystatic issues disrupt rational decision making by foregrounding unresolvable disagreements. Are children angels sent by god or purely biological phenomena? How do you resolve that issue? Asystatic controversies spin a vortex in which all hope of agreement is lost and prejudices are condensed because they do not generate any new information or alter the participants' perceptual frames in any way. While rhetorical tradition warns us to avoid asystatic controversies, dark rhetors rely on them. Political commentators call them wedge issues, a phrase more vivid than meaningful. Dark. (link) to drive a wedge between the devout and the others and so render an intergroup consensus, i.e. rational, shared decision-making, impossible. Thus politics and law and religion (tribalism if you like) are replacing critical thinking in our collective decision-making processes. Similarly, what we might once have taken for "news" we now understand as propaganda or marketing. It's not like we can't distinguish Instagram from reality; it's just that we are influenced by social media even when we aren't on it because what people talk about and hear about on news talk radio and television talk shows and conversations around the water cooler, to use an old world metaphor, is all driven by social media and the algorithms that decide what rises to the top of mind, which means we need to be even more vigilant about how we deal with what is presented to us as evidence about how to live or how we should be living or what we should envy and desire and what we should believe and do consequently.In Off the Edge Kelly Weill argues that YouTube video algorithms drove an increase in the number of Flat Earth Theory believers simply because it knew that extreme videos garnered longer views and longer view translated into more dollars. YouTube has since modified its algorithms, but the fact remains that what we encounter on social media we do not encounter unmediated. See in particular Chapter 5, "The Rabbit Hole."

Our world is now full-on rhetorical and there is no point in being nostalgic for enlightenment or scientific progress or liberal democracy or consensus. We need to understand opinion formation thoroughly and that means understanding it at its most underhanded and most malevolent because those practices pose the greatest threat to our collective and personal safety. If we want to be ugly about it, it's not a question of truth or lies, it's a question of which "truth" we think offers us our From my perspective, "our" is as inclusive as it can be without disintegrating. This is not a universal perspective, of course, and I am not assuming it ought to be. It is just my preference, one shared by lots of others, especially in educated circles. best life. Given that "truths" are provisional at best, we need to be hyper-vigilant about the rhetorical techniques people use on us and perhaps less reticent to use such techniques on others while being careful not to use them on ourselves unself-consciously. Denial, like confirmation bias, will lead us to persist when we should perhaps abandon, while a desire for belonging and purpose prepare us for cult leaders.

We have to see our belief systems for what they are, malleable thought processes that lead to predictable but unnecessary conclusions. If we understand this, perhaps we can gain some control over how our thoughts are molded and some well-placed suspicion about anyone who seeks to mold those thoughts for us. The more ideas you can entertain, the less likely you are to be exploited by your beliefs or by those who want to use your belief system against you. At the same time, learning left-handed rhetorical techniques gives you resources to fall back on when your status in a group precludes direct discussion, when you want something you can't just take, ask, or bargain for.

What is Dark Rhetoric and How Dark Can it Get?

Ideally, opinions are created by drawing relatively valid inferences from relatively accurate, relevant, and complete data to help an audience of informed people reach the best possible conclusion while doing so in a way that helps uninformed or misinformed members of the audience willingly grant authority to the expert, open and honest good faith conversations intended to bring about better understanding and therefore better decisions. But because interpretive practices are rhetorical in themselves, the same evidence can be interpreted in diametrically opposed ways. Because all thinking rests on unexamined premises and different interest groups form around different unexamined premises, the conclusions one group draws can mystify or outrage another group. In other words, we don't have to have malevolent intentions to skew a conversation dark. If we seek control rather than ascent, we are using dark rhetorical techniques if not full on dark practices.

In open and honest rhetorical situations, emotions are identified and acknowledged and valued but not manipulated or played. A light rhetor observes how the current emotional state alters perceptions and inferences and seeks to balance that state to optimize the decision making process and maximize the chances of the audience reaching the correct conclusion -- heating people up when they are complacent, cooling them off when they are over wrought, and so on. One ought not use emotion to exploit people or create a situation which you can then exploit: making people fearful of imaginary dangers in order to sell submission in the guise of security, for example. The ideal is clear, but what counts as "the correct decision" is harder to identify in all but a few cases, especially when there are multiple competing interests and not a great deal of clarity or agreement about fundamental matters, like who gets to decide what.

In any rhetorical situation where there is an imbalance of power or a perceived imbalance of power such that direct communication -- requesting, bargaining, debating openly and honestly in good faith -- isn't possible or desirable for some reason, dark techniques are an alternative to silence or acquiescence or self-denial or submission or violence. Thus dark isn't necessarily bad and for some people those techniques are their only means of self-promotion or even self-defense. Dark isn't so much about shady as it is about the will to dominate a group one isn't permitted to (or perhaps shouldn't) dominate.

Whenever a would-be thought leader manipulates the data, fudges the validity of the inferences, manipulates the audience's perception of the data or the validity of the inferences, inflames irrelevant passions, they are operating outside the rhetorical ideal. If the conclusion they seek the audience to grant is positive for the audience, then perhaps the manipulation is warranted. If the audience will pay an unreasonable price to the speaker's benefit, then no doubt the manipulation is only warranted in the speaker's mind or the minds of those enthralled to him or her.

The worst rhetorical situations are those where the manipulators goals are to exploit the target audience and the audience is unaware to how they are being targeted. Thus we cannot simply dismiss dark techniques out of hand as beneath our dignity. We need to think carefully and in detail about how they work and when we might be willing to use them if we are going to fully understand what they are and how they work. They all aim at achieving control of someone ne without their awareness and therefore without their knowing ascent.

Shades of Grey

A dark rhetorical technique is any convert attempt to manipulate a person's awareness and or emotional state in order to secure ascent without that person's full knowledge of how they came to believe or the implications of their commitment to that belief. Persuasion without awareness. Theft by deception. Victory without battle.

Not all dark rhetorical techniques are equally dark. Some are more gray than black and some are off-white. Hence shades of grey.

The grayscale of any given rhetorical technique can be influenced by intention. If the rhetor's goal is deception, using an expression metaphorically instead of literarily might be considered dark whereas the same move for purely poetic reasons would be considered colorful. A euphemism might protect someone from experiencing even greater unnecessary discomfort in an emotionally charged setting but a euphemism might hide a more plausible interpretation for what is going on. The same technique, different intentions and therefore different shades. There are, however, some techniques that are dark even when well-meaning because they break sacred rules like trust or decorum or reciprocity. Shame typically keeps us from using these techniques, but shame isn't necessarily a good thing and in some cases it can be destructive. There was an advertisement for a medical test for colon cancer a few years back whose slogan was, "Don't die of embarrassment". Exactly. On the downside, however, most people are prone to trust what others tell them and there are a handful of completely shameless people in every population who will use that trust to their advantage, often at everyone else's expense. To take another example, people sometimes say crude, insensitive, or just nasty things under the banner of honesty or "free speech." While decorum can be a form of repression, the people who revel in triggering others tend to be from dominant social orders -- or they feel invulnerable because hidden behind an avatar and a screen name. A jerk is more likely to poke a bear in a zoo than provoke one in the wild. An antagonist might consider self-censorship a form of repression, but they are not really being repressed so much as equalized and they resent the loss of their perceived superiority.

Perhaps the most common dark rhetorical technique is lying, but there are different kinds of lies and therefore different shades. Trying the get a child to behave by telling them that grandmother is watching from heaven might be considered a spiritual truth, a common cultural assumption, a "white" lie, or a cop-out. Promising something you can't be sure you can deliver is more bet than lie, depending on the odds. If the person knows they are accepting a risk and knows the chances of failure to deliver, they are just chancing with you, like investing in the stock market with an honest stock-broker. But if they don't know the real chances of your delivering, then you are distorting their reality and/or exploiting their ignorance. Promising 10% when 8% is historically more likely, would be promising more than you can be certain of delivering but you might get lucky. Making a promise you know you can't deliver is almost as bad as making a promise you have no intention of delivering on even if you could.

The classic dark-dark example here is the Ponzi scheme, where you say you will invest a person's money and promise 4%. Then you take their money and use it to elevate your lifestyle to look more prosperous than you are and use the lure of apparent wealth to hook your next investor. Then you take some of the new fish's money to pay the "interest earned" to the previous victim (thus offering evidence that you are legit), elevate your own lifestyle still further and keep going. Rob Peter to pay Paul. You can run on for along time doing this as long as none of your victims demands their principle back or as long as you always have enough cash to keep the "dividends" flowing. If you could legitimately make 6% and pay back 4%, you would be in actual business or if you upfront said what fee you would charge, actually invested the money, and charged only the fee, you would be doing nothing wrong even if you invested poorly and they lost money. It's just when you don't actually make the investments but live off the principle and use new principle to appear to be paying interest that you are running a Ponzi scheme. A slick variation here is to invest the original sum and pay legit dividends to convince the mark of your trustworthiness, a proven track record with them, after all, and then you make a greater promise and require much greater investment. You might suggest that this investment strategy isn't for "people like them", playing on a social insecurity you perceived so eventually they beg you to take their money. And when they eagerly hand over their life's saving's, you skip town and change your name. If you can do all this over the internet, you don't even have to skip town.

These sorts of scams are fairly common because in any population there are bound to be a few people who want to live off other people's labor and lack the kind of cultural or financial capital required to do so legitimately or the kind of conscience that would plague them for doing it illegitimately. But not all con artists start out as cons. There are many cases where a decent person starts out believing they can make money by investing money in a business or in stocks or whatever and they convince someone else to buy in. Then maybe something unfortunate happens and the person panics, kites a check or moves some money from one account to another intending to pay it back as soon as another check clears, but then that check doesn't clear and some other arrangement must be made, or it does clear and they get away with it and so are willing to take the risk again. Often people get addicted to the risk/reward dynamic and their inflated sense of self-worth and superiority makes them think they can keep getting away with it. And they do, until they don't.

On this point you might read Ponzinomics: the Untold Story of Multi-Level Marketing and or view LulaRich.

The same descent into depravity can happen to charismatic leaders as well. Some start out as trustworthy visionaries whose goals and ambitions can benefit many people not just themselves and some of these people create new worlds worth living in. But among the charismatic there are some whose narcissism leads them to maximize the returns of the endeavor for their own benefit and as their power grows, as their congregation grows, they may become increasingly unstable and increasingly exploitive. Jim Jones, to take a notorious example, started out as a legitimate clergyman with a profound commitment to interracial harmony and ended up encouraging his faithful to commit suicide.

You might view Hulu's The Dropout for a slightly more nuanced representation of charisma run amok. You might also read The Charisma Myth: How Anyone Can Master the Art and Science of Personal Magnetism.

What's Dark for You?

Because darkness is relative, it is important to calibrate periodically your rhetorical sensitivity. That expression is not a euphemism for "bullshit detector" because from our perspective it's all bullshit. The question is what kind and how much bullshit will you tolerate from yourself and others. Remember that while person A might be unable to sling much of even the weakest kind at you, person B will cover you so fast you won't know what's happening until the stink over powers you. And even in that case shame and cognitive dissonance might lead you to accept submission instead of risking the kind of identity upheaval that attends the arrival of a new way of seeing the world. Perhaps I am being melodramatic. How bad does a boss have to get before you will quit? When does the hot tub become a Dutch oven?

On a Likert scale from 1 to 10 where 1 is a muttered bs and 10 is a public denunciation, how dark do you rate each of the following? And why? If you think it depends on the scenario, then offer at least two different scenarios to explain the resulting differences in intensity. [Were this a full semester class I would have a form here you could fill out to share your ideas with me and your fellow class mates, but since this is a summer class, just do this thought experiment in your head. If you want to pick it up in your reading journal, that's fine. If not, that's fine too.]

1. Saying you are offering just the facts when you have cherry picked the data.
2. Does the fact that confirmation bias makes cherry picking a default thought strategy modify your assessment of distorting the data? (Is unintentional cherry picking as bad as intentional cherry picking?).
3. Offering to help someone when your help exploits them.
4. Offering to help someone when your help diminishes them in some way, making them dependent on you.
5. Offering to help someone when your help is unintentionally condescending.
6. Appearing helpless in order to attract/entice/distract/ someone.
7. Being dramatic (disruptively) in order to get your way.
8. Selling a person a car they can't afford by exploiting their social status issues.
9. Selling a person a car they can't afford by hiding the real cost and talking the person into feeling great about the experience.
10. Exaggerating positive attributes.
11. Diminishing negative attributes.
12. Omitting potentially significant information.
13. Telling someone what they want to hear.
14. Exploiting ignorance.
15. Exploiting innocence.
16. Exploiting moral weakness.
17. Exploiting character flaws.
18. Manipulating emotional states just to mess with people.

Darkness is relative to the rhetor's goals and the audience's state of mind and social position. What you consider fair game for some you might consider wickedly unfair for others. Theft is theft, but the consequences vary. When the British purchased the Parthenon Sculptures (1806) and renamed them the Eglin Marbles after the Scottish nobleman Lord Elgin took (appropriated? liberated? stole?) them from the Athenian people in 1801 they did so, they said, to protect the world heritage objects from corruption and mismanagement. Here, let me take those in safe keeping for you. I'm paraphrasing, to the point of taking liberties, so here's a more nuanced rendition of the same event. Keep in mind that morality from rhetoric's perspective is another rhetoric, not a transcendent fact but a strategic choice. If you don't believe me, that's probably a good thing. But let's consider what I think of as the most universal human law: Thou shalt not kill. Kill what? Under what circumstance?

There are several dimensions along which you might try to measure how dark a rhetorical act is for you either as actor or agent or recipient. Understanding these dimensions for you personally is important, especially as they may be functioning as forms of rhetorical repression, your sense of decorum keeping you from clapping back or making you question your own reality when you would be better of calling theirs's out.

1. The technique -- how deceptive/transparent, how commonly practiced, and how widely accepted? Just because is is common doesn't necessarily mean you should accept it but outrage would seem disproportional without careful ground work being laid in advance.
2. Your attitude toward the technique -- how uncomfortable does using it make you (because this dimension is subjective the same technique might make one person melt from shame while another person wouldn't think twice about it or maybe even remember having done it) -- and how angry would you be if someone used it on you?
3. The victim -- innocent, ignorant (buyer beware or manipulated evidence), willing, complicit, unsympathetic, could they be held accountable at some level, and if the victim is you?
4. The intention -- good -- > unintentionally bad --> intentionally bad -- good for some bad for others?
5. The outcome -- good for them and you -- > good for you, no harm to them --> good for you bad for them --> bad for you, good for them?
6. The damage -- embarrassment --> debt -- > alienation from family & friends --> incarceration -- > death?
7. The duration -- inconvenience --> financial set back --> diverting a person from their original life course for a week, a month, a year, for years --> PTSD ?

Six Concrete Examples

Painting a bright future for someone in order to talk them into to going to college, for example, is pretty light on technique (over simplification of reality, playing on desire for wealth and prestige and acceptance when the degree / enhanced earning equation is just a correlation not a causation and the correlation may be less now than it was 20 years ago), dark on the duration scale (how many years to degree? how much opportunity cost), light on the intention scale, potentially dark on the outcome and damage (debt) scale.

You are pro-choice and you believe that the pro-life movement is largely white evangelicals and you assume they are also racists so you argue that if RvW is overturned, the white race will absolutely be the minority in America within one generation and non-existent in two. If this argument were in fact efficacious, would help stop the RvW overturn, would you be willing to make it? Would you use racism to resist sexism? (I absolutely short handed this argument. You would need to beef it up a lot to make it more plausible, but the bones are "right" in the sense that they could be fleshed out.)

I heard an advertisement for a credit card company that says it will plant a tree every time you make a purchase using it. This is obviously an appeal to environmentalists and climate change advocates as well as perhaps those who feel guilty buying something and would feel even more guilty if rewarded with sky miles or 2% back or any of the other ploys available. Is this just another example of acceptable marketing technique? It depends: What does "plant a tree" mean? What kind of tree? Where? How? How well?

You are a budding academic. You have sacrificed a great deal financially and personally and have accrued considerable opportunity costs to achieve your dream, a tenure track position. Your thesis supervisor, someone with the credentials and connections, is key to your success. How far are you willing to go?

1. Would you write a paper, do the research, write a solid draft, and then let your supervisor edit it and use their reputation and credentials and friends in the business to get it published, in return for being your co-author. You did nearly all of the work, but they get half the credit.
2. If you are ok with that, would you still be ok if they insisted on being first author?
3. Would you do the bibliographic research for the book they are writing? In exchange for an acknowledgment in the Acknowledgments? Would fear of disappointing them be enough?
4. You can see where this is going. Back in the day (my day in fact), it was not unheard of for Teaching Assistants to do favors for their thesis supervisor, grade their papers, house-sit while they were away, run errands, be essentially a personal assistant. The hope of a strong letter of recommendation and the time spent with a successful member of the community you long to join being enough to out weigh your doing things far outside your defined role. I went to school with several people who were treated this way. I was not, just for the record. Would you accept the role of Personal Assistant under the heading of Teaching Assistant?

You have successfully obtained a tenure track job. To get tenure you need well-placed people to write letters of support. You aren't allowed to ask them directly and they aren't allowed to discuss writing such a letter with you. But everyone knows the young ones are eager and vulnerable. How far do you as one of the young ones go?

1. Would you set up and get funding for a conference and ask them to be the key note?
2. Get them a fancier than average hotel room (payed for by the university)?
3. Or by you?
4. Pick them up at the airport? Show them the town?

How far do you go? Before I got tenure, a senior colleague roughly my mother's age at another university made two sexual advances at me. One too subtle for obtuse me to pick up on. My buddy who overheard the exchange had to explain it to me. The other was so overt that I did notice but ignored it. She expressed her displeasure by retracting her offer to vet an article I was working on and by looking straight through me at subsequent conferences. She did not write a letter for me when I came up for tenure, not that I enlisted her help. I knew better than that at least.

You are a well-placed, tenured professor of considerable reputation. Your name alone opens doors. What will a given student need to do for you to open the door for them? Don't dismiss this out of hand. The grosser forms of exploitation are far beneath you, granted, but what of the subtler ones? How sensitive are you? How tone-deaf? How obtuse? How busy? How needy?

How Shady are You Willing to Get?

Keep in mind that dark rhetors have no rhetorical compunctions; anything that works in the moment is a legitimate tool. They are facile liars; they don't recognize contradiction and can talk their way out of any situation. Indeed, many enjoy the challenge of evasion the way others enjoy games of chance and athletic competitions. Also, because they see people only as resources to be exploited, they don't care about others feelings except in so far as they can exploit those feelings. They are not oblivious to others' feelings; they are callous, not obtuse. They don't like to lose but they are pragmatic about failure, anytime something doesn't work, the potential mark was defective and so they move on. No bad money after good. No gambler's fallacy Allowing your hopes to override your understanding of the odds. If you are dealt a winning hand three times in a row the chance of your getting a winning hand on the fourth are exactly the same as they are for any one winning hand. The odds don't have an historical memory and they don't play favorites, regardless of what gamblers think. for them. If you believe in loyalty or even integrity, you are prone to the gambler's fallacy and certain kinds of rhetorical bad actors will play on that weakness. Don't give up on me; I can change; this isn't the real me; you make me better. I was drunk and I will never drink again.

Also keep in mind that while we good rhetors enjoy watching rhetorical bad-assery, in literature and cinema if not in our own lives, because even twisted genius is genius, a lot of dark rhetors are not intentional; their personalities and experience leads them to use these techniques the way a baby's cries elicit help from caregivers. Many can't see that what they are doing is wrong and there is a long list of rationalizations -- the topics of denial, deflection, recrimination, victimhood -- that they habitually use to get out of trouble and to keep them from reflection and remorse. So committed to their world-view are they that they cannot be talked out of it and while the judicial system can slow them down or even stop them through incarceration, they will claim victim status while on the sidelines. In the most dramatic cases, they will go the gallows unrepentant and might well see mass suicide -- a narcissist won't go anywhere alone -- as an attractive alternative to incarceration.

They are not artists. They are con artists.

Dark Practices

The purpose of any rhetoric of power is to bifurcate thinking, narrow the target's language, habits of inference, sources of information, and friends and associates so that they can only see the world in one way, as good vs evil, truth vs lies, right vs left, men vs women, however you wish to configure the binary. You need to isolate your targets intellectually, linguistically, socially, and perhaps even physically, so that no cracks can appear in the façade through which any other kinds of thinking might be seen or overheard, no encounter with friends or family can be allowed to draw the target from your way of thinking. You are the center of their universe. They need to love you for that and to fear alienating you. Your approval is all that matters. Your targets must learn to fear alienation more than death. They have to fervently believe that if they leave the circle you have drawn around them they will die a horrible and useless death. You are never wrong. Any failure of any kind is their fault. They don't believe ardently enough, they haven't sacrificed enough, they have let you down. You weren't wrong. They have failed. In the end you may be able to let them roam freely because they will no longer be able to see the world in any way other than the way you programmed them to see it. They will draw the conclusions you want them to draw from any evidence they encounter, even if it is evidence you didn't anticipate.

Don't over estimate the durability of your influence. Dark rhetors depend on churn, a constant rate of entrances and exits. If a person wanders, let them go and make an example of them to the faithful. Never stop recruiting. Never over value any one recruit. Plenty of fish; just keep fishing. Every catch can cast its own net for you too. Let them buy their way out.

Everything that follows I've culled from one or more of the books on our bibliography. Most of it is also reflected in the documentaries and docudramas about cons and cults that are all over Netflix and Prime these days. Why are cons and cults having a moment just now? Are they or did I just imagine that because of recency bias? I started thinking about something and now I see it everywhere. Might just be an illusion or it might be a reflected image. Or it might be data-verifiable. Might make an excellent topic for a paper.

You can test any of the following advice by trying it out and seeing what happens, but of course most of it is dangerous advice and using it will have at very least a psychic cost and it could damage a relationship. You can perhaps test it more safely by watching it happen in the wild, by seeing others do it and have it done to them. If you think back over your own life you may well discover that you were conned or seduced by a thought process at one time or another. You can see all of these practices enacted in literature. In fact, a subscription to HBO is really all you need to see these techniques in action. Oz, The Sopranos, The Wire, Game of Thrones: all the early shows but most of the current ones as well. Succession and Yellowstone from Starz, as well. Drama (literary or cinematic) is about manipulating feelings for effect, and thus it is an obvious place to explore themes of deception and revelation at a meta level as well as at the level of plot.

Sometimes Persuasion is Just Permission

Figure out what the target wants but is resisting; give them permission to give in; then twist whatever it is to your advantage or figure out how to twist their cherished belief, then give permission. (see Cultish p. 94)

Dark rhetors are typically unrepentant when they get caught. They know right from wrong; they just don't care because they believe morality is for the weak, the inferior, everybody but them. Their grandiosity justifies their crimes. Their sense of entitlement is reinforced by the fact that their victims went along with what passes for willingness. They wanted to believe what the rhetor was telling them and refused to consider alternative points of view that might have extricated them earlier. The dark rhetor's greatest skill is speaking in ways that let the victims write themselves into the narrative, infer meaning when there isn't any, accept as real entirely imaginary things, because they want so badly to believe. Dark rhetors use their victim's pre-existing beliefs against them much the way a martial artist uses their opponent's momentum against them. But in a fight, of course, each party wants to win. In a con or a cult, the victim thinks resistance is a moral failing.

Exploit Cognitive Biases: Bait the Hook

We think of the charismatic as smooth talking charmers and they are but they are because they know how to listen and then mirror what they see and hear.

They can figure out what their target wants and then they promise it in such a way that the target feels instantly connected and hopeful this person can deliver what they long for. People in vulnerable positions can make easier targets, people suffering from illness, a sick kid, financial problems, loneliness. But cults and cons are money-making schemes and so they need to recruit people who can afford to pay. Thus they exploit people who have their lives together but feel under appreciated, need to feel more useful, more important, to be participating in something larger than themselves. The need for meaning, a purpose to one's life, the idea that there is some cosmic plan that you play a part in even if that role is less than you want is preferable to the idea that life is meaningless, random, that we are and then we aren't and that's all there is. Insignificance and alienation are most people's greatest fear. Dark rhetors understand this and know how to exploit it, which isn't as hard or as tricky as it may sound because normal people are hard-wired to believe and to trust and to hope.

You might want to read the wiki list of cognitive biases. Below I explain and offer some examples of how to use the ones I think most common in dark rhetorical situations but you will want to seek alternative explanations and more options: I'm not a dark rhetor. [Am I protesting too much?]

Heuristic thinking, cognitive shortcuts or biases that lead us quickly to a satisfying but erroneous answer (Thinking: Fast and Slow) are the pre-existing thought-ways that persuasive people exploit.

Naïve realism -- People who lack sophisticated skepticism and operate under the influence of ego-centric bias believe they see the world exactly as it is. They don't doubt their perceptions or question their inferences. Collect a range of a person's opinions and you know how they see the world. From there you can sell them anything you can pass off as compatible with those pre-existing opinions.

Naïve Realism: Bird or Woman?