Dark Rhetorical Techniques

ohters before they can accuse you. Every accusation is a confession. If you are doing something shady, accuse your target of the same behavior or simply project the accusation onto the world, as a form of self-defense, a pre-emptive strike.

Make everything personal, your adversaries are character assassins, gossips, envious children, deranged narcissists, misguided fools, sheeple. Abstract ideas don't sell well. If you make the consequences of an idea personal, it will be heard more clearly. If a man doesn't care about equality, talk to him about his daughter's struggles for economic independence (which are tied to his own). I saw a pan-handler sign once that said, "This could be you".

Speak assertively; be assertive. An assertion is a statement expressed as though it were a fact, a statement accepted as true without evidence, a given. If you assert boldly, as though you are simply speaking an unquestionable truth, some people will accept your assertion as if it were a fact. If someone who the others are willing to listen to questions your assertion's status, it stops being a fact until evidence to support it can be obtained. This is partially why persistent and adamant denial -- that's a lie! -- can undermine community belief systems and why in an authoritarian world denial of sanctioned facts is punished. It is also why democratic organizations are only as strong as the shared facts enable further thinking and therefore why democratic organizations are inherently unstable.

An "alternative fact" is an assertion that one group wants granted the special status of fact but which is not widely believed.

Some people would rather that only universally accepted assertions were given the status of facts, but that standard requires a relatively cohesive community, with similar ways of looking and similar ways of evaluating. The old feint, "any reasonable man (sic.) would agree" seeks to shame such a community into existence. Absent that unified audience, calling an assertion a universal fact simply ignores the existence of dissenters and relies on the rhetor having the privilege to grant an assertion the status of fact by decree. When one faction achieves dominance, it decides what the facts are and rivals will have to propose alternative facts.

In a unified culture "rational" debate, i.e. approved of procedures, methods of inference and what evidence is required to establish a fact might lead to amending of granted facts and or a willing suspension of the status of a "fact" awaiting more evidence or attending to different matters. But in a highly contested rhetorical situation, factions use "facts" as a way of trying to gain leverage over fence-sitters and increased adherence among the converted and absent an approved method of judging, rationalization in the sense of interaction agreement becomes unlikely.

Name-drop, brand-brandish, get your photo taken with a celebrity, say you studied with someone famous or at a prestigious institution, lived in a famous hotel or district or city. Seek endorsement from someone famous or initiate a Twitter exchange or get a photo taken with someone impressive. Then claim to know them. Photobomb or Photoshop if necessary.

A similar approach is simply to hang out in places where people feel good so that by transference they associate you with a good time.

THE LAW OF MISATTRIBUTION

Sometimes making friends is simply a matter of being in the right place at the right time. When people feel good about themselves and do not attribute the good feeling to a specific cause, they tend to associate the cause of that good feeling with the person who is physically close to them at the time. If you happen to be that person, you're going to benefit and be liked not for anything you did but because of the "misattribution." In a sense, what we have here is a case of collateral benefit rather than collateral damage. The Like Switch, Jack Schafer. p 101

Talk them into doing something daring or funny or fun (hold my beer/cosmo) but also illegal or at least shameful when sober, document it, and then hold it over their head. If they are proud, play on their feelings of inferiority by questioning their superiority and thus talk them into doing something shameful or criminal so you can document that and hold it over their head. There's a fine line between bonding and bondage. Remember also that dark rhetors feel no shame and aren't afraid of punishment, so the fact they were there too will not keep them from outing you if it one day suits their purposes.

nothing is ever your fault; you are never wrong.

Convention, reciprocity, decorum, politeness (accuse those who "do the right thing, the expected thing" of self-righteous "virtue signaling"). Disruption unbalances people, makes them pause because they didn't see it coming. You have to be shameless to pull this off and you have to be able to deal with how you may be treated in the future. Being likable is useful; being liked is irrelevant. People mistake indecorous behavior for honesty, rusticism with integrity, sophistication with deception and equivocation, unpredictability with excitement and authenticity -- you're not playing a part you're just being you.

Make general statements about a person based on the context, their dress, accessories, manner, age, gender, anything visible. Then pick up on what they put down. This is what palm-readers do. You're not really trying to predict the target's future but rather creating the impression that you see them for who they are (actually, who they want to be), that you've known each other all your lives or met in a previous life or were destined to meet.

If a person doesn't know what is going on, it's harder to pay attention, and that makes it easier for you to slip something past them or plant an idea unnoticed. Look one way but be another. Rumpled appearance but keen knowledge of the relevant numbers. Indifferent even though what's at stake seems big to the other person. You want them to ponder the encounter after it's over but focus on the irrelevant details rather than the heart of the actual matter.

"Only 5 items left," "Time is running out" "Don't be left out!" "Going out of business sale!" "Get in on the ground floor." Anything that makes a person's mind race to the conclusion you want them to reach will make them more likely to reach it.

is retail markup a fair advantage?

Ted Bundy carried a crutch to look helpless, which looks like harmless. A much less vivid example took advantage of me a few years back. I bought a prestige automobile and as part of the out the door process someone other than the sales rep took me to a small room off the main floor to try to upsell me various products and warranties. Somewhere along the way he slipped in that he used to have a company car but had lost it due to poor sales. He intimated he had been demoted. Had me trying to feel sorry for him. Help him redeem himself by buying some "special" car polish, at 1000% mark up, but a tiny fraction of what I was already spending on the car. Cringe. The tactic worked. I'm such a push over. They could probably sense I felt guilty buying such an expensive car. A more proud purchaser might have twigged to some other approach, one that was premised on pride rather than guilt, which may have been embedded in the patter but which I missed because I am who I am and that tactic was aimed at someone other than me.

• emotional (you validate their feelings or they feel abandoned)
• financial (their paycheck goes into your account and you give them an allowance)
• psychological (no one gets them like you do)
• physiological (feed 'em cake and bacon), dispense their meds.
• routine (your agenda runs their daily life)

Rely on words and expressions that everyone assumes the meaning of. "The economy" is a great example. If you stopped to define it, you would quickly get bogged down in details and risk boring or alienating people. Just say "bad for the economy" and people will disapprove without further reflection. Some other examples: the country, the people, elites, blue colar, America, welfare, taxation, tax payer, criminal, six figure income, the poverty line, imigrant. What else can you add to this list? Any widely used and never defined or examined word or expression belongs here.

to cut in half. The process for creating us vs them, good vs evil, rhetoric vs dialectic. Arguably the primary rhetorical technique. Dichotomizing enables the creation of a hierarchy of values which you can then manipulate. There are two kinds of people in this world ... A nice flourish on the technique: "There are two kinds of men in this world and your neither of them," Jason Isbell, "Songs that She Sang in the Shower".

While dark rhetor use words without defining them, relying on connotation rather then denotation, and the audience reading in what it wants to find, once you have created an us vs them, you can identify further characteristics of each to highlight and thus increase the apparent contrast. People like us, we don't say things like that. That's just ____. Only a ______ would _____

Never accept responsibility for failure, always blame others, your scapegoats preferably, or circumstances when you expect more favorable circumstances or want to make your targets long for them.

You need an enemy, a corrupt, violent, oppressor to struggle against, thus giving you the moral superiority of the underdog, Cinderella. Your enemy defines you, so you need to pick a good one. At the same time, you need to make sure that enemy doesn't actually exist because if it did you would be in a real battle. You could pay people to seem to oppose you and then by "vanquishing" them prove your superiority, but then you will need a new enemy. Whatever you choose, your followers need to see themselves as inherently different: us against them. It's a good idea if you can cast as enemies any people or groups that your followers already imagine as standing in their way, taking their jobs, corrupting their children, distracting their spouses. Again, it's best if none of that is happening but your followers think it is. You are like a protective, dutiful parent slaying the monster under your kid's bed. Just make sure they never find out you put it there in the first place.

Never say what you are thinking only what others are, hide, lie, sugar or shit coat the given reality, use words that have absolute connotations (motherhood, founding father, patriot, honor, justice, rights, hope) but never define anything. Make a list of these god/devil terms, pick the ones relevant to your story and use them constantly. Your goal is to leverage other people's commitments and beliefs, not share your own. Most importantly, they can never understand what you are doing because what you are doing is harming them. They need to think you are doing something else, something good, noble, self-less.

Nothing is at is seems, tilted charts, cherry picked data, Potemkin villages, confederates (shills), salt the mine (plant "evidence"), filter the photos, make time stand still (no clocks on casino floors), withhold food, water, sleep.

Make them look at something else, highlight irrelevant information, change the subject, create a scandal, a spectacle, a rally, say something outrageous and set Twitter a twitting. Your goal is to keep them from noticing what matters. Nothing up your sleave.

Talking over, talking down, getting the last word, dismissing, condescending explanations, fact checking, credential pedaling, boasting and bragging, loud talking, glowering and remaining silent. Your opinions must prevail. It doesn't matter what the subject is or how you assert your dominance; just dominate the scene. Always.

Heads I win, tails you lose. Do you want item A or item B (suggests that neither and both aren't options. aka the fool's dilemma)

You never stole anything. You might have borrowed or taken it without asking. If you are accused of anything, lighten the words used to describe the behavior. Whenever you accuse, do the reverse. When you do it, it's trash talking. When they do, it's inciting a riot.

Even when you are being open and honest, you want, of course, to be neither. You want to say things that people can take at face value but in such a way that you can later twist the message or deny intending what they heard you to say. Here is an ultra academic version of this technique. We use the cliche to call "a spade a spade" for plain talk: unvarnished, non-rhetorical, speech, an expression that doesn't try to spare the hearers' feelings or make the speaker appear in any way sophisticated -- the sort of person who would never use a euphemism. If you know the history of the expression call a spade a spade -- I didn't until I stumbled on this video -- you realize that to call "a spade a spade" is a euphemistic translation for something along the lines of, the Spartans are the sort of people who would never call a vulva a fig. Watch the video, and then think about how you can say things that your targets will hear one way and your inner circle, your informed friends, will hear in a different way. I'll bet you a dollar if you watch the video the next time you hear someone say "call a spade a spade" you will have to stifle a laugh.

♬ Italian - ALLSOUND

Value increases as quantities dwindle. Exclusivity makes people feel special, elite, entitled. But exclusivity also suggests isolation, to remove people from others and thus to work on them without interference.

Uncertainty and instability are helpful to people like you. Stability needs to be toppled and ambiguity is the first opportunity. If something could be one way or another, emphasize the duality. Make people uncomfortable, uncertain. Trouble the water to catch the fish. People who are already in power will tend to resist ambiguity, emphasize the black and white nature of all things because they have defined the world to suit their power. Ambiguity destabilizes.

Take advantage of need for money, need for companionship, need for validation, approval, boredom, curiosity, innocence, desperation, isolation. If you have to, you can always create an exploitale weakness.

Confidence passes for knowledge. All cons are predicated on this rhetorical technique. No doubt. No fear. No question. No problem. Confidence is also associated with charisma and attractiveness generally. So, even when you speak of the future, say it as thought it has already happened.

Your thing is so much better than that thing (which is irrelevant, not real, not in the running). There's a Chevy truck ad that features fancy race car inspired sedans stuck in sand dunes. Why pay 100 grand just to get stuck in the sand when you can pay 70 for a truck! Wait. What now?

People who are afraid don't think clearly, are impulsive, they will seek protection from you. Veil your threats by presenting them as dire predictions. The world is a dangerous place, but you will protect them; the world is ending but the space ship is coming for you and you can save them a seat, as long as they do exactly what you tell them to do. Once they are afraid, offer them hope: you can get them that contract (treatment, admission) they so desperately want. You just need to bribe some official. Give me the money and I'll take care of everything.

Can't touch this. This is not for you. I'm not sure you can handle this. Forbid a certain kind of person from doing what you want them to do and in effect you are encouraging them to do it, firing their curiosity and natural defiance. Some people see boundaries as challenges. This tactic, known as "forbidden fruit", is also known as reverse psychology. Encouraging transgression also lets you differentiate the bold from the obedient. You can also blackmail them later.

Direct attention towards what is useful and away from anything problematic. Every threat is an opportunity; every failure signifies the need to double down. The more resistance you encounter the more widespread the infection [resistance = infection is an example of pathologizing] and the greater urgency there is to eradicate the infection, by cutting and burning if necessary.

Named after a 1944 psycho-thriller movie, to gaslight someone is to make them think they are going crazy, seeing things, misremembering, forgetting. The goal is to make them lose all faith in themselves and transfer that faith to you.

Because nothing is ever your fault, you are in the habit of blaiming people and making them feel guilty. Incite that feeling and then use it for leverage.

The house inevitably wins, but no one who gambles takes that fact personally. The house flashes lights and rings bells when someone wins and is silent when someone loses, while hope biases every sucker towards thinking they are special, that this time is their time.

Your Maserati, which signifies your financial acumen, is a rental. The private plane you selfied in is a prop. Dress for success. Dye your hair, tailor your suites. Wear athleasure and carry a water bottle -- wouldn't hurt if you worked out, but that's not necessary. Hire beautiful, fit, young people to front for your less than youthful self. Get a mail order degree and put PhD on your business cards. Or just put the letters down. No one will check. And if someone does, there must have been a fire in the archives or a data breach of some kind. You suspicious bitch. How dare you question my authority. Or you could just laugh and keep talking.

Aggressive, dismissive, mockery, ridicule, sarcasm (make the in group feel good at the expense of the out group, keep the would-be climbers in line)

Insinuate, let the audience fill gaps with assumptions, prejudices, desires. Let them write themselves into your script so they will forget it is yours and think it is theirs.

Make people dependent on you. They don't need to work, decide, exercise, struggle in any way at all. Anticipate and meet all of their needs so that they stop thinking and acting on their own impulses. Enable their addictions. Slowly weaken them until they need you, or at least your advice, in order to get through the day. Whenever anything happens, they should look to you first, to follow your lead. You can test your success. Put on a funny video and see if they look to you before they laugh.

Your targets must never entertain an alternative point of view. They must dismiss without thinking anything that isn't a part of your dogma. They must listen only to "trusted news sources" and reject without thinking anything else. Everything else is a lie, a distortion, a temptation.

Veil your threats. Keep your superiority always on display. In your office have plaques, trophies, medals, certificates. They don't have to be real or relevant. Wear expensive looking clothes and accessories. Know more about whatever they like to talk about than they do. Your goal is to keep them from testing you by making them think they will lose. Make them come to you and make them wait, sit on a smaller chair, maybe one that has one leg an eighth of an inch shorter.

Serve strong drinks or other mind altering substances openly or disguised. Use aerobic exercise to generate oxygen depletion; light headedness is useful.

your victims. Keep them away from anyone or anything that might make them question your program. In particular, keep them away from family and friends. Once they are fully indoctrinated and dependent, you can let them re-emerge, to test their loyalty but also to give everyone a false sense of openness.

access to alternative sources of information, perspectives, possibilities, outcomes. Artificial boundaries of all kinds are critical for keeping people moving only in the direction you want them to move in.

Dress like you belong there more than anyone else does. Power pose. Chin up. Neck exposed, solid stance, hands ready. Fill the space and betray no doubts. This is your world. It's show time!

Overwhelm the initiate with protestations of love, appreciation, gifts, promises of growth and support, a whole new way life. Nothing else matters. No one else exists. If necessary, use a proxy, one of your fittest, hottest minions.

I sense that you [insert what they want to hear or something vague enough that they might elaborate on it and thus show you what to say next. ]. Like cold reading but without the context of prognostication. You're not reading their palm, you're planting seeds in their head.

To build rapport, reflect the other person visually and verbally. If they lean, you lean; if they stroke their chin, wait a second and do something similar. You don't want to be super obvious with this or people will get annoyed or at least suspicious.

A way to appear to be in agreement with someone without agreeing with their beliefs is to mirror their style of language. If they are lovers of cars, use automotive metaphors and jargon. If they work in fashion, then you may not be cut from the same cloth, but you can talk about the 'fabric' of daily life, how something is or isn't your 'style'. From Comply With Me, Lisa Morgan, p. 99

Everything a person arrives thinking is wrong. You need to replace their information with different information. First undermine all their existing beliefs. Once the target is questioning, provide YouTube videos, TikToks, blogs, and lectures that will fill their now empty heads with the nonsense you need them to accept in order to dominate and control them.

Disinformation campaigns consist of carefully crafted and craftily placed documents that are lies and or forgeries that people mistake for truths that lead people to think what you want them to think. Fake "leaks" are the most common example.

Why do we use the expression the founding fathers instead of referring to each of them as individuals? What about the founding mothers? And the people in close proximity whose actions made the founders' efforts possible? What of the visitors? The natural resources? The people already living here? The flora and fauna? All of these relevant sources of information are not boiled down into the perfect distillate that is "history." They are ignored, forgotten, misunderstood, lost. They don't matter even though to actually understand American history all of these elements and more would need to be taken into account. A handful of historians -- those who can see past the American propaganda passed off as History -- and archaeologists and anthropologists have a better understanding, but their combined efforts take years of intense study to understand and the vast majority of people are basically content with the idea that America is the result of insemination, America is a baby born of no mother and a couple dozen men. Yes, of course that is an example of reductio ad absurdum. Any effort to render the welter of human experience into easily remembered images and metaphors is a dark rhetoric if it is designed to be mistaken for a "truth" that advantages some at other's expense. All rhetoric, however, dark or light, is an oversimplification of phenomenon. A few thousand people are working on a few hundred phenomenon at a level of physical reality, but the vast majority of people have no knowledge of that knowledge and many reject it without understanding it precisely because they can't understand it. We have rhetoric because we can't accept our profound ignorance and yet most of us can't handle or have the time and money required to try to handle anything other than pleasing, memorable stories that shape our beliefs and thus make us useful to those who we grant power over us.

Any opinion that isn't your own is a sign of mental illness. People who do not agree with you are sick, mentally ill, sad, broken people.

Colorful displays attract attention and people draw inferences about a person based on what they are wearing and driving and so on. The goal is to look effortlessly rich and refined. I came across the following shady gem:

"One of my students told me of a common ruse that he and his friends often employ on nights out. On the way to a bar, they will stop by a large bank's ATM and pick through dropped receipts until they find ones that have especially large balances printed on them. These they pocket for later. Then, if the student or one of his friends meets a girl who is above his financial standing, he will casually write his phone number on the back of the purloined receipt-creating the illusion that he is a wealthy man." Jack Schafer, Marvin Karlins, The Like Switch. p. 113.

Accuse others of what they might accuse you of before they can accuse you. You can reverse this technique and elicit the attitude you need to use to your advantage. Take trust as an example. When I was a freshman in college at the University of British Columbia, a friend of mine got conned by a guy who claimed he would sublet his apartment to my friend, for a very reasonable deposit. While we were sitting 15 stories up, overlooking English Bay, the landlord abruptly announced he was going to take a shower. For no apparent reason, he left us alone. On a shelf under the window with the view of English Bay was a case of Bushmill whiskey, well over a hundred dollars worth of easy to steel booze. Would he notice if we took a bottle? If we took the whole case and ran off? We looked at the case; looked quizzically at each other, and waited patiently for the benefactor to return. He did. My friend handed him the cash and we left. Shortly after my friend discovered the apartment building was an old age facility. No one under 65 could live there. We were 20 and it had taken my friend a couple months of waiting tables and couch surfing to save that down payment.

More than you can possibly deliver or intend to deliver, bait and switch

Any thing that sounds logical can pass for logic among people in a hurry or not versed in logic. Follow any request with because... a reason you are making the request and your chances of success improve, even if the reason you offer is irrelevant or absurd.

If you are in the dominant position, speak as rarely as possible and say very little when you do speak. If someone is making excuses, just stare at them. They will fold. If someone is trying to convince you, just stare at them. Don't nod or make agreeable sounds. Don't blink when you stare. Make them do the work. Make them dig the hole. You are listening and carefully, but you are not engaging. The better someone knows you and the less they want from you, the more content they are with silence. Everyone else will be a bit unnerved.

Identify an out group and blame them for all evils; this will make your in group more cohesive, give them an enemy and a reason to be.

You can garner attention in lots of ways, but because people love to gossip and social media sharing thrives on drama, you can stir the waters by planting an outrageous image or story. Many years ago (2003), an example emerged that was perfectly designed because it included plausible deniability. There's a move called using the cat's paw, having an agent do your dirty work for you, which allows you to maintain the illusion of integrity. An image started circulating that looked like it might be an ad for Puma which, well, it is too risqué to describe politely. Puma strenuously denied it had anything to do with the ad. Later it was discovered that, "a small Eastern European agency affiliated with Saatchi & Saatchi created the ads on spec, trying to win business with a PUMA subsidiary. They got nothing and emailed the ads to friends; from that point it snowballed" (link)

Make everything as sensually enticing as possible; add butter, salt and garlic to the steak, perfume the breeze, ambient music, leather, soft wool, fine wood, sparkling water.

Exploit their insecurities

for your subordinates' accomplishments as long as they are not present. If they are, make sure you share the limelight but imply your leadership made their achievement possible.

Dangle the bait just out of reach to increase desire and leverage impatience. So clooooossse! You're nearly there. Just one more! The harder a person works for something the more they value it.

Don't go there; it is what it is; that's just stinking thinking. Thought blocking is the technique of abruptly diverting a thought process. Thought blocking is the intellectual equivalent of spraying water on an unruly cat or dog. You can snap a rubber band or suck on a lemon or drink an ounce of vinegar, play with a fidget spinner, hum a tune, play with an app, anything that can quickly divert your attention from the destructive thought path you have found yourself on. Since words are handier than lemons and rubber bands, you need to create a few infectious, memorable thought blocking expressions for your followers to use whenever intrusive thoughts of home and previous relationships threaten to derail their progress towards your goals. If you can't think of any, use the many ready to hand or borrow one form somewhere your targets have never been. Throw in a rubber band with your slogan on it, for good measure, but make sure your targets have to struggle to "achieve" that "reward". But giving them identifiable rubber bands to wear like jewels to appreciate like trophies won are also a good supplement.

self-confidence, self-determiniation, sense of reality, sow doubt, create confusion (or the opposite). You need to encourage people to change their mind and building on a surface that has already been prepared is easier than trying to wrap a new idea around an existing structure.

to puzzle and intrigue, distract and confuse, or inspire misplaced confidence. "This way to the giant egress", a sign allegedly used by PT Barnum to show his freshly fleeced customers the door. Covfefe. You're selling Samsing, not Samsung.

Name calling is oddly effective at denigrating and distracting. Marjorie Taylor Green referred to Democrats as, "the Party of Pedophiles." Newsweek, 4/06/22 5:48 am. Ewan Palmer. If nasty seems wrong, try condescending or dismissive. Humorous pet names (pseudo affectionate diminutives) might work if the target is directly in front of you and antagonizing them will be less effective than belittling them. Alliteration, rhyming expressions, and vivid images are more memorable and therefore more effective. Here's an example from Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. Apparently Florida's pension fund is invested in Twitter and if fending off Elon Musk leads the board of Twitter to dilute the value of the stock, Florida will lose money and so the Governor is threatening political retaliation. Notice the word narrative (10 years ago that word would have been rhetoric), also "orthodoxy", "regime", "failed legacy media outlets", as well as "little play toy Twitter".

"They rejected it because they know that they can't control Elon Musk," DeSantis said at the press conference Tuesday. "They know that he will not accept the narrative and that their little play toy of Twitter, it would not be used to enforce orthodoxy and to basically prop up the regime and these failed legacy media outlets." Insider, Katie Canales April 19 2022 549 pm

relevant information (alternatively, bury them in information so they can't find what they need: Spam!) Use Dark UX Patterns literally and figuratively. Once they are in it should be very hard for them to find the exists, until you are ready to get rid of them, of course.