Orwellian and Proud of It

Some books, even if they are second-rate, slap-dash jobs like this one, are valuable reads and important to discuss because they force a break in one’s own headlong pace. Left to its own devices this blog might go merrily along looking at language as essential to community. It is that, but it can also be the enemy of community.

Humans can indeed live in a state of freedom and equality beyond anything imaginable by other primates, but we can also be manipulated and enslaved beyond anything primates can do to themselves. No chimpanzee will ever agree to strap on a bomb and blow itself up. No gorilla can be persuaded to hand over all its wealth to a con-artist. So we owe a thankful nod to Dr. Frank Luntz for his Words that Work: It’s not what you say, its what people hear and its detailed look at how to be a demagogue.

The distinction between rhetoric and propaganda is very subtle, and subject to constant blurring. Propagandists will always call their skill rhetoric, and rhetoricians will sometimes give way to propaganda’s temptations. As long as we have been conscious of speech and writing there has been tension between rhetoric and propaganda. Socrates called the propagandists of his day ‘sophists,’ and he distinguished between sophists who sought honor and office and philosophers (rhetoricians) who sought truth. These days we are a bit more skeptical about where truth lies, but the distinction can still be made:

• propagandists seek to manipulate through language and is, at its heart, contemptuous of humanity;
• rhetoricians hope to teach and persuade by respecting their audience.

Luntz is no teacher, and there is nothing in this book about how to be true to yourself, but he is a great salesman/propagandist, a manipulator who has become so proud of his ability to manipulate that he has spilled his beans, like a magician showing the spring devices hidden up his sleeve. He tells us:

I have built a company and a career by finding the exact word for my clients to create the exact context and therefore provoke the exact response they want. (pp. 45-46)

The book’s central chapter is number four, “How Words that Work Are Created” which describes how to discover things like the way to get people without any inheritance to speak of to support repeal of the estate tax. (Call it a “death tax.”) It’s a short chapter because the method is simple. Gather small groups of people together and let them tell you how to push their buttons.

Why does anybody agree to tell would-be manipulators how best to manipulate them? Partly because they are lied to, told that they have an opportunity to let the big guys know how they think and feel. Luntz  says the real point of these kinds of investigations:

It’s a matter of finding the most appealing and persuasive way to present a preexisting proposition or program in a more accurate light. (p. 47)

He’s using a few working words right here. Strike out persuasive which implies some kind of appeal to reason whereas the whole point is manipulation; present implies the audience is passive, while the point is to make them respond exactly; and accurate suggests some sort of concern with truth when the point is to control the context exactly. We can try that sentence again: It’s a matter of finding the most appealing and persuasive effective way to present sell a preexisting proposition or program in a more accurate controlled light.

Well, I could go on for a while about all this material, but the point for this blog is that the book’s title doesn’t lie. Words can work, and they do so in exactly the way often discussed on this blog, by directing attention. Plainly the original speakers did not have the industrial-strength level of manipulation that we see today, but that doesn’t mean that the time honored techniques of flattering, trimming, lying, bullshitting, blarney, and misdirection were not common parts of the prehistoric world.

We can see two contradictory tendencies at work in the evolution of speech. One is communal, encouraging the capacity to listen and share a common language; the other is individualist, using speech as a tool to control others for one’s own ends. The communal urge works against the “selfish gene” view of evolution, promoting the interests of a linguistic community rather than genetic kin. The individualist urge is much more in keeping with contemporary genetics, but if it were to become predominant, the linguistic community would collapse into a realm of complete mistrust.

This community-individual tension is surely very old and has probably played a role in speech origins from the very beginning. Thanks, Dr. Luntz, for giving me the opportunity to remind my readers that this blog is talking about the evolution of a double-edged sword.

Comments

[giorgio marchetti]

Correct, Blair. Words are tools (to direct attention). As such they can be used, like any other tool, for/pro or against/contra human beings. Sometimes, we realize that they are only tools. Some other times, we believe (or make other people believe) they are things living in and for themselves, independently of us and of whom is speaking them. In the latter case, you can have either have poetry, art or mysticim, propaganda, demagogy and pretence (obviously, in between there are a lot of other possibilities, such as illusion: the important for me is anyway to highlight the extremes).
Giorgio Marchetti