Get yourself in the mood . . .

Persuasion loves the heat.

Uncertainty?  Fear?  Confusion?  Peithos lights up, “Is someone calling my name?”  The Ancient Attendant prepares for affairs of the heart or affairs of the state.  It’s all the same, you know.

Science loves the light.

Uncertainty?  Fear?  Confusion?  Galileo smiles, returns to the lab and breaks the problem down, step by step until knowledge replaces ignorance.

Except today.  Science has a new companion, Persuasion.  And Science won’t go anywhere without Her, especially in Public.

. . . perhaps Fever at a higher pitch . . .

Need Persuasion for the Science of Health Care Reform?  Let me show you how to spend one trillion dollars to reduce mortality by 1% and make people think we’ve Fixed It.

Need Persuasion for the Science of the FDA?  Let me show you how mandatory menu calories counts will produce a 30 calorie reduction and fool people into thinking it is the End of Obesity as We Know It.

Need Persuasion for the Science of Global Warming?  Here’s how you hide statistically insignificant data in a pretty chart to convince the People.

Need Persuasion for the Science of Selling News?  Here’s how you market Science to people so they get all that great knowledge you’d have to suffer through in lectures, labs, and libraries, but without that annoying peer review.

. . . or Fever with the King . . .

Great times for Peithos, my friends, and it’s only going to get better.  The last time Science came courting like this was during the Clinton Administration.  Democrats are smart people in case you haven’t talked with one lately.  You don’t even have to ask; they’ll tell.  Especially the progressive ones.  You know, the ones that use Science to inform Policy.  Here, it’s good for you.  Trust us.  We’re smart.

Peithos loves them the best.  Progressives don’t mind throwing Science overboard in a storm when you need to lighten the load.  Is the data messy, complicated, and inconsistent?  Pitch it and use this simple chart.  Results disconfirm the original hypothesis?  Let me adjustment myself in private and we’ll call it Post Hoc.  Got folks who disagree?  Frame them as Deniers.

Don’t worry about the Science.  Persuasion will fix that.

. . . that’s all there is . . .

So, you’re walking along your favorite city street today when your cell phone beeps a text notification, so you look at the screen and Wow! there’s a coupon offer for 15% off any purchase in the next hour at North Face and Wow! you realize that North Face has a shop just a block up and a block over from you and Wow! you’ve been thinking about that new sweater and Wow! before you know it you’re already walking that block up and over and Wow! there you are at the checkout with that sweater and Wow! that 15% discount.  Is North Face cool or what?

Maybe.  Just maybe.  Or maybe not.  It’s complicated.  And it starts with location.

See, marketers are creating what they call geo-fences, electronic rings around businesses that sense GPS signals from opt-in cell phones.  When you cross the fence with your opt-in cell phone, the marketers pick up your signal, then match it to opt-in businesses within the fence that have offers.  The marketers then match your cell phone with your businesses and their offers, then shoot you opt-in text messages.  Think of it as a marketing dog collar and shock fence, but not for dogs; it’s for you.  And, at present there are no shocks.

From the Cascade perspective this is a rapid communication play wherein the fence triggers immediate Reception which torrents through prior Processing and Response to elicit almost instant behavior – Go or Not – as you amble along the road.  It’s a whistle and a shout, “Here, boy!  Come ‘ere, girl!” to a happy dog on a summer day lolling on the lawn now joyously interrupted with an exciting offer of a new play.

You’ll experience precious little High WATT Central Route processing of strong Arguments with this persuasion play.  This will be the hot Low WATT Cue on that text message:

Hey, look at all the North Face logos walking around me, everybody’s doing it, let’s join in!

Hey, North Face is the face of cool, what’s not to like with North Face?

Hey, North Face would protect me from the elements on Mount Everest, so they’ll keep me warm on this cold city day!

Hey, North Face is giving me this 15% discount, I need to give them something in return!

Hey, North Face is my brand and here’s my chance to prove my loyalty; onward a block up and over!

Hey, I’m the only guy on this busy street getting this rare offer of a discount from North Face that is only good for the next hour!

At least this is the theory and the dream behind the persuasion play.  Man, to quote the immortal Young Frankenstein, “It . . . Could . . . Work!”

But there are problems, problems, problems.

Initially, realize: It is a dog collar for people.  You don’t see it right now, but you will.  One day you’ll be waiting for an important message through your cell phone and your heart will jump when it buzzes with word of life, death, love, loss, victory, or defeat, except, it’s that damn North Face with a damn coupon dammit, leave me alone.  Then you’ll see the invisible dog fence you just crossed and you’ll realize every time you hit North Michigan and Ontario, your cell phone starts chirping.  And, you’ll go Commando, circling your favorite business areas trying to find the perimeter.

Now, consider:  How will marketers restrain themselves?  Sure, this whole play can be just fun like a dog playing fetch with the kids and sometimes we won’t mind being the dog as long as we’re having fun on a spring day with that blue sky and those puffy Simpson clouds.  But, what happens when greed and competition break all the shackles on business prudence and your cell phone is a constant shock box of offers, discounts, Get It Now! text messages?

Finally, ask:  How you gonna like it when the Queen of Tomorrow finally invents that iEye visor and you get subliminal messages when you cross her lines?  There’s an interesting future ahead of us, ladies and gents.  1984 and Brave New World are so quaint aren’t they?  Those high school chestnuts, remnants of the old modern neuroses clinging like cobwebs to our PostModern snark.  Except maybe Orwell and Huxley weren’t Moderns, but Prophets for All the Ages.

Consider, Mr. Orwell . . .

“It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away.  A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself –anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide.  In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face . . . was itself a punishable offense. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime…”

Now, Brave New World . . .

“I only said it was lovely here because . . . well, because progress is lovely, isn’t it?”

Persuasion, persuasion, persuasion.

Thomas Friedman provides this persuasion advice for frustrated True Greens.

In my view, the climate-science community should convene its top experts — from places like NASA, America’s national laboratories, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford, the California Institute of Technology and the U.K. Met Office Hadley Centre — and produce a simple 50-page report. They could call it “What We Know,” summarizing everything we already know about climate change in language that a sixth grader could understand, with unimpeachable peer-reviewed footnotes.

Friedman also offers this name change for Global Warming.

1) Avoid the term “global warming.” I prefer the term “global weirding,” because that is what actually happens as global temperatures rise and the climate changes.

The Rules.

All Bad Persuasion Is Sincere.

It’s about the Other Guy, Stupid.

If You Can’t Succeed, Don’t Try.

You Cannot Persuade a Falling Apple.

. . . so I come early from work and catch my best friend in bed with my wife and I says, “Lennie . . . I gotta . . . but you?

Get your swing ding-a-ling on . . .

. . . Machiavelli adheres forever with persuasion as both description and prescription.  To persuade is to be like Mach and to persuade well is to make Machiavelli proud.  Machs exhibit no ideological commitments, possess a cynical take on human nature, follow a heartless calculation toward other people, and display a marked disregard for conventional morality.  “Git ‘er done, baby” could be the popular homespun saying, properly twisted.

Academic studies of Machiavellianism paint a dark and dangerous portrait.  Those infected with Mach qualities find themselves classified as pathological and can read detailed descriptions of themselves in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, the bible of deviance for clinicians and insurance companies.  And, those who elude capture, but range free in the world like Hannibal Lector between incarcerations, can find themselves quantified in journal reports with Normal Machs who reveal their dark side in Prisoner’s Dilemmas, the Ten Dollar Game, and blasts of white noise.

Of course, it also helps when you invent a Machiavelli that does not exist.  If you read the original Mach IV scale that measures the contemporary meaning of Machiavellianism then compare it to to what Machiavelli wrote, you wonder whether the scale authors were academics or poets.  The Prince is much more subtle than hammers on the thumb like,

“One should take action only when sure it is morally right,”

“Most people are basically good and kind,”

“Honesty is the best policy in all cases,”

“There is no excuse for lying to someone else.”

Certainly anyone who scores High Bad on statements like this is someone to examine carefully for either poison or a bad sense of humor.  They might even be crazy.  But, persuasive?  Manipulative, even?

And while it is good to despise pathology – but, isn’t that a tautology – it is free riding to savage those who save the city from predators.  Machiavelli should not be acknowledged as a bastard, but our bastard, but as a deep thinker on the means of survival, success, and succor for all, including those who would carp, criticize, and cavil all the way to a death camp.

Consider from the Dark Source itself, The Prince, with Machiavelli describing the case of the notorious tyrant, Agathocles:

Yet it cannot be called talent to slay fellow-citizens, to deceive friends, to be without faith, without mercy, without religion; such methods may gain empire, but not glory. . .  Nevertheless, his barbarous cruelty and inhumanity with infinite wickednesses do not permit him to be celebrated among the most excellent men. What he achieved cannot be attributed either to fortune or to genius.

And, now, a different source, but still Machiavelli’s thought:

“All cities that ever, at any time, have been ruled by an absolute prince, by aristocrats, or by the people, have had for their protection force combined with prudence, because the latter is not enough alone, and the first either does not produce things, or when they are produced, does not maintain them.  Force and prudence, then, are the might of all the governments that ever have been or will be in the world.”

from “Words to be Spoken on the Law for Appropriating Money”, in Chief Works and Others [of Machiavelli], trans. Allan H. Gilbert, 3 vols. (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 1965), v. III, 1439.

Prudence operationalizes itself through power and persuasion.  This is pathology?  This is dangerous?  Even Jesus admonished the Disciples to spread the Gospel, but wise as a serpent and harmless as a dove . . .

. . . or blues out with Mr. Armstrong . . .

Please consider this etymology from EtymologyOnline.

hypocrisy:  from the Greek, hypokrisis, “acting on the stage, pretense,” from hypokrinesthai, “play a part, pretend.”

from hypo- “under” plus the middle voice of krinein “to sift, decide” (see crisis).

The sense evolution is from “separate gradually” to “answer” to “answer a fellow actor on stage” to “play a part.”

[Sidebar:  Actors also look for subtext, so they sift the meaning under the playwright's text, truly to sift under.  One can drift into this subtext sifting with readers, too, as some look for other meanings beyond the obvious.]

hypocrite
from Greek, hypokrites “stage actor, pretender, dissembler,”

hypocritical
from Greek, hypokritikos “acting a part”

crisis
from Greek, krisis, lit. “judgment,” from krinein “to separate, decide, judge,”

Persuasion can literally be hypocrisy.  It acquires its unsavory connotation from those who are sincere, realistic, and traditional watching those who offer many meanings.

An anonymous reader a Goodreads wants us to enjoy quotations.  Like this.

quotable quote

“You can lead a whore to culture but you can’t make her think.”
— Mae West

Great edgy line, isn’t it? And I almost compelled to “like” the quote except that Mae West didn’t say it.  Dorothy Parker’s got dibs on it.

Mae West was arguably the first great InSincere Blonde and I’ll bet she kicked herself for not thinking of this line if she heard the quotable Mrs. Parker. (”Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses.”)

Mrs. Parker distinguished herself as a great New York City writer in the 1920s and 30s with the Algonquin Round Table luminaries of the time including Robert Benchley, George Kaufman, Alexander Woolcott, and occasionally Harpo Marx and Tallulah Bankhead.

I can understand the anonymous poster’s great confusion – Mae West should have said this to further inflame her reputation – but it was a Smart Girl who thought of it.  Not the Blonde.

With the recent passing of J.D. Salinger, the Literary Lice are moving as this NYT story demonstrates with an analysis of several unpublished personal letters from Salinger to an old friend, who has also passed away.  The old friend had surreptitiously sold the letters to a third party who gave them to a repository.  And, now that Salinger is well buried, it is safer for that repository to make public the letters since it is unlikely that Mr. Salinger will rise to defend his privacy.  The letters disclose two powerful quotes from Salinger, one that simply resounds within me, the second that provides insight into one of my Rules.

. . . he can’t recall ever answering the telephone “without unconsciously gritting my teeth.”

I suspect that many of us have felt this way.  For me a ringing telephone tends to pull the trigger on my Reactance revolver – an unfair restriction on my autonomy as I’m reading, writing, or just thinking where my mind will go.  Only when it is from someone I care about, like various trade school graduates of my acquaintance, does the Reactance reverse.

But, that’s me.

The second quote is more to our purposes.

“Most stuff that is genuine is better left unsaid,” the author wrote back . . .

Recall my Rule:  All Bad Persuasion Is Sincere.

Nothing about Salinger was Bad Persuasion and it was because he did not write sincerely, but rather artistically.  And Salinger’s observation of “left unsaid” does not mean unexpressed.  Properly revealed, the people you want to know will understand your sincerity.  But as Salinger, Oscar Wilde, and my modifications advise, never reveal your sincerity when striving for Art or for Persuasion.