ARISTOTLE’S GUIDE TO SELFPERSUASION
How Ancient Rhetoric Can Help You Change Your Life
JAY HEINRICHS
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ARISTOTLE’S GUIDE TO SELF-PERSUASION
Jay Heinrichs Aristotle’s Guide to Self-Persuasion
How Ancient Rhetoric Can Help You Change Your Life
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To Viyan, and to her life’s argument from strength.
Aris totle ’ s Guide to Self- Persuasion
Introduction Leave the Rut
The useful art of soul bending
“Wish is a form of appetite . . .”
—Aristotle, On the Soul
This book got its start some years ago when I attempted to turn my life around with rhetoric, the art of persuasion. To be honest, my wife, Dorothy, told me to. She’s very smart and I do everything she says; so, tapping the wisdom of Aristotle and other sages, I began an ambitious experiment in self-persuasion. The art itself began in the most social of ways, when a bevy of ancient consultants in Greece got rich by helping people win lawsuits and rule the masses through the sheer power of words. These itinerant experts deftly branded themselves “the Wise Ones”— Sophists. One of them, a massively popular Greek orator named
Gorgias (exquisitely pronounced “gorgeous”) made so much money speaking and teaching rhetoric that he allegedly ordered a solid gold statue of himself. It was as if Taylor Swift supplemented her enormous concert revenues by teaching songwriting . . . and then erected a gold statue of herself.
Over the centuries, rhetoric went on to inspire democracies, lubricate business deals, and build empires. It empowered the likes of Lincoln and Gandhi and MLK. The American Founders used their common schooling in rhetoric to help throw o the yoke of empire and launch a republic. Shakespeare applied the knowledge of rhetoric he acquired at the Stratford Grammar School to do, well, Shakespeare. One of the original liberal arts, rhetoric is partly responsible for what we know as western civilization.
Rhetoric does more than win friends and influence people. The Sophists claimed it can bewitch an audience with the practice of psychagogia, or “soul moving.” (The ancient Romans more aptly called it soul bending.) The gorgeous Greek Gorgias credited rhetoric with moving the soul of beautiful Helen, along with her body, all the way to Troy—launching those thousand ships and sparking the Trojan War. Gorgias played her defense attorney in a mock trial, blaming rhetoric for “drugging” her.
Some years ago, my wife became weirdly convinced that rhetoric’s power could help me personally. Dorothy is the kind of dawnenabled lark who springs out of bed with a cheerful “Good morning! What are your plans for the day?” and I love her anyway. I, on the other hand, am by nature the kind of geezer we used to make fun of, resenting the state of the world and kids these days. What’s more, back then I was su ering from an ailment called snapping hip syndrome, which begins with a debilitating tightening up of the muscles. You could say the same thing was going on with the
rest of me. In my late fifties, I had gotten old beyond my years, drinking too much and growing nostalgic for the good old days when I was an enthusiastic outdoorsman. Worst of all, I was losing my taste for life. I was truly stuck.
A relentless booster, Dorothy listed some of the triumphs that had come from my work with the art of rhetoric: helping pediatricians get children vaccinated, enabling NASA to coax mothballed MX missiles from the Pentagon, showing corporations how to recover from their own screwups . . .
She leaned in and whispered ecstatically, “And you once got thousands of publishing executives to lick each other!” (This was not entirely accurate. I had asked two thousand executives to lick each other. It was in the London Palladium during a tour for my book How to Argue with a Cat. The stage lights were bright, and I couldn’t see the audience. But I did get them to purr.)
Still, Dorothy believed that my work on the ancient art lacked one helpful angle. “Have you thought of using the tools on yourself?”
I shook my head. It was true that whole empowering philosophies—Stoicism and Epicureanism, among others—had been built from the foundations of rhetoric. But rhetoric requires an audience; it stands to reason. Besides, persuasion works best when it disguises itself. No one likes to be manipulated. What kind of persuasion succeeds when both manipulator and manipulatee are the same person? It would be like a magician revealing his fakery during the performance. Here’s the woman’s torso and the box that doesn’t really cut her in half!
Dorothy ignored my objections. “What have you got to lose?”
With frequent nudging by my wife, I did a deep dive into Aristotle, poring over works that I had passed by in my previous rhetori-
cal research, and . . . eureka. Self-persuasion has an audience after all. It’s not you, exactly; not the you who scarfs potato chips and binge-watches streaming shows. It’s your very own soul.
I don’t necessarily mean the immortal spirit we hear about in churches and temples, but rather Aristotle’s brilliantly distinct concept of a soul. In his view, your soul is a superior version of yourself, one that reflects your truest character and reason for being. Your Aristotelian soul is your you-est you, the Michael Jackson man-in-the-mirror. It can become your audience, enabling you to bend it as the ancients liked to say. By directing rhetorical devices at this “audience,” you could master another language, change careers, or simply overcome a fear of heights. The process makes you more resilient, better at dealing with change, and more skilled at growing old with grace. Most of all, rhetorical soul bending o ers agency—the power to change your character from victim to protagonist, allowing you to take control of your brain and your circumstances. It lets you be the boss of you.
How can an art created by dead white men be relevant today? The ancients knew that, while cultures change, human nature remains the same. You’ll find the lessons of persuasion woven through politics, literature, philosophy, and even popular culture—and many of its teachers appear in this book. Aristotle, Socrates, Benjamin Franklin, Hedy Lamarr, Muhammed Ali, P. T. Barnum, Je rey “the Dude” Lebowski, and of course Taylor Swift will help illustrate the concepts. Their wisdom literally got me o the couch.
Count the Ways
Obviously, you don’t need a particular goal to practice the art of rhetoric on yourself. As far as we know, Aristotle never assigned himself any specific goals. (Get tutoring job, teach young prince how
to conquer world.) Still, a good project o ers a chance to experiment, not just with the tools but with yourself. Plus, if friends notice a change in you, imagine the frisson you can experience when you tell them your success has something to do with the Aristotelian concept of the soul.
Here are a few examples of where this book might take you. Your first project may be to dream up a specific goal of your very own, one that best suits your yearning soul. (Turn to chapter three for rhetorical inspiration.)
Lose weight. In attempting any objective, we need to know the frame, ensuring that we firmly grasp the meaning of the terms. What exactly does losing weight mean to you? While we’re pondering the definition of our issue, we might as well throw in a logical analysis, assessing the goal with an ancient system that inspired the scientific method. Before we start starving ourselves, though, we want to get in touch with our soul, which you’ll meet in the next chapter. If all this framing and assessing seem like a pain, put it this way: The time you spend on thinking is a hiatus from all that diet and exercise.
Learn a new skill. Let’s say you want to play the guitar. You do some online research, buy the instrument, and schedule lessons. What else do you need to do? How much persuasion does it take to do something you have always wanted to do? Well, obviously, the problem is not playing the guitar. It’s practicing the guitar. This is true for any new skill—learning a language, taking up fly-fishing, or mastering haute cuisine. The idea sounds brilliant until it comes to finding an hour a day and then going through the necessary repetitive motions, bleeding fingers, and tedium. A variety of tools in this book will give you the motivation to keep going. Give a speech. This ambition is not at all impressive if you were born a natural ham, free of any performance anxiety. Just
write a good text and, ideally, memorize it. For the rest of us, though, we need to deal with our fear. Start with a mindset—or frame, in rhetoric—that redefines the occasion as something less scary. It’s a toast, not a State of the Union Address. You will master redefinition in chapter seven.
Become wittier. The ability to speak or write cleverly can do wonders for boosting confidence or overcoming shyness. In chapter nine, you’ll find ways to express even the most mundane thoughts in ways that make people (and yourself) think you’re terribly clever. Admittedly, Aristotle dismissed wit as “educated arrogance.” But he himself would have benefited from a wittier style. While his thoughts are profoundly brilliant, reading them entails a terrible slog. You and I will never become Aristotles, but we can make ourselves more entertaining through cunning rhetorical devices.
Improve your love life. This objective admittedly sounds cringingly self-helpish; but ancient philosophers wrote volumes on sex and relationships. (Socrates being an exception; when he lost his sex drive in old age, he told friends he was glad to be “rid of an old demon.” Was his wife just as grateful?)
You can find whole taxonomies of love in the literature. Search for “Aristotle’s Masterpiece” on the Web, and up pops an English sex manual, first published in 1684 and falsely attributed to the philosopher. The pseudonymous author had good reason to borrow the brand; Aristotle had written at least two books covering reproduction in animals. The modern reader would hardly think the man wrote the book on human love. For one thing, Aristotle believed that the female was, “as it were, a deformed male.” Still, given that Aristotelian rhetoric starts with the tools to gain the liking and trust of people, we had best not dismiss him right away.
But this is a book of self-persuasion, not of Marvin-Gaye-getit-on seduction. In order to gain a lover or improve a relationship
with a significant other, we need to begin by seducing ourselves— convincing our disappointed souls that we are worthy of love. Just about every tool in this book applies.
Learn to nap. While this goal may not seem terribly ambitious, it requires as much rhetorical skill as any other venture. Most people who fail to take a daily rest will tell you, “I don’t nap.” Well, of course. This is literally true. Those among us with demanding in-person jobs find few opportunities to put their feet up and snooze. But over years of napless days, I don’t nap can turn into a self-description, as in I’m not the type who naps. At that point, even the best circumstances for napping—remote work, quiet room, long lunch hour—won’t lead to one of the finest habits to promote health and sanity. Your false interpretation of your soul gets in the way. In the next chapter, we’ll work to fix that problem. Then, to foster the habit yourself, you can call upon a whole rhetorical array, from framing to Aristotle’s Lure & Ramp method.
In fact, I would argue that the napping skill can constitute the single greatest proof of your ability to persuade yourself. Now there’s ambition for you.
Set your own goal. Start a business, buy your first home, earn another degree, quit smoking, learn a language, read Moby-Dick for pleasure . . . Every ambitious objective uses similar rhetorical methods. You can find inspiration in chapter three. Then align your ambition with your soulful needs and consider a wildly ambitious goal. Whether you triumph or fail nobly, your e ort will allow you to see a more soulful person, a decorous ethos, in the mirror.
Navigating Change
The tools of rhetoric start with improving your mood, your selfbeliefs, and your willingness to take action—or to stop doing
something harmful. Changing your mood can be relatively easy. Take a bath, light a candle, watch cat videos. The e ect rarely lasts, but you will have succeeded in a small rhetorical victory. Changing your default mood, on the other hand—transforming your habitual emotional state—takes some serious self-persuasion.
Changing your mind is less easy. You know this from the horrible political fights that ruin Thanksgiving dinner. Still, with the right rhetorical tools, you can succeed in a self-consensus favoring Dunkin’ Donuts co ee over Starbucks; or an apple over a donut.
Now, action—persuading yourself to exercise at an ungodly hour, or to eliminate cocktail hour—comes hardest of all. You can download a jaunty exercise playlist and win an argument with yourself about the need to get fit; but actually doing the crunches you intended? Gym franchises’ whole business plans depend on your failure to show up. The tools in this book can spark the motivation you need. A couple of them can even remove the need for motivation altogether. They will help you get unstuck and gain triumphant goals, both ambitious and merely healthy.
Obviously, this book will not replace therapy or cure neuroses. But if you end up in a rut, you probably struggle to talk yourself out of it. One reason could be your own self-identity—your ethos, in rhetoric. In my persuasion consulting practice, I often hear young clients say, “I’m not a leader.” Out-of-shape men and women often reveal that they “don’t sweat.” And I once had a friend share that he would love to learn guitar but that he was “not musical,” as if he had inherited a chord-blocking gene. Sure, he might never cut an album, but with the appropriate rhetorical tools he should be able to learn to strum a decent “I Fought the Law,” and feel good about that.
All the tools in this book have to do with the ways our minds process words. Early on, the Sophists understood that they could
manipulate their audiences’ perception of reality. In the chapters to come, you’ll see that the Sophists’ techniques led to pure magic, transforming existence through the repeated use of certain terms. In learning these tools yourself, you might change your own meaning—your life’s essential cause.
This is more than a revenue source for me; it happens to be my own cause. Used for good, rhetoric’s tools of human manipulation bring people together, help them make mutual decisions, and inspire them to act. Used for evil . . . well. We all have seen what the dark art can do in politics and marketing, not to mention family relations. All the more reason to unveil the secrets.
In the meantime, we’re changing ourselves. As an example, I will tell the tale of a rail-thin character standing almost naked in the early cold at the base of a mountain. He has talked himself into the notion that he is a magnificent athlete, that getting up in the dark is a fine habit, and that the silly goal that he will probably fail to achieve represents the single greatest idea he has ever had. His personal experiment includes a mountain, a diet, an exercise plan, a radical change of habits, a personal made-to-order time zone, thousands of embarrassing strangers, and a birthday. Not to mention his wife, thank her endlessly tolerant soul.
That character, of course, is me. Some of the tools in the experiment failed miserably. Others succeeded far beyond my expectations. My experiment literally changed my life. More importantly, what it taught me just might change yours.
Part 1 READINESS
1 Soul
Motivate Yourself
Hamlet’s most excellent question
“Everyone ceases to inquire how he is to act when he has brought the moving principle back to himself and to the ruling part of himself . . .”
—Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
Successful self-persuasion worms through the gaps in life, or closes them altogether. There’s the gap between our lust for a fresh, inviting cinnamon roll and our desire to lose a few pounds. Many of us sense a gap between the life we have grown accustomed to and the alarming changes we see around us—or within ourselves. In this chapter, Aristotle will help us deal with a more personal chasm: between your day-to-day self, the one salivating in front of that cinnamon roll, and your superior soul. Personally, when I look in the mirror first thing in the morning,
I hardly see a fine human specimen. Yet e ective rhetoric depends on getting your audience to like and trust you—projecting an upstanding character, or ethos. When that assembly consists solely of the person in the mirror, you literally face a problem. That mirror image can see right through you, flaws and past sins and all. It’s the great self-persuasion paradox: To believe in yourself, you first have to get yourself to believe in yourself. Most of the devices in this book exist to help close that gap, the one that separates our noble core from our sorry daily behavior.
Scientist that he was, Aristotle pursued the concept of the soul like a biologist studying the liver. He speculated about the various parts of the body that might contain the soul. (Many years later, the seventeenth-century philosopher and devoted Aristotelian René Descartes located the soul precisely in the pineal gland.) Aristotle went on to ask: Was the soul “the rational faculty”—or, as we moderns would say, the mind? If so, was it made of something physical, or did the soul exist beyond our own bodies, “intermingled in the whole universe”? Aristotle seemed to be enjoying himself in these speculations. The soul can’t exist everywhere, he decided, because plants do not have souls. Neither, he believed, do animals. This makes me doubt he had pets.
Therefore, Aristotle concluded, the soul had to be something human; not a physical object but a kind of spiritual spark plug, the quality of a person that senses things and responds to those sensations. The soul is the you-ness of a person, one’s deepest identity and ultimate motive. Aristotle wrote an entire book on the soul— titled, appropriately, On the Soul—and devoted many thousands of words in his other books to the art of bending it.
While any attempt to persuade yourself aloud can seem positively schizophrenic, the soul provides the required audience. This helps explain why some people can talk themselves into good
habits and noble goals. The “themselves” they convince are their souls. In return, their souls make them better.
Modern science rarely examines the soul; but you can see traces of Aristotle in many social science experiments. The noted psychologist Elliot Aronson called self-persuasion the most e ective enticement of all. Other kinds of allurements, such as advertising or political speeches, often fail to persuade because they come from an external source. We see an ad telling us to vote for someone and we ask ourselves, “Do we really want to?” With self-persuasion, Aronson said, “individuals come to believe that they really want to.” That’s because they themselves wanted to in the first place. Then what was the need for persuasion? If you want to do something, why not follow the path of almighty Nike and just do it?
You know why: Desire only gets you so far. Aronson believed that your own sense of identity will take you much further. His research showed that cognitive dissonance triggers self-persuasion. This is the unpleasant feeling we get when we say or do something counter to our own beliefs—“especially if this action threatens the individual’s self-concept of being a decent or rational person.”
He and a colleague conducted an experiment in which they invited volunteers to join a discussion session. First, the scientists put half the group through a rigorous initiation; the other half suffered only a mild introduction. The psychologists who led the discussion deliberately made it boring. Afterward, the volunteers who had been through the mild initiation admitted they had been bored. The ones who had been through the tough version, on the other hand, were convinced that the discussion had been fascinating. They thought of themselves as rational people. What reasonable person would deliberately go through a torturous initiation just for a pointless conversation? The experiment had caused painful cognitive dissonance in those poor volunteers.
Aristotle would have understood the phenomenon. The participants’ self-identity constituted what he called the soul. When each volunteer manipulated herself into believing that the discussion was interesting, she was trying to strike a harmonious chord with her soul.
Was this a good thing? Weren’t the volunteers simply deluding themselves?
Welcome to the dark art of rhetoric. Aristotle, the most rational of all rational beings, understood that logic rarely persuades on its own. The most powerful persuasion comes from an audience’s sense of its identity and its identification with the speaker. Any dissonance between the persuader and the audience, however logical the message, will block the persuasion. When it comes to persuading yourself, the audience is your soul. The more your daily behavior strays, the more you separate yourself from your soul’s true needs. This, Aristotle would say, is a major source of unhappiness. Your soul and your behavior fail to strike a harmonious chord. When a parent says “You’re better than this” to a naughty child, she points to what she optimistically believes to be an admirable little soul, one distinct from the kid’s abominable behavior. When Taylor Swift sings to an ex-boyfriend “It’s my turn to be me,” the “me” is her true self—as opposed to the lovesick Taylor who, as she says in the same song, “bent all my rules.” Ditto when she sings “I’m the only one of me.” Good for her. This woman is in harmony with her own soul.
Your Soul Is a Scout
Think of your soul as the you your daily you rarely lives up to. It’s the higher you, the one that restrains itself from finishing a quart of Cherry Garcia ice cream before bed. This admirable soul of yours