Verbal Self-Defense #1

Actual street fights are, thankfully, rather rare in the world. Verbal street fights, sadly, are common. In most cases these fights spring out of an amoral need to preserve status. If you begin to question or diminish ideas which someone feels tied to – from which they gain standing in one way or another – they’re likely to dislike you and/or to verbally attack you. All of us with non-standard opinions have experienced this.

So, since non-standard opinions are the path to progress, it’s important that we learn how to deal with these attacks. This will be the first of several posts on this subject, which I sometimes think of as Verbal Judo. They’re adapted from my book How To Think Clearly, which you can find at veraverba.com in either paper (while supplies last) or PDF.

The attack I’ll describe below involves something called the either-or fallacy. A fallacy is a deceptive statement. It is something that’s false, but is made to appear true. In practice fallacies are coordinated with emotional attacks. Our first trick goes like this:

A speaker makes an impassioned argument, leading to an either-or choice: Either Option A or Option B. And, almost always, they’ll apply pressure for you to pick one or the other immediately.

I ran into this trick many years ago, listening to someone proposing a new environmental law, because a factory was dumping poison into a river used by several communities. (Or so they claimed.) The speaker went through a list of horrible things that were happening or might happen to the people living along the river, and especially to the children. He went on to explain that millions of concerned people had vehemently condemned this, and concluded his argument with a choice: Either you support our new law or you are supporting the abuse being done by the evil factory; abuse that has been universally condemned.

The argument was fallacious, of course, but nearly everyone in the audience went along with it. In reality, many options existed beyond the two which were offered:

• Their law wasn’t the only one that could be written. A team of law students could probably come up with a dozen alternatives in a day or two.

• The people along the river could bring lawsuits against the factory. If the claim of poisoning the river was true, all of these people could legitimately claim that they were being poisoned. Legal systems already in place were specifically designed to deal with such issues.

• If the people along the river wanted to be a bit feisty, they could bring water from the river, hand it to the factory owners and insist they drink it. I wouldn’t suggest going much farther than this, but it would certainly make their concerns clear.

So then, many other options existed for this problem, not just the speaker’s law or poison in baby’s cereal.

How The Trick Works

As I said, nearly everyone in the audience went along with this trick. And so I’d like to show you how it worked:

• The claim of poison was made quickly. It may have been true, but the speaker didn’t spend time proving it. Rather, he used it to stir up emotions and then moved immediately forward. This is crucial to success when manipulating people: The flow of emotions is key, precisely because emotions displace careful thinking.

• He described the effects on the poison in vivid images, chosen for their emotional impact. He particularly used children because nearly all humans have a strong instinct to protect babies and small children.

• The speaker claimed that the crime – poison in the river – had been strongly condemned by large numbers of people and powerful organizations. This, strange though it may sound, was a threat, and a strong one. What the speaker was implying was this: “If you don’t agree with me, all those people and powerful organizations will hate you, and are likely to hurt you.”

• Finally, with his emotional pressures at their peak, he presented the false choice: Support this law or be a monster.

• “Choose now” is used to cement you to the choice before the manipulation wears off, as it would once you had time to think about it. If you say “yes,” however, you’ll tend to stick with it because changing would involve calling yourself a sucker.

I think you can see why the trick worked so well. In simple terms, we can describe this as a disengaging of our thinking circuits and an overload of our reactive circuits. And if others in the audience start screaming “Yes!” and “Support the Law!” the conformity pressures go sky-high. And you should be aware that serious manipulators will plant friends in the crowd to do precisely this. It works.

Another aspect of this is that humans have an innate tendency to see things in a binary way. We see this very clearly in word association tests and games, where the fastest and most common answers tend to go Hot, Cold. Happy, Sad. Hard, Soft, and so on

Apparently this is primitive brain circuitry we inherited; but in any event, dropping to hot/cold, happy/sad and so on are the easiest things for our brains to do, and they involve almost no purposeful thought. That makes them perfect for emotional manipulation.

How To Handle The Attack

Simone Weil once noted that “Conscience is deceived by the social.” That’s true, but more to the point, conscience is intimidated by the social. And when an emotional attack strikes, you can feel the change in your mental state: You become less certain of yourself, more afraid, and suddenly joining with the crowd feels like a safe thing to do. This is the moment you must learn to notice.

When you feel these things, you must pull yourself away. I recommend that you physically step away if you can, but certainly you must pull away mentally. At first this can be challenging, but the more you do it, the easier it becomes.

Once you step away and your stream of thought clears, you should be able to find the flaw in the argument easily enough.

The crazy thing about this sort of manipulation is that once you pull your mind out of the emotional flow, the tricks they play are so juvenile... so transparent... that their effectiveness seems crazy.

So, your first self-defense move is to step away from confusion and self-doubt. Gain some space and the trick will dissipate, allowing you to see it for what it is.