A quick note regarding why being specific about motivation is important

On why I write this blog

Photo by Jakob Owens on Unsplash

In response to The Senseless Prey of a Vicious and Conniving Gold-digger, Mike Hind of the excellent blog Rarely Certain writes:

I suspect that as well as inflaming public opinion the (possibly unaware) intention of this kind of polemic is to encourage the worst reactions from the enemy. It looks to me as if the Republican gif thing *was* intended as a misogynistic flourish. The author & their fans can then gesture to those responses with a ‘see? 🤷‍♂️’.

I’m reposting and expanding on my reply to him, because it gets to the heart of Rhetoric, and why I write this blog:

It may well be a misogynistic flourish. What it can't be is based on the premise that Goldberg says it is, that the politicians, who hate Hollywood, will side with the rebellious but goodhearted movie people in order to pwn the uppity women. That's impossible, because they don't hate Hollywood. She is mischaracterizing their motivation.

Maybe they hold all women in contempt, maybe they all had bad breakups with blondes, maybe they just like Johnny Depp, who knows? But we don't live in "Star Wars." They're human beings, not villains in a space opera, so wicked that they will compromise their principles and side with their sworn enemy just to eat the souls of the helpless.

They may well be misogynists. They aren't characters in a film. (Nor, for what it's worth, is Depp actually Jack Sparrow.) This is important because it reveals Goldberg's actual worldview, and because it demonstrates the precise lengths of insane overreach she's willing to go to in the defense of the indefensible; i.e., construct a caricature of the world and slot people into roles within it that they don't actually fit. Making people into caricatures is how you demonize them in the public eye, and you do that by making their motivation seem cartoonish.

People who write opinion columns (and who work in media spaces generally) aren’t stupid. They aren’t the best and brightest, but they do know things about their trade. We all learn how to write in secondary school, so it doesn’t occur to many of us that it’s a specialized skill, but there’s more to writing on a professional level than knowing the rules of grammar.

These days, journalists are more or less explicitly propagandists, propaganda is about emotional and psychological manipulation, and manipulation has a set of established methods and best practices. If you doubt me, you might want to look into the work of Edward Bernays, “The Father of Propaganda,” who invented the term “psychological warfare,” and who based his life’s work on the insights of his uncle, Sigmund Freud. Bernays wrote books and articles with titles like “Manipulating Public Opinion: The Why and the How” and “The Engineering of Consent.” It’s not just a vague set of principles—there are fucking flowcharts and textbooks that detail how to use language to make people angry, or despondent, or afraid.

Rhetoric, my profession, is centuries older, and its most famous practitioners, the Sophists, understood a lot of things Bernays had to rediscover. But persuasion is all ultimately based on the same principles and uses the same methods. My goal in writing this blog is to make those methods explicit, because they’re being used against you on a daily basis, and the wholesale use of psychological warfare tactics against unsuspecting people makes my fists itch. I don’t like being manipulated myself, and I don’t approve of manipulating others. Communication is supposed to be a dance, not a mugging.