You can’t simply reject The Perfect Rhetorical Fortress (TPRF). You actually have to lay siege to it.
Rhetoric has more of a Mutually Assured Destruction logic to it—you try to destroy me, you will get destroyed as well. If you simply ignore people who use TPRF you’re simply allowing them to degrade you without any cost to themselves. But if you show them that you can degrade their reputation as well, if not better, than they can decrease yours, you give them an incentive to not use TPRF.
The prescription isn't to *ignore* people who use TPRF, it's to reject their terms and refuse to play by their rules. If they engage in ad hominem, appeal to authority, or try any of the myriad other logical fallacies, you point that out and refuse to accept them as legitimate rhetorical moves.
The fortress can't be laid siege to, because in even attempting to do so you are acquiescing to its rules of engagement. You need to instead laugh and say, "Sorry, the fight's not in there. It's out here. That's where I'll be. Come when you're ready."
The problem with this is that this is assuming an enemy that will fight with honor, honoring the rules of debate and rhetoric. Many of these people don't even know the rules, let alone follow them; and if they do, they dismiss the rules as being "part of the problem".
If one has the patience and the space, they can attempt to teach the rules, although that still leaves open whether or not the opponent will learn and follow the rules. In practice, they aren't open to considering those rules, let alone learning or adopting them.
That’s the way discourse works in the idealistic imaginations of many. In reality, people aren’t automatons who meticulously scrutinize a statement for its adherence to the rules of logic, nor even care if a the rules of logic are broken. In the real world, a small group with bad intentions can use cheap rhetoric to gain control then take action to guard their power.
Those of us with good intentions must live and fight in the real world.
I'm usually condescended to in that way, so none of what you just said is much of a surprise. The thing is you're straw-manning what I am talking about, so there's nothing substantive for me to respond to here.
If you become indistinguishable from those you're opposing because you try to adopt their tactics to beat them, what does victory even mean anymore? "Because I'm one of the good guys" is not a justification for mirroring the total abandonment of civil discourse. *Everyone* thinks they're one of the good guys. The way forward is to be the adults in the room, and to hold people to adult standards of engagement. It doesn't mean rolling over and taking abuse or accepting bad behavior.
I'm not condescending to you. I'm simply not mincing words as I say what I believe. I also didn't straw-man your argument, because you didn't really put forward an argument. You put forward an assertion. I replied to your assertion with my own assertion.
If you would like to have a friendly debate on this topic, we can.
My first question to you would be how do you plan to "hold people to adult standards of engagement"? What are you going to do when people fall below those standards?
And they will, because cheap rhetoric is effective. Fallacies and shame and character assassination are all very effective tools for manipulating others and getting one's way. That's why we've been using them for as long as humans have been around.
What happens when you posture as the adult, but no one follows your lead because they're getting what they want by acting like a child? Then what?
You can straw man an assertion, which is what I believe you did. It doesn’t have to be an argument for you to mischaracterize it.
And when you imply that I am not engaging in the real world, and that what I’m saying works in an idealistic imagination, that comes off as pretty condescending.
As for your questions: What you do when someone falls below the adult and mature methods of engagement is you call it out clearly so they and everyone else can see. You offer a way forward beyond that, and if they refuse, the conversation is over.
Cheap rhetoric is effective for a while, but people can tell the difference between that and real engagement. And I think many people are coming around to the fact that this nonsense is exhausting and they want no part of it. The numbers are on the adult side of the equation, regardless of how it might seem online.
But even if no one follows my lead, at least I’m not contributing to the problem by mirroring the behavior of those I’m opposing. Fighting fire with fire burns everything to the ground.
Daryl Davis actively, compassionately, and bravely engaged with hundreds of people who literally believed he was sub-human and he was successful in changing their minds. If he can do THAT, then we can do this.
At no point am I advocating for acquiescing to nonsense and letting bullies get their way. I’m simply saying that returning fire in kind gets us nowhere good.
I'm sorry you feel that way. Although, an assertion is more or less a straw-man. If you want to add some flesh and bone to your assertion, then turn it into an argument.
It hardly seems fair of you to get upset with me because I didn't turn your assertion into an argument for you. I've already considered both sides of this issue and come to the opposite conclusion as you. If you think you have some argument that might change my mind, then the onus is on you to present it.
As for the argument you have now presented:
First you say we can enforce the adult standard of engagement by calling out anyone who falls below it. Next you say, if those we call out prove recalcitrant, we should no longer engage with them. (In a word, we should ignore them.) Finally, you say "[a]t no point am I advocating for acquiescing to nonsense and letting bullies get their way," referring to the people who are degrading our discourse with their immature rhetoric.
But that is, in effect, exactly what you advocate for earlier in your argument. If we simply break off conversation with and ignore anyone who will not follow our "adult" example, then we are effectively acquiescing to them. We are vacating the field and allowing them to continue polluting our discourse unopposed.
I'm not sure what leads you to believe the numbers are on our side either. If telling people to be better and ignoring those who refuse worked, the we should have seen some improvement in the discourse by now. But the discourse has only gotten worse in recent years. The reason we are debating the best approach to discourse is because more and more people are looking for a solution to what they view as a worsening national discourse.
So it is already the case that people pollute our discourse and ignore encouragement to stop. And that trend has been worsening for some time now. Which means we are already at the point where your proposed solution has failed. If we were to continue following your proposal, we should be entering the phase where we simply acquiesce to those immature people by ignoring them.
I think you recognize this as our status quo, as well. Because you preemptively argue that, even if your proposed solution were to fail (I'd argue it already has), then you'd rather fail with your integrity intact than betray your values to succeed.
That's a false moral equivalence, in my view. There is no moral equivalence between bad-faith actors who use rhetorical weapons to empower themselves and abuse others, and good-faith actors who use rhetorical weapons to convince bad-faith actors that it is in their self-interest to engage in good-faith. Ignoring evil when you have the power to stop it is a moral failure.
I think there is a tendency among classical-liberal types to believe that our values are not merely values, but rather some sort of higher Truth. And, if only people are made aware of the Truth, they will willingly adopt it. Almost like Christians believe people will be helpless to accept Christ as their one true lord and savior when he reveals himself.
But I don't buy that. I think our values are the best set of values, but not the inevitable set. Which is why I believe we must enforce our values if we don't wish to live by others--preferably while enforcement only requires some tough rhetoric.
I've been saying for years that the endgame of Cancel Culture is not cowering opponents, but Mutually Assured Destruction.
Also useful to keep in mind is that many of the Successor Ideology/TPRF proponents think and act as if they will never lose, as if the arc of history will inevitably bend towards them. If you can at least make them consider that this will not be the case, it will expose just how large the downside (the "destruction") could be for them--not only could they lose, they could lose big after going all in.
The communists of the 1930s thought that this was the case for them. Regardless of what you think about his ethics, McCarthy 20 years later taught them otherwise. McCarthyism wasn't right, and it wasn't fair, but that didn't stop it from being a thing.
Couldn’t have said it better myself. They aren’t playing our game, they don’t care about our rules.
Trying to hold people to the rules of a game they aren’t playing is dumb. That’s like chasing after a soccer fan whose broken onto the field and snatched up the ball with his hands and reading the rules of soccer to him. “See Chapter 1, page 11. You can’t use your hands! You can’t use your hands!!!”
Yeah—he knows.
All you can do is taze him and drag his limp body off of the field. And hopefully any would-be future hooligans who are watching will think twice before following in his footsteps.
I think that there are multiple strategies to evade some of this structure that are very hard to manage because we have built no counter offensive yet.
One very new one is “Verbum ex machina” where something a machine or computer spits out is seen as authoritative, a variant on “deus ex machina” in drama. The anonymity of AI is useful.
There are other versions of this - “argumentum ex scientia” where all language is impenetrable scientific jargon, quite popular.
Here is a book about gender I generated Sunday afternoon - “generated by an AI” - in the language of “Judith Butler” with somewhat impenetrable jargon “ex scientia” though I’ve been told it’s more readable than Judith:
What do you refute? People have a very hard time labeling what a computer creates as having human attributes or points of rhetorical attack. It feels like you are attacking a paper clip.
Another idea is what I call “Verbum ex juvenes” or “what kids say”, which gives the appearance of being unsullied or tainted by any possible adult objective.
Here’s the same book from the Sunday batch as though written by the plucky Nancy Drew.
Humor and ridicule is a powerful rhetorical device also, and when done well, devastating. It takes many forms. It can introduce ideas which normal defenses block but the silliness key allows it to get in your mind. Perhaps “Verbum ex morio” - words from a buffoon.
Same book except written by Foucault in a hideous Pepe le Pew French.
Anyway I have the same idea constructed by Dawkins, Sontag, Hesse, Kafka, Sapphire, Achebe, Assis, Mishima, Xun, Gibran, Premchand, Allende, Solzhenitsyn and Edward Gorey, and Plato. Enough time for a beer at The Eagle Sunday afternoon beer bust with the leather guys while waiting for the AI ghost writer to crank them out.
The purpose of rhetoric is not to be correct, it is to convince people. It’s part of the foundation of the trivium “grammar, logic, and rhetoric” and somewhat separates skill in logic from rhetoric, and the accuracy of grammar.
There are many approaches possible now at a scale never before thought of. The “Santorum” ploy is only the tip of the iceberg.
As a writing, grammar, and rhetoric instructor, I can say few people know English grammar, fewer know logic, and fewer still know rhetoric enough to detect when the Ivory Tower uses the illogic of the obstacle course, minefield, and tprf to retain power and authority at the expense of Truth. Students arrive willing to assent to such expert authority, from whom they then parrot the rampant illogic of the ideology at play. Students think they are ‘factually’ or ‘truthfully’ critiquing their newly revealed false consciousness when they are actually persuaded by a professor’s lack of sharing countervailing evidence and rhetoric; by trusting the sheer volume of an article’s citations; by an ideology that is an orthodoxy, etc.
I have seen people get into peeing matches on sites like this one, and I didn't have the impression it was an effective strategy to respond in kind. If you mean that we have to discredit them, that seems true. I have thought that exposing their games would cause other people to see them differently, but that doesn't seem to work very well either. A big part of the problem is that high concentrations of these people in certain cities and online have created a trance-like compliance of belief and behavior in the populations there.
It’s difficult to give blanket advice because each conversation has a slightly different context and underlying emotional dynamic. But here are a couple of techniques I regularly employ.
1) Positive/high-status always wins.
All of the different emotional approaches to a conversation can be conceptualized in a four box matrix. Along the top is Positive Emotion and Negative Emotion. Along the side is High-Status and Low-Status.
You always want to be in the top-left quadrant, positive/high-status. The person who seems happy and confident in a conversation will always come across better than someone who seems angry and impotent.
2) Never accept a premise you don’t have to.
Pay more attention to premises than conclusions. You can challenge a conclusion indirectly by challenging its premise.
When the conclusion of is an accusation of immorality, this is particularly useful. You never want to directly challenge an accusation, that’s why defense attorneys never repeat their client’s charges. However, you can challenge an accusation against you, indirectly, by challenging its premise(s).
3) He who wins the frame wins the debate.
Debate is about framing. Framing is the act of using facts and reasoning to tell a particular story, instead of the other stories that could be told using the same facts and different reasoning.
When your opponent is telling a story that casts you as the villain, don’t ignore it or deny the accusation of villainy. What you need to do is respond with an alternative, more powerful story. One which frames you as the good guy and your opponent as the bad guy.
Your opponent usually won’t give up the framing battle easily. You’ll have to knock down your opponent’s frame and reassert your own several times. But once your opponent stops fighting for the frame, you know you’ve won.
Thank you for the helpful and detailed post! I’ll get back to you with a specific example or two when I have some time. I am an expert witness, so I am familiar with legal argumentation (and enjoy it).
Nice! Then you should be very familiar with framing. The attorneys are trying to create a frame using yes-or-no questions. And, often, witnesses will get annoyed by this, and try to offer context with their answers to challenge the questioning attorney’s frame.
She’ll be lambasted for sure . Much of it will be personal attacks not anchored in debate but in silencing dissent. Which of course leads to criticism by those who would never sully themselves to read the book but to dismiss it out of hand . Bravo to Shrier for poking the bear once again. There are too few left who will
I whole heartedly agree with your description of the the rhetorical fortress problem. I find the same landmines when discussing race in America. Certain concepts are off limits. You are either a racist or a poor person of color who has been captured by self hatred. I find slow deliberate discussion of facts helps push conversations forward. Whether it's mental health for children or racial politics we have to overcome the victimhood starting line. How do you navigate when there is some fact to the story of past injustice or present day vulnerabilities? The "yes ,that is true but.... "
In fairness, there is some legitimate criticism of the book. Both Twenge on her Generation Tech Substack and Haidt on the Honestly podcast infer that her central thesis is not supported by research. Twenge goes on to challenge several additional conclusions Shrier makes, while acknowledging what she gets right—a very balanced review worth checking out.
Excited to read this after hearing good things so far. Also curious about ACEs as I’ve seen them first hand working with children and find myself worrying about where the ACEs will lead them.
It certainly always struck me as intuitively true, but that doesn't mean the research is necessarily strong. I recommend you read the book to see the critique of the methodology. Indeed, I recommend you read it for all sorts of reasons!
"Did the speaker lose their cool? We dub this the “don’t get angry” barricade, in which someone hastens their own demise by voicing frustration." -- Bonus hypocrisy points are awarded when the person using this argument attacks others for "tone policing" when they criticize the non-cordiality of people if the criticized people happen to fit into marginalized identities.
Thanks so much for this lucid analysis of the anti-rational arguments that dominate public discourse. Wouldn’t it be great if students once again had training in rhetoric so they would know how to identify fallacies and fearlessly rebuff them? Frankly, I needed this refresher, myself.
After your comprehensive description of the rhetorical fortress, which is how things are taken down, another major contribution could go along the lines of assembling a compendium of bad ideas or practices. You got started in "Coddling" and this books looks like a continuation. Might be good to keep an ongoing count in an equally accessible format.
Excellent article. Will likely order the book. Albert Ellis’ REBT discourages people from being mired in their depression/anxiety. Is this similar to CBT?
I'm curious how you square your praise of her book with your praise of CBT. Shrier does say to go get therapy if you really need it, and I've only seen her interviews so far and not read the full book, so maybe she's more explicit there, but do you find her at all too flippant about it? From her interviews, it seems like she's railing against giving your kids therapy unless they "actually need it" a majority of the time without clearly articulating what it means to "actually need it." I can see this, in a warped depressed brain, becoming a justification for not helping oneself because of the risks of therapy she states. Do you have concerns that it will drive people away from getting the help they need?
The book praises CBT repeatedly, but she does stress that there are risks to therapy, and because of that you shouldn't get your kid therapy unless they really need it. You can learn some of the mental habits of CBT without therapy at all.
Outcome research on the effectiveness of psychotherapy usually shows that mainstream psychotherapies such as CBT, psychodynamic and experiential therapy are about equally effective across populations of patients and diagnoses. There are a few exceptions, especially with specific kinds of anxiety and PTSD, where forms of CBT can be more effective than other forms of therapy. The average improvement rate across all diagnoses and populations is about 75% reduction in symptoms and self-reported distress, and improvement in targeted areas of functioning. These findings have been systematically reviewed more than once, and have remained stable.
There is some evidence that individual therapists vary in their effectiveness, and some may get much better and others much worse than 75% average improvement in their patients. There is also considerable variation in how much individual patients benefit from treatment. There is evidence that patients who get relatively good outcomes from one kind of therapy may be able to get them with any mainstream therapy.
Their is a strong argument for a "Common Factors" theory, which concludes from the above evidence base that the effectiveness of psychotherapy is real, and is not primarily based on differences in the therapists' theoretical or practical approaches, assuming that they lie within the mainstream practices. Common Factors might include variables within the therapeutic relationship, the sustained attention of both therapist and patient on specific issues, and a mutual effort to try out multiple problem solving strategies. There could be a lot of variables involved that we know nothing about.
There is also the reality that significant average improvement can be predicted for groups of patients who are put through any process that they strongly "believe in." The placebo effect is high. It can be 50%. The placebo effect is about positive expectations and hope of relief. In psychotherapy it is not a "false outcome," it is actually one of the desired effects of treatment. Hope means that one of the major symptoms of depression has been resolved, at least temporarily, and other improvements can occur as a result, e.g., resumption of a job search.
In comparing psychotherapy outcomes to surgical outcomes in treatment of people with "gender dysphoria," it is very possible that surgical outcomes could be better than a no treatment condition, because there is a high level of hope combined with a high level of sacrifice (body parts and sexual identity). When something costs a lot, the buyer tends to place more value on whatever was purchased. The hope would be likely to decline over time, however, because the placebo effect does that.
An additional comment I would make is that "depression" and "anxiety" are usually what is being measured in recent research on Gen Z mental health issues. While I have no doubt that white liberal adolescent girls are reporting record levels of those mind states and symptoms, the focus of research needs to be on the diagnosis of personality disorders and behaviors similar to what is seen in borderline and narcissistic personality disorders. The primary mental health symptoms that the Gen Z females exhibit to people around them are behavioral problems, bad attitudes, inappropriate anger, and disinhibited verbal aggression. Most forms of mainstream therapies can be adapted to address these interpersonal patterns of behavior, but the therapist has to arrive at an accurate diagnosis and treatment plan that is specific to Cluster B personality disorders.
With the caveat that I have not yet read Shrier’s new book, I wonder if there isn’t an important distinction between “therapy” writ large and CBT specifically. Having seen various traditional therapists at points as both an adolescent and an adult (and having had kids in therapy), I am comfortable that CBT and traditional therapy are quite different experiences. So different, in fact, that I routinely tell the story of my first visit with a CBT-oriented therapist—who just happens to be the last therapist I’ve seen/needed.
To the extent Shrier’s critique of “therapy” is pointed toward the traditional “let’s spend fifty minutes every week reliving the worst moments in our lives” approach, I’m right there with her. Your mileage may vary, and traditional therapy probably has its place, but it did nothing for me. In my first-ever experience with CBT, by contrast, I started to rehearse my standard litany of complaints about my father leaving when I was young, etc. The therapist’s response was something like, “I’m getting paid by the hour, so you can talk about whatever you want to talk about and I’ll be fine. But if you actually want things to improve, then maybe we should talk about the behaviors you don’t like and about how we can fix them instead.” That completely changed the game.
I don’t know how careful Shrier is about making distinctions at that level of granularity. Relatedly, I suspect she might tend to think of even CBT for kids as at best a cop-out, since I think she does tend to think of a lot of therapy (possibly including CBT) as a form of inappropriately outsourcing parenting and of overreaction to the ordinary problems of adolescence to which children are generally more resilient than many assume.
One thing I’ve been thinking about lately is the extent to which something like CBT might be a semi-necessary corrective to the therapeutic mindset pervading the culture itself. Again, it might not be as valuable to our kids as reducing their exposure to that mindset or as helping them navigate it through engaged and thoughtful parenting. But if we’re going to allow our kids to experience the full therapeutic culture of the moment and cannot or will not help them navigate it ourselves , maybe CBT has a broader role to play.
Yes, name-calling has evolved on campus, names are now great mulittaskers, they are not only accusations, they are verdicts. The reason for this is that they are related to feellings, and feelings are part of lived experience and must be sanctified and treasured. I am in the fight of my life for my teaching position, I must respond to accusations of "racist" "islamophobe" and "violent" . My absurd response that I did not mention race or religion and I have never raised my voice let alone hit or threatened anyone is met by bemused looks from the "investigators." We don't rely on evidence in a uni court, only balance of probabilities they tell me - otherwise known as who is the better liar or who the investigator likes better. And when name calling is a combo accusation, trial and verdict we are waging war on reason, I'm not sure if we are moving back to earlier times or going back to kindergarten.
William Irwin Thompson. Old school 60s countercultural historian/multiculturalist has some interesting insights into the emergence of “planetary” culture and why “new age” stuff was mostly bs. His role in the Lindesfarne Association (sp?) taught him that postmodern, “green meme” consensus process is usually dysfunctional.
Robert Kegan’s developmental theory is the standard one.
Regression is described in many histories as the fall of empires, or similar (Simon Bolivar described “serving a revolution “ as “plowing the sea” after he saw tribal, racial and class war break out after independence from Spanish Absolutism). Ronfeldt’s TIMN model describes the role of techno-economic disruption and regression in paradigm shifts and cultural evolution.
In systems theory, emergence, self organization, punctuated, dynamic equilibrium. See Koestler’s Ghost in the Machine which describes Holons).
This describes the way that postmodernism gets stuck in the transition from rationalism to meta-rationalism, resulting in in a “crisis of meaning” and thus regression to pre-rational, pre-modern modes of thinking.
Postmodern “leftism” regresses to mythic and tribal , pre-modern levels, reinventing a quasi-religion of pre-modern and anti-modern values that are socially pathological.
The solution, development of meta-rationality is the solution, but it is difficult.
I disagree that “minimization” is a fallacy or a dodge. It is usually the central initial focus that ought to be brought to bear on any purported problem: How big a deal is this? Is it even a bad thing? In traditional formal policy debate, the first negative speech is normally devoted to minimizing the asserted problem (as well as arguing that what problem there is is not attached to the cause the affirmative wants to address).
You can’t simply reject The Perfect Rhetorical Fortress (TPRF). You actually have to lay siege to it.
Rhetoric has more of a Mutually Assured Destruction logic to it—you try to destroy me, you will get destroyed as well. If you simply ignore people who use TPRF you’re simply allowing them to degrade you without any cost to themselves. But if you show them that you can degrade their reputation as well, if not better, than they can decrease yours, you give them an incentive to not use TPRF.
"An eye for an eye will leave us all blind."
The prescription isn't to *ignore* people who use TPRF, it's to reject their terms and refuse to play by their rules. If they engage in ad hominem, appeal to authority, or try any of the myriad other logical fallacies, you point that out and refuse to accept them as legitimate rhetorical moves.
The fortress can't be laid siege to, because in even attempting to do so you are acquiescing to its rules of engagement. You need to instead laugh and say, "Sorry, the fight's not in there. It's out here. That's where I'll be. Come when you're ready."
The problem with this is that this is assuming an enemy that will fight with honor, honoring the rules of debate and rhetoric. Many of these people don't even know the rules, let alone follow them; and if they do, they dismiss the rules as being "part of the problem".
If one has the patience and the space, they can attempt to teach the rules, although that still leaves open whether or not the opponent will learn and follow the rules. In practice, they aren't open to considering those rules, let alone learning or adopting them.
That’s the way discourse works in the idealistic imaginations of many. In reality, people aren’t automatons who meticulously scrutinize a statement for its adherence to the rules of logic, nor even care if a the rules of logic are broken. In the real world, a small group with bad intentions can use cheap rhetoric to gain control then take action to guard their power.
Those of us with good intentions must live and fight in the real world.
I'm usually condescended to in that way, so none of what you just said is much of a surprise. The thing is you're straw-manning what I am talking about, so there's nothing substantive for me to respond to here.
If you become indistinguishable from those you're opposing because you try to adopt their tactics to beat them, what does victory even mean anymore? "Because I'm one of the good guys" is not a justification for mirroring the total abandonment of civil discourse. *Everyone* thinks they're one of the good guys. The way forward is to be the adults in the room, and to hold people to adult standards of engagement. It doesn't mean rolling over and taking abuse or accepting bad behavior.
I'm not condescending to you. I'm simply not mincing words as I say what I believe. I also didn't straw-man your argument, because you didn't really put forward an argument. You put forward an assertion. I replied to your assertion with my own assertion.
If you would like to have a friendly debate on this topic, we can.
My first question to you would be how do you plan to "hold people to adult standards of engagement"? What are you going to do when people fall below those standards?
And they will, because cheap rhetoric is effective. Fallacies and shame and character assassination are all very effective tools for manipulating others and getting one's way. That's why we've been using them for as long as humans have been around.
What happens when you posture as the adult, but no one follows your lead because they're getting what they want by acting like a child? Then what?
You can straw man an assertion, which is what I believe you did. It doesn’t have to be an argument for you to mischaracterize it.
And when you imply that I am not engaging in the real world, and that what I’m saying works in an idealistic imagination, that comes off as pretty condescending.
As for your questions: What you do when someone falls below the adult and mature methods of engagement is you call it out clearly so they and everyone else can see. You offer a way forward beyond that, and if they refuse, the conversation is over.
Cheap rhetoric is effective for a while, but people can tell the difference between that and real engagement. And I think many people are coming around to the fact that this nonsense is exhausting and they want no part of it. The numbers are on the adult side of the equation, regardless of how it might seem online.
But even if no one follows my lead, at least I’m not contributing to the problem by mirroring the behavior of those I’m opposing. Fighting fire with fire burns everything to the ground.
Daryl Davis actively, compassionately, and bravely engaged with hundreds of people who literally believed he was sub-human and he was successful in changing their minds. If he can do THAT, then we can do this.
At no point am I advocating for acquiescing to nonsense and letting bullies get their way. I’m simply saying that returning fire in kind gets us nowhere good.
I'm sorry you feel that way. Although, an assertion is more or less a straw-man. If you want to add some flesh and bone to your assertion, then turn it into an argument.
It hardly seems fair of you to get upset with me because I didn't turn your assertion into an argument for you. I've already considered both sides of this issue and come to the opposite conclusion as you. If you think you have some argument that might change my mind, then the onus is on you to present it.
As for the argument you have now presented:
First you say we can enforce the adult standard of engagement by calling out anyone who falls below it. Next you say, if those we call out prove recalcitrant, we should no longer engage with them. (In a word, we should ignore them.) Finally, you say "[a]t no point am I advocating for acquiescing to nonsense and letting bullies get their way," referring to the people who are degrading our discourse with their immature rhetoric.
But that is, in effect, exactly what you advocate for earlier in your argument. If we simply break off conversation with and ignore anyone who will not follow our "adult" example, then we are effectively acquiescing to them. We are vacating the field and allowing them to continue polluting our discourse unopposed.
I'm not sure what leads you to believe the numbers are on our side either. If telling people to be better and ignoring those who refuse worked, the we should have seen some improvement in the discourse by now. But the discourse has only gotten worse in recent years. The reason we are debating the best approach to discourse is because more and more people are looking for a solution to what they view as a worsening national discourse.
So it is already the case that people pollute our discourse and ignore encouragement to stop. And that trend has been worsening for some time now. Which means we are already at the point where your proposed solution has failed. If we were to continue following your proposal, we should be entering the phase where we simply acquiesce to those immature people by ignoring them.
I think you recognize this as our status quo, as well. Because you preemptively argue that, even if your proposed solution were to fail (I'd argue it already has), then you'd rather fail with your integrity intact than betray your values to succeed.
That's a false moral equivalence, in my view. There is no moral equivalence between bad-faith actors who use rhetorical weapons to empower themselves and abuse others, and good-faith actors who use rhetorical weapons to convince bad-faith actors that it is in their self-interest to engage in good-faith. Ignoring evil when you have the power to stop it is a moral failure.
I think there is a tendency among classical-liberal types to believe that our values are not merely values, but rather some sort of higher Truth. And, if only people are made aware of the Truth, they will willingly adopt it. Almost like Christians believe people will be helpless to accept Christ as their one true lord and savior when he reveals himself.
But I don't buy that. I think our values are the best set of values, but not the inevitable set. Which is why I believe we must enforce our values if we don't wish to live by others--preferably while enforcement only requires some tough rhetoric.
I've been saying for years that the endgame of Cancel Culture is not cowering opponents, but Mutually Assured Destruction.
Also useful to keep in mind is that many of the Successor Ideology/TPRF proponents think and act as if they will never lose, as if the arc of history will inevitably bend towards them. If you can at least make them consider that this will not be the case, it will expose just how large the downside (the "destruction") could be for them--not only could they lose, they could lose big after going all in.
The communists of the 1930s thought that this was the case for them. Regardless of what you think about his ethics, McCarthy 20 years later taught them otherwise. McCarthyism wasn't right, and it wasn't fair, but that didn't stop it from being a thing.
Couldn’t have said it better myself. They aren’t playing our game, they don’t care about our rules.
Trying to hold people to the rules of a game they aren’t playing is dumb. That’s like chasing after a soccer fan whose broken onto the field and snatched up the ball with his hands and reading the rules of soccer to him. “See Chapter 1, page 11. You can’t use your hands! You can’t use your hands!!!”
Yeah—he knows.
All you can do is taze him and drag his limp body off of the field. And hopefully any would-be future hooligans who are watching will think twice before following in his footsteps.
How does one go about degrading their reputation?
You label them, shame them, mock them, question their character, etc..
Same things they do to anyone they don’t like.
I think that there are multiple strategies to evade some of this structure that are very hard to manage because we have built no counter offensive yet.
One very new one is “Verbum ex machina” where something a machine or computer spits out is seen as authoritative, a variant on “deus ex machina” in drama. The anonymity of AI is useful.
There are other versions of this - “argumentum ex scientia” where all language is impenetrable scientific jargon, quite popular.
Here is a book about gender I generated Sunday afternoon - “generated by an AI” - in the language of “Judith Butler” with somewhat impenetrable jargon “ex scientia” though I’ve been told it’s more readable than Judith:
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/5vwtrgnc06kipela6muug/Butler_112233full.pdf?rlkey=39zh8v4p2dsluni0xznlt1k8j&dl=0
What do you refute? People have a very hard time labeling what a computer creates as having human attributes or points of rhetorical attack. It feels like you are attacking a paper clip.
Another idea is what I call “Verbum ex juvenes” or “what kids say”, which gives the appearance of being unsullied or tainted by any possible adult objective.
Here’s the same book from the Sunday batch as though written by the plucky Nancy Drew.
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/l64vkkcs9q1z3hzt5tyi1/ButlerDrew_112233full.pdf?rlkey=d1k8968emvlmvkhw9i6s1hm61&dl=0
Humor and ridicule is a powerful rhetorical device also, and when done well, devastating. It takes many forms. It can introduce ideas which normal defenses block but the silliness key allows it to get in your mind. Perhaps “Verbum ex morio” - words from a buffoon.
Same book except written by Foucault in a hideous Pepe le Pew French.
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/11z67n1vrpj2rdb1adhj5/ButlerFoucault_112233full.pdf?rlkey=ehmkzggyowztnsazgwsw92qbp&dl=0
Anyway I have the same idea constructed by Dawkins, Sontag, Hesse, Kafka, Sapphire, Achebe, Assis, Mishima, Xun, Gibran, Premchand, Allende, Solzhenitsyn and Edward Gorey, and Plato. Enough time for a beer at The Eagle Sunday afternoon beer bust with the leather guys while waiting for the AI ghost writer to crank them out.
The purpose of rhetoric is not to be correct, it is to convince people. It’s part of the foundation of the trivium “grammar, logic, and rhetoric” and somewhat separates skill in logic from rhetoric, and the accuracy of grammar.
There are many approaches possible now at a scale never before thought of. The “Santorum” ploy is only the tip of the iceberg.
As a writing, grammar, and rhetoric instructor, I can say few people know English grammar, fewer know logic, and fewer still know rhetoric enough to detect when the Ivory Tower uses the illogic of the obstacle course, minefield, and tprf to retain power and authority at the expense of Truth. Students arrive willing to assent to such expert authority, from whom they then parrot the rampant illogic of the ideology at play. Students think they are ‘factually’ or ‘truthfully’ critiquing their newly revealed false consciousness when they are actually persuaded by a professor’s lack of sharing countervailing evidence and rhetoric; by trusting the sheer volume of an article’s citations; by an ideology that is an orthodoxy, etc.
That’s the beauty of rhetorical jujutsu - feed them on their own devices.
I have seen people get into peeing matches on sites like this one, and I didn't have the impression it was an effective strategy to respond in kind. If you mean that we have to discredit them, that seems true. I have thought that exposing their games would cause other people to see them differently, but that doesn't seem to work very well either. A big part of the problem is that high concentrations of these people in certain cities and online have created a trance-like compliance of belief and behavior in the populations there.
It’s difficult to give blanket advice because each conversation has a slightly different context and underlying emotional dynamic. But here are a couple of techniques I regularly employ.
1) Positive/high-status always wins.
All of the different emotional approaches to a conversation can be conceptualized in a four box matrix. Along the top is Positive Emotion and Negative Emotion. Along the side is High-Status and Low-Status.
You always want to be in the top-left quadrant, positive/high-status. The person who seems happy and confident in a conversation will always come across better than someone who seems angry and impotent.
2) Never accept a premise you don’t have to.
Pay more attention to premises than conclusions. You can challenge a conclusion indirectly by challenging its premise.
When the conclusion of is an accusation of immorality, this is particularly useful. You never want to directly challenge an accusation, that’s why defense attorneys never repeat their client’s charges. However, you can challenge an accusation against you, indirectly, by challenging its premise(s).
3) He who wins the frame wins the debate.
Debate is about framing. Framing is the act of using facts and reasoning to tell a particular story, instead of the other stories that could be told using the same facts and different reasoning.
When your opponent is telling a story that casts you as the villain, don’t ignore it or deny the accusation of villainy. What you need to do is respond with an alternative, more powerful story. One which frames you as the good guy and your opponent as the bad guy.
Your opponent usually won’t give up the framing battle easily. You’ll have to knock down your opponent’s frame and reassert your own several times. But once your opponent stops fighting for the frame, you know you’ve won.
Thank you for the helpful and detailed post! I’ll get back to you with a specific example or two when I have some time. I am an expert witness, so I am familiar with legal argumentation (and enjoy it).
Of course! Happy to help in any way I can.
Nice! Then you should be very familiar with framing. The attorneys are trying to create a frame using yes-or-no questions. And, often, witnesses will get annoyed by this, and try to offer context with their answers to challenge the questioning attorney’s frame.
She’ll be lambasted for sure . Much of it will be personal attacks not anchored in debate but in silencing dissent. Which of course leads to criticism by those who would never sully themselves to read the book but to dismiss it out of hand . Bravo to Shrier for poking the bear once again. There are too few left who will
I whole heartedly agree with your description of the the rhetorical fortress problem. I find the same landmines when discussing race in America. Certain concepts are off limits. You are either a racist or a poor person of color who has been captured by self hatred. I find slow deliberate discussion of facts helps push conversations forward. Whether it's mental health for children or racial politics we have to overcome the victimhood starting line. How do you navigate when there is some fact to the story of past injustice or present day vulnerabilities? The "yes ,that is true but.... "
In fairness, there is some legitimate criticism of the book. Both Twenge on her Generation Tech Substack and Haidt on the Honestly podcast infer that her central thesis is not supported by research. Twenge goes on to challenge several additional conclusions Shrier makes, while acknowledging what she gets right—a very balanced review worth checking out.
Excited to read this after hearing good things so far. Also curious about ACEs as I’ve seen them first hand working with children and find myself worrying about where the ACEs will lead them.
It certainly always struck me as intuitively true, but that doesn't mean the research is necessarily strong. I recommend you read the book to see the critique of the methodology. Indeed, I recommend you read it for all sorts of reasons!
It comes in the mail tomorrow, so I’m excited to read it!
"Did the speaker lose their cool? We dub this the “don’t get angry” barricade, in which someone hastens their own demise by voicing frustration." -- Bonus hypocrisy points are awarded when the person using this argument attacks others for "tone policing" when they criticize the non-cordiality of people if the criticized people happen to fit into marginalized identities.
Well said. But like so much in life, the excesses of the collectivists are self-correcting.
You will recall the trope that ends "...and hard men make good times."
Thanks so much for this lucid analysis of the anti-rational arguments that dominate public discourse. Wouldn’t it be great if students once again had training in rhetoric so they would know how to identify fallacies and fearlessly rebuff them? Frankly, I needed this refresher, myself.
I usually hate being a fanboy, but… this is the single best piece I have read on the Internet (which means, read) in the past year or two.
Which means you must be canceled…
Wow, thank you!
Really interesting reading. I learned some things.
After your comprehensive description of the rhetorical fortress, which is how things are taken down, another major contribution could go along the lines of assembling a compendium of bad ideas or practices. You got started in "Coddling" and this books looks like a continuation. Might be good to keep an ongoing count in an equally accessible format.
Excellent article. Will likely order the book. Albert Ellis’ REBT discourages people from being mired in their depression/anxiety. Is this similar to CBT?
Yes!
Really excited to see that interview! Any way to be notified?
I plan to post it here!
I'm curious how you square your praise of her book with your praise of CBT. Shrier does say to go get therapy if you really need it, and I've only seen her interviews so far and not read the full book, so maybe she's more explicit there, but do you find her at all too flippant about it? From her interviews, it seems like she's railing against giving your kids therapy unless they "actually need it" a majority of the time without clearly articulating what it means to "actually need it." I can see this, in a warped depressed brain, becoming a justification for not helping oneself because of the risks of therapy she states. Do you have concerns that it will drive people away from getting the help they need?
The book praises CBT repeatedly, but she does stress that there are risks to therapy, and because of that you shouldn't get your kid therapy unless they really need it. You can learn some of the mental habits of CBT without therapy at all.
Outcome research on the effectiveness of psychotherapy usually shows that mainstream psychotherapies such as CBT, psychodynamic and experiential therapy are about equally effective across populations of patients and diagnoses. There are a few exceptions, especially with specific kinds of anxiety and PTSD, where forms of CBT can be more effective than other forms of therapy. The average improvement rate across all diagnoses and populations is about 75% reduction in symptoms and self-reported distress, and improvement in targeted areas of functioning. These findings have been systematically reviewed more than once, and have remained stable.
There is some evidence that individual therapists vary in their effectiveness, and some may get much better and others much worse than 75% average improvement in their patients. There is also considerable variation in how much individual patients benefit from treatment. There is evidence that patients who get relatively good outcomes from one kind of therapy may be able to get them with any mainstream therapy.
Their is a strong argument for a "Common Factors" theory, which concludes from the above evidence base that the effectiveness of psychotherapy is real, and is not primarily based on differences in the therapists' theoretical or practical approaches, assuming that they lie within the mainstream practices. Common Factors might include variables within the therapeutic relationship, the sustained attention of both therapist and patient on specific issues, and a mutual effort to try out multiple problem solving strategies. There could be a lot of variables involved that we know nothing about.
There is also the reality that significant average improvement can be predicted for groups of patients who are put through any process that they strongly "believe in." The placebo effect is high. It can be 50%. The placebo effect is about positive expectations and hope of relief. In psychotherapy it is not a "false outcome," it is actually one of the desired effects of treatment. Hope means that one of the major symptoms of depression has been resolved, at least temporarily, and other improvements can occur as a result, e.g., resumption of a job search.
In comparing psychotherapy outcomes to surgical outcomes in treatment of people with "gender dysphoria," it is very possible that surgical outcomes could be better than a no treatment condition, because there is a high level of hope combined with a high level of sacrifice (body parts and sexual identity). When something costs a lot, the buyer tends to place more value on whatever was purchased. The hope would be likely to decline over time, however, because the placebo effect does that.
An additional comment I would make is that "depression" and "anxiety" are usually what is being measured in recent research on Gen Z mental health issues. While I have no doubt that white liberal adolescent girls are reporting record levels of those mind states and symptoms, the focus of research needs to be on the diagnosis of personality disorders and behaviors similar to what is seen in borderline and narcissistic personality disorders. The primary mental health symptoms that the Gen Z females exhibit to people around them are behavioral problems, bad attitudes, inappropriate anger, and disinhibited verbal aggression. Most forms of mainstream therapies can be adapted to address these interpersonal patterns of behavior, but the therapist has to arrive at an accurate diagnosis and treatment plan that is specific to Cluster B personality disorders.
With the caveat that I have not yet read Shrier’s new book, I wonder if there isn’t an important distinction between “therapy” writ large and CBT specifically. Having seen various traditional therapists at points as both an adolescent and an adult (and having had kids in therapy), I am comfortable that CBT and traditional therapy are quite different experiences. So different, in fact, that I routinely tell the story of my first visit with a CBT-oriented therapist—who just happens to be the last therapist I’ve seen/needed.
To the extent Shrier’s critique of “therapy” is pointed toward the traditional “let’s spend fifty minutes every week reliving the worst moments in our lives” approach, I’m right there with her. Your mileage may vary, and traditional therapy probably has its place, but it did nothing for me. In my first-ever experience with CBT, by contrast, I started to rehearse my standard litany of complaints about my father leaving when I was young, etc. The therapist’s response was something like, “I’m getting paid by the hour, so you can talk about whatever you want to talk about and I’ll be fine. But if you actually want things to improve, then maybe we should talk about the behaviors you don’t like and about how we can fix them instead.” That completely changed the game.
I don’t know how careful Shrier is about making distinctions at that level of granularity. Relatedly, I suspect she might tend to think of even CBT for kids as at best a cop-out, since I think she does tend to think of a lot of therapy (possibly including CBT) as a form of inappropriately outsourcing parenting and of overreaction to the ordinary problems of adolescence to which children are generally more resilient than many assume.
One thing I’ve been thinking about lately is the extent to which something like CBT might be a semi-necessary corrective to the therapeutic mindset pervading the culture itself. Again, it might not be as valuable to our kids as reducing their exposure to that mindset or as helping them navigate it through engaged and thoughtful parenting. But if we’re going to allow our kids to experience the full therapeutic culture of the moment and cannot or will not help them navigate it ourselves , maybe CBT has a broader role to play.
Yes, name-calling has evolved on campus, names are now great mulittaskers, they are not only accusations, they are verdicts. The reason for this is that they are related to feellings, and feelings are part of lived experience and must be sanctified and treasured. I am in the fight of my life for my teaching position, I must respond to accusations of "racist" "islamophobe" and "violent" . My absurd response that I did not mention race or religion and I have never raised my voice let alone hit or threatened anyone is met by bemused looks from the "investigators." We don't rely on evidence in a uni court, only balance of probabilities they tell me - otherwise known as who is the better liar or who the investigator likes better. And when name calling is a combo accusation, trial and verdict we are waging war on reason, I'm not sure if we are moving back to earlier times or going back to kindergarten.
several social scientists describe it as regression in their developmental models (regression to tribalism in terms of cultural evolution.
).
See John Vervaeke, evolutionary psychologist, systems theorist.
Can you post an article on this? Or I can google
William Irwin Thompson. Old school 60s countercultural historian/multiculturalist has some interesting insights into the emergence of “planetary” culture and why “new age” stuff was mostly bs. His role in the Lindesfarne Association (sp?) taught him that postmodern, “green meme” consensus process is usually dysfunctional.
https://www.reddit.com/r/JordanPeterson/comments/6td1kx/ken_wilber_on_postmodernism/
Robert Kegan’s developmental theory is the standard one.
Regression is described in many histories as the fall of empires, or similar (Simon Bolivar described “serving a revolution “ as “plowing the sea” after he saw tribal, racial and class war break out after independence from Spanish Absolutism). Ronfeldt’s TIMN model describes the role of techno-economic disruption and regression in paradigm shifts and cultural evolution.
In systems theory, emergence, self organization, punctuated, dynamic equilibrium. See Koestler’s Ghost in the Machine which describes Holons).
HTTPS://www.meaningness.com/meaningness-history
Urgh. Bad link, this should work:
https://web.archive.org/web/20231127150100/https://meaningness.com/meaningness-history
This describes the way that postmodernism gets stuck in the transition from rationalism to meta-rationalism, resulting in in a “crisis of meaning” and thus regression to pre-rational, pre-modern modes of thinking.
Postmodern “leftism” regresses to mythic and tribal , pre-modern levels, reinventing a quasi-religion of pre-modern and anti-modern values that are socially pathological.
The solution, development of meta-rationality is the solution, but it is difficult.
https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Robert_Kegan_Model_of_Adult_Development
I disagree that “minimization” is a fallacy or a dodge. It is usually the central initial focus that ought to be brought to bear on any purported problem: How big a deal is this? Is it even a bad thing? In traditional formal policy debate, the first negative speech is normally devoted to minimizing the asserted problem (as well as arguing that what problem there is is not attached to the cause the affirmative wants to address).