Counterrhetoric

Adam: Hi.

Bob: Hi. Thoughts on this quote from How To Think Like a Roman Emperor?:

otherourselvesconsequencecausingundoing

Adam: So the idea here is that strong emotional or metaphorical framings of situations help create emotional reactions?

Bob: Yes. You might have some automatic emotional reaction in the moment, and that’s not particularly easy to control, but you’re much more able to control your reactions in the subsequent moments. One of the decisions that you can make regarding that control is how to frame things. How you choose to frame things - whether you use objective, neutral descriptions or emotional/metaphorical/strong descriptions - will affect how you see things.

Adam: Doesn’t what description you use reflect how you see things, instead of affecting how you see things?

Bob: Your description serves both purposes. Your description reflects how you saw something in the moment, but will also affect how you remember the thing when the moment passes, which will affect how you think about it in the future.

There’s no way to guarantee being free from error in how you evaluate some situation, but it’s important to use good methods and do your best. One way go about doing that is to try being as objective as possible - ruthlessly objective, like a judge. Avoid any metaphors, emotional rhetoric, any “gloss” on what’s happening - as a first step, take the approach of “Just the facts, ma’am”.(Tangentially, this is supposedly one of those “Beam me up, Scotty” things that was never actually said in the show it’s attributed to. https://www.strategicamerica.com/blog/2012/10/just-the-facts-maam/) This gives you the best chance of getting an accurate assessment of the facts in the moment, and having an accurate recollection of what happened later.

So my point here is that you can affect how you see things by the mental attitude you bring to evaluating some situation. Are you trying to be objective and fair and impartial, or are you giving into bias and rhetoric? Are you engaging with all the facts in front of you or evading some?

How you see things, how you judge some situation, isn’t something that’s totally autonomous from the mental habits and processes that you bring to that situation. There is of course always a large background context of ideas that you use to interpret some situation. But you can also affect how you see things by making your best effort to be honest, mentally focused, and clear-headed (or not). People know this, and will often take a minute, go for a walk, count to 10, or whatever, when they fear that they are on the verge of saying or doing something rash, because they don’t want to be the sort of person that makes rash decisions in anger, and would prefer to be calmer and more clear-headed instead.

Suppose you have a dispute with someone about how they acted. You can’t directly see things the same way they did because their perspective is in their mind, and has a bunch of their background knowledge involved in terms of what they’re paying attention to, what they think is significant, and so on. So what can you do? One concrete thing is to avoid the sort of language described above. Every emotional, rhetorical framing could be put in a calmer, more neutral, more objective way. “She’s always being a bitch!” could, for example, become “She frequently makes statements I take to be unkind.” “That bastard shot me down in flames!” could be “That person rejected my proposal.“ “This job is complete bullshit!” could be “This job has various downsides, some of which I regard as serious.” In choosing to frame things in a calmer, more objective tone, you are making your descriptions of events correspond more directly to reality, and thus avoid enflaming passions that might cause you to react in a problematic manner.

Adam: Are metaphors or strong value-laden framings of things inherently bad?

Bob: No, but they are overused. Most people could benefit a lot from practicing thinking and talking about things in a more neutral and objective manner.

Here is more from How To Think Like a Roman Emperor to consider:

anticounterDiscoursesnotyou’ll turn me into himnobodycould

Adam: That’s interesting - the bit about the non-Stoic becoming really frustrated. It seems like he was feeling really threatened in some way.

Bob: Yes. I think that kind of thing is common. People feel pressured by reason and philosophy - pressured to change, to be more consistent, to be more rational, to have integrity, to change their habits, to reconsider their assumptions - and they feel like if they keep going then they’ll lose some essential part of themselves. They are attached to parts of themselves. They are attached to particular habits and activities and beliefs. They don’t want to reconsider those things. If they follow the rational path consistently, they might have to. So they resist doing so, and one of the techniques they use, per the quote above, is emotional rhetoric.

Adam: Yeah. The stuff about killing him and being unable to bear it.

Bob: Yes. Imagine if he framed the situation as “I am troubled by your criticism. I don’t like the idea of being more like Epictetus.” Then you might be able to have a discussion about exactly what’s troubling him, or what exactly he doesn’t like about Epictetus. In other words, you could try solving the problem and coming to agreement. But his emotional rhetoric makes it difficult to figure out how to proceed. It’s clear that he doesn’t like the criticism he’s getting, and he doesn’t want to be more like Epictetus. But does he want to discuss it? Is he so upset he doesn’t want to consider or talk about the issues? I think a person saying that kind of thing probably wouldn’t want to discuss it. But they don’t want to say that they don’t want to discuss it. They want other people to back down without them having to say “I am opting out of reason now; leave me alone.”

Adam: Because they feel pressured to be rational?

Bob: Yes. They don’t actually want to say “I prefer to follow my whims; reason be damned!” They want to have the self-image of someone who is open to reason without having to earn it. So the emotional rhetoric helps with this because it is a way of asking people to back off with the expectation of rationality without having to say the words that make that request clear. The emotional outburst muddies the waters about what happened - possibly for the other participants in the conversation, but most importantly for the person who is engaging in the outburst.

If you stay calm, clear, objective, and neutral in your statements, it’s much easier to figure out what’s going on in a conversation. All your statements are anchored closely to reality, rather than being connected only loosely to reality through layers of metaphors that you have to untangle in order to figure out what’s actually being referred to. But the obfuscatory attributes of emotional language and metaphor are the actual thing that people want when they are feeling defensive, attacked, pressured - they want to confuse things. The more unclear they can make things, the more they can obfuscate, and so the less pressured they’ll feel.

El proceso resulta más práctico cuando se define la necesidad de una prenda suelta o una equipación completa. Una tarea práctica consiste en guardar las medidas del producto para compararlas con otras opciones. Antes de decidir, «» puede orientar la tarea de identificar fuentes relacionadas con el tema. Una vez elegido el modelo, conviene leer las condiciones de cambio y devolución.

Adam: Interesting.