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Argumentation & Influence NOTES

Research

  • Andrew Wilson
  • Rob Noerr

Coercion

  • Like coercion, shame usually operates in the background via what social theorists call “virtual causation.” The mere expectation that one’s behavior will trigger coercion or shaming has the intended effect of modifying one’s behavior without the censors ever lifting a finger. Since there are no visible acts of censorship—whether coercive or normative—the censors claim it is much ado about nothing. This tends to entrench the censorship because of the lack of a sensory experience for society in seeing someone being silenced via coercion or shaming, what is known as an “availability heuristic.” Without an availability heuristic that the brain can summon, the motivations in society to do anything about it are reduced. Gilley, Bruce. The Case for Colonialism (pp. 154-155).
    • Most memorable in Mao’s China was the Cultural Revolution, a purification movement intended to crush political opponents through recourse to ideological struggle. The identification of right-deviationists would purge the Party of incorrect thinking and invigorate the ranks. Ambitious cadres were given a way to signal their virtue and loyalty to the cause. Not surprisingly, the most aggressive agents were the Red Guards, teenagers and university-aged youth for whom participation in the purges was both fun and a quick route to the top. They ran the “shaming festivals” where deviationists were shamed by having their hair cut, their heads bowed, and their thought crimes read aloud for all to hear. But the real agents of the Cultural Revolution were the higher ups in the Party who, rather than standing up, sat silent or mouthed support.
    • Mao guided the movements with “work teams” and “central leading groups” sent from the top, no different from the Diversity Office or Institutional Review Board investigations of today. The error-prone were invited to correct their ways through struggle sessions, self-criticism, hysterical declarations of loyalty to Mao, and rustication to learn from the peasants—parallels found in today’s remedial cultural competency training, “awareness of whiteness” seminars, mandatory diversity statements, and service-based learning.

To Win You Must Lose: How to Argue Better | Dave Sumner | TEDxMcMinnville - YouTube

  • Need to think about argument not to win, but to learn
  • Thinking about debate instead of a battle, thinking about it like a dance.
  • Listen to the person’s reason, instead of projecting secret motives
  • Argue to learn
  • Find the place where disagreement begins, to find the place where agreement begins and you might find a shared epistemology
  • Accept your own fallibility first
  • “The progress of human enlightenment can go no further than in picturing people not as vicious, but as mistaken. When you add that people are necessarily mistaken, that all people are exposed to situations in which they must act as fools, that every insight contains its own special kind of blindness, then you complete the comic circle, returning again to the lesson of humility that underlies great tragedy.” —Kenneth Burke

“He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion… Nor is it enough that he should hear the opinions of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them…he must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form.” ― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty