The utility of rhetoric

This one is for Ted, who has moral qualms about the use of rhetoric.  I'm not going to appeal to Aristotle's authority, but will simply caution against blithely dismissing the man's reasoning... and note that he seems to have anticipated at least a part of Ted's objections by a few thousand years.  Note that he defines rhetoric as: "the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion."

Rhetoric is useful because things that are true and things that are just have a natural tendency to prevail over their opposites, so that if the decisions of judges are not what they ought to be, the defeat must be due to the speakers themselves, and they must be blamed accordingly. Moreover, before some audiences not even the possession of the exactest knowledge will make it easy for what we say to produce conviction. For argument based on knowledge implies instruction, and there are people whom one cannot instruct.

Here, then, we must use, as our modes of persuasion and argument, notions possessed by everybody, as we observed in the Topics when dealing with the way to handle a popular audience. Further, we must be able to employ persuasion, just as strict reasoning can be employed, on opposite sides of a question, not in order that we may in practice employ it in both ways (for we must not make people believe what is wrong), but in order that we may see clearly what the facts are, and that, if another man argues unfairly, we on our part may be able to confute him....

[I]t is absurd to hold that a man ought to be ashamed of being unable to defend himself with his limbs, but not of being unable to defend himself with speech and reason, when the use of rational speech is more distinctive of a human being than the use of his limbs. And if it be objected that one who uses such power of speech unjustly might do great harm, that is a charge which may be made in common against all good things except virtue, and above all against the things that are most useful, as strength, health, wealth, generalship. A man can confer the greatest of benefits by a right use of these, and inflict the greatest of injuries by using them wrongly.

It is clear, then, that rhetoric is not bound up with a single definite class of subjects, but is as universal as dialectic; it is clear, also, that it is useful. It is clear, further, that its function is not simply to succeed in persuading, but rather to discover the means of coming as near such success as the circumstances of each particular case allow.

Therefore, I conclude that the wise man who is capable of dialectic will not restrict himself to its use, but will also utilize rhetoric when that is a form of communication more suitable to both the audience and the situation.  As for morality, it is worth noting that the first kind of rhetoric depends upon the personal character of the speaker.  It is neither moral nor immoral in itself, its morality depends upon how it is used.

Detachment is a DHV

Stingray explains:

Clinical detachment seems much more like criticism to woman. Cold detachment, given that it is so blunt, reacts extremely poorly with the solipsistic woman. One can only approach it with the same cold bluntness and if this is not something that a woman is good at, then it can be quite difficult to read.

This observation on her part may help explain why ALPHA frame tends to require a level of indifference.  Cold detachment is a relative DHV because the woman being subjected to it has a tendency to interpret it as the detached man holding a position of authority over her.  Whether she responds obediently or in a rebellious manner to that perceived authority, she is responding to it, and therefore cannot easily dismiss the man as one of the masculine masses unworthy of her attention.

It also offers an explanation for why warming to a woman often causes her to abruptly lose interest.  Unless the man has displayed other DHV or otherwise maintained his authority, ceasing to be coldly detached also eliminates his perceived authority and therefore his high value.  Conclusion: a man should not cease to be emotionally detached in a relationship with a woman until he has demonstrated sufficient additional high value or established additional authority that will persist regardless of the state of his emotional involvement with her.

Emotion, logic, and dishonesty

Over the course of the discussion of female solipsism, the distinction between dialectic and rhetoric, and between logic and emotion, has repeatedly come up.  Two things have become obvious as a result, which is that 1) men have no choice but to accept the observable female inclination for solipsism, rhetoric, and emotion, and 2) women have to accept that those men who strongly prefer objective perspectives, dialectic, and logic are never going to look favorably upon women's rejection of those things even if they accept the fact of the female disinclination.

The problem is that emotion and rhetoric are both more or less dishonest in discourse, the former intrinsically and the latter practically.  This is not to say that emotions are negative, only that because they are dynamic and the truth is static,(1) emotion-based reasoning is guaranteed to be false at least part of the time.  Rhetoric, on the other hand, does not have to be dishonest, but because it is designed to manipulate and convince those who, as Aristotle pointed out in Rhetoric, "cannot take in at a glance a complicated argument, or follow a long chain of reasoning", it usually has to be at least somewhat in variance with the complete truth because it is primarily designed to appeal to the emotions rather than reason.

Consider the NYT editorial written by a nurse advocating gun control.  Note that I'm not at all interested in a discussion of the pros and cons of gun control here, so don't get distracted by that, but rather considering whether the argument being presented is dialectical or rhetorical in nature.

With the hope of presenting the issue of guns in America in a novel way, I’m going to look at it from an unusual vantage point: the eyes of a nurse. By that I mean looking at guns in America in terms of the suffering they cause, because to really understand the human cost of guns in the United States we need to focus on gun-related pain and death....

[W]e need to stop talking about gun rights in America as if they have no wrenching real-world effects when every day 80 Americans, their friends, families and loved ones, learn they obviously and tragically do.Many victims never stand a chance against a dangerously armed assailant, and there’s scant evidence that being armed themselves would help....

A trauma nurse I know told me she always looked at people’s shoes when they lay on gurneys in the emergency department. It struck her that life had still been normal when that patient put them on in the morning. Whether they laced up Nikes, pulled on snow boots or slid feet into stiletto heels, the shoes became a relic of the ordinariness of the patient’s life, before it turned savage.

So I have a request for proponents of unlimited access to guns. Spend some time in a trauma center and see the victims of gun violence — the lucky survivors — as they come in bloody and terrified. Understand that our country’s blind embrace of gun rights made this violent tableau possible, and that it’s playing out each day in hospitals and morgues all over the country.  Before leaving, make sure to look at the patients’ shoes. Remember that at the start of the day, before being attacked by a person with a gun, that patient lying on a stretcher writhing helplessly in pain was still whole.

The entire piece is nothing but rhetoric and emotion from start to finish.  It is also profoundly dishonest and manipulative.  Let's consider a few of the salient points from the dialectical perspective:

1. The writer is looking at the issue from the eyes of a nurse.  Why?  What can a nurse say about a macrosocietal issue that a statistician cannot?  Nothing, except for an appeal to emotional authority, which in this case turns out to be a false appeal because the woman isn't even a trauma nurse!  She has little more experience of gunshot victims in trauma rooms than anyone else, moreover, her emotional authority as a nurse has nothing to do with the many victims who are dead at the scene and never go to the hospital.
2. Who on either side of the debate talks "about gun rights in America as if they have no wrenching real-world effects"?  No one.  In fact, the relatively small number of daily deaths attributed by gun deaths are about the only ones that are ever discussed in terms of their effects on the survivors.  Her point would be much more applicable to daily deaths by falls in the bathroom, traffic deaths or lethal attacks by meerkats.
3. Contra her baseless assertion, there is considerable evidence that being armed often helps people avoid being victimized by assailants, armed or otherwise, and ironically, the only way for the average individual to have any chance against dangerously armed opponent is to embrace the very concept she is attacking.
4. She spends three out of 13 paragraphs talking about shoes and then makes a personal request of the reader.  Why?  Because she has constructed a naked appeal to female solipsism.  She is attempting to get the reader to imagine an emotional connection between the gunshot victim writhing helplessly in pain and themselves, and to encourage them to use that connection as a basis for the leap to the irrational conclusion that gun control could somehow prevent them from ever experiencing that pain.  The rhetorical message is "support gun control or you will find yourself in the trauma room".

Now, it would be easy to respond by going methodically through the entire editorial and highlighting all of the logical errors, factual omissions, and material falsehoods in order to try changing the minds of those who found the piece to be credible and convincing.  This is, indeed, how most male gun advocates tend to respond to such pieces.  But, as both the discussion of solipsism and Aristotle have taught us, this is unlikely to be very effective.  One should never make the mistake of utilizing dialectic when faced with a rhetorical audience; ironically, that is a logical error.  Consider an alternative response utilizing a rhetorical perspective.

1. The response is written from the perspective of a rape victim.  Her emotional authority is considerably greater, and more solipsistically powerful, than that of a nurse who doesn't even see the trauma victims about whom she is writing.
2. The writer describes how powerless she was to defend herself from her unarmed attacker, her terror and outrage at her violation, and how afraid for her life she was when she was being victimized.   She describes how awful it was to realize that the police were not there to protect her, and how long it took before she saw a single officer.  She talks about the fear she still feels, every day, when going to the gym or the grocery store.
3. She then describes how she went to a gun range and how powerful and confident she felt when she was firing the gun, and how she doesn't feel afraid anymore as long as she has her gun in her purse.  She regurgitates some statistics about how many times guns are used to scare off rapists and home invaders.
4. She spends three paragraphs about how she has a whole new social circle at the gun range, how much fun it is to make new friends there, and mentions how she is involved with a handsome man she met there, complete with a sly remark about what a big gun he has.  The rhetorical message is "oppose gun control, buy a gun, and you will meet handsome men, because if you don't, you will be raped and murdered at the grocery store".

Now, consider which of the two responses, the dialectic response or the rhetorical one, you think would be more likely to convince the sort of individual who was convinced by the original editorial?  The need to correctly engage the audience at its preferred level of discourse doesn't only hold true for political or intellectual dispute, but for everyday discussion as well.

(1) Comparatively static relative to emotional fluctuations, if you wish to be more precise.  Don't even think about bringing up quantum mechanics or Heisenberg; if you're tempted to do that, then you're perfectly capable of following the argument without being a pedantic ass about it.

A graceful concession

As she promised she would if the case could be made, Susan Walsh has graciously declared her acceptance of the concept of "female solipsism":

As a female Boomer, I will undoubtedly continue to exhibit robust self-esteem and a somewhat emotional view of the world, processed through the lens of my inner experience. I’ll happily cop to female solipsism, or whatever the guys are calling it these days

On the one hand, it doesn't matter in the slightest if Susan, or anyone else, deigns to accept the concept.  She isn't the Conceptual Police, solipsism either exists or it doesn't, and it doesn't actually matter what anyone, including me, happens to believe.  On the other hand, the discussion has been a very useful one, as concepts that survive this sort of critical refinement only become stronger and better understood.

The discussion also got me to think about the concept in a different way.  I don't know that I would go so far as to describe female solipsism as "a feature, not a bug", as Keoni Galt did, but his perspective did remind me that it exists whether I like it or not, exhibitions of it are not indicative of female failings so much as feminine attributes, and there is nothing I can do about it except accept it and potentially make productive use of it.

And how does one make use of it?  By looking for opportunities to frame the discussion with a female interlocutor in terms of her self-perspective.  For example, if for some reason you want to convince a woman that Volvos are better than Toyotas, female solipsism suggests it will be less effective to appeal to her sense of logic by presenting a set of objective metrics that make sense, and more effective to appeal to her self-perception.  Simply saying "I think you're the sort of woman who can really pull off a Volvo" will likely prove much more interesting to her, and get her thinking about the car much more deeply, than a comprehensive set of performance reviews from Car and Driver and other automotive magazines.

As with all material and scientific concepts, the proof is in the predictive model.  So far, female solipsism appears to be useful in this regard.  I hope to complete the first draft of the Solipsism Quotient test before the end of October; but one need not wait for it in order to test the basic concept in real life.

I would be remiss to fail to point out that this has also been an example of Susan's value to the androsphere as well as showing her genuine openness to our ideas.  Does she tend to have an immediate emotional and negative reaction to anything that promises to offend Team Woman?  Yes, and it is certainly fair to point that out.  But it must also be admitted that she can, and observably has, risen above that immediate reaction to consider a conceptual case on its merits.  Furthermore, if we cannot convince her, whose mind even her more committed critics must admit is at least relatively open in comparison with other female bloggers, then what hope have we of ever convincing women who are more instinctively hostile to the ideas and concepts we are continuing to develop?

There is no question that the vast majority of women, and perhaps the vast majority of men as well, will have to be instructed by rhetoric.  But the more we can convince through dialectic, the better, as they will become our allies in developing the required rhetoric that is not our native language.

The appeal of female intelligence

One of the primary challenges of explaining the rules of attraction to the opposite sex is that both sides have a natural tendency to project their own attraction factors to the other one.  So, men can't figure out why women aren't attracted to loyalty, responsibility, and sexual purity while women can't figure out why men aren't attracted to university degrees, good jobs, and intelligence.  This last matter is one of particular importance to a certain group of women, as women who identify themselves as intelligent find it especially difficult to grasp that what they consider their primary attribute, and what they tend to find tremendously attractive in men, is of relatively little value to men as an initial attractant.

As I have previously pointed out, the fact that nearly all women are attracted to smarter men and desire them as mates does not mean that most men feel that way. This should be obvious, and it is a very good thing too, otherwise it would be almost impossible for men and women to pair off.  After all, both sides of the couple can't be the smarter one any more than they can both be the taller one.  Most women understand that dumb men aren't attracted smart women - such men feel "threatened" is the usual line - and they aren't concerned about that because, being hypergamous, they usually aren't attracted to less intelligent men.  What they don't understand, unfortunately, is that most intelligent men aren't attracted to their intelligence either.

That doesn't mean that smart men don't value female intelligence in a relationship, only that they tend to do so in the way that a woman values loyalty in a man.  But it means that men don't, by and large, find themselves instinctively drawn to displays of female intelligence in the same way they are drawn to displays of large breasts, well-formed posteriors, or long hair.

But even when female intelligence is valued, the value isn't necessarily what the average smart women thinks it might be.  This is because intelligence, like height, is relative, and +1SD is +1 SD. The "smart" 120 IQ girl looks even dumber to the 150 IQ guy than the "dumb" 95 IQ girl does to the "smart" girl. And once the intelligence gap passes a standard deviation, it can be difficult to distinguish between the various stupidities being expressed, so for the highly intelligent man, it doesn't much matter if she's got an IQ of 85 or 135, because it all looks pretty much the same to him.  The lower IQ may even be preferred by some men, since intelligent women tend to be much less agreeable and more prone to instigating verbal conflict than their less intelligent sisters.  One is unlikely to see a woman with an IQ below 116 launching into a pedantic fighting withdrawal every time she is caught saying something materially false, just to give one example.

Height is a useful proxy here.  If you're Shaq, can you even tell at first glance if a woman is 5'2"or 5'8"?  Does it really make any difference to you?  Then consider that to a man with the lowest possible Mensa score of 132, a woman with an average IQ of 100 is proportionately to him what a 5'4" woman is to the 7'1" Shaq.  It's even worse at the so-called genius level of 145 IQ; the average woman looks proportionately like a 4 foot-something midget.  For most tall men, anyone below a certain height is simply "short".  And for most intelligent men, anyone below a certain level of intelligence is simply... let's just say "ünfiver".

However, there is one area where intelligent men tend to value female intelligence, namely, their offspring.  Very few smart men can bear the idea that their children might be grinning idiots incapable of any intelligent discourse with them.  However, note that children are an intrinsically LTR-related subject, which shows why attempting to use one's intelligence to initially attract a man in an STR context is a basic category error.  It no more works for a woman to attempt to attract a man by displaying her ability to bear him smart children than for a man to attempt to attract a woman by displaying his agreeability as well as the high probability that he will always remember her birthday and the correct toilet seat position.

So, female intelligence does have an appeal to the sort of men that smart women want, but it has to be utilized correctly, and in the proper context.  (Of course, this is also true of the appeal of male intelligence to women, but we'll save that for a future post.)  The key thing to remember is the vital distinction between I (initial attraction) factors and R (relationship) factors.  For men who value it, intelligence is almost always an R factor, not an I factor.

The abyss stares back

The irony is deep indeed when women who dress in a manner they hope will attract male attention object to being forced to face the fact that some men actually pay attention to them:

Campaigners are fighting to close an online forum that promotes the photographing of unsuspecting women for users' sexual gratification.  The message board on the popular website Reddit was explicitly created by users who wanted to ogle candid photos that were taken without the subjects' knowledge.  The sub-forum is called 'CreepShots', featuring images of ordinary women on the street, in the gym or even at school who are caught unawares by stealthy 'creeps' with cameras....

The images include unsuspecting women working out at the gym, waiting for the bus, standing in line at the grocery store and riding escalators. All were taken by men who simply saw them on the street and thought the subject was attractive.  The women are usually wearing nothing more revealing than jeans, t-shirts or yoga pants.

It has long been a matter of settled law that there is no expectation of privacy in a public place.  The "creeps" cannot break the law by taking pictures of people in public places when the government is doing exactly the same thing, every single day.  If you want privacy, you have to remain private.  The photographed women have chosen to dress this way, every single person who happened to notice them saw exactly the same thing that the pictures recorded, and the picture is nothing more than a public record of what they looked like at that moment.  There is nothing more salacious about the entire concept except the fact that men are paying attention to women and the women cannot ignore it.

There are three things that are at the core of this "outrage".  The first is that some women simply don't like seeing the image they actually present to others.  It punctures their rosy image of themselves.  This is understandable; it is always surprising and often a little unpleasant to hear your own voice on the radio for the first time.  The second is that this is attention being paid by precisely the wrong sort of low socio-sexual rank men for whom the women are not dressing.  Ideally, they want to look attractive for high rank men and other women while the low rank men politely avert their eyes and remain invisible.  r/creepshots is an intrinsic violation of this virtual male purdah and reminds women that even if the low rank men pretend not to be noticing them, they actually are.

The third thing is the reminder it provides of female vulnerability.  Many women like to walk around in a self-absorbed haze, defensively shutting out the world and acting as if their refusal to see others means others cannot see them.  This is why even the most pedestrian image of a fully-clad, middle-aged woman walking along the sidewalk looks vaguely threatening to a woman, because she is forced to see what a woman looks like when seen through the eyes of a potential predator.  She doesn't want to know that she looks just that vulnerable to the myriad of people who pass her by on a daily basis.

But even if the forum is closed, it would amount to nothing more than a pointless pretense.  The fact that these men pointedly refer to themselves as "creeps" indicates that they know where they stand; it would be very surprising if there were any alphas, betas, or even deltas actively involved in the forum.  Their desire for unattainable women will remain, as will their ability to see what is in public around them, whether women are forced to be conscious of those simple facts or not.  The existence of the forum is more depressing than salacious; to the extent it can even be said to exist, its sexuality is retro-Victorian.

And I would be remiss to fail to note that the campaign is, in itself, an indicator of female solipsism.  How many of those who are outraged by this have actually ever had their picture taken on the street by a stranger and posted to a public forum... and how many are emotionally involved solely due to imagining how they think they would feel if it happened to them?  It might also be amusing to learn how many of the campaigners who are fighting to close the forum are regular readers of People magazine and other tabloids that publish photos taken by the paparazzi.

Crushing a male hamster

As I have often had occasion to point out, Man is not a rational creature, but rather, a rationalizing one.  And in his post "Rationalizing Fornication", Elihu at Freedom Twenty-Five shows that he is in possession of a rationalization hamster capable of spinning as furiously as any woman's:

I am presently withholding judgement on the question of whether or not the bible actually condemns pre-marital sex. Depending on how you interpret various scriptures, and which Greek-English dictionary you happen to have lying around, the bible may or may not give contemporary Christian men some wiggle room that allows some compromise between God and Game.

In this post, I offer my best attempts to rationalize the peaceful coexistence of the two. If I’m right: Christian men, go forth and seduce. If I’m wrong, I hope learned men such as Dalrock, Bruce Charlton, Koanic Soul, Vox Day, Bonald, The Gentleman Poet, Patriactionary, Ulysses and ballista will set us straight.

To put it succinctly, he is wrong.  I will address each of his five rationalizations to demonstrate why.

1.  Banging a non-virgin woman with a condom doesn’t violate the biblical injunction against adultery, because you’re not actually going to adulterate any of her children. Non-procreative sex upholds the spirit, if not the letter, of the biblical injunction against adultery.

The relevant Biblical injunction is not the one against adultery, but rather those against fornication and sexual immorality.

2.  You are free to assume that any woman you bang is a virgin. If you make the (shocking!) post-coital discovery that she is not, let Deuteronomy 22 be your guide and divorce her.

This advice is applicable to Jews.  Not to Christians, whose perspective is further refined by Luke 16.

3.  In the time of Christ, marriageable women abounded. Those men who sought, found them. The world we live in is different, and requires different coping strategies.

 Jesus Christ is the Alpha and Omega.  He is eternal.  The world is different, but human nature has not changed on iota.  It may require different coping strategies, but that does not condone sin.

4.  Since most contemporary American women are best viewed as whores with poor negotiating skills, we have a free pass to occasionally taste their wares, so long as we don’t let our pursuit of them cross the line from idle hobby to all-consuming obsession.
 
The Old Testament warns against prostitutes.  The New Testament bars fornication and sexual immorality.  Christians have no such free pass.

5.  Christian sexual morality only applies to Christian women. Outsiders are fair game

Christian sexual morality applies to Christian men as well as to Christian women.  Outsiders are not fair game, indeed, their outsider status is totally irrelevant with regards to the sexual morality of the Christian.

It is understandable why some Christian men, facing religious contempt from non-Christian women and seeing nominally-Christian women indulging their hypergamy by chasing non-Christian alphas in preference to them, desperately wish to carve out some sort of exception to the Christian morals imposed upon them by God and His Son.  But Christianity is not the easy way, it is the hard and narrow way.  One can no more rationalize fornication than human sacrifice or demon worship, it is a complete impossibility.

The SMP is part of the world that Christians are called to be in, but not of.  Being in the world means it is important for Christian men to understand the reality and the principles of Game, but the existence of Game does not mean that all of the uses to which Game can be put are compatible with the Christian life.