04/01/2024
Objectivity and 27 Words to Win the Game
Does this sound familiar?
//
You want to be rich? You can be.
It wasn’t your fault. You are only poor due to racism.
It doesn’t have to be this way. We have a bright future.
But you’re going to have to tell the truth, and the truth is that most people in this country are evil and prejudiced against you.
You should accuse random strangers of possessing “white privilege” and being complicit in “systemic racism.” Let’s fix this by overthrowing the Constitution.
//
What in the world was that?
That was a lie.
It was an effective lie.
It was effective because it followed the Rule of persuasion.
And there is something we can learn here.
If you want to know how to defend the Constitution against the Radical Left (or even against some of the more cringey members of the New “Right”), keep reading.
Anti-Constitutional ideas are gaining popularity.
But there is something we can do.
We can win—if we will simply notice the trick our opponents keep using against us.
What is the trick?
While we have been aiming at “correcting and convincing” (at establishing truth), the anti-Constitutionalists have been aiming at validating their hearers—and then fascinating them.
That’s it. That’s their game.
And as long as human nature persists, we need to adapt to this reality.
In other words, it is exactly as you suspected:
Our post-truth opponents are not even playing the same game that we’re trying to play.
Our opponents might dress their words in a facade of objectivity, but their primary goal has never been establishing truth through rational discourse.
Their primary goal is establishing power though manipulation of emotion.
Therefore, for many of the anti-Constitutionalists, anything might go—any degree of insanity offered to the public as an “argument”—so long as it “works” to gain more of a following.
What sort of following will be developed by people who take such an approach? The kind of following they deserve. And the kind we now see: people without principles.
You were not wrong for thinking this approach was evil.
(It is.)
And you were not wrong for prioritizing objective truth.
(Truth should be your highest priority.)
But what were you missing? What made your words fall on deaf ears?
(What did no one tell you?)
No one told you the Rule.
The Rule is 27 simple words from Blair Warren. They will change how you play the game:
//
People will do anything for those who:
encourage their dreams,
justify their failures,
allay their fears,
confirm their suspicions,
and help them throw rocks at their enemies.
//
“But that’s just manipulation!” someone might say.
Is it?
That depends on how the Rule is used.
Human nature is not going to change anytime soon, and I think you already know that.
If we ignore the Rule of persuasion, this will be bad news for us.
But there is power in learning the Rule and in asking what it makes possible.
Blair Warren restated the rule even more concisely:
“Validate and Fascinate.”
That’s what our opponents have been doing. That is the play you keep watching them run.
Does it feel like our opponents have some power we lack?
They do. They understand the Rule.
They have been winning by this method all along.
But here is what no one told you:
There is an ethical way to play the same game.
How do we do that?
We can—and should—play the truth game and the persuasion game at the same time.
We don’t need to ignore the Rule of persuasion. We need to use it in service of our commitment to objective truth.
That will make us different from our opponents.
They have been playing the game of persuasion for all they are worth… while pretty much ignoring the game of truth.
We must win both games.
How?
First, we must recognize that human psychology is what it is.
We cannot persuade until we first capture attention.
We cannot capture attention until we first validate our hearer—in at least some truthful and ethical way.
We win attention by showing our hearers something they care about—something they dream is possible.
We hold their attention by showing them some reason to trust us.
That reason needs to be one or more of the following:
-We justify one of their failures
-We allay one of their fears
-We confirm one their suspicions
If we can do even one of those things, and do it ethically (meaning: in a way that is truthful), then we will have built the foundation for persuasion—we will have validated the other person.
Why is the validation step so important psychologically?
Well, think about it this way:
Everyone senses that they have a fundamental need to be in contact with reality.
If you invalidate someone’s perceptions… If you tell someone (or imply) that they are not in contact with reality… then they will have no way to trust you anymore—because you have invalidated their tool for knowing what they can trust and what they can’t.
Invalidating people’s perceptions simply does not work, if persuasion is your goal.
Persuasion depends on trust, and trust depends on you finding something about the other person’s way of thinking that you can agree with—that you can validate. That is the foundational step.
After that, there is only one other step to persuasion:
Fascinate.
You might worry about whether you have what it takes to be fascinating.
But here is some good news:
To create the kind of fascination we are talking about here, you don’t even need to be a particularly extraordinary person.
You only need to be interested in your hearer.
Pay attention to what you see in your hearer, and talk about it.
Continue to validate it, ethically, based in truth. Find a way. Look for the common ground and talk about it.
If you do that, then you will fascinate. And you will eventually begin to persuade.
You do not need to be an unconscionable manipulator in order to play this game.
If you want proof of that, you can review everything I’ve told you so far.
Check: Did I follow the Rule?
(I did.)
Check: Did I say anything untrue?
(Nope.)
Did you read this far?
(🙂)
You knew that I was doing this all along.
And it never made you hate me.
The good news is that you actually CAN follow the rule while being a decent person.
And we are going to need to do exactly that.
The anti-Constitutional movements on both “sides” (left and right) are being created by the same kind of people.
They are unconscionable manipulators who primarily aim not at principles, but at gaining power for their own clique.
We should not imitate them in that.
But there is one way we should imitate them:
They know the game. They understand persuasion.
Implicitly, they understand the Rule.
We will begin to win when we understand the game and take it seriously.
We already own the moral narrative.
Here is what we need to do next:
1 - Validate what we can about our hearers.
2 - In the context of validation, Fascinate them with the truth.
What does that look like?
Well, consider how two different groups of anti-Constitutionalists have been following the rule (in untruthful ways).
I already showed one way that the Radical Left follows the Rule:
1 - Encourage their dreams
2 - Justify their failures
3 - Allay their fears
4 - Confirm their suspicions
5 - Help them throw rocks at their enemies
It translates to:
1 - You want to be rich? You can be.
2 - You are only poor due to racism.
3 - It doesn’t have to be this way. We have a bright future.
4 - But you’re going to have to tell the truth, and the truth is that most people in this country are evil and prejudiced against you.
5 - You should accuse random strangers of possessing “white privilege” and being complicit in “systemic racism.” Let’s fix this by overthrowing the Constitution.
Did it always feel like there was some script at play?
There was.
Consider how the Anti-Constitutionalists on the New “Right” are using the same script:
1 - Encourage their dreams
2 - Justify their failures
3 - Allay their fears
4 - Confirm their suspicions
5 - Help them throw rocks at their enemies
1 - A brighter future for you is possible.
2 - The economy and culture are only floundering because the wrong sort of people are in charge of the government-funded institutions.
3 - We don’t need to rebuild the culture from the bottom up and persuade people into believing in some far-off libertarian or classical liberal ideal. There is a shortcut to turning things around: We need an “unbound executive” who is on our side—a family-friendly Caesar.
4 - We have been losing the culture war against the Left all this time because too many people on the Right have been buying into the post-war liberal consensus—believing that classical liberalism is the right approach to government.
5 - It’s actually the classical liberals who are holding us back from taking our proper place of power in this country. We should call our former friends stupid Boomers—they ruined everything. Let’s fix this by overthrowing the Constitution.
As silly as this looks, it works.
If by “works” you mean “gets me a lot of attention and several thousand loyal followers on social media.”
The truthfulness of the claim is one thing; the effectiveness of the script is quite another.
Could we use the script too?
Could we use it ethically?
What story are you going to tell?
