One of the commitments that I have that’s hard for me to shake is the idea that everyone can change their mind given the right amount of time, the right place, and the right conversation with the right person. There are so many factors involved here that it might be easier to just say, “It is rare for people to be able to change their mind,” or perhaps, “it is rare that people change.” This is the conventional wisdom, but I think it represents a very unhealthy way to think in society, a very fatalistic attitude, and it gives up the history and tradition of rhetoric and the persuasive arts to the very shallow enlightenment concept of a stable, objective reality that can be accessed and applied to all of us with the right set of refined epistemological tools. We lose people that way, and more importantly, we lose a foundational concept of democracy, that of it being about people deciding. The more people we exclude from it, the less like democracy it becomes.

What got me writing this post was the large amount of people on social media saying that the current situation in the U.S. is not the time to persuade or argue, that things are too dire, that it’s not time to change minds , that people have chosen their side and it’s time to go to battle. Although it certainly feels this way, and looks this way on the streets of America’s major cities, this isn’t right. It’s times like this that are perfect to engage others in mind-changing activities, or what we might call argumentation, persuasion, or debate. 

The best times to get engaged in persuasion or arguing with others is when people want to talk. Generally, if people are sharing their views on things – or sharing the same 20 memes or images of Martin Luther King, Jr. quotes – this means they are motivated to speak about what is going on, they want to talk, they want to engage others. I think there are two primary situations in which people really, really want to talk:

1. They have discovered something good, true, or right. They want to tell others about it and bring others on board with the cool new thing (well they think it’s the truth) that they have found. This is why I often say “Truth is the starting point, not finishing point, for rhetoric.” It is what motivates people to talk. Maybe it’s the thrill of discovery? More likely it’s the thrill one gets from exercising power over others and showing them how wrong they are (the dark side of rhetoric to be sure). 

2. They have discovered the principles upon which they base a lot of their navigation through daily life have become unglued, unsticky, are developing cracks, or seem to be rusting. This is more of a panicked reinforcement of principle and belief and a look for reassurance. They want to engage others to say “this isn’t right!” “This should not be happening!” etc. 

Sometimes you get both happening at once, i.e. “Things are a mess but I know what we need to do!” I think that best qualifies as the description of where we are now with the protests happening across the U.S.

When things become controversial, when things go off the rails, things get cloudy and our first impulse is to fan the dust away, vacuum it up, clean it all off, and get a clear picture again. Our initial response is to cut through the dust and fog and find clarity and certainty for ourselves and our fellow citizens, friends, and people. This speaks to the power of the utterance and the rhetorical precept to provide a navigable path through the polarized and unstable world for us. Just think about how confident submarine captains and navigators are when the sonar is working properly. That’s us! Just sound, sound alone is what gives them the confidence to say “Turn here,” or “dive 100 meters” or whatever they do. But if we were there we would be a bit claustrophobic. 

When the sonar goes out, everyone is in real trouble, and we really can’t move, we can’t act, we can’t operate. We need that sounding board. We need those precepts and preconceptions about what to do; what to bounce our decisions off of. We start to ping a lot when there’s confusion, uncertainty, newness, or a crazy web of discovery. We start to talk and reassert our presence and our pathways by re-articulating the things that we stand for and believe. 

In times when there is not a lot of dust kicked up, when there’s not much cloudiness or fog at all we don’t articulate our supporting principles or positions because, well, it’s obvious where to go and obvious what to do. Things are clear, we don’t need to ping as much. We might do a bit of it if we meet up with a friend, but again, the stakes are not high if we disagree, we are just talking, and things are pretty good. 

The opportune situation for persuasion is when the rhetorical dust is everywhere, and we are very constantly and very repetitively saying the things that used to be helpful in guiding us. This repetitive nature of speech (or social media posting, as I have experienced) is a cry for a stable field, for agreement, and for consideration. It’s the cry to engage, and it’s the characteristic invitation to persuasion. “This is what I think” is the natural moment for the engagement with others, for the asking of questions and developing new ones. It’s the invitation for exchange – signal back! Help me get some footing here? Or perhaps more relevant, share my footing with me! For it’s rare that we doubt our own footing on matters of culture, society, race, policy, and governance. 

So the right time, the right situation for persuasion is when there’s smoke in the air and disruption in the streets. The person who is angry about the traffic jams that protesters have been causing is speaking exactly to my point: Why won’t this familiar pathway provide me what I want? And the response to that question is to start asking others, to start engaging and seeing how and where they go. When people are willfully expressing their underlying beliefs about how things should be, that’s a great time to move the conversation toward those things.

It’s much more difficult to get to the principles or underlying beliefs without the rhetorical dust all around, clouding things up. But with that there, we can start to look at the why question, and start to look at the supports and the foundation of things. This is a great opportunity, and one that most rhetors, when they want to persuade, have to construct very carefully. Most of us don’t want to lay bare our beliefs all the time. Often times we can’t. 

Ok so that’s probably good for one night. A lot of my beliefs here are pretty weird, I accept that. But they are motivated by improving the quality of political engagement and supporting a democracy that puts people first, above conceptions of facts, truth, right-ways-of-doing, or anything like that. Democracy requires us to be able to share our opinions in ways that make sense to as many other people as possible, then requires us to engage those shared opinions with our own thoughts and experiences. It doesn’t require the truth, or rightness, or any of that other nonsense that we think we know and put way ahead of the thoughts of other people. 

I’m going to write a bit more about this. For now, just consider the idea that times when things are unclear encourage people to say more – they say a lot more, both in words and in depth. They start to draw out their fundamental principles. And with those out and people willing to share them, there’s no better time to inquire after them in the spirit of improving thought, improving questioning, and improving the construction and co-construction of the narrative we call reality. This is one of the best times to try to persuade others. I really don’t understand why we wouldn’t want to when there’s so much discursive dust in the air.