Mehdi Hasan: Win Every Argument

The art of argument

Winston Churchill: “Of all the talents bestowed upon men, none is so precious as the gift of oratory. He who enjoys it wields a power more durable than that of a great king.”

The Fundamentals

Ken Haemer: “Designing a presentation without an audience in mind it’s like writing a love letter and addressing it ”to whom it may concern”.” [1]

How you make an argument in front of a skeptical audience? You have to be able to adapt, you have to be agile, and to do that, you have to know your audience and cater to it.

Anytime an audience is present, you cannot, cannot, afford to ignore them or take them for granted. Above all, you have to try to understand where your audience is coming from.

First, find out who is going to be in the audience.

The key benefit of knowing your audience is that it grants you the ability to modify the language you use to make your case. Everything from varying and volume, to varying content and emphasis, matters.

You should present your argument in such a way that people feel comfortable getting on board with that argument, because you’ve specifically tailored it to their interests or identities.

By changing your approach, and finding a common language, you immediately make the issue much more palatable.

You must grab your audience in the very first minute, ideally in the very first 10 or 20 seconds.

Start with a strong opening line.
Start with the question.
Start with a story.

Starting with a question creates a knowledge gap; a gap between what the listeners know and what they don’t know. This gap creates curiosity because people are hardwired with a desire to fill knowledge gaps.

Getting people’s attention is one thing. Keeping people’s attention is another. To keep an audience’s attention and to keep them on your side, the name of the game is to connect.

Try your hardest to avoid the “death by presentation” phenomenon. That means; do not read from your notes, or from PowerPoint slides.

Make eye contact.
Heap praise.
Get personal.

To connect to your audience, you want them to relate to you. You. Not just your arguments.

The audience is the equivalent of what military strategists like to call a ‘force multiplier’.

Feelings, not (just) facts

Dale Carnegie: “When dealing with people, let us remember we are not dealing with creatures of logic. We are dealing with creatures of emotion.”

You have to appeal to people’s hearts, not just their heads.

Aristotle in his Rhetoric defined three proofs or “modes” of persuasion:

An appeal to ethos relies on the “character” and “credibility” of the speaker.
An appeal to pathos relies on our human emotions and feelings: anger, fear, joy, and the rest.
An appeal to logos is founded on logic and reason, on facts and figures.

Pathos beats logos almost every time.

Our emotions and feelings are critical to guiding and influencing our decisions.

When you’re looking to win an argument, you are trying to guide your listeners to make a decision. The heart steers the head. How do you reach the heart?

Tell a story.
Choose words carefully.
Show, don’t just tell.

Uri Hasson explains that our brains become” aligned” with one another’s when we hear the same story. He calls it” brain-to-brain coupling”.

Storytelling is a potent method of persuasion. Next time you want to persuade an audience, tell them emotions-filled stories about specific individuals.

When you’re building an argument, seek out words that invoke pathos and feeling. You want capital-letter nouns, vivid adjectives, bold verbs.

I also agree with Aristotle, who argued that the introduction and the conclusion over speech are the most important and memorable junctures to make that emotional appeal to your audience.

Feelings are what help you get your facts across to your audience.

Show your receipts

In recent years, we have witnessed a full-scale and very global assault on truth, on reason, on reality itself. In 2018, the RAND Corporation coined the term Truth Decay. Diminishing role of facts and analysis in American public life.

Here are three lessons on how to bring the evidence, and best your adversary:

Find receipts.
Create your own receipts.
Time the receipts.

Delayed gratification is often the key to deploying receipts.

Receipts can boost your confidence while reducing your opponent’s. if you have receipts, you don’t have to be intimidated by the intellect, qualification, or confidence of an opponent.

Play the ball and the man

Tullius Cicero was notorious for the invective he rained down upon his rivals.

The Latin phrase ad hominem literally means “to the person” – and so the ad hominem argument is an argument that’s applied to, or against, the person.

In theory, a person’s merits are irrelevant to whether their argument makes logical sense. In the real world, playing the ball and the man can prove to be rather effective, and often necessary, tactic.

You need to establish your own credibility while challenging your opponents. And for that, you need to rely on ad hominem arguments – logical fallacies and politeness be damned!

Here are the three most common forms of the ad hominem:

Ad hominem: abusive.
Ad hominem: circumstantial.
Ad hominem: to quoque.

The last argument is all about hypocrisy. Tu quoque literally means “you also”.

We have to treat the argumentum ad hominem, as the philosopher Alan Briton has argued, “as primarily a rhetorical phenomenon rather than as primarily a logical one”.

Credibility is an asset in any argument, and if your opponent isn’t warranted, don’t let it stand unchallenged.

The best plan is to challenge your opponent’s three C’s: character, credentials, and claims.

Challenge their character. Don’t be afraid to identify who your opponent really is. Don’t be afraid to define who your opponent is. Don’t be afraid to characterize the arguer, and not just the argument.
Challenge their credentials. As soon as your opponent asks the audience to rely on his or her credentials, they are fair game for attack.
Challenge their claims. I’m referring here to challenging their record of past claims. Use your opponent’s past claims against them.

When the flames blow back at you, how should you handle it? There are multiple ways how you can address an attack on your own character or record.

First, you can appeal to the old conventional wisdom and point out that your opponent is using an ad hominem argument!
Second, you can own it. You can own whatever attack on your character or record that comes your way.
Third, you can attack back with your own ad hominem argument and call it self-defense.

Ad hominem in an argument is a high-risk/high-reward argument. Get it wrong and your attack could backfire on you. Get it right and your opponent will be on the ropes.

Listen, don’t (just) speak

Be honest: When people speak, do you listen to them? Or do you just hear them? Hearing is a physical process. Listening requires absorbing, processing, and comprehending what you just heard. In a crisis, we listen, we react, we pay attention.

We need critical listening and empathetic listening. You have to be critically assessing the truth, veracity, and internal logic of everything an opponent is saying, in real time. There are three core missteps you should look out for, three ways in which critical listening will help you win an argument:

False claims.
Fallacious arguments.
Concessions.

Three ways to improve your ability to listen critically:

Keep an open mind.
Clear your mind.
Take notes.

There’s a second essential listening style that any good debater needs to master. Critical listening is what you should be doing when your opponent is speaking. But empathetic listening is what you should be doing when an audience member is speaking. The goal of empathetic listening is to focus on the speaker’s views and to understand where that person is coming from.

Nelson Mandela once told author: “To really touch someone’s heart, you need to speak to him in his own language.”

The free strategies that are most useful for practicing empathetic listening:

Stay present.
Make eye contact.
Ask the right questions.

Real people will connect with you and be more open to your ideas and arguments if they feel they are being listened to. To be a good listener, of the critical or empathetic variety, requires a mix of patience, concentration, and self-discipline.

To debunk and defeat your opponent’s arguments, not to be a critical listener. And if you want to connect with your audience, learn to be an empathetic listener.

Make them laugh

Laughter is the best medicine. But it’s also one of the best ways to win an argument, one of the crucial ingredients of a good speech. Laughter provides your audience with “social glue”.

Humor serves three main purposes in a speech or in a debate:

Punch lines build rapport.
Levity lightens the mood.
Laughter hurts like nothing else.

The DOs of debate humor:

Do be self-depreciating. Make fun of yourself.
Do be spontaneous.
Do be expressive.

The DON’Ts of debate humor:

Don’t be offensive.
Don’t go over the top. Don’t tell jokes back-to-back.
Don’t be wooden. Don’t tell I’m gonna tell you a funny story.

Tricks of trade

The rule of three

There are plenty of tried-and-tested rules to rhetoric, but one of the most important rules, one that you should never forget, is the Rule of Three.

Three is the magic number. It covers it all: from birth, life, and death, to past, present, and future.

There is an old Latin phrase: oh man Omne trium perfectum. Everything that comes in threes is perfect.

Cicero was known for using triads. His weapon of choice was the Greek tricolon – a group of three words or phrases that built in parallel toward a common point.

The tricolon is only one form of triad. There is also the hendiatris, in which three words in a row are used to communicate one main point. Think “liberte, egalite, fraternite”. Think “veni, vidi, vici”.

Our short-term memory could only hold between 5 and 9 ”chunks of information”. The magical number is seven, plus and minus two.

Multiple studies of our working memory “converge on the notion that, reliably, people can remember up to three basic units or chunks or ideas at once. If something happens once, it’s just a one-off. Twice? It’s a coincidence. But when it happens three times, we tend to see a pattern – and a pattern makes us think.

In his book Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer, Roy Peter Clark, says: “use one for power, two for comparison, and free for completeness, wholeness, roundness.

Separate your speech, presentation, or argument into:

Introduction.
Body.
Conclusion.

In the Body, make sure you present three main arguments. In the Conclusion, make sure you summarize and repeat those three main arguments.

Three arguments, three items, three points. Limit yourself to your best three points. Any fewer, and your message won’t be compelling. Any more, and your message risks becoming tedious.

Judo moves

To win in a debate or gain the upper hand in an argument, you often have to be both flexible and willing to yield, judo-style. Maximum efficiency, minimum effort.

Three fundamental “judo moves”:

Concession.
Preemption.
Reframing.

We often see making a concession as a sign of weakness. It isn’t. it is a sign of strength and confidence.

There is, of course, a technical Greek term for this rhetorical technique (concession): synchoresis. The act or an instance of conceding an argument in order to make a stronger one.

Our conclusions depend on how we frame a particular situation., frames, say experts, are the filters our brains use to try and process and interpret information in any given setting.

To be honest, questioning the premise of a question, the assumption it’s based on, and the frame it is using, is a good trick.

The art of the zinger

The term zinger originated in baseball slang where it was used in the 1950s to describe the fast ball that a pitcher throws to catch a hitter “off guard”.

Zingers are used to undermine an opponent or their arguments.

Chirs Lamb is saying that the best comebacks require a good ear, a nimble brain, a sharp wit, and a comic’s timing. Three guidelines for zingers:

Be prepared.
Keep ‘em short.
Pick your moment.

One-liners are much better when they come spontaneously than when they’re prepackaged.

Setting booby traps

Here are my three favorite ways to plant a booby trap for your unsuspecting opponents:

Trap them with their own words.
Trap them with a contradiction.
Trap them with a question. (the one they cannot or will not answer)

Beware of the Gish Galloper

Gish Gallop is a speaking method that involves “spewing so much bullshit in such a short span that your opponent can’t address let alone counter all of it”. It has one aim: to bury your adversary in a torrent of incorrect irrelevant, or idiotic arguments.

It takes more time and energy to “disprove” a “false claim” than to make one.

Trump is using that approach a lot. But he is not the originator. The originator was Duane Tolbert Gish.

The “nonsense” is a feature, not a bug, of the Gish Gallop.

How do you tackle a Gish Gallop:

Pick your battle.
Don’t budge.
Call them out. (Point to the audience what they are doing).

Behind the scenes

Confidence is everything

Mark Twain: “There are two types of speakers: those that are nervous and those that are liars.”[2]

Confidence is neither an ability nor an attribute. It is a belief in oneself. It is an attitude that inspires both action and presence. Confidence is crucial to winning an argument.

Some techniques for building up your confidence:

Visualize success.
Take risks.
Keep good company.

Amy Cuddy: “Don’t fake it till you make it. Fake it till you become it.”[3]

How to act confident:

Fix your body language.
Project your voice.
Make eye contact.

Lillian Glass:

Do “keep your chin and head up”.
Don’t cross your arms.
Do “stand up straight”.
Don’t slouch or shrug.
Do “gesture with your palms” open and up.
Don’t fidget.

Keep calm and carry on

Three tips for staying calm:

Breathing.
Laughing.
Self-talking.

Humor is the shock absorber of life, according to Peggy Noonan.

Practice makes perfect

Demosthenes started off as an awful orator. But by practicing he became good enough to deliver his “The Philippics”, passionate public tirades against Philip II.

Practice how you look.
Practice how you sound.
Practice your timing.

Gesture only when you try to emphasize something.

There are four basic aspects to vocal delivery according to Dadelszen and they are known as 4P:

Power.
Pitch,
Pace.
Pause.

It takes considerable time, skill, and effort to condense everything you might want to say on a topic into a short yet effective presentation.

Practice does make perfect. Preparation does deliver success.

Do your homework

Mark Twain: “Supposing is good, but finding out is better.”[4]

Three crucial components to the preparation before any argument:

The brainstorm. (Quantity not quality, past is prologue, get in your zone).
Research. (Google beyond page one, start don’t end with Wikipedia, check your sources).
Play the role. (Find a partner, prepare for the worst).

Steelmanning process – the strongest version of your opponent:

What is your opponent’s best arguments?
What is their best evidence for that argument?
Who is the best advocate for that argument?
What is their best critique of your argument?

In conclusion

The grand finale

Lord Mancroft: “A speech is like a love affair. Any fool can start it, but to end it requires considerable skill.”[5]

Every good speech deserves a grand finale. The ending of the speech or argument is so important that rhetoricians even have a special name for it: peroration. Plead or pray. Your peroration is the grand finale of any argument – your final plea to your audience.

The trick to the peroration is to strike a balance between: restating your main argument so that it sticks and grabbing your listeners’ emotions and attention, so that they leave on a high.