Amplification is the vice of modern oratory. It is an insult to an assembly of reasonable men, disgusting and revolting instead of persuading. Speeches measured by the hour, die by the hour.
The fish once caught, new bait will hardly bite.
Most men are not scolded out of their opinion.
It is an anomaly that we can split the atom, but we are nearly powerless to persuade each other to embrace justice.
If you hear my idea and dont believe it , thats not your fault its mine.
The social intuitionist model offers an explanation of why moral and political arguments are so frustrating: because moral reasons are the tail wagged by the intuitive dog. A dog’s tail wags to communicate. You can’t make a dog happy by forcibly wagging its tail. And you can’t change people’s minds by utterly refuting their arguments.
When leaders use words to bludgeon and not to persuade, when opinion supersedes fact and people stop listening to one another, we have, the perfect conditions for the true demagogue. [Donald] Trump is running hard for that role.
Highly technical philosophical arguments of the sort many philosophers favor are absent here. That is because I have a prior problem to deal with. I have learned that arguments, no matter how watertight, often fall on deaf ears. I am myself the author of arguments that I consider rigorous and unanswerable but that are often not such much rebutted or even dismissed as simply ignored.
Exposure as a propagandist is fatal to the would-be persuader.
Sometimes it appears that we're reaching a period when our senses and our minds will no longer respond to moderate stimulation. We seem to be approaching an Age of the Gross. Persuasion through speeches and books is too often discarded for disruptive demonstrations aimed at bludgeoning the unconvinced into action.
