Dilbert on Trump
This smart piece from the Washington
Post was posted on FB by my good friend Matt. It is well worth reading, so I have included
it in its entirety. My contributions are
in [blue].
"SCOTT ADAMS remembers just how the game turned. He was
young and improving at chess, but the masterful kid across the board would
outmaneuver Adams till the game seemed a runaway. Now, this kid didn’t want to
just beat Adams; he wanted to embarrass him. “So after he’d picked
away three-fourths of my pieces and I was discouraged,” Adams recounts, “he
would offer to turn the board around and play with my pieces.” And then
effectively “win” again.
On those occasions, Scott Adams, the creator of “Dilbert,”
got insight into the type of personality that loves not only the challenge of
game strategy, but also the thrill of overwhelming the competition. It is the
sport of meticulously plotted domination.
And that is part of why Adams believes Donald Trump will win
the presidency. In a landslide.
Adams, in other words, believes that Trump himself has turned the campaign game around. On the stump,
the real-estate mogul is not running on the knowledge of his numbers or the
dissection of the data. He is running on our emotions, Adams says, and sly appeals
to our own human irrationality. Since last August, in fact, when many were
calling Trump’s entry a clown candidacy, the “Dilbert” cartoonist was already
declaring The Donald a master in the powers of persuasion who would undoubtedly
rise in the polls. And last week, Adams began blogging about how Trump can
rhetorically dismantle Clinton’s candidacy next.
[Notice
above that Adams sees the power and influence and strategy of Trump as an effort the
change the game, so that a different set of resources and criteria for success
matter. So, beneath the presenting conflicts we see a conflict over venue, rules, whose game we will play.]
Adams, mind you, is not endorsing Trump or supporting his
politics. (“I don’t think my political views align with anybody,” he tells The
Post’s Comic Riffs, “not even another human being.”) And he is not saying that
Trump would be the best president. What the Bay Area-based cartoonist
recognizes, he says, is the careful art behind Trump’s rhetorical techniques.
And The Donald, he says, is playing his competitors like a fiddle — before
beating them like a drum.
Most simply put: Adams believes Trump will win because he’s “a master persuader.”
The Manhattan mogul is so deft at the powers of persuasion,
Adams believes, that the candidate could have run as a Democrat and, by picking
different hot-button issues, still won this presidency. In other words: Trump
is such a master linguistic strategist that he could have turned the political
chessboard around and still embarrassed the field.
[A second
major theme in this piece is the argument that Trump is a master
persuader. Read
this with Harry Frankfurt’s On Bullshit in mind, because there is a stronger case to be made that Trump is a master bull shitter
than a master persuader. Further, master persuader suggests his phony ‘business
success’ story has merit, so master persuader also frames this argument in a way that is
contrary to the best available data.
Master bull shitter does not have the weakness.]
Adams does not claim to be a trained political analyst. His
stated credentials in this arena, says Adams — who holds an MBA from UC
Berkeley — largely involve being a certified hypnotist and, as a writer and
business author, an eternal student in the techniques of persuasive rhetoric.
(His self-help memoir is titled “How
to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life.”)
“The most important thing when you study hypnosis is that
you learn that humans are irrational,” Adams tells Comic Riffs. “Until you
understand that, hypnosis is hard to do. … For me, it was this great awakening
to understand that humans are deeply irrational, and it’s probably the greatest
influence on me in terms of my writing.”
“This was a trick I learned from Bil Keane,” the late
creator of “Family Circus,” Adams tells Comic Riffs. “He basically taught me to
stop writing for myself, which I realized I had been doing — writing a comic
that I wanted to read.”
So Adams pivoted to write more about the workplace, and the
budding “Dilbert” in the early ’90s became “about this huge part of people’s
lives that was invisible to the rest of the world and about suffering in a
hundred different ways.”
“By simply mentioning that world,” Adams says, the comic
connected with readers “on an emotional level.”
And isn’t that essentially, in turn, what Trump is doing? He
is acknowledging the suffering of some, Adams says, and then appealing
emotionally to that.
And he bolsters that approach, Adams says, by “exploiting
the business model” like an entrepreneur. In this model, which “the news
industry doesn’t have the ability to change … the media doesn’t really have the
option of ignoring the most interesting story,” says Adams,
contending that Trump “can always be the most interesting story if he has
nothing to fear and nothing to lose.”
[Here Adams
is smart again. While media organizations are
certainly powerful, they are often NOT the most powerful actors on stage. Candidates and elected officials and
corporate CEOs know how to use the mass media to get ‘free advertising’ and
saturate communication channels with their message, their frames, as Trump is
very skillfully accomplishing right now.]
Having nothing to lose essentially then increases his chance
of winning, because it opens up his field of rhetorical play. “Psychology is
the only necessary skill for running for president,” writes Adams, adding:
“Trump knows psychology.”
Within that context, here is what Candidate Trump is doing
to win campaign hearts and minds, according to Scott Adams:
1. Trump knows people are basically irrational.
“If you see voters as rational you’ll be a terrible
politician,” Adams writes onhis blog.
“People are not wired to be rational. Our brains simply evolved to keep us
alive. Brains did not evolve to give us truth. Brains merely give us movies in
our minds that keeps us sane and motivated. But none of it is rational or true,
except maybe sometimes by coincidence.”
[I am not a
social psychologist, but this seems overstated.
Conveniently so. But even if we read this with a grain of
salt, there is some insight here as well. Yet it is possible to recognize the power of
our emotions without also giving up on the power of cognition…and that, in
fact, attending to both is more likely to lead to success.]
2. Knowing that people are irrational, Trump aims to appeal
on an emotional level.
“The evidence is that Trump completely ignores reality and
rational thinking in favor of emotional appeal,” Adams writes. “Sure, much of
what Trump says makes sense to his supporters, but I assure you that is
coincidence. Trump says whatever gets him the result he wants. He understands
humans as 90-percent irrational and acts accordingly.”
Adams adds: “People vote based on emotion. Period.”
3. By running on emotion, facts don’t matter.
“While his opponents are losing sleep trying to memorize the
names of foreign leaders – in case someone asks – Trump knows that is a waste
of time … ,” Adams writes. “There are plenty of important facts Trump does not
know. But the reason he doesn’t know those facts is – in part – because he
knows facts don’t matter. They never have and they never will. So he ignores
them.
“Right in front of you.”
And stating numbers that might not quite be facts
nevertheless can anchor those numbers, and facts, in your mind.
[Here I
will just point out that this has been a critique of Fox News, climate deniers,
birthers (like Trump), and others for more than a decade, many arguing that doing
this is encouraging us to become the kind of angry and ‘irrational’ voter that
Adams says we are. Lots to think about
here.]
4. If facts don’t matter, you can’t really be “wrong.”
Trump “doesn’t apologize or correct himself. If you are not
trained in persuasion, Trump looks stupid, evil, and maybe crazy,” Adams
writes. “If you understand persuasion, Trump is pitch-perfect most of the time.
He ignores unnecessary rational thought and objective data and incessantly
hammers on what matters (emotions).”
“Did Trump’s involvement in the birther thing confuse you?”
Adams goes on to ask. “Were you wondering how Trump could believe Obama was not
a citizen? The answer is that Trump never believed anything about Obama’s place
of birth. The facts were irrelevant, so he ignored them while finding a place
in the hearts of conservatives. For later.
“This is later. He plans ahead.”
5. With fewer facts in play, it’s easier to bend reality.
Steve Jobs famously aimed to create “reality distortion
fields” to meet his needs and achieve his ends. Trump employs similar
techniques, and apparently can be similarly thin-skinned when his “reality” is
challenged. “The Master Persuader will warp reality until he gets what he
wants,” writes Adams, noting that Trump is “halfway done” already.
(Among the persuasive techniques that Trump uses to help
bend reality, Adams says, are repetition of phrases; “thinking past the sale”
so the initial part of his premise is stated as a given; and knowing the appeal
of the simplest answer, which relates to the concept of Occam’s razor.)
6. To bend reality, Trump is a master of identity politics —
and identity is the strongest persuader.
“Do you think it is a coincidence that Trump called Megyn
Kelly a bimbo and then she got a non-bimbo haircut that is … well, Trumpian?”
Adams writes. “It doesn’t look like a coincidence to this trained persuader.”
One way to achieve this is by deploying “linguistic kill
shots” that land true, and alter perception through two ways.
“The best Trump linguistic kill shots,” Adams writes,”have
the following qualities: 1. Fresh word that is not generally used in
politics; 2. Relates to the physicality of the subject (so you are always
reminded).”
Writes Adams: “Identity is always the strongest level of
persuasion. The only way to beat it is with dirty tricks or a stronger identity
play. … [And] Trump is well on his way to owning the identities of
American, Alpha Males, and Women Who Like Alpha Males. Clinton is well on her
way to owning the identities of angry women, beta males, immigrants, and
disenfranchised minorities.
“If this were poker, which hand looks stronger to you for a
national election?”
[A very
intriguing question. What do you think?]
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