Kill the Witch

“Go, prick thy face, and over-red thy fear, Thou lily-liver’d boy.” (Macbeth, 5.3)

JScholar posted a poem about the fine art of scathing wit and the lost art of insults:

Insulting others through writing is as ancient as writing itself, and rhetoric is older than Socrates. Scathing insults announce themselves, but rhetoric persuades you to the point of view of the rhetorician, using partial truth and emotionally charged language to do the heavy lifting instead of relying on a logical argument. Rhetorical framing is a weapon against logical argument, forsaking the rational for the emotional.

Victorian epistolary salutations are an example of this, such as “To my dearest son, who has broken his mother’s heart with his sinful ways,” The closings in Victorian epistles can be equally charged, and will be if successful rhetorical theory is understood and employed, as readers remember the first and last things they read and tend to forget what comes between the two: this is what “burying it in the middle” is. My textbook from my history and theory of rhetoric course at the College of Charleston devotes an entire chapter to this technique. It’s a successful method of presenting information, allowing the speaker to deliberately frame events or ideas in partial light of the speaker’s choosing—the speaker has already decided how you should feel and has put empirical data in the backseat: you’re not allowed to see it until you’re sufficiently emotional. Next, a portion of the argument is given, followed by the closing framework. In successful rhetoric, by the time the work ends, the audience is ready to act on the speaker’s behalf.

Emotional appeals are not inherently bad, although they are primarily concerned with propagating feelings ahead of logical thought, often employing logical fallacies to accomplish the goal of swaying the audience to feel what the speaker wants the audience to feel. That’s when it becomes dishonest, when the speaker manipulates facts or events, carefully editing and omitting without uttering falsehoods but using loaded language to plant ideas and emotions through negative space, leading the audience to believe they have arrived at a logical conclusion.

Anything that provokes an emotional rather than rational response in order to persuade deserves scrutiny; the purpose and the extent of the framing ultimately determine whether it’s good or bad— the subjective appeal must be examined objectively with all of the facts, even the ones obscured by the frame. Anyone who says they don’t use emotional appeals is a liar—all humans use emotional appeals for various purposes; it’s one thing that differentiates us from the machines we’ve created—they’re allegedly without moral judgment. The LLM one of my students used to complete her morality assignment stated, “As a large language model, I have no moral values.” Let’s take a step down from the sand dune of moral high ground. The question is not whether or not an item is emotionally persuasive, it’s how it’s being used and for what purpose: the rhetorical goal.

Here’s the question: which is more honest and respectful, directly addressing offensive behavior, even if it’s not received well, or framing an incident to manufacture the desired emotions from an audience to gain support ahead of the argument?

If someone has established a reputation of kindness and generosity, how much freedom to frame things rhetorically is granted without truly examining behavior? How do assumptions of character based on one’s own experience shape one’s judgment of those who oppose the one labeled kind and generous? In this world of false dichotomies, cruel is the default answer, regardless of whether it’s true or not, as the framed incident is the only one observed, usually in a way to obscure the actions and motives of the one who is kind, generous, and manipulative. We tend to not call out manipulation when we enjoy it, when it justifies all of our negative feelings and gives us a ready-made target.

I’ve seen this used as a weapon against me multiple times, reputation and experience of one behavior used as a shield while manipulating opinions against a perceived enemy. My husband’s sister used this technique ahead of calling her mother to try to stop my wedding. In that phone call, she told a blatant lie, that I was addicted to methamphetamines. Anyone who knows me is fully aware that I don’t even like cocaine, which at least tastes good, and, though processed, originates from the earth, not a laboratory. Anyone who knew her and hadn’t met me assumed she was telling the truth because of the reputation preceding her lie. To this day, my sister-in-law claims that she has never been anything but kind and generous to me, and it appears true publicly through careful curation of partial information.

You may accuse me of having a chip on my shoulder about this, but it’s more like a cinder block. This is not the only encounter I’ve had with this behavior, and I will not quietly observe the same behavior in action here. If you want to kill this witch, arm yourself better than Dorothy did—I’ve already survived having a house dropped on me, and I’d rather swim than walk. Water revitalizes me instead of eradicating me.

“More of your conversation would infect my brain.” (Coriolanus, 2.1)

*Author note: I’m now working on an annotated bibliography supporting my argument. Stay tuned. I suppose Geeks will be the appropriate home for it.