The Rhetoric Game: A Guide to Messaging and Debate - Part 2: Commanding the Public Consciousness

“A society grows great when elders plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.” 

—Greek Proverb

Imagine ideas are plants that grow from the soil. When the soil is fertile, beautiful flowers grow. When it is infertile, weeds grow. If you’ve ever heard of the Overton window, the range of ideas the public is aware of and tolerates within a society, that’s the soil you’re planting ideas in.

Whenever you enter a conversation or debate or attempt to spread your messaging, you need to tailor your message to the environment in which you’re speaking. If you deliver your message to an environment that is hostile to that message, you will be planting your ideas in barren soil and they won’t take root.

By contrast, when the soil is fertile and the seeds appropriate to it—that is, the message is tailored to the environment of public consciousness—then your messaging is conveyed smoothly without friction and opposition and your ideas will thrive in their environment.

When you understand that you are not making arguments in a vacuum, but in a pre-existing environment, you will begin to appreciate that effective rhetoric is a garden that is tended over long timespans and requires regular maintenance.

The Overton window shifts via normalization in culture. As such, a movement attempts to shift the culture. For this reason, it is important for a movement to be social. A social movement is a movement that tills the soil of public discourse in a way that recycles energy in a feedback loop of social validation. You want to build a positive feedback loop: warming up the culture to your message, so you can more effectively spread your message and further shift the culture.

The opposition will try to impede you and disrupt that loop by attaching shame to your movement. You fight back by working to normalize your message. This helps to inoculate against shame, whereas reservation and silence acts as tacit acceptance of that shame. What you should not do, but will have the impulse to do, is to respond, to debunk false claims and try to reassert your narrative, but this reinforces shame and can get you trapped in a vicious loop of responding.

You must not simply react. Always lead the conversation and maintain your momentum. If you respond, you are only treading water while being swept up in the current working against your movement. To shift the current and keep it in your favor, you must take others’ contributions and direct them where you want the conversation to go, to keep the current of discourse moving in your favor. 

If your opposition responds to what you’ve brought up, then you are leading and they are responding, as you keep the focus of the public discourse on your topics. Consistent effort in this regard defines the Overton window. This is why Trump’s flood the zone strategy works. A flood is, after all, a current.

What this looks like in practice would be: When you’re talking about climate change, and somebody tries to fearmonger about immigration, don’t just respond to their bogus claims, because that lets them change the topic to immigration. Instead, keep the discussion on the importance of addressing climate change. “Climate change is going to be such a big problem for all of us—rather than fight over scraps, let’s build energy storage systems so we all have plenty”. By asserting climate change as the focus and premise, you are practicing normalization.

Focus. Focus. Focus.

Control the flow of discourse by picking your battles and not allowing yourself to be baited. There are thousands of topics out there, but you aren’t going to be yanked to them. You are in control and will keep the conversation right where you want it. What this might look like in practice:

Opposition: “We don’t need to spend more tax money on the climate agenda, Trump’s bringing back energy independence and not this woke nonsense!”

You: “If you want energy independence, then you want domestic green energy, like Biden was doing. But anyway, as I was saying, the effects of climate change are going to do damage to our shorelines and endanger a lot of species.”

If you are to respond to a tangent or bait, you do so swiftly, offhandedly, casually, and move right back onto where you are directing the focus. In the example above, there were two red herrings (tangential distractions): “energy independence” and “woke”; but note that the response does not linger on them, and immediately pulls the convo back to climate change. Remember, those other topics aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. Don’t get baited into thinking you need to shift the focus right then and there. That’s the trap. Don’t fall for it. 

Conversely, you should be baiting the opposition to get them where you do want to focus. To this end, deploy provocative phrases or arguments, phrases you know they will feel a strong impulse to respond to. (You know what this is like from being on the other side of it!)

If you were discussing Trump’s criminality, for example, and the other person tries to shift to economics, remind them that Trump is a rapist and a felon. This is salacious and damning—and more on-topic than a digression on economics. The opposition is unlikely to let that statement linger, and once they’ve taken the bait, you’ve lured them right back to focus on Trump’s criminality. From there you can delve further into any of his other court cases, or highlight how his history of stiffing people he owes money has continued with the recent contractor’s lien against the now-demolished East Wing. The point is to keep the focus of discourse where you want it.

In a similar vein, you want to avoid trigger words that you know will distract from your main point and send your interlocutor off on a reactive tangent. For example, if you were trying to focus the convo on economics, if you so much as nudge the topic of gender, be prepared for the conversation to go on a tangent about gender issues. Inversely, if you’re talking about gender issues, you should steer clear of economic points unless you actually want to steer the conversation in that direction. Don’t give your interlocutor an off-ramp out of your lane. 

The Overton Window is like soil from which discourse grows

Remember, when the fields of discourse have been salted against your ideas, it is hard for your ideas to take root, which is why you must point out hypocrisy and contradictions to delegitimize your opposition and wash the salt out. You do not want to normalize, by means of tacit complicity, having the well poisoned against your ideas such that they no longer compete on a level playing field of discourse. 

Likewise, you should define yourself, or your opposition will do it for you and they will portray you as undesirable and untrustworthy. Your goal as a movement is to define your culture and community as social, accessible, common-sense, hip, respectable—people to be listened to, amplified, and followed.

Last but not least, you should aim to be pithy, succinct, eloquent. We live in an era of snappy sound-bites and short social media attention spans. Pithy messaging is easy to digest, easy to remember, easy to repeat and repost. Repetition creates an illusion of an issue no longer being in contention. In other words, when ideas are repeated, they seem normal, common sense, undisputed. The more often ideas are repeated, the less likely there is to be sustained impassioned opposition. Over time, as people respond less to the ideas, the impression forms that the idea is common sense, which is why no one bothers to dispute it. It becomes normalized, like muscle memory.

It becomes a current. It becomes the soil. It centers the Overton Window.

In sum, there's a feedback loop of normalization in public discourse built around social validation. When you keep your positions in the forefront of the public consciousness, you are building up long term success and sustainability.

Referenced Resources:

Relevant Resources:

Action GuideL Arhetoric, direct action