Persuaded by "Persuasion-Resistant Humans"

Have you ever stood up in front of a group of people and started talking about a certain topic? As soon as you open your mouth everyone, or well mostly everyone turns and looks at you. One of the hardest things to do is to maintain an audience focused throughout your whole presentation, or speech, or whatever it is you are talking about.

In the first chapter of Thank You For Arguing, Heinrichs assures us that he will teach us to use “logic as a convincing tool…”(5). Because he tells us that “Logic alone will rarely get people to do anything”(9). We are trying to get people to do what we want, this is not easy, and it takes practice, but with the right techniques one can be successful.

Heinrichs talks about the rhetorical tricks that even the most “important” people in our society have used or are still using. Julius Caesar, Cicero, and even Shakespeare.

I want to learn how to manipulate the audience that is why I want to continue reading Heinrichs ideas. 

After reading the first 2 chapters I can say that I now have a little more idea about how to make the “audience eager to listen”(6). Not only that, I have a better idea of how speakers manipulate the audience to get what they want out of you. You can either argue or fight, but in reality it is the proper arguments that will get you to win.

There are many examples of persuading the audience, or manipulating them, even Heinrichs manipulates his own son and he lets his son feel “triumphant” (3) in order to get what he really wants.

In a presentation about famous speeches last year in France, a woman told us that Hitler used to put cocaine drops in his eyes, he used them to be able to see better and so he wouldn’t have to use glasses. This permitted him to look more powerful, or less weak in front of his audience and showed he had no kind of impairments.

Going back to Heinrichs, he wrote that apparently if we used mirror image in a presentation it would be really effective. Thousands of people joined the Peace Corps because of something John F. Kennedy said (mirror image) “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country”(10).

“The happy ones argued” (16). we need to argue, not fight in order to be happy.  You don’t have to be a “bully” (16) and try to bring a person down in order to win, you prosper when you argument well.  Like I said before, we want people to get to do what we want them to, and the easiest and most powerful way to do it is to argue capably.