Lifting the Veil: From Ancient Rhetoric to Modern Psyops — How the Magicians Are Destroying the Republic

Rhetoric, propaganda, and the “magical” qualities of language have been used as a means of controlling mass opinion for thousands of years. First codified by Aristotle in his Rhetoric, the art of using language as a means of persuasion and increasing suggestibility has been at the heart of the struggle for political power since the early days of Western civilization.

Going back to Aristotle’s Rhetoric, we already find the tricks of the trade of those smooth talkers diligently laid out and formalized. They were the sophists and rhetoricians who seemed to always know just what to say, how to say it, and when to say it in order to elicit and guide the desired emotional responses of audiences. Depending on whether the speaker sought to sway his listeners by way of anger, empathy, fear, or pity, a different set of images and subjects was considered fit for the job. The art of rhetoric lay in knowing which themes and subjects to choose and using the proper sequence of thoughts and images to induce the desired emotional state. In the case of a speaker who sought to induce pity in his audience, Aristotle wrote:

“We will now state what things and persons excite pity, and the state of mind of those who feel it. Let pity then be a kind of pain excited by the sight of evil, deadly or painful, which befalls one who does not deserve it; an evil which one might expect to come upon himself or one of his friends, and when it seems near.”

The Rhetoric, Book II, Part VIII – Aristotle

Today, we are regularly bombarded with new “sequences,” often opening with images of helpless women and children or civilians suffering at the hands of some cruel dictator or nation deemed a “foreign threat”; followed by truisms and platitudes i.e., general statements about “freedom,” “human rights,” and “democracy”; and finally; new “suggestions.”

Then as today, rhetoric was often devoid of real content, genuine insight, or meaningful wisdom—however artfully and passionately presented—but was subversive and powerful precisely because its practitioners were able to effectively model the outward linguistic forms and strategies used by the wisest and most compelling storytellers and poets. These included the poet’s ability to use imagery and tell stories that shaped and colored the imaginations of audiences.

In modern terms, the powerful effects of such rhetoric and storytelling can be understood as the act of inducing “altered-states”—emotionally heightened states in which imagery and narrative are used to alter an individual or group’s emotional disposition. These heightened emotional states can then be used to suggest new ideas—especially after a turbulent or traumatic period—leading individuals or entire populations to a new cathexis or outlook.

In the particular case of rhetoric, the process may involve powerful trance-inducing language “sequences.” The inductions begin with carefully framed imagery, followed by truisms and platitudes to create an air of agreement and the heightened emotional conditions for “behavior change,” followed by covert commands in the form of suggestions or false choices i.e. “binds.”

In contrast to the kind of rhetoric and eloquence codified by Aristotle, what we know as Plato’s dialectical method can only be understood as a direct strategic response to the sophistry and rhetoric used by the political classes and foreign operatives (the Persian Empire) infesting the institutions of the ancient Athenian Republic—the cradle of Western civilization. The purpose of the dialectical method was to weed out the sophistry and subversive ideas that were often presented or “framed” (in modern Neuro Linguistic Programming parlance) using emotionally compelling images, technically sophisticated linguistic models and subtle language patterns. Plato’s purpose was to introduce a means whereby one could evaluate not only the outward forms and feelings elicited by carefully framed messages or set images, but to identify precisely how these messages and their underlying stories were composed, and therefore, the underlying axioms or assumptions someone would be assimilating through these narratives.

Ultimately, Plato recognized that no republic could survive the tyranny of public opinion or the perversions of oligarchical rule unless a deeper love of wisdom—the love of Truth itself—rather than pleasing outward imitations—became people’s primary object of desire—and cultivated to its highest degree in its leadership.

In his Seventh Letter, Plato writes the following in the historical aftermath of the Peloponnesian War, the installation of the Thirty Tyrants, and the execution of Socrates, among many other related tragedies:

“Though at first I had been full of a strong impulse towards political life, as I looked at the course of affairs and saw them being swept in all directions by contending currents, my head finally began to swim; and, though I did not stop looking to see if there was any likelihood of improvement in these symptoms and in the general course of public life, I postponed action till a suitable opportunity should arise.

Finally, it became clear to me, with regard to all existing communities, that they were one and all misgoverned. For their laws have got into a state that is almost incurable, except by some extraordinary reform with good luck to support it. And I was forced to say, when praising true philosophy that it is by this that men are enabled to see what justice in public and private life really is. Therefore, I said, there will be no cessation of evils for the sons of men, till either those who are pursuing a right and true philosophy receive sovereign power in the States, or those in power in the States by some dispensation of providence become true philosophers.”

– Plato’s Letter VII

Unfortunately, too many of today’s academics—termed  “bread-fed scholars” by the poet and historian Friedrich Schiller—have contented themselves with treating Plato’s dialectical method as some kind of stand-alone armchair philosophy. They overlook his real-time involvement in the military and political situations of the day (along with Socrates and many others in the School of Athens), which actually led him to his more mature recognition that the fundamental problems and destruction of Greek civilization were not merely the result of systems breaking down, or some cyclical God-willed fate, but were rooted the corrupted hearts and minds of a people who could simply be contented with outwardly pleasing imitations and illusions, that is, until they came crashing down. The result was always the same: vacillation between tyrannical rule by a few degenerate oligarchs and the Jacobin “democratic” totalitarianism of mobs.

Thus, philosophy—a love of wisdom—emerged not as some pedantic practice, but from the recognition that it was the only thing that could actually save societies and civilizations from the otherwise inevitable cycles of opulence, corruption, pride and destruction. It was understood that such things would always creep back when a people became too comfortable and proud, such that they would forgo the cultivation of the higher faculties necessary for conceptualizing the long-term survival of civilizations.

Lesser minds than Plato have gone so far as to believe that these cycles are the natural state of things, simply because they have happened many times before. However, saying something has happened so many times before and must therefore be natural while at the same time never understanding the deeper roots for why such things happen in the first place is, as Plato demonstrates over and over again in his dialogues, not much of a standard for Truth, or what a healthy society could or should look like. For, such simplistic thinking would lead us to concluding things like because the history of man has been filled with violence and ignorance, violence and ignorance must be the natural state of man; or because the victors have often written history, “might” must truly “make right.”

In reality, the questions of Goodness and Truth belong to an entirely different domain of inquiry, one that goes far-beyond mere empirical observation or the charting of trends over time. In a word: it requires philosophia—a love of wisdom—which pertains to those unchanging and timeless principles which cannot be corrupted or erased by any amount of time, rather than statistical descriptions across time or the clever modelling of “patterns” over time—none of which actually tell us if something partakes of the Good, or if it pertains to some essential Truth about the universe and the nature of Goodness in absolute terms.

The Republic Revisited

So, Plato in his Republic used the example of tragedians depicting deep suffering and crises that moved people in emotionally compelling ways, but observed in Book X of his Republic that just because certain experiences were considered compelling and relatable, resulting in cathartic experience, such things in-and-of themselves had no actual bearing on Truth, the Good, or how they might best be sought out and realized in the actual world. Indeed, many people experience trauma, and despite their catharsis, simply continue to live out the same thing, given a higher and qualitatively distinct notion of a Good life is by no means implied in the purgative catharsis of evil or ugliness. As Plato observed, such things belong to an entirely different and higher epistemic order. For, episteme pertains to the domain of actual knowledge, as opposed to merely gradations of “doxa” i.e. opinion and sense experience.

For these reasons, the Socratic method became the means of enabling listeners to unearth the underlying axioms embedded within the “deep structures” of a story, drama, speech or slogan, such that one could make the distinction between mere imitations and the real thing i.e. actual wisdom and actual Truth, rather than mere compelling descriptive accounts or familiar experiences presented as truth by virtue of their recurrence or commonplace nature.

In Book X of The Republic, Plato playfully and teasingly writes the following:

“Therefore, Glaucon, I said, whenever you meet with any of the eulogists of Homer declaring that he has been the educator of Hellas, and that he is profitable for education and for the ordering of human things, and that you should take him up again and again and get to know him and regulate your whole life according to him, we may love and honour those who say these things—they are excellent people, as far as their lights extend; and we are ready to acknowledge that Homer is the greatest of poets and first of tragedy writers; but we must remain firm in our conviction that hymns to the gods and praises of famous men are the only poetry which ought to be admitted into our State. For if you go beyond this and allow the honeyed muse to enter, either in epic or lyric verse, not law and the reason of mankind, which by common consent have ever been deemed best, but pleasure and pain will be the rulers in our State.”

Then Plato cheekily invites anyone to prove him wrong or offer a compelling argument in favor of why drama and poetry’s mesmerizing charms should be allowed to circulate and freely cast their magic over all society without any sanction or guidance:

“And now since we have reverted to the subject of poetry, let this our defence serve to show the reasonableness of our former judgment in sending away out of our State an art having the tendencies which we have described; for reason constrained us. But that she may not impute to us any harshness or want of politeness, let us tell her that there is an ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry; of which there are many proofs, such as the saying of ‘the yelping hound howling at her lord,’ or of one ‘mighty in the vain talk of fools,’ and ‘the mob of sages circumventing Zeus,’ and the ‘subtle thinkers who are beggars after all’; and there are innumerable other signs of ancient enmity between them.

Notwithstanding this, let us assure our sweet friend and the sister arts of imitation, that if she will only prove her title to exist in a well-ordered State we shall be delighted to receive her—we are very conscious of her charms; but we may not on that account betray the truth.”

By saying what he does, Plato distinguishes himself as a philosopher of the highest order who can himself never speak of poetry without becoming impassioned and showing his affections, and at the same time and for just those reasons becomes on of the philosophers who perhaps more than any other delivers a testament of poetry’s true power—and that of the “sister arts of imitation.” This notwithstanding, oodles of pedantic prose have been churned out over these passages by commentators and intellectuals of every stripe, virtually all of it overlooking the actual provocative and playful paradox posed by the philosopher king himself. Instead, Plato has often been treated as some kind of pure literalist, as though there were no nuance—no poetry—or irony in his dialogues—or jokes—only straight prose.