The useful art of soul bending

Rhetoric's deepest purpose, and how it can help you resist our future robot overlords.

“The effect of speech upon the condition of the soul is comparable to the power of drugs over the nature of bodies.”

Gorgias, quoted in Plato’s dialogue, Gorgias

I figure the best way to explain what the ancients called “soul bending” is to give you a slightly modified excerpt from my upcoming book, Aristotle’s Guide to Self-Persuasion. In later posts, we’ll get into what exactly Aristotle meant by “soul” and how rhetoric can bend it. (Plus how it can turn into a witty, sexy, body beautiful, leader of the free world.)

Meanwhile, let’s begin at the rhetorical beginning…

Several thousand years ago, a well-dressed bevy of consultants trickled into Greece’s richest city in quest of serious income. What they had to sell eventually led to the first liberal art.

The consultants deftly branded themselves the “Wise Ones”—Sophists. They offered the people of Athens a set of tools to win lawsuits and rule the masses through the sheer power of words. One of the Sophists, a massively popular Greek orator named Gorgias (exquisitely pronounced “gorgeous”) made so much money speaking and teaching rhetoric that he allegedly ordered a solid gold statue of himself. It was as if Taylor Swift supplemented her enormous concert revenues by teaching songwriting…and then erected a gold statue of herself.

But Gorgias and his colleagues taught more than an art of entertainment; they were sharing secrets to wealth and power. Some of those secrets appear in the pages to come. They will help you face some of the problems of life, with the eventual goal of making you healthier and happier. These tools are extremely powerful; use them with caution, consult your doctor, and try not to start a revolution.

The Sophists’ persuasive tools worked so well, in fact, that the losers of lawsuits and elections understandably began to see rhetoric in a dim light. “Sophistry” has meant tricky manipulation ever since. The philosopher Aristotle defined it as “a kind of art of money-making from a merely apparent wisdom.”

He was certainly right about the money-making. But he himself taught many of the manipulative tricks—his most famous student was Alexander the Great—and he wrote the first and most impactful book on rhetoric. Aristotle knew its positive potential; rhetoric gathers the best methods that allow people to make decisions in common, and to spark the passion needed to act on those choices.

Meanwhile, the Sophists’ art went on to inspire democracies, lubricate business deals, and build empires and Madison Avenue. It empowered the likes of Lincoln and Gandhi and MLK. The American Founders used their common schooling in rhetoric to help throw off the yoke of empire and launch a republic. Shakespeare applied his knowledge of rhetoric acquired at the Stratford Grammar School to do, well, Shakespeare. One of the original liberal arts, rhetoric is in part responsible for what we know as western civilization. It continues to be taught in thousands of high schools, colleges, and law schools.

Some of the earliest Sophists became our first philosophers. While we think of the study as the arid domain of academics, the Greeks thought of philosophy as argument, and therefore—being passionately fond of debate, a word that comes from the Greek for “battle”—downright sexy. They loved arguing so much that they argued among themselves for pleasure. Over time, they began arguing over the biggest question of all: What constitutes the good life?

Some of the Sophist philosophers claimed that their persuasion techniques might help us achieve that good life. Rhetoric can do more than win friends and influence people, they said. It can bewitch us with the practice of psychogogia, or “soul moving.” (The ancient Romans more aptly called it “soul bending”). The gorgeous Greek Gorgias credited rhetoric with moving the soul of beautiful Helen, along with her body, all the way to Troy—launching those thousand ships and sparking the Trojan War. Gorgias played her defense attorney in a mock trial, blaming rhetoric for “drugging” her.

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True, this seductive art has made people do things they regretted next morning. But even while Aristotle argued against Gorgias’s claims, the soul benders’ early concepts helped inspire his own philosophy. Marcus Tullius Cicero, ancient Rome’s greatest orator, called rhetoric “sovereign of all things.” Only through our use of the power of words, he said, can we prove ourselves “superior to animals.”

That may be a bit of a stretch; most of us have known some superior animals. On the other hand, rhetoric has done remarkable things for us humans. The techniques originally invented by the Sophists have allowed practitioners to persuade employers, markets, spouses and (most ambitiously) cats.

Besides, there has never been a better time to learn the art of rhetoric. Aristotle saw it as the most human of all active disciplines, a persuasive practice that empowers great leaders and enables people to disagree peacefully. What will best prepare us to resist our future robot overlords?

The tech world is buzzing about the approaching Singularity, a moment when artificial intelligence writes its own software, becomes self-aware, sees our species as rather clueless and easily manipulated, and... Planet of the AI! Scantily dressed humans enslaved to apelike androids!

Or maybe Elon Musk will save humanity with his plan to implant computer chips in our brains, enabling us to control computers with our thoughts and keep them from conspiring on their own. What could possibly go wrong?

We’re already feeling the first drops of the AI tempest, as software and robots eliminate jobs in tech and other fields. But in the short term at least, our problem may not be computers but we humans. The threat lies in our abandonment of studying how to be human. That is what the moral of the story of rhetoric is all about. The meaning of life lies in the meaning, and power, of words.

This is Aristotle's Guide to Soul Bending.