Rizz is a kind of magic

In one of Plato’s dialogues, a young man complains of a terrible headache. Socrates offers a remedy he picked up from a physician in Thrace. Don’t worry about the body, he says. Cure the soul, and the headache will go away.

The man asks, how do you cure the soul?

With a “charm,” Socrates says, quoting the doctor.

What kind of charm?

“Sweet words.”

Just what those sweet words were, Plato leaves out of the script. Socrates might have done better to prescribe willow bark. Still, you can see the positive effects of rhetoric in the placebo effect, the healing that comes from a belief that the cure will work. The pharmaceutical industry spends billions trying to remove the placebo effect from data on their prospective drugs in order to determine their “true” efficacy. But in a rhetorical sense, the placebo effect itself is real. It’s based on belief, which in term can come from sweet words — “charms.”

I’ll be dealing with various kinds of magic in newsletters to come. Charms, belief, repetition, frames, identity…all these things and more do strange things to the brain. They can let you gain your voice in the world, and possibly even influence yourself.

Aristotle took the concept further, asserting that you could make yourself into a charm. He called it karisma, a knack for making yourself irresistibly attractive to others. Karisma also alleviates doubt about actions and results, or procedures and cures. A confident-looking doctor in a white coat, standing in front of her impressive degrees, has a medical charm—or, to use a modern spelling, charisma. The charismatic person has an awesome ethos. She shows dedication to the concern of others, a quality Aristotle called eunoia, or “disinterest.” Her charisma also comes from being successful, a sign of Aristotle’s phronesis, or “practical wisdom.”  The more difficult the tasks achieved, the greater the charm.

Thanks to Tik Tok, charisma became rizz. A person with rizz is charming. She has charisma. Being as how the original users of this term were teenagers, rizz connoted a person’s ability to charm a lover without words, like one of those sexy vampires in Tru Blood.

A very unsexy version of success-sourced charm was Robert Moses, the man who built many of the parks and highways in New York and Long Island. A perfectly horrible person in many respects, Moses fought mass transit, destroyed whole neighborhoods, forced lower-class families from their homes, and in general acted like a tyrant. But people loved him for working without a salary (a sign of disinterest) and they loved him even more for his practical wisdom — his ability to build things in a city that had been infamous for its infrastructural incompetence. For decades, he was a saint to most New Yorkers. He had the charisma of accomplishment.

What about the rest of us? Suppose you lack a Moses-level resume. Once again, Aristotle comes to the rescue. He noted that charisma can also come from proving that you suffer well. My friend Dan, a passionate outdoorsman, once led a group of Boy Scouts on a winter hike up one of the highest peaks in New Hampshire. While the boys brought snowshoes, Dan carried skis. After summiting, they began heading back down when Dan slipped and broke his leg. Pushing away the scouts, who were thrilled at the chance to apply first aid, he sent them ahead and then skied down alone on one ski. It wasn’t just the skill that made him a charismatic legend among fellow outdoorspeople. It was how well he suffered the pain and effort. People would follow him anywhere into the dangerous wilderness.

To achieve Dan-level charm, remember that suffering can count as a skill. Charm yourself by remembering how much you have proven you can bear misfortune. But, hey, when you break your leg? Get to a hospital. Dan is charismatic, but he’s also a little crazy.