This is the very best time to find serendipity.

About to lose your head? Take the Case of the Missing Camel.

Once upon a time, the king of a rich land reached the sorry conclusion that his sons had been spoiled rotten. These privileged young jerks were taking their great wealth and status for granted. To teach them a permanent lesson, he banished them to a strange, hostile, faraway place.

Soon after they arrived, the young princes learned that a camel had gone missing. Having nothing else to do, they decided to investigate. After searching through clues at the scene of the crime, they reported their findings to the beast’s owner, a merchant. “Your camel was old,” one prince said. The second prince said, “It was missing a tooth and blind in one eye, carrying a load of honey on one side and butter on the other.” “Plus a woman,” the third prince added. “She was pregnant.”

“Thieves!” the merchant shouted. “How can you know all that unless you stole the camel yourselves?” Outraged townsfolk dragged the princes before the emperor, and the merchant demanded their execution for the capital crime of camel rustling.

We interrupt this story to provide a crucial detail: The land where the princes had been banished, and where they were about to get their heads chopped off, was an empire called Serendib (now Sri Lanka). It’s where we get the word serendipity: a happy chance occurrence. This admittedly makes no sense until you hear the rest of the tale.

The emperor gazed down from his throne at the princes. “What do you have to say for yourselves?” The boys explained that they had induced their facts from elementary observation. Grass had been eaten on the less lush side of the road, which had to mean the camel was blind on one side. Tooth-sized clumps of grass had been left behind, implying the missing tooth. Other clues included dribbles of fly-covered butter on one side and honey on the other, as well as a woman-sized footprint with two handprints in front of it, and a wet spot that smelled of urine. “It is obvious,” the first prince said. “A woman had stopped to relieve herself and had to use her hands to get back up, which tells us that she was pregnant.”

Just then, a man entered the palace serendipitously shouting, “Is someone missing a camel?” He had found one wandering in the desert.

The delighted emperor showered the princes with gold and took them on as his top advisors. They all lived happily ever after, with the possible exception of the pregnant woman. Immortalized in a popular tale, “The Three Princes of Serendib,” the adventure eventually inspired the Sherlock Holmes stories.

The moral, at least for our purposes: While we tend to think of opportunity as sheer luck, the greatest chances for success rarely arise in the best of times. Serendib is a scary, chaotic place where you could lose your head, but it’s also the land of possibility.

Still, Aristotle would say that chaos is nothing but a gap in your life until you use it. When you begin to think serendipitously, you see chaos all around, in your own life as well as in popular culture. In the movie It’s a Wonderful Life, Jimmy Stewart saves a building and loan while the evil Mr. Potter takes over the rest of the town. Some years later, Potter offers Stewart’s character a job running his business. During the Depression, Potter says, “you and I were the only ones that kept our heads.”

Potter, master kairoticist.

The Potter-Stewart spirit seemed to hold true during the Covid-19 pandemic, when hopeful unemployed workers attempted to turn a disaster into a positive; new business applications for the year were up more than forty-three percent.

An opportunity constitutes a fulcrum between outcomes. Your decision tips the scale and launches you into a particular future. While opportunity often entails good luck, just as often it means bad luck. Without the decision to investigate the camel mystery, the princes of Serendib would simply have suffered banishment.

Americans faced a fulcrum of their own when the Soviets shockingly sent up beeping, spiky little Sputnik, the first satellite. We responded with the fabulously ambitious Apollo program, going way beyond Earth’s orbit and creating much of the technology that enables our smartphones. We made the moon our Serendib.

Kanye West became Taylor Swift’s Serendib when he humiliated the nineteen-year-old singer at the MTV VMA awards; she rose to a whole new level of artistry.

A Massachusetts printer named Milton Bradley landed on his own Serendib when he faced the looming bankruptcy of his printing company during a nineteenth-century economic depression. He dreamed up a game called The Game of Life, printed it, and launched the board game industry.

In the art of persuasion, the in-between times are the moments of opportunity, when an audience has not yet made up its mind and a choice must be made. A problem or gap needs a solution, and the time is ripe to sway people toward the decision you want. It’s a time of crisis—a word that once had a more positive meaning than it does today. Bear with me for a bit more etymology.

We get our notion of crisis from the Greek krisis, meaning “decision.” The Greeks labeled a persuadable moment hypokrisis, literally “before the decision.” They saw decisions as a matter of contingency, applying wit and knowledge to solve singular problems and act on particular opportunities.

None of this answers the questions, What to do now, and how can rhetoric help? A few suggestions:

1. Find your exigence.

In times of greatest stress, we tend to ignore what we actually need. The greater the pain, the faster we go for a pill that will temporarily relieve it instead of looking for a cure that will end it.

In rhetoric the exigence is the problem, the exact thing that needs solving. Everyone’s exigence is different. Jimmy Stewart’s character sees his exigence as the need to protect his savings and loan. Mr. Potter spots a brilliant opening to more wealth. Having too wide a peripheral vision can paralyze us. Before freaking out on the state of the world, focus on a problem that has a chance of solution.

For instance, if you’re worried about your investments (assuming you have any), talk to some smart financial types. As Mr. Potter proved, panicky investors create opportunities. So, for that matter, does delusional optimism. People who think we’re all about to die, and those who believe America is about to become great again, are the stuff of serendipty for the Potters among us.

2. Avoid nostalgia.

Our lives are like Heraclitus’s river, a stream that transforms itself through constant flow. You can’t step into the same stream twice, Heraclitus said. And it’s impossible to return to a life that has already rushed by. The temptation to set the clock back and go home to our past, a home that no longer exists, can debilitate us if we feel it strongly enough. This yearning for home gave rise to the term nostalgia. A combination of the Greek words for “homecoming” and “pain,” the word was coined by a Swiss medical student in the early 1700s to describe the condition of mercenary soldiers who suffered from sadness and loss of sleep and appetite.

Today, nostalgia has become one of our nastiest social diseases. It drives us into bad decisions in the vain hope of restoring a rosy, and often false, past. There’s nothing wrong with indulging in the happy memories of our youth. Go online and order Blow Pops and Jelly Bellies. Stream old shows. Bore children with detailed descriptions of landlines and 8-track cassettes. But when memory becomes painful, consider yourself in the throes of a disease. A pathological desire for the past stifles any vision for the future and cripples our ability to make a change for the better.

Aristotle pointed out that deliberative rhetoric, the language that forges choices out of disagreement, focuses on the future. Past-tense rhetoric inspires blame and retribution.

3. Focus on your ethos.

Most decisions need allies. As Aristotle himself sadly wrote, your audience’s opinion of you outweighs the most elegant logical appeal. See my posts on Caring (eunoia or disinterest), Craft (phronesis—a problem-solving reputation), and Cause (arete, or virtue).

4. Don’t ignore the power of pathos.

The GDP and the crime rate don’t sway elections. Voters’ feelings about the economy or crime determine elections. I once mentioned to a group of worried mothers that our national violent-crime rate was much lower than when they were kids. The mothers almost took my head off. In retrospect, rhetoric helped me understand why: Most people view reality through their gut, when they’re not looking through the lens of their particular tribe.

I may lose subscribers with this next paragraph, but so be it…

I often get invited to speeches and symposia on “civil discourse.” Civility is great. I’m all for civility, especially at the dinner table. But the power of words doesn’t come from civility. It comes from manipulating audiences’ emotions and tribal instincts. Want to fight the oligarchy? Inspire hatred of billionaires. Show how they dodge paying taxes, collaborate with Chinese and Russian dictators, and take money out of the mouths of us hardworking Americans. Is this approach fair? Is it civil? Thousands of years of rhetoric has proven that love doesn’t conquer all. Neither does hate; but hate works better in power struggles.

And if you nostalgically believe that our rhetorically educated Founders engaged in civil discourse, read the anti-federalist papers in The Aurora. It’ll blow your hair back. While you’re at it, see how Benjamin Franklin, the Revolution’s greatest propagandist, practiced extremely effective forgery—the fakest of fake news. The Revolution wasn’t fought with gloves; similarly, the rising oligarchy is showing bare knuckles.

Meanwhile, don’t dismiss the people who vote for a populist. Instead, let’s examine the emotions behind their votes. We’ll learn a lot, and maybe win an election. Besides, this understanding can actually lead to peace.

5. But mentally stay logical.

While others will ignore statistics and follow only the news that confirms their beliefs, you and I need to practice inductive reasoning. It’s what lies behind the scientific method. And it will help you find the higher state of mind that the Epicureans called ataraxia, or freedom from disturbance.

6. Find serendipity.

Serendipity lies behind every major choice—when to marry, when to buy a house, whether to quit your job and start a business. It resides at the beating heart of decisions.

This is the last of a series on kairos, the art of timing. This Thursday I’ll explore a different aspect of psychogogia—soul bending, aka rhetoric: Do speeches actually work?