Power, Persuasion and Scenario Plausibility

In this week’s soliloquy, Professor Jackson presents three potential alternatives to the assumption of impermeable autonomous actors rising and falling in power and driven, despite common social context, by the same rules of the game.  He then asks, among other questions, “Are all of these plausible scenarios?”  I would answer, tentatively, yes.  My mind may change as we go along, but my thought is that what we now consider idealistic dreaming could tomorrow be so commonplace as to not even warrant question.  Consideration of, not so many generations ago, a “global community” or a United Nations would have been thought outlandish.  If one went further back in time, even the “globe” itself was not in common consciousness.  As to the most desirable, it probably goes without saying that I favor the “Human Project.” But, if it is a plausible scenario, and if it is to be brought about, it may see some kinks along the way.  I go back to my concern with climate change and the silver lining in its linking disparate communities of human beings.   The medium through which humanity’s common cause in mitigating natural threat emerged and grew at such fantastic speed, has also fostered an almost overnight transformation in the nature of power in the West.  Communications are changing persuasive mechanism and so, changing not only power structures, but the rate of speed at which they transform.

Professor Jackson notes, history is written by the victors.  And, persuasion often writes the victors. In the moment, anything can sound like victory through artful rhetoric. Its power is a theme that could be woven through each of Professor Jackson’s scenarios because without buy-in from one’s audience, any one of those given scenarios, however plausible would fall flat.  The method of delivery matters. In both New World and Old World ancient cultures, manufactured heroics glorifying cultures and leaders were carved into city structures and pottery.  They were woven into tapestries and oral traditions and religions.  The printing press granted access to a far broader audience. But, modern communications have launched the power to disrupt the status quo to anyone either chancing on a message that resonates or actors with an aptitude for mass audience manipulation.  Timing matters.  We have seen an election won through appeal to darkest human emotions, not through speeches, but repetition of any given inanity in 140 words or less.  And, orientation matters. None would have had the same effect without more than a little priming through seemingly innocuous platforms – fake websites, social media, and orchestrated releases from entities such as Wikileaks or, more egregiously, the FBI.  Similar dynamics threaten the viability of the European Union (though, you can see in my Week 12 post, I have hope it, and we, will survive the challenge).   

 Bringing this back to the question of taking the ideal and making it plausible, I believe the answer lies not in the nature of dominion or in its constitution, but in the power of rhetoric to unite through emotion what are most commonly held as virtuous themes over those which tap into the drive to annihilate that which is not “us:” ideas, institutions, people.  If this seems a little simplistic, I would argue, it is more complex than it seems on the surface.  In my mid-term paper, I made an argument for anthropological and epigenetic factors leveraging one power structure over another with significant transformational speed.  These appear to ride to great extent on content and patterns in communication.  Rhetoric is not simply about persuasion. It changes us to some extent, physiologically. I suppose what makes the ideal plausible for me is that we can evolve to get there if we can manage rhetoric effectively to that end.  It just might not look like the thing we imagined – and there might be a few Trump-like bumps in the road.