#persuasion — Public Fediverse posts

It’s bad enough that our culture doesn’t know how to sell; it’s criminal that people in advertising don’t. We review #TheArtofSellingYourself (sort of): http://the-agency-review.com/art-selling-yourself #selling #persuasion #advertising #marketing #business #culture @TarcherPerigee

The Biology of Narratives

Persuasion is hard. You can’t just walk up to someone and drop your request on them. You have to set the stage. You have to build context. You have to be patient enough for the other person to normalize the idea, and only then, slowly, bring them to a point where the decision feels like their own.

Kids do this with their parents all the time. Politicians do it with citizens. Brands do it with customers. The mechanics are the same. Build the narrative, water it, and wait.

Now, have you ever wondered why it’s so hard to shift someone’s stance on a topic, even when the facts seem obvious to you? Resistance to change isn’t really the person’s fault. It’s natural. It’s biological.

We are physiological beings. Our brains are wired by neurons, and those neurons govern our perceptions, our beliefs, our values, our identity, and the emotions wrapped around them. We don’t actually think critically about a situation as a first move. The very first reaction the brain produces is emotional. A piece of news, a sentence, a visual, an audio clip, whatever the trigger, our brain, depending on how it has been wired by childhood and past experiences, releases a cocktail of hormones. Happy. Sad. Angry. Hopeless. Excited. Whatever fits the pattern it has already learnt.

The second step is where reasoning enters, and this is the part most people miss. The brain doesn’t reason first and then feel. It feels first, and then it goes hunting for reasons that justify the feeling. It pulls from our belief system, our values, our self perception, our identity, basically the bundle that adds up to what we call personality, and constructs an argument. If you win that argument with the other person, you feel great and satisfied. If you lose, something more interesting happens. And that brings me to a pattern I keep noticing.

There seem to be roughly three kinds of people when it comes to handling counter opinions.

One, the stubborn type. They are rigid. They protect their world view at all costs and resist changing it even when shown evidence. This is the kind of person for whom hearing something bad about themselves is painful, almost physically so, because you’re not just challenging an opinion, you’re challenging an identity. That’s actually why criticism stings the way it does. The brain interprets it as an attack on the self, not on the idea.

Two, the easily influenced. They flip with the wind. Whoever spoke to them last shapes their view. They fall for lies and clever framing because they haven’t anchored their thinking in anything strong enough to push back.

And three, somewhere in the middle, basically the most of us.

But here’s the catch. It’s not that you are permanently one type. Depending on the topic, the person you’re talking to, your confidence in the subject, your mood, even how tired you are, you fluctuate. You can be the stubborn one in one conversation and the easily influenced one in another. The three types aren’t fixed identities, they’re positions on a sliding scale we keep moving along.

So why am I going into all of this? Because every bit of it is governed by biology. By how your brain is wired. Whether you are open minded or closed minded, in what corners of life, comes down to the architecture of your neural pathways.

When we come across a counter opinion or something we don’t align with, the brain has two paths. Either it rejects the input outright, which is the cheap and easy option, or, if we are even slightly open to change, it has to do something expensive. It has to build. New neurons have to connect. New synapses have to form. A new neural pathway has to be carved through tissue. That is the actual, physical, biological cost of changing your mind.

This is also why we tend to get more rigid as we age. It isn’t that the brain stops being flexible. People learn new languages, new instruments, and enter entirely new careers well into their later years. But the muscle gets weaker if you don’t use it. The more you practice learning new things, the easier learning becomes. The less you challenge your own views, the harder it gets to challenge them later. Rigidity isn’t really a personality trait. It’s a fitness level.

And these new pathways take time. I don’t know the exact numbers, but the point is, you can’t upgrade a belief the way you upgrade software in an instant. The brain has to physically rebuild itself, and that takes real time.

This explains how the world actually works.

This is why politics is the way it is. You’re not arguing with a person, you’re arguing with their entire wiring. The narrative they’ve been living inside isn’t an opinion they hold, it’s the only world they have access to. To change it, the brain has to literally redo itself, and that is exhausting and slow.

This is why public policy is so hard. You can pass a law in a day, but you cannot pass a behavioral change in a day. Behavioral change isn’t a software update. It’s biology rewriting itself, repetition by repetition, across millions of people, in parallel.

This is why brand building takes years. A brand is essentially a stable narrative living rent free inside a customer’s head. Building one means slowly carving a neural pathway across millions of brains. There is no shortcut. You either repeat enough times to become the default association, or you don’t.

This is also why pivoting an audience is brutal. If you’ve been known for one kind of content and you switch to another, your audience doesn’t start from zero. They start from below zero. They first have to erase the old version of you they had built in their head, and only then can they begin building the new one. You’re working against the pathway you yourself helped create.

And this, I suspect, is how social media algorithms work too, and on both sides of the screen. The algorithm itself learns the way a brain does, through sheer repetition. Every click, every pause, every share, every second you linger, is one more rep feeding the loop. The patterns get stronger, the predictions get sharper, the model’s internal wiring goes deeper. In a real sense, the algorithm is building its own version of neural pathways about you.

But here’s the twist. While it’s busy learning you, it’s also shaping you. It keeps serving the same flavor of content over and over, not just because it’s engaging in the moment, but because every repetition carves a groove on your side too. So you end up with two systems quietly training each other in parallel. The algorithm learning what reliably hooks you, and you slowly becoming the kind of person who gets hooked. The algorithm isn’t just predicting what you’ll like. It’s shaping what you’ll become. And you aren’t just consuming content. You’re teaching it, scroll by scroll, who to make you into. Over months and years, those pathways, on both ends, become you.

And this happens at a scale and speed our biology was never built to defend against.

So the next time you find yourself struggling to convince someone, or being convinced too quickly, or wondering why a political conversation went nowhere, remember. You’re not really fighting opinions. You’re fighting biology. You’re asking a brain to spend energy rebuilding itself, and brains, like most things in nature, prefer the path of least resistance.

The good news is that the same biology that traps us also frees us. Pathways are not destiny, they’re patterns. And patterns can be redrawn, slowly, deliberately, with patience. The same way kids work on their parents. The same way politicians work on the public. The same way brands work on us.

One thoughtful repetition at a time.

Subscribe to get notified or follow the blog, and if you like what I write, please share it with your network 🙂

The Biology of Narratives

Persuasion is hard. You can’t just walk up to someone and drop your request on them. You have to set the stage. You have to build context. You have to be patient enough for the other person to normalize the idea, and only then, slowly, bring them to a point where the decision feels like their own.

Kids do this with their parents all the time. Politicians do it with citizens. Brands do it with customers. The mechanics are the same. Build the narrative, water it, and wait.

Now, have you ever wondered why it’s so hard to shift someone’s stance on a topic, even when the facts seem obvious to you? Resistance to change isn’t really the person’s fault. It’s natural. It’s biological.

We are physiological beings. Our brains are wired by neurons, and those neurons govern our perceptions, our beliefs, our values, our identity, and the emotions wrapped around them. We don’t actually think critically about a situation as a first move. The very first reaction the brain produces is emotional. A piece of news, a sentence, a visual, an audio clip, whatever the trigger, our brain, depending on how it has been wired by childhood and past experiences, releases a cocktail of hormones. Happy. Sad. Angry. Hopeless. Excited. Whatever fits the pattern it has already learnt.

The second step is where reasoning enters, and this is the part most people miss. The brain doesn’t reason first and then feel. It feels first, and then it goes hunting for reasons that justify the feeling. It pulls from our belief system, our values, our self perception, our identity, basically the bundle that adds up to what we call personality, and constructs an argument. If you win that argument with the other person, you feel great and satisfied. If you lose, something more interesting happens. And that brings me to a pattern I keep noticing.

There seem to be roughly three kinds of people when it comes to handling counter opinions.

One, the stubborn type. They are rigid. They protect their world view at all costs and resist changing it even when shown evidence. This is the kind of person for whom hearing something bad about themselves is painful, almost physically so, because you’re not just challenging an opinion, you’re challenging an identity. That’s actually why criticism stings the way it does. The brain interprets it as an attack on the self, not on the idea.

Two, the easily influenced. They flip with the wind. Whoever spoke to them last shapes their view. They fall for lies and clever framing because they haven’t anchored their thinking in anything strong enough to push back.

And three, somewhere in the middle, basically the most of us.

But here’s the catch. It’s not that you are permanently one type. Depending on the topic, the person you’re talking to, your confidence in the subject, your mood, even how tired you are, you fluctuate. You can be the stubborn one in one conversation and the easily influenced one in another. The three types aren’t fixed identities, they’re positions on a sliding scale we keep moving along.

So why am I going into all of this? Because every bit of it is governed by biology. By how your brain is wired. Whether you are open minded or closed minded, in what corners of life, comes down to the architecture of your neural pathways.

When we come across a counter opinion or something we don’t align with, the brain has two paths. Either it rejects the input outright, which is the cheap and easy option, or, if we are even slightly open to change, it has to do something expensive. It has to build. New neurons have to connect. New synapses have to form. A new neural pathway has to be carved through tissue. That is the actual, physical, biological cost of changing your mind.

This is also why we tend to get more rigid as we age. It isn’t that the brain stops being flexible. People learn new languages, new instruments, and enter entirely new careers well into their later years. But the muscle gets weaker if you don’t use it. The more you practice learning new things, the easier learning becomes. The less you challenge your own views, the harder it gets to challenge them later. Rigidity isn’t really a personality trait. It’s a fitness level.

And these new pathways take time. I don’t know the exact numbers, but the point is, you can’t upgrade a belief the way you upgrade software in an instant. The brain has to physically rebuild itself, and that takes real time.

This explains how the world actually works.

This is why politics is the way it is. You’re not arguing with a person, you’re arguing with their entire wiring. The narrative they’ve been living inside isn’t an opinion they hold, it’s the only world they have access to. To change it, the brain has to literally redo itself, and that is exhausting and slow.

This is why public policy is so hard. You can pass a law in a day, but you cannot pass a behavioral change in a day. Behavioral change isn’t a software update. It’s biology rewriting itself, repetition by repetition, across millions of people, in parallel.

This is why brand building takes years. A brand is essentially a stable narrative living rent free inside a customer’s head. Building one means slowly carving a neural pathway across millions of brains. There is no shortcut. You either repeat enough times to become the default association, or you don’t.

This is also why pivoting an audience is brutal. If you’ve been known for one kind of content and you switch to another, your audience doesn’t start from zero. They start from below zero. They first have to erase the old version of you they had built in their head, and only then can they begin building the new one. You’re working against the pathway you yourself helped create.

And this, I suspect, is how social media algorithms work too, and on both sides of the screen. The algorithm itself learns the way a brain does, through sheer repetition. Every click, every pause, every share, every second you linger, is one more rep feeding the loop. The patterns get stronger, the predictions get sharper, the model’s internal wiring goes deeper. In a real sense, the algorithm is building its own version of neural pathways about you.

But here’s the twist. While it’s busy learning you, it’s also shaping you. It keeps serving the same flavor of content over and over, not just because it’s engaging in the moment, but because every repetition carves a groove on your side too. So you end up with two systems quietly training each other in parallel. The algorithm learning what reliably hooks you, and you slowly becoming the kind of person who gets hooked. The algorithm isn’t just predicting what you’ll like. It’s shaping what you’ll become. And you aren’t just consuming content. You’re teaching it, scroll by scroll, who to make you into. Over months and years, those pathways, on both ends, become you.

And this happens at a scale and speed our biology was never built to defend against.

So the next time you find yourself struggling to convince someone, or being convinced too quickly, or wondering why a political conversation went nowhere, remember. You’re not really fighting opinions. You’re fighting biology. You’re asking a brain to spend energy rebuilding itself, and brains, like most things in nature, prefer the path of least resistance.

The good news is that the same biology that traps us also frees us. Pathways are not destiny, they’re patterns. And patterns can be redrawn, slowly, deliberately, with patience. The same way kids work on their parents. The same way politicians work on the public. The same way brands work on us.

One thoughtful repetition at a time.

Subscribe to get notified or follow the blog, and if you like what I write, please share it with your network 🙂

The Biology of Narratives

Persuasion is hard. You can’t just walk up to someone and drop your request on them. You have to set the stage. You have to build context. You have to be patient enough for the other person to normalize the idea, and only then, slowly, bring them to a point where the decision feels like their own.

Kids do this with their parents all the time. Politicians do it with citizens. Brands do it with customers. The mechanics are the same. Build the narrative, water it, and wait.

Now, have you ever wondered why it’s so hard to shift someone’s stance on a topic, even when the facts seem obvious to you? Resistance to change isn’t really the person’s fault. It’s natural. It’s biological.

We are physiological beings. Our brains are wired by neurons, and those neurons govern our perceptions, our beliefs, our values, our identity, and the emotions wrapped around them. We don’t actually think critically about a situation as a first move. The very first reaction the brain produces is emotional. A piece of news, a sentence, a visual, an audio clip, whatever the trigger, our brain, depending on how it has been wired by childhood and past experiences, releases a cocktail of hormones. Happy. Sad. Angry. Hopeless. Excited. Whatever fits the pattern it has already learnt.

The second step is where reasoning enters, and this is the part most people miss. The brain doesn’t reason first and then feel. It feels first, and then it goes hunting for reasons that justify the feeling. It pulls from our belief system, our values, our self perception, our identity, basically the bundle that adds up to what we call personality, and constructs an argument. If you win that argument with the other person, you feel great and satisfied. If you lose, something more interesting happens. And that brings me to a pattern I keep noticing.

There seem to be roughly three kinds of people when it comes to handling counter opinions.

One, the stubborn type. They are rigid. They protect their world view at all costs and resist changing it even when shown evidence. This is the kind of person for whom hearing something bad about themselves is painful, almost physically so, because you’re not just challenging an opinion, you’re challenging an identity. That’s actually why criticism stings the way it does. The brain interprets it as an attack on the self, not on the idea.

Two, the easily influenced. They flip with the wind. Whoever spoke to them last shapes their view. They fall for lies and clever framing because they haven’t anchored their thinking in anything strong enough to push back.

And three, somewhere in the middle, basically the most of us.

But here’s the catch. It’s not that you are permanently one type. Depending on the topic, the person you’re talking to, your confidence in the subject, your mood, even how tired you are, you fluctuate. You can be the stubborn one in one conversation and the easily influenced one in another. The three types aren’t fixed identities, they’re positions on a sliding scale we keep moving along.

So why am I going into all of this? Because every bit of it is governed by biology. By how your brain is wired. Whether you are open minded or closed minded, in what corners of life, comes down to the architecture of your neural pathways.

When we come across a counter opinion or something we don’t align with, the brain has two paths. Either it rejects the input outright, which is the cheap and easy option, or, if we are even slightly open to change, it has to do something expensive. It has to build. New neurons have to connect. New synapses have to form. A new neural pathway has to be carved through tissue. That is the actual, physical, biological cost of changing your mind.

This is also why we tend to get more rigid as we age. It isn’t that the brain stops being flexible. People learn new languages, new instruments, and enter entirely new careers well into their later years. But the muscle gets weaker if you don’t use it. The more you practice learning new things, the easier learning becomes. The less you challenge your own views, the harder it gets to challenge them later. Rigidity isn’t really a personality trait. It’s a fitness level.

And these new pathways take time. I don’t know the exact numbers, but the point is, you can’t upgrade a belief the way you upgrade software in an instant. The brain has to physically rebuild itself, and that takes real time.

This explains how the world actually works.

This is why politics is the way it is. You’re not arguing with a person, you’re arguing with their entire wiring. The narrative they’ve been living inside isn’t an opinion they hold, it’s the only world they have access to. To change it, the brain has to literally redo itself, and that is exhausting and slow.

This is why public policy is so hard. You can pass a law in a day, but you cannot pass a behavioral change in a day. Behavioral change isn’t a software update. It’s biology rewriting itself, repetition by repetition, across millions of people, in parallel.

This is why brand building takes years. A brand is essentially a stable narrative living rent free inside a customer’s head. Building one means slowly carving a neural pathway across millions of brains. There is no shortcut. You either repeat enough times to become the default association, or you don’t.

This is also why pivoting an audience is brutal. If you’ve been known for one kind of content and you switch to another, your audience doesn’t start from zero. They start from below zero. They first have to erase the old version of you they had built in their head, and only then can they begin building the new one. You’re working against the pathway you yourself helped create.

And this, I suspect, is how social media algorithms work too, and on both sides of the screen. The algorithm itself learns the way a brain does, through sheer repetition. Every click, every pause, every share, every second you linger, is one more rep feeding the loop. The patterns get stronger, the predictions get sharper, the model’s internal wiring goes deeper. In a real sense, the algorithm is building its own version of neural pathways about you.

But here’s the twist. While it’s busy learning you, it’s also shaping you. It keeps serving the same flavor of content over and over, not just because it’s engaging in the moment, but because every repetition carves a groove on your side too. So you end up with two systems quietly training each other in parallel. The algorithm learning what reliably hooks you, and you slowly becoming the kind of person who gets hooked. The algorithm isn’t just predicting what you’ll like. It’s shaping what you’ll become. And you aren’t just consuming content. You’re teaching it, scroll by scroll, who to make you into. Over months and years, those pathways, on both ends, become you.

And this happens at a scale and speed our biology was never built to defend against.

So the next time you find yourself struggling to convince someone, or being convinced too quickly, or wondering why a political conversation went nowhere, remember. You’re not really fighting opinions. You’re fighting biology. You’re asking a brain to spend energy rebuilding itself, and brains, like most things in nature, prefer the path of least resistance.

The good news is that the same biology that traps us also frees us. Pathways are not destiny, they’re patterns. And patterns can be redrawn, slowly, deliberately, with patience. The same way kids work on their parents. The same way politicians work on the public. The same way brands work on us.

One thoughtful repetition at a time.

Subscribe to get notified or follow the blog, and if you like what I write, please share it with your network 🙂

The Biology of Narratives

Persuasion is hard. You can’t just walk up to someone and drop your request on them. You have to set the stage. You have to build context. You have to be patient enough for the other person to normalize the idea, and only then, slowly, bring them to a point where the decision feels like their own.

Kids do this with their parents all the time. Politicians do it with citizens. Brands do it with customers. The mechanics are the same. Build the narrative, water it, and wait.

Now, have you ever wondered why it’s so hard to shift someone’s stance on a topic, even when the facts seem obvious to you? Resistance to change isn’t really the person’s fault. It’s natural. It’s biological.

We are physiological beings. Our brains are wired by neurons, and those neurons govern our perceptions, our beliefs, our values, our identity, and the emotions wrapped around them. We don’t actually think critically about a situation as a first move. The very first reaction the brain produces is emotional. A piece of news, a sentence, a visual, an audio clip, whatever the trigger, our brain, depending on how it has been wired by childhood and past experiences, releases a cocktail of hormones. Happy. Sad. Angry. Hopeless. Excited. Whatever fits the pattern it has already learnt.

The second step is where reasoning enters, and this is the part most people miss. The brain doesn’t reason first and then feel. It feels first, and then it goes hunting for reasons that justify the feeling. It pulls from our belief system, our values, our self perception, our identity, basically the bundle that adds up to what we call personality, and constructs an argument. If you win that argument with the other person, you feel great and satisfied. If you lose, something more interesting happens. And that brings me to a pattern I keep noticing.

There seem to be roughly three kinds of people when it comes to handling counter opinions.

One, the stubborn type. They are rigid. They protect their world view at all costs and resist changing it even when shown evidence. This is the kind of person for whom hearing something bad about themselves is painful, almost physically so, because you’re not just challenging an opinion, you’re challenging an identity. That’s actually why criticism stings the way it does. The brain interprets it as an attack on the self, not on the idea.

Two, the easily influenced. They flip with the wind. Whoever spoke to them last shapes their view. They fall for lies and clever framing because they haven’t anchored their thinking in anything strong enough to push back.

And three, somewhere in the middle, basically the most of us.

But here’s the catch. It’s not that you are permanently one type. Depending on the topic, the person you’re talking to, your confidence in the subject, your mood, even how tired you are, you fluctuate. You can be the stubborn one in one conversation and the easily influenced one in another. The three types aren’t fixed identities, they’re positions on a sliding scale we keep moving along.

So why am I going into all of this? Because every bit of it is governed by biology. By how your brain is wired. Whether you are open minded or closed minded, in what corners of life, comes down to the architecture of your neural pathways.

When we come across a counter opinion or something we don’t align with, the brain has two paths. Either it rejects the input outright, which is the cheap and easy option, or, if we are even slightly open to change, it has to do something expensive. It has to build. New neurons have to connect. New synapses have to form. A new neural pathway has to be carved through tissue. That is the actual, physical, biological cost of changing your mind.

This is also why we tend to get more rigid as we age. It isn’t that the brain stops being flexible. People learn new languages, new instruments, and enter entirely new careers well into their later years. But the muscle gets weaker if you don’t use it. The more you practice learning new things, the easier learning becomes. The less you challenge your own views, the harder it gets to challenge them later. Rigidity isn’t really a personality trait. It’s a fitness level.

And these new pathways take time. I don’t know the exact numbers, but the point is, you can’t upgrade a belief the way you upgrade software in an instant. The brain has to physically rebuild itself, and that takes real time.

This explains how the world actually works.

This is why politics is the way it is. You’re not arguing with a person, you’re arguing with their entire wiring. The narrative they’ve been living inside isn’t an opinion they hold, it’s the only world they have access to. To change it, the brain has to literally redo itself, and that is exhausting and slow.

This is why public policy is so hard. You can pass a law in a day, but you cannot pass a behavioral change in a day. Behavioral change isn’t a software update. It’s biology rewriting itself, repetition by repetition, across millions of people, in parallel.

This is why brand building takes years. A brand is essentially a stable narrative living rent free inside a customer’s head. Building one means slowly carving a neural pathway across millions of brains. There is no shortcut. You either repeat enough times to become the default association, or you don’t.

This is also why pivoting an audience is brutal. If you’ve been known for one kind of content and you switch to another, your audience doesn’t start from zero. They start from below zero. They first have to erase the old version of you they had built in their head, and only then can they begin building the new one. You’re working against the pathway you yourself helped create.

And this, I suspect, is how social media algorithms work too, and on both sides of the screen. The algorithm itself learns the way a brain does, through sheer repetition. Every click, every pause, every share, every second you linger, is one more rep feeding the loop. The patterns get stronger, the predictions get sharper, the model’s internal wiring goes deeper. In a real sense, the algorithm is building its own version of neural pathways about you.

But here’s the twist. While it’s busy learning you, it’s also shaping you. It keeps serving the same flavor of content over and over, not just because it’s engaging in the moment, but because every repetition carves a groove on your side too. So you end up with two systems quietly training each other in parallel. The algorithm learning what reliably hooks you, and you slowly becoming the kind of person who gets hooked. The algorithm isn’t just predicting what you’ll like. It’s shaping what you’ll become. And you aren’t just consuming content. You’re teaching it, scroll by scroll, who to make you into. Over months and years, those pathways, on both ends, become you.

And this happens at a scale and speed our biology was never built to defend against.

So the next time you find yourself struggling to convince someone, or being convinced too quickly, or wondering why a political conversation went nowhere, remember. You’re not really fighting opinions. You’re fighting biology. You’re asking a brain to spend energy rebuilding itself, and brains, like most things in nature, prefer the path of least resistance.

The good news is that the same biology that traps us also frees us. Pathways are not destiny, they’re patterns. And patterns can be redrawn, slowly, deliberately, with patience. The same way kids work on their parents. The same way politicians work on the public. The same way brands work on us.

One thoughtful repetition at a time.

Subscribe to get notified or follow the blog, and if you like what I write, please share it with your network 🙂

The Biology of Narratives

Persuasion is hard. You can’t just walk up to someone and drop your request on them. You have to set the stage. You have to build context. You have to be patient enough for the other person to normalize the idea, and only then, slowly, bring them to a point where the decision feels like their own.

Kids do this with their parents all the time. Politicians do it with citizens. Brands do it with customers. The mechanics are the same. Build the narrative, water it, and wait.

Now, have you ever wondered why it’s so hard to shift someone’s stance on a topic, even when the facts seem obvious to you? Resistance to change isn’t really the person’s fault. It’s natural. It’s biological.

We are physiological beings. Our brains are wired by neurons, and those neurons govern our perceptions, our beliefs, our values, our identity, and the emotions wrapped around them. We don’t actually think critically about a situation as a first move. The very first reaction the brain produces is emotional. A piece of news, a sentence, a visual, an audio clip, whatever the trigger, our brain, depending on how it has been wired by childhood and past experiences, releases a cocktail of hormones. Happy. Sad. Angry. Hopeless. Excited. Whatever fits the pattern it has already learnt.

The second step is where reasoning enters, and this is the part most people miss. The brain doesn’t reason first and then feel. It feels first, and then it goes hunting for reasons that justify the feeling. It pulls from our belief system, our values, our self perception, our identity, basically the bundle that adds up to what we call personality, and constructs an argument. If you win that argument with the other person, you feel great and satisfied. If you lose, something more interesting happens. And that brings me to a pattern I keep noticing.

There seem to be roughly three kinds of people when it comes to handling counter opinions.

One, the stubborn type. They are rigid. They protect their world view at all costs and resist changing it even when shown evidence. This is the kind of person for whom hearing something bad about themselves is painful, almost physically so, because you’re not just challenging an opinion, you’re challenging an identity. That’s actually why criticism stings the way it does. The brain interprets it as an attack on the self, not on the idea.

Two, the easily influenced. They flip with the wind. Whoever spoke to them last shapes their view. They fall for lies and clever framing because they haven’t anchored their thinking in anything strong enough to push back.

And three, somewhere in the middle, basically the most of us.

But here’s the catch. It’s not that you are permanently one type. Depending on the topic, the person you’re talking to, your confidence in the subject, your mood, even how tired you are, you fluctuate. You can be the stubborn one in one conversation and the easily influenced one in another. The three types aren’t fixed identities, they’re positions on a sliding scale we keep moving along.

So why am I going into all of this? Because every bit of it is governed by biology. By how your brain is wired. Whether you are open minded or closed minded, in what corners of life, comes down to the architecture of your neural pathways.

When we come across a counter opinion or something we don’t align with, the brain has two paths. Either it rejects the input outright, which is the cheap and easy option, or, if we are even slightly open to change, it has to do something expensive. It has to build. New neurons have to connect. New synapses have to form. A new neural pathway has to be carved through tissue. That is the actual, physical, biological cost of changing your mind.

This is also why we tend to get more rigid as we age. It isn’t that the brain stops being flexible. People learn new languages, new instruments, and enter entirely new careers well into their later years. But the muscle gets weaker if you don’t use it. The more you practice learning new things, the easier learning becomes. The less you challenge your own views, the harder it gets to challenge them later. Rigidity isn’t really a personality trait. It’s a fitness level.

And these new pathways take time. I don’t know the exact numbers, but the point is, you can’t upgrade a belief the way you upgrade software in an instant. The brain has to physically rebuild itself, and that takes real time.

This explains how the world actually works.

This is why politics is the way it is. You’re not arguing with a person, you’re arguing with their entire wiring. The narrative they’ve been living inside isn’t an opinion they hold, it’s the only world they have access to. To change it, the brain has to literally redo itself, and that is exhausting and slow.

This is why public policy is so hard. You can pass a law in a day, but you cannot pass a behavioral change in a day. Behavioral change isn’t a software update. It’s biology rewriting itself, repetition by repetition, across millions of people, in parallel.

This is why brand building takes years. A brand is essentially a stable narrative living rent free inside a customer’s head. Building one means slowly carving a neural pathway across millions of brains. There is no shortcut. You either repeat enough times to become the default association, or you don’t.

This is also why pivoting an audience is brutal. If you’ve been known for one kind of content and you switch to another, your audience doesn’t start from zero. They start from below zero. They first have to erase the old version of you they had built in their head, and only then can they begin building the new one. You’re working against the pathway you yourself helped create.

And this, I suspect, is how social media algorithms work too, and on both sides of the screen. The algorithm itself learns the way a brain does, through sheer repetition. Every click, every pause, every share, every second you linger, is one more rep feeding the loop. The patterns get stronger, the predictions get sharper, the model’s internal wiring goes deeper. In a real sense, the algorithm is building its own version of neural pathways about you.

But here’s the twist. While it’s busy learning you, it’s also shaping you. It keeps serving the same flavor of content over and over, not just because it’s engaging in the moment, but because every repetition carves a groove on your side too. So you end up with two systems quietly training each other in parallel. The algorithm learning what reliably hooks you, and you slowly becoming the kind of person who gets hooked. The algorithm isn’t just predicting what you’ll like. It’s shaping what you’ll become. And you aren’t just consuming content. You’re teaching it, scroll by scroll, who to make you into. Over months and years, those pathways, on both ends, become you.

And this happens at a scale and speed our biology was never built to defend against.

So the next time you find yourself struggling to convince someone, or being convinced too quickly, or wondering why a political conversation went nowhere, remember. You’re not really fighting opinions. You’re fighting biology. You’re asking a brain to spend energy rebuilding itself, and brains, like most things in nature, prefer the path of least resistance.

The good news is that the same biology that traps us also frees us. Pathways are not destiny, they’re patterns. And patterns can be redrawn, slowly, deliberately, with patience. The same way kids work on their parents. The same way politicians work on the public. The same way brands work on us.

One thoughtful repetition at a time.

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Movie TV Tech Geeks #Movie #Persuasion #Dune #TheDarkTower 8 Worst Book-to-Movie Adaptations of All Time, Ranked http://dlvr.it/TSNpcc

“A well-known principle of human behavior says that when we ask someone to do us a favor we will be more successful if we provide a reason. People simply like to have reasons for what they do.”
― Robert B. Cialdini, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, 1984

#manipulation #persuasion #validation #influence #conversation #memory #neuroscience #campaigning #narratives #storyTelling #Psychology #socialPsych #socialPsychology #facilitation #Cialdini #book

“A well-known principle of human behavior says that when we ask someone to do us a favor we will be more successful if we provide a reason. People simply like to have reasons for what they do.”
― Robert B. Cialdini, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, 1984

#manipulation #persuasion #validation #influence #conversation #memory #neuroscience #campaigning #narratives #storyTelling #Psychology #socialPsych #socialPsychology #facilitation #Cialdini #book

A quotation from Ambrose Bierce

CONGREGATION, n. The subjects of an experiment in hypnotism.

Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?) American writer and journalist
“Congregation,” “Devil’s Dictionary” column, San Francisco Wasp (1881-08-12)

More about this quote: wist.info/bierce-ambrose/83549…

#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #ambrosebierce #devilsdictionary #church #congregation #hypnotism #persuasion

A quotation from Ambrose Bierce

CONGREGATION, n. The subjects of an experiment in hypnotism.

Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?) American writer and journalist
“Congregation,” “Devil’s Dictionary” column, San Francisco Wasp (1881-08-12)

More about this quote: wist.info/bierce-ambrose/83549…

#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #ambrosebierce #devilsdictionary #church #congregation #hypnotism #persuasion

A quotation from Ambrose Bierce

CONGREGATION, n. The subjects of an experiment in hypnotism.

Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?) American writer and journalist
“Congregation,” “Devil’s Dictionary” column, San Francisco Wasp (1881-08-12)

More about this quote: wist.info/bierce-ambrose/83549…

#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #ambrosebierce #devilsdictionary #church #congregation #hypnotism #persuasion

Orators [from the archives, 31 March 2021]

#Ichneumonidae #Rhyssapersuasoria #sabrewasp #rhetoric #persuasion #loqueliciteritas #radiosputnik #industrial #batteryacid #modularsystem #blackandwhite #dronescape #basimilusiteritasalter #insects #distortion #comareactor #darkwave #doomsdaybassoon #modulartechno #eurorackmodular #doombeats

Convincing Is Not Persuading

https://blog.alaindichiappari.dev/p/convincing-is-not-persuading

#HackerNews #Convincing #Is #Not #Persuading #communication #persuasion #psychology #debate

NBC News: Using AI makes writing more bland, study finds. “The research team found that users who heavily relied on large language models (LLMs) produced responses that diverged significantly in meaning from the answers of participants who only partially relied on LLMs or avoided their use altogether, suggesting heavy AI use alters the substance of humans’ arguments in addition to changing […]

Yale News: AI’s hidden bias: Chatbots can influence opinions without trying. “Prior research has shown that content generated by artificial intelligence (AI) that has been prompted to be persuasive can indeed shift people’s opinions. But this study provides evidence that the same is also true of content that is not intended to change minds, such as the summaries that popular chatbots […]

We are generally the better persuaded by the reasons we discover ourselves than by those given to us by others.
-- Blaise Pascal

⬆ #Wisdom #Quotes #BlaisePascal #Persuasion

⬇ #Photography #Panorama #Panopainting #Driftwood #Florida

Proposer des services de copywriting.

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A quotation from Euripides

MEDEA: I think the unjust man who can speak cleverly
   incurs the greatest penalty for, feeling confident
   to cloak injustice in fair speech,
   he dares the utmost villainy.
 
[ΜΉΔΕΙΑ: ἐμοὶ γὰρ ὅστις ἄδικος ὢν σοφὸς λέγειν
   πέφυκε, πλείστην ζημίαν ὀφλισκάνει:
   γλώσσῃ γὰρ αὐχῶν τἄδικ᾽ εὖ περιστελεῖν
   τολμᾷ πανουργεῖν.]

Euripides (485?-406? BC) Greek tragic dramatist
Medea [Μήδεια], l. 580ff (431 BC) [tr. Ewans (2022)]

More about (and translations of) this quote: wist.info/euripides/81800/

#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #euripides #medea #argument #boldness #coverup #debate #deceit #deception #dishonesty #eloquence #emboldening #evil #evildoer #fasttalker #glibness #injustice #justification #knavery #persuasion #silvertongue #smoothtalker #talkaway #wrongdoer

» Bare facts by themselves are not persuasive; they must be “storified” in a way that triggers people’s sense of self

» A smaller initial ask can increase the likelihood of agreement to a larger, related ask

A quotation from Mark Twain

How easy it is to make people believe a lie, and how hard it is to undo that work again!

Mark Twain (1835-1910) American writer [pseud. of Samuel Clemens]
Dictation (1906-12-02), The Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 2 (2013)

More about this quote: wist.info/twain-mark/43956/

#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #marktwain #belief #conviction #deceiving #deception #lie #lying #meme #persuasion

A quotation from Mark Twain

How easy it is to make people believe a lie, and how hard it is to undo that work again!

Mark Twain (1835-1910) American writer [pseud. of Samuel Clemens]
Dictation (1906-12-02), The Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 2 (2013)

More about this quote: wist.info/twain-mark/43956/

#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #marktwain #belief #conviction #deceiving #deception #lie #lying #meme #persuasion

A quotation from Mark Twain

How easy it is to make people believe a lie, and how hard it is to undo that work again!

Mark Twain (1835-1910) American writer [pseud. of Samuel Clemens]
Dictation (1906-12-02), The Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 2 (2013)

More about this quote: wist.info/twain-mark/43956/

#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #marktwain #belief #conviction #deceiving #deception #lie #lying #meme #persuasion

A quotation from Mark Twain

How easy it is to make people believe a lie, and how hard it is to undo that work again!

Mark Twain (1835-1910) American writer [pseud. of Samuel Clemens]
Dictation (1906-12-02), The Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 2 (2013)

More about this quote: wist.info/twain-mark/43956/

#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #marktwain #belief #conviction #deceiving #deception #lie #lying #meme #persuasion

A quotation from Mark Twain

How easy it is to make people believe a lie, and how hard it is to undo that work again!

Mark Twain (1835-1910) American writer [pseud. of Samuel Clemens]
Dictation (1906-12-02), The Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 2 (2013)

More about this quote: wist.info/twain-mark/43956/

#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #marktwain #belief #conviction #deceiving #deception #lie #lying #meme #persuasion

RE: https://hachyderm.io/@mariyadelano/115957290327801559

So thought-provoking - in a practical way! 😁Could be studied in school, continuously: the younger we start, the more we’ll learn, the less we’ll be ‘at the mercy*’ of marketers & manipulators of any & all persuasions (see what I did there?):
“Once you see how much effort is being spent on marketing certain worldviews to you and how much of that can be studied, analyzed, and replicated - you can’t unsee it.”
* there is no mercy 😐

Thanks so much for sharing your direct experiences & how they shaped your thought & understanding. Valuable insights. 😁🙏🏻

#marketing #manipulation #persuasion #propaganda #education #semiotics #reconnectingConsequencesToCauses

A quotation from Eric Hoffer

The real persuaders are our appetites, our fears, and above all our vanity. The skillful propagandist stirs and coaches these internal persuaders.

Eric Hoffer (1902-1983) American writer, philosopher, longshoreman
Passionate State of Mind, Aphorism 218 (1955)

More about this quote: wist.info/hoffer-eric/19720/

#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #erichoffer #appetite #appetites #darkside #ego #fear #passions #persuasion #pride #propaganda #vanity

BritBox January 2026 Schedule: New Movies & TV Shows

Link: https://film-book.com/britbox-january-2026-schedule-new-movies-tv-shows/?fsp_sid=118925

#BritBox #HamishMacbeth #Persuasion #RiotWomen #StreamingNews #TheGame #TraceyUllman’sShow

Very glad that our research proposal 'Replicating a Classic Study on Argument Quantity and Quality' was funded by the NWO replication studies programme. List of all funded projects: https://www.openscience.nl/en/news/27-studies-re-examined #argumentation #persuasion #research

NBC News: AI chatbots used inaccurate information to change people’s political opinions, study finds. “But the study also said that the persuasiveness of AI chatbots wasn’t entirely on the up-and-up: Within the reams of information the chatbots provided as answers, researchers wrote that they discovered many inaccurate assertions.”

https://rbfirehose.com/2025/12/05/nbc-news-ai-chatbots-used-inaccurate-information-to-change-peoples-political-opinions-study-finds/

A quotation from Hannah Arendt

What stuck in the minds of these men who had become murderers was simply the notion of being involved in something historic, grandiose, unique (“a great task that occurs once in two thousand years”), which must therefore be difficult to bear. This was important, because the murderers were not sadists or killers by nature; on the contrary, a systematic effort was made to weed out all those who derived physical pleasure from what they did. The troops of the Einsatzgruppen had been drafted from the Armed S.S., a military unit with hardly more crimes in its record than any ordinary unit of the German Army, and their commanders had been chosen by Heydrich from the S.S. élite with academic degrees. Hence the problem was how to overcome not so much their conscience as the animal pity by which all normal men are affected in the presence of physical suffering. The trick used by Himmler — who apparently was rather strongly afflicted by these instinctive reactions himself — was very simple and probably very effective; it consisted in turning these instincts around, as it were, in directing them toward the self. So that instead of saying: What horrible things I did to people!, the murderers would be able to say: What horrible things I had to watch in the pursuance of my duties, how heavily the task weighed upon my shoulders!

Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) German-American philosopher, political theorist
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, ch. 6 (1963)

More info about this quote: wist.info/arendt-hannah/13940/

#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #hannaharendt #banalityofevil #burden #difficulty #duty #genocide #Holocaust #killer #murder #murderer #persuasion #pity #selfcenteredness #selfdeception #selfpity #task #selfjustification

A quotation from Hannah Arendt

What stuck in the minds of these men who had become murderers was simply the notion of being involved in something historic, grandiose, unique (“a great task that occurs once in two thousand years”), which must therefore be difficult to bear. This was important, because the murderers were not sadists or killers by nature; on the contrary, a systematic effort was made to weed out all those who derived physical pleasure from what they did. The troops of the Einsatzgruppen had been drafted from the Armed S.S., a military unit with hardly more crimes in its record than any ordinary unit of the German Army, and their commanders had been chosen by Heydrich from the S.S. élite with academic degrees. Hence the problem was how to overcome not so much their conscience as the animal pity by which all normal men are affected in the presence of physical suffering. The trick used by Himmler — who apparently was rather strongly afflicted by these instinctive reactions himself — was very simple and probably very effective; it consisted in turning these instincts around, as it were, in directing them toward the self. So that instead of saying: What horrible things I did to people!, the murderers would be able to say: What horrible things I had to watch in the pursuance of my duties, how heavily the task weighed upon my shoulders!

Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) German-American philosopher, political theorist
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, ch. 6 (1963)

More info about this quote: wist.info/arendt-hannah/13940/

#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #hannaharendt #banalityofevil #burden #difficulty #duty #genocide #Holocaust #killer #murder #murderer #persuasion #pity #selfcenteredness #selfdeception #selfpity #task #selfjustification

A quotation from Hannah Arendt

What stuck in the minds of these men who had become murderers was simply the notion of being involved in something historic, grandiose, unique (“a great task that occurs once in two thousand years”), which must therefore be difficult to bear. This was important, because the murderers were not sadists or killers by nature; on the contrary, a systematic effort was made to weed out all those who derived physical pleasure from what they did. The troops of the Einsatzgruppen had been drafted from the Armed S.S., a military unit with hardly more crimes in its record than any ordinary unit of the German Army, and their commanders had been chosen by Heydrich from the S.S. élite with academic degrees. Hence the problem was how to overcome not so much their conscience as the animal pity by which all normal men are affected in the presence of physical suffering. The trick used by Himmler — who apparently was rather strongly afflicted by these instinctive reactions himself — was very simple and probably very effective; it consisted in turning these instincts around, as it were, in directing them toward the self. So that instead of saying: What horrible things I did to people!, the murderers would be able to say: What horrible things I had to watch in the pursuance of my duties, how heavily the task weighed upon my shoulders!

Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) German-American philosopher, political theorist
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, ch. 6 (1963)

More info about this quote: wist.info/arendt-hannah/13940/

#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #hannaharendt #banalityofevil #burden #difficulty #duty #genocide #Holocaust #killer #murder #murderer #persuasion #pity #selfcenteredness #selfdeception #selfpity #task #selfjustification

A quotation from Hannah Arendt

What stuck in the minds of these men who had become murderers was simply the notion of being involved in something historic, grandiose, unique (“a great task that occurs once in two thousand years”), which must therefore be difficult to bear. This was important, because the murderers were not sadists or killers by nature; on the contrary, a systematic effort was made to weed out all those who derived physical pleasure from what they did. The troops of the Einsatzgruppen had been drafted from the Armed S.S., a military unit with hardly more crimes in its record than any ordinary unit of the German Army, and their commanders had been chosen by Heydrich from the S.S. élite with academic degrees. Hence the problem was how to overcome not so much their conscience as the animal pity by which all normal men are affected in the presence of physical suffering. The trick used by Himmler — who apparently was rather strongly afflicted by these instinctive reactions himself — was very simple and probably very effective; it consisted in turning these instincts around, as it were, in directing them toward the self. So that instead of saying: What horrible things I did to people!, the murderers would be able to say: What horrible things I had to watch in the pursuance of my duties, how heavily the task weighed upon my shoulders!

Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) German-American philosopher, political theorist
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, ch. 6 (1963)

More info about this quote: wist.info/arendt-hannah/13940/

#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #hannaharendt #banalityofevil #burden #difficulty #duty #genocide #Holocaust #killer #murder #murderer #persuasion #pity #selfcenteredness #selfdeception #selfpity #task #selfjustification

A quotation from John Adams

As I have always been convinced that abuse of Words, has been the great instrument of Sophistry and Chicanery — of party, faction and Division in Society.

John Adams (1735-1826) American lawyer, Founding Father, statesman, US President (1797-1801)
Letter (1819-03-31) to J. H. Tiffany

More info about this quote: wist.info/adams-john/36295/

#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #johnadams #equivocation #ambiguity #chicanery #deception #language #meaning #persuasion #rhetoric #sophistry #talking #terminology #wordplay #words #definition

A quotation from John Adams

As I have always been convinced that abuse of Words, has been the great instrument of Sophistry and Chicanery — of party, faction and Division in Society.

John Adams (1735-1826) American lawyer, Founding Father, statesman, US President (1797-1801)
Letter (1819-03-31) to J. H. Tiffany

More info about this quote: wist.info/adams-john/36295/

#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #johnadams #equivocation #ambiguity #chicanery #deception #language #meaning #persuasion #rhetoric #sophistry #talking #terminology #wordplay #words #definition

A quotation from John Adams

As I have always been convinced that abuse of Words, has been the great instrument of Sophistry and Chicanery — of party, faction and Division in Society.

John Adams (1735-1826) American lawyer, Founding Father, statesman, US President (1797-1801)
Letter (1819-03-31) to J. H. Tiffany

More info about this quote: wist.info/adams-john/36295/

#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #johnadams #equivocation #ambiguity #chicanery #deception #language #meaning #persuasion #rhetoric #sophistry #talking #terminology #wordplay #words #definition

A quotation from John Adams

As I have always been convinced that abuse of Words, has been the great instrument of Sophistry and Chicanery — of party, faction and Division in Society.

John Adams (1735-1826) American lawyer, Founding Father, statesman, US President (1797-1801)
Letter (1819-03-31) to J. H. Tiffany

More info about this quote: wist.info/adams-john/36295/

#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #johnadams #equivocation #ambiguity #chicanery #deception #language #meaning #persuasion #rhetoric #sophistry #talking #terminology #wordplay #words #definition

At the end of reasons comes persuasion.
-- Ludwig Wittgenstein

⬆ #Wisdom #Quotes #LudwigWittgenstein #Persuasion

⬇ #Photography #Panorama #LavaFlow #Galapagos #Geology

A quotation from Abraham Lincoln

When the conduct of men is designed to be influenced, persuasion, kind, unassuming persuasion, should ever be adopted. It is an old and a true maxim, that a “drop of honey catches more flies than a gallon of gall.” So with men. If you would win a man to your cause, first convince him that you are his sincere friend. Therein is a drop of honey that catches his heart, which, say what he will, is the great high road to his reason, and which, when once gained, you will find but little trouble in convincing his judgment of the justice of your cause, if indeed that cause really be a just one.

Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) American lawyer, politician, US President (1861-65)
Speech (1843-02-22), Temperance Address, Washington Temperance Society, Second Presbyterian Church, Springfield, Illinois

More info about this quote: wist.info/lincoln-abraham/4516…

#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #abrahamlincoln #abrahamlincolnquotes #abelincoln #appealtoemotion #cause #conviction #friendliness #friendship #influence #persuasion

Trump Supporters Are Lying About Biden ‘Censorship’ To Justify Brendan Carr’s Unconstitutional Kimmel Threats

https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://www.techdirt.com/2025/09/23/trump-supporters-are-lying-about-biden-censorship-to-justify-brendan-carrs-unconstitutional-kimmel-threats/

"Being able TO TALK ABOUT IT ... is a privilege." Words matter ... not condoning violence. #debate #politics #rational #philosophy #law #analysis #social #issues #society #errtlings #android_dreams #policy #psychology #persuasion #politician #lifestyle #cambride www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zn0_...

Cambridge Debate Coach Reveals...

𝐀ctrice 𝐝𝐮 𝐉our

𝐃𝐚𝐤𝐨𝐭𝐚 𝐉𝐨𝐡𝐧𝐬𝐨𝐧
Actrice Productrice Américaine

#dakotajohnson c'est déjà plus de 30 Films

#ActriceDuJour #actress #actrice #cinegenres #cinema
#CrazyInAlabama #thesocialnetwork #beastly #21JumpStreet #needforspeed #Cymbeline #FiftyShadesOfGrey #ChloeAndTheo #blackmass #ABiggerSplash #Single #suspiria #badtimesattheelroyale #chacharealsmooth #Persuasion #daddio #madameweb #materialists #Splitsville #Verity

𝐅ilmographie :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hdhncsx_Xhk

A quotation from Ambrose Bierce

REASONABLE, adj. Accessible to the infection of our own opinions. Hospitable to persuasion, dissuasion and evasion.

Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?) American writer and journalist
“Reasonable,” The Devil’s Dictionary (1911)

Sourcing, notes: wist.info/bierce-ambrose/77857…

#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #ambrosebierce #devilsdictionary #openmind #persuasion #reasonableness

At the end of reasons comes persuasion.
-- Ludwig Wittgenstein

⬆ #Wisdom #Quotes #LudwigWittgenstein #Persuasion

⬇ #Photography #Panorama #Hammock #KinderhookCreek #NewYork

A quotation from Euripides

HECUBA:      The clear actions of a man,
   Agamemnon, should speak louder than any words.
   good words should get their goodness from our lives
   and nowhere else; the evil we do should show,
   a rottenness that festers in our speech
   and what we say, in capable of being glozed
   with a film of pretty words.
                    There are men, I know,
   sophists who make a science of persuasion,
   glozing evil with the slick of loveliness;
   but in the end a speciousness will show.
   The imposters are punished; not one escapes
   his death.
 
[ἙΚΆΒΗ: Ἀγάμεμνον, ἀνθρώποισιν οὐκ ἐχρῆν ποτε
   τῶν πραγμάτων τὴν γλῶσσαν ἰσχύειν πλέον:
   ἀλλ᾽, εἴτε χρήστ᾽ ἔδρασε, χρήστ᾽ ἔδει λέγειν,
   εἴτ᾽ αὖ πονηρά, τοὺς λόγους εἶναι σαθρούς,
   καὶ μὴ δύνασθαι τἄδικ᾽ εὖ λέγειν ποτέ.
   σοφοὶ μὲν οὖν εἰσ᾽ οἱ τάδ᾽ ἠκριβωκότες,
   ἀλλ᾽ οὐ δύνανται διὰ τέλους εἶναι σοφοί,
   κακῶς δ᾽ ἀπώλοντ᾽: οὔτις ἐξήλυξέ πω.]

Euripides (485?-406? BC) Greek tragic dramatist
Hecuba [Hekabe; Ἑκάβη], l. 1186ff (c. 424 BC) [tr. Arrowsmith (1958)]

Sourcing, notes, other translations: wist.info/euripides/77262/

#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #euripides #hecuba #actions #evil #excuse #glibness #persuasion #propaganda #rationale #smoothtalker #sophistry #wordsanddeeds

Stop Persuading Your Readers

Most writers misunderstand their purpose Continue reading on The Writing Cooperative »
https://writingcooperative.com/stop-persuading-your-readers-a232bf60892

#persuasion #purpose #writingstyle #writerspurpose #writing
@indieauthors

Stop Persuading Your Readers

Most writers misunderstand their purpose Continue reading on The Writing Cooperative »
https://writingcooperative.com/stop-persuading-your-readers-a232bf60892

#persuasion #purpose #writingstyle #writerspurpose #writing
@indieauthors

Stop Persuading Your Readers

Most writers misunderstand their purpose Continue reading on The Writing Cooperative »
https://writingcooperative.com/stop-persuading-your-readers-a232bf60892

#persuasion #purpose #writingstyle #writerspurpose #writing
@indieauthors

Stop Persuading Your Readers

Most writers misunderstand their purpose Continue reading on The Writing Cooperative »
https://writingcooperative.com/stop-persuading-your-readers-a232bf60892

#persuasion #purpose #writingstyle #writerspurpose #writing
@indieauthors