browsing deer
Silver Member
A very dismal and heartbreaking think piece by Scott Adams.
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Adams, mind you, is not endorsing Trump or supporting his politics. ("I don't think my political views align with anybody," he tells The Washington Post, "not even another human being.") And he is not saying that Trump would be the best president. What the Bay Area-based cartoonist recognizes, he says, is the careful art behind Trump's rhetorical techniques. And The Donald, he says, is playing his competitors like a fiddle -- before beating them like a drum. Most simply put: Adams believes Trump will win because he's "a master persuader."
The Manhattan mogul is so deft at the powers of persuasion, Adams believes, that the candidate could have run as a Democrat and, by picking different hot-button issues, still won this presidency. In other words: Trump is such a master linguistic strategist that he could have turned the political chessboard around and still embarrassed the field.
Adams does not claim to be a trained political analyst. His stated credentials in this arena, says Adams -- who holds an MBA from UC Berkeley -- largely involve being a certified hypnotist and, as a writer and business author, an eternal student in the techniques of persuasive rhetoric. (His self-help memoir is titled "How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life.")
"The most important thing when you study hypnosis is that you learn that humans are irrational," Adams says. "Until you understand that, hypnosis is hard to do. ... For me, it was this great awakening to understand that humans are deeply irrational, and it's probably the greatest influence on me in terms of my writing."
"This was a trick I learned from Bil Keane," the late creator of "Family Circus," Adams says. "He basically taught me to stop writing for myself, which I realized I had been doing -- writing a comic that I wanted to read."
So Adams pivoted to write more about the workplace, and the budding "Dilbert" in the early '90s became "about this huge part of people's lives that was invisible to the rest of the world and about suffering in a hundred different ways."
"By simply mentioning that world," Adams says, the comic connected with readers "on an emotional level."
And isn't that essentially, in turn, what Trump is doing? He is acknowledging the suffering of some, Adams says, and then appealing emotionally to that.
And he bolsters that approach, Adams says, by "exploiting the business model" like an entrepreneur. In this model, which "the news industry doesn't have the ability to change ... the media doesn't really have the option of ignoring the most interesting story," says Adams, contending that Trump "can always be the most interesting story if he has nothing to fear and nothing to lose."
Having nothing to lose essentially then increases his chance of winning, because it opens up his field of rhetorical play. "Psychology is the only necessary skill for running for president," writes Adams, adding: "Trump knows psychology."
Read more at Michael Cavna - Donald Trump will win in a landslide, says 'Dilbert' creator Scott Adams
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"
Adams, mind you, is not endorsing Trump or supporting his politics. ("I don't think my political views align with anybody," he tells The Washington Post, "not even another human being.") And he is not saying that Trump would be the best president. What the Bay Area-based cartoonist recognizes, he says, is the careful art behind Trump's rhetorical techniques. And The Donald, he says, is playing his competitors like a fiddle -- before beating them like a drum. Most simply put: Adams believes Trump will win because he's "a master persuader."
The Manhattan mogul is so deft at the powers of persuasion, Adams believes, that the candidate could have run as a Democrat and, by picking different hot-button issues, still won this presidency. In other words: Trump is such a master linguistic strategist that he could have turned the political chessboard around and still embarrassed the field.
Adams does not claim to be a trained political analyst. His stated credentials in this arena, says Adams -- who holds an MBA from UC Berkeley -- largely involve being a certified hypnotist and, as a writer and business author, an eternal student in the techniques of persuasive rhetoric. (His self-help memoir is titled "How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life.")
"The most important thing when you study hypnosis is that you learn that humans are irrational," Adams says. "Until you understand that, hypnosis is hard to do. ... For me, it was this great awakening to understand that humans are deeply irrational, and it's probably the greatest influence on me in terms of my writing."
"This was a trick I learned from Bil Keane," the late creator of "Family Circus," Adams says. "He basically taught me to stop writing for myself, which I realized I had been doing -- writing a comic that I wanted to read."
So Adams pivoted to write more about the workplace, and the budding "Dilbert" in the early '90s became "about this huge part of people's lives that was invisible to the rest of the world and about suffering in a hundred different ways."
"By simply mentioning that world," Adams says, the comic connected with readers "on an emotional level."
And isn't that essentially, in turn, what Trump is doing? He is acknowledging the suffering of some, Adams says, and then appealing emotionally to that.
And he bolsters that approach, Adams says, by "exploiting the business model" like an entrepreneur. In this model, which "the news industry doesn't have the ability to change ... the media doesn't really have the option of ignoring the most interesting story," says Adams, contending that Trump "can always be the most interesting story if he has nothing to fear and nothing to lose."
Having nothing to lose essentially then increases his chance of winning, because it opens up his field of rhetorical play. "Psychology is the only necessary skill for running for president," writes Adams, adding: "Trump knows psychology."
Read more at Michael Cavna - Donald Trump will win in a landslide, says 'Dilbert' creator Scott Adams
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