Sep 27, 2025 08:09 PM
(This post was last modified: Sep 27, 2025 10:14 PM by Magical Realist.)
Rhetoric in the sense of seeming to say something meaningful and important but which doesn't capture the reality of what is going on in any way. Such speaking without saying is designed to sway emotions and mass opinion. To create the illusion of articulating a truth when it is merely reciting cliche talking points and commonplace generalizations without any substance. And one of the key hallmarks of rhetoric is using a lot of abstractions and imputing to them an absolute reality and agreed-upon value without really addressing the actual situation. But in fact the reality we endeavor to describe is rarely binary or understandable in neat black and white terms. It is a subtle and shaded mix of many factors and relationships that must be teased out and illuminated thoughtfully with care. Especially is this true of politics, where the complexity of the situation requires us to avoid reified abstractions and simplistic correlations in order to track insightfully the organic unfolding of relevant intelligibility.
"To keep to the social level, our political universe is peopled exclusively by myths and monsters; all it contains is absolutes and abstract entities. This is illustrated by all the words of our political and social vocabulary: nation, security, capitalism, communism, fascism, order, authority, property, democracy. We never use them in phrases such as: There is democracy to the extent that... or: There is capitalism in so far as... The use of expressions like ‘to the extent that’ is beyond our intellectual capacity. Each of these words seems to represent for us an absolute reality, unaffected by conditions, or an absolute objective, independent of methods of action, or an absolute evil; and at the same time we make all these words mean, successively or simultaneously, anything whatsoever. Our lives are lived, in actual fact, among changing, varying realities, subject to the casual play of external necessities, and modifying themselves according to specific conditions within specific limits.”
–Simone Weil
"To keep to the social level, our political universe is peopled exclusively by myths and monsters; all it contains is absolutes and abstract entities. This is illustrated by all the words of our political and social vocabulary: nation, security, capitalism, communism, fascism, order, authority, property, democracy. We never use them in phrases such as: There is democracy to the extent that... or: There is capitalism in so far as... The use of expressions like ‘to the extent that’ is beyond our intellectual capacity. Each of these words seems to represent for us an absolute reality, unaffected by conditions, or an absolute objective, independent of methods of action, or an absolute evil; and at the same time we make all these words mean, successively or simultaneously, anything whatsoever. Our lives are lived, in actual fact, among changing, varying realities, subject to the casual play of external necessities, and modifying themselves according to specific conditions within specific limits.”
–Simone Weil
