Don’t get easily persuaded by political rhetoric, be more active and informed voters in GE15

With GE15 is just around the corner, like fish in water, we are immersed in persuasion even before we know we are swimming.

At this point, when there is no one holding a bludgeon over our heads to make we vote (or not) for or against a politician, a party, or a coalition, it is important to recognize the power of language to make a better decision.

Firstly, we should be conscious that the connection between the word and the world is not merely referential, nor is its referentiality innocent of human interest and motivation; we can do things with words.

And this forms the very basic function of rhetoric, the use of words by human agents to form attitudes, or to induce actions in other human agents, which is certainly not “magical”.

Using the primary resource of human speech (spoken, written or visual) is a thoroughly realistic way. But it becomes problematic when many of us are passive language users who unconsciously agree to make and ‘buy into’ the taken for granted knowledge, assumptions, and inferences in communication, which then affects the ways we interpret and understand ‘reality’.

For example, when the other animals in Orwell’s (1945) Animal Farm are dazzled by a porker pig named Squealer, they are not unconscious in the Freudian sense of being repressed, but simply in that they are not aware of Squealer’s pseudo-logic, alongside his rhetorical skills used to engineer consent.

Squealer is charismatic, and when he is convincing the other animals, he has a way of skipping from side to side and whisking his tail which is deemed very persuasive.

In one of the many instances, Squealer manages a great public-relations stunt by portraying the pigs as near-martyrs who only think of others and never themselves when explaining to the murmuring animals why the pigs have been getting all the milk and apples: “It is for your sake that we drink that milk and eat those apples, (Orwell, 1945, p.23)”.

The pigs’ greed is constructed as a great sacrifice, appealing to science (which presumably has proven that apples and milk are “absolutely necessary to the well-being of a pig”) and lying about pigs disliking the very food they are hoarding.

Consequently, the other animals receiving less and less food, while the pigs growing fatter.

Understanding the rhetoric of our politicians will save us from being manipulated in the GE15, we must make better choices in GE15. Below are three key suggestions that I want to make:

Beware of familial rhetoric

As in most collectivist cultures, any notions of a family are always persuasive because they strike a resonant and deeply embedded cultural chord in Malaysia.

Politicians come to our homes as our Abahs, aunties, uncles, brothers, and sisters once every five years, with a smile on their faces, bringing all sorts of goodies, and suddenly interested about our well-beings. Such seasonal (and in some cases superficial) means of appeasement have been used since the Roman Empire.

Rome was eight and a half centuries old when the Roman poet, Juvenal criticized about ‘bread and circuses,’ Latin: panem et circenses in his poetry, i.e., how public consent was manufactured through diversion, distraction, or the mere satisfaction of the immediate need of the people, i.e., bread (food) and circuses (entertainment), as opposed to exemplary or excellent public service or policy.

In 2022, we Malaysians, should not become trapped in the reciprocation rule that we must repay, in kind, what these politicians brought to our homes with our votes.

They are not doing us any favour, it is their responsibility, as politicians, to act on our behalf and to protect our interests.

Beware of the predictions about the future

Some politicians (and supporters) will prophetically create perceptions of value for unexplored and unknowable spaces that exist at a time-distance from the here-and-now in the future, and hence limit the potential of what can be. Such power of futurological prediction is a significant one, because injunctions about what we must do or must not do now can be legitimized in terms of such predictions about the future.

The promise or threat of the outcome is typically expressed in the form of rhetorical questions.

For instance: ‘Do we want a more prosperous country for our progeny?’(Pre-assumed answer: yes) Or ‘Do we want the future of the nation to be destroyed just because we choose wrongly?’(Pre-assumed answer: no).

These rhetorical questions provide ostensible answers in the way that the questions are phrased, assuming that the proof is given.

But in the case where your politicians try to prove what is not self-evident by means of itself, they actually beg the original question, i.e., by making an argument that assumes the truth of its conclusion, rather than proving it.

Why? Because like you and me, we must realize that they cannot prove something that is yet to happen. If they still say they can, they may just be another ‘Raja Bomoh’ (Shaman King) for us.

Beware of the appeal to fear

Situating something in the future unavoidably involves an element of uncertainty: we can never be sure what eventually will happen, and this understandably causes fear, which consequently make a fear appeal a persuasive message.

A fear appeal argument attempts to arouse our emotion of fear by depicting a personally relevant and significant threat by: (i) citing some possible outcome that is fearful for us, then (ii) recommending us to a course of action, before (iii) arguing that in order to avoid the fearful outcome, we should take the recommended course of action.

Here, it is significant to realize that such appeal is a powerful technique of argumentation because it is capable to rouse and exploit our sentiments and preconceptions as it contains some implicit external threatening scenarios that are intended to evoke irrational fears: fear of change, of loss of privilege, of the future, of other races; in principle, of almost anything can be constructed as a threat to ‘Us’.

At this point, we need to check the psychological underpinnings of our own fear to be more informed, level-headed citizens.

Otherwise, there is a tendency for us accept a conclusion with a menacing either/or projection, while backgrounding other possible alternative options just to release ourselves from the uncertainty. When we reach this stage, it is important to recognize that it is no longer a persuasion, but a subtle coercion.

Let’s vote for politicians who can work for the rakyat, based on facts, not fears.

All the best, Malaysians!

Dr Nadilla Jamil, Department of English Language and Literature, Abdul Hamid Abu Sulayman Kulliyyah of Islamic Revealed Knowledge and Human Sciences, International Islamic University Malaysia.