"Don't believe everything you think"

“Don’t believe everything you think” – my new favorite bumper sticker.

Personally, I think rhetoric is misunderstood, and has been misunderstood for a very long time. Society as a whole seems to consider it a dirty word. Anyone who engages in rhetoric is essentially a used salesman trying to sell us a lemon or a politician trying to get our vote. If we are truly smart, we will disregard this rhetoric, acknowledging it as the artless flattery Plato’s Socrates deemed it. We will not buy that lemon no matter how nicely that salesman tries to sell that car. We will not cast that vote – for the politician in the “other” party – no matter how persuasive that politician’s rhetoric is. Or no matter how reasonable each argument is. We have come to believe the lie that rhetoric is persuasion and that persuasion is brainwashing. We have come to believe that everything we think is truth and that there is no need to consider beliefs beyond our own truth.

Recently, I’ve become very fond of Paulo Freire’s work, particularly Pedagogy of the Oppressed. He talks at length about what he calls the banking concept of education and how that form of education creates robots who function in a reality not of their making without ever questioning that reality or trying to transform it. We fight the notion that we are robots doing what our oppressors bid us to do, yet we refuse to consider that what our neighbor believes could have validity if that belief conflicts with our own. Using rhetoric isn’t brainwashing, but avoiding it may be. Our beliefs are only a starting point. Through rhetoric we can explore the validity of our beliefs and expand those beliefs. We can challenge our own beliefs by testing them against the beliefs of others.

In Pedagogy, Freire also says that the banking form of education considers students to be empty vessels that teachers then fill with knowledge. True communication between teacher and student does not occur because there is no need. The teacher will just tell the student what the student needs to know. This mentality is not conducive to student creation nor is it conducive to critical thinking; in essence, it does not foster reasonable thought, which I believe is the crux of rhetoric. Rhetoric is a tool to engage in critical thinking. We can use it to come to reasonable solutions. We can use it to reassess our beliefs so that we don’t believe everything we think. And we can use it to transform our reality.