Name: Win Every Argument
Rating: 4.3 (554 reviews)
Author: Mehdi Hasan

What’s in it for me? A short introduction to the ancient art of rhetoric.

Mehdi Hasan has been arguing his whole life. Today, it’s how he makes his living. As a TV pundit and anchor, he’s gone toe-to-toe with presidents, prime ministers, and spy chiefs inside the White House, Downing Street, and even the Saudi embassy.

Hasan doesn’t just love arguing, he also sees it as the lifeblood of democracy. Arguments, he says, expose us to new ideas and help us solve our problems. Philosophically speaking, they lead us to the truth. As the English thinker John Stuart Mill put it, to know only your side of an issue is to know little. In other words, if you can’t back up your own claims and refute those of your opponents, you don’t really have a good reason for preferring either opinion.

Knowing how to argue well also has practical benefits: it’s a soft skill that can help you advance your career and advance your lot in life. In the words of Winston Churchill, oratory is a precious gift: those who wield it enjoy a “power more durable than that of a great king.”

In this Blink, we’ll be looking at this vital skill and helping you win your arguments. To do that, though, we first need to correct some common misconceptions about what we're doing when we argue.

Persuasive arguments appeal to facts and feelings

Facts don’t care about feelings. So goes the internet adage, anyway. It’s an appealing idea: truth is truth, whether or not we want to believe it. From this thought follows the equally appealing idea that debate is an inherently rational activity. It’s about following the facts and accepting the better argument – the argument which best fits the evidence.

But it’s never been that simple. The ancient Greeks called the language deployed in such debates rhetoric – a word derived from rhetor, meaning “public speaker.” But for philosophers like Plato, rhetoric was downright pernicious. Honey-tongued debaters, he said, tend to be amoral. Theirs is an art of persuasion that’s just as easily turned to deceiving audiences as it is to the noble task of uncovering truth. Other thinkers didn’t go that far. Aristotle, who wrote the book on rhetoric, literally and figuratively, noted that proper reasoning or logic and rhetoric may be separate pursuits, but they can – and often do – overlap.

For Aristotle, persuasive speech has three modes. The first is ethos – the Greek word for “character.” Ethos in this context concerns the credibility of a person. We’re more inclined to accept what a practicing doctor has to say about vaccinations, for example, than an anonymous blog author. At least, we should be, anyway; as we saw during the pandemic, the link between expertise and credibility isn’t as strong as it once was – but that’s a different topic.

The second is pathos or “emotion.” In Aristotle’s words, “Our judgments when we are pleased and friendly are not the same as when we are pained and hostile.” Imagine that our doctor’s credentials haven’t persuaded their reluctant patient, so they start telling the patient a story about a couple in perfect health who refused to get vaccinated. Both died within 15 days of each other, the doctor says, leaving behind four young children. That’s pathos: the attempt to sway an audience by appealing to powerful emotions such as love and fear.

Finally, there’s logos or reasoning. This form of persuasion deals in facts and figures. If our doctor points out that multiple peer-reviewed studies show that COVID vaccines result in a 90 percent decrease in the risk of hospitalization and death, they’re appealing to logos.

In contemporary debates, it’s usually logos that’s asked to do the heavy lifting. That makes sense: we extol facts and figures, data and statistics, because we want our arguments to be rooted in truth. In an ideal world, the evidence would do its own talking. But that’s rarely how public debates play out. In the real world, logically unassailable arguments fall short and leave audiences cold. People are stubborn. Reactive. Overconfident. Afraid of change. More importantly, they’re emotionally invested in beliefs, ideas, and ideals. That adage, then, has it back to front: often enough, it’s our feelings which don’t care about the facts.

For self-avowed rationalists, the issue is simple: we’ve forgotten how to reason properly. If we trained ourselves to think more dispassionately, public debates would become more rational.

That view assumes that reason and emotion are separate – and contradictory – things. But new research into human cognition has called that assumption into question. As the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio summarizes the findings of this new research, humans are neither thinking nor feeling machines, but “feeling machines that think.” Let’s break that down.

In his acclaimed book Descartes’ Error, Damasio looks at people who’ve suffered damage to the part of the brain which handles emotional processing – the prefrontal cortex. At first glance, these people seemed to be reasoning machines: theirs was a black-and-white world of pure logic in which the fuzzy gray tones of emotions had disappeared. Being unemotional, though, didn’t make them more rational. Instead, they became “uninvolved spectators” in their own lives who struggled to assign different values to different options. They could know, but they couldn’t feel. Reason, Damasio concludes, isn’t a standalone faculty. Without feelings, our decision-making landscape becomes “hopelessly flat.” In short, to make rational decisions we need a jolt of emotion.

What does that have to do with winning arguments? In a word, everything. To win an argument, you have to get your listeners to make a decision – they have to choose you over your opponent. If neuroscientists like Damasio are right and the heart leads the head, pure logos won’t cut it: you also have to appeal to listeners’ feelings. This isn’t about jettisoning reason and simply saying what people want to hear. The point, here, is that audiences may only accept better, more truthful arguments once the person making them has established an emotional connection. Put differently, pathos may be the best vehicle to deliver logos.

If you want to persuade people, tell stories

How, then, can you appeal to listeners’ emotions while still making rational, evidence-based arguments? Well, you can tell stories.

Storytelling is as old as humanity. We’ve been telling each other stories ever since our distant ancestors started painting wooly mammoths on the walls of their caves. According to the evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar, around two-thirds of our daily conversations consist of a particular kind of story: gossip. When humans communicate, in other words, they tell stories.

Sometimes it’s okay to play the man, not the ball

In sports like soccer and basketball, you’re told to play the ball, not the man – or woman. Tackles that win the ball are fair game. If you bring down your opponent, though, you’ve committed a foul. It’s the same in public debates – or so we like to think.

Your aim is to go after the argument, not the person making it. Bringing down an opponent is the logical equivalent of a sporting foul: a fallacy. It’s ad hominem – an argument “to the person.” In theory, the merits of the person speaking have nothing to do with the soundness of what they’re saying. As Michael Austin, the author of a best-selling study about rhetoric called Reading the World, puts it: if Adolph Hitler said the world was spherical, that wouldn’t make it flat.

Final Summary

Winning arguments isn’t a matter of being right or wrong – it’s about persuasion. That has an obvious downside: unscrupulous actors can use all kinds of dirty tricks to come out on top. But that doesn’t mean that the facts don’t matter. Effective arguments make those facts compelling by appealing to people’s emotions and calling out bad-faith actors.

Kernaussagen in Win Every Argument

Worum geht es in Win Every Argument?

Win Every Argument (2023) is a guide to the art of argument by one of the world’s most combative debaters: journalist, anchor, and writer Mehdi Hasan. Drawing on ancient theories of persuasion, neuroscientific theories of cognition, and the rhetorical tricks of contemporary politicians, Hasan reveals the secrets to winning arguments in today’s post-factual world.

Über den Autor

Mehdi Hasan is an award-winning British American journalist, anchor, and author. He’s the host of The Mehdi Hasan Show on MSNBC and a regular contributor to newspapers including the New York Times and the Washington Post. Hasan is a former political editor of the New Statesman and a former columnist for the Intercept. Win Every Argument is his second book.