Aleks’s Reviews > The Art of Political Storytelling: Why Stories Win Votes in Post-truth Politics > Status Update

When Aaron Banks says that you’ve got to ‘connect with people emotionally’ if you want to win them over, he’s basically quoting Aristotle (although he may not, of course, realize this). A hundred or so years after Thucydides had tackled the subject of linguistic spin, Aristotle, in his Art of Rhetoric, wrote of the way that an orator needed to play on the audience’s emotions. Effective persuasion, according to his formula, consists of three fundamental elements. First, there’s ‘logos’, or pure argument, which involves creating a rationally convincing case—of marshalling your facts. Second is ‘ethos’, the character and status of the speaker. An audience is more likely to be persuaded by someone they trust, like, and feel who has authority over the subject matter. Finally, there’s ‘pathos’—the mood created between speaker and audience. ‘[T]hings do not seem the same to those who love and those who hate, nor to those who are angry and those who are calm,’ Aristotle says. The aim of rhetoric is to guide the audience towards making a particular judgment about the matter at hand. It’s therefore important to create the conditions that are most likely to lead them to this judgment. Emotions such as anger, pity, and fear ‘are those things by the alteration of which men differ with regard to those judgments’. Or to put it another way, provoke a sense of anger, fear, and resentment, and you engineer a mood which is more amenable to your battle cry of taking back control.