One of my altered-state conversations with Joseph Smallwood, an American of the 1800s, contained this description of Abraham Lincoln’s persuasive powers as part of a discussion of how everyone sees the world differently. As usual, sentences in italics are mine, those in Roman are Joseph’s.
[December 27, 2005]
Your mental processes furnish the analogies, always. That’s what they do. What somebody sets in front of you is one thing. The connections it suggests is a different thing. That is why three people looking at the same thing not only have their different opinions about it among them—they each are in their own world about it in a way. They each think about other things that suggest themselves. So you can see how rich this makes things. You take a thousand men surviving a battle, or even a hard winter, and they will each one of them have been associating it with stuff from their past before that – and not just in that lifetime, either! Everything they are is affected by everything that happens to every part of them. You think that’s simple?
It ain’t that it’s hard to understand how disagreements arise. It is more surprising when any two people see things the same! That’s why if you want to persuade people, you have to do it with pictures. And that was Mr. Lincoln’s specialty.
Now, don’t fight me on this, and you might learn something. State your objections so we get it on the record, so to speak. Continue reading Mr. Lincoln’s Specialty