After reading more than eight chapters of Thank You For Arguing I've grown a little tired of lies. I realized rhetoric as a lie as a whole. You may think I'm repeating what I previously said, but I'm just supporting a hypothesis I considered before. In other words, rhetoric is having the ability to trick people. An example is ethos' third asset, disinterested goodwill. One can be the evilest person but if one is a good liar people will trust you.
I have two thoughts: Rhetoric is a strong weapon and one has to doubt people. The speaker wants you to think he or she cares for you when he doesn't, meaning that if a politician gets your vote, what will stop him from not achieving those things he promised? "Even if you are a chockfull of virtue, street smarts, and selflessness, if your audience doesn't believe what you are, you've got a character problem." (75) Why in the world would anybody read this and think about being a good person if they can (not so) easily trick others into thinking this? To make things worse, dubitio just expanded this web of lines into one that includes acting. Maybe Honest Abe wasn't honest after all. Maybe, just maybe, he made his audience believe he is honest, but not really... I'm not sure I like how rhetoric works.
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