HOW A MASTER PERSUADER WON THE ELECTION

If you ever read the Dilbert Cartoons in the newspaper or seen them posted on the walls in cubicles and business offices, then you know of Scott Adams who created Dilbert. As a cartoonist he wrote dialogue in those cartoons exposing the non-sense and blindness of bureaucracies and organizations. Well, to my surprise, on August 13, 2015 he predicted that Donald Trump had a 98% chance of winning the election. And he is not a Trump supporter. Having voted Democrat for many years he even describes himself as ultraliberal (p. 4).

Now while I know of Scott Adams as a cartoonist, I did not know him as a persuader or a political pundit. Sometime during the decades of producing Dilbert, Scott Adams studied hypnosis, read extensively in the field of persuasion, including books on NLP. In his Appendix he refers to Anthony Robbins, Awaken the Giant Within and the Bandler/ Grinder book Reframing. And after reading the book, I would guess that he has read other NLP books. He could have even had some training in NLP for all I know. How I found out about this was from Brian van der Horst, Paris, when he mentioned Scott Adam’s new book on the NLP Leadership Summit.

The book is Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don’t Matter (2017). Adams here tells the story of how he predicted that Donald Trump would win the election more than a year ahead of the election. As he documents the major events during the 2015—2016 of the two campaigns, he explains his framing of Trump as a Master Persuader and why Trump’s persuasion skills convinced him that he would win (pp. 2, 6-7). Along the way he pointed out 31 sign-posts of “Persuasion Tips.”

In my opinion, we can look upon Winning Bigly as an NLP Application book. Although he only documents NLP in the first appendix, he definitely uses NLP throughout the book. He especially notes many occasions where Trump engaged in “pacing and leading” (p. 28). He describes the individual maps that we operate from as “movies” that we invent in our minds and constantly emphasizes that they are not about facts and reality and the only value in them is as they are useful. That is, if they make us happy and better at helping us predict what will happen.

“The common worldview, shared by most humans, is that there is one objective reality, and we humans can understand that reality through a rigorous application of facts and reason. ... The only wrinkle with that worldview is that we all think we are the enlightened ones. And we assume the people who disagree with us just need better facts, and perhaps better brains...” (p. 2- 3, 35, 37, 45)

“... the human mind is not equipped to understand reality in any deep way. Instead, we create little movies in our minds, and we live in those movies until events in the observable world make that impossible.” (p. 243) “Humans only imagine that facts matter to our decisions. The reality is that we are inventing our own personal facts to fit the movies playing in our heads.” (247)

Adams presents himself as a persuader, a hypnotist, and political observer. He warns about the Confirmation Bias throughout the book and the power of cognitive dissonance which leads us humans to create movies and stories in our minds (p. 16). Confirmation bias is just a bug in the human operating system. “It is the operating system.” (p. 61). He writes about various filters that we use that cause us to mis-read things (mind-reading . p. 59). These are “not windows to reality.”

“All that matters is whether or not your filter keeps you happy and does a good job of predicting.” (p. 93).

Adams explains how the media and pollsters got it so wrong and how it set up so many people for cognitive dissonance on Election Day which then generated mass hallucinations (p. 50). He explains why Californians not only do not understand New York humor or style, but positively mis-understand it (pp. 171–172).

“Sure enough, Trump’s win set off a cluster bomb of cognitive dissonance the likes of which history rarely sees.” (p. 52) “When ... New Yorkers laugh at ‘offensive’ jokes, we are usually reacting to the awfulness of it. ... It’s funny because the idea is so awful.” (p. 171)

He even explains something that I did not like in Donald Trump and which I misunderstood. What I considered just simple name-calling and negative framing, Adam saw as high level priming persuasion. Quoting Trump’s designations for his competitors, low-energy Jeb, lyin’ Ted, crooked Hillary, Pocahontas, Goofy Elizabeth Warren, cryin’ Chuck Schumer (p. 129-134), he analyzed why these terms were powerful persuasionally and why those that Hillary’s campaigned used were not (135-136).

“Cialdini’s newer book, Pre-Suasion, focuses on how to prime a person to be persuaded. It teaches how to put a thought in a person’s mind that will influence the next thought ion ways that would not be obvious to the untrained.” (p. 166)

Throughout the book Adams points out various persuasion techniques that Trump used (and continues to use) which many people take offense at as his New York humor. What they don’t realize, says Adams, is that it is a technique. “People who are not trained in persuasion would miss the technique.” (p. 137). And so they do and as a result, still do not understand him or his appeal or how he won.

Given that he has already written about NLP in his blog— written about Milton Erickson, John Grinder, and others, my suspicion is that he knows a whole lot more about NLP than he’s putting on. Even to write the following statement suggests that: “Much of the NLP field has exaggerated claims, but there is some strong reality at the base of it.” (p. 263). https://blog.12min.com/win-bigly-pdf/