In Thank You for Smoking, Aaron Eckhart’s smooth-talking lobbyist teaches his son that winning an argument isn’t about being right — it’s about making the other person wrong. It’s a masterclass in rhetorical sleight-of-hand: shift the frame, control the tempo, and confidence will do the rest. The scene feels comic until you notice how familiar it has become. Today, that logic isn’t confined to the debate stage; it’s embedded in the operating code of our systems.
From political spin to corporate comms, confidence has become a performance metric. The ability to sound certain — on camera, on stage, or on Slack — now outweighs the substance beneath it. Algorithms amplify conviction; audiences reward fluency. The smoother the delivery, the less we notice what’s missing. Institutions evolve accordingly, optimising for optics over outcomes, because visibility has quietly replaced validity as the benchmark of success.
This is the rhetoric virus at work: a social contagion that spreads through repetition, rewarded by metrics and immune to correction. It’s not malicious by design, but systemic by incentive. When every interaction is scored, recorded, and surfaced for engagement, the bravest act is no longer speaking up — it’s admitting doubt.
Scenario: Patient Zero
A hipster barber sets up his phone at the perfect angle — ring light, low hum of clippers, a half-smile caught between sincerity and performance. He’s talking to camera while cutting a client’s hair, spinning an easy monologue about relationships, trust, and knowing your customer. It’s polished but casual, the kind of authenticity that plays well on TikTok. The algorithm loves a man with convictions.
Between mentions of craftsmanship and connection, he drifts. “Thing is,” he says, “you’ve got to keep standards high — there’s a new Turkish place opening every week now. These places just don’t get it, you know? Don’t quite… click with the locals.”
The line hangs in the air — half joke, half judgement. No slogans, no slurs, just the faint residue of a wider script. A phrase borrowed from headlines, a rhythm lifted from talk radio, now repackaged as authenticity. The customer nods. The clippers buzz on. And somewhere between the small talk and the upload, another dose of rhetoric slips into the bloodstream of the feed — polished, personable, and perfectly infectious.
Every system has its pathogens. Rhetoric is ours. It spreads not through malice, but through mimicry — fragments of language lifted, repeated, and rewarded until they harden into belief. Each share, like, and nod becomes a droplet in the cultural air, carrying tone and certainty faster than truth can catch up.
The barber’s comment wasn’t a manifesto; it was a mutation. A few borrowed phrases, a hint of grievance, a rhythm rehearsed by headlines — small enough to pass unnoticed, potent enough to replicate. That’s how the rhetoric virus thrives: by colonising the language of everyday competence and coating prejudice in polish.
In this ecosystem, confidence isn’t just a trait — it’s a transmission vector. The smoother the delivery, the faster the spread. And when certainty becomes a contagion, systems evolve to reward the symptoms rather than treat the cause.
The Authority Reflex
The rhetoric virus thrives in the gap between what we know and what we think we know. Online, confidence reads as competence; fluency becomes a proxy for truth. The smoother the delivery, the less we question the depth beneath it. That’s the cruel elegance of the feedback loop — ignorance wears the mask of expertise, and the mask performs better than the face.
The Dunning–Kruger Effect was meant to explain a psychological quirk: the less we understand, the more likely we are to overestimate our ability. But in the attention economy, that bias isn’t an accident — it’s an advantage. Platforms don’t measure knowledge; they measure conviction. Certainty signals authority, and authority gets rewarded with reach. The bias that once lived inside the individual is now baked into the system.
Communities, workplaces, and entire institutions learn the same pattern. The confident are promoted; the cautious are passed over. Belonging depends on sounding sure, not being right. The humble are drowned out by the decisive; the reflective mistaken for the weak. What began as a flaw in human cognition has become an operating principle of culture.
When truth competes with confidence, confidence usually wins — not because it’s truer, but because it travels faster. In the new economy of persuasion, doubt is a liability and certainty the ultimate credential.
The Metric Metastasis
If confidence is contagious, data is the carrier. Our systems no longer just reward certainty — they quantify it. Dashboards, leaderboards, and engagement metrics turn human bias into machine logic. What was once a social instinct — to trust the most assured voice — has become a design principle. The algorithm doesn’t care who’s right; it cares who’s resonating.
Automation bias plays its part. When a number appears on a screen, we assume it must mean something. A five-star rating, a trending chart, a KPI dashboard — each a signal dressed as truth. But these metrics don’t measure value; they measure visibility. They tell us not how well something works, but how much it’s been noticed. Systems built to optimise for attention inevitably conflate traction with trust.
The result is a culture of reflexive validation. Institutions chase engagement because engagement looks like endorsement. Individuals chase metrics because metrics feel like meaning. The loop tightens: data becomes gospel, dashboards become doctrine. And somewhere in that feedback glow, judgement quietly switches off. The human learns to echo the machine — smooth, efficient, unthinking.
When certainty can be counted, doubt becomes invisible. And in systems that fear what can’t be measured, the unmeasurable — nuance, humility, truth — begins to vanish from view.
The Abuse of Substance
In healthy systems, performance is proof of practice. Performative competence isn’t pretence — it’s the ability to make knowledge legible, to translate skill into action that others can see and learn from. It’s how competence becomes contagious in the best sense: clarity that travels, practice that persuades. But under the rhetoric virus, the mechanism mutates. Delivery still matters, but depth no longer does.
When visibility becomes the metric of value, performance detaches from its source. Institutions begin to rehearse success instead of achieving it. Presentations replace prototypes; headlines substitute for reform. What was once a bridge between substance and audience becomes a barrier — a spectacle that consumes the attention it was meant to serve.
The result isn’t performative competence; it’s synthetic competence: fluency without follow-through, delivery without development.
The addiction is self-reinforcing. The more convincing the performance, the less incentive there is to return to the work itself. Systems learn to feed on polish because polish is predictable. Each quarterly fix of certainty buys time, attention, and temporary relief from scrutiny. But like any substance abused for effect, the tolerance rises. More confidence, more metrics, more theatre — less truth. The signal gets stronger; the meaning gets weaker.
Authentic performance was meant to express substance. The virus teaches systems to emulate it instead — until the performance becomes the product, and the craft beneath it quietly fades from view.
Conclusion
Every epidemic eventually meets its immune system. Ours begins with doubt. Not the cynical kind that corrodes trust, but the curious kind that tests it. Critical thinking isn’t the opposite of confidence — it’s its calibration. It slows the spread of certainty long enough to question exactly what we’re so sure of.
The rhetoric virus feeds on unexamined fluency. It rewards speed over reflection, delivery over dialogue. But immunity doesn’t come from isolation; it comes from discernment — the capacity to separate the performance that communicates truth from the one that merely imitates it. That’s the essence of performative competence: to make understanding visible without mistaking visibility for understanding.
Relearning that distinction is the cultural vaccine. It asks us to value articulation as evidence of depth, not as camouflage for its absence; to rebuild systems that prize learning over projection, and progress over performance. Certainty may still spread faster than truth, but curiosity — practised publicly and persistently — is still the stronger contagion.
Behavioural Principles
Immunity to Rhetoric
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Pause before sharing.
The first symptom of infection is haste. -
Question fluency.
Smooth talk often hides rough logic. -
Reward uncertainty.
It's a sign of someone still thinking. -
Seek substance.
It's not about who sounds right, but who has the confidence to show their work. -
Practice Performative Competence.
Let clarity become the visible form of care.
