Something to say. Something to hide. Something to achieve.
The substance of style in modern rhetoric.
Men of ambition and common thieves act out of second intentions. It is a device to put men at ease right before the attack. By appearing to lose, these thieves win. By losing, they conquer. They put themselves in second place to finish first in the final sprint. This method of second intention rarely fails if it is not detected.
Clever men speak and write with second intentions. It is less used to attack and more used to mislead. By using words with more than one sense and constructing grammatical structures with ambiguous referents, these clever men mislead. They appear forthright but mislead. This method of second intention often fails but does entrap the credulous. When magistrates have second thoughts, the victims have no hope.
In this essay, we consider men who act politically to gain power over other men. We will call such men honor-lovers because they desire power and being first above all other things. These men, too, act on second intentions. When they are acquisitive, they use the methods of thieves. When they seek power by applying the laws to their enemies, they use the methods of clever men. But when the honor-lover seeks to mobilize the passions and interests of other men for his own purposes, his intentions are split between a public and a private meaning. The honor-lover always has something to say, something to hide, and something to achieve.
Hiding Intentions
There are only two ways to hide intentions when communicating with a large audience.
Speak to different groups differently. Simply tell them different things.
Speak to everyone the same way, but with a public and a private meaning in the same speech.
This essay treats the latter as one speech with double intentions. Prudent men can discover the artifices in such speech by locating the pretexts and subtexts that no man can easily conceal. These very artifices are the means by which he signals his secret meaning. To conceal one thing, the man must unveil another.
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