I deal on this in Chapter 32, Subsection 4b of
The 11-Week Email Course, but here I dole it out free. Show some humility and respect!
Those who are internally corrupted, those masters of rhetorical calumny, will do best for themselves when, instead of externalizing and projecting outward their error-based opinions about others, that
instead resolve to turn that rhetorical engine against
themselves; what they say and what they do.
This is the spiritual or moral function of •confession• and its benefit is internal and curative. Sharp, honest but biting and incisive criticism is brought out against one’s self for the un-sane, destructive things on has done and is doing.
Flash — please proceed
Veggie — you go next
Note: this must be voluntary and sincere and cannot have successful results if it is coerced. Especially when it comes to internment in the Reeducation Camps, if they are to function not as mere prisons but as places of moral healing you must initiate the processes of getting better by submitting voluntarily to the regimen of reeducation.
In
Gorgias Plato puts it like this:
Socrates: Then rhetoric is of no use to us, Polus, in helping a man to excuse his own injustice, or that of his parents or friends, or children or country; but may be of use to any one who holds that instead of excusing he ought to accuse--himself above all, and in the next degree his family or any of his friends who may be doing wrong; he should bring to light the iniquity and not conceal it, that so the wrong-doer may suffer and be made whole; and he should even force himself and others not to shrink, but with closed eyes like brave men to let the physician operate with knife or searing iron, not regarding the pain, in the hope of attaining the good and the honorable; let him who has done things worthy of stripes, allow himself to be scourged, if of bonds, to be bound, if of a fine, to be fined, if of exile, to be exiled, if of death, to die, himself being the first to accuse himself and his own relations, and using rhetoric to this end, that his and their unjust actions may be made manifest, and that they themselves may be delivered from injustice, which is the greatest evil.