Arak Journal

Mind on the Moon

By Prasanna Krishnamoorthy

I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth”
President John F. Kennedy,  1961

With these incredible words delivered before Congress on May 25, 1961, President John F. Kennedy confirmed America’s commitment to the Space Race. Following international applause for the Soviet Union’s milestones in space exploration (from sending the first man to space and into orbit) and derision toward America’s Bay of Pigs debacle, Kennedy needed an unprecedented national initiative to restore American prestige. After careful deliberation, he proposed the Apollo lunar mission, receiving an enthusiastic Congressional response. Most political support at the time likely stemmed from Cold War tensions against the Soviets, in a strained war” for geopolitical influence (?Project Apollo”). But beyond the politics and immense technological progress required for the mission, Kennedy needed the psychic backing of a nation. The Moon shot” would be a decade-long, highly ambitious, and work-intensive project demanding the time, money, and energy of the public. While many addresses by the government and NASA attempted to persuade the country, Kennedy ultimately secured national support through his televised speech at Rice University in September 1962 (Jordan 210). We Choose to Go to the Moon” succeeded in invigorating the American spirit and space effort, in an era of societal uncertainty, no less. This brief yet rhetorically potent address proved more than another show of presidential charm; rather, it demonstrated Kennedy’s keen psychological intuition about the American public, comprehensively appealing to their motivational drives and decision-making judgment.

Before we discuss the efficacy of Kennedy’s rhetoric, its psychological underpinning in human motivation must be understood. Many theories of motivation emerged from psychologists over the past centuries, and contemporary perspectives still overlap with other early schools of thought. American psychologist Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs will serve as an interpretive starting point and foundation for rhetorical psychoanalysis in this essay, as this seminal theory of human motivation pairs well with many other empirical models. Often depicted as a pyramid composed of prioritized layers of human needs, Maslow’s hierarchy asserts that basic physiological needs (food, water, air) must be satisfied before someone can be motivated to respond to higher level needs” (Ellison 17). Maslow believed all of these needs demanded fulfillment for individuals to feel truly content. The lower yet powerful deficiency” needs progress vertically from physiological and safety needs (sense of security, stability, ? certainty, and comfort”) to social needs (a drive to share love, feel loved and valued,” and belong to a group”) (Ellison 18). McClelland’s need theory, a more contemporary work based on organizational motivation, suggests a similar foundational need of humans?a need for affiliation, to build close personal relationships” and participate in cooperative and interactive activities” (Rybnicek 446-447). These theories also parallel Maslow’s belief that most Americans have an unmet need for love and belongingness,” and psychoanalyst Karen Horney’s theory that the anxiety of life provokes a reaction of moving toward people” with an insatiable need to feel safe” and accepted,” bordering on self-sacrifice” (Ellison 19; Smith 60).

The Cold War’s looming threat and national anxiety likely triggered Americans’ safety and social needs for affiliation, both to find security in patriotic identity and contribute resources toward national endeavors. Contemporary models assert that groups satisfy these individual impulses, that at the level of the nation, the group fulfills economic, sociocultural, and political needs, giving individuals a sense of security, a feeling of belonging, and prestige” (Druckman 44). Druckman notes that the nation achieves personal relevance for individuals when they become sentimentally attached to the homeland,” grow motivated to help their country,” gain a sense of identity and self-esteem through their national identification,” and internalize the norms and role expectations of the nation” (44). Social identity theory defines such behavior as patriotism, while noting that pride in national achievements increases cooperation” and trust in public institutions,” both crucial goals under Kennedy’s turbulent and tension-stricken administration (Gangl). Not only can in-group identification build patriotic cohesion and trust, but it also fosters competitive drive against out-group members. In a political competition like the Space Race with a realpolitik leader like Kennedy, such drive merely enhances long-term national effort (?Project Apollo”). These group security and competitive needs connect to Maslow’s esteem needs of either external respect from prestige or internal self-esteem from mastery, paralleling McClelland’s other two human needs for social power and achievement (Rybnicek 446-447). The utilitarian benefit from citizen achievement needs and the importance of international power through prestige are crucial elements of realpolitik theory, a key concern amidst the technological superiority scramble of the 1960s (Druckman 53). A realpolitik proponent himself, Kennedy taps into the intrinsic power of these psychological theories and group-oriented Maslovian needs by speaking to the visceral value of patriotism.

Drawing on American affiliation needs, Kennedy first unites his national audience then frames this desirable social condition as contingent on achieving his lunar objective. He begins by expanding the spatial focus of his rhetoric, using location as a metaphor for social affiliation. Progressing from we meet at a college noted for knowledge, in a city noted for progress, in a State noted for strength” to describing this city of Houston, this State of Texas, this country of the United States,” Kennedy expands outward in physical presence to engage his audience’s sense of belonging. Conflating the physical and abstract allows him to tie every American’s individual identity to a conceptual national identity that is otherwise too large to grasp. This technique proves successful. According to American sociologist Amitai Etzioni, loyalties transfer from local to national entities by gradually enlarging the group [such] that the individual perceives himself to represent ? that bigger group” (Druckman 46).  Throughout the speech, Kennedy combines this conceptual reorientation of identity with a repetition of we,” centering the focus of his rhetoric on the audience. Once spatially unified in the present, he reflects on ancestral heritage to temporally tie personal identity to a collective American spirit, attaching national values to the Apollo mission. He first highlights humanity’s historical progress by asserting that it is impossible to fully grasp how far and how fast we have come,” then focuses specifically on American advancement, claiming that this country was conquered by those who moved forward.” He evokes the human and American ideals of steadfast, courageous conquest, quoting William Bradford, America’s first colonial governor, that all great and honorable actions are accompanied with great difficulties” that must be overcome with answerable courage.”

Knowing he has anchored audience identity within a national one, he refers  to the actions of past Americans in order to incite the same emulatory motives as for any other in-group member. Kennedy motivates his audience to identify with and perpetuate the historically American ethos of Manifest Destiny, tying nationally celebrated values of courage and tenacity to the current space endeavor. But to ensure long-term American investment in the Apollo program, he casts fulfillment of these ancestral group” expectations?conquest by mov[ing] forward”?as conditional upon achieving his proposal. He evokes the insatiable affiliation drive during times of anxiety described by Horney, an impulse bordering on self-sacrifice for the American cause. Listing the waves” of technological advancement those who came before us made certain that this country rode,” he affirms that this generation does not intend to founder in the backwash of the coming age of space,” that the vows of this Nation can only be fulfilled if we in this Nation are first.” To ease the national anxiety of his era under the reckoning eyes of ancestors, Kennedy demands nothing less than support for the Moon shot. He portrays the endeavor as a seemingly inevitable next wave of progress, whose supporters will fulfill their duty to the nation and be worthy of his mythic American identity.

Having established audience membership within American heritage, Kennedy then threatens this pride with foreign competition. Since increasing group affiliation amplifies competitive urges, Kennedy optimally postpones this introduction of competitive nationalism until he first builds in-group camaraderie. Subtly integrating Cold War tensions into his emotional appeal, he plainly affirms that America is behind, and will be behind for some time in manned flight.” Yet he contextualizes this competitive anxiety with the American value of eminence, asserting that no nation which expects to be the leader of other nations can expect to stay behind in the race for space.”

While the audience clearly recognizes the threat posed by the Soviet Union, Kennedy deftly converts this anxiety to avidity for the American space effort by appealing to the social esteem motives that lead his audience to desire power and achievement. His rhetoric both crafted an inspiring social frame and introduced within it uncertainty that demanded resolution. Combining the cooperative drives of a unified national identity with the competitive drives to establish international prestige, he offered the nation a direct path toward gratification in the form of the Apollo program.

Kennedy’s partial fulfillment of such security and social esteem needs provides a foundation for targeting higher-level integrative tendencies,” or Maslovian growth needs, toward self-transcendence. Contemporary self-determination theory (SDT) asserts that once their previous psychological needs of competence ? and relatedness,” people have natural integrative tendencies, which lead them to seek out challenges, to be curious and interested” (Di Domenico and Ryan 1853-1854). These tendencies manifest as intrinsic motivation plus internalization of social regulations, resulting in personal growth” and community contributions” (Di Domenico and Ryan 1854). Within Maslow’s hierarchy, these tendencies reflect the growth-oriented strivings for self-actualization, knowledge, and understanding.” While self-actualization (the supreme need, according to Maslow) refers to a person’s desire to realize his or her latent potential,” prerequisite cognitive needs rely on knowledge and understanding to satisfy curiosities and interests,” and learn new information” (Di Domenico and Ryan 1852). These cognitive and exploratory needs manifest as curiosity, a human drive with evolutionary origins. In an effort to minimize survival threats, curiosity evolved primarily as a coping mechanism for uncertainty.” This information-as-reward” mechanism invests greater resources even when they are scarce” and more effort until unknown information is attained” so that individuals can minimize perceived risk (Shin and Kim 854-855). As such, this seemingly higher-order psychological need has far-reaching roots that make appeals to curiosity an effective choice for rhetorical persuasion, especially when the concept of outer space could be thematically reoriented and conflated with foreign political threats to incite atavistic uncertainty.

In Freudian terms, curiosity and higher-order Maslovian needs span both primal id and transcendent superego motives in the human psyche, the latter of which is guided by moral values (Lapsley and Stey 1). Such guiding values can extend into foundational Maslovian needs as well, making them powerful targets for rhetorical appeal. However, value ambiguity and diversity make them difficult to comprehensively employ in persuasion. For instance, ten culturally universal values still oppose each other in the contemporary Schwartz model due to their dichotomous forms (change versus conservation and self-enhancement versus self-transcendence).

This value dichotomy conveys the two sides of resistance Kennedy would experience in proposing a risky endeavor with individual implications (Levontin and Bardi). Values would certainly appear diverse in a broad national audience, necessitating a more comprehensive psychological and rhetorical tool?symbols?to invoke the power of humanity’s highest needs. Symbolic images, according to Carl Jung, represented a different kind of cognition from rational thought: their purpose was? to override such distinctions by telescoping opposites into one” (Lindenfeld 223). For Kennedy to rise above the binary value divisions of his audience via symbols, a posthumously theorized sixth Maslovian tier may be invoked: self-transcendence, or a person’s ability to obtain a unitive consciousness with other humans” (Venter 3). Such transcendence beyond psychological resistance proves possible with numinous symbols and imagery, which Jung described as the best and highest expression for something divined but not yet known to the observer” (Lindenfeld 227). These symbols, argues American psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, contribute to a sense of centeredness, integrity, and vitality that is needed to offset the threats to stability ? from society”; where in eras of political, social, disintegration, people were likely to compensate for this by turning to charismatic leaders ? as embodiments of ‘larger-than-life’ archetypes” (Lindenfeld 227). In fact, according to recent rhetorical research, symbolic or sensory imagery are highly correlated with presidential charisma. To inspire and instruct” a nation, a leader’s ability to ‘persuade people to do what they ought to do without having to be persuaded’ ? may rest on his or her ability to convey images in words” (Emrich et al. 555). In other words, Kennedy’s own capacity to bring deep, motivational significance to the Apollo program benefited from his use of such rhetorical techniques: meeting the American public’s intrinsic curiosity, actualization, and transcendence needs.

Kennedy develops this resounding call to transcendence by inciting his audience’s imagination, raising intrigue and employing motivational symbolism. As required by self-determination theory, he already primed his listeners to accept these integrative tendencies through his previous affirmation of patriotic relatedness. Now he paints outer space as a mysterious expanse of unknown rewards, using vague language to pique audience curiosity. He states that space exploration dispels old [ills]” and promises high rewards,” while generating new ignorance, new problems, new dangers,” that demand humanity to solve these mysteries.” Kennedy rhetorically obscures those rewards” while clearly acknowledging the risky stakes by speaking in broad generalizations. He crafts uncertainty that taps directly into curiosity and exploration drives. With his listeners now emotionally eager to uncover the unknown, he relieves some tension by drawing on achievement and actualization needs as psychological solutions. The only way to ease the itch of curiosity is through exploratory action, and Kennedy inspires bolder and long-term action with symbolic imagery. While he repeats abstract notions of overcoming hardships,” he draws on the powerful image of scaling mountains when he quotes the motivation of Mount Everest’s first climber: Because it is there.” Paralleling the awesome yet alluring presence of a mountain to be conquered with the presence of space, Kennedy turns the public’s question of exploration into that of mere achievement for achievement’s sake. Once this new motivation is introduced, he moves beyond justifying the endeavor as necessary for individual and national transcendence, toward realizing America’s potential as rightful world leader. He conflates the mythic spirit of American frontier exploration, with all its Jungian symbolism of courage and the unknown, with new frontier symbolism. Again referring to the audience locale in Texas, he claims the furthest outpost on the old frontier” will be that of the new frontier of science and space.” In achieving a goal requiring the best of all mankind,” he says, Americans will comprise the vanguard of humanity; not only in technological leadership but in stewardship of this frontier under a banner of freedom and peace,” protected from earthly weapons of mass destruction.” Broaching Cold War sentiments against violence, Kennedy makes clear that American space exploration will accomplish more: the endeavor will unite all humanity under peaceful cooperation,” a hallmark of Maslovian self-transcendence, while its monumental scale will push individual Americans far closer to realizing their own destined potentials, a natural impulse toward self-actualization. Having mobilized curiosity and achievement drives to rhetorically cast the space effort as irresistible and necessary, Kennedy drives home Apollo’s appeal by asserting that mere political support for his mission would have heroic significance.

While appeals based on transcendent achievement needs and patriotic esteem motives are compelling, Maslow himself understood that any motivational system required more rational cognitive response mechanisms. While Maslow did not emphasize these other mechanisms, objective decision-making heuristics were identified by other behavioral scientists. These models include unconscious risk-versus-reward or cost-versus-benefit analysis during uncertain situations.  This decision-making analysis involves both rational trade-off assessment (comparing potential gains and losses) and emotional responses to the situation (risk-aversive fear or reward-seeking desire) (Leuker et al. 84; Basten et al.).  In assessing curiosity-driven actions, these systems yield decisions mostly based on effort cost (i.e., the negative appraisal of the effort required to complete a task)” and emotional cost (i.e., the negative emotions associated with task engagement)” (Shin and Kim 857). A tasks’s effort cost indicates feasibility and its emotional cost determines motivation. Under uncertainty, like that of the Cold War era, such evaluation schemas become further apparent in individuals, making them effective targets for presidential persuasion (Chen and Kwak).

Additionally, risk-reward mechanisms experience significant temporal influence, suggesting rhetorical techniques shaping time perception can effectively persuade an audience’s course of action. Time-imposed stress enhances learning about positive outcomes but impairs learning about negative outcomes of choices,” meaning that listeners under time pressure would more likely approve of bolder proposals (Mather and Lighthall). Decision-making processes may also use abstract mental construals (interpretative units) to comprehend temporally or spatially distal objects, a phenomenon explained by construal-level theory (CLT). CLT proposes that temporal distance shifts the overall attractiveness of an outcome closer to its high-level construal value,” such as the desirability of said outcome, than to its low-level construal value,” such as the feasibility of that outcome (Trope and Liberman). In other words, an individual’s risk-reward decision-making model recognizes and more values the feasibility of a hypothetical event the closer in time that event seems. To exploit this psychological process and persuade audience members to support the space effort, Kennedy needed to logically and emotionally increase perceived reward and minimize perceived risk. Of the three components of Lloyd Bitzer’s rhetorical situation (exigence, audience, and actor constraints), Kennedy must transform the Apollo mission’s seeming implausibility, which represents the problematic exigence for the audience, such that apparent feasibility combines with temporal urgency to decrease actor constraints and public resistance (Turnbull). Having already kindled the audience’s emotional support, he must now assure and further incite his audience toward action.

Descending from transcendent to earthly realms of discourse, Kennedy first attests to the immense practical challenges of his vision (?its high costs” and obvious dangers”) before gradually reframing the mission as feasible and urgent. Kennedy’s overt assertion of risk merely augments his ethical candor, inspiring his audience to accept his logical reasoning and rhetorical refiguration to minimize perceived risk. Kennedy begins by unleashing a narrative of technological achievements, compressing 50 millennia of humanity into 50 years. Advancing from the invention of wheels to nuclear power in exponentially smaller time intervals, emphasizing the accelerated rate of scientific development, he finishes with America’s latest spacecraft to Venus having literally reached the stars before midnight tonight.” Progressing beyond imagination, Kennedy mentions witnessing in the last 24 hours” the ground-shaking Saturn C-1 booster rocket,” and facilities?created for the greatest and most complex exploration in man’s history.” He intentionally ends his narrative in the present moment, placing the audience and America at the precipice of his story’s logical new chapter of frontier conquest. Kennedy cleverly employs this technological narrative as both logically inductive premises toward future exploratory success and a rhetorical ploy to bring a moon landing within tangible proximity to the audience’s imagination. If so much progress toward the construction of lunar rockets occurred in such a brief span of history, his reasoning goes, then a moon landing appears technologically imminent. By construal-level theory, this imagined imminence becomes  perceived feasibility. The implied imminence of space conquest, supported by Kennedy’s mention of milestones already reached, shortens the once daunting gap between the Moon and America into a step of mere practicality. This sense of looming success proved essential for the space program since Apollo required a sustained effort over a decade’s worth of struggle and innovation” (Jordan 218).

From Kennedy’s speech to the following years of work on the Apollo program, the compression of temporal (and by extension, spatial) proximity resulted in no perceptual distinction between what someone was doing in a given moment and the organization’s objective”. This is evidenced by plenty an engineer’s remarks that  we’re putting a man on the moon!” (Carton 11). Such a personal connection to the space program indicates the success of Kennedy’s rhetoric in shifting conveyed feasibility into national motivation.

In his speech, Kennedy then emphasizes the practicality of the mission for the average American by minimizing perceived individual risk. He claims the increased Apollo expenditure is still somewhat less than we pay for cigarettes and cigars every year,” with an individual cost of 10 cents per week. Conveying tangible stakes to the audience further strengthens Kennedy’s trustworthiness and integrates a sense of fiscal feasibility with the patriotic duty motives explored earlier. This practical motivation evokes a sense of volition in choosing to endorse Apollo, competence in financially supporting the effort, and relatedness through patriotism?the three requisite beliefs according to SDT for individuals to seek out challenge and express their capacities.

Kennedy himself believed that to motivate an individual to great deeds, one must “arouse his will to believe in himself, give him a great goal to believe in, and he will create the means to reach it” (Meagher 50). Additionally, he called for the use of fear as a transformative catalyst for inciting self-belief, employing hard shocks” to unite the people and equal the centralized effort of the dictators” (Meagher 48). Such fear came in the form of imposed urgency in We Choose to Go to the Moon.” Having described the breathtaking pace” of technological innovation in America, he affirms that his era is the opportune moment to apply their fruits of progress. Letting the chance pass means leaving the fruits to rot, for space science, like nuclear science and all technology, has no conscience of its own.” Kennedy thus associates the palpable Cold War threat of nuclear annihilation with the urgent need to secure space, declaring that America is unwilling to postpone” in an hour of change and challenge, in a decade of hope and fear.” The urgency of these temporal references, combined with conceptual proximity, motivates Americans to psychologically value the benefits of Apollo far higher than the costs. Kennedy already conveyed the deep emotional relevance of these rewards and, having logically minimized the feasibility risks, confirms the support of the deliberative public through urgency.

By metaphorically building social unity, symbolically evoking transcendent desires, and enthymematically assuring feasibility plus urgency, President Kennedy became the voice that energized a national era. Through rhetoric, he successfully aligned his audience with his mission by reframing America toward outer space?socially, spiritually, spatially, and temporally. He appeased the burning hopes and fears of the American people to sell them a tangible solution to intangible uncertainty. His bully pulpit eloquence on Apollo endured in the American imagination, despite his untimely death, due to its direct answer to humanity’s fundamental drives and rationale. To motivate individuals toward a course of action, one must imply how those actions will both fulfill their intrinsic needs and prove logically attainable. While Kennedy did not consciously employ research findings, his intuitive application of human psychology exemplifies productive public influence. Though global and national circumstances evolve, the president can still apply social authority?along with psychological awareness of their audience?to steer the nation toward solutions. Successful government requires public cooperation, whether in the space race or the race to a vaccine, and the Head of State can enter the heads of citizens to secure it.

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Paper Prompt

Now that you have walked through the steps of writing an analytical paper with each other (congratulations!), you will be going through the process again on your own (well, not entirely alone ? you have the support network of your peers, your professor, and resources like the Writing Center). This time we are adding a research component. The core of a research paper is your own analysis ? for our purposes, the analysis of a text. But it broadens your ideas by putting them in a larger context and in a dialogue with other scholars and researchers. By the end of this unit you will be skilled at writing a 12-15 page research paper.

Note that we will be having fewer group Zoom meetings for the next couple of weeks as you move towards more independent work. The conversation within your groups will be continuing on Basecamp, and most of you will be scheduling individual meetings with me to discuss your papers.

Research and writing tasks [completed over several weeks]:

• Choose the political speech or speeches you will be analyzing for your final paper. You can choose what you like, so far as the speech is a) American, and b) from the twentieth or twenty-first century. Post your speech to a Basecamp thread and say why you chose this speech.
• Begin studying your speech and doing The Method” on it. The process of analysis in not a one-time event, but a recursive process. You will be returning to the speech and seeing more and more as you read it repeatedly. You will be submitting a write-up of The Method” on 11/2.
• After our class meeting about finding library resources, begin working on your annotated bibliography (see guidelines posted on Basecamp).
• Read Writing Analytically, Chapter 8 (?Conversing with Sources”). On a Basecamp thread, discuss how this description of the relationship to sources correlates or differs from how you thought about the research process in high school.
• Post your completed annotated bibliography on Basecamp. (This is worth 5% of
  your course grade). Read Writing Analytically, Chapter 9 (?Finding, Evaluating, and Citing Sources”). On a Basecamp discussion thread, post a few things your found useful about the information in this chapter.
• Draft analytical paragraphs even as you continue to be reading your scholarly articles. People
  write in different ways at this stage, so I don’t want to be too prescriptive in terms of specific
  approaches or deadlines.
• Read Writing Analytically, Chapter 10 (?From Paragraphs to Papers”). On a Basecamp
  thread, discuss what you learned from this chapter in terms of how you want to structure your
  own paper
• Post a complete draft of your paper on Basecamp. This draft should be  a minimum of 12 pages, and it should have all of the elements: an intro, a thesis, a solid structure, a conclusion, good engagement with sources. This draft will be assigned to someone from a different team for peer editing.
• Read Williams’s Style, Lesson 9 (?Concision”). Discuss what you take to be the most
  important points of this chapter on a Basecamp thread. Edit your draft for concision.