Michael Ruppert Argumentative Analysis

Michael Ruppert has been around the block. In the documentary Collapse, he talks about his personal experiences and explains how they have formed his beliefs of today’s society. He uses a combination of pathos and logos argumentative appeals. The way he mixed them together made a very compelling argument. He begins the documentary by stating his accomplishments and credentials to convince the audience that he was a man who was intelligent, and could be trusted because he knew what he was talking about. The pathos part was set up by this whole introduction of announcing his qualifications to theorize about the collapse of our society, that Ruppert talks about in the documentary.  His logic consists of actual facts and referring to the past. The most powerful argumentative appeal was definitely ethos. In the documentary Michael Ruppert talks about “what if” scenarios. These are all just accusations but he puts it into a reference where you can imagine your life being affected by these issues.

 One example is Ruppert talks about a world where everything is going to be local. Everything from the food you eat to the people you will communicate with, he says there will be no cell phones and other necessities, things we cannot picture our lives without today. When I was watching the film I truly believed at the time that all of this was true. I began to picture a garden behind my condo in Bedford, and thinking, damn I don’t want to live local. I didn’t spend time to think about the other sides of this argument, automatically I thought that everything Ruppert said was true. The fact is he is right about our diminishing natural resources but we are in the great technology era, no one can predict the future. If someone told me you could watch television on your phone and use it as a GPS when I was in middle school I would have never thought I could have that in college.

I can’t wait to live to see what the future holds, hopefully everything doesn’t crash and we will not be living in an old fashion America like Ruppert says.  Using words like human survival strikes a chord and makes you want to survive. Another argumentative method he uses is empathy. The way the document is presented is displaying Ruppert as an underdog. He is someone that no one listens to, but has great ideas. Everyone has heard the story of the boy who cried wolf, and that what Ruppert is in a sense. He keeps warning people that things need to change in order to have success as humans in the future. As a whole, people are not listening. Maybe he is right, is the government really after him? It makes me question, can I trust the government, the media, and the news, who knows?