say you literally start out your op-ed piece as folllows,"i am rational, and my opponents are not." now of course that doesn't go anywhere toward establishing your rationality; it's not a particularly rational thing to say. indeed, it's rather hard to see what sort of fools would think that something like that could enhance the columnist's credibility. that you are an egomaniac, that your indulge in continual preening self-congratulation and flattery of your audience, while basing your 'argument' around ridiculing your opponents: these tend rather to establish your uselessness than your rationality. in actual debate, you might want to try prefacing every sentence with 'all rational people agree with me that...' this would give everyone good reasons to agree with you.
in general, the thing you need to doubt is what people say in praise of themselves. you're a fool if you believe what someone says who starts with a stirring tribute to her own honesty. you might think about whether and to what extent my declaration of my own honesty establishes the truth of what i'm saying. if someone's telling you how fair they are, or how good, or how beautiful, immediately draw the opposite conclusion. and if someone is telling you how rational they themselves are and praising you for how rational you are for agreeing with them, switch them off. they're not helping you to think clearly, and they don't actually care about the truth, just saying whatever can supplement their self-esteem. the only people with a rational motive to tell you how rational they are all the time are psychotic feebs.
it's like a comedian who starts with: this is going to be so funny.
i've seen some pathetic rhetorical strategies, but self-praise is the worst, and just offhand i want to point out that it's the basic rhetorical strategy of the american left, which issues a rhythmic drumbeat of 'we're so smart.' obviously, people have a motivation to believe good things about themselves without regard to whether those things are true. and obviously they have a motivation for getting you to agree with them about these assessments; that is, they are establishing right there a conflict of interest with regard to the truth of the question. even if they weren't trying to manipulate you, the self-interest and self-indulgence they're expressing undermines their credibility; they'll say whatever makes them feel ok about themselves right now. the self-praise is a strategy for enhancing self-esteem and forging a consensus by means irrelevant to truth, or connected to it inversely.
connected to it inversely: i say that you know the truth by effacing rather than inflating the self; you've got to see what's there, not merely what you want to see or what it makes you feel good to see. making any factual issue into a kind of pecking-order in which i turn out to be rational and you not (or i christian and you not, for example, depending on the community) makes you wonder whether truth is what matters or this pecking order, truth or making you feel good about yourself.
