You know how a certain kind of sound vibration can destroy certain objects if it hits them at just the right resonant frequency? (The classic example would be opera singers and wine glasses, which *is* theoretically possible.) If you "tune" the sound just right, any object is susceptible to destruction in this manner. Technically, as [[audience and Record Player X#Original Source|Douglas Hofstadter points out]], this means that for any given record player, you can create a record that will cause that record player to produce the very sounds that will result in its own destruction—just like for any given computer, there's always an app that, when the computer runs it, the computer will destroy itself. This is a good metaphor for thinking about the fact that [[the key to rhetoric is audience, audience, audience]]. **For any given audience, if you can "[[a speaker tunes themselves to their audience|tune yourself]]" *just right*, there is a bit of rhetoric that will persuade them. *Always*.** [[Ted Chiang]] actually explores this in his short story, "[[Chiang 1991 - Understand|Understand]]." For any given human mind, there's a sentence or a word or a thought that, if that human thinks it, they'll destroy themselves. (Imagine, for instance, a thought—a memory, a realization, an epiphany—that, once your brain had fully processed and unpacked it, the implications were so devastating it made you decide to destroy yourself.) The rhetorical version of this is less dire: for any given human, if you "[[a speaker tunes themselves to their audience|tune yourself]]" and your rhetoric *just right* for that specific person, then there's a way to persuade them of *anything*.[^Gorgias] Obviously, in practice, it's impossible to know *exactly* how to perfectly tune yourself to just the right frequency, but the concept as such holds. [^Gorgias]: In a sense, this is what [[Gorgias]] argues Paris did for Helen of Troy in his [[Encomium to Helen]]. #### Original Source This comes from [[Douglas Hofstadter]]'s book, [[Gödel, Escher, Bach - The Eternal Golden Braid (1979)|Gödel, Escher, Bach]] (1979), in a discussion of [[Kurt Gödel]]'s **Incompleteness Theorem**: > Achilles: That's true. I see the dilemma now. If any record player—say Record Player X—is sufficiently high-fidelity, then when it attempts to play the song 'I Cannot Be Played on Record Player X', ==it will create just those vibrations which will cause it to break ... So it fails to be Perfect. And yet, the only way to get around that trickery, namely for Record Player X to be of lower fidelity, even more directly ensures that it is not Perfect==. It seems that every record player is vulnerable to one or the other of these frailties, and hence all record players are defective.