Aristotle's elements of honor state: "The elements of honour are: sacrifices, memorials both in verse and without metre, rewards, sanctuaries, precedence, tombs, statutes, public maintenance, barbarian practices, such as genuflection and standing back, and gifts, which are valued by all recipients. Indeed, a gift is a surrender of property and an indication of status, which is why it is sought by the mercenary and the ambitious, providing as it does what they both seek, as the mercenary are after possessions and the ambitious are after status (Aristotle, Lawson-Tancred, p. 89)."

The wars begun after September 11, 2001, have long ceased to be about bringing to justice the perpetrators of evil and destruction, and have become the mechanisms to obtaining possessions (material wealth) for politically aligned news media, and the elevation to status for the right and the left public officials who gain support and attention for saying the right things, whether or not they truly believe in what they are saying; which is misleading. The military assuages the loss and grief of fallen soldiers by awarding posthumous medals-of-honor and folded flags that draped the coffins of their loved ones.

Religious leaders around the world are not exempt from the philosophy of misleading, and like politicians they employ the Aristotelian philosophies in order to bend the minds of their followers. Aristotle says:

"Good works pertain either to safety and the necessities of existence, or to wealth, or to some one of the other good things, whose possession is not easy either in general or in that place or at that time -- many men seem to attain status for seemingly slight services, but this is due to the times and places (p. 89)."

Religious leaders, like the Islamic fundamentalists who promote terrorism in the name of Allah and Islam, achieve status as...

The Taliban, as many know, are the product of decades of war in Afghanistan, many growing up in refugee camps across the border in Pakistan where they lived in the shadow of terror that most of us cannot imagine. For providing food, clothing, and shelter to them -- of which they had been deprived most of their lives -- Al Qaeda was able to bend their minds towards hatred and destruction of others because those others chose a different religious path. They mislead them; convincing them that paradise awaits them if they use their bodies as weapons of destruction.
Other religious leaders are not exempt from employing the philosophy of misleading, again, using the same described Aristotelian concept. Today, televangelists amass financial fortunes and achieve celebrity status amongst their followers. In exchange for donations, they promise salvation. They have studied their markets well, and mislead their followers, and have fine-tuned the practice of convincing people that the Bible is literal, rather than a beautiful collection of stories intended to address the social and spiritual problems of the ancient of communities for which they were written, and which continue to exist today.

Misleading is more than rhetoric, it is a philosophy.

References

Aristotle and Lawson-Trancred, H. (1991). The Art of Rhetoric, Penguinclassics.com,

Penguin Classics.

Birenbaum, a. (1997). Managed Care: Made in America, Westport, CT., Praeger

Publishers.

Birenbaum, a. (2002). Wounded Profession: American Medicine Enters the Age of Managed Care, Westport, CT., Praeger Publishers.