There is an uncomfortable truth about great
oratory. The most compelling speakers in
history were not always its greatest men.
They were, in many cases, its most dangerous. This is my take on rhetoric as I understand
it, not the feel-good tripe Toastmasters feeds people. Rhetoric is a weapon, just like a knife or a
gun. It can be used for any cause. If Toastmasters has proven anything to me, it
is that simple minds are easily moved by flowery words – even when the underlying
ideas are meaningless. Now, imagine if
those ideas are dangerous, not merely stupid.
Adolf Hitler could not run a country. He could not manage a war. He was, by all objective measures, a mediocre
administrator who nearly destroyed an entire continent through sheer
incompetence. Yet he held an audience of
100,000 people in absolute thrall. Helene
Bertha Amalie “Leni” Riefenstahl’s 1935 documentary, Triumph of the Will,
captured what that looked like: a stadium full of human beings reduced to a
single organism, breathing in unison, surrendered entirely to one voice. That is not leadership. That is rhetoric weaponised. And if you cannot recognise it when it is
happening to you, you are the next victim.
What is Rhetoric
Rhetoric is not the art of sounding good. It is the art of moving people. Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates treated it as
one of three pillars of a civilised man, alongside ethics and logic. The Aristotelian model divides persuasion
into three elements: logos (logical argument), ethos
(credibility), and pathos (emotional appeal). Every speech ever made draws on some
combination of the three.
The Greek word logos means “reason”, “appeal”,
or “discourse”. The Gospel of John
opens, “In the beginning was the Word” — “Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος”. The translators struggled because logos
means more than “word”. It means the
governing principle of the universe.
When a demagogue tells you he alone has the answer, he is doing
something structurally identical: positioning himself as the logos of
the political moment.
Ethos is the
ethics of argumentation. Niccolò di
Bernardo dei Machiavelli wrote in Il Principe, “So much depends on
reputation — guard it with your life.”
Your credibility as a speaker is half the battle before you open your
mouth. The audience decides whether to
trust you within the first thirty seconds.
Everything after that is confirmation bias.
Pathos is the
Greek word for suffering. It is the
appeal to emotion. The uncomfortable
truth is that human beings are not rational creatures who occasionally feel
things. They are emotional creatures who
occasionally think rationally. Every
skilled communicator — honest or malicious — knows this.
The Mechanics of
Manipulation
The Anchor
The most important moment in any speech is the
first sentence. Not because it sets the
tone — that is the conventional wisdom.
Because it sets the frame. Cognitive
science calls this “anchoring”. The
first piece of information a person receives becomes the reference point
against which all subsequent information is evaluated. A skilled speaker plants that anchor deliberately,
then builds every argument around it. Adolf
Hitler’s speeches invariably began with Germany’s humiliation. The Treaty of Versailles. The stab in the back. Every policy, every promise, every enemy
existed in relation to that anchor. He
did not have to make rational arguments.
He simply had to remind his audience of the wound, and they would accept
any proposed cure.
Donald John Trump does the same thing. “American carnage.” That was the opening of his 2017 inaugural
address. The country was broken. Only he could fix it. The anchor was set before the first paragraph
was complete.
Simple Language
There is a reason neither Hitler nor Trump
spoke in complex sentences. Research by
the American political scientist Dr Drew Westen, published in The Political
Brain (2007), demonstrated that voters make political decisions based on
emotional response, not policy analysis.
Complexity is the enemy of emotion.
Simplicity is its carrier. Trump’s
vocabulary in his 2016 campaign speeches tested at a sixth-grade reading level
— lower than any major presidential candidate in the previous forty years,
according to a Politico analysis of debate transcripts. This was not stupidity. It was professional competence. Simple words travel faster. They cross demographic lines. They stick.
Hitler’s speechwriter, Maximilian Amann, later
noted that Hitler never used technical language in public. Every idea had to be reducible to a
slogan. “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein
Führer.” One people, one nation, one
leader. Twelve syllables. A complete political programme.
Never Appeal to Charity
This is the mistake that defeats most
salespeople, most politicians, and most leaders. Do not tell people what is good for
society. Do not appeal to their
altruism, their decency, or their compassion.
None of this moves human beings.
Tell them what they personally gain.
Calculate their self-interest.
Structure your argument around it.
Hitler did not ask Germans to sacrifice for some abstract
principle. He told them they would be restored. Their greatness would be returned. Their enemies would pay.
Marc Antony understood this in 44 BC. After Julius Caesar’s assassination, Antony
faced a Roman crowd that had welcomed the conspirators. He did not argue Caesar’s case directly. He read Caesar’s will, which left money and
gardens to the Roman people. He made it
personal. He made it financial. The crowd burned the Senate. William Shakespeare captured the psychology: “Friends,
Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears; I come to bury Caesar, not to praise
him.” That opening is a masterpiece of
misdirection. By declaring he will not
praise Caesar, Antony removes the audience’s defences. What follows is anything but neutral.
People Cannot be Told What
to Do
Effective manipulators do not issue
orders. They ask leading questions. They make suggestions. They arrange circumstances so that the target
reaches the predetermined conclusion independently, and therefore owns it. Hitler rarely commanded his inner circle
directly. He expressed preferences, made
his displeasure known, and allowed subordinates to compete to please him — a
system that historian Sir Ian Kershaw called “working towards the Führer”. The result was that his followers enforced
his agenda more zealously than any direct order could have produced. Trump operates identically. He does not say, “Do this illegal thing.” He says, “Someone should look into that.” He plants the seed and lets the audience
water it. The principle is this: people
fight harder for conclusions they believe they reached themselves.
The Three Case Studies
Adolf Hitler: The Power of
the Voice
Hitler was, by the assessment of
contemporaries who despised everything he stood for, an extraordinary
orator. The British historian Alan Louis
Charles Bullock, Baron Bullock of Leafield, writing in Hitler: A Study in
Tyranny (1952), noted that his voice had a hypnotic quality that
transcended the content of what he said.
He used silence. Long pauses
before the climactic phrase. The
audience filled those silences with their own anxiety, and then received the
demagogue’s conclusion as relief. He
mirrored the audience’s existing feelings.
He did not create resentment. He named resentment that already
existed and gave it a target. The
audience believed the demagogue understood them. In fact, he simply told them what they
already believed, in the most validating terms available. He created an in-group. Every mention of the enemy had the structural
effect of reinforcing who was not the enemy. The audience became a community through
shared hatred. The result was a collapse
of individual critical thinking. People
who later described themselves as reasonable, educated individuals remembered
standing in crowds and screaming. They
could not explain why. That is not
coincidence. That is engineering.
Donald John Trump: The Art
of Repetition
Trump’s rhetorical strategy is, in several
respects, more sophisticated than Hitler’s — because it functions in a media
environment that Hitler never faced. Trump
understood, before almost any other political figure of his era, that the
twenty-four-hour news cycle rewards disruption over substance. Every outrageous statement generated
coverage. Coverage generated name
recognition. Name recognition generated
votes. The psychological phenomenon
known as the “illusory truth effect” — documented by Lynn Hasher, David
Goldstein and Dr Thomas Toppino in a 1977 study published in the Journal of
Experimental Psychology — demonstrates that repeated exposure to a
statement increases the likelihood that a person will judge it true, regardless
of whether it actually is. Trump
repeated his core claims with a consistency that bordered on liturgical. His audience eventually stopped fact-checking
and started reciting.
By assigning reductive nicknames — “Sleepy Joe”,
“Crooked Hillary” — Trump reduced complex political figures to a single
attribute and made it socially contagious.
This is branding applied to political destruction. He also performed victimhood at a scale no
previous American president had attempted.
His followers were not following a strong man. They were following someone who claimed, credibly,
to share their sense of being wronged.
Benito Amilcare Andrea
Mussolini: The Theatre of Power
The third case study belongs here for a
specific reason: Benito Mussolini invented the playbook that both Hitler and
Trump borrowed from. Mussolini
understood that rhetoric is inseparable from performance. He designed his public persona with the
deliberateness of a stage director. The
jutting jaw. The upraised fist. The balcony.
The crowd below. He had himself
photographed from below to appear larger.
Every element was calibrated.
He is also the originator of one of the most
durable rhetorical techniques in authoritarian politics: the deliberate
contradiction. Mussolini would make two
contradictory promises in the same speech and then accuse anyone who noticed of
bad faith. The contradiction was not a
weakness. It was the point. It demonstrated that he operated outside the
normal rules of logical discourse — and therefore outside the normal rules of
accountability. The technique
survives. It is alive and well.
How Not to Be Manipulated
The uncomfortable conclusion is that rhetoric
is value-neutral. The same techniques
Hitler used to mobilise a nation toward genocide, Prime Minister Jacinda Kate
Laurell Ardern used at the Christchurch memorial in March 2019 to hold a
country together. She used allusion —
the Arabic greeting as-Salaamu’Alaykum — to signal inclusion rather than
exclusion. Same tool. Opposite purpose. The question is never whether rhetoric is
being used. It is always being
used. The question is whether you can
see it.
Watch the anchor. The first thing a speaker tells you is the
most important thing they want you to believe.
Evaluate it separately. Ask: Is
this actually true?
Notice the absence of facts. Demagogues deal in emotion, not
evidence. If a speaker has moved you
deeply but you cannot identify a single verifiable claim they made, that is a
warning sign.
Identify the in-group. Every populist narrative creates an in-group
and an out-group. Ask: who is the
enemy? Ask who benefits from your belief
in that enemy.
Apply the self-interest
test. Ask what
the speaker personally gains from your agreement.
Be suspicious of simplicity. The world is not simple. If an argument makes it sound completely
simple — one enemy, one solution, one leader — it is almost certainly
incomplete.
Seek the strongest
counterargument. Not the
version the speaker presents, which they chose for its vulnerability. Find the best opposing case. If you cannot articulate it, you do not
understand the issue well enough to have a strong opinion on it.
The Lesson
Aristotle wrote the first systematic treatise
on rhetoric in the fourth century BC. He
understood that rhetoric was not inherently dangerous. What was dangerous was ignorance of it. An audience that cannot recognise rhetorical
technique cannot defend against it. An
audience that understands how anchoring works, how pathos functions, how
simple language bypasses critical thought — that audience is significantly
harder to manipulate.
The dark arts are not dark because of the
tools. They are dark because of the ends
to which they are put. And the only
reliable defence is literacy — the ability to read a speech the way you read a
contract: looking for the clause that was designed to be overlooked. The finest speakers in history understood
that language is power. The finest
listeners understood that power requires accountability. Learn both.
You will need them.
Terence
Nunis, DTM | Division Advisor, District 80 Division M | Club Advisor,
AIA Toastmasters | Past President & Founder, Awesome Toastmasters
