Quora Answer: Are Speakers Expected to Force the Audience to Believe the Way They Think?

The following is my answer to a Quora question: “As a speaker, are you expected to force your audience to believe the way you think?” 

Mere words cannot force people to believe anything.  The art of rhetoric is to articulate a position in order to convince others.  A great speaker is able to convince the audience that this was their position anyway, and he is merely elocuting it.  People do not like to be told things.  Their egos automatically push back against anything they perceive as contrary to their interests.  This is regardless of information.  Their cognitive bias only interprets information and facts according to their preconceived positions. 

A speaker utilises rhetoric to go around it by assuming the speaker persona.  He utilises kairos, an appeal to timelessness; pathos, the appeal to experience; ethos, the appeal to values; and to an extent, logos, the appeal to logic.  In the course of his speech, he weaves all these in, and subtly utilises rhetorical devices such as allusions and changes in pronouns to convince the audience that this is what they believed in all along.  People want to feel that they are part of something bigger than themselves.  The larger the crowd, the easier it is to sway them to an emotive position.