Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…Again, I told you I like practical stuff. This all started with I kept reading about people like Cicero giving speeches in ancient Rome, lots of speeches. They would give a speech in the Forum with 10,000, 20,000 people. And the thought occurred to me, “Well, in ancient Rome, you don’t have microphones. You don’t have loudspeakers. So how does someone give a speech outdoors in a windy place, not acoustically sound, to 20,000 people?” They just can’t hear you. Part of the answer, it turns out, well, part of it’s oratorical training. You learn how project your voice. But some of it too is that the Romans actually had this system of gestures that orators like Cicero would use to accompany their speeches. And what I ended up doing is combining two types of evidence again. So I looked at the rhetorical handbooks like Cicero’s. And also there’s this guy, Quintilian, who lived about 100 years after Cicero, who wrote this long thing called the Institutio Oratoria, which has a description of all types of oratorical stuff, including about 40 pages on gestures. So he actually says, “When you put your fingers like this, it means such and such.” It turns out Roman orators had a system of sign language that they would use to augment their speeches. But here’s the fun part. It wasn’t like modern American Sign Language, where a gesture means the same thing as a word. Instead; and this goes back to Cicero; a certain gesture would indicate a certain emotion that you were meant to feel when you heard the words. It’s like your body is adding an emotional gloss to your speech. You’re saying words, and then you’re indicating how you think those words should make you feel. And even more fun, the Romans believed that, “If I make certain hand gestures, you will almost involuntarily feel certain emotion.” So if you’re skilled, you can manipulate your audience by playing on their emotions. This might sound weird or improbable, but the metaphor that Cicero himself uses is he says, “Think about music. Everybody knows that certain musical tones will make you feel a certain way.” Think of movies today: in a horror movie, they’re going to play strident, tense music. In a romantic scene, you’re going to have strings, and it’ll make you feel a certain way. When you hear the Jaws theme, you feel tense. Cicero said, “The orator’s body is like a lyre.” A lyre is a musical instrument. “And you have to learn to play on your own body as a musical instrument to affect the emotions of your audience.” I think he might be onto something, especially given how central public speaking was in Roman culture. Yeah. And a lot of the Roman oratorical gestures: I could probably do some, and you could probably guess what emotion they’re meant to be. For example, there’s one where you hold up your hands to the side and push like this. This is the gesture, and what that means is mild aversion. I don’t like something. Now if I couple this with turning my face to the side, that; pushing off to one side, turning my face away, it’s a strong aversion. That’s like fear or something. If I clench my fist and press it to my chest, that’s anger or grief. If I slap my thigh, again, that’s indication of anger. So a lot of these make sense. I mean, they’re natural gestures. Now, some are really weird and artificial. I mean, one of my favorite of these is if you hold your hand up open, then curl the fingers in one by one, and then flip it out; this sort of thing; that, to the Romans meant “wonder,” which you sort of see. But again, if you’ve been raised in a societal context where you’re used to the notion that this gesture means this emotion, when someone does it, you’re probably going to feel that emotion.…

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