Gregory Aldrete: belief

Transcript context

…And you’ve written, which is fascinating. It’s fascinating when the echoes of people from a distant past are seen today. The same stuff is seen today, not just like some of the beautiful legal stuff that we’ve been talking about, but the tricks, let’s say the shitty stuff we see in politics. So, many of the rhetorical tricks you wrote, such as mudslinging, exaggeration, guilt by association, ad hominem attacks, name-calling, fearmongering, us versus them, rhyme, and so on and so forth. So, I’m guessing it worked given that we still have those today. Yeah, I mean, one of the things Cicero did is he wrote at least three of these handbooks about how to be a good public speaker. So, we know a lot about that. We have his own speeches that survive. And then, we have later people after Cicero who wrote about what Cicero did too. So, we know a lot about what he did. And the key to Cicero’s whole enterprise about persuading an audience, let’s say either it is speech to the people or in the courtroom is Cicero believed that people are fundamentally ruled by emotion. So, if you can touch their emotions, all sorts of other things become less important. If you can get a jury emotionally worked up and fear, anger, or particularly powerful there, then the facts might not matter, the truth might not matter, evidence might not matter, reason might not matter. Emotion is the key to everything. So, Cicero used what I would arguably call a lot of tricks to get his audiences emotionally riled up. And you can just go through these and they’re all the stuff you were saying, name-calling, mudslinging, us versus them arguments, ad hominem attacks, incredibly sophisticated. All this stuff that we think of today is, oh, very sophisticated techniques for propaganda and persuasion. It’s not new. People aren’t coming up with that much that’s new outside the realm of technology, human nature is the same. Cicero understood human psychology. He knew how to play on people. He knew how to play on their emotions, and he would do just… I mean, I want to say hilarious, but they’re depressingly hilarious things. He thought it’s important to use props. So, he said, “People are visual. They will respond emotionally to visual things in a way that just words alone won’t work.” So, he says, “An order is just like an actor and like an actor he has to prepare his stage and use props and things as visual cues to stir up the audience. So, for example, once he was defending a man in a court case who had just had a new baby born to him, and Cicero literally delivered the defense oration for this guy while cradling his newborn son in his arms, you can imagine, “Oh, cute little baby. Jury, how could you find him guilty and leave this cute baby without a father to take care of him?” Another time, he was defending a guy who had a photogenic son, a young boy, and Cicero literally propped up the kid behind him while he was giving the speech, and again said- Literally propped up the kid behind him while he was giving the speech, and again said, “Look at his eyes brimming with tears, thinking about his father being punished. How could you leave this wonderful boy without a father to care for him?” Another time someone didn’t have a photogenic kid, so he propped up his old parents in the courtroom and said, “Look at this nice old couple. You won’t want to take their son away.” That kind of stuff; I mean, it’s manipulative. have a photogenic kid, so he propped up his old parents in the courtroom and said, “Look at this nice old couple. You won’t want to take their son away.” That kind of stuff; I mean, it’s manipulative. Cicero, by the way, I should say also had philosophical beliefs about defending the republic and such. But he wasn’t above using these things. Even though he may have had altruistic or high notions of what he was doing, he also wasn’t above using these kind of rhetorical tricks.…

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