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Throughout the Agora Educational Program, we've included many snippets, quotes, examples, and videos of successful speakers, where "success" for us means that they were effective in moving people to action largely due to their rhetoric. Since this is not a literary educational program, our focus is mainly on speakers that have actually lived, rather than on movie or book characters where the reaction of their audience is totally scripted by the author.
In the program, you will see examples from all sides of the political, ideological, and moral spectrum - from Lincoln to Trump, from Hitler to Obama, from Lenin to Ronald Reagan, from Ben Shapiro to Joe Biden. You will see examples from scientists, priests, and even crackpots as we analyze and illustrate the techniques that they use, how they fit into the existing research on public speaking, persuasion, and leadership, and how you can use those tools in your own speeches.
In Agora, we do not see public speaking as a goal in itself, as a literary exercise that needs to conform to some academic canon and tick some list of checkboxes, or as an activity devoted to producing merely public speaking contest winners and coaches, but rather as a means to an end - leadership for actively building a better world. So while people like Trump and Obama are at the antipodes of rhetorical finesse, there's no denying that they were both extremely effective at what they set out to do - getting people to vote for them.
Public speaking is a tool, like a hammer is. Like any tool, you can use it either for good - to build someone else a house, or for bad - to kill another person. There's nothing intrinsically good or evil in the hammer itself. The selection of a particular speaker does not necessarily mean that we endorse that speaker's morals, viewpoints, religion, or any other facet of his personality or worldview. It doesn't even mean that we endorse the public speaking technique that he or she uses. However, under the principle of neutrality and intellectual honesty, we do want to make our members aware of the existence of such techniques if they work and are backed by solid research.
No matter how repulsed you may be at a particular figure, studying their approach and tactics is fundamental to defeating them.
If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle. –
Sun Tzu
Once you're given all the available tools, your internal moral compass will dictate how you use them. We can only hope that it points in the right direction.