Besides, the feeling is not really "fear". It is a disturbance of equilibrium, of what is normal stability, of feeling what you always feel, of business as usual. It could be thought of as "getting keyed up", "excitement". Putting a positive spin on the imminent experience. One other help to a "cure" is experience, enough that one can become desensitized to the "fear" angle and develop a new arena of self-confidence, thus adding to a repetoire of skills useful in business, social and political contexts.
Speaking in public. Speaking with good preparation. Speaking one to many. Not impromptu. Not reading from manuscript. Not speaking from memory. Good forethought, but leaving the spoken words to the spontaneous moment, with confidence the words will flow.
The Speakers: A great number of speakers do not meet the speaker's burden. They beg many questions that can leave the audience dissatisfied.
The Listeners: The speaker's auditors do not meet their burden of responsibility to keep their speakers accountable. Most listeners need basic instruction in the criticism of public speaking.
Both speaker and listener must know what the speaker should be doing. "What is sauce for the goose is sauce for a gander." The criteria by which to judge speaking performance constitute a critical apparatus to be applied by communicators and auditors.Therefore! This basic instruction should be made available. Just in case the criteria for judgment are not made available anyhere else on the WWW, some basics are put here in a nutshell, surrounding an example, the ten drachma course.
"Dem Wahren, Schönen, Guten" A German phrase saying, "To the true, the beautiful, the good". What is it? Is it a toast to the wonderful works of a famous person? to the serene beauty of a treasured place? to a brilliant work of classic art? to a thrilling performance in a theater or concert hall? to a lovely ceremony? a summary in remembrance of a life well lived? None of those.
A good exercise, if you work in a group, is to have each person come prepared to give only an unforgettable opening that will be relavent to the chosen topic. Discuss and judge the "memorability" of each after all have been presented.
Where did I see it? After World War II, I was walking the streets of Berlin, littered with the debris of skeletal buildings. The bombings had flattened nearly everything. I saw in the rubble an arched stone. Carved on it were those words. It had marked the entrance to what was once a public park. I recognized immediately the irony of that sentiment, "the true, the beautiful, the good", lying in a heap of war-torn debris at the entrance to a supposed place of urban solitude.
What was it that I read that day, a remembrance I have never forgotten, carved in stone, lying monumentally in ruins? It was a belief. As it lay there, it became a testament to the false, the ugly, the evil.
It was an aspiration of a culture, a need, an idea which the people who carved it in stone themselves eventually subverted. How? By following an ideologue whose demogogic rants compelled a naive public to accept the idea of a holocaust and Lebensraum as truth, beauty and good. How firmly did that belief etched in stone reside in the hearts of the people? A demagogue would know.
Ideologies can be dangerous ways of thinking. Ideologies can be destructive of all that is good, beautiful, or true. Ideology is a statement contrived from beliefs and not derived from reliable knowledge, and often contrived by charismatic leaders who can persuade people to accept their authority to define what they should be thinking, and who also contrive to back up their authority with some form of coercion. The ideological falsehood may also be something the people want to hear, to their shame.
To quote from a poem I wrote about ideology:
To say, then see, reality contrived.
To see, then say, reality derived.
Are there markers of a national ideology? If so, what are they? In any national ideology, are there portents of a national tragedy that would lead to some major conflict, to revolution or civil war? Do people in our nation have a national ideology that has any fatal flaws?
I want, first, to talk about that German ideology which so infamously involved the world in war. Second, I want, mainly, to dwell on the American ideology that now involves us in questions about the soundness of our social compact.
There are markers of ideology in both Germany and the United States. These are the most telling markers of destructive ideology in the United States: (enumerate here).
The enumerated ideological practices in the U.S. warrant the throwing of yellow flags for infractions that, if not penalized, will allow the game to get out of the control of the referees and eventuate in a major conflict, endangering democratic principles in the social contract. We defeated the British tyranny. We resolved the internal issue of slavery in a civil war. As we now stand looking forward with trepidation to the possibility of a new civil war, it will be the theocratic ideologues versus the democratic practitioners. Leadership of party or person may tip the balance toward civil discourse rather than civil war.
I have written a libretto for an opera about the ideology of the French nationalists that gave us the eponym, chauvinism, from the life of Nicolas Chauvin, a highly decorated soldier in Napoleon'a army, ultimately lampooned on the French stage for his excessive patriotism glorifying the French empire and the French Grande Armée. I am very sensitive to the effect of ideology and I see much of it in everyday life. Reliable knowledge, proceeding from science, is the antidote.
How we as a nation now respond to this warning will determine the future political course of our society.
"To the true, the beautiful, the good" can be a noble aim perverted in the hands of the ideologue who can dim the consciousness and brainwash a naive society with a group belief system, ritual, and a charismatic presentation of himself or herself as the last and only authority on the final solution for social survival, An ideology contains every dangerous feature that can hypnotize its adherants to follow it to a false, ugly and evil conclusion.
How the speaker looks, acts, sounds, uses the time given, and supplements with visual aids are five more critical aspects of his or her performance.
ESPECIALLY:
See these pages:
Appearance of the Speaker
(Last updated on April 28, 2006 )