Utopia, Vision, and Narrative: Is there a real Philip Dru out there? If you don’t like White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon and the effect he’s having on American politics, take heart: his polar opposite is out there somewhere. A century ago a real man who in his day was every bit as powerful as [ more » ]
The Spoken Word… or the Spoken Thought?
Has President Donald Trump’s own distinctive delivery style rendered the formal prepared speech forever obsolete? For millennia, the business of public persuasion by princes, politicians and those in power, has depended on a deliberate construct based on the rules of oratory and rhetoric. Building up a chain of logical argument by means of tested ideas [ more » ]
Blood and Soil takes it all
So the white working class bet the farm on Donald Trump, in the process bringing out the *farm-boy deep inside every American male. In the week since the 2016 US presidential election, much of the focus has been on the tangible policies the president-elect may or may not have promised voters. But Trump’s extraordinary skill [ more » ]
Primary Colours
Just as every hue in the rainbow can be traced back to a mix of primary colours, can human behaviours and the ways we communicate them, be boiled down to a recognisable pattern? Alas, humans don’t conform to colour theory. In fact, if there’s one truly consistent thing about human behaviour, it’s that people behave [ more » ]
A Golden Age of Narcissism
Thanks to the undoubted persuasion power and oratorial skills of certain politicians, some commentators have laid the blame on charisma for what might be called a battle of “Demagogues Vs. Democrats” that’s now unfolding across some western liberal democracies. In fact, we seem to be entering a new Golden Age of Narcissism, built around the [ more » ]