The Hidden Power of Rhetoric

Oft times, we find ourselves tongue tied in situations. Situations where you plumb the depths of your vocabulary, situations where you attempt to find the best riposte and situations where you try to overwhelm your opposition with just the right words.
Certain other situations lend themselves to allow you the speaks to have an element of preparation to woo and wow the audience.
In this day and age of progress, financial turmoil, violent religious fervor and unprecedented overall greed and selfishness unseen in humanity of the past, it is important to dwell on what motivates us. How are we any different from being forced into action by a hate speech, or one of religious calling from say the time of Adolf Hitler or Nero? I doubt if very little has changed, except for the verbosity of speeches which may be contemporary, but the speech in itself would be so mired in bombast, rhetoric and pithy platitudes that we've in essence been listening to the same record, year after year, century after century and have somehow unwittingly not been able to assess the underlying driver behind all of them - to me the driver is Rhetoric

So what is Rhetoric?

Rhetoric in itself is a branch in politics and distance from logic. Not alarmingly it finds its best proponents in politicians, leaders and various religious rabble rousers over time. It is not far removed from political debate, courtroom arguments, and the typical lets-tighten-our-belts kind of speech given by hopeless CEO's in times of crises. While there are many branches to rhetoric, depending on which end of the chain it gets applied - we often as a humand race find solace in lofty words, false promises, and hope for a better dawn. How else do you explain time after time when people go out to exercise their franchise to listen to the bijli-sadak-paani nonsense time after time - bewitched by the utopian promises by spineless politicians and yet end up voting option 1 or option 2 back in power on a flip-flop. It really doesn't - we know what we like to hear, and our leadership panders to such cravings. Rhetoric is a key essence of motivation, however it loses its place in actual problem solving - If I, as an engineer, listened to a bombastic routine from any of my top management and if they could actually see the smirk and smug look on my face they would immediately stop - certain problems call for immediate and quick resolution. All others which require healing over time, can have the woollen gauze of rhetoric applied over them...