MLK's Delight Strategy

Martin Luther King Jnr and the Three Questions for Speech Impact (2)

We are looking at the three essential questions that must be asked of any speech that seeks to make a world changing impact.

· What is your persuasive intent?

· What is your delight strategy?

· What is your dynamic content?

Persuasive intent, we saw, is the intention to do something to the audience, not merely say something. Speech is full of what are called in philosophy “performatives” - words which accomplish what they signify. We used Martin Luther King’s famous I have a dream speech section to make the point. His dream-words lifted his hearers from despair to hope, from weariness to confidence. That was his intent, and that day he sent 250,000 activists away from the Washington Mall with a new enduring activism that would make inevitable the passage of the Civil Rights Act a year later.

Here's the second question:

What is your delight strategy?

How are we going to arrange and deliver our words to cause assent in the hearts and minds of our listeners?

One of the greatest orators of the ancient world was St Augustine (354-430AD), a north African man of such intelligence that three books he wrote still form the basis of psychology (Confessions), politics (City of God) and theology (On the Trinity). He was first and foremost an orator. His initial career consisted of being paid a fortune to turn up at civic occasions and whip crowds into a frenzy of adulation towards the Roman rulers. He tired of this nonsense before he was thirty and spent the rest of his life being persuasive about God. He gave all speakers in his wake a piece of advice worth carving in gold:

“You can only move the [human] will through delight.”

Words must be put together in such a way that they give pleasure, captivate, enchant, charm, entrance, excite, enrapture – to offer a few synonyms. If a human being hears facts that are compelling, they don’t compel unless the facts are wrapped in compelling words. In the world of speech, information has never been power. If the will is the target (in modern parlance, our deepest desires), it must be moved, seduced, entranced, so that we will overcome our innate stubbornness and choose to change.

It used to be called “style,” but this gets a bad rap. And style is not a substitute for substance. There is nothing more irritating that a speaker who is funny, brilliant, clever, but has nothing to say behind the style. I heard a speaker lately roll out an old cliche in a debate: “That speaker gave a great impression of a longhorn cow – a point here, a point there, and a lot of bull in the middle.” Problem was, this speaker didn’t even have bull. There was a hole where an argument should have been. Style serves substance. Style gives substance power. But style never substitutes for it.

So instead of using words like style or rhetoric, let’s use delight – a strategy of arranging words to make our point so well that the will is moved, a person is changed, a new direction is created.

How?

In the 301-word module of MLK’s I have a dream speech, King conjured delight by producing six vivid snapshots of deepest longings fulfilled.

Let’s stress that again. This is how it is done.

VIVID SNAPSHOTS OF DEEPEST LONGINGS FULFILLED.

To see how this was done, lets detour via Hitler. He went to the Pope in 1933 and asked two questions:

- What do you fear the most?

- What do you want the most?

The Pope feared the communists the most. Hitler promised to neutralise them. The Pope wanted a Concordat the most. Hitler signed one, though it wasn’t worth the paper it was written on. For this, Hitler made the Pope dissolve the Catholic Political parties in Germany, which were the only effective opposition to the Nazis, and disband the Catholic Youth, which then all became the Hitler Youth.

But the strategy is critical, and every time Martin Luther King paints a picture, he is taking his audience from what they fear the most, to what they want the most.

Here we go.

And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’

What does his black audience fear the most? That they will never belong in America. That the American dream will pass them by and exclude them forever.

What does his black audience want the most? That America will become their home, and the grand great sentiments of the Constitution will fully apply to them.

I have a dream that on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down at the table of brotherhood.

Here the fear of never meeting as equals is pictured – in resonant biblical language – as a snapshot of what they wish the most - fellowship without distinctions. Meals were always a place of discrimination. No longer.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

Mississippi was the place of atrocity. It wasn’t safe to be black there. One feared just to be in the state as a black person. But the picture is painted of a state of freedom and justice. Even Mississippi!

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today.

The fear was that a black person would always just be judged and dismissed by the skin colour. It was the reality. The hope was that one-day skin colour would no longer be a barrier, and everyone would be judged on the deeper aspects of humanity – character! Its also intensely personal – these are MLK’s kids! This is his hope as a father! Any parent is really going to feel this.

I have a dream that one day down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of “interposition” and “nullification,” one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers. I have a dream today.

The “governor” and “Alabama” – both words were calculated to conjure a picture of hate and exclusion. The fear is clear. We don’t want to be in a place like Alabama a moment longer. What do we want? A place in Alabama where children of all stripes can be innocent of the scourge of racism. Let the children play today oblivious of colour. What a picture!

I have a dream that one day ‘every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low; the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked placed will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.”

Martin Luther King was a Christian pastor, and his audience were predominantly churchgoers. To quote the Bible was to evoke the authority of God, and to go to a place of beauty and peace and justice that God himself would build. This paradise applies even to the downtrodden Baptist blacks. It is not only for the Episcopal whites. The fear of his audience was that they were locked out even from the promises of God. They want a full and eternal citizenship. You can’t get a bigger dream than that.

He moves on to the importance of faith, since that is what will bring it about. But the pictures have done their work: Vivid snapshots of deepest longings fulfilled!

That’s Delight moving the Will.

Notice, he paints pictures. He doesn’t tell stories, although the pictures conjure a story. One does not always have to tell a story, as that may simply require more words that one has time for.

Just six pictures. Just six sentences.

And a new world to live in... even while the old one feels utterly oppressive.

Let no one say after this that style does not matter.