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For all you speechwriters out there, forget metaphors, anaphoras, alliteration and other rhetorical devices. They’re overrated. What you really need today are good old sayings. New made-up ones work, too. And don’t worry if they make sense or not. The most important thing is that they be simple enough so that anyone can understand them, and sufficiently deep (at least on the surface) to make any principal sound instantly wise. This is a rare commodity these days.
Need some examples. How about these? The ocean is vast because it admits all rivers. Delicious soup is made by combining different ingredients. And my personal favorite: Honey melons hang on bitter vines; sweet dates grow on thistles and thorns. Yeah, these are all real. That’s how Chinese President Xi recently addressed the United Nations in Geneva and World Economic Forum participants in Davos. And he sure wasn’t there to talk about food.
His message was clear: “The global economy is the big ocean that you cannot escape from (….) If one is always afraid of bracing the storm and exploring the new world, he will sooner or later get drowned in the ocean.”
Jean-Michel Basquiat
What’s interesting here is not so much who this warning was addressed to, but the choice of terminology. A storm. A New World. Rings a bell? June 4, 1940. House of Commons. As France is collapsing and England contemplates an imminent invasion, Churchill chooses these very words to show his enemy and the world his resolve. Several members of Parliament were crying.
No crying for President Xi’s speech so far. But still, there is a new war brewing. A trade war -- for now. And that’s perhaps why the Chinese president, quoting the Swiss writer and Nobel laureate Hermann Hesse, stressed the importance of serving “not war and destruction but peace and reconciliation.”
Or perhaps that’s because he knows his classics. In both speeches, Xi was able to take his audience seamlessly from Charles Dickens and Sun Tzu to Confucius and Stephen Hawking. He might be readying for war, but he does it in style.
There were also existential questions in those speeches. Questions like, Where did we come from? Where are we now? And where are we going?
A new form of diplomacy is born; let’s call it “Wisdom Diplomacy.” And let us remember, as Hesse wrote in Siddhartha, that “Wisdom cannot be passed on. Wisdom which a wise man tries to pass on to someone always sounds like foolishness.”
See, it works…