© Elliot Essman 2005. All rights reserved.

These pages contain the complete 2005 revised text of Building Yourself, public speaking trainer Elliot Essman's guide to living the successful life.

Elliot Essman Public Speaking Training
Building Yourself Table of Contents
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• The one pervading evil of democracy is the tyranny of the majority. Lord Acton (1834–1902)

Your world starts with you. You may be part of a family. Are close family friends who aren't blood relatives part of your family? Are relatives you're less close with as much a part of your real family as the others? Is a single parent with a single child a family?

As we move to larger institutions, they become more abstract and harder to define. When we talk about the government, for example, do we refer to the people who clean the street and put out fires, or do we mean strictly people who work at government desks?

When we talk about “society” we're talking about some­thing much larger than even the government. Some people might try to define the word society as a collection of shared moral attitudes among a people, but how much do we really share? The only certainty about the word society is that it is a word. It's a convenient term that never means the same thing twice to two different people.

It's a major mistake to view society as something inflexible, something engraved in stone, a rule-giver, a strict parent. If you do, you're vulnerable to two time-wasting dangers: accepting society and rebelling against it. Both are unneces­sary. Society is not a person. You can't logically obey it. And rebelling against it is like trying to stab the air. You'll only be fighting with yourself. Society is a powerful idea you have to come to terms with inside your own head if you want to free yourself from it.