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The Secret History And Strange Future Of Charisma

How our culture, politics and technology became infused with a
mysterious social phenomenon that everyone can feel but nobody can
explain.

[Charisma-written-by-Joe-Zadeh-Noema-Magazine-]
[Charisma-written-by-Joe-Zadeh-Noema-Magazine-]
Refael Idan Suissa for Noema Magazine
FeaturePhilosophy & Culture
By Joe Zadeh May 24, 2023
   
Credits

Joe Zadeh is a writer based in Newcastle.

In 1929, one of Germany's national newspapers ran a picture story
featuring globally influential people who, the headline proclaimed,
"have become legends." It included the former U.S. President Woodrow
Wilson, the Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin and India's
anti-colonialist leader Mahatma Gandhi. Alongside them was a picture
of a long-since-forgotten German poet. His name was Stefan George,
but to those under his influence he was known as "Master."

George was 61 years old that year, had no fixed abode and very little
was known of his personal life and past. But that didn't matter to
his followers; to them he was something more than human: "a cosmic
ego," "a mind brooding upon its own being." Against the backdrop of
Weimar Germany -- traumatized by postwar humiliation and the collapse
of faith in traditional political and cultural institutions -- George
preached an alternate reality through books of poetry. His words swam
in oceans of irrationalism: of pagan gods, ancient destinies and a
"spiritual empire" he called "Secret Germany" bubbling beneath the
surface of normal life. In essence, George dreamed of that terribly
persistent political fantasy: a future inspired by the past. He
wanted to make Germany great again.

George dazzled Germans on all sides of the political spectrum
(although many, with regret, would later distance themselves). Walter
Benjamin loitered for hours around the parks of Heidelberg that he
knew the poet frequented, hoping to catch sight of him. "I am
converting to Stefan George," wrote a young Bertolt Brecht in his
diary. The economist Kurt Singer declared in a letter to the
philosopher Martin Buber: "No man today embodies the divine more
purely and creatively than George."

Max Weber, one of the founding fathers of sociology, met Stefan
George in 1910 and immediately became curious. He didn't buy George's
message -- he felt he served "other gods" -- but was fascinated by the
bizarre hold he seemed to have over his followers. At a conference in
Frankfurt, he described the "cult" that was growing around him as a
"modern religious sect" that was united by what he described as
"artistic world feelings." In June that year, he wrote a letter to
one of his students in which he described George as having "the
traits of true greatness with others that almost verge on the
grotesque," and rekindled a particularly rare word to capture what he
was witnessing: charisma.

At the time, charisma was an obscure religious concept used mostly in
the depths of Christian theology. It had featured almost 2,000 years
earlier in the New Testament writings of Paul to describe figures
like Jesus and Moses who'd been imbued with God's power or grace.
Paul had borrowed it from the Ancient Greek word "charis," which more
generally denoted someone blessed with the gift of grace. Weber
thought charisma shouldn't be restricted to the early days of
Christianity, but rather was a concept that explained a far wider
social phenomenon, and he would use it more than a thousand times in
his writings. He saw charisma echoing throughout culture and
politics, past and present, and especially loudly in the life of
Stefan George.

"I knew: This man is doing me violence -- but I was no longer strong
enough. I kissed the hand he offered and with choking voice uttered:
'Master, what shall I do?'"
-- Ernst Glockner

It certainly helped that George was striking to look at: eerily tall
with pale blueish-white skin and a strong, bony face. His sunken eyes
held deep blue irises and his hair, a big white mop, was always
combed backward. He often dressed in long priest-like frock coats,
and not one photo ever shows him smiling. At dimly lit and exclusive
readings, he recited his poems in a chant-like style with a deep and
commanding voice. He despised the democracy of Weimar Germany, cursed
the rationality and soullessness of modernity and blamed capitalism
for the destruction of social and private life. Instead, years before
Adolf Hitler and the Nazis came to power, he foresaw a violent
reckoning that would result in the rise of a messianic "fuhrer" and a
"new reich."

Many were immediately entranced by George, others unnerved. As the
Notre Dame historian Robert Norton described in his book "Secret
Germany," Ernst Bertram was left haunted by their meeting -- "a
werewolf!" he wrote. Bertram's partner, Ernst Glockner, on the other
hand, described his first encounter with George as "terrible,
indescribable, blissful, vile ... with many fine shivers of happiness,
with as many glances into an infinite abyss." Reflecting on how he
was overcome by George's force of personality, Glockner wrote: "I
knew: This man is doing me violence -- but I was no longer strong
enough. I kissed the hand he offered and with choking voice uttered:
'Master, what shall I do?'"

As German democracy began to crumble under the pressure of rebellions
and hyperinflation, George's prophecy increased in potency. He became
a craze among the educated youth, and a select few were chosen to
join his inner circle of "disciples." The George-Kreis or George
Circle, as it came to be known, included eminent writers, poets and
historians like Friedrich Gundolf, Ernst Kantorowicz, Max Kommerell,
Ernst Morwitz and Friedrich Wolters; aristocrats like brothers
Berthold, Alexander and Claus von Stauffenberg; and the
pharmaceutical tycoon Robert Boehringer. These were some of the
country's most intellectually gifted young men. They were always
young men, and attractive too -- partly due to George's misogynistic
views, his homosexuality and his valorization of the male-bonding
culture of Ancient Greece. 

Between 1916 and 1934, the George Circle published 18 books, many of
which became national bestsellers. Most of them were carefully
selected historical biographies of Germanic figures like Kaiser
Frederick II, Goethe, Nietzsche and Leibniz, as well as others that
George believed were part of the same spiritual empire: Shakespeare,
Napoleon and Caesar. The books ditched the usual objectivity of
historical biographies of the era in favor of scintillating
depictions and ideological mythmaking. Their not-so-secret intention
was to sculpt the future by peddling a revision of Germany's history
as one in which salvation and meaning were delivered to the people by
the actions of heroic individuals.

In 1928, he published his final book of poetry, "Das Neue Reich"
("The New Reich,") and its vision established him as some kind of
oracle for the German far-right. Hitler and Heinrich Himmler pored
over George Circle books, and Hermann Goring gave one as a present to
Benito Mussolini. At book burnings, George's work was cited as an
example of literature worth holding onto; there was even talk of
making him a poet laureate. 

"Their not-so-secret intention was to sculpt the future by peddling a
revision of Germany's history as one in which salvation and meaning
were delivered to the people by the actions of heroic individuals."

Weber had died in 1920, before George truly reached the height of his
powers (and before the wave of totalitarian dictatorships that would
define much of the century), but he'd already seen enough to fatten
his theory of charisma. At times of crisis, confusion and complexity,
Weber thought, our faith in traditional and rational institutions
collapses and we look for salvation and redemption in the irrational
allure of certain individuals. These individuals break from the
ordinary and challenge existing norms and values. Followers of
charismatic figures come to view them as "extraordinary,"
"superhuman" or even "supernatural" and thrust them to positions of
power on a passionate wave of emotion. 

In Weber's mind, this kind of charismatic power wasn't just evidenced
by accounts of history -- of religions and societies formed around
prophets, saints, shamans, war heroes, revolutionaries and radicals.
It was also echoed in the very stories we tell ourselves -- in the
tales of mythical heroes like Achilles and Cu Chulainn. 

These charismatic explosions were usually short-lived and unstable --
"every hour of its existence brings it nearer to this end," wrote
Weber -- but the most potent ones could build worlds and leave behind
a legacy of new traditions and values that then became enshrined in
more traditional structures of power. In essence, Weber believed, all
forms of power started and ended with charisma; it drove the volcanic
eruptions of social upheaval. In this theory, he felt he'd uncovered
"the creative revolutionary force" of history. 

Weber was not the first to think like this. Similar ideas had been
floating around at least as far back as the mid-1700s, when the
Scottish philosopher David Hume had written that in the battle
between reason and passion, the latter would always win. And it
murmured in the 1800s in Thomas Carlyle's "Great Man Theory" and in
Nietzsche's idea of the "Ubermensch." But none would have quite the
global impact of Weber, whose work on charisma would set it on a
trajectory to leap the fence of religious studies and become one of
the most overused yet least understood words in the English language.

---------------------------------------------------------------------

Come the spring of 1968, the New York Times columnist Russell Baker
was declaring that "the big thing in politics these days is charisma,
pronounced 'karizma,'" and that all the Kennedys had it. Since then,
charisma has been used to explain everything from Marilyn Monroe to
anticolonial uprisings, New Age gurus and corporate CEOs. When the
Sunni jihadist preacher Anwar al-Awlaki -- whose YouTube videos were
linked to numerous terrorist attacks around the world -- was executed
by drone strike by the Obama administration in 2011, some observers
suggested that his main threat had been his "charismatic character."

Today, a Google Ngram of its usage in American English shows it to be
still on a steep upward trend. And not just in American English:
Charisma has migrated to Chinese in its Western pronunciation, to
Japanese as "karisuma" and to Spanish, French and Italian as
"carisma," "charisme" and "carisma" respectively. The wholesale
migration of the word in exact or close to its original form suggests
that no equivalent previously existed in those languages to express
its magnetic and mysterious quality. On TikTok, charisma has become a
viral term; shortened to "rizz" or "unspoken rizz," it refers to a
person's wordless ability to seduce a love interest with body
gestures and facial expressions alone. The hashtag #rizz has over 13
billion views. 

A word survives and thrives because it continues to quench an
explanatory thirst; it meets a need or desire. And any word carefully
examined will reveal itself to be a wormhole -- an ongoing exchange
between the past and the present. The prevalence of charisma implies
a widespread belief in the power of it, and also in the ability of
extraordinary individuals to change history. Weber's terms still
echo: Something magical and dangerous, something unfathomable, is
afoot when charisma is present. "The pertinent question," pondered
the cultural theorist John Potts, "is not whether charisma actually
exists, but why it exists."

Most of us will have experienced the allure of a charismatic
individual in our lives. Few have experienced the feeling of being
charismatic, where your desires, beliefs and actions are having a
disproportionately powerful influence on those around you. But when
people try to break down how it feels to experience it, they veer
into cryptic comparisons. "When she [Elizabeth Holmes] speaks to you,
she makes you feel like you are the most important person in her
world in that moment," Tyler Shultz, a whistleblower who worked at
Theranos, told CBS News. "She almost has this reality distortion
field around her that people can just get sucked into." 

About a meeting with Leo Tolstoy, Maxim Gorky wrote: "I can not
express in words what I felt rather than thought at that moment; in
my soul there was joy and fear, and then everything blended in one
happy thought: 'I am not an orphan on the earth, so long as this man
lives on it.'" Reflecting on her rare experiences of charisma across
25 years of interviewing notable figures, the newspaper columnist
Maggie Alderson wrote: "I still don't understand what creates the
effect. ... If not fame, beauty, power, wealth and glory then what? It
must be innate. I find that quite thrilling."

"Something magical and dangerous, something unfathomable, is afoot
when charisma is present."

It certainly seems to be a subjective and circumstantial spell: a
"prophet" to some is a "werewolf" to others. Not all young men and
boys are drawn toward the "charisma" of the misogynistic influencer
Andrew Tate; not all financiers and experts who encountered Holmes
and Theranos were convinced to invest in a technology that turned out
to not exist. "We tend to think of charisma in a sinister register --
a kind of regressive thing, where people are being affirmed in their
prejudices," the University of Chicago anthropologist William
Mazzarella explained to me. "Yielding is the problem from this point
of view. It's viewed as submitting to domination, being taken for a
ride and not being the master of your own destiny. But then there's
also the sense of yielding as being selfless and participating in
something greater than yourself. It's the thing that allows us to be
our most magnificent as human beings."

As Mazzarella reminded me, people also use charisma to talk about the
most admired and inspiring figures in their lives and the charismatic
teachers they've had. "There the implication is that this person
helped me to become myself or transcend myself in a way that I
wouldn't otherwise have been able to do," he said. "That's what's
interesting about charisma: It touches the darkest fundamentals of
human impulses while having the capacity to point to our highest
potentials. Charisma has these two faces, and it's the fact that we
seem to not be able to have one without the other that is so uncanny
and disturbing. Inspiring charismatic figures can become
exploitative, manipulative or violent. Violence gives way to
liberation, or liberation gives way to violence. The problem is not
just that we have a hard time telling the good charisma from the bad
charisma, but that one has a way of flipping into the other."

Weber believed that whether we thought of ourselves as explicitly
religious or not, humans had a fundamental need for mysticism. As the
modern world was becoming increasingly secular, industrialized and
rationalized -- in his now famous term, "disenchanted" -- and more
faith was placed in a demystified scientific worldview rather than in
gods or shamans, the irrational and mystical appeal of charismatic
power wouldn't just fade away; we would crave it even more. 

This is perhaps most evident in our political realm, where a longing
for charisma prevails, and a lack of it is frequently commented on.
In the U.K.'s left-leaning newspaper The Guardian this year, Andy
Beckett bemoaned the Labor leader Keir Starmer's lack of "messianic
qualities" -- unlike Tony Blair, he wrote, "Starmer can't use personal
charisma." Meanwhile in America's conservative magazine National
Review, Nate Hochman wrote that while Ron DeSantis might be focused
and competent, Donald Trump "beats him in raw charisma." In fact,
wrote the American historian David Bell, "Trump's base [is] tied to
him by one of the most remarkable charismatic relationships in
American history." Last month, Vanity Fair reported a theory that
Tucker Carlson's departure from Fox News was linked to Rupert
Murdoch's distaste for Carlson's "messianism" and Murdoch's
ex-fiancee's belief that Carlson was "a messenger from God."

"I'm convinced that the way we frame political discussions has far
more of an impact on politics than we realize," explained Tom Wright,
a cultural historian at the University of Sussex. "If one of the
terms of debate is that some people have a gift and others don't,
then that conditions the way we reflect on the political process and
the kind of leadership we want, the kind of disruption that's
possible, the kind of people that can and don't enter politics." A
good example of this was a 2007 campaign slogan for Gordon Brown in
the U.K.: "Not flash, just Gordon." The goal was to communicate that
his blatant lack of charisma shouldn't detract from his trustworthy
competence as a political leader. Brown would go on to lose his first
and only general election to the charismatic David Cameron.

"That's what's interesting about charisma: It touches the darkest
fundamentals of human impulses while having the capacity to point to
our highest potentials."
-- William Mazzarella

A scientifically sound or generally agreed-upon definition of
charisma remains elusive even after all these years of investigation.
Across sociology, anthropology, psychology, political science,
history and theater studies, academics have wrestled with how exactly
to explain, refine and apply it, as well as identify where it is
located: in the powerful traits of a leader or in the susceptible
minds of a follower or perhaps somewhere between the two, like a
magnetic field. 

The Cambridge Dictionary reports that charisma is "a special power
that some people have naturally," but this association with
individual influence is criticized as just another tedious expression
of the Great Man Theory and overlooks much interconnected complexity.
In her book, "Charisma and the Fictions of Black Leaders," Erica
Edwards argued that this view has "privileged charismatic leaders,
from Frederick Douglass to Martin Luther King Jr., over the arduous,
undocumented efforts of ordinary women, men and children to remake
their social reality." This uncritical faith in charisma as a motor
of history, she wrote, "ignores its limits as a model for social
movements while showing us just how powerful a narrative force it
is."

As Wright explained to me, Weber himself would disagree with the
individualized modern understanding of charisma. "He was actually
using it in a far more sophisticated way," he said. "It wasn't about
the power of the individual -- it was about the reflection of that
power by the audience, about whether they receive it. He saw it as a
process of interaction. And he was as fascinated by crowds as he was
by individuals." In Weber's words: "What is alone important is how
the [charismatic] individual is actually regarded by those subject to
charismatic authority, by his 'followers' or 'disciples.' ... It is
recognition on the part of those subject to authority which is
decisive for the validity of charisma."

Charisma then, like love or beauty, may be in the eye of the
beholder: intoxicating love and belief, enacted on a mass scale,
during particular historical circumstances. Along these lines, the
late American political scientist Cedric Robinson believed charisma
to be a "psychosocial force" that symbolized the ultimate power of
the people: the expression of the masses being focused into one
chosen individual. Such an individual, he argued, is totally
subordinate in the relationship: They must enact the will of the
people or their charismatic appeal will vanish. "It is, in truth, the
charismatic figure who has been selected by social circumstance,
psychodynamic peculiarities and tradition, and not his followers by
him."
Read Noema in print.

Charisma, he wrote, "becomes the most pure form of a people's
authority over themselves." The charismatic leader, for better or
worse, could be understood as a mere mirror or a charming marionette
-- the "collective projection of the charismatic mass, a projection
out of its anguish, its myths, its visions, its history and its
culture, in short its tradition and its oppression." The reason they
seem to read the minds of their followers is because they are the
chosen embodiment of the group mind. In the leader they see
themselves. 

As the Dutch socialist Pieter Jelles Troelstra once wrote, "At some
point during my speeches, there often came a moment when I wondered
who is speaking now, they or myself?" 

---------------------------------------------------------------------

"I'd pretty much adamantly say that most of the research done [on
charisma] until the last 10 years has been utterly useless," said
John Antonakis, a professor of organizational behavior at the
University of Lausanne. "It's just been extremely hypothetical -- not
really putting our fingers on what it is and then not being able to
define it in a way where we can experimentally manipulate the
behavior and do real scientific field experiments." Antonakis isn't a
sociologist, historian or cultural theorist; he's a psychologist and
scholar of leadership with a background in math and statistics. He
doesn't believe charisma is a slippery concept at all. "I focus on
what I believe to be the core elements of charisma," he told me. "How
one speaks, what one says and how one says it."  

For over a decade, Antonakis has been experimenting with ways to
break charisma down into its composite parts, therefore making it
measurable and teachable. He believes it can be the great leveler in
a world obsessed with physical appearance. His resulting definition
is that charisma is "values-based, symbolic and emotion-laden leader
signaling." 

Along with a team of researchers, he boiled it all down to 12
"charismatic leadership tactics," or CLTs for short. The CLTs include
nine verbal techniques -- like the use of metaphors, anecdotes,
contrasts and rhetorical questions -- as well as three nonverbal ones
like facial expressions and gestures. Anyone trained in these CLTs,
he said, can become more "influential, trustworthy and leaderlike in
the eyes of others." He and his team developed an artificial
intelligence algorithm, which they trained on almost 100 TED talks,
that can identify the charismatic quality of speeches. The algorithm
is called "Deep Charisma" but Antonakis calls it his
"charismometer." 

In one experiment, they used the algorithm to show that a higher
prevalence of CLTs in a TED talk correlated with higher YouTube views
and higher ratings of inspiration reported by test subjects.
Charisma, in other words, can equate to internet virality. We shared
screens on our Zoom call and he opened up Deep Charisma for me to
see. "Think of a famous speech and let's put it in the machine," he
said. Having just started Malcolm X's autobiography, I asked him to
put in X's 1964 speech "The Ballot or the Bullet." 

"Harder to explain is the allure of unconventional individuals who
can draw us in against all rationality for a myriad of complex
reasons, subconscious desires and historical circumstances."

"Ah, this is already fantastic," said Antonakis. "It's already a
metaphor." He pasted a transcript into Deep Charisma and numbers
began to fill the screen. Within a minute, we had a final score: 350.
"That's a very high score," he told me. "You cannot fool my
charismometer."

Out of interest, I asked him if we could try putting in a speech
created by ChatGPT, so he asked it to write one in the style of
Winston Churchill. "My fellow citizens," it began, "we stand here
today at a pivotal moment in history." He pasted the finished speech
into Deep Charisma, and it began to analyze. "So now we're using one
artificial network to generate a speech and another one to code it
for charisma," he said. It conjured a calculation. "Oh shit," he
said, "it's very good." I asked him to test it again, but this time
by asking ChatGPT to just write a "charismatic speech." I wanted to
see if it actually could determine what charisma was rather than
simply emulating the style of a known charismatic speaker. A score
appeared. "Yeah, this is average," said Antonakis.

I admired his scientific formulation of charisma and the possibility
of democratizing something that was previously thought to be innate
and ineffable. But I couldn't help but feel that to make charisma
measurable, he'd had to redefine it, and in that process something
integral to the phenomenon had been lost. Deep Charisma can identify
the persuasive and uplifting habits of gifted orators and the
characteristics of rousing speeches, but perhaps harder to explain is
the allure of unconventional individuals who can draw us in against
all rationality for a myriad of complex reasons, subconscious desires
and historical circumstances.  

I thought about John de Ruiter, the shoemaker from rural Canada who
started a religious movement in the 1980s that became a
multimillion-dollar spiritual organization with thousands of
followers. De Ruiter, who was recently charged with sexually
assaulting several women, developed a charisma not through what he
said or how he said it, but what he didn't say: His sermons were just
long periods of complete silence, during which he stared at his
followers for hours. Or the fact that Trump's speeches, when read as
transcripts, are often rambling and incoherent rather than great
works of rhetoric and metaphor. The CLTs don't seem to touch the
deeper mystique. Deep Charisma, Antonakis told me, rated Trump as
distinctly average. "He's not that charismatic," he said. Millions of
Americans, I think, would disagree.

"Human relationships with technology have always been implicitly
spiritual."

The CLTs are adept at pushing human buttons that will make us feel
engaged, inspired and impressed. For that reason, it's no surprise
that Antonakis' work has been picked up by researchers working on
artificial intelligence. Last December, a group of computer
scientists published a paper titled "Computational Charisma -- A Brick
by Brick Blueprint for Building Charismatic Artificial Intelligence."
The abstract for the paper begins: "Charisma is considered as one's
ability to attract and potentially influence others. Clearly, there
can be considerable interest from an artificial intelligence's
perspective to provide it with such skill," before concluding with
the provocation: "Will tomorrow's influencers be artificial?" 

Bjorn Schuller, a professor of artificial intelligence at Imperial
College London and the lead author of the paper, told me the most
exciting avenue of this research is the voice. "We're a long way from
seeing and accepting visually rendered agents, but we don't have
those issues with the voice anymore," he said. "We can render a voice
from a few seconds of your voice and make a piece of audio that
sounds just like you. So if people are just interacting with a voice
interface, we're less worried about the uncanny valley." The aim is
to create a charming and persuasive AI entity you could call up and
converse with. "If you have a virtual doctor or mental health
therapist, then a charismatic one would probably reach you better,"
explained Schuller. "In other words, in human-computer interaction,
it gives AI a huge leap forward in terms of acceptance and ... I
wouldn't want to say obedience, but ..."

Once an AI is perfecting this form of charisma through endless
reinforcement and imitation learning, Schuller believes it could
become far better at it than humans. "We lose our charisma now and
then, because we have our temperament and only so much effort is
available," he said. "But an AI would have no problem controlling
expression, tone of voice and linguistics all at the same time. Add
that to the fact it's constantly learning about your likes and
dislikes." 

"At some point," he concluded, "once the AI has established new
approaches and achieved success with it, it might become charismatic
in ways that humans haven't even thought about. We might end up
picking up charismatic behavior that has originated from an AI."

---------------------------------------------------------------------

The Eurocentric version of how Weber conceptualized charisma is that
he took it from Christianity and transformed it into a theory for
understanding Western culture and politics. In truth, it was also
founded on numerous non-Western spiritual concepts that he'd
discovered via the anthropological works of his day. In one of the
less-quoted paragraphs of his 1920 book "The Sociology of Religion,"
Weber wrote that his nascent formulation of charisma was inspired by
mana (Polynesian), maga (Zoroastrian, and from which we get our word
magic) and orenda (Native American). "In this moment," Wright wrote
in a research paper exploring this particular passage, "we see our
modern political vocabulary taking shape before our eyes."

Native American beliefs were of particular interest to Weber. On his
only visit to America in 1904, he turned down an invitation from
Theodore Roosevelt to visit the White House and headed to the
Oklahoma plains in search of what remained of Indigenous communities
there. Orenda is an Iroquois term for a spiritual energy that flows
through everything in varying degrees of potency. Like charisma,
possessors of orenda are said to be able to channel it to exert their
will. "A shaman," wrote the Native American scholar J.N.B. Hewitt,
"is one whose orenda is great." But unlike the Western use of
charisma, orenda was said to be accessible to everything, animate and
inanimate, from humans to animals and trees to stones. Even the
weather could be said to have orenda. "A brewing storm," wrote
Hewitt, is said to be "preparing its orenda." 

This diffuse element of orenda -- the idea that it could be imbued in
anything at all -- has prefigured a more recent evolution in the
Western conceptualization of charisma: that it is more than human.
Archaeologists have begun to apply it to the powerful and active
social role that certain objects have played throughout history. In
environmentalism, Jamie Lorimer of Oxford University has written that
charismatic species like lions and elephants "dominate the
mediascapes that frame popular sensibilities toward wildlife" and
feature "disproportionately in the databases and designations that
perform conservation." 

Compelling explorations of nonhuman charisma have also come from
research on modern technology. Human relationships with technology
have always been implicitly spiritual. In the 18th century,
clockmakers became a metaphor for God and clockwork for the universe.
Airplanes were described as "winged gospels." The original iPhone was
heralded, both seriously and mockingly, as "the Jesus phone." As each
new popular technology paints its own vision of a better world, we
seek in these objects a sort of redemption, salvation or
transcendence. Some deliver miracles, some just appear to, and others
fail catastrophically. 

Today, something we view as exciting, terrifying and revolutionary,
and have endowed with the ability to know our deepest beliefs,
prejudices and desires, is not a populist politician, an internet
influencer or a religious leader. It's an algorithm. 

"The idea that charisma could be imbued in anything at all has
prefigured a more recent evolution in the Western conceptualization
of charisma: that it is more than human."

These technologies now have the power to act in the world, to know
things and to make things happen. In many instances, their impact is
mundane: They arrange news feeds, suggest clothes to buy and
calculate credit scores. But as we interact more and more with them
on an increasingly intimate level, in the way we would ordinarily
with other humans, we develop the capacity to form charismatic
bonds. 

It's now fairly colloquial for someone to remark that they "feel
seen" by algorithms and chatbots. In a 2022 study of people who had
formed deep and long-term friendships with the AI-powered program
Replika, participants reported that they viewed it as "a part of
themselves or as a mirror." On apps like TikTok, more than any other
social media platform, the user experience is almost entirely driven
by an intimate relationship with the algorithm. Users are fed a
stream of videos not from friends or chosen creators, but mostly from
accounts they don't follow and haven't interacted with. The algorithm
wants users to spend more time on the platform, and so through a
series of computational procedures, it draws them down a rabbit hole
built from mathematical inferences of their passions and desires. 

Like crowds who feel a charismatic leader somehow understands their
individual anguish and aspirations, many users of TikTok experience a
computational process as akin to mind-reading. People speak of eerie
revelations in which the curation of videos in their personal feed
has triggered them to reconsider their sexuality ("TikTok's
algorithms knew I was bi before I did. I'm not the only one."),
radicalize their politics ("From transphobia to Ted Kaczynski: How
TikTok's algorithm enables far-right self-radicalization"), or
reassess their mental health ("How do I go about bringing this up to
my doctor? Because I feel like TikTok says I have ADHD will be
laughed at.")

Users are drawn to the algorithm on an emotional level, wrote Holly
Avella, a professor in communication at Rutgers University, not
because its gaze is genuinely insightful but because the impression
of feeling seen is intoxicating. This, she wrote, works to create
"cult-like" beliefs "about algorithms' access to the unconscious
self. ... A sort of metaphysical understanding."  

The inability to understand quite how sophisticated algorithms exert
their will on us (largely because such information is intentionally
clouded), while nonetheless perceiving their power enables them to
become an authority in our lives. As the psychologist Donald McIntosh
explained almost half a century ago, "The outstanding quality of
charisma is its enormous power, resting on the intensity and strength
of the forces which lie unconscious in every human psyche. ... The
ability to tap these forces lies behind everything that is creative
and constructive in human action, but also behind the terrible
destructiveness of which humans are capable. ... In the social and
political realm, there is no power to match that of the leader who is
able to evoke and harness the unconscious resources of his
followers."

In an increasingly complex and divided society, in which partisanship
has hindered the prospect of cooperation on everything from human
rights to the climate crisis, the thirst for a charismatic leader or
artificial intelligence that can move the masses in one direction is
as seductive as it has ever been. But whether such a charismatic
phenomenon would lead to good or bad, liberation or violence,
salvation or destruction, is a conundrum that remains at the core of
this two-faced phenomenon. "The false Messiah is as old as the hope
for the true Messiah," wrote Franz Rosenzweig. "He is the changing
form of this changeless hope."

---------------------------------------------------------------------

By 1933, Hitler had risen to power and the violent and bloody
cataclysm Stefan George had beckoned was alive on the streets. His
dream of a Secret Germany that would rise to the surface and destroy
the old order was afoot. And yet he stayed remarkably quiet and
ambiguous. He took a long vacation to Switzerland, which some
described as voluntary exile, and died there without ever explicitly
revealing whether or not he supported the Nazi Party. At his funeral,
younger followers were seen giving salutes, much to the horror of his
Jewish followers. Walter Benjamin, now a critic of George, had fled
to the Spanish island of Ibiza, from where he wrote in a letter to
his friend Gershom Scholem: "[I]f ever God has punished a prophet by
fulfilling his prophecy, then that is the case with George."

The German army officer Claus von Stauffenberg was one of the many
devoted George disciples who eventually joined the Nazi movement, and
he took part in the invasion of Poland in 1939. But as he became
aware of the atrocities being committed, he chose to join the German
Resistance in an attempt to close the Pandora's box that the George
Circle had helped to open. 

On July 20, 1944, Stauffenberg walked into a briefing meeting
attended by Hitler, shook him by the hand, placed a briefcase (filled
with explosives) under the solid oak conference table, and then left
the room to take a call. When the bomb exploded, it killed three
officers and a stenographer, but Hitler survived, having been
shielded from the blast by one of the table legs. 

Just after midnight that night, Stauffenberg and his co-conspirators
were lined up against a wall, illuminated by the glaring headlights
of a truck, and assassinated by firing squad. Before he was shot, he
shouted his last words. "Es lebe das heilige Deutschland!" ("Long
live our sacred Germany!") is typically what historians think he
said. But some witnesses disagree, having heard "Es lebe unser
geheimes Deutschland!" ("Long live our secret Germany!")

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