UNDERSTANDING THE CLOAK OF CHARISMA

The snails were out in force this morning. As I focused on not stepping on these wee creatures, the title of this piece came to me: “Understanding the Cloak of Charisma.” My conscious intention was to blog on the importance of understanding “charisma” in the present political and cultural climate. What was new in the spontaneous presentation of this title, was the word “cloak.”

Aside from referring to clothing in the form of a bell-shaped, sleeveless cape, the word denotes something that conceals or hides. “Cloak-and-dagger” points to its sinister connotations in crime novels. One recalls Bela Lugosi’s vampire cloak, as well as the cloaks of invisibility popular in fantasy fiction and comic books (think Harry Potter) and many other such examples.

Yet, the common understanding of charisma is more in keeping with hyper-visibility than anything hidden. Clearly, this unintended and autonomous experience brings the ideas of charisma and cloaking together, much as a dream might. And, I must not forget, all in the context of snails.

I may be trying your patience and ignoring your demand to “get to the point,” but I trust this congeries of snails, charisma, and cloaks will yield something of value. And, I am not just referring to how important it can be to tend these unexpected, improbable mixtures, akin to the surprising and unplanned admixtures of volunteer seedlings vexing the intentions of the gardener.

Charisma. The major sense of the modern term “charisma” was defined by Max Weber in his 1924 book, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization: “Charisma is a certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he is set apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities. These as such are not accessible to the ordinary person but are regarded as of divine origin or as exemplary, and on the basis of them the individual concerned is treated as a leader.” This was a more formal definition than his treatment of charisma in his 1905 book, Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.[1]

The term did not come into popular use, however, until it was applied to President John F. Kennedy and since then it has become ubiquitous, devolving into synonymic syzygy with “celebrity.” This is unfortunate because the deeper significance of charisma will always implicate “divinity” in ways that are not true of celebrity. While Jung uses the word only twice in his published work, and not in this modern sense, his concept of mana personality will prove useful for further analysis of charisma. Jung defines the mana personality as “a dominant of the collective unconscious, the well-known archetype of the mighty man in the form of hero, chief, magician, medicine-man, saint, the ruler of men and spirits, the friend of God.”

However, these archetypal forms do not adequately convey the full sense of charisma in its irrational power since these forms are common structural aspects of most every society. Figures in these roles may identify with (and become inflated by) the underlying collective unconscious energy and members of the culture may project these qualities onto the figure (and thereby become identified with the figure). But these archetypal forms and dynamics may be quite evident without the figure being imbued with charisma—even if the figure embodies a mana personality.

Typically, the mana personality is understandable even if the mechanism of such a dynamic is not clear. However, the question of “why” such energy is invested in a particular person is often unanswerable. Jung’s best attempt to analyze this is in response to a correspondent’s questions about Adolf Hitler.[2] The first question: “How do you, as a psychiatrist, judge Adolf Hitler as a ‘patient’?”

Jung answered:

Hitler was in my view primarily an hysteric. (Already in the first

World War he had been officially diagnosed as such.) More particularly he was characterized by a subform of hysteria: pseudologica phantastica. In other words, he was a ‘pathological liar.’ If these people do not start out directly as deceivers, they are the sort of idealists who are always in love with their own ideas and who anticipate their aims by presenting their wish-fantasies partly as easily attainable and partly as having been attained, and who believe these obvious lies themselves. (Quisling, as his trial showed, was a similar case). In order to realize their wish-fantasies no means is too bad for them, just because they believe they can thereby attain their beloved aim. They “believe” they are doing it for the benefit of humanity, or at least their nation, or their party, and cannot under any circumstances see that their aim is invariably egoistic. Since this is a common failing, it is difficult for the layman to recognize such cases as psychopathic. Because only a convinced person is immediately convincing (by psychic contagion), he exercises as a rule a devastating influence on his contemporaries. Almost everybody is taken in by him.

The correspondent asked Jung: “How could this ‘psychopath’ influence whole nations to such an extent?

Jung replied:

If his maniacal wish-system is a socio-political one, and if it corresponds to the pet ideas of a majority, it produces a psychic epidemic that swells like an avalanche. The majority of the German people were discontented, and hugged feelings of revenge and resentment born of their national inferiority complex and identified themselves with the underdogs. (Hence their special hatred and envy of the Jews, who had anticipated them in their idea of a “chosen people.”!)

The correspondent asked: “Do you consider his contemporaries, who executed his plans, equally “psychopathic.”?

Jung answered:

Suggestion works only when there is a secret wish to fulfill it. Thus Hitler was able to work on all those who compensated their inferiority complex with social aspirations and dreams of power. As a result he collected an army of social misfits, psychopaths, and criminals around him. To which he also belonged. But at the same time he gripped the subconscious of normal people, who are always naïve and fancy themselves utterly innocent and right. The majority of normal people (quite apart from the 10 per cent or so who are inferior) are ridiculously unconscious and naïve and are open to any passing suggestion. So far as lack of adaptation is a disease, one can call a whole nation diseased. But this is normal for mass psychology; it is a herd phenomenon. Like panic. The more people live together in heaps, the stupider and more suggestible the individual becomes.

The correspondent’s final question: “If that is so, how can they be cured?”

Jung’s answer:

Education for fuller consciousness! Prevention of social herd formations, of proletarianization and mass-mindedness! No one-party system! No dictatorship! Communal autonomy!

Here Jung has given a straight forward rational analysis of a mana personality in the form of Adolf Hitler. And as we read this analysis the application to Donald Trump is inevitable. So many echoes! But I sense something lacking in Jung’s analysis and that lack is what I will now call the irrational cloak of charisma. Charisma, as a type of mana, originates in the collective unconscious. In my study of charisma, I find there are two main types, which for simplicity, I will call rational and irrational. Jackie Kennedy tried to immortalize her husband’s charisma by calling his legacy Camelot in her interview with Theodore White. President Kennedy, she said, was strongly attracted to the Camelot legend because he was an idealist who saw history as something made by heroes like King Arthur (a claim White knew to be untrue). “There will be great presidents again,” she told White, “but there will never be another Camelot.”

Whatever value the Camelot explanation, it is altogether rational. But what is so evident in both Hitler and Trump is how altogether irrational their “power” seems to be. All the usual ways of understanding both figures and the impact on the collective consciousness and behavior of the masses seem impotent in generating any sense of genuine understanding. This is the mark of the irrational power stemming from the collective unconscious which strikes one as not understandable in any of the usual ways. This is why the usual modes of understanding gain no traction in the present situation.

There are “levels” of reality in the collective unconscious, not unlike the different levels of reality in the “quantum” world. We cannot understand quantum reality by using the conceptions applicable to ordinary reality. Likewise, we do not understand realities of the collective psyche in ordinary psychological terms. Moreover, in quantum reality, certain aspects are not understandable even in quantum terms: time moves forward and backward, particles can exist in two different places at the same time, and particles can communicate between one another faster than the speed of light. It is no great leap then to imagine that certain aspects of the collective unconscious are not understandable or interpretable in standard archetypal terms. I think the irrational cloak of charisma as such a phenomenon.

We might also do well to remember that the collective unconscious is the field in which theoretically all aspects of existence are “interconnected” and that the vast extent of this field of connection is unconscious to us humans. The current cloak of charisma falling on Trump is no doubt an expression of a new dominant in the collective unconscious. Since this new dominant is expressing an unknown future in formation, the old ways of understanding even simple things fails to hold. While much of this new dominant is hyper-visible, the cloak suggests that something is not seen, not visible.

My sense is that part of the new dominant includes various nascent forms of psychic expression of the coming apocalyptic effects of climate change. The collective unconscious is even more affected by the actualities of climate change than our conscious awareness is. It may seem odd to think of the collective unconscious as hyper-aware, but this conception fits the facts better than most. In addition, my sense is that the cloak of charisma is hiding an unknown third aspect, the nature of which is at this point a total mystery but beginning to reveal itself to individuals here and there who have access to experiences of the collective unconscious.

Meanwhile, most humans blissfully will be unaware of these developments and most subject to the sway and allure of surface appearances. The charismatic power that Trump is carrying will take center stage. Those who are taken in will have images of Trump taking over more and more of their consciousness. But this will happen as well to those consciously opposed. Charisma will force Trump into the center of everything and everyone, just as all contagions do, whether viral, bacterial, psychic, or cyber. It is not Trump per se, but the workings of the collective unconscious. And when there is no knowledge of this source, there can be no understanding of what humanity is about to confront nor any way to adequately prepare.

My thoughts in more detail on how to prepare and what to do will be the subject of a subsequent post. I will not forget the snails.

[1] The linkage between the spirit of capitalism, religion, and charisma will be explored in a subsequent post.

[2] The correspondent was Eugen Kolb, writing Jung from Geneva for The Daily Guardian of Tel Aviv. Jung’s responses appeared in “Answers to ‘Mishmar’ on Adolf Hitler.” In C. C. Jung, Collected Works Vol. 20, 1384. Written on September 14,1945, Jung’s reply was not published until 1974.