Successful Prophets

Why the Cult Leader Was Never the Point

The btrmt. lectures started as a way to teach this stuff to anyone who’d listen—me, a microphone, and one idea at a time, after a day of lecturing. But not everyone likes to listen, so here’s the cleaned-up version for the readers. Rather hear it? Here’s the episode. And the article it grew out of is Successful Prophets.

Where’s the charisma?

I want to talk today about successful prophets. To kick this off, I’d really like you to go and watch a tape of what would classically be considered a charismatic cult leader. I’ll link to a couple in the show notes. The first is Marshall Applewhite, the co-founder of the Heaven’s Gate cult, which ended tragically in 1997 when a substantial proportion of its members took their own lives by poison in order to transcend their human nature. It’s an interesting case if you haven’t come across it—go and read more about it—but it’s one of the archetypal cults people reach for when they talk about charismatic leaders, and the charisma supposedly centres on Applewhite, despite the fact that he had a co-founder, his partner Bonnie Nettles.

If you look at interviews with ex-members of the group, they’ll tell you he had a lot of charisma. Sam Harris has a podcast where he comments on the quality of Applewhite’s eye contact—lots of commentary on his ability to draw people in. So watch the video. What you’ll see, or at least what I see, is somebody with fairly strange, wide, staring eyes, almost dazed, saying things that are equal parts platitude and impenetrable new-age jargon. Honestly, not a person I’d want to stop and chat with in the street.

Similarly, Teal Swan, an increasingly popular spiritual guru who’s been repeatedly accused of cult leadership. Watch one of her videos—and this is at least ten years into her rise—and she still comes off like a slightly drunk bohemian university student. She’s got an eye thing going on too, and the same impenetrable new-age jargon. Not someone I’d be interested in a long conversation with, just from the material. And yet the first Google result calls her charismatic, and in the podcasts about her, her followers all say she’s got something.

I use these two examples—one uncontroversially a cult leader, one more controversially accused, maybe more of a mundane cult than a destructive one—because the followers and the people around these groups all say the same thing: these leaders are almost supernaturally magnetic. And yet when you go and look at the material, you don’t see something magnetic. You see something that’s really quite odd, or anodyne. So my question going into this is: for these charismatic cult leaders, where is the charisma that everybody keeps telling us lives here? I’m not saying it isn’t real—people absolutely feel this charisma—but it’s plainly not in the leader’s presentation itself. And that’s the question this little episode is about.

More relevantly, perhaps: at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, I teach a bit of this, but from the opposite side. The military—and a lot of business leaders too—are terrified of groupthink: the idea that people come together and land on collective solutions that lead to ethical atrocities, or just poor outcomes. So the military leans really hard on leaders to have the moral courage to be what we call the safety catch: stepping in at the right moment and saying no to bad group behaviour. Awkwardly—and we’ll get to this—a leader’s influence has a lot less to do with their character than with their ability to represent a group. So let’s get into it.

The story we tell about cults

I’ve written about this, and there’s a lecture too. Our general picture of a cult is this tragic product of a dangerously charismatic, morally bankrupt leader. They’re magnetic, they’re manipulative, they’re somehow special—special in the way they catch their followers by the sheer force of personality. Perhaps you haven’t come across this narrative, but go and listen to some of the podcasts on the topic. There’s a whole genre around cults and cult dynamics, and the episodes repeatedly name the leader. The leader gets all the airtime, and if the followers feature at all, it’s simply as victims of his mismanagement. I suspect that’s because it’s something like a comfortable story. If the cult leader is a supernatural manipulator, then no wonder ordinary people fall into the trap. It soothes our discomfort at the fact that people fall victim to these kinds of groups.

Fifty traits and a checklist

But I won’t just leave you to go and check the podcasts—let me walk through some of the examples. One of the most influential figures in this genre is Joe Navarro, an ex-FBI profiler who wrote the thing that essentially ranks first on Google when you search for cult leaders. So it’s no surprise you’ll find him cited everywhere. The article, which precedes his book on the same topic, is titled 50 Traits of Cult Leaders That Give Us Hints as to Their Psychopathology.

Let me walk through a few, because they highlight a couple of problems. The cult leader is frequently boastful of his accomplishments; he doesn’t listen well to the needs of others, his communication is one-way. Or, in the less mundane cases: when criticised, he lashes out not just with anger but with rage; he’s stated that he’s destined for greatness, or that he’ll be martyred. Now, some of these sound more mundane and describe people you might know—the boastful, the poor listeners—versus the less common traits, like lashing out with rage or claiming you’re destined for greatness. And even that latter sort is less and less unusual in a modern era saturated with gurus who are hijacking the grievance pop culture that plays so well in the world of discourse.

When I look at the whole list, taken one at a time these seem like pretty common character flaws—some more extreme, some much more common, but individually not that unusual. And more problematically, there are fifty of them. How many do you need to determine what actually characterises a cult leader? How would you score somebody on this list? Contrast Robert Hare’s psychopathy checklist—a clinical tool we use to identify people who are low on empathy, with twenty items, where you score around 75% to qualify as a psychopath. Navarro’s list of fifty doesn’t have the same rigour. With a list like that, you could characterise anybody as a cult leader. It’s not very discriminating, and it’s not clear how you’d tell. Maybe all fifty traits would start to worry you—but is ten too many? Twenty? It’s not really clear.

The narcissism story

So maybe we can take a different tack. A lot of the media in this genre highlights that the more famous cult leaders have traits consistent with narcissistic personality disorder—they’re narcissists. Now, as a clinician—or maybe ex-clinician is a better way to put it—I should point out that it’s not really sweet to diagnose people at a distance. Real professionals don’t do that, because it’s hard to do, and the diagnosis of NPD makes that especially clear.

To define the disorder: these people can demonstrate grandiosity, a lack of concern for others, and at the core a fundamentally selfish orientation, which often comes with a superficial charm—because of those more problematic attributes, they become very good at manipulating people in their own interest. So you can see why people reach for it: cult leaders seem selfish and grandiose, somehow damaged in a way that makes them good at manipulation. But return to the difficulty of diagnosing it. NPD, at least in the DSM-5, is a cluster B personality disorder. That clustering is a bit arbitrary, but cluster B describes traits that are dramatic, erratic, and more emotionally involved. NPD lives there for a couple of reasons. At its core, we think, is a lack of self-esteem or self-worth—they might be building a grandiose sense of self to protect them from the fact that they feel awful about themselves, so any time that protection is threatened, they react emotionally and erratically. And the other reason is that NPD is kind of vague as a concept itself. Grandiosity and superficial charm can appear, but both NPD and the milder narcissistic traits can take a really large number of forms. Covert narcissists are the scariest, because they don’t build the grandiose self outwardly—they keep it inward. They’re the people who take it overly personally when you cut them off in traffic. I’m simplifying for narrative purposes, but my point is that narcissism doesn’t necessarily appear in this form.

So what people are doing is using NPD to achieve the same end as before: it helps us identify this specialness—the idea that they’re damaged somehow, but also that they have a supernatural ability to charm. Understood by the layperson, it’s a useful label to get at that.

I bring all of this up firstly to highlight how thin the evidence is that people use to characterise cult leaders this way—to show there’s something a bit wrong with what we’re doing. But mostly because characterising cults as the product of these narcissistic or otherwise preternaturally charming people misses the point. And it misses the point because what the literature says about who actually joins cults doesn’t correspond very well to that narrative.

People are befriended in, not hypnotised

What happens when you look at the literature is not so much that people get hypnotised into these groups, but rather that they get befriended into them. Most persistent converts—the people who stay in these high-control, high-demand groups—are otherwise normal people who find themselves in some patch of transient vulnerability. Stress, a loss, a life transition. Loneliness is a big one. Being between social affiliations. These things seem to characterise the followers who stay. And when you look at what brought them in, you find it follows existing social ties: an emotional bond, recruitment by a friend or a family member, before the beliefs of the cult. When you look at followers who don’t have those network ties, you find most of them leave pretty quickly after joining. Eileen Barker’s work on the Moonies is a good example.

I want to call back to my last lecture—this one came out of it—on a phenomenon called shared madness, where two people go delusional together. A core feature of that kind of madness, to use the archaic technical term, is intimacy in isolation. When people are isolated and lonely, but isolated and lonely together, in intimate relationship with others, then they can really be subject to taking on all sorts of very strange beliefs. And some of those beliefs look remarkably similar to the strange behaviour of the more destructive cults.

The point of all of this is that when you look closely at these groups, it’s pretty obviously about the followers’ needs, and much less obviously about the leaders themselves. We really want to blame the leaders—using this kind of thin evidence to pin it on them and their supernatural charm. But the leaders don’t feature very much in the followers’ reasons for staying. So let’s talk about what it could be instead.

We invent the specialness

Think back to Marshall Applewhite of Heaven’s Gate, and Teal Swan, described as charismatic. When you look at them and their content, it’d be hard to see that charisma on the surface of it. Charisma is something people report; it’s not really something you can observe from a single interaction. And in an article on the same topic, I think we do this in other areas too. Serial killers are a really good example—people who get retrofitted as charming geniuses, somehow magnetic to their victims, or supremely clever. You think of the Zodiac Killer, or Ted Bundy, as respectively clever and charming as portrayed in the media. Then you look closer at the cases and find that Bundy was actually a bit of a rambling mess, and a lot of people reported he was a bit of a loser. The Zodiac Killer has a long history of not being caught, but when you look at the things he sent the police to taunt them, it looks delusional—it doesn’t necessarily look clever.

What we’re doing in cases like this—with serial killers, with cult leaders—is removing the discomfort that people can be subject to these kinds of forces, that cult followers can be taken by cults, that the victims of serial killers can simply be victims. It’s a nice, easy narrative that helps us do away with the fact that we live in a world like this. It’s something like scapegoating, but in reverse: rather than blaming them, we inflate their attributes. And if we look a bit closer at the dynamics of the followers, we’ll start to see what’s actually going on.

The romance of leadership

I’ve mentioned that we teach some of this at Sandhurst, because the dynamics I’m about to describe aren’t special to cults. Organisational psychology, for example, has a name for it: the romance of leadership. This is the phenomenon where people systematically over-attribute what a group achieves to its leader, when the real causes are more diffuse, or more situationally dependent.

And when you look closely, it resembles the effects of another psychological phenomenon called emotional contagion—catching feelings. In the organisational psychology literature, if a team feels a certain way about a leader, they often go hunting for evidence to justify the feeling, and that feeling, and the process of attribution that comes with it, travels down network ties. Two people come together; one feels very good about the leader and says, I think this good thing happened because of the leader; and their friend goes, oh, perhaps it did. So we watch these other people credit the leader with the good things, and we credit her too. We catch the charisma the way we catch a mood—but not from the leader. In this case, we’re catching it from our peers, from the other followers.

Charisma is conferred, not possessed

What I teach at Sandhurst is the literature coming out of social identity theory on engaged followership and identity leadership. The most interesting paper on this is by Alex Haslam and Stephen Reicher, and I’ll link a more recent review in the show notes. The idea is that we identify with a group only so far as we can tell it apart from other groups—and an important part of that is that some members visibly represent the identity of that group, as a prototype. You need leaders that really represent what the group is, so you can tell it apart. And these people, when they’re really successful, are so prototypical of the group that they seem to be crafting the group’s sense of itself: the way the group behaves, and the way it sees itself, comes from the exemplar that is the leader.

What’s important here is that the charisma this leader has doesn’t come so much from the leader as from the followers. The followers are the ones identifying that the leader represents the group’s identity. They’re conferring the charisma, because the leader is somehow an emblem of who they, as followers, are, and of the reasons they’re in the group. And that’s why people like Applewhite and Teal Swan can be personally not obviously charismatic, but still be called charismatic—because the charisma never had anything to do with them to begin with. It’s the group’s conception of the leader, projected onto something like a convenient emblem.

Let me take a dip into sociology. Weber named the structure of this; he called it charismatic authority. I’ll quote him, and I want you to pay attention to the direction of what he says:

He—as in, the leader—is set apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities. And on the basis of them, the individual concerned is treated as a leader.

So Weber is saying the leader is treated as endowed. This is something conferred by the followers on the leader, not something possessed by the leader himself. Xavier Marquez, a politics professor, notes something similar:

Charismatic relationships contain moments of authorization, when followers “recognise” the leader’s charisma and submit, and moments of accountability, where the base decides that some failure of the leader is sufficiently large that they no longer recognise his charismatic gift. Charismatic leaders appear to be successful “representatives” to the extent that they mirror or amplify the identity, values, and interests of their base.

Elon Musk and image immunity

I want to put this into context, because there’s a really good example, and it’s topical to take a potshot at the man: Elon Musk. I wrote this up at the height of his popularity, before his more public disgraces recently. When we all thought Elon Musk was incredible, he was lauded as some kind of super-genius emblem of progress: co-founder of PayPal, started SpaceX, CEO of Tesla, founded the brain-human-interface company Neuralink. And in all his presentations—in the media, on podcasts, on TV, at conferences—he held forth as though he were au fait with every domain he ever touched, all these disparate fields of engineering. He was a thought leader.

And Elon Musk is famously charmless. People recognise it pejoratively now, but even back then it was there: the jarring delivery, the puerile jokes, and—especially now—the very public tantrums. Not the most magnetic person. And the explanation, I think, is the same thing: the charisma was purely representational. He was an emblem of techno-progress, and so we, as people interested in techno-progress, conferred it onto him.

What’s really interesting about Musk is that he shows another feature of this kind of representational, or identity, leadership: a sort of image immunity. Even at the height of his popularity, Musk would make all sorts of provably false claims that never seemed to cost him anything. He’s promised fully self-driving cars every year since, I think, 2014. He pledged $6 billion to solve world hunger, and then, when somebody took him up on it, the money basically went to his own foundation. None of it dented the icon of who he was. It wasn’t until very recently that we started to sour on him.

A cult runs itself

There’s another body of literature on the reason for this. I’ll quote the now-debunked book When Prophecy Fails—and I’ll link the book and the critique in the show notes. It’s about a cult that predicted the apocalypse, and when the apocalypse came, the believers seemed to carry on. The case itself is disputed, but a lot of the conclusions still track with the modern literature:

Beliefs may withstand the pressure of disconfirming events, not because of the effectiveness of dissonance-reducing strategies, but because disconfirming evidence may simply go unacknowledged.

The idea is in the neighbourhood of cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias: we seek out evidence that confirms our beliefs and ignore evidence that might violate them. But disconfirming evidence here has an additional problem—it can’t erode an attachment that was never about facts. The culture around an emblem just doesn’t need to register the failure. Facts can’t touch a representation. Janja Lalich has a lot of literature on this; she calls it a self-sealing system, where the community insulates itself into one that bounds the choices its members can make—and one of those constraints is that the culture makes failures less salient, less obvious, simply by not acknowledging them.

So what you end up with is this: if charisma is something we confer upon leaders, because the leader is somehow an emblem or a representation of what the group means, then the leader is almost irrelevant. They don’t need to be present, or competent, or even alive. In an article on this I talk about Eastern Lightning, a cult with two leaders who are functionally and geographically separated from the cult, and yet the cult goes on nonetheless. The reporting fixates on one of the leaders—who moved away from the US, where the cult was based, and went silent—and ignores the fact that the leaders aren’t even in the same country. Which brings me back to my first point: we do everything we can to ignore the fact that the leaders don’t really seem to be so important in these cults.

The leader is optional

So let me talk about some implications, and then I’ll wrap up. If charisma belongs to the group, and the leader is just the emblem or representation it lands on, then my point is that the leader is almost optional. A lot of mundane cults, as opposed to destructive ones, run fairly leaderlessly. You think of something like CrossFit and F45, or parenting and pedagogy orthodoxies, or stock-trading and investing communities. All of these are mundane cults that don’t really have any obvious leaders, and the reason is that the real object was never the person. It’s the abstraction—the shared idea—and our connection to each other through it. The leader is just a face we slap on it. Roy Wallis called this loose, individualised locus of authority “epistemic individualism”, and in fact called it the defining trait of a cult.

So what do we do with this?

I want to ground it in some realities. Thinking back to what we teach at Sandhurst: if members of the military believe that ethical danger lives in the leader’s character, then the whole safeguard against ethical atrocity is to install leaders with the moral courage to be the safety catch—to be the thing that catches that danger. But if charisma is conferred, and the group then self-seals around it, the danger—and the potential to do good—actually live in the group dynamics, not in the virtue of a specific leader. And more generally, for everybody: not all cults are destructive. The destructiveness of a cult is supplied by controlling norms that the members police themselves. So if you’re looking around for cult-like groups that might be harmful, and you’re concentrating on the character of the leaders, then you’re watching the wrong thing. You need to be watching the groups themselves. The question isn’t “is my leader a good person?” It’s much more structural than that: what abstractions have we gathered around, and did we choose them, or were they handed to us? That’s something I talk about a lot here at Betterment, and I’ll put some links in the show notes.

A successful prophet

So I titled this podcast “Successful Prophets”, and I did that kind of facetiously, because I think this is what a successful prophet actually is. Not a person, but a shared abstraction—some kind of ideal, or an emblem that holds the values of a group. And that can be a leader, but it often isn’t. You take a person with an idea, you let her surround herself with enough people by catering to their vulnerabilities, and then she can elevate herself into an emblem for that idea. And after that, she barely has to do a thing. The human machine does the rest. That is a successful prophet. And the prophet, as it turns out, was never really the point of the thing.

I’ll leave it there.

Show notes

Further reading

· Successful prophets — the article this lecture grew from

· You Can Catch Madness — the previous lecture, on shared madness

· Mundane cults

· The charismatic leader (Weber)

· Cult charisma as social recognition, not a leader trait

· Charisma as representation

· Education is entertainment — the Musk write-up

· Social identity theory

· When culture trumps evidence

· Everything is ideology

· The loneliness epidemic

References

· Marshall Applewhite and Heaven’s Gate — the 1997 video and contemporary coverage

· Teal Swan — a recent video and the Gateway podcast coverage

· Joe Navarro, “Dangerous Cult Leaders” (Psychology Today, 2012)

· Robert Hare, the Psychopathy Checklist (PCL-R)

· Eileen Barker, The Making of a Moonie

· Meindl, Ehrlich & Dukerich, “The Romance of Leadership”

· Haslam, Reicher & Platow, The New Psychology of Leadership

· Max Weber, on charismatic authority

· Xavier Marquez, on charisma as representation

· Festinger, Riecken & Schachter, When Prophecy Fails (and a critique of the study)

· Janja Lalich, Bounded Choice — self-sealing systems

· Eastern Lightning