Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. In the 1930s, an unlikely man from rural Louisiana rose to political stardom.
Chapter 2: What is the significance of charisma in leadership?
Huey Long appealed to working-class Americans with fiery speeches and a populist agenda. He promised free textbooks, better infrastructure, and redistribution of wealth. While we might have millionaires, and men worth two million, and men worth three million, maybe, and men worth maybe five or six million, but that nonetheless there must be a limit on how big any one man could get.
Thousands gathered to hear him speak. His promise to make every man a king soon earned him a nickname, the Kingfish. But Huey Long also made powerful enemies along the way.
Chapter 3: How did historical figures like Huey Long exemplify charisma?
Critics saw him as a dangerous demagogue. They warned that he was crooked, cunning, and completely unconcerned with checks and balances. He fired those who opposed him, took over state agencies, and appointed loyalists. When Louisiana State University published a newspaper article criticizing him, Huey Long saw to it that the seven students who wrote the piece were expelled.
Huey Long wasn't just popular. He was magnetic, dangerous to some, divine to others. He rewrote the rules and dared the system to stop him. In 1929, after he became governor of Louisiana, Huey Long was impeached on charges of bribery, corruption, and abuse of power. Rather than prove his innocence, he orchestrated a political blockade in the state senate.
He persuaded senators to sign a letter vowing not to convict him, which made a trial pointless. He went on to become a U.S. senator. His popularity didn't just survive. It soared. Today on the show, we take a deep dive into the psychological forces that draw us to charismatic figures in the worlds of politics, sports, and religion.
The science of loyalty and the building blocks of devotion, this week on Hidden Brain. We often turn to history to understand how the world changes. We examine the lives of leaders who sparked revolutions and gathered thousands behind their cause. We ask, what made these leaders so powerful? What explained their influence? How did they manage to change the course of history?
At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, historian Molly Worthen explores how individuals inspire change, create movements, and sometimes change the world. Molly Worthen, welcome to Hidden Brain. Thank you for having me. Molly, I want to talk about some unlikely leaders in American history. Let's start in the 18th century. Jemima Wilkinson was born in Rhode Island in 1752.
When she was 23, she fell ill and was on the brink of death. When she recovered, she claimed to have undergone a profound spiritual transformation. What did she say happened to her? She reported that she had seen two angels, and they had delivered this amazing message to her.
They told her that her body was a vessel for the Holy Spirit, that in fact, Jemima Wilkinson, the 23-year-old human female, had died, and now her body was a vessel for this androgynous divine presence. She stopped dressing like a conventional woman of her time.
She stopped using female pronouns whenever she could, wore her hair long and wore a large gray felt hat, began dressing in a smock that concealed her figure, looked a bit like a dressing gown, sometimes wore a purple cravat. And she launched a preaching campaign.
Her message in the context of the revolution, right, this is 1776 that she has this attack and is reborn as the public universal friend, is a kind of vague one that is compatible with a lot of different theological questions and doubts about existing churches, questions about the end times that a whole range of followers were having in this era.
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Chapter 4: What psychological forces draw us to charismatic leaders?
Steve Jobs was intense and visionary. Martin Luther King Jr. was a brilliant speaker with strong convictions. But there's an important part of the story we don't explore. That is the story of how charismatic people awake something in us. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. We often conflate charisma with likability.
When we think about charismatic people, we think of people with beautiful smiles, great social skills, and relatable backgrounds. People like John F. Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe, or Oprah. At the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, historian Molly Worthen offers a different view. She says that charismatic people in history aren't always charming or beautiful or even inspirational.
Rather, she argues, we are drawn to them not because of their traits, but because they reveal something to us about ourselves. Molly, I think it might help to first understand what you mean when you use the term charisma. What is the history of this word?
If we go back to the way the ancient Greeks used the word and bequeathed it to the authors of the Bible, it's best to think of charisma or charis as a kind of grace, a gift from God or the gods that in the ancient Greek context brought with it power that could be redound for good or for ill.
It was power that the recipient could not completely control, a gift that the human recipient didn't necessarily ask for. And the word remained in that Christian theological context for really 1900 years. I mean, it was a fairly obscure term. You would only have occasion to use it or know it if you were, you know, very active in church or you were a professional church historian or theologian.
How did the term come to be secularized, Molly? Around the turn of the 20th century, the German sociologist Max Weber was casting about looking for ways to describe all the complicated changes he was seeing unfold in Western modernity. He was really interested in leadership. and in the way particular individuals could turn into disruptive forces. So he borrowed the term charisma.
He heard it in a lecture when he was a student, a lecture in church history. And he borrowed it to describe a particular kind of authority that he saw manifest in both religion but also, importantly, in politics.
a type of authority that he said was different from authority based on institutions, like the institutional role of a president or a prime minister, different from authority premised on a society's tradition, and separate, too, from authority that comes with military power. Charisma, instead, is the quality of an individual seen by his followers, that this leader has superhuman qualities
qualities and therefore can promise for them a new path forward that is totally impossible except for his leadership. By the late 1950s and the 1960s, American journalists start picking it up and kind of playing with the word charisma as a way to describe contemporary politics here. When I think of the word charisma, Molly, I often associate it with people who are magnetic.
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Chapter 5: How did Jemima Wilkinson change societal norms in the 18th century?
You say that the religious leader Joseph Smith exemplifies this paradox. How so, Molly? Joseph Smith was a child of kind of poor New England homesteader, farmer family members who couldn't really make a comfortable life in the context of, you know, the turn of the 19th century America. They were constantly... scrapping and struggling to make a living materially.
And also, his parents were seekers who were frustrated with existing church options, really interested in the supernatural side of life, prone to having dreams and visions, but unable to really find an institutional home. And that's awfully confusing and disorienting. Joseph Smith had this
I mean, Mormons would say he, you know, he received revelation that helped him to diagnose the gaps, the ways in which the existing religious story, way of understanding the Bible and the relationship between humans and God was just leaving, I guess, a critical mass of early Americans confused. feeling frustrated and lost.
And so he offers, as he's reporting his revelations and interpreting these golden plates that he says he's been led to find in a hill in upstate New York by the angel Moroni, And then he spends the next two years kind of spinning out what this new religious community built around this new scripture will look like.
In many ways, he offers a deeply American form of Christianity that is very much in line, I think, with the desires and anxieties of Americans at this time. Hmm. They want to have their free will celebrated and recognized. And the Mormon faith is kind of the ultimate free will faith.
I mean, it's very clear in offering a roadmap for earning your exaltation and your access essentially to different stages of heaven. So it's this story of...
both tremendous empowerment, but also an invitation to subsume your individual struggles and your efforts to scratch out an existence on your little homestead in upstate New York or Ohio into this broader story that God has ordained in some meaningful way. And so that, I think, is a great example of that paradox of offering both empowering and agency and security.
As you're talking though, Molly, it feels so clear to me that when charismatic people have these followings, it's clear they have these followings because they're unlocking something in the people who they are leading. The people are hearing something about themselves in this message.
So even if the charismatic leader is not charming and is not good looking and is not likable, the point is the message makes me think differently about myself. That's right. And Joseph Smith is a great example of this. I mean, some people who met him in person found him really physically compelling. He was tall for the era. He had these electric blue eyes.
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Chapter 6: What lessons can we learn from Marcus Garvey's leadership style?
You know, I can see in some ways how that can be more painful. Yeah. I mean, you have a disagreement, a difference in how you see things, right? There's The relationship has expired or turned sour or run its course. The other piece that Molly kind of points at or that comes to my mind is it's been a long time, right?
And of course, one's resources, emotional, cognitive and otherwise, are trapped, kind of stuck on this. And there might be more life to live, right? It's important to end something. so that one feels freed up to explore new possibilities. Antonio, a listener wrote in with a hypothesis about why things often get worse before they get better after a breakup.
Carlos Alberto saw something online that said that after a relationship ends, people may experience a withdrawal of sorts from their ex-partner. Essentially, the post suggested that the struggle we feel after a breakup might be similar to the cravings of someone experiencing an addiction. Here's Carlos Alberto.
And I feel that this view is very reductive of the relationship, and it doesn't really encompass all the complex things that are going around. But on the other hand, I do feel that it makes sense in a certain way. So my question is specifically if there is value in this understanding of breakups as recovering from addiction, or if this is a rabbit hole that is not really worth exploring.
What do you think, Antonio? Is the comparison between breakup grief and addiction withdrawal on the money? You know, when you first introduced it, I thought, well, I don't know. And then the first thing Carlos said, I realized Carlos and I were on the same page. It is a bit reductionistic, right?
You know, there are some things that are just very sort of functional in terms of getting over an addiction that might be similar behaviorally in terms of getting over a relationship. You're gonna have to change your lifestyle. You're gonna have to change who you hang out with. So there's some similarity there. But I think the issue of relationships and grief become also more complicated.
It is reductionist to think of it as just that, because as Carlos was kind of hinting, there are other issues of personal meaning, of attachment, of identity. And there's no correlate there with respect to drug addiction. Antonio, a listener named Cliff reached out with a question about how to know when we might be stalled out versus taking time to recover from a breakup.
Cliff and his wife got together when they were teenagers and they were married for 25 years. But eight years ago, Cliff's wife asked for a divorce. It threw him for a loop and he says he's still struggling to move on. Here he is. I'm healthy, active, and have a good career. Yet I feel unable to move forward emotionally.
The idea of dating again in my 50s, even after eight years, still feels impossible. Being alone feels safer than risking being hurt or blindsided again. At the same time, I recognize that this belief may be irrational. My question for Antonio is, how can I tell the difference between thoughts that are irrational and those that may simply reflect caution or self-protection?
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Chapter 7: How can we recognize the impact of charisma in modern contexts?
And sometimes the years roll by and you actually have to reinvent the relationship. If you think of projects you've done, I don't know, I wrote a book, but people do other sorts of things, right? You renovate a house or you start a career or have children. These things, a big project in life takes six to eight years from beginning to end. And I mean, if you're having kids, it keeps going.
But of course, the first six to eight years are really special and very hard. So You know, if that's true for everything else, it's probably true for relationships, too. And if you don't reinvent the relationship every six to eight years, well, then it will probably expire. Right. Which is OK, too.
But if you wanted that relationship, you got to lean in, as I've been saying, and take the time to find a date night again. You don't have time for that. You have a date breakfast. Often one is kind of rediscovering. I find myself with my wife. We have kids. Our kids are like 9 and 10 now. And it's sort of like, oh, that's who you are. That's interesting. That's exciting. Be curious.
That would be my advice. Be curious. Don't take it for granted. You know, I remember hearing someone say, if you don't make time for health, you are going to make time for illness. And I love that line because it suggests that being healthy is a proactive exercise. And as you're talking now, Antonio, I'm realizing the parallels here.
If you don't make time for your relationship, you will make time for your breakup. It's very true. And it's very time intensive if you have a breakup. Antonio Pascual Leone is a psychologist at the University of Windsor in Canada. He is the author of Principles of Emotion Change, What Works and When in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life. We also heard today from Molly Worthen.
She's a historian at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and the author of Spellbound, How Charisma Shaped American History from the Puritans to Donald Trump. Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristen Wong, Laura Querell, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury.
Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. Our unsung hero today is Kelly Rudin. Kelly has worked for me for many years as my lecture agent. She's fielded incoming calls and emails and set up many speaking engagements. She's retiring, and I want to express my heartfelt gratitude for her many years of friendship and service.
Kelly is a master gardener, and I expect she's going to get to spend many more hours in her beloved garden. Thank you again, Kelly. If you love Hidden Brain, please be an ambassador for us. Tell one or two friends about the show. Your word-of-mouth recommendations are one of the most powerful ways to connect more people with the ideas and research we explore on Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.
See you soon.
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