Regarding charisma

[jhetley]

A lot of discussion, some of it rational, at Making Light on the subject of charisma.  I guess I was responding to the Zeitgeist...

http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/009941.html

I still distrust the beast.  It tends to blind the audience.

(Oops: Edited to use the direct URL rather than the Live Journal syndicated feed...)

Comments

[malkingrey.livejournal.com]

I don't trust charisma, particularly; but since a lot of the people who have it can't help having it, I try my best to discount it when I'm making my decisions. A smart and competent person who's self-aware enough to make effective use of their charisma can be a strong force for either good or bad; one has to stand back outside of their charm radius, if possible, and look at where they're going.

The worst kind of charisma is the crazy-but-powerful kind that pulls susceptible bystanders down into the person's craziness with them. I got to watch that kind in action once on a thankfully small scale, in the course of some fairly wild and wacky internal politics in the Society for Creative Anachronism: A fairly sticky situation got even stickier, and ended up disrupting social weather patterns over the entire east coast for almost a year, when two of the people involved -- on opposite sides of the argument -- turned out to have that particular kind of lethal charisma. Thankfully, the whole SCA episode never escalated beyond the level of a very intense and psychically traumatic game, but it left me with a new appreciation of what could easily happen if somebody with that sort of mutation (as it were) were to get into national politics at the wrong moment.

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

One thing the Making Light discussion seems to be ignoring, at least as far as I've read it -- Huckabee runs on charisma, too. It's part of the Southern Baptist Preacher module.

Yeah, I try to filter it out and see what lies underneath.

[malkingrey.livejournal.com]

My guess is that a high charisma rating is in the "necessary but not sufficient" category for both good politicians and good preachers -- assuming, in this case, those values of "good" which also map onto "more or less non-toxic and socially responsible" rather than simply "effective at its designed purpose."

("Good" is a slippery word that way.)