← Alive with Steve Burns
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- [00:02]
Molly Worthen
Lemonade. Every institution you can imagine, Americans trust in, those institutions has just totally plummeted. We're in a place when, you know, a guru comes along making a pitch that actually everyone else is wrong about the world. And we have fewer tools at our disposal to kind of test that story, to decide if it's really what we should do.
- [00:40]
Steve Burns
Hey, come on in. Good to see you. Welcome to Alive. All right, here's a question for you. Would you say that you have charisma, the Riz? Hmm. Well, I certainly think you do. I've never considered myself a charisma guy. Personally, I'm more of a nervous energy, bald with tea kind of guy. There's tea. You want tea. But charisma is. Is something I've been thinking a lot about lately. You know, what it is, what it does to us, because when we say that someone has it, we almost always mean that as a compliment, right? We say, ooh, she's so magnetic, or, he's so charismatic. But it's not always that simple. Because, yeah, I mean, George Clooney's got a lot of charisma, but technically, so did Charles Manson. It's not always a good thing. And we live in the golden age of charisma right now because everyone is an influencer. And if you've got an Instagram account, then, boom, you've got a platform from which to persuade people with the influence of your Riz. And that influence is not always tied to the social good or to truth. It's really just all about persuasion. And when a particularly charismatic person seems to really believe the things they are saying, we tend to believe it too. Right? Here you go. I mean, it's wild. It's like some strange social magic. It's like some kind of spell almost, that we're all susceptible to. And I'm wondering, why is that? What is the power of Riz? Why are we so easily persuaded by charisma? What do you think? Huh? Interesting. You know what? Let's go. Okay. So my guest today is Molly Worthen. She's. She's a historian, a journalist, a cultural thinker who studies the strange and powerful force of charisma. She teaches at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and writes for the New York Times. Her latest book, How Charisma Shaped American History, from the Puritans to Donald Trump, is amazing, and it explores charismatic authority, how it has shaped the American story, and how persuasion often can disguise itself as truth. She spent her career asking why certain people seem to have that. That glow. That glow of conviction and why the rest of us can't help but me be moved forward by that. And one of the things I admire about her is she doesn't just study the persuasion and charisma as a trick. She treats it as like an actual human impulse, a thing that we all kind of have to some degree and that we're all susceptible to some. Oh, she's. She's here. Okay. Here we go. Hello, Molly.
- [04:28]
Molly Worthen
Hello.
- [04:28]
Steve Burns
It's so nice to see her. Thank you for coming to the magic Window. We. We really, really appreciate it. I'm looking forward to this.
- [04:35]
Molly Worthen
Me too.
- [04:37]
Steve Burns
Let's just jump in. Well, before we do that, tell me a little bit about you and how you came to study this.
- [04:44]
Molly Worthen
I am a historian of ideas, especially religious ideas, mostly in the context of America, and historians take a while to write. So the origin of this project lies almost 10 years in the past. Now, I have always thought, like, as long as I've been a student of humans, that our species is, in a pretty fundamental way, religious. And by that I simply mean, I think whatever our metaphysics, we crave a connection to a big transcendent story, a big source of meaning outside ourselves. And just because that impulse is no longer landing as often as it once did in traditional houses of worship, it seems to me to be a mistake to think that it's just vanishing. But clearly our tools are not capturing it in the way that maybe they once did. So the question is, if it's not landing in the places where the statisticians are capturing it, where's it going? And one hypothesis I had was that perhaps an interesting place to look for this religious impulse is in the relationship between certain leaders and their followers. So it was kind of the intersection of the current political moment and that deeper problem, I think, facing those of us who are interested in religion and needing some new methods for understanding it. Even the political scientists are saying, you know, the way Americans are talking about their political affiliations, it's got, like, this vibe that is religious. And I think they are picking up on the way in which more Americans now, you know, as the traditional kind of doors through which our, you know, previous generations have found our way to a sense of transcendent meaning as those doors have kind of closed for a lot of us think. I think we are finding other places to plug ourselves into a big picture that means something.
- [06:38]
Steve Burns
When we say that someone is charismatic, what are we really describing about that person?
- [06:45]
Molly Worthen
Yeah, this is the question. And a major reason why I wanted to take up this topic was Because I sensed some confusion in myself. And it struck me that charisma was a term people use casually in describing political candidates and so forth. But it remains rather fuzzy what we're actually talking about. When I started this project, I see, in retrospect, that I confused charisma with charm. I thought I would be writing about a lot of really charming people, people who are great at working a room. You meet them at a party, they make you feel as if all of your problems are their problems. I thought all my subjects would be really good looking and have sex appeal. I imagine that they would be amazing public speakers. And those qualities were not absent from my cast of characters. But I would say they're truer in the breach than in the pattern of things. And in fact, most of the people I ended up writing about over the big swath of American history, From the early 1600s to the present, were really polarizing. Maybe a small core group found them really compelling, but just as many, if not more people were totally repelled. And where I ended up landing is that the heart of charisma is a particular kind of storytelling. Charisma is a relationship between a leader and followers, premised on the leader's ability to invite followers into a new transcendent narrative that makes sense of their lives and gives them a sense of a real role they have to play, a way they can claim a bit of agency in the universe. And it has to somehow be a story that is more compelling than the other stories on offer in the culture at a given moment in time. And I'm interested in the book, in telling the story of that charisma. What types of charismatic storytelling really resonate in particular periods in American history? Because it has everything to do with a leader's ability to sense the particular desires and anxieties and fears of his or her moment. But that's intertwined with the history of charisma in the original sense of the term. It comes from the ancient Greek charis, meaning divine anointing gift from the gods in the New Testament. Did you not realize you were going to be getting a little bit of a lesson in ancient Greek here?
- [09:21]
Steve Burns
No, I'm glad. I'm happy.
- [09:22]
Molly Worthen
Yeah. And then in the New Testament, Paul the Apostle takes it, makes it charisma. And in the context of the Bible, it describes supernatural gifts from God, you know, unbidden powers. It can mean, you know, in some parts of the New Testament, he uses it to mean the gift of salvation to believing Christians. But then it also means specific supernatural gifts. The. The Gift of prophecy, the gift of miraculous healing, the gift of, you know, speaking in. In strange tongues. That's the origin. And the German sociologist Max Weber, a little more than a century ago, took the term from the world of Bible nerds and theological studies, and he. He kind of redefined it to mean this kind of authority that is distinct from authority that comes from a leader's place in an institution or having a big military or having the, you know, the tradition behind you. It's this different thing that is premised on followers being convinced that the leader has. Has a supernatural set of abilities or achievements. And he's really the one who kind of bequeathed to us the way we use the term in politics. But they're still very conn. One thing.
- [10:40]
Steve Burns
You said that I found incredibly fascinating was you brought this back to story. And we've covered a lot of different topics so far on this podcast, and so many of them come back to the human impulse for story, for the human bias to be told a pleasing, reassuring narrative about something. And what I thought was really interesting about what you said is that part of someone who's charismatic, whether they're a politician or a religious leader or anyone who has a charismatic following, is this idea that they're casting you in that narrative in a way that gives you agency. And so there's an element of telling you stuff you want to hear. Yes, there's a way of reassuring you that is part of charisma. And what I'm wondering is this is starting to sound like manipulation, Right? It's starting to sound. I can see how it doesn't have to be manipulation, but it sounds really useful to someone who wants to manipulate you.
- [11:50]
Molly Worthen
Yeah, this is a really important question. And when I say that charisma is a kind of storytelling, I don't mean to suggest that charisma is about fabulism, weaving a fantasy. As you say, humans are storytelling story craving creatures. This is how we organize information about the world. And I think there are charismatic leaders who tell stories premised on facts that have a relationship to reality and perhaps invite their followers to understand information they already knew in a different way or see some piece of the world they didn't see before. And then certainly there are leaders who do present a pseudo reality, who pull back the curtain on a world that other people don't see, that they persuade their followers is the real world. And I think that is a helpful way of distinguishing between those charismatic leaders who are agents of moral progress and those who are not. I think, too, our hunger for a Sense of agency is qualified by a fear that humans have of too much responsibility. And so I think successful charismatic leaders offer a kind of balance. They offer you a sense that you know where the story is headed. There's a plot, it makes sense, and you do have a role to play. But ultimately, a force or a person or a movement bigger than you is in charge. You don't have to carry the weight for yourself. So charismatic leaders speak to that paradoxical desire we have for both freedom and security. Mm.
- [13:41]
Steve Burns
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- [18:10]
Molly Worthen
What makes our own era different and what you're pointing to is the way in which, in the past, we were in what I'd call a healthier social ecosystem. Most Americans derived their sense of duty, their sense of identity. Where does morality come from? How do I think about progress? They were part of a kind of constellation of functional communities, whether it's a church or something else, they're planted in their local geographic area with less turnover of neighbors and so forth. And so when a charismatic leader came along in those contexts, I think Americans had more counter narratives to kind of place up against the story that this new leader was offering more ways to sort of test the veracity of this, and institutions were stronger. So, you know, charismatic leaders are. They're kind of this X factor. And I think we need them in culture because institutions do become sclerotic and corrupt and overly bureaucratized, and, you know, they. They lose their ability to respond to the. The will of the people. So there's a role for charismatic leaders in a healthy democratic civilization. But where we are today is at a place in the history of America in which institutions are as weak or weaker than they have ever been. I mean, if you look at the poll data, it's quite remarkable. So 1958 was the first year when the National Election Study asked Americans, do you trust the federal government to do the right thing all or most of the time? 1958, 75% of Americans said yes. Now when they ask that question, the figure is 22%, right? It's a little bit lower for Republicans, a little bit higher for Democrats. And then they ask those questions about every institution you can imagine, you know, from the Supreme Court to mainstream media, higher education, even the military Americans trust in, and loyalty to those institutions has just totally plummeted. And so what this means, I think, you know, you combine that with the fact that we are all totally glued to the little glowing rectangles in our pockets, and we have this illusion that we've never been freer to gain information about the world. And everyone can do your own research, right? Like that's the phrase. But in reality, we are totally atomized and kind of cut off from institutions. So we're in a place when a guru comes along making a pitch that actually everyone else is wrong about the world and we've been screwed over and it's time to burn everything down and really just follow this movement. And this is the picture of what the future should hold. We have fewer tools at our disposal to kind of test that story, to decide if it's really what we should.
- [21:06]
Steve Burns
Do, because we have weaker institutions. And a lot of the cultural, social structures that provided stability are also eroding. And as these things change, what I'm noticing, particularly online, is this mistrust and this uncertainty being kind of thrown into a marketplace, you know, and people sort of exploiting that through these charismatic stories, like these values are the only ones that ever mattered, and this person, I alone know the answer to these problems. And. And this sort of dynamic seems manipulative. Do you see that, too? Do you see people exploiting this?
- [21:51]
Molly Worthen
I think you identified something key when you said that you detect this message from charismatic leaders today. That I alone know the answer. That's where the danger lies. So when I think about charismatic leaders in history who I think we can say were a force for moral progress, I think about Martin Luther King Jr. He is someone who detected the anxieties and appetites and desires of his time. So I write about how this period, from about 1945 to 1965, is exceptional in American history because Americans otherwise have a pattern of being fairly suspicious of experts and, you know, elite, technocratic knowledge. But in the wake of World War II, when charismatic leadership in the kind of emotional, demagogic sense really became associated with Adolf Hitler and the Holocaust and the horrors of fascism, there's this turn across Western countries among both academics and journalists, and I think at a popular level, to some degree, to say, if that's what charisma is, it has no place in Western democracy. We want expertise and reason and institutions. And Martin Luther King understands that about a certain dimension of his cultural moment and leans into, you know, his. His academic training. If you watch footage of him on. On network news, he's an intellectual. Yeah, absolutely. Voice of cool reason. Now, in other contexts, he was equally able to tap into the, you know, black Christian prophetic tradition, so he could sort of. He had an agility that I think is a feature of successful charismatic leaders as a kind of. Kind of flexibility to meet the moment. But the key thing is that ultimately, the story he was inviting his followers into, come see the world, come believe you can change. It was all kind of framed within a faith in the rule of law. So ultimately, the mechanisms for change that his wing of the civil rights movement put their faith in were the legal mechanisms, the mechanisms of the procedures of democracy. And I think what is the biggest red flag is when a leader expresses disdain for those mechanisms and sees this charismatic story as a vehicle that really elevates personal power and authority over everything else. And if procedures get in the way of that, well, too bad for the procedures. I think that that's the thing to really look out for.
- [24:45]
Steve Burns
I certainly can see that as a red flag. But, you know, you started out talking about 2016, which I think is a really good example, because. Yeah, you know, same speech, two Completely different reactions to it. Right. Throughout an entire population. And you said that that is a facet of charisma, that charisma is polarizing, which I thought was really interesting. Maybe that's part of the story or something. It's part of the. It's part of that narrative that we enjoy is that not only am I right, but you are very wrong, you know, which makes me more right to and which also makes me in opposition to you in a way that is heroic. Right. You know, I can see that in sort of melodramatic terms being very attractive and being a huge part of charisma. But what is it about us that wants to be persuaded, that is looking for this?
- [25:51]
Molly Worthen
Well, I think we all want to see our own lives as a. As a story. And I think when we find ourselves looking at a political movement with bafflement, wondering, how can anybody listen to this person? We should ask ourselves, you know, what's the story that this leader is offering followers? And what's my relationship to it? And perhaps I am repelled by this person because he's not offering me a role I like. He is casting me as a villain. He's just sort of writing me out entirely. And maybe I should interrogate that a little bit. Now, you may conclude reasonably that the, you know, this leader is telling is premised on false assumptions about what's true about the world. But maybe that narrative that isn't your narrative can draw your attention to ways in which the stories that you're committed to have left huge swaths of people out. So, you know, it's clear across the west, we are seeing, we have seen over the past 15 years or so, the rise of these populist movements, often informed deeply with xenophobia, or at least a skepticism of immigration. And I think it has drawn more attention from, you know, the kind of elite educated class to the way in which this triumphal story about globalization that dominated the post Cold War era has actually left out huge swaths of people, you know, in a range of different countries who have both felt like they are the losers economically. And that's, you know, borne out by, I think, economic data. But also there is a psychological dimension to this, a sense that they don't recognize their own country anymore. They're uncertain of their status in it. They're not sure what the national purpose is. Right. I mean, the Cold War, for all the fear and suffering that came with that period, there was a moral clarity, I think, for many, even quite secular people across the west, had the benefit of A kind. An effectively religious frame, you know, in which. In which you can talk about good and evil with a fair amount of certainty. And we've been kind of wandering ever. Ever since then. So, you know, I think that when we sense that in ourselves, that negative reaction, that suspicion toward a leader, you should prompt a set of questions that we pose to ourselves before we write it off. And I also. I don't. I don't think that it's ever the case in any movement of any size that everybody who supports a particular political candidate is in a kind of charismatic thrall. Right. So I don't want the lens of charisma to become an excuse to write off people on the other side of a political divide from you as irrational. Right. I mean, I know so many people who vote for a range of kind of sober policy reasons, as well as those who are really committed to a bigger sort of transcendent sense of the story this movement represents. And so we want to be discerning about that.
- [29:16]
Steve Burns
Yeah, for sure. It sounds like in a world where people feel uncertain about institutions, as you say, about their place, about agency within a changing world where they feel insecure and uncertain, and if they also crave narratives, they're going to gravitate toward a story that provides conviction and deep belief and certainty.
- [29:43]
Molly Worthen
Absolutely. And what I noticed, too, is that charismatic leaders have a knack for sensing what will bring about that feeling of certainty in their historical place and time. What combination of experience, claims to authority, presentations of argument and evidence will give a potential follower this sense of, okay, I am making a decision. I am stepping across a line deliberately, I am acting. We want to feel as if we are actors in our own narrative, not that we're just being pulled along and we see versions of that. I think, in every charismatic movement, an instinct that these leaders have for that balance of doubt and credulity where I think a lot of us live like we want to be persuaded. We want to be given the means to follow this path into a story that means something. And so charismatic leaders know how to stud that path with breadcrumbs. You might say.
- [30:53]
Steve Burns
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- [31:35]
Molly Worthen
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- [33:15]
Steve Burns
All of this, Molly sounds like charismatic influence is about this, this almost irresistible story that transcends our understanding that that provides more than, than than the complexity that we're currently treading water in. But if we're so compelled by the story, I see that as really fraught, you know, because the story itself can include truth or not, and can be morally positive or negative because the story itself is so persuasive. What bums me out maybe is, and this is a question I would ask you, why isn't. Why aren't facts and empirical knowledge more charismatic? You know.
- [34:10]
Molly Worthen
Man, Yes. I mean the the longer I don't know, the longer I study history, the more it is just clear to me that we in the 21st century west, we have this image of humans as, you know, fact based, scientifically minded, reasonable creatures and we are hanging on to reason by a fingernail like it is a constant fight. Reason operates in concert with and often subservient to other motive impulses. And I think the more we Learn from cognitive scientists and social psychologists about the relationship between emotion and reason and the way so much of our reasoning is motivated and our strong instinct to reject data that undermines a picture of the world we're already committed to. Frankly, the more findings we get along those lines, the more I think, okay, we're simply learning that the theologians and philosophers from centuries and millennia ago were right. They were right about fundamental human depravity and how we are too governed by the passions. Right. Know, some of the ancient Greeks and Romans would say, I mean, everything you're alarmed by, like, this is, this is the human. This is the human predicament. Like, this is what we're like, you know, So I think our only path forward is to just become as aware as we can be of, of our own tendencies. And the more we can just be conscious of them and be in the habit of noticing them, then maybe, you know, we, we stand a fighting chance of bringing facts to bear when our passions need to be cordoned off a little bit.
- [36:09]
Steve Burns
Yeah. And maybe we need to craft charismatic stories about empirical data. Maybe we need to figure out a way to make truth as compelling as confirmation bias. If we really do have this crazy human proclivity to follow narrative that reassures us, you know, maybe.
- [36:35]
Molly Worthen
And there is, I mean, what, what you see when you look at the 400 years of history is there is a kind of pendulum swing that as a society we, we have, we go through a period of having an appetite for destruction, frankly, for tearing down institutions. But that is followed by more of an appetite for, for building. And I hope, I mean, I, I don't think we are in a period, I think, I think the period from 1945 to 1965 when experiment and the stories that they told had charisma. I think that was a pretty anomalous period in our history. But at the same time, I wonder if we've kind of hit peak guru in our own moment. And maybe we're moving into a new phase where there is more of an appetite for institutions and connection with tradition. I mean, this is how I read the movement of a surprising number of young people, especially young men, Gen Z men, into traditional churches in a way that is really unusual. Like we have among college educated Gen Z men higher rates of church attendance and belief in God than among women. That's never happened before in like, the history of statistics.
- [37:44]
Steve Burns
I did not know that.
- [37:45]
Molly Worthen
Really interesting.
- [37:46]
Steve Burns
I did not know that.
- [37:47]
Molly Worthen
And I think, I mean, it's also connected to the very damaging story that mainstream secular culture has been telling young men for the past 10 or 15 years. You know, when you tell young men that masculinity is inherently toxic, like no wonder, you know, they, they go looking for another source. But I, I don't buy the kind of cynical read of this, this religious renewal that says, well, this is just about young men trying to find a, a place where they can reassert patriarchy. I don't think that's what's happening. I think they can, they can end up kind of politicized and misguided by bad mentors. But what's underneath it is a pre political crisis of meaning. And I'm struck by my own students. I mean a surprising number of them tell me in office hours that they have voluntarily closed down their social media accounts.
- [38:35]
Steve Burns
Yeah.
- [38:36]
Molly Worthen
And when I ban laptops and phones from my classroom, a surprising number of them really like it. And they, they have the sense that they are missing out on human community and what learning is supposed to be that, that human connections are fr. Little anecdotal pieces of evidence. I don't know, they give me cause for very cautious hope that, that maybe we're, we're going to have a little bit of a course correction in our culture.
- [39:08]
Steve Burns
Yeah. You know, tell me, tell. Talk to me more about. Well, first of all, I love the idea of. Personally, I would find it reassuring if we had a little bit more of a return to the charisma of expertise.
- [39:25]
Molly Worthen
Right.
- [39:26]
Steve Burns
I like that idea. I think we need some more of that. But that's just my personal opinion. Talk to me more about how you feel. We might be at peak guru. I like that idea. What does that mean to you?
- [39:40]
Molly Worthen
I just wonder if a critical mass of. Not just Americans, I mean, I think there are versions of this happening happening certainly across the western of observers and participants in our culture have the growing sense that this is not how it's supposed to be. And the process of social change is. I think it's always a complicated story of the burbling up of grassroots impulses and action with some top down movement. I think periods of big social change in our country, whether you want to talk about the era of the New Deal or the civil rights revolutions, it's always a both and it's always movement in the institutions and at the grassroots. And listen, as much as I am a believer in institutions and my book is about what happens when institutions become weak and how dangerous that is, I also understand that institutions lost, lost the faith of so many Americans for good reason. People, people were betrayed by institutions I mean, they, they watched the country become admired in this, you know, morally quite dubious Vietnam War. You know, they, they have, I think in my own world, in, in higher education, we have a serious crisis of, of purpose. Education in this country is, is so expensive and our students graduate into the most precarious economy imaginable and we don't really know what our relationship is to the technological revolutions. We aren't really sure what our role is as shapers of character. How do you teach students about the true and the good and the beautiful while also recognizing the messy pluralism of our culture? And we haven't always navigated that well. And I think it's also true that in higher ed we've seen a real skewing toward the political left among the professor class, far more extreme than in previous generations. Although universities have always, I mean, they've tended to the left of the culture for at least a century. But that, that gap between how ordinary Americans think and the spectrum of opinion in, you know, across the country and what you find at the leading universities, that gap has really widened and that create, creates a credibility problem, right? Especially for public funded schools like mine. So these are all real problems or I think about in the zone of religion, right? I mean, the child abuse crisis in the Catholic church, reports of sexual assault and so forth in some of the big Protestant denominations. All of this draws our attention to the fact that people running institutions have screwed up in major ways across, across the past couple of generations. The scholar Yuval Levin, in his book A Time to Build, points out that whereas in the past, congressmen and leaders in university spaces, journalists were more inclined to see themselves as serving an institution, participating in a tradition, preserving something for future generations. Now these figures who climb to the top of traditional institutions tend to view the institution as a platform for their own performance, for building their own brand. And so again, it's no wonder why people become a bit cynical and disillusioned. So I hope that some of the current kind of political tensions we're experiencing where we are seeing a significant amount of interference and pressure, certainly in my world, in higher ed, from the current administration, that, that outside pressure, I mean, it does provide a context in which we see some rebuilding and reform on the insides of these institutions, such that the institutions deserve the trust again of people who, you know, whose parents and grandparents were much more committed to them than they feel themselves.
- [44:01]
Steve Burns
Let's talk a little bit about charisma as it relates to technology, as it relates to the way that we relate to each other. Social Media. You know, in what way do you kind of see influencers as kind of being micro pastors with micro congregations? You mentioned earlier how you talked a little bit about faith and how that relates to charisma and how we've sort of taken that from one area and moved it. We've moved the impulse into social media, into technology.
- [44:41]
Molly Worthen
So, you know, when it comes to influencers that we discover on the Internet, I, I want to be careful and not, not attach the, the phrase charismatic movement to every person with a significant Instagram following, especially because there is, there's often something. I mean, I think one of the great tragedies of our current political cultural moment is the way in which the Internet tricks us into mistaking, you know, following someone on social media for meaningful political action. It's not, it's different, right? I mean, getting wound up sitting in your pajamas, you know, at your laptop or on your phone, like, you know, getting mad at people on the Internet. I mean, it may make you feel emotionally like you are, you know, fighting in the culture wars and, you know, being a moral warrior, but actually you're just in your pajamas scrolling on your phone. Right. And I think too, that habit, that way of engaging with the world, it turns us into incredibly cynical, disengaged citizens who mistake these one dimensional, you know, flickers of often the worst features of human nature for what people are actually like.
- [46:04]
Steve Burns
Do you think people should and can develop sort of a charisma literacy around this stuff? So, so that they know, so that, so that they sort of know the way in which they are being charismatically appealed to? Because as you say, I mean, it's everywhere now. We do have micro pastures in our pockets and we, we do have all us access to these charismatic narratives that could be good or bad. So is there a way to develop some sort of understanding around it as, as a, as, as protection from the negative parts of it?
- [46:42]
Molly Worthen
I love that phrase, charismatic literacy. Yeah, I think, yeah, I think that's our, our only, that that's the only kind of positive step we can take. I don't think we can turn off our attraction to charismatic stories. So this is just part of how we are, are. We're wired as humans. And as I have said, charisma in and of itself is morally neutral. It's not, you know, an evil force that we need to stamp out. I think it's part of a healthy, democratic, pluralistic ecosystem. It helps keep institutions in balance. And I think studying these different cases of charismatic movements that are a bit further removed from Our own moment where we can approach them, you know, a bit more neutrally, without the same emotional charge we feel in our own times. It can equip us with just a set of questions to pose to ourselves, to our friends and colleagues in those highly charged situations that increasingly we find ourselves in. Because one feature of the infusion of religious meaning into politics in our own time is that the list of policy issues on which Americans feel there is room for reasonable people to disagree, there is room for compromise, they don't signal your moral status as a person. That list is shrinking. And more and more issues are really treated as a sort of shorthand for your deepest tribal political identity. And that is, I think, really destroying our ability to talk to each other. And perhaps one way to begin to diffuse that is, is to ask this question. What is the story that this particular fight I'm focused on, this speech I heard that really riled me up, this unpleasantness I experienced at Thanksgiving dinner with my uncle, who's on the other side of the political divide than I am. What is the story that this is in for him? And what's the story it's part of for me? And seeing it in that way can just give us a little bit of critical distance on ourselves.
- [48:52]
Steve Burns
Fantastic. Boy, do I agree with so much of what you're saying, Molly. And this is a fascinating conversation, and I feel like it's particularly fascinating in the moment we currently live in. And this has really helped me have a greater understanding of what charisma actually is and how it is so much more than what I initially assumed it was. You know, I thought it was all Riz. So. What a great conversation, Molly. And thank you so much for spending this much time with us and sharing your incredible brain today. And I look forward to talking to you again. Take care.
- [49:33]
Molly Worthen
Yeah, thank you for having me.
- [49:34]
Steve Burns
Bye. Wow. Okay, that was fascinating. That definitely expanded my understanding of what charisma actually is and isn't. I wrote a bunch of stuff down. Here's one. Charisma isn't just something, a quality that a person has. It's a power. It's something we give to them. It's a relationship, not a spell or a magic trick. Here's one. The truth isn't always influential or persuasive, but a deeply held conviction from a charismatic leader can often feel like truth, even when it isn't. And that is problematic. This last moment, I think, kind of sums up a lot of what. A lot of what I took away from this interview. We crave people who sound certain because being human feels so uncertain. Yeah, let's go. Okay, so I guess we all want to be part of a story. One where we have an important role, one that matters, one where we have agency and a sense of purpose. And it's super easy to be drawn to those charismatic voices that offer certainty and offer reassuring answers as part of that story, even when what they're not saying is true. But what if we didn't do that? You know, what if we didn't? What if we stopped? Stopped reaching for comforting answers and allowed ourselves to be led by the questions that challenge us? How would that change the story? What do you think? Yeah. Yeah. Well, thanks for coming by. I really appreciate these conversations. It means a lot. And you look great. You do. You really do. Alive with Steve Burns is a Lemonada Media original. If you haven't subscribed to Lemonada Premium yet, now's the perfect time. You can listen to the show completely ad free, plus you'll unlock exclusive bonus content from me as I reflect on this episode. Just press subscribe on Apple podcasts. Head to lemonadapremium.com to subscribe on any other app or listen ad free on Amazon Music with your prime membership. That's lemonadapremium.com Alive is hosted by me, Steve Burns and produced by Jeremy Slutskin. Our editor is Christopher Champion Morgan. Our associate producer is Akshay Tharabailu, audio engineering by James Sparber. Lemonada's SVP of weekly programming is Steve Nelson. Executive producers are Jessica Cordover, Kramer, Steph, Stephanie Whittles, Wax, and me. We'll see you next week, and you look great, by the way.
- [54:17]
Molly Worthen
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