The Spell

I once went to see Bill Clinton speak in Calgary. I was gifted the ticket by a friend and decided I’d go because I suppose I wanted to get more fodder to fuel my low opinion of him. I walked in very ready to dislike him. The Lewinsky scandal was still fresh in my mind, and I’s every intention of sitting there with my arms crossed, unmoved and unimpressed. Then he started talking. Within minutes, I forgot my dislike. His voice filled the room the way warmth fills a house. He wasn’t aggressive but completely natural and in command of the room. He made eye contact with people that somehow felt personal even in a crowd of thousands. When he told a story, I leaned in. When he paused, I held my breath. By the time I left, I was shaken not by what he said, but by how easily I’d been pulled in with his charm despite every guard I had put up. I had to remind myself what I felt going in to the event and why.

That experience taught me a lot about charisma. I’d always thought if someone had charisma it meant they were charming. But it’s so much more than that. It’s a force. And there are two versions of it, with the most dangerous version being the one that doesn’t ask our permission to cast its spell on us.

Charisma itself isn’t the problem. Some of the most beloved figures in human history were magnetic in exactly this way. Jesus of Nazareth spoke to fishermen and tax collectors and they voluntarily left everything behind to follow him. He didn’t do it by threatening them or with bribery. He did it through his presence and his way of speaking that made people feel known and the invisible feel seen. Two thousand years later, his words still move people to tears or leave everything behind to follow his teachings. That’s charisma on a scale most of us can’t even comprehend.

Martin Luther King Jr. stood in front of a quarter million people in Washington and was able to turn a political rally into a spiritual experience. He didn’t just argue for civil rights. He made folks feel the moral weight of the moment deep in their bodies. He made justice sound inevitable. People who heard him speak in person later on described it the same kind of way I describe hearing Clinton. We walk in with our own thoughts, and we walk out changed.

Dolly Parton has a different frequency, but her pull is just as real. She walks on to a stage and every person in the arena suddenly feels like they’re her favourite. She’s built an empire on that warmth and then used her success to build her Imagination Library, disaster relief, and to demonstrate her quiet generosity. No one ever feels manipulated by her. We all just feel loved.

Mr. Rogers did something that changed lives through a TV screen. We didn’t need to be in a room with him because he was somehow magically there in our living room with us. He was charismatic in the gentlest possible way. He spoke softly, moved slowly, looked directly into the camera, and made millions of children feel individually safe even when they never met him in person. That’s an incredible power. He used it to teach kindness and acceptance of our neighbours.

Stephen Colbert takes the same kind of gift and uses it to make people laugh and think simultaneously. He gets us to hold a mirror up to absurdity while making us feel like we’re in on the joke rather than the butt of it.

These people all had, or have, that thing. That room-filling, three-dimensional, gravitational thing. And they used it to build, to heal, to connect.

But evil charisma? That’s different, and we need to recognize the difference before it traps us.

Hitler started casting his evil charisma as a spellbinding speaker in beer halls. People who attended his early rallies described an almost physical sensation. They said it was a charge in the air, a feeling of being swept up in something larger than themselves. He gave a broken, humiliated nation a story to tell that felt true. Told them they were great, and had been betrayed. He said I see your pain, and I alone can restore what was taken from you. Millions of intelligent, educated people followed that feeling he gave them right off a moral cliff. Millions of Jews died brutally as a result of previously normal people blindly executing his evil orders.

Jim Jones filled his church with people who genuinely wanted to make the world better. He preached racial equality and community in 1950s Indiana. He taught radical, beautiful ideas. People who followed him didn’t think they were joining a death cult. They thought they’d joined a movement. Jones had the kind of charisma that made his followers feel like they’d finally found their people, their tribe, and not the loneliness and injustice they’d always felt at home. By the time his spell revealed what it actually was, over nine hundred people were lying dead in a jungle in Guyana.

Donald Trump walks into an arena and twenty thousand people feel like he’s talking directly to them. He doesn’t use the traditional tools of persuasion. He breaks every rule of rhetoric because he rambles, contradicts himself, goes on tangents and insults people by name. And none of it matters to his tribe. The energy is the message. People don’t follow the argument. They don’t even care about it. They follow the feeling. He tells a room full of people that they’ve been forgotten, that the system was rigged against them, that powerful forces have been working to take what’s theirs. He names the enemies, which often shift, but there are always enemies. And then he positions himself as the only one willing to fight those enemies on his voters’ behalf. The pattern is older than any of us. A group in pain or need is given a target for that pain and a protector who asks only for their undying loyalty and trust.

These are wildly different people in different times with different ideologies. But evil charisma follows the exact same playbook every single time. And once we see the patterns, we really can’t unsee them.

Evil charisma tells us who we should blame. Good charisma expands our sense of who matters. King made white Americans feel the pain of Black Americans. Mr. Rogers made children care about their neighbours. Evil charisma does the exact opposite. It draws a circle, with us safely inside of it, and tells us that everyone outside it is the reason we’re suffering. Hitler cruelly targeted the Jews. Jones went after the government, the media, and the defectors. The target doesn’t seemingly matter. What matters is that our pain gets a face, we’ve got an enemy, and suddenly the world makes sense in a way it didn’t before. That relief is the hook evil charisma uses. It replaces our good  judgment with blind loyalty. When Dolly Parton or Mr. Rogers moved people, nobody then stopped thinking for themselves. We could love them and still disagree with them. We could be warmed by them without being consumed. Evil charisma doesn’t leave us that room. It asks first for our trust, then our devotion, then our identity. Questioning the leader starts to feel like we’re questioning ourselves. Hitler demanded total loyalty and destroyed anyone who wavered and didn’t follow his commands. Jones literally rehearsed mass suicide with his followers, conditioning them to obey without hesitation. By the time the real thing came, obedience was reflex.

Evil charisma makes us feel like we’re the heroes of the story. This is the cruelest trick. Jesus made people feel they were called to serve others. King made people feel the courage to sacrifice for justice. Evil charisma makes us feel like heroes too, but for doing nothing brave at all. We’re not serving anyone but them. We’re not sacrificing anything except our own rights. We’re just believing, and the belief itself is recast as an act of great courage. We’re not following, we’re waking up. We’re not in a crowd, we’re in a movement. The surrender is dressed in the language of empowerment, which is why it’s so hard to see it from the inside. It also punishes doubt. King welcomed debate within the civil rights movement. Colbert builds his entire art on questioning authority. Good charisma can survive scrutiny because it isn’t threatened by it. Even when Colbert was supposed to be cancelled, his stance was one that reflected his entire character.

Evil charisma treats doubt as betrayal. The people around us are moved. The energy is electric. To raise our hand and say, “Wait, does this actually make sense?” would be to risk being cast out of the very warmth that drew us in. In Jones’s Peoples Temple, doubters were publicly humiliated. In the worst cases, they simply somehow disappeared.

I was speaking with a friend recently who was in a room with Trump. She said before being in that room she really didn’t get it because to her he was anything but impressive.  But when he walked by her she literally felt it. From the minute he came into the room to the point his body walked past hers, she felt the charisma and the evil, and felt her body instinctively clamp shut out of fear. She’s a powerful, strong woman, and I can’t imagine her being afraid to speak her mind to anyone, Yet she said it was unlike anything she’d expected and it was terrifying to be that dumbstruck out of fear when all he did was walk past her.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t be moved by charismatic people. That’s both impossible and pointless. Charisma is real, it’s powerful, and some of the best humans who ever lived had and have it in abundance. But there’s one question we should ask ourselves that will help us separate the Dollys from the Hitlers, the Kings from the Joneses. And we can ask it in real time, right in the middle of the spell. That question is: “Who is this asking me to become?”

When Mr. Rogers spoke, he was asking us to become kinder. When King spoke, he was asking us to become braver in the service of justice. When Jesus spoke, he was asking us to become more loving and welcoming, especially toward people we’d been taught to ignore and those far less fortunate.

When evil charisma speaks, it asks us to become smaller. Angrier. More afraid. More certain that the world is a war and we’d better pick the right side or we will be the casualties. It asks us to surrender our own discernment, our own instincts and beliefs, and calls it freedom.

The spell isn’t broken by being smarter. Intelligence didn’t protect Germany’s professors and doctors and lawyers from committing heinous crimes. It isn’t broken by being tough. Jones’s followers included military veterans and community organizers.

The spell is only broken by being honest with ourselves about what we’re being asked to feel. I tell people over and over to trust their instincts, because our instincts are usually right when it comes to evil and good. Even when everyone else is trusting what they’re being told, our own moral compass will always serve us. When the room is electric and everything seems to make sense and our chest is swelling, that’s the exact moment to pause. Not to kill the feeling. Just to name it. And then to ask Is this making me more compassionate? Or more afraid? Is this opening my heart? Or closing my fist?

If you’ve ever walked out of a room glowing about someone you walked in planning to distrust, you already know the power of the spell. The only question that matters is what it’s asking you to do while under it.  

❤️🇨🇦