这个博客的忠实读者都知道，我对唐纳德·特朗普的魅力以及推动他登上权力宝座的社会和心理力量有着长期的兴趣。最近，我对多伦多大学(University of Toronto)心理学家、自助大师乔丹•彼得森(Jordan Peterson)突然成为知识分子的名人很感兴趣，他的最新著作迅速登上了美国亚马逊(Amazon)畅销书排行榜的榜首。这些以及其他一些事件激起了我对魅力现象的兴趣。I have been reading and thinking about this subject for some time now, and have made it the focus of this month’s contribution to the中国伊朗亚洲杯比赛直播blog.

有些人升到领导职位时似乎散发出一种让很多人无法抗拒的个人魅力，这是一种常见的现象。在20世纪早期，社会理论家马克斯·韦伯将这种神秘的特质称为“魅力”。The word comes from the Greekkharisma—meaning “a divine gift or favor.” In the Christian tradition it refers to gifts such as prophecy, healing, and speaking in tongues that flow from God’s grace. Weber adopted the term as a name for an attribute of a certain kind of leader. It is, he said, “a certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he is considered extraordinary and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers.” Although there’s nowadays a spectrum of opinion among social theorists about what exactly charismatic leadership boils down to, most tend to think of it as a kind of authority that’s grounded in followers’ attitudes of reverence towards their leader, grounded in illusions that the leader wittingly or unwittingly cultivates.

Some charismatic leaders are very obviously destructive. Hitler is the paradigmatic example. As Laurence Rees observes in his bookHitler’s Charisma, the charismatic leader “must possess a strong ‘missionary’ element and is almost a quasi-religious figure.” He continues, “Followers of such a leader are looking for more than just lower taxes or better health care, but seek broader, almost spiritual goals of redemption and salvation. The charismatic leader cannot exist easily within normal bureaucratic structures and is driven forward by a sense of personal destiny.” What gives these leaders such immense destructive power is summed up by the subtitle of Rees’ book:Leading Millions Into The Abyss. They are able to attract zealous followers who are ready and willing to commit crimes and atrocities at the leader’s behest.

Hitler was exceptional, both in the scope and the degree of the devastation that he wrought. Most charismatic leaders cannot be readily compared with him, as his malevolence, ambition, and gifts far outstripped those of most others. But you don’t have to incite violence to do harm. I think that there is something inherently injurious about charismatic authority, because it undermines followers’ autonomy, often in the guise of promoting it. The charismatic leader may loudly endorse the importance of truth, autonomy, and the ethic of personal freedom, while implicitly subverting these very values. He may urge his followers to take responsibility for their lives, to be reflective and self-critical, to speak truth to power, and to realize their human potential, while at the same time cultivating their idealization of him, fostering their intellectual and moral subservience and never challenging their abject failure to critically assess his pronouncements.

The German philosopher Immanuel Kant argued that autonomy is precious because it provides the platform upon which morality and rationality rest. You don’t have to swallow the whole Kantian framework to recognize that there is truth to this claim. However well intended, and whatever positive consequences might flow from behaving in ways that erode others’ autonomy, relating to others in this way is a gesture of profoundest disrespect.

尽管魅力型领导有很多变体，但这些变体都有一些共同的核心特征。有魅力的领导者通常是男性，因为这种领导方式与典型的男性叙事和象征主义密切相关(当体现在女性身上时，往往会遭到反对)。He isheroic. Fearlessly bucking convention, and unconstrained by the rules that hamstring others, he boldly points out facts that others are too timid or cowed by political correctness to address. He isconfident and decisive, untroubled by uncertainty or self-doubt. As Hannah Arendt commented (apropos of Hitler’s charisma) that, “Extraordinary self-confidence and displays of self-confidence…inspire confidence in others; pretensions of genius waken the conviction in others that they are indeed dealing with a genius.” Even though he may be well read and have facts at his fingertips, his claims are often grand and sweeping—perhaps even cosmic in scope. He frames his message as an apocalyptic struggle between great forces. He asserts rather than questions, propounds rather than discusses, and contemptuously caricatures the views that he disagrees with, as well as the people who hold them.

The charismatic leader possesses aprophetic vision. He offers to rescue us, to redeem us, banish the sources of anxiety or despair, to avert an impending catastrophe. His message is an urgent one, alerting us to the danger posed by a powerful, demonic enemy. The enemy might be a cabal of Jews, a horde of illegal immigrants swarming across our southern border, or an army of postmodern neo-Marxists, chipping away at the foundations of Western civilization. But whatever its source, the leader takes pains to let us know that the menace has been ignored, underestimated, or pandered to by the complacent (or complicit) members of the ruling elites.

The charismatic leader appears to besincere—usually because he really is sincere. He embraces his prophetic calling, and fully commits to the truth and value of his redemptive project. His power resides, in large measure, in the aura of authenticity that he projects. The charismatic leaderperformssincerity. He is a master of stagecraft, with a gut-level understanding of the power of long, dramatic silences and animated gesticulations, and an uncanny ability to find just the form of words that are most likely to inspire the listeners whom he targets. To those untouched by his gospel, he seems arrogant, grandiose, and narcissistic. But to members of the charismatic community surrounding him, the experience is something akin to being in love.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, he has aninstinctive feelfor theemotional pulse他的目标受众，并能诊断和回应他们的痛苦，困惑和挫折。许多作家指出，这样的领导人往往是在社会快速变化的时代出现的，当时既定的角色和规范正在失去控制，传统身份陷入混乱。在每一次这样的转变中，都有一些人觉得他们正处于失去他们认为是他们应得的权力、地位或安全的危险中。他们不再知道自己是谁，也不再依赖于社会生活的普通假设和惯例。正是像这样的人，特别容易陷入魅力宣传的网中。

You don’t have to be stupid, uneducated, gullible, or deplorable to fall for charismatic leaders. Life can be hard, and is full of uncertainty, vulnerability, and disappointment. Because of this, and because of the uniquely human capacity to envision a different world, it is part of the human condition to have a weak spot for magical solutions to life’s seemingly intractable problems. It’s easy to sneer at those whom we recognize as true believers in would-be saviors, but the fatal attraction of charisma is something to which none of us are entirely immune. And this makes it all the more important to resist.