CHAPTER THREE

Gurus and Demagogues

THE CREATIVE POWER of belief is not limited to devotees of New Thought or to
adherents of chaos magick. It is also not a power exclusively for good. The
road to hell, we know, is paved with good intentions, and many a true believer
has helped lay out its tarmac. Self-belief, we can say, is a necessary ingredient in
any successful creative effort, any act of will. As William James saw, believing
that you can do something is an indispensable aid in actually doing it. And it is a
truism of practically all self-help and personal improvement philosophies that if
you believe in yourself, other people will believe in you too. In some cases, they
will be absolutely desperate to do so.

With this in mind, consider the following quotations:

Be assured, we too put faith in the first place and not cognition. One
has to believe in a cause. Only faith creates a state.

We want to believe, we have to believe; mankind needs a credo. Faith
moves mountains because it gives us the illusion that mountains do move.
This illusion is perhaps the only real thing in life.

The first quotation comes from Adolf Hitler, who said this to his followers in
1927. The second comes from Benito Mussolini, who wrote it in 1912, and
whom Hitler was consciously echoing.

Both Hitler and Mussolini wanted people to believe in them, and both found
that this was precisely what many people wanted to do. They, it seemed, were
made for each other. How Hitler and Mussolini got millions of people to believe
in them was by believing in themselves and their respective causes, in Hitler’s
case National Socialism and in Mussolini’s fascism. They did not win this belief
through argument, persuasive reasoning, or a convincing display of facts. They didn’t force people to believe nor did they buy their compliance. Something
much deeper and more immediate was at work. Something that is a part of the
very fabric of our being.

Mussolini and Hitler gathered the masses behind them by fulfilling a need, a
very powerful one, and also by meeting a desire. The need is to believe that our
lives have some meaning and purpose beyond that of fulfilling our basic animal
appetites. This is the essence of all religion. We need to feel there is some reason
for our existence. The lack of this belief leads to nihilism, the belief in nothing, a
condition that postmodernism seems to have saddled us with today. Man, we
know, does not live by bread alone; if he did, any feasible plan for the equitable
distribution of the planet’s resources would solve the world’s problems
overnight. As George Orwell, a witness to the rise of populist demagogues in
pre–World War II Europe, wrote, “Hitler . . . knows that human beings don’t
only want comfort, safety, short working hours, hygiene, birth control and, in
general, common sense; they also want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to
mention drums, flags and loyalty parades.”

Orwell is critical of such romantic longings, but he knows that if they aren’t
met in some legitimate way, they will be satisfied by other means. We all have a
need to feel that our lives are part of something larger than ourselves—every
devoted football fan or pop star follower knows that—and Hitler and Mussolini
were adept at providing many people in Germany and Italy with the sense that
they belonged to some larger reality beyond their everyday lives. This is why all
attempts to explain Hitler’s success through economic, class, or some other
“rational” reason are ultimately inadequate. They leave what we might call the
“existential” element out of their reckoning, the need for a meaning to life more
significant than a full stomach. How we fulfill that need is a serious question.
Authoritarianism, whether in the form of a demagogue or a guru, is a dubious
means of doing so. But that this need exists is without doubt. And this leads to
my second point.

The desire Hitler and Mussolini met in millions of people was a simple one:
to be free of the burden of giving meaning to their lives themselves, of fulfilling
their hunger for “struggle and self-sacrifice,” for some greater purpose than the
satisfaction of their own appetites, through their own efforts. This is a temptation
we all face at some time. As Laurence Rees writes in his analysis of Hitler’s
“dark charisma,” “the desire to be led by a strong personality in a crisis, the
craving for existence to have some kind of purpose, the quasi-worship of
‘heroes’ and ‘celebrities,’ the longing for salvation and redemption,” have much between the two. Gurus and demagogues have much in common, and both share
certain characteristics with magicians like Aleister Crowley, who was also a guru
and who had clear political views, some of which exhibit a strange similarity
with those making the news in our post-truth time.

• • •

ACCORDING TO ANTHONY Storr in his study of gurus, Feet of Clay, both
charismatic leaders and gurus feel they have a peculiar mission and that they
possess the unique powers needed to fulfill it. Throughout his campaign, Trump
insisted that he was the only one who could heal “crippled America,” in the way
that a guru might tell a disciple that it is only through him that he may reach
enlightenment. Both gurus and demagogues tend to gather disciples or followers
but not to make real friends. Both exercise an authority over others, a dominance
they maintain by appearing to forgo all common human needs for intimacy, rest,
relaxation, even food and drink and other “guilty pleasures,” the weaknesses that
make the rest of us “only human” and set them apart as supermen.
“A leader can have no equals, no friends,” Mussolini said, “and he must give
his confidence to no one.” Like Hitler and Trump, Mussolini claimed that he
“did not need advice and rarely felt the need ever to discuss policy with
anyone.”

Gurus and demagogues rarely enjoy small talk, and tend to avoid one-
to-one conversation. They feel most at home addressing a crowd, when they can
have complete control over their self-image, the persona they present to the
world and through which they can influence it. It is here also that their
dominance can express itself most clearly. The leader becomes the voice of the
crowd, his speech giving form to the dreams and longings of the people in it. But
the crowd also serves as a kind of mirror for the leader; in it he sees his own self
projected large and receives confirmation of his own self-belief. As Storr points
out, many gurus exhibit narcissistic traits, and the same is true of charismatic
leaders.

Charismatic leaders also tend to be unpredictable. This is true of Trump, but
it was also a part of Hitler’s and Mussolini’s personalities, and is axiomatic for
chaos magick. It is also true of the kind of gurus who exhibit “crazy wisdom.”
Here the teacher performs unconventional acts, at least from the perspective of
the nonbeliever, like the Zen master arbitrarily whacking his pupil on the head.
The crazy guru’s motives, incomprehensible to the average person, are beyond
scrutiny. Hitler, Mussolini, and Trump all said they favored their instincts over reason and came to decisions suddenly, with firm resolution. According to his
biographer Denis Mack Smith, Mussolini liked to give the impression that he
knew exactly where he was going, but he also liked to be seen as “incalculable,
inscrutable, always taking others by surprise.” He set small store in coherence,
again much like Trump, and “knew the value of violent effects and contrasts and
was enough of an illusionist to revel in the way they baffled the . . . audiences he
met every day.”

Hitler too made sudden, snap decisions and kept his entire program
“deliberately vague on detail.” National Socialism was a “movement,” in (German a Bewegung), rather than a political party. This gave it a religious
character. People did not join the movement; they were swept up by it. The
philosopher Jean Gebser witnessed the rise of Nazism in Germany in the 1920s
and concluded that the “group mind” emerging at the rallies was an expression
of what he called the “magical structure of consciousness.”

Jung believed the
German people were overwhelmed by an archetype from the Collective
Unconscious. And while there is no evidence that Hitler used “occult powers”
to gain control of Germany—much literature on “occult Nazism” aside—as the
historian Hans Thomas Hakl cautions, “to abandon the myth of the ‘occult roots
of Nazism’ does not mean that the genesis of National Socialism is explicable in
purely materialistic terms.”

Hitler’s vagueness allowed for flexible and multiple interpretations and let
his followers fill the gaps with their own projections. It allowed for a hazy sense
of broad, overall meanings that Hitler could allude to with an inflection of his
voice or a gesture of his hands. It did not matter that, when read in the cold light
of day, Hitler’s speeches lacked almost any concrete content. He was not
presenting ideas but stimulating an emotion. The great leader is antinomian, that
is, not held back by the rules and not responsible to anyone but himself. He is
beyond good and evil, and logic too, or at least is the author of their definition. It
is this presumed infallibility that gives him his power over a flock or a nation.

• • •

THE GURU’S OR charismatic demagogue’s absolute certainty in his judgment
radiates out to his followers and puts them in a kind of ecstatic trance,
temporarily lifting them beyond themselves. Earlier we saw that one of the aims
of chaos magick was to achieve “visible results by which the magician
demonstrates to himself that he can do things which, a short while ago, never entered his mind as possibilities.” Such is often the effect of a powerful guru or
demagogue. A follower of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, one of the gurus Storr
studied, said that his guru “seemed to radiate energy and to awaken possibilities
in those who came into contact with him.”

Similarly Hitler’s followers gained
great confidence and self-esteem through their belief in him. Through him their
lives became special.
They became special because Hitler gave his followers a powerful sense of a
“release from the limitations of all conventional restraint.” This is not far
removed from what New Thought and chaos magick aspire to, with their desire
to re-create reality.

If what is fundamental in chaos magick is to break out of
our “existing cognitive habits” and make the “creative leap beyond what is
already known,” and if, as positive thinking tells us, “attitudes are more
important than facts,” then we must recognize that the magical effect of
demagogues and gurus can also manage this.

In the case of Hitler and Mussolini, the “release from all conventional
restraint” led to heinous acts of violence, in which neither chaos magicians, for
all their punky rhetoric, nor positive thinkers are interested. But even with less
dangerous characters, such as the magician Aleister Crowley, the release from
“all conventional restraint” led, more times than not, to questionable, if not
tragic consequences. “Do what thou wilt” can too easily turn into “Do what you
like,” or even “Just Do It,” and such an ethos often spells disaster.
This power to entrance, to project a vision of the world and of himself, is part
of the guru’s and demagogue’s appeal, as it is of the magician’s. It is his
glamour, his allure, his ability to conjure realities, to provide a spectacle of
power, to draw his magic cloak around himself and “make things happen.”
Glamour, style, image, appearance, the confidence they instill in the magician
and the belief they inspire in his audience are important parts of chaos magick.
Hence its penchant for changing beliefs as one would a set of clothes. Mussolini
had a similar taste for self-dramatizing and for casting a self-image. In his early
socialist days, he would appear “ill-dressed, dirty, and unshaven” when
appearing in public as a “proletarian leader,” but change into “patent leather
shoes and a silk-lapelled coat” in private. He reminded some who knew him of a
“burlesque actor” and he admitted that he once wanted to be a famous writer or
musician, much as a young Hitler had artistic aspirations. Mussolini soon found
he lacked the talent to fulfill his dreams, but he was nevertheless determined to
be a “great man.”

As with Hitler, what might have found a safe home in some
creative pursuit was let loose on the world with savage fury.

Hitler also early on knew the importance of keeping up appearances. He was
one of the first to grasp the central importance of propaganda and to make use of
the new media of radio and film, much as today’s meme magicians use the
internet. He also knew that because of these media, propaganda must not be
boring. It must entertain, something Hitler’s spin doctor, Joseph Goebbels,
reminded him of repeatedly.
Trump has an advantage here over his charismatic predecessors in that he
spent years entertaining millions of viewers through reality TV.

The crossover
between the “real” world and the televised one helps make the union of politics
and entertainment more effective. All becomes spectacle, postmodern bread and
circuses, that serves the familiar purpose of directing attention elsewhere.
Radical thinkers like the Situationist Guy Debord and the postmodernist Jean
Baudrillard have spoken of the “society of the spectacle,” built on the media-
saturated public’s taste for endless distraction.
19 Baudrillard even remarked on
how the 1991 Gulf War “did not take place,” a comment on how its reality was
overshadowed by its media representation, its “simulacrum.”

Street hustlers do the same thing. The confidence trickster gains his power
over his victim by making them feel good about believing him. The audience
mystified by the magician’s tricks wants to be fooled—does anyone ever get
angry at Derren Brown for doing this?—just as the disciples of a guru want to
jettison their critical minds and accept the new reality he gives them. The appeal
of all three is ultimately an emotional one.