The Cult of Charisma

EDIT: I wrote this last year and finally scheduled it to post several months ago - the fact there has since been a UK general election called for this week is entirely coincidental!

The Cult of Charisma

I’m not big on big personalities.

Now don’t get me wrong, if they are decent people, good luck to them. The problem I have is the way in which society latches onto a big, charismatic personality to the detriment of all else, decency included. Because in this media driven world, it does seem to me as though being big and loud and passionate and exciting, someone who can make a splash on the front pages and some juicy, news-content selling headlines seems to outweigh whatever they actually happen to do. A big personality can get away with murder in the way a quieter soul cannot.

And this is something that seems to permeate society. Take relationships and the great dramatic (not sure I want to call it romantic) trope I call the thrill. It happens over and over again in TV drama, soaps especially – a person in a stable, loving relationship, with a stable, loving partner abandons it all for a splashy, passionate affair with someone, quite often, they don’t even like. But it’s passionate and that’s what matters – it’s big and it’s exciting. Who cares about all the lives that person’s life and all those around them will be ruined? Who cares that their life would have been so much happier with the loving, stable partner? Less thrilling and less passionate to be sure – but what happens when the passion wears off?

And the problem is, it feels like too many people see a TV drama and mistake it for real life. The same trope repeated over and over again, just as in the Realm, becomes normal life. And the media tells us we should be looking for passion in a partner. Not someone who is safe and stable and will care about us and stick by us – a friend as well as a partner. No, that’s dull, they say, we need excitement and thrill. And then the passion and excitement and thrill wears off and unlike in a soap, when a troublesome ex will simply be dispatched to Manchester or abroad for some unrealistically fast job opportunity, real people have to live with the consequences.

So why is it considered bad not to be a big personality? Why is being a sane, sensible, decent human being no longer considered enough? Simply put, the media. There’s no story in being decent, there’s no drama in being sensible. In TV drama, a nice, sensible character is considered dull – hence the majority are unrealistically overblown. In the world at large, personality is key - if the media can’t make money off the back of you, then you aren’t any use. You aren’t worth the trouble. They will therefore either try and push you to one side for a more interesting character or ignore you entirely.

The place in which this makes me most angry is politics. I shall just stress – this is a general observation. I have no particular political affiliation, I don’t have any especial drum to bang, I take various politicians as I find them and judge them on that. But the cult of charisma in politics drives me nuts. Because if there is one area that should never be about being a big personality, it’s government. I can think of example after example both here and abroad where the big, flashy personality is chosen over a sensible but dull rival, as though being charismatic makes one a better leader than someone quiet and competent. And the media laud every antic of the big flashy one (because they sell more papers) while either ignoring the rivals or deriding them as the ultimate insult - boring.

I just do not understand boring as an insult in this context at all. Because, simply put, boring is the insult the media use when that person doesn’t make them money. But why should it be a put down to the rest of us? To me, boring is not necessarily a bad thing - the opposite even. Because from where I’m standing, gazing back at history, I would take every day of the week, month or year someone who is quiet and dull and gets on with the job without making a splash or overexciting the media over some big, flashy charismatic somebody who is so busy being big and flashy and charismatic and somebody that they can’t actually do the job at all. To me, a quiet person who isn’t interested in selling themselves and how they come across is far more likely to be focussed on doing things right than someone whose entire being is focussed on being a personality.

As a society, I do feel we badly need to get over the cult of charisma. That we need to shake off the media grip on how we view the world. I think it would do the world a lot of favours. But unfortunately, the true irony is we’d probably only do so if the media told us to…