Charisma is well-known and most widespread. It has been widely portrayed in literature, debated intensively as a social phenomenon which in earlier sociology, but has been relatively little researched by modern scientific methods. Comparative studies of different kinds of charismatic persons are very few. There are some key similarities and differences in the uses to which charisma and the authority or power which it almost invariably makes possible are used. Sathya Sai Baba, whose charisma was very considerable, shared many of it typical features with other charismatic figures as will be seen here.
Charisma is an interactive phenomenon: Charisma, from the Greek, was believed to be a divine quality, blessedness endowing people with superhuman powers. This is a false assumptions about how any person achieved charisma. Charm, attractiveness, apparent compassion and love of everyone have a charisma-inducing effect, one that also happens to be a defining mark of a sociopath. It is exclusively an interaction between a person and an audience whereby they are told what they want to hear. A devoted following is the essential condition of the charismatic figure. The intense desire for a leader towards a promised land can arise from serious sufferings such as come of social disruption, poverty and unemployment or loss of sovereignty, confidence in one’s own country, its culture, religion, leaders and people. Personal attraction is an interaction between people who perceive likeability in another. Seeming greatness and infallibility as a leader bewitched people into admiring Sathya Sai Baba, who encouraged it himself constantly among the peasantry of backward southern India from his very early years. Thus we see that charisma cannot come into being in anyone on their own, it is not any inborn or inner nature of the personality. Sathya Sai Baba was worshipped as a divine incarnation by some close to him in babyhood and thereafter and his following grew in the villages and at school until he announced he was an incarnation come to save his devotees and eventually the entire world.
When social conditions bad or chaotic, they can favour the rise of a charismatic leader whether political or religious. Not only are Lenin and Hitler classic examples of this, but it was also true of the Dalai Lama’s charismatic position as the spiritual head of the Tibetan people after occupation by the Chinese. In India after Independence, the country went through massive crises, especially religious (the Hindu-Muslim mass murdering) and economic, with no solution to huge poverty, ill-health and suffering, which all came to be blamed by those in power on the former British rule. The degeneration of values in public life with corruption and bribery as the norm in post-Independence India went against the religious sentiments and teachings of Hinduism which imbue the population, on which background the desire for a very strong spiritual leader was fulfilled by the eventual emergence of Sathya Sai Baba as having both moral and a very unnatural mystical appeal.
The charismatic is always endowed with great apparent self-confidence (outwardly and in public if not also necessarily inwardly and in private – see Sai Baba’s major claims here). People are not born with such ‘charismatic’ self-confidence in public because it comes only from getting positive responses from the social environment. Despite this, Sai Baba’s apparent unmoved self-certainty and emotional invulnerability degenerated in his later years as he became an invalid and declined mentally and physically to the utmost degree before his death.
To reinforce their relationship to their following, charismatic leaders often project their own image as the successor of some powerful tradition, whether divine or heroic, and the constant reinforcement of a mythology laden with promises of a utopian future and even divine salvation from the cycle of rebirth (as Sai Baba did, provided one followed his directives). Sai Baba hammered away at promoting the all importance of ‘selfless love’ and panacea promises of transformation of India, then of the whole world. He insisted that his overall mission in life was to regenerate the ancient Indian religious value system of the Vedas and reclaim India from its degeneracy to lead the entire world into a new age of truth and goodness with universal peace, and that within a very short period of time which has already expired. The packaging of his retrogressive and anti-scientific, anti-intellectual agenda and ambitions were always positive and before long no word of criticism of any kind could be said in his presence or to his zealous followers without consequences from exclusion from his movement to severe discipline on his powerless students and dependent servitors of all kinds. As his influence grew, he imposed authoritarian rule in his ashrams and all the institutions built up around him and within his fiefdom. Sai Baba always spoke of his fathomless compassion and love for all, and succeeded in becoming seen as such by many who were dazzled by meeting him, though a dispassionate evaluation of his life shows that he often lacked patience and empathy with others, despite all his countless promises and claims of omnipotent protection of their welfare.
Continued as ‘Charisma of ‘Divine Incarnation’, Sathya Sai Baba’
Sathya Sai Baba Deceptions Exposed 