Charismatic Leaders and Delusions: The Crazies Can Get Crazier

 Our political discourse is characterized by a polarization in which two parties view each other as delusional and irrational.  Those are distinct terms with specific meanings.  Delusion refers to the refusal to believe or understand an objective, verifiable fact.  Irrationality is more complicated.  If a person is surrounded by people who suffer from a delusion and the person embraces that delusion as well, is he/she being irrational?  Rationality is a group-dependent concept.  Interestingly—and perhaps unfortunately—group dynamics play a role in how we interact within society.  William J. Bernstein considers these issues in historical contexts in his book The Delusions of Crowds: Why People Go Mad in Groups.  He considers episodes from the past when human group responses have led to extremely unfortunate behavior.  Bernstein claims he is purposely limiting himself to religious and financial manic behavior and avoiding political episodes, but some of our current political manias seem to be hovering close to the religious in nature.  He resurrects the old joke about the size of a deluded population.

“…a delusion shared by hundreds of people is called a ‘cult,’ whereas one shared by millions is called a ‘religion’.”

What does one call a delusion shared by nearly half the voting citizenry…a political party?

Political scientists have long told us that if a politician wishes to get the attention of a voter, he must have a good story to tell—a narrative in political jargon.  That is also the crux of Bernstein’s explanation for why crowds of people are willing to risk their money and even their lives activated by some delusion: they heard a narrative that moved them emotionally by promising them something they fervently desired.  It could be wealth, or salvation, or merely a return to better times, but it must activate an emotional response.  Nature provided sentient animals with emotions as improvements over instinctive responses.  Emotions don’t tell us exactly what we must do given an activation, they warn us that a response must be considered and let our consciousness determine what should be done.  Fear as an instinct might tell us always to flee.  That would work many times, but it also might reveal us to a predator who would slay us.  Fear as an emotion gives us the opportunity to consider more nuanced responses.  The problem with this system is that we humans do not always take full advantage of our cognitive abilities when they are called upon.

We like to take shortcuts whenever we think we can get away with it.  Rather than rethink each event from scratch we often depend on past conclusions reached in supposedly similar situations.  This is referred to as “heuristic thinking.”

“Strictly speaking, a heuristic is a story we tell ourselves as a mental shortcut that bypasses more rigorous analysis…” 

“Psychologists have demonstrated that people are ‘cognitive misers’ who avoid rigorous analysis in favor of heuristics—simple mental shortcuts—and that a compelling narrative is the most powerful heuristic of all.”

We practice these shortcuts regularly when reading or viewing stories.  An author or screenwriter introduces some highly improbable event to move the plot along and we are willing to stifle any cognitive dissonance that might cause so that our satisfaction with the narrative will not be diminished.

Peer pressure can also encourage cognitive shortcuts.  A narrative becomes much more powerful as others in our sphere also become engaged.  And what narrative is more effective than one that promises us something that we desperately want or need?  Once one buys into a given narrative, one becomes less likely to rethink the accuracy of it.

“Thus, the deeper the reader or listener enters into the story, the more they suspend disbelief, and thus the less attention they pay to whether it is in reality true or false.”

“Put another way, A good story usually trumps the most ironclad fact.”

Bernstein provides an example of narrative leading to disastrous behavior that should have some relevance for us today.  It involves an offshoot of the Anabaptist movement during the Reformation era and illustrates the role a charismatic leader plays in keeping a delusion alive after reality attacks.

Anabaptists began with a reasonably solid quibble with Church dogma.  They believed that baptism should occur in adulthood rather than as an infant.  A reasonable suggestion at a time when Luther and the Lutherans were dividing the religious into armed camps became an intolerable and dangerous heresy.  They also drifted further from orthodoxy in preaching that wealth should by shared among the people when much of the wealth was controlled by the Church, and the taxes it imposed on the masses were what drove the desire for distribution.  As if that was insufficient, they also added the refusal to recognize the authority of existing governments.  These were serious sources of conflict with established authorities, but the path to madness came when some Anabaptists fell under the spell of Melchior Hoffman who preached of the coming apocalypse.

“As have apocalypticists before and since, he enthusiastically applied home-brewed eschatological math.  Hoffman calculated that Christ died in A.D. 33, and the apostolic period lasted one hundred years, until A.D. 133.  For the sins of the Judeans, he believed, mankind received a punishment of three and a half years, which was increased by a factor of twenty during the Babylonian period, and another twenty-fold for the falling away of the Church from Christ, i.e.,1,400 years.  Therefore, the apocalypse would occur in 1533 (133 + 1400), a prediction that precipitated riots and mayhem in multiple Baltic trading cities…a trail of chaos that earned him expulsion from each.”

Hoffman would spend the period of interest incarcerated while followers would propagate his beliefs with uneven success.  Their foremost task was to keep the believers happy when 1533 passed uneventfully into 1534.  This forced the apocalypse to be moved back while these leaders looked for more fertile ground on which they could work.  The target location become Münster where significant support existed.

Münster was by then a mixture of Catholics, Lutherans, and Anabaptists.  It was ruled by a Church-approved local nobleman termed a “prince-bishop.”  The evolution of the Anabaptist madness would be recorded for history by two independent observers.  Their accounts describe Bernard Rothmann as a prime mover in turning the populace towards overthrow of the existing order.  Apparently Rothmann fell in love with the rewards of demagoguery.  Bernstein quotes one of the historical accounts.

“Many people, especially those weighed down by debt, revered him like some godhead, hung from his every word, and were convinced that he was driven in his actions by the Spirit of God.  Despite official order to the contrary, they followed him in crowds from the city on account of their eagerness to hear him speak, their desire to do so being so great that they considered that there were no preachers but him and despised, condemned, and cursed the others along with the entire clergy.”

Rothmann would soon turn from Lutheranism to promote Anabaptist beliefs.

“By this point, things moved rapidly.  The Anabaptists sent envoys to neighboring cities with the message that by Easter of 1534, God would return to punish the wicked and that few would survive; safety and salvation could only be had at Münster, the New Jerusalem.  The end of the world was nigh.”

Rothmann had predicted the end would come on February 6, but the day came and went with the explanation that God had granted a temporary period of grace to mankind.  To recover from this setback the believers were encouraged to take to the streets telling all to repent while there was still time.  Things got a little crazy.

“Rothman’s Anabaptist colleagues, fearful that his forecasting incompetence had devalued their stock, comically attempted to reinflate their credibility by rushing through the streets and declaiming loudly ‘with horrifying shouts and insane bellows’ for nonbelievers to repent…Their remonstrations recruited others, who variously jumped up and down, rolled their heads, and flopped in the mud.  One Anabaptist galloped through the streets on horseback, announced the End, and told all who would listen of the tens of thousands of angels he had beheld.”

Later that day the Anabaptists would try to take control of the city but were not quite strong enough and were turned back by a force of Lutherans.  Within a few weeks they had taken control of the city council and ordered any nonbelievers to leave the city.  Meanwhile, the prince-bishop began a siege of the city, limiting the restocking of food.

Rothmann would gradually lose his leadership role.  A man named Jan Bockelson would rise to that position and take the movement to its bitter end.  Even though “the end was nigh,” the believers should fight to defend the city and relish the little time left.

“…Bockelson would fashion his theatrical skills and calculating nature into a formidable political force.  Born into bitterness and disappointment as the bastard son of a town mayor and a serf woman, he was provided by his parents with rudimentary schooling and an apprenticeship in tailoring, at which he proved maladapt.  Nature, nonetheless, had endowed him with other attributes that he would shortly deploy in Münster: blond good looks, grace, cunning, oratorical prowess, and acting talent.  In the words of millennialist scholar Norman Cohn, he used these gifts ‘to shape real life into a play, with himself as his hero and all Europe for an audience’.”

Bockelson and his lieutenants were suspiciously interested in gathering up the gold and silver of the community.  Since the end was still coming by Easter, of what use was it to the churches and individuals.

“The first Catholics to depart were allowed to take their possessions, except for food, which was already in short supply; the last ones out left with just the clothes on their backs, usually minus their buttons and golden hooks, which were confiscated.  The Anabaptists, with the memory of the Lutheran counterattack against their coup still fresh in their minds, concentrated their ire on the menfolk.  For their part, the Lutherans and Catholic men fully expected the prince-bishop to recapture the city, and so left behind their women to guard their houses and possessions.  The resultant excess of women within the city’s walls would soon produce dire consequences.”

The Anabaptists would make up the nearly the entire population and would be further encouraged in their delusions by their success at defending the city from the prince-bishop and his mercenaries, the landsknechts.  Surely, God was pleased with their activities and would be returning soon.  Additional proclamations would not only collect precious metals and monies but eliminate even the concept of private property.  Since the future was nearly upon them, there was no need to maintain the past: books were burned, along with municipal documents, including any records of debts 

One of the townsmen, Heinrich Gresbeck provided a written description of the events taking place and would be a prime source for historians.

“In 1534, Easter fell on April 5, Jesus did not materialize, and the world did not end.  On that day Matthys and perhaps a dozen followers departed the city gates and rode toward the prince-bishops landshechts, who slaughtered them.  Gresbeck reported that the besiegers cut Matthys’s body into a hundred pieces and playfully struck each other with the gory fragments, affixed his head to a pike, and yelled back to the city that the inhabitants should retrieve their mayor.  The deluded Matthys may have been trying to entice Jesus to come, or, alternatively, to fulfill the passage in Revelation 11 suggesting that the deaths of Enoch (himself) and of Elijah (Hoffman, still rotting in a Strasbourg prison) would signal Jesus’s return.”

Bockelson would again have the problem of explaining why the world continued.  He would return again to the notion that the fault lay with the people not yet being worthy of Jesus’s return.  Bockelson could claim that not only did God wish him to accept Matthys’s responsibilities, but he would be required to marry his beautiful widow.  Bockelson also proclaimed that not only should God’s people be required to be rebaptized as adults, but remarriage was also required. 

“In July, Bockelson declared all previous marriages invalid and ordered all adults to remarry.  Women now outnumbered men by almost three to one, a situation exacerbated by the left-behind Lutheran and Catholic women, and so the Anabaptists encouraged polygamy.  At first, the more aggressive among the Anabaptist men engaged in a mad scramble through the city in search of young women and virgins on the theory that, in Gresbeck’s words, ‘The more wives they had, the better Christians they were.’  Quickly, the leadership realized the testosterone-fueled free-for-all had destabilized the city.”

Not every citizen was willing to go along with this and an insurrection occurred, but it was soon overcome.

“Most of the rebels pled successfully for mercy, but Bockelson had 47 of them shot, beheaded, or, in a few cases, hacked to death.  For good measure, he also had executed yet more women who had resisted forced marriage.”

Bockelson, buoyed by continued success in defending the city from the forces of the prince-bishop, would surround himself with an entourage that included at least sixteen wives.  He concluded that he was the reincarnation of King David, making him the only legitimate ruler in the world.  His “kingship” would soon be expanded to provide him dominion over all the Earth.

Meanwhile, fate and time were not on his side.  While he ate and dressed like the King of Earth, the townsfolk were starving.  The strength of the prince-bishop increased as others from nearby regions came to his aid and strengthened the blockade around the city.  Bockelson’s attempts to get reinforcements from other towns in the region failed as emissaries sent out never returned.  It became clear the Anabaptists could not save themselves, but they had to assume that God would save them.  However, for many, the slow inevitability of death by starvation was a greater motivator than any faith in Bockelson’s divinations.  The “King” was forced to begin allowing people to leave the city.

“By this time the landsknechts were beheading 50 male escapees daily, allowing women and children to huddle together in the no-man’s land outside the walls, a hellish landscape a few hundred yards wide and four miles in circumference.  The women and children languished there without sustenance or shelter for more than a month.  The besiegers finally allowed the foreign women and children within to proceed home, and interned the locals until after the city fell.” 

The end would come soon.  As with most insurgencies, Bockelson and his ilk were tortured and killed. 

Bernstein’s goal in recounting this tale was to describe how deluded belief could become immune to reality and persist when all evidence indicated otherwise.  That is also why we, in an era when delusions seem to easily become revealed truth, should also take note and realize there may be no easy exit from our current situation.

We should also recognize that there is another lesson to be learned from Münster’s tale.  When madness reigns and the constraints of civilization have eroded, whether by strength, deceit, cunning, or sheer luck, a leader will emerge.  In these situations, it will not be a member of what we would, in another time, call “the best and the brightest.”  Rather, a “king rat” will emerge from the nether reaches of humanity.  Bockelson was the king rat of the Münster story.  Who is the king rat of our tale?