Mick Hartley

There’s an interesting post at Metafilter on Carlos Castaneda, prompted by the recent identification of human remains found in Death Valley as one of his disciples, Patricia Partin, aka Nury Alexander. It’s a suitably macabre coda to the whole sordid tale.

It has to be said though, looking back with the benefit of hindsight, that Castaneda was pretty good value. He was surely the most interesting of the cult leaders of the past few decades. Not that he seemed like that at the time, of course: he presented himself as a post-grad student who happened to meet this remarkable character Don Juan, a Yaqui Indian shaman in Northern Mexico, and was taken on as a disciple. It was brilliant stuff, perfectly tuned to the post-hippy age, and played beautifully on the myth of the ancient wisdom of Native Americans which young guilt-ridden whites could get hooked on. The drugs helped, of course, and no doubt a hefty proportion of the readership were almost as stoned as the protagonists. But as the books continued to pour out and the rumours started, it was no surprise when the whole thing turned out to be bogus.

This, linked to by a Metafilter commenter, is a review of a book, “Prophetic Charisma: The Psychology of Revolutionary Religious Personalities“, which discusses the phenomenon of charisma with the usual psychoanalytic blather, but always from the point of view of the one with the charisma. No doubt there’s a certain interest in what sort of person becomes a cult leader, though I’m not sure it gets much more profound than noting that they need a total obsessive belief in themselves – or Narcissistic Personality Disorder, as it’d be termed nowadays. After all, if Kim Jong Il counts as a cult leader, how profound can the psychology be? What’s much more interesting is why people become followers. In fact you could surely argue that there’s no more interesting or more pertinent question.

Nothing to do with cults – here’s something from the BBC on speculation that much of our sociability derives from our cooperation against predators:

Despite humankind’s considerable capacity for war and violence, we are highly sociable animals, according to anthropologists.

Where would we be without anthropologists? But yes, I’ve always disliked that glib 2001, Lord of the Flies stuff about man being somehow uniquely tainted with evil. As we discover more about our close relatives, like chimps, it becomes more and more clear that we are in fact remarkably friendly and sociable, and it’s only because violent incidents are so infrequent that we concentrate on them so much. Everyday we – most of us – have tens if not hundreds of encounters with other people, many of whom we’ve never met before, all of which are characterised by friendly gestures, thank yous, how-are-yous, and all the rest of it. The big fly in the ointment – and maybe it’s a necessary corollary of our extreme sociability – is this propensity to roll over and submit to big strong men: to take them at the same extremely high value that they take themselves. In that respect Castaneda was one of the better ones: he wasn’t trying to change the world, or exterminate the Jews, or cling onto power in some starvation-ridden African country, or found a new religion. He just let his imagination get carried away, and no doubt didn’t object when the pretty women started tagging along….