They rely on the rhetorical force of leadership figures that are never wrong in the moment.
It’s only with meticulous, long term observation, following some inkling that something may be awry behind the scenes, that one starts to detect a pattern of certainty that is built on a faulty foundation.
That revalation is both dangerous and terrifying, and often impossible to articulate against the infallible facade that portrays absolute self-assurance, wit, vulnerability, and charm.
The cause is nearly universally grandiose narcissism, often relying on veneers of moral authority, ecclesiastical selflessness, and rigorous dedication to a vision grander than their own character. This is misleading: it distracts from the engine of the issue at stake, which is their own satisfaction (however disguised this may be by narratives of self-sacrifice, this is laying the pattern for victims, not the figurehead’s own dedication to ecclesiastical self-annihilation).
The two options are these: (a) bask in the warmth and assurance of utter confidence, charisma, and a gravity-like, unwavering orientation; or (b) become their enemy.
Keep kin mind: this is their survival strategy. They rely on their mythos with the same tenacity that you rely on food. Enemies will never leave their mind or earn freedom through distance and non-interferance. They must be eradicated to complete the conscience that demands universal adherence to a mythology.
The study of charismatic leadership figures that are able to command mass acclaim and willful obedience by use of their personality structure (which is an invisible undercurrent that is impossible to articulate in the social world—it is a medical scale, lifelong, inextricable ethos) —
should be a firm lesson in the necessity and value of independent reason and democratic oversight, due to the sheer danger of how vastly a lone individual can effect devastation from a hidden core of distrust, cynicism, contempt, and nihilistic self-preservation—
all while projecting a poised, almost universally coherent demeanor of absolute infallability.
It is impossible for the average person to imagine—because of how horror stricken and betrayed they would feel—that this confidence is not masking a wounded justification, but that at root there is nothing fully formed there.
Often a design of intentional malice is the closest structure overlaying a deep self-ashamed-of-itself, or self-against-itself, to the point where it is wholeheartedly resigned to the destruction of All.
Endless buckets of love could never fall into this dark place and leave a permanent stain. They buy time amd allowance—by the grace of remittance, like a tithing or tribute.
It is unimaginable that a soul would churn around itself, its own self-annihilation, while appearing on the outside like a golden orb of authenticity.
One must use reason, and find what core elements are working tirelessly just ever so slightly at odds with each other that refuse examination in their behavior and their words and actions—
to ever convince the world that they don’t in fact quite well deserve to destroy it, and everyone in their path along with it.
