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version seven. http://demongin.org |
On the Nature of Charismatic Authority
(III of III)
Sunday, 2005-09-18 | Classic Gin
While I was traveling through the Hoenn region, I noticed that fishermen were the contemplative caste; each time I happened upon a man fishing, he made remarks concerning the immaterial or the supernatural.
That a man whose gaze is fixed primarily upon the bounding main should wax asomatic when encountering a traveling stranger should hardly come as a surprise. It is our Occidental tradition and apparently also the tradition of the Orient that a fisherman is likely to be a purveyor of wisdom or a student of the ineffable (or both).
Those familiar with the Christian Gospels know the trope. Those who are more interested in the edification offered by the paradoxical koans of Buddhism know it as well. Fishing and the search for something beyond this life are easily recognizable as analogues; in the case of the fisherman or the priest, we're talking about a man whose occupation either by vocation or by profession has to do primarily with plumbing the incomprehensible depths of this world in search of sustenance.
This sort of person can be cut from one of two types of cloth. From Alex Haley's Autobiography of Malcolm X:
I offered my services to our Temple's Minister, Lemuel Hassan. He shared my determination that we should apply Mr Muhammad's formula in a recruitment drive. Beginning that day, every evening, straight from work at the furniture store, I went doing what we Muslims later came to call "fishing."There is one kind of fisherman whose bait and tackle are simply symbols; he is the sort who is content to fish alone or with others because the pursuit of fish is, to him, more important than actually hooking a live one.
...Recruit as I would in the Detroit ghetto bars, in the poolrooms, and on the corners, I found my poor, ignorant, brainwashed black brothers...
The other kind of fisherman is the one whose bait and tackle are the tools of a trade. He trades in fresh fish, selling them for the highest price that the market will bear. In the case of Malcolm X and others who are fishermen like him, the bait is absolution and the tackle is an ecclesiastical apparatus. Insensate, purposeless and bereft of anything but the nervous endurance called 'the self-preservation instinct,' the fish drift in the abyss. One day, they may happen across what appears to be a sustaining morsel--a bit of hope that their woe may finally be over. Some pass this by. Others bite down hard.
What little hope was there for those fish, the hope, in the case of those who responded to X's fabulous narrative of Mr Yacub and an age-old conspiracy to enslave and destroy 'the black race,' that they dwelt in an atramentous and flimy destitution that was not of their making, was soon revealed to be a razor-sharp knife in the craw. Some fish responded to the uplifting message and were pulled kicking and screaming into the light. Others, smarting at the pain, managed to shake themselves loose. Those who did not escape became a commodity, members of a religion and votaries of a man who claimed to know the will of God.
X presents just one example of how this sort of fisherman makes his living. There are countless others, others who search the depths for material addition associated with every sort of hustle; there are Oscar Wilde's lectures in America, Hitler's wildly successful organization of Germany's young men into a highly efficient killing machine, Protagoras' lecture in Athens and countless others to consider. In each case, the fisherman is not merely fishing as a means to achieve proximity to his ideals by achieving distance from the minutiae of this life. He is fishing for profit, for material addition; he is supplying the demands of hungry fish and the demands of others like him who make their living collecting fish.
Charismatic Authority, where it is not checked by swift, unwavering insistence on agreement and mutuality grows quickly into a cancer which grows even as it consumes and lays waste to the body which provides for its existence.
Those who would lead according to what they say is their exclusive claim on some special knowledge are the sworn enemies of cooperation and productivity.
