Today’s Jan 06 hearing was rather terrifying in many ways and made me wonder what it is about people that cause them to blindly follow along with the group. Perhaps the scariest part to me was the short testimony by the guy that got wrapped up in the event and barged into the capital building. He said that he is a “normal” American citizen with a job and family doing normal things with family and friends, but that he had become a “social media” junky. He was comfortable with what he found there, and found no reason to disbelieve Trump’s statements – so when Trump asked him (along with millions of others) to “come on down” to the Jan 06 demonstration in support of patriotism and Trump, he got all fired up and headed out at the last minute with some friends.

When asked if he believed all of the lies at the time, he said he did and really hadn’t considered any other option. Asked if he still believes them, he said he no longer does because he had done a little independent research and realized that they were not only lies, but essentially impossible. In summary, he said that he had been living with blinders on and that he hopes that others will find it within themselves to take them off and look around – it isn’t what they are being told. Perhaps it should be that we should look around because it isn’t what we are being told. I think he represented a million or so people that either don’t want to, or don’t know that they can, remove their blinders and look around. This is extremely scary to me because we have many historical examples of what happens in that situation – very few of them good.

Letting that be for a minute — last night I watched the first episode of the documentary about Patagonia on CNN. It was pretty cool, nice photos, interesting discussion – but what caught my attention was the bit about the sea lions and their harems. The big boy sat in the middle of a circle of his “ladies”, just sort of luxuriating in his domain. All the ladies seemed quite content with the situation, perhaps being protected. Then a challenger came along and there was a big fight, which the challenger lost so he slunk away – leaving the family group as before. However, had the challenger won, the “girls” would have been just as content with the new guy. It wasn’t about the personality of the “boss”, loyalty or love – it was about something else, more about an inherited way of acting. Elk herds do a similar thing, with the possible exception that apparently few of the offspring from the harem are children of the main guy- there is a lot of “hanky panky” going on beyond the fringes of the group.

The juxtaposition of the documentary and the testimony at the hearing were striking. Is there something going on here that is “built in” to people through our millions of years of evolution? Is there something built into us that in certain situations forces us to put on our blinders and follow like a herd of sheep? Some relatively recent examples are of course Hitler, maybe Kennedy, and now Trump. Is it possible that there is something about these people that is almost irresistible to us?

When I was in college during the “hippy days” I took a “speech” course to meet my general education requirements. It turned out that the class was not a normal speech class but instead a class on interpersonal communications. This was much better than what I had expected because we didn’t have to write speeches and present them in front of people, we just had to talk to each other (while paying attention to what was going on). I excelled at this, so much so that I was allowed to assist the Dr. Dennis Winters in future interpersonal communication classes. I don’t recall any money for doing this, I guess it was just for fun. In retrospect, this arrangement was kind of odd for a physics major.

This particular teacher was the campus superstar, speaking at large “peace/anti-war” rallies and all kinds of things like that. He was always in demand for most anything that required a charismatic speaker, everyone that I knew was sort of in awe of him. All of a sudden I was connected to a widely popular guy – and made “important” because I was his aid. I never came under his influence, but it was interesting to be a tiny bit popular with the transferred adulation. It didn’t hurt that all of a sudden I was “something” with a lot of cute girls that would normally have ignored me.

The thing that I found most interesting was his teaching me how to be that kind of a charismatic speaker. I failed at picking up the skills, but remember the story about how he did it. He grew up in Butte Montana, making friends with Evel Knievel and Jesse Jackson. Dennis told me stories about the three of them hanging around together, discussing how to make a “big” hit in the world, especially how to be positive influences in the world In retrospect, I am not sure how it worked out for them but Evel and Jesse certainly made a name for themselves. I haven’t heard much about Dennis. According to Dennis, they spent a lot of time analyzing the details of what movements, facial expressions, voice modulations, etc makes a speaker irresistible. Basically, what do you have to do in order to become charismatic! If this is true, all three of them exceeded in doing so.

Dennis offered to share his findings with me, so that I too could become a charismatic public speaker. Being the independent type, I unfortunately declined the offer – assuming that if I were destined to be a charismatic “leader” it would happen naturally. Of course that never happened, so I continue to stumble along the best that I can when I am unable to weasel out of speaking to a group. What I found interesting was that he claimed that this is something that you can learn to do – and if his popularity is a result of that, he succeeded. Jesse Jackson also became an iconic, and important, liberal leader. He is an example of the good a person can do with the power of smarts, dedication, compassion and charisma.

So now back to my original thoughts – do people with this kind of “magnetic” charisma tie into something that is deeply embedded in us from millions of years of evolution? Can we put on faces, expressions, body movements and other physical attributes to “connect” with this hardwired instincts, sort of like a peacock spreading its splendid tail feathers? Is this something that we can learn to do? (Dennis Winters claimed that he had, and that I could too.) If that is the case, is there something here that we can take advantage of in the quest for making the world a better place, one that is not ruled by people such as Hitler, Trump, and a long list of other leaders that are followed blindly, everyone with their blinders on?

I wonder if perhaps if we clearly understand that we are responding to wired in instincts instead of “truth” perhaps we can learn to take off the blinders and look around. As usual, I offer no solutions here, just something that I find curious. Maybe if we can learn to identify the triggers we can also learn to look beyond them.