Ethics versus Manipulation: About Charisma and Other Types of Communication

AuthorCorina Rădulescu
PositionLecturer, Faculty of Bussines and Administration, University of Bucharest
Pages465-475

Page 465

Introduction

Nowadays not only people trained to govern have public offices or political functions. Actors (for instance, Arnold Schwartzeneger), poets, musicians, journalists and even porn stars have been elected for different administrative levels. Is it possible for their success to be the result of their personal magnetism, their charisma? Is it possible for such people to have outstanding communication skills meant to counter-balance the lack of strict specialized training? May be social influence considered a specific form of power? Is it natural to meet within the public communication environment (specific for administration) the two forms of social influence: persuasion and manipulation? Which is the difference between persuasion and manipulation? All these questions and similar ones are the object of study for communication ethics.

The ethics of communication is the most important branch of the applied ethics, comprising everything that means communicational aspect within the other professional ethics (journalist ethics, business ethics, legal ethics, medical ethics, ethics of public servants, etc). However, necessarily for the ethics of communication – the lie (with its variant – deceit) is the most significant subject and we will address it throughout our research. This is the concept within makes the difference between moral and immoral on the level of communication means and according to which there is traced the border between good and bad upon purpose level. The lie, more exactly its inexistence, is a minimal threshold in terms of moral.

Before discussing in terms of moral the communication pathological types or potentially pathological, we believe it is necessary to examine what can be considered either as a favoring factor for communication or as hindrance or jam, as ante-chamber of the “diseases” of communication, but which may not be ignored, namely charisma. It might be defined as the personality trait, mainly expressed by non-verbal language (attitude, gestures, look, voice, etc.),Page 466 but as well by verbal language – which triggers an abnormal receptivity condition of the interlocutors or audience.

Is charisma a catalytic of communication? If it acted biunique (as the communication process should develop), the answer would be positive. But charisma seems to catalyze the communication in a single way, from the charismatic speaker to the receiver (audience). Even so, it seems a positive factor. But charisma does not increase the speech’s clarity and does not add to a more efficient, clearer decoding of the message, but it only amplifies its persuasive effect (sometimes it transforms persuasion into manipulation). The communication process is impaired anyhow because, objectively speaking, “the code of the transmitter is not identical with the receiver’s code”1. Thus, we rather tend to deem it an obstacle against healthy communication, a “pathologic” communication, the invoked pathology being a moral one.

Decomposing charisma in its key-elements: the art to speak in public, to adjust to the perceptive horizon, to the audience’s “code”, the art to listen and the power to persuade, the art to inspire trust, to benefit of a kind of gift in relation with others, to have trust in your personality, to penetrate the heart’s secrets, to seduce by your own charm, to have a sort of aura for those who surround you, to know what decisions must be made for the respective group or team, to foresee future events – we would rather believe that it is important to learn them and to apply them immediately, to refine them in order to ensure success. As it could be easily noticed from the above enumeration, charisma is a sort of climax of communication, in its both forms: verbal and non-verbal. But, are its consequences only benefic, as it might seem on first sight? We say it again, if its cultivation becomes a purpose in itself, we may rather consider it an obstacle against healthy and efficient communication. More exactly, we refer to the semantic entropy which is reached during the coding-decoding process within communication, which entropy arises from the fact that a word’s meaning is extrinsic and not intrinsic (= arbitrary feature of the linguistic sign) and it depends, on a large scale, on our perceptive experience (linguistic and not only). Charisma, on its turn, increases the entropy degree, thus, the recollection of the two codes (transmitter and receiver) and the communication act is twice difficult.

Charisma, manipulation, persuasion, lie:

But, to begin with, let’s understand what charisma is. The word charisma has, first of all, a religious origin: it is the mane given to extraordinary spiritual gifts. In Greek, charisma means “divine grace or favor”. Charis was one of the three dainties and it symbolized the divine attributes every human being has in itself. Only later, the word charisma meant the authority of a known, prestigious person, the influence such person exercises on someone else. The root “charis”, which names grace, means, on its origins – and this is decisive for the word’s meaning and “color” – what shines, what enjoys (the eye).

Therefore, the three classic meanings of the word “grace” deserve our attention:

- Charm (in French the word “charme” has as first meaning “spell”) of beauty, joy, pleasure;

- Favor, benevolence, courtship, signs of respect, condescendence, desire to like (la bonne grace);

- Acknowledgement, reward, remuneration, wage, gifts received only because one is king, deity;

When we say to a person that she/he is gifted with charisma, we generally refer to a particularly exceptional quality in the relation with others. This quality is often difficult to define, it is like a sort of aura or magnetism, something unclear which makes us intimidated by thePage 467 presence of the respective persons or subdue, seduced, caught by the charm that person has over us. But, this quality needs to be acknowledged by a number of people to be able to speak about charisma, therefore a social acknowledgement is necessary. We can give countless examples of contemporary characters we name charismatic. The conductor Herbert von Karajan has a charisma which charms, casts its spell over musicians ad allows them to search for perfection constantly with him, between them it is creates complicity close to osmosis. High level athletes, like the soccer player Zidane is often assimilated to heroes and, thus, he benefits of a prestige that triggers trust in his words; at this point his prestige may be successfully used in advertising.

Regarding the nature of the charismatic power, “the sociologist Max Weber relates the charismatic power with someone who has received from gods, demons or nature a gift others have not received”2; then, he associates the idea of gift with the one of capacity and exceptional skills. The one who has this kind of gift has an ascendant, attraction, informal power over others. That person is vested with a sort of authority which is not based on success or demonstrations. The person’s speech convinces by means of evidence and not because it is more rational or eloquent. The person’s orders are not questioned. He/she is seen be people around, as someone who knows what decisions need to be made. We cannot assess if the charismatic boss (=charismatic management) has exceptional gifts, but it is important for those around to believe. Usually, he/she is related to the classes of scared, heroes, exemplary because that person exercises a real fascination over people around.

We cannot justify in a rational way the existence of the charismatic power. It would turn us back to an ancient age (Moses and Romulus are classic examples). But, the notion of charismatic leadership becomes autonomous again with Fr. Nietzsche and the theory of super-human. In the contemporary age, we speak about the “providential human being”, who appears during crises and is able to cope with dangers and defeats. That person is “by nature” the leader. Thus, such power is grounded on the leader’s personality additionally to the adhesion triggered by such personality. This sort of adhesion is addressed by napoleon when he said: “trust comes from below”; it is a phenomenon of faith with religious, mystic nature. The charismatic leader is not in opposition with the collectivity, he/she is not imposed or inspired by it, but he/she is not distinct: on the contrary, he/she is deemed as expressing perfectly a given historic moment. All his/her power resides in this relation.

When we speak about (moral) authority, prestige over other person, about strong personality, we have to admit that such persons are more gifted than others, without being able to say if such gifts are natural or transmitted by culture (education). Al least, we can consider that all gifts (sharp, “open” mind) rarely lead to positive accomplishments if they are not backed up by work. At the same time, it is certain that education, the way the child is considered by people around, the trust the child gains in his/her own force, the acknowledgement of its abilities – play an essential part for the capacity to be able later to use freely such gifts.

But not all gifts entail automatically charisma, they do not imply by themselves such capacity of presence over the other- which remains very difficult to explain. There are, of course, relation techniques which can be learnt, taught. For instance, elocution may improve, similarly listening, silence management, respect for other’s speech (it is known that the word’s meaning is external, not internal, thus, it is necessary to be cautious and very careful upon decoding). We can point out “its mark images” necessary to seduce, to inspire trust, to increase the...

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