A chilling Radio 4 series “The New Gurus” tumbled into my lap during holiday downtime, and is appallingly relevant today.
Presenter Helen Lewis is a journalist I’ve long admired for her staunchly down-to-earth reporting. She’s often heard on Radio 4, although her main job now is staff writer at The Atlantic magazine. Her tone is so much like a teacher’s that I always picture her wearing sensible shoes.
The Avocado or Alligator Pear; Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew by Marianne North. Photo credit: The Board of Trustees of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew
Her new series starts with erstwhile comedian Russell Brand, and she admits to having been charmed by him when he guest-edited The Spectator magazine, where she was working at the time. He is now in full flow as a crazy guru on his various social media channels.
The internet has plenty of advice on how to succeed as a guru. Use all social media channels to win followers and become an influencer. Be outrageous – get your name out there. Notoriety is a plus. Get your fans on board: give them a sense of community – an ersatz family to belong to.
Dedicated support forums operate like dysfunctional families; favourites are rewarded, lesser fans work hard to win the guru’s attention. There is often a language in common – acronyms and catchphrases understood only by acolytes. Perhaps not surprisingly, gurus are predominantly men.
Gurus give us certainty in a terrifyingly uncertain world. Apparently even people who like maths, including Silicon Valley techies, are flocking to superstitious belief systems like astrology and Tarot card reading.
It’s easy to make a quick buck by exploiting the gullible and the vulnerable. The perpetrators don’t feel guilty about it; they get plenty of plaudits from their fans, and the media generally admire their success. Many of them use that foundation stone of consumerism: ramp up the customer’s anxiety, then sell them a balm to relieve the anxiety.
Edward Alexander ('Aleister') Crowley by Leon Engers Kennedy. © the copyright holder. Photo credit: National Portrait Gallery, London
As a Strict Baptist Minister, my great grandfather was a kind of cult leader in a remote village in rural Bedfordshire: a big fish in a tiny pond. To be a preacher, he must have liked the sound of his own voice; apart from that, I know little about him. Would he have had his own YouTube channel today? Or was he rather a proponent of Christian humility, someone who selflessly served the congregation?
I have no sense of him at all. This means that I never heard my grandmother – his daughter-in-law – or other relatives speak of him: a notable omission. I reckon he may have been revered and feared, but not particularly liked.
I was brought up in the cult he created, and it has left me susceptible to other cults. I’m attracted to charismatic conmen and their tight-knit band of followers; educated as I am, I fall for their nonsense, suspending my disbelief for fear of having to leave the group. Evidence shows that it’s often the fate of a cult leaver to ricochet haplessly from cult to cult without realizing it. There are plenty of yoga teachers and diet gurus who are in effect cult leaders, imposing absurd rigours on their followers and shaming those who fail.
Would my great grandfather have wanted his granddaughter to cling to any old rugged cross that presented itself? Wouldn’t he have wanted me to have a mind of my own?
The internet began as a space where scientists could share their research internationally, and it’s still a handy tool for finding out how to suck eggs if your grandmother is dead. But it’s now also a “spiritual marketplace”.
“As our trust in institutions wavers, we’re looking to charismatic individuals to tell us how to live…Gurus by their nature are outside the establishment.”
They draw people in by promising forbidden knowledge that the establishment wants to keep secret; and they make an absolute fortune from it.
“Becoming ever more extreme because the market rewards it is known as ‘audience capture’,” says Helen. When you’re an online guru you have an exceptionally keen sense of what your fans want because the feedback is overwhelming.”
Unlike the furiously argumentative Puritans of the 1640s - who had cut off the head of the king - today’s gurus are “championing heresy for its own sake”. And because the money just won’t stop rolling in.
Check out "The New Gurus" on BBC Sounds.
Or listen to it as a podcast: The New Gurus Podcast.
You have the gift of drawing in your readers with thought provoking details, personal as well as more general, and questions. And the photos are splendid. Crowley seems the quintessential guru with his bare chest, robes, and oh so significant gestures. I am intrigued by the connection between charisma, gurus and cults. I suspect your great-grandfather lacked charisma but ruled by the force of his self-ordained indisputable and patriarchal authority. Thus also did certain priests when I was a boarder in a very fundamentalist Catholic boarding school. (‘Dirty, filthy bare arms,’ I remember one nun exclaiming when we changed from our long sleeved blouses to short sleeved sports dresses — with hems nevertheless well below the knees.)
There was a visiting Catholic Priest from America, Father Patrick Payton who did strike me as charismatic. I was completely charmed by him (I guess charm and charisma are cognate words. ) His slogan was .’The family that prays togethers, stays together’, and thousands of families flocked to pray with him in the Sydney sports ground. Whether those families did stay together subsequently I do not know.
The only other charismatic leader I encountered was Cesar Chavez, leader of the Farm Workers’ Union in California— a pacifist and a saint. His followers would risk their lives for him, and he was a powerful orator. One of the best men.
That should begin ‘You have a gift of drawing in …..!!
Corrected it myself…the power of the blog owner!!!
You’ve made me think about men versus women charismatics. In The Handmaid’s Tale, the founder of Gilead, Serena Joy, is a charismatic. In the HBO series she is played as a youngish woman, but in the book, she is older.
Yes, a fascinating podcast! My cousin, in her wayward youth, became a sanyasi in Poona and we were all horrified by how gullible she seemed. She gave everything to the guru she followed and worked like his slave. But she outgrew him eventually – thank goodness – and returned much poorer but strengthened by her ability to turn away from what she saw ultimately as a form of exploitation. It has coloured my view of gurus ever since, I’m afraid, and listening to Helen Lewis talking about Russell Brand I am just amazed that we still fall for people like him. It’s sad!
On another note, Jo, have you watched The Wonder with the brilliant Florence Pugh? I thought of you as I watched it and would love to hear your opinion of the film. Personally I found it mesmerising.
Happy 2023!
Thanks, Monique, glad you enjoyed it. I haven’t seen The Wonder but I’m also a big fan of Florence Pugh, so I will look out for it.
Happy New Year to you, too!
Oh, what a brilliant review of the series and the subject, thank you Jo. I came across the first episode by chance and found it fascinating to hear about Steve Jobs’ last gift – Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda. Especially as I had recently been given it, highly recommended, by an old friend and am part-way through reading it. Also it was interesting to learn of Jobs’ seeming frustration that he never found his own guru, despite a lot of searching. Helen Lewis said some very interesting things about Yogananda, which I hadn’t picked up from the small amount of his book I have so far read; she gave some useful perspective. I do need to listen to it again, as I only had one ear on the radio at the time, and also to listen to the rest of the series so I’ve subscribed.
I did have a ‘guru’ experience in my early twenties, when I went on a couple of Zen meditation weeks – in the middle of the second of them, the Zen monk leading it suddenly declared that he was the Maitreya (future) Buddha, which is a bit like a minister declaring he was Christ returned again. The first week had been a good, intense experience, but the second was rather bizarre. He did go on to open a centre of his own, and was very fond of powerful motorbikes. A few years later we bumped into him at a Mind, Body and Spirit Festival at Olympia, with hair, a camera round his neck and a girl on his arm. (I hope he doesn’t read your blog.)
Thanks! Yes, all the recognisable names are fascinating.
As for me, I really like kundalini yoga – the postures and the singing. But can I accept that the teacher is a shaman, her gifts passed down to her through generations of ancestors? Not so much.