Personality cult
| Drink the Kool-aid |
| Iä Yog-Sothoth! |
A personality cult or cult of personality is a system in which a leader is able to control a group of people through the sheer force of his or her personality and is often portrayed as a god-like figure. Where the personality cult is about a head of state, criticism of that person is generally prohibited, and state-sponsored media are employed to ensure that the masses are given a consistent picture of the person's perfection. That picture is likely to be a literal picture, and the image of the leader is typically plastered over much of the visual landscape. New surfaces may be produced for no other reason than to present that image, as satirized with the balloon bearing Joseph Stalin's image in an empty field in the 1994 Russian film Burnt by the Sun.[1]
Personality cults are often found in totalitarian regimes. Although it is very rare to see them in democratic countries, they do occur from time to time.
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[edit] Examples
- Li Hongzhi, self-proclaimed "Main Buddha of the Universe" (China)
- Mao Zedong, Xi Jinping (China)
- Fidel Castro (Cuba)
- Gamal Abdel Nasser, Hosni Mubarak, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi (Egypt)
- Augustus Caesar (Most of Europe)
- Saddam Hussein (Iraq)
- Benito Mussolini (Italy)
- Muammar al-Gaddafi (Libya)
- Adolf Hitler (Nazi Germany)
- Kim Il Sung, his son, and then his grandson (North Korea)
- Vladimir Putin (Russia)
- Joseph Stalin (Soviet Union)
- Park Chung Hee (South Korea)
- Omar Hassan Ahmad Al-Bashir (Sudan)
- Hafez al-Assad and his son, Bashar al-Assad (Syria)
- Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali (Tunisia)
- Saparmurat Niyazov (Turkmenistan)
- Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (Turkey)
- Nicolae Ceausescu (Romania)
- Hugo Chavez (Venezuela)
- Ali Abdullah Saleh (Yemen)
- Ayn Rand and her Randroids (USA)
- Charles Manson and his "Family" (USA)
- David Koresh and the disaster we know as Waco (USA)
- Jim Jones and his "Kool-Aid drinkers" (USA)
- If you want to stretch it a bit, Ronald Reagan for Republicans and John F. Kennedy for Democrats,[2] and the Founding Fathers in general (USA)
[edit] In pop culture
For various reasons, the idea of a personality cult is entering pop culture spheres, sometimes as just another set piece (such as in "Cult of Personality" by Living Colour in 1988), but sometimes it's a major element of a movie. An example is the German The Wave (originally made in 1981 and remade in 2008). The movie is based on the social experiment of Ron Jones,[wp] about a German teacher who attempted to show his high school students what fascism was. The result was he accidentally created a personality cult that led to large amounts of vandalism, an attempted murder, and a suicide when the instructor (Wenger) tells them that the experiment is over. The 2001 German thriller film Das Experiment is somewhat similar.
[edit] External links
- "On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences" on Wikipedia
[edit] Footnotes
- ↑ Burnt by the Sun, IMDB
- ↑ A portion of people reading this article will be probably thinking "Why not Obama?" Simple: looking back from today, it was a very short one. The most important element of a personality cult is the usage of authority to perpetuate artificial 'apotheosis'; you don't want videos such as these lying around. American society has an unusual tendency to mythologize Presidents (ironically, even worse than today's constitutional monarchies), and over time ignore the very things which make them human. But who knows what will happen in 50 years to the legacy of the first POTUS who transcended the barriers of race. (We'd like an objective account, thanks.)