When a guru or his creed announces the end of the world and it does not come, how is it possible that his followers do not abandon him immediately? When an ideology or its apostles, or a political program, or the charismatic leader who advocates it, fail miserably, how is it possible that they continue to retain an important part of their followers? In The Kingdom, Emmanuel Carrère tells us that “it is a known phenomenon, often observed by historians of religions: denials of reality, instead of ruining a belief, tend, on the contrary, to reinforce it.”
I have been interested in this mystery for a long time, which is that of faith, that of the desire to belong, that of the love for a collective cause, the fascination with charisma, the vertigo of power. I do not entertain myself to feel liberated, or to look at it with the distance of someone who has already understood it or has overcome it, but because I am sure that, more or less consciously, we are all always victims. Football fans, the furious identifications they generate towards the clubs of our hearts, often remind us: if neutrality exists, it is for stones. Or for the Swiss. The authentic pleasure of being a football fan begins when you abandon yourself to definitive affiliation, when you identify with the destiny of a group with which it can be just as genuine to share four fundamental things, as to stop sharing three thousand…
One recovers documentary series about former First Division presidents, for example, such as the magnificent La Liga de los Hombres Extraordinarios, on Movistar, or the more recent Núñez, on 3.cat, and one cannot help but wonder how we could continue to keep them so alive. our hobbies, with these types of leaders representing them. In the impressive anthropological study The dawn of everything, David Graeber and David Wengrow seem to answer the question: “In the same way that gods (or God) are not limited by morality (only those who are beyond the good and of evil may have created good and evil), Divine Kings cannot be judged in human terms; Behaving in arbitrarily violent ways with those around them is precisely proof of their transcendent status.” We do not need to stick to the bizarre behavior of leaders of large sports clubs of that time. We also fall in love with wild women, with primary men, and we are fascinated by mysterious characters, with ambiguous moral behavior, who contradict what we say we believe with what they do, without flinching. Call him Tony Soprano, Colonel Kurtz, Norma Desmond, Britney Spears… Who knows how to bring out the best in each of us, does he do it through arguments or with a good punch on the table?
