Charming!
How to master the dark arts...
I used to think that I was pretty savvy when it came to inoculating myself from the charm of others.
And then I met Bill Clinton.
Turns out that I am much more of a sucker for charm than I thought I was! Politics aside, I can report that everything you’ve read about him is disarmingly, unnervingly true. I really did feel, for those few short minutes, like I was the only person in the room.
Still smarting from the dramatic collapse of my carefully constructed charm defenses all those years ago, I was excited to speak with today’s guest, Professor Julia Sonnevend, who believes that charm is one of the defining political trends of our era.
In her book, Charm: How Magnetic Personalities Shape Global Politics, Julia argues that charm will do no less than “shape the future of democracy worldwide,” and explores how it is constructed and deployed by politicians ranging from Jacinda Arden to Kim Jong Un.
Social science is a field that tends to shy away from analyzing phenomena that can’t be quantified, so Julia’s research into the nebulous, mysterious world of charm represents an exciting break from consensus (yes, you’ve just heard a Quant argue that there is more to life than what’s quantifiable).
In our episode, you will discover why charm has emerged as a political force and how to innoculate yourself when you encounter it in the wild. Julia and I also dig into the five components of a charming interaction, a tantalizing prospect for those of you who want to dabble in the dark arts yourself…
I’ve shared the full transcript below, and links to your provider of choice are available here. As always, if you like what you hear/read, please leave a comment or drop us a review on your provider of choice.
In the meantime, here are four things you may not know about charm…
Charm is not Charisma: In the Good Old Days (TM), charisma ruled the roost. Leaders like De Gaulle positioned themselves as aloof, grandiose figures with absolute power and moral authority. Nowadays, with everything mediated by social media, such lofty aspirations come across as deluded at best, dangerous at worst. Instead, we expect our politicians to be relatable - to play with their kids, get the bus, and buy groceries just like the rest of us. Charisma leads us to think, “They are a Great man/woman.” Charm, on the other hand, makes us realize, “I’d love to have a beer with them.”
The Audience is the Arbiter: Julia argues that Americans, in particular, are wary of charm, always fearing that it is a disguise for its evil twin, deception. But here’s a powerful reframe: whether an interaction is (a) charming or (b) cringe/deceptive/weird is determined not by the charmer but by the reaction of their audience. In other words, YOU get to decide whether something is charming. You have the power!
Charm can be Manufactured: Charm isn’t just something you have or don’t have. It can be carefully and deliberately constructed. Put it this way - if Kom Jong Un can successfully launch a charm offensive, then you can too.
Take a Moment: Charm, especially in political contexts amplified by social media, acts like a spell that suspends critical thinking and prompts immediate emotional responses. To counter this, Julia teaches her students a simple yet effective trick: get in the habit of pausing before emotionally responding. This feedback-gap gives the intellectual brain time to kick into gear.
Transcript
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Well, hello everyone. It's Jim O'Shaughnessy with yet another Infinite Loops. Today's guest is someone that I've been looking forward to talking to for quite some time, because I think her book is hitting at almost the perfect time. She didn't plan it that way, but a very serendipitous outcome that it is being published at the end of this month. Her name is Julia Sonnevend, she's the Associate Professor of Sociology and Communication at the New School for Social Research in New York City. She focuses on the events, icons, symbols, and charismatic personalities of public life.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Her book, Charm: How Magnetic Personality Shaped Global Politics is coming out at the end of this month and will be the discussion for most of this podcast. I'm going to do a spoiler alert here, Julia. Do you know these lyrics? Please allow me to introduce myself. I'm a man of wealth and taste. But what's puzzling you is the nature of my game.
Julia Sonnevend:
I love it, but I don't know where it's from.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
That is from The Rolling Stone's iconic song, Sympathy For the Devil.
Julia Sonnevend:
Great. Okay.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
And so I thought of it when I was preparing for our podcast, because you make the case that we've moved into a world where charm and charisma, and we're going to talk about the difference between those two, but where charm specifically is really tilting the outcomes of elections, in a way that really didn't happen prior to the advent of visual media. So first off, welcome. And tell us a bit about your book.
Julia Sonnevend:
Thank you for having me. This will be fun, I already see it. So my book is about personal magnetism, with a particular focus on politics. And what I'm arguing in this book, is that we live in an era in which charm is the keyword of global politics. How political figures appear on the global stage defines that political power. It's a key quality that they need to possess. And charm is very hard to pin down. If you're a social scientist like me, we like to define things, we like to quantify things, put numbers next to them and so on and charm is not like that. You can't create a straitjacket definition, you can't put numbers next to it in every context. It is complicated. And therefore, I think social scientists have largely avoided this term. We tend to avoid things we can't define. But then we all know charming people in our everyday lives, right? We have them in our families, maybe a boyfriend, ex-boyfriend, spouse and so on. And they're also there in our contemporary politics. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? We can probably discuss.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
So I'm wondering, you're probably aware of the famous exchange between Richard Nixon and John Kennedy, when TV was just becoming popular in the United States. And there was a poll afterwards and it was stark. The people who had listened only to the debate between President Kennedy and President Nixon, well, neither had been president quite yet, the radio listeners believed overwhelmingly, that Nixon had in fact won the debate. The TV viewers on the other hand, overwhelmingly said that the very charming and very charismatic young Senator John F. Kennedy had won. And currently, you can ask a single question and it determines outcomes more than you'd like. And that is, which of these candidates would you like to have a beer with? So if you wouldn't mind, expand on that. Why have we become so smitten with the, in many aspects, completely manufactured personality of our political leaders?
Julia Sonnevend:
It is really an absurd situation. I mean, if you consider, well, we are looking for politicians who should appear in the media as if they were our next-door neighbors. And there is a reason obviously, why next-door neighbors are not our leading politicians. Nonetheless, this is what we expect. The character who appears as a person who we would like to have a beer with is the type of person we want to have as a political leader. And if you think about it, a personable figure, an authentic figure in the media may not be the best when it comes to leading the country, but somehow, we set this requirement.
Julia Sonnevend:
Going back to the example that you gave, what is really interesting about the Kennedy-Nixon example, that actually there is very little data to prove this mythology, that that was the case that whoever was watching had a different view than whoever was listening. But that we have this mythology already proves that we are fascinated by this question. Is it the appearance or not? Actually, that poll is really weak when it comes to quantitative data, yet we still keep referring back to it. Why do we have this? That goes back to the difference between charisma and charm.
Julia Sonnevend:
So charisma has always been a quality of politics, no question that it was always important how a politician presented himself. But there is a difference between charisma, which was based on distance from audiences. Think Churchill or [inaudible 00:23:35], these kind of bombastic little [inaudible 00:23:38] performances. Far away from the audience, the politician appears as some kind of God, right? In contrast to that, now you want to have a figure with whom you want to have a beer with. That's a very different understanding of politics. So you want the person to construct authenticity in an environment that is completely fake.
Julia Sonnevend:
So we all know that media environments are constructed. We all say, "Oh, that's so fake in the media," or, "Oh, that's just a fake performance.” But then when somebody goes into this sphere, we want them to be authentic. We want them to be themselves. If you think about it, it's a really strange or weird requirement. Why would you be yourself in a setting that is really not very natural, where you have these microphones and cameras and all that around you? Yes, you should appear as this next door neighbor really coming over for a beer. Yet we set the standard and it has a lot to do with the changing media environment.
Julia Sonnevend:
When you have continuous visuals of politicians, then you continuously run these authenticity tests. You see authentic, you see normal is looking like me in this setting. And then you run, run, run these tests throughout. And sometimes they appear as authentic and you will say, "Fine, okay, he met passed the test." And in other cases you will feel like, "Okay, the performance is somehow falling apart. It's becoming cringe, fake, strange." And that's when the performance is failing. We all know this, right? When you watch politics, be it on TV or on your phone, you know these moments when you feel like, "Oh, I connected. This is really a moment of fusion." And then other cases when you look at it and say, "Oh geez, this is so cringe." Right?
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
That's very interesting. And I love the correction on the Nixon versus Kennedy. It reminds me of the film starring Jimmy Stewart, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. And he's very successful. It's in the Old West of America, and he's been very, very successful and he's told the real story to the journalists. And literally, they're all watching shocked, because the real story conflicts dramatically from the legend as it were, or the public knowledge. And so there's this great scene, where they're concluding. And the lead journalist finishes writing the true story. And then he takes it and he goes over to the potbelly stove and starts putting it in. And Jimmy Stewart's character goes, "You're not going to print any of it?" And the journalist answers, "When the legend becomes fact, we print the legend." And I just think that is so interesting, because it's so difficult often to disambiguate. When you get a public perception of yourself or of another, like a political candidate locked in, it needs something rather dramatic to disturb that.
And one of the things that you do in the book that I think is really interesting is make that distinction between charm and charisma and the fact that charm, it seems to me, and this is my reading, correct me if I'm wrong, charm is more easily manufactured, i.e. we can create a charm offensive.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
I think for example of Mark Zuckerberg. If you go back to 2015, his public perception of that guy was really bad, literally everyone portrayed him as a robot, a horrible rapturous capitalist doing all sorts of bad things. And then you've seen recently it essentially flipped. He changed his hairstyle and he started doing martial arts and he appears at least superficially to be a much more at ease, much more at peace type person. And I wonder though, does it require a charismatic person to be able to be perceived as charm? I think of, so for example, I am going to do a lightning round with you later, and I'm going to go through some political names and ask you charming or not charming.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
But I had the opportunity to meet President Clinton, after he was President. But I must tell you Julia, that when I met him, I felt like I was the only human being in the room. He looked like a million watt light bulb to me. I, myself am not a terribly political person. I have one thing, and that is I am extremely anti-authoritarian of the left or of the right.
Julia Sonnevend:
We share that, yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Well-
Julia Sonnevend:
As a Hungarian.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
I was going to say, I don't think I've ever met an East European who lived under communism, who was a big fan of authoritarianism. But is there a difference? Do you need to be like President Clinton, charismatic to also be perceived as charming or can it be manufactured?
Julia Sonnevend:
That's an excellent question. And what is really interesting that every single book on charm or charisma mentions Bill Clinton, and it's always the same story. I also read his biography, stories about him internationally, in the United States and so on. And all of these profiles mentioned that you meet him, let's say you don't like him beforehand, your politics are different, whatever. You go into the room and he's like a vacuum cleaner, he sucks you in. But most importantly, exactly the line that you gave that he makes you feel that you are the one and only in the room. And you are really not alone with this experience, pretty much everybody had the same experience, which shows that regardless of what kind of people he has met, he managed to give this feeling. And does he still remember the details of the meeting? Of course not, but he somehow radiated that feeling to you that you matter.
Julia Sonnevend:
And I think that's very important because we are often just numbers, statistics. We are one in a crowd, particularly as viewers of politics. And then there is a person who makes you feel that you are the one and only, you are one. You are an individual, you are unique, and that's a core element of charm. When it comes to your question, I mean, there is a whole industry, and I don't have to explain this to you, that is built on the idea that you can teach charisma and charm to people. Come to our workshop over a weekend and we will teach you charm. And obviously there are qualities you can teach, but I also feel that there are elements of it that are very hard to explain that go beyond these trainings. We all know people who you can put through endless numbers of trainings and they will not become charismatic fully. And then you have a Bill Clinton who obviously have trainings, but that's not the reason why he operates this way.
Julia Sonnevend:
So I think the truth is somewhere in-between, and again, social scientists hate to say, "This because we want to say these are the factors, and if you do that, you will become charismatic," but it's not the case. I mean, that's the unexpected charm of social life, right? And I'm actually very curious how you experienced this in business and investment. Did you use your charm? Did you get seduced by people who were charming and maybe made the decision you shouldn't have?
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Well, so okay, we're flipping roles here for a moment.
Julia Sonnevend:
[inaudible 00:32:09]-
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
No, I know that's the academic in you, which is charming. I was raised by a mother who always beat into me that you would catch a lot more flies with honey than with vinegar. And so, I guess I had sort of the natural tendency towards that. And in my experience in business, I have tried to take people who maybe weren't so charismatic or charming and kind of give them lessons. And unfortunately I came to much the same conclusion that you have academically. I think that, and the reason I asked that question was because I think, and this is just my opinion and I'm often wrong, I think that charisma has an innate, built-in sense, whereas charm, the way you look at it in your book, is potentially more easy to manufacture primarily because it seems to need to be intermediated visually, right?
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
And a classic example was Ronald Reagan, right? Ronald Reagan or his handlers, oh my God, did that guy understand optics? The speeches he gave were, there were always the American heroes as he called them, and they always came from regular work-a-day lives like police officers, paramedics, doctors, et cetera, nurses. And then the flags. And he definitely understood these kind of artificial icons, at least for an American. And so, I'm not saying that he wasn't charming, I'd never met him, but by all accounts of people that I know who have, he was. And one of the things that I often hear when people are referring to famous politicians or people from other endeavors, when they talk about charisma, they often say in the same breath, "And man, is he funny or she funny." Is there a connection between charisma and humor?
Julia Sonnevend:
I do think there is. And then it's also through what you said about charm. Because particularly you manufacture it on social media at the moment, it is more tweakable and you can shape it a little bit with advisors. And if you have a good team, they will make the right cuts and you will appear a bit more this kind of relatable everyday person. So if the listeners are asking, "Oh, what do you mean by charm?" That's what I mean by charm is this understanding that the person is just like us. He could not be more different when it comes to his everyday life in most of the cases, but we still feel that way. So that constructed element. And I think there is an element of joking, of joy to use a current key term that is often there as an element. And why? Because humor works as a form of taking down walls, boundaries, barriers, and that's what we do with charm.
Julia Sonnevend:
And particularly in politics, when you are in a complicated situation of diplomacy, let's say for instance, I analyze in the book the Iranian Nuclear Deal as an example, it's a tedious negotiation about details, often boring, not really meant for the media. It means a lot if you have a charming character right there, that character makes it more translatable, the event more translatable for the international media. But we also know of countless cases in which that helps, right? You can even tell the collapse of the Soviet Union in some ways through moments of charm and certain politicians made responsible decisions, but they also connected over beer or had a moment in which they acted just like human beings do. So I do think there is an element of humor.
Julia Sonnevend:
I mean, if you think about personal interaction just right now as we talk, if you laugh there is a connection and we will connect much more with the audience as well. And writing this book, I've spent a whole lot of time thinking about that in workplaces and in business and politics of how do we connect with people? How do we overcome those barriers, those walls that are between us?
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Have you had the experience since writing the book that you find yourself more guarded or on the lookout for what you now would list as a charm offensive? And do you take the case studies you present, for example, you use Jacinda Ardern, the Former Prime Minister of New Zealand as a case study, and you walk through five techniques. So maybe let's take those questions in reverse order. Maybe we talk a little bit about your case study of the five techniques with Jacinda Ardern, the Former Prime Minister, and then how are you reacting or have you inoculated yourself as a person against charming or charismatic types?
Julia Sonnevend:
It's hard not to start with the second part, okay? But I will start as you asked me to do. So there are these five elements that I identified in the book that are sort of Lego blocks or key building blocks of charm. And the first one is performing authenticity. There's this idea that you will appear as yourself, and as we discussed, you do this in environments that are really not meant for that. If you think about the campaign, every second is planned. These politicians barely have time to go to the bathroom, yet they have to be appearing as super authentic, or let's say they never take a subway, but they have to know how to swipe the subway card, although now it's easier with the credit card in New York. But still there are these things we expect them to do or order the right type of burger or don't appear as to out of touch too elitist. It is really a very fine line between authentic and as my students would say, cringe. That's the keyword that they like to use for these kind of cases. So that's the first element.
Julia Sonnevend:
The second one is de-masking. What do I mean by that? So if you are a leading politician, you have sort of a mask on, you are the President of the United States, let's say, when there are moments when politicians sort of drop this. If you remember George W. Bush reading a kid's story on the day of 9/11, we all remember that picture when they come and tell him what is happening, and then suddenly there is this worry in his eyes and he has to leave and that the plane takes off and he has to figure out who am I at the moment? Am I a human being, being freaked out what is happening or am I the President of the United States? And this happens a whole lot of time, and there are moments when the humanity of politicians simply shines through, and that's the moment when they drop the mask, they appear like you and me like regular human beings. And then they come back and they again appear in their formal official role. So that's de-masking.
Julia Sonnevend:
The third element is breaking the routine. So there is a routine in media in terms of how you cover events, there are press conferences, there are planned events and so on, but politicians also create unique sites. For instance, let's say they go to the beach or they appear on a balcony or in a diner. So break the routine of formal reporting and appear in these regular settings. There's a famous picture of Modi from India and Benjamin Netanyahu from Israel taking a walk on the beach. It's not the regular site of negotiations, but they somehow decided to present this. They're not friends, obviously, that they don't hang out on the beach regularly together. It was a message for the media that this is a new relationship and this is how we are going to communicate it. So that's breaking the routine.
Julia Sonnevend:
There's re-staging when you create a whole new stage of interaction. So Jacinda Arden that you mentioned, for instance, love to take live videos sitting in a car and saying, "I have such a packed schedule, I cannot fit in a regular briefing to you. I'm going to tell you about my new idea or my new policy right here in the car. This is the moment when I'm going to do that." So that's not a regular stage again for politics, but it also communicates that you have continuous access to the politician. She also posted an image from the waiting room before giving birth. So there was this picture of her right there. That's again, not a typical representation of a politician, but she said, "Let's invite you."
Julia Sonnevend:
And then finally, the fifth element is equalizing. When politicians come up with sort of a trick to make you feel that you're part of a community. So if you think about countries, especially internationally, politicians have very diverse audiences, we are radically different. But they things like, "oh, our community of 10 million or our family." These are constructions, these are imagined communities, and they communicate in a way so that you feel like you're part of a village. And if they do it right, you do feel like that, "This is my tribe and I'm going to do everything for my tribe. And if the tribe makes mistakes or the leader makes mistakes, or if there is corruption, I'm going to forgive it because I'm part of this tribe." And that's what they ultimately want to achieve.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
It does sound... I'm sure you're familiar with Edward Bernays, I call him that fucker guy because he was so good at rebranding propaganda in renaming it public relations.
Julia Sonnevend:
Yes.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
But the power of it is undeniable, right? That guy overthrew Guatemala without a single gun being fired. And he did it all through this managing the stage. Have you seen the movie, Wag The Dog?
Julia Sonnevend:
Oh, yes. Yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
And as I was getting ready to chat with you, I thought of that movie because it is kind of trying to de-mask what actually is going on behind the scenes and how many things are just pure fictionally created, right? And I'm fascinated by that. But I'm not going to let you get away from the second part of the earlier question-
Julia Sonnevend:
The second part, I was just-
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Which-
Julia Sonnevend:
Oh my God, I did not answer that. You're good.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Do you find that writing this book has in some sense inoculated you against charming or charismatic people?
Julia Sonnevend:
Well, Jim, I'm in academia, so I wish there were more charming people. So my situation is different than yours, okay? I would think in business you have that, in academia you sit in endless boring faculty meetings and you just wish there was somebody finally who was charming. But actually, in addition to my history and background as a Hungarian growing up with a lot of charm and charisma around me in politics, one of the things that inspired this book was actually a hiring meeting in a previous workplace where my colleagues said, "We have to be extremely careful in this hiring process because these charming candidates, they come in, they seduce us, and then they're not going to publish anything and they'll not teach their classes. It'll be a nightmare." I remember sitting there and I thought that was so interesting that they had this Harvard educated, serious academics. What are we worried about? We are worried about a charming person sort of entering a cut and changing it.
Julia Sonnevend:
And that was actually the direct inspiration of the book. And in that sense, I do look for it. I do see manifestations of it. And when I'm scrolling my phone and look at social media, obviously I detect, "Oh, this is what I thought by charm," or this is a moment when it breaks down, and then I try to post it and analyze it on various social media sites. So that's there. I think if you write a book about charm, you change a bit, but does it mean that I don't get seduced by charming people? No, that's not [inaudible 00:45:26].
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
As you mentioned academia, I immediately thought of Professor Richard Feynman who was, he was a quantum physics expert and wrote many books, but was amazingly charming and quirky. And as I was listening, I'm thinking, isn't that funny? Johnny von Neumann, another noted, great storyteller, in addition to being one of the smartest man, if not the smartest man on the planet when it was on the planet. And I started thinking, wow, am I drawn to reading and following academics who are also charismatic and charming? Now I've got to think about that for the rest of the day.
Julia Sonnevend:
So now you have to be very careful, Jim, from now as you're reading these people. But yes, I mean, it's not an accident also why certain academics stand out and become leaders also shaping public opinion. If you have that kind of charm, you also excel in the classroom, you may be able to convince your dean about something and so on. So it has its powers within academia too, but I think there is a tendency to try to fight it. And that tendency I also see in everyday life. So I'm sitting on the plane and somebody's asking me, "Oh, what are you writing about?" And I said, "I wrote a book about charm." Then in addition to stories and Bill Clinton and so on, the other thing they say is, "Oh, I'm very skeptical. I'm very skeptical about charming people. It's just very..." And I find that so interesting.
Julia Sonnevend:
And I have to say, particularly in the United States, this is very, very often frequent response I'm getting to my work and I'm curious about that. So there is, I think this suspicion about seduction, which is there, if you think about the Bible and important mythologies internationally, seductive people or figures are dangerous very often in these stories. So there is this kind of skepticism somewhat religiously, I would say, of distancing yourself from charming people, but also because they're unpredictable, because it's volatile, because you can't fully figure it out. You might want to avoid it, there is this reflex. At the same time, we all know it's power. So that's the balance that I see between seduction and deception. And there is the spectrum. And if you are a charming person, your seduction is deception. And if try to figure out which one it is, and it's very often in-between.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Yeah. And then that gets us back to the lyrics that we opened the show with from Jagger. If you do or did, if there was a devil and you happen to encounter him or her, they would be incredibly charismatic and charming. They would not be [inaudible 00:48:29] type at all because that's frightening. And it leads me to another question about I personally, and again, this is an opinion, this is my perception. I think often people confuse their opinions that are generated from their perceptions as facts. I luckily do not suffer that delusion. So this is just my, or think I don't suffer, maybe I do.
Julia Sonnevend:
Want to know how you avoid that, but okay, let's wait for the question.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
My personal opinion is that in the United States, certainly, and maybe more generally globally, we are in a period where we have kind of the worst political class of history, at least that's my opinion. And I'm wondering, and I'd always tried to kind of put my finger on why I thought that. And when I was reading your stuff and getting ready for it, I thought this might be a component of that. It might be that because we are saturated with visual media, social media, regular media, et cetera, that the chance to vote for the candidate who is advocating policies that you yourself support kind of gets lost in the charm of this class. And sometimes I think like sociopaths, psychopaths, et cetera, tend to be able to at least fake charm and do it with great aplomb. Do you think that the emergence of these visual media, of these staged events, of things that are not in any way real, your example of the two walking on the beach? Do you think that they're leading a worst class of person to seek out those high offices?
Julia Sonnevend:
That's the $1 million question, obviously. But I think what you described in terms of a stronger focus towards personalities than to policies is what we see in political science and in sociology as well. There is actually quite a lot of research now on that, that the last 30 years have been characterized by what we call a political personalization, which means exactly this process that we focus on personalities and less on policies, institutions, values, and even facts. So if you take that process and then put the media environment there as well, in which you have continuous visuals, continuous representation, and you have to deal with that repeatedly, you barely have time to think through the latest video, you immediately comment, you express your opinion and so on. That's not really an environment in which you would carefully weigh facts or consider policy suggestions and try to decide which one is stronger based on its merits. It's the reality of contemporary politics that we focus on personalities.
Julia Sonnevend:
On the one hand, I think it has advantages. So if you have a tired audience, nobody's paying anymore any attention to politics, then there is a charismatic, charming personality there. And that person can energize people and say, "Okay, let's discuss something. Let's think about the future of the country." And so that's the positive side, and I think we often forget that. But then there is the dark side of it as well, which is this very volatile environment in which you suddenly have a figure who emerges and then fails, then again, up, down, up, down, up, down, which is not an environment for those policy discussions that you just mentioned. So that's where it becomes really tricky when it comes to the future of democracy. And that's not a US story, it's an international story.
Julia Sonnevend:
If you have very polarized societies, which is again, not only in the United States, but in many countries internationally, you have this media environment and a strong focus to personalities then not only your national politics, but your international politics will be this kind of drama, this theater, this performance. Again, with certain advantages, for instance, young audiences might start to pay attention who haven't beforehand. But there is a very strong risk involved that a charming character could lead the country astray just with the tool of deception. And that's a really existing danger, not just in the US again, internationally too.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
And I think, would you agree that that seems to have been amplified by the just ubiquity of always on media? I'm not on TikTok, I personally don't want to have the CCP of China like brainwashing me, and I'm kidding kind of. But TikTok is an amazingly successful media platform, and it is all as my friends in Texas would say, it is all hat and no cattle. In other words, when somebody makes a wonderful presentation, but that doesn't have any real experience to back it up, the Texans would say, "All hat, no cattle."
Julia Sonnevend:
I love that. Okay, I'm going to steal that.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Please do. Please do. And so I just wonder... And then of course you see the people who are fighting against this will often, despite whatever their political position is, will often go out into crowds, right? And they will assign the stated platform of the person that they oppose.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
So for example, if you were a Harris supporter, you would go out and you would ask people, "Do you support Trump's position on this?" And it wasn't his position, but it was Harris's. You would find very, very quickly that people aren't listening to the policy positions at all.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
What they do when you pull a fast one on them and you assign her positions to him and his positions to her, her most ardent supporters are like, "Yes, I..." I mean, you could almost get them, "Yeah, build that wall." But the same is true on the other side, right?
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
When you go to a dyed-in-the-wool Trump supporter and give that person Harris's positions, "Yeah, yeah. I'm totally in support of that." And that, I find creepy and frightening. Have we come to that?
Julia Sonnevend:
No wonder that you find it creepy and frightening. And it's again, it is what we find in research as well that identities first. It was a long time when in media research we thought that no, if you encounter some real life situation that will shape your thinking. Let's say the country has terrible healthcare or education, whatever, and if your kid goes to school, it'll change your view and so on. And that's not the situation. What we see internationally as well.
Julia Sonnevend:
What we see is that there are tribes and you feel connected to this kind of leader, heart leader, you're part of the tribe and you will say, "Okay, well these are the issues. Yeah, fine, I heard about them. That's a problem, but I belong to this tribe." And that shapes what you described as well.
Julia Sonnevend:
It doesn't really matter what the person actually says, "I have made my decision. I'm part of this community. And I forgive some of these things." So obviously a Trump supporter would recognize that this sounds a bit weird as a Trump position that you just mentioned.
Julia Sonnevend:
We'll say, "Well, okay, maybe he said that," right? Maybe he said that, I'm with him." So that is something that we are reckoning with in research. This idea that identities first, that the feeling of belonging that we want to belong to a group and that trumps everything else, whether we like that or not.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Yeah. Again, personal opinion. I think that the dissent into tribalism and cults of personality generally does not lead to good things because it precludes and sometimes prevents people from having an actual reading on, "Well, maybe their policy on energy and/or on taxation, and/ or..." You can list all the things that government is meant to do.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Maybe we might be living in a better land if people actually paid attention to the policies that our politicians on both sides of the aisle are recommending. And yet it does seem to me that there is this idea that you're writing about in your book that almost blinds us to the serious matters at hand.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
And I wonder, I had a question for you about, are there moments in time... So I'm going to give two recent examples. So when Trump was shot and his reaction was to raise his fist in the air, while still in mortal danger, if you look at the photograph and shout, "Fight."
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
And then the other image I think of was the one they staged. Most people don't know this, but the marines planting the flag during World War II on Iwo Jima. It was staged only in that the photographer missed the original shot. And he was like, "That's a really great shot, could you do that?"
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
I guess my question is, are there moments that are authentic that are real? I think also of the image of the young man standing in front of the tank and Tiananmen Square, is there a difference between what are seemingly authentic, i.e., not planned in any way, images that become iconic and maybe change people's views on things?
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
I certainly know that when I saw that image of the young student in Tiananmen Square, I literally got shivers, "Talk about talking..." I'm using quotes here for our audio only listeners, "Talk about talking truth to power." I mean, oi. But what-
Julia Sonnevend:
I teach that image every year to my students, to my undergraduate students. Also the Iwo Jima image. First of all, I'm trying to sneak in history whenever I can in some way or another, but these are exceptionally powerful images. Does it matter that there was that element in the Iwo Jima picture? Not so much I think in terms of authenticity, because the question will be will the viewer perceive it as authentic? And we certainly do.
Julia Sonnevend:
And with the Trump picture, what I think is also really interesting that he knew that the cameras were there. So it's a moment in which you know that this will be everywhere in the world. So even in your mortal fear and as a human being dealing with all that, if you're a politician, it is in your mind in some way that this will be captured.
Julia Sonnevend:
And you also need to send a message to your followers and whoever will see that. And that, I thought was really interesting in that moment that he one way or another thought that through and created that moment, which was very much also for international and national media coverage. So that's that.
Julia Sonnevend:
I wanted to go back for a moment to TikTok and your previous thoughts on that. So I teach undergrads every term, and one of the things as a professor I try to do is to show different viewpoints. I find it very important that I show them opinions and text they don't agree with that they would hate immediately.
Julia Sonnevend:
But it's not that regular rhythm in academia these days, and I think that's a major problem, which in my classroom I'm trying to fight it. But it is a fight, and that's where it starts that in classrooms we simply have to show different viewpoints and not cancel it, not say that it's not okay. We can analyze it and we can say, "It fails in this and that way."
Julia Sonnevend:
But we have to see it to form an opinion. And that's how it starts. And when it comes to TikTok, it also made me think of my classrooms because I teach 18-year-olds as well. So I teach PhD students who are in their 30s, I teach master's students in their 20s and I teach freshly minted undergrads.
Julia Sonnevend:
And I had a class recently, 18 undergraduates, really excellent students, and I asked them, "What is your news source, where do you learn about political events?" And all of them said, TikTok, one and only news source. Top university, heart of New York, private institution and so on. It really gave me a pause and made me think deep and had in terms of how to educate better.
Julia Sonnevend:
If that's your one and only news source and you are clearly a good thinker, you are excellent in class, then how do we deal with that? And I won't say it's not scary, but it's a reality. If you're an educator, you have to deal with this.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
So of course you are inviting the question, how do you deal with that?
Julia Sonnevend:
How do I deal with that? Well, first of all, I trust this generation, so I don't agree with that, that they are stupid in any form or shape. They are very capable of discussions. You just have to create the environment in which they do that. So for instance, how do I deal with that? I say that in the first class that, "You will hear things here that you don't like and that's fine, that's what college is for, that we clash ideas."
Julia Sonnevend:
And I introduce that and I've never had a student to complained. I never had any kind of complaints about that in my classroom. So I do think they want that, but they might need some explanation on why you are actually do it in that environment. And then I also do a lot of critical media analysis. So we look at videos, we look at images, we look at TikTok videos as well, and we analyze them in detail.
Julia Sonnevend:
Sometimes we spend half an hour, 45 minutes on a brief video, a few seconds or a minute of a video. And we just analyze it deeply in the same way as we would analyze a book. And I think that's a critical skill they have to have, and that's something that is our responsibility.
Julia Sonnevend:
And sometimes it happens in high school, but very often it doesn't. And when it comes to history education, I often teach students who did not reach the Vietnam War in their history education. I asked them, "What was the last thing..." But it's very often the case that you need this kind of critical thinking being introduced in the classroom. And then they work with that. They do take that seriously, but it's up to us and we have to do that work.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
I feel like Diogenes and I've discovered an honest person, which makes me delighted that you are teaching young people. I, like you have great faith in young people. I think that the classic older generation dumping on the younger generation, there's a joke about when they finally translated the first Sumerian Cuneiform. It was like, "Oh my God, this young generation we're going to hell in a hand basket."
Julia Sonnevend:
It's easy to say, right? They're annoyingly young, so we want to hate them…
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Right. I often think that that's more envy than anything else because as we get on in years, we're like, "Oh, they're so young." And so then we go, "Well..." We invent excuses for why they're horrible, which I don't cling to any of those. I, like you think that our younger generation is doing just fine as long as they can get some good training.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
I had a great personal experience when I was at the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown. I had an incredibly charismatic teacher, Jan Karski, who was a Pole. There's many books written about him and his exploits. Because he was one of the first people to convey the information to the United States about what was really happening in the death camps because they threw him into one.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
But what was really interesting... He was a member of the Polish Underground. What was really interesting to me that really just made me become fascinated with this man was that in his course, which was Modern Foreign Governments, this is, I'll date myself, this is 1981. And so, at the height of the showdown between Reagan and the powers that be in the Politburo of the old USSR, he was meticulously fair.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
In other words, he would go on, "And many people believe these are the benefits of a communist system and here are the people who don't agree and here's what they think." So I was always taken by how meticulously fair he was in the way he would approach things, especially after visiting his first office hours.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
During his office hours, which I came to cherish far more than the class itself. We got the real story and we have a film division at O'Shaughnessy Ventures. I want to make a movie about this guy, because talk about charisma and the ability to persist under horrible, dangerous conditions.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
He was captured by the Nazis who tortured him endlessly at one point, taking the severed head of one of his collaborators and putting it on his knees in a cage that he was held in, where he had no movement, to escaping that and then getting caught by the Russians who already had their designs on Eastern Europe. And so, they threw him into a camp where he also escaped from.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
But the reason I bring him up and my desire to make a movie about him is are there certain things... And it ties into the earlier question, like the flag at Iwo Jima and various other... the student in Tiananmen Square. Are there certain events that literally are not plantable, but then can be transplanted to used as ammunition in a charm offensive?
Julia Sonnevend:
My first book is exactly about this question on how you construct a global iconic event. It's about the fall of the Berlin Wall, which was a very messy as you know, bureaucratic process in many ways. And it had a lot of accidents and mistakes and so on, but it's not how we remember it. We remember it as this magical moment when people overcome the power that is much larger than they are.
Julia Sonnevend:
So that's an example in which you take a messy, complicated, confusing event and you don't want to remember it as a set of mistakes or as a set of bureaucratic meetings or changes in a party system and so on. You want to remember it has this kind of magical moment of explosion, this unique situation. So that's how we construct events.
Julia Sonnevend:
And I often play around with my students as well in thinking through major events internationally from the Holocaust to 9/11, what are the conditions that made it an iconic event and how do we communicate this message now? And one thing that I've found is that you need a core message, be it trauma or hope or loss that more or less resonates internationally. And then you will be able to recycle it in radically different contexts.
Julia Sonnevend:
And this process involves a lot of simplification, you create icons. If you think even about the Holocaust, there were many camps, there were many details of the event it went through over years. Nonetheless, you have iconic sites like Auschwitz that stands for the whole event.
Julia Sonnevend:
So you create these iconic representations that do not represent every detail of the event, but they somehow come to stand for it, like the famous images of 9/11. And similarly, it's not about all the four planes, it's not every detail that happened that day, but they're somehow iconic representations. So we do weaponize images, we do weaponize events and figures in such ways.
Julia Sonnevend:
And if they are simplified enough and condensed enough really condensation, something complicated, confusing, condensed quickly, then you can use it in new radically different context. Which again, have the risk that you might use it in an environment where it doesn't belong, but it keeps the event alive as well.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Is there a way or a methodology that allows people suitably trained to see through these intended manipulations? I'm speaking specifically about the use after the fact, right? You mentioned the Berlin Wall. I remember watching when they actually brought it down, it was broadcast live. I got shivers. I'm a human being. And I also remember Reagan's iconic, "Mr. Gorbachev tear down this wall." And also-
Julia Sonnevend:
You think of an iconic moment. Yes.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Right? And also loving history. I know all of what you referred to about what actually led up to that happening and how complicated it was and how details were completely omitted. I also made me think as you were talking about D-Day, and I often ask people, "If D-Day happened today, do you think it would have gone down as one of the most unmitigated disasters in history?" I mean, can you imagine if there were soldiers with cell phones-
Julia Sonnevend:
Recording themselves in every second.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
... texting, "This situation is FUBAR," which is in an acronym for Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition that people in the military use a lot. Right? And if you know the real history of D-Day, it was a series of horrible mistakes and disasters, and yet it is remembered, "D-Day, the day we began the liberation of Europe." Thoughts?
Julia Sonnevend:
Yeah, I mean that's the case with historic events. I mean almost all of them. I mean, it's a complete mess when it comes to events, happenings on the ground. And then imagine a media environment in which you broadcast that immediately. So that was not there at the moment and would be there now. Yes, soldiers there recording immediately contradicting there would be conspiracy theories, "Is it really happening? Not happening? How it would happen?" Right?
Julia Sonnevend:
Yeah. I often think about this with events as well. I just visited Budapest, Hungary where I'm from originally, and there was a very moving memorial event dedicated to Raoul Wallenberg, was a Swedish diplomat going to Hungary and saving thousands of Jews during the Holocaust. He was a 30s diplomat with no clear mandate or mission.
Julia Sonnevend:
He shows up, and one of the scenes that they were mentioning at this event was that he went to the bank of their venue. He saw people being lined up there and being shot into the venue. And he just started to shout, "Stop it. These are Swedish citizens and you will be on trial for crimes of humanity if you do so." And he managed to stop it. And there was this moment of immediate personal courage. And I was thinking of that. That's unbelievable how certain people have this feeling and action of courage immediately in a situation.
Julia Sonnevend:
But again, there wasn't a media environment that would have interfered with that whole scene and how it would have been covered immediately right there by the soldiers, by everybody who was there just watching it and so on. So every single event we can think through in such a way that, "Wow, I don't know how it would look like now."
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Yeah, I have my suspicions. And I think exactly one of the things you mentioned, the whole emergence of all these conspiracy theorists mindsets, generally speaking historically, you see conspiracies increased dramatically during times of great change during times of it is more difficult for the general public to understand very, very complicated things and what generated them and why they happened that way.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
And so much easier to tie a bow around it and say, "It was fill in the blank. It was the deep state," or, "It was the Nazis," or "It was whatever." And yet it also makes me think about... I want to play our round of charming or not charming with some current political figures.
Julia Sonnevend:
Oh no, I think [inaudible 01:16:31] I was hoping we're running out of time.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
But I'm going to ease you into it. I'm going to ease you into it with a historical example. And the historical example I want to use is Adolf Hitler versus Joseph Stalin. Now, I personally find both of these, as you know, I've already stated, my one political thing is I am fiercely anti-authoritarian.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
So both of these people belong in a rogues gallery of brutal, bloody-minded, horrible people who managed to take power over large and powerful countries. And yet in America, at least, when somebody wants to really vilify somebody, they always say, "He's a Hitler. He's just like Hitler." Why don't they ever say, " He's just like Joseph Stalin"? Was it because-
Julia Sonnevend:
There you go, [inaudible 01:17:36]
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
... Joe. Right. Okay. If you wouldn't mind opining on that one a little bit, we can ease into the modern day figures.
Julia Sonnevend:
So my book has a chapter on Germany and on Angela Merkel as last chapter. And I found her an interesting case because she does not use these contemporary techniques of charisma and charm. We don't see her stepchildren, no pictures. Angela Merkel is really not trying to charm you. Stands there, the color of the jacket is maybe changing, but that's about it, right? She's not playing with these tools. Yet she was in power for 16 years, she had 80% of approval rate when she stepped down. I mean, it's unbelievable success when it comes to politics.
Julia Sonnevend:
So she was an interesting case and I kept researching why that was possible. And one of the things that I have found that in German publics, there was a very strong resistance against charismatic politicians because of Hitler. So that was very interesting. And there is even a story of Angela Merkel first meeting President Obama and being very skeptical before the meeting saying that truly doesn't like charming and charismatic people. And this kind of idea of giving bombastic speeches is really not her thing.
Julia Sonnevend:
So there is this tradition in German publics and no accident there was Hitler. But I think the answer to your question is exactly charisma. Hitler is a reference point because in addition to the absolute horrors he unleashed, he also possessed this quality that was able to convince people to do things they really shouldn't have done. And that's something that we are fascinated by.
Julia Sonnevend:
And particularly in Germany, it's all, its historical and cultural tradition. It's inclusive culture, it's huge Jewish community and so on. It is just incomprehensible to the human mind of how is that country transforming into this killing machine? What it turned into. And therefore, as you know, a lot of discussions, is it inherent or non-inherent and so on.
Julia Sonnevend:
But there is this ultimate fear in us that it can happen to us that whichever your country is, it'll be the same that we have all our culture and education and lives and money and so on. But there will be somebody who will radically change us as human beings. And I think that's what Hitler is an icon for this kind of transformation that you are deeply terrified about, that can happen to you. So we use one all sides in one form or another.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
And another thought of mine was that Stalin as brutal as he was, and as responsible for millions and millions of deaths. Now, the deaths he was responsible were more of a political nature, like Mao, where they went after people because of the class they belong to. And in both Stalinist and Maoist China, if you were… boy, you would be one of the first up against the wall, unfortunately, because you're highly educated, you're an intellectual, and people like Stalin and Mao did not like people like you. And Mao especially made great theater of it, right? He put the dunce hat on them and it was scary.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
But Hitler, he did Blitzkrieg raids and tried to take over all of his neighbor's countries. And because he also persecuted not exclusively people for their religion, the Jewish people, also any what he would call an undesirable, a gypsy, anyone with any kind of physical or mental handicap. I mean, he was a horrible, horrible human being. And yet I am fascinated that other horrible... For example, where are all of the outrage movies about Pol Pot who took Cambodia into one of the largest genocides per capita of any country? And if you've ever been to Cambodia, the Cambodian people are just amazing.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
At least they were in my experience. And here you're looking at it, at my guide was actually, he's my age, so I'm 64. And for people who don't know about Pol Pot and Cambodia, it was a, as I say, horrible genocide, largest per capita ever. And I must tell you, and here's again to charisma, my guide was very charismatic and he was my age. So he was a teenager, young teenager when Pol Pot took over. He was the son of a mother and a father who were highly educated, who were members of the academic community in Cambodia, who knew their fate. They knew that they were going to be executed.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
So his name was Yoko, is Yoko. And so they sent him to the countryside to live with a distant relative. They instructed him to break his glasses to, when he got to the countryside, rub his hands on a tree until they were heavily calloused so that when the Khmer Rouge came through, he could claim that he was a working person, not the son of a intellectual. And yet, I won't go on. It's a great story, but it takes too long.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
He ended up being one of only two members of his grade school class of, I can't remember this number, 25 or 30 to survive. All the others were killed. And yet everybody knows about Hitler. Most people know about the banality of evil that was Joseph Stalin. I don't know a lot of people who were like, if you were doing a quiz game and you said, "Okay, who's worse? Pol Pot or Vlad the Impaler?" I wonder whether anyone would, especially people who are not history nuts, would know both of those. Is there reason for that or am I just dense?
Julia Sonnevend:
I mean, that is a really difficult question because obviously it also has to do with geography, with our attention to certain cultural contexts in contrast to others, the types of histories with teaching schools. So I don't think there is one factor to answer your question, why there is more attention, less attention.
Julia Sonnevend:
I mean, when it comes to banality of evil, I mean, that is a really interesting term. And it was introduced in connection with Eichmann, who was a key perpetrator of the Holocaust, put on trial in Jerusalem. And one of the things that people, I mean as you know, were shocked about is how everyday he looked. He looked like a boring bureaucrat. And there's these very powerful photographs of him in jail in Jerusalem, and he's reading there, having his breakfast and so on. And you look at it, is this really the person who was a key crucial perpetrator of the Holocaust planning the train trips?
Julia Sonnevend:
I mean, it is really incomprehensible, I think, to the mind. And we want to have these evil characters. If you think of superheroes and villains, you want to have a Joker. He looks terrible, he's evil. There is no exception. I have a six- year-old, and he always asks me, "Is this a good guy or a bad guy?" That's the first question. And there's a clear distinction. There's the good people, bad people, the kind of gray zones that are now dead. And I think that's where it is really hard for us to understand that many of the most evil people internationally look regular or don't have these bombastic visuals that you necessarily associate with Hitler, with the most powerful speeches and so on.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Yeah, that is one of the great dangers, I think. And you're not escaping the lightning round, the lightning round.
Julia Sonnevend:
Almost did, right?
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
You almost did. I really admired your, "I'm going to get out of this without having to comment", but so for example, everybody is aware that there's an election this year in the United States, and so we're going to ask specifically about charm, not charisma, because as you yourself detail in your writings, they're different. So Vice President Harris versus previous President Trump, charming, not charming. Which one?
Julia Sonnevend:
So again, remember how I defined charm as trying to appear as one of us, having these social media performances that construct that? So what we are trying to answer is not whether the person is inherently charming or charismatic. I think both candidates have these qualities. It also depends obviously on your political views. If you hate one of them, then you're not willing to accept that there could be an element of charm.
Julia Sonnevend:
But I'm a researcher, so I have to take a bit of a distance from whatever I'm thinking of this election and look at it. And I think we have to see that. What is interesting about former President Trump, that he has both the elements of charisma and charm in some ways. So he triggers in some people this kind of distant hero, godlike character in his followers, but he also, when he puts on the red hat, Make America Great Again and so on, here is a millionaire who wants to look like us. So there is that element of charm there. And with Harris as well. I mean if you think of the laughing videos, the dancing videos, as she's telling about her Jewish mother-in-law, so I mean these are all cases in which you see personal magnetism being performed. Whether you fuse with it, that's a different question because your politics emerge.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
That's a perfectly evasive answer that I love.
Julia Sonnevend:
The answer is both have it.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
I was going to say I'd probably answer that the same way. Now let's take it maybe an easier one. Zelensky, Putin?
Julia Sonnevend:
That is much easier, right? I mean, I've already thought that one of the reason why Navalny had to be murdered by Putin was his looks, his charm. He was this tall, really charming guy who had to be eliminated because that is exactly the quality the Russian president doesn't have. I have a hard time finding a moment in the Russian president's presentation that could be considered as charming. I mean, obviously he has these videos of joking or trying to appear as one of us. I mean even he tries to use those tools.
Julia Sonnevend:
Zelensky, I think is in many ways a natural. But it's again, worth remembering. He's coming from television and he's actually not coming from a social media catch. He's coming from television. He performed the role of a president, so it's his universe in many ways. But I do find it very interesting how many really boring European bureaucrats are lining up to take selfies with him because they want to have the stardust of charisma and charm. You want to be with this person. So I think that's a slightly easier case, but again, I'm sure that you will have listeners here, particularly from Russia, who would say, "Oh, but what about this video or that video?" So again, it very much depends on our political preference, but I think it is an easier case.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Okay, I agree with you by the way. The more fun one, the current mullahs of Iran or Kim Jong-un?
Julia Sonnevend:
Yeah. So I have a Kim Jong-un chapter in the book with the title-
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
I know. I didn't pick that just randomly.
Julia Sonnevend:
I know. And I did actually pick it because here's a character people would think has no charm, but when the Korean Olympics happened, he used every possible way to perform charm. He introduced female family members to the cameras. He has never done that before in the same way. He took selfies, he had life covered conversations, various very powerful visuals. So even somebody like Kim Jong-un had to perform these roles and use these tricks. And I have this chapter directly to convince the reader that you can have a Kim Jong-un appearing as charming.
Julia Sonnevend:
The case of Iran might be, again, difficult also culturally, because we perceive it differently than many of the local followers and followers of the cult in many ways. So that is a more difficult case to answer. But I do have an Iranian politician in the book as well, a chapter dedicated to foreign minister Zarif who was the Iranian foreign minister during the Iranian nuclear deal negotiations, who was so charming that it was covered across the globe as such, and it really had Iran in that moment when it comes to signing the deal and changing its international image. But it was a brief charm offensive, as I discussed it in the book. It's not a long-term shift in the Western perception of Iran.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
And I wonder, does that ultimately damage more than it helps? I mean, you can accomplish, as you point out, he was short-term, very charming, but longer-term, not so much. Does that damage the longer-term way people are perceived and or countries are perceived? Those people, how they managed to pull off that and now they reverted to throwing people off buildings and putting women head to toe in black garments. Is there a price that's paid or no?
Julia Sonnevend:
I mean, obviously it becomes a reference point and you can make jokes, and in that sense, it's a risky endeavor, but it's the reality of contemporary politics that countries run charm offensives, particularly authoritarian countries. There are situations in which they either need money or they need a deal to be signed, or there is a shift in constellations regionally, and they have to change their image and then they will run these brief charm offensive. I always say the difference between traditional soft power, which is based on values and charm offensive, is that soft power was like marriage. Long-term, you have commitment, your values, you have beliefs and so on.
Julia Sonnevend:
Charm offensive, none of that. It's like an affair. It's a quick change of hearts. You are seduced and so on, but it can accomplish major things in diplomacy within a brief period of time. The tricky part is exactly as you described, that it doesn't change hearts long term. So that's a trade-off. You might need it still because you need that deal so much or that shift of public opinion of your country, very much so you need to do that, but it can also become a reference point. Okay, use that trick. Are you still that character who did that? But I think there is quite a lot of tolerance for charm offensive because most countries do this regularly. It is just the reality of contemporary politics, partly because of the media environment in which politicians operate.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
And I wonder about that too, because the idea of the Potemkin villages that they set up in the old USSR, like those are historical facts. There's been books written about how deluded many of the western journalists, or not deluded, but misinformed, tricked into believing. And for those who aren't aware of what a Potemkin village was, they were literally stage fronts that they would drive or train the foreign journalists past, and they would build these seemingly prosperous, wonderful communities that if you looked around the back of them, were basically like a stage front you see in Hollywood. How can we know about this objectively? And here I'm speaking really about educated people, educated people who know about the Potemkin villages, who know about the strategies like Iran used, etc. Is it just human OS that lets us be fooled again and again and again?
Julia Sonnevend:
Well, we get fooled again, again, and again, like in everyday life, in politics and so on. I mean, I think it's very hard to say, "Oh, there is a clear way to avoid that." But there are some things we can do. I mean, I think one is resisting this request to respond immediately. We all have that. We see something, we immediately comment, we like it, dislike it, and so on. And just take a moment, okay? Take a moment and try to think it through. Who is trying to force me to give an answer immediately? Who is benefiting from this? What is the construction that I'm seeing here? What is this video about? So that's exactly what I'm trying to teach my students to, not this kind of reflex, more reaction of immediately I have to cancel, immediately I have to approve, but take a moment to think it through.
Julia Sonnevend:
And I think if you do that, you will see over time patterns of influence, persuasion that is trying to charm you, trying to seduce you, and that can create some form of a distance. So it's very much temporal too. It's about time giving you that kind of moment of thinking. And if you think of the techniques I described, if you look for them, you will see them repeated and that can create some form of a distance as well. But is there this final medicine I can give and you will never be charmed again that in your life? No, that I wouldn't say.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Yeah, I think that-
Julia Sonnevend:
You want that? No, sometimes we do want to be charmed. So there is that too.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Very true, very true. One thing I try to habituate in myself was the idea of whenever I'm reading something, especially something topical or news oriented, I have internalized the questionings for myself. Why am I reading this now? What are the intentions of the person? What do they want me to believe? Should I believe it? Right? And I find that helpful. And I think your guidelines are also excellent. If you can for a moment, not react. And for a moment, it's like President Lincoln used to write very angry letters to people and then put them in his desk drawer. And he decided over several days whether to send that letter or not. Hint, he very rarely sent the letters. And even back to Alexander the Great, probably apocryphal, but it's a great story at least. And that is that apparently the apocryphal legend goes, I have to be careful with an academic like yourself.
Julia Sonnevend:
Be careful with academics all the time. That's a good approach.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
But apparently, before deciding on a strategy of attack when they were off conquering the world, Alexander and his generals would discuss it formally and soberly and they would agree on what they wanted to do, and then they would get rip-roaring drunk. And when they woke up the next day, if they still believed that that strategy was right, they would execute against it. That's probably an apocryphal story. But what I liked about it is elongating the process, not reacting emotionally, not like saying, "This is what we're going to do now, let's go do it." and so putting some distance between yourself and something you're looking at reading, hearing, watching, is not bad advice. And I feel that we are quite lucky to have you teaching young people today, because the more that we can learn those types of things, I think for the most part the better.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Well, I am getting the hook finally from my nanny. As I joked to you about earlier, I tend to go on because your subject and you are very fascinating. We do have a final question, but before getting to that final question, tell our listeners and viewers, where can they buy your book, I hope everywhere, and where they can find you on the internet?
Julia Sonnevend:
So thank you for having me, first of all. I'm really enjoying it. So I could just go on and on. Yes, you can buy the book everywhere it goes out. It's published on the 20th of August. You will see when you release this episode. So yes, all the regular sites, Amazon and so on, Princeton, you will be able to find it. And when it comes to finding me, you can find me on Instagram, you can find me on Twitter, X, you can find me on Facebook. And I also use that old medium called email. So you can also send me an email. I know that's radical for many of my students that still use this email version and yeah, shoot me an email. And I'm always happy to discuss ideas in the same way as I discuss it with colleagues and friends and with my students as well.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Well, this has been terrific. I think your book is amazing. I wish more people were talking about this. That's what really drew me when our good friend, mutual friend Anna told me that I would really like you. She was right. Good judge.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Now for our final question, we are going to wave a wand and we are going to make you the emperor of the world. You can't kill anyone, you can't put anyone in a re-education camp. You can't run a charm offensive in your case specifically. But what you can do is we're going to give you a magical microphone. And much like the movie Inception, you're going to be able to incept in the world's population two ideas. And all you have to do is speak both of these things into the microphone. And the next morning, whenever their morning is, when people wake up, they're going to say, "You know what? I just had the best two ideas. And unlike all the other times, I'm going to actually act on both of these ideas starting right now." What two things are you going to incept into the world's population?
Julia Sonnevend:
That is a great idea. I think one tool or idea I would introduce is try not to assume the worst. You receive an email, you receive a call from somebody, you read an article, you see a video, and your immediate reaction is that this is an expression of the enemy, or this is something I really don't want to deal with. And try to assume that that's not the case, that it's another human being maybe with an idea or a mindset that is radically different from yours. It's annoying. I know it. It's annoying for me too when I'm encountering people with very radically different views. But we should try to learn to deal with that in this course and not with violence and attacks and assuming the worst. So that would be one element.
Julia Sonnevend:
And the other maybe would be that to accept that not everything is rational in life, that there is something called charm, there is luck, there is love. There are all these qualities that are not so easy to define, to quantify, to capture, but they still shape us and that's okay. So we don't have to appear always as these perfectly rational and objective human beings, we are just not there.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
I love both of those and to put them in my lexicon, the first sounds a little bit like remember the golden rule, treat others like you would like to be treated. You probably send, I know God, I do, things that are misunderstood. And so getting-
Julia Sonnevend:
I have that too. Yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Getting a little bit of time away from them is a very good thing. And then the second one is absolutely true. In fact, we are not purely rational creatures. We are often very emotional creatures and just being aware of that. And this is coming from a former quant, right? Where everything was empirical.
Julia Sonnevend:
I'm listening. Jim, I can't believe you're saying this right?
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
This is coming from-
Julia Sonnevend:
But also wonderful family pictures behind you. And that's another quality of life that is not entirely rational in many ways, but it's really important to many of us.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
And take it from a quant, it doesn't necessarily mean that if it can't be measured, it doesn't matter. There are in fact, lots of things in the world that can't be measured precisely that matter a lot. So I love both of those. I think those are both great inceptions and if only people would act upon them, I think we might be able to scooch the universe to be a little bit better, because those are two great ones. Well, this has been so much fun. Thank you so much for coming on.
Julia Sonnevend:
Thank you, I really enjoyed it.
I love the distinction between charm and charisma! Interesting!!