Personality cult

A personality cult or cult of personality is a system in which the political legitimacy of an organization is the function of the leader. Often such leaders are able to control a group of people through the sheer force of their personality. In extreme cases the leader can be portrayed as a god-like figure.
Where the personality cult forms around a head of state, criticising that person is generally prohibited and/or dangerous — with threats or actions made against the critics by supporters of the head of state. Where the head of state has attained strong or complete control of state-sponsored media, they have often used this to spread propaganda to ensure that the masses receive a consistent positive picture of the head of state. Propaganda will typically depict the leader as being a great leader (or even called "Great Leader" as in Kim Il Sung), a genius prophet or a god-like figure, able to relate to ordinary people and upholding their interests, always in command — shown in propaganda with commanding appearance and never shown in submission to anyone. Frequently, personality-cult leaders claim to be devoted to a mission as the embodiment of the will of the people or of the nation. Leaders promoting personality cults will frequently tie their own image to various national heroes (personality cults of yore) as a means of legitimating themselves and their policies (think of Roman Emperor Augustus making his great-uncle the Roman dictator Julius Caesar a deity and dedicating monuments to him, or of Soviet posters showing the faces of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao). 
Various monarchies claimed some form of divine sanction (or "healing touch"), but that doesn't necessarily make them personality cults in the modern sense, as the phenomenon is most commonly associated with post-19th-century mass-media. "Personality cults like Gaddafi's are different. They depend on modern technologies of mass communication and surveillance, so the leader can seem omnipresent as well as possessed of magical properties."Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present by Ruth Ben-Ghiat (2021) W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 0393868419. The effect is essentially the same between pre-modern and modern personality cults, creating the appearance of an aura of divinity or the supernatural.
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.Burnt by the Sun IMDb.New surfaces created solely to present advertising, on the other hand, are perfectly fine.
Personality cults are often found in strongly authoritarian societies like absolute monarchies with no democracy in them, but they can also develop in authoritarian semi-democratic societies like those of Julius Caesar and Augustus, or in totalitarian societies like Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler or like the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin. Although it is very rare to see them in strongly-democratic countries, they do occur from time to time; a lesser but still ridiculous example would be the so-called politicians in the Philippines who have a fetish for plastering their names and imagery all over public works projects they spearheaded. While legislation has been proposed to put a stop to such vanity face-pasting and other such shameless propaganda, the practice of epal politics still remains rampant in the country with some politicians defending it, maintaining that it is done mainly to inform the (already ignorant) masses that this mayor or congressman was behind that particular project.
==Examples==
===Current and former heads of state===
====Europe====
====Americas====
====Africa====
====Asia & Oceania====
===Other political figures===
===Religious and anti-religious personalities===
===Crime===
*Charles Manson and his "Family" (USA)Charles Manson: The Cult of Personality Surrounding a Killer by Raj Persaud & Peter Bruggen (Nov 20, 2017) Psychology Today.
*Keith Raniere and NXIVM
*Andrew Tate
*Luigi Mangione
===Technology===
*Steve Jobs (USA): co-founder of Apple Computers known for his showmanship and obnoxiously perfectionist behaviorThe cult of Steve Jobs by Kate Dailey (7 October 2011) BBC News.
*Elon Musk (USA): (in)famous businessman and engineer known for his batshit insane approach to new technologies. Hyperloop anyone?Elon Musk: The Cult of the Controversial Businessman: Is the SpaceX and Tesla entrepreneur really a visionary, or is it all modern-day myth-making? by Ian Nordin (February 15, 2020) Study Break. Musk declared himself 'technoking' in 2021.Elon Musk is now 'Technoking' of Tesla. Seriously by Chris Isidore (6:34 PM ET, Mon March 15, 2021) CNN.
* Richard Stallman (USA): free sofware/open source advocate and creator of the GNU libraries, which are the backbone of the Linux operating system. Noted for ghosting people who don't called Linux, GNU/Linux and making fun of those who use Vi program for coding instead of Emacs.
In the technology world there a number of what is known as people who are like unofficial gurus of a particular project who become the final say of a project and its actions. However no cult is based around them. For instance; Linus Torvalds for Linux and Eugen Rochko for Mastodon.
===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 by Living Colour in 1988), but sometimes it's a major element of a movie. An example is the German film The Wave (originally made in 1981 and remade in 2008). The movie was based on the social experiment called "Third Wave" created by and is about a German teacher who attempts to show his high school students what fascism is. As a result, he accidentally creates a personality cult that leads to large amounts of vandalism, an attempted murder, and a suicide when the instructor (Wenger) tells his students that the experiment is over. The 2001 German thriller film Das Experiment is somewhat similar. The Emperor of Mankind is also a fine example.
==Bad attempts==
There have been in bad attempts to create cults of personality on certain individuals, only to flop usually because the person doesn't much of a personality in the first place. Examples include East Germany's who the government initially called their youth wing Thälmann Pioneers, and who famously made a old-man-yells-at-cloud speech about pop music. British far-right wingers have tried British Union of Fascists's Oswald Mosley, by calling him "Leader". In a modern context there has been an attempt to build a cult of personality around Margaret Thatcher; with the Thatcher Room at 10 Downing Street, a former study at the prime minister residence, the Margaret Thatcher Foundation, a conservative neoliberal thinktank, and several statues including one in the Westminster Guildhall and the other in hometown of Grantham which have both been attacked. When Margaret Thatcher's Statue Was Decapitated With A Cricket Bat (And A Metal Pole), The Londonist Grantham statue of Margaret Thatcher vandalised again, BBC News Lincolnshire 
The John Birch Society named themselves after a then-deceased Baptist missionary and low-ranked US Army officer during World War II in China. The Society trotted out a hagiography, puffing up the minimal factual information that was known about him.Who is John Birch? The John Birch Society.
==See also==
*Great man theory
==External links==
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==Notes==
==References==
Category:Authoritarianism
Category:Culture
Category:Cults
Category:Political terms
Category:Psychology
Category:Totalitarianism