Benji

• Leaders use their charisma to influence others in very specific ways. By analyzing speeches given by charismatic individuals, one helpful model shows a distinct, three-stage use of emotion. First, the speakers model and amplify the mood prevailing among their audience (“We are angry because those people over there are bad!”). Then they introduce a dissonant emotion that actually confuses people (“But you know what? I don’t really care about that.”). Finally, they use that confusion to reframe the emotional environment and win over the audience to their view (“Because we should be happy that we are better people than they are!”).

• We deceive ourselves if we imagine that we can ever be passive, impartial observers. Every perception, every scene, is shaped by us, whether we intend it or know it, or not. We are the directors of the film we are making — but we are its subjects too: every frame, every moment, is us, is ours.

• Our passing thoughts, as William James says (in an image that smacks of cowboy life in the 1880s), do not wander round like wild cattle. Each one is owned and bears the brand of this ownership, and each thought, in James’s words, is born an owner of the thoughts that went before, and “dies owned, transmitting whatever it realized as its Self to its own later proprietor.” So it is not just perceptual moments, simple physiological moments — though these underlie everything else — but moments of an essentially personal kind that seem to constitute our very being… We consist entirely of “a collection of moments,” even though these flow into one another like Borges’s river.