For someone to be charismatic, they may either inspire devotion by "followers" or claim they are receiving divine inspiration. If someone finds themselves with

For someone to be charismatic, they may either inspire devotion by "followers" or claim they are receiving divine inspiration. If someone finds themselves with a bunch of people who are devoted to them, this is a form of implicit trust. i.e. the thing that inspired originally may have been trustworthy, but eventually the trust becomes implicit in that the "followers" will follow more regardless of inspiration. I've written about this effect on cloud services before. Divine inspiration also deals with trust channels. If someone claims to be divinely inspired (which I personally believe is possible - see Buddhism Insight for example) then whoever they relate this information to will then have to implicitly trust the information coming to them is actually represented as the divine intended it (assuming they don't have direct access themselves). Obviously, that's caused a lot of problems in the past for us, so it's non-tenable. Teachers of the way[1] avoid dictating teachings received from insight because of this. It's also probably why sutras tend to be very terse, now I think about it. The answer to your question is that it might be possible, but it's unlikely to be possible for long as the trust channels turn implicit, which then has an impact on the individual's relationship with their followers. When someone trusts you implicitly, there is no feedback on whether their trust is warranted or not, or put another way, there's no way for you to to trust if the trust you are receiving is real. And that is just as bad as you not being trustworthy. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_Way https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_Way