Organisation
The most valuable secret of the Illuminati was their own moral system of authority, which was already practiced inside the order, but was now supposed to be applied on the outside world. The deceit and patronizing of the lower-positioned members soon provoked disagreements within the order. This was caused by Weishaupt’s aim to perfect the individual by encouraging it to practice more self-discipline and covert leadership. He assumed that for the improvement of the individual the first necessary step was to know its secrets. Probably, he adopted this concept from his arch-enemy, the Jesuits, which were known for their slavish obedience and their gentle but still effective leadership by means of confession. Actually, according to Illuminati-expert Agethen, the order stayed in a dialectic entanglement with its opponents: they used Jesuit methods of investigating the conscience in order to emancipate the individual from the intellectual and spiritual domination of the church; they also used a ranking system and mystical fuss, similar to the enthusiastic irrationality of the Rosicrucians, to further the success of Enlightenment and rationality. They subjected their members to an utterly totalitarian monitoring and psychological techniques in order to ultimately free mankind of the despotism of princes and kings.
Members
This temporary success cannot hide the fact that the Illuminati order mainly consisted of quite subordinate academics who maybe joined the order especially in the hope of more career opportunities. Indeed their hope correlated with Weishaupt’s concept of infiltration. Of course new members were ignorant about those intentions. The order hardly achieved its actual aim, namely to form the intellectual and political elite of society. Apart from the mentioned exceptions (Goethe, Herder, Knigge), all the really important representatives of the German “Spätaufklärung” either completely absented themselves from the order (as Schiller, Kant, Lessing, but also Lavater whom Knigge unsuccessfully tried to convince of joining for a long time) or shortly afterwards quit, just as Friedrich Nicolai did, out of disappointment about the rigid structures within the order. “Bookworm Weishaupt and his companions, utopists in a good and a ridiculous way” were never considered a real threat for the state of Bavaria but “the challenge for the old regimes was of course still too strong, even in this moderate form.”