The mythos of leadership
aeon.co
aeon.co
Trying to have a good life and be good to those around you, while riding on the one-way track of technological progress seems like a better strategy.
But they aren't that special.
Often, they're high-performing individuals with a somewhat-damaged attachment that they have found ways to channel productively. Their success and visibility feed more success and visibility. So we talk about them more and more, dissect their histories, daydream about what potential causes could be. But I can guarantee you there are plenty of people who did those same things whom we never hear about. There's certainly a luck component to it.
Once I realized that, I then had to question: why hold these people up on a pedestal at all? They don't need my help in maintaining their position, after all. I reject the idea that they're "higher value" individuals than I am, despite culture's insistence otherwise. If luck played such a role, why should I value them more?
(It's hard to talk about this without reeking of sour grapes.)
Sure, having kings, emperors, or prophets like the good old days was so much less individualistic.
In truth, the president very rarely has any major effect on the lives of Americans, therefore they don't really care one way or the other.
Or to put it another way, that food needed to be harvested regardless of who was king, as long as said king didn't interfere with the food harvesting, people might have opinions but ultimately didn't care.
Huge numbers of people have a status quo bias. Anytime the leadership changes you're dealing with fear impulses.
That's not the same as preferring the white doll.
I think the premise is flawed. Everyone doesn't praise great men. In fact, one of the identifying features of a 21st century American is which "great" men they criticise.
To start with there is the "i was born healthy, wasn't malnourished, wasn't in a war zone" kinda luck.
Then there is the "being at the right place at the right time" kinda luck - which is part luck, part perseverance and persistence. You won't be in the right place if you never try or want it.
Then there is the "my direct reports did all the work, but I took the credit" kinda luck - which is pretty much any manager in the world.
Then you come to the "i have the title & power to affect change, the high standards/insight to enforce certain ideas or create certain products, and the financial backing to work through failures" kinda luck, which is where everyone wants to be, and thinks they can execute better then the other guy - but they're almost always wrong. The person who got there was self-selected by the system, and fought their way to reach the spot. The kinda of personality traits, qualities and other attributes that got that person the job, are not simply borne out of luck. Its the combination of their life experience and working through difficult situations, taking a collection of people of varying ability, personalities, etc along for the journey and getting a a large chunk of people to agree with them, etc. Its not that easy to hand-wave this away. The seeming counter-examples of people who were just gifted the role through nepotism or what have you, are not really examples, because they don't have the respect and don't play in the same league.
But I lack faith that the system produces people that I look up to. They did well at their game, I can respect that. It may not be my game, though.
Scientifically, the only trait we've found these people have in common is that they're all low empathy, dark triad types, sociopaths, etc. That is to say, to climb to the top, like in the royal courts of old, the system tends to choose not those with the most merit, but those who are the most ruthless and dishonest socially.
Steve Jobs was a ruthless bully and had a mess of a personal life. Apple workers accepted being screamed at him as part of the job. Elon Musk walks the floors of his factory and fires people on whims, then bought twitter to spread hate speech. Torvalds is a bully of the highest order and regularly has child-like tantrums over code suggestions. etc, etc.
The meritorious in our system tend to get locked down in skill worker positions, bullied out of jobs, burned out by being the hard worker to the 'idea guy' or the 'chummy country club guy' or the 'rich kid' or the 'bully' or the 'loud mouth political player', have their work and labor surplus stolen, etc. The game-playing sociopath is the one who ends up in the c-suite.
You do not live in a just universe. This is trivially provable.
>Scientifically, the only trait we've found these people have in common is that they're all low empathy, dark triad types, sociopaths, etc. That is to say, to climb to the top, like in the royal courts of old, the system tends to choose not those with the most merit, but those who are the most ruthless and dishonest socially.
There is no "scientifically" here. It's peoples opinions and self-reported views. Cultural contexts, human experiences, personality traits, opinions, feelings, views are highly variable throughout the world are are nowhere near deterministic. Science is about determinism and discovering objective truths about the natural universe. Frankly this is not science, and is an abuse of the term.
There’s an implicit moralizing in your stance. Why do you presume that the dark triad traits you assert “””these people””” have in common are unrelated to merit? That suggests a moral, not pragmatic, stance that valorizes “the hard worker” while denigrating things like charisma, vision, boldness, and ruthless drive which, to sample your phrasing, are “trivially provable” to be essential traits of merit in leadership.
Likewise, Microsoft during the early Gates' years was not a lock to rise to the level it attained.
Or the Buffett Partnership and eventually Berkshire Hathaway under Buffett.
Maybe these are outliers (and by company size/outcome, they quite obviously are), but that seems to itself be a (perhaps circular) argument that leadership plays a significant role in directing the trajectory of the company.
There's going to be some noise when you zoom in but I firmly believe that human technology marches forward over time.
This view is problematic too. It removes agency, accountability, participation. Leader worship is dangerous, I agree, but there's a strange emptiness to life when "someone's gonna do it, it's inevitable" takes root.
A person ought to believe they can do great things. Also that we're quit ridiculously irrelevant in the scheme of things. Also: we can do great things. Lovely things.
And whenever I say that, there are people who immediately tell me that men's basketball is better. To those folks: it's ok to have a different opinion. You could be right! I'm just trying to illustrate another way of people working together.
I think there's pressure on us to think this, but I find that the older I get the happier I am moving away from this idea. I've accomplished a lot in my life and at the end of the day it doesn't bring me satisfaction. What brings me satisfaction is being able to sit quietly with peace of mind and be content with just being.
The desire to do "great things" is paired with an existential anxiety that I don't think is healthy. And not to be political, but often "great things" mean accomplishments that don't correctly model externalities like environmental damage and human exploitation.
The paradox of holding both extremes is crucial i think. We're everything and nothing.
Humans want to believe in a just world and those in power are happy to provide narratives to that end. Meanwhile they are not correlated with how power is actually gained in the real world.
> rule seven—which is basically that once you have power, money, and success, people will forget and forgive how you got there—is such an important rule is that it frees you to do everything else. This rule says that at the end, if you are successful, success excuses almost everything.
"People excuse almost anything for those in power got into power."
instead of:
"It was morally OK to do the things that led them to obtain that power."
The cyclic nature is unavoidable, and to some, a feature, not a bug.
Right in the beginning in the Eden narrative there's a prophecy about one who will ultimately defeat the snake. Characters like David are portrayed as anointed by God yet flawed because they are supposed to build anticipation for a true Messiah or Christ who will not make mistakes or sin and really, truly offer redemption for mankind and a return to union with God. As you read the Bible you watch each leader rise while hoping they will be the one to defeat the snake and then you return to anticipating the true king when they fall.
This is one of the reasons Jesus was consistently referred to as the "Son of David."
Jesus is presented as the true and greater version of every flawed leader of God's people who came before him, especially the big names like Noah, Moses and David.
What's interesting to me is that you don't even have to agree with the claims of the Bible to see how the characters function in the story. But as I've learned more and more about the Bible, it seems that most people make arguments about the claims of the Bible or its purpose as a religious text without understanding how it actually functions as a group of different stories and types of literature.
For anyone interested, Robert Altar's works about Biblical narrative and other literary styles delve deep into these subjects.
The fact of multiple authors and time periods doesn't categorically negate the possibility of a coherent narrative. One may end up at the conclusion that there's no coherent narrative. But to correlate the impossibility of an overall coherent narrative with the fact of multiple authors over multiple time periods is to misunderstand the culture and circumstances that were responsible for its creation.
Also, maybe I wasn't as clear about my point as I could have been. By cohesive narrative I don't mean that the Bible reads seamlessly like a novel. I mean that it has very clear themes that are introduced and fulfilled over the course of the whole book.
people in congress aren't "leaders" in the same way people in the executive power are leaders.
in the executive power, the representative elected by the people must indeed be leaders in the full sense of the word.
but in the legislative branch, the elected people aren't leaders but representatives, this is perhaps too subtle of a difference for most voters?
That's because it is largely true. There are a ton of people who are born into opportunity but never really leave their mark on history other than their position. For example, how many Pharaohs can you name?
Yet, there are people who have an impact far beyond their circumstances. An example is Temujin, whose father was killed when he was young, and he had a very hard early life but later became Genghis Khan one of the greatest rulers in history.
Octavian was born into wealth, and his uncle Julius did adopt him, but the odds were heavily stacked against him, but he became the founder of the Roman Empire, kicked off the Pax Romana, and became known in history as Caesar Augustus.
When Philip II came to the throne, the Macedonians had just recently suffered horrible defeat at the hands of the Illyrians and he was just a regent. He ended up becoming king, built the phallanx, and conquered Greece which was far wealthier than Macedon.
His son, Alexander, sure he was king, but Greece and Macedonia were just a backwater compared to the Achaemenid Persian Empire which probably ruled over a greater percentage of humanity than any empire before or since. He ended up conquering that Empire.
Sure, there are trends in history. Sure, many "Great Men" (and women) were born into privilege. But they end up doing something far greater than people in similar circumstances and make an inflection point in history!
Can we please stop reading history and stories as things that people in the past slavishly believed to the letter like unthinking machines? Of course stories about leaders glorify them. That’s just the victors writing history. Of course leaders and their sycophants mostly bragged and embellished.
Did people have a reason to believe those things in their heart, though? What does “divine right” matter to a serf?[1]
Of course we all know that we just don’t automatically believe everything about some person just because his bank account is large enough, or he is a high authority in the military, or the so-called democratic process chose him to be a representative of something. But somehow we tend to speak of the Middle Ages like, oh that’s when everyone believed in Divine Right (or whatever) and no one was the slightest bit sarcastic about it. (But then what were all those armies and fortresses about? If everyone toed the line...)
It’s like cynicism was only invented in 1970 or something.
And the answer to the question has got nothing to do with leaders per se. It’s just that political liberalism reigns supreme, which is incredibly individualistic. (The dominant political philosophy is very relevant to the conception of leadership.)
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7qT-C-0ajI&pp=ygUUbW9udHkgc...
People back them did not had so many information. All negative information about the king or leader was (self) censored.
Look at cult Steve Jobs had in his lifetime, he was far from perfect, but nobody cared. Or some political leaders, despite all the corruption, drugs...
I could make a manifesto about being the greatest person to have ever lived. People are not going to believe it just because there doesn’t exist a counter-manifesto about me.
Of course you won’t be convinced either way so there is no point pursuing this.
[1] The mind is not like a vessel that you fill up with knowledge and facts.
It's inaccurate to think of Prussian school as a system of conformity. Rather that's the opposite intention.[1]
For example, thinking about the movie 300(2006) required some knowledge of how aristocratic Sparta actually works. It's basically a fascist movie glorifying the brutality of Spartan warriors with no question on its actual efficacy as a fighting force(unremarkable). I recommend this essay on why Sparta sucks.[1]
1. https://aeon.co/essays/who-are-the-leaders-in-our-heads-and-...
The mistake is thinking that you can just "think for yourself" without possessing knowledge.
I think people who avoid scams, cults, and pseudoscience largely does it through general knowledge and heuristics, not by thinking hard.
This is clearly a mistake since EVERYONE THINKS FOR THEMSELVES WITHOUT BEING SPOON-FED IT.
A person needs to be socialized enough to develop language. As long as you’re more human-sociable than a chimpanzee-raised jungle child, that base is covered. You don’t need much more beyond that in order to “think”.
> I think people who avoid scams, cults, and pseudoscience largely does it through general knowledge and heuristics, not by thinking hard.
Everyone has built-in heuristics. Why do you think “rationalists” complain about “cognitive biases” so much? We need heuristics to survive. Something which we did prior to Prussian-inspired schooling.
What do you think happens when people work the land? When people cook, plant, tend animals, build their own tools to make more tools with, do handcrafts? They experiment and learn. They pass along knowledge.
I recommend picking up an Eric Sloane book if you're interested in that. He wrote a lot about not the middle ages in Europe, but how people lived in the pre-electrified rural US.
Good point!
This essay doesn't explore enough how "leaders" hold on to power through the use of violence/coercion. The targets of this violence certainly didn't believe in the "divine right" of the person threatening their existence.
> "That was why regicide (the murder of a king) was considered, well into the early modern era, the worst crime one could possibly commit – it was against the ruler and against God."
If I was a king, and I knew that people hated me because I was killing them, I would probably make a decree that murdering the king is the worst crime! If a society is authoritarian (king == sole decision maker) then we can't look at the "laws" as anything but the product of the self-interest of that authoritarian ruler. "Was considered...the worst crime" by whom? Surely the average normal person (e.g. not in the ruling class) would still consider the murder of a loved one as a worse crime than the murder of a king?
> "It is hard to escape this view of leaders and leadership. It is all around us. We still tend to teach, study and celebrate ‘Great Men’. All over the world, people are in search of larger-than-life figures who can lead them past crises and catastrophes, and into a bright future."
The question, I think, is: Who is the "we" that the author refers to in this essay? The writing moves slickly from "we who teach, study and celebrate 'Great Men'" to "people all over the world". Is it "we" the population that benefits from the decisions made by the ruler? It certainly isn't "we" the people the ruler wants to get rid of!
Medievalists don't do that. There are a lot of common wrong-headed beliefs that stem from "The Enlightenment," a time when some really smart people discovered that they were suddenly enlightened, thus causing the equally sudden endarkenment of the ones who lived before them in "The Dark Ages."