"Be a Leader!"
The cult of leadership: force without direction
I drop my two-year old off for daycare most weekday mornings. I normally say goodbye with some more-or-less stock phrase, like “have fun, buddy!” I can hear other parents nearby saying other similarly expected things, like “I love you!” or “Don’t worry, I’ll see you in a few hours.” Solid, classic, timeworn parenting phrases.1 But some parents like to offer more bespoke parting words, phrases less common, and, therefore, more memorable. One parent in particular often leaves her 2- or 3-year old son with these words: “be a leader!”
This farewell phrase immediately caught me off guard—and piqued my interest—for a number of reasons. The first thing that I wondered was what this phrase could possibly mean to such a young child. Can a three-year old be a leader? What does that look like? Who are they leading, and where? Surely we’d prefer the teachers to do the leading, at least at that age?
Which leaves open the question, though: even if “be a leader!” is not the right parting phrase to leave for a three-year old, still, some might think this parent has the right idea, just a bit too early: perhaps this would be a good thing to say when dropping off a second grader, or a fifth grader, or an eighth grader? But I’m not so sure. Indeed, I’m not sure this phrase would be a good thing to say to one’s child, even if they were heading momentarily over to the National Mall to be inaugurated as the next President of the United States.
Leadership is a sort of magical word in contemporary English. Everyone wants to be a leader. Public intellectuals, for example, are no longer public intellectuals actually, but “thought leaders”. Likewise, whereas in the past a corporation might have had one vice president, these days, it seems that every department of any given large company has multiple vice presidents: “VP for sales”, “VP for sales expansion”, “VP for sales expansion oversight”, etc., etc. Indeed, anyone who has ever tried to hire someone has probably noticed that every candidate for just about any position—no matter how humble—claims to have been an indispensable leader at every place they’ve ever worked, including those few months when they bagged groceries in high school.
We are constantly, and very enthusiastically, shouting at each other about how excellent we are at leading each other. Which is actually rather odd. Not only because most of the claims we make about having led others are patent B.S., but because even genuine claims to leadership are most often totally vacuous.
Leading, after all, is really just the art of convincing people to do something, generally something they either actively don’t want to do (hop out of this trench and charge that nest of machine guns, lads!) or at least something they don’t care about at all (update all of our PowerPoint files with the new corporate logo, independent contractors!). People don’t normally need to be led to do things they want to do (though admittedly they may need some leadership in figuring out how to do those things effectively.) Leadership, then, is in many ways morally, intellectually, and pragmatically agnostic: a “good” leader is the one who can convince us to do anything, whatever it happens to be.
The ability to lead, by itself, is no virtue, because it can just as easily be employed to direct people to large scale mischief, or even crime, as it can be employed to coordinate acts of beauty or kindness. Indeed, the historical record suggests that leaders most often use their skills not to render true justice or build a society of solidarity, but rather to figure out how to marshal the forces at their command to take what doesn’t belong to them. It’s no accident, I think, that when we bring to mind “great leaders” it is often Napoleon and Genghis Khan we think of. Smart men, to be sure, impressive men, even. But also doers of great, even extraordinary, mischief. The world would probably be a better place had they stayed home and left the leading to others.2
Being able to lead, like being able to swing a hammer, is of ambiguous value on its own. It all depends on what we are going to do with that skill. I can swing a hammer to build a homeless man a house—or I can swing the hammer into his skull and take what little he has. The hammer, and the swinging, are just as useful either way. Leadership, I fear, functions more or less similarly.
And so I am not convinced that “leadership” is the answer to any of our questions, crises, or needs, any more than I think a bag full of hammers will deliver us from our impending doom. The question is not “do we have any good leaders”; the question is “where are these leaders trying to take us?”3 The problem is that all of the people in command of our institutions—government, business, academia, and, most definitely, our religious institutions as well—are precisely the sort of people who sought leadership for the sake of being a leader. People who are obsessed with leading are the people who just want to be in the front of the line, no matter where it’s going.4
And this is the crux of the matter: people desire leadership. To be in command is itself something that many of us want. We want to lead, not normally because we are convinced that we have the best ideas, that our time in charge will genuinely benefit those subordinate to us. Rather, we want to lead because many of us deeply enjoy the feeling of being in command.
Power attracts us, in other words, not because it is an instrument to transform the world, but because to hold power, to feel it in one’s possession, is for many people itself a very pleasant sensation—leadership is an end unto itself, instead of a means. The question of who is in command is rarely decided by who would be best at being in charge, and instead normally determined simply by who wanted it the most. Phenomenologically and psychologically, power allures many of us, and it is those who respond most slavishly to the desire for power who tend to get it. An alcoholic (at least one not in recovery) would love to be in charge of the liquor supply, and would likely campaign hard to get that job. But that would hardly be a wise way of issuing assignments.
To be in command, that’s the goal of “leadership”. But the desire to be in command, and indeed even having the right personality and skillset to lead, does not actually mean that one knows where we should be led to. And that’s the heart of the issue. Being a “good” leader is essentially being someone who can concentrate and release force effectively. A good leader gets everyone coordinated and pointed in the same direction. But moving in one direction doesn’t mean we are moving in the right direction. A vector needs both magnitude and direction. Good leaders often get a big magnitude developed, but they hardly seem to know whither it should be aimed.5
And so a society obsessed with leadership—as ours surely is—is a society that can concentrate extraordinary energy, but can’t actually discern what to do with it. And so we expend huge sums of money and resources, and yet achieve little thereby. Whether it’s militarily—the US’s diabolical forays into Iraq and Afghanistan surely bear witness to this leadership without direction—or in our major technological and economic developments over the least decade—crypto currency, the gig economy, Mars colonization, AGI research—we have done a lot and yet gotten nowhere.
What post/modern civilization needs is not more leadership. Indeed, we could use quite a lot less. Energy is no substitute for wisdom. Speed is no substitute for discernment. “Moving fast and breaking things” is how children operate. Before anyone puts on their suit and insists they ought to lead us, we ought to spend some time considering where we even think we might be going, and whether a course correction might be advisable. The trouble is that those who lead us don’t care where we are going—as long as they are in front.
In other words, to employ another over-used word, what we need isn’t so much leadership as vision. Now, of course, this word too is often abused and misused as well. But I think that’s a reason to reclaim it, rather than surrender it to corporate PR departments and politicians (often one and the same, after all). We need a vision of what our problems are and what it might look like to solve them. Currently, it seems to me, we are a society being led very energetically towards nowhere, being told over and over that the same behaviors that have created our crises will somehow end up solving them. It’s an approach to life that, at least for me, does not inspire confidence.
I’d like to think that philosophy and theology are, at least at their best, efforts to consider—with whatever length of time that consideration requires—just what we humans ought to be doing with our lives. We live in a society that insists that we need to just get on with it, get moving, get things done—but what does this mean, if we don’t know what we ought to be doing? What does it mean to win, if we are playing checkers on the deck of the Titanic?
It does feel like our society has largely moved on from thinking that thinking about thinking is time well spent. We might like to make memes of Socrates’ famous dictum that “the unexamined life is not worth living”, but it seems that our society rarely actually then does any examining. Perhaps it’s time we change this. What we need is more time to honestly ask “where are we headed?” Most of us seem to realize, even if only intuitively, that the answer to that question is nowhere good. Instead of seeking leaders to accelerate us, perhaps we need to seek some voices that can help us change direction.
Though I have to admit that the phrase “have fun”, though its heart is in the right place, is probably not very helpful advice. Fun is something that tends to come—and go—of its own accord. It’s rather hard to tie down and keep hold of. Indeed, it often seems we experience the least fun precisely when we are trying hardest to have it.
No matter what Hegel said at Jena.
The archaic “whither are these leaders trying to take us?” is even clearer—a great example of why I wish that “whence” and “whither” were still regularly used in contemporary English. Alas…
It has been said that the only people, for example, who should ever be elected as bishops are precisely—and only—those people who don’t want to be bishops.
See how helpful “whither” can be?