bovlomov wrote:Cugel wrote:History reveals that men like that have always been in charge, with a very few teeny-weeny exceptions. It's the nature of such men to want to be in charge and to find the means to be so.
I've wondered about this. Had Trump lived three thousand years ago, would he have been a leader of a tribe? Could Johnson have led an army into battle?
It seems to me that the people are hard-wired to recognise certain traits as being desirable in a leader, and in a past those traits came in a package along with courage, responsibility and practical skills. Many of today's leaders are altogether different. They are people who have learned to fake the easiest of those leaderly indicators - arrogance, belligerent oratory, emphatic gestures - but don't possess the qualities that matter most. These frauds are ahead of the population, that is too often inspired by the charade.
It's worth noting that, often, the courageous
aren't the ones acting like baboons. No comment on their suitability for leadership, but Attlee and Heath certainly experienced the worst of warfare, as did Robert Runcie. They might lack machismo, but they put Farage and Johnson's secondhand, Eagle comic bravado into perspective.
I'm never sure about the mapping between heroic leaders and bravery in war. This is because the behaviours involved are broad in their detail, with huge variations in type and motivation. The Eagle comic bravado is often seen in real war but can manifest as red-eyed stupidity and hatred rather than the sort of bravery required to overcome fear whilst still performing acts that are moral - even if the morality is the queer one found in warfare.
Two impressive kinds of bravery are: being a conshie in the face of tremendous social pressure to "join up"; performing vicious but necessary acts despite an inner horror of having to do so. Those who find it easy to shoot others and put themselves in harm's way just to get that opportunity strike me as nasty and stupid rather than brave.
History is a difficult thing as fundamentally it's made-up-stuff, in the sense that it's a series of stories that inevitably have the perspectives and perhaps prejudices of the historian embedded in them. "A great leader" from one perspective is "a genocidal psychopath" from another perspective.
Sometimes a leader emerges who is other than just an ideologue with particularly strong obsessive-compulsive drives or a bad case of narcissism. It generally seems to happen almost despite their own efforts, as a demand of some less-tribal zeitgeist that's arisen in their time & place. Attlee seems to have been one such, rising in politics despite being "a modest man with a lot to be modest about". He did a lot of good, not via tub-thumping oratory and the development of a Grand Personality but by being able to herd the cats of the post-war Labour Party. A different sort of leader from the usual.
Our evolved tribal nature does, as you intimate, make us suckers for the often over-aggressive behaviour of Great Leaders. But we have civil societies and many other modes of being humans together, now, that seem preferable to The Tribe. Personally I avoid politicians that are nationalist, faux-patriotic or otherwise an advocate for some modern tribe. They're just as dangerous as they always were. Moreso, as now technology has vastly increased their reach and power to do harm in the name of their tribe.
Trumpet's "Make America Great Again" seems to be ultra-tribal, in that he's going to go after this "greatness" by belittling everyone and everything else, including huge swathes of the USA populace who are "not one of us" - i.e. a Trump sycophant. Farage is another example, currently a bit of a toy rabble rousing narcissist but becoming more dangerous as he uses Brexit to acquire power and influence. Hopefully he'll not be able to manage them, as his past history indicates is likely to be the case.
Cugel
“Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence are usually the slaves of some defunct economist”.
John Maynard Keynes
. Mind you, might be a bit inconvenient for someone wanting to drive, say, from Guildford to Leatherhead, and find themselves having to go the long way around...
