The mythos of leadership
aeon.co
The mythos of leadership
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Re: The mythos of leadership
#2This rings true because as someone without a religious background, I definitely feel the opposite: that progress is inevitable and the people who are "in charge" while it progresses are a commodity. I also find the "deification" of leaders (like say Steve Jobs) to be damaging to culture, leading to arrogance, political fighting and empire building.
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.
Re: The mythos of leadership
#3This rings true because as someone without a religious background, I definitely feel the opposite: that progress is inevitable and the people who are "in charge" while it progresses are a commodity. I also find the "deification" of leaders (like say Steve Jobs) to be damaging to culture, leading to arrogance, political fighting and empire building. Trying to have a good life and be good to those around you, while rid…
Yep. Everyone praises the "great men," as the article mentions, and Western culture is heavily individualistic, so it stands to reason that we should deify the most visible leaders of things.
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.)
Re: The mythos of leadership
#4This rings true because as someone without a religious background, I definitely feel the opposite: that progress is inevitable and the people who are "in charge" while it progresses are a commodity. I also find the "deification" of leaders (like say Steve Jobs) to be damaging to culture, leading to arrogance, political fighting and empire building. Trying to have a good life and be good to those around you, while rid…
Yep. Everyone praises the "great men," as the article mentions, and Western culture is heavily individualistic, so it stands to reason that we should deify the most visible leaders of things. 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…
> Yep. Everyone praises the "great men," as the article mentions, and Western culture is heavily individualistic, so it stands to reason that we should deify the most visible leaders of things.
Sure, having kings, emperors, or prophets like the good old days was so much less individualistic.
Re: The mythos of leadership
#5This rings true because as someone without a religious background, I definitely feel the opposite: that progress is inevitable and the people who are "in charge" while it progresses are a commodity. I also find the "deification" of leaders (like say Steve Jobs) to be damaging to culture, leading to arrogance, political fighting and empire building. Trying to have a good life and be good to those around you, while rid…
I could have just fallen prey to exactly the flaw that you're describing, but if I look at Apple during the Sculley years and immediately prior to Jobs' coup vs afterwards, I think that the company changed direction and the subsequent progress was by no means pre-ordained in 1991-1997.
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.
Re: The mythos of leadership
#6> Such books are celebrations of individualism. Their primary effect is to promote an individualist perspective on the world.
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...
Re: The mythos of leadership
#7Highly recommend Jeffrey Pfeffer’s books about power and leadership. He has developed a great mental model about how leadership works in the real world, which explains the pitfalls of common ways to think about it.
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.
Re: The mythos of leadership
#8This rings true because as someone without a religious background, I definitely feel the opposite: that progress is inevitable and the people who are "in charge" while it progresses are a commodity. I also find the "deification" of leaders (like say Steve Jobs) to be damaging to culture, leading to arrogance, political fighting and empire building. Trying to have a good life and be good to those around you, while rid…
> "I definitely feel the opposite: that progress is inevitable and the people who are "in charge" while it progresses are a commodity."
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.
Re: The mythos of leadership
#9This rings true because as someone without a religious background, I definitely feel the opposite: that progress is inevitable and the people who are "in charge" while it progresses are a commodity. I also find the "deification" of leaders (like say Steve Jobs) to be damaging to culture, leading to arrogance, political fighting and empire building. Trying to have a good life and be good to those around you, while rid…
Yep. Everyone praises the "great men," as the article mentions, and Western culture is heavily individualistic, so it stands to reason that we should deify the most visible leaders of things. 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…
> why hold these people up on a pedestal at all?
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.
Re: The mythos of leadership
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep. Everyone praises the "great men," as the article mentions, and Western culture is heavily individualistic, so it stands to reason that we should deify the most visible leaders of things. 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…
> Yep. Everyone praises the "great men," as the article mentions, and Western culture is heavily individualistic, so it stands to reason that we should deify the most visible leaders of things. Sure, having kings, emperors, or prophets like the good old days was so much less individualistic.
Yes, it was. Individualism is the last thing you want if you want people to act as though their lives are worth less than the king's / emperor's / state. You don't want people valuing themselves and having legal and economic standing, free to make agreements between themselves. You want them to do what you want them to do.