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The mythos of leadership

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Re: The mythos of leadership

#21

Post by taway789aaa6 »

avgcorrection wrote: post #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 embellish…

> What does “divine right” matter to a serf?

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!

Re: The mythos of leadership

#22

Post by avgcorrection »

kiba wrote: post #20
avgcorrection wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t need to have so many information in order to think for yourself. You can choose to believe it or not. 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.

Thinking for yourself required knowledge and actual study, not just something people can do on a moment's notice. 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 su…

Thinking for yourself requires just existing. That goes for anyone who is not being indoctrinated into a cult.

Re: The mythos of leadership

#23

Post by marcellus23 »

marmaduke wrote: post #11
mikpanko wrote: post #7

Highly 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.

Just read some summary of his points elsewhere and had a hard time taking it seriously. For instance, > 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.

Could you explain why you think that's not worth taking seriously?

Re: The mythos of leadership

#24

Post by avgcorrection »

tcgv wrote: post #18
avgcorrection wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t need to have so many information in order to think for yourself. You can choose to believe it or not. 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.

We live in an era defined by information and science. It may seem natural for us to adopt a skeptical stance and question long-standing myths, as we've been encouraged to do so—it's ingrained in our education system and our culture. That certainly wasn't the norm in the medieval times when people lived a restrained rural life without access to education and under totalitarian regimes.

Half-correct in a completely incorrect way. Who’s more indoctrinated: someone who lives off the land and has all the free-mind time in the world since he does manual work all day? Or someone who went through over a decade of Prussian-inspired conformity/workplace training (schooling)? And gets information-saturated from all free angles throughout the day?[1]

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.

Re: The mythos of leadership

#26

Post by empath-nirvana »

farleykr wrote: post #14

This article gets a few things right but the author doesn't seem to understand the full purpose of characters like David in the Bible. You don't even have to believe they were real people or be religious, much less Christian, to see and understand their purpose. 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 anoint…

I don't think that outside of a religious perspective, that a reading of the Bible as any sort of coherent overall narrative makes any sense at all, given the circumstances of it's composition. Different books of the bible were written by different people at different times, many of them were almost certainly edited by others at different times, and then it was all collected at a later time by other people for their own purposes. In particular, reading any kind of redemption narrative into the Hebrew bible is basically a christian viewpoint.

Re: The mythos of leadership

#27

Post by kiba »

avgcorrection wrote: post #22
kiba wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thinking for yourself required knowledge and actual study, not just something people can do on a moment's notice. 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 su…

Thinking for yourself requires just existing. That goes for anyone who is not being indoctrinated into a cult.

Thinking for yourself requires just existing. That goes for anyone who is not being indoctrinated into a cult.

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.

Re: The mythos of leadership

#28

Post by farleykr »

empath-nirvana wrote: post #26
farleykr wrote: post #14

This article gets a few things right but the author doesn't seem to understand the full purpose of characters like David in the Bible. You don't even have to believe they were real people or be religious, much less Christian, to see and understand their purpose. 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 anoint…

I don't think that outside of a religious perspective, that a reading of the Bible as any sort of coherent overall narrative makes any sense at all, given the circumstances of it's composition. Different books of the bible were written by different people at different times, many of them were almost certainly edited by others at different times, and then it was all collected at a later time by other people for their…

Redemption is absolutely baked into the Hebrew Bible. The claim that Jesus is the Christ is the Christian bit.

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.

Re: The mythos of leadership

#29

Post by kiba »

avgcorrection wrote: post #24
tcgv wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We live in an era defined by information and science. It may seem natural for us to adopt a skeptical stance and question long-standing myths, as we've been encouraged to do so—it's ingrained in our education system and our culture. That certainly wasn't the norm in the medieval times when people lived a restrained rural life without access to education and under totalitarian regimes.

Half-correct in a completely incorrect way. Who’s more indoctrinated: someone who lives off the land and has all the free-mind time in the world since he does manual work all day? Or someone who went through over a decade of Prussian-inspired conformity/workplace training (schooling)? And gets information-saturated from all free angles throughout the day?[1] Of course you won’t be convinced either way so there is no…

Half-correct in a completely incorrect way. Who’s more indoctrinated: someone who lives off the land and has all the free-mind time in the world since he does manual work all day? Or someone who went through over a decade of Prussian-inspired conformity/workplace training (schooling)? And gets information-saturated from all free angles throughout the day?

It's inaccurate to think of Prussian school as a system of conformity. Rather that's the opposite intention.[1]

1. http://hackeducation.com/2015/04/25/factory-model

Re: The mythos of leadership

#30

Post by wolvesechoes »

tcgv wrote: post #18
avgcorrection wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t need to have so many information in order to think for yourself. You can choose to believe it or not. 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.

We live in an era defined by information and science. It may seem natural for us to adopt a skeptical stance and question long-standing myths, as we've been encouraged to do so—it's ingrained in our education system and our culture. That certainly wasn't the norm in the medieval times when people lived a restrained rural life without access to education and under totalitarian regimes.

'Formerly, all the world was mad,' say the most refined, and they blink...
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