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The mythos of leadership

aeon.co

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Re: The mythos of leadership

#61

Post by apsurd »

smoothjazz wrote: post #56
apsurd wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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…

> A person ought to believe they can do great things. 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 paire…

I agree! The older I get the more i'm able to understand peace. It becomes the only thing truly valuable.

The paradox of holding both extremes is crucial i think. We're everything and nothing.

Re: The mythos of leadership

#62

Post by avgcorrection »

kiba wrote: post #27
avgcorrection wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> The mistake is thinking that you can just "think for yourself" without possessing knowledge.

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.

Re: The mythos of leadership

#63

Post by avgcorrection »

kiba wrote: post #29
avgcorrection wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 con…

I skimmed your little heterodoxy. I don’t see how that applies to my argument. I guess the “Prussian” model was quite anarchic and freeing? I’m not some Khan Academy, tech-optimistic, gadgets-will-solve everything type that your article seems to be arguing against.

Re: The mythos of leadership

#64

Post by robertlagrant »

PH95VuimJjqBqy wrote: post #17
robertlagrant wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

you may as well claim everyone in the US believes their lives are less important than the presidents. 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 b…

Possibly, but I'm referring to how large-scale decisions were made. You can wipe out inequality with a sustained attack on the wealthy[0], but if you value all lives, not just the lives of your group, then you shouldn't see that as an option. If you value your pilots' lives you cannot invent kamikaze planes, nor even cheap planes. You have to invent F16s and the like, that improve their pilots' survivability at significant cost. That's the sort of thing I'm talking about.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Terror

Re: The mythos of leadership

#65

Post by anonymouskimmer »

farleykr wrote: post #59
anonymouskimmer wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious how the apocrypha fit into this. Books have been actively filtered in order to create a coherent narrative.

Now I'm curious too. What parts of the apocrypha would throw a wrench in the gears of an otherwise cohesive narrative? 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.

I don't know. That's why I'm curious. The apocrypha were removed for reasons, and I'd like to know why. This is not a topic I'm even remotely an expert on.

Re: The mythos of leadership

#66

Post by PH95VuimJjqBqy »

anonymouskimmer wrote: post #46
PH95VuimJjqBqy wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you may as well claim everyone in the US believes their lives are less important than the presidents. 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 b…

I can't find them anymore, but I've read interesting articles on attitudes of slaves and minorities. One of these wrote of certain slaves valuing themselves less than their owners. Then there's the research on black children preferring white dolls to black dolls. Huge numbers of people have a status quo bias. Anytime the leadership changes you're dealing with fear impulses.

I'm familiar with the doll research, the children were asked which doll was prettier and chose the white doll.

That's not the same as preferring the white doll.

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