Politics, Nonsense, and the Task of a Leader

14-11-2020

Looking at the human nature and the political games the humans play, we can observe the following:

1. Human beings are status-seeking beings. Ergo, most humans seek to achieve as high a social status as possible.
2. In order to achieve and maintain the highest social status possible for themselves, most humans would willingly sacrifice personal comfort, happiness, enjoyment—that is, they would willingly endure suffering.
3. Correlatively, human beings are power-seeking beings. Power is centripetal. Power tends to become concentric and concentrated. Ergo, power holders seek to concentrate power unto themselves.
4. Power holders seek to attract and then keep subordinates not on the basis of competency but on the basis of loyalty in order to maintain and concentrate power.
5. They entice people to be loyal by way of providing them with a higher social status which would be extremely difficult or impossible for them to achieve otherwise.
6. Nonsense is a more effective loyalty-generating and group-organizing tool than that which makes sense or the truth, because any rational person can believe in what makes sense, but to believe in nonsense requires blind loyalty above rationality.
7. Ergo, believing in nonsense is an unforgeable demonstration of (blind) loyalty.
8. A belief in nonsense serves as a political uniform. And if you have a uniform, you have an army.
9. Believing in nonsense debilitates the individuals’ rational sense-making ability by corrupting their intellectual integrity and honesty, concomitant with the corruption of moral integrity and honesty.

A leader needs to recognize this aspect of the human nature and to discipline himself or herself not to use power politically. Instead, the leader needs to learn to use his or her power:

• To empower others so that the power is optimally distributed—that is, to make power radiational and centrifugal, instead of gravitational and centripetal.
• To attract and keep colleagues and subordinates not on the basis of blind loyalty but of professional competency.
• To engender true loyalty on the basis of alignment in mission and value, and of mutual respect, trust, and enjoyment.

To use power in this way requires wisdom. To develop a network of wise leaders on a planetary scale is the path to take that will save humanity from self-destruction caused by the environmental pollution of proliferating political nonsense.