We as a
species have been prone to rally toward charismatic people, elevating them to a
status of “leader”. We look to these people, who seem to have the art of living
down so well, as our guides in life, believing what they believe, trusting that
which they trust, teaching our children to respect and obey them – but what do
these people truly know about life?
We so easily
assume that since certain people have a nice smile and speak in a way that
stirs our emotions that they must be right and what they say is the only
possible truth in life. We like that there is someone who is willing to lead
the way and give us one voice. WE assume that since these leaders are
successful and speak of making life better that they are above reproach, that
they are incapable of exploiting or abusing.
Unfortunately,
most of these leaders care more about themselves and their own goals than they
do about you or I. What is also unfortunate is that all it takes to be a leader
is a nice face and smile – give us that and we’ll build a friggin statue to
show our love and devotion. No matter if this leader is talking about genocide
or about covering the world in flowers.
WE are
willing to completely and absolutely give ourselves over to a leader, so long
as he/she says the right words and looks the right way. What is it that drives
us to give up all sense of reason and take up arms for an arbitrarily
attractive person who is, in all probability, preaching an entire boatload of
propaganda-style crap?
Apparently,
we don’t want to make our own choices – because choices are hard. We don’t like being in difficult
situations, so if there’s a chance we can pass off the hard questions to some
other “anyone but me”, we will. We use labels to help differentiate between the various groups of "What I believe is true" thinkers so that we can easily assess whether we should hate/despise them or not.
How many wars has this practice of leadership lead to?
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