This 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.
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.)
I don't think this argument is all that great - most rational people have already internalized that luck plays a role for everyone in the world.
To start with there is the "i was born healthy, wasn't malnourished, wasn't in a war zone" kinda luck.
Then there is the "being at the right place at the right time" kinda luck - which is part luck, part perseverance and persistence. You won't be in the right place if you never try or want it.
Then there is the "my direct reports did all the work, but I took the credit" kinda luck - which is pretty much any manager in the world.
Then you come to the "i have the title & power to affect change, the high standards/insight to enforce certain ideas or create certain products, and the financial backing to work through failures" kinda luck, which is where everyone wants to be, and thinks they can execute better then the other guy - but they're almost always wrong. The person who got there was self-selected by the system, and fought their way to reach the spot. The kinda of personality traits, qualities and other attributes that got that person the job, are not simply borne out of luck. Its the combination of their life experience and working through difficult situations, taking a collection of people of varying ability, personalities, etc along for the journey and getting a a large chunk of people to agree with them, etc. Its not that easy to hand-wave this away. The seeming counter-examples of people who were just gifted the role through nepotism or what have you, are not really examples, because they don't have the respect and don't play in the same league.
Except there is incredible luck and bias. Being born to rich or connected parents. Being white. Being male. Business culture has rarely been a meritocracy. Like the post above you said, there really isn't a lot going on here that millions others don't have. Its luck, failing upwards, and cultural biases and corrupt business culture making these people leaders.
Scientifically, the only trait we've found these people have in common is that they're all low empathy, dark triad types, sociopaths, etc. That is to say, to climb to the top, like in the royal courts of old, the system tends to choose not those with the most merit, but those who are the most ruthless and dishonest socially.
Steve Jobs was a ruthless bully and had a mess of a personal life. Apple workers accepted being screamed at him as part of the job. Elon Musk walks the floors of his factory and fires people on whims, then bought twitter to spread hate speech. Torvalds is a bully of the highest order and regularly has child-like tantrums over code suggestions. etc, etc.
The meritorious in our system tend to get locked down in skill worker positions, bullied out of jobs, burned out by being the hard worker to the 'idea guy' or the 'chummy country club guy' or the 'rich kid' or the 'bully' or the 'loud mouth political player', have their work and labor surplus stolen, etc. The game-playing sociopath is the one who ends up in the c-suite.
You do not live in a just universe. This is trivially provable.
Your third paragraph is like talking about Tiger Woods without mentioning a green jacket.
There’s an implicit moralizing in your stance. Why do you presume that the dark triad traits you assert “””these people””” have in common are unrelated to merit? That suggests a moral, not pragmatic, stance that valorizes “the hard worker” while denigrating things like charisma, vision, boldness, and ruthless drive which, to sample your phrasing, are “trivially provable” to be essential traits of merit in leadership.
You are presenting your own bias and opinions - which is fine, everyone is biased and has opinions, but you're smuggling them as objective moral truths about the universe. Sorry, it doesn't work like that. People absolutely do not agree on what objective moral truths there are, or even if they actually exist in the universe.
>Scientifically, the only trait we've found these people have in common is that they're all low empathy, dark triad types, sociopaths, etc. That is to say, to climb to the top, like in the royal courts of old, the system tends to choose not those with the most merit, but those who are the most ruthless and dishonest socially.
There is no "scientifically" here. It's peoples opinions and self-reported views. Cultural contexts, human experiences, personality traits, opinions, feelings, views are highly variable throughout the world are are nowhere near deterministic. Science is about determinism and discovering objective truths about the natural universe. Frankly this is not science, and is an abuse of the term.
> 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.
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 but ultimately didn't care.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> "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.
> 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 paired with an existential anxiety that I don't think is healthy. And not to be political, but often "great things" mean accomplishments that don't correctly model externalities like environmental damage and human exploitation.
I like to think of the solo hero vs the group as more like the difference between men's and women's basketball. Men's is all about the individuals but women's is interesting because there aren't really heroes so much as team play, teamwork.
And whenever I say that, there are people who immediately tell me that men's basketball is better. To those folks: it's ok to have a different opinion. You could be right! I'm just trying to illustrate another way of people working together.
Progress isn't inevitable because the government can stop it sometimes. Nuclear power is regulated to be forty times safer than natural gas (the safest natural gas) (the factor of forty is ignoring the additional climate costs), and that's why we don't have abundant nuclear power.
> However, if, for example, Cyrus the Great did not help build the Jewish Second Temple
And again, who was convincing Cyrus to do this? Why not call them the "great men" instead? Had Nebuchadnezzar the second never destroyed the Jewish temple would Cyrus had spoken as he did about the Jewish god? Had Cyrus not ordered it rebuilt, isn't it likely the Jews still would have survived to rebuild it later on?
There's a real question whether Jesus existed. One alternative explanation I've seen is that he was invented by one of the Flavian Roman emperors in order to more firmly draw the Jews into the empire. Not being a historian or even historical fictionist I could see something like this happening even without Cyrus.
As far as I know, it isn't controversial amongst scholars whether Jesus existed - the consensus is that there was an actual teacher around whom the cult of Christianity formed. Obviously this consensus doesn't regard supernatural claims with any validity, nor the content of any Gospel as being historically accurate.
Maybe yes, maybe no, it is not known and really, it's unknowable how the arc of history would have turned out had events been different. But it is not reasonable to say that their actions did not affect and influence the world, at their level of political power.
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.
This is what social proof looks like: everyone believing that everyone else signed off on a successful person, thus they should continue to be seen as successful.
The cyclic nature is unavoidable, and to some, a feature, not a bug.
Not the parent, but I wonder if it's too simplified. It's true for absolute power, but that's effectively impossible to obtain in reality, and a far cry from middle managers climbing over each other. Donald Trump is powerful but far from immune from everything he's done to obtain power. Mark Zuckerberg is powerful but doesn't have full control over his reputation. More broadly, I think seeking power will likely create enemies, whose behavior you can't control even if your power increases. Lots of leaders fall from grace all the time, in part for things they did to obtain power.
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 anointed by God yet flawed because they are supposed to build anticipation for a true Messiah or Christ who will not make mistakes or sin and really, truly offer redemption for mankind and a return to union with God. As you read the Bible you watch each leader rise while hoping they will be the one to defeat the snake and then you return to anticipating the true king when they fall.
This is one of the reasons Jesus was consistently referred to as the "Son of David."
Jesus is presented as the true and greater version of every flawed leader of God's people who came before him, especially the big names like Noah, Moses and David.
What's interesting to me is that you don't even have to agree with the claims of the Bible to see how the characters function in the story. But as I've learned more and more about the Bible, it seems that most people make arguments about the claims of the Bible or its purpose as a religious text without understanding how it actually functions as a group of different stories and types of literature.
For anyone interested, Robert Altar's works about Biblical narrative and other literary styles delve deep into these subjects.
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.
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.
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.
Most of what executives do is just rubber stamping, too. I could easily imagine a milquetoast executive who just does what others agree on. There is definite room for "leadership" in the legislative ranks, and it happens all the time with various legislators championing bills or protests.
Old Cliché, but appreciate the difference between Leaders and Managers. Managers get promoted along with leaders, sometimes further up the chain. For a nauseating exploration of the tyranny of Management, and perverse rewards, read Robert Jackall's "Moral Mazes."
> But you will usually read little in them about all the things that provided the basis for the success stories but which had nothing to do with the protagonists personally, like being born to wealthy parents in a socially and economically stable country with myriad educational and commercial opportunities. The message from this literary cottage industry is that where there’s a will, there’s a way. ‘Leaders’ are ‘winners’. They built themselves up and achieved greatness through their extraordinary qualities. They made their own history.
That's because it is largely true. There are a ton of people who are born into opportunity but never really leave their mark on history other than their position. For example, how many Pharaohs can you name?
Yet, there are people who have an impact far beyond their circumstances. An example is Temujin, whose father was killed when he was young, and he had a very hard early life but later became Genghis Khan one of the greatest rulers in history.
Octavian was born into wealth, and his uncle Julius did adopt him, but the odds were heavily stacked against him, but he became the founder of the Roman Empire, kicked off the Pax Romana, and became known in history as Caesar Augustus.
When Philip II came to the throne, the Macedonians had just recently suffered horrible defeat at the hands of the Illyrians and he was just a regent. He ended up becoming king, built the phallanx, and conquered Greece which was far wealthier than Macedon.
His son, Alexander, sure he was king, but Greece and Macedonia were just a backwater compared to the Achaemenid Persian Empire which probably ruled over a greater percentage of humanity than any empire before or since. He ended up conquering that Empire.
Sure, there are trends in history. Sure, many "Great Men" (and women) were born into privilege. But they end up doing something far greater than people in similar circumstances and make an inflection point in history!
Almost every Marx-related model makes sense from the perspective that he was a NEET(Doesn't feel control over any aspect of his existence) and it manifested in his life and writing. The description of ancient rulers like David being tyrannical juxtaposes the fact that they were at some point saviors. And so ancient stories like the myth of David hold leadership not necessarily as performance in moral virtue but effectiveness (when it matters) much more so. The shift from Biblical law to Machiavelli highlights this.
> 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.)
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!
> Can we please stop reading history and stories as things that people in the past slavishly believed to the letter like unthinking machines?
Medievalists don't do that. There are a lot of common wrong-headed beliefs that stem from "The Enlightenment," a time when some really smart people discovered that they were suddenly enlightened, thus causing the equally sudden endarkenment of the ones who lived before them in "The Dark Ages."
> 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.
People back them did not had so many information. All negative information about the king or leader was (self) censored.
Look at cult Steve Jobs had in his lifetime, he was far from perfect, but nobody cared. Or some political leaders, despite all the corruption, drugs...
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 sucks.[1]
> Thinking for yourself required knowledge and actual study, not just something people can do on a moment's notice.
What do you think happens when people work the land? When people cook, plant, tend animals, build their own tools to make more tools with, do handcrafts? They experiment and learn. They pass along knowledge.
I recommend picking up an Eric Sloane book if you're interested in that. He wrote a lot about not the middle ages in Europe, but how people lived in the pre-electrified rural US.
> 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.
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.
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]
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.
I think the contrary is more likely to be true: that people from that era had a vivid inner life and curiosity about the universe. They talked about things with each other. It's hard to censor thoughts, or discussions between people. A good book about this is The Cheese and the Worms by Carlo Ginzburg, focusing on the trial of a single peasant in the 16th century.
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.