Many people suspect our leaders cannot be trusted – but it’s a sort of half-hearted suspicion; you can see them thinking: “Well I do trust them really, but because (insert this week’s leadership media scandal) has made me very cross I’m just going to say they’re all very naughty just to show I was never really taken in. But mark these words well, and think for a moment about their implications: our leaders really cannot be trusted.
You want proof? Of course you do; and quite right too. I’ll give you a little proof – little not because only a little exists, but because there is so much proof that even if I were to write a whole book on the subject I would still only be scratching the surface; and that’s if we only talk about the proven cases of deliberate outright lies our trusted leaders tell us; if we included the full catalogue of half truths, omissions and deceptions we could fill entire bookcases.
Try visiting your favourite on-line book store and typing the words “lies and history” into the search engine. When I did it 690 books were listed. O.K., some of them are duplicated or out of stock, and others are irrelevant to this subject, but you get the point.
Leaders cannot be trusted. The importance of this fact cannot be understated, as our entire society is founded upon the bedrock of trustworthy leadership. Now this is not to say that all leaders are untrustworthy, and certainly not that they are untrustworthy all of the time – but this just makes the problem worse, because we seldom know for certain when we’re being lied to, or intentionally deceived, until it’s too late.
When ordinary people are sacked from their jobs for misconduct – or even just a sniff of misconduct, it’s almost impossible for them to find re-employment in similar work on the assumption that they cannot fully be trusted. But when it happens in public office or corporate boardrooms it seems to serve as an important examination that’s been passed, an essential rite of passage confirming one’s suitability not only for re-employment, but promotion to properly high office. The biggest prizes are reserved for those special rising stars where misconduct is strongly suspected, but cannot be absolutely proven. Ideally these examinations should not attract too much public attention, but even if they do it doesn’t present anything like the same obstacle to one’s career as it would for millions of lesser mortals.
Once properly schooled our public and private sector leaders then assume their rightful places as master puppeteers. Many lead quite uneventful lives and may remain as sleepers throughout their careers and never be called upon to seriously betray the nation’s trust. However, sometimes they are required to exercise the skills for which they’ve already shown a talent, and which won for them their exalted position. They could be required to lead a largely unwilling nation into an illegal war, say – a task requiring reasonable acting abilities, a total disregard for the truth, and psychopathic quantities of inhumanity.
Such is the situation in which we find ourselves. It’s not a new situation – a brief examination of history from the people’s perspective quickly shows that our leaders have nearly always proven themselves completely worthy of total mistrust. So what can be done about it?
First, and most important of all, is simply recognising that basic truth: leaders cannot be trusted. This is not an easy step to take, because the implications are truly immense, but it is an essential step: we can only fix a problem once we actually realise we have a problem.
It’s worth repeating that very few leaders are untrustworthy all of the time. Many, perhaps most, don’t even know themselves they cannot be trusted. These comprise the junior and middle ranking leaders who form the essential glue to keep the whole rotten edifice standing upright. Most of the time this very substantial group sincerely believe in the rightness of what they’re doing for no better reason than they’ve been told to do it by someone who they suppose knows what’s going on. “Just following orders” – that famous defence that was rightly blown out of the water at Nuremberg. How many ordinary soldiers in how many wars would have gone “over the top” to their certain deaths for absolutely no reason whatsoever except for the fact that some poor brainwashed fool of a junior leader went over first shouting: “follow me chaps”?
Next, after accepting that leaders cannot be trusted, we need to think about a very important question: what do we actually need leaders for? What ‘value added’ to our lives do they supply? In all the time I’ve thought about this subject (and that’s quite a lot), the only answer I can come up with is that in times of crisis it’s pretty useful to have someone who knows what they’re doing directing or co-ordinating the actions of others. But how often do such crises occur? Unless you work in the emergency services, how often does a real crisis affect your daily life so badly that you actually need a leader telling you what to do? Providing you’ve been properly trained for your job, have the appropriate resources to hand, and have good lines of communication with equally well-provided colleagues, how much do you actually need to be led? Even in times of national emergencies it’s not actually leaders we need, but organisation. Even the greatest leader can achieve nothing without an organisation; but an organisation may function perfectly well without a leader in sight – it only needs well trained, properly resourced people with efficient lines of communication.
Leaders affect almost every aspect of our lives, and the first realisation that they cannot be trusted comes as something of a shock. However, this is more than compensated for with the realisation that we don’t actually need them anyway. Anarchists have been telling the world this for many years, but have singularly failed to get the message across. Not that it’s entirely their fault. Our leaders, some of whom are not very stupid, fully understand the considerable danger to their positions of a world that suddenly comprehends it no longer needs them. Consequently they employ the awesome forces at their disposal to poison the minds of the people to the powerful messages of anarchy. Indeed, the very mention of the word conjures up to most people images of mindless wild-eyed fanatics smashing up anything and everything in their way (individuals who are often paid agents rather than real anarchists anyway), not something that prizes noble virtues such as peace, freedom and equality.
Perhaps the most traditional “essential” function of leadership is decision-making. We are encouraged to believe that our leaders have two very special qualities to enable them to undertake this vital function. Firstly we’re conditioned to believing that our leaders have particular natural gifts that enable them to make extraordinarily inspired decisions – decisions that no ordinary person could ever hope to make. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, we’re led to believe that our leaders always place our interests far above their own (the fact they must suffer lives of pampered luxury while the rest of humanity rubs along as best they can is no doubt some sort of penance they must endure for their noble self-sacrifice).
So let’s examine a little more closely this special duty of leaders: decision-making.
Firstly, consider the notion that they might have particular natural gifts and abilities. Undoubtedly there have been one or two leaders in the past with quite extraordinary personal abilities – but usually these talents have manifested themselves in the form of awesome ruthlessness and inhumanity. Upon closer examination, about the only notable quality of your average national leader, like some of Britain’s monarchs and certain American presidents for example, seems to be a quite spectacular lack of intelligence. Even the really bright ones seem unable to demonstrate an original thought they might once have had. How could such people possibly glide effortlessly from one inspirational decision to the next?
Then there’s the notion of self-sacrifice – the view that our leaders are driven only by the purest of ideals: to serve the greater good, a noble desire to do what’s best for us, the lowly mortals who gaze up with misty-eyed trusting awe at our saintly protectors. In other words we are conditioned to believing that the decision-making of our leaders can be wholly trusted because they always act in our best interests.
Armies are quite a good place to look for examples of leadership in practice; after all, they do epitomise the rigid hierarchical control model that is mirrored almost everywhere else in society. But there’s a bit of a problem. If military leaders (or their political masters) are so selfless in all their decision-making, why do they always locate themselves behind expensive desks in comfortable offices at very safe distances from any real danger? Why does their self-sacrifice on our behalf confine itself to sending ordinary people to distant deserts and frozen wastelands to kill and die for their own good? Why do our trusted leaders never lead from the front, or send their own sons and daughters to have a turn at getting up close and personal with death?
Directly related to the principle of self-sacrifice is what I call the payola-paradox. The private sector is the best exemplar of this (although the public sector is not far behind). The payola-paradox says that whilst all the best leaders will naturally be fully committed to self sacrifice, the best way for all that selflessness to be demonstrated is for them to accept top dollar – but the best way for workers to demonstrate their own self sacrifice is by working for nothing. So the greater a leader’s wealth, and the greater the workers’ poverty, the greater must be purity of decision-making and sacrifices everyone is making for the common good.
It’s cruel I know, but sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind, and mocking such high-principled self sacrifice just has to be done in order to make a pretty valid point: the only people our leaders truly serve, and have ever truly served, are themselves.
Now don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with a little self interest; after all, it’s directly related to the survival instinct that’s common to every living thing. The real problems occur when the self interest of some individual, or class of individuals, is awarded grossly preferential weighting to the self interest of others (as it always has been).
So where are we? We’ve established that leaders cannot be trusted, and we’ve established the myth of perfect decision-making by self-sacrificing leaders; but the most significant point to take on board is that we don’t actually need leaders anyway. We’re perfectly capable of making our own decisions.
This is scary stuff; but consider it for a moment. What goes into making a good decision?
There are just three basic components: information, information and information.
First off, you need just the right amount of background information about any situation that requires a decision. This is best provided not by dozens of experts all repeating each other, but simply by two experts – who disagree with each other. Then you need the right consequential information about the possible results of any decision you might make – no chess player worth her salt ever makes a move without thinking about all the possible consequences; and finally you need a reliable means of informing relevant people about what the decision is. None of these components are, of themselves, difficult; but they are often made extremely difficult by devious people serving their own self-interested agendas.
It isn’t difficult to grasp the essential requirements of a good decision – it’s only taken me one paragraph to write it. So instead of being conditioned to rely on people we can never fully trust to make our decisions for us, why can’t we instead be conditioned to just make our own? And the decisions of government should be OUR decisions to make. After all, we pay for them – often with our lives.
Some would rightly argue that oftentimes group decisions need to be made; and that if a group of people is involved in anything it must be led. Not so. Groups need organised systems with a few key individuals providing specific communication functions, not leadership. Ah, but you need a leader to create the organisation. No you don’t. Groups are more than capable of organising themselves when there’s a real need to do so, as tens of thousands of rebel groups throughout history can testify.
But perhaps the most compelling argument for the failure of the principle of leadership, and why we have to abandon it, is this: the world is full of leaders, and look at the state of it. We have permanent war, ecological catastrophe, and a global economy that institutionalises massive poverty and obscene wealth for tiny all-powerful elites who, coincidentally, are the most strident advocates of leadership. Leadership is a failed experiment. The people, properly informed, must be free to manage the governments they pay for.
