Humans don't ......
How can you decontaminate a word? In this case ‘leaders’. In the heads of many people there is a confusion between Alpha’s and leaders. The whole Alpha and Beta social setup amongst some animals is completely misunderstood. Basically an Alpha gorilla is the individual that has the best access to food and reproductive opportunities, this individual isn’t the leader. There would be no particular survival advantage for a group to ‘follow’ an Alpha, the individual who’s social status was acquired by being the biggest, most aggressive, most dominant member of the group. Such a skill set, if it can be called that, won’t improve in any way the group’s capacity to find food and survive.
Most members of a group will ‘follow’ the individual who has the best foraging skills, most likely an older experienced female. In this context there is no subservience just rational decisions by the ‘followers’ to go along with the individual with the best adapted skills and experience.
This viewpoint brings into question our addiction to ‘leaders’, some of whom see themselves as some sort of human Alpha. Our current systems offer high social status roles to aggressive, competitive individuals and tends to deny them to those who have the better adapted skill sets. The revelations of the Covid inquiry in the UK would seem to lend force to this argument.
Newspapers, TV, and social media reports reinforce this status quo through their use of language ‘world leaders’, powerful individuals’ and the rest. These reports will also conflate a ruling elite with it’s Nation, they use the country’s name rather than the name of the top leader and his/her elite. “Russia has invaded the Ukraine”, China this or that, India … etc etc. We can question the idea that the majority of the Russian public would have even thought about invading the Ukraine had the ruling elite not pushed for it.
This year’s COP is a astonishing example of this, faced with profound existential crises the COP is being used to negotiate new oil deals and is run by individuals with vested interests keeping the world destroying status quo in place. Those people with the knowledge, appreciation of the urgency and with the ideas about what we can do are, sometimes, listened to by these ‘world leaders’ and then ignored in the subsequent negotiations.
It’s not the leaders who are the problem it’s their followers
A leader without followers is just some person in the bar full of, for the most part flawed, ideas about the importance of their viewpoint and their potential role in ‘getting stuff done’. We’ve all probably heard the bar room lawyer spouting nonsense and don’t pay them much attention. Some, thanks to their personal charm, capacity to argue someone else into a corner start to attract followers who will then blindly follow the ‘next best hope for us all’.
We didn’t do this before, there is no evidence that prehistoric human groups, who managed to survive and get along pretty well over thousands of generations, had ‘leaders’ in the way that we understand them today. As above, the group would tend to follow the person with the best adapted experience and skill set but without subservience and wouldn’t think at all that said individual should become the overall group top dog, the person who dictates what, where and when the group will do. Again, this would not be an optimal survival strategy and this is being highlighted today. History shows that our addiction to ‘leaders’ has meant serial wars and conflicts, holocausts, famines, environmental degradation, inequality and the other tragic and traumatic burdens humanity, we, have to carry. It could have been and still can be very different.
The questions which arise are why are we so addicted to wanting ‘leaders’? Why do we want to give power away to individuals? Why do we think that the next ‘leader’ is going to be the one who sorts things out? Basically because the ‘proto-elite’ discovered long ago that people who are full of fear can be easily dominated. Encouraging fear of others, fear of losing access to food and resources and suchlike means people were and are continually in a state of reaction and would/will blindly follow anyone who promised to protect them and their interests. This continues today, being a part of the ruling elite is ‘high status’ and maintaining said status means continually acting to ensure that their Nation has the best access to the resources needed to maintain the status quo, resources like land, minerals and energy sources. This despite all the evidence that the economic and geopolitical systems that enable these ‘high status’ roles are destroying the resources on which they depend.
We must stop reacting and start acting. The existential crises of today are a consequence of how we have allowed ourselves to be led. It is time to stop according high status to the false prophets who shout the loudest, who have access to the resources needed to get elected or to seize power. We must stop trusting bullies and people who have overly high opinions about their own intelligence and skills. The world isn’t lurching towards more wars, more environmental destruction, more crises, we are being led towards them by fools fighting for high status roles in the ruling elites.
If we can imagine a world without war, famine, poverty and injustice then we can build it. But we have to start according higher social status to those who don’t seek it but are offered ir because they help, they share, they are pro-social. Underneath it all we are compassionate beings trying to make sense of life living under the weight of an elite which lacks empathy and which encourages competition and rivalry. They will contend that competitive market places are ones that best promote innovation and progress yet it is more than likely that we would have progressed faster and in a different way had we all cooperated together.
In the same way as a dropped stone causes ripples to spread out we, each one of us, can act. The most effective strategy is to start in one’s own local community, we can change how we appreciate and behave towards other people. We can stop bending a knee to those who seek power and start appreciating those people who are simply busy helping out and making peoples’ lives a little bit better each day. We all know someone like that. We need to change how we value the contributions made to our communities by different individuals, a farmer can get along quite well without a distant President yet said ‘leader’ will die fairly quickly without the food producer. We need to change how we measure things and move away from brute quantity to include quality, away from tonnes per hectare to people well-fed per hectare, away from economic metrics that mean a war or disaster raise GDP. We must build pro-social local systems in which things like poverty, hunger, delahabidated housing and inequality are simply not acceptable.