Pylimitics

We pay far too much attention to “leaders.” Partly because we’re very susceptible to a halo effect where we reflexively ascribe general authority to someone who has achieved some sort of success (for any reason) in one specific pursuit. Elon Musk, for example, is very successful at accumulating wealth. That doesn’t mean he knows anything at all about other areas of knowledge, but we treat him like he does. The same goes for practically anyone who’s ultrarich and decides to opine about something (anything), whether it’s forms of government, space exploration, robotics, or religious scholarship.

Sometimes a person achieves success in an extremely narrow specialty: “climbing the corporate ladder.” Most business organizations are arranged as a strict hierarchy, with “leaders” who got promoted for whatever reason, and purely for that reason they have “followers.” A group of people can perform coordinated actions without a strict hierarchy, and without “leaders” at all, at least as we think of them. It’s our set of cultural assumptions that makes it very difficult for us to believe that, let alone act on it. Jeffrey Nielsen’s book The Myth of Leadership goes into detail in this and related areas.

Nielsen explains that as soon as we decide to regard someone as a “leader,” we have granted them power over others (“followers”). The leader speaks and the followers listen. The leader commands and the followers obey. And so on.

This is most obvious in business and military organizations, but it’s everywhere else too. It’s so ubiquitous in our culture that, as I alluded to, it’s hard for us to conceive that there’s nothing natural about it, and it’s just a set of cultural choices we’re taught from birth. We even impose this idea on our view of nature itself — that deeply embedded idea of “alpha males” is based on a study of wolves, but the study focused only on a group of wolves in a very specific situation: a zoo. But once the “alpha male” meme existed, it got applied all over the place, to the point that it’s an automatic response for us.

In my newsletter Artisanal Scribbles I write a lot about mechanical reproduction and its unintended consequences. The newsletter is about writing by hand in the age of AI, but mechanical reproduction, and our misapplication of it, has been around much longer than AI, and has much more pervasive effects. And here is one: when we internalize a concept so completely that it becomes an automatic response, that’s a lot like mechanical reproduction, and it bypasses our ability to think critically and creatively.

That’s my point. There is too little critical or creative thought around the myth of leadership and the halo effect of believing that a business leader or a person of wealth (or a celebrity, athlete, performer, politician, etc.) has anything to say outside of their own personal specialization.

A really astonishing thing (maybe I shouldn’t be astonished by this) is that the individuals in those positions seem to believe the myth about themselves. Musk, for example, seems to really believe that the things he says about practically any subject, from government to physics to transportation, are more significant because they’re what he thinks. We have an aging and failing resident of the White House who also appears similarly affected. Peter Thiel, who succeeded at accumulating a lot of money, now seems to think people should listen to him about some pseudo-religious raving about…well, whatever it is. Antichrist this and armageddon that. Makes zero sense, but he keeps drooling it out.

At a smaller scale, I’ve watched people in a company I used to work for rise to executive positions and begin to believe in their own myth, opining about things far beyond their personal purview. And because they’re “leaders,” the “followers” listen. Even deliver fawning praise.

You can’t have a “leader” without “followers.” We could, as a population and a culture, self-correct this situation, which I think is a massive error in countless ways. It’s just a matter of moving past your conditioning (which, I’ll admit, is far from easy). Just refrain from being a follower. Even better, refrain from being a leader. Everything is still possible without that particular bit of erroneous, conditioned thought.