Bugger leadership
This was always one of my stalking horses in the old Spanish blog.
I mean, really: "liderazgo". What a turd of a word. They take an English word, misunderstand it (probably) by an angle of about 10deg, small but significant, badly adapt it to the Spanish phonetic system, add a silly suffix, and (this is where you want to scream) turn it into a cardinal virtue, the attainment of which requires you to read three self help books per month (check out your local supermarket, just past the turnstile and before you get to the apples and tomatoes). As a teacher, I have a particular aversion to "leadership", for the simple reason that it's one of those things, usually the main thing and in some cases the only thing, that my job description and the mission statement of whatever institution I am working for tells me I have to instill in my students, irrespective of the subject taught, and which I have neither the inclination nor, probably, the means to instill. I don't want to turn my students into "leaders", and if I wanted to I couldn't, for the simple reason that I am not a leader myself. (Incidentally, if you think "leadership" is part of the job profile of a teacher, then you are behind the times. That was back in the eighties. Now teachers are supposed to be "facilitators", not leaders. Just as well, really.)
Apparently, this, or rather I, was not always so. My mother always cherished a school report of mine from about age eight that said: "[Cakesniffe] is a born leader. Unfortunately he tends to lead everyone in the wrong direction."
Cute, but a bad prognosis, I think. I am self-evidently not a born leader, since if I were, I guess I would have led someone somewhere by now. I haven't. Wherever I have gone, at least since attaining legal adulthood, a sum total of 0 people (rounded up to the nearest integer) have followed me. And that's just the way I like it.
What's my beef with leadership? Well, a bit of Spanish comes in useful. "Lider" is the ananym of "redil", which is a place where you round up sheep. And that's my whole point. To be a leader, you need to find someone willing to be led. The necessary corollary of leadership is sheep. Now, of course it is a fact of life that the world is full of sheep, and will continue to be so no matter how many or how few self-empowerment books are sold or how many or how few teachers take their Mission Statements seriously. So, the argument presumably goes, better that they have good leaders than bad leaders. Moreover (the argument presumably continues), if it is possible to turn a sheep into a leader, then doing so should be the sacred mission of anyone concerned to avoid the extreme verticalization of power structures that gives rise to dictatorships or to mob psychology. If there have to be sheep, better that their loyalties be divided between a thousand rival petty-Fuhrers in a branching web of partial and conditional allegiances than that they should all be clicking heels to the same mustachioed Hero of the Fatherland. I agree with this, but I think we are dealing with a false dichotomy here. Or at any rate, that we are missing the point.
We should not be teaching kids, teenagers and young adults that the accumulation of "followers" is a measure of social worth, still less of individual worth. (This is just one more reason, to add to the pile, why Twitter is social and political cancer.) We should not be suggesting that if you have a talent for obtaining enthusiastic assent from others, this means both that you are a credit to your country's Ministry of Education and that what is assented to by those others is very probably the right thing. Instead, we should be teaching them, by word and example, that your worth lies in how much of a unique, independent, deep and whole individual you are able to become (and not giving an airborne amatory engagement how many followers you have is arguably a fairly good proxy with which to gauge this); and that, furthermore, there are good reasons to suppose that success in the accumulation of followers correlates negatively, rather than positively, with success in the vastly more important area of self-realization. In other words, and with due allowance for outliers, popular people tend, with blessed exceptions, to be superficial people. Run your eyes down Twitter's or YouTube's Top 100 and tell me this ain't so (who the hell is Katy Perry? Should I have heard of her?).
"Good reasons"? Sure. This probably deserves another post, but briefly: (1) Individuating experience tends to involve loneliness, or at least aloneness, and sometimes misery. A person genetically endowed with the lineaments of easy popularity will, ceteris paribus, be less likely to undergo such experience. (2) The language of leadership, of influence and persuasion, is a debased language: it is necessarily tribal and premasticated. Demagoguery is both easier and more popular than lyricism. Further, this language is seldom taught (at least since the trivium fell out of the school curriculum), and more often learned through imitation by those to whom imitation is second nature - the jerks and the twerks. (3) In order to want to influence other people, to be a Leader of Men, you must first have a high opinion of yourself. People who have a rich inner life seldom have a high opinion of themselves, since one necessary component of a rich inner life is empathy, which is precisely that quality that prevents you having a high opinion of yourself, by allowing you to appreciate just what riches lie in the minds and hearts of others. So - reasons enough.
In sum: being a leader is better than being a sheep, but being your own person is better than either.
And don't get me onto nPower.
I mean, really: "liderazgo". What a turd of a word. They take an English word, misunderstand it (probably) by an angle of about 10deg, small but significant, badly adapt it to the Spanish phonetic system, add a silly suffix, and (this is where you want to scream) turn it into a cardinal virtue, the attainment of which requires you to read three self help books per month (check out your local supermarket, just past the turnstile and before you get to the apples and tomatoes). As a teacher, I have a particular aversion to "leadership", for the simple reason that it's one of those things, usually the main thing and in some cases the only thing, that my job description and the mission statement of whatever institution I am working for tells me I have to instill in my students, irrespective of the subject taught, and which I have neither the inclination nor, probably, the means to instill. I don't want to turn my students into "leaders", and if I wanted to I couldn't, for the simple reason that I am not a leader myself. (Incidentally, if you think "leadership" is part of the job profile of a teacher, then you are behind the times. That was back in the eighties. Now teachers are supposed to be "facilitators", not leaders. Just as well, really.)
Apparently, this, or rather I, was not always so. My mother always cherished a school report of mine from about age eight that said: "[Cakesniffe] is a born leader. Unfortunately he tends to lead everyone in the wrong direction."
Cute, but a bad prognosis, I think. I am self-evidently not a born leader, since if I were, I guess I would have led someone somewhere by now. I haven't. Wherever I have gone, at least since attaining legal adulthood, a sum total of 0 people (rounded up to the nearest integer) have followed me. And that's just the way I like it.
What's my beef with leadership? Well, a bit of Spanish comes in useful. "Lider" is the ananym of "redil", which is a place where you round up sheep. And that's my whole point. To be a leader, you need to find someone willing to be led. The necessary corollary of leadership is sheep. Now, of course it is a fact of life that the world is full of sheep, and will continue to be so no matter how many or how few self-empowerment books are sold or how many or how few teachers take their Mission Statements seriously. So, the argument presumably goes, better that they have good leaders than bad leaders. Moreover (the argument presumably continues), if it is possible to turn a sheep into a leader, then doing so should be the sacred mission of anyone concerned to avoid the extreme verticalization of power structures that gives rise to dictatorships or to mob psychology. If there have to be sheep, better that their loyalties be divided between a thousand rival petty-Fuhrers in a branching web of partial and conditional allegiances than that they should all be clicking heels to the same mustachioed Hero of the Fatherland. I agree with this, but I think we are dealing with a false dichotomy here. Or at any rate, that we are missing the point.
We should not be teaching kids, teenagers and young adults that the accumulation of "followers" is a measure of social worth, still less of individual worth. (This is just one more reason, to add to the pile, why Twitter is social and political cancer.) We should not be suggesting that if you have a talent for obtaining enthusiastic assent from others, this means both that you are a credit to your country's Ministry of Education and that what is assented to by those others is very probably the right thing. Instead, we should be teaching them, by word and example, that your worth lies in how much of a unique, independent, deep and whole individual you are able to become (and not giving an airborne amatory engagement how many followers you have is arguably a fairly good proxy with which to gauge this); and that, furthermore, there are good reasons to suppose that success in the accumulation of followers correlates negatively, rather than positively, with success in the vastly more important area of self-realization. In other words, and with due allowance for outliers, popular people tend, with blessed exceptions, to be superficial people. Run your eyes down Twitter's or YouTube's Top 100 and tell me this ain't so (who the hell is Katy Perry? Should I have heard of her?).
"Good reasons"? Sure. This probably deserves another post, but briefly: (1) Individuating experience tends to involve loneliness, or at least aloneness, and sometimes misery. A person genetically endowed with the lineaments of easy popularity will, ceteris paribus, be less likely to undergo such experience. (2) The language of leadership, of influence and persuasion, is a debased language: it is necessarily tribal and premasticated. Demagoguery is both easier and more popular than lyricism. Further, this language is seldom taught (at least since the trivium fell out of the school curriculum), and more often learned through imitation by those to whom imitation is second nature - the jerks and the twerks. (3) In order to want to influence other people, to be a Leader of Men, you must first have a high opinion of yourself. People who have a rich inner life seldom have a high opinion of themselves, since one necessary component of a rich inner life is empathy, which is precisely that quality that prevents you having a high opinion of yourself, by allowing you to appreciate just what riches lie in the minds and hearts of others. So - reasons enough.
In sum: being a leader is better than being a sheep, but being your own person is better than either.
And don't get me onto nPower.
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