[HN Gopher] The mythos of leadership
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The mythos of leadership
Author : pepys
Score : 59 points
Date : 2024-02-04 07:21 UTC (2 days ago)
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(TXT) w3m dump (aeon.co)
| smoothjazz wrote:
| 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.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| 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.)
| hartator wrote:
| > 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.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| 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.
| PH95VuimJjqBqy wrote:
| 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.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| 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.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > why hold these people up on a pedestal at all?
|
| 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.
| pompino wrote:
| 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.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| This is essentially arguing that systems ultimately select
| for competence, given a long enough timespan. And I'd
| agree!
|
| But I lack faith that the system produces people that I
| look up to. They did well at their game, I can respect
| that. It may not be my game, though.
| pompino wrote:
| I directly addressed what I thought was the main point
| you were making about luck. Who people "look up to" is a
| more complicated issue.
| zoeysmithe wrote:
| 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.
| pompino wrote:
| 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.
| sokoloff wrote:
| 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.
| smoothjazz wrote:
| I'm talking about a larger timescale than an individual
| product or company. Bronze age -> iron age -> industrial
| revolution -> information age...
|
| There's going to be some noise when you zoom in but I firmly
| believe that human technology marches forward over time.
| apsurd wrote:
| > "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.
| drewcoo wrote:
| 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.
| smoothjazz wrote:
| > _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.
| Ilverin wrote:
| 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.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| > 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.)
|
| [1]
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7qT-C-0ajI&pp=ygUUbW9udHkgc...
| Throw73747 wrote:
| > 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...
| avgcorrection wrote:
| 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.
| tcgv wrote:
| 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.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| 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.
| kiba wrote:
| _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]
|
| 1. http://hackeducation.com/2015/04/25/factory-model
| wolvesechoes wrote:
| 'Formerly, all the world was mad,' say the most refined,
| and they blink...
| kiba wrote:
| 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]
|
| 1. https://aeon.co/essays/who-are-the-leaders-in-our-heads-
| and-...
| avgcorrection wrote:
| Thinking for yourself requires just existing. That goes
| for anyone who is not being indoctrinated into a cult.
| kiba wrote:
| _Thinking for yourself requires just existing. That goes
| for anyone who is not being indoctrinated into a cult._
|
| The mistake is thinking that you can just "think for
| yourself" without possessing knowledge.
|
| I think people who avoid scams, cults, and pseudoscience
| largely does it through general knowledge and heuristics,
| not by thinking hard.
| karaterobot wrote:
| 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.
| taway789aaa6 wrote:
| > What does "divine right" matter to a serf?
|
| Good point!
|
| 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!
| drewcoo wrote:
| > 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."
| mikpanko wrote:
| 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.
| marmaduke wrote:
| 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.
| boredemployee wrote:
| Saw the release date of said books and I was just about to
| ask if it applies to 21 century ideas. Thanks for answering
| it.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| This is an accurate theory of mind for the vast majority of
| people.
| marcellus23 wrote:
| Could you explain why you think that's not worth taking
| seriously?
| mxwsn wrote:
| 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.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| The higher you climb the larger the screwups and
| violations you're excused from. But as you say, this is a
| ladder, not an absolute.
| compiler-guy wrote:
| The "rule" is about how people behave. Not a moral judgement.
| It's more like:
|
| "People excuse almost anything for those in power got into
| power."
|
| instead of:
|
| "It was morally OK to do the things that led them to obtain
| that power."
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Indeed, it's descriptivism versus prescriptivism.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| 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.
| motohagiography wrote:
| Pfeffer's book "Power" will let you know pretty fast whether
| you are suited to or ready for leadership. +1
| farleykr wrote:
| 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.
| empath-nirvana wrote:
| 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.
| farleykr wrote:
| 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.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| I'm curious how the apocrypha fit into this. Books have
| been actively filtered in order to create a coherent
| narrative.
| runamuck wrote:
| Old Cliche, 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."
| Onlyartist9 wrote:
| 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.
| ysofunny wrote:
| bear in mind that leadership is not the same thing as
| representation
|
| people in congress aren't "leaders" in the same way people in the
| _executive_ power are leaders.
|
| in the executive power, the representative elected by the people
| must indeed be leaders in the full sense of the word.
|
| but in the legislative branch, the elected people aren't leaders
| but representatives, this is perhaps too subtle of a difference
| for most voters?
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| 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.
| jbandela1 wrote:
| > 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!
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