Is Leadership Broken?
We’re a furious world. But we’re maddest at our leaders. Here’s why.
Welcome to the Age of Rage. If the defining characteristic of the 80s was post-peak-cold-war pastel-colored prosperity, that of the 90s was romantic (swoon) cyberutopianism, that of the 00s was boom, bust, and crash…and the defining characteristic of the 2010s is (exhale) “aurrrggghhhh”.
Not to ring the alarm bells, but the world appears to be broken. Societies are fracturing. Economies are stagnating. Empires are declining. And the people in them? Well, they’re growing more desperate, angry, and furious by the microsecond. At whom? Everyone. Each other. Themselves. Their neighbors, partners, friends, peers. But most of all…their leaders.
And so, in protest, in anger, in plain dumb vengeance, a new kind of Big Cheese — or a very old kind, if you’re enamored of history — is on the rise across this troubled globe. They reflect the bitter anger of the people that propelling them to power. The masses are bringing a righteous and mighty wrath down on the heads of their failed leaders…by vengefully replacing them with this new breed of figureheads, who trumpet the very failure of the leaders people once believed in.
These figures are the flip side of the Age of Rage. And they are different from yesterday’s failed leaders, not just in tone and style, but in logic and substance. In the old world, leaders competed to offer freedom. And perhaps because they failed at offering enough of it, enough of the time, with enough truth, today people have rejected them — and it.
This new breed is convinced that they and they alone can fix the broken institutions in society and the broken hearts in people. But not the old way of modernity: through perseverance in adversity, courage against fear, a higher purpose in each human life, and uniting it all, freedom. Instead, via a new way: through exclusion of undesirables, nationalist glorification of the old country, veneration of its rightful inhabitants, tribalist loyalty, fanaticism of belief, and, uniting it all, protection. Their fundamental promise to people isn’t about prosperity, openness, and liberty. Instead, like mafia bosses, they compete to offer people safety, rescue, salvation.
The new world is broken, and thus it is unsafe, frightening, spectral. Today, in the ruins of post modernity, societies crumbling around them, prosperity declining away from them, people are like huddled travellers in a deep, dark wood, seeking not freedom but shelter from the monsters they imagine to be oozing from every shadowy ruin. These new figureheads boast that they, and they alone, can protect people from the monsters they cry are emerging from the cracks of a shattered world.
This new breed of figures rising across the globe conjures frightening monsters, slithering and crawling out of the ruins of a broken world — and then promise to rescue and protect people from the very monsters they have conjured. Some of the monsters they conjure are “them”: Mexicans, Muslims, immigrants, refugees. Some of the monsters they conjure are “us”: the weak, the infirm, the vulnerable, the poor. Some of the monsters have hungry jaws, and threaten to take all we have — like illegal aliens. Some of the monsters have sharp teeth, and threaten to tear us apart whole — like shadowy criminals.
The gallery of monsters this new generation of figures is conjuring is vast, grotesque…and as old as time. For every society in decline, every fallen age, deals with the central question: will it rise again — or merely shrink fearfully from the ghosts and monsters it imagines are rising from the ruins of its decline? The simple truth is that from Rome to Constantinople to Berlin, great empires have always found outcasts and untouchables to scapegoat for their problems. But that is how great empires fall — not how they rise again. And so while this new breed of figures is starkly different from the failed leaders of post modernity, they are not new to history. History has a name for them.
I’m going to call this new, or very old, class of emerging figureheads “demagogues”. Demagogue literally means “leader of people”. But this isn’t classical Greece, and today, demagogues are everything that true leaders aren’t. They’re on the rise in nearly every advanced nation — in the US, UK, France, Germany, Scandinavia, Turkey, Greece, to name just a few. They mark the greatest tidal shift in global power for decades — not since the second world war has the world seen so many extremist figures rise so quickly and to such heights.
In this series of essays, I’m going to explain why a broken world and the broken hearts in it need better leaders — not just worse demagogues — if we are to have a hope of healing both. Demagogues will turn an age of rage into an age of hate, fear, violence — just as they have throughout history. That’s not going to fix a broken world — it’s going to shatter into it a million pieces, which will be harder to put back together than before.
Thus, the need for leaders has never been greater in post modernity than it is today. Right here and now. Not just because the world is beset by historic problems, from climate change to inequality to debt crisis to economic stagnation — but also because the world now has an even more fundamental problem: demagogues. For they will make all the problems on the first list even greater threats to global stability and prosperity than they are today. We don’t just need leaders to solve the world’s great problems — we need leadership to stop demagogues, who divide, terrify, and ruin, from turning those problems into calamities.
Let me be clear. The proximate problem in an Age of Rage is demagogues — but the ultimate problem in an Age of Rage is what caused them. The failed generation of leaders that gave rise to them. In an Age of Rage, people are lashing out at a generation of failed leaders, and seeking vengeance and retribution through demagogues. Their anger’s understandable — because their leaders have betrayed, abandoned, and double-crossed them at nearly every turn, imploding middle classes, siphoning wealth to glorified mobsters, sacrificing the young, poisoning their air, food, and water, turning their careers into dead-end slave-wage McGigs, phantom-zoning their towns and cities, and smiling beatifically the whole way down into the abyss.
The question is why. It isn’t just that leaders are born terrible people. It’s what made them terrible. The problem isn’t leaders — but leadership.
Our popular theories and mental models of leadership are deeply and profoundly flawed. They posit that if you want to be a leader, then you must be a something like a robot vampie zombie wearing a human mask: coldly calculating, ruthlessly self-serving, obsessed with personal gain, smugly self-aggrandizing, able to pretend that you care about serving people only so you can trick them into serving you. In them, the means justify the ends, and the ends have no higher purpose. They justify, excuse, encourage, and demand narcissism, machiavellianism, and sociopathy. Their goal isn’t doing enhancing, elevating, or expanding human life in any serious or resounding manner — mostly, it’s cleverly scamming your way onto the lifestyles of the pointlessly rich and internet famous. Let’s put it plainly. Our popular theories and mental models of leadership don’t create leaders — they create monsters. Hence, a generation of failed leaders.
It’s little wonder, then, that the world’s great problems, from climate change to inequality to economic stagnation, are only getting worse. But they’re not going to magically fix themselves. We need true leaders now, more than ever — because we are desperately require people who can lead human effort, imagination, ingenuity, and daring in the direction of solving them.
We’ve never needed leaders more, but wanted leadership less. And watching the grim rise of demagogues across the globe, it’s not too hard to see why. If you, me, and every second-rate talking head calls every extremist fanatic peddling violence a “leader”…then who’d want to be one? That is precisely why I will develop herein a theory of leadership that isn’t about power, position, title, ruthlessness, cunning. Theories of leadership that are focally concerned with pursuit of power and dominance have failed in the truest sense: they may succeed at getting people into power, but only for self-serving, self-aggrandizing, life and wealth-destroying ends, and by destructive, ruinous means. Hence, an age of rage…not just at you, me, your boss, and my bonus…but at a generation of failed leaders…leaders who have failed people, society, history, the future, the young, the old, the planet, the world…becaue what they’ve been taught is leadership…is what functioning humans would probably call at best gruesome mediocrity — and at worst repugnant monstrosity.
Thus. We need desperately to reinvent leadership. Not just if we’re going to save the world — but if we’re to have a snowball’s chance of hell of living peacefully and prosperously in it.
The theory of leadership that I’m going to develop is about human lives, and how to live them at their best, truest, and wholest. The people who can offer us those are the people we should call leaders. And the inconvenient truth is that in this broken world of rising demagogues, we’re going to need both different, better, truer theories of what leadership is to develop a generation of them. Or else the world will keep right on breaking into a million jagged shattered pieces.
Let us, then, begin the improbable, foolhardy voyage towards healing a broken world. We surely will not succeed at finding the promised land. But still, perhaps, together, we can chart a path to the glimmering sunlight of a brighter day.
Umair
London
March 2016
