Leaders will always disappoint

Leaders will always disappoint — anywhere in the world.

This has much less to do with leaders and much more with the nature of power as it exists today.

The center of anything large (organization or country) is a very difficult place to be in.

Like travelling in a high speed car, the scenes around begin to blur — the details start to get lost. All around, a bubble of Yes-Sayers starts to form.

Research coming in says power does serious harm to the brain — all the attention, all the sacrifice, the sheer number of decisions to be made all of it is a huge stretch.

Moreover, the number of interests our leaders have to juggle and manage is crazy — all around are entire networks who want to instrumentalize power for their own gains.

In the middle of all these, walking with a diverse constituency means that there will always be opposition and disagreement.

And add to it the complusions of re-election or giving shareholders returns, upholding a non-human superhero / heroine image — its too much pressure.

The real culprit is not the leader but this way of organizing that centralizes power with a few and then entrusts them with the task of ‘leading’ us.

Such a system will never deliver us what we dream of. Only a decentralized collective where leadership is a process (that flows from person to person depending on the situation and need) — a collective that knows how to share power, such a collective has a real chance of getting something meaningful done.

All else will only be more of the same.