Unfortunately many “leaders” do not know in what direction to lead their society.
All societies like to have a leader, who will hopefully, in general, support the general wishes of the members of the society. Thus a society will normally have President or a Prime Minister to carry out this function.
But all societies must also have officers in charge the technical activities of the society. These officers are usually in charge of the important functions of the society – like the finance or the transportation facilities of the society.
But, in a democratic society, this leader must be elected in some fashion and likewise all the various officials of the society. This total process must become a very complex business. It is so complex that most people just accept the rules and laws of their country without questioning the total process too much. The total problem is simply much too hard.
Most “leaders” in societies also try to delegate the really hard problems.
But this system doesn’t always work correctly. For a few years I was employed in the Actuarial Department of GIO. At one point in time, the official actuary of the company was sacked by the current head of the company, for doing his proper actuarial task – checking that the company had enough assets to cover all their given commitments to their clients. This should never have happened – but it did.
This could be said of Hitler.
Now I simply hate to see a society not functioning properly. I first became the President of the Sydney Rock-Climbing Club in 1964 and I soon saw the bad effects of my too dominant position. I successfully corrected the situation in 1973 by becoming the secretary of the club and, for a few years, the club did function correctly. But, in a few years, the club degenerated again to its unfortunate previous “president dominant” ways. This whole story is written down on page 224 in my “Society of Choice – book”(pdf) in the introduction of my chapter on “The Executive”.
This cartoon is also horribly true.
But, if we are to create a good democratic green society of about 100 people to show the world how we ought to be living, then we must solve this officer/leader problem correctly. Now this green society must be self-sufficient in food, water and energy and so it must have a very large number of important well-qualified officers.
Firstly the society must have 5 important officers to run the: Agriculture, Building, Transport, Social Activities, Care and Education departments.
Then it must have 5 officers to run the: Energy, Water, Recycling, Communication and Workshop service departments.
Finally it ought to have 6 executive officers of the usual form: Representative (external activities), Treasurer (finance and banking), Membership (this includes discipline), Secretary (internal – employment), Analyst (equivalent to opposition) and Chairperson (checks that, over a year, each officer and all the members have a balanced amount of speaking time at community meetings).
So, if we have all these democratically elected officers, we will have very little freedom left over to give any extra power to an independent “leader”. The easiest thing is to call the “Representative” to be the community “President” and as such they are the “leader”. But this, in fact, this would mean that the leader would very little power over all the other correctly elected officials. At least, in this case, I can’t work out a better solution (and I have spent 40 years working on this very subject). Please tell me your better different solution – if you have one.
If you read this book carefully then you might realise that Napoleon was the best leader the world has ever known (if you count the number of good reforms he made). But he, like all of us, also had his unfortunate weaknesses. We cannot rely on any leader. We must solve our problems ourselves.
My experience in life is that the main use of “A leader” is to have someone to blame for the various troubles of your society. Otherwise we might have to blame ourselves for electing the wrong officials. This would never do.
You might now also like to look back at:
either my “Home Page” (which introduces this whole website and lists all my webpages),
or “Political_Fundamentals” (which introduces this major set of webpages).
My next normal webpage is:
“Economic-Growth_or_Free-Time“.
Updated on 14/11/2016.