The Word “Leader”
How many times have you heard someone say, “we need to have better leaders” or “we need to demand better from our leaders?”
For my part, I’ve heard it about a bagillion times.
In present day use, this term is meant to refer to people who hold political offices – governors, presidents, congressmen, senators, mayors, their campaign managers, the people who go on donut and coffee runs for the campaign managers, on and on and on.
The terminology began as the designation for someone with an important role in a particular political party. A key spokesperson for the Republican Party would be referred to as one of their party leaders. However, at least since the turn of the 19th century, the term took on a vastly expanded meaning in the West and began to be applied to all politicians in general.
Political “Leaders”
In today’s world, we call politicians the leaders of our societies. We always say it with the implicit sense that they are the people whose decisions will benefit or harm us more than the decisions of any others.
We say it with the sense that their choices are constantly setting and re-setting the direction for our collective future.
In a certain sense, this is accurate in America today. The rise in the use of the term “leader” applied to politicians came in parallel to a staggering rise in the amount of influence and power that they hold, especially through the twentieth century.
Political office holders in the US truly have acquired the power to pick the winners and losers in society (which is why about $5 billion dollars is recorded as being spent on lobbying in 2024 – never mind what isn’t recorded). There is basically no area of life in which the US government is not involved in some way (even baseball isn’t safe).
According to Dominik Frisby in his wonderful book “Daylight Robbery,” the typical American in 2018 had 38% of everything he owned taken from him through taxation, not including inflation. If you include inflation (not the patent lie that is CPI), which is impossible for anyone to know exactly at any given time, our typical American certainly has at least 50% of his wealth confiscated by the government year over year.
The US government officials engage in endless warmongering, regime building/destroying, spying, and attempts to police the world. They propagandize to us constantly about how dangerous other nations and their ideas are.
In light of all this, it’s no wonder we refer to them as leaders.
They control most of the resources in the country (through one means or another). They’re involved in almost every aspect of life. They’ve managed to convince most people that we need them to “protect our economy” with trade-war measures and threatening foreign policy stances. They’ve gotten most of us to believe we need them to keep foreign enemies (that they created) at bay.
Each year, government institutions surveil us a little bit more and erode our personal liberties a little bit more. The impetus in government is always for more action and control, never for less.
What would we possibly do without them?
Generation alpha (humans born between 2010 and 2025) is coming online (my little nephews are among them!). Like their older Gen Z brothers and sisters, they’re joining the world at a time when the state is more powerful than it’s ever been in the US. They don’t have any different experience – they would be likely to seriously ask the above question – what would we possibly do without our leaders running everything and protecting us?
The term “leader” does give a person a certain indispensable aura in their role. The more trouble on the horizon, the more someone whom we refer to as a leader will be looked to for guidance and solutions. Maybe that’s why politicians cause a lot of trouble.
But are politicians actually leaders?
Real Leaders
What is a leader really? I have a simple definition to propose.
A leader is someone we want to follow because we want to go where they are going.
Eckhart Tolle fits my definition of a leader. He undertook (and his still undertaking) his own profound spiritual journey, and has invited us to go deeper into our own experiences through his books, workshops, interviews, etc. His wisdom and relatability give him a magnetism that has attracted millions of people to walk on a spiritual path.
Brian Tracy also fits my definition of a leader. He is one of my personal heroes. After some wandering around the world, he committed to never-ending development and personal responsibility. He developed an attitude of lifelong learning and has lived by the maxim that there is nothing you can’t learn if you’re serious about it.
Brian’s commitment to learning and taking responsibility led him to great success in business enterprises, and he went on to write many, many books to teach others how to develop the same mindset and skills. Through his books, videos, and seminars, he has inspired and empowered millions of people with his message.
Eckhart and Brian both own their message and their work, and no one but them bears the consequences of their decisions. They offer their ideas/products/services in the marketplace, and people are free to judge the value and use them or not. As Taleb would say, they both have a lot of skin in the game.
Leaders are guideposts and guiding lights, people who show you a possibility by demonstrating it in their lives.
The key essence of a leader is this: They go to a place worth going by overcoming challenges in their own life.
A More Fitting Description for Politicians
Following or Being Pushed
Almost invariably, our politicians in the US are well-intentioned individuals who are trying to make the world a better place. They are not bad people, even if they make bad choices sometimes. I make plenty of bad choices myself. They are people in a bad system.
It’s a bad system because it incentivizes them to act against human thriving (even their own) in a hundred ways.
We must always remember the essential nature of government (which is why I write this in more than half of my blog posts). Government is organized violence, a centralization of physical force. All government action is violence and the threat of violence. Tariffs, legal tender laws, money printing, industry regulations, taxes – all enforced by physical might.
Each positive action (positive meaning choosing to do something rather than nothing, or commission instead of omission) implemented by a politician is a violent action. It’s a use of force to achieve a result. And the incentive structure in government pushes politicians to action – no rewards for doing nothing.
A person who wields force pushes people in front of him. He pushes them where he himself has not gone. The people pushed suffer the consequences while he remains untouched.
Politicians have no requirement to be productive and generate anything useful for other humans – their job consists of trying to oversee and micromanage the people that are being productive. Politicians don’t have the healthcare programs that they legislate into existence, forcing everyone else to use them.
They don’t get taxed in the same way that they force everyone else to be taxed. The laws determining crimes do not apply to them in the same way as other citizens. Politicians start wars, and they do not fight and die in them.
Being a politician is something closer to the opposite of being a leader. No matter how noble a political office holder’s sentiment may be, he or she has only violence as a tool, and does not bear the consequences of his or her actions in office – everyone else does. Not much skin in the game.
Leader Inflation
The more power the state acquires, the more regulation and top-down planning, the more that success for humans in the society becomes divorced from effort, creativity, and skill. The more powerful the political office holders, the more success depends on being politically connected.
No matter how smart or talented you are, you can’t beat an insider. You can’t beat someone who gets to make and bend the rules to suit themselves. If you have 4 aces, they’ll have 5 because they get to pull from a whole other deck. And that’s exactly how the US operates today.
Under these conditions, the value of real leaders has deteriorated significantly. When developing yourself has progressively limited gain because winners and losers are determined arbitrarily by politicians, you need less and less to be inspired by people who have done remarkable things in their lives.
Just as fake money (backed by force) drives out real money, fake leaders (backed by force) drive out real leaders. When everyone is being pushed in the same direction, what’s the point of following anyone? Rule by force eventually kills all heroism and true leadership.
How Can We Improve Things?
For the sake of the heavens, the oceans, the dogs, the bees, the trees, and all goodness, politicians are not leaders. We must call them by more accurate names. “Politicians” is fine. I’ll settle for “government agents/officials” or “public servants” as well.
We need to think carefully about the importance we ascribe to politicians and the power we allow them to take for themselves.
Today, we call them leaders and allow them to live lives above the status of ordinary citizens. The special benefits they receive come at the expense of everyone else, on the basis that we need them to run everything and tell us what to do, that we can’t live without them.
I’m big on ending any exposition of an idea with an exposition of what I think would actually make things better – all talk and no real proposals would make Jeffrey a hypocritical boy.
Here I’ll outline what I propose be done, what I would do if I acquired the opportunity to do it.
Reduce the government budget for armed protection of politicians to 0. If politicians want to carry guns or hire bodyguards with their own money like anyone else, okie dokie. Armed guards paid by forced taxation – so many things wrong with that on so many different levels.
Decommission the US capitol building and the White House, and designate them as National Monuments for posterity to witness how important we made our politicians out to be.
a. Construct nice office buildings and campuses for our legislators and politicians to work in, no better or worse than some of the good ones today. The campuses of Goldman Sachs or Google would be a good model.
In every single case with no possible exception ever, no matter what, with no taksies-backsies, politicians must live by the same laws and rules as everyone else. They must not have immunity to reality and must face the consequences of their decisions directly.
a. No legal immunity for anything, in scope of duties or not. If you break the law, you pay immediately
b. No tax exemptions or advantages for any reason
c. No special government benefits, free health care, pensions, etc
d. Salaries set around the average US income for the last few years
Here’s a good heuristic for you. If being a politician seems like an attractive career in your society because it offers money, fame, status, and privilege, you’re already cooked.
4. In all wars fought on foreign soil, politicians who vote for or advocate for war fight on the front lines.
The most important actions we can take are those necessary to reduce the government to its proper role – military defense (not attack), the police, and law courts. Federal government is probably only necessary for national defense. The rest can be managed by each state on its own.
No economic planning, no regulations to stimulate productivity or “progress,” no social or cultural meddling, no intervention in global trade (even if other national governments do it), no financial manipulation, no infrastructure projects, no government licensing, none of it. Just military, police, courts.
The more we reduce the power of government officials in accordance with the requirements of human thriving, the more we will allow the emergence of real leaders like Eckhart Tolle and Brian Tracy to step forward and guide us to places we actually want to go.