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?” 

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…

The terminology seems to have originated 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 is not immune).

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.

Political officials control most of the resources in the country (through one means or another). They’re involved in almost every aspect of society. There is a general belief that we need political officials to protect our economy with trade-war measures and threatening foreign policy stances.

Year over year, it seems government institutions surveil common citizens a little bit more and erode personal liberties which were once taken for granted a little bit more. The impetus in government almost always seems to favor more action and control, never less.

In light of all this, it’s no wonder we refer to them as leaders. 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.  Perhaps 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.

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. 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 political decision is a violent action.  It’s a use of force to achieve a result.

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 modern role largely consists of attempting to oversee 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 everyone else is. 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 does not meet the requirements for my definition of 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. This condition is unfortunately prevalent in the US today.

Under these conditions, the value of real leaders has deteriorated significantly.  When developing yourself has progressively limited gain as winners and losers are determined arbitrarily by politics, 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 coercion tends to drown out heroism and real leadership.

How Can We Improve From Where We Are?

We need to think carefully about the importance we ascribe to politicians and the role they play in society.

Today, we call them leaders and allow them in some ways to live lives above the status of ordinary citizens.  The special benefits they receive come at the expense of other citizens, on the basis that we need them to run society.

Here are some interesting changes to consider when it comes to status/role political officials in the US, not because I think such ideas will be implemented, but because they might be stimulating to think about.

• Should politicians get armed guards paid for by citizens through taxation, while citizens are constantly under the threat of having their own weapons taken away? What if tax money could not be used for their protection, and politicians had to hire their own bodyguards if they wanted them?

• What if we decommissioned the US capitol building and the White House, designated them as National Monuments, and constructed some nice campuses (like those of Google or Goldman Sachs) for politicians to work in? Might it reduce any inflated sense of importance within the political sphere and help to see government in a more practical light?

• What if the structure was changed so that political officials had no legal immunity for the commission of any crime? What if politicians had no tax exemptions, special government benefits, free health care, or pensions? And what if politicians were paid salaries set around the average US income for the last few years?

• What if in all wars fought on foreign soil, politicians who vote for or advocated for the war fought on the front lines?

• What if being a politician in the US was not an attractive career to many because it did not offer money, fame, status or privilege?

Perhaps under such conditions, politicians would behave more like real leaders, with more personal skin in the game. In any case, the most important actions we can take are those necessary to limit the government to the role of restraining violence.

The more we reduce the power of government officials and return responsibility and agency to individual citizens, 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.