What Doth A Leader Make Essay Research — страница 2

the leadership signal. It is oriented to the past and to the present. The second element is what makes the leader distinct. Again, it is a resonance. The leader must be perceived to resonate in perfect harmony with a vision of the future, which the people who elect him find agreeable. ?Agreeable? ? this means compatible with the fulfilment of the aforementioned needs in a manner, which will render life acceptable. To each group of people, its own requirements, explicit and implicit, openly expressed and latent. The members of a nation might feel that they lost the ability to shape their future and that their security is compromised. They will then select a leader who will ? so they believe, judged by what they know about him ? restore both. The means of restoration are less

important. To become a leader, one must convince the multitude, the masses, the public that one can deliver, not that one knows the best, most optimal and most efficient path to a set goal. The HOW is of no consequences. It pales compared to the WILL HE ? This is because people value the results more than the way. Even in the most individualistic societies, people prefer the welfare of the group to which they belong to their own. The leader promises to optimize utility for the group as a whole. It is clear that not all the members will equally benefit, or even benefit at all. The one who can convince his fellow beings that he can secure the attainment of their goals (and, thus, provide for their needs satisfactorily) ? will become a leader. What matters could vary from time to

time and from place to place. To one group of people, the personality of the leader is of crucial importance, to others his ancestral roots. At one time, the religious affiliation, and at another, the right education or vision of the future. Whatever determines the outcome, it must be strongly correlated with what the group perceives to be its needs and upon its definition of an acceptable life. This is the information content of the signal. Selecting a leader is no trivial pursuit. People take it very seriously. They harbour the belief that the results of this decision will also determine whether their needs will be fulfilled. In other words : the choice of leader will determine if they will lead an acceptable life. These seriousness and contemplative attitude prevail even when

the leader is chosen by a select few (the nobility, the party). Information is gathered from open sources, formal and informal, by deduction, induction and inference, through contextual surmises, historical puzzle-work and indirect associations. To which ethnic group does the candidate belong? What is his history and his family’s / tribe’s / nation’s? Where is he coming from , geographically and culturally? What is he aiming at and where is he going to, what is his vision? Who are his friends, associates, partners, collaborators, enemies and rivals? What are the rumours about him, the gossip? These are the cognitive, epistemological and hermeneutic dimensions of the information gathered. It is all subject to a process very similar to scientific theorizing. Hypotheses are

constructed to fit the known facts. Predictions are made. Experiments conducted and reality data amassed. It is all fitted into a theory. As more data is revealed, accumulates and unfolds ? the theory undergoes revisions or a paradigmatic shift, to use an old adage. As with scientific conservatism, the theory tends to colour the interpretation of new data. A cult of ?priests? (commentators) emerges which defends common wisdom and ?well known? ?facts? against intellectual insurrections and non-conformism. But finally the theory settles down and a consensus emerges: a leader is born. The emotional aspect is predominant, more than it is in the implementation of the scientific methodology. Emotions play the role of gatekeepers and circuit breakers in the decision-making processes

involved in the selection of a leader. They are the filters, the membranes through which information seeps into the minds of the members of the group. They determine the inter-relations between the various data items. Finally, they assign values and moral and affective weights to them within a coherent emotional framework. The emotions in this case are rules of procedure. The information is the input processed by these rules within a fuzzy decision theorem. The leader is the outcome (almost the by-product) of this potentially explosive mixture. This is why the politics of government and leadership is so charged with emotions. This is a static depiction, which does not provide us with the dynamics of the selection process. How does the information gathered affect it? Which