Who are the leaders in our heads – and how did they get there? | Aeon Essays

But leaders are also human and they make mistakes that have nothing to do with leadership and everything to do with human weakness and temptation. The

As Carville liked to say, quoting Disraeli, “A good leader knows himself and the times.”

Without realizing it, too many leaders assume that the role of leadership is to control. They espouse Plato’s “division of labor,” which, according to social thinker Hannah Arendt, has influenced government and military structures for thousands of years.

(2) Throughout human history, within every social group there is a hunger for authority that will provide orientation and reassurance, particularly in times of stress and fear. What is new is that there is now a hunger for leadership that (3) can deal with the intensification of systemic complexity emerging from the cybernetic, economic, political,