Follow the Leader
Most men seek self-actualization through submission to totalitarian leadership. They convince themselves that they are on the path of enlightenment and end up as empty automatons.
The most reasonable explanation for this soul-destroying error is that leaders tend to appear larger than life. They project an image of powers that others are drawn to because they lack this in their own selves. It is a disingenuous idolatry that men worship and at the same time fear power. This is why they give their loyalty to those who dispense it.
But there is a deeper problem. Beyond the calculating self-interest, their slavishness is rooted in the soul. The followers experience the illusion of relief from their own mortality. It is of course, the most natural thing in the world to desperately seek relief from one’s own annihilation.
But beyond the death of the physical being is the fear of the death of our symbolic self. After struggling for years to craft oneself as a unique being of dignity and nobility, The end result of all of this is death.
This is why men submit so blindly to leadership. He cannot escape literal death; he uses his loyalty to a powerful figurehead to do so symbolically.
A charismatic leader possesses a quality most men do not possess (or at least project); the infectiousness of the unconflicted person. The charismatic leader seduces his followers because he appears free of the same inner conflicts that his followers have. Such men are confident when others feel ashamed, free where others feel trapped, and does what others dare not do.
These people offer permission to express forbidden impulses and secret desires. With this person as a central figure, others no longer feel that they are alone, small, and helpless. Once they have submitted to their leader, they believe they possess the same powers that their leaders do. The charismatic leader promises to transform the fundamental source of his follower’s misery into a pathway towards salvation. He gives the followers the illusion that they’d transcended their own limitations and fears.
This involves an absolute rejection of self-identity. Subsequently these former individuals blindly follow orders into acts of ever-increasing nihilistic annihilation. It becomes a magical transformation of the world and of oneself, a deep self-deception toward a false sense of the heroic.
This is why people are capable of doing what any rational mind would condemn. This heroic transformation doesn’t just provide a philosophy or justification for action. It provides a story, almost a mythology, that gives the world a fundamental purpose. It gives meaning to death: this is why few men are willing to live for anything, but many are willing to die for something.
There is an inherent danger in this kind of transformation. It inevitably simplifies a complex world into the duality of insiders and outsiders, good guys and bad guys, of imagined destinies and unquestioned entitlement. It transfers a sense of helplessness, guilt, and conflicts into a narrow construction of meaning and identity.
All of this is facilitated by the charismatic leader who absolve his followers from any personal responsibility. The price for this is that he absorbs their personal freedom and individuality. men who fetishize their leaders’ become byproducts of an ideology.
Ironically the leader loses his individuality and freedom just as much as his followers. He has to continually and unerringly qualify for leadership by acting in accordance to his followers’ assumptions and expectations. Inevitably it escalates beyond what the leader originally intended.
In the end everybody who is not destroyed by this process ends up exactly where they started; trying to free themselves from a sense of principles that once promised a symbolic victory over death.
We see an entire generation rising right now who are hungry for male role models. They are desperate for a leader to provide safe haven from their troubles, and where they can finally feel like they can belong to something greater than themselves and their own empty existence. It is a search for a father figure that goes beyond the sense of the paternal into a source for purpose and meaning.
These temporary models for father figures never stand up to the test of time. They act, intentionally or unintentionally, solely out of their own self-interest. They can never fill the void that lingers behind the momentary intoxication the leaders create. All they have are illusions; and all illusions fall apart.
Every person we admire has a different version of what life should be. It’s more than puzzling; it is disheartening. The leader with the most seductive voice, strongest appearance, and the most authority and success gets our momentary allegiance. Eventually our perspective changes or evolves in these different versions of truth become more than a little pathetic.
Everybody thinks that he has the formula for triumphing over life’s limitations and thinks this justifies him to create a following. For them, winning converts is more than just an outlook on life. It is a formula for immortality.
Be careful of the leader who promises to empower you: more often than not he seeks only to empower himself at your expense. Do not allow yourself to become fascinated with one man’s worldview or ideology. More often than not waiting one man’s ideas against another’s a relevant compared to thinking about the underlying principles to draw you towards these would be leaders. Ask yourself with brutal honesty what is truth and what is lie? What is heroic or villainess? Who must you save, and who must suffer in the process? Finally, who do you have to be, and who do you really want to be?
The world- the universe - is always bigger than what any one man has to say about it. Reflect, stay critical, safeguard your freedom, your moral compass, your individuality, and never stop expanding your personal worldview.