Learning about Leadership

For the last few years, I have internally enjoyed an imagined notoriety by secretly holding the belief that 'Leadership Is Wrong'.  In my experience, people self-consciously doing big L Leadership have an institutions good in mind and are engaged in coaxing that good from people who have their own goals for themselves. I was recently challenged to think this through again, by the real seriousness with which many sensible people have taken up the concept. I spent a few days in a confusion of trying to think what the Zizekian ethical treatment of leadership might be - abandonment of a false belief in a Big (Institutional) Other? Or a Heideggerian treatment of Leadership as some kind of Phronemos-ity... 

The rub of my ethical concern is that Leadership (as it is taught) encourages people to use their speech, behaviour, practices and commitments to influence and govern the choices of the led.  This is a significant moral burden, and the significance is never discussed.

In the end, the solution was from one of the leaders I respect the most.  Like it or not, we are always-already in leadership, always-already trade influence, practices, speech and commitments with the people in our world to influence them.  The choice is between leading others to share the Good we have or desire for ourselves, or leading them to the Bad we have, or leading them away from the Good and into the Bad for our benefit.  The choices that go with authority and leadership will sometimes be only bad.  So be it.  You can't scrape yourself clean, nor should you want to.  We are all liable to provide for others.

(The truth is that none of us are people the way we imagine people are - unified, rational, sturdy integral selves.  We rely on the appearance of that wholeness well-faked by others to motivate us to our best performances of imitation. By seeing a teacher appear to understand, I learn to pretend I understand, where in fact I 'only become familiar' (as John von Neumann put it). See C.S. Lewis' "Till We Have Faces" for a wonderful treatment of this theme.)