Replying to LO28552 --
Rol asks,
> Or, why is anyone necessary? Why is an accountant necessary? Why is an
> artist necessary? Why is a pianist necessary? Teacher? What is the
> difference between any of these and a leader that makes this an intriguing
> question?
A provoking question. Each of the "roles" in life you describe above,
except leader, seems to me to be a vocation/avocation of some sort. I'll
suggest that one principal difference focuses on focus: the former group
first internally focus themselves along a variety of paths or channels,
whereas the leader is often (but not always, by any means) outward prone.
At the very least, the leader reinforces a direction taken by example; at
the other extreme, a leader forces others into a direction.
I learn accountancy principles, then apply them.
I learn in class or on my own those proportions and spectral combinations
which may define (graphic) art forms, all the while applying, learning,
applying.
I study keyboard on my own or with Czerny's assistance, and make music which
others could possibly listen to and appreciate.
I pass information on to others in a way and at such time that the receiver
may learn.
But leader, well, there's been so much written about this. It's so
tantalizingly intangible. We can say in the United States that the
Democratic Party has no leaders today on the scale of Lyndon Johnson. That
in the absence of a resourceful, politically astute, globally aware
leader, the Palestinians are cursed in their predicament. That as the
world population grows, and grows more linked by calamity and proximity,
it will become more difficult for leaders to emerge who know how to deal,
on the one hand, with the increasing number of uneducated, starving adult
males with learning deficiencies who assault the gates, and on the other
hand with the more affluent, educated, catered-to males who control their
'tribes' and wish to enjoy life, such as it is, to the fullest.
There are certainly leaders among us whom we respect for their deeds. Is
there a line crossed in human societies when leadership is transformed by
necessity (by the way humans interact) into something perforce
ineffectual? Are we doomed to the effects of that line? I'll leave it to
your imaginations to define what constitutes effectual leadership.
I think there's a spiritual realm, but there, too, leadership has been
typically perverse. Read in The Brothers Karamazov the author's famous
chapter on The Grand Inquisitor.
All for now.
Love,
Barry
--Barry Mallis <theorgtrainer@earthlink.net>
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