The capricious unpredictabilities of leadership

Remember the quote "You can only connect the dots looking backwards"? Reading Boris Johnson's essays in The Spectator during my university years, I didn't exactly suspect the man would one day become prime minister. Not that it compares to the 'cognitive shock' of seeing the twin brothers (Jacek and Placek) in the Polish 1962 adventure film for kids (The Two Who Stole the Moon) later become president and prime minister of Poland, respectively. Without getting into the politics of it (or the long list of controversies attached to one of the longest-serving politicians in Poland), let's just say that the state of shock has been made rather difficult to shake off over decades, to put it mildly.

Today, I reached for one of those memorable editions of Newsweek from my university years with "Putin's New Formula For Russia. Same Old Aftertaste" on the cover. It was May 2001. Little did I know that five months later, America would change forever, or that the world we live in would let the man in question eventually become...who he is today. Had the world (or at least those who really should have!) started taking the threat seriously enough and connecting the dots (at some point, just about any, really!), we wouldn't be where we are today.

The story of a dictator: born or bred?

When you know well in advance that you have over two decades to methodically peddle the venom of propaganda into the ears of the nation, and in the process, hope you will succeed in building national unity around some of your favourite ideas, what you might want to put at the forefront of your efforts is the fundamental conviction of injustice and oppression at the hands of a vicious enemy, where - inevitably - you're the one riding the white horse of justice and values worth dying for and everyone else occupies the "forces of evil and oppression" territory. Here's how you go about it!

Chapter I: Motivation

If there's one thing you will really need a lot of as an aspiring dictator, it's motivation! Not the kind that you get from watching TEDx presentations, Hollywood blockbusters or Netflix series, but the most visceral, atavistic category. A good old inferiority complex or feeling underrated or bullied for years will do. History proves time and again, it always helps to be physically short and undersized (in just about every Freudian meaning of the word) but not petite or Lilliputian, because you really shouldn't make it too difficult for people to see you in a certain way.

Chapter II: Remember, nothing is ever your fault!

As you go about building the foundations for your (inevitably, ever-more ruthless) propaganda machine, there are a few steps you will likely want to follow:

1. Always start your indoctrination efforts "early", as early as possible, in fact! No need to be too straightforward about it at all times! Remember, you can always dress it in a compelling narrative, story, melody, march, event, poetry contest, song, heroic paintings of the benevolent leader (always seen "from below", of course!). And don't forget about posters, monuments, graphics, TV and radio broadcasts, epic cinema productions by your homeland's best directors. Reaching for the likes of the classic western body-builder-turned-Hollywood-superhero-turned-governor can be risky, but you can always rely on some true legends of action films, like Steven Segal, to support your message of true grit, leadership and integrity.
2. Always make sure your version of world history and its most pressing contemporary challenges reaches as many of your compatriots and as often as possible. Generously reward loyalty and everyone for whom no opportunity for flattery or opportunistic gestures is to be wasted, no matter how spineless or unethical it makes them! Never forget that the most important thing is the clarity of your message in the eyes of the nation, so do your best to avoid and eliminate all noise, all unnecessary distractions. Luckily, the stronger you become, the more efficiently and "quietly" you will be able to silence your enemies (aka critics, opposition, and, eventually, any incarnation of think different). Sometimes put the severity of your punishment on public display, if only to show your strength and determination, while sowing primal fear in the hearts of many.
3. Be sure to often make use of flowery metaphors and heroic tales of sacrifice, with a unifying spirit and a sense of injustice and oppression you were born to fight against, so that everyone who is to lay down their lives "for a cause" is always fully focused on it. Remember, you're superhuman! Anything human is just not enough, so why risk unnecessarily that anyone might want to turn their gaze, even for a brief moment, towards any of your all-too-human qualities and motivations. demiurge and the direct perpetrator of all "confusion".

Chapter III: The lessons of the greats before you

Finally, always let (and help!) people believe that the best that could happen to them in their miserable little lives is you, the "benevolent dictator"! Always caring, yet strong and firm, a true father to the nation, independently and tirelessly solving the smallest and the greatest of issues and dilemmas, day and night. Never stops caring for and thinking about everyone, especially those perfect little children in perfectly white shirts and with perfect hair. Here's a little video, one of many, illustrating much of the above. It goes back to 2017, mind you. A year earlier, a very different song was posted on YouTube and has since recorded over 42 million views. As irony would have it, even this heavily satirical portrayal of Russia's notorious dictator would normally have an image-warming dimension to it, were it not for a single decision in February 2022, and its deadly consequences, unfolding before the world's eyes.

Many excellent biographies and history books have already been written about tyrants and psychopaths of the worst kind. Some of them were even supposed to be priests and painters, but things din't work out quite the way they wanted. What the world didn't know at the time was how they might go about venting their anger and "making the world a better place".

The oldest of habits die...much harder than we'd like to think

One of the countless reasons why I love talking to very(!) different people at very(!) different conferences (both on- and offstage) is the sheer diversity of their viewpoints, backgrounds, perspectives, the amazing wealth of their experience, knowledge and the wild variety of topics and disciplines they so often represent (and feel passionately about). Emceeing events and debates almost automatically forces your brain to instinctively operate in the out-of-the-box (aka think different) terrain, which, over the years, becomes an instinctive preparations ingredient.

Daily access to such an amazing diversity of backgrounds, egos and personalities inevitably makes you an ever more astute, humble and careful observer. Over time, you are hopefully able to reduce the impact of cognitive biases on the final outcomes of your thinking, performance and on-stage reflexes. Continuously improving your observation skills, however, is not an easy 'blessing' to live with, not in a world where ignorance continues to enjoy its blissful status and political leadership is so easily confused with pathological reasoning dysfunctions, at best.

If you have lived your entire life in a remote Siberian village and did next to nothing about it, chances are your daily requirements for intellectual and emotional stimulation will be a very easy prey for atavistic political storytelling, assuming that winning your vote still matters for the continuity of power and influence.

Every now and then (i.e. far too often, and in far too many places), the world becomes a stage for systemic, premeditated acts of unimaginably barbaric violence, the kind that makes it really difficult to believe there may even be a future (let alone a sustainable one) for a civilization that, despite centuries (if not millennia!) of "lessons learned", still finds it next to impossible to free itself from its atavistic need to unleash a true hell, here on Earth, preferably starting with your immediate neighbours.

The power of distance...to yourself

I sometimes wonder if it would change anything if everyone could somehow (magically, if you like) take a brief look at this planet of ours from a distance, from outer space – if only to, for a brief moment, replace the sensation of powerlessness with that of weightlessness, to realize how ridiculously primitive our warmongering motivations still(!) are! And how little they have changed since time immemorial.

If there is one thing that the past few years have proved beyond reasonable doubt, it's that the world can change almost beyond recognition in a matter of days (see COVID19). If there is one thing the past few weeks have proved beyond reasonable doubt, it's that one man's ill-fated decision can turn the lives of millions into an absolute horror, literally overnight, and no existing systemic checks and balances, precautions and alliances can stop it before it's too late. Worse still, in most cases, the very people who ultimately push the 'unleash hell' button are often left to build themselves glaringly authoritarian immune systems for decades, worthy of the most notorious magalomaniacs in history, before things spin out of control. And spin out of control they always do. Remember how long the gentle individual on the November 1997 Newsweek cover was eventually allowed to pursue his idea of a functional, mature and well-managed state?

Leadership extremes

Portentous and apocalyptic as it may sound, it's really quite simple, while easier said than done, of course: our world will never become a (sustainably) better place, unless humanity redefines and relearns the ultimate responsibility and accountability attached to the very concepts of leadership and puts effective compliance and risk-management mechanisms in place. In other words, tolerance for mediocrity, inadequacy, buffoonery, populism, disinformation, unintelligence and insensitivity is what is killing us – less visibly than guns and bombs, perhaps, but far more effectively in the long run, assuming we still have a long-enough track left to change our ways.

What the world needs (more urgently than ever before, perhaps) is a profound redefinition of what we can and what we really can't put up with in those who assume leadership roles, especially at national and international level. Otherwise, we may as well keep turning a blind eye for decades to individuals (and blood-thirsty immune systems they build, once left to their own devices) up until their pathological inferiority complex mutates into evil of truly mythological proportions, making the world rediscover its ultimate fragility, over and over and again.

Ironically enough, with the pressing challenges of climate change and our progressive impact on multiple natural ecosystems, we might just have a lot less time to do it than we're prepared to admit (see denial).

Ignorance is bliss

If there's one thing our world has consistently been exceptionally good at proving, time after time, century after century, it's that ignorance really is bliss, and there seems to be no such thing as too much (systemic) denial or hypocrisy. As a species, we may be reaching the critical-mass point in multiple life-changing areas, beyond which there really seem to be no alternatives but to rethink our thinking and recalibrate our actions.

Historically, there seems to be only one 'social phenomenon' capable of bringing about a qualitative/quantitative change of such unprecedented proportions. The word is LEADERSHIP, albeit the kind that truly inspires, unites, builds trust, love and understanding across countless differences and infinitely diverse boundaries this global village of ours has become so full of.

If there's a glimmer of hope in all that, a symbolic yet very powerful light at the proverbial end of the tunnel, it's probably humanity's unbelievable capacity for goodwill, generosity and bottom-up initiatives that, more than anything else, perhaps have the power to become the necessary catalysts for a truly lasting, positive change, somewhere between revolution and evolution.