Trego's Mountain Ear

I am a sociologist – and it is difficult to look at any level of government without recalling Max Weber’s definition:

It is such a simple definition – possibly the simplest possible.  Max continues with a definition of power:  “Power is the chance to impose your will within a social context, even when opposed and regardless of the integrity of that chance.”

Phillip Bobbitt wrote “War is not a pathology that, with proper hygiene and treatment, can be wholly prevented. War is a natural condition of the State, which was organized in order to be an effective instrument of violence on behalf of society. Wars are like deaths, which, while they can be postponed, will come when they will come and cannot be finally avoided.”  Bobbitt graduated highschool at 15, and spent the summer at the White House (Lyndon Johnson was his uncle).  Bobbitt is bright – and his contribution to understanding today’s news can be condensed to the single sentence: “War is a natural condition of the State, which was organized in order to be an effective instrument of violence on behalf of society.”

Kind of fits in with Weber, and explains why our country, under the leadership of a long-term professional politician, is involved in war in Ukraine.  If you accept Bobbitt’s premise, that the State is organized to be an effective instrument of violence, it all makes sense. 

C. Wright Mills, a generation behind Max Weber, studied “the power elite”: “By the power elite, we refer to those political, economic, and military circles which as an intricate set of overlapping cliques share decisions having at least national consequences. In so far as national events are decided, the power elite are those who decide them.”

Another of Mills’ observations is: “A society that is in its higher circles and middle levels widely believed to be a network of smart rackets does not produce men with an inner moral sense; a society that is merely expedient does not produce men of conscience. A society that narrows the meaning of ‘success’ to the big money and in its terms condemns failure as the chief vice, raising money to the plane of absolute value, will produce the sharp operator and the shady deal. Blessed are the cynical, for only they have what it takes to succeed.”

He noted how corporations fit in with government: “For the corporation executives, the military metaphysic often coincides with their interest in a stable and planned flow of profit; it enables them to have their risk underwritten by public money; it enables them reasonably to expect that they can exploit for private profit now and later, the risky research developments paid for by public money. It is, in brief, a mask of the subsidized capitalism from which they extract profit and upon which their power is based.”

Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders?  Is worth reading as we consider who our leaders are:

“In fact, most leaders — whether in politics or business — fail. That has always been the case: the majority of nations, companies, societies and organizations are poorly managed, as indicated by their longevity, revenues, and approval ratings, or by the effects they have on their citizens, employees, subordinates or members. Good leadership has always been the exception, not the norm.

So it struck me as a little odd that so much of the recent debate over getting women to “lean in” has focused on getting them to adopt more of these dysfunctional leadership traits. Yes, these are the people we often choose as our leaders — but should they be?”

This is consistent with the finding that leaderless groups have a natural tendency to elect self-centered, overconfident and narcissistic individuals as leaders, and that these personality characteristics are not equally common in men and women. In line, Freud argued that the psychological process of leadership occurs because a group of people — the followers — have replaced their own narcissistic tendencies with those of the leader, such that their love for the leader is a disguised form of self-love, or a substitute for their inability to love themselves. “Another person’s narcissism”, he said, “has a great attraction for those who have renounced part of their own… as if we envied them for maintaining a blissful state of mind.”

When I was hiring people, my most frequent blunder was to accept that confidence for competence – I learned over a few years that presentation of self as competent doesn’t always correlate with top, or even average, performance, but mistaking confidence for competence stayed with me.  If we really are electing ‘self-centered, overconfident and narcissistic individuals as leaders, it’s fairly easy to see why our leaders are failing us – as voters, we’re making the same mistakes I made (and make) on interview committees.  As I look at our more recent presidents, the adjectives “self-centered, overconfident and narcissistic” don’t appear to be far wrong.

To end, with one more observation from C. Wright Mills: “All politics is a struggle for power; the ultimate kind of power is violence.”  Our professional politicians spend lifetimes dealing with this – and we wonder why they make decisions that lead to unneeded wars.  We may continue to vote based on their presentation of self – but we need to start voting against leaders whose performance sucks.