Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Leadership Page 2 of 5

Do The Same Sorts Of People Lead All Societies?

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On August 11, 2025

35 Comments

There often seems to be an assumption that leaders everywhere are the same: that there is no real difference between leaders in different countries or at different times.

It’s true that leaders generally share some attributes: almost all want to lead and want power. But beyond that, no.

Think a little about how leaders changed over time in America. Can you really say that the same port of people run politics or corporations today as when FDR was in charge or during the post-war period?  The people then were builders who were expanding the social safety net and increasing the middle class, not the upper. The corporate leadership was dominated by engineers, not by MBAs, and many had started at the bottom and risen to the top.

Or think about the leadership of Europe before and after it was conquered by America and the USSR and split up. These were not men who were automatically subservient to outside powers, without national pride and without ambition.

Think about China under Mao and then China today. The people who ran China under Mao, then during the Deng era, and even in Xi era, while they have some continuity, show significant changes. Over the entire history of the CCP party members are selected, not self-selecting and under Xi’s rule, they’re increasingly chosen based on technocratic accomplishments combined with belief in Party principles. To compare them to the shysters who run America, or the bloodless technocrats of Europe is insane.

In the past we’ve chosen leaders primarily based on military skill and heredity. Leaders of hunter gatherer bands (smaller groups, not all hunter-gatherers have had band formations) were often chosen not for aggressiveness but patience and lack of temper.

Leaders are different in different societies, whether different in space or time. They have different characters, different abilities and different goals. The political elites of 1933-1968 or so in America are very different from those who replaced them and that’s a relatively minor change compared to the replacement of feudal nobles by centralized court aristocrats who were then replaced by elected officials and appointed bureaucrats. Let alone the rise of the bourgeois and capitalists. Men of business think very different from aristocrats competing for court favor, let alone nobles who rule their own domains and armies and who consider even the King simply the greatest among equals. Such nobles are vastly different from Roman imperial bureaucrats or the Senatorial families and elected officials who ran the Roman Republic and were forced to come up thru the Cursus Honorum and actually learn how government works.

Of all the things we do as a society, selecting our leaders and deciding what power to give them is possibly the most important.

It’s something we’ve been very bad at for a long time now.

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The Loss Of American Leadership Competence Viewed From WWII

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On October 31, 2024

17 Comments

This is an elevated comment, from Stewart M.

By StewartM

What strikes me is our loss of leadership competency, from the extremely competent people who managed us through the depression and through WWII to the clowns of today.

I’ve been involved in Youtube exchanges where some idiot creates a video claiming how we “saved” the USSR in WWII via Lend-Lease. First, that is that factually untrue. The USSR saved itself; Lend-Lease was such a trickle in 1941-1942 that it had essentially NO effect on the Battle of Moscow in December 1941, and very little impact on the Battle of Stalingrad in the fall-winter of 1942. Stalingrad at the very least marks the point where “the USSR will survive and not lose” so Lend-Lease didn’t “save” the USSR. Lend-Lease did help the USSR, but the bulk of it (60 %) came in the last 10 months of WWII well after the USSR had turned the tide and driving back the Wehrmacht out of the USSR. The most important part of Lend-Lease help wasn’t the weapons we sent, nor the locomotives, nor the steel, nor the petrol, nor even the trucks (the most common ‘fact’ brought up). It was the food we sent–in 1942 42 % of the USSR’s arable land was occupied, and the USSR instituted a rationing program where soldiers, workers in essential industries, and children got first priority on food. If you weren’t one of those, you didn’t get much, and hunger contributed mightily to the USSR’s civilian death rate in the war. The FDR administration promised the USSR 10 % of US food production to help, but could only manage to deliver 3 %.

But my point in mentioning Lend-Lease is that such Youtubes miss the main reason why we did what we did in aiding the USSR. It wasn’t some act of friendship or mercy, we weren’t just ‘being nice’; we did it OUT OF ENLIGHTENED SELF-INTEREST. George Marshall and the US military leadership were not sure we could win WWII without Soviet help; at the very least if the USSR went down to defeat and Hitler obtained access to the USSR’s resources it would prolong both the length and sacrifice of the US and UK. The military problem the US faced was war both in Europe and the Pacific, with far-flung bases and long supply lines that “ate” up manpower and required a powerful Navy and Air arm to protect. We thus couldn’t raise an army of hundreds of divisions and supply it overseas, to do the work that the Soviets were providing the West by grinding up the Wehrmacht. Keeping the Soviets in the war was quite vital; ergo Lend-Lease.

In short, Marshall and his ilk had a clear and correct notion of what the US could do, and what it couldn’t do. The manpower restrictions on ground forces meant “no land war in Asia” which meant we wouldn’t field armies in China. Instead, we focused on a ground force manpower-minimizing “island hopping” strategy where we only took relatively few key islands and just left Japanese ground forces in elsewhere stranded and cut-off from supply. The bulk of the ground forces we did raise were going be used to defeat Hitler, whom Marshall correctly identified as the biggest threat to the US, given Germany’s technological skills and industrial base.

This kind of calculation is what we’ve lost. In WWII, we knew we were powerful, in some ways relative to the world more powerful then than now, but we knew we couldn’t do everything and that we shouldn’t even try. But after WWII, inside the US spread the notion (largely spread by conservatives and the anti-communists) that we had really ‘done it all’ and won the war without much of anyone’s help. Why did we cave to Stalin at Yalta? Why didn’t we let Patton drive the Soviets out of Eastern Europe? We had the bomb after all! (cue in Henry Stimson rhetorically patting his coat pocket). WE WERE OMNIPOTENT!

The first generation who acted on this belief, a belief definitely not shared by those who planned and executed WWII, was the “Greatest Generation” who had fought it as common soldiers when they assumed leadership—JFK through Reagan/Bush I. It led to Vietnam and to interventions everywhere, because we could and should impose our will upon the world. It was exacerbated when (as you say) financial means of scoring economies replaced measures of actual industrial capacity and output, from Clinton to today. What gets me is that the US’s leadership is more arrogant and more convinced of its supremacy despite the fact by all objective measures, whatever power the US actually has is far less relative to the rest of the world than the US during WWII during Marshall’s and FDR’s time. Yet Marshall and FDR knew we weren’t omnipotent and couldn’t ‘do it all’. And I fear nothing less than a massive comeuppance will change their attitudes.

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The Leadership Competence Crisis

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On October 7, 2024

22 Comments

By StewartM

(This is an elevated post by commenter StewartM.)

What strikes me is our loss of leadership competency, from the extremely competent people who managed us through the depression and through WWII to the clowns of today.

I’ve been involved in Youtube exchanges where some idiot creates a video claiming how we “saved” the USSR in WWII via Lend-Lease. First, that is that factually untrue. The USSR saved itself; Lend-Lease was such a trickle in 1941-1942 that it had essentially NO effect on the Battle of Moscow in December 1941, and very little impact on the Battle of Stalingrad in the fall-winter of 1942. Stalingrad at the very least marks the point where “the USSR will survive and not lose” so Lend-Lease didn’t “save” the USSR. Lend-Lease did help the USSR, but the bulk of it (60 %) came in the last 10 months of WWII well after the USSR had turned the tide and driving back the Wehrmacht out of the USSR. The most important part of Lend-Lease help wasn’t the weapons we sent, nor the locomotives, nor the steel, nor the petrol, nor even the trucks (the most common ‘fact’ brought up). It was the food we sent–in 1942 42 % of the USSR’s arable land was occupied, and the USSR instituted a rationing program where soldiers, workers in essential industries, and children got first priority on food. If you weren’t one of those, you didn’t get much, and hunger contributed mightily to the USSR’s civilian death rate in the war. The FDR administration promised the USSR 10 % of US food production to help, but could only manage to deliver 3 %.

But my point in mentioning Lend-Lease is that such Youtubes miss the main reason why we did what we did in aiding the USSR. It wasn’t some act of friendship or mercy, we weren’t just ‘being nice’; we did it OUT OF ENLIGHTENED SELF-INTEREST. George Marshall and the US military leadership were not sure we could win WWII without Soviet help; at the very least if the USSR went down to defeat and Hitler obtained access to the USSR’s resources it would prolong both the length and sacrifice of the US and UK. The military problem the US faced was war both in Europe and the Pacific, with far-flung bases and long supply lines that “ate” up manpower and required a powerful Navy and Air arm to protect. We thus couldn’t raise an army of hundreds of divisions and supply it overseas, to do the work that the Soviets were providing the West by grinding up the Wehrmacht. Keeping the Soviets in the war was quite vital; ergo Lend-Lease.

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In short, Marshall and his ilk had a clear and correct notion of what the US could do, and what it couldn’t do. The manpower restrictions on ground forces meant “no land war in Asia” which meant we wouldn’t field armies in China. Instead, we focused on a ground force manpower-minimizing “island hopping” strategy where we only took relatively few key islands and just left Japanese ground forces in elsewhere stranded and cut-off from supply. The bulk of the ground forces we did raise were going be used to defeat Hitler, whom Marshall correctly identified as the biggest threat to the US, given Germany’s technological skills and industrial base.

This kind of calculation is what we’ve lost. In WWII, we knew we were powerful, in some ways relative to the world more powerful then than now, but we knew we couldn’t do everything and that we shouldn’t even try. But after WWII, inside the US spread the notion (largely spread by conservatives and the anti-communists) that we had really ‘done it all’ and won the war without much of anyone’s help. Why did we cave to Stalin at Yalta? Why didn’t we let Patton drive the Soviets out of Eastern Europe? We had the bomb after all! (cue in Henry Stimson rhetorically patting his coat pocket). WE WERE OMNIPOTENT!

The first generation who acted on this belief, a belief definitely not shared by those who planned and executed WWII, was the “Greatest Generation” who had fought it as common soldiers when they assumed leadership—JFK through Reagan/Bush I. It led to Vietnam and to interventions everywhere, because we could and should impose our will upon the world. It was exacerbated when (as you say) financial means of scoring economies replaced measures of actual industrial capacity and output, from Clinton to today. What gets me is that the US’s leadership is more arrogant and more convinced of its supremacy despite the fact by all objective measures, whatever power the US actually has is far less relative to the rest of the world than the US during WWII during Marshall’s and FDR’s time. Yet Marshall and FDR knew we weren’t omnipotent and couldn’t ‘do it all’. And I fear nothing less than a massive comeuppance will change their attitudes.

The Hard Problem of Leadership: Scale and Good Leaders

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On April 2, 2024

15 Comments

This Post is by Purple Library Guy, aka Rufus Polson

Ian – this is elevated from the comments on my post, “The Hard Problem of Leadership.” The problems of leadership are scaling (for example, Athenian style direct democracy doesn’t scale, nor do city states), and selecting good leaders.

I have thought about this problem a lot. As a leftist, I come at it largely from noticing the two main strands of left wing thought–the relatively centralized state-oriented socialist strand, and the anarchist variety with its tendency to decentralized direct democracy. Both have fundamental problems of leadership.

But I have concluded that the distinction between the kind of leadership problem which is all about crappy leaders, and the kind of leadership problem wherein the governance doesn’t scale, are not mirror images. They are fundamentally different in kind. And what I have concluded is that the first kind of problem is insoluble: it is essential to any kind of large polity with powerful individual or small group leadership. It comes from the creation of a distinction between rulers and ruled, which results in the rulers having different interests, attitudes and culture, and information from the ruled. Almost inevitably they rule for the rulers (generally including some technocratic group that participates in rulership) rather than for the citizens. Furthermore, just because any civilization is made up mostly of the people, not the rulers, inevitably the rulers’ self-dealing and ignorance about the situation lower down are bad for the polity’s health and will pile up what Marx called “contradictions”. I could argue this at length, but for this discussion I’ll just assume it; I would like to note that individual leaders CAN occasionally resist all these factors and do good things, it’s just really bloody rare and tends to require major popular pressure to also exist. There are just mighty damn few Hugo Chaveses.

But the second kind, the problem that systems along the lines of direct democracy do not scale, is NOT insoluble. It’s a technical problem. And it’s a technical problem which has confronted hierarchical systems as well–they’ve just solved it better. This may be partly because solving this problem for direct-democratic, relatively leaderless systems is harder. It is probably also just that there has been a lot more work put into solving the problem for hierarchies. Just in the time I’ve been alive, organizations have gotten a lot better at doing hierarchy, allowing bigger transnational corporations, incredibly complex “project management” with special software assisting the processes, sophisticated communication technologies and so on. There are masses of software products for helping hierarchies organize, endless “business schools” dedicated to researching and teaching people how to effectively dominate subordinates and make large hierarchies effective, and so on and on.

But in a broad sense, many of these technologies would also be useful for creating a non-hierarchical, direct democratic organization that scaled. I have in fact figured out how to do it.

Before I describe it I’d like to talk briefly about why failing to scale is in fact a crippling problem. There are two reasons. The most important is, if you have a governance type that does not scale and you are opposed by a governance type that does scale, you lose. There’s no point in having lots of lovely little societies which then get assimilated by the Borg, or the Romans, or whoever else out-organized you. The second is that there are actually things that a large organization can do that are useful that a bunch of little ones can’t. For instance, there’s standards: Imagine you have a group of 30 anarchist towns, and they all use different railway gauges and electrical plugs and USB-like-thingies and http protocols. Besides that, there are projects that people might want to do which require mobilizing a lot of resources, like big bridges, or long railways that don’t break off at every town that decided they didn’t want to bother, or space exploration, or co-ordinated action against climate change. But really, the key problem is that decentralized small-scale organizations get eaten by large scale organizations. Anarchists know it’s true, they just can’t hack the leadership problems of centralized socialism so they pretend (centralized socialists know the anarchist critique of socialist leadership issues is true, but they want to win, dammit, so they pretend too).

So, how do you do it? How do you scale direct democracy and break the “iron law of oligarchy” and so on? Well, the fundamental problem with direct democracy as it gets larger scale is that of information/decision overload–people can’t be involved with all the decisions, there are too many. But consider that this is a problem with autocratic/oligarchic rule as well–one man at the top cannot possibly be involved in all decisions all the way to the bottom of the pyramid. There have been an amazing number of schemes dedicated to allowing the general will of rulers to be transmitted, so that all the little individual decisions follow that general will without the rulers having to pay attention to them. None have been perfect, hence the phenomenon of micromanagement and the tendency of organizations to subvert the intent of particularly annoying management decisions. But they work pretty effectively.

I have a group of ideas and principles for getting past this problem. The first is to separate the idea of any given person actually being involved in every decision from their right to be involved in that decision. In my scheme, most people aren’t involved in most decisions–but they could be if they wanted to, so if some group is making a decision that affects a lot of people and pisses them off, they can join that decision-making group and contribute to making that decision different.

The second is distributed, nested decision making and the principle that bigger groups’ decisions trump littler groups’ decisions. So, say there’s a group of people who work in a salmon hatchery on some stream. They’ve got a little decision making group for deciding how to run the salmon hatchery–but note that anyone can join it, they don’t HAVE to be working at the salmon hatchery. There is a broader group that is a decision making group about how to do things about the stream; it has sub-groups like the hatchery group, the sport fishing group, the marina association and stuff. There is a broader group than that for the whole regional watershed. OK, so, say the sport fishing group is deciding to allow some practice which is going to be a problem for the salmon spawning. The majority vote in that group is to allow that practice. But! A minority can vote to kick it upstairs; if say 30% or something think that this decision shouldn’t be made just by the sport fishing people, the proposal gets moved to the stream group–all the subgroups will now see the issue and vote on it. If the stream group think it’s too hot to handle it can get moved to the watershed group. So a vote by the stream group would overrule a vote by just the hatchery group, and a vote by the whole watershed group would overrule a vote by the stream group. Ultimately, a vote by the whole country overrules everything smaller. This turns on its head the autocratic approach in which decisions by smaller groups higher up overrule larger groups lower down.

Related to this, my approach suggests that in general, people should be expected to serve in a few decision making groups, and groups should generally have a few people randomly assigned to them by lot, like jury duty. This helps prevent little closed groups from getting insular about their decisions.

My approach requires substantial use of modern communications technology and software to help decisions get made. This allows for various factors that make even theoretically democratic organization turn oligarchic to be eliminated. Specifically, it escapes the agenda and the ability of someone to literally set the agenda, to define just what decisions get made and how they are framed. So the process at the level of a decision making group goes like this: Someone in the group identifies an issue that needs to be decided on. They submit an issue description and maybe a couple of possible decisions that could get made about it, to the group. A timer starts. There is a conversation thread about the issue, and anyone in the group can add decision options, so you end up with a few proposals of action that could be taken. When the time is up, the proposals are frozen and people can vote (also with a time limit). The vote is some kind of ranked choice setup, and the winning proposal is adopted. This avoids a problem often seen in US state-level voting on issues, where some group gets to carefully define a proposed solution, and you end up either getting their self-serving solution or you get nothing, so whatever issue isn’t dealt with at all. With this kind of software a decision making group needs no leader–anyone can initiate proposals, nobody can control an issue once it is raised. The software doesn’t currently exist, but lots of social software of equivalent or greater complexity does–it shouldn’t be that hard.

With this, it should be possible to have an organization in which small scale or specialized decisions get made at the small scale, but rarer, broader decisions to mobilize social resources on a larger scale can be made by larger groups, with no hierarchies, leadership or class structure required.

 

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The Hard Problem of Leadership

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On April 1, 2024

12 Comments

We have lived under representative democracy for a long time now, and while it has had its victories and there have been good leaders, it’s fair to say that most of the leadership, most of the time, has been bad or even evil, and that representative democracy has failed its biggest test—managing climate change and environmental collapse.

This is a Green Age After the Collapse Article. You can read the others (this is the fourth), here.

The other forms of leadership we’ve tried since the invention of agriculture have all, likewise, been more bad than good or have failed to scale well enough to protect themselves. Kingship, rank societies, big man societies, feudalism, imperialism, direct democracy and so on. On the economic side, when it’s not identical to the political, we’ve also tended to choose bad leaders, whether they were merchant lords, corporate CEOs and boards, guild masters or slavers. Most systems work well for a few generations, then fall apart. Seven generations when you’re lucky, more commonly three, as with neoliberalism.

Just thinking back over my life, I can’t think of a President who wasn’t doing more evil than good. This even includes Carter, who was the neoliberal leader before neoliberalism. The case for every other President is clear: Obama, for example, ramped up drone assassinations and encouraged the banks to steal people’s homes without the necessary paperwork, while massively ramping up shale oil and gas production and bragging about it.

As for corporate leadership, the idea that Musk, Bezos, Gates, and the various banking CEOs and so far are good leader is ludicrous. They are, to be sure, successful, but the society they have created is heading towards catastrophe. Even when you look at a man many worship, like Steve Jobs, you find a mixed legacy at best. Jobs opus was the smartphone. And while it’s a marvelous piece of technology, when you look at the actual literature of the effect of smart phones, it’s that the more you use one, the less real friends you have and the more unhappy you are.

And the weird thing is that Jobs didn’t even invent the underlying breakthrough, which is to say the graphical GUI, any more than Gates invented the PC (Jobs has a better shot there). And the people who make the most money out of the internet and the world wide web didn’t invent either of those things—both were invented by government supported researchers.

What Jobs and co did is bring certain ideas to scale, which is necessary if the idea should be brought to scale. But there are many different ways that an idea can be scaled and it may not require the sort of psychopathy that is common to corporations; that is, indeed, part of their DNA.

Leadership is one of the few core problems: if we can’t get it right, we can’t get anything right, because almost everything is downstream from our decisions as a species, and our leaders, whoever they are, make the most important decisions.

We have to select leaders better, or we’ll never live in good societies for any length of time, and those of us who do luck out and live in one, will indeed, just be the recipients of luck.

I’m going to write about this more, soon. The next step will be talking about Plato and the book of his everyone loves to hate, The Republic.

Because Plato’s specific solution might be repulsive to almost everyone, but he was trying to answer the right question, and we need to understand why we hate his answer, and if we’re right to do so.

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The Essential Political Skill For Ordinary People

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On August 28, 2023

19 Comments

Is knowing who to trust.

The people were right to trust FDR and probably right to trust Eisenhower, for example. (Truman was a much worse president than his reputation.)

Clinton and Obama could not be trusted, both made things considerably worse for their rank and file followers and did so deliberately.

We’re about a third of the way there: a lot of ordinary people have realized they can’t trust ordinary elites. They’re increasingly open to people who don’t feel like the normal politician.

This is behind Brexit, Trump, the rise of LaPen in France. It was behind Corbyn’s rise and how well Sanders did.

But there are large gaps. Distrusting the neoliberal technocrats who joined the EU and slowly immiserated almost all of Britain outside of parts of London made sense, but turning to Boris Johnson indicated monumental bad judgment. I think Brexit could have been a boon, but not run by Boris and the Conservatives, because what they objected to in the EU was the good stuff, not the evil.

In America, people turned to Trump, who presented himself as a right winger FDR: the class traitor who knows how the system works but is out for ordinary people. (Although religious fundamentalists who voted for him were right to trust him. He’s not Christian in any meaningful way, but he delivered for them.)

Corbyn was a good sign: but ordinary people proved susceptible to a propaganda campaign. They trusted the media, which lied about 80% of the time with respect to Corbyn, and then they trusted Starmer, who could not have been elected Labour leader if he had not embraced most of Corbyn’s policies: which he has since walked back and which a pre-schooler should have known he never believed in, nor intended to honor.

In a democracy you can’t be well led if you won’t support people who have your best interests at heart. It’s just that simple.

Now it’s true that elites have spent a lot of time and money building a media, intellectual and educational apparatus designed to make sure that people don’t learn good judgement in their childhood and if they stumble across a good judgement in their adulthood don’t stick with it. This isn’t precisely ordinary people’s “fault” but they, we, have to fix it, because sure as hell our elites won’t.

Every society has leaders. Even relatively egalitarian societies. It’s up to us to learn how to pick and support good ones.

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The Features of Good Leadership In Societies & Large Groups

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On March 18, 2022

15 Comments

Leaders have power. They often don’t have to care what happens to most people, because those people can neither help nor hurt them. As a result, most leaders act badly, and hurt great numbers of people.

There are three qualities you need in a good leader of large groups.

1) kindness to people who can never help or hurt them. This is the origin of seeing how people treat waiters or other service staff.

The problem with this test is that a lot of people want to be liked by everyone they meet and are good at making it happen. Bill Clinton was famous for making everyone he met feel important. He also signed the bill slashing Welfare and did various other things that hurt many Americans and people overseas, in particular imposing murderous sanctions on Iraq and bombing a pharmaceutical factory.

Still, it’s the first test. It’s less important than the second and third qualities.

2) concern for the affect of their actions on people they will never even meet.

Most people a leader will affect he or she will never meet. So they have to care about people they don’t know, or they won’t try and do right by them. Almost no major politician alive passes this test. Jeremy Corbyn did: he cared about everyone.

3) Willingness to take away the power of bad actors, even if that hurts them.

If you care about everyone and won’t hurt a fly, you can’t deal with people who do harm. This was Corbyn’s flaw: he wouldn’t remove staffers and MPs who stood in direct opposition to his policies and beliefs and who made it clear  they wanted to do him nothing but harm. The staffers took deliberate actions to make Labor lose the election and in 2017 the margin of loss was so small that Corbyn would probably have been Prime Minister if they hadn’t.

MPs could have been re-selected (made to undergo primaries when the majority of those voting were left-wing, to oversimplify) en-masse, but Corbyn never did that either. If he had, Labour would still be controlled by the left and would eventually back into power, whether Corbyn was leader or not. Instead Keir Starmer has done what Corbyn wouldn’t, and purged the party (of left wingers in his case) and, in fact, will probably back into power not because he is liked at all, but because people are sick of Johnson and the Tories.

The task of any form of selection of who leads is to select good leaders. It is clear that representative democracy does not do so, and so we need to find a better way. This is true of groups we don’t consider governmental, but which really are, like corporations, as well.

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The Psychological Difficulty of Radicalization

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On January 25, 2022

18 Comments

“Radical” is a slur word in most of our discourse. “A radical” is someone who thinks society needs truly fundamental changes. If you are a democrat in a monarchy or a one-party state, you’re a radical. If you believe in equal rights in a state with rights based on rank, you’re a radical. If you believe in fascism in a democratic state, you are also a radical, and if you want to go back to women not having the vote and blacks only being able to vote in theory, you’re a radical, though we tend to call that style of radical a reactionary or sometimes a Republican.

Another kind of radical, perhaps the most common in our society, though still rare, is the type that believes that capitalism has to go away; that fundamental economic relationships shouldn’t be determined through markets controlled by capitalists. (You can be for markets, and against capitalism, weirdly, though it’s rare.)

It’s clear our societies have failed. We pretend they haven’t because the final collapse hasn’t happened, but that’s like saying that the Titanic hadn’t sunk after it hit the iceberg. Technically true, but believing it will get you hurt, bad. Might be good if other people believe it, though, while you sprint for the lifeboats.

The argument for this is tedious, and I’ve made it many times so I won’t bother here.

In the face of a failed society, trust in leaders is insane. Crazed. They’ve obviously run society off a cliff, and they either are okay with that or are incompetent, or both. (And the smart ones are selling you the line that everything is okay while they sprint for the lifeboats: a.k.a., New Zealand.)

For over ten years now I’ve been telling Americans to get out. Oh, it’s not that the US is the only developed nation heading for failed state status — for all intents and purposes there are no exceptions, not even Sainted New Zealand, but the US is one of the leaders in the failed-state race (Britain’s another), and I have a lot of American readers. If you’re going to have everything go sideways into a propeller, better later than sooner.

But most Americans won’t or can’t get out, and Musk and Bezo’s dreams of escape to space aren’t going to happen for humanity en-masse, not in time.

We’re all in a big ship, and it’s going down. Some areas are already underwater, others will be soon, and the entire thing is going to sink.

And we have no lifeboats. We could, perhaps, have built some, if we’d started 30 to 40 years ago with massive investments, but we didn’t, and if our leaders were that able, they’d have been able to save the ship, since that’s when they had to act.

But this article isn’t about how “we are fucked,” it’s about how “too many of us refuse to admit it and that it means we need radical change.”

And one of the big reasons for this is the need for “Daddy.” One of the big hurdles preventing radicalization is that becoming radicalized means you realize you can’t trust your leaders at all. That they have fucked up, betrayed you, or both. That they are bad, evil people who not only aren’t acting in your best interest, but are your enemies.

I’ve been pounding this issue for a couple  years, and some regular readers are probably sick of it. I am.

But it matters. If you don’t accept, psychologically and intellectually, who your enemies are, you can’t protect yourself from them. If you don’t accept, psychologically and intellectually, that your leaders are your enemies, you can’t properly take action on your own, with friends, family, and other groups — because at some level, you’re still thinking that government or corporations will come through and take care of things.

All your life, government and corporations have taken care of you. They’ve often been abusive parents, but they have made sure there’s food available to buy, streets to walk and drive on, laws, jobs, etc, etc. They run almost everything and you’re dependent on them for almost everything just like  you were dependent on your parents and teachers when you were a child.

Bad parents still feed and house you. They’re monsters, but monsters who kept you alive. Children love their abusive parents even as they fear and hate them, and the same screwed up psychology pertains to business and government leaders, and those they lead.

An entire life’s conditioning works against radicalization in anyone for whom the system has even slightly worked.

But the fact of the matter is that if we want to handle climate change, environmental collapse, or any of our other problems (“handle” doesn’t mean “stop,” but many problems are essentially trivial, and could be fixed any time our leadership wants to, like health care or spam calls), that means we need radical change. We need to change our system completely, and we need to get rid of our entire current leadership class, all of whom have proved their incompetence and ill will.

That’s radical. That’s a leap.

And that’s hard.

But acknowledging that there will be no real help from above until radical change happens is necessary, for the world, and if we can’t change them before they defenestrate themselves after trying to shove us all out the window first, to protect and care for yourselves in the face of a malign government and corporate class.

Corporate and government daddies and mommies aren’t going to save you. They’re the ones hurting you. They’re the ones making your life hell and destroying your world.

Accept that at your core.

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