Unmaking Sense

Episode 5.04: Ten Reasons for the universality of the Cult of Leadership.

We consider 10 different reasons why we might be disposed to go on believing in the cult of leadership despite the fact that leaders have been responsible for so much of the misery that has befallen the world. Note: The title of Simone de Beauvoir’s book mentioned is “The Ethics of Ambiguity” not “The Ambiguity of Freedom”.

Episode 5.03: Unless we learn to control our nonconscious selves we become prey to manipulation.

Our nonconscious selves, our susceptibility to devotion to external influencers and our lack of self-understanding make us prey to those who would manipulate us to serve their own ends. By more self-consciously attending to the external influences we fall under - especially by refusing to buy into the myth of our need for leaders - we can take control of our lives and make the world a better and safer place.

Episode 5.02: The dangerous need for something outside ourselves that we think completes our selves.

The roots of our devotion to leaders lie in a defective notion of the self and behaviour that reflects a belief that we are made whole by things outside and beyond ourselves. The cult of celebrity and the cult of the leader. We need to unmake this mistaken sense of self to free ourselves from the Hitlers, Stalins and Putins of this world.

Episode 5.01: Unmaking our Sense of Self.

This is the first episode of a new series that will examine how we understand ourselves, how we misunderstand ourselves, and the need for us to unmake our sense of self. We begin by considering once again the misleading notion of consciousness and indeed introspection as a guide to who we are.

Episode 4.50: Monarchs, Presidents & PMs show the dangers of leaders with near-absolute power.

Anarchic collectivism would avoid vesting any president, monarch, emperor or prime minister with absolute power, and so save us from them and them from themselves. That we have never seriously tried to forge such models of collective leadership may reflect our unresolved yearning for god-like, all-wise, all-knowing, all-powerful external agencies. No living being can possibly deserve or live up to such impossible expectations.

Episode 4.49: We can’t just throw a switch and change the world, but the time to start is now.

The kinds of changes to our behaviour that would be necessary in order for us to become independent autonomous socially-responsible human beings capable of constructing a self-organising free leader-light society cannot be learned overnight. Least of all can they be achieved by throwing some kind of switch. So we need to start working towards the establishment of the kinds of political, social and educational systems that will move the world into a better place beyond this obsession with leadership. And the time to start is now.

Episode 4.48: Kropotkin and the Leadership Protection Racket.

Peter Kropotkin’s “The Conquest of Bread” and “Mutual Aid” as foundational texts in the search for a sustainable leaderless way of life. Belief in the necessity of leaders as a Protection Racket that is the cause of the problems it proposes it will solve.

Episode 4.47: Social self-organisation as better than anything on the Hobbes-Rousseau spectrum.

If we need a reason why the world needs an alternative to top-down leadership hierarchies as mechanisms of social organisation, the war being waged by Putin against the sovereign state of Ukraine is an excellent example. While the world - that’s you and me - goes on believing that we need leaders of this kind, that we need someone to tell us how to live beyond some kind of minimal decision-making, this kind of thing will go on happening and lives will be lost and ruined by megalomaniac self-important leaders ready to prey on the susceptibility of populations to believe that they need them. And the same goes for the likes of Johnson, Biden, Macron and Trump in so-called democracies.

Episode 4.46: Two ways we are dissuaded from living the present or try to stop others from doing so.

Parents often become concerned when their children become obsessed with some particular activity and misguidedly attempt to prevent them from continuing to do it. Well-meaning friends and others sometimes try to prevent us from doing what we think best to do right now because they don’t understand why we are doing it or the point of doing it, because it doesn’t make sense within their world. We should resist both these temptations to prevent one another from living the present to the limits of our ability.

Episode 4.45: Backing off the present makes its imperfections worse. We should engage with it more.

There is no suggestion in what I’m saying that the present needs to be perfect before we can live in it. On the contrary, the present is always imperfect but backing away from it only makes it more so. We would be surprised how much more we could learn and derive from the present - how much more we would enjoy it - if we engaged with it more wholeheartedly and fully.