Why I Don’t Believe in Our Leaders Anymore

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There’s one place in the world where I feel my burdens and fears lift these days. Here we are this weekend, my lovely wife and I. Strolling through Paris. And the heaviness in my heart seems, slowly, step by step, to vanish into…where? And why only here?

We go to our favorite cafe. Nothing fancy. Just a neighborhood joint, popular with the locals. Two old men sit down beside us, father and son. They laugh. The father says, young people and their phones, shaking his head. Dad, says the younger one, who’s not young at all: this is how people live these days.

My wife and I smile at one another. The waiter arrives. An old friend. How are you, he cries. I order my usual, which is a cheeseburger and a cafe Viennois. He shakes his head dramatically. You’ve got to have some nerve to order the most American and then the most French thing on the menu. We’re old school. He gets the joke.

My wife talks about fashion. What a…what a disgrace it’s become, the spectacles of fashion week. She used to be a runway model. These days, we look at fashion—trash-shaped denim, masquerading as couture, branded under the name of long-dead creative geniuses. And we wince. I laugh, quietly. This is how people live these days, I say. She gets the joke.

Inside, I’m elsewhere. I dread most days. I feel the pulsations of grief and rage and pain tearing the world apart. They batter me and bruise me. I’m the walking wounded. The trenches are my home. In Paris, though, something’s different.

Inside, with the worry easing, the haze of despair clearing, a sudden thought enters my head.

Why I Don’t Trust Our Leaders Anymore

I don’t trust our leaders anymore.

Now, that’s not a particularly original thought, I understand. But let me try to explain it to you, in context, through the funny and strange story of why I feel better in Paris.

There are two ways that people think of leaders these days.

The first is that they hope they’ll have the answers. Maybe all the answers, or at least some of the answers. In other words, some of us approach leaders with the hopeful eyes of competence. We trust that they’ll do the job, as best they can. That they’ll know what they’re doing, better than the rest of us.

And so we work assiduously. To get them elected, or convert our friends to their cause, to make others true believers in this sort of belief we share, that if we can only help get these people into positions of power, hey presto, things will change.

The other view of leadership is the opposite, and it’s more cynical. It’s that leaders aren’t to be trusted. They’re malign figures, who know how to game systems, and are self-serving, interested in their own power, fortune, advantage.

At the extreme, of course, this perspective becomes the belief that leaders are installed by ultra-powerful age-old groups like the Illuminati or whatnot.

So this is sort of the spectrum of people’s attitudes to leadership. It ranges from hopeful to outright cynical, and in many cases, at the same time, for different figures. Those who truly believe in Kamala, for example, are deeply cynical about Trump, and vice versa.

Now. I point all that so that you sort of interrogate your own beliefs. As I sat there in this cafe, I began to realize: I don’t believe in our leaders anymore.

But not in the way of either of these positions, really.

In a different way.

Let me explain.

When I look at our leaders, most of all, do you know what I see? Not puppets installed by conspiracies, not even malign narcissists, not even climbers of hierarchies.

I see people who are out of their depth.

Our Leaders Are Out of Their Depth Because This Age is Different

If we were to make a kind of ideal leader today, what would we want that person to understand? To know? In deep and sophisticated ways?

To ask that question is almost to design a curriculum, if you like, for 21st century leadership.

Mine would go like this.

• I’d want them to understand, deeply, and be able to memorize, and then repeat back to me, in painstaking detail, climate tipping points, how close we are to each one, and in what sense each one matters.
• I’d want them to understand, and be able to repeat back to me, in what ways our economic paradigms have failed, around the world, why, and what precise failures they can point to. For example, poor countries like China didn’t develop stable middle classes, while America’s fell apart, and in that regard this paradigm didn’t work.
• I’d want them to be able to articulate to me the pros and cons of our various forms of political economy, and their social contracts, and tell me their history. For example, America’s gotten nominally richer than Europe, but of course Europeans by and large enjoy far better lives, on almost every dimension, and that’s sort of the most basic difference between predatory capitalism and social democracy today.
• I’d want them to tell me why authoritarianism rises, what ignites waves of fascism, and how to defuse these time-bombs for society, according to the great lessons of history, which we gleaned from the 1930s through the 1970s.

Now. That might sound like a lot—or it might not, I don’t know. I don’t think it’s a lot. Not to ask of people who want to be leaders. Of countries, companies, cities, institutions—doesn’t matter.

I think these are the basic pillars of knowledge we should all have, in fact. But we don’t, because our systems don’t inculcate these in us. And in that sense, our systems are obsolete, but I digress a little.

I’m pretty sure that if I asked leaders—and you could choose who they are, because it doesn’t really matter—99.9% of them would get a flunking score. On every single dimension above.

I doubt, for example, that Kamala could tell me about climate tipping points (let alone Trump.) That’s not a dig. I want you to think about this with me analytically and carefully. She’s a career prosecutor. She’s not trained or schooled in climate science, and certainly her speeches and policies don’t exactly reflect a burning need to avert climate catastrophe. So I doubt—highly doubt—like I said, that she has a working knowledge of this.

And that’s not me getting her. It’s not a criticism of her, really. It’s a criticism of the way we develop leaders. I don’t think most of our leaders could answer that question well, because they’re not educated in it. The only one who appears to know the subject of climate tipping points well, if at all, is the UN Secretary General, who’s obviously passionate about the subject, and maybe those in his vein.

But the rest? It’d be flunk city. I’d bet they couldn’t even give me a list of tipping points, let alone a ranked one. And that’s sort of not okay.

Why Leadership’s Flunking Out Of the 21st Century

LOL, I put that in caps for a reason. What is it we want leaders to do? Solve problems. But you can’t drive a car if you don’t…know how to drive. You might crash it, or go around in circles, or never end up where you want to go.

And this is what’s happening to our civilization, because our leaders are out of their depth.

Now that I’ve sort of given you the idea, let me try and put that more formally.

Our leaders lack the knowledge of the very problems they are tasked to fix. All aspects of that knowledge. There are many aspects of knowledge. So climate tipping points, for example, demand a certain level of technical knowledge. Understanding how authoritarianism arises, a kind of historical knowledge. Mastering the ins and outs of economic paradigms requires historical and technical knowledge both. And understanding why some social forms are superior to others requires synthetic knowledge.

I’ve come to believe that our leaders lack all of this knowledge.

What happens is that they try and make up for these gaps through hierarchy and organization, which is how we humans handle complex tasks. But in this case, it’s not working.

So they’ll hire advisors and so on. Who’ll of course try to tell them to do this or that, or try this and that, or that this idea might work better than that one.

But this doesn’t make up for a leader’s lack of knowledge in itself. Substituting an advisor’s knowledge isn’t the same, because of course the advisor isn’t the one with skin in the game, the one facing the moral weight of action, the one bearing the burden of responsibility.

Meanwhile, the more that all that is shifted onto advisors and surrogates, the less effective our leaders get, because then they’ve just shirked responsibility for their job.

See the paradox there?

So this approach isn’t working.

Leaders with zero competence, or next to it, in all the great problems we face as a world and civilization.

It’s a huge problem in itself now.

How do we choose leaders, anyways? Well, the way things work—at their best, which is in our democracies—is that people rise through party ranks. Anointed by insiders of older generations, previous power figures, perhaps, the way that Barack anointed Kamala, and Biden stepped aside for her, endorsing her.

None of this is good enough.

Just because yesterday’s power figures judge you worthy of power—that might have been OK in an Age of Stability—but today? It’s more or less meaningless. Sure, it might mean you have the right temperament or demeanor. It might mean you’ve put your time in in the party hierarchy.

But it doesn’t mean—absolutely not—that you know anything about the great problems of today. In the way we’ve discussed. That you have a working knowledge of climate change, modern economics, politics, social thinking, and so on. It doesn’t ensure any of that—in fact, it almost ensures you don’t, because of course to be anointed by the old guard is also for them to regard you as not too disruptive or different or difficult.

So this model is failing on several counts. The way we develop leaders is failing, because the way we choose leaders is failing. It doesn’t matter anymore that insiders think this person is Going to Make an Awesome Leader in an age where that very insiderness, its paradigms, approaches, assumptions, objectives, created much of the mess we’re in. It doesn’t help anymore that these institutions and this approach fail to create leaders that know much about the world in this most modern and urgent of senses.

How I Don’t Believe in Our Leaders Anymore

So I don’t believe in our leaders anymore.

Not in a cynical way—they’re puppets, installed by the Illuminati! They don’t have to be. They’re just self-serving figureheads! Maybe, but even that doesn’t explain this level of incompetence.

What does is that they’re…actually…incompetent. And I know that sounds harsh, but again, I mean it in a technical, analytical, careful way. They haven’t been taught the basics about the modern world, and I mean that, not in grad school, not as they ascend through the ranks, never, because who does teach this stuff in school, almost nobody, not enough, anyways—and so not knowing it, when it comes time to wield power…they don’t know what to do.

They sort of flail. They fumble the ball. They say, at best, we’re the lesser evil. Or sometimes they profess that their hands are tied. Doesn’t matter. Problems never get solved, and worse, weirdly, it seems that leaders are uninterested in solving them, but more than that, sort of bewildered by them.

And that leaves the rest of us sort of terrified and panicked, as things grow more and more destabilized by the day—judge for yourself how much worse you feel than a decade ago, but I’d bet almost all of us do, to some degree.

To believe in our leaders again, I’d need them to master the knowledge of the 21st century. That’s not the hard part—reading some books, watching some movies, absorbing it. The hard part is wanting to do it, versus thinking you don’t have anything new to learn. That’s where most of our leaders are, and its painful to watch.

Because this isn’t the old world anymore. That’s painfully clear to all of us. But not to one group in society, our leaders—and that’s why trust in them is cratering so fast, because this gulf is huge, apparent, and pretty startling. Lots of us are learning about these subjects, as fast as we can, but only our leaders seem hell-bent on not doing that.

The Test of Leadership is Human Possibility, aka…

All of which brings me back to Paris. Why do I feel so much better here? These stones and these avenues have seen all this before. And these cafes I sit at—they have, too. Here, I do what so many before me have done. There I am, sitting. I light a cigarette. The city streaks by. Night falls. I think my thoughts. This is how the world should be.

And the world goes and does what it does, anyways.

This is the city where the existentialists created the world anew. Where the revolution freed the peasants. Where the Nazis prowled, and then fled, in disgrace. The place where artists and writers and designers created the most modern of freedoms.

And in all that, through all that, today, it’s a place where you can be in a certain way. Not in an indifferent one. In a tragic one, I suppose, still so full of care, responsibility, truth, love. It would be irresponsible not to love. It would be reckless to. Where does that leave us? This is the question we wrestle with. It’s why cafes were invented, I guess, go ahead and laugh with me.

The world goes and does what it does, anyways.

The chairs at the cafes always face the street. This is the story of modernity, in a sentence. This is how people live these days. We are here, first, to see each other.

In all that, leadership is understood as a test, not of morality, not of action, but of existence, of being, of duty, a kind of brotherhood and sisterhood. Which, when an age can’t pass, figures like me sit, at the cafes, watching the night fall. It would be irresponsible not to love. It would be reckless to. In between, lies the struggle, for life, against death.

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