Are leaders getting worse? Were they always this bad? How we make better ones?

In My Humble Opinion
1

An observation: Over the last decade or two, the quality of leaders seem to have plummeted. The recent presidents are a joke, our techbro elites are cray cray whiny man-childs, our pundits yell louder than ever yet say nothing much, our CEOs fail upwards while taking down entire companies and causing thousands of layoffs, bankers and cryptobros gamble with ordinary people’s life savings… it’s like we’re producing a generation of powerful but hollow men (and they’re usually men) who lack any sort of moral backbone or concern for anything beyond their own selfish greed (for wealth or power, or both).

At the same time, the masses have much greater awareness of all the fucked-up-ness all around them and routinely see the grand failures of their supposed superiors. Of course we’re kinda powerless to do anything about it, but I guess I’m just naively wishing for some sort of Great Leader to arise from the rabble and take humanity into the future, blah blah. Were there ever actually good ones like that, or were they just legends passed down through rose-colored nostalgia, from times when transparency was less the norm and public discourse and criticism wasn’t so easily recorded?

I look around and all I see are ordinary people being misled by evil and mediocrity, or worse, evil mediocrity, the sort of banal corruption that slowly unwinds a society’s greatness from within. Is it just me, or are our leaders really that bad? Is it getting worse? How do we produce/select/elect/empower better ones?

2

Shoot, sorry, this probably belongs in IMHO rather than GD. I haven’t posted in a while and forgot about that other forum, my bad. If a mod agrees, could you please move it?

3

This is far more likely to be a horror than a good. “Great Leaders” would be more likely to be a Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Mao or Trump 2.0 and not King Arthur.

It is a nice wish, but not one that is likely to end well.

I’ll move it over.

4

This is the kind of complaint that could have been made 20, 50, or 2000 years ago, rather like the one about young people being disrespectful.

In my opinion, a society makes better leaders by being better people and not being led astray so easily. Leaders who are not sincere only do what works, and if their manipulative tactics didn’t work, they wouldn’t be a problem.

The solution, as with everything, starts with you alone. Be a better person. Lead by example rather than manipulation. Also it helps to develop a broader outlook, including a better understanding of cultural history.

6

Be careful what you wish for. The last thing I want is a capital G capital L Great Leader.

7

All of them? Please describe how each is a joke.

8

I’ll throw out some theories, but I honestly don’t know whether/to what extent they’re true, nor whether/to what extent they account for the supposed poor quality of leadership nowadays.

  1. People in general are getting worse. People today do not have the qualities of character taught to them or developed in them to the same extent that they did in the past.
  2. The methods we use to choose our leaders are flawed: they do not select for, and may actively select against, the qualities we really want in a leader. (For example, what it takes to get elected is quite different from what it takes to be a good President.)
  3. Things aren’t really any worse than they have always been. Great leaders have always been the exception rather than the rule.
9

I’ll agree with two and three. Not so sure about #1, but I will say we the people aren’t very good choosing good leaders. Which is to say, we get the leaders we deserve.

I don’t think people are getting worse. By some metrics I think we’re getting better. But it’s much easier to not be a very good person, and very VERY easy for a potentially bad leader to appeal to those people.

10

And is this the key? From what I read LBJ was a horrible person, but things didn’t leak out to the public to the same extent back then.

My emphasis.

Maybe I don’t understand, but to me these two statements read as polar opposites.

11

No, we are getting worse. We as a society crave bullshit. The less credible, the better we like it. We want theater not governance. From poor Ronnie babbling about a shining city on a hill down to pussy grabbing demented Donald shattering everything we hold sacred, we’ve cheered them on. Because they give us what we demand - BULLSHIT!

The old hucksters like Jim Fulsom, Huey Long, FDR and LBJ paid off the populace. We got fair weights, good roads, public education, voting rights. They got rich and/or powerful but we shared in the process. And, they gave good theater. JFK was magnificent, even Truman confronting MacArthur puts the current clowns to shame. In that theater Trump and Reagan would have been laughed off the stage.

What do the new hucksters pay us for their power and privilege. We have unlimited access to semiautomatic weapons, they are mining university students for debt dollars, public schools inferior to much of the world, outrageous health care costs, outrageous pharmaceutical costs, increased collusion of government with religion, increased barriers to voting anti science propaganda all presented as FREEDOM.

The only hope is public education in the liberal arts. Good old Commie stuff like Jesus said ’ the commandments were made for people, not people for the commandments’. Move religion out of the schools and science in. Stop book bans. Fund college attendance. Restore our motto E Pluribus Unum, believe in the Constitutional goal of promoting the general welfare and act like civilized human beings.

How can we make better ones? That’s all I can think of right now.

12

You can’t. You have to make better voters.

13

The Party system is basically broken again. The Electoral College is a huge problem we’ll probably never get rid off, but should.

14

Yeah, my best guess—and it is just a guess—is that people are genuinely getting better in some ways and worse in others.

From what I’ve read, LBJ was a complicated person, and there was a lot of good and bad in him. For example, he was a racist, but also a champion of civil rights.

Maybe they are. I’m not insisting that any of my theories are true, let alone that they’re all true at the same time.

15

Not really, LBJ was the ultimate politician, he bought and sold power.

16

If you look back through all of human history, I don’t think you can say that current leaders are worse than they used to be. About all you can say us that leaders have generally been bad, with few exceptions.

17

The only thing that’s really gotten worse is that we let the principles of modern advertising and public relations craft our perceptions of the people we decide to vote for or against. It used to just be a matter of who’s going to do what’s best for me and my country. Now it’s who looks like they could play President on TV.

18

Even that could be confirmation bias or the availability heuristic. Maybe there have been lots of good leaders who have flown under the radar because they quietly kept things running smoothly.

19

Well this is the sort of question where everyone is going to come up with their own individual opinions on how and why modern leadership is failing to live up to their own personal and political ideals.

Firstly, what do we mean by “leadership”? People will have trouble agreeing on that. But broadly speaking, I think it’s someone who has an ability (and power) to inspire others to action that is right, moral, and smart. Especially when those actions are difficult and come with sacrifice.

I would say least here in America, it seems like we don’t have that. As a culture, Americans are obsessed with wealth, power, and superficial celebrity status. Most of the time, there are no real consequences to poor or stupid leadership or their constituents. Or if there are, they are often so abstracted that poor leadership can divert attention and blame.

For examples of good leadership, I would look at someone like Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelenskyy. He is doing what he believes is in the best interest of his country, in spite of overwhelming hardship and personal risk.

Or Dr Anthony Fauci during COVID in his attempts to guide people to do the right thing in the name of science.

But more often than not, leadership is about moron wrangling. At least 80% to 90% or more of people are useless morons who only care about their stupid interests. So they tend to pick leaders who facilitate that.

20

We had Obama, but a whole lot of people didn’t appreciate him.

21

There’s a lot of attention here on the political/presidential side of things, and I wonder if there isn’t some trickle-down effect where having bombastic fools as national executives creates copycats further down the social/corporate ladder?

The leaders themselves no longer have anyone to look up to, just their shitty peers around the world, all cut from the same cloth. We don’t even have a metal model for how it could be different anymore, much less a path by which to get there.

And then between only have bad leaders to choose from and the masses having no critical eye for most of them (and/or the power to choose better ones even if they saw through the bullshit), seems like we’re just kinda stuck lol. When the money dries up, is it all just going to collapse on itself?

All of them? Please describe how each is a joke.

We had Obama, but a whole lot of people didn’t appreciate him.

(sorry, I don’t know how to quote individual people)

I’m sure we all have our own opinions on the last few, but it’s been decades now where basically half the country hates the president at any given time, red, blue, or otherwise. In any other profession, a 50% score would be considered a massive failure. And then you can further subdivide them by demographics and basically my conclusion is that they’ve long served ceased serving the people and are just mouthpieces for a system that’s broken at a much deeper level.

Be careful what you wish for. The last thing I want is a capital G capital L Great Leader.

Democracy isn’t really working though, is it? Seems like it’s just circling the drain and that we’re headed towards global authoritarianism regardless. Thus, if we must have a capital L leader, can’t they at least have the capital G too…? Why must our dictators be mediocre too?