To have a great country (more to the lines of having a utopia), you gotta have great leaders, so how do we go about making sure we have phenomenal leaders?
I was thinking more of the lines of starting a ‘school /training centre/’ to cultivate and nuture ‘highly potential’ children (high iq, strong psychological stability, strategist, traits of being dedicated sacrificial, etc) througout their lives.
Training them to avoid corruption, bribery, excessive personal gain, etc. (any other suggestions?)
Helping them to acquire the qualities to be great leaders. Provide top education, etc.
They will be trained to work together and cuz in the end, it’s not about choosing the best to be president but rather ALL who qualify to lead the country together.
Considering that we sometimes get leaders that many times are not to ‘par’, might this be a good suggestion? (I realise it’s gonna be quite hard and complicated to implement or even allow such a thing, but please help me to understand the complications AND how we can overcome such complications)
If one of your Elite units wins a battle, there is a 1 in 16 chance that you will get a Great Leader out of it. If you are a Militaristic civ, the chance is doubled. If you build the Heroic Epic, then your chance of getting Great Leaders also goes up. I think what you are suggesting is a combination of the Heroic Epic and War Academy.
A special school is something I oppose, because that would limit leadership to a select few privileged members of society. Arguably that’s already the case, however it isn’t institutionalized yet, but rather a side effect from rigid power structures.
Being somewhat of an idealistic dreamer, I don’t value the current qualification of a president as much. The qualification I mean is the ability to garner enough support in a political party and to excite the population in order to support his campaign. Sure, you’d have to have charisma and you’d learn every dirty trick in the book and what to promise whom to achieve your goals, but ironically those are the traits politicians are most loved and hated for at the same time.
I would like to see a test for the future president. Instead of having the political parties present their current champion every 4 years, I’d love to see an open application: Job Offer - Vacant position as president
Everyone could apply and the criteria crowblood wanted to apply (high iq, strong psychological stability, strategist, traits of being dedicated sacrificial, etc) would be the measurements for the candidates.
An impartial (more or less, because everyone is only human and has their own agenda) jury, possibly with foreign umpires, would select roughly a dozen candidates, who could then present themselves to the population for about 3 months. Afterwards and election is held and everyone can pick the candidate he is most comfortable with.
In case someone dislikes all the choices, there is also a negative vote (I don’t want that guy to become president) and the “I disagree with this whole election” vote, in order to gauge the populations satisfaction with the process per se.
More often than not, people aren’t voting anymore because they are convinced of a particular party or president, but because they are choosing the lesser evil.
A case might be made that such places already exist. In the UK, twenty-five prime ministers (out of, IIRC, fifty-one PMs) are graduates of Oxford University. In the US, even though many presidential candidates have campaigned through the years as coming from outside the traditional power structures and have stressed their down-home roots, a perusal through presidential biographies keeps turning up the names Harvard, Yale (especially post-WW2), Princeton, and Willliam & Mary (for the early presidents). Clinton gets to claim both Yale and Oxford.
Although these older “elite” establishments don’t exist purely for the purpose of turning out great leaders, I am sure that their governing bodies would claim that it’s a natural side-effect. Of course, you can’t set up schools that produce only those bound for the very top spots – that would be horrendously expensive per student, and there’s no guarantee that every graduate would get to be President/Prime Minister/Grand Poobah. So, they plan on training a cadre and expect that a few will make it to the very top.
Other countries have similar elite universities that have traditionally filled large numbers of government positions.
[I’ll leave someone else to give examples as I don’t have time right now.]
