Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Leadership

This is not to discuss the qualities of leader with respect to management, but about the impact of the word leader, within our mind and our urge to follow certain leader or to become a leader. With in the context of this blog, a leader is one who can integrate certain component of the minds of a group of individuals and focus the integrated ‘social mind’ towards a fixed goal and be part of that ‘social mind’. The ‘social mind’ is common for all individuals in that group and hence the group is one entity with respect to that goal towards which the ‘social mind’ is focused. The success of that leader is the success of this group and hence how well the ‘social mind’ is integrated.

We have seen great leaders in history, who were capable of integrating the mind of a whole nation and achieve certain results, some of them are positive and some of them are destructive. On day-to-day basis we see leaders everywhere and we ourselves play the role of leaders at certain situations of our life.

Leadership is a quality rather than practicing a method. This statement may be much against all the ‘self help’ groups. This does not mean without inborn quality of leadership one can never assume the position of a leader. But how far happily and peacefully one can perform this integration of minds into a ‘social mind’ and focus that ‘social mind’ towards desired goal depends on one’s natural instinct of leadership.

Wealth and status are most sought commodities by every one of us. We consider education as a tool for making or achieving these commodities. There is no limit for these two commodities one need at any point of time. But we need a little more from what we have ‘now’ and this ‘now’ keep on shifting and hence the limit of wealth and status required are also keeps on shifting with ‘now’. In this race on moving with ‘now’ for capturing wealth and status, we seldom have any sensitivity towards our nature or the way our brain is composed of. On keeping pace with the race, we simply ignore our sensitivity (if at all we have) and hence simply ignore our own life itself.

The natural tendency or instinct expresses itself as our interests and we can easily identify them and align our life accordingly, if we have sensitivity towards our nature. If we follow our interests, we will be living our life naturally and in that living, possibly we can integrate a social mind with out any effort and hence become natural leaders. Unfortunately, seldom were we allowed to follow our interests and seldom are we allowing our children to follow their interests. We brainwash our children to become earning machines, with least attention to their real interests. On this race, we kill their sensitivity also and hence it appears that becoming an earning machine as their interest, for them too. When such children become earning machines and play the role of leader, they need enormous effort to play that role. Because they may not have any natural inclination towards the field in which they are in. In this effort, they lose their life or lose complete sensitivity towards life.

Our mind is bonded with culture, religion, status, beliefs, the knowledge acquired and many other things. With all these bondage, it is not easy for us to understand the truth of any subject. We create our own images of the subject based on all these bondages. Such images are seldom close to truth or reality. They are just images of us, but appear as truth for us due to the bondages we have. In other words, for any subject, we have very limited view as all the paths are blocked by our beliefs, our memory about the previous appearance of subject, and so on. With that limited view, we can see just a small portion of the subject and from that limited viewing build our own images about that subject.
When we have such limited view, any body who understand this limitation of us and capable of handling nice arguments around our view can easily hijack our minds and integrate them into a common ‘social mind’ and direct it towards their own goal. Alas! They are our leaders now! We have political leaders, we have religious leaders, we have cast leader, we have leader for our language, we have many other leaders for us…. Our own leaders!

Another person who can place counter-arguments for first one and if it appeals to us, we got our new leader…… Endless trap! What has been achieved by such leaders except achieving their own goals and making a section of our mind boiling? Of course there may be very few exceptions, who can integrate a worthy ‘social mind’ with respect to a society. But the majority of such leaders of yesterday, today and tomorrow are in this general category that uses the weakness of society for their own cause – may be the cause is noble for them.

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