The reason we have leaders goes back to 50,000 years. When Homo sapiens step foot on this
planet there were other hominid species that existed, but we survived and they died off.
And one of the reasons is because we work together. And for 40,000 of the 50,000 years
we've been on this planet we live in populations that were never bigger than about 150 people.
That all changed when we started farming 10,000 years ago. But there's still an inherent problem
with living in a population that's about 150 people. We're all hungry. What if somebody
brings food back to the tribe and dumps it on the ground? We all rush in to eat. And
if you're lucky enough to be built like a football player, you can shove your way to
the front of the line. If you're the artist of the family, you get an elbow in the face.
This is a bad system because the odds are that if you punch me in the face this afternoon
I'm probably not going to wake you and alert you to danger tonight. Bad system. And so
we evolved into hierarchical animals.
We are constantly assessing and judging each other all the time. Who's alpha to us? Who's
more dominant in the pecking order? Sometimes it's informal, but very often it's formal
like in an organization. We know what the rank structure is. People have titles that
inform us who's more senior and who's more junior. And when someone is more senior we
defer to them. So going back to those cavemen times when we assess that someone is alpha
to us we voluntarily step back and allow our alphas us to eat first. So our alphas get
first choice of meat and first choice of mate. And though I may not get to eat first I will
be guaranteed to eat and I won't to get an elbow in the face. Good system. Nothing has
changed in our modern day.
In other words we're used to deferring to and giving special treatment to those who
are higher in the pecking order. However, none of those perks come for free. You see
the group is not stupid. We don't give all those advantages to our leaders for nothing.
There's an expectation. There's an expectation that if danger threatens the tribe that the
leader, the one who's better fed and more confident, who's stronger, will rush towards
the danger to protect us. That's why we gave them her first choice of mate because they
might die first and we want to keep their genes in the gene pool. We're not stupid.
And so what makes us loyal and love and respect our leaders is when we know that they uphold
that deal. When we have visceral contempt for some of our leaders, like we have this
visceral contempt for some of the banking CEOs and their disproportionate salaries and
bonus structures it's because we know that they allowed their people to be sacrificed
so they could keep their bonuses and salaries. Or worse, they chose to sacrifice their people
to protect their bonuses and salaries. And this is why we do not trust them, we are not
loyal to them and why we sometimes have visceral contempt for them. But leaders we admire,
the leaders we follow are the ones that we know would sacrifice their interests to take
care of us. That's the deal. That's the anthropological definition of leadership. It is always balanced.
The perks of leadership are not free. They come at the cost of self-interest. They come
at the cost of taking care of those in our charge.