https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=YaAItRIsgzk
Well, what I thought we’d talk about today is the difference between leadership and tyranny. And I’ll talk about why I’m picking those two things to juxtapose and what the difference is. And of course, we’re going to talk about not just leadership and tyranny, but also what a leader is. What is a tyranny? Let’s start there. A tyranny is a collapse of leadership into a leader or a head, because the leader is the head, right? It’s a flattening or a compression, a reduction of a large body, basically, into one point. And that point is the tyrant. And at the same time, you’re also compressing time, right? It’s a loss of time or merely sequence, although I’d argue those two are fairly well-related. When this happens, you’re losing a structure. And the thing about a structure of that nature is that it is the thing that allows you to have a relationship with something bigger than the people in it, right? Any individual in it can’t have a relationship with whatever that structure is going after. What then do we make of a leader? One has to clear a path that others cannot clear. And when you’re clearing a path, you’re out in front. That’s certainly true. They’re doing work for the benefit of others. They’re doing work that maybe they’re the only ones that can do. Maybe there are others that can do it, but maybe they’re the best fit for the job or the best fit for the job in the moment, or maybe they’re the right person for this particular job and the job will change up ahead. It doesn’t really matter. Does a leader have to be in front all the time? No, no, only when the path cannot be cleared by others, right? The leader is doing something that other people cannot do or cannot do as well. The remainder of the time, the leader needs to rest. They need to be not burdened by other things so that they can do the thing they’re best at. So then notice that the juxtaposition isn’t between a leader and a tyrant, right? Although I just covered those two things. It’s actually between a tyrant and leadership. So a leadership is not just a leader. So let’s explore that for a bit. So I want to define leadership as the hierarchy that exists in the world. As the hierarchy that exists across and along and inside a body. It exists in several parts. It exists in authority. It exists in reliability. It exists in consistency. It exists in structure and adjudication, right? When the structure is too rigid, you adjudicate, maybe you make an exception, right? It exists in the boundaries, in the constraints of the system, right? Which provide a barrier and in the telos, which gives you something higher to reach for and orient in relationship to. So a structure has to have a direction to go in. That direction is determined not merely by, oh, we’re moving away from this, but by the orientation that it has to the ideal. So that’s really important. Orientation to the ideal. Now, this structure, as I said earlier, allows you to be in communion, participate in something bigger than you, okay? You’re not going to make a cell phone by yourself. Maybe there’s one or two people in the world that could maybe do such a thing, although I tend to doubt it. So how do you make a cell phone? You work for a cell phone company. That structure helps you to build a cell phone. Then you can participate in giving cell phones to people, whether they’re paying for them or not, because almost all these big companies give their product away, by the way. And that’s really important. That’s actually one of the more important aspects, is that you’re able to do something, sure, because you’re able to do something, sure, you can’t do the whole part of it, but you’re able to contribute and participate in something bigger than you. And this orientation is bigger than a single person. And maybe it’s not bigger than any single person ever. Steve Jobs might be big enough to invent the cell phone, effectively, or at least the modern smartphone. And maybe no one else was or is or could have. And maybe it’s the combination of Steve Jobs plus the organization that he built, bought and rebuilt, if you want to get technical about it. I don’t know. But I think so. Worked for a lot of companies, seen a lot of things. That telos needs to be something that the structure can go towards. So the structure needs a body, not just an internal skeleton, right? Not just an internal, like, what would you call it? Not just an internal system, right? The system has to have boundaries to it, right? And that’s what we’re talking about. The internal system, right? The system has to have boundaries to it, right? Because those boundaries help the people in the structure, operating on the structure, to help the structure to orient towards the telos, to orient the structure inside and orient themselves inside the structure. So there’s lots of orientation going on. There’s an external orientation towards the telos, which is outside the structure. That’s what you’re participating in. You’re also participating in jiggering around the internal bits of the structure by orienting based on the boundaries of the structure, right? So that that structure either improves, right? Or at least keeps working, right? And that may be sweeping the floors. Sweeping the floors is really important. A lot of CEOs, especially ones that came up in the 80s and 90s, started out as janitors, really, and became Fortune 500 CEOs. And look, some of them had silver spoons, but they still started out in the mail room. And that’s actually really important to learn about the structure you’re managing. It’s not required. There are certain extraordinary individuals who can just run any old company, but that’s not you. It might be Elon Musk, but it’s not you. And it’s okay. You can contribute in other ways that are just as important. Everybody in a structure is replaceable in theory, not always in practice. So that idea of orientation, both internal and external, is super important. And of course, what is then a leader in that context? The leader is the head of the structure. Now, the authority doesn’t reside entirely in the leader. That’s not what the authority is. Sometimes the leader has no authority. That happens. And if you’ve seen that, you can look around and see it now. But that authority shouldn’t be collapsed into mere leadership. Because again, that’s a flattening, that’s a reduction, that’s a compression. You don’t want to do that. You want an enchanted structure with lots of moving parts where the authority is spread out. And so that the power doesn’t get condensed. And what do I mean by power? Power, in my model, is time, energy, and attention. T, very important. So you need a body to contain that power. You need authority to help adjust the structure and maybe move the boundaries of the body even. And you need a leader to keep that going towards the T-loss. That’s required. It’s not optional. Now, when this leader, who is hopefully exemplifying that higher thing, that telos, or at least the way, the path to the telos by clearing a path no one else can, that vision beyond which maybe the individuals can’t even see fully, maybe the leader sees it the best, but also not fully, when that leader fails to yield to the authority and ignore the advice and ignore the parts of the body that are required or the structure, then things start to break down. Disunity starts to dismantle the structure and malform the body, which is the only thing that can hold the journey. You’re not making one of these on your own by yourself. You need people. It is the body that’s holding that and the structure that’s holding that body in place. These are all separate components, but they’re not optional. You can’t privilege one over the other for any length of time. You have to pay attention to all of them. The leader fails to do that. The mission fails. Things collapse and reduce and flatten. That can turn into a tyranny. It can turn into lots of things. It usually just turns into a broken company. And it is a type of collapse. That’s the best way to think about it. And you’re taking it from an enchanted hierarchical structure down to a flattened tyranny with any part of the body, whether it’s through authority or through direct intervention. There are some interesting examples of this. One of the examples I like is to some extent during the Cuban conflict, the only leader that could reasonably navigate that situation was Jack Kennedy. Now, having me from Boston, I’m a kid. I’m a Kennedy fan, at least JFK fan. The rest of the Kennedys, you know, JFK, good guy. What he does is his wife and the wife of Khrushchev, I believe, the Russian premier, where they got along oddly because Jack, you can get along with anybody. And Jack kind of realized, I can pick up the phone and call Khrushchev. And he did. And he says, our generals are idiots and they’re going to get our countries into a war. And I don’t want to launch nukes at you. And I don’t think you want to launch nukes at me. And Khrushchev agreed. And they both stood down the troops before the generals who were getting heated made a mistake. And I know, I know, there’s this story about the Russian sub captain, whatever. But that’s an example. The body needs to be led. Sometimes it gets out of control. That’s what the leader’s for. And sometimes the leaders get out of control. That’s what the sub captain’s for. He’s part of the body. So you can see this dynamic, bottom up and top down reciprocal relationship. And I will argue here and now that that does not exist without a structure, ever. It cannot exist without a structure. And that structure needs a body. That structure, I sometimes call it container, needs a body. Right? That’s what it is. It’s the body. Otherwise, the structure collapses. And without the structure, the body collapses. And structures are generally rigid. Sometimes they get too rigid. Sometimes they get too soft. But you have to have them. And within them, you need authorities. Within them, you need the components of leadership. Right? You need that way to orient that head. You need the people who are driven and devoted, who add their power, their time, energy and attention to the structure so that the structure can function. Structures don’t function on their own. They don’t do things to people. Not without time, energy and attention being put in. The structures, institutions, the, we’ll say the formations of the bodies that do things in the world that appear to have agency, all of their agency, all of their power is derived from the people within them lending or granting or forcing their time, energy and attention, power into them. It is not arbitrary. The power does not exist within the education system or even an individual school. Power exists as a result of the people participating in the structure. When people participate poorly, structures break down and fail. If you see a structure and you think it’s corrupt, the thing that corrupted it are the persons within it. And it is nothing else, ever. That’s going to be my statement. When a structure starts to collapse, it tends towards a tyranny. Because the leadership gets concentrated into a leader and that leader takes on more than they can. And their only alternative is tight tyrannical controls. So when you see tyranny, you are seeing a collapsing leadership structure where the leadership is either rolling up or falling into a single point. That may not be the leader of today. That may be the leader that deposes the current leader. Maybe the leader that steps in when the current leader leaves. Right? I’m not saying this is going to make it easy for you to figure out what’s going on. You don’t have to figure out that much about what’s going on. When you see something corrupting, you know there are corrupting agents, persons in it, making it corrupt. The hard part is identifying those agents. Because it’s not always the person that becomes the tyrant or that appears to be the tyrant. That is the problem. The problem may be that they were forced into that situation by the corrupt individuals who destroyed the leadership structures. The structure, the container of the system, or tried to orient the structure away from the talos. That’s when you get tyrannies. Effectively what I’m saying is, tyrannies form in lots of ways. The reason why we can identify them is because there’s a ton of ways. They all result in roughly the same flattening, compression, reduction happening. That results in the same sort of thing, which looks like what we call tyranny. That’s why these concepts are very important. Because the concept of a tyranny is very clear in our heads to some extent. But the fact that it can happen many different ways is not. Ben Shapiro, I don’t listen to Ben Shapiro much anymore, if at all. He used to say quite a bit, more than one thing can be true at the same time. There’s more than one path to tyranny. There’s also more than one path to leadership. And there’s more than one path to finding a leader. Someone who can clear the path that no one else can. And will do so. It’s not just able. You can be able to do a lot of things, but if you’re not willing, that’s different. And if you’re able and willing, but you don’t actually do it, put your time, energy, and attention to it, then also no good. That’s the pragmatism. We’ll talk about pragmatism someday soon. And with that, I’d like to thank everybody for watching. I think it’s wonderful that I have so many subscribers now. And I’m really appreciative of that. And look, I’m also very appreciative that I have the thing that I value the most, which is your time and attention.