Officially naïve creatures such as Obama, bellow that there are leaders, so mighty, they decide of everything. (Obama even believe that “leaders” can lead, “from behind”.) Hitler said he understood the world, and how to better Germany. 12 years after he was voted in, Germany was in ruins, and 10% of Germans dead. And Hitler did not have one idea he could call his own. He was mostly an angry parrot.
That leaders lead is just smoke, disinformation. A clay pot is not made of iron, just because it’s black. Obama does not seem to have had a single significant idea he could call his own. His entire art, was to hide that from those who voted for him, while flaunting to those who financed him, that he got his ideas from the “Financial Times”. Black? Mostly from too much Wall Street’s smoke.
Plutocratic Butler With Gift Of Gab Is Passé
In truth, humanity’s trajectory is rarely inflected by individuals. Obama himself may as well have been a robot programmed by the haves; all he did, as president, was highly predictable, once one has situated him as an excellent Republican president, Reagan with a fresh coat of paint… From the Financial Times.
Instead, Humanity is guided by the logos, ideology, and the institutions it gives rise to. Rather than just by the individuals they inhabit.
Even Christianism understood this, and identified the Logos to God, in the first few lines of the New Testament!
This was not just the price Christianity had to pay, to be taken seriously by the Greeks. It was already an evidence at the time. Now we call the Logos “Apps”. And it is the path to riches.
That ideas truly lead, especially when organized as vast ideologies, is not the usual vision of history. In conventional history “Leaders” of flesh and blood, are supposed to be paramount. But the truth is different.
A famous example? After 10,000 Greek soldiers led by (philosopher) Xenophon succeeded to extricate themselves from the core of the Persian empire, in spite of having the entire Persian army after them (plus the Kurds), the idea became paramount among the Greeks that the Persian empire could be conquered. And the top plutocrat, Philip of Macedonia, prepared the assault. After his assassination, his son Alexander took the reigns of the planned invasion. Clearly Alexander was secondary, and the idea, that Greece could defeat Persia, was primary (all the more remarkable that most Greeks refused to help Alexander!)
If Alexander had never existed, some of other leader would have led a (real) Greek army across the heart of Persia. The idea of democracy had won over that of the empire of plutocracy.
What leads humanity, the real leaders, are ideologies. And thus, those who launched these ideologies (as Muhammad did), are paramount. Secondary are those who deflected existing ideologies. As the Third Caliph did, in the case of Islam (as I mentioned in the past).
Another example: modern science is a hyper-critical ideology which got launched in the Middle-Ages during the Twelfth Century, among the individuals around Abelard. (At least, so I claim.)
Abelard was crucial for erecting, for all to admire, the very way in which hyper-criticism was to overrule everything. Hence Abelard’s fight to death with Saint Bernard. In the fullness of time, Abelard won. Abelard launched, not just an ideology, but a mood of hyper-aggressivity towards the established mental order. In short order, this new attitude brought tremendous advances in science and technology.
Thus individuals can have tremendous influence… As long as they give rise to ideas… Or new attitudes.
Patrice Ayme’
Patrice Ayme's Thoughts 
May 10, 2015 at 12:33 am |
Had Alexander never existed, my guess is that any Greek invasion would have failed. Alexander was usually grossly outnumbered, although in fairness that statement depends on greek historians who may have bloated the opposition, nevertheless he won partly on a very disciplined professional army, but also on extremely competent uses of his forces. He is often ranked as the best military commander of all time, so “anyone else” is very likely to have failed. Interestingly, Alexander’s greatest problem was probably at the Granicus, where his main opposition was Greek mercenaries.
So I would also argue that leadership also involves skill, and not necessarily ideologies.
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May 10, 2015 at 3:48 am |
Alexander’s main Macedonian army, his “field army” was just above 40,000.
Xenophon’s 10,400 routed the Persians at the battle where Cyrus the Younger got killed. The Persian army was at least 100,000. The Greeks routed the left wing, and then routed the much larger right wing. In spite of facing the world’s best cavalry.
They demonstrated astounding superiority of fully armed hoplites and other Greek professional soldiers. Only one got wounded.
However they lost, because the Hellenophile leader who had hired them, Cyrus the Younger, had been killed by a javelin (his killer got rewarded by being eaten by insects for 17 days, while lying in his own feces, and tenderly fed).
What Alexander had was the world’s best cavalry, even better than the Persians. He used weird tactics, a la Hitler (very unforeseen). Which depended heavily on the sturdiness of his Greek-like phalanx and Greek mercenaries, as he was galloping around, in search of the deadly stab.
However, we would have been better off if the Athenians had listened to Demosthenes in a timely manner, and Macedonia kept in check (as it had been before). Then the Greeks could have kept Persia on the Iranian Plateau, until they were ready, maybe centuries later, to invade that too.
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May 10, 2015 at 4:14 am |
The higher Obama climbs, the more he shows his behind
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May 10, 2015 at 4:24 am |
Thus are monkeys. They climb well, and their buttocks are round, but we do not esteem them as much as we should.
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May 10, 2015 at 8:49 pm |
The Ruling Ideology is whatever is “Good For The Jews”.
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May 11, 2015 at 5:25 am |
Alexandros: Before reading you I did not realize how important the Jews still are for some people. This is the paradox.
Someone such as me say: of, there is a problem with the fractional reserve banking system. Right. And that has nothing to do with the Jews (fractional reserve started in the Florentine Republic around 1200 CE). So I can act.
Criminal idiots, though, will say: ‘Oh, the problem is that we did not process all the Jews through Auschwitz, that’s why banks are bad.’ Such a logos is idiotic and criminal in so many ways, that, finally, it only adds to crime and stupidity, without fixing the criminal stupidity of frac. banking.
And so on. The grand total of 14 million Jews are totally not ruling, especially not with an ideology: Judaism is too tribal for this.
PA
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May 11, 2015 at 4:51 pm |
Tribalism goes to our biological core. It is the human herd instinct.
The problem for the larger society is that while it gives the strength of a vital community, too explicitly expressed and it essentially creates an antibody response from other such organic groups.
Witness German Nazism, which was also a strongly tribalistic movement and the emotions and actions of the Holocaust do resemble an antibiotic reaction.
Which is not to excuse it, but to further examine how deeply some of these fractures in the larger society go and what has to be done to realistically address them.
In math terms, it goes to the intersecting frames and the narratives to support them. Which is why I see making the argument of time and thus narrative as being an effect of action akin to splitting the atom, in terms of social effect.
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May 11, 2015 at 5:47 pm |
Nazism was indeed motivated by tribalism, and it has a long history in Germany. Basically, way back, in 500 CE, there were 3 types of Germans: the tribal ones, the half-tribal ones on the way to civilization (Ostrogoths, Visigoths, and especially Burgonds), and… the Franks. Only the Franks threw the tribalism completely overboard (starting in 310 CE; by 600 CE, everybody was a Frank, by decree).
The old German tribalism survived until Nazism, through philosophers such as Kant and especially Herder (NOT Goethe, Marx, Nietzsche!)…
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May 12, 2015 at 2:41 am
Now we have corporate congregation as the tribe.
Why is that?
Because money is the primary social medium.
When that bubble bursts, it’s back to whatever gives us shelter.
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May 11, 2015 at 4:03 am |
Patrice,
More than anything you need a flawed ruling paradigm.
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May 11, 2015 at 4:04 am |
Then you can use truth as a weapon.
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