Blog

Leadership is the downfall of humanity. Not necessarily because of bad leadership, more the reason we are compelled to follow leaders. We do not like making decisions, we do not like responsibility, we do not take responsibility. We assume someone else will sort it out. Our lack of responsibility did not happen by accident. We have been socially engineered that way. Bit by bit we have given up our responsibility. I will give you an example. My grandma told me a story about a time when she was seven years old, the mid 1920’s. My grandma’s mother needed to pop to the shops to get her messages, (messages is a Scottish term for shopping). My grandma was given strict instructions to look after her grandmother, (who was ill in the back bedroom) whilst her mother was out. After her mother was gone five minutes, my grandma decided to check in on her grandmother. She was not breathing. Fearing her grandmother had passed away, my grandma took a mirror and held it over her grandmother’s face to check if the mirror would mist up or not. The mirror was not there long enough to yield any results as her grandmother woke up, shooed the mirror out the way proclaiming she was not dead yet! The point of that short story is how many seven-year-olds know how to check if someone has died? How many seven-year-olds would be bold enough to check? I would suggest none. In the 1920’s the old and disabled were looked after by their families. It was what everyone did. They were responsible, it was their loved ones. At some point the state wanted a bigger work force. Getting more out of each family for the sake of the state. People no longer had time to look after aged relatives, so the government intervened: care homes and old folks’ homes were mostly free to the masses. The responsibility of the old was taken away from people by the state. People now fear growing old. We have to work even harder and longer for money to ensure comfort and security in old age. Our decreasing responsibility is our down fall. It makes life harder in the long run, and it builds more fear into our existence. 

Our modern-day leaders amplify the lack of responsibility structure we have. They amplify the business structures and systems that have resulted in the society we have today. We wait and hope our next elected members of government will change things. It has not worked in the past, has it? You may disagree, and point to innovative leaders that will lead us from this mess. Innovative leaders that have done very well from the masses. If you keep following, you will get more of the same, that’s a given. There is no knight in shining armour coming to save you, if you are waiting for that, you will have a miserable life as things will just continue to get worse. That miserable existence will be your fault, you were happy to follow, be told what to do, even though you know deep down things are not right, you follow. We have forgotten how to be our own leaders, how to be responsible for ourselves. When something goes wrong we automatically look for someone else to blame, that is our human instinct, that instinct has been socially engineered over the years. 

There are no quick answers to this, but the first step is recognition. Recognition of what we have become. A vision of what we want to be, how we want our society to look. It starts with us.