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There is an anthropological reason we have leaders. For 40,000 of the 50,000 years that our species has been on this planet, we lived in populations that were never bigger than about 150 people. This presents a bit of a practical problem. There are austere times, we’re all hungry, and if someone brings food back to the tribe and dumps it on the ground, we’re all going to rush in to eat. If you’re lucky enough to be built like a football player, you will shove your way to the front of the line. But if you’re the artist of the family, you get an elbow in the face. This is a bad system, because what it means is that, if you punch me in the face this afternoon, I’m probably not going to wake you and alert you to danger tonight. And so we evolved into hierarchical animals.
We’re 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. When someone is more senior, we defer to them. Going back to those caveman times, when we assess that someone is alpha to us, we voluntarily step back and allow our alphas 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 get an elbow in the face, good system. Nothing has changed in our modern day, we still defer and give advantages to our alphas, those we perceive as leaders, and we have no problem with it.
There’s not a single person in any organization that has any moral problem with somebody more senior than them getting a higher salary. They may be ineffective at their job, but it doesn’t bother us that somebody who outranks us makes a higher salary or gets a bigger office, or has a better parking space, it’s totally fine. 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 is 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 first choice of mate, because they might die first, and we want to keep their genes in the gene pool, we’re not stupid.
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 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. The leaders we admire, the leaders we follow are the ones that we know will 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.