Sunday, February 4, 2018

Loyalty, Leadership, Power, Love, and Fear

My teammates dogs, Ranger and Remington,  have started to blog.  Their latest blog was about what alpha really means and was titled: Loyalty and Leadership. They are funny as heck, but made me think that I needed to respond to them. 


Ranger and Remi, 

Now before I respond, I need to make it perfectly clear that I have always had a problem with authority, never more so than I became an authority figure myself. I try on a daily basis to make my students understand that rules are positive because they keep up safe. I also make sure that they know that it is sometimes necessary for a civilized people to break unjust laws, and take the consequences for that action. My life is full of strange contradictions like that. 

So, my wise wee-ones, human beings sometimes have leadership problems because they forget the pack. There are a couple of quotes about people and power (leadership). 

1) Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. -John Dahlber-Acton
2) “it is much safer to be feared than loved because ...love is preserved by the link of obligation which, owing to the baseness of men, is broken at every opportunity for their advantage; but fear preserves you by a dread of punishment which never fails.” 
― Niccolò Machiavelli

When people forget that the pack is all of us, and sink slowly in to the cesspool of self-aggrandizement (Mom will tell you what that means) they allow power to corrupt them. They believe that they are better than the rest of the pack. They use their power to prove their own worth, and not to improve the well-being of the pack. 

Other humans find themselves in positions of leadership or power for which they are unready or perhaps are incapable of handling. Instead of asking for help, they assume a stance in which they must convince others that they- and only they- are the final say on all things. These leaders often decide that they must consolidate their power by making the pack fear them. Sooner or later, though, human history has shown that these leaders fail.