We Have All Been Here Before

If you’re familiar with the “hippie” generation in the United States, you may also remember this refrain (quoted in the title of this post) from a song by a musical group of hippies named “Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young” — “Deja Vu”. Many years later I heard a song by Frank Zappa (which was probably recorded around the same time) mentioning Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young “fighting at the Fillmore East”. Hippies don’t follow leaders — I think Bob Dylan once said something like that.

OK, so here we are — over half a century later … and this post is actually supposed to be about something completely different (although it might also be somewhat inspired by Jimi Hendrix’s quote about “the power of love” vs. “the love of power”). Picking up from last week’s post about “progress” (see “The Progression from Progress through Progressive towards Progressivism”) and also the previous one about Taylorism, etc. (see “Scaling Time”), I want to delve a little deeper into this notion of leadership and power. Apparently there is nearly never any shortage of potential leaders, hierarchical power structures, etc.

Let me provide just one example — a contrast between two such “powerful” leadership icons.

First, we have the quintessential dictator himself, referred to as “Führer” (“leader”) by many millions of followers. This was a case of Influencer 0.1 (or maybe even 0.0.1? … ??)

Second we have the quintessential caricature of leadership from just a few decades ago: Steve Baller Ballmer.

Whereas a full century ago, a leader had to build stuff, make things and maybe also start wars, kill millions of people and many things more, more recent leaders can get by simply by creating enough hot air to increase global warming — either on their own or through oddly “pleasant” [1] humming sound coming from their machines.

Lucky for us, leaders have apparently moved on from obvious large-scale death and destruction. Unlucky for us is that apparently the narcissistic hunger for power has transformed natural environments from military battlegrounds to environmental battlegrounds … and the unfortunate transformation has replaced obvious battlegrounds with stealth battlegrounds.

[1] Note that I feel this “oddity” is based on something like a narcissistic personality disorder in which the narcissist is motivated by their experience of complete power over machines.