When I was younger, I loved a comic book called The Legion of Super-Heroes. These weren’t just any super-heroes; they were a group of super-powered teenagers in the 30th century, teenagers not just from Earth but from a wide range of planets. And a meme I came across recently put me in mind of my beloved Legion.
It was a meme framing a quote from Terence McKenna, the controversial ethnobotanist who wrote many books, made many films, and gave many talks on myriad topics, from philosophy and culture to environmentalism to mystic mushrooms. A keen observer of the world, he said the following:
“We have the money, the power, the medical understanding, the scientific know-how, the love and the community to produce a kind of human paradise. Yet we’re led by the least among us – the least intelligent, the least noble, the least visionary. We are led by the least...”
Well... he’s not wrong.
His statement holds true here in the US. It holds true in any nation you can name in the free world. It holds true today, and has been true for decades.
I can come up with several intelligent national leaders who served in my lifetime. Carter. Clinton. Obama. I can count on several leaders who were noble – Birch Bayh. Howard Baker. Margaret Chase Smith. And visionary, wow – John Lewis. Shirley Chisholm. And, of course, JFK...
But these are the exceptions that prove the rule. We can survey the political landscape of the past dozen election cycles and easily discern an emphatic lack of moral and intellectual substance. We can even go so far as to say these traits work against a candidate in an uncomfortable number of electoral domains.
But there’s one brand of candidate who is least, in intelligence, nobility, and vision, by nature: the social dominator.
Social dominators are individuals with little or no empathy – a neurophysiological deficit, but one with deep social consequence. Those individuals who score high in social dominance orientation tend to be ambitious, seeking to control the lives of others. They tend to frame the world in kill-or-be-killed terms, typically displaying callousness and aggression, and are generally unconcerned with the actual work expected of them in positions of leadership and public trust. Rules (and, by extension, laws) are for other people, not for them.
The problem we face today, of course, is that there are only a couple of domains where such people can thrive. One, of course, is religion; a social dominator can easily rise in religious hierarchies, particularly in the Fundamentalist sector, simply by using the right language, promising the right things, and stirring a crowd of followers to fear of whatever stands in the dominator’s way. Business is another such sector, but harder to crack: you have to actually perform in order to rise to the top, or shareholders will call for your head and the board will remove you.
That leaves politics – the sector where social dominators most easily survive and thrive.
Social dominators, though generally absent of empathy, will nonetheless hone the skills of charm and charisma. By knowing the right things to say and when to say them, they can win the confidence of others through strategic flattery and sympathy. And their penchant for aggression and violence against opponents draws the fearful to their side, often placing them at the head of parties and movements.
But the social dominator, however bright he might be – and we can name some bright ones – is generally bereft of the type of intelligence most necessary to the public trust: emotional intelligence. The social dominator, by definition, doesn’t feel very much, and thus possesses little or no emotional intelligence – only facility at emotional manipulation.
There is nothing noble about the social dominator. They want everything for themselves and nothing for others; they will sacrifice nothing to achieve a worthy goal, but will endlessly sacrifice others in pursuit of their own. They display no authentic moral principle; morality, after all, derives from empathy, of which the social dominator has none.
As for vision – that's a thing a leader brings to the group they lead. A meaningful vision for a people is a bond between them, a roadmap to shared safety and success and prosperity. The social dominator isn’t the least bit interested in sharing; they are interested only in their own.
McKenna’s lament, then, that we are lead by the least among us owes largely to the fact that those most attracted to leadership and public trust today are those who would exploit it. They are not the only ones, of course, and not even a majority – but there are enough of them to taint the water for all.
Which brings me back to the Legion. One Legionnaire in particular springs to mind in this context, a young man from a faraway planet named Bismoll with a power so stupid and a name so ridiculous that I will not repeat them here. But he’s relevant, because his exit from the Legion occurs when his homeworld drafts him into public service. He does not choose to go into politics; it is his civic duty. So off he goes, and he eventually becomes president of Bismoll. This works well, because he’s intelligent, noble, and visionary.
We should give that a try on this world...
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