National News Service, Kolkata: Throughout history starting from the days of tribes till very recently, the people chose their leaders as people to whom they can look up to.
The tribes chose the elderly people as their leaders not because of their age but because of the experience and knowledge.
When Kingdoms grew it was necessary for the people in the street to believe that the Kings were divine. This trend started with the the rulers of Egypt more than 7000 years ago.
Religion and religious ceremony was necessary to hold together the primitive civilizations and cultures that were beginning to form some 7,000 years ago or more. The great fear of the time was death and the blackness that this brought. The promise of life after death for those that believed and followed the ‘true’ teachings was a big incentive to conform.
In the Ramayana, Ram always had to prove that Sita was more chaste than others, Caesar wife had to prove the same even though they were separated by time and space.
The concept of leaders of nations began when a tribe found itself short of food or women a raid would be organized against other local tribes and eventually one tribe grew stronger, dominated the area and assimilated its neighbors.
As the tribe grew in influence the tribal leader became what we would call a warlord who eventually took on the mantle of king.
With the growing influence of the tribe so the influence of the leader grew. The leader would mostly be male and aggressive because the means of choosing a leader was usually by fighting between challengers. The leader would then gather a powerful group around him, consisting of other aggressive males, to reinforce his leadership. The leader would remain in power so long as he could command the loyalty of his men, which he did by giving them special privileges such as the best food and the choice of the women.
The most able leaders would have realized that the strong-arm tactics that kept the populace in order did not bring as much prosperity and power as a growing economy. It was also wasteful because it took men away from work in order to enforce his leadership. The fewer men that this took the more produce and goods there would be available for trade.
The more intelligent leaders would therefore have selected some of the more able and thinking types to act as his advisers.
Brains gradually replaced brawn and the heavies would have been put in charge of the army and border guards while the king gathered about him a corpus of advisers who organized the different aspects of state affairs under his guidance. As the task grew larger and more complex these advisers would have gathered their own staff to help them.
The leader or king was expected to provide protection for his people and this would have extended to food storage against bad harvests. If he couldn’t or hadn’t provided enough he would send his army to annex his neighbor and steal their food stocks. If he lost he would be killed and his area of influence taken over by the victors or one of his generals.
In this context Henry VIII saw that being a King alone could not give him the power he sought, so making an excuse of the Pope standing in the way of his many marriages took on the mantle of head of the Church of England and his many marriages took on the an aura of divineness, and being close to god gave him added power.
Since people were supposed to look up to their leaders when Richard Nixon went in for a little bit of skulduggery, the kind that is indulged in by many, but he was hounded out of office because the leader was supposed to better than the multitudes.
When Bill Clinton went on the escapade with his interns he too was nearly hounded out of office. The same reason applied despite the vast majority of the citizens indulged in peccadilloes, their leader was supposed to be better.
Then appeared on the scene Laloo Yadav. By an accident of politics he became the Chief Minister of Bihar. By his antics and the media attraction to his antics the vast majority of the Biharis who thought themselves as country bumpkins and semi idiots saw somebody just like them could become a leader.
The dormant majority who never dreamed that they could become leaders started seeing dreams of greatness, till now they believed that only the educated and thinkers could be leaders, but here was a man just like them, who became a leader.
What was the net result, scam after scam, the most famous of which is the fodder scam and when this caught up with Laloo, in steps Rabri Devi confirming that leaders need not have any ability or qualities at all. Bihar has become a mafia dominated lawless bankrupt state, but who cares the country bumpkins have their own in power and their dreams that one day they will make it too.
Now this information seeped through to George W. Bush. It got him thinking if Laloo can make it why not him. He had an advantage he had a brother in power in the State of Florida. He started off with the same antics, naturally the American version. Again by virtue of the fact that Justices of the American Supreme Court, because of their inability to rise above partisanship brought another moron to power even though he lost the popular vote. Where Laloo's damage is limited to a State in India, George W. Bush became the leader of the Militarily most powerful country.
Again the silent majority of Americans who never dreamt of power and with the same IQ as George W. Bush found that their kin could become a leader, why not them someday. Today by his moronic ideas, the whole of the world has become a place of strife and terror. The Olympic Games a celebration of friendship between the athletes of the whole world a security threat.
Beheading of innocent people rampant, hostage taking a new fashion, the basest instincts of humans flowering in Abu Gharaib Prison, the story of Bihar retold on a worldwide scale. People divided on religion and beliefs, many countries in the world on an economic slide, the world beware the country bumpkins of Bihar and the morons of America are united.
Posted by proutist-universal on August 13, 2004 11:34 PM