ON THE DANGERS OF IDEALISTIC LEADERSHIP

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

LEADERSHIP

Leadership can be defined as the ability to perceive a problem and do something about it. A leader sees a problem and gathers other people and through their collective efforts solves or attempts to solve that problem. As a practical example, consider the abysmal state of economic infrastructure in Nigeria . Nigeria ’s roads, electricity, schools etc are in terrible shape. A leader perceives these problems, studies what to do to improve them and sets himself the goal of improving them. He gathers other people (human resources) and money (capital resources) to improve those issues and sets about doing so. He does this twenty- four-seven. He goes about solving these problems as if they are his personal problems. He does not see social problems as other people’s problems, but as his and solve them as if he is solving his personal problems.

The non-leader, on the other hand, perceives the same problems the leader perceives but goes about his business of making a living, of providing for himself and his family. The non-leader does not perceive social problems as his personal problems. He tends to see social problems as others problems to solve, but not for him to solve. In so far that he gets involved at all it is to criticize those trying to solve the perceived social problems. Sitting idly, he thinks that he knows how things ought to be done and uses his idle standards to judge those actually trying to solve problems.

The leader sees social problems as his personal problems. He wants to solve his personal problems which include social problems.  Since most social problems require their solution through the auspices of several persons, leaders persuade people to accept the need to solve perceived social problems and lead them in solving them. Leaders have visions of how their society ought to be. They mobilize men and material in their efforts to solve social problems.

Because leadership requires using people and money in solving problems it is ideal that leaders possess people and financial skills. An education that is equivalent of master’s in business administration with emphasis in general management, organizational behavior, finances, accounting and economics is a plus. It is also helpful if leaders understand law and politics.

The leader has his eyes on the goals he set for his social group.  Since he works with people he must necessarily understand people. Whether he studies psychology or not he has basic understanding of human nature and the human condition. He understands people as they are, not as they should become. He works with people as they are, not as they could become.

A realistic leader does not go about thinking that he could change people. The fact is that neither he nor any one else can change human beings. Despite all their grandstanding, no Western psychologist, to date, has changed one human being into something he was not already so. Be it psychoanalysis, Behaviorism or Neuroscience, not one of these approaches to understanding human beings have changed one human being.  Simply stated, the realistic leader does not aim at changing people; instead, he accepts them as they are and uses them as they are to solve perceived social problems. 

HUMAN SELF CENTEREDNESS

As Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan) and Adam Smith (Wealth of Nations) reminds us, people are essentially motivated by self interests. The typical human being wants to survive at all costs. He knows that he needs material things to survive so he works hard to acquire those things he needs to survive. He bargains with other people and in doing so they mutually produce what serves each others self interests.

Whereas people engage in cooperative behaviors to serve their mutual interests, they have no illusions that they are serving other people’s interests. How so? Consider that when such associations no longer serve their individual needs they disband and go seek what serves their needs elsewhere. 

Simply stated, the average human being lives for his self interest and that is the way life on earth is.  In trying to seem to conform to the dictates of his religion and or political ideology (such as socialism and communism)  he may talk about serving public good but when push comes to shove the average person looks after his self interests, if necessary at the expense of other peoples interests. This is the truth about human beings and we do not need to beat about the bush about it. 

Leaders take people as they see them to be and still work with them in achieving social goals. They have no illusion about human nature and do not have the neurotic belief that they can change people (neurosis is desire to become ideal and compulsive effort to seem ideal when in fact one is not ideal).

People are the product of their selfish genes and their social experiences and by and large those experiences dispose them to be selfish. People’s selfish natures are maintained by their selfish cultures.

NIGERIANS SELF CENTEREDNESS

The contemporary Nigerian is totally self-centered. He works mostly for himself and, perhaps, for his extended ego, his family members. He seldom works for the entire society. 

In so far that the typical Nigerian is interested in society it is in seeming important in people’s eyes. He would buy social titles so as to appear a very important person in society’s eyes. 

Make no mistake about it, if the typical Nigerian is given money to use in improving his people’s lot in life, given his self centeredness, the chances are that he would pocket that money (cart it to overseas banks).  The fact that his fellow Nigerians live in abject poverty and are dying of starvation and preventable diseases is not really his concern. Of course, he mouths social interest but if you are naïve enough to take his words as real and entrust him with resources on behalf of his people he shows his true colors: a predatory animal that lives only for himself.

Of course, there are always exceptions to every general rule. May be one percent of Nigerians are altruistic and (agape) loving and would work for the general good?  I doubt it. In dealing with Nigerians one must be totally cynical and untrusting; when these people see money they can sell their mothers down the river. Come to think about it, their ancestors sold some of their people into slavery (in Arabia and America ) and, apparently, did not feel guilty and remorseful for the evil they did. One must exercise suspiciousness in dealing with these people; only a fool would trust their profession of good intention.

For our present purposes, realistic leaders take people as they are, and work with them as they are, without misguided efforts to change them. In this light, a realistic Nigerian leader works with Nigerians as they are, fully aware that they are each serving their personal interests and knows that if you look away that they would steal from the public treasury and from each other.

Knowing that they would steal he institutes a draconian and punitive mechanism that arrests, tries and jails those who step out of line. The realistic leader in the Nigerian context is not at all sentimental with those he is dealing with for he knows that only brute force exercised in an impersonal manner would get those habituated to stealing to respect other people’s properties and lives.

The criminal is not deterred by homilies on altruism but by the presence of force: police men, harsh judges and prisons. The thief can only be deterred from thieving if you are willing to arrest him and despite his cowardly begging for clemency lock him up in a prison and throw away the key. 

The point is that realistic leaders in Nigeria would work with Nigerians as they are and not expect them to be angels, for angels they are not going to be, not in this century (twenty-first), any way. The disease of corruption is so deep in the psyche of Nigerians and in their society that it would take no less than a hundred years to re-socialize Nigerians from engaging in corrupt acts to pro-social behaviors.

IDEALISIM

Idealism can be defined as the tendency to perceive what is and appreciate its shortcomings and wish for it to be different and better.  The idealist appreciates human imperfection, the imperfection of social institutions and the imperfection of the world itself and wishes to make them perfect. 

Generally, in childhood he uses his thinking and imagination to construct ideals of how he, other people, social institutions and the world ought to be and strives to make them become like his ideals.

He may gravitate to ideologies that emphasize ideals, such as socialism and communism. These ideologies reject selfish human beings and posit how they ought to become, social serving. (The socialist man is the man who devotes his life to serving other people, Karl Marx’s “from each his abilities and to each his needs”.)

Generally, in childhood the idealistic to become person evaluates his self and finds it imperfect and wishes to become a perfect self. He judges other people and finds them even more imperfect than himself and wishes that they are perfect. He observes social institutions and finds them imperfect. Indeed, he finds the entire world imperfect.

The idealistic child (if you must employ clinical language you could  say the neurotic child; see Karen Horney, Neurosis and Human Growth and Alfred Adler, The Neurotic Constitution.) rejects his real self, rejects other peoples real selves, rejects extant social institutions and reject the world as it is. In their place he uses his thinking to come up with how he, other people, social institutions and the world ought to become. That is, he rejects the imperfect real and invents a perfect imaginary self and world and aspires after bringing that fictional perfect self and its world into being. 

Of course, the idealist is not going to succeed for the perfect is imaginary, is a mental construct; the perfect is not affected by the realities of matter, space and time. In our minds, for example, we can imagine ourselves always twenty-five years old (when people are at their physical best).  But the fact is that time and space ages the body. Whether we like it or not, we must age and eventually die our wishes for ideal self, immortal and eternally youthful, not withstanding.  The point is that idealistic constructs of reality do not alter reality.

In the meantime, the idealist posits an ideal self and ideal society and an ideal world and tries to bring them into being.  He employs the standards of his fictional ideals to judge real people, real social institutions and the real world. By existential necessity, real human beings and their institutions are imperfect and if compared to ideal selves and institutions must fall short. 

The idealist is always aware that people are imperfect Vis-a- Vis his ideal standards. Because people do not measure up to his ideals, idealists often are tempted to disrespect imperfect human beings.

Some idealists reach a state where they develop contempt for real people (and for themselves, too, though they disguise their self hatred) for not been perfect. As a matter of fact, some of them reach a point where they resolve to either change people into ideals of what they should become or kill them.

If you have read Adolf Hitler’s Mien Kampf, written in 1925, when he was thirty two years old, you would have appreciated his total contempt for real human beings. Hitler, a total political idealist, appreciated people’s imperfections and wanted to transform them into perfect human beings and to kill those who seem imperfect-able, such as those born with handicaps, homosexuals, Jews, Slavic people and, Oh, yes black people. 

In 1933 Hitler came to power and quickly made himself a dictator and set about transforming Germans into his ideal perfect selves. He himself was five feet-seven inches tall and dark in complexion but his ideal man was six foot-six inches tall and blue eyed blond.  His ideal was the opposite of everything he is, in fact. This man so hated his real physical self that he refused to have children lest they turn out like him, not ideal.

Hitler set about breeding tall, blue eyed blonds. His SS were selected because of their physical attributes and encouraged to have sex with as many women as was possible and have as many children as was possible; such children were the future of the Third Reich.

In time Hitler and his Nazi criminal gang gathered the seeming ugly folks of this world into concentration of Camps. He sent ordinary Germans go die at the war front and did not bate an eye when they died for they were rubbish. Finally, Hitler descended on Eastern Europe , the Slavic world, and since he thought them subhuman beings who have contributed nothing to evolution he set out killing them. The man killed over 25 million Russians (sub human beings, he called them). He was fully intent on killing all the Slavic people and taking over their lands, all the way to the Ural Mountains ( Central Russia ). 

Hitler did not feel like he did anything wrong in doing all these dreadful things for, to him, the people he was killing were sub human beings, unintelligent folks who have contributed nothing to evolution.

(If the Slavic race has contributed nothing to civilization and were worth killing, just imagine what Hitler would have done to Africans if he had won that war; he would have killed them off. Africans must thank the Russians and Americans for stopping Hitler, for they would have been gone and their lands given to Germans to have living space, lebensraum.)

Joseph Stalin was also an idealist, a socialist idealist. He wanted to transform human beings whom he perceived as selfish into selfless socialist men. He killed over 35 million people, capitalists, that is, selfish people and did not feel guilty from doing so.

The salient point is that idealists do kill those who do not seem to meet the criteria of their idealism. Therefore, idealists in politics pose a danger to other people.

REALISTIC VERSUS IDEALISTIC LEADERS

Realistic leaders are those who accept themselves as they are and are happy to be who they are, and accept other people as they are and do not work to change other people. Good leaders are happy in their own skin. One way to know normal leaders is whether they laugh often and have a healthy sense of humor, and whether they respects all human beings, as they are, despite their imperfections.

Idealistic leaders tend to come from those who, in childhood, had self rejection and desire ideal self and pursue ideal society; these people can treat people as means to an end. 

As a college student, for example, I toyed with communism. I actually accepted the communist teaching that it is sometimes necessary to destroy those who are too self- centered and resist transformation into ideal socialist man.  In the African context, I did not see any wrong with the death of millions of bourgeois Africans if in the end we obtained the socialist state.  That is to say that in pursuit of my goal, socialist state, socialist man, I was willing to accept the death of millions of people and would have easily rationalized this situation as a necessary price for the desired goal, socialist state, socialist man. Moreover, since I am interested in science and technology, I could have easily justified doing away with those who, to me, seemed primitive, if in doing so we attained my much cherished scientific society operating under scientific culture. I had little attachment to what folks called African culture if by that they meant preliterate African cultures. What interested me was how to industrialize Africa and make it as developed as the Western world. I was ashamed of non-scientific societies and would not have regretted their demise, one bit. That is to say that my ego ideal was associated with a modern state and whatever was not modern was game for removal.

DISCUSSION

Realistic leaders are people who identify with their people and do what enables them to survive in the here and now world. They deal with real people and the real world. They solve real problems. They do not look at people from an idealistic frame of reference.

Idealists reject people as they are and wish that they become ideal persons; they reject reality as it is and seek an alternative reality. Idealists are escaping from the world of the here and now, an imperfect world. They want to transform people to the imaginary ideal self and its world rather than work with them as they are.  They are, therefore, dangerous, for they can destroy real people whom they perceive as not good enough. 

Adolf Hitler saw real people as not good enough and wanted to change them to ideal people. He was willing to kill real people and killed over 50 million people in his pursuit of ideal people.

Communists and socialists are idealistic dreamers; they want to transform people to loving and socially serving people. They too are willing to kill people in pursuit of their idealist human beings. Joseph Stalin killed 35 million people in his misguided neurotic efforts to transform selfish human beings into selfless ideal socialist people. Mao Tse Tung killed millions of Chinese in his efforts to make the selfish Chinese over into ideal persons.  Other socialists did the same.

In my view, idealists are dangerous people for they reject themselves as they are, reject other people as they are and seek to transform themselves and all people into their imaginary constructs of who people ought to be.

Idealists, I think, are playing God; indeed, they are playing greater than God for, apparently, God tolerates an imperfect people/world whereas idealists do not want to tolerate an imperfect humanity/world. 

Idealists want to recreate the world that religionists believe that God created into their own perfect version of it; perfection as they defined it. Idealists, despite their seeming interest in improving human beings are really on a dangerous power trip; they are motivated by power, grandiosity (some of them are indeed narcissistic-paranoid personalities, Hitler and Stalin were).

In the end idealistic leaders cannot transform themselves and other human beings into their mental constructs of ideal human beings. With this realization, they escape into merely judging people with their ideal constructs of how they ought to be. They judge everything with how they ought to be; this is a waste of time.

Idealists often feel angry that nobody, society and governments are not ideal, as they want them to become.

Whereas active idealists like Hitler attempt to change the world, passive idealists escape from the world of the real and live in the world of the imaginary, a fantasy world where all is ideal.

CONCLUSION

Despite their wishes for ideal states, idealists do not make good leaders. Good leaders accept people and society as they are and work within the reality of human imperfection; they are not motivated to make themselves or people ideal.

Those who are motivated to make human beings and society ideal may seem to succeed for a while and cause a lot of suffering for people but in the end must fail. Hitler’s National Socialism lasted twelve years; Soviet Socialism lasted seventy years.  

The world is not an ideal place and any effort to make it ideal, though it may succeed for a while must fail. We do not need to cause human beings unnecessary suffering and death that the pursuit of fictional ideals often engenders.

In the Nigerian situation we all know that the recent elections were rigged. If, in a democracy, the people’s vote legitimizes leaders, it follows that the ensuing government is illegitimate. From the perspective of idealism that government is not to be accepted. But from the perspective of real politics most governments are imperfect.

Consider the US government: to African Americans and Native Indians this government seldom serves their interests, nor does it represent the will of these minority persons. The American government represents the interests of white Americans and seldom the interests of African-Americans and from the latter’s point of view is illegitimate. But African-Americans have to live with this government!

In the real world the powerful rule the weak and such is life. Realistic persons accept this ugly reality and operate within its framework (and, hopefully, work to change it, where change is possible).

Realistic leaders would accept the flawed leaders of Nigeria and deal with them, as they are, whereas those insisting on ideal leaders would  reject them, and keep on living in the fantasy that it is possible to have an ideal government any where in this world.

Human beings are flawed creatures and their societies and governments must be flawed. We must work with flawed people as they are and not expect them to live up to our mentally constructed ideals of how they ought to become.

Finally, human beings must have some ideals to give movement to their actions. It is doubtful that a person can get up and go do something if he does not have some ideals that he wants to approximate. The trick is to know the difference between what is wished for and what is attainable, what is ideal and what is real. Understanding the difference between the ideal and real lies the individual’s maturity.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

May 14, 2007

Dr Osuji can be reached at ozodiosuji@gmail.com

Robot  Villager

# 1 In the Nigerian situation we all know that the recent elections were rigged. I...Read the full article. Posted by Robot| 15.05.2007 12:50

oluye  Villager

# 2 A good read. In it we see ourselves, we also see the the man at the Rock, his vice and the new man too. We come to understand the driving force behind those who yearn for an alternate reality. It also explains why, contrary to the sorry state of living of Nigerians as revealed by Sabella Abidde, Nigerians are one of the happiest people on earth. Its like going back to the Psychology class with Dr Omoluabi in my University days. Thank you. I also come to see that while the likes of Hitler may be active idealists, monks who hide away in monasteries instead of doing the good they can in the society are equally guilty as passive idealists. More guilty are critics who hide away in foreign countries and send nothing but their criticisms and cynicisms instead of working their way into the system and doing what good they may. Your conclusion reminds me of the following quotation, God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; the courage to change the things I can; and the wisdom to know the difference. Posted by oluye| 15.05.2007 17:04