Army Leader Competencies Quotes

In his book Democracy Incorporated, Wolin, who taught political philosophy at Berkeley and at Princeton, uses the phrase inverted totalitarianism to describe our system of power. Inverted totalitarianism, unlike classical totalitarianism, does not revolve around a demagogue or charismatic leader. It finds expression in the anonymity of the corporate state. It purports to cherish democracy, patriotism, and the Constitution while manipulating internal levers to subvert and thwart democratic institutions. Political candidates are elected in popular votes by citizens, but candidates must raise staggering amounts of corporate funds to compete. They are beholden to armies of corporate lobbyists in Washington or state capitals who author the legislation and get the legislators to pass it. Corporate media control nearly everything we read, watch, or hear. It imposes a bland uniformity of opinion. It diverts us with trivia and celebrity gossip. In classical totalitarian regimes, such as Nazi fascism or Soviet communism, economics was subordinate to politics. “Under inverted totalitarianism the reverse is true,” Wolin writes. “Economics dominates politics—and with that domination comes different forms of ruthlessness.

Leadership has mostly been studied in the context of armies (military leadership), nations (political leadership) and business (corporate leadership), with good reason. Fine leadership – by which we mean competent and moral, since one can be an effective, but morally bankrupt, leader – in these realms can win wars, defeat evil and create lasting prosperity, stability and happiness. Since these are desirable outcomes, it is natural to strive to understand and emulate effective leadership.

But why does this all matter? Why is the math of arrows and swords relevant to understanding why you might have a boss, a boss’s boss, and a boss’s boss’s boss at work? For a simple reason: as ranged weapons became more common, the dynamics of warfare started to dramatically favor societies with more soldiers. If a few hundred people got together and formed an army under the rule of a single chief, egalitarian bands of twenty to eighty members just couldn’t compete. And when humans get together in larger groups, flat societies become impossible. Put enough people together, and hierarchy and dominance always emerge. It’s an ironclad rule of history. Some people had to learn this the hard way. Bands that stubbornly stuck to the old ways of flat society started to get wiped out by those who joined together and embraced chiefs. Plus, on the battlefield itself, having leaders (generals) with formal power over their soldiers was much more effective than a ragtag bunch of soldiers making their own decisions. It was the opposite of the !Kung hunting rituals. To win a war, you didn’t want to insult your best and bravest. You needed to elevate your best fighters, not cut them down to size.

Wang Xing embodied a philosophy of conquest tracing back to the fourteenth-century emperor Zhu Yuanzhang, the leader of a rebel army who outlasted dozens of competing warlords to found the Ming Dynasty: “Build high walls, store up grain, and bide your time before claiming the throne.” For Wang Xing, venture funding was his grain, a superior product was his wall, and a billion-dollar market would be his throne.

Conservative complicities in the fascism’s arrival in power were of several types. First of all, there was complicity in fascist violence against the Left. One of the most fateful decisions in the German case was von Papen’s removal, on June 16, 1932, of the ban on SA activity. Mussolini’s squadristi would have been powerless without the closed eyes and even the outright aid of the Italian police and army. Another form of complicity was the gift of respectability. We have seen how Giolitti helped make Mussolini respectable by including him in his electoral coalition in May 1921. Alfred Hugenberg, Krupp executive and leader of the party that competed with Hitler most directly, the German National Party (DNVP), alternately attacked the Nazi upstart and appeared at political rallies with him. One at Bad Harzburg in fall 1931 made the public believe the two had formed a “Harzburg Front.” But while Hugenberg helped make Hitler look acceptable, his DNVP membership drained away to the more exciting Nazis.

The use of divination, for example, implies the claim that a meaningful connection may exist between two events (a sneeze and the future salvation of an army, to take one example from among many in Xenophon’s Anabasis) that does not stem from the events themselves, the deliberate action of human beings, or chance. Or, to refer to divine punishment for certain misdeeds, as Xenophon does very emphatically in the midst of his Hellenica, is to suggest that those deeds had consequences not stemming naturally, so to speak, from the deeds themselves. In particular, it is to deny the validity of the suggestion which seems to be conveyed by the beginning and the ending of the Hellenica: that human affairs are drawn out of their usual confusion only when, and so long as, they are directed by human prudence in the form of a competent leader at the helm.