It is not true that some people are born leaders and others
born followers. This statement is correct because leadership is linked more to
nurture than it is to nature. Look at the history of the leaders who made a
mark on history, and you'll find that they were individuals who accomplished
extraordinary feats because they were brought up in a certain way, and because
fate put them in the right place at the right time.
Wherever you look in whatever field of endeavor you
research, you'll find that some people are better suited to lead. Also, there
is no denial that some people feel more comfortable following a leader rather
than think for themselves, or act independently of someone. To use an analogy,
there are the captains who excel at devising strategies, the foot soldiers who
are happy to implement those strategies, and everyone else doing different
things up and down the hierarchy.
Ever since the principle of division of labor gave nascence
to that hierarchy, society has functioned well using it. But like everything
else in life, what began as useful soon developed a dark side … and that’s
because good and evil are the two sides of the same coin. In no time at all,
division of labor fell prey to that reality and developed a dark side that
infested the entire hierarchy, spoiling it from head to toe. This resulted in
leaders getting drunk with power, and ordering the commission of atrocities. It
also resulted in foot soldiers slavishly following the ideas with which they
were imbued even after the leaders had disappeared from the scene.
To visualize this phenomenon, it is useful to recall what
the apartheid regime in South
Africa used to do. It used to train dogs to
go into the submission mode when seeing White people, and go into the attack
mode when seeing Black people. They were trained to bark at the Blacks and to
bite them … and because dogs have no intelligence comparable to that of humans,
they would attack even a Black person trying to save a White child from
drowning in a swimming pool. This is not a far fetched analogy to make when
describing people that turn the ideas hammered into their heads – into the
dogmas that make them act as thoughtless dogs. In fact, this is where the word
dogma came from.
One American leader, whose example spawned a multitude of
ideologues, especially after he disappeared from the scene, is Ronald Reagan.
This former President of the United
States came up with a few ideas that some
people adopted with enthusiasm and did well with them, improving their own lots
and contributing to society. Unfortunately, the Reagan influence did not stop
here. It affected some feeble minds as well – people that turned the ideas into
dogmas they followed with the same dogged determination as that displayed by
the dogs of South Africa .
And their effect on the American culture has been devastating.
One such dogma freak is Lee Smith who not only consumed
every idea that was attributed to Ronald Reagan – whether it was a correct
attribution or a false one – but also consumed every idea that the Likud party
of Israel threw at the
mindless dogs that were willing to bark the refrain of the party in America .
The work of Lee Smith is on display in the piece he wrote under the title: “A
Study in Contrast, Iran Edition,” published on April 28, 2015 in the Weekly
Standard.
In that piece, Smith demonstrates how incapable he is to
understand that Reagan was endowed with a flexibility in thinking which allowed
him, for example, to bomb Libya without announcing it, but restrained him from
bombing the Soviet Union which he mused he would do. Smith contrasts that
President with Barack Obama, the current President, who is endowed with the
same flexibility in thinking; a view that Lee Smith does not share.
Despite the fact that Obama attacks America 's
enemies anywhere he finds them but holds back when provoked by the unruly
faction inside the Iranian setup, Smith fails to see that the two men are
similar. On the contrary, he believes they are opposite to each other.
To prove his point, Smith mentions an incident that happened
recently in the Persian Gulf involving Iran . Despite the fact that the
differences between the two are stark, he sees a likeness between that incident
and what happened three decades ago when Reagan was President. Because Reagan
responded forcefully whereas Obama did not, Smith concludes that “what's
different now is the man sitting in the Oval Office.”