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Posina Venkata Rayudu's avatar

No, Holden, there is no leader (with due apologies to Francis Church ;)

Dear Professor Thorp,

Tangential as it may very well be, if I may, I am trigger-sensitive to the sound of leader. Simply put, is it not, mildly-stated, a confabulation?

At the risk of sounding whataboutist, we have brains, not one, but way too many to count, none of which seem to have a leader neuron, so to speak, and yet they work and continue to work well.

Is leader yet another subversive construct by the self-anointed intellectuals, hell-bent on holding hostage the subaltern in a state of make-believe purgatory of waiting, all waiting for some vaguely visualized something (or not even a thing anymore), with no positive properties, an ill-conceived other, not-them, notwithstanding their selves that are there to do all that needs to be done for them, a so-called leader to deliver.

Why do collectives of individuals, now baptized mass (note the implicit degradation of an individual to mass defined by indistinguishability, by the negation of all that is definitive of personhood), need a leader to lead them, when we a have a brain (e.g., my brain, if none else), which as a society of neurons (I hope Minsky doesn't sue me ;) that seems to be working well, with no leader neuron leading the way?

Leadership is about stories, about peddling narratives (descriptions are too difficult for their puny brains; cf. Gardner).

Please allow me to close with my Professor F. William Lawvere's abstraction of the workings of societies, with specific reference to the place of individual in the space of their of societies:

Individuals do not set the course of events; it is the social force.

https://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~wlawvere/ToposMotion.pdf

Thank you very much for your patient reading!

Thanking you,

Yours truly,

poison

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Paul Vorndam's avatar

This.

"And it’s a massive injustice to the laboratory trainees who deserve excellent mentorship."

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