Follow My Leader

A Remark upon the Cardinal Qualifications for the Leadership of a Possibly Less Phlegmatic Future State

ALDOUS HUXLEY

FOR suggesting that human beings ought to live without leaders or governments—virtuously, and by the light of pure reason— Shelley's father-in-law very nearly got himself dapped into jail. Luckily for him, the book in which he expressed these dangerous views was published at the price of three guineas. For those who could afford three guineas, this mild, millcnarial anarchism would not, it was felt, be very harmful. Godwin was not destined to see the inside of Newgate.

We may well wonder, today, why he was not ushered into Bedlam. The views which were then criminal, now appear merely a little imbecile. Man being what he is, we can see that it is biologically impossible for him to do without governments and leaders. A society of locusts or lemmings can dispense with leaders, because each individual is internally governed by instincts which allow him no freedom of action; at any given moment, there is only one thing he can do. A race of superior beings, like Milton's angels, for example, could equally dispense with leaders; they could be trusted in any crisis to do the virtuous and the rational thing. Men fall between two stools. Most of us are only too happy to shift the greater part of our responsibilities to other shoulders; we like to be told what to do, which way to go.

And, fortunately, there are always shoulders ready and eager to accept the burden. Guides offer themselves to us as importunately as those shady gentlemen who, in imperfect English, tender their services on the Boulevard des Italiens to every Anglo-Saxon who longs to see the night life of Paris. For among the innumerable many, whose destiny and desire it is to be led, there are always a few who have the ambition to lead.

What are the capacities which, in the world as we know it, qualify a man to become a leader? And what are the qualities which, ideally, he ought to possess? These are interesting questions, which I will try to answer to the best of my ability.

The Will to Power

TO begin with, there must be the ambition to become a leader. All of us, I imagine, have a certain lust for power. But the desire varies greatly in intensity, and the objects over which it is desired to exert power are not always the same. An artist, for example, lusts for domination, not over his fellow men, but over words, over colors, over bits of stone; above all, over his own thoughts. The philosopher, more ambitiously, longs to tyrannize over the whole universe. With a truly Procrustean love of neatness and symmetry, he chops and stretches the untidy facts of experience until they fit his favorite system. But philosophers and artists, after all, are rare monsters. The power most people desire is over their neighbors. When that desire is very strong—so strong that it docs notshrink before any expense of labor or of thought—the man who feels it may be said to be ambitious to become a leader.

The ambition has now to be satisfied. To do that, it is almost essential that a man should be endowed with a good dose of what the quacks of an earlier age called "animal magnetism ". This quality, which seems to belong in part to the graces of the body, in part to those of the mind, expresses itself in varying degrees of intensity. At its most amiable, we call it charm. At its most formidable, it is that queer power which enables certain people to inspire confidence and, sure of obedience, to command. The would-be leader should also possess—the essential complement to this endowment—a certain gift of the gab. Eloquence enables him to exert his magnetism at long range and over a number of people at the same time.

Next, I may enumerate one or two of the common cardinal virtues. Without a few of them, no leader can hope to be successful. The two most important are courage and resolution. Chastity, in this age of virtuous public opinion, has great practical value. (Poor Parnell!) But prudence, the virtue which prevents one from being found out, will be found by some leaders the easier to practice. Finally, there is honesty. But this is by no means essential to success. Indeed, a would-be leader possessing no other quality but this, is almost inevitably doomed to failure. After a month or two of Mr. Baldwin's ingenuous honesty, we all began to sigh for a little of Mr. Lloyd George's cleverness.

The Insignia of Leadership

IT is unnecessary here to do more than mention those adventitious aids to success which, in one form or another, almost all leaders have employed. I refer to the distinguishing badges of office and, in more modern times, to the peculiarities of physique and dress which leaders always cultivate in order to make themselves easily recognizable. It is one of the achievements of democracy to have abolished the badges and liveries which were once worn by every man in the social hierarchy, from mechanic toking. Everybody nowlooks like eve|ybody else; the Prince of Wales is no more than the type and model of Vanity Fair's Well Dressed Man.

In order to make themselves promptly recognizable—which is as important for a politician as it is for a patent medicine or a breakfast food—leaders are compelled to cultivate little personal eccent ricities. Gladstone had his collar and his prophetic hair. The latter waves, an hereditary liberal symbol, from the skull of Mr. Lloyd George. Chamberlain had his eyeglass and orchid; so has his son. But Joe also happened to have political ability. Tirpitz has his fabulous whiskers; Clemenceau has his drooping ones, and William Hohenzollern his aspiring moustaches. The old method of dressing up the ruler in feathers, robes and coronets was perhaps the more satisfactory; for these trade-marks of power had the advantage of being fixed and hereditary.

We have now to consider the intellectual qualities of the successful leader. These are, in the first place, a prompt and practical intelligence, and a touch of cunning. Almost equally essential, if success is to be steady and anything like permanent, is a good dosage of the current prejudices. Certain leaders, it is true, have been relatively free from the prejudices of the led, and have succeeded in imposing upon them unfamiliar, and therefore unpopular ideas. But their efforts, though often fruitful in the future, have rarely met with an untroubled success during their own lifetime.

The typical successful leader shares the prejudices, however platitudinous or false they may be, of the society in which he finds himself, and prefers the teaching of tradition to that of experience. He belongs almost invariably to the class which Trotter has called the stable-minded. Successful leaders are rarely remarkable for their purely intellectual capacities; indeed, it is difficult for a man to be very intelligent and to accept the prejudices of the society in which he lives. They are rarely subtle or skeptical; they do not like the scientific suspense of judgment, preferring always to believe one thing passionately, rather than another, and to make definite decisions even when they have no rational excuse for doing so.

Men possessing these qualities have succeeded in the past, and still continue to succeed. They are the leaders whom we know today. The state in which the world finds itself in the present year of grace is not, it must be confessed, a very glowing testimonial to their capacities. But while, acting as individuals, we dismiss incompetent and dishonest servants without a character, we continue, in our collective capacity, to employ the same rulers who, in the past, have reduced us to ruin.

The fact is, that we can find nobody else; the ruler shortage is even more acute than the shortage of servants. We are compelled, for lack of anyone better, to employ those whom experience has taught us to regard as bad. Tradition, however, which is more powerful than experience, still teaches us to respect them; so that the glaring stupidity of our action is not clear to us.

An Uneasy Dominion

TRADITION, too, makes us imagine that we are still living in the sort of world where these leaders could function without doing too much mischief; where they could even be positively beneficial. In a society of stable traditions, a stable-minded leader was entirely in his element. At the head of a relatively small, sparsely peopled and self-supporting state, where social, economic and intellectual change was slow, the most narrow-witted of traditionalists could do no harm; and, by consolidating the people in their traditional virtues, he could frequently do good.

But the leader who now comes to power finds himself at the head of a profoundly unstable society, large sections of which have lost their traditional respect for the established order of things. He finds enormous populations dependent for their livelihood on an industrial system, shaken by external events and unsteady from its own inward rottenness. He finds universal discontent. He finds, in every department of life, changes going on with a dizzying rapidity. He finds material unaccompanied by mental development—huge hordes, with the minds of neolithic men, armed with trinitrotoluol and tanks.

To rule such a society, a man should be a philosopher and a scientist. He should possess vast knowledge. He should be exquisitely sensitive to every lesson of experience. He should be quick to seize on every new idea, to judge it, and to assimilate the virtue contained in it. He should, in a word, possess all those intellectual qualities which the typical leader of the past—who is also, alas, the typical leader of the present day—does not possess.

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And the worst of it is that it seems almost impossible for a leader to possess these intellectual qualities together with those other qualities which I have already enumerated as being essential to success. One set of qualities seems to exclude the other.

It is in the highest degree unlikely that the pensive introvert, who cultivates his mind until it becomes capable of philosophic breadth and scientific sensitiveness, can also be a man of action, endowed with resolution, practical cunning, animal magnetism and the necessary pinch of charlatanism. In the whole of recorded history, there is scarcely one example of the philosopher king. Nor, until very recent times, was the need of such a type seriously felt. It is only now, when the world is immensely complicated, changeful and unsteady, that ho has become a necessity. But it would be unduly optimistic to believe that this new kind of leader will actually make his appearance, however much we pray for him.

And even if a lonely monster of this kind were to appear in one country, he could achieve little or nothing so long as the old type of leader remained in control of the surrounding states. One Poincaré would be enough to reduce ten philosopher kings to impotence. A single, solitary nation cannot possibly afford to embark on schemes of disarmament while its neighbors retain their fleets and aeroplanes. Similarly, no state could afford to be governed by reason while the rest of the world was governed by the good old fashioned light of unreasoning prejudice.

We are on the horns of a dilemma. There is every reason to suppose, on the one hand, that leaders of the old school will involve the new and complex and unstable world in fresh and even more appalling calamities. And on the other hand, there seems to be not the slightest probability of a new type of leader being evolved; at any rate, in the immediate and. for us, interesting future. The unstable-minded introvert (of whose literary sub-species I may modestly claim to be a member) has neither the initial desire, nor the capacity to turn himself into a busy extrovert.

In the long course of time, humanity will doubtless find some issue between the horns. Stable-minded men will always adhere to tradition and prejudice; but prejudice may as well be in favor of rational conduct as opposed to it. To face reality will become respectable; public schoolboys will be taught that it is good form to learn by experience, to do and to believenothingbutwhat seems reasonable.

But the distant future can safely be left to look after itself. What we are most anxiously concerned with is the immediate future. It is still by no means respectable to face reality; to believe only what is reasonable; to suspend judgment about the things we do not and cannot know; to act in an unprejudiced and sensible manner. And our leaders belong to the respectable classes. . . .

In the absence of good management, we can only pray for luck.