I want to add one extra blog post to the twelve I announced when I opened this category. It is a message from someone who has in those last few years become a well known figure. An Israeli, an academic, an author, and now more and more also a public speaker. A person is Yuval Noah Harari. And a message?
Waiting for a political saviour
Watching political scene and general political state in my country, I tend to come to the same conclusion: we are sitting and waiting for the political saviour. A person that would come with all the answers and save us from all our problems. Candidates come and go, and years pass by. We keep on having that same expectation and are, over and over, disappointed by the outcome.
The thing is that such expectation is inherently flawed. A person with all the answers could only exist at the time of great monarchs and tyrants that silenced everyone that turned up with an “unpleasant question”. The thing is such person can not exist, and even moreso, it is in fact not a good wish to have in the first place.
Keep on waiting, or …?
There will never be a (political) saviour that we keep on waiting for. We must rather challenge our expectations about leadership and what we expect a leader to be. I encountered following words from Harari. Read carefully.
What we humans need, and especially people in position of power, is to understand (our) own limitations and to try to not exceed them. (We need) to do the things we are qualified for. (In other words) to delegate power … A famous saying says that “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely”. Facing complex challenges we hope that someone very powerful will come along and take responsibility away from us. That is extremely dangerous – nobody can do it! The only solution is if a lot of people take responsibility. /…/ And that we do not expect one person to come up with all the answers.
Paradim 