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Tag: "Alexander Hamilton"

Brexit and the Failure of Leadership

Yet again, the mainstream media has hidden the main for Brexit.  Brexit, or Britain/UK leaving the EU is at its core a massive failure of leadership.  From American president Woodrow Wilson once said,
“The ear of the leader must ring with the voices of the people.” If the leaders in the UK had been listening to the people for the last 30 years, perhaps their wouldn’t be a surge in the rise of neo-Nazi, and fascist groups.  The mainstream media has been lashing out saying that those who voted to leave the EU are all just a bunch of racists and bigots.  I won’t argue that some of the are indeed racists and bigots, but you know as well as I do that 52% of the population isn’t comprised of racists.  That’s an overly simplistic thought, and like all overly simplistic thoughts, it’s wrong.

The heart of the Brexit issue can also be found in what’s going on across the pond here in the U.S. The popular movements supporting Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders and Presumptive Republican candidate Donald Trump both point to a lack of leaders listening to the people. It’s much easier for the establishment to call Brexit, Sanders and Trump supporters stupid, bigoted or entitled, but the truth lays in the fact that all three of these groups are comprised of disenfranchised people who feel as if the system has turned their backs on them.  Or as the brilliant comedian and philosopher George Carlin once said, “They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around a kitchen table and think about how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fuckin’ years ago.”

Great leaders make sure that everyone on their team is well taken care of.  The unwritten contract between leaders and followers is that each will take care of the other.  So what happens when we put our faith and trust in leaders that we have put into power and then they ignore our needs? A study done by Princeton and Northwestern universities concluded that “The U.S. government does not represent the interests of the majority of the country’s citizens, but is instead ruled by those of the rich and powerful.”

Working-class voters are waking up and realizing that their leaders don’t care about them beyond getting elected or re-elected, hence the dramatic rise in alternative groups.  Brexit would never have happened had the elite thrown down more than just a few crumbs to their followers.  Globalization has eviscerated the middle class.  It didn’t have to be so, but corporate profits became the overarching goal, while the needs and future of the people were tossed into the garbage bin of history.

Now read the following story about Alexander the Great and ask yourself, “would ANY of our leaders today do for his followers what he did?

““Now, however, he marched out against Dareius, expecting to fight another battle; but when he heard that Dareius had been seized by Bessus, he sent his Thessalians home, after distributing among them a largess of two thousand talents over and above their pay. In consequence of the pursuit of Dareius, which was long and arduous (for in eleven days he rode thirty-three hundred furlongs (644km), most of his horsemen gave out, and chiefly for lack of water. At this point some Macedonians met him who were carrying water from the river in skins upon their mules. And when they beheld Alexander, it being now midday, in a wretched plight from thirst, they quickly filled a helmet and brought it to him. To his enquiry for whom they were carrying the water, they replied: ‘For our own sons; but if thou livest, we can get other sons, even if we lose these.’ On hearing this he took the helmet into his hands, but when he looked around and saw the horsemen about him all stretching out their heads and gazing at the water, he handed it back without drinking any, but with praises for the men who had brought it; ‘For,’ said he, ‘if I should drink of it alone, these horsemen of mine will be out of heart.’ But when they beheld his self-control and loftiness of spirit, they shouted out to him to lead them forward boldly, and began to goad their horses on, declaring that they would not regard themselves as weary, or thirsty, or as mortals at all, so long as they had such a king.” -Plutarch, Life of Alexander 42.3-6 (Plutarch. Plutarch’s Lives. with an English Translation by. Bernadotte Perrin. Cambridge, MA. Harvard University Press. London. William Heinemann Ltd. 1919. 7. )

July 1, 2016 | 0 comments | View Post

Do Most Leaders Suck…and Where are the Great Leaders?

Declaration_independence

Chances are, if you’re over the age of eighteen and have worked a few jobs it probably occurred to you that most of the people you worked for were horrible leaders.  Did you ever stop to ask yourself why that was?

We have over 7 Billion people on the this planet, so why are aren’t we brimming full with amazing leaders?  Where are the Alexander the Great’s, the Winston Churchill’s, the Julius Caesars, the Asoka’s, the Franklin D. Roosevelt’s, the Thomas Jefferson’s and Napoleon Bonarparte’s, and the George Washington’s? Where are the Nelson Mandela’s,  the Mahatma Gandhi’s, and Joan of Arcs, the Ataturk’s, the Hamurabi’s and the Leonidas’? Where are the 21st Century’s versions of Marcus Aurelius, Catherine the Great, the Simon Bolivars?  Our world history is replete with tremendous leaders, who left their mark on the societies that they lived it.

Just here in the United States of America alone we had John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, John Jay, Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton just to name a few.  The original thirteen colonies had a population of approximately 3 million people.  Let that sink in for a moment. A fledgling country with a population of 3 million people had six brilliant leaders.  The US population is now well over 350 million people.  That means that we should have over seven hundred leaders at the caliber of the US founding fathers.  But we don’t, why? In three words we can sum up why, education and role models. You see, these men all were educated not what to think, but how to think. Equally importantly they had role models.  At a young age, Alexander  was exposed to Achilles from a poem called The Illiad. was a heroic Greek warrior from a famous ancient poem called the Iliad. Achilles became the model of the noble warrior for Alexander, and he modeled himself after this hero.

Alexander was first educated by  Leonidas, who was a relative of Alexander’s mother Olympia. Alexander’s father King Phillip asked Leonidas to teach Alexander math, horsemanship and archery. Alexander’s next tutor was Lysimachus, who used role playing as a way to engage and make the lessons stick. Alexander was enthralled by the warrior hero Achilles in the epic poem, the Illiad.  Alexander’s fascination with the Illiad lasted throughout his life and he was said to always have a copy with him on his military campaigns.   Eventually King Philip hired the philosopher Aristotle to teach  Alexander. For three years, Aristotle taught Alexander philosophy, poetry, drama, science and politics.

America’s Founding Fathers were immersed in what was called a “classic education.”  From the article The Classical Education of the Founding Fathers
“The typical education of the time began in what we would call the 3rd Grade—at about age eight. Students who actually went to school were required to learn Latin and Greek grammar and, later, to read the Latin historians Tacitus and Livy, the Greek historians Herodotus and Thucydides, and to translate the Latin poetry of Virgil and Horace. They were expected to know the language well enough to translate from the original into English and back again to the original in another grammatical tense. Classical Education also stressed the seven liberal arts: Latin, logic, rhetoric (the “trivium”), as well as arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music (the “quadrivium”).”

By now you have probably already come to the same conclusion as I did, “Why weren’t we educated in this manner?”  Can you imagine what America would be like today if we had, as opposed to the intentional dumbing down of this country’s citizens?

And my dear reader is what Hardcore Leadership is all about, educating the next generation of leaders. And as Patrick Henry once said, “I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience. I know of no way of judging of the future but by the past.”

February 15, 2016 | 0 comments | View Post