This post is about the romantic attachment to leisure which displaces personal duty.
The attachment to saviour figures is animated by this process, which offers the usual consumer rewards. I call this process “Leaderism”.
CONTENTS
What is Leaderism?
Leisure Without End
Followers and Leaders
Who put the U in Guru?
Part two - Some Examples of Leaderism
New Atheism
Donald Trump
Volodymyr Zelensky
Gordon Tabletson
Vladimir Putin
Postscript - Cosmic Foo-Foo Merchants
Apologies for any errors in this post. I am suffering from an insubordinate molar, whose pleas for attention are difficult to ignore.
What is “Leaderism”?
Leaderism is the investment of a sense of salvation in a leader figure. In following the persona of the Leader, the consumer can
magnify themselves
enjoy status by proxy
relax and do nothing themselves
Leaderism is a belief system. It offers the believer or follower a deal.
What does this belief system provide?
Leaderism is a transaction which allows you to do nothing and feel good about it.
It offers the purchase of status, peace of mind and affords a pyschological reward without merit.
The status is transferred from the distinguished leader to the consumer.
The peace of mind flows from the immense relief from thinking and from the responsibility of taking any action.
The psychological reward is twofold: the follower participates in the status of the leader, as if his credentials were theirs.
The follower also gets to look down on non-followers. These are the two main instances of unmerited status conferred by leaderism.
Why is Leaderism a problem?
Leaderism is like an opiate. It is addictive, nullifies and isolates the addict and eventually steals their soul.
It limits your input from the world, providing a comforting filter for reality. Just as opiates makes you feel less, which becomes the same as feeling “good”, Leaderism replaces much of your interaction with the world outside with itself. It is a substitute.
Like most consumer processes it is designed with dependence in mind. I would describe addiction as a method of securing freedom from choice, and Leaderism provides this option. If you follow, you do not have to think for yourself or consider your own role in the world beyond a beacon of the Leader’s wisdom.
LEISURE WITHOUT END
Every culture has its animating myths. The consumer culture preaches convenience, indulgence, gratification. It suggests it is wise to look no further than ourselves.
The ultimate consumer fantasy is a state of permanent leisure - a life of unlimited scrolling and browsing and grazing, with no return to the ugly complexities of reality, duty and agency.
Leaderism is the pursuit of leisure. It frees you from your duties.
As with all effective means of control, Leaderism leaves actual power structures untouched. Its appeal is to the vanity of the follower, who is consoled by attachment to a powerful totem.
Leaderism affects people across the political spectrum and is a further example of the persistence of superstition - or “magical thinking” - in the technological age.
FOLLOWERS AND LEADERS
Not all following is Leaderism. Whilst no leader is perfect, there are degrees of sincerity - from pure grift to complete conviction.
The example of Tony Blair serves to illustrate that complete self belief in your own product (yourself) is not equivalent to “goodness”.
Men are flawed, and the flaw inherent in Leaderism is to forget the flaws and follow regardless. This is a form of idolatry.
It is possible (and desirable) to accept leaders and leadership without investing in them this totemic power. In the same way it is possible to shop for groceries and clothes without infusing these purchases with an emotional, psychological or even “spiritual” dimension.
In this post I will examine several instances of Leaderism drawn from politics and popular culture.
LEADERISM - OR - WHO PUT THE U IN GURU?
The famous guru, even those with a modicum of fame such as the microcelebrities with fringe social media followings, is emblematic of “Leaderism”.
The rascal gurus of the Sixties were an earlier example, such as Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. Before them, in the late 19th century, came a wave of occultists. Social media has accelerated the rise of a new class of digital gurus.
These Leaders have their own brand to sell you. Following them gives you a totem to invoke. The Leader becomes a synechdoche, a sort of metaphor for your idea of the world. Affiliation to the Leader can be worn like a badge.
This shorthand helps in the digital world, where attention spans are critically limited.
Leaderism is the displacement of appraisal with attachment.
No human leader is perfect, of course, and it is necessary to have them in the political sense.
Yet Leaderism is not the acceptance of human limitations. The totemic adoption of Leaderism differs from the pragmatic recognition of hierarchy. It is the investiture of personal significance in the symbol of the leader.
This is akin to a form of animism, similar to the wearing of a lion skin to absorb and display the courage of a power animal.
As this cringe meme illustrates, “leaderism” is a personality cult. It permits a retreat into relaxed self indulgence with the comforting belief that the leaders are doing everything that is necessary.
The “New Atheists” pictured above as the Beatles were described in a book as the “Four Horsemen of the Atheist Revolution”. They first rode out in a Wired article of 2006, which dubbed them “The Church of the Non-Believers”. It was a cult which enjoyed popular appeal for a few years.
Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett are represented in a manner which suggests that their celebrity is their power.
The arguments these men advanced are unserious - but secured their popularity.
(For a serious treatment of the subject, see John Gray’s Seven Types of Atheism).
Why did people buy into this cult? Why did they follow these leaders?
These men offered you the chance to feel superior to others. You didn’t have to do anything to merit this other than to parrot their memes.
You could call yourself a “bright”, which is the toe-curling term Dawkins coined for his followers, whose luminescence derived from their rejection of superstition generally.
You could say, like Daniel Dennett, that human consciousness is an “emergent property”. Dennett had a beard and was a professor. You could repeat his sciencey jargon and feel very clever about grandly saying nothing.
Harris refuses to criticise Israel, and Hitchens supported the Iraq war.
This form of leaderism is halo-polishing. To identify with the Leader is to absorb their power, and subsume yourself into their fame and influence. To echo their ideas is to aggrandise yourself, and to see their limitations is anathema. Leaderism is a source of gratification, but never satisfaction.
The Leading Light
What matters about the leader is that he is famous and will solve your problems for you.
He also acts as a totem - you can wear your allegiance to him to signal that you share his qualities. The Leader confers a synthetic identity on the follower. He is a magical celebrity whose glamour can be shared.
This is a transaction which permits the follower the luxury of doing nothing themselves.
Doing nothing to solve your own problems is a consumer option which flatters an idea of life as leisure activity.
In this life, what is most offensive is any interruption in entertainment. The consumer identity is available to permit your escape from responsibility and action. Its adoption gives the impression - to you - that something has been done.
Again the New Age idea of personal realisation informs this illusion - that in assuming a new idea, that is - in consuming a ready made product - you have not only enhanced yourself but you have changed the world in a positive way.
Finally, it does not actually liberate anyone. Instead, the follower comes to govern their life through the medium of second hand messages. This practice does not liberate but nullifies through the reduction of life to an experiment with borrowed thoughts. The retreat from responsibility, from remedy and the recognition of the reality of yourself is the result of total immersion in the Leader’s worldview.
Symbols of the Superior
This mentality always insists on a public display. The follower has done much internal work, and has invisibly transformed themselves.
It is therefore vital to show the world that you have changed, and that the world has changed with you. It would not notice otherwise.
The symbol of the followers of the New Atheists became the fedora. Wearing this hat in a “cool” way was intended to show you had evolved beyond the foolish superstitions of the past two thousand years of culture and tradition.
At the time, people such as famous debunker James Randi would sport the hat as a signal to others that they were wisely Godless.
The wearing and tipping of a fedora became one of the most cringe inducing memes on the internet, producing more anguish in the viewer on behalf of the hapless victim than the “mask of shame” associated with the formerly credible hacker collective Anonymous.
BAD ORANGE MAN
His Imperial Majesty Dr President Donald J Trump is the most popular saviour figure on the populist “right”.
He is flawed, but effective. He is appealing as he appears as a convincing tribune of the people: a man from the billionaire class who has the common touch and plainly identifies himself with the cause of the commoner.
Any politician preaching to this majority will succeed, as the majority opinion and the people who hold them are excluded from the political process.
McDonald Trump is bit just a nothingburger. The people who hate you hate him too. Several factions want to destroy him personally. This is because he is unlike them, and is a threat to their death cult business model.
His name literally triggers insane fits of rage in the differently saned, which is hilarious and also functions as an instant litmus test of who to avoid in person.
This does not make him perfect, but his opposition to Forever War and his hard-nosed dealmaking hucksterism place him on the side of reality versus fantasy, and on that of life versus death.
Trump, I think, is going to win. Empire is a business and the current managers are bad for that.
There are strong signs that the Regime is retreating from some formerly non-negotiable positions. It has changed tack on Ukraine and on Israel with surprising speed. I think this is because factions within it realise its current course leads to disaster.
Summary:
Trump is not perfect. Do not sit back and expect everything to magically recover simply because he wins an election.
You are responsible for your life.
I would recommend you
foster strong family and community bonds,
take measures to favour financial and domestic resilience
join local governance and voluntary groups
meet like minded people in real life and online
VOLODYMYRR ZELYENSKYY
The injury to sanity that is the war in Ukraine has not merely resulted in the needless destruction of hundreds of thousands of lives.
It has offered us another leader to follow: a comedian sponsored by oligarchs, who was memed into the Presidency by a television programme.
Zelensky is a native Russian speaker.
To autocorrect this error, his name attracted more consonants as the war went on, making him a prized asset in Scrabble.
In addition, a sort of cult of Zelensky emerged. Other leaders hugged him. Congress reached out and touched him. Candles were sold bearing the image of this Jewish man got up like a Catholic or Orthodox Christian saint.
Zelensky became an icon of democracy and freedom, as he suspended elections, banned the opposition, shut down journalists and arrested priests.
GORDON TABLETSON
Jordan “Gordon Tabletson” Peterson is a cult leader. He dresses, talks and acts like one. He was formerly a psychologist, which is a cursed profession anyway.
Following his exposure to the mass media his mind melted, and now he turns out dressed like a tarot card to lead humanity to his idea of salvation.
As I have explained before, Peterson’s creed sounds remarkably like that of Aleister Crowley. I am not the first person to point this out, and I do go on about it here:
Crowley himself was a “rascal guru” who marketed himself through notoriety - whilst selling an agenda of total self indulgence. This may seem a severe charge to level at Peterson, who began with advising young men to clean their bedrooms.
Peterson is now saying that the foundation of life, meaning and order is the innate spark of divinity of mankind. This is at best a Gnostic idea. It is my view that Jordan Peterson sells a credentialed intellectualism to his followers which is as suspect as his New Aeon spirituality.
You may like these ideas he is selling, but they are not original and they have an obvious lineage. To my knowledge he does not have any ideas of his own. By this I mean his work includes ingredients from the Western “illumninist” tradition, whose subtraction leaves us with a few practical tips on personal administration.
Peterson’s product is a continuation of the Western mystical tradition which emerged in the 19th century with Helena Blavatsky.
Crowley’s student, L Ron Hubbard, created his sales-religion of Scientology on leaving Crowleyanity. In it, sorcery is repackaged as self-improvement, and is presented in scientific terms as a means of liberation from the limitations of the self.
Peterson’s is also an interior wisdom cult. He is a “scientist” of the mind, and has cultivated a public charisma.
His latest outfit, which he called “Good and Evil”, recalls the formula encoded in the card of Art in the Crowley deck: “Visit the interior earth, rectify the occult stone”. It is an invitation to transform the world from within oneself - through the reconciliation of opposites. These are shown as fire and ice, male and female in the card.
This is the dialectic of good and evil, with man at the centre - axis of his destiny, and that of the world.
From Blavatsky through Crowley, to the Maharishi and Rajneesh, there is an established tradition of esoteric leaderism. Producing a fusion of the personal and the powerful, they repackage the Devil’s bargain in the fashion of their times.
BASED PUTIN
If a leader owns the libs, he will have no end of fans.
That Trump, Peterson and Putin all enrage the people who have tormented reality into a fool’s paradise has an understandable appeal.
To ignore the nature of their product for this reason is to come close to Leaderism. Putin is a former spook with a PhD in the geostrategic significance of Russian oil and gas reserves.
He is an effective manager, bringing order to the factions of Russian state and non-state power. Russia is an empire and Putin has directed its fortunes from anarchy to renascence. It is once more recognised as a great power.
This is an extraordinary achievement. Yet it is not for his statesmanship that the cult of Putin has been kindled in the dissident West. It is because he upholds values our leaders have abandoned, and will defend them in person without hesitation.
The correct place for the admiration of these traditional values is within your own nation. It is generous to acknowledge the leadership of another land, but it is treason to abandon your own because it has disappointed you.
How would Putin have made his Russia if all his people had followed Clinton, Bush and Blair?
Grim as things may seem, Russia was in a far worse state in the 1990s than is the US and the West now. Putin is often right about the West, but that is no surprise when things have gone so far wrong. His astute remarks are certainly informed from having to deal with years of turmoil and crisis, where a keen eye for reality was vital for survival. This habit, too, has aetiolated in the West under three decades of complacency.
Putin is admired for his basic common sense, which is absent from most - not all - of our leadership class. It is tempting to worship men who state the obvious in such times, but this is a dangerous habit.
COSMIC FOO FOO MERCHANTS
The technique of selling people nonsense as sense was infused with a “spiritual” dimension in the New Age movement.
This was downstream of occultism, or “Scientific Illuminism” as some called it. A 19th century movement of mysticism, ritual and largely made-up wisdom “traditions”, it resulted in the esoteric -the intensely personal - as product.
You could now go and feel cosmic and enlightened by burning some incense and buying some rocks.
The same principle is at work when you ritualise the repetition of memes you have downloaded from some online huckster or other.
But not me. Oh no. I am not like the other grifters.
My goal is not to aggrandise myself or you, but to make the argument for reality. I think the ultimate reality is God, and that we should try to live a holy life.
The advice I have for you is to treasure the human bonds of family, kinship, friendship and to diminish the habit of sin. If you do not believe in “sin”, look at what Aristotle said about virtue and do that.
One of the best pieces of advice I have ever heard is that we should try to become social missionaries. Help the other survivors where you can.
Leaders are necessary, but beware of falling in love with them. You would laugh at people who do this to characters in a soap opera. This factor is what distinguishes leaderism from the ordinary recognition of hierarchy. The crime is this misplaced romance. Learn to have no use for unrequited love.
Haven fallen into this trap (atheism) 20 some years ago I can say in retrospect it was driven mainly by the neocon use of American Christians to wage war. It was the hypocrisy of the religious in America that turned me off. Had American Christians rose up to defeat that invasion, I would have never held such a position. I would fit in well with the early 20th century non interventionist conservatives. Liberalism brought internationalism. We had half the globe, should have built sea walls centuries ago.
I would expect that a good leader inspires action in his followers. "Leaderism" sounds like bad leadership as the followers expect the leader to act on their behalf.