Opinion/Editorial
BREAKDOWN INTO TRIBALISM
It’s not what you’re thinking. It’s not about the conduct of rules and hierarchical genetic transmission so identified with the tribes of past and modern Africa. The wording has changed, and therefore the meaning of what has happened to current supposedly civilized societies has gone into quiet secrecy while the ungodly, unruly, mean-spirited, and fully murderous form of socially structural leadership has not returned but has been revived to allow those who have less intellect, less ethics, and less care and compassion to assume roles of ultimate leadership and control of those around them.
A very innocent and even positive-sounding word called populism has taken over the title, where tribalistic thinking, maneuvering, and controlling people, treating, speaking to, and imploring the people around him or her is referred to today as the ‘popular’ leader. That dictator-driven authoritarian person grows in power as time goes by until the country or social order reaches such a closed in prison type of group that only a bloody, violent revolution can cast it off and then begin from ‘scratch’ rebuilding all over again (as in Russia, the United States breaking from the British, France, and many more).
Sometimes, as with the fall of the Roman Empire, the social order can never be rebuilt again if the authoritarian leaders cannot be stopped. Fear is the greatest and most powerful emotion in helping initiate the rise of a ‘popular’ leader, as God-like powers, so badly wanted by the people, are mistakenly invested in one person. That person, being one person, cannot live up to that kind of pressure, and fuses begin to blow out over time, and the leader becomes ever more undependable, ever more mean-spirited, and then violent.
Meanwhile, the cabal surrounding the leader continues to give the helpless, out-of-his-element leader more and more power, no matter how ridiculous the leader’s conduct becomes. Hans Christian Anderson wrote a story back in 1837 called The Emperor’s New Clothes (often mistakenly called the Emperor Has No Clothes). It was about such an authoritarian king who was sold on wearing a suit that was specially made to be visible only to his greatest supporters.
Earlier this week, the current U.S. president was given ‘new clothes’ by the ever more groveling Supreme Court. He was given the power to hire or fire almost anyone in government, which has never been the case before for a president; this move, despite how impossible it has become for the man to make truly well-grounded or rational decisions about anything. Nobody who is a grand MAGA supporter, as the people who ‘see’ the suit in the Anderson story, can see that the latest decisions by the man (Iran War, the Never Ever Peace there, the reflecting pool, the JFK center, the grand building of the coming Arch, or even the holding of the UFC fights on the White House Lawn, and so much more) are not brilliant well thought out moves.
The MAGA faithful see a ‘new suit’ while the rest of society sees an emperor wearing fewer and fewer clothes as time goes by. The question that all the stupefied citizens are forced to ask themselves is one of survival. Will it take a revolution to stop this, and if it does, then what kind of revolution will it be? Twenty-eight more months of this kind of leadership are too long for the population to ‘wait it out.’
