Week 2: Thoughts on various "Leadership"

Aside from this LILTDY course, I'm taking IR classes in this semester and I came up with the thoughts related to "Leadership" in one of them. Today, I would like to write about it and that is about "after all, Leadership is a methodology and therefore, what matters most is HOW we use them"



In the class about "IR of Latin America", I met with the political concept of "Populism". Just in brief explanation, it's a type of politics that particularly focuses on getting popular support. In that sense, it seems same as Democracy but different in terms of the nuance which the word itself has. Although "Democracy" generally entails the "positive" image, "Populism", in many cases, entails the "negative" image. That's because, firstly, since it too much focuses on the support of people, their policies are in most cases inefficient, such as dole-out policy. Secondly, and more importantly, it's because Populism use emotional tactics rather than convincing, rational tactics. It appears as a mass use of Rhetorics by the politicians. Some people say that Populism is similar to Sedition.

In my opinion, Populism, is one of the forms of Leadership in the sense that it works pretty well to manage the community and the people there. Putting aside the discussion about right or wrong, leaders of Totalitarian can also be said that they were using Leadership. And I think particularly, Populism very much fits to the context of the discussion about Leadership since looking at the political back ground of Latin America, personal relationship between the leader of certain group (small, regional or local level) and the members are the strongest tie compared to other relationships such as within the social classes or legal relationships. 

Taking this into account, I think we should not forget that Leadership is not the something that is always good. (I think people have positive image to the word Leadership rather than negative one.) After all, it's just a discipline of methods that can be used to lead groups. Therefore, as same as other cases where we learn any methodology, the most important point is to think HOW we use it.

To me, tactics of Leaderships should accompany the respect to the ownerships of the members. In that sense, to me, Populism is not a good form of Leadership even though it works "well" in unifying the group. Why? One obvious reason is...because I just feel that I prefer being treated like that! Well, let's be more practical. So, to be realistic, in fact respecting the ownership of members contributes to the dynamics of that group. It's kind of a same logic as to assert that the Capitalism has more potential of prosperity than the Communism, in whose system Government controls all. Better to left the room for independence than trying to control all.