A leader is not a leader without a follower. It seems clear that it is the followers that make him a leader. Most of the time, however, the leader thinks that it is the other way around, that it is he who generates his followers, and it is here, from this narcissism, where leadership problems start, especially in liberal democracies. .
It all starts with the difficulty in finding a talented candidate and it all ends with the streets full of citizens frustrated by broken promises.
Demonstrations for socioeconomic reasons, like the ones we have seen this week in several European cities, imply a failure of the system to generate equality. However, those that obey partisan interests, which also abound, seek the opposite, that is, to protect individual rights at the expense of collective ones.
It is shocking to see doctors and nurses, in Spain and the United Kingdom, the same professionals who received so much praise during the pandemic, demand the minimum to move forward.
It is shocking to see European leaders make decisions without knowing where they lead. Why is priority given, for example, to green hydrogen over the family doctor?
"No, it's not about prioritizing," the bureaucrats of the system say then. “Energy is one thing and health is another; they cannot be compared”, insist the same experts.
But this is precisely what we citizens, stunned by the deterioration of the quality of life and the decline of leadership, do.
Life isn't that bad, but it seems so. GDP has grown in Spain by 5.5% in 2022, above expectations. Inflation is going down, just like the price of electricity and fuel. Reduces the risk of recession in the European economies. The states maintain extraordinary aid to citizens while Brussels prepares new support for the industry and, even so, it is not enough. It seems that everything is going wrong. The climate is fed up and tense, of fear in the face of uncertainty.
Do we live in a reality invented by others, the enemies of democracy and common sense?
These enemies are not just the autocrats, the populists, the ultranationalists and the neo-fascists, the agitators who seem to be the only possible leaders. They are also the democrats who benefit from misinformation, from the profitable business of promoting confrontation, complaints and denunciations, from the trivialization of news and human relations, less and less real and more virtual, from the dictatorship of immediacy. and instant gratification. We demand immortality as demonstrated by a recent essay titled The Death of Death. The scientific possibility of physical immortality and its moral defense.
It seems impossible to lead from reason. The candidate who defends the mortality of man has no option against the one who guarantees eternal life.
Much of this virtuality is produced by machines that learn from themselves by leaps and bounds. ChatGPT, a system that generates responses and reasoned texts, will be a very effective tool to spread disinformation automatically.
Democratic leaders, unable to make a decision without consulting polls and statistics, will now rely more on artificial intelligence to govern.
However, 90% of executives who manage a company's human resources believe that only managers who focus on the human aspects of leadership are successful. The survey by the North American consulting firm Gartner adds that only one in three workers believes that they have a boss with this sensitivity and empathy.
Since the pandemic changed the paradigms of production, distribution and consumption, many company directors, as well as many presidents and prime ministers, have lost credibility. They make decisions without knowing what they are doing.
It is true that uncertainty is still too great today to be sure that we are moving in the right direction, but the executive or politician who wants to maintain the confidence of their workers and citizens must admit it. It must be honest, transparent and clear. Clarity is even more important than transparency. People have the right to understand why a leader makes a decision even if he is not sure about it.
This right to understanding, however, is not easy to achieve in a society with a diminishing attention span, indifferent to the other for most of the day, as well as to the phenomena that make it up.
Democracies are resilient. It seems that nothing can with them, neither Trump nor Bolsonaro. The Netherlands is a good example. Institutionalized racism, violence from drug trafficking and the extreme right, as well as the harassment of Princess Amalia have not tarnished its image as a liberal country, one of the most democratic and advanced in the world.
It is possible that nothing will ever happen to the citizens of the European Union, that it is the same who demonstrates and who governs us. A neo-fascist leads Italy and the fundamentals do not change. I don't know. Happiness depends on the aspirations of each one, but indifference is regressive and progress requires leadership that we do not have today.
