Leadership

Shakyamuni Buddha (शाक्यमुनि)

Leadership |
Tuesday – March 31, 2026

Leadership is something that is quite lacking here in the modern world, and this shows. What leaders can be spoken of today? Well, if by leader you are merely thinking about temporal power, then you are thinking in the right way, but your conception of leadership is lacking. When we are considering the subject of leadership we have to understand the certain division or bifurcation between raw power and legitimate power. Sure, there are plenty of people holding raw power today, but few, if any, are actually holding legitimate power, and I believe the major problem or mistake being committed by many here is the assumption that leadership begets power, or even the other way around, that power begets leadership. First of all, there is no such thing as power without authority, but authority and power are not the same thing nor are they in any way equivalent; power is derived from authority, that is to say from essence, and from that point of view power must be understood as something quite substantive, and indeed power is always substantive. This is why power is understood by the masses, but authority, true authority, is something that always eludes them, another argument against democracy. We are essentially dealing here with different domains, or the application of different principles across domains in such a way that causes confusion and diffraction of authority. I should also mention that authority will always diffract in the sensible order, as most men are unable to understand authority. Violence and coercion, these are surely understood by the masses, mostly because the mass itself has to be held back by the threat of violence (coercion) and when the mass becomes too unstable the only thing able to hold it back is violence, and this has been the history of the world, but this history is of course, very crude and only considered from a profane point of view, and you notice this with politicians all the time. Are politicians true leaders? Or are they perhaps something else: manipulators? Indeed, the best way to control the crowd, apart from raw power, is through propaganda, manipulation, and sentimentalism, and I suppose that you may contract, or conscript really, all of these things into one concept – the propagation of sentimentalism. The example of the Buddha is significant in this connection not because he was a proponent of crude conceptions about the world but because he understood the impedance between different modalities, read "Hierarchy". Surely this is the case: when did the Buddha condemn in the name of human rights the caste system? At no point, and the idea that the Buddha was a kind of early or primitive humanist leader is of course nonsense.

    What then is a true leader? Well, there is no such thing as a true leader, for leadership is a principle, never a reality. A principle in its pure form is merely something outside the manifested world; it is impossible for a true leader to ever be known to man, but here one man speak of men that aspire more or less to the principle, and of course, men that aspire to true leaders are many, but very few actually ever reach closer to the essential pole, as most tend to remove themselves further and further away from the essential. Indeed, no true leader, again not that this principle would be possible in manifested form, would ever consider himself a man of pure contemplation or pure action; a true leader would have to be both, and a good analogy would be the interaction between brain substance and bodily substance. In our times, most "leaders" are either mostly contemplative or mostly corporeal, and among the mostly contemplative there are very few. Indeed, most so-called leaders in our days are merely men more able in the domain of action, and often these men have very poor self-control and restraint, just an expression of where they come from. This is why you should expect the worst from political leadership and never the best. No good man would engage in the political arena, as he would always remain aloof from such material matters. Besides, most people will make it perfectly clear that they do not want to lead. Indeed, most people have no interest in being leaders, as most of them are happy if they can be guided by better men, and most of them will even admit to this. It is only because of our peculiar times and the strange ideals of egalitarianism, that each man is expected to take part in the governance of the land, the nation in the modern sense, read "Modern Warfare" as well. Indeed, why would anyone want to be a leader? This is a question that most people would fail to answer, mostly because of ideological indoctrination – everyone can become the future by leading the way... Complete nonsense! I would suggest to all lazy bums out there to continue on their path, as they are unqualified, and really none of the material on this page applies to them. If you are "offended", then you may also continue to be offended, because you are apparently a person of very low mentality.

    I am also going to dispel any nonsense about strength necessarily being the same thing as leadership: strength is not leadership, and there are plenty of examples of this; strength is also another individualism of sorts, as if it is weak to contemplate. Yes, for most people strength is only understood as an aspect of raw power, and if contemplation has any strength, it is only interesting in the application of materialism; an example to mention could be profane science. Besides, even if strength was a necessary aspect of leadership, this leadership would only be a very modern and provincial leadership, such as in the example, again, of politicians. But even when it comes to most politicians, there is not much strength to remark about; politicians are confused people, not strong people. Besides, most corporeally abnormal people have a very low mentality as well, but would anyone consider these people strong? Hardly, not even the most radical proponent of the material order would suggest that these people are strong; well he would claim that a disordered nature is a kind of strength, but privately he would avoid these same disorders, for disorders are only fine to the extent that they can advance individualism.

Reginald Drax – March 31, 2026.