WANTED! More Leaders and less Power Addicts...
<a href=www.vheadline.com>Venezuela's Electronic News Posted: Friday, May 30, 2003 By: Gustavo Coronel
"If the politician does not take care of the problems, the problems will take care of the politician" -- R. G. Collingswood: "The Idea of History."
VHeadline.com commentarist Gustavo Coronel writes: Throughout its republican history, Venezuela has had many authoritarian Presidents who felt certain that, by exercising power, they were doing the right thing: The Monagas brothers, Guzman Blanco, Castro (yes, we had our Castro), Gomez, Perez Jimenez and, now, Chavez. However, when they departed, the country was in worse shape than before they arrived ... with the possible exception of Guzman and Perez Jimenez, both thieves, but also doers who left abundant infrastructure behind.
The negative impact of strongmen on Venezuelan society suggests that the exercise of power is not the answer to our problems. In one of Plato's Dialogues, Gorgias says that "Power is the chief good of Life" and can be obtained "through the use of rhetoric."
"It is a natural law," he adds, that "those with power impose their will on the weak".... however Plato goes on to say, through Socrates, that "Rhetoric is cosmetic and deceiving. True politics requires the exercise of leadership, not the exercise of power."
This concept is amplified by Robert Tucker in a book called "Politics as Leadership" that I have already mentioned in a previous commentary and recommend to our readers. Leadership, in the platonic sense, has to do with inspiring followers to better themselves and work together ... not with reducing followers to the condition of members of a herd.
Power and leadership are old foes ... they have faced each other in many countries and the result of the confrontation determines if the country progresses or stagnates. Holders of power have changed faces throughout history: King or Prince, as in Machiavelli's work; cliques as in the Soviet Union; the proletariat as in Marx; the racial "elites" as in Hitler; the intellectual "elites" as in Pareto; the caudillos as in Sukarno, Hussein, Quaddafi, Castro, Kim Il Sung, Peron, Chavez, Duvalier, Pinochet or Trujillo. Caudillos generally do not possess an organic ideology beyond the lust for power, although all speak of revolution. Some, like Sukarno, can even be catalysts of national integration but most are promoters of misery and ignorance.
Facing this group of power addicts are the true leaders, many of whom were never officially elected to positions of power. Tucker calls them "non-constituted" leaders and mentions, as examples: Gandhi, Schweitzer, King, Sakharov. I would add Mother Teresa, Rachel Carson, Casals, Lincoln, Uslar Pietri ... men and women who lead humanity up the path of civilization, justice, beauty and compassion.
In his book on "Leadership," James MacGregor Burns states that leadership has to do with the persuasion of followers "to act for certain goals which represent the values and the motivations, the wants and needs, the aspirations and expectations of both leaders and followers." Such a definition clearly excludes most caudillos since they are, at the most, wielders of a power used to fulfill their own expectations.
True leaders can read correctly the aspirations of the society where they live and, therefore, can become agents of human progress, helping others going up the ladder which leads to full "species-hood". This is a term used by Erickson ("Life History and the Historical Moment") to define a fully evolved human being. Erickson postulates that world governance can only be possible if, first, a world society emerges ... and this is the work of leaders. Authoritarian figures, on the other hand, tend to remain at work at the level of the pseudo species, where tribes prevail over nations and where castes and ideologies are more important than a sense of true human solidarity.
Teilhard de Chardin spoke of "homo progressivus," for whom the well-being of the species, of society, was more important than individual well being.
Not many of those can be found in Caracas.
We will get our share some day ... meanwhile, however, we are going to experience some severe social upheavals since, as Collingswood predicts, either the politician takes care of the problem or the problem will take care of the politician.
In Venezuela. the problem is one of extreme and desperate poverty and ignorance, one of social chaos...
These afflictions will soon take care of those politicians who have proven incapable of moving effectively towards their solution...
Gustavo Coronel is the founder and president of Agrupacion Pro Calidad de Vida (The Pro-Quality of Life Alliance), a Caracas-based organization devoted to fighting corruption and the promotion of civic education in Latin America, primarily Venezuela. A member of the first board of directors (1975-1979) of Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), following nationalization of Venezuela's oil industry, Coronel has worked in the oil industry for 28 years in the United States, Holland, Indonesia, Algiers and in Venezuela. He is a Distinguished alumnus of the University of Tulsa (USA) where he was a Trustee from 1987 to 1999. Coronel led the Hydrocarbons Division of the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) in Washington DC for 5 years. The author of three books and many articles on Venezuela ("Curbing Corruption in Venezuela." Journal of Democracy, Vol. 7, No. 3, July, 1996, pp. 157-163), he is a fellow of Harvard University and a member of the Harvard faculty from 1981 to 1983. In 1998, he was presidential election campaign manager for Henrique Salas Romer and now lives in retirement on the Caribbean island of Margarita where he runs a leading Hotel-Resort. You may contact Gustavo Coronel at email gustavo@vheadline.com