Follow Something or Rather
I suppose this depends on one’s definition of leaders and followers. From what I’ve read and come to understand, I’m not entirely convinced that there is such a thing. I mean, sure, there’s certainly a pragmatic difference between a CEO of a company and the people that stock the shelves or flip the burgers. Each role serves a purpose in the organization, the latter more important than the former, since there are plenty of instances in which a company goes without a CEO or sometimes an entire C-suite for weeks or months, but the moment the “essential” workers are taken out of the equation, either because of a strike or illness or interruption to a store’s ability to function, the business crumples. It just happens that most companies, and society at large, does not pay people based on their importance within a company, but rather how far removed they are from actual, well, work.
So I guess I would argue more so that society isn’t organized around the concept of leaders and followers, but more so around authority and subordination. Of which, everyone exhibits characteristics of both, it’s just some more than others.
I have authority over my person, and the actions and thoughts that I do and think. But I would not classify myself as someone that has, or wants (for that matter), the authority over any other person. I have authority over all the things that I do on a daily basis, along with actions and consequences that affect my future self as well. Whether those actions affect others, well, I suppose that’s conditional.
Whether or not I do a good or bad job at work will affect my coworkers and customers, as does my coworkers ability or inability to do their job affects my job. So, in a work setting, I’d say there’s always a counterplay of authority and subordination at play in everything we do. Even someone that works by themselves, such as a writer or painter or photographer, have the authority and ability to affect their own work, and as such it affects those that look and/or consume their various forms of media.
I think this dynamic can probably be applied to many different organizations and interpersonal relationships, from the romantic to platonic to anything and everything between. I think the idea of there being leaders and followers is a myth we tell each other, but usually it’s just individuals with varying degrees of confidence at a particular thing. For example, a lot of people see the president of any country as the ultimate leader within that country, but when it’s closely examined, various countries’ presidents are representative figureheads with authority over specific functions within their government that can, and usually do, affect huge chunks of their population. And sure, we assign the moniker of leader and leadership to presidents of countries and companies, but outside of their various functions and responsibilities to their role, they don’t have all that much authority outside of what society and the people they represent give them.
Those that hold various titles and roles that seem important are given the assumption that they are leaders, but ultimately they, as with everyone, is subordinate to someone or something other than themselves. Even sovereign citizens and their whacky and crazy ways. They answer to an authority that both not fully in their control, yet still affected and influenced by them too. I find that there always tends to be a dichotomy of motion playing between how we perceive authority and how we perceive subordination, and it’s sometimes easy to throw around titles like leader and follower, but at the end of the day, those ideas seem kinda antiquated and too narrow in scope to fully define the dynamics of relationships people form.
Granted, I’m also open to the idea that this is just my convoluted way of skirting around the possibility that I’m more of a follower than a leader as defined by most people, probably because, while generally it’s agreed upon that leaders and followers are both necessary for a functioning and healthy society, it’s typically agreed by general consensus that being a leader is better and good, whereas being a follower tends to be looked down on. This is probably why, as I mentioned at the beginning of this little diatribe, CEO’s and executives of a company are paid exorbitantly more than the employees beneath them, despite how most companies tend to not really need a CEO outside of just having a figurehead that appears to be making decisions, but really relies on a whole team of assistants, corporate caretakers, and actual workers to babysit the CEO from truly and utterly fucking up the business.
In the end, I hardly think it matters. But personally, I think I’d probably rather live in a world that consistently strives to improve and progress upon how it treats everyone rather than allowing a small fraction of ruthless, probably sociopathic, “leaders” control how and why society organizes itself.
Fred Aiken Writing 