Ralph Waldo Emerson suggested that all history is biography. In other words, notable historical events are triggered by the thoughts and actions of one person. History is earmarked by the charismatic and decisive individuals who step upon the world stage and leave an indelible notation in the history of humankind.
Their names are numerous and well known e.g. Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Napolean, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, Martin Luther, Joseph Stalin, Mao Tse Tung, Charlemagne, Genghis Kahn, Ghandhi, Martin Luther King, Constantine, William the Conqueror, Socrates, Lenin, Muhammad…anyone can make their own list.
The poster child for the evidence of the power of one man to seduce the will of a people to his own purpose is Adolph Hitler. The German population in 1941 was 70 million…not all of which supported the Nazi ideology…not all were inflamed by the anti-Semitic hatred that he generated…not all were willing to take up arms for him. But enough Germans trailed his leadership into war, Jewish extinction (the Final Solution), barbarism, and the lie of an Aryan race to rule the world. Hitler was evil but he was effective.
On the other hand, group decision making, our most common means of diluting responsibility, is usually less terrifying but altogether less elegant. Groupthink, which is indecisiveness writ large, is rife with opinion and compromise and majority rule (As if the majority has any more clue than the minority). The common result of this form of decision making is confusion, dysfunction, frustration, delay, and failure to launch…to name a few. Consider the debacles of the bridges to nowhere. Google it. Or the ongoing money pit of California’s high-speed rail project. How about Bud Lite’s marketing team’s decision to popularize its beer with a DEI motif?
These are mere minor examples compared to the United States annual budget or, say, the Vietnam War. How many committees, how many compromises, how many man-hours, how many strange pockets are filled, how many debates between differing opinion? Because the Obamacare bill contained a thousand pages and weighed more than garbage truck, the speaker of the House insisted that it be passed “so we can find out what’s in it.”
Is there a political model that would provide good government without the risk of autocratic tyranny or the committee-based machinations of brokered decisions? I believe that such a government has been proposed. It was suggested by a wise man about 2500 years ago. I have more to say about this later.