“we”
by Mark Hunter Mulvey
Published: March 3, 2008
A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves.
- Lao Tzu, 600 B.C.-531 B.C.
In a country of 300 million people, there is a certain degree of audacity required for anybody to say, ‘I’m the best person to lead this country.’
- Sen. Barack Obama, 1961 A.D.
–
I call it The Leadership Conflict. The greatest of all leaders are those who know enough to appear invisible and empower others instead. Yet becoming a leader requires a significant amount of ego and bull-headed stubbornness. How, then, does one become a leader without an ego?
Traversing this schism of comprehension is so frustrating that many have resorted to giving up entirely, accepting the futility of such an exercise. In the context of American politics, no presidential candidate can ever be considered a Great Leader as defined above. An enhanced Ego is required to campaign, lobby, advertise, orate, and attempt to loom tall over other candidates. Ego is the extreme confidence of one’s self. Ego leads to pride, pride leads to arrogance, and arrogance is a dangerous sense of superiority. We all know where a sense of superiority leads.
The answer, I learned, is in the pronoun. When the word we is substituted for I, in any instance, a Collective Ego is created. A Collective Ego is more noble a confidence, and a more admirable goal for which a leader should strive. I argue that if some errant Executive proofreader were to replace all instances of the word I with We in every presidential speech, the public reception would be 35% more positive. 35% may sound arbitrary, but I will never back down from this figure until said errant Executive proofreader actually begins work and attempts to put my prediction to the test.
Looking to presidential candidates, it seems Barack Obama has the fullest grasp on this concept. His Super Tuesday speech on February 5, 2008 included his declaration that “change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.” Here, the pronoun is the means and the end! I realize this is all drifting into the abstract and cerebral, so I will make my way back to the point…
Arrogance is a danger every leader faces. By definition, a leader is more susceptible to arrogance than the rest of us. George W. Bush fell prey to Ego Fallout when he rebelliously declared, in response to a satirical website, “There ought to be limits to freedom.” Whose freedom exactly? He was not wont to say.
The point of all this is that whomever we elect president next, whether Democrat or Republican, should embrace the Collective Ego and use it liberally in speeches as much as in morning-time discussions over coffee. A president or presidential candidate who makes an honest attempt at replacing I with We, reinforces the notion that everyone in this country faces the rest of the world together. This simple idea should be at the core of whatever value system lies above it. We is America’s common denominator.
—
(email this article or post to social network)
—
