Freedom is frightening

And so we look for people to follow

Human beings, my friend, are a very complex paradox. Very, very dangerous. They don’t wanna be leaders, they wanna be followers. I mean, they can’t wait to find some nut, who they think is just wonderful, to tell them what to do. And they all wanna be brought under control. — Marlon Brando as an oil company CEO in the movie The Formula (1980)

When it comes to people, what you see isn’t all you get. People will tell you one thing and do another. It’s complicated.

Most people will react to being told what to do with an angry defiant “NO!” They know when their freedom is being threatened, and their perimeter defenses are half-cocked in the pissed-off position. So we can be forgiven for assuming that most people really do want to be the boss of themselves all the time.

But if you pay close attention to people when they are free from being directed or ordered or controlled by some boss or partner or enemy, you will often notice a certain unease and disquiet. Left to our own devices to figure out the what and when and how to do each thing in each moment, many of us feel burdened by worry and anxiety (angst) about all the challenges and decisions we face in life. Without an organizing external structure, we are thrown into uncertainty and doubt which is no easy feeling. We often manage those feelings with what we call addictions.

Everybody is dealing with how much of their aliveness they can bear and how much they need to anesthetize themselves. We all have self-cures for strong feeling. Then the self-cure becomes a problem in the obvious sense that the problem of the alcoholic is not alcohol but sobriety. — Adam Phillips

While most of us don’t (consciously) want to be told what to do, we do welcome the feeling of orientation and embeddedness we get from the people around us. When we suffer from the confusion and uncertainty that come with too much freedom and complexity, we are attracted to people who can provide a sense of order and direction (leaders, mentors, influencers, pundits, celebrities, gurus etc.). These figures can serve as a nucleus around which we can orbit in some comfort zone of distance from a powerful attractor. So we give them our attention.

As we bounce around in the container of our tribe, nuclear forces hold us tight enough so that we don’t go spiraling off into outer space. Our social chemistry is stably unstable and it usually works well enough to avoid the extremes of fusion or disintegration.

Campaigns and elections

Human nature has its good and bad elements, and we are capable of coalescing and orbiting around both good and bad actors to avoid becoming free radicals. Through various appeals to our instincts and wants and needs, emerging leaders will capture a chunk of the population who will then aim to attract ever more members into their gravitational field of influence.

With each membership appeal, the remaining free agents will chose to accept or reject that growing body and its siren song. If we view that mass as malignant, then our social immune system will be activated and attempt to avoid or defeat it. If the growing mass is judged to be benign, a merger and acquisition deal might be made.

The choices we make about who to follow as an escape from unbearable amounts of freedom are a litmus test of our individual and tribal makeup. They reveal who we REALLY are (vs. who we say/think we are). Each election is an opportunity to vote our conscience and our character and our values, and so in that sense we do end up with the leaders “we” deserve.

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