*26.02.2006
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Leaders Should Make Followers Wise
[This is the first part of the two-piece special opinion paper written by Min Khin Kyaw]
Leaders should make followers wise. Leaders of people must lead their people toward happiness and prosperity. And freedom is essential to achieve happiness and other value of life. A national leader is who can promote the freedoms of people. A leader leading a wise community is indeed greater than a leader ruling a society of fools. After all, freedoms are the pathways to liberty, peace and growth- the foundation for wisdom. What is freedom and what are they then?
Freedom is a very natural condition with no willed or desired or deliberate action applied on it. Freedom is a very natural state free from all conscious activities. It must be, thus, with no restriction or guideline from anyone, especially from the ones who are against the wellbeing of individuals or community from doing necessary actions- whether truly good for the doers. Particularly, absolute Freedom is a very condition free from all other natural or manmade rules and phenomena. To be absolute freedom, a condition must be free from the condition of freedom itself even- this seems this absolute freedom doesn’t exist but it does at least rationally and logically as idea and as reality.
There are countless of freedoms from something anything. However, apart from conventional knowledge, the ones very important to know and be enforced by the good leaders are as I believe:
1. Freedom from slavery. Certain belief and ideology have enslaved people from breaking through the sphere of ignorance. People have to get out to the wide open space of wisdom and prosperity in all aspects. The slaves have no right to act at will; the wrong views of life have controlled the people not to act at will either. But they are controlled or tuned or programmed to do for the task of their owners. This kind of enslaved people will not spiritually and culturally happy. When people applied the restriction by themselves, it is the worst- this happen because they have the wrong views. And also all kinds of slaveries, either physical or mental slaveries, are cruel. Controlling fellow human beings either as physical slaves or intellectual slaves is the cruelest thing to commit on earth.
2. Freedom from stupidity or idiocy. Good leadership has responsibility to warn the people to be aware of being used for all the bad purposes. Sadly most people do willingly volunteer to be fooled. The stability of the balances of the common sectors of a nation or community is up to the level of intelligence of the majority and their leaders. Long term prospect of happiness, prosperity and strength of a people is always based upon their resources, allies, environment and intelligence. Wise people will not let themselves fooled by anybody; they will not give a chance to anyone to take advantage of them, ridicule them and spoil their life.
3. Freedom from ignorance. People who know too little about life, and about themselves- even if they know too much about other things and about other people, cannot manage to get a better life. Their way of thinking and the process of their thinking cannot be rationally organized for their life. Their ways of life could be in disorder if little knowledge they have are not the necessary ones. Nothing wrong with knowing little as long as knowing the right things in life- individuals can manage their lives in harmony and peaceful situation; they could even settle disputes and feuds to build good societies side by side; and further more their little knowledge could be widen and enhanced so that they could even build civilizations.
4. Freedom from ill will. The people of a land or many lands who tend to hate one another must have no tender mindset. This kind of people is contempt toward anyone. They might even let anyone down deliberately with no other reason but anger, jealousy etc as ill will. Their mindset alone will let all of them down together as a whole. In fact, people are different in every society. They majority’s mindset is what I’ve mentioned here. A well-known saying in Burmese is ‘more fire- fire wins, more water- (then) water wins’.
5. Freedom from indifference. The majority of people are always busy. They have a lot to do everyday. However, apart from daily routine, they have also to do for their political management- this must not be considered as extra burden or as the particular work of politicians. They must also always be readily seeking what more they can do for the society. People must be active socially because this alone can guarantee their general conditions and national developments. All leaders should encourage people to be active in everything good for society whilst discouraging wrong activism in wrong activities whatever they are. All leaders should alert the society not to be sleepy and idle.
6. Freedom from delusion. Faith is important actually to overcome doubt. Faith is, as I understand, awareness and confidence in the reality of something; faith is an active mind enclosed by conceptual judgment of a belief; faith is trust. Conventionally, people accept there are true faith and blind faith. True faith is a rarest value in human mindset and as high as wisdom and breakthrough achievement. Everyone has a faith in something and it can be true faith after they have overcome doubt by mean of realization but a few have at purest level. Most people have the tendency to side with heavier group as water follow, fish follow. This ‘heavier’ also means crave or attachment or bias or tendency. As being lack of true faith, fear rules the majority whose minds easily whiffle like winds.
Rather than knowing absolutely all the details of right and wrong by cool-headed analyses with accurate conscience by themselves, the majority of people have to rely on the experts who should have realistic precept, unbreakable honesty and unbending righteousness. The experts, however, must be flexible too as searching for the true meaning of life. Human mindset is strange indeed. It’s best to approach human mindset by psychological access. To have through human mindset to know it in (somewhat) detail is essential for everyone to be developed and understanding. It’s essential to be considerate, tolerate and caring- such individuals build peaceful and happy society; they can be readily agreeable to one another as they’re determined to conform and be dutiful. They are not corruptible. [*] When leaders are divided, a nation is already divided. But good leaders may divide themselves (if needed) for good; unite the nation to last in good shape.
[*Outsiders’ influence is exception: every people or every two people is dividable when they fall victim to deceit as a cause of misunderstanding. Dissension is a particular problem that must be treated properly with additional care. A nation must always beware of outsiders who never become insiders or intend to become- especially the ones playing parts of the big games. Ordinary people are just ordinary so they think and act ordinary but they might be used and when they are used, they are very good fuels. Every organization- good or bad needs people but it can use only the people who become its followers. If an organization is bad, they, the followers, will be oxidized with idiotic ideologies- the level the majority can follow, and they will become zealous fanatic and destructive mechanisms and they destroy themselves when they don’t have a chance to destroy other. If the organization is for good purposes, it will make a garden of happy people. People are rather canvas to be painted or clay to be molded. They actually paint and mold themselves into forms of cultural mores. So they’re always shapeable, treatable, actually it’s up to their leaders with ideologies influencing their idiosyncrasies. People will be how their leaders let the people the way they are or mold them. Religion, politics and location are socially three-dimension: you can consider time (or era) too to be four dimensional. We are in the era of various fanaticism as well as terrorism. People make various thoughts, creations and findings. Disrespect, respect, competition and admiration stir the world. Terrorism that uses violence is obvious but their destruction can only come occasionally. However, the soft effects of the power of civilized ideological movements are like the sea snails that eat other sea snails in the dark or in broad daylight. However, this has the quality of being insignificant and able to screw constantly and shape a society, even to change into new form. In regard to terror-fanaticism, the Muslims particularly should look within their nations and societies carefully, and should consider receptively what a liberal society can be for them. (This is merely an advice.)]
By psychological approach to the reality of human characters and the structure of general humanity in the way they are, everyone can reach a precise realization of this reality but rather scientifically by not denying the established concepts and beliefs before they’re tested and proved in various ways. This realization can lead to perception of true faith and every individual will be able to understand the importance and necessity of the great precepts of life and natural law of duality. Individuals can achieve true faith as a goal by building oneself up mentally and educationally. Indeed, great deals of determinism and effort have to be mentioned; however, it’s easier to learn as a sort of education with gradual growth through childhood to adulthood so this will not be a burden.
Without true knowledge, true faith cannot be achieved. Without true faith, people are historically dangerous because they tend to do anything they think or believe what good and right to do even though speculation is predominant; but their beliefs and determinism can be too strong as the unconscious mind is being influenced by blind ego. Without true faith, untamed people cannot stop infighting, provoking and taking advantage of each others. Without the belief of duality of the existence- moral or immoral, no precept based on moral can be seen as an importance as an essential standard; let alone to be conformed and dutiful but if being brainwashed, they can be according to what they’re taught by their masters and handlers. Such condition is as natural as dubious mindset. Blind faith is not true faith as being blind and cannot see reality.
Good leadership must have the value of Doubt-is-being-overcome. Being having true faith is indeed difficult to everyone so leaders are no exception; however, as leaders have to rely on right judgments, they must be really wise and knowledgeable as fundamental requirement. However, being full of all the wrong knowledge and wrong understanding, many (people) leaders with wrong views become cruel and stubborn and extremely attached to power and wealth and passionate about seeking them without ending.
Good leaders should encourage people to have true understanding in things accurately to have true faith in themselves and their beliefs. As being understood of things, their beliefs happen to base on reality rather than speculation. Being pragmatic and decisive is their quality thus. Good faith or bad faith doesn’t exist because faith exists precisely as true faith or delusion.
Delusion is the general mindset of everyone naturally to start with. A person who has no realization (in a particular thing or person) is a person who doesn’t have true faith (in that particular thing or person) instead it is delusion that person possesses as a mental state. Realization is conscious or unconscious conclusion personally achieved from thorough analyses through the study for sufficient knowledge of reality of things (and human-mindset or psyche) which that person needs to build up in his/her intellect as a quality. Anybody who has true faith is calm, courageous and wise because that person has satisfactory and contentment. That person is indeed a sage weather he/she could speak well to explain. This person is self-sufficiently enormous as he/she doesn’t need the world of wrong struggles anymore. Among all kind of knowledge, the knowledge of life is the most essential and valuable. True faith in life is incomparable.
7. Freedom from weakness. Both genders- male and female must be actively engaging themselves in general activities mentally and physically. Passiveness is weakness, we all understand. Being lack of courage or being passive is not having power to be active in making the necessities done. Especially women, they shouldn’t be passive all the time but voluntarily active so they can be also dutiful. Even if female is a weaker sex to be naturally passive, their emotion is active so is their love; thus, they should be active most of the time rather than passive all the time.
Leaders should encourage both genders to be dutiful, courageous and open-minded. Equality in activeness is what should be highly valued because this builds a good society. Women should be voluntarily and openly active in daily activities that are obviously necessary. Loving (themselves, their family and their society) means their minds are active. Rather than encouraging being passive, good quality of leadership encourages everyone to be strong. By showing the way to overcome weaknesses and empowering the people to act accordingly, I believe both genders can understand and tolerate each other’s requirement.
A nation which has happy families, tolerant communities and dutiful individuals is a strong nation with long endurance and unity. This nation is productive and stable. Domestic peace is the driving force of this nation.
8. Freedom from oppression. Everybody with political or social awareness knows what this means. For the positions and authority to rule- not natural leadership, whilst animals contest physically, human kind better contest intellectually in graceful manner. Whilst some kinds of creatures lacking for awareness for peaceful power transition, many other species know how to keep peace within a group even though different species have to preying on each others in the diversity and coexistence. Yet general human nature is intellectually higher than other species. Human kinds should know how to make accords among ethnicities and nations. Sadly many dictators have been willfully oppressing their own peoples by means of cruelty. Freedom to get all the natural rights is always genetically human concern. Human know that intelligence means keeping dignity, rights, serenity and freedoms of both individual and community.
9. Freedom from misleading. This is the most important of all. Without the above freedoms, people are very fragile to get misled. A people having no national leaders will always have tough time. They will have tougher time ahead even. However, their leaders should try better wisely. And all leaders should aim to become good leaders and further more to become national leaders. Misleading could cause the misconduct of people and the fall of a nation, indeed it is a great mistake to do. The leaders who have ever misled the people would fall in disgrace or lose face sooner or later. But the price the people have to pay during or after the misleading period is always bigger than the mistake the leaders did.
Apart from freedoms to have, every nation should be serious about producing good leaders. This is no easy task. Many great civilizations became history or were forced to change whence they produced bad leaders. It’s really a hard task to keep the momentum of this kind of production line.
Leaders always come from people. Good people have good leaders. Bad people have bad leaders. Bad leaders make bad people. Bad people are always broke and unhappy. Bad leaders are always rich. Bad leaders aren’t afraid of making power and wealth out of the expenses (heads, hearts and tears even) of people. Good leaders are equal to the people. Bad leaders are above the people. Good leaders make people smart, proud and confident. Bad leaders make people smaller than reality and fear.
Good leaders are who make their people wiser all the time what ever the influences they have- political or natural or of other forms. Good leaders are who always willing to become wiser and wiser too. They are also encouraging the nation for potential leaders with great wisdom as the true product of the people. When a wise one appears, good leaders will give the right reward to that person. When someone appears to be wiser than the existing leaders themselves, good leaders will let that person to take the right place simply for the sake of people as serving them readily.
Animals need to fight for power physically. Humanly good people will not act like such low intelligent creatures. Humanly good people always use their big brains wisely for peace and happiness. Good people will not fight for influence over others. They know power and wealth cannot give them contentment among suffering people. So they will not fight like animals for power, but they will choose a leader or give power to the wiser individuals who truly deserve to serve the society.
However, among the sages and different individuals, many empty individuals can happen to exist. Sometimes they are cleaver enough. When such empty but cleaver people come to exist, a nation might have to face serious internal problems. Among those empty people there can be the ones who have wishes for high political powers and enormous wealth but they do have no moral as their nature. As being empty, they don’t even bother what might happen to them and the people associating with them in long-term. They could have the ability to disguise and pretend as if they were wiser than everyone else. They could get caught if people are not sleepy but they won’t get caught if people are satisfied with a belief- nobody is a bad guy among us so we won’t have any trouble in any future. Every system has weaknesses to be fixed, improved and changed; however, this usually happen only when the flaws are seen or certain laws are breached so the flaws appear to be seen; and improvements can only happen when alternative ideas are found. Even the people with great wisdom can be fooled time to time. The wise people must always look after the health of their unity, accord and all-round conditions of their nation. The wise people, they must also know the plots emerging within. Indeed there are cold-blooded talented fools who dare to destroy or let others destroy everything; they enjoy being protagonists as villains.
The Enemy without is less dangerous than Enemy within. Indeed they might not produce a bad guy but even when they let an outsider in, they believe that all friendly outsider too is always the good guys. Ordinary empty people are indeed not at serious position to cause a threat to their nation but they can cause a significant effect only when they are used in mass by the cunning ones at a position with a great deal of power. When ruling people with different authorities are empty and cunning, a nation will destroy itself. And it will destroy others too if it is powerful enough to do so. Many great nations in history were destroyed by outsiders who were let in and enjoy high statuses associated with power but a well-known fact is- those nations were strong enough to face external enemy that they could never be succumbed to the invaders by force unless the invaders were disproportionately strong; however, the domestic weaknesses were the real causes of such nations to ruin.
** This is important. Having good leadership is the luckiest condition of a nation. Any other developments, any other success are just minor as bad leadership cannot satisfy people. Bad leaders will send their followers to hell or build the hellish conditions for them to live in all their life. Unless people are free from ignorance, hatred and delusion, they are very weak to manage to balance their social and spiritual needs; far worse to be able to achieve good leadership. They usually have the belief or assumption based on their delusion and misinterpretation about their national pride and successes usually the past ones. They’d believe they’re great people of great nation. They’re likely to think they had necessary knowledge and they had true faith of precept of moral life and other aspects that make people great. Nobody would have a chance to let them know the reality. They have closed all doors and windows. They have forgotten receptivity. Indeed they’re fools. They create for themselves troubles. They have no condition to enjoy freedoms, and have no freedom from fear but they will have to live in fear as long as they deserve. This fear will not let them live in peace but rather make them to search for enemy within and without because they don’t have true faith but strong doubt. Hurting and damaging one another is sadly their ultimate goal in life.
Many people have nonviolent tendency by nature. Many bad people, even serious criminals can have u-turn in their way of life. This is likely only whence they have seen the true picture of humanity: sufferings and grievance. In fact, mistakes, manmade disasters, merciless destructions and consequences against the creation and growth of the various communities are as daily phenomena, and are the doses that energize the chaos world we belong to. People are easily to lose their mind and accept and adopt all the bad habits and characters and when these bad things pile up in the society, new nightmare like events are again created to let history repeat all again. They will only stop doing so after they witness the ruin of their lives as regret. But how many people really get regret is an enigma. So no wonder the world has never short of cries and tears.
People, who have realization in reality as it is, have true faith and so are simply capable of everlasting nonviolence as they have become to understand the value of life and so they tend to value it as its value.
The growth of life to flourish in full scale proportion is only possible in the condition full with freedoms. Struggle for freedoms is rather a duty of all individual human beings and it’s a necessary thing to do in life. As freedom alone can guarantee all goodness and virtue of life, everyone has the right to struggle for their freedoms. Thus, good leadership is particularly a helpful and necessary tool. Every leader is responsible for promoting and giving these freedoms to the general public; the bad leaders only can ignore this duty as they are corrupt. Good leaders just do their jobs whether they have this kind of theory- they do good things because they’re good- just that simple.
In promoting freedoms, true faith and nonviolence, sometimes using force and a limit of violence is justifiable: such as police cracking the dangerous drug-traffickers down. In certain struggle, violence can be practiced in nonviolent way or just a reflection as defensive action. Or the violence of nonviolent mindset is certainly necessary in certain circumstances. People have the right to judge how to struggle and maintain their freedom and peace. In this scenario of defense, they are always defender, promoter and keeper of everyone’s freedoms and are never aggressors. They only take actions responsibly in appropriate measure.
We all know there are people who always looking for weak points and chances. Many have been already taking advantage of those weak points of others. There are abusers, users, criminals and dictators. We, human kind, have always enemies within. This is how groups, races, nations, etc fought mercilessly against one another for many millenniums.
Greed, hatred and foolishness are the most powerful components of mentality. No good leaders will use them to achieve their promotion. Only bad leaders will prey on their followers for their personal interests by stimulating and fertilizing the growth of these three components. On the other hand, they pretend as if they were not suppressing the freedoms. Or no matter how rich and big they are, the leaders who have no wisdom don’t even bother to become aware of such freedoms. So what will they let their followers know, indeed no freedoms but sacrifices as a good thing to do for leaders like them and they use the sacrifices of their followers for their pathway for more power, wealth and misleading. But they will also eventually force themselves drown in the pool of misery caused by their own greed, hatred and foolishness. They will follow the way their many followers went. Then you readers can imagine how the lives of their followers or people under their authority might be.
[To read the second part of this special opinion essay, click here ]
Min Khin Kyaw