Leadership
A quick note to explain one reason why I am writing so much about the Dalai Lama these days. As we have seen, the Dalai Lama becomes the political as well as the spiritual leader of his people through a very (to western eyes) bizarre, and decidedly “undemocratic” [1] process. He is declared to be the reincarnation of the previous Dalai Lama through some dodgy evidence, isolated and rigorously trained, and appointed the leader of the Tibetan people at 15 (!). Before I continue with his story and tell you how that turned out [2], I want to pause and talk about why this is significant for me.
The Tibetan process for selecting a leader is, on the face of it, irrational and absurd, and could not possibly work. Our “democratic” process for selecting political leaders, on the contrary, is exquisitely rational and fair. But—and I can see you rolling your eyes now— the Tibetan process produces a great leader that saves thousands of his people and the key institutions of his nation strictly non-violently, and creates a stable society for future generations in exile. Our “democratic” process produces the most incompetent, narcissistic, destructive leaders possible. We're ecstatic when, very occasionally, it produces a functioning human being, like Justin Trudeau.
We spend a lot of time pulling our hair out at the last outrages from the likes of Trump or Poilievre or Farage or Milei or ... and rightly so, of course. But I don't think we ever raise our eyes to look more broadly at the political system that produces these leaders regularly. One of the things I want to do with these posts is to start analyzing why “democracy” fails so spectacularly at producing even moderately competent leaders. This is a systemic failure, and to repair it we need to try to understand the mechanisms that cause it to happen.
Having said that, please grab the popcorn and find a comfortable chair, for the next part of the story gets really dramatic.
[1] As you can probably tell, I don't agree that the political systems of countries like Canada and many others is even remotely democratic. So I denote such systems with quotation marks. I call them “democracies”. So “undemocratic” here means not following the rules of “democracy”. Of course that begs the question of what democracy, without the quotes, actually might be. That is something to be explored in the future.
[2] It turned out spectacularly well.