By: Poor Richard

Poor Richard — Thu, 14 Jun 2012 13:05:59 +0000

One way in which I feel our intellectual leadership fails at followership and peerism may be due more to their individualism than to their scheduling constraints– I don’t think they share enough common face-time with their own peers. I think we need a general assembly of our public mentors and intellectual innovators. I’m thinking of folks like Noam Chomsky, Chris Hedges, David Graeber, E.O. Wilson, Sam Harris, Ralph Nader, Naomi Klein, Bill Moyers, Robert Riech, Van Jones, Lawrence Lessig, Roger Penrose, Richard Dawkins, and of course Michel Bauwens….It is customary for third parties to host the odd forum of two or at most three such leaders now and then, but I think it is a failure of both leadership and followership that larger groups of such folks don’t get together on their own initiative far more often. IMO this is one of the key obstacles to creating the critical mass and internal cohesion for a stronger mass movement. Books, articles, emails, one-on-one interviews, and individual public lectures are necessary but not sufficient. The US Founders had to occasionally caucus together in common rooms or the US may ultimately have been still-born.

I don’t want to hear objections that the Occupy or 99% movement doesn’t have or need intellectual leaders. I’m appealing not to leadership but to followership and service on the part of an important collective resource, a key structure within our collective brain that doesn’t seem to be acting in an adequately organized and integrated manner. SO WTF?

Comments on: Leadership as Holarchy: leading/following in peer governance

By: Poor Richard