Political leadership
By Karmayogi
After the World War,
the world has not thrown up a leader of world stature. After the procession of
intellectuals who wanted to shape the world according to their ideas –
Rousseau, Voltaire, Marx, Russell, Sartre – in the last twenty-five years no
single intellectual has attained their stature. Leadership in war and thought
has passed away from the collective.
This is a phase of social evolution where the INDIVIDUAL emerges. There was a
time when local chieftains gave place to a national monarch. It was he who
decided on wider national issues as well as local issues. Later the king’s
power moved away from him to the local municipalities. Further, it moved to the
individual in matters of religion, education, etc.
Presently we have a leaderless world. It only means the individual is coming
into his own. Over the past few decades, the exam system in schools and
colleges has lost its original purity and standard. Malpractices have crept in
and are dominating the field in their own way. Unconsciously the system, by
growing corruption, has prepared itself for abolition. Politics has taken a
similar turn and we see more and more the initiative of thinking is moving to
the public, which means the individual is becoming more responsible to the
nation. It is high time that the citizen, at least mentally, must take greater
responsibility for the future of the country. We do see the phenomenon of
public opinion being taken into greater account.
It is a fact of life that systems held in veneration lose this aura and their
use. They do not disappear all at once. They grow putrid until they destroy
themselves. USA, which declared its independence in 1776, signed the final
treaty with Britain in 1814, after an interval of 38 years. The saga of great
leaders has gone and the era of the individual is being born. Mind cannot offer
that leadership, as even intellectuals of that calibre are vanishing. It is for
each individual to become a thinker of the nation’s political future. It is
better that that individual is the Spiritual Individual who invokes the Spirit
and lives by that Spirit.