The 100 Season 3: Communism versus Fascism versus the Individual (early access)
The moral case for rejecting centralized control and focusing on the individual.
What makes for a good leader?
What are the qualities that a leader must have to properly lead? Should they be directed towards a specific goal? Or the general well being of everyone for whom they're in a leadership position for? Could it be a combination of both or is that a foolish idea? These are the things at the heart of the question of proper leadership and how to evaluate exactly how well they do. Although how to evaluate these aspects of leadership is up for debate. Not to mention, it's hard to say that anyone would actually choose one over the other. So instead people choose both, or different aspects of each. They then evaluate how good a leader is doing based on those aspects.
Previously in this space, we've looked at why rules exist as well as how to negotiate between different sets of rules within conflicting visions of what makes sense for those living under different rules. One of the persistent requirements of this is the necessity of having a leader who can do those negotiations. Someone who can advocate on behalf of the ones they lead and get the best outcomes for them at least, if not all those involved. We also looked at the idea of appointing a neutral person who won't necessarily benefit from going one way or another, or will benefit from all of them getting the most out of any deal.
We've seen a number of different types of leaders within The 100 so far. Kane began as a much more authoritarian, survival at any cost kind of leader before learning to compromise and consider a better way. He found this way in part through Jaha who is his direct superior and in some ways a mentor, who taught him the value of compromise and balance to which he subscribes wholeheartedly. Jaha clearly isn't on board with a purely survival oriented leadership. On the other hand, he wasn't completely on board with Abby's belief in the need to prioritize moral rightness over everything else. Abby is a big believer in making sure that the morality of decisions regardless of the consequences is paramount.
Similarly, these leaders have their mirror images in characters like Clarke, Bellamy and Lexa. Each of them show the downsides of people adhering to these ideas. Where Abby succeeds in her argument for morals over survival, Clarke fails to make the same case. As Kane will fail to make the case for survival, Bellamy will succeed. The same holds true for Jaha and Lexa. They all have flaws in their leadership style. Whether it's Lexa's adherence to tradition, or Jaha's view that getting out is the best way to ensure his people's survival, or even Abby with her need to stick to her principles. It's hard to say that any of them have the one single solution to everyone's problems.
So the question then is what kind of leader do you need to be in order to do the best for everyone? If your goal is to get as much benefit for everyone as humanly possible, it's important to figure out how you go about doing that. You need to know how far to go in order to achieve the needs of everyone. It's hard to know exactly where the line is and sometimes people go way too far in order to get there. They cross that line in favour of the greater good they see as their ultimate goal. Which is where the ideas of communism and fascism come into play.
They are perhaps the most persistent and destructive forms of trying to achieve the best for everyone. What they want is their end goal to come to pass. For them it's only a question of what is the most efficient and easiest way to go about it. All other considerations are secondary to that end goal. Because what happens in the end will be a perfect society where everyone is safe and happy and needs for nothing. In the meantime however, some people are going to have to suffer so they can get there. An ideal scenario would be to minimize the number of people who suffer, but that's not always what ends up happening. Usually, it requires a huge amount of those living under the system to get there.
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