What makes a good leader?
When I was younger I saw leaders in all areas of life who had compassion, fairness, an ability to acknowledge their mistakes, respect for those they were leading and an understanding of the responsibility they had for those in their sphere of influence. I thought that this is what leaders would always be like. It was the type of leader I have attempted to be throughout my life and I feel like I have to some extent succeeded.
At some point, the world moved away from me and the type of leader I valued became obsolete and unpopular with the majority of the human race. Now that we are in the 2020s the majority of people want leaders who despise others who disagree with them and look to make them suffer. We have leaders who revel in being prejudiced and dismissive and whose followers love them for that. The worse they are to those who are of a different mindset, the more popular they become. When they make mistakes they double down, they lie, and they attack everything about those who have seen their mistakes. Their devoted followers are despised as human beings and seem to be completely disposable. The idea of responsibility for those they lead is now completely out of the question. They only see responsibility for their own enrichment, their own power and their own selfish desires.
This change goes from the President downwards. Leaders in politics have never been worse, leaders in business at all levels have never been worse, and human nature has never been worse in my lifetime. At some point life left me behind in this respect, but there was no way I was ever going to follow the wrong direction.
If you could un-invent something, what would it be?
My son came round the other day and he was telling us about this programme or podcast that he had seen. It was a thought experiment regarding vehicles. Basically, the speaker was imagining a world where the electric vehicle was the only option and someone was proposing a petrol or diesel driven vehicle. It would become very clear very quickly what an appalling invention was being proposed.
The Internal Combustion Engine would be associated with pollution, destruction of the environment in countless areas through the requirement to drill into the ground and sea and, as a side issue, be the cause of wars and territorial disputes in countries like Venezuela, Iran and Greenland, to take three random examples, where spurious reasons for taking over a territory might be given by a greedy super power intent on profiting from a huge amount of oil lying in the ground.
The first attempts to produce commercial electric vehicles were patented in the late 19th century and Andreas Flocken is credited with building the first proper road going electric vehicle in 1888. Many other areas of life happily relied on electricity to run things. Electricity was used in trains both underground and overground from the same time and are still in use today. Why didn’t it work? Well, the original batteries were fine for the shorter trips favoured at the start of the 20th century and were in fact more reliable than the fuel in petrol driven cars. Unfortunately, people started to want to drive longer distances and neither electric nor petrol vehicles had the infrastructure needed to support them. So a choice had to be made, and to the extreme detriment of the environment petrol stations rather than charging points were chosen.
Money talks as they say, and the oil based motor industry paid off more politicians than the electric equivalent. If the reverse had been the case we would be living in a much better, cleaner and more peaceful world. The Infernal Combustion Engine (the typo is deliberate by the way!) has been nothing but a disaster for our world and it should never have been invented.
Can you share a positive example of where you’ve felt loved?
I have been tremendously lucky over the past 38 years and counting. Ever since my wife and I started going out together I have felt loved. In so many ways we are there to support each other and our family. I suppose if you want a practical example of that love, last year I finished full time work and that was completely driven by my wife who decided that it was going to be best for me long term to stop the daily commute. She made sure we had the money to do that and here I am now. Whatever happens in the future that love is guaranteed.
Where can you reduce clutter in your life?
When we think about clutter it tends to be our belongings we think of. That’s what the ‘self help’ and ‘lifestyle’ books concentrate on. However, the clutter we really need to concentrate on is the internal clutter that our minds are more and more prey to these days.
I have started to try to reduce my internal clutter by removing or at least reducing the Internet content that I look at which either wastes my time or makes me feel angry. The way that this works is using the ScreenZen app to reduce my time on social media on my phone to 45 minutes at the most each day. Yes, I can go to the laptop and take a look but I don’t tend to do that anything like as much as I used to on the phone. I have reduced my social media outlets to two at a time and I really don’t miss the other three anything like as much as I expected. I have the Calm app which I have mentioned a good few times and I also have Happy Color which I love and which gives my mind time to breathe.
Am I going to sort out the external clutter? To some extent, but it isn’t the most important thing to do. Getting your mind clearer is the best way you can deal with clutter in all its forms.
What is your favorite animal?
I love seeing animals of all kinds in the wild. There is something incredible in seeing a creature living a life that is close to what nature intended. Only one creature does not and that of course is human beings. Based on the Bible, we see ourselves as having ‘dominion’ over all other inhabitants of the Earth. This is nonsense in my opinion. We are not a species who are different from every other, we are just one branch of the animal kingdom, specifically one evolved from primates. Instead of working with other creatures we work against them and we destroy and poison their habitats.
Even if I accept that we do actually have ‘dominion’ we are doing an appalling job aren’t we? World leaders who profess to believe in some form of God are enthusiastic in their attempts to destroy our planet’s habitats and to dig up more and more areas to make the survival of other living things even less likely. How is that exercising dominion? Perhaps it is a misreading of dominion as dominance that current and past leaders have had, a misreading that says so much about us as a species and the awful human beings we elect around the world.
I remember a poem I read at school which was about the last rabbit on the last piece of grass in England. It never occurred to me that I could live to see it.
David Pearce - Popular Culture and Personal Passions 