Leading by Intelligence and Empathy

Today’s leaders seem a complicated lot, duplicitous intriguers whose every intent is obfuscated by some platitude.  A simple breakdown of human character can help clear the way in our understanding of both leaders and followers, shepherds and sheep.  In doing so, our classification system will merely entail the incorporation of two traits of man, intelligence and empathy, and from this we can better understand the hierarchical system of humanity.

Let us start at the top and then work our way down:

1.  Political and business leaders are those with high intelligence and little empathy.

2.  The middle classes are those with high intelligence and high empathy.

3.  The lower classes are those with low intelligence and high empathy.

4.  The criminal classes are those with low intelligence and low empathy.

Of course, people are not so easily pigeonholed into such simple classes, but an argument can be made that such a classification approximates our hierarchical structure.  At the top of the food chain are men that are highly intelligent and that are not constrained by their conscience, allowing them to makes grave decisions without emotions clouding their judgment.  These qualities allow them to intrigue their way to the top of the social heap, and once there these conniving qualities,  unrestrained by empathic manacles, allows them to act in a fashion that allows them to remain in their elevated position.

The average middle class Joe is intelligent but is harnessed by his sense of right and wrong, his conscience, by his endowment of a heightened senses of empathy.  He also cares too much about how he might be seen in the eyes of others to allow for the shenanigans of his dreams to come to fruition.  This is the class of discontent by way of unrealized desire.

In the lower class folks what we have are rather unintelligent masses whose concern for others keeps them in check.  Almost romantic in scope, the peasant class has little by material standards but has the greatest capacity for a community-based lifestyle. As long as they are not being taken advantage of by society’s upper crust they may in fact be the most contented of classes as they do not manufacture desires to be filled but instead only have their most basic desires coupled with their community to keep them satisfied.

At the bottom of the heap we have the peoples whose paucity of intelligence and empathy lead them to a life of crime and punishment.  This class forever endeavors in get rich quick schemes that seem too easy because their limited intelligence does not allow to see the obvious dangers that their shenanigans are fraught with.  Their low empathic characters likewise keep them unconcerned with the considerations or perceptions of others.

There you have it, the politically incorrect system of sociopathic class gradation for the hierarchical totem pole of man.  Unsavory though it may seem, proving it wrong will demand the might of specious equivocations based upon convenient foundations of reality, precepts solidly entrenched as reality  in the minds of humanity that is currently appreciated here on Planet Earth.

Genruk