Representatives or Leaders

I was thinking about all these articles that I have read where they say that the Occupy movement should pick leaders and it occurred to me how little people understand who do elect. We don't elect leaders, we elect representatives and there is a big difference.

The people we vote for are supposed to represent what we believe and want, not lead us to what we should think. That would be backwards. The problem is that we look at any politician as our "leader", they are not, leaders political "leadership" is totalitarian.

The Tea Party picked leaders and it has gotten them nothing. The problem is not "authority" the problem is looking for leaders. Why would the people of California vote for someone like Arnold, because they think that they are supposed to vote for a strong father figure. It makes them feel safe.

I have been responsible for managing people for four decades and I have never once considered myself to be anyone's leader. I think of work as a group effort with people having different roles to play.

A call for a leaderless society is not a call for anarchy, it is a call for representation. When we elect representatives they have elective authority which makes their decisions have authority. When they cease to represent us they lose this authority. If 90% of the people have no confidence in our elected representatives because they are not attempting to represent us and represent a limited group then our government loses it's moral authority as it has failed to meet it's primary responsibility of representing us. Their duty to represent us is even more important that their duty to protect us.

Before we can fix things we need to understand what went wrong. Part of the problem is what we think and how this led us to electing leaders and representatives that don't represent us. Think about the whole election process, a bunch of sociopaths offer to do things for us, give us things, we vote for them and then they blame others in congress or wherever for being unable to give us what they promised.