THE THIRD WAVE
The emerging civilization of the Third Wave demands, for these reasons, a wholly new type of leadership. The requisite qualities of Third Wave leaders are not yet entirely clear. We may well find that strength lies not in a leader’s assertiveness but precisely in his or her ability to listen to others; not in bulldozer force but in imagination; not in megalomania but in a recognition of the limited nature of leadership in the new world.
The leaders of tomorrow may well have to deal with a far more decentralized and participatory society—one even more diverse than today’s. They can never again be all things to all people. Indeed, it is unlikely that one human being will ever embody all the traits required. Leadership may well prove to be more temporary, collegia!, and consensual.
Jill Tweedie, in a perceptive column in The Guardian, has sensed this shift “It is easy to criticize … Carter,” she wrote. **It is possible he was (is?) a weak and vacillating man. . . . But it is also just possible … that Jimmy Carter’s major sin is his tacit recognition that, as the planet shrinks, the problems … are so general, so basic and so interdependent that they cannot be solved, as once problems were, by one man or one Government’s initiative.” In short, she suggests, weare moving painfully toward a new kind of leader not because someone thinks this is a good thing but because the nature of the problems make it necessary. Yesterday’s strong man may turn out to be tomorrow’s 90-pound weakling.
Whether or not this proves to be the case, there is one final, even more damning flaw in the argument that some political messiah is needed to save us from disaster. For this notion presupposes that our basic problem is personnel. And it isn’t. Even if we had saints, geniuses, and heroes in charge, we would still be facing the terminal crisis of representative government—the political technology of the Second Wave era.
THE WORLD WEB
If choosing the “best” leader were all we had to worry about, our problem could be solved within the framework of the existing political system. In fact, however, the problem cuts far deeper. In a nutshell, leaders—even the “best”—are crippled because the institutions they must work through are obsolete.
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