Is the power of leaders waning just about… well, everywhere?
It’s fair to say that people don’t like being told what to do. In fact, a weird psychological trait we human’s have developed means that if someone tells you what to do you end up wanting to do the opposite. If someone says “don’t push that button”, you sort of want to push it just to see what happens. This is called reactance, and it’s an evolved behaviour that reminds our brains that we are each in control of what we can do, not anyone else.
In the last two or so years, people living in countries that constitute some of the world’s traditional regional and international power bases have started to react against leaders that have been telling them what to do. Sometimes violently. It begs the question as to how and why such flashpoints of unrest have fired up, and if they signal a general decline in leaders’ abilities to maintain power and order over their governments and populations.
When looking at these individual acts of defiance on a short-term time scale they can seem isolated and somewhat random. But stepping back and looking through the lens of history, they’re a continuation of the trajectory of the rejection of absolute authority and may be a sign of a future social structure that is completely incomprehensible to us today.
