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The Price of Empathy
The Greatest Quality a Person Can Have is also the Most Painful
What makes a great leader? I’ve been asking myself this for years now. I was asking it before America was very nearly plunged into a fascist dictatorship and I’ve asked it ceaselessly since then. Capriciousness and dictatorial behaviour does not an effective leader make. Timidity or even remoteness are also ineffective. Presidential scholars will often cite the Nietzschean “will to power,” as the driving force behind a President’s rise to power, but this does not seem to truly translate into effective leadership. At best it results in almost psychopathic personality traits.
I will accept the possibility that ego and selfishness can drive a person to power. That is absolutely true of our worst Presidents. James Polk, Richard Nixon, and Donald Trump don’t have a lot in common, but each of them came to the Presidency uninterested in service and the public good and with an expansive view of executive power. And all three of them very nearly tore our country apart.
In contrast, Presidents like Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, and Barack Obama exercised humility, compassion, and radical empathy. They made mistakes. But each of them set in motion events that would eventually make our country better. Two of them paid with their lives. The most recent paid…
