So leaders can be killers and often are

Am posting this here as new website a bit slow these days -sorry if you have already seen it!

People sense things about others.  My mother swears her first impressions are always spot on.  Mine are totally crap.  It’s not just that I lack that intuitive feel for people; it’s something more fundamental than that.  Lately, I have begun to suspect I am a hermit in a modern world.  Think about it, what social skills do hermits need?  None, in fact in a certain light a desire for social interactions is a positive flaw.  You can’t have a hermit hanging out on street corners gabbing away about the local gossip.  Neither, do you want a talkative hermit with the broadcast signal ever on.  No, you want silence, introspection, a tendency to prefer your own company and a genuine desire for solitude.

Perhaps, first impressions were evolved by the sociable among us after their initial forage into community dynamics around Stone Age fires.  After chatting to enough fur clad companions these extraverts began to figure out who would respond willingly to conversation gambits and who would respond with a club to your head.  This over centuries morphed into an intuitive feel for different types, perhaps fuelled by common gestures, speech patterns, physical habits etc After all, most of us can tell when relatives are sulking, moody or bad tempered.  They don’t have to verbalise such distress, banging doors, awkward silences and even the way in which they perch uncomfortably on a chair say it all.  Gradually, those proficient in first impressions began to use their newfound skills.  It’s not a big jump from understanding your audience to manipulating and directing them.  Maybe, our first leaders emerged from this very cohort, skilled in the art of reading others, they could have used it to attain positions of authority.  No wonder intertribal warfare became common.  Into the mix comes different groups with their own loyalties and impervious to the group manipulation of their rivals. 

You can see it all evolving nicely with politicians and sales people emerging from this early branch of extraverts.  So if this holds true, what happened to the hermit?  Well, perhaps being on your own lends itself to development of crafts and arts.  It allows extra time to fine hone skills that only the extended isolation from others permits.  Some philosophers and scientists perhaps, could also trace their evolutionary roots back to the hermits in caveman days, loners who had time to examine sunsets on a mountain top, contemplate the grain of a wooden club.  But it is not all rosy in the hermitage.

Psychopaths and violent criminals also usually spring from hermit stock.  Studies have show that the majority of criminals at the vilest end of the scale have not yet mastered the social skills of toddlers.  Such people have often cannot even manage basic eye contact when speaking, nor learned rudimentary body language cues. So there you have it.  Hermit or socialite?  Are you adept at social skills, reading people, responding to their overtures?  Or are you happier in your own company, introspective and socially constipated?

Mind you it makes sense in caveman society that if you are a violent killer, there would be a high likelihood of some community minded individual clubbing you to death in your sleep.  After all, one of the advantages of community living is that one’s faults are plain for all to see.  Indeed one of the little known facts about psychotic aggressives is that, generally, they move frequently causing little oasis of pain in their wake.  Out of proportion to the number of social contacts most of us have.  The advantage of moving is that they can often evade detection by exiting when their activities begin to reach night time clubbing proportions or in today’s parlance, when they come onto police radar. 

But there are psychotic individuals who perversely rise to the very top.  Probably, the caveman example would be the violent oppressor who manages to rule the community with fear and impunity.  Despite their violent tendencies such characters have usually cloaked themselves in the disguise of a greater cause.  Thus, justifying their mass murders.   You may well think I’ve lost the plot here but you need only look back to   Stalin, Russia (through his land programme and The Great Terror caused the death of millions), Hilter, Germany (including six million Jewish people in the Nazi genocide) and in case you think World War 2 was an exception, later the killing propensity of leaders went on with Mao Zedong, China (40–70 million people through starvation and executions).  The list goes on, stretching not just back into the past but depressingly on up to present days.  So leaders can be killers and often are.  The question is, are they hermits with killer tendencies or extraverts with murderous intent?  I have come to no conclusions except two suggestions:

1. My conviction that things will improve when we elect leaders not because they want the position of power but because they are capable of serving a nation. 
2. It would also help if the horrendous tortuous process of becoming and staying a leader did not deform even normal decent human beings into a shadow of their former selves.  You may be a hermit or an extravert or somewhere in the middle but do spare a thought for those in power whatever they started off, corruption seems to set in sooner or later!