Born leader
A creative personality imbued with a historical vision of the world.
To be historically fertile, a political movement or regime needs a leader, that is, a head. Even if elected or chosen, the leader is nevertheless predestined to the divine spark, if he’s not already genetically imbued with it. History is the fertilisation of a people’s passive soul by the active soul of its born leaders.
Man or woman, the born leader is a recurring and necessary figure in history — a notion rejected by Marxist egalitarians (attached to their dogmas about the ‘masses’), though they too depend on such leaders.
The born leader brings the danger of despotism, but of destiny as well. History refuses to conform to the vision of our humanitarian egalitarians. The born leader is a man of storms, but also a man of extraordinary creativity. He appears where he is not expected, whatever the ideology he animates. He seizes hold of reality and transforms it. He seduces the people, like a snake paralyses the bird. He is history’s surprise, whether he’s divine or dramatic and bloody. The born leader is an indispensable, as well as a tragic figure. He can lift up and liberate (Charles Martel, Joan of Arc, Mustafa Kemal, etc.), doing so like a tyrant (Lenin, Stalin, Mao . . .) or a conqueror (Alexander, Napoleon, Abd-el-Rahman . . .). He’s an inescapable given in the lives of a people faced with constant dangers or in pursuit of a great ambition.
In our decadent, nearly exhausted civilisation, born leaders no longer appear because the natural elites have been turned away from politics and no longer serve the people (confused with the ‘state’) — the people has been abandoned to careerist functionaries. In the present situation, only a tragic crisis will permit a born leader to emerge. He alone can cut the Gordian knot of what historically appears as an inextricable situation. Robert Steuckers thus writes, in reference to Carl Schmitt, that the latter ‘wanted to restore the personal dimension of power because this personal dimension is alone capable of responding to a state of emergency. Why? Because the born leader can act more rapidly than slower procedural mechanisms’.
The born leader accordingly has a dictatorial character, but in the positive sense. A dictator is not an oppressive tyrant, but one who ‘dictates’, who cuts through and saves things in a state of emergency. The born leader appears thus as a people’s supreme protector, disinterested, the ultimate symbol of true democracy, ‘populist’ democracy, in the Hellenic political-philosophical sense. The born leader is he who both sets a people in motion and protects its ancestral character, its identity. He is the one who breaks the system for the sake of a futuristic dynamic that paradoxically preserves the archaic, that soul of a civilisation. He is both Agitator and Dictator.
The born leader is a figure of individualism, in the positive sense, as in ‘altruistic individualism’. In a given period, at a tragic or fertile point in history, he crystallises and formulates the unconscious will of the people. Muhammad was probably the greatest born leader of all time, having, in a few decades, set the world ablaze with his religious and warrior doctrine, which, today, constitutes for Europeans, as it does for many other peoples, the greatest of dangers — the principal enemy — that which is to be contained and hurled back. Europe has need for born leaders today, for she will be saved neither by intellectuals nor politicians nor entrepreneurs, but only by those embodying the People’s Soul. Remember, though: there are no generals without an army — no chief without a tribe.
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881-1938) was a Turkish military officer in the First World War who led the Turkish national movement following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, later becoming the first President of modern Turkey. His reforms laid the foundation for the secular, democratic Turkish government which has existed up to the present day.
Abd-el-Rahman al-Ghafiqi was the Arab military leader who led the Muslims into battle against the Frankish forces of Charles Martel in 732. His army was defeated and he himself was killed by Franks during the battle while attempting to stop his men from retreating.
From Vouloir, January-February 1995.
(see aristocracy; democracy; elite; personality, creative)
