by Chris Brady

Perhaps now as much as ever, the world is in dire need of leadership.

I don’t speak of the candy-coated, teleprompter variety, or the plastic-faced tell-you-what-you-want-to-hear politician. I am also not referring to the high-born, or the well-connected, or the well-to-do. I don’t refer to the do-gooders, or the world-controllers, neither the people arrogant enough to think they can save the world if only they could impose enough of their infallible wisdom upon others.

No.

What I’m referring to is real leadership. The kind that bubbles up from among the population of good, hard-working, honest people.

I don’t know why, but it seems as if the general mindset of people today runs along the tracks of, “There ought to be a law,” or “The government should do something,” or “An agency must be created to make this better.”

This mindset is dangerous, cowardly, and lazy. The world has rarely been made better by centralized, top-down impositions of somebody’s concept of utopia. But yet, that is the exact type of solution to which we have either become accustomed, or conditioned.

Many, many of our problems today are the direct result of top-down, collectivized, centralized decision making. “Government this,” “agency that,” until we are smothered under regulation and control. The problems thus created cannot be solved by the same false thinking that created them.

The challenges of our times call for solutions, for certain, but solutions of the grass-roots variety; fixes that spring from the individuals most affected, and most concerned, with the state of things around him or her. Individual initiative and pluck, combined with ingenuity and creativity, is responsible for more good and progress in the world than any collective body of government bureaucrats and professional nincompoops. This occurs when individuals are free to conceive and create, build and construct, produce and prosper. In short, when individuals lead.

Leadership is not a subset of management theory or political theory or business theory. It is central to all human activity. There are always those individuals who dare to stand up to injustice, stand in the gap of need, and stand on principle. They use what they have, where they are, to fix what they see as being wrong. They improve things, move them along, and contribute to the overall picture by their individual actions.

That is leadership.

And we need it now from individuals everywhere.

Will you respond?