The Importance of Wisdom and Leadership: the Different Faces of Leadership

The Importance of Leadership and Wisdom plays a big role in society. Leaders should always value happiness to the people. It could take awhile to understand and eventually reach the values and morals. At the end, it is the leaders job to teach his own people and show them. Doing so it could lead to the people seeking for both wisdom and virtue. Good rulers take responsibility for their own people first and second for themselves.

The philosopher Plato saw a lot of problems with the society that he was living with during his time.

Plato felt that not all people were experts at things and that sometimes they can also make non intelligent decisions. He felt that when it came to leadership, it drew in people who wanted power that were inspired by their own personal self rather then for the people’s good in the public. Plato makes a conclusion that leadership requires a expert and rulers who are carefully chosen and trained into becoming one. I think Plato’s wisdom is very arguable here because it gives us a example or a suggestion of a good ruler over a bad one.

When becoming a good leader, the best way to achieve that goal is if you were also a good philosopher. This is because if you have that ability, you would be able to see the true forms of all different kinds of things. You would also be able to understand that to live virtuously is actually the best way of living. Therefore, I feel that they would be the best kind of leaders. When a leader is able to understand true goodness and justice in a way that most other people cant, they will demonstrate good leadership. This is exactly what Plato had believed. This is because they would understand that the best thing to do for their own good is to live virtuously, they would act out morally and not out of self-interest. They would also have a even better thinking skills and have a lot more education. This all results in them having a better skill when it comes to making policy decisions.

A leader must not act on the mercy of the people and also not under the mercy of the government. This could result to the people overthrowing the leader or other disturbing events. Gaining that trust from the people and them showing that trust to the leader is very important. To much forgiveness would lead to the people to not take you so seriously anymore. They will repeat the same mistakes over and over again and except the leader to forgive them. The people would gain power and eventually become even more powerful than the leader. Therefore a leader must never show forgive towards their people.

There can also be no leaders without followers and there can also be no followers without a leader. My reason on this is that if there’s followers and no leader, there is no one to guide those people. This can lead to disasters as to deaths fights and riots because everyone has different ideas. If half of the people agree with something and the other half don’t, this won’t have a great outcome. If there is a leader and no followers, what point is there to be a leader? Who are you leading? The answer would be only yourself. Machiavelli tries explaining here by saying, “The lion cannot protect himself from traps, and the fox cannot defend himself from wolves. One must therefore be a fox to recognize traps, and a lion to frighten wolves”. Machiavelli uses this analogy to encourage the citizens and government to all work together to keep the flow on the state going. This is basically saying that, there can be no leaders without followers and there can also be no followers without a leader.

Lastly, I disagree that a leader should make the decision that the people, no matter who you are, must always stay out of the hands of government policies in order to have a healthy state. Everyone must follow the same rules, laws and obligations. Machiavelli viewed this as a amazing idea because it gave the government secure protection. This is how Machiavelli viewed the state to the point where it would be both fair and healthy.

I disagree with this whole idea of Machiavelli’s because the people should also have a right to overthrow the government if something unpleasant happens. If the government decides to murder innocent people because they think that if they do, it would keep the state fair and healthy, this is not fair and healthy. We all should have the right to take over the government and overthrown them if something doesn’t seem right and is not good thing toward the state because if we don’t, it could lead to a disaster. A state is not healthy and fair when disasters occur that us citizens have no right over it to stop. 

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