The Search for Leadership

Today, there's a frantic search for leadership among the masses in this country. We feel oppressed, powerless, and leaderless.  We want someone to tell us what to do.

Whenever we crave for leadership, we devalue ourselves. We minimize our power of creation. We separate ourselves from our problems. We vicariously exist in the mythology of the Superman complex. And we do all of this to ourselves without any assistance from anyone.

The victims of the world desire so many things that we believe we cannot achieve on our own. We define power as an institution, a society, or a government. We bellow to ourselves and other victims how great it would be if we could become a part of this great power. This inclusion would free us from our suffering so can lead the other victims out of their suffering. We become self-proclaimed leaders of victims.


The victimization of people is caused primarily by our search for someone to solve our problems for us. We search for leaders whenever we feel things are not going well in our lives. And when we feel powerless individually and collectively, we search for like-minded individuals to share our grievances and gain their support.

We believe the more support we have from other victims, the more we can find a leader to lead us from our suffering. Sadly, this never works.

We can have a million victims come together and they are still victims. Our conversations, strategies, and actions epitomize the social phenomenon of victimization. WE are fatally flawed by the biblical stories of someone coming to save us from our own beliefs and actions.

No, we are the ones responsible for whatever problems we have in our lives. It's out actions that's causing the suffering in our lives.

In our search for leadership, we overlook ourselves. WE forget that our problems are self-created. WE forget that the power of love, peace, wisdom, freedom, creation, abundance, and power are within us.

WE are the leaders that we're searching for. WE have the power to lead ourselves from the suffering that's causing us to devalue ourselves. 

Most of us searching outside of ourselves for answers to our problems, are condemning ourselves to lives of suffering and victimization.

Victimization is not limited to color, class, or status. It affects all of us who crave for things -- money, fame, institutional power, and so on -- to overcome our suffering. Unfortunately, suffering is found in the things we crave for the most.

Nevertheless, we continue to believe there's someone in the world now or is coming later to save us from our own deleterious behavior. We believe we can turn all our problems over to someone else to solve for us. And this someone will overcome the problems we have with illiteracy, crime, poverty, dependency, and so forth.

There are some salient questions we need to ask ourselves about the mythical leaders we are searching for.  

What skills will they possess? How will they overcome the societal suffering affecting all of us? And why can't we possess the same skills and overcome our own suffering? The answers to these questions undoubtedly opens the mind to see clearly the folly in such a search.

One illustration of the magnitude of our problems is found in education. Children who have been victimized by their environment  sit in classrooms and use the same text books, listen to the same teacher as the rest of the students, and continue not to succeed. 

What do students hear or think that causes many of them not to achieve the desired success? What prevents the students from reading, studying, turning in homework?

Is it racism? Oppression? Laziness? Lack of motivation? Victimized minds? What? It's something and it's been happening to children for hundreds of years without any really meaningful progress.

Whatever victimizes our students also victimized us.  We are their guardians. Yet we want someone to do something for our children that we are unable or unwilling to do ourselves.

We want leaders to magical transform the habits of children who have been beaten down by society so badly that life has have very little meaning to them. Unfortunately, they have been conditioned to accept powerlessness, and its ancillary effects of failure, long before they enter the classroom.

Meanwhile, solving our problems is more complex than a mythical leader created from the visions of victims. We need to enlighten our minds to overcome years of feeling inadequate about who we are and the power we have in this world.

The transference of power from others to ourselves is a psychological action -- an action of our minds. This doesn't require an outside leader.

So let's work to get over this nonsense of outside leadership. There's no one in the world better equipped to lead us than ourselves. We know what's happening in our lives.

We only need to get the inspiration and will to do something about it. This will and inspiration comes from an enlightened mind that's free of suffering. When we do, the world will look much different to us.