October, 2008
Leadership Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Socialism
Johnathan Lott
I recently attended a national leadership conference, which I shall leave unnamed for the purposes of this article and generically refer to as "Leadership Camp." I went expecting to learn how to be a better a leader at my campus (as was stated in the pamphlet). Granted, they taught this, but the means with which they taught it were iffy at best. Specifically, I learned that good leadership and the free market are inherently conflicting.
The program was run entirely by higher education administrators. For those of you who have never experienced a higher education administrator, I invite you to walk into the Dean of Student’s Office in Peabody Hall and bask in the bureaucratic glory. While higher education administration is a noble and necessary profession, in practice most of these people are the tools of the liberal Academy who militantly preach the messages of diversity, acceptance, and the inalienable right of everyone to never be offended. Their worldview states that tolerance alone is not enough; all cultures and ways of life should be accepted and celebrated whether or not we agree with them (for more, see "The PC of Murder" in April’s Frontier).
How fitting that these are the people who teach us how to be leaders. Most of the messages at Leadership Camp were completely universal and related to holding true to one’s own personal values, but throughout the week there were subtle undertones of anti-conservatism.
One of the great, never explicitly stated messages of the week was "Competition is bad." This is, from any reasonable point of view, a false statement, but it gains truth and validation in the isolated utopia of the Academy.
For one activity, they split us up into several groups, gave each group a pack of balloons, and asked everyone to "build the tallest free-standing balloon structure possible." Of course each group worked independently and attempted to build a structure that was taller than any of the other groups could make. At the end of the allotted time they told us "This wasn’t a competition. We just asked you to build the tallest structure. You could have all worked together as a large group with all the balloons." The meaning: "Competition is bad and restricting. It would be better if we distributed all the resources to everyone and expected everyone to do their best without any incentive."
For a group of young and enthusiastic student leaders – the people that higher administrators are constantly exposed to – this may have been the best option. In real life, as was the intended analogy, this is a totally flawed theory that has and will inevitably fail.
In the competitive scenario, each group had the incentive to build a structure that was bigger than any of the others in hopes of winning. This meant that the largest standing structure possible given the skill of each team would be created in the shortest amount of time. This is an efficient use of resources and produces the best possible product. On the other hand, had the groups combined into a non-competitive super group, chaos would have ensued. An absurd amount of resources would go to managing the large group and keeping conflicting opinions in line. Some people would not be able to participate, and a large amount of balloons would not be used; all these resources would be wasted. Furthermore, once the construction actually did begin, there would be no incentive or benchmark to make it as large as possible. Someone might say "Why are we trying to make this so large? Why not just stop now? We’ll come out the same in the either way." Someone else might say "Why are we working so hard to make this tall? Why don’t we just create a very easy but inefficient plan so that we can start our break?" The end result would be a mess that in all likelihood, despite the increased resources, would not produce a single tower as large as the tallest competitive group’s.
The anti-competitive sentiment echoed throughout the week. We began asking "Is this a competition?" before any exercise. If the answer was "No," we didn’t try as hard. Case-in-point.
Toward the end of the week, we were assigned the most telling activity of all. We were each given 5 randomly drawn chips of different values and asked to go around the room and, without communicating, trade chips. We asked if it were a competition, and all we were told was to "Trade effectively." At the end of the round, we were separated into different groups based on score. The highest score group (my group) was given preferential treatment including free candy and sodas. The other groups were given nothing. The highest group was told (very patronizingly) that since they did the best, they got to make up the rules for the next round. The other two groups got upset when they realized this and grouped together to protest these rule changes.
At the discussion that immediately followed, we began to realize that the "trading" was capitalism and the "groups" were the classes that capitalism creates. We were also told that when the game was played as a competition with prizes, dishonesty and cheating typically ensued. We were given the question to ponder: "Why do we act differently when it’s a competition?"
The answer, which almost no one else at the conference was able to arrive at, is that human beings are rational. They will always act with their own self-interest in mind. This is inherent human nature and cannot be changed by any amount of education or indoctrination.
This sense of self-interest is not a bad thing; it is what causes us to strive toward our goals and compete for the greatest reward. The by-product of competing interests is quality, affordable products that allow us to have such a high standard of living.
Academics and liberals always have and always will tend to favor equality over freedom. This is what leads them to reject competition and the free market – ideals which lead to inherent inequality yet great freedom. Conservatives, on the other hand, will always favor freedom. They know that only in freedom can we live our lives to our fullest potential and, very ironically, lead others to their full potential.