Do you actually have to have some kind of insight that other people don't have to become a good national leader? Or is the entire game just social skills to cement yourself while benefitting from the intelligence and insights of people and institutions below you? I'm very curious about how much public facing leaders can actually influence their nations, as opposed to the apparatus at large.
>>18544285>Do you actually have to have some kind of insight that other people don't have to become a good national leader?Not really, the guys who come up with insights are typically thinkers. Leaders are doers. To be a good leader you don't need to be gigabrained, you just need to be smart enough to know which thinkers to trust, and how to distinguish actual insights from dumb takes. 95% of people are incapable of this. Most of the ones who can do it are thinker-types that can't lead. The small remnant is real leaders.> Or is the entire game just social skills to cement yourself while benefitting from the intelligence and insights of people and institutions below you? You are not thinking about it the right way, a good leader would not benefit himself, at least not primarily. A good leader would benefit the nation, himself is a benefit to the nation, and acts by turning into reality the merely theoretical good ideas of others. Rarely, they contribute their own ideas.Depending on the environment, yes, good social skills can be very necessary to achieve this.
>>18544285Being good at politics is probably about "social intelligence." It's about managing human relationships, how to "read the room," how to analyze and interpret the emotions of other people. Chinese leaders seem like autismos and they have things like chemical engineering degrees but I don't think it's that different since people rise up in the system there based on who they know like everywhere else. (Also see Stalin in this regard.)People with military experience can do well in American politics. The Democratic Party is kind of funny because you have these social butterflies who get their start in the DSA and then you have these ex-military/ex-CIA people, but those people can actually spend a whole lot of time managing morale. Also you have to show confidence even when you have no idea WTF is going to happen, like a lot of the time these politicians don't know if they're going to win their primary or not until the results start coming in.Zohran Mamdani has a very honed ability to "connect" to people (Bill Clinton also had this):https://youtu.be/N5iO5a95LxY
>>18544327>Most of the ones who can do it are thinker-types that can't lead.This is a delusion. Most people who think of themselves in this way are just so much better at bullshitting than they are at critical thinking that they manage to bullshit themselves, while others see through their bullshit.
>>18544285I think for xi you just have to have basic common sense. The rest of the world thinks being nice and letting people vote is some banchmark of evolution, but xi knows there are bad people and they'll use the system to favour themselves. It's basic common sense. The rest of the world are all just insane.
>>18544285You have to be very educated to even be accepted into the Chinese Chinese Communist Party to begin with, so their model for selecting head of state instantly filters out every single person in their entire jurisdiction with poor memorization skills.
>>18544285From Machiavelli: in short: be magnanimous, but never give up your majesty; take credit for the good, misdirect or obfuscate for the bad.
