Bad Leaders Divide. Great Leaders Create.

Nothing is more costly than incompetent leadership.

Here is my ranking of types of leaders: socialist < nationalist < capitalist < technologist.

Why does socialism keep arising over and over again? One way of answering that question: it is the easiest way to become a leader.

In any functional society, you can just start yelling that 51 percent is oppressed by 49 percent. That will always work to get attention and arouse passion. You can find some unjust axis and start agitating that issue. Conflict gets attention, and attention is currency. If you're shameless, you level up. Socialism is the lowest-skill way to put yourself at the head of a mob. This and variants on it, like demagoguery, will work in almost every country. You're pitting some faction against another.

One step up from socialism, we have nationalism: unifying one nation against the other side of the border. The good part about nationalism is it stops the conflict internally. People are aligned internally because of a common cause. That's the good part. The bad part about nationalism is that often people are so enthusiastic that they move from nationalism (or patriotism) into much worse jingoism, chauvinism, or imperialism.

One level up from nationalism, we have capitalism. Now we're unifying people on the basis of a common cause in the market. Now defeating the other guys doesn't mean killing them or starting a war; it means fighting them in the market in a voluntary way where they can submit peacefully. You're virtualizing the conflict. Capitalism is positive-sum because you're creating something of value. You can lead a very large group. The scale of capitalist enterprises can be very, very large. I don't think we've seen the limits of them yet.

The highest level of leadership is technology leadership. It's not simple positive-sum capitalism; it also brings something new to the market. You're literally moving humanity forward. For example, you're not just building an organization that creates chairs (which are valuable), but you are building spacecraft doing something that has never been done before.

As we go from demagogic socialist to nationalist to capitalist to technologist, the degree of difficulty gets harder, but more value is added to society in the medium- to long-run. Every other group benefits from technologists. Planes work. Trains work. We take all this for granted now, but a small group pushed those technologies forward and scaled them.