Let me tell you a few things about leadership in general. Leadership is a group phenomenon. Any group will look for a leader, either formal or informal, either temporary or permanent – in every situation, a group or a team or a people will look for someone to follow. Leadership is not a character trait, nor a learned skill, nor a method or a set of behaviors. Leadership is a kind of relationship that is always sought out by groups and leaders alike. There is no one type of leader. Not even a small set of types of leaders. There are probably thousands of types of leaders. Leadership is too complex and depends on so many details – just as any complex relationship, especially a group relationship – that it becomes very restrictive and naïve to believe we can categorize them in a shortlist of types. But we can look into some concepts of psychology and analyze a few traits in different leaders – or a few traits in the relationships of leadership between leaders and followers. Of course, all of what I have said is pretty much controversial and expresses my beliefs and studies over the years – but bear with me.

So, there’s this kind of leader that we can call a ‘Leader-that-is-supposed-to-know’ (LSTK). This is actually the first kind of leader we encounter in our lives. As we come out of our warm and forgiving mother’s womb to face the dark disappointing frustrations of reality, we are vulnerable and ignorant. We look to our parents for guidance. They are the ones who will tell us what to do, what are the dangers, and the protocols, our rights and our responsibilities. They are the ones ‘supposed-to-know’. They are our first leaders and our first LSTK’s. We obey them implicitly and they are the examples we follow and the sculptors of our early behaviors. When we grow up we are sometimes tempted to look for these kinds of leaders again. Individuals who will fill the voids of our vulnerabilities at any time and who will be able to tell us here and there what we should do and how we should behave. Some leaders will, in fact, believe this should be their main role: know what each follower should do and demand it of them – sometimes reprimanding them for not knowing in advance what should be done. Treating their followers like children, they still get frustrated when these don’t act as adults themselves. This replication of a parent-child relationship in a workplace or other adult environment is considerably misguided. It is generally a tragic mistake from both leaders and followers, and for both leaders and followers.

There is another kind of leader we can call the ‘Good-enough Leader’ (GEL). Contrary to our superficial infantile assessment, a good mother or father is not simply an adult ‘supposed-to-know’, is not simply someone who knows what we are supposed to do and demands it of us. A ‘Good-enough’ parent has a much more comprehensive role – he/she is able to contain the anguish and anxiety, to support the efforts of the baby to fend for his/herself, and, most importantly of all, be able to convey to the baby a positive self-image – in summary, one of Love. A ‘Good-enough Leader’, as a ‘Good-enough Mother’, does not assume knowing everything a follower should do or not do. A GEL will help the followers to develop their own roles and support them in their efforts to grow and assume responsibilities themselves. Doing this, the GEL assumes a daunting risk: he/she will have to face unrealistic expectations from the followers who may want determination, orders, no pain or responsibility, magic solutions to all problems, success in all situations.

These unrealistic expectations are a major trap we followers must be aware of as we choose our leaders. It is easy to be fooled or pushed into relationships characterized by LSTK leadership – after all, it may be convenient at an earlier time to receive clear-cut orders on what to do, and be able to always know who to follow. But it is a fools’ errand. In the end, a GEL will be a much more effective and complete leader, even though his/her style may be more uncomfortable and sophisticated at times – avoiding the temptations of simple but self-defeating or basically wrong top-down decisions. An LSTK will tell you what to do, while a GEL will want you to be involved, make decisions, vote, share the responsibility – all these uncomfortable things.

A particular type of ‘Leader-that-is-supposed-to-know’ is what we can call the ‘Savior/Victim’ Leader.  ‘S/VL’s identify themselves with a group allegedly victimized, claiming they are victims themselves, so they can, in turn, assume the role of Saviors, the ‘Chosen ones’ able to confront all enemies and save the victims from all injustices – the ones who know the path to glory. Some ‘Savior/Victim’ leaders are ‘Martyrs’ – they sacrifice themselves so that their followers can receive their own power and save themselves. We can see that in Jesus Christ or the Spartacus in Kubrick’s movie I spoke about here.  But most ‘Savior/Victim’ Leaders work in their own interest and suck the power from their followers becoming immensely powerful on the shoulders of the powerless themselves. Examples are leaders like Adolf Hitler, Mao Ze-dong or Donald Trump. Of course, they are not victims and really do not belong to the group they are claiming, nor are they able to save it. They are mostly illusionists and con-artists, convincing a vulnerable mass they will stop the hurt and the hopelessness. Instead, they work to increase this hurt and hopelessness that serve them so well.

The main responsibility, though, is with the followers. First of all, accepting an LSTK, looking for a savior, believing in magical solutions, is a certain path to tragedy and catastrophe. There are no magical solutions – understanding that is a crucial part of growing up and a crucial pillar of a mature mind. Every solution, every decision, every obstacle overcome, has a cost. If we really want a ‘Good-enough’ leader we must stop looking for someone who is promising the sky and heaven on Earth. We must stop imposing impossible demands on our leaders, or be discouraged by the minor negative detail, and we must start working for the future, believing in the future ourselves. Perfection is an illusion. Life is not perfect. If we want someone real, and effective, working to solve real problems and searching for real solutions, we must stop deluding ourselves in the first place. Virtue is very often in the center. The more radical we become the more deluded we will be. Democracy is about compromise and about collaboration and about being able to bring people together. The more radical we are, the more we are rejecting this dynamic.

So, “first of all, we’ll be judged by our courage”. But not just the courage to destroy and ravish and break – also the courage to stop, to see and to think. And to ban populist and childish illusions. See you around the next campfire, fellow warriors. Stay in the fight.

I don’t know why but lately I’ve been remembering HBO’s GAME OF THRONES here and there. What a wonderful series it really was and what an event to have followed from start to finish, especially after having read the SONG OF ICE AND FIRE books. The show had great production value, but what made it incredible was the story, the characters, the dialogues, the actors, the directing, the strength of it all. I know many people, including yours truly, were disappointed with the last season. I spoke about it here. But when you look back I’m sure you will be able to identify many incredible moments that made you a fan and locked you to the screen every time the show was on. So today I’m going to talk to you about 5 memorable scenes that stuck to my mind and make me wish the show had never ended. Of course, there are many more brilliant scenes and maybe there were even better ones – but these are a few that I immediately recall and which I’d like to remind you of. There is no particular order, as you may perceive from my usual lists.  Oh, and SPOILER ALERT – If you haven’t watched GOT yet, don’t ruin it by reading this article.

1. MHYSA – At the end of the third season, Daenerys has freed the Unsullied in a spectacular fashion and has become known as the freer of slaves. She and her forces arrive at Yunkai and demand for the slaves to be freed. They don’t know what will be the reaction of these slaves as they are given to the Mother of Dragons. Will they bite the hand that’s feeding them? The mass of slaves exit the city and face Daenerys – hesitant. And she speaks to them. She tells them they are free now. Suddenly, slowly they start calling her ‘Mhysa! Mhysa! Mhysa!’ The word is translated. It is means ‘Mother’. Daenerys is being hailed. She smiles and says – ‘These people are not going to hurt me.’ She climbs downs from behind her soldiers and she goes into the crowd. Every slave is trying to reach her, to touch her, enthralled. They pick her up and the beautiful music of Ramin Djawadi starts playing. The camera climbs to the heavens and on the ground, we see the lovely pattern of the concentric circles of slaves trying to touch Daenerys as she is raised by them. What a brilliant ending! First-class!

2. RED WEDDING – There are innumerous shocking scenes in GOT, but few have had more impact than the bloody Red Wedding. The Scene is well laid out. Robb Stark – the King in the North, his mother, and his bride are attending a truce wedding at the Castle of the Frey’s. It’s a way to appease the Lord because of the failed marriage of Robb with one of his daughters. As the celebrations carry on, Caitlyn Stark is looking at Robb and his lover wooing when she notices a man going to close the doors to the room. Something is wrong. The scene moves to the exterior, where the Hound and Arya are arriving, but they cannot pass the gate, for the guard tells them the party is over – yet, we see armed soldiers going in. At the wedding room, the musicians start playing The Rains of Castamere. Caitlyn is suspicious something is wrong. When she finally finds out that the men of the house have mails beneath their clothes she understands the danger and shouts. But it’s too late. The killing of the Starks begins, starting with Robb’s wife and the unborn child but continuing with Robb, his mother, and any other present. The scene sent shock waves across the globe and I remember watching videos of outraged reactions from many countries and understanding the absolute terror people were feeling. Absolutely brilliant!

3. HODOR – Oh, this is no doubt one of my favorite scenes of the series, maybe even my absolute favorite. It happens halfway into the sixth season. Hodor is the big guy who has been taking care of the handicapped Bran. Whenever he needs strength, Bran gets inside the retarded companion’s mind, and this happens again when Bran and Meera are escaping a zombie-infested cave beyond the Wall. As Hodor holds the door allowing for his friends to escape, Bran is able to see back into the past, to when Hodor was a boy – and the presence of ethereal Bran seems to set Hodor into an epileptic spasm. He starts shouting ‘Hold the door! Hold the door! Hold the door!’ until he can’t, until he is only capable of shouting ‘Hodor! Hodor! Hodor!’, the one-sentence he has been saying all along. We gather, then, that his whole life was resumed to that single moment – the moment he would hold the door to save Bran. This, I guess, is the mark of George R.R. Martin. It’s a moment that it’s not in any of the books but which could only have come from his mind (what other reason could there be for Hodor to be called Hodor?). It’s a nugget of brilliance that we can trace back to the mind of a genius.

4. ARYA KILLS – Arya was always one of my favorite characters in the saga, along with Tyrion and Dany. Her storyline always seemed to be distant from the others but we knew it would amount to something great. Among the clumsy episodes of the last season, especially the strangely unsatisfactory Battle of Winterfell, one of the greatest moments was, of course, the moment Arya manages to kill the Night King. The Battle is already lost when the powerful Night King approaches Bran and we know he intends to kill him. Jon, which we might think would be the King’s match, is pinned down facing the Ice Dragon, and Theon, Bran’s last guardian, is dead. So now what? At the last moment, Arya jumps in as a light breeze, ready to stab the King in the back with her special Valerian dagger. But as Bran senses her coming, so does the Night King, who turns around just in time to catch her by the neck. And that’s when the Princess of Winterfell made use of one of her tricks, letting her dagger fall into her free hand, and stabbed the King of Evil. As with many other twists, feel free to search the Internet for the numerous foreshadowing instances of this moment. It still made me jump in my seat.

5. BATTLE OF THE LOOT TRAIN – The first battle of  Daenerys Targaryen, Drogon and the Dothraki against the Lannisters is in my view the best battle in the entire series. Old Robert Baratheon once had said: ‘Only a fool would face the Dothraki in an open field.’ But as the forces of Jaime Lannister and Bronn were ambushed as they came in from the South with a train full of loot, they didn’t just face the Dothraki, they faced Daenerys herself mounted on the great Drogon. The scene is 9-minutes long and was shot over an 18-day period. It’s tremendous. I always speak about it when I refer to a great Pay-off to a good Build-up. The reaction you can find online by people all over the world to the appearance of Drogon is a writer’s dream! Completely cathartic.

And these are five beautiful moments of this fantastic series. I hope you agree and I hope mistakes of the last season don’t discourage you to revisit the series once again, as it was, in fact, a very special event that we were lucky to witness. See you around the next campfire, fellow warriors.

A few things have been bothering me recently which I want to talk about. Things that got into my radar over the last few days. First, an article describing how the city of Chicago had given Amazon the opportunity to pocket taxes in the same amount as their employees were paying. The end result, as you may perceive is that in effect the workers were paying taxes… to their employers. In theory, it’s a strange arrangement that some would compare to feudalism itself. In reality, it’s a bad practice that has been spreading more and more: big companies pay little or no taxes. As my girlfriend said: «Does Jeff Bezos really need this money?» The employees’ money should have gone to pay for roads, fire stations, public utilities, and instead goes to pay their own salaries. These days we also learned that Isabel dos Santos, daughter of the former long-time President of Angola, deemed the richest woman in Africa, probably ripped off her country’s resources and companies for hundreds of millions of dollars. Angola, for those who don’t know it, is a country rich in diamonds, oil, and other natural resources, but which its 29 million people live with an average of $4,170 a year, according to BBC, including 30% who actually live with less than $1,9 a day. I forgive you to think, in the lightness of the moment, ‘so what? Isn’t that the way the world works?’. Yes, yes it is. Nepotism and abuse from the elites aren’t new or surprising. But that’s part of the whole tragedy. They are both wrong and they should not be condoned.

We live in a world that is rebelling against Elitism. There is certainly cause for this revolt. Capitalism, that engaging phenomenon that has brought tremendous wealth and crushed poverty all over the world, has been systematically corrupted and disfigured. Public and private powers are now promiscuous among each other, with companies feasting with public money and politicians enjoying the wealth of privateers. Curiously, though, this rebellion against the Elites is exploding in unexpected ways. While many scream against the abuse of the powerful, others are fooled by populists and other con-artists to believe that the educated and the sophisticated urban citizens are the Elites themselves and that it is them who are the bringers of doom.  Inequality levels have been rising considerably in the last decade and we are now at a point where the true middle class is being crushed and destroyed.

Let me put it this way: I may be elite myself. I have a college education, I have a car, and I can see the sea from the window of my room where I am right now writing this text in my laptop – a room where I have an internet connection and cable TV. All this puts me in the high levels of the wealthiest people in the world – I gather that I am in the 15%-20% of the richest in the world.  That doesn’t mean I’m rich. I don’t feel rich. I have no equity, I’m indebted, of course, as most of my fellow citizens and I don’t have the means to independently assure my retirement in a few years. A few weeks ago, I injured my knee. I had the option of waiting a few months for an almost free orthopedist from the Portuguese National Health System or pay almost €100 for a private one. I had to think about it because that money had to come out of other things I’d have to sacrifice. I ended up going to the private doctor who prescribed me some exams. I’m still figuring out how I’m going to pay for those. I don’t feel rich. But I’m still better off than people out there working several jobs to make ends meet, or who have lost their homes and their savings in the recession, or others in Third World countries trying to figure out what they are going to eat in the morning. So inequality is too big a problem to solve, probably, but what sickens me is that it has been increasing systematically in the last few years. See some graphs here. The recession, it seems, left the rich richer and the poor poorer. And the middle class poorer.

Still, inequality is not the only problem with Elites. Another thing is what I call Aristocratic Thinking which, in truth, is a sense of entitlement. I know because I used to have it. I remember saying to my colleagues in class in eighth grade, so I must have been 14, that ‘You are only poor if you want to.’ I had a very angry reaction from a friend of mine which impressed me. But it took me a few years to fully understand his anger. And now I’m ashamed of my speech. But Elites feel they are entitled to things, to attitudes, to a certain degree of what they would call respect, or service, or other euphemism. They/we feel superior and different. Of course, differences will always be there. There will always be someone taller, or thinner, or luckier, or more beautiful. But “all men are created equal”. That is the creed we believe in. So that sense of entitlement is wrong. Wrong and dangerous. Saint Agustin used to say that justice towards the inferior is called Discipline – that ability to restrain ourselves and respect other people’s rights and dignity. So even if we would feel superior, that sense of entitlement is unjust and wrong. It leads to nepotism – that idea that we can benefit our family without regard for rules or responsibility. And it leads to xenophobia. And it leads to other dangerous behaviors – as genetic selection, to name one.

Finally, there’s a third problem with Elites: abuse. A couple of years ago I read an article in a newspaper about a woman working in a cork factory in Portugal. She had been to court complaining about a wrongful termination by her employer and won the battle. The company was ordered to give her her job back and pay a fine. The company did that, but gave her a particular assignment: she had to carry the same 20-kilo bag of corks from one shelf to another all day, with timed bathroom breaks on a specific bathroom with no walls (she had to bring a dark cloth from home to hide herself). I have not confirmed this case and the article specified that the company denied these charges – but let’s say they are true: do they surprise you? How many abusive work-related stories do you know yourself? Or even have been through yourself? There is a massive culture of abuse that comes with the Elites, the ones that are strong, simply not caring, simply not looking at people as… people. Or at least people with the kind of rights and dignity we have fought the last 250 years for. We believe that a Human Being has certain rights just for being a Human Being. Don’t we? And still, we tolerate all kinds of abuse all the time. In the case of the cork worker, the law had worked – it had given her a chance, it had evened the odds – but still, she was abused and mistreated. There is something as doing the Right Thing and it does matter. Doing the Right Thing matters. It has to.

I’ve written many times before: this Elitist mindset, thriving in inequality, aristocratic thinking and entitlement, and abuse, is the banal behavior that leads to Evil. Ignoring what is Right for the sake of interest, greed, and egotism is what Hannah Arendt warned us would lead to totalitarianism and to repeating the tragedies of the Past. We saw this kind of mindset at work once more these past few days in the US Senate and in Trafalgar Square. Let’s hope we can avoid the tragedies that may follow. Fight on, fellow warriors. See you around the next campfire.