A country produces the leaders it deserves. This is true whether you live in an oligarchy, dictatorship, democracy, republic, or total chaos. Did Saddam Hussein create Iraq, or did Iraq create Saddam Hussein? People choose what will lead them by what they hold dear. Do the people hold hatred and division dear? Do they look for ways to blame each other? Do they mistrust each other? Are they disenchanted? Then they will choose a leader who embodies all of that. He will seem to them as though he is speaking the truth when he affirms hatred and division, and promises to punish violence with more violence.

After such a leader has led them into more ruin than they had any idea of, a people will wash their hands of him, and look for alternatives to anger and its spawn, division.

But wouldn’t it be easier to look for those alternatives before driving into the ditch?

A massive distaste for personal attacks

A people chooses what will lead them.  Imagine this, that among a people there was massive distaste for personal attacks. That they were sensitized against personal attacks, recoiling anytime they heard them. Personal attacks sounded wrong; they regarded anyone who would use them the same way we regard a public nose picker.  Beyond the pale.

Could someone who habitually made personal attacks attain to any prominence in such a  society? Friends, he would not be heard. People would close their ears to him as to chalk squeaking on a blackboard. He would be as a sounding brass or clanging cymbal.

A people chooses what will lead them. Imagine this, that a people had learned a big lesson about division, that they had soberly regarded all the fruits of division in their history: the wars, distrust, ancient hatreds, displacement, despair and loss, and called them by the proper name of division. They recognized division in all its forms. They were sensitized against seeing others as different from themselves, against characterizing other groups in any way, against judging, punishing, and blaming. These things sounded wrong to them, and woke in them an ancient memory of suffering. They wholeheartedly renounced division.

Could someone who consistently spoke the language of division make any headway in such a society?  He would be shunned and ignored. People would recognize in him the embodiment of all their previous trials. They might thank him for reminding them of what they wished to forget. They might thank him for making the choice before them so stark and easy.

Mi casa es su casa

Our house is the same house

Division is the belief that in any way you see your interests as apart from someone else’s.  Here is the source of all trouble, the belief that in any way, our interests could diverge. Mi casa es su casa. Our house is the same house. I cannot live over here in comfort and safety, while you are over there in suffering and despair.

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Imagine a people who had learned to associate miseries with division, and had renounced division. Imagine a people who understood that our house is the same house. What kind of leader would such a people choose? No one preaching division would get a hearing. He would fall to the wayside like chaff; he would be blown away, a seed that cannot take root.