Greatness vs Mimicking Greatness

Image from: https://realtruthmatters.com/

The topic of “Power vs Greatness“ and their relationship has been on my mind for a while so I thought I do a brain dump in here, with the hopes of it helping me to better separate them apart in life when I see them!

TLDR; I think it comes down to, when the society is corrupt, the powerful rules, when the society isn’t corrupt the great has authority.

Now what’s the difference between power and greatness? Are they separate things or the same? Do they come together? does one come after the other? All interesting things to ponder about!

My observation is, some people are compelled to power or irresistibly hungry for it. These people might think it is normal and everyone is like that, but that’s not the case. And a second group are people who are compelled to greatness.

I think once someone accesses power, they don’t necessarily need to be more great. They will just keep doing what they can to continue to have that power.

Let’s take it a part a bit. I think there is something arbitrary about power! The thing is if your desire is power, there is something dangerous there, because you are going to do whatever it is to maintain that power. It is the mimicry of greatness, because you want the great to be powerful. why wouldn’t you?

I personally would like the great to be powerful! Why wouldn’t I? I exalt the people that I believe are great! I want them to have power because I think they have earned it!

Isn’t that normal? Who else would you want to lead you? I mean if they are good at doing something why wouldn’t you put them in the front? Do you want to be led by someone who isn’t great? This has been a natural thing to do, even before the modern society, in tribes and tribal hunters. Who did they put in charge? The best hunter! And the best hunter who is also the most generous and have more and more people in his hunting party. Even then we wanted productivity and generosity and wanted to be led by such person.

Now interesting thing is, how do we discern people who are mimicking greatness for power and greatness? I think one way is just by paying close attention and by listening and by talking about it and that’s one of the purposes of free speech and the purpose of political attention. Because you want the great in the front, but unfortunately greatness can be mimicked by even psychopaths to use power.

That doesn’t mean that power is the basis of our hierarchical human relationships. That’s only the case when they’ve gone badly wrong.

When a society is corrupt then the powerful rules; when a society isn’t corrupt, then the great have authority. And that’s one reason that we might confuse powerful with great.

Sometimes we are so afraid of power that we are willing to dispense with greatness entirely or even to question weather greatness even exists and start attacking the meritocracy.

With this confusion of power and greatness, we hear ideas like “There is no meritocracy”, “there is no greatness”, and “no one who has a position deserves it!”.

I believe that not all institutions are pure and that not everyone with talent is rewarded, maybe because there isn’t a selection method that is a 100% accurate.

I personally have decided to pursue this and try to make this distinction between greatness and power in life!

How do I know if someone is great? I admire them! We have this instinct of admiration that if we someone great we admire them! Why? because we want to be like them. That’s the instinct of imitation!

We can identify what’s great, because it would be better to be great than the way we are so when we see it, we go “oh, man, I really admire that”. And maybe we are mad about that because we are so unlike that and it’s judgmental and makes us annoyed but fundamentally we are like, ”I’d like to be like that”.

And interestingly I think that admiration happens spontaneously specially in the domain that you value. The more you admire the domain the more admiration you have for that person.