blog 2 (12-14-11)

What are one's values as a leader? I think that there is a major controversy between being loved and being feared. Loving a leader is harder, more forced/fake, and comes with lots of effort. Whereas, fear is more personal, honest, and ideal. Love is temporary, but fear is permanent. To love a leader, the leader has to keep providing and giving to people, but is that real love? I think that sort of relationship is not honest and is not morally correct. Ideally, you should be generous because you want to, not because of how people will think of you. However, in most cases, people do things and give things in order to fulfill and satisfy their reputation. It is hard to give and maintain a solid reputation, and it seems that most people would rather drop the giving component, and save their reputation. An effective leader would probably favor their reputation over what is best for their people. On the other hand, a good leader would keep giving even if it was secretive and unknown in your reputation. As a leader your goal should be for people to owe you, not for you to owe them. What does generosity mean? Generosity a lot of the time is financially related, and in regards to the government, generosity and giving means giving citizens money and not expecting much in return. As a leader this is a tough decision because you sometimes have to choose between satisfying yourself or your people. Occasionally you have to "give" without giving, meaning you have to give your time and effort without physically giving money or possessions. On the flip side, sometimes you tell people you are giving and you try to get them on their side, without actually doing anything kind, productive, or beneficial. When you give to your people, as in money, than eventually you slowly start to lose money, which results in taxing people. Taxing people means angry people who get pissed at the leader who taxed them, so being generous bites you in the back. Therefor as a leader you would rather be feared than loved because loved is something you have to keep up and it both hard on the individual and on the people, but being feared is forever, and requires less effort and less stress.