The Theatre of Leadership

Do we confuse dominance with strength? Visibility with competence? Certainty with wisdom? Charisma with leadership? I increasingly think we do.

There is something strange about the qualities we reward in modern leaders. We say that we want competent people, thoughtful people, people capable of making difficult decisions and accepting responsibility for them. Yet the people who most easily attract our attention are often those who speak the loudest, hesitate the least and appear absolutely certain that they are right, even if they aren’t.

We seem to prefer leaders who are confidently wrong over leaders who are cautiously right.

That preference extends far beyond politics. Social media has created an entire economy around visibility. Influencers become authorities. Commentators become experts. Entrepreneurs become philosophers. Successful people in one field suddenly acquire an audience willing to listen to them on almost every other subject imaginable.

And somewhere along the way, having an audience began to resemble having something worth saying. It doesn’t.

The Performance of Authority

Leadership has always involved performance to some extent. A leader has to communicate. Confidence matters. Charisma can inspire people, especially during difficult moments. An army commanded by someone who visibly expects defeat is unlikely to fight particularly well, and a government incapable of explaining its decisions will struggle to maintain public trust. But confidence is useful only when something exists beneath it. The problem begins when the appearance of leadership becomes more valuable than the qualities required to exercise it.

Someone who speaks slowly because they are considering several possibilities may appear weaker than someone who immediately produces a simple answer. Someone who says I don’t know appears less authoritative than someone willing to improvise. Someone who changes an opinion after receiving better information can be portrayed as inconsistent, while someone who repeats the same mistake indefinitely can be praised for conviction.

These incentives are almost perfectly backwards. Knowledge tends to create doubt because knowledge reveals complexity. The more deeply someone understands economics, medicine, war, engineering, law or almost any sufficiently complicated subject, the more aware they become of uncertainty, exceptions and unintended consequences.

Ignorance has no such burden. It is very easy to be certain when you don’t know enough to understand why you might be wrong.

Yet certainty is extraordinarily persuasive. We confuse it with strength.

Authority Has To Be Earned

One of the stranger consequences of the internet is that expertise has become transferable in the public imagination.

For a relatively absurd example only, let’s suppose I follow a technology reviewer who has spent fifteen years testing computer hardware. If that person explains why one processor performs better than another, their opinion carries some weight. They have experience, methodology and a record that can be examined.

Then tomorrow they publish a video explaining vaccines. Why should their authority follow them there? The subscriber count remains the same. The confidence may remain the same. The production quality certainly remains the same. The knowledge does not.

This seems obvious when written down, yet we constantly behave as though authority were a property of the person rather than a relationship between the person and the subject.

A brilliant engineer is not automatically an economist. A successful businessman is not automatically a political philosopher. A doctor is not automatically an expert on foreign policy. A professor is not automatically correct outside their discipline. And none of these people should find that observation insulting.

Recognizing the limits of our knowledge is part of intellectual maturity. I write about engineering because I have spent much of my life doing it. I write about philosophy, history and politics because I enjoy studying them and reflecting upon them, but I would never pretend that this blog gives me the authority of a historian, philosopher or political scientist. The distinction matters.

There is a difference between contributing to a discussion and demanding authority within it.

Everyone Has A Voice

This inevitably runs into a popular modern idea: everyone has a voice. Of course they do. Freedom of expression is one of the foundations of a free society, and I would rather tolerate an enormous amount of stupidity than grant governments the authority to determine which opinions citizens are permitted to express.

But freedom to speak and entitlement to credibility are completely different things. You may believe whatever you want. You may say almost whatever you want. Nobody is obligated to regard what you say as informed. That distinction has become strangely uncomfortable.

We have gradually turned equality of political rights into an imagined equality of knowledge. Because every citizen deserves one vote, every opinion supposedly deserves equal intellectual consideration. But democracy never required us to pretend expertise does not exist.

If ten engineers inspect a bridge and conclude that it is structurally unsafe, the fact that one thousand people on social media believe otherwise does not make the bridge safer. Reality does not count votes.

Everyone is entitled to an informed opinion. No one is entitled to being ignorant.

An informed opinion does not require a doctorate. It does not require formal education at all. It simply requires the minimum intellectual responsibility of trying to understand what you are talking about, examining evidence, acknowledging uncertainty and accepting that somebody who has spent twenty years studying the subject probably knows things that you do not.

That should not be controversial. Increasingly, it is.

Influence Without Foundation

The influencer economy has turned this problem into a business model.

Being noticed is valuable. Attention produces money, status and further attention. But careful expertise is slow, specialized and frequently boring. Certainty, outrage and aspiration are much easier to sell. This is particularly visible in the endless industry of people selling success.

There is always another course explaining how to become wealthy, another entrepreneur explaining the secret that traditional education supposedly refuses to teach, another twenty-something millionaire promising financial independence if you simply reproduce a system conveniently available for €299.

The obvious question should be: if this system reliably produces wealth, why is selling the system the business? Yet the marketing works because the product is rarely knowledge. The product is certainty. The luxury car, the watch, the holiday destination and the carefully framed apartment provide visual evidence that the person speaking possesses some hidden understanding of the world. Success itself becomes a credential.

The manosphere applies a similar mechanism to identity. Often we can find that figures in that space do not merely sell political or social opinions. They package answers to genuine anxieties experienced by young men: loneliness, rejection, insecurity, lack of direction, financial frustration and uncertainty about masculinity. Around those problems they construct a worldview in which confidence becomes wisdom, wealth becomes virtue, dominance becomes masculinity and disagreement becomes weakness.

The attraction is understandable. That does not make the answers good. Indeed, that is precisely what makes them dangerous.

Bad ideas are most effective when attached to real problems. A young man who feels directionless may genuinely benefit from being told to exercise, work harder, develop discipline and take responsibility for his life. None of those ideas are particularly objectionable. But accepting useful advice in one area does not require purchasing the entire ideology surrounding the person giving it. Someone helping you go to the gym has not earned authority over your relationships, your politics, your understanding of women or your conception of society.

We should be much better at separating the value of an argument from the status of the person making it. Instead, we increasingly do the opposite.

When Bad Opinions Become Dangerous

Most uninformed opinions have limited consequences. Someone confidently misunderstanding computer hardware might waste a few hundred euros. Someone confidently misunderstanding nutrition might adopt a terrible diet. Someone confidently misunderstanding economics might purchase an equally terrible online course. But some subjects impose costs beyond the individual.

Vaccination is an obvious example. Choosing not to understand vaccines is not equivalent to choosing the wrong graphics card. Infectious disease is a collective problem. Vaccination decisions affect not only the person making them, but infants, immunocompromised people, the elderly and others who may depend partly on population-level immunity.

At that point, epistemic irresponsibility acquires physical consequences.

This is why the growing willingness to treat medical expertise as merely one opinion among many is particularly dangerous. A physician saying the available evidence indicates this treatment is safe and an influencer saying I don’t trust it are both technically opinions. They are not epistemically equivalent. One has a foundation that can be examined. The other may have nothing beyond intuition.

This is not an argument for censorship. I think misinformation, censorship and the limits of free expression deserve their own discussion.

It is an argument about responsibility. The question here is not whether someone should be allowed to say something foolish. The question is why we choose to trust them.

Politics Multiplies The Consequences

And then there is politics. An irresponsible influencer can damage thousands or perhaps millions of people who choose to listen. An irresponsible political leader can damage people who never chose to listen at all. That distinction changes everything.

Political power converts opinion into consequence. A politician does not merely comment on healthcare, education, economics, energy, diplomacy or war. Governments allocate budgets, appoint officials, negotiate treaties, regulate industries, command armed forces and establish policies affecting entire populations.

Competence therefore becomes a moral requirement. This is where I return to something I wrote while reflecting on Marcus Aurelius: Character without competence can produce admirable failure. Competence without character can produce extremely efficient corruption. Public service requires both.

Duty requires competence. It is not enough for a political leader to mean well. Good intentions do not compensate for an inability to understand the consequences of decisions.

But competence without character is equally dangerous. An intelligent, capable political leader who treats public institutions primarily as tools for personal enrichment, revenge, ideology or self-preservation may simply become much more effective at causing harm.

Leadership therefore requires something much less glamorous than charisma. Preparation. Knowledge. Judgment. Restraint. Character. And, above all, responsibility.

The Trump Problem

Donald Trump is probably the most obvious contemporary example of leadership as performance, but focusing exclusively on him would miss the wider point.

Trump did not invent the culture that produced him. He mastered it. His political strength has always been his ability to dominate attention. He speaks in absolutes, reduces complicated problems into simple narratives, attacks opponents directly and projects extraordinary confidence. To supporters, this can appear decisive and refreshingly unfiltered. To opponents, it appears reckless and narcissistic.

But whichever interpretation one prefers, the political mechanism is difficult to ignore. Attention becomes authority. Certainty becomes competence. Dominance becomes strength. And complexity becomes weakness.

The consequences matter because the United States is not an isolated organization whose leadership affects only its employees. Decisions made by an American president move markets, alter trade flows, affect military alliances, influence conflicts and shape international institutions.

In 2026, for example, Trump’s administration has continued pursuing aggressive tariff policies whose effects extend well beyond American borders and through deeply integrated supply chains. His administration has also intervened directly in childhood vaccination policy despite strong objections from major medical organizations.

One can support the political objectives behind a policy and still ask whether the reasoning, preparation and implementation behind it are competent. That is precisely the kind of question political tribalism makes increasingly difficult.

Criticize Trump and many supporters assume you must therefore belong to the opposing tribe. Criticize the European Union and others assume you must oppose European integration. Question immigration policy and you are assigned one ideology. Question inequality and you are assigned another. The leader becomes inseparable from the tribe, and once that happens, evaluating competence becomes remarkably difficult.

We stop asking whether a decision is good. We ask whether our side made it. That is not political judgment. It is fandom.

And governments should not have fan clubs.

The Leader Who Says “I Don’t Know”

Perhaps one of the qualities I increasingly value most in a leader is one that modern political communication systematically punishes: The ability to say I don’t know. Not as an excuse for ignorance, but as recognition of its existence. I don’t know. Let me ask someone who does.

That sentence should increase our confidence in a leader. Instead, it often destroys it. Political opponents will extract the clip. Commentators will call it weakness. Social media will circulate it as evidence of incompetence.

So politicians learn the obvious lesson. Never hesitate. Never concede. Never admit uncertainty. Never admit error. And we consequently select for people willing to pretend they know things they do not. That may be one of the most destructive leadership preferences we have developed.

A leader does not need to know everything. That is impossible. A leader needs enough knowledge to understand what they do not know, enough humility to seek expertise, enough judgment to distinguish good advice from bad, enough character to choose something unpopular when necessary, and enough responsibility to accept the consequences when the decision turns out to be wrong.

That is leadership. Not omniscience. Certainly not volume.

Duty Over Attention

Marcus Aurelius ruled an empire and repeatedly reminded himself that he was not particularly important. That remains one of the things I admire most about him. The lesson is not that politicians should become Stoics, quote Meditations or imitate a Roman emperor. It is that power should increase one’s sense of responsibility rather than one’s sense of importance.

The more people affected by your decisions, the greater your obligation to understand those decisions. The larger your audience, the greater your responsibility for what you tell it. The greater your authority, the more carefully that authority should be exercised.

Modern culture frequently teaches the opposite. Become visible. Build an audience. Establish a personal brand. Speak confidently. Never appear weak. Own the room. Dominate the conversation. Win.

Perhaps we should become suspicious of leaders who seem to want leadership too much. Public service is not supposed to be the final stage of personal branding. It is work. Difficult, frequently thankless work performed on behalf of people who will criticize you, oppose you, misunderstand you and eventually replace you.

That is what makes the concept of duty so important. A good leader does not ask primarily how powerful the office makes them. They ask what the office requires of them.

What We Reward

Ultimately, this is not only a criticism of leaders. Leaders respond to incentives. So do influencers. If outrage generates engagement, people will manufacture outrage. If certainty generates followers, uncertainty will disappear. If dominance wins elections, politicians will perform dominance. If admitting a mistake destroys a career while repeating it excites supporters, we should not be surprised when nobody admits mistakes.

We create part of the problem ourselves. We decide who receives attention. We decide who receives credibility. We decide who receives votes.

Perhaps the uncomfortable question is therefore not why leadership has become so shallow. It is why shallow leadership works so well on us. Why do we trust certainty more than evidence? Why does someone admitting doubt make us uncomfortable? Why do we expect experts to explain every qualification while allowing charismatic outsiders to make extraordinary claims without proving anything? Why does intellectual humility resemble weakness while intellectual recklessness resembles courage?

We complain about terrible leaders while repeatedly rewarding the characteristics that produce them. And perhaps that is the leadership preference we should question most.

Strength without knowledge is recklessness. Knowledge without character is dangerous. Confidence without either is merely theatre. Leadership requires more. It requires the humility to learn, the character to serve, the competence to act and the responsibility to answer for the consequences.

Everything else is just noise. And we already have more than enough of that.