Legitimacy and Leadership
Leaders are whomever we follow, deliberately or unconsciously, but never slavishly. Those we follow into war are less leaders than they are representatives of an idea their followers believe in. They are objects of our infatuation and are therefore whatever our fantasy, ideology, or worldview requires them to be. The ideology is akin to the video game, and we are all its players. The real leader is the programmer, the architect of the worldview into which we each have assumed a role. The visible leader is as much a puppet as the rest of us.
In a reality we know to be artificial, the difference between the leader of the dream and the dream leader is obvious. But when the dream is the assumed reality, the distinction becomes less clear. The point at which a worldview becomes "true", is the point at which its leader becomes its prophet, and their dream becomes an inevitability. I would, therefore, prefer not to call Arthur C Clarke a prophet, but I think he wanted to be recognized as such. The world he proposed, of interconnected computers, bio-engineering, and space elevators, was made by us because we found his ideas compelling, not because they were prophetic.
But Arthur C. Clarke imagined himself a modern-day Moses leading us into the promised land. And, like Moses, he had a new God and new commandments to render us spellbound to a new world order, an order that would unite all the world's religions and political institutions under a single truth. I don't blame him. He was merely a man of his time, imagining himself within the archetypes of his age. Writers who saw possibilities were fortune tellers, they saw things in their imaginations the rest of us, with smaller imaginations attendant to immediate concerns, could not. His world was as old as civilization and had suffered enough cataclysms to seem invincible and permanent. Belief would, it seemed to him in his time, continue to be the force that maintains human culture and drives its evolution toward the singularity of a unifying truth.
That truth is a property only of fiction, and prophecy only an idea attributed to that fiction's God, would have unsettled him, and perhaps would have made him a less ambitious and prolific writer. He believed in Science, as do most of us, still, today. And he could not separate himself from the belief without also de-legitimizing the science. Legitimacy, to Arthur C Clarke was a mystical attribute that made something true. But in reality, legitimacy is a consensus, and consensus makes it true no more than truth makes for consensus.
In a reality we know to be artificial, the difference between the leader of the dream and the dream leader is obvious. But when the dream is the assumed reality, the distinction becomes less clear. The point at which a worldview becomes "true", is the point at which its leader becomes its prophet, and their dream becomes an inevitability. I would, therefore, prefer not to call Arthur C Clarke a prophet, but I think he wanted to be recognized as such. The world he proposed, of interconnected computers, bio-engineering, and space elevators, was made by us because we found his ideas compelling, not because they were prophetic.
But Arthur C. Clarke imagined himself a modern-day Moses leading us into the promised land. And, like Moses, he had a new God and new commandments to render us spellbound to a new world order, an order that would unite all the world's religions and political institutions under a single truth. I don't blame him. He was merely a man of his time, imagining himself within the archetypes of his age. Writers who saw possibilities were fortune tellers, they saw things in their imaginations the rest of us, with smaller imaginations attendant to immediate concerns, could not. His world was as old as civilization and had suffered enough cataclysms to seem invincible and permanent. Belief would, it seemed to him in his time, continue to be the force that maintains human culture and drives its evolution toward the singularity of a unifying truth.
That truth is a property only of fiction, and prophecy only an idea attributed to that fiction's God, would have unsettled him, and perhaps would have made him a less ambitious and prolific writer. He believed in Science, as do most of us, still, today. And he could not separate himself from the belief without also de-legitimizing the science. Legitimacy, to Arthur C Clarke was a mystical attribute that made something true. But in reality, legitimacy is a consensus, and consensus makes it true no more than truth makes for consensus.
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