memes

John Brown and Mao and Fidel and Che were all commanders*. Perhaps also figureheads. Mao and Che were excellent theorists; John Brown and Fidel were particularly inspiring spokesmen. If you were to make radial graphs of each executive, they'd be drastically different.

Fidel and Che spoke a language that didn't have the word "leader" in it and certainly did not include the concept of "leadership". I don't know Chinese well enough to make any conclusions about it.

John Brown revised a lot of his ideas away from overall subordination of children in an era where patriarchy was particularly strong.

*Command in war is one place where there is a stratified authority across the board, rather than in just one domain. Perhaps that is why so many First Nations would separate the role of war chief from other forms of authority.

I guess my point here is that the component parts of "leadership" are a lot more useful than the blanket concept. Maybe in centuries past, education and development would have been so limited that one person could be the best at all these parts... maybe. But these days, examining the blind spots of our language and culture, and using anthropology and linguistics and biology and other sciences to inform our politics, could be the difference between a movement faltering and succeeding.