The human animal has always felt a need for leadership. Kings, presidents, even chief executive officers are not allowed to lead the masses solely based on the fact that they are chosen or elected. The masses crave it. In every community, these people-in-charge fill a job, a position which would not exist if humans didn’t require such direction. Humans would be lost as a group without a leader, be it a country or a book club. Big or small, communities depend on the few to provide direction to many.
This direction comes in different forms; strict rules or implicit proper behavior, firm choices for the future or a suggestion of things to accomplish, are some of the methods these community monarchs drive their respective tribes towards a goal. Whether the goal is good or bad, the actions of a given community are sculpted by their leader’s vision. David Berreby cut to soul of the phenomenon in It Takes a Tribe, with “Humans are looking to be told what group they belong to, and then once they do that, they want to know, ‘What are the rules?’(123)”.
The rules my father, Steven King, remembers from his brief stint in the United States Army have a lot to do with Georgia. My father’s drill instructor was from the state of Georgia and considered it the greatest state in America. My father, not necessarily enjoying this new leadership foisted upon him chose to respectfully disagree with his drill instructor, which lead the drill instructor to respectfully request my father and the rest of the platoon dig a large tree stump from the ground so they could “learn to love the smell of Georgia clay (King)”. Towards the end of the day, the drill instructor would require the men to re-bury the stump, because “his” stump was cold, and “wished to be back in the arms of its native, Georgia soil (King)”. The men needed to follow someone, and the US Army gave them someone to follow. And though the drill instructor was not the men's choice of an excellent leader, they obeyed his orders because “someone had to be in charge (King)”. This tale uncovers a truth even in a small, temporary community during basic training. The conclusion drawn from my father’s memory is obvious- communities obey the rules of one man for the sake of following them, because people need rules.
Different communities comply with a small ruling body’s commandments for fear of being jilted from a group. Amish church districts sometimes use “shunning” as a method of negative reinforcement for members which have disobeyed its Ordnung. The Ordnung of a modern Amish district can be highly restrictive as evidenced by John Hostetler in his reading, The Amish Charter, and is essentially the rules by which the community abides. According to Erik Wesner, another surveyor of Amish culture, each Amish district is led by its chosen Bishop, the man who’s “role is one of deciding which issues should be put to vote—for example, to decide if a new technology, currently under trial, should be accepted into the district’s Ordnung”. An Amish bishop is “the head of the individual church district (Wesner)”, and as such, dictates the direction of the Ordnung and therefore community itself. This bishop and his ministers and deacons, determine the flow of the entire district, including marriages, shunning, and spirituality. That a large people, such as the Amish, allow their lives to be bound with the rules enforced by a few men illustrates the case made for the few leading the many.
This trend carries over to a smaller scale- a Barbie collector’s community. In Shari Caudron’s essay, Befriending Barbie, she describes around 150 people standing in line wearing “psychedelic clothing (169)”. This observation hides two directions of the aforementioned subtle type, the most obvious being “wear a certain type of attire”, and the second “wait in line until we decide to open the doors”. Approximately 150 people agreed to be dressed in a certain fashion and to wait in a line for a period of time because that is what the lead event organizers (presumably much less than 150) chose to expect of them. The direction laid out for that community function implied a dress code. The rules for that community function required that group to wait until a prescribed time. These rules and directions from a group of organizers were followed for the good of the event, likely happily, but were obeyed nonetheless by a throng of people.
The collection of Barbie lovers probably enjoyed their organizers’ suggestions. The Amish respect the Bishops decisions. My father and his platoon hated the drill instructor’s orders. All these communities had different reactions to the direction of their leaders yet shared one commonality: every community took direction from a source much smaller than the whole. The human animal will always feel a need for leadership, the masses will crave it, and big or small, communities will continue to depend on the few to provide direction to many.
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