Martin luther king
John lennon
Timothy leary
I consider these men leaders, who could have been universally affective if they were ever elected to any office.
The closest thing to a true leader we have now is Dennis Kucinich. He ran for president twice and was ignored twice, because people are stupid.
First, I think we need to devise some sort of quantitative methodology for determining the very abstract "greatness" of historical leaders. Otherwise, this thread will be continue to be quite the pedantic exercise. But since this is just a message board thread, why am I even bothering? Anyway, I thought we at least informally agreed that leaders would have the common denominator of being political----meaning public officials upholding their terms of the social contract. And further, I doubt that any of the three would have surrendered to the imperatives of political decisionmaking, and given the proud antiestablishment posture of the latter two of the three, they probably wouldn't have had much of an abiding desire to be more than a leader of a narrow interest group of relatively limited power. However, because of their thoughts and actions, I still have considerable affection for all three individuals.
Edited by Rol82, 17 April 2011 - 02:11 AM.
