By this I mean, organize around some single person for leadership, or in other contexts focus on a popular figure. Even societies that tend to be described as more collectively-organized/oriented tend to do this.
People are people and are as flawed as one another, so this pervasive tendency to elevate others is odd to me. It can be fun and goofy as a game, but as a more serious organizing or focal principle, it just seems extremely fragile and prone to failure (e.g. numerous groups falling into disarray at the loss of a leader/leader & their family, corruption via nepotism and the like, etc.).
perhaps, somewhat related, a place to point out the example of tge republic of San Marino. They have, and have had, since an horn’t times: a system of co leadership at the highest national level of government.:+. Two people, elected, jointly holding the position, no singular figure, (and even those two, are changed, at most, every six months on a regular basis, and I belive they can’t serve more than one term consecutively, if at all).
Theyve had, San Marino, a long and sucequite sucessfully history. Perhaps the only country then known to survive the the conquest of many surrounding regions on the peninsula. No civil wars, and no transitions of power of changes of government in wchich anybody seems to have been so much as killed or seriously injured. And the system hof co government, and rotation aahs lasted a long time, the longest lasting continuous republic to exist today, I think it’s supposed to be. San Marino.
This thread has a lot of frankly bad takes in it. Lots of people going “the majority of people are just hard wired to love authority” and that’s just wrong. Psychological research into authoritarian personalities (the kind of people who are like that) tells us authoritarian follower personalities not rare but by no means are they the majority.
I think you know where all this stuff comes from because the fact that you’re asking the question at all makes me think you’re on the other side of the authoritarian follower spectrum (anti-authoritarian). What would happen to the person who rejected authority figures? They would be hurt. That does not come about by accident and it’s not some innate feature of human psychology. It is intentional. Authority (control) is maintained with violence. Either soft violence (neglect) or actually capital-V Violence.
Nearly every organization a person is in from ages 5-25 is hierarchical. There is always a authority figure you have to at least pretend to listen too. And if you tick off that authority figure by doing something they don’t like, they punish you in some form.
So people learn to ignore authority figures as much as they can and rarely challenge them directly as there are usually consequences for challenging someone in certain contexts. This leads to everyone pretending to agree and pretending to care about what leaders care about to avoid conflict. It is simply easier to cater to those who can and will make your life miserable than to challenge them successfully without creating grudges that might come back to bite you.
It is also worth noting that we are never taught to lead others, We are just expected to figure it out by trial and error or not figure it out at all.
TLDR; It’s learned behavior from the institutions we are exposed to. It’s easier and more encouraged to follow than to challenge authority figures.
Just to add to this: there is, although seeing it thuroughly implemented is comparatively uncommon, there are the practices of ‘democratic education’ and ‘self directed education’. The sudbury valley school in massechusets is one, relatively well known, example of thiese.
In those context, the trends are, in many ways, turned on their head. They, sudbury valles school as an example, havee a website, and a a youtube channel(, accesible vía That froendly alternative frontend that I can’t rember just now) , with intervies with some alumni of the school, and some published books listed with accounts from other svs graduates.
Just wanted to add, that the phenomenon described with in the comment replied to, although all too common, are not universal., nor always are they the only option.
edit: this page gives n OK overview of the self directed edu things : https://www.self-directed.org/sde . Pretty sure it can be seen as related to the question and the above reply.
edit:spelling and grammar.
