Caudillos II – Glut of personality

  By Gonzalo López Martí – LMMIAMI.COM

• Mark Zuckerberg, Trevor Kalanick, Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos.
• Last names are brands.
• More than ever before.
• We need to believe there’s a human being behind the products and services we buy.
• We need to root for them.
• Deposit all our hopes & expectations on them.
• Life is more simple this way.
• We worship the self.
• Caudillos.
• Which leads to another, more philosophical question: if we supposedly live in the age of flattened hierarchies, democratization of information and hyper-collaboration, why do we still need familiar faces in positions of power?
• We Latin Catholics are particularly prone to this trait.
• Mejor malo conocido que bueno por conocer.
• The Anglo Protestant mainstream, however, is not immune to the bug either.
• Look at the political dynasties running the country: Bushes, Clintons, Pauls, Cuomos.
• Is there some sort of atavistic drive pushing us to behave this way?
• Is it herd mentality?
• Have we finally become a hopeless society of drooling groupies?
• Is it a throwback to a more simple era when we delegated our personal decisions to paternalistic leaders?
• Has the age of hyper awareness, hyper information & hyper collaboration gotten so messy and chaotic that we crave for authority figures we can follow like lemmings?
• Are we mired in so many mindboggling choices that we just gave up and want somebody else to make decisions for us?
• Are we so immobilized by the abundance of data that we are collectively drawing a blank, a cognitive blackout?
• What if it is the total opposite?
• What if we are entering the age of the hyper ego?
• What if the deafening cacophony that surrounds us is just a consequence of a fierce competition among millions of egos out there?
• Needy, high-maintenance, high-strung and, more often than not, pathetic egos screaming for attention.
• Maybe nobody is listening to anyone or anything.
• Maybe it’s just an ocean of monologues nobody pays attention to.
• Maybe we are all charismatic caudillos giving riveting speeches to imaginary crowds.