Why did anyone in ancient history agree to having leaders in the first place...

Why did anyone in ancient history agree to having leaders in the first place? I get that after the fact people went along with it because it was the new normal, but why did anyone let that process begin? Why not tell them "no, fuck you, do something productive like scavenging for zebra carcass."

"leaders" as a concept was invented at different times and different places for different reasons, but one example would be that with the advent of agriculture, some people just had more successful harvests and better access to arable land just sort of by chance. over time, they'd institutionalize their access to a river or something and make people acknowledge their rule to get food from their excess harvests, over time creating a labor force that could then build irrigation canals and further curry favor with others. over time, if they were not obeyed, they would assert their leadership by cutting off the canals and things. this is one example of thousands if not millions of leaders re-emerging in new contexts at new times of human history

Divine right

LEADERSHIP IS NOT SOMETHING ON WHICH PEOPLE FORMALLY AGREE; IT IS SOMETHING THAT OCCURS NATURALLY AMONG HUMANS, AND AMONG SOME ANIMALS.

LEADERSHIP IS NATURAL; IT IS THE AVERSION TOWARD LEADERSHIP THAT IS UNNATURAL.

>IT IS THE AVERSION TOWARD LEADERSHIP THAT IS UNNATURAL.
I'm pretty sure a lot of indigenous tribes turn out to not have centralized leadership the way western nations do.

Bad post

Not an argument.

>pretty sure
you're pretty wrong bucko

Yeah, no shit, idiot. It's a statement.

Proofs? I'm seeing Pirahã for starters as not having leaders.

Probably derivating from warrior leaderships.
War is a circumstance these ancient peoples were probably used to for a while. And war demands leadership to be effective.
I don't know why warrior leaders aren't as common in non-sedentary societies, but for sedentary societies these types of people gained a lot more power. Maybe because with the amount of people they commanded, being impossible for each follower to have personal links among themselves, their power became harder to challenge.

Alternatively: "Dude, i'm like, a GOD ok? So do what i tell you."

I'm inviting you to try having a point instead of a shitpost.

>I'm pretty sure a lot of indigenous tribes
You mean a tiny handful, which are more or less typical outliers and almost always were heavily isolated from the rest of the world.
>the way western nations do
You mean the way the rest of every other group of peoples has ever done even when isolated from other groups for the entirety of human existence?

Leadership is a natural concept formed from the natural inequality between groups of people, especially from one that was as much if not more a hunting species as it was a gathering species.

I was gonna post this. It's not something people conceptualize and agree on, it's the natural product of hierarchies, and those occur on every level of the natural world, it's not something exclusive to humans.

Monarchy is the natural order of Man. All forms of government inevitably slide back. Even the American Forefathers understood this.

Chichimecs typically had no leaders except during times of war.

As annoying as this guy can be, he has a point, I assume the vast majority of us are guys and have seen natural leaders in our lives. I saw this in the military, there's always someone ready to rise among his peers and if he really does prove himself he earns our respect and we follow him. This position becomes more solidified as the Marine gains experience and moves up in rank or billet.

Others try but they just fall short, it just isn't in them.

Dirty commie detected.
Go take a psychology or sociology class, commie

Maybe OP's question should have been about rulers instead of leaders.

It's the same thing with rulers. Any legitimate ruler is a leader.

And no ruler is naturally legitimate.
It's not the same thing at all.

That is right, legitimacy is earned, but people don't formally agree to have a ruler either, rather people allow to be ruled by someone with legitimate authority.

>That is right, legitimacy is earned
Not necessarily, but it doesn't matter
The point is that having rulers is something that began only at a specific point for humans.

I'm not a communist. I don't even like that I have to pay taxes.

Rulers are a natural extension of leaders. A ruler is just a leader of a society

>A ruler is just a leader of a society

If he's wrong say why. It's not like even if he's wrong he was comically wrong, "leader" and "ruler" do get used as synonyms.

No, its ironic that all this vague conceptual arguing would lead to this immensely obvious statement

They're not. They may coincide sometimes, but they're absolutely not the same thing.

Here to illustrate my point.
This sort of "natural" leadership you guys are talking about only translates to a charismatic type of leadership.

>charismatic type of leadership
I mean rule, not leadership.

Well, if the question is based on how ancient peoples came to have rulers, the first two stem from the third

Fuck off, faggot you shit up every thread

It's not necessarily obvious or even true that they're the same. I could see someone thinking of "ruler" as similar to the "boss" image in this picture, where they just exert control over others from a sheltered position of affluence, in contrast with "leader" as someone who's in the trenches with the people they're leading.

Forgot picture.

But the third didn't always exist either.

>do something productive
Leaders solve group coordination problems, perform resource distribution, and mediate in-group conflicts. A leader of an egalitarian band- or tribe-level society must be able to redistribute resources and punishments fairly to hold on to their political power. A "big man" or chief in a tribal or band level society might even be the most impoverished individual of the tribe/band.

The third always existed, even if not in set-out 'this person is leader of X' terms. Humans naturally form hierarchies and the third leads to the other two as humans stemmed out from simple hunter-gather types into civilizations with rules, laws, and traditions
This separation of a ruler and a leader is, in terms of human existence, a rather new concept. The ruler in pre and early antiquity was in both parts a boss and lead from the front. As civilizations grew, and delegation became more effective, rulers both delegated as 'bosses' to sub-rulers, while also being expected to lead, lest they be looked down upon for cowardice. As the lethality of warfare increased in the colonial and industrial times, it became even more effective to simply rule rather than also lead.

>The third always existed
Nope.
You could have someone leading a war band, or a hunting party, but that isn't a ruler.

In terms of your pic, which is that humans look to one of those three as a source of leadership and authority, yes, the third has always existed. Trying to constrew Im saying that rulers have always existed is blatantly false on your end.
Yes, that is someone leading a warband, but if that warband or hunting party became a tribe or a civilization, that leader becomes a ruler. When humans began the concept of civilizations, the very people who would be considered 'leader' became 'ruler', and it was one and the same.

leader = ruler
its rooted in the same idea, and while the "ruler" could get undermined by somebody more charismatic, in the animal sense its based in the same instinct

> Trying to constrew Im saying that rulers have always existed
That is what you're implying though, even with this very post.
>Yes, that is someone leading a warband, but if that warband or hunting party became a tribe or a civilization, that leader becomes a ruler
As it turns out, that doesn't necessarily happen with non-sedentary tribes. People don't look to the warrior or hunter leader as a source of authority.
>When humans began the concept of civilizations, the very people who would be considered 'leader' became 'ruler', and it was one and the same.
Probably, but before that, he wasn't a ruler. It's also possible the people who became rulers had a religious background.

>in the animal sense its based in the same instinct
kys

Leadership was not invented. it has always existed. It's a natural consequence of pack structure, animals have an alpha male leading their group, it could only have been the case for pre-humans, whose packs evolved into tribes, with an alpha male recognized as the ruler of these early societies.

The question to ask is, why did people drop the aspect of the strongest individual leading, and instead accepted hereditary rule as a thing? I understand it: children are like their fathers, therefore this child must be as strong as his father; it would help to avoid anarchy and cohesion in the tribe since it would stop all the males from constantly vying for leadership.

What I question here is how people were intelligent enough to accept this and overcome the instinct for a might makes right leader after eons of humans and proto-humans living that way. When did this shift in thinking occur?

Tribes are merely families writ large, and nations merely tribes writ large.

Pecking order is natural among all social mammals. When young, your father was generally the authority figure who you went to in order to resolve disputes. In tribes, it's generally the chief or the wise men. In nations, the king and his government.

Granted, it's never 100%, revolutions and Coup d'états happen, and that rebellious teenager phase, but most people understand there must be hierarchy for family and society to function. This naturally cascades bottom up and top down, and has probably been the case since before we learned language or came down from the trees, even if the details have changed and become more complex.

>humans are wolves!
Stop

Human instinct is to act as they learned to.
Shifting into hereditary inheritance of authority wouldn't have been harder than shifting out of it was, just a matter of political and cultural change.

Leaders exist because some people are stronger/smarter than other people.

>What I question here is how people were intelligent enough to accept this and overcome the instinct for a might makes right leader after eons of humans and proto-humans living that way. When did this shift in thinking occur?
It didn't. The definition of "might" has merely changed over time. Physical prowess doesn't get you much in a world where people can be bought and sold. In larger societies, social prowess and economic power became the deciding factor - but for all the rhetoric, might still makes right.

Put a bunch of kids on an island and it goes right back to the way of the ape. We haven't changed so much as our circumstances have.

And then there's THIS guy

Violence and coercion mixed with stockholm syndrome.

Thanks doc.

>hey this guy is usually right about stuff, maybe I should listen to him
or
>hey this guy and his friends could beat me up, maybe I should listen to him

That picture is fucking retarded. The whole point of being a leader is having an overview, controlling the bigger picture. The "leader" in the bottom picture would lead them straight into a ravine he can't see coming because he's acting just like all the other men.

You realize that the idealized end state of communism wouldn't involve taxes right? You're thinking of state socialism or a transitionary phase (which conveniently lasts a long time for some reason). You've given no indication you're not a dirty communist

the kingdom of God has no taxes either

The first leaders probably -were- very hands-on; if you were really good at, say, killing zebras, then people would look to you as a 'leader' because you might be able to teach them how to kill zebras better.

Over time, being a leader required being good at more things, until it became the case (due to the Agricultural Revolution) that leaders-types could dedicate themselves to particular crafts.

In some societies, this meant having a warlord who was an expert at being killy and organizing killy stuff, and in some societies, that meant having someone really good at the whole 'knowing a lot of stuff' thing, which generally made -everyone- more efficient.

The leaders that most often carried anything forward long-term, though, were the ones that were best at organizing society; a leader who could do that would ensure a growing supply of people, basically increasing the computational power of the infant civilization and allowing them to innovate faster while also ensuring there were a lot of soldiers at the same time.

Over time, those leaders came to supercede the warlords and the scholars simply because having an organizer on top makes just about everything work better.

That's my take on it, anyways.

That's like saying the Soviet Union wasn't real communism. If the picture isn't real leadership, then why does it seem so familiar?

Oh- to elaborate on the 'work better' part at the end- writing would have increasingly disempowered the scholar archetype leader, because now the village elder's knowledge could be gained by anyone with access to the books (including the organizers).

As for the warlords, there winds up being a certain point where the complexity of civilization requires an increased dedication to managing its operation, so the warlord becomes a general under the organizer, essentially, over centuries and millennia.

'Course, some leaders were both warlords/scholars and organizers, or even all three, but usually, the bigger the civilization, the more complicated its operation, and the more complicated its operation, the more specialized the leadership (if it wanted to last, that is).

Apes naturally organize in rigid hierarchies. Its only once we'd developed sentience and a capacity for some degree of abstraction that we could develop concepts like fairness, freedom, or even self respect, and put some critical thought into who we submit to instead of following the biggest monkey. Leadership is necessary to group organization. Unfortunately, people with antisocial traits (lacking innate social faculties) are commonly good at acquiring power, and will use their influence to encourage expression that consolidates power and encourages docility. As a power structure forms, along with distinct laboring and ruling classes, it inevitably leads to a prioritization of the ruling class's own persistence over the wellbeing of the wider group, as an increasing degree of othering between the two groups develops culturally (sacred bloodlines, slave races). At this point the idea of living free of rule will feel completely alien.

That's why they haven't done fuck-all for the last few million years.

People in ancient times were more concerned about staying alive than about M-MUH FREEDOM, so they followed smart people who could help them organize to stay alive.

Men are subservient to those with more power.
The level of respect and reverence given to their rulers varies wildly, but that's not important. Being respected is just another way in which power is built and maintained

Power is built up in most cultures by strength, class, or wealth. If you are strong you can directly defeat those who challenge you, and if you are wealthy or inherit a position of respect then others will defeat your challengers on your behalf.

How the populous feels about being ruled over is only important when the leader loses some level of power, and decides whether the ruler is bolstered in a time of need or overthrown.

Its inevitable, the mental process already begun the moment a recently born child look up to their father for guidance and care aka leadership