The trick of a successful dictatorship is to reduce all considerations to the balance of power and then grab power at all costs and any consequence.  If you have the power you can do anything you want and usually what all dictators want is what you had before they got the power to take it away.  The billionaire burns through all their material desires very quickly, as materially, everything is in reach. The ultra rich can buy anything they can think of but in the end, like the humblest tradesman, the rich still can come up empty looking for meaning beyond materialism.  Power or love are their crossroads decision for the next level of meaning in a life to be well or badly lived.  To those who choose power, everything outside of  power’s trance  seems like a cheap arcade. Power is considered the better more effective alternative to love. Power or love ultimately present a decision point in life to the wanna-be dictator or the billionaire trapped in golden handcuffs. Power seems infinite to the mindset that thinks life is for sale or for the taking. 

The fatal weakness of the powerful dictator and the ultra rich, is power disconnects people from society and the non transactional community.  While power most certainly can corrupt and usually does, more importantly, the power of the dictator leads to isolation as hubris, influence, and eventually fear build walls against the subtle, incomprehensible pain of their existence. All power based dictators rule in fear and fearfully.  The ultra-rich can be simply padded with the gauze of no consequence and infinite choice which in a democracy makes them wholly unsuited to lead. They have forgotten the patterns of daily life that shape the population of a democratic society. With a few notable exceptions the powerful and ultra rich choose power. 

Good for people of power and those whose good fortune it is to have serious wealth is to choose love as a counter force to their near fatal conditions.  Love in this case is as far from the sentimental Hallmark card as it can be.  Love is the spirituality of leadership.  Franklin Roosevelt chose to dedicate his massive capacity to influence to helping the average American citizen live a life free from the oppression of overwhelming material need. His leadership, despite his wealth and influence, was the servant leadership that brought us out of a crippling depression. This writer can’t imagine how you could compare the first 100 days of this current administration that is taking us into a depression and autocracy to Roosevelt’s first 100 days of servant leadership in a reinvigorated democracy that saved millions of ordinary lives and reduced suffering by ending a depression. Good is voting for people who can still remember what it is like to be the people they are serving.

“the only thing we have to fear is fear itself — nameless, unreasonable, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” JAMELLE BOUIE from the New York Times quoting President Franklin Roosevelt.