Ambassador Chan, you can't order love

A very good opinion piece by Chan Heng Chee in the ST yesterday, but there is one problem. You can't order leaders to love their people. It is just impractical. It has never worked historically and we even have current evidence to prove that. Even religious leaders inducted on a higher calling, too many of them abused their positions and those they led. Think pedophile priests.

To have leaders who love the people is an unmatched bonus. The Chinese sages repeat themselves silly that leaders must love the people. The problem is you could never find enough of such leaders even for those tumultuous times when they produced the most. In ordinary times, despite our best efforts, we regularly choose the wrong people to become leaders beginning with awarding scholarships to far too many self serving candidates. This is a universal problem yesterday, today and most likely tomorrow.

The sages couldn't think up something better than love and so when Chan Heng Chee proposed that it is time for love to come to the fore in politics, I think nobody can think of something better. We just have to make the best of it. In a relative world, we just need to have more caring leaders than most others. Thank God for relativity.

But we will not make it if we become less and less special and more like elsewhere. The high road to that damned place is importing best practice instead of leading by making our own. Perhaps best today but certainly ordinary and undifferentiated tomorrow. So much for our vaunted long term thinking.

I worry that our methods for identifying the best might not have also driven away the unrecognized better. Increasingly the public is gravitating to this conclusion.

Stop showing me the money before you show me love. This is the stuff the best leaders are made of.