YOU ARE THE LEADER

by James Gutteridge

Photo of Rosie, Bernice and me from a year & a half ago. Man Bernice looked zoned. You guys try holding an iPad in front of you and trying to press that wobbling button to take a pic. Two most amazing people in the world. Unfortunately I can’t say the same about myself.

Things About Governance (2026) - 13

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"Things About Governance" is a thematic series of articles, sponsored by Reality Skimming Press. Pieces in the series run from Jan-June 2026. Query us about contributing for $25 CAD a post at https://facebook.com/relskim  or by email at info@realityskimming.com

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Guys! How’s it going? I’m so pumped today to embark on this adventure with you, graciously sponsored by Lynda. The topic is good governance and I think Lynda is in fact a great example of this. For those of you who don’t know, she runs a writer’s group twice a month and she keeps all of us prima donnas in check — and there is a room full of us — peacock feathers in our hats and all, without so much as even lifting a finger or a word. She just creates the atmosphere needed, and it is obvious to all of us that this is the case. I will come back to this later.

What really inspired me about her Okal Rel Saga — particularly in Book 2, Righteous Anger, where the following incident is described (though the juicy details of debauchery are all over Book 1 as well) — is this guy called Ava Delm. I hate the guy. Particularly because he has golden curly locks, and I don’t, and apparently they shone like the sunlight. My wife once dyed her hair blonde when she was a teen. She wanted to dye them blonde again recently, but I told her, “No. Absolutely no!” I am a strange guy. I was thinking of making an AI portrait of Ava Delm posing in front of the portrait artist just as described in the book, looking like a real jerk while pretending to be a kind benefactor of Sevildom, forcing the artist to put a “kind” smile on his face. It all fell through — H’Reth was easily able to see through it. The giveaway was those incredibly cold, hard eyes. But you guys don’t like AI so I didn’t do that. For a fun portrait of a guy with a solar-feather in his hat, check out this portrait: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_XIV. That guy was millennia ahead of his time.

So the thing that stuck out for me, and struck me between the brows like Goliath, is that one of the fabulous Demish princes confides in Di Mon in Book 2 that, yes, we hate this guy Delm too, even though we have chosen him and put him in power and basically worship him because he is the ultimate Pureblood, and so you must keep him there (I paraphrased this). The Demish prince even goes so far as to call Mr. Delm a “wastrel.” One of my favourite words of all time… thanks Lynda for bringing that back. I can think of a few other people on the world stage who are wastrels right now and need some Sword Law. Because sadly that is the one thing Delm is mostly immune to: accountability under Sword Law, something which otherwise binds the cosmic concoction of his people together and provides the spiritual enforcement of the Life-Giving Okal Rel. (Sorry Lynda if I am getting this wrong.) The curious thing is that these fantastic Purebloods, who are always promptly installed on the thrones of Sevildom as Avas is that they are crap with the sword. Amel knows how to make a sword dance and catch it in his smooth, lamb-glove-like hands before it slices him open, but can’t use the darn thing to save his life in real combat. Ev’rel and Delm are both helpless in sword fighting. So I began to wonder, Surely if Sword Law bound these cretins and awful people too they would never have been able to get away with a fraction of the horrible things they did. Ava Delm was famous for porking one of his Sevolite subject’s wives over and over, in the plain sight of the whole kingdom, just for the hell of it. The usual reason which most despots give: “I was bored.”

So — what if there was accountability? I can see so much changing on the world stage in our modern times if that was the case. Solution to the Ukraine war fiasco: put Putin on the front lines. Coward ends the war immediately. Solution to the current joke of an Iran conflict: put Trump in an oil barrel and have him float down the Strait of Hormuz. Numerous lives saved and everyone can take plane trips to see their families again. Ben Netanyahu? (Guy on the internet I knew called him “Nut-and-yahoo.” I call him “Benji.” Makes him cuter.) Horrific evil war and genocide ended: put that guy right on the front line. See if he can bomb a hospital with his bare hands. Nah. Cowards. ALL OF THEM. (Not vindicating Hamas here — they’re monsters too.)

And then I grasped the ultimate example: the man known as Alexander the Great. “Great” because he killed a great number of people. See the thing is, Alexander led his troops into battle himself. He was an incredible, almost-unparalleled example of this. Wikipedia says that yes, there were some precedents, and this was fairly common in ancient warring tribes and small city-states in general, particularly in the Macedonian tradition from which Alexander came (notice that I left out “the Great”) — but that Alexander took this to a whole other level. His whole ethos to be able to mobilize his warriors was that he would often literally put himself on the forefront of the battles and lead the charges himself, often at great risk to himself. He received serious injuries in multiple of these skirmishes and battles. His troops loved him. They followed him to the death.

I feel I would still be Christian if I had Martin Luther King Jr as my pastor. That guy actually had balls. He put his foot where his mouth was. Wait, that didn’t come out right. I mean, he actually did the shit that he said he was going to do. He actually did the stuff he propounded from the pulpit. He died for what he believed in.

I’m never going to sacrifice my life for someone who’s not going to take the blow first for me. Various other people — monsters — like Hitler, Stalin and Mao, retreated behind literal or ideological walls, sequestering themselves from society and radiating an aura of invincibility or untouchability. Not for me. I want someone who is soft to the touch, who has a warm, pumping pulse when I touch their skin.

I would die for someone who really believed in what they were saying.

And that’s why I don’t like any of our modern leaders. No one sitting on the cushy chair of the US Presidency or Canadian Parliamentary throne does anything for me. They just don’t inspire me, they don’t stir my imagination. I don’t care what they’ve done, they may even be great or ok leaders, but they just make me shrug. Give me someone with balls.

And that’s where it falls right apart. I had a “Duh” moment while I was reading Alexander the Great’s wiki page. (Wouldn’t it be cool if you had a wiki page? I checked Google… and I do not have one. I would find a way to make large portions of it not true.) See the thing is — I was hoping and leaning on this idea of “If you want to kill people, then you’ve got to put the cold, steel sword at your neck and let it draw a little pinprick line of blood first.” I thought that would deter all possible killing. That it would end war and all madness and evil. Works for Trump. Would work for that unmanly Poutine. But — not for ancient warrior peoples, like I said earlier. And certainly not for Alexander the Great. See the thing is, one of the biggest reasons for Alexander’s success, that allowed him to kill an enormous number of people, was that he put himself right on the frontlines. Yeah. Dang. His troops would gladly have followed him off a cliff, precisely and absolutely because he would die for them and sacrifice himself for them in a second’s passing.

Would I die for Alexander the Great?

Nah. Sigh. We’ve got to search for the answer somewhere else. Which brings me back to the writer’s group I was talking about at the start. You know there’s a parallel concept to the one we’ve been driving at until now. We’ve seen action and now there’s inaction. I want to talk about the action of inaction. I’m pulling a lot of this from what I think is one of the greatest books ever written: the Tao Te Ching by an ancient Chinese sage with long whispery white beard, Lao Tzu. I think Lao Tzu is a hundred times smarter than Einstein and has better hair to boot. (Ok we don’t know about the last part.) So the only thing is, it’s impossible to speak about this. It’s a philosophy of nothingness, of emptiness, of silence. Of a silence to be venerated, since it’s the only thing which really is and in which everything is born. It’s a massive Womb guys. We’ve got to respect wombs.

Wow I got a dog-eared copy of this book myself. Lao Tzu says, reaching out of the grave, “Buy my book. Pay me later.” I used to take this book to McDonald’s when I felt sad — before we had Rosie — and I would sit there and the old McDonald’s near Pine Centre kinda had a beach vibe with the long windows. Got to chill out with Nothingness.

I’d like to illustrate it with this spicy symbol: ◉. Its antithesis I’ll simply describe as ◎. Why? Because I think it’s very easy to get bogged down and our imaginations carried away if we allow any connotations whatsoever to be connected to these ideas. Because they are simply the eternal NO and YES. You know them, or maybe not, by the names “yin” and “yang,” but I prefer to name them by something that has no sound. Simply by primal difference. So, sadly, ◉ is unspeakable. It makes no sense. It cannot be related. Which is why the Tao te Ching appears like a load of garbage to the vast majority of people. Lao Tzu goes about with great vim and effort to write a small tome that says absolutely nothing at all, though much more artfully and mystically than the modern equivalent, like many of the essays I wrote in university. To understand ◉, you’ve got to go beyond sense. You’ve got to **** up and listen. Imagine this — you’ve got this guy in a room and some guy’s been talking to him for an hour. Then at the end of the hour the guy hands the first guy a big wad of cash. You’re the manager. You bust in and say “What the heck? What is going on here? You just spent an hour doing nothing. You can’t get paid!!” And the guy who paid him turns to you and says, “He helped me a lot. In fact, he helped me more than the guys who talked to me.” That’s counselling for you. (Though the “nondirective” style of counselling or therapy is very rare.) If you’ve ever been listened to, you know what this is like — to really be held, to really have the space held for you, that total openness, when time and space gapes open and you feel eternity, where no pain is and nothing comes after you. Like floating on an ocean, or if you’re more keen on your budget, a tub full of suds.

I think this is where we need to go next as a species. We and all the “kings” have effed all this up. Ever since civilization began, all those inky eons ago, how many good kings or rulers or queens have there been? Next to none. And every time we’re flabbergasted and say “Huh. That guy was bad. Again,” and slap our hand against our foreheads. That’s why we instituted democracy honestly. We just got tired of all the heartbreak. We turned bitter, our hearts blackened, it just took too long for our sweetheart, the Good King, to return. Just kidding. Democracy is a great system. I probably would have been run through by a sword or burned alive by now if it wasn’t for democracy. But in a sense, democracy has been a real giving up. We’ve decided that good rulership just ain’t going to happen, so we’ve got to put a ton of checks & balances, as many as we can, around our now castrated presidents and prime ministers. We’ve decided to settle for “not bad” rather than “good.” Democracy is very good at preventing its heads of state from doing atrocious things.

Democracy is an example of a system. A system is “what cannot be seen.” Can you point out a system to me? Can you touch it? For me, the true King is now no longer a flesh-and-blood human but an ◉. Within these small walls, this cubicle, the prime minister or president is groomed and curated and shuttled, knowing that if they were ever to resist democracy’s buffering power, they will be offed. The system has a will of its own now. Let’s not put our trust in heads anymore. There is a softer, more gentle example: to go back to Lynda’s writer’s group and to the elusive counsellor. To solve the problem of governance, and to make this world a better place, we could tutor each other. Nurture the conscientious soil that is in us all, with which we are born. Drawing it out, we can make what is already there. This may seem silly, or ineffective, but weakness is strength. And the mighty are first to fall. Why raise up ruler and ruler and ruler when you can create a people whose justice never fades and who need no leader? It can be done. Ask the counsellor. Ask the academic tutor. Where is the good governor? Where is the good king? It is already in us. In all of us. Bring it out. Unleash yourself. Trust that you were born into this world for a reason. The counsellor (if of a nondirective style like Rogerian therapy) brings out and adds to and gives a nudge and shoulder to the health and health-seeking vibes that are already in the person. What heals a broken hand? The body or the cast? I have been a tutor many times and I know that it is very easy or simple to bring someone to the “answer” without giving it to them. They already have it in them. We do not need leaders. We need leaders-with. We cannot expect kings and princes and prime ministers to do things for us. How can they ever uphold justice if we never do our part or are not conscientious or good ourselves or do not report each other? How can we concentrate goodness in one person like squeezing sand through a vise when we are all evil?

Like Lao Tzu says, darkly, when the time comes and goodness is here, we will say, “We did it ourselves” (ch. 17).

Lynda leads without

Saying a word

Lifting a finger

Doing anything

Because listening speaks

Because gentleness is force

Because being booms!

Yet no one in Lynda’s group ever misbehaves.

Every group I have been in, large or small, has been derailed or destroyed by a few individuals. Sound familiar?


This is not to idolize Lynda’s group or Lynda. Just saying you do not have to look on top of the Himalayan Mountains or a thousand years in the future for ◉ to appear.

Thank you guys and everyone out there

I look forward to and am excited to read what you have written

James

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James Gutteridge is a guy who has bumbled his way through life, though he has been bumbling better lately. Not sure if that’s good or bad. Luckily along his way, he met his soulmate Bernice and had a daughter, sweet little Rosie who is now 2 years old. This post (and his blog below) are dedicated to little Rose. By the way he did write a book with his friend Brent, who illustrated the whole thing in vivid chock-full colour called the Chronicles of K’ammek-kraeu. A word of warning: it was written for people who don’t read: https://booksandcompany.ca/item/pGK2qdAAaoEeirP1H3SCdQ

• He also has a blog which died a year ago. The 251 posts are still up there and are excited for people to read them. The 251th one is in fact dedicated to you guys!! It features James’s signature “manic”-style writing, which he gleaned from years of having bipolar and having a hell of a ride. Spicy hot wheels 🏎️ : https://3reddeer.wordpress.com/
  

• Also for any reason whatsoever you can email him at: FatherSkyMotherEarth@hotmail.com. He likes chatting with people and community and you guys are everything to him.

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References

• Check out all Lynda’s books here. Easiest place to get them and they’re being rebooted in her top secret lab: https://www.realityskimming.com/

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_the_Great

• Tao Te Ching (Ursula K. Le Guin, Ed.). (2009). Shambhala. Most ridiculously awesome book of all time, as I was saying. But there’s more: written as poetry by the super-SF nerd Le Guin, who carried a dog-eared copy of the Tao Te Ching around with her on the bus and while she was in the shower and in the bathtub. She lived in the spirit of it, and this all went into her edition of it. It’s not a translation, actually an inspired exhuming of previous translations and attempts. Lao Tzu reached out of his sepulchred crypt in the Himalayas and paid me to say that. Thanks, Lao.

• On Becoming a Person by Carl Rogers. Ridiculously awesome book as well. One of the few true examples of “nondirective” therapy. Nondirective therapy (where the patient is the leader) sounds like garbage but it is extraordinarily powerful. Very few people are capable of being servants to those who are bowing under a mountain of suffering and whose cries and screeches punctuate the clouds. Not for the faint of heart.

• Montessori Method by Maria Montessori. Also an awesome book. I can’t recommend a particular translation though. It’s all in the same vein.