Poor guy.
He so badly wants to be popular. Again.
Ok. FFS.. so let me try to help him along a bit.
Because there's something about the picture here that's harder to shake than the quote.
A man stands with a microphone, smiles the smile you smile when you're fairly certain the room is with you, and tells the world that the problem with its leaders is that they have too much testosterone.
Not too little judgement.
Not too little courage.
Not too little truth.
Too much of a hormone.
This is said by a man who himself flew attack helicopters over Helmand, which as far as I know is not something you end up doing in a sudden fit of too much oestrogen.
You have to give him that it's an elegant diagnosis, because it moves the entire question from character to chemistry, and the second something is chemistry, it's also treatable.
You can almost picture how it would play out in practice, with blood tests at the entrance to the next summits - where the delegation with the lowest values are the ones who get the floor first, and the peace prize at year's end goes to the head of state who has best managed not to want anything particularly much or set any boundary anywhere for anyone.
But somewhere deep inside, he's actually not completely off the mark.
And that's what we need to deal with.
So I'd better try to say it, now that he's so thoroughly rubbish at formulating it in a way that's understandable to anyone other than men in walking suits and high heels.
It's true that there's something in the world's leaders that needs to go.
He's just pointing at the wrong thing, because he doesn't have the word for the right one.
What he's looking at, when he looks at the kind of men he has in mind, is not strength.
It's strength without brakes.
It's force that was never tamed, never bound to something greater than the man himself, and which therefore becomes dangerous the precise moment it gets power.
And that condition has a name older than all of us, which we once taught our boys, long before anyone had heard of a hormone - it's TEMPERANCE
Not the absence of force.
Mastery over it.
That's what a culture does with its men, when it still works.
It doesn't extinguish the fire. It gives it DIRECTION, it gives it a TASK, it sets it to CARRY something heavy, and then it holds the man ACCOUNTABLE for what he does with it.
That's the ENTIRE difference between a soldier and a thug, and that difference has never lain in the blood. It's lain in who the man was accountable to.
If anyone - that would be me - were to help him say what he's fumbling for, it could sound roughly like this -
"The world doesn't need weaker men at the top. It needs strong men who are bound to something greater than themselves."
That's a sentence he could easily stand behind. It's just harder to say, because it makes a demand on the one who says it.
Because a world with less testosterone doesn't get fewer tyrants.
It just gets fewer men who can stop them. Because the world will NEVER lack tyrants. They don't take orders from mama's boys.
And it's so essential for our time to grasp this.
The opposite of a tyrant has NEVER been a soft slack man.
It has ALWAYS been a strong man who could, and refrained.
And everyone knows the testosterone level in that man.
And most long to rest in the safety it brings to the world.
❤️🔥🪽
Happy weekend, friends ☀️
