“In real life, the political and strategic games used by politicians and statesmen are in fact social games - requiring social intelligence as well as technical mastery of information. The skills of the orator, cultivated by ancient statesmen like Cicero and Demosthenes, or by modern statesmen like Benjamin Disraeli and Abraham Lincoln, require emotional maturity and the talent of seeing events through the eyes of others. A great statesman sets aside his own egoism. He takes a more objective view. In this way, he avoids the errors that attend a purely egoistic standpoint. The explanation which Kierkegaard offered, which is none too flattering, is that people no longer desire a great king, a heroic liberator or an authoritative religion. They don’t want strict rules or high standards. That is because they want an easy time of it. They want a soft existence which can only be guaranteed by eschewing the great and heroic, the true and the noble. This is the moral perspective of high politics and of true statesmanship. Only those who reach this fifth stage can transform world calamity into world regeneration.” HeroHeroicStatesmanshipSocial IntelligenceDemosthenes Author:J.R.Nyquist
“Furthermore, a serious distortion of statesmanship occurs. Year by year, the statesman's time is increasingly devoted to an growing subset of misfits and neurotics, supposedly "oppressed" by an unfair social system which must be rectified. Little by little, the "oppressed" become the state's chief preoccupation, eclipsing the traditional tasks of statesmanship. The system no longer justifies itself in religious or historical terms, but on egalitarian grounds, in terms of "fairness" or "social justice." What actually happens, overall, is that greater and greater demands are placed upon the productive citizen to provide for the unproductive.” Social JusticeStatesmanship Author:J.R.Nyquist