How do we know if a leader is responsible?

"The price of greatness is responsibility."
- Sir Winston Churchill

While most of us would find it difficult to disagree with Churchill's statement, it has an important weakness.

All powerful people, especially political and religious leaders, rationalize what they do in terms of taking responsibility--for their people, for their religion, for their personal safety or even for the welfare of the world.

God, for example, has been cited as the reason why most countries have gone to war over the past 2000 years. In the Second World War, both the Allies and the Axis countries gave directions from God as reasons for their participating.

What is necessary to make Churchill's statement more valuable is for the people of a country to define--themselves--what a responsible leader would do. And they must do it before such a leader takes power or that leader will define it in his own self-benefitting way and use propaganda techniques to prove himself correct.

What is "responsibility?"

Bill Allin
'Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems,' striving to encourage everyone to decide for themselves what responsibility means and how to know if someone has accepted it.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/cgi/index.pl