>>>Community only survives if members are willing to be led by people with whom they disagree.
>>
>>That's the trouble with the Western mind, it believes in leaders too much, to the point where this belief has become an example for another belief: a self-fulfilling prophecy.
>
>Now you have got me totally clueless if you are speaking of !FarEast (=!{Zen,Buddhism,Hinduism}, but how to fit in Confucius ?) or !BehindFormerIronCurtain, where I think the "leaders" had much more belief in their god-ahem-history-given role than the worker bees - but as the system(s) endured for some time, I guess not only the leaders believed this.
>Update: Or is this a California vs. New England thing ?

I wouldn't know, is it possibly the whole Judeo-Christian culture that has this idea that the people are incapable of doing anything by themselves, someone has to tell them what to do. The cult of stupid masses and intelligent leaders, which somehow arise from those same masses. Which sounds so black/white - the guys with best ideas on what to do in a particular situation may not be the same as those with best people skills, those with best organizational minds etc etc. These gifts may be spread at random. But somehow it's expected that a select few has them all, and the unwashed rest has pretty much none. Not the best use of our resources.