They may be ineffective at their job, but it doesn't bother us that somebody who outranks us makes a higher salary or gets a bigger office or has a better parking space.

It's totally fine.

In other words, we're used to deferring to and giving special treatment to those who are higher in the pecking order.

However, none of those perks come for free.

You see, the group is not stupid.

We don't give all those advantages to our leaders for nothing.

There's an expectation.

There's an expectation that if danger threatens the tribe, that the leader, the one who's better fed and more confident, who's stronger, will rush towards the danger to protect us.

That's why we gave them first choice of mate, because they might die first and we want to keep their genes in the gene pool.

We're not stupid.

And so what makes us loyal and love and respect our leaders is when we know that they uphold that deal.

When we have visceral contempt for some of our leaders, like we have visceral contempt for some of the banking CEOs and their disproportionate salaries and bonus structures, it's because we know that they allowed their people to be sacrificed so they could keep their bonuses and salaries.

Or worse, they chose to sacrifice their people to protect their bonuses and salaries.

And this is why we do not trust them.

We are not loyal to them.

And why we sometimes have visceral contempt for them.

The leaders we admire, the leaders we follow, are the ones that we know would sacrifice their interests to take care of us.

That's the deal.

That's the anthropological definition of leadership.

It is always balanced.

The perks of leadership are not free.

They come at the cost of self-interest.

They come at the cost of taking care of those in our charge.

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