By this I mean, organize around some single person for leadership, or in other contexts focus on a popular figure. Even societies that tend to be described as more collectively-organized/oriented tend to do this.
People are people and are as flawed as one another, so this pervasive tendency to elevate others is odd to me. It can be fun and goofy as a game, but as a more serious organizing or focal principle, it just seems extremely fragile and prone to failure (e.g. numerous groups falling into disarray at the loss of a leader/leader & their family, corruption via nepotism and the like, etc.).
A lot of people don’t really understand how things work. Rather than try to understand, they latch on to someone who does understand. In return for their loyalty, they get a path up where they won’t threaten the boss in charge.
Wouldn’t it be more apt to say that a lot of people latch on to someone who appears or acts as if they understand how things work, given the thinking that a lot of people simply don’t understand to begin with?
Definitely. If you don’t understand how the world works, you can’t tell if someone else does either. Only experts can easily spot fake experts. And that’s exactly the trouble with things like pseudoscience and misinformation; it’s easy to fall for without the domain knowledge necessary to avoid falling for it.
Yeah, it would be.
This is the best answer so far in my opinion
A great example is when you’re in elementary school and you get that one really athletic kid on your team for some team sport in gym class. You know you’re not on that level and never will be, so you tie yourself to them, knowing that them succeeding is good for you.
Likewise, we like to attach our fortunes to a designated person, and they become greater than just a person in our mind. Like, that athletic kid is not longer simply a kid who’s good at sports; they’re the athletic kid. Our favored 19th-century political thought leader is no longer just some person who had opinions on society and wrote them down; they’re a political messiah.