Intriguingly, this is one of those moments when what is happening both within the game and at the table coincides - it is a process that happens among the PCs 'in universe', as it were, and among the players themselves in the real world. Some strange alchemy of personality, context, and luck seems to determine it.
I've been thinking about this issue a lot in the last month or so as a result of reading two books which, oddly, relate to the same theme. The first is The Lord of the Flies. I've embarked on a mission to read all of Golding's works (thanks in part to a long-ago recommendation from a commenter on here that I read The Inheritors) and have finally made my way to Flies after not having read it or thought much about it since I read it at school at the age of, I think, 12 or 13. I'm almost at the end, and I've found the experience surprisingly rewarding. Without having to read it for school, and without any pressure to discuss the contents in the light of the weary prodding of some jaded teacher, I've been able to simply enjoy its brilliance - and it is brilliant: a miracle of a book.
As you may recall, authority and how it emerges is one of the main themes of The Lord of the Flies. The boys find themelves on an island in the absence of any pre-existing framework of authority - there are no adults, parents, teachers, policemen, and so on. They are thrust together as ostensible 'equals' (although some, the 'littluns', are exempt from this). And from that, a hierarchy emerges, as well as a set of vaguely defined but fairly fixed roles - the chief (Ralph), the head of the hunters (Jack), the voice of reason (Piggy), the visonary (Simon), the clown (Morris) and so on. It is an unstable structure, to be sure, but it remains in place for a long time - the narrative implies that the boys live in relative harmony for some months.
What the book implies about the role of the leader is particularly interesting. At the beginning, indeed it is pretty much the first thing that happens, Piggy and Ralph find the conch, and Ralph uses it to summon the rest of the boys on the island. And he then provides them with a project: they are going to start a big fire and then be rescued. On this basis - the fact that he has a plan - he then becomes chief. Later - spoiler alert - the shift to the leadership of psychopathic Jack is accompanied by a similar assertion of a project: to hunt pigs and 'have fun'.
This all makes visceral some remarks made by Alexandre Kojeve in The Notion of Authority. Here, Kojeve provides some brief notes of a theory of authority, and identifies a form of authority - that of the Leader - which emerges in this type of context. He puts before us the image of a group of children in a field. They are ostensibly in a position of atomised equality - each is a child the same as any other. But then one of them asserts a plan: he suggests going to raid the apple orchard next door to steal apples. Suddenly they are united - and he is the Leader.
He becomes the Leader, Kojeve elaborates, because he is the one who had a plan - he was able to envision a future (one in which the group gets the apples) and bring it into the present in the form of a project. He orients the group, as it were, towards the otherwise empty and contentless expanse of the future, and responds to it by imbuing it with content in the present. And everybody else goes along because of this claim to be able to see further; the others, recognising that they 'see less well and less for', willingly submit.
This obviously describes something of what goes on in the assertion of leadership by Ralph (and Jack) in The Lord of the Flies - and it is something that all of us remember from our playground days. The crudest and most immediate form of human authority is that in which a group of people are suddenly united (it can happen almost instantaneously) by one of them putting forward a project and orienting the others towards a future. And this is also something that all of us will recognise from playing RPGs, too. There, authority as such seems to emerge when one player (and one PC) shows himself willing to claim to see further than the others and lay out a project - and when the others, acccepting it, go along. It is not always necessarily the same person - authority in this context is very fluid - but it will tend to be the case that it most often is. There will be one person who the others tend to look towards for decisions. And this role will be taken on very early - usually in the first couple of sessions. In a brief moment, authority will be up for grabs, and seized, at the start.
What determines the identity of the person who will take on this role is mysterious - I earlier attributed it to an 'alchemy of personality, context, and luck' - and the process is, I think, inevitable. And it has its advantages and drawbacks. Without leaders, human beings are indecisive and vapid. But leaders can direct their charges into hideous mistakes. We will all be familiar with such scenarios. One way of shaking things up and experimenting in interesting ways might be to formalise roles and deliberately, before play starts, elect one person to be the leader - or even to circulate the leadership role each session. I would be curious to learn if anybody has ever tried such experiments, and what the results have been like.
For a while when I was running a lot of games at conventions or open tables where whoever showed up was the party, I would have players roll to see who was the leader or assign it to the player of the character with the highest Charisma. I found some people did not easily inhabit the role and would look to someone else to make decisions. The alchemy of why that person became the de facto leader even when the dice said otherwise was mysterious to me.
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