6. On leadership and power 1. Hegemony and counter-hegemony cannot be controlled. People are way too irrational and too unpredictable and the complexities and pluralities of any form of hegemony or counterhegemony are too complex and too diverse to be controlled by anything or anyone. Institutions, social organizations nor individuals succeed in doing so. Hegemony is not directed by a ruling class, just as counterhegemonies are not directed by some kind of vanguard: leadership at most reinforces what is already present. Within societies, it is difficult to quasi-impossible to really pull the strings as power relations are almost always dispersed, scattered, nuanced, fuzzy and flou.
2. Hegemony is built on consent, not coercion. Leaders and leading groups emerge only because we, the people, allow them to emerge. Power can only be hold on to when we, the people, consent to it. We determine the forms of power to which we consent. We all shape hegemony, both in reaffirming it and in changing it. What we all think and do or don't think or do, determines what hegemony looks like and how it evolves. Leaders and leading groups are merely the megaphones that amplify the different currents within a hegemony.
3. Leadership is always temporary. The role of the hegemon (the leader or leading group) is never fixed or absolute. Consent by the group or society is still needed. Without consent, only coercion remains. When the center of gravity shifts from consent to coercion, both hegemon and hegemony lose legitimacy.
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