Finding a good leader is difficult. Finding a good person even more so.

Do you ever wonder what it would be like if you were a dictator? Sure, everybody has. Everybody has had the idea that if they were in charge, things would be different, things would be better. Naturally, there would be great limitations to what we could do, human nature is sometimes unpredictable and oftentimes uncontrollable, especially by those that govern. You could enforce laws but there will always be someone breaking them or the laws would have no point. After all, laws are there to stop people from doing things they would like to, but should not.

A harsh dictatorship is better than any anarchy. In terms of societies, order is generally more efficient than chaos. It is why Feudalisms worked so well, it is why Nazi Germany and Soviet Republics were such efficient war machines. Everyone had clear guidelines to follow and more than clear consequences to face if the demands were not met. But these systems all collapse under their own weight because they need one seriously crucial bit that tends to be a letdown. The leader.

We learn from Machiavellian principles that a good leader is one who is necessary for everyone. Or well, preferred by everyone. That way the leader will remain in power - who were to desire the leader out of the way would be faced with few allies in the plot. It is better to keep a beneficial leader in power than to let him fall, even if you were to cause it. This means the leader must be efficient at managing resources and the happiness of those resources. The greater the country to lead, the more resources to manage. If the country gets bigger, more resources have to be managed. Even if there is a strong leader at the helm, finding a successor is a huge conundrum.

But being a leader does not have to be only being a head of state. A leader comes out in small groups of people as well. The tasks remain mostly the same. Assess what the people are good at, make sure they get to do things they are good at and enjoy doing (or an efficient compromise of the two). Keep the broncos from bucking, ease tensions between people as they work together. Find out who works better with whom. Keep everyone happy and motivated, and make sure they know they need you to keep the incredible machine running. Because you should not pull out the control panel of life support machines. Pull it out and it stops working effectively. Having a good leader is paramount.

"The difficulty arises out of the fact that authoritarianism must discourage criticism; accordingly, the benevolent dictator will not easily hear of complaints concerning the measures he has taken." - K. Popper

The leader position is not just about handling others. It is about communicating, and a large part of communicating is listening. That means also listening to people telling what you are doing wrong. In the case of states, it is tempting to censor everything negative. In the case of smaller groups, it is easier to simply ignore the negative. But negative is the part that is easier to learn from, constructive criticism guides us. We need opposition to the ruling government as much as we need friends that tell us when we make mistakes, or are about to. Human beings have the ability to learn from the mistakes of others, and the annoying tendency not to. But sometimes we do, and that is what guides us. You can't be a good leader if you do not improve upon your faults.

Would you be better than your clone?

"Without sensibility no object would be given to us, without understanding no object would be thought. Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind." - I. Kant

What if the content were replicated, the object copied? Generally we think of original works as having more value than mere imitations. With mass produced goods the difference is not as great as when we are talking about rare items such as paintings and sculptures. Because anyone skilled enough can create something beautiful or extremely useful once they've seen it, but coming up with an original idea and making that happen, that is significantly more impressive.

"Look at any photograph or work of art. If you could duplicate exactly the first tiny dot of color, and then the next and the next, you would end with a perfect copy of the whole, indistinguishable from the original in every way, including the so-called "moral value" of the art itself. Nothing can transcend its smallest elements."

What if the copy was exactly like the original? Not just dot-to-dot or nail-to-nail, but even molecule-to-molecule. No possible way of distinguishing the copy from the original. Would the copy be less valuable as it is simply a rendition of someone else's work? Or would it be more valuable as making such a copy would be an extremely impressive act. Many of us remember the grand old film "How to Steal a Million", where the father said "Don't you know that in his lifetime Van Gogh only sold one painting? While I, in loving memory of his tragic genius, have already sold two.". Even now, copies are often considered to be as valuable as their originals. Museums sometimes display copies instead of originals to protect the originals, and there are very few people in the world who could discern a copy from the original. So why are the original pieces considered more valuable than copies?

"There are only two ways in which we can account for a necessary agreement of experience with the concepts of its objects: either experience makes these concepts possible or these concepts make experience possible." - I. Kant

Original works do both. They are derived from experience and create the opportunity to learn from it, thus gaining experience. Copies are merely secondary mediators, similar to cyclic AMP. They do not create the signal, they transfer and multiply. In essence, they share.

What is more bizarre, many original works owe their value to the fact that whoever created them was or is widely known. The works might not have any purpose or innovative lines, and yet they grow to be extremely valued. Sometimes because of who created them, sometimes because of who bought them. But still the originals tend to be more valuable than their copies, because there is only one original. The supply is tiny, the demand slightly greater. Copies can be everywhere, thus increasing the supply and subsequently the supply/demand ratio. But in their essence, copies are as good or sometimes better than the originals, just less value is bestowed to them.

Silence is a powerful tool. Knowing when to break it is even more powerful.

Can you ever fall in love with a person or can you only ever love the idea of the person, what you imagine the person to be?

It is yet another question that Perception raises, but it is an interesting one nevertheless. After all, what can we possibly know about a person? How he or she acts in different observed situations. Oftentimes these situations' variation is rather limited, we meet the people in similar places, do similar things. Couple that with the known fact that people act differently not only in different places, but also when surrounded by different people (or when alone altogether) and you get a sad knowledge that you might not know the people around you as well as you think you do.

With love the matter is even more complicated. So you might not know your friends as well is it could be possible, you know them well enough. You become friends with them, get to know them better, and depending on whether you prefer them to be your friends or not, stop being friends with them (no need to make enemies, just keep them as acquaintances). Many friendships linger in the limbo without any decisive action taken. But love, now that is a bit more difficult to stop.

The problem with falling in love with or having a crush on someone is that usually the object of obsession becomes highly idealized. We become blind or extremely tolerant concerning his or her (or their) faults while praising their positive characteristics, sometimes even those that the person in question does not possess. In doing so, we fall in love with the idea of the person, not the person itself. But you cannot hold an idea, you cannot kiss an idea, and it is not an idea that we miss. It is the person. But is it right to be with someone about whom you have an image you know to be false? In fact, does it even matter?

If you know you have a mistaken understanding of the person of interest then you know you have a choice. Either stick around and see what the person is like in reality or leave and cherish the ideal image of the person. After all, reality can be harsh. Even you might be thought of as possibly daft so why hang around and remove all doubt? Do you really want to ruin the ideal picture of the person that catches your fancy or that of yours? And in the case of love, do you even have the choice of ever walking away?

Sometimes the idea may be better than reality, but sometimes reality is better than anything you could have dreamt about.