Leadership Quote by Marguerite Young

Certainty is the drug Young refuses to prescribe, and that refusal is the point. "If there is no certain reality" doesn’t read like a cozy relativist shrug; it’s a provocation aimed at the political craving for clean narratives. Young, a writer steeped in the mess of American mythmaking, frames reality not as a stable floor but as contested terrain. Once you accept that, leadership stops being a natural good and starts looking like a rhetorical performance that needs auditing.

The syntax does a lot of covert work. The conditional "If" is a trapdoor: it forces the reader to grant, even temporarily, that the world may not offer a single agreed-upon truth. Then the second clause lands with moral pressure: "must be scrutinized". Not "should", not "might". Young isn’t condemning leaders outright; she’s indicting followership as an unexamined habit. The target is the comfort people take in outsourcing judgment, especially when the world feels incoherent.

Subtext: when reality is uncertain, authority grows hungrier. Leaders don’t just manage facts; they manufacture them, or at least the version that rallies a crowd. In that environment, loyalty becomes epistemology: you believe something because your side says it, and your side says it because belief keeps the group intact. Young’s line anticipates the modern information crisis without naming it - propaganda, charismatic politics, and the seductions of "strong" leaders who promise clarity by simplifying complexity.

Context matters, too. Writing in a century of mass media, totalitarian spectacle, and American self-invention, Young treats skepticism as civic hygiene. Scrutiny isn’t cynicism here; it’s the price of staying intellectually alive.