Leadership Quote by Jack Herer

Calling leaders “lemmings” is a rhetorical ambush: it doesn’t just accuse them of being wrong, it paints them as proudly unthinking. The power of the line is its speed. In five words, Jack Herer collapses complex institutions into a single image of herd behavior - obedience mistaken for strategy, momentum mistaken for mandate.

Herer, a cannabis and hemp activist whose politics were forged in conflict with law enforcement, propaganda, and bureaucratic inertia, isn’t aiming for nuanced critique. He’s aiming for exposure. The lemming metaphor suggests leaders aren’t leading at all; they’re following scripts written by donors, agencies, moral panics, or career incentives. The subtext is that “policy” becomes a contagion: one official copies another, consensus forms, and suddenly a bad idea has the legitimacy of repetition.

The context matters because Herer spent decades watching the drug war and anti-hemp policies persist despite counterevidence. Framing leadership as herd movement implies that evidence is irrelevant when the system rewards conformity. It’s also a populist move: if leaders are lemmings, then the public doesn’t need deference, it needs disobedience. Activism becomes a corrective force, not a nuisance.

There’s an extra bite in the choice of lemmings, a creature popularly (if inaccurately) associated with mass suicide. Herer is warning that this isn’t mere incompetence; it’s self-destructive governance - a stampede toward damage that everyone can see and no one in power will interrupt.