"People, like sheep, tend to follow a leader - occasionally in the right direction"
About this Quote
The jab lands because it flatters and insults in the same breath. Chase borrows the oldest metaphor for mass behavior - sheep - then tightens the blade with that single, stingy adverb: "occasionally". It concedes that leadership can work, but only as an accident, not a reliable outcome. The line is built like a trap for our vanity. We like to imagine ourselves as discerning citizens, skeptics, independent thinkers. Chase suggests the opposite: most of what passes for conviction is just motion in a crowd, with one figure at the front making it feel like purpose.
The intent isn’t to sneer at "people" from some Olympian height; it’s to puncture the romance of leadership itself. Leaders, in this view, aren’t proof of clarity - they’re proof of our appetite for outsourcing judgment. The sheep image does cultural double duty: it invokes docility, but also the unsettling fact that sheep aren’t evil or stupid; they’re simply social, safety-seeking animals. That’s the subtext Chase is after. Following isn’t a moral failure so much as a default setting, and that’s precisely why demagogues, trendsetters, and corporate visionaries all speak the same dialect of certainty.
Placed in the mid-20th century, the cynicism reads as earned. Chase lived through the age of mass propaganda, televised charisma, and institutions selling consensus as virtue. "Occasionally in the right direction" is the grim comfort: progress happens, but not because crowds suddenly become wise - because history sometimes gets lucky with who ends up holding the stick.
The intent isn’t to sneer at "people" from some Olympian height; it’s to puncture the romance of leadership itself. Leaders, in this view, aren’t proof of clarity - they’re proof of our appetite for outsourcing judgment. The sheep image does cultural double duty: it invokes docility, but also the unsettling fact that sheep aren’t evil or stupid; they’re simply social, safety-seeking animals. That’s the subtext Chase is after. Following isn’t a moral failure so much as a default setting, and that’s precisely why demagogues, trendsetters, and corporate visionaries all speak the same dialect of certainty.
Placed in the mid-20th century, the cynicism reads as earned. Chase lived through the age of mass propaganda, televised charisma, and institutions selling consensus as virtue. "Occasionally in the right direction" is the grim comfort: progress happens, but not because crowds suddenly become wise - because history sometimes gets lucky with who ends up holding the stick.
Quote Details
| Topic | Leadership |
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