Much of my career, such as it has been, has consisted of teaching, writing, training, researching, and thinking about what makes people leaders, why we follow people in the first place, and once we become leaders, how we can become better. It’s not exactly the sexiest career, but it pays (some) of the bills.

For me, thinking, reading, and writing sit at the bottom of every act a person who leads commits to. Decisions can’t be made, and choices can’t move from idea to practicality without those three acts. Followers can’t be ethically guided, and enemies can’t be accurately identified, confronted, and, in some cases, defeated. Without a robust practice of thinking, reading, and writing, leadership becomes a buzzword and a marketing term rather than an act that changes people and can change the world.

However, in America, and the West overall, I suspect, we have either entered, or are entering, a post-literate world, as defined by Rose Horowitz of_ The Atlantic_ in the long excerpt below:

“For the August issue of The Atlantic, I investigated what our society will look like as reading vanishes for all but the smallest sliver of Americans. The share of Americans who read a book or an article on any given day has fallen by 40 percent over the past two decades. In 2022, fewer than half of all adults had read a book of any kind in the prior year. Only 38 percent had read a novel or a short story. One historian I spoke with described reading as a ‘niche hobby, like stamp collecting or growing orchids.’ And its disappearance shows no signs of slowing down.

“Humans spent millennia communicating only by voice. The advent of reading and writing transformed society. It altered people’s consciousness and politics, along with the intellectual feats they were capable of. The decline of reading will bring about changes of the same magnitude. It will affect how we think, how our elected leaders campaign and govern, what skills our culture values, and even how we tell the history of our civilization. If we look closely, we can see that these changes have already begun.

“This shift is often referred to as a literacy crisis. But that’s not quite right. Americans can still read. Paradoxically, they might be reading more words than ever before. People’s lives are filled with emails, text messages, X posts, Reddit threads, and Instagram captions. But these snippets of text have crowded out the time necessary for sustained reading of complex texts. And over time, people have lost the higher-order abilities of comprehension and synthesis. America, in other words, isn’t illiterate. It’s post­literate.”

Here’s my harsh prediction: In a post-literate America, both leaders and followers will struggle not only with comprehension of hard ideas, but also with being unable even to ask the types of questions that lead to formulating the initial hard ideas in the first place. Combine this fact with evidence of the Iron Triangle of Arrogance–where people not only genuinely believe wrong information and facts, but also shout them at louder and louder decibels via every channel they can broadcast them, because correction would require a change in identity, rather than just a change of mind–and a post-literate, American electorate will be fooled often and taken for a ride frequently.

Future leaders will not only be literate–they will be able to read the words on the page of those hoary old relics called books–but they will also know what the words mean, what the author meant, and what those words mean for their post-literate followers. Followers who will have a lot of text in their brains, but very little comprehension or wisdom in their hearts.

Behold, what a brave new world we are entering, folks, and behold all the people in it.