Marcus Bussey PhD
Understandings of leadership and what makes a good leader tend to be framed by those in power. By contrast the ‘led’ get worn out models and poor role modelling as the infotainment industry’s standard serve of ‘News’. This is reinforced in most walks of life. The dominant model for leadership is not very encouraging. Think of schools, corporations, governments, churches, movies and families: what we find are very limited models of leadership. The very word suggests a singular, perhaps enlightened but certainly strong individual (think man) in charge. Such a person embodies what Ja-Naé Duane and Steve Fisher call ‘command-and-control management styles’ (2025, p. 232). We are all familiar with this model. Its tools are violence, conformity and a relentless attack on the future.
Alternatives
But there is no universal rule that this is the only way to organise societies. The work of David Graeber and David Wengrow (2021) highlights the many ways humans have ordered social relationship over millennia. Similarly, Roman Krznaric (2024) offers further historical insights into alternatives to hierarchy in examining the peoples of Djenné-Djeno and other African societies. He, along with Graeber and Wengrow, note that Western history has a tendency to focus on specific models that reify constructions of the past that support dominant elite perspectives and power. Furthermore, John Tosh (2010) notes that history is useful because it offers a ‘chronicle of alternatives’. Things need not be as they are and clearly, if we take this seriously, things as they are, can be changed.
This powerful insight is always being challenged as it has the potential to upend the business-as-usual world many of us feel comfortable with. Yet, there is increasing discomfort as we see a growing dissatisfaction with the way things are from both sides of politics. The struggle is between moving into possible new social configurations that promise a wide range of personal and social ‘goods’ along with much uncertainty or a retreat into apparent authoritarian certainties that, we are told and hope, will hold the line when everything familiar is crumbling.
Security
There is something primal going on here. Security matters to us all, but how do we get that lovely feeling of being ‘safe’ in a world that appears so unreliable? Amanda Sinclair offers a useful insight here:
“When people set off looking for more leadership—individuals, groups, organisations and nations—what is going on? History and public policy research suggest that calls for leadership are heard most often when anxiety and apprehensiveness about the future are pervasive, and when the problems facing a group require a radical shift in approach. People in such situations are seeking a leader who can relieve a group from its stresses. At some level, they may be looking for a ‘father figure’, a god or saviour to lift them out of their suffering or insecurity. This yearning for leadership is all the more powerful because it is usually unconscious or repressed. Leaders and followers collude in the imagining of leadership as heroic feats that will fix problems and usher in a new era” (2007, p. 33).
We can see this today as leaders such as Donald Trump behave with deeply cynical and narcissistic flamboyance. A recent example is his September 2025 speech at the United Nations (see https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-09-24/penny-wong-responds-to-donald-trump-un-speech-albanese-meeting/105809070) in which he declared climate change to be “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world” and stated that coal is clean and good! Such brashness is of course his trademark and delights his many followers. Populism has always leveraged the emotions of fear and superiority. The future becomes a zone of winners and losers, a place where we can cancel Truth and build illusory castles in the air.
Cancel the Future
Such a disregard for alternatives has a deadening effect on social imagination. Rob Hopkins puts it this way: “For so many people, the future has disappeared: colonised by megalomaniacal billionaires, crushed by precariousness” (2025, p. 23). Yet he is an optimist. He argues that we must ‘fall in love with the future’. His method is possibly counter intuitive. It is to vision alternatives; to dream them up; to also take note of how alternatives are bubbling up around us. He offers mental time travel and a good dose of fun.
This playfulness is a healthy counter to the heaviness we face on a daily basis. It also seeds the creative energy needed in accessing futures that are so near and yet hidden by the noise of the mainstream media. This is where this paper pivots to explore the possibilities for transformative futures work that takes Neohumanism as a starting point and play in the form of games, as a method of deconstruction. Presupposing Universalism as a starting point changes the nature of the story. For it is story that we live our lives by. Story is usually an unconscious foundational assumption about reality. Here are some examples of dominant stories that are hampering Neohumanist Universalism:
- People are fundamentally selfish
- Big government is bad
- Science is a joke
- Life is unfair
- Look out for Number One
- Poor people are lazy
The list could go on for a long time! But I think you get the picture. The work of futurist Sohail Inayatullah (2020) takes such stories head on, subjecting them not to withering critique but to a critical probing through a range of carefully crafted tools.
Mantra as Method
This work is a curated series of interventions that lead his clients to understanding how they are complicit in stories that disable whilst simultaneously enabling them to form alternative stories that act like ‘mantras’ that liberate them from conditioned responses. As he notes:
“The mantra process helps imagine creating a new future, an authentic future. It adds a feeling dimension to the rational act of creating alternative and preferred futures” (2020, p.51).
This linking of feeling with our rationality is key for me. It reconciles our inner emotional drives and yearnings with how we make sense of the world through rationality (Bussey, 2025). Neohumanism as a philosophical approach to managing this dialogue between inner and outer selves is really helpful. Inayatullah’s use of the word mantra in this context is deliberate. Mantras are repeated statements that we recite to reinforce our consciousness of the given reality we are seeking to generate and maintain. There is a precise meditational science to this process but in the way used here, mantra refers to the power of the incantative in shaping consciousness. Mantra is personal, powerful and generative. So, for instance, if you go through life with the mantra “People are selfish” you will experience life very differently than if your mantra is “People are generous”.
The Sadvipra
Prabhat Rainjan Sarkar coined the word Neohumanism back in 1982 as he sought to bridge the philosophical divide between European Humanist culture and Indian Tantric Cosmology, which is essentially universalistic in nature (1982). Neohumanism offers a Universalist Rationality that finds reason nested in a relational field of inter-being. Such a consideration led Sarkar (1988) to propose the Sadvipra as a leader who was seeking to integrate this relational consciousness into social forms that deeply challenge modern leadership assumptions and leadership practices.
Of course, the sadvipra is a work in progress, but the function of such a leader is to transcend the sentiments that keep society from unifying and to lead the various social psychologies (Varnas in Sanskrit) towards an integrated view of collective action in which the classes of worker, warrior, intellectual and capitalist cooperate in achieving an inclusive and thriving society. Such a vision is not utopian but rather pragmatic as it validates each class as key to bettering society. But it is a model and one that we can work with in provoking rich thinking about leadership and our own assumptions about what this entails.
Model? I hear you say. Yes, it is a model, a way of analysing our institutional and social world to unpack what sits beneath this so called ‘reality’. Sarkar presents us with a model of the social cycle and then suggest, via the sadvipra as enlightened leader, a possible escape route. Models are useful thinking tools.
The Sarkar Game
One application of this insight that has great value when considering leadership for the 21st Century is to role play the social cycle Sarkar describes. The embodying of the various ‘social psychologies’ yields surprising results for participants. Peter Hayward and Joseph Voros (2006) developed this role play into the ‘Sarkar Game’ which has been used countless times with groups for over twenty years now. Hayward and Voros ran this game with students at Swinburne University in Australia multiple times. They observe:
“The Sarkar game experience taps into the ‘deep’ scripts that we all have; scripts that cover role, power and relationship. Our societal processes have programmed these scripts into us and they continue to operate unconsciously until an experience draws them into consciousness thereby making them accessible to inquiry and examination” (2006, p. 291).
The game has students playing a role. Some are service providers, the workers of Marxist theory. Some take on the role of the warrior. They have weapons and are free to make sure everyone behaves as they should. Others take the role of the intellectual, priest, philosopher who rationalises power and creates culture to support powerful elites. A fourth group are given the role of the merchant. For them ‘money solves all problems’. Each group engages in the constructed social space created by the facilitators. Ultimately one group comes to dominate the others. The players lose themselves in the roles because the roles are understood at a deep level… we live them right?
When the game ends, Hayward and Voros observe:
“Sarkar made the point that while the agent of transformation is the individual it is the creation of social consciousness outside the individual that enables true social justice and progress. Once individuals have played the game and they have observed the deep social structures , they can return to the game with a changed perspective. Now they are no longer actors in a drama; instead they can adopt the Neohumanist perspective of the Sadvipra. The ‘game space’ now becomes a diagnostic space where alternative strategies can be trailled, dialectic positions can be examined and the crude mind of individual gain can be transcended. The observation here is that participants with this new perspectival knowledge can readily adopt Neohumanist stances. The ego-mind and ‘I’-sense is replaced with the collective-mind and ‘We’-sense, or indeed, a synthesis of both” (2006, 294).
Things can be different. The Sarkar Game allows us to explore difference through role play. I personally love to be enmeshed and enfleshed in such games. Game playing extends the visionary power Rob Hopkins is advocating as noted above.
Conclusion
Games are powerful tools that open us to deep understandings of self-other in a world that flattens consciousness through an all-pervasive present. So, what does this mean for leadership? Well for a start we need to explore those ‘scripts’ Hayward and Voros point to. We have to consider how we are all complicit with what is going on. Here I am thinking of the work of activist and social philosopher adrienne maree brown (name intentionally lowercase) where she speaks of ‘loving corrections’ (2024). In this text she notes:
“We create the patterns of our society through our choices and beliefs and practices. As such, the path to a future in which humans can be in an authentic and accountable peace with each other is fractal – we must be willing to practice authenticity and accountability at the small scale of ourselves and our lives, both in ourselves and in our immediate relationships” (2024, 149).
So, the quest for a good leader starts with us. The concept of sadvipra is a tool. It requires us to become self-aware of our own patterning, our complicity in the maintenance of an unjust and violent world, and through reflection, begin to make the change in our own lives. The Sarkar Game helps with this as does a solid dose of critique, the kind that helps us be a little freer of the chains of conditioning and complacency. The future is calling to us, inviting us to live as if a better tomorrow is already with us. This is a comforting thought, but it requires work and a big heart. As Sarkar noted many times in meetings with disciples: “Love is the beginning point; Love is the end point”. Love and leadership go hand in hand. Are we ready for this?
References
Brown, A. M. (2024). Loving Corrections. Chico CA: AK Press.
Bussey, M. (2025). Neohumanism, Yearning and Becoming: Essays on Education and Spirituality (Vol. Authors Press): Delhi.
Duane, J.-N., & Fisher, S. (2025). Super Shifts: Transforming how we live, learn, and work in the Age of Intelligence. Hoboken NJ: Wiley.
Graeber, D., and Wengrow, David. (2021). The Dawn of Everything: A new history of humanity: Penguin UK.
Hayward, P., & Voros, J. (2006). Playing the Neohumanist Game. In S. Inayatullah, Bussey, M., and Milojevic, I. (Ed.), Neohumanist Educational Futures: Liberating the Pedagogical Intellect (pp. 283-296). Taipei: Tamkang University Press.
Hopkins, R. (2025). How to Fall in Love with the Future: A Time Traveller’s Guide to Changing the World. White River Junction, Vermont: Chelsea Green Publishing.
Inayatullah, S. (2020). A castle surrounded by hungry wolves: toward a stage theory of the uses of the future. World Futures Review, 12(1), 40-54.
Krznaric, R. (2024). History for Tomorrow: Inspiration from the Past for the Future of Humanity. London: WH Allen.
Sarkar, P. R. (1982). The Liberation of Intellect: Neohumanism. Calcutta: Ananda Marga Publications.
Sarkar, P. R. (1988). Ananda Marga Philosophy (Vol. 1-4). Calcutta: AM Publications.
Sinclair, A. (2007). Leadership for the Disillusioned: Moving Beyond Myths and Heroes to Leading That Liberates. Sydney: Allen & Unwin.
Tosh, J. (2010). The Pursuit of History: Aims, methods and new directions (5th Ed). London: Pearson.