Keith Grint - Mutiny and Leadership

History never repeats itself but it rhymes

(attributed to Mark Twain)

Mutiny and leadership are two sides of the same coin: as soon as leadership emerges within a group there will be resistance to that leadership. It has always been thus. From what we know about our ancestors in hunter-gatherer societies from their contemporary incarnations, we know that reverse-dominance hierarchiesattempts by subordinates to organize against the superordinate to either discipline or overthrow themare omnipresent (Boehm, ), where leadership is embodied in coalitions, not individuals. But mutiny is a different form of resistance to that employed in most organizations. Generally speaking, where the subordinates are unhappy with their lot, they will either remain passively unhappy or rationalize their unhappiness (it could be worse, at least we are alive) or do something about it. What they do about their unhappiness depends on a whole raft of issues, including the time and space for the resistance, the resources available to them, the legitimacy of their oppression and resistance, the presence of enough people willing and able to lead the resistance, and, of course, the equivalent issues for those deemed by the oppressed to be the oppressors. Since mutiny is, by definition, limited to social rather than individual dissent, and to military or naval organizations rather than all organizations, the leadership of both sides in a mutiny are often encased in a different aspic than their equivalents elsewhere.

Elsewhere, social dissent might take the form of a protest, a go-slow, a strike, a march or sit-in, or any one of hundreds of other manifestations of dissent that are visible every day. For example, on the day this section was written (7 October 2019) there were reports of overt public dissent in Hong Kong (anti-government), Iraq (unemployment and corruption), and Britain (Brexit and Extinction Rebellion). When I first came to revise this section, on 10 November 2019, a mutiny by the Bolivian police began the slow overthrow of President Morales. The final edit occurred on 5 June 2020, at which point COVID-19 was rampaging through the world, and protesters marched through large numbers of American, and indeed European, cities after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.