Often thinkers, when they want to explain how social agents act in the world, posit a pair of personality types as binaries. Arthur Koestler, the former communist intellectual and philosopher of science, wrote a book titled The Yogi and the Commissar. In the lead essay, which bears the same title as the book, he discusses the two personality types of the yogi and the commissar. The commissar seeks to manipulate social reality with scientific knowledge, changing it to make it congruent with his own ideals. The yogi, in contrast, turns the gaze inward, seeking internal transformation. The world, as a result, fades into maya. On the spectrum between the yogi and commissar, most people are somewhere in between. In India, our genius has enabled us to breach this binary. We have a yogi commissar.
In another interesting binary, presented by Isaiah Berlin in his seminal essay ‘The Hedgehog and the Fox’, the Oxford philosopher argues that the “fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing”. The hedgehog acts with a singular purpose, “a single, universal, organising principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance” whereas the fox, in contrast, pursues “many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way, for some psychological or physiological cause, related to no moral or aesthetic principle.” The purposive behaviour of the hedgehog leads to achievable outcomes whereas that of the fox is dispersed and often results in unachieved goals. Again, as in Koestler’s argument, most people are somewhere in between.
Looking at the statements and choices of the incoming administration of Donald Trump in the US, two distinct personality types emerge. Unlike the above examples, these are, however, not binaries in opposition but allies. In partnership, they offer a distinctive relationship to social reality. Drawing on the statements of the president-elect, concerning his goals, the qualities he is looking for among those in his inner circle, his plans to radically transform government, and his “day one” agenda, the two personality types that stand out are the “maverick” and the “loyalist”. Since we are days away from Trump’s assumption of the most powerful job in the world, it is not too soon to speculate on the implications of these personality types, for US politics and the whole world. The prognosis is intimidating.
Trump, by all accounts, is a maverick. Interestingly, he is also closely associated with another maverick, Elon Musk. A maverick is a person whose choices and behaviour are unpredictable. This can have both creative and destructive consequences, creative in that it is unconstrained by the established way of doing things, and destructive in that it upends even the good things of the existing order. The maverick sees the establishment as having accumulated inefficiencies and interests that are hostile to promising innovations. This establishment produces path dependency. Social behaviour, as a result, stays on the path, finding the cost of exiting too high. The special quality of the maverick is that she is ready, and willing, to exit the path at any time. For the maverick, the path must be destroyed either because it has served its purpose, or because it is an obstacle to a better way of doing things, or because it has accumulated inefficiencies. Schumpeter called this “creative destruction”. In the world of commerce, this is often a positive thing. Musk has proved it with Tesla, SpaceX and Neuralink. In the world of government, however, we are not so sure about “creative destruction” since destabilising the government can indeed be costly. Things can fall apart.
A pilot experiment of creative destruction is taking place in Argentina where President Javier Milei is working to overturn the established policies and institutions of the Peronist state. Early data on costs and benefits are trickling in. He has been able to rein in inflation from 26 per cent in December 2023 to 2.7 per cent in October 2024. But his actions have also resulted in an increase in poverty among Argentines from 42 per cent in 2023 to 53 per cent in 2024. The jury is out on the consequences of such radical destabilising of the conventional government. Compared to Milei, Trump is a bigger tsunami. The world awaits his arrival with trepidation.
Which brings me to the other face of the maverick’s behaviour — the destructive consequences. By dismantling the established system that has taken decades to evolve, the maverick undermines the primary value of any state, the routinisation of state power. Routinisation is one of the most effective ways to establish the equality of citizens and to consolidate a regime of rights. Routinisation gives citizens a sense of what to legitimately expect from the state. Power becomes impersonal as it gets bound by rules and regulations. This has to be destabilised. The maverick does so and replaces stability with uncertainty. Public health experts in the US are currently worried about the incoming health czar Robert F Kennedy Jr, who, as an anti-vaxxer, wants to do away with most vaccines. Destabilising the state will affect the disadvantaged the most.
While the maverick’s two faces, creation and destruction, are causing public officials to be anxious, it is the other personality type, the loyalist, a core part of the incoming Trump regime, that, to me, is a cause of greater worry. Information feedback is an important part of every chief executive’s decision ecosystem. Such information must be honest. It must have scientific integrity, especially when decisions made have far-reaching consequences. Sometimes, such information can go against the opinion of the primary decision-maker, the boss. Loyalty discounts such a possibility. It compromises the information feedback. It massages the message. This means that sometimes decisions known to be harmful are taken because being loyal is more important than being truthful. This is more true in the context of a president who has a firm opinion on all things. Challenging it is an occupational hazard.
In a fast-changing age, where technology is driving us into the future, where hostilities are breaking out across the world and where the ability to manage them is getting more feeble, leading to a huge loss of innocent lives, as in Gaza, loyalty will push the world into a dangerous corner. Even a powerful president will not be able to manage the ensuing chaos. Across many of the world’s democracies, maverick regimes are making an appearance, including in the largest. In 1975, when the Emergency was imposed in India, a maverick-loyalist regime had appeared. American democracy will gain by looking at that episode, especially during its 50th anniversary.
The writer is an independent scholar and co-editor with Rukmini Bhaya Nair of Keywords for India: A Conceptual Lexicon for the 21st century
