After the world war, the world has not thrown up a leader of world stature. After the procession of intellectuals who wanted to shape the world according to their ideas - Marx, Voltaire, Roussean, Russell, Sartre - in the last 25 years no single intellectual has attained their stature. The leadership in war and thought has passed away from the collective. This is a phase of social evolution where the INDIVIDUAL emerges. There was a time when local chieftains gave place to a national monarch. It was he who decided on wider national issues as well as local issues. Later the King's power moved away from him to the local municipalities. Further it moved to the INDIVIDUAL in matters of religion, education etc.
Presently we have a leaderless world. It only means the individual is coming into his own. For a few decades the exam system in the schools and colleges have lost their original purity and standard. Malpractices had crept in and was dominating the field in its own way. Unconsciously the system, by growing corruption, has prepared itself for abolition. Politics has taken a similar turn and we see more and more the initiative of thinking is moving to the public which means the individual is becoming more responsible to the nation. It is high time that the citizen, at least mentally, must take greater responsibility for the future of the country. We do see the phenomenon of the public opinion being taken into greater account.
It is a fact of life that systems held in veneration lose this aura and their use. They do not disappear all at once. They grow putrid till they destroy themselves. USA which won its Independence in 1776 had signed the final treaty with Britain in 1814, after an interval of 38 years. The saga of great leaders has gone and the era of the individual is being born. Mind cannot offer that leadership as even intellectuals of that calibre are vanishing. It is for each individual to become a thinker of the nation's political future. It is better that that individual is the Spiritual Individual who invokes the spirit and lives by that Spirit.