You’ll Be Back

This sardonic, Beatles-inspired breakup song directed at the American colonies is sung by King George III (originally played by Jonathan Groff) in the Broadway musical, Hamilton. The song features the King warning the colonies that “when push comes to shove, I will send a fully armed battalion to remind you of my love” and threatening to “kill your friends and family to remind you of my love.”

This is the behavior of a tyrant.

Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) was a German-Jewish political theorist. She rejected the label “philosopher” because philosophy, in her view, studies man in the singular, while politics is about people in the plural. Arendt explored how totalitarian systems make other human beings irrelevant or superfluous. By that measure, many leaders exhibit tyrannical behavior.

Irrelevant is “not related, connected, or important to the subject, situation, or discussion at hand.” Look at who is actually in the song. The colonies never speak. Their grievances never come up, and neither do their reasons for leaving. The whole song is about the King—his love, his hurt feelings, his confidence that they’ll come crawling back. The colonies only show up as something he owns and is about to lose. He calls that love.

Arendt’s own word for this was “superfluous.” In The Origins of Totalitarianism, she argued that total domination works by making people superfluous: interchangeable, unnecessary, with no voice in the world they share with others. Her answer to this was what she called plurality: the plain fact that every person who has ever lived is distinct, and each one arrives able to begin something new. A tyrant can’t tolerate that, because any new beginning he didn’t authorize looks to him like rebellion.

Most leaders would never threaten anyone with a battalion. The workplace version is quieter:

• A decision gets made in a room the people it affects were never invited into.
• A “feedback session” happens after the slides are already final.
• Someone raises a concern and watches it disappear without an answer.
• The org chart gets redrawn over a weekend.
• Someone resigns, and the boss says, “They’ll be back.”

All of this requires only one assumption: that the people affected by a decision have nothing to add to it.

Irrelevance gets taught in small doses. People learn fast whether their words change anything. When they learn that their words don’t, they stop offering them. They keep showing up and they keep working, but they hold back their judgment, their ideas, and their warnings. The leader takes that silence for agreement, and the cycle gets tighter.

Relevance is something a leader can give away on purpose. It looks like asking before you decide when the decision touches someone’s work or life. It looks like closing the loop: “You said this, and here is what we did with it,” or “Here is why we didn’t.” It looks like treating the person in front of you as someone who might see what you can’t. Respect means believing that another person’s view is related, connected, and important to the matter at hand. Turn the dictionary definition of irrelevant around, and that is what you get.

The King comes back later in the show, after the war. The colonies have won and now have to govern themselves, and he is delighted at the thought of them failing. He still can’t picture the people he once controlled leading on their own. That may be the clearest mark of a tyrant: the people he was supposed to serve were never real to him except in relation to himself.

Who on your team has gone quiet? When did they last see that something they said changed something you did? If they left tomorrow, would your first thought be about their reasons or about your loss? Leaders show people they matter by making them relevant. That is the Bison Way.