Individuals are back. Powerful individual humans gained power in recent years at the expense of collective movements and institutions in all the world’s five most populous nations: India’s Narendra Modi has a second wind after 12 dominant years; Xi Jinping is China’s most powerful leader since Mao Zedong; Donald Trump is radically reshaping America at home and abroad; Indonesia’s Prabowo Subianto is rehabilitating the image of the country’s last dictator; while Pakistan’s Asim Munir consolidates power.

This is happening, and will continue to happen, because of how the brains of these leaders – and their followers – shape and respond to the world around them.

Human societies are made of humans with human brains. These societies naturally have hierarchies that are often central for their members’ success, which is why our brains so carefully track these social hierarchies. Human societies always contain both leaders and followers. Leadership arises from both the dominance leaders get from things like guns, as well as the prestige arising from qualities seen as admirable by those who follow. In contrast, many people are averse to shouldering responsibility for others, and this, too, arises in the brain. Moreover, compelling experiments show that many humans – although not all, including some who resist – often do obediently conform to and follow others. This human timber, from which every human society is made, explains why we will always have leaders and followers.

Individual leaders often become more important in times of crisis or rapid change. By contrast, institutions necessarily embody the rules and processes for ‘business as usual’. Many aspects of institutions exist for good reasons and some will remain vital. But many rules and processes lose value when you must rapidly adapt to wrenching change.

During relatively stable periods, the Roman Republic had remarkable systems to balance society’s interest groups. It appointed a dictator during dangerous periods, which required rapid decisions that could result in big winners and losers within Roman society. During the American Civil War, Abraham Lincoln gathered executive power to himself. In the Second World War, Winston Churchill centralised decision-making even as the state massively expanded to fight ‘total war’. In peacetime, Franklin Delano Roosevelt concentrated power to tackle the Great Depression. Today’s America sees calls for decisive action to cut through blocking institutions’ interminable rules and process from the left (e.g. the ‘Abundance’ agenda that seeks to unpick administrative barriers to progress) or from the right (e.g. Peter Thiel, who decries corporate and government stasis), especially compared to a China led by engineers rather than lawyers. Beijing can build high-speed rail orders of magnitude faster and cheaper than America. When US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent taunted Europe’s response to crises such as American designs on Greenland as being ‘the dreaded European working group’, it hurt because many Europeans knew it to be true: the thicket of EU processes better suit stable 2006 than febrile 2026.

We are in a period of wrenching change. For 25 years after the Cold War’s end the US enjoyed overwhelming military and economic superiority. Now China is the world’s manufacturing superpower, producing more than the world’s next four (or even nine) countries, with more industrial robots per industrial worker than any G-7 country, and introducing true innovations in batteries and robots. China could have the capability to win a long war against America. And what about Chinese intentions over somewhere like Taiwan? Vladimir Putin showed against Ukraine that authoritarian leaders can act unilaterally to take territory. Xi Jinping has enormous domestic power, and a decision to invade will be made inside his skull alone.

The US cannot just sit out such world historical developments: the Western Hemisphere holds a small and shrinking part of the world’s population (about 13 per cent). Apple alone invested a Marshall Plan’s worth of money and expertise in Chinese advanced manufacturing, dwarfing US responses to Chinese industry, such as the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act. Will an individual like Trump wrench change fast enough in the US? Perhaps, or perhaps not. But business as usual won’t work.

In the future, power from institutions could flow not to individuals, but instead to collective movements – although at the time of writing none seem poised to take off. In the 20th-century, ‘followers’ coordinated around communism, fascism or liberal democracy, and yet today none of these movements offer a clear path forward. Fascism lost catastrophically in the Second World War by its own metric of military strength. Communism stultified economically before imploding to lose the Cold War. And liberal democracy, which is my strong preference and which seemed supreme after 1989 as the only future, today to many resembles a tired status quo.

Partly liberal democracy’s travails have resulted from a failure to produce satisfying enough outcomes. Outside the US, no company now worth over $100 billion market capitalisation has been founded during the last 50 years in any rich democracy (except speculator SoftBank). Meanwhile, despite America’s greater economic dynamism it suffers from inequality, relative deindustrialisation, and political polarisation.

Liberal democracy also suffers from a very human problem: all societies are intergenerational, so that every child grows up seeing the world through its own eyes and builds its own models of the world in its brain. That’s why victories must be won again in the brains of each new generation, and our forebears’ hard-fought successes often seem like an uninspiring status quo. Millennials in advanced democracies, for example, have been found to be less satisfied with democracy than the preceding generations and less likely to believe it ‘essential’ to live in a democracy.

Ibn Khaldūn, the 14th-century Muslim scholar described inter-generational change. For Khaldūn, empires were created and collapsed over three generations. The first generation are driven founders. The second generation can preserve what they saw their parents create. The third generation’s rulers are palace-suckled princelings without the tenacity to sustain the founders’ creation. The neural machinery in every new brain starts as that of a baby for whom much of the world is, to quote William James, the father of American psychology, a ‘blooming, buzzing confusion’. Our new brains don’t just download our worldviews fully formed and identical to those of our parents, version 2.0. Moreover, our brains will always be focused on anticipating the future – that’s what brains do. Eternally unsatisfied, and full of plans for how they can make the world a better place for themselves, their families, and societies. That’s our nature.

Little, then, seems likely to reverse the rise of powerful individuals soon. But counter-intuitive though it seems for many citizens of democracies who value pluralism and liberty, this trend leaves considerable room for optimism.

First, the rise of individual leaders won’t necessarily lead to autocracy and it could bring benefits. Remember, too, that the alternatives are not risk-free either. Business as usual, in which institutional processes and rules prevent building or changing at the required scale – also brings serious risks of decay. Collective movements like communism or fascism galvanised vast 20th-century followings, and swept millions to death or disaster. Many individual leaders who centralise power (although not all) can and do step back once they have helped their society meet its challenges: George Washington retired rather than become king; Winston Churchill unceremoniously stepped down during the Potsdam conference when he lost the 1945 general election. America’s founding fathers knew the importance of effective leaders, and anticipated the risk of dictatorship so they built institutions to support as well as to constrain them.

Indeed, powerful individual leaders working in tandem with institutions can be a highly effective mix. As the Second World War progressed, Hitler largely stopped collaborating with advisers. But the three Allied great powers – Britain, the US and the Soviet Union – all had powerful leaders and each also fought their war substantially by committee. British Prime Minister Churchill headed a Cabinet, and he did not overrule his military chiefs once during the war. That British system fiercely challenged ideas and (usually) improved them. US President Roosevelt’s team was similarly greater than the sum of its parts. Even Stalin ran the war through the Soviet State Committee, or Stavka.

A concerned citizen in a democracy, then, should not simply be suspicious of all leaders, fearing a Julius Caesar in every general, or a Putin in every spy. Mutiny, scepticism and blocking can seem attractive, but we need effective leaders.

This introduces a second reason for optimism: we are learning how key features of leadership work in the brain, and how to improve them. Effective leaders require the self-confidence to shoulder responsibility for others, and calibrating this self-confidence requires our remarkable human capacities for metacognition, or ‘thinking about thinking’. Metacognition rests on your brain’s most human region, the frontal pole that sits behind your forehead. It helps you judge your own judgments about what you perceive, feel and think. Most wonderfully, we can all enhance our metacognition. Simple methods include taking a third-person perspective on yourself, or, like Churchill, surrounding yourself with people who challenge you.

Effective leaders also need a clear model of what they want to achieve that can provide purpose for others. Dwight Eisenhower was US president from 1953 to 1961, and it was he who provided the clear purpose of preparing the United States to thrive over the ‘long haul’ against the Soviets. Eisenhower also had that ability, vital for any effective leader, to communicate his model, to place it in the brains of other people so it could guide them to accomplish what they couldn’t do individually. His presidential TV ads ran with the simple ‘I like Ike’.

A third reason for optimism is that we can make a seemingly ever more puzzling world more comprehensible, once we remember that leaders are, simply put, human. Consider the world’s two most powerful human beings.

When an individual is as personally powerful as President Trump, his brain really matters. ‘Yeah, there is one thing,’ he responded, when asked about limits on his global powers, ‘My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.’ And when asked why he needed to possess Greenland, he said: ‘Because that’s what I feel is psychologically needed for success.’

Is he really that difficult to understand? He likes his family, he likes attractive women. He gains power through dominance, shown so obviously in his control over tech titans invited to a White House dinner, or handing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a phone receiver and listening in as Netanyahu humbly apologised to Qatar’s prime minister for a bomb strike. He has also gained power over willing followers through prestige: many thought his 2016 election win was a fluke, but coming back after his 2020 loss, winning in 2024 and then his frenetic first year in office, it turns out that he is skilled at politics.

An example of how Trump operates politically is his effective use of tools like unpredictability, which is so powerful because it’s central to how all brains work. Our brains constantly use models of the world to predict what is going to happen – and when those predictions are wrong, when our expectations are violated, that surprise is a powerful learning signal to help us change our models. Managing predictability is central to effectiveness on social media, as shown by large MIT studies (and Taylor Swift), the ‘madman theory’ of Richard Nixon, counter-insurgency, and it has always been an effective tool in war, from Germany’s Blitzkrieg to the actions of Hamas on 7 October 2023.

Understanding China’s Xi Jinping presents almost the opposite problem: he doesn’t post a firehose of social media posts, Xi is inaccessible: no interviews with western journalists or off-the-cuff remarks. Yet nothing matters more for the world’s future than how he believes power works at home and abroad. Xi’s human story cannot provide all the answers, but it helps.

Born to a senior party official, Xi became a victim of the brutal, chaotic Cultural Revolution that shaped the worldview of many like him. As a teenager Xi was forced to wear an iron dunce’s cap while a crowd shouted for his punishment; he was desperately hungry yet his own mother turned him away out of political fear; and he was exiled from Beijing to a peasant’s life. But he became ‘redder than red’ to rise through the Party’s ranks. He harnessed predictability to build trust with senior party officials and so survive local scandals that would have felled others. Since gaining power in 2012 he has asserted his dominance: making clear he would allow no repeat of communist Russia’s collapse, whose leaders were not ‘man enough’ to use force; he viscerally rejects criticism of China abroad; he allowed his predecessor Hu Jintao’s public humiliation; and he has purged top military ranks.

When I was in China during Xi’s first term interviewing top scholars, as well as officials from bodies like the Central Military Commission, all believed that it was mainly raw power that determined how countries acted in the world. If Xi thought he could, little suggests he would not ruthlessly take Taiwan. And as a human he is mortal: already aged 72, any attempt to take Taiwan would likely occur before the end of his fourth term in 2032.

We humans need to see ourselves as we are. Doing otherwise can be disastrous. In 2003 US leaders predicted Iraq’s people would embrace freedom and democracy. After the 2008 financial crisis, Alan Greenspan, who had been the US Federal Reserve’s hugely influential head, admitted the crash happened because of his and others’ too unrealistic views of human nature. Until the mid-2010s ‘any writer who predicted that nationalism was the wave of the future would have been regarded as eccentric’ – and yet ignoring human drives for group identity and belonging was wishful thinking. Better self-knowledge of ourselves as humans, as humanity, would have helped then, and can help today. Once again powerful individuals are back, for ill and for good: that is who we are.