Why Society’s Greatest Leaders Often Come from its Edges

Photo courtesy of NPP

Something struck me while watching President Anura Kumara Dissanayake hosting a meeting with media organizations at the Presidential Secretariat recently. Here was a leader of a political party which had spent decades in the political wilderness – ridiculed, ignored, sometimes persecuted – yet when they finally gained unprecedented power, their response was not the usual self-aggrandizement we have come to expect from politicians. Instead, they have displayed for close to a year a remarkable simplicity and discipline that still feels almost alien in our current political landscape. President Dissanayake refused the traditional presidential perks and Prime Minister Dr. Harini Amarasuriya has maintained her professorial demeanour and continued living modestly. Both seem unaffected by power’s trappings, treating their positions as responsibilities rather than rewards.

This got me thinking: what if we have been looking for leadership in all the wrong places? What if the very qualities that make someone successful by conventional metrics actually disqualify them from transformative leadership? And what if those we dismiss as unsuccessful – the perpetual opposition voices, the excluded idealists – are developing precisely the capabilities that genuine transformation requires?

The more I have reflected on this, the more convinced I have become that we are witnessing something profound in Sri Lanka and elsewhere: a demonstration that society’s edges, not its centres of power, often hold its greatest leadership potential. This is not mere confirmation bias or romantic celebration of underdog victories; there are identifiable mechanisms, grounded in neuroscience and psychology, that explain why prolonged marginalization can forge superior leadership capabilities while access to power relatively early in one’s life often corrupts them.

The 60 year crucible

The NPP party’s journey exemplifies how sustained adversity builds character. For six decades, they existed in political exile, first as the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna, facing brutal state suppressions that killed tens of thousands and nearly eliminated the organization. Through the 1990s and 2000s they scraped by with two or three parliamentary seats while mainstream parties traded principles for coalition opportunities.

Their performance at the 2020 general election was humiliating – just three seats, 3% of the vote. Political commentators treated them as irrelevant relics. Yet during those wilderness decades, something profound was happening. While other parties abandoned enduring principles for power sharing opportunities, the JVP maintained positions that seemed politically suicidal. When President Dissanayake became leader in 2014, his first major act was publicly apologizing for the organization’s violent past – moral accountability rare among politicians. When crisis finally created political space in 2022, they were ready not because they had been positioning for power but because they had been preparing for responsibility.

The contrast with former publicity secretary Wimal Weerawansa illustrates the alternative path. When the party chose principled opposition over ministerial positions in 2008, Weerawansa defected, explicitly stating his goal was gaining access to power for building a mass base. He spent fifteen years accumulating ministerial portfolios and personal wealth while his former comrades built grassroots movements. By 2024, as the movement he abandoned achieved unprecedented victory, Weerawansa had become politically irrelevant – a clear vindication of integrity over opportunism.

The crucial distinction: liberation vs. revenge

But here I must acknowledge a crucial complexity. Not all who experience marginalization emerge as transformative leaders. Some who bear chains develop not empathy but resentment and a burning desire to impose those same chains on others. The poet Walter Stanley Senior, writing during Ceylon’s colonial era, captured this essential truth when he expressed caution about freedom to a nation he deeply wished would be free of imperial oppression:

And would ye free a people
From a long and strong control?
And would ye keep your freedom
While the testing ages roll?
If ye fain would free the body
Ye must first make free the soul

Senior understood that freedom from external oppression means nothing if internal wounds remain unhealed. It was a prescient concern about a deeply divided community’s ability to hold on to their freedom unless they were able to unite, a concern that was sadly realized over decades of conflict and bloodshed that followed. It is evident that those who experience marginalization like we did under colonial rule and unable to heal the spiritual and psychological wound that it inflicts on the human soul, often perpetuate the very systems that oppressed them. As Jean-Jacques Rousseau observed: “Citizens consent to bear chains, so they may impose chains on others in turn.”

This adds critical nuance to our analysis. Marginalization alone does not create transformative leadership; it is marginalization combined with self-reflection, spiritual healing and genuine commitment to liberation rather than revenge that produces leaders capable of breaking oppression cycles rather than perpetuating them.

Many revolutionary movements have devolved into the very tyrannies they opposed. Leaders who experienced genuine suffering but emerged with bitterness rather than empathy recreate those same dynamics when assuming power, using past victimization to justify present authoritarianism. The NPP leadership’s response to power so far suggests they have undergone the spiritual liberation Senior’s poem demands. They can do well to ensure that this remains the case and that any fragments of vengeance or humiliation wedged in any parts of their institutional makeup are identified and addressed.

The global pattern

This pattern repeats across cultures and centuries. Nelson Mandela’s 27 years in prison transformed an angry activist into someone capable of uniting a nation through reconciliation rather than revenge. Prison forced deep reflection that developed emotional regulation and moral authority that made peaceful transition possible. Gandhi’s 21 years facing racial discrimination in South Africa developed the empathy and innovative thinking that transformed both India and global understanding of resistance. His marginalization forced creative problem solving that generated entirely new approaches to political change. Abraham Lincoln’s prairie origins and political defeats shaped his transformative presidency. His experience of poverty, manual labor and repeated electoral failures created humility and perspective that privileged contemporaries lacked. His famous empathy – ability to understand even political enemies – was cultivated through struggle rather than inherited through advantage.

Environmental scientists like Rachel Carson and geochemist Clair Patterson faced years of ridicule and industry opposition before their warnings gained acceptance; Carson for exposing the dangers of DDT and Patterson for demonstrating lead contamination’s devastating health effects and fighting the petroleum industry to end leaded gasoline. Eastern European dissidents like Václav Havel emerged as transformative leaders after prolonged persecution, their experience of state oppression creating authentic connection with popular struggles.

In the same vein, many revolutionary movements have devolved into the very tyrannies they opposed. Leaders who experienced genuine suffering but emerged with bitterness rather than empathy recreate those same dynamics when assuming power, using past victimization to justify present authoritarianism. Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge, having endured French colonialism and American bombing, perpetrated genocide against their own people. Robert Mugabe transformed from liberation hero fighting white minority rule into an increasingly brutal dictator who destroyed Zimbabwe’s economy and democracy. Joseph Stalin, who experienced persecution under Tsarist autocracy, became one of history’s most murderous tyrants. These leaders emerged from genuine oppression but allowed unhealed wounds to metastasize into vengeance rather than pursuing the spiritual liberation that breaks cycles of abuse.

Why power corrupts and adversity builds

Modern neuroscience explains why this pattern exists. Power triggers measurable neurochemical changes that alter brain function, reducing activity in the prefrontal cortex responsible for empathy, moral reasoning and impulse control. Brain imaging has shown that power holders display neural patterns similar to patients with frontal lobe damage. This reduces our ability to understand perspectives other that our own by roughly 300%. High power participants more often fail to recognize emotional expressions. They become more willing to break rules when beneficial and shift from principled ethics to justify outcomes and ignore ethical considerations of the means by which they are achieved.

Power also creates increasing isolation through relational asymmetry – subordinates self-censor around authority figures, telling them what they want to hear rather than what they need to know. Bad news gets filtered as it moves up hierarchical levels. The powerful become progressively disconnected from those they are supposed to serve.

Adversity works differently. Research on post-traumatic growth have shown sustained challenges can enhance relationship appreciation, recognition of new possibilities, increased personal strength, deeper philosophical understanding and greater empathy. Brain scans have shown individuals with prolonged challenge experience have enhanced prefrontal cortex development, better emotional regulation and more developed mirror neuron networks.

The marginalized develop outsider advantages – enhanced perspective-taking abilities, social intelligence and behavioral adaptability that translate directly into leadership capabilities. They learn systems thinking from needing to understand complex power dynamics with limited resources. They develop authentic empathy from experiencing exclusion personally.

The disciplines of exclusion

Marginalization processed with wisdom develops specific capabilities that privileged individuals rarely acquire. Resource scarcity breeds innovation; those operating with minimal means become masters of creative problem solving and efficiency. Coalition building necessity develops sophisticated skills in finding common ground across difference and maintaining unity while respecting diversity.

Patient persistence emerges from understanding that meaningful change requires sustained effort over extended periods. Marginalized leaders develop generational thinking – planting seeds for trees whose shade they may never enjoy. This patience proves essential for addressing complex problems requiring long term solutions rather than quick electoral fixes.

Perhaps most importantly, principled opposition under persecution builds moral courage and clarity that leadership seminars cannot teach. They learn to distinguish core values worth defending from tactical positions open to negotiation. They understand integrity’s true cost because they have paid it repeatedly.

The blindness of conventional success

Our traditional success metrics are actually designed to select against transformative leadership qualities. Elite credentials, high status employment, material wealth, proximity to power – these markers often indicate individuals who have learned to work within existing systems rather than transform them. Research has shown that wealth reduces empathy because compliance can be obtained without empathetic connection. Early power access prevents development of internal resources that sustained leadership requires. Why develop patience when obstacles can be overcome through privilege? Why maintain authenticity when image management proves lest arduous and more rewarding?

We have created leadership pipelines that systematically overlook individuals whose struggles have actually prepared them for transformative challenges. We promote those who look like success while ignoring those whose experiences have built the character qualities our complex world demands.

The recognition challenge

For institutions seeking genuine transformation, this suggests fundamental changes in leadership identification. Instead of conventional credentials, we might ask: who has maintained integrity under pressure? Who has demonstrated patience pursuing long term goals? Who has built authentic relationships across communities? Who has innovated when resources were limited? The marginalized leader brings gifts privileged leaders often lack: authentic empathy for those most affected by policy failures, patience for long term perspectives that complex problems demand, innovation skills developed through constraints and moral clarity preserved through principled opposition.

For marginalized individuals, the message is both validating and challenging. Your exclusion may be developing precisely the qualities transformative leadership requires but this requires conscious choice to maintain integrity despite adversity, continue building capabilities despite lack of recognition and prepare for opportunities that may not come for decades. Your challenge is using marginalization as a vantage point for understanding systems that insiders cannot see clearly. Observe how power operates, how institutions function or fail, how policies affect those they claim to serve. Develop deep empathy and systemic thinking from experiencing society from multiple perspectives. Build coalitions based on shared values rather than mutual advantage.

Most importantly, understand that your worth is not determined by society’s current recognition. The qualities you are developing – patience, empathy, authenticity, systemic understanding – are exactly what our complex world desperately needs. The fact that current power structures undervalue these qualities does not diminish their importance; it may make them more valuable because they are scarcer.

The wisdom of the excluded

Society’s edges often provide its clearest vision. Those excluded from power structures can see their limitations more clearly than those embedded within them. They understand policy failures’ human costs because they experience them directly. They recognize the gap between institutional rhetoric and lived reality because they inhabit that gap daily.

This perspective proves invaluable for addressing systemic challenges that insider knowledge cannot solve. Climate scientists, social justice advocates and democratic reformers have long been marginalized voices whose exclusion from power actually enabled them to see truths that insiders could not acknowledge due to embedded interests in existing systems. They possessed prophetic vision – ability to see problems before they become crises and solutions before they become politically feasible. This develops from combining outsider perspective with careful observation, maintaining connection to ground level reality that power often obscures.

The patient revolutionaries

What the NPP story illustrates is the power of patient revolution – maintaining transformative vision through extended powerlessness while building authentic relationships and deep understanding. This patience is not passive acceptance but active preparation: developing capabilities, building coalitions, refining strategies and maintaining integrity despite temptations to compromise.

The patient revolutionary understands that lasting change requires cultural and institutional transformation that cannot be achieved through conventional political manoevring. They use marginalization as education, exclusion as perspective building, powerlessness as training for wise power use when it finally comes.

In our current moment of multiple crises, we desperately need leaders capable of transformative rather than incremental change. The Sri Lankan experience, alongside similar patterns throughout history, suggests that such leaders may be found more often among society’s excluded voices than its celebrated successes. Society’s margins may indeed hold its future leadership. The question is whether we are wise enough to recognize this before crisis forces recognition upon us and whether we can create systems that cultivate rather than waste the transformative potential that adversity often creates.

True leadership may have less to do with climbing hierarchies than with maintaining humanity while excluded from them. In a world facing unprecedented challenges, this may be exactly what we need most.