Tulisan ini mengajukan argumen bahwa penyebab utama malaise kepemimpinan di Indonesia adalah karena tiadanya pengindahan pada nasion dan demokrasi serta tiadanya kesadaran akan simbiosis antara keduanya. Selain itu, tulisan ini juga menelusuri betapa para pemimpin di Indonesia kian tergerus dan perjalanan bangsa berujung pada tumpukan keterpurukan. Penulis mengusulkan jalan keluar: konsolidasi kebangsaan—dengan nalar dan sasaran yang jelas.
The man who faces and who fears the right things from the right motive, in the right way and at the right time, and who feels confidence under the corresponding conditions, is brave; for the brave man feels and acts according to the merits of the case and in whatever way the rule directs. — Aristotle, Ethica Nichomachea
One of the major purposes of studying politics and society, love and death, religion and science, in the light shed by the classic works is to escape the fashionable academic abstraction of excessively scientific or “theoretical” social science or literary theory. Truly great books are never abstract, in the sense of abstracting from the gripping questions of human fate and existence. Truly great books vindicate, while enlarging and deepening, the good citizen’s perspective on the issues that realy count. — Thomas L Pangle