Hermann Hesse wrote a short story called “Journey to the East,” in which a group of men take a long journey. They are accompanied by a servant named Leo who does the menial chores and lifts the group’s spirits with his singing. He takes care of the little things. The trip is going well until Leo disappears. Everything falls into disarray, and the trip is abandoned. Many years later, one of the men stumbles into the organization that had sponsored the journey and discovered that Leo is, in fact, the leader of this great organization and not some functionary. This story inspired the concept of
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