A leader is one who, out of madness or goodness, volunteers to take upon himself the woe of the people. There are few men so foolish, hence the erratic quality of leadership.

Updike frames leadership as an unnatural act: a person must be either morally compelled (“goodness”) or psychologically unbalanced (“madness”) to volunteer for the burden of representing others and absorbing their grievances. By calling the pool of such volunteers “few,” he suggests that most people sensibly avoid the costs—scrutiny, blame, responsibility, and the emotional weight of collective suffering. The “erratic quality” follows from this scarcity: when leadership depends on rare temperaments, outcomes will be uneven, idiosyncratic, and sometimes unstable. The line is both skeptical (leaders may be driven by pathology) and faintly admiring (some accept the burden out of altruism), capturing Updike’s characteristic ambivalence about public virtue.