The truly subversive claim here is that leadership isn't about discovering what people already want—it's about reshaping what they're capable of wanting. King understood that the masses weren't secretly yearning for integration; he had to make integration thinkable, desirable, inevitable through moral argument and sacrifice. When a parent refuses to let a child's immediate preferences dictate bedtime, they're molding consensus too: the child may not yet understand why rest matters, but the parent's conviction creates new agreement around a shared value. This separates the leader from the pollster, the visionary from the functionary.