FRAGMENTS OF A PHILOSOPHY -- HOLLOW MEN LEADERSHIP IN A CELEBRITY CULTURE

FRAGMENTS OF A PHILOSOPHY – HOLLOW MEN LEADERSHIP IN A CELEBRITY CULTURE

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July 13, 2009

It was probably when I was not yet nine that I noticed something was wrong. World War Two was just underway and the quiet of the globe was starting to experience a nervous rumble underfoot sending shockwaves up the spine.

I didn’t understand this but noticed it in my da who smoked continuously with my mother in Iowa City awaiting the birth of my little sister, making us four siblings, two girls and two boys. We were poor. He worked on the WPA with a seven-grade education and yet he was in every sense my leader and the personification of my security.

In the scheme of things, I suppose, he was a forgotten man, one of the dregs of society limping out of the Great Depression, but in another sense he was his own man, as the celebrity culture that would come to dominate society for the next sixty-five years was just being born.

My parents felt a kinship with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt as a father figure someone “out there” that was watching over them but not in any intrusive sense, someone whose word was his bond, which in a way reaffirmed their bond to themselves. He was the President of the United States and was viewed almost in the same sense as our first president, George Washington, something of a mythic figure, but one that conducted “fireside chats” on the radio, which bonded them to him and to themselves.

It was this connection that remained throughout the Great War, and that died on April 12, 1945, when FDR died at the age of sixty-one. Harry S. Truman, a poorly educated man like my da, a feisty man like him, took office only three months into FDR’s fourth term. Truman became a presence, dropping the atomic bomb, having spats with the press over his daughter’s talent, and then bringing leadership down to the level of a scrum by ceremoniously removing General Douglas MacArthur from Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in the Korean War. The irony here is by removing the celebrity general Truman unwittingly elevated celebrity to the leadership sport of the future.

Thereafter, we have elected personalities not leaders, posers not doers, tacticians not strategist, celebrities not men of conscience. Time magazine in its July 20 (2009) issue deals with leadership superfluously, a magazine once that stood on the top of the pyramid in its industry like General Motors on its, with it and GM now a shadow of themselves.

It is ironic that the Time article quotes the German sociologists Max Weber who once wrote on authority in terms of doers, whereas the article is a profile of current personalities as leaders. The article ends by quoting Supreme Allied Commander in Europe in WWII, General Dwight David Eisenhower, who wrote an apology brief (never published) if the D-Day Invasion on June 6, 1944 had failed.

Time called the unpublished brief an example of leadership. The great WWII journalist, Ernie Pyle, got it right. General Eisenhower from the beginning was a political general, and the brief was a political failsafe exercise.

It was a “my fault” brief in the character of MacArthur’s assertion, “I shall return” (to the Philippines) when the Japanese took over the islands early in WWII. Celebrity is all about “me,” never all about “us.”

That said much of what Time says in the article I have written in the past on leadership, especially the empty suit that charismatic leadership is, yet I have a confession to make. I write in anger, and I would imagine that cuts me off from an audience. Time writes to romance its dwindling audience now essentially replaced by bloggers and the Internet.

My concern is not this evolutionary change from traditional sources of communication to a more amateur indiscriminate media. Indeed, I am an example of it. No, my concern is that of the celebrity culture that is endemic to us all, a culture in which the focus is on finding an audience not finding the measure of one’s own soul, or being acclaimed, celebrated, recognized, and, yes, rewarded when none of this has sustaining significance when it comes from the outside.

If an individual fails to develop a moral center, a moral compass, he has no guidance system. He is forever lost and cannot find his way to where he expects to go for he has no idea where he is.

It is no accident T. S. Eliot wrote of “hollow men.” He could see a celebrity culture was moving in the direction of a “hollow society” run by charismatic personalities, who look good, speak well, have the right credentials, marry well, and project the right tinsel image once limited to Hollywood.

T. S. Eliot:

“We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together,

“Between the idea,
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the shadow,

“This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.”

When a society looks to CNN for its news, when leaders look to polls to see how they are doing, when those who lead become method actors coached by gurus on how to present themselves, when leadership becomes a game and not a gamble, when children are not allowed to be children and programmed into precocious celebrities, all direction comes from outside as there is no inside to contemplate. When we worry more about what others think about us and less about what we think of ourselves, we are not in charge, we are hollow men, and what we construe as leadership is another form of enslavement.

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