LEADERSHIP AS A CRACKED VESSEL!

LEADERSHIP AS A CRACKED VESSEL!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© November 10, 2014

THE PROBLEM WITH THE AMERICAN PERSPECTIVE

We have been inundated with the idea of America’s exceptionalism and have taken this abstraction to be unsaleable.  This has often put us at juggernauts with our foreign friends, as well as with world enlightenment and morality.  

Our guiding principles, which may be valid to us as Americans, presuppose that the moral principles embraced by Americans possess both perfect clarity and universal validity.  

It is like saying Christianity is the only valid religion in the world, and its validity is how our specific denomination practices that religion.

Reality demands a different view.  Reality accepts the world as it is, and the peoples of the world as they are, not as this world and these people might or should be. 

Nothing is either/or but “what is.”  

There are good people and bad people in the world, as there is good and evil.  

Human nature is a cracked vessel and it would be well for those in positions of leadership to be aware of this, and to deal with it, not from the perspective that “the leadership has the answers,” but from the awareness that people, for good and bad reasons, behave as they do. 

Nations purport to behave consistent with national interests and their rational character.  As we know from history, as recent as yesterday, nations often behave in conflict with their national interests demonstrating the irrational side of their collective character.

Those who read me know that I have trouble with crusaders, true believers, rabble rousers, and exhibitionists.   Moral crusaders, for example, invariably produce more evil than good.  

Leadership that works is quiet, unobtrusive, prudent and moderate with prudence as its virtue.

Where I differ with authorities on the subject is that the standards of morality for a person and the nation are not in variance, but consistent with each other.    

Again, those who read me know the authority of the individual is primary in terms of promoting one’s own personal best interest, and not sacrificing that interest to another; to be guided by pleasing oneself so that in turn one can be supportive and cooperate with others.  In other words, I am not for turning the other cheek. 

Now, what follows may seem a contradiction but it is looking at the cracked vessel that is leadership.  Once one takes on the responsibility of leading others, once one steps out of the role of personal validation to take on the role of collective validation, one’s duty is to defend and support the interests of others with one’s sense of what is right and wrong.

This does not mean that one is free of moral responsibility but one is now in a servant’s role to promote, protect and sustain the well-being and rights of others.

LEADERSHIP’S CRACKED VESSEL GETS MURKY

Those who rise to leadership roles are invariably ambitions, driven by their demons and perhaps angels of their nature as well.  That said they are nonetheless driven to rise as high and to go as far as their wits and whims will take them.  

The predicate of self-interest is likely to be dominant with the desire to make the right connections, please the right people, curry favorites with people of influence, and always say what such people expect to hear rather than need to know.  So, it has been since the days of the Romans.

One of the fault lines in this strategy is that the matter of interests can become conflicting.  It starts in the microcosm of leadership in the family, company and extends to those in leadership roles in the nation. 

Parents make a fatal error when they think their job is to be “friends” with their children, when the primary job is to guide and direct them to becoming wholesome individuals in their own right independent of parents.

People in leadership roles in companies make the same error, which can color their decision-making, believing their duty is first to the workers when the welfare and survival of the company is the first priority and their basic responsibility.  

The greater magnitude and importance of leadership decisions are to the company’s permanence compared to individual worker happiness.  

This does not mean to exploit workers, which is counterproductive, but to focus on the right things that lead to survival, and to the benefit of everyone, including workers in the end.     

The same exacting moral compass is manifested at the national level.  

Economist Max Weber made the distinction between “ethic of conviction” or intention (“Do the right thing!”) and ethic of responsibility. 

  

Doing the heavy lifting of being a parent, an executive or national leader means differentiating between role demands (“Do the right thing!”) and self-demands (or self-interests and ego drive).

ABSTRACTIONS AS MORAL PRINCIPLES

For at least the past hundred years, moral leadership has been fogged up with an index of high sounding but abstract moral principles.  As they are mentioned here, many reading this will accept them as truism and wonder why they are even in the discussion:

Woodrow Wilson: “The role of the United States is to make the world safe for democracy.”

Allied Leaders of WWI: “This is a Great War to end all wars.”

Woodrow Wilson in WWI and Franklin Delano Roosevelt in WWII: “The only victory is unconditional surrender.”

Several national leaders: “There is no disputing America’s exceptionalism.”

Most Americans: “The President of the United States is the most powerful leader in the world.”

American pundits: “The United States is the lone super power.”

CEO of General Motors in the 1950s: “As General Motors goes so goes the United States.”

Democracy is not for everyone; the "Great War" didn't end all wars, but contributed to WWII; unconditional surrender punishes the adversary which leads to Hitler type tyrants; the idea of exceptionalism is ethnocentric and blinds those so afflicted to reality; the pusillanimity of America's performance in the world in recent years makes "super power" suspect; and GM is on life supports today, and is hardly the destiny of the United States.

Some say we are a country (and a time) intoxicated with abstractions.  We are seemingly divided by a set of moral principles divorced from reality with another set of moral principles derived from reality.  

As pointed out earlier (“Leadership and Toughness: Indigenous to Each Other”), we as a nation have experienced a menu of abstractions as national policy when what is called for are concrete decisions, decisions decided on the basis of how circumstances changed and in the best interest of the United States, not to appease an ally or the appeal of a moral principle.

Diplomat George Kennan claims there are good wars and bad wars, wars that are right consistent with our national best interests and wars that are not.  He had trouble with WWI and the provocations that led to WWII.  Was he wrong?

FDR thought he could charm the Soviet Union’s Joseph Stalin to live up to the Yalta Agreement that dealt with Eastern Europe after the war, but Stalin did not because he didn’t have to.  

Other presidents before and since have mistaken agreements and arrangements for reality; companies have done the same.  

Indeed, parents have been known to believe because they see their actions to be in the best interest of their children that the children will be so obliged to concur. 

Even the magnanimity of the United States has demonstrated the cracked vessel of leadership.  The Truman Doctrine was designed to give aid to Greece and Turkey after WWII, but became unlimited in scope, purpose and commitment to those who would benefit indiscriminate of need.  Often the aid never reaches the intended because of corruption or interdiction.  

There is no question the American people are a generous people.  Equally true, there is no disputing that the American people at large appreciate the good fortune they have enjoyed during their brief existence of 238 years, which is roughly the equivalent of “The Pax Romana” or the golden period of Rome.

During this period, Rome enjoyed internal order and external peace (27 B.C. – A.D. 180). 

Rome became an imperial melting pot with the implosion of peoples from the East including the Christians.  Indiscriminate wars followed, often wars that could have been avoided, or wars that weren’t in Rome’s best interest.  Meanwhile, Rome itself became plagued with promiscuity, excess, chaos and corruption.  Instead of addressing these problems, Rome became obsessed with its Empire paying little attention to matters at home.   

In the span of a brief three hundred years (A.D. 177-476), Rome declined and fell, followed by a thousand years of what has been called “the Dark Middle Ages" of Europe.    

These sins of this cracked vessel of leadership committed by Rome have become familiar to us in these times with ourselves as well as with our leadership.

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