Leadership in Crisis- Part 2

My thoughts on the relationship between leadership and personal responsibility

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

In Part 1 of this essay, I framed our leadership crisis in terms of a corrupt, dysfunctional system and a society whose values place individuals and their self-interests above common welfare and common good. And I concluded by asking if maybe We, the People should take personal responsibility for the kind of leaders that we have.

Right off the bat, you could dismiss the whole discussion by saying, well, it’s like the chicken and the egg: Which came first, the leader or the followers? But that argument gets us nowhere. My guess is that like love and marriage, horse and carriage, you can’t have one without the other. I’d go so far as to say that no human society can function without leaders in some capacity, and there are those among us who happen to be well-suited to leadership roles because they are:

1. intelligent, creative, competent, talented and far-sighted;

2. able to motivate, direct, and inspire others;

3. know how to facilitate, organize, delegate, articulate and accomplish what many of us cannot.

But that doesn’t mean that the rest of us can only follow and obey; I think we all know what comes of blind obedience. And it doesn’t mean that only those well-suited individuals become our leaders. Far from it!

As Nils Melzer, former UN Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, wrote in The Trial of Julian Assange:

The problem is that we allow the powerful, against our better judgement, to disregard justice and the rule of law, and that we do not hold them accountable, either legally or politically, but celebrate them as great leaders and possibly even honor them with Nobel Peace Prizes. The problem is that we allow corporate bosses to ruthlessly destroy our livelihoods and shamelessly exploit the vast majority of the world’s population, and still admire them as benefactors and philanthropists when they donate a few billion dollars from their looted wealth for the mitigation of humanitarian disasters they helped to create. We do not want to see that the corporate media that feed us our understanding of world politics, and our personal circumstances, are owned by the very same people who also finance the election campaigns and careers of our politicians. Nor that those politicians, in turn, pass the laws and make the billion-dollar investments that keep allowing an increasingly narrow segment of society to enrich themselves at the expense of the general public and of future generations.

Worth noting in the above passage are the words: we allow. Our biggest challenge exists, therefore, not at the top, but at the bottom of the power structure.

But wait a minute, that’s why we have elections, isn’t it? And voting is how we citizens exercise our individual democratic right, or not? However, what good does voting do when there is no decent, competent candidate to vote for, and your only choice is between two evils? (Take the choice between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, for instance.) As Laura of Normal Island News put it:

My favourite aspect of British democracy is how the super rich get to choose which candidates can and can’t win elections. Your vote is just a secondary thing after the shortlist has been chosen and the necessary moves have been made to reduce the likelihood of you making the wrong choice.

So much for voting!

To vote or not to vote notwithstanding, I’d wager that most of us see ourselves as essentially powerless to change anything at all. Countless are the times that I feel brutally powerless in the face of the genocide in Gaza, ceasefire or no ceasefire, and a conflict in Ukraine that has the potential to escalate into World War III. If you think in terms of changing the world or saving the planet or raising universal consciousness or creating a mass revolution and overthrowing the government, then , yes, we are powerless. But we are not powerless if we:

1. acknowledge and accept the limitations of our particular situations, and

2. figure out what we are able to do within or despite those limitations, no matter how small our actions.

In a recent conversation with Chris Hedges, Dr. Gabor Maté brought up history’s failures to stop suffering and cruelty and to promote healing and peace. Although Buddha and Jesus Christ failed to end all human suffering and cruelty, it was not as Dr. Maté pointed out because these are futile goals, but because humanity is a long-term project. The task of healing the world is not yours or mine to finish. But that reality need not prevent us from acting individually or joining others in our struggles.

Credited with saying “be the change you wish to see in the world”, Mahatma Gandhi wrote:

If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. This is the divine mystery supreme. A wonderful thing it is and the source of our happiness. We need not wait to see what others do.

For change to come about in leadership and how leaders govern, we cannot afford to sit around and wait for someone to make the world better. For one thing, when was the last time an elected official asked for your opinion on past or future policy, or for your evaluation of his/her performance? And for another, how many times has a President or Prime Minister said one thing in campaign speeches and done something else, or nothing at all?

To quote C. G. Jung:

As any change must begin somewhere, it is the single individual who will undergo it and carry it through. The change must begin with one individual; it might be any one of us. Nobody can afford to look around and to wait for somebody else to do what he is loath to do himself.

At the risk of sounding Pollyannish, it seems to me that first and foremost we have to become our own leaders. The big question is how the hell are we supposed to do that?

Next: 8 relatively easy ways we can become our own leaders

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