I used to shake my head at the foolishness of people who couldn't see through the sham of the Bush administration. I thought, if they were paying more attention, or if they were more exposed to what he was really like..., but no. Here I am, a smart, well-read person who pays really close attention. People even say I hold leaders to an especially high standard. So it feels important to think hard about how it is that I was fooled about the failed leadership right in front of my own eyes.
Frank Rich wrote in the NY Times yesterday that Americans have a problem with denial that leads us to ignore warning signs about our economy, climate change, the Iraq war, etc., etc. I usually love what Frank Rich says. I have to read it out loud to my partner, "hey listen to what Frank Rich is saying today..." But this time I thought, no he got it wrong. We were just confused because we were systematically lied to. The right wing machine owned enough of the airwaves and print media and bought enough headlines to confuse Americans about almost every issue. They used the principle Stanley Milgram discovered when he did his ground breaking research on obedience to authority back in the 60's at Yale.
Milgram set out to prove that Americans and Germans are fundamentally different and that something like the German holocaust could never happen here. Americans, he surmised, were too independent in their thinking to blindly follow authority. Oops. What he ended up discovering instead, was that Americans were a lot like Germans. If a concerted, supposed authority figure told his subjects to do something, even something they really didn't want to do, even if they thought it was causing pain and possible harm to another person, they would obediently follow the authority figure's directives, despite their own personal distress. Wow. Milgram tried changing lots of things to see what would lead people to say "no" to the man in the white coat. What finally did, was adding a second experimenter who openly disagreed with the first experimenter.
Milgram's experiments tell us not only about obedience, but about leadership and ethics. It's not just me, but the vast majority who start from a place of assuming leaders are trustworthy. It's a working assumption derived of the social contract. Hmmm... s/he is in a leadership position; must be because people thought s/he is somehow worthy of such a position; therefore I should give what s/he says consideration. Too bad this line of reasoning turns out to be as circular as Joseph Heller's "catch 22." I should certainly realize by now that all it takes is for someone to strut about as if they are a leader, and pretty soon they are elevated to some leadership role with a bunch of people following them around as if they know what they're doing.
Okay, I wasn't that bad. I knew the leaders of my organization were way off track about certain things and out of touch about others. I knew that wasn't good. But I thought maybe they knew some things that I don't understand as well, and that overall their leadership would turn out to do more good than harm in the long run. Is this what many Bush supporters thought about the "war on terror," or Iraq?
I keep coming back to something fundamental about the whole idea of what a leader is. How can I know a real leader when I see one? So I'm going to start from a really flawed place: "not like these people who have just messed up so badly." So here's what I think is problematic about what all of us (Americans in general) expect from our leaders.
First, I think we need to stop treating our leaders like royalty. The pampering and hauteur we shower on them only serves to attract the most egotistical and insecure people to seek leadership posts. Leaders need to be helped to remember, not made to forget, the circumstances facing the most vulnerable people who are subject to their decisions and choices.
Second, we (this includes me) have to stop looking for leaders who make us feel safe (because they are so sure of themselves, which is a dangerous illusion) and instead seek leaders who help us grow, by challenging themselves and us. I said themselves first intentionally, because we need to respect as leaders only those people who are willing to role up their sleeves and work alongside us, and who are very clear that they too have things to learn, and a need to grow.
Third, we need to get much clearer about what honor is. As Americans, we have a bizarre, distorted sense of honor that leads to great harm when we apply it to leadership. Our sense of honor is something we might have learned from spaghetti westerns or bad WWII movies. Something about not ratting out a peer or sticking together, blah, blah. It's like reading Lord of the Flies and deciding that Piggy was the bad guy and wasn't it a good thing somebody finally dropped that big rock on his head.
What passes for honor in this country is downright terrifying. It leaves us collectively scratching our heads about whether prosecuting leaders who have lied to us and broken the law would do more harm than good to our government. Our upside down sense of honor allows people to look the other way when they see their peers doing the kind of harmful, wrong things that took place at Abu Ghraib. In the video below Philip Zimbardo shows how ordinary people can behave like monsters under the influence of such ethics.
"honor is a thing of the heart
and the heart cannot be coerced into a lie."
I think real honor is derived from love. Not romantic, hollywood love, but deep abiding care for one other and an undeniable sense of interconnection. I can only truly honor what I love and I will always treat what I honor with loving care. Genuine honoring is not something that can be scripted or forced. It is spontaneous and most importantly, it is always mutual. It is a mistake to think that pomp and ceremony and falderol, where the many are expected to fawn over one who is elevated, necessarily confers genuine honor. Think of the inauguration this past January 20th and the difference between the people whose presence was obligatory v. the people who attended voluntarily. Too often what we think of as signs of honor are rituals designed to soothe the insecurities and weak egos of people who crave being special. I can't truly honor something or someone who treats me with indifference or disrespect just by participating in a charade and neither can anyone else. Because honor is a thing of the heart and the heart cannot be coerced into a lie.
I know what I honor by listening to what I feel in my heart when I am at peace. I find what I honor in deep understanding and quiet contemplation. Not through fancy rituals where I am forced by barricades, red carpets, and brass bands to accord special dispensation to someone wearing expensive clothes. I can't honor them because I don't love them. I can't love them because I can feel that they have elevated themselves above me and rendered me invisible, dispensable, and unimportant to their continued existence. If I follow them it is only out of fear of some presumably scary, unknown alternative. When I hold onto this basic understanding the rest falls into place. It is simple really, because real honor and love in community are always mutual and reciprocal.
I'm thinking so hard about all of this because I was one of the people who stood by and clucked reassuringly in response to warning signs as the leadership of my university went about amassing a bloated and privileged entourage, dressed up in fancy suits and fed at tables dressed in white linen, crystal and silver. I ignored my personal ethics and bought into the idea that this was necessary to attract larger donations, grants, and more students. I told myself this was nothing like what I was seeing on the national stage.
As the financial crisis hit, I believed that the leaders of my university would do the right thing. I waited for them to demonstrate their care for the institution and the people whose well being they had accepted the charge to protect. And I have been among the many who have been stunned into paralyzed silence by the truth of their craven indifference.
