Wednesday 16 May 2018

Life without leadership

This is a new phenomenon - that we must live without leaders. And this is the situation because there are none worthy to lead.

As I have said before, most modern leaders are overpromoted middle managers; mediocrities who are permanently out of their depth, avoidant of judgement, and reliant on committees and protocols to tell them what to do. The others are psychopaths - some charismatic, others merely aggressive; parasites who aim to exploit by manipulation.

There aren't any other kinds of leaders - at least not in large powerful influential organisations - and this includes the Christian churches. There are some genuine leaders of individual church congregations (I know one) - but none at the national level.

This is a novelty - to be without leaders to follow; to be in the position where we have to work things out for ourselves or else passively to consume garbage and nonsense.

In a nutshell we must be active - in our thinking; and part of this is that we need to know that we know, and know what we know - explicitly in a way that was not always the case.

Being right and doing right but without knowing it is right, has become a rare and fragile situation; extremely vulnerable to external subversion and indeed inversion.

So on the one hand there are no leaders of authority, no leaders worthy of being followed; and on the other hand, to survive and thrive, to remain Good in the face of endemic evil... we need to be conscious and self aware in such a way that, well, we do not need leaders... or at least, not in the way that we used to.

In sum: anyone who needs leadership in the modern world is going to be corrupted; so we will have-to strive to be the kind of person that can hold to good, and can discover new kinds of good, without leaders.

We needn't be infallible and unerring, luckily; just so long as we are properly motivated towards Good, and recognise and repent our errors and lapses. Just so long as we learn from experience - we will zag-zag in the right direction.




3 comments:

Kirk Forlatt said...

So true, so true.

I recently mused to a friend, "I find it impossible to have an honest conversation with a church-going Christian." After reading this post, I realized that at least part of this impossibility stems from conventional Christianity's dependence upon gurus and authority figures. I have known affluent, educated churchmen who see nothing wrong with people seeking out their pastor's advice on WHAT SORT OF CAR TO PURCHASE, if you can believe that! When someone is crippled and immature to this extent, trying to show them the wisdom of weaning themselves from leaders is indeed a fool's errand.

Anonymous said...

Another way to describe this is that we need to be Protestant.

Bruce Charlton said...

@JQP - Well, no; except maybe by a great deal of extrapolation.