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Do People Really Want Leadership Today?

“Political Science was founded by Plato and Aristotle… In its essentials the classical foundation of political science is still valid today… As for subject matter, it is nothing esoteric; rather it lies not far from the questions of the day and is concerned with the truth of things that everyone talks about.  What is happiness?  How should a man live in order to be happy? What is virtue?  What, especially, is the virtue of justice?  How large a territory and a population are best for a society?  What kind of education is best?  What professions, and what form of government?  All of these questions arise from the conditions of the existence of man in society.”  

~Eric Voegelin in Science, Politics, and Gnosticism (1958)

The wages of Woke are upon us.  Absurdity, demonization, cancel culture, the death of dialogue, anarchic governance, community breakdown, endemic violence, and socio-economic chaos now rattle our once complacent cages ceaselessly.  And though the Woke activists are numerically insignificant, their influence in government, the bureaucracy, the media, academia, and the world’s largest corporations and professions is pervasive.  Hence the vast majority of people in western liberal democracies are either dismayed but docile, or aghast but afraid to resist.

The name is new, but the phenomenon is not, and since it impacts all of us, in the home, the community, schools, and workplaces, and the nation at large, we are duty bound to recognise Woke, understand it, and strenuously oppose it.  The Woke phenomenon is in fact a repackaging of an old strain of spiritual duplicity that has occurred many times in history.  And high intelligence has never proved to be a prophylactic.

Consider the case of a brilliant young academic, a gifted public speaker and celebrity, whose genius has him earmarked for greatness.  His popularity affords him no end of opportunities to indulge an insatiable appetite for wine, women, and song, yet he finds these delights in conflict with the restless energy of his exceptional intellect, which demands a relentless search for truth.

The circles in which he moves introduce him to a group of people who are bound together by a seductive philosophy of life that seems to offer relief for his inner turmoil.  He is a good man, and there is nothing wrong with his promiscuous lifestyle, they tell him, and his obvious gifts qualify him to become part of a chosen elite, whose members alone have the knowledge to transform society and the world, ridding humanity of the age-old evils that burden us.  The young genius is won over, and spends the next eleven years of his life virtue-signaling and virtue-subverting.

The story does have a happy ending, because the young man did escape the lie, and went on to provide a massively positive influence on the lives of millions, just as he still does today.

The words of the political philosopher, Eric Voegelin, quoted above, are rich in their implications for leadership, not only in politics, but also in business, the professions, and indeed, in every form of community.  Voegelin was forced to leave Austria because of his opposition to Nazism, and spent the rest of his life, mostly in the US, in analysing why people fall for the utopian promises of totalitarian ideologies like Nazism and Marxism.  He sheds a lot of light on the current crises facing the western world.

In his book, Science, Politics, and Gnosticism, Voegelin showed the striking similarities between modern ideologies and the ancient religion of Gnosticism.  Modern neo-fascists, neo-Marxists, neo-Liberals, and neo-conservatives, and the Woke vandals of today, like their ancient gnostic forebears, feel deep dissatisfaction with the world as it is, and believe that human beings can and must take control of the historical process and reorder reality.

The essential characteristics of Gnosticism read like a description of the Wokism with which we are wrestling in the secular West of the Third Millennium:

  1. Gnostics believe that the world, that is, the way things are, is evil, and must be transformed if humanity is to find true fulfilment.
  2. Only an elite minority, gifted with an exclusive knowledge (gnosis), is able to see through the façade of the world as it is, to the reality of the evil that drives it.
  3. Life itself is all about the deadly conflict between the dark forces of evil and the chosen elite who have been enlightened by the special gnosis.
  4. Gnostics live in what Voegelin calls a “dream world”, obsessed by their vision, and hostile to common sense and any rational argument that exposes the intellectual poverty of the claims they make.
  5. In terms of morality, Gnostics exhibit a curious blend of puritan and permissive attitudes. Hatred of the conventional order of things spurs them to condemn traditional moral norms, and to promote radical social programs like veganism, pacificism, and collectivism.  On the other hand, their repudiation of traditional marriage and child-bearing and rearing encourages the promiscuous behaviour that inevitably undermines marriage, the family, and all relationships and community through the virus of deceit and betrayal unleashed.
  6. Gnosticism typically promises the establishment of a state of bliss once the evil powers that control the existing order are destroyed. However, while for the ancient Gnostics this entailed passing from the evil world of matter to a spiritual paradise, modern Gnostic movements tend to see the world of matter as the only reality, and therefore promise their followers utopia, that is, heaven on earth.
  7. All of these points underline the first principle of Gnosticism – the non-recognition or denial of reality, and the call for humanity to construct reality for itself. For a person who does not believe in reality, there is no such thing as a lie.  Gnosticism is the empire of lies.

Physiophobia is fear and loathing of being, as it manifests itself in the nature of things, especially human nature.  Wokeness is physiophobic, and since you can’t abolish human nature, irrational frustration and rage are common symptoms of wokeness.  Then there is the condition known as misology, which is an aversion to reasoning, feeling revulsion or suspicion in the face of logical debate; this too is easily recognised in the Woke phenomenon.

As Voegelin pointed out regarding Stalinism and Nazism, “…we are confronted here with persons who know that, and why, their opinions cannot stand up under critical analysis and who therefore make the prohibition of the examination of their premises part of their dogma.  This position of a conscious, deliberate, and painfully elaborated obstruction of reason constitutes the new phenomenon.”

Now we all know people, often family and friends, who are highly intelligent and successful, but who have nonetheless become loud and uncompromising advocates for Wokism, and who have sacrificed dialogue for demonization of anyone who asks questions for which they have no rational answer.  How does this happen?  Voegelin explains by citing the example of Marx, who he sees as an intellectual swindler, a man whose entire life’s work was constructed on a lie.  And he enlists the aid of Nietzsche, another Gnostic, but a rather more insightful psychologist than Marx, to throw light on the matter.

Nietzsche saw the Will to Power, the libido dominandi, as the passion that spurs a willingness to engage in intellectual deception.  As all of us should know, it is common in human beings to want to be the master, not just in politics and business, but even in small groups and families; hubris afflicts all of us at some time or other, and the ego is hard to silence.  Arising from what is often an innocuous delight in masquerade and fooling others, the libido dominandi develops a malign nature that is ruthless in manipulating and suppressing truth.

And lies always engender greater lies.  Awareness of one’s deceit is submerged, and one’s conscience is progressively smothered.

Nietzsche recognises that what drives this is the revolt against God, who is truth itself, because once God is silenced, one can make one’s own truth, and therefore  become a law unto oneself.  Marx’s own doctoral dissertation makes this clear: Philosophy makes no secret of it.  The confession of Prometheus, ‘In a word, I hate all the gods,” is its own confession, its own verdict against all gods, heavenly and earthly who do not acknowledge human self-consciousness as the supreme deity.  There shall be none beside it.”

This is a very seductive appeal to human beings, and has been since the beginning of time.  As the serpent said to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, “You shall be as gods”.  Woke appeals to not just those who accept its claims on blind faith, but also those for whom it offers justification for attitudes and actions they don’t wish to change, not to mention those who see in it the opportunity to further a particular agenda, be it political or commercial.  These people are not interested in leadership; they simply want to be masters in a new social order.

Of course, the Will to Power that says, “My will is all that matters”, is deeply narcissistic, and even the worst people still want to be seen as good, and justified in all they do.  Hence the tsunami of virtue-signalling that inundates the world in the socio-political chaos of the Third Millennium.

Andre van Heerden
Andre van Heerdenhttp://www.powerofintegrity.com/
ANDRE heads the corporate leadership program The Power of Integrity, and is the author of three books on leadership, Leaders and Misleaders, An Educational Bridge for Leaders, and Leading Like You Mean It. He has unique qualifications for addressing the leadership crisis. Since studying law at Rhodes University, he has been a history teacher, a deputy headmaster, a soldier, a refugee, an advertising writer, a creative director, an account director on multinational brands, a marketing consultant, and a leadership educator. He has worked in all business categories on blue-chip brands like Toyota, Ford, Jaguar, Canon, American Express, S C Johnson, Kimberley Clark, and John Deere, while leadership coaching has seen him help leaders and aspirant leaders in Real Estate, Retail, the Science Sector, Local Government, Education, Food Safety, Banking, and many other areas. Subscribe to my Substack HERE.

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CONVERSATIONS

  1. If leadership is a process and not necessarily about a position, then we could define political leadership as a process of mutual influence between citizens and elected officials (with the addition of the administrative apparatus), with the common good as its objective, the general interest. This definition obviously applies to a democratic regime in which free and fair elections are possible.
    That said,the crisis of the citizen’s political leadership is linked to the concept contrary to that of leadership, the victimhood: the citizen who feels himself a victim, powerless in the face of events and the power plays of the elected, renounces exercising the influence which is intrinsic to share of sovereignty which, as a citizen, belongs to him. Whenever he considers himself a victim, the citizen is actually no longer a citizen but a subject. He passively accepts everything the elect decide on his behalf, without even knowing what they decide and for what reasons they do it. He no longer has any influence, no possibility other than to passively accept.
    So, the political leadership of the citizen dies: if the citizens consider themselves subjects, the elected are free to do what they want, not what they have to, that is, to make choices that pursue the common good.

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