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The Law of Leadership

Classical Natural Law gives rise to natural rights, grounded in human nature rather than human convention.  The use of the word ‘classical’ is important because its understanding of nature differs from the modern understanding.  The classical understanding of nature sees it as a thing’s essence, that which makes it what it is, as something with definite meaning and purpose, naturally oriented towards the achievement of certain ends.

The modern understanding of nature, on the other hand, is malleable.  The mechanistic worldview of Modernity rejected the idea of innate meaning and purpose in things in favour of a materialist vision of the world as mere matter to be refashioned by human beings in their quest for Utopia.  Hence Nazism, Marxism, and libertarian technocratic meritocracy.

Like all natural phenomena, the practical reason of human beings is directed towards specific ends, namely, whatever the intellect perceives to be good.  Obviously, a properly informed, rational person will perceive the fulfilment of natural human potential as the good to be pursued.  When we misconstrue what is good for us, it is the result of ignorance, irrationality, or perversity.

So good conduct is simply that which is aligned with right reason.  To be properly rational is to do what is good to achieve the goals set for us by our human nature.  And it is not difficult to list things that are good for us, and by contrast, things that are bad for us.  Truth, justice, freedom, community, peace, meaningful work, and challenge are good for people, while lies, injustice, slavery, social isolation, violence, unemployment, and inertia are bad for us.

As rational animals, human beings are naturally social and political, living in communities and depending on others in various ways for our mutual well-being.  At the heart of human societies are family relationships with their natural rights and obligations, and groups of families form wider relationships in which we become friends, neighbours, employers or employees, citizens, and so on.  Obviously, the flourishing of these relationships is a natural good for human beings.

The agrarian activist and writer, Wendell Berry, gives us a lot to think about in this regard when he talks about the injustices visited upon people in rural America: “bankruptcy, foreclosure, depression, suicide, the departure of the young, the loneliness of the old, soil loss, soil degradation, chemical pollution, the loss of genetic and specific diversity, the extinction or threatened extinction of species, the depletion of aquifers, stream degradation, the loss of wilderness, strip mining, clear-cutting, population loss, the loss of supporting communities, and the death of towns.”  If this, together with the degradation of humanity in the inner cities, is what liberal democracy has to offer, we can say with certainty that it is not justice.

One might also reflect on the injustices of the Crash of 2008 brought about by the corruption of bankers and politicians.  In the preceding decade, politicians from both parties in the US manipulated the mortgage system to enable people with no money to get mortgages for homes costing more than half a million dollars.  This shakedown of the taxpayer allowed politicians to brag about the great surge in homeownership their supposed vision had created.

Bankers bundled the worthless mortgages into investment packages, in which complex financial engineering allowed few people to understand the menacing risks.  Of course, the bankers and politicians never faced any penalties when the house of cards came down.  For example, one of the too-big-to-fail banks was awarded $45 billion in bailouts and $300 billion in taxpayer guarantees.  Many politicians have thrived, continuing to defraud the taxpayer ever since.

As Frederic Bastiat, the French economist said, “…legal plunder can be committed in an infinite number of ways.  Thus we have an infinite number of plans to organize it: tariffs, protection, benefits, subsidies, progressive taxation, public schools, guaranteed jobs, guaranteed profits, minimum wages, a right to relief, a right to the tools of labor, free credit, and so on.”

Liberals, libertarians, progressives, socialists, and extremists of both left and right, all claim to hold the keys to utopia, but their visions never materialise.  They offer only ideological agendas that, as soon as they are exposed in rational dialogue, are seen to promote the narrow interests of a few to the detriment of the many.  Ideology, by definition, can never be the source of just laws.  And ideologues are inevitably misleaders.

Classical Natural Law theory recognises private property rights that are robust but not absolute e.g. property owners are never justified in undermining the Common Good.  Accordingly it rules out socialism at one extreme and laissez faire liberalism at the other.  There is plenty of room between those extremes for reasonable debate on how best to apply the principles of Natural Law, and solutions would depend on insights drawn from economics, sociology, and political theory.

According to Adrian Vermeule, Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard, the Common Good may be understood as: “The structural, political, economic, and social conditions that allow communities and individuals to live in accordance with the precepts of justice: ‘to live honorably, to injure no one, to give everyone his due.

Plato provided a sound idea of the Common Good: “Our aim in founding the State was not the disproportionate happiness of any one class, but the greatest happiness of the whole; we thought that in a State which is ordered with a view to the good of the whole we should be most likely to find justice.”  The same principle applies to any community, business, or family.

So the Law of Leadership is simply this: The purpose of a leader is the Common Good, the flourishing of all.  It requires laws that promote justice, that is, true community, in which people are virtuous, avoid harm to others, and give each and every person what is due to them.

And if there is no justice for all, then there is no justice at all.

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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4 CONVERSATIONS

  1. Andre, these sentences, strung together from different parts of your essay, seem to constitute the heart of the matter:

    “The prime purpose of leadership is justice. The prime purpose of justice is the Common Good. The prime purpose of the Common Good is human flourishing in community. And the prime instrument for the achievement of all these benefits is law, properly understood. So law, even in the form of rules or convention, is a measure of leadership. And law is measured by justice … Things become more complicated when it comes to social conduct, especially in a climate of moral and cultural relativism and the autonomous will of the individual. Hence the interminable wrangling about capitalism, socialism, immigration, education, climate-change, vaccinations, abortion, euthanasia, the nature of marriage, gender fluidity, drugs and alcohol, etc. … As rational animals, human beings are naturally social and political, living in communities and depending on others in various ways for our mutual well-being. At the heart of human societies are family relationships with their natural rights and obligations, and groups of families form wider relationships in which we become friends, neighbours, employers or employees, citizens, and so on.”

    The post-modern West is in decline because we no longer share definitions of the Common Good or human flourishing. My special interest is more important than your special interest, and I’ll only believe I’m flourishing when my special interest is fulfilled to my satisfaction. As a result, the law is meaningless because “justice” is utterly subjective. So, we’re no longer the rational, communal animals we once were because we’ve chosen to use socialization and politics as tools of divisiveness, rather than instruments of unification. And the dissolution of family relationships and their influence on children is hastened by government intervention that nullifies the influence of parents, treating children as wards of the state and vessels for ideology.

    The thing that appalls and horrifies me most is that so few people seem to see what’s happening or to care about it.

    Thank you being a voice of sanity.

    • Many thanks, Mark – you are absolutely right about the disintegration of community in the West. We see it in the US because that’s where the news focus is, but we are experiencing the societal collapse right here in NZ, and the same is happening in Australia, Canada, and Europe. The roots of the problem lie in the intellectual revolution of some 500 years ago and the birth of Modernity – the subject of my essay Disenchanted in Babel. Seems everything I write these days centres on that foundational shift. Always appreciate your support.

  2. The common good is a concept that arises from far away and is at the center of Christian thought, and is a fundamental principle of the Church’s social doctrine. In secular culture, on the other hand, the concept of the common good leaves the scene since the early Renaissance and has not yet recovered the ground progressively lost in modernity, continuing to be anachronistic for many, above all due to the persistence of an individualistic vision of man, which at the base it undermines the possibility of founding its sociality, and therefore politics, on an objective fact around which to converge.
    As a good of each and every one, it must include everyone, starting with the excluded, the most fragile and the poor; it must also include future generations, especially in terms of environmental resources; it does not admit the excessive inequality of income both between the citizens of a nation and between individual states, which is still so widespread today and has always been the main cause of all social and international tension. It is the commitment to the common good that allows the Christian to tend to God as his ultimate goal and to the individual and to political action in general, to pursue that happiness which, from Aristotle onwards, continues to be the ultimate goal of life human and which, while not coinciding with the common good of a nation or a people, nevertheless constitutes its presupposition.

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