Why Politicians Fail as Leaders

“Indeed, that was an apt and true reply that was given to Alexander the Great by a pirate who had been captured.  For when that king asked the man what he meant by keeping hostile possession of the sea, he answered with bold pride, ‘Precisely what you mean by seizing the whole world; but because I do it with just one ship, I am called a robber, while you who do it with a great fleet are called an emperor.’” 

–St. Augustine in City of God

Politics has always been associated with dishonesty, and today’s protagonists, shiftier than ever, shamelessly line up alongside the postmodern equivalents of the proverbial used-car salesman, that is, the MSM journalist, the Big Tech psychopath, and your common or garden narcissist.  Their almost universal deceit precludes them from leadership, which by definition, rests on truth, as the plain meaning of the word ‘mislead’ readily attests.

Politicians are only called ‘leaders’ because the meaning of leadership has been reduced to the mere wielding of power.  The distinction between power and authority has been eroded, and when words lose their meaning, understanding evaporates, and leadership gives way to misleadership.

Few have explained the essence of authority better than G K Chesterton: “Tyranny is the opposite of authority.  For authority simply means right; and nothing is authoritative except what somebody has a right to do, and therefore is right in doing.  It often happens in this imperfect world that he has the right to do it and not the power to do it.  But he cannot have a shred of authority if he merely has the power to do it and not the right to do it.”

This explains the malfeasance and ineptitude that characterises politics in the postmodern West.  Leadership failure is inevitable when the politics of power replaces the rule of law.

Yet note that politics is not the problem; politicians are.  Which is not to say that only scoundrels go into politics, but merely that even well-meaning people will typically be sucked into the vortex of deceit generated by the hubris and pleonexia actually nurtured in western society.

Hubris is the calculating self-centeredness of people who believe that morality is defined by their personal desires.  It is seen in the narcissism that shreds relationships at all levels, with people manipulating others for personal gain.  Pleonexia is the insatiable desire to have what rightfully belongs to others; it is the unrestrained avarice embedded in postmodern secular society, informed as it is by a materialist, utilitarian, and nihilist worldview.

Hubris and pleonexia spawn deceit and make justice impossible.  And where there is no justice, there is no leadership.

In a 2021 article in Palladium, N S Lyons revealed how China’s leading public intellectual viewed the consequences of the political perversities in the West.  Wang Huning gathered the material to write his most famous book, America Against America, while studying in the US in 1988.  In it, he expressed dismay at the societal decay evident in the world’s foremost superpower.

Wang concluded that America was caught up in an “unstoppable undercurrent of crisis”, with serious societal fault-lines between rich and poor, white and black, democratic aspirations and oligarchic power, egalitarianism and elitism, individual rights and collective responsibilities, cultural traditions and postmodern non-culture.

The Chinese scholar discerned what many western critics of Modernity have signaled over the past century and more: the problems are not such as can be solved by technocratic expedients.  They are all interconnected, and are not so much problems, but rather symptoms of a single all-pervasive malady: the radical, nihilistic individualism of Modernity and the Enlightenment Project.

Wang was dismayed to find a “younger generation [that] is ignorant of traditional Western values”, and that had been taught to despise its cultural heritage.  And he asked the logical question: “If the value system collapses how can the social system be sustained?”

Wang recognized that America’s cult of the self drove the decline of the family and the other mediating institutions of civil society, as the West embraced the idea of the social contract between the autonomous individual and Leviathan, the all-powerful state.  In America, this was exacerbated by the commodification of everything and the modernist myth that regards material reality as something to be refashioned according to the desires of humanity.  Anything and everything can be bought and sold, and nothing is sacred except the will of the individual – “what I want is all that matters”.  The inevitable consequences of this worldview are social dysfunction on an unprecedented scale, a lugubrious landscape of loneliness, and a shrieking mental health crisis.

Nihilism, by definition, means the death of culture, and younger generations, ignorant of the roots and fruits of Western civilisation and the Judeo-Christian ethos on which it has been built, are taught to despise their own cultural heritage.  With no communal belief system there can be no true community; a coherent conceptual narrative is essential to sustain any authentic society.

The failings of the hyper-individualistic and culturally-fragmented western polities are made obvious by urban and rural decay, callous economic inequality, endemic unemployment, family breakdown, drug culture, homelessness, violent crime, a demographic winter, a sense of hopelessness, spiritual angst, a loss of national unity and purpose flowing from an ideologically-driven contempt for the rich cultural heritage, uncontrolled immigration, racial tension, riots, political instability and corruption, reckless financial engineering, unrealistic asset prices, and powerful tech monopolies wielding suffocating political influence.

Liberal democracy, in the eyes of many of the greatest minds of the past 200 years, as well as Chinese intellectuals like Wang, turns out to be nothing more than an economic administrative façade, an “empire of lies” if you like, increasingly inept at concealing the corrupt oligarchy that props it up.

These are the predictable consequences of the machinations of a hopelessly wayward political class, driven by deceit in four closely related ways:

• Their agendas are always justified by an appeal to some ideology or other, an ideology being any metanarrative that blocks out aspects of reality that contradict its claims. Note that many people are not sincere believers in the ideology they support, but go along with the lies because of fear or a desire for personal gain.  Lenin’s lackeys did not believe his claim that the party (meaning Lenin) was the sole source of truth, but found it expedient to nod in agreement.  Ideology is basically a lie, a product of western modernity, which 500 years ago embraced the separation of morality from politics.  As Machiavelli misguidedly proclaimed, “Politics have no relation to morals.”
• Politicians tend to focus on systems, instead of on people, which is partly explained by the technological revolution and our technocratic mindset, but also by the fact that their consciences rest more easily in the corridors of power than at the coalface. This is why for decades in the health system, bureaucrats increase faster than clinicians, and in the state school system, bureaucrats increase faster than teachers.

In the words of T S Eliot in Choruses from the Rock:

“They constantly try to escape
From the darkness outside and within
By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.”

• Most politicians represent parties hostile to religion, ignoring the irony of their own religious zeal in pursuit of personal or ideological agendas. The reason for this, specifically in the case of Christianity, is that Liberal Democracy, whether libertarian, progressive, or socialist, has shaped western society to become the first civilization in history to actively promote hubris and pleonexia.  And Christianity condemns both. It rejects the idea that the detached autonomous self, held lightly in check only by an ever-expanding state, must be left to maximise self-gratification, unconstrained by universal moral norms.  The inevitable social dysfunction that flows from this provides ever more groups of ‘victims’ to justify state power in its endless quest to uncover and promote new human rights.  Excluding religion from politics, education, and the public sphere generally, serves to marginalize any worldview that challenges the politically correct distortion of reality now prevalent throughout the West.  Even self-proclaimed Christian politicians, more often than not, fall in line behind the reigning ideology.
• Politicians typically promise utopia, but deliver dystopia through their socially subversive policies and the age-old political tactic of divide and rule. The word ‘utopia’, meaning ‘nowhere’, is based on the Greek words ‘ou’, meaning ‘not’, and ‘topos’ for ‘place’.  It was first used in the book Utopia (1516) by Sir Thomas More.  The ‘dys’ in the word ‘dystopia’ comes from the Greek word for ‘bad’.  So utopia is nowhere to be found, but the bad place, dystopia, is everywhere.  In spite of endless promises and ever-increasing budgets, healthcare is in crisis throughout the western world, as are state schooling, tertiary education, agriculture, and infrastructure, and debt levels are astronomical to the point where they have become meaningless.  Yet in the lead up to every election, the same old promises are wheeled out, as politicians assure voters that new or streamlined systems will usher in utopia.

But there’s the rub; there are no new systems – they have all been tried.  The ones that have worked best have invariably worked because of virtuous people – leaders and followers – rather than the merits of the system.  Good people will make a bad system work; bad people always bring good systems to ruin.

Systems can obviously help to a degree in reducing abuse of power, but not in eradicating corruption.  That depends on the human heart, which no socio-political or economic system has ever been able to control; the fall of empire is a constant theme throughout history.  Human beings are a fusion of mind and body; the latter is susceptible to control by tyrants, while the former is far less so when properly shaped by an adherence to truth, as history again readily attests.

The great irony of the crumbling secular managerial state is that despite ever-accumulating information banks of Himalayan proportions, proliferating channels of communication, and ridiculously expensive state schooling systems, the mental state of the citizenry is typically one of ignorance, confusion and distractedness.  For all the hoopla around the possibilities presented by the immensely seductive artificial intelligence technologies, the essential problem – deceit – will continue to plague a civilisation built on lies.  AI is fed the lies that prop up the establishment elite, and its output will always reflect the input.  Several friends and correspondents have already reported receiving either nonsensical or ethically incoherent responses to simple questions that they posed to the machines.

And so our challenge is rather daunting, the political class, on either side of the ideological divide, have made it abundantly clear that they are not to be trusted.  And as G K Chesterton told us, “The main mark of modern government is that we do not know who governs, ‘de facto’ any more than ‘de jure’. We see the politician and not his backer; still less the backer of the backer; or (what is most important of all) the banker of the backer.”

We deplore violence, yet ignore the fact that violence is inextricably bound to the lie.  As Solzhenitsyn famously said: “Violence does not always necessarily take you physically by the throat and strangle you; more often it merely demands of its subjects that they declare allegiance to the lie.  And the simple step of a simple, courageous man is not to take part in the lie, not to support deceit.  Let the lie come into the world, even dominate the world, but not through me.”

It is of the very essence of our humanity that we tend to lie, to a greater or lesser extent, in all our dealings with our fellows.  Often consciously, but even more often unconsciously, we represent reality in ways that are favourable to our own interests.  Armed with all the subtleties and ambiguity of language, the choice of content, the refuge of silence, and the diabolical poison of deliberate deceit, we negotiate our relationships primarily for personal gain.  The only possible way we have back to truth is through the submission of self to the Author of Truth.  And how is that possible, unless you first accept that you are living a lie?

We typically rail against the deceit of our political class, but things will only continue to get worse until we address the dishonesty that characterises western society at large and the untruths that blight our own lives.  How hard it is for the children of an indolent and hedonistic society, exposed from infancy to ever-multiplying material advantages, to confront suddenly the uncompromising reality of a world in which honesty and self-denial are imperatives for human flourishing.  The incomparable T S Eliot told of it a long time ago in Choruses from The Rock:

O weariness of men who turn from God
To the grandeur of your mind and the glory of your action,
To arts and inventions and daring enterprises,
To schemes of human greatness thoroughly discredited,
Binding the earth and the water to your service,
Exploiting the seas and developing the mountains,
Dividing the stars into common and preferred,
Engaged in devising the perfect refrigerator,
Engaged in working out a rational morality,
Engaged in printing as many books as possible,
Plotting of happiness and flinging empty bottles,
Turning from your vacancy to fevered enthusiasm
For nation or race or what you call humanity;
Though you forget the way to the Temple,
There is one who remembers the way to your door:
Life you may evade, but Death you shall not.
You shall not deny the Stranger.