How to Effectively Empower Individuals in Society

Good Information Leads to Good Decisions — Jack Welch

Let’s distill this issue into its simplest perspective.

Knowledge is Power

The most effective approach is also the approach that focuses on the most crucial responsibility for a democracy to fulfill if the people truly want to create a stable society capable of achieving its potential as a peaceful and prosperous community.

Education is the most effective way to empower people. It’s the only way to empower people.

Every other method involves coercion, imposition, and, ultimately, the subjugation and deterioration of a people.

Nothing empowers an individual more than learning to accomplish goals in ways they never thought possible before. Nothing brings society together in a common cause more than the information all members need to make good decisions for themselves.

Everything we see today recognized as toxic and destructive to democracy is directly due to an abysmal level of education. From the cheerleading to the taunts, to the entrenchments, to the emotionally unhinged betrayals of the social contract, can be traced back to a paucity of education.

Racism, misogyny, and all the bigotries eroding relationships and community cohesion to contribute to escalations in conflict to feed criminal behaviours can be cured with appropriate levels and forms of education and public awareness campaigns.

People can learn to protect themselves without relying on a nanny state if the nanny state could stop infantilizing its public.

Democracy has been perpetually criticized for its chaotic nature by people who judge democracy by its lowest common denominator, but that destroys every form of governance.

Democracy is an inspirational form of governance because it is built upon the initiative and ingenuity derived from the fruits of individual potential all benefit from.

Leaders and caretakers of the public good must serve as teachers and coaches for those who struggle to cope with challenges.

We should not strive to impose, direct, herd, or subdue people but show them the paths they can take to achieve their best selves and our best communities.

We have no problem taking this approach within our learning institutions because we have learned from experience how to motivate students to achieve their best.

Somehow, though, we reverse course once the educational curriculum is completed, and that’s to the detriment of everything we hold dear in society.

It’s because we do not extend a supportive, proactive, and growth-oriented approach to cultivating our societies that we have an escalating force of militarized subjugation of the people. Those tasked with the responsibility of protecting and serving the public have metastasized into a destructive force of militarized imposition on the people to become state-sanctioned terrorist operations.

It’s because we have not learned to appreciate what we learned from our institutions of learning that the state empowers its protectors with an attitude of entitlement to brutally abuse its people and be responsible for committing homicides of the people and being protected by the state for their betrayals of justice.

We have allowed ourselves to develop an entirely destructive approach to reactionary mismanagement of society and the issues we all struggle to live with.

It is because we abandon the lessons taught to society by its leaders in education — of all forms, that innocent citizens can be murdered in their beds while sleeping by those who are supposed to protect them.

The lowest common denominator that critics love to cite when bashing democracies is not the least educated among us but those who are educated and who abandon their lessons to wallow in their basest instincts.

The lowest common denominators among us are the leaders who fail to lead us.

The lowest common denominators among us are those who are allegedly trained in conflict de-escalation while adopting conflict escalation techniques to murder innocent citizens.

We need to change that dynamic and fire every leader who does not inspire better behaviours from the rest of us. Leaders in society must be aspirational, not deaden, depress, or dishearten us all to disengage from our responsibilities to self-govern.

We cannot create a thriving democracy by tearing each other down and shutting people out of our roles and responsibilities to ourselves and our self-governance.

We cannot tolerate those who fail to lead us to a better world because we can see the trajectory of self-destruction occurring everywhere corrupt leadership exists.

If we want human civilization to survive, our leaders must do more than provide lip service to hope. Our leaders must empower the people to cultivate hope on an individual basis. This is the only way for us to come together to solve our common problems and preserve our present to protect a future for our children.

We cannot accept less than those who can lead by example because the examples we live with now demand violence to eject them from our midst lest we lose everything we hold dear.

Leon Wieseltier — Democracy

My friend thinks I’m lazy not to want to work more than 40 hours for extra money.

The original question this post responds to in its full format is as follows: “My friend admitted that he thinks I am lazy and childish to not want extra hours for extra money. He said working 40 hours a week, smoking weed, and playing video games is very, very lazy and I should ashamed. Is he right?”

Your “friend” is opinionated and not much of a friend.

He’s also been conditioned to believe life is a race to the top of the economic ladder and that it’s within everyone’s reach if they apply themselves.

Forty years from now, he’ll find himself alone and lonely while getting nowhere because the world will have changed so much that everything he believes now won’t apply.

He will then view the friends he knew as people who had life figured out much better than he did by taking as much time away from work to enjoy life as much as possible when they still could, mainly because they managed to find a community to fit into while prioritizing their enjoyment of life so that they have supports that he will no longer have from alienating himself from the people he looked down on as lazy.

Ask yourself and him what those extra hours of work will get him. What will an additional fifty dollars do for him? Will he bank it and watch it grow over time?

That sounds wise until you realize how fragile your savings are when an economic bust comes along and corporations gouge you with price increases while keeping your salary low. Inflation eats away at your buying power so that those extra few dollars are no longer extra but necessary to survive on.

The harsh reality is that his go-getter attitude has been exploited to the point where leisure time has been lost because every moment is expected to be invested in monetization efforts.

Your leisure time is much more important than he realizes. It’s how you keep sane while he gets an ulcer.

This isn’t to say that if you feel motivated to grow your life in a particular direction, putting in extra effort isn’t worth it because it is. It’s just that you need a better reason than just collecting extra cash. Money is good for getting stuff, but what you get for it is what matters.

Something you may have already noticed is how the workaholics among us who do well financially also piss away a lot of their money on expensive toys. Instead of being happy with a $20,000.00 sedan, they buy a $100,000.00 sports car.

That may make them happy but also quite stressed when they freak out about people bumping into their car and scratching the paint.

Life is about more than impressing people with material things — not to say that you shouldn’t aspire to some luxuries, only that you don’t allow materialism to define the whole of your life.

Life is about finding a balance that makes you happy and feeling fulfilled, not about what other people expect of you.

Please do what you can to plan for a happy future for yourself but don’t forget you have a present to live in or by the time you realize how much time you’ve lost in gaining something you can’t take with you, it’s going to be too late to recover moments to build memories you can treasure.

Life is about accumulating happy memories of doing what you love and with people whose company you enjoy, not about the objects you collect or the transient status that leaves you hollow when it’s gone.

You do you, and he can do him.

If that’s not good enough for him, he’ll move on with his life, and you will do it with yours.

The only competition worth your attention is the one you have with yourself as you challenge yourself to grow as a human being, learning about yourself and the world you inhabit for such a brief and fleeting time.

Temet Nosce

How do people feel about this whole ‘woke and extreme leftist’ ideology?

The question this article is a response to was originally posted in its full length as, “What are people feelings regarding this whole ‘woke and extreme leftist’ ideology that seems to be so prevalent nowadays? Is the push back that I’m feeling actually gathering pace, with ever more people speaking up against it, actually happening?”

Describing a capacity for empathy as “extreme” is evidence of an extreme disparity on behalf of people who justify abusive behaviours toward others.

People who describe “woke” as extreme are the people responsible for the widespread character of casual cruelty permeating our societies.

Such people are bullies in society who cannot seem to exist without demeaning and disparaging vulnerable others.

These people make the most significant contributions to the most embarrassing statistics we face as a species and as societies attempting to live up to our self-declared state of “advanced civilization.”

These people are not the civilized citizens among us but the barbarian holdouts who refuse to evolve within the protections of civilized society that they mock and undermine at every turn with their atavistic predilections.

These people are the uncivilized extremes who threaten social stability while routinely betraying the social contract as they function in the limited capacities of predators and parasites, draining the best from among us while disparaging it as they gorge themselves on their benefits.

People are getting so sick and tired of their disgusting behaviours that we are seeing pushback in many different ways.

We can tell that progress is being made by the increasing extremes in their behaviours as they ramp up their disparagements to be perceived as the crazy relatives in everyone’s family.

In his debate with Kamala Harris on September 9th, Donald Trump’s performance has shown how people are tired of a steady diet of manufactured moral outrage.

How people responded to Tim Walz’s son, who openly displayed his emotionally charged pride for his father, is a distinctly different attitude of intolerance for abusive behaviour than was the case when Trump openly mocked a disabled person like the extremely psychopathic monster he is.

The hatred porn peddled by those who perpetually disparage the “bleeding hearts” in society is running its course.

The meek are well on their way now to inherit the Earth, as those who hypocritically pretend to worship a god of love and peace have known for ages. They don’t want to relinquish their power and privilege now that their end is nigh.

It is time for the barbarians to rest into eternity as the disturbing nightmares of primitive existence they embody.

We are all in this mess together, and we’re sick and tired of the crabs dragging us down to face oblivion together. Such is their fate, not the rest of humanity.

We are destined to explore the stars, and we will never make it there while burdened by the toxicity of hate-mongers among us.

They can grow up or crawl into their dank holes and wallow for all the benefits they offer with their whining negativity.

It’s time for the haters to wake up and rejoin the human race.

It’s hard work. We know.

Stop being so lazy about it, get off your rocking horse, and get to work.

Explaining “My Freedom Ends When the Freedom of Others Begins”

It means everyone is free to be who they are and to do what they choose as long as they do not infringe on the freedoms of others.

It means “freedom” is not a licence to abuse others or violate the freedoms of others.

It means religious people do not get to dictate how other people choose to live their lives, and that includes the freedom to seek a remedy to a medical condition without suffering from subjectively applied restraints or conditions by others.

It means freedom from religious persecution and the freedom to practice one’s religion without persecution for one’s personal choices.

It means the right to self-determination and bodily autonomy without restriction.

It does not mean the freedom to impose one’s views onto others because that violates their freedoms.

It does not mean the freedom to abuse others because that violates their freedoms.

It does not mean the institution of laws to dictate the personal choices of others because that violates their freedoms.

It means do whatever you want to do, think whatever you want, and believe whatever you want, but don’t be an asshole to others about it.

It means “The Golden Rule” — “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

It means reciprocity — treat others as you want to be treated, but if you’re a masochist who wants to suffer, it does not mean that you have an excuse to indulge in sadistic behaviours toward others.

It means trying to be a decent human being toward other people. It means trying to respect their identical right to be who they are and to do what they want to do, think, and believe without having to endure your assaults.

It means learning to respect other people’s boundaries.

Freedom means developing empathy, compassion, and sensitivity toward others.

It means freedom isn’t free. Freedom comes with boundaries and at the cost of eternal vigilance.

Why do MAGA come off as spoiled rotten, whiny and ungrateful babies?

This question as it was originally posted on Quora in its complete form is: Why do so many MAGA elitists come off as spoiled rotten, whiny and ungrateful babies who are in desperate need of a diaper change?

Donald Trump is a malignant narcissist, and his success at achieving such a high degree of public awareness and top of mind bolstered by all the corporate media driving him to the Whitehouse with their tacit support for his return to power is like a Midas Touch inspiring narcissists everywhere.

That’s why Elon Musk, owner of the world’s most enormous megaphone, fawns over the grifter in chief.

Donald Trump appears to naturally have what Elon had to pay $44 billion to have and with less fawning attention as he’s finding his audience of worshippers dwindling instead of doubling down in their support of him as a saviour equal to Trump. (That must also not be very pleasant for him because he is naturally much more intelligent than Trump.)

He’s like catnip for ego masturbators everywhere, and every single one of them is characterized by the image of a spoiled rotten, whiny, and ungrateful child. Anyone who has had any direct experience with a malignant narcissist, and chances are that it’s more than most realize because many still don’t get what that implies, will see the pattern in his behaviour and understand it for the malignancy that it is.

Powerless narcissists everywhere see him as the embodiment of their dreams of power for themselves, even on the smallest of levels, by permitting them the ability to act locally on their toxic impulses. It’s why hate crimes escalated while he was in office. His presence there was a license for every narcissist, malignant and covert, to feel justified in every destructive action they took against those they deem their enemies.

When we say a leader leads by example or when a role model sets the stage for all the performers to play similar roles, this is what is meant. Humans emulate acceptable behaviour. This is how we learn to socialize.

When long-repressed behaviours are allowed to let loose, they do precisely that. We saw that in spades on January 6th. — narcissists like the Q-Anon Shaman dood (Jacob Chansley), through to their flying monkeys, got into the acting out stage of rage against the system of their oppression.

Jacob even requested a special diet of organic food for him during his 41 months of incarceration, which was granted to him for “religious and health” reasons.

“Because of his “shamanic belief system and way of life,” eating food that isn’t organic or has “unnatural chemicals” would cause the client, Jacob Chansley, “systemic responses that are not simply discomforting, but debilitating and, notably, dehydrating,” attorney Albert Watkins wrote in a filing on Wednesday. Chansley had lost more than 20 pounds, and his condition was “declining,” Watkins wrote”

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/02/03/qanon-shaman-organic-food-465563

Narcissists don’t much care for anything that doesn’t cater to their self-centred sensibilities, and having a malignant narcissist at the top of the power hierarchy meant they were and are entitled to their entitlements.

A narcissist will expect the world to conform to them, and any form of compromise they are expected to make is perceived as an assault against them. Living in society is already a condition of oppression they must conform to if they wish to survive and succeed in life. They don’t want to conform to a world that does not cater to them, but they learn to do precisely that to get what they want.

MAGAts don’t care about anything beyond whatever serves their ego, and that’s why you can hit them with a mountain of facts and evidence. They’ll keep coming back with yet another fiction they can present to avoid the admission of defeat and score what they can conceive of as a win. Their egos will permit them nothing less because that risks a full-blown narcissistic collapse.

They would rather die than face that hit to their ego.

Their incapacity to admit error or publicly acknowledge a weakness is what makes these freaks a severe threat to democracies everywhere. This is how and why they destroy families everywhere.

They are psychological children trapped in adult bodies as a consequence of having their emotional maturity halted at a young age due to severe trauma.

There is no cure for them beyond addressing the cause, and that cause is a horrendous problem statistically represented by a whopping majority (70%-80%) of families being dysfunctional. That also spills out to statistics involving a mental health pandemic visibly affecting a minimum of one in five people today.

We must prioritize mental health in society to have any hope of solving our common problems and preventing another Drumpf catastrophe. Our only other choice is to wait for the next Drumpf to capture public attention, while the media will be much more prepared to ensure the oligarchs win complete control over the nation.

Source:https://www.hrmorning.com/articles/mental-health-in-the-workplace/

Why is Gen Z struggling with employment?

Genz Contemplating a Rapidly Changing Future

It’s not just GenZ.

The entire employment system is broken.

Many places advertising for employees aren’t actually looking to hire people inasmuch as conducting market surveys.

Many employers are so used to seeing hundreds of applications today that they narrow their vision for what they’re looking for on such strict parameters that they forget they are hiring people and not selecting machines.

Employers often over-rely on agencies who aren’t in the least interested in team building or cultural fits but in spotting skill sets to narrow their candidate lists by algorithms rather than people exercising their judgements.

Most applications are ruled out before any human sees them and are ruled out by humans if their applications aren’t formatted in the manner they expect.

Companies will often advertise for people “who think outside the box” but are so intimidated by outside-the-box thinkers when they interview them that they immediately reject that candidate.

Making matters worse for people in technical professions is having their skills evaluated by people without technical expertise, who judge the candidate based on the limits of their ignorance. They’re incapable of comprehending what skills are transferable and how they contribute toward success in a different area.

Even worse are companies that place upper limits on the experience they’re willing to accept, which rules out highly experienced candidates. Meanwhile, they also often advertise a requirement of years of experience in a technology that’s only been on the market for a few months.

Then they complain, after ruling out qualified candidates, that they can’t find anyone to hire because no one wants to work anymore.

Many unemployed people struggle to find work while being rejected outright because they don’t fit neatly into narrow boxes of expectations defined by ignorance and bias rather than insight.

GenZ may be experiencing struggles unique to their stage in the employment mill, but the overall employment system has massively degraded over the last several decades.

I’ve been struggling for ten years now to land a simple junior-level job in graphic production work to regain balance after having a thirty-year career as an independent professional destroyed by people who are supposed to protect and serve, not scapegoat for political gain.

What do people benefit from being cyberbullies?

It’s a toxic coping mechanism for them, like an addiction. It is less a benefit than it is a salve.

Making others feel bad makes them feel less bad about themselves.

For a bully, bullying someone is like having their arm go numb, and they bang it against a wall to ‘wake it up” and restore circulation.

Without that outlet, their inner tensions build up and explode randomly. This exposes their weakness to whoever may have bullied them, resulting in them being bullied further by their bullies.

Bullying is learned behaviour, and it’s reinforced until it sticks and takes over one’s mindset.

When that happens, that person struggles with anger management issues as they learn to cope with their emotional fragility while alienating themselves from others until they learn self-control.

It’s easy to hate bullies, but it’s also easy to see how they became bullies just by looking at whoever bullied them.

(I have an example in mind of a homicidal police officer who contributed to the death of a person suffering from a mental health condition. I want to talk about it but can’t at the moment, but I intend to do so in a more appropriate manner. At any rate, I mention it here now because I saw a photo of him with his father, and his father had “bully written all over his face and demeanour” that most would not notice unless they have been victims of bullying themselves.

This is part of a more significant societal issue that has led to the “defund the police” movement.)

Bullying happens everywhere and at every level in society. Most bullying doesn’t involve any form of physical violence. Most bullying is just verbal intimidation, while a lot of it is a consequence of a power dynamic in a workplace.

Many low-level supervisors are toxic bullies promoted to their Peter Principle peak and stay there for life because they are viewed as effective at that level while incapable of handling higher levels of responsibility.

Bullies who manage to get higher in an organization tend to because the organization itself is entirely toxic from top to bottom, and people are selected for favouritism on their ability to capitulate to the pecking order.

These are environments rife with sycophants, high turnover rates, and senior executives who refer to their staff as family while they rip them off of value for their labour.

Cyberbullying is just more accessible for a bully because they don’t have to risk direct consequences from a reactionary response. They can take their time planning their attacks while knowing their victim can do nothing to harm them.

Cyberbullying is probably the most cowardly form of bullying because of it. In some ways, it may also be the easiest to deal with because many sites and systems have blocking mechanisms that prohibit bullying, and that’s why we often see people on Quora complaining about “cowards” turning off their comments.

The more serious versions of cyberbullying are more complicated to deal with because they often involve kids from a common and relatively small social circle where they share personal details with classmates, for example, that they cannot get away from or block in ways that prevent another avenue of bullying by their bully.

Until we can acknowledge the full scope of the problem of bullying in society, victims are essentially left to their own devices to develop coping strategies for themselves, and that’s the greatest shame in our failure to address bullying in society.

The Impact of “Woke Ideology” on Society

The Opposite of Woke

It’s incredible how much of an impact a non-existent thing can have on people.

It’s much like religion and a non-existent paternal figure.

“Woke” is a word that describes an attitude of awareness over systemic injustices that must be corrected in society.

That’s it.

There is no “ideology” exactly like no “woke mind virus” exists.

All of the hysteria surrounding the term “woke” amounts to nothing more than the whining of children who don’t want to be held accountable for their abusive behaviours.

An ideology is, by definition, a collection of beliefs organized under a dogmatic banner, but to be woke isn’t a belief unto itself. It’s an attitude favouring the support of justice in society and equal access to it for all people — not just the privileged few.

“Woke” itself leads to nothing because it’s not an ideology people rally around in protest of making the world “woke.” There is no singular image of “woke.” There are no collections of rules defining “woke.” There is no institution, group or body of people who represent “woke” as any organized movement for change in society.

“Woke” means simply that a person has realized a corrupt status quo is not sustainable.

“Woke” simply means a person understands and accepts how wrong it is for police to barge into a private residence and shoot people to death while they’re sleeping.

A person who is described as “woke” is just someone who is not only capable of empathy and compassion but is also not intimidated into keeping silent when injustices occur.

That’s what pisses off the people who whine about “woke” as an ideology and invent childish slurs like “woke mind virus” to serve as a boogeyman to fear and attack it out of an illusory need to protect oneself from an imaginary threat.

Some people don’t want social justice.

Some people want to hate.

It’s an addiction for those people, and the media feeds it with a steady diet of conflict porn.

Conservative politicians build their careers around hating groups of easily victimized people.

History is filled with the graves of millions sacrificed on the altar of hatred.

To be “woke” is to know this and be horrified by what humanity has done.

To be “woke” is to want better for themselves, their families, friends, and their communities.

To be “woke” is to want a better future for one’s children and all of us as humans striving to reach our potential as a species.

Some, however, are just mentally ill. Unfortunately, that group comprising “some” amounts to one in five people in our dysfunctional society.

In a city of one million residents, that means 200,000 people are suffering from visible mental health issues.

In a nation of 350 million citizens, that means 70 million citizens are in desperate need of professional mental health services.

The COVID-19 pandemic shut down the entire world for fewer infectees than that, and we live with it every day in society instead by pretending it doesn’t exist or that it’s just normal — like almost daily mass shootings that extinguish the lives of thousands of children every year.

Gun Deaths Among Children — Pew Research Centre

Gun deaths among U.S. children and teens rose 50% in two years

How do the mentally ill who want this nightmare to continue deal with these horrifying facts?

They invent disparagements like a “woke ideology” or a “woke mind virus” because fixing these problems means they will no longer be able to enjoy watching people suffer. They will no longer be able to feel better about themselves if they can’t see other people suffering more than they do.

They can’t stand the idea that they have to work on themselves because they can’t accept how utterly broken they are as human beings. Some no longer even qualify for that distinction.

10 Symptoms of the Woke Mind Virus

Why fascism always appears in economically struggling countries.

Freikorps members flying the flag of the German Empire during the Kapp Putsch, Munich, 1920.

When people suffer from economic struggles, particularly over a prolonged period, they become desperate for someone to step up to the plate and offer solutions they cannot devise for themselves. People become conditioned through desperation for a strong leader to take charge and “lead the way to prosperity.”

Desperation causes people to lose perspective, while critical thinking skills suffer from a need to quell the pain. Anyone who can convincingly present themselves as a saviour will be welcomed with open arms.

Even though the solutions to economic problems may be obvious, they’re also too far out of reach of hope to implement them.

In today’s world, we are dominated by a handful of wealthy people who control all our systems with deaf ears to the cries of the suffering. Most of their focus is on their well-being, fortunes, and plans for their futures and legacies. The rest of us matter only insofar as we can be useful to them.

As our economies have become global and our economic infrastructures have become multinational entities, we have lost our communities.

Only a few decades ago, our communities thrived by our connectedness to each other.

We have lost that, while those who have been the greatest beneficiaries of a global economy have lost their sense of community attachment because the entire globe is their playground.

The plutocrats among us who are most responsible for the economic hardships suffered by millions are entirely due to their wins at the expense of the millions suffering today. Their goal has never been to raise humanity out of poverty, even though that has been the promise of capitalism.

They have their armies of servants at their disposal to secure themselves against resistance and to continue reshaping the world into their image. They are perceived as being too far beyond the reach of laws to allow the little people any sense of hope for justice.

Anyone who can present themselves as a leader capable of alleviating their suffering is welcomed with a total investment of all their hopes and dreams, while a widespread perception of one capable of rising to that need is one from among the untouchable class. That’s why someone like Donald Trump can succeed in assuming control of an entire party through a cult level of worship.

The trouble is that leaders who claim to be their solution also demand their unquestioning loyalty and obedience. That’s the key which opens the door to fascism because the only way for a single leader to wield enough power is to align themselves with the existing status quo of power.

Donald Trump — “Nobody know the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it.”

Is leader authenticity a matter of integrity?

The original question this article responds to in its complete format is as follows: “Is leader authenticity a matter of integrity? Should leaders behave similarly across different contexts and situations? Provide a specific example to explain your position.”

Authenticity IS integrity.

I often cringe when I read “Should” so-and-so do, be, or say such-and-such because that implies an externally imposed expectation.

One “should” do, be, or say whatever is required to accomplish or achieve whatever one seeks to accomplish or achieve by meeting externally defined expectations. That’s about it. All other motivation is derived from establishing and maintaining an inner equilibrium in which one can exist in a state of balanced compromise between the demands of the world and the needs of the self.

Authenticity is determined by a matching of one’s words and deeds. If someone is going to live an authentic life and be an authentic person, they’re not fulfilling an external expectation. They’re living in consistent alignment with who they perceive themselves to be.

Their ability to consistently maintain their authenticity while acknowledging the impact of their behaviours on others is how they are deemed to have integrity by others who make that determination about them.

One doesn’t decide to have integrity as if it’s an accoutrement to their lives. One chooses words and deeds that maintain one’s inner balance with one’s external self to be an authentic person with integrity.

A leader is just an ordinary person who lights a path or blazes a trail others can follow.

Some leaders are incredibly toxic and take people who follow them down dark paths that are absent of integrity.

I would argue that the most influential leaders we have in the world today are primarily psychopathic monsters who bleed their followers dry while being responsible for setting our world on a trajectory toward oblivion.

Followers are just as important as leaders within a leader/follower dynamic. Without followers, a leader is a solitary traveller.

The challenge we have in this world today is that those who seek leadership should have something other than followers. At the same time, too many followers must learn to distinguish between leaders who can elevate and inspire them to achieve their best and those who lead them to their slaughter.

An authentic person with integrity behaves consistently with their values across all domains, contexts, and situations. That’s what authenticity means. Be, say, and do what is right and good for you without compromising the balance permitting you to remain whole as a human being with your own functioning identity.

Integrity means others can trust you to be consistently authentic and that you will sacrifice whatever is necessary to maintain your authenticity of self.

Leadership means others recognize and value one’s consistency enough to derive value from it in whatever capacity brings them to a state of internal equilibrium.

Should followers be too broken to value integrity, so will their leaders.

Temet Nosce