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.
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.
This is the question as it was asked in its original form: “Will something like the “voluntary human extinction movement” become more and more popular in the future as the Earth’s destruction due to our unending greed becomes more difficult to ignore?”
So… Every human who voluntarily refuses to reproduce does so from a motivation of compassionate care for the environment to lay the entire future of human reproduction at the feet of those who don’t care about our impact on the environment.
This sounds very much like people choosing not to vote in an election because they feel their government is too corrupt, so they decide not to participate in the corruption as a form of protest. The result of that strategy is for the corrupt psychopaths among us to take up the slack of government operations. Abstention facilitates government transformation into a sociopathic entity that the abstainers chose to rebel against by stepping aside and letting the corruption continue without resistance.
Self-sacrifice may seem humane as a movement, but it merely hands unrestrained power to wreak ecological havoc over to those most responsible for environmental destruction.
By culling the portion of our population who have the most developed sensitivities of empathy and compassion, we leave behind a world of psychopaths and sociopaths who are free to do as they please without resistance.
As noble as people may want to make themselves out to be by adopting this attitude, it neither solves the problem of protecting the environment nor does it result in the extinction of humanity by attrition. What it accomplishes is to breed out the most crucial qualities of humanity that would protect our environment while allowing us as a species to achieve a balanced cohabitation with all other life on this planet.
This isn’t a solution to the planet’s problems. It’s a way of hastening them and the destruction of our environment.
It’s doomed to fail as a long-term strategy, but as a form of protest, it might successfully make a statement that could motivate the rest to rise and fight against corruption.
It is otherwise a way of stripping humanity’s only hope for evolving beyond our most destructive impulses. We need to encourage the development of empathy, not cull it from our population.
The main problem with the notion of passivist approaches toward resolving issues created by the psychopaths among us is the naivety involved in believing the most vile amongst us will experience a magical epiphany and become woke enough to care about their destruction.
They won’t.
They’ll destroy everything, and when they’re done, they’ll bemoan their fate while blaming something other than their actions for the consequences of those actions.
This would be like expecting Donald Trump to end up in prison and realizing, “Gee, maybe I should have behaved better.”
Not a friggin’ chance in hell that will happen.
If he ends up in prison, he’ll rail against the injustice of a witch hunt and believe himself unfairly persecuted until his last breath.
Neither cowardice nor apathy are solutions to saving our asses.
A democratic form of governance demands engagement, while the quickest way to destroy democracy is apathy. We’ve been doing a remarkable job of dismantling our democracies since Reagan by meekly handing over power to the powerful predators that have been reshaping human society into a collection of sociopaths who think nothing of exploiting their neighbour for a minor trinket serving as a temporary distraction from despair.
We must do the hard work of facing our monsters and reigning them in.
No shortcuts exist that will save humanity from itself.
No peaceful Kumbaya has ever prevailed against the barbarians at the gates.
This movement may signal a voluntary extinction of humanity, but it’s an extinction that will take every other creature with us. It won’t save them from our psychopathic predations.
This phrase was first coined by a Founding Father, John Dickinson. His pre-Revolutionary War song, “The Liberty Song” was published on July 7, 1768.
“Then join hand in hand, brave Americans all, By uniting we stand, by dividing we fall; In so righteous a cause let us hope to succeed, For heaven approves of each generous deed.”
It’s a bit dated and difficult to listen to now, but it reflects the spirit of the people who rebelled against an oppressive ruler and founded a new nation.
The meaning of “united we stand, divided we fall” is timeless.
It speaks to the survival success of the human species. It invokes Margaret Mead’s insight when she describes a knit bone as the beginning of civilized humanity. We have survived by uniting together and we began that journey of survival by being united when we hunted large animals in groups to feed and clothe ourselves.
To be united is more than just a word describing proximity. To be united is a pact we make to survive and prosper as families, friends, local communities, cities, regions, states/provinces, and nations.
Now that our world has shrunk to the level where geography is no longer a boundary between people, to be united now means continents and continental trading blocks. As our global environmental emergency escalates, united means the entire globe must come together as a species to restore our home to its natural state of sustaining humanity or we may not survive the culling. Our current efforts to mitigate environmental destruction already indicate many millions won’t if we don’t begin taking bold steps to fix our mess now.
Insofar as the efficiency of managing groups of people is concerned, the larger the group, the less efficiently they can be managed, and the less able any administrative body is to meet the group’s needs.
This dynamic creates a tension between individual needs and group needs that scale beyond individuals and their tribes into tensions of needs between tribes and regions, regions and their nations, and a global community comprised of a nesting doll of associations.
Even corporate structures are defined by layers of independence within a hierarchy of authority. Sections, departments, divisions, regions, and boards represent independent areas of authority limited by scope and subordinate to an escalated chain in a hierarchy of authority.
The human mind also works similarly within a structure of escalated authority in processing information. Our AI development efforts mimic that structure because it is the most efficient way of processing and managing escalated levels of complexity at escalated degrees of abstraction.
At any rate, after all that preamble, there are limits to what any state is capable of simply because of limited resources. In Canada, the differences between provinces are a little more obvious in my mind simply because of my familiarity with differences in resources across regions. In the western province of British Columbia, forestry is the primary industry and source of economic growth for the entire world. Next door in Alberta, the oil industry has generated its wealth. Its rich resources have had its provincial politics polluted by greedy Americans like the Koch brothers. Next door to Alberta is the province of Saskatchewan, which has a farming output that has fed the world. Manitoba has a greater diversity of resources to exploit but has had essentially enough to sustain its economy. The same is true for Ontario, where national equalization payments across provinces have helped to stabilize the country’s economies during periods of instability.
I’m not as clear on the specific details of U.S. methods of assisting member states — but the point of being united, over and above the typical answer of a military force to protect the nation from foreign aggression, is the national security arising from economic stability across all states.
Each state has the freedom to operate and manage its affairs as the citizens of each state determine what is best for them.
Freedom, however, and as this question implies — along with all the numerous exclamations by many people and groups like libertarians and anarchists fail to appreciate that freedom is not free. Freedom is always defined by limitations and accompanied by obligations.
For each state to exist as its own country would make each state vulnerable to numerous enemies ranging from foreign agents (including all other states), economic volatility, and bad actors within each state. Operating as a united states means all states are members of a community working together to ensure mutual security, stability, survival, and prosperity.
Many Americans have lost sight of the significance of community synergy and have allowed themselves to buy into the toxic competitiveness that justifies selling their own families down the river for a few extra pennies in their pockets.
These Americans, Canadians, and essentially the whole of conservative ideology all across the globe today have lost sight of the value of the community while pursuing a cutthroat agenda of “I’ve got mine so fuck you”.
It is this perversion of individual desires above the needs of the many that has led the nation down a path of toxic fascism that threatens the end of 243 years of democracy. If Americans lose their crucial battle for freedom in their next election, if they install a convicted felon as their head, then that will serve as a severe blow to freedom for all people all across the globe. The hegemony of plutocrats and their medieval infrastructures of authoritarian operations we casually refer to as corporations will assert their ascendance above all who are reduced to disposable cogs in a modern facsimile of ancient serfdom.
Each state should want to be an integral part of a larger community if it wishes to survive as an independent community. It’s as much in their best interests to be united as a nation as it is in the best interests of their citizens, families, and communities, as it is also in the best interests of all citizens as a united whole.
For the reasons cited above, the citizens of the U.K. are now suffering from their childish error in judgment by voting for Brexit. They are learning to cope with their grievous error of impetuous judgment, like the petulant child in a family who decides they can cope well enough with a treacherous world to survive on their own while they still haven’t reached adulthood. They often can’t and are converted into forgotten faces buried within statistics.
The way forward for the survival of our species is not to fractionate ourselves into warring tribal units but to unite as a community to stand tall as we meet challenges far more monumental than we have ever faced.
Here’s a song based on the phrase “United we stand, divided we fall” in an easier-to-listen-to version of the expression as interpreted by “Flower Children” from the “Age of Aquarius”:
“For united we stand Divided we fall And if our backs should ever be against the wall We’ll be together, together, you and I.”
As a child growing up in an era where television programming ended at the end of each day with a closing message, this song inspired me even as I struggled within my fractured community.
It still holds meaning for me, and I believe more firmly than ever before in my life that this is the way forward because the nightmare of toxic individuality we have been cultivating is responsible for creating a world of psychopaths I do not want to live in.
BONUS:
While doing some basic research to answer this question, I discovered a modern variation of the expression “United We Stand, Divided We Fall” by the group “Two Steps from Hell”. Of the three musical examples provided, this one is far less literal, far more emotive, and far easier to listen to:
I also learned it was music used in an advertisement for the MCU release of Captain America’s Civil War:
thotbag 