Episode 6 - ELECTING FIT AND WORTHY LEADERS

In this episode we reconceptualize our understanding of the role those in power and authority and in that light, examine our responsibility to elect fit and worthy leaders, capable of meeting the needs and challenges of our time.

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Hello and welcome to Reimagining Our World, a podcast dedicated to envisioning a better world and to infusing hope that we can make the principled choices to build that world. In this episode, we re conceptualize our understanding of the role of power and authority and examine our responsibility to elect fit and worthy leaders. I'm delighted that you could make it today. It'd be lovely to see where you all are tuning in from. I know we have folks from all over the world, so if you want to just drop something in the chat telling us where you're from, that would be lovely and perhaps have a conversation in the chat on Facebook or YouTube, wherever you're tuning in from. Okay. Last time we were together last Saturday, we talked about one of the key responsibilities of leaders, those into whose hands we entrust power and our destinies. We used a powerful quote from Jim Rohn, who said that to lead others means to help them change their thoughts, beliefs, and actions for the better. And we concluded that this is one of the main tasks of leaders, or one of the important ones, which is to build unity of thought amongst the population and then followed by unity of action. Today we're going to look at a corollary responsibility that we have as electors in any society. That is the responsibility to elect worthy and deserving leaders. In other words, leaders who are fit to meet the needs of our communities, be they local, national, or global. For instance, by providing us with equitable access to health, to education, to shelter, safety and security, opportunities for dignified work and to fulfill our purpose and potential in life. To really recognize the power and agency that we have as electors in doing this. One of the things that comes to mind, one of the very egregious and abject failures that we saw in 2020 in one part of the world, and this happens everywhere, we can't cover the whole world, but it was the explosion that happened at the port of Beirut in August 2020, when you had 2, 750 tons of dense ammonium nitrate that had been stored in a warehouse for months. And despite all the pleas on the part of many people that it be moved to a safe location, it wasn't. There was a failure of leadership at many different levels caused a massive explosion that registered 3. 3 on the Richter scale and was felt as far away as the country of Cyprus, which is 125 miles away. It destroyed and damaged more than half of the city of Beirut. Hundreds of thousands were left without homes. 6, 500 people were injured, 190 died, and it was just an absolute catastrophe that could have been avoided. The question is then, What is our responsibility as electors to elect fit leaders so that these kinds of things and the kinds of disasters we've had never happen again. Disasters with coronavirus, with the complete lack of preparedness at all levels, global, national, local. The absolute failure of responsibility on the part of world leaders to make the binding decisions that will allow us to arrest the process of global warming and mitigate some of the damage from climate change. So why is it important that we take on this responsibility and talk about it today? I've noticed that a lot of effort and energy is put on designing and reforming institutions. And that's incredibly important because you do have to have well designed institutions that are structured to afford us all these opportunities that we were talking about. However, you can design the most perfect institutions, but if the people who are members of those institutions are unfit, those institutions become very susceptible to abuse and corruption. So, we have to look at both sides of the equation, not just dealing with creating fit institutions, But making sure that the people who represent us within those institutions are truly fit for purpose. Now before I proceed, I want to very clearly give a disclaimer. None of my thoughts here are driven by any sense of partisanship. I do not belong to any political party. I completely shun partisan politics. We are going to be talking at the level of principle in an attempt to re imagine the world that we could have. This is an important conversation that we all need to be having, and it's important that we raise it to the level of principle, as we discussed in one of the prior episodes, so that we can then apply these principles to solving the challenges of today, which include the fact that we have a lot of leaders who are failing in their responsibility to protect and guide us and to make sound decisions. Okay, I'm going to start with by saying that there are three particular areas that we need to focus on. These are my own personal thoughts that I want to share with you. The first is if we're going to address this problem of unfit leadership, we have to start by shifting our mindset around what power and authority mean and what the purpose of power and authority is. This is a big topic. I'm not going to delve into a lot of detail. I just want to plant a couple of seeds for us all to reflect on. Maybe between this week and next week you could reflect on it and maybe post again in the chats or come back next time with further thoughts and ideas. At the moment, the way most of us conceive of power and authority is that those in power seek to dominate and control us. Control us as people and control the resources that are at their disposal because of the positions that they're in. They have access to amazing resources. As a result of this view we're very cynical, and human beings around the world have generally become very distrustful of those in power and those in authority. And indeed we expect them to lie and cheat and steal if they can get away with it. What a cynical way to approach something that is so fundamental, which includes electing leaders who have the reins of our affairs in their hands and our destinies in their hands. So we have to take responsibility for that cynicism and for the passivity that comes with it and the blame. So we apportion blame, this leader's bad, that leader's bad, but rarely say, Oh, well, we're the ones who elected this leader. It's our responsibility. It's time to own it, and we don't like the results. So we need to shift what we've been doing. And this is the purpose of this exercise. What if we flipped this mindset and this belief to say instead, that the job of those in power and authority is actually not to dominate and control, but to create the necessary conditions within society that allow each and every one of us to develop our potential and to live lives of meaning and purpose. That is an amazing shift, and I posit that if we were to make that shift in mindset a lot would change. If we were to associate the concept of power and authority with words such as empower or enable or encourage, as opposed to dominate and control, how different might our conception be of those in authority? The second thing we need to consider is that, at the moment we think of those in power and authority by and large as being driven by their egos, by egotistical interests, and definitely by their self interest. What again if we were to flip that notion and say, actually, what we associate power and authority with is the concept of service? That these folks have been put in these positions, because they have a duty, a responsibility, but beyond that, a privilege to serve those who have elected them. It brings to mind the analogy of a waterfall. If we think of a waterfall, you think of this cascading water that is so powerful that crashes down the rocks from great heights It seems so majestic and it makes a huge uproarious sound, and you can get crushed by the water. But actually the place in the waterfall that is the most powerful is the reservoir at the bottom, where the water actually pools and you can access this water of life. That is really the place of servitude, the place of humility where all leadership should reside. The third mindset change that needs to happen is this. At the moment, we tend to assume that those who are in positions of authority are somehow better. They have a higher station, they have a higher status, and they're somehow better than the rest of us. Many leaders believe that to be so about themselves. But what if we were to again flip this notion and recognize that all that's happening is that these folks are merely fulfilling a necessary function in society. They happen to be the best suited to fulfill this particular function, to be these particular cogs in the wheel at a particular period in time. Every single one of us is suited to fulfilling some function in contribution and service to society at any given time. And people in positions of leadership are no better or worse than anyone else or shouldn't be regarded as such. So some of us may be really good at sewing, as some are very good farmers and can provide food. Others are really amazing as health workers or teachers. And some are really good at managing other people and coming up with creative solutions to big problems and who can empower and encourage and guide people in order to go towards those solutions. It's sort of like an army. Not everybody in an army can be a general or an officer, and not everyone can be a foot soldier. You need the hierarchy not because people are better, but because some are just better suited to particular tasks. Okay, now once we have flipped our mindset in the ways that I have proposed in those three particular ways that we've just talked about, we'll soon start to see that we automatically shift our attitudes towards what we're looking for in our leaders. If those three mindset shifts are actually true and we come to believe them and espouse them and we imagine them as what we want the future of our world to be, then we will start looking for completely different things in our leaders. Instead of looking for people who are just charismatic, who can stand up there and wow the crowds and who have silver tongues or who make grand promises, we start to look for a couple of completely different things. I propose that there are three criteria that we're going to look at. We're going to start looking very closely at the qualities of character that we want in our leaders. First and foremost, amongst these qualities is the quality of honesty, the ability to tell the unvarnished truth. As electors, how do we know that somebody is likely to be honest? Well, you know what? It's actually based on common sense. To my mind, and I share this thought with you, humbly if somebody has been known to cheat on their spouse during their life, the one person that they have promised to honor and to be faithful to, if they can't even be faithful to that one person, what makes me think that once I have elected this person, they're somehow magically going to change and be faithful to the promises they've made to me as an elector, even though they don't know me from Adam or Eve. The same is true of business. If someone is known as a cheat and an embezzler in business, why would they suddenly change once get put in a position of power where the temptation is even greater? It's kind of crazy. And this is where we have to take responsibility for, our choices in elected leaders. There was a very funny and interesting comment by a former British parliamentarian, Rory Stewart, who was hoping to run as leader of the Conservative Party in 2019 and become the next Prime Minister after Theresa May. He had been going around the country meeting people and he was interviewed on the Economist radio podcast and he said something really interesting. He said, you know, in talking to people, I've been surprised to recognize that people actually want to be told the truth, even when it's unpleasant, and even when it's hard to swallow. I thought, yeah, you know, it's about time that our leaders recognize this. Okay, the second quality we need to be looking for is freedom from prejudice. We don't want somebody in positions of power who will stoke the fires of hatred, discrimination, and prejudice. Rather, we want to have somebody who's interested in the collective interests of the society that they represent and who is a unifier above anything else. If we do this, we can avoid some of the most egregious human rights abuses that we have seen on the face of this earth. The genocides and the ethnic cleansings. The way the Rohingya have been treated in Myanmar and who are now in camps in Bangladesh. Or the Uyghurs, the problems in Northwest China, the problems in Syria, and on and on and on. Really look at any part of the world. Black structural racism in the United States. All of these stem from this very dysfunctional habit and quality of prejudice. So we have to take responsibility when electing leaders to make sure that this quality does not exist, that they are free of the scourge of prejudice. The third quality is we must look for people who have courage. Courage to tell the truth as it is, as Greta Thunberg famously said to the UN General Assembly, to the leaders assembled there, tell the truth, tell it like it is. She was talking in particular about climate change. Don't sugarcoat it, don't deny it, don't lie about it. We also need them to be courageous about being creative and innovative about solutions they propose. We live in a time where we have to majorly think out of the box. In fact, we have to forget that a box existed. Because the kind of thinking that got us here, as Einstein famously said, we can't use that same kind of thinking to get us out of the problems that we're in. They have to be courageous in that they have to be willing to do the right thing, no matter how unpopular it may seem. So these are some examples of ways in which we need to look for the quality of courage in folks that we are thinking about electing as our leaders. As one of the former politicians in Luxembourg, Jean Claude Juncker, famously said, "We all know what to do..." This was apropos of the financial crisis, the euro crisis a number of years ago. "...but we don't know how to get re elected once we've done it." What an astounding statement. At least he was being really honest. But really, is it about them getting re elected? Isn't their job and responsibility to serve and do what is right in order to get us out of these problems as opposed to think about, oh gee whiz, if I do this, what are the chances of my getting re elected? So this is again a dysfunctional habit that we need to break out of. Another quality is freedom from corruption, and I don't need to say more about this because corruption is rife in almost every single country in the world. It's been stunning to see how many amazing scandals, and this is just the ones we hear about, have taken place around the world. Whether you look at Asia, Europe, Africa, North America Latin America, it really doesn't matter, everywhere. And it's quite a scourge. The next quality is competence, just basic competence in administering the affairs of people and basic understanding of policies and laws and foreign policy and domestic policy. The next two qualities are really important ones, and we've learned how important they are during COVID. The willingness to listen to us, the electorate, in a spirit of humility. And compassion and empathy, two qualities. So willingness to listen and compassion and empathy. And in fact, a number of interesting articles have been written demonstrating that the countries who have done the best in tackling COVID have been countries in which the leaders like Jacinda Ardern, I'm going to mention her name because she's been astounding in the qualities of person and of character that she has evinced. Willing to listen to what the people need and want and be humble about it. And also to then show compassion and empathy, which are not signs of weakness, but rather signs of humanity and strength. These are two qualities that women in particular are strong in. And again, we're seeing during COVID that women leaders who have been more willing to demonstrate these qualities and their societies and countries have fared a lot better as a result. And generally the last quality is just to have a strong moral compass. The ability to distinguish between what is right and what's not, and to have the courage to do it. Now, why are these qualities so important? I would suggest that we need to do the opposite of what we tend to do right now. We put what I call the cart before the horse. We tend to look at what people's policies are going to be and what are the promises about what they're going to do once we elect them I think we've got it completely wrong. We need to pick people on the basis of their qualities of character, first and foremost, as we've just discussed. They also need to have certain skills, as I said, some basic competences. And then we need to trust them to use their goodwill, their skill, their conscience, and the ability to consult and to listen and to empathize in order to tend to the problems. There's a famous quote from Abraham Lincoln, which I love. He says, I never had a policy, I have just tried to do my very best each and every day. And in fact, over time, his understanding and his own moral conclusions about what was right and wrong evolved, and he ended up making decisions that served the United States of America very well, and in fact, kept this union united and together. The other reason why it's really important to first and foremost elect those with these qualities is that we need to afford our leaders the agility and the ability to adapt to new realities instead of electing them thinking they're going to do X. So an example is this, Boris Johnson was elected on the basis that he was going to get Brexit done. Little did the people of the United Kingdom expect that he was going to deal with a pandemic, with the global economic recession, and with facing the scourge of racism within his own country, on top of getting Brexit done. But all of a sudden the promises that he'd made and the agenda that we thought he would have, shifted. When Harold Macmillan, a former Prime Minister of the UK was asked, what do you think is most likely to throw government off course? This is what he said. "Events, dear boy, events." And that is so true. We have seen it with a coronavirus pandemic in spades. So better to elect someone who has the capacity, the moral compass, the qualities of character, the good judgment, the ability to consult, and who has the interests of all of his or her people at heart, rather than elect them on the basis of promises that they very often can't keep once they're elected, even if they want to. Or they're beholden to moneyed interests. The other two things we need to look for, other than qualities, two other criteria, are what are the motivations of these people who are running for leadership and what is their record of service. Fortunately, in today's world, with the internet at our disposal, it is very easy to discover people's motivation and record of service based on their past history. Are they interested in money? Is that what's driving them? Are they interested in status and ego and influence and power? Or are they willing to work for the collective interest of not only their people, but the nations of the world? And this brings us to one of our earlier episodes in which we talked about the fact that humanity has now become like a single organism, because we're so interconnected and interdependent, and that this is a social reality and that there is a principle that governs our social reality, the law of oneness. If we ignore that reality, our institutions as we see are going to crash and going to continue to crash. So we need to have leaders in all our legislatures around the world and at local levels who understand that when they make decisions, they're not just making decisions for the people in their locality or nation, but about for people everywhere. And climate change is a perfect example of this, as is COVID. Our behavior in any one place will impact the lives of people all over the world. I am going to end here. There is a skill that is required in order for us to be able to apply these three criteria. I'm not going to discuss it today. Hopefully we'll discuss it next episode, but I'm going to end for now and take any questions if you have them. I'll also remind you, as I've been doing, that if you like the material in this program, you will like this book that we just released, The Alchemy of Peace: Six Essential Shifts in Mindsets and Habits to Achieve World Peace. It is available around the world on Amazon and on Barnes Noble and Kobo. com websites. And here is the cover. But I am now going to look at the comments and see what we have. Yep, standing up against corruption. Thank you, Alex. Yes, yes I'm just going to put this up so you can all see this. Laws of nature require that the new needs to be built on the ashes of the old. Existing social structures are well rooted and fireproof at the moment. Not so fireproof as it turns out. I mean, we're seeing our political, social, economic, environmental systems collapsing under their own weight. And it will happen. And the funny thing about collapse is once things start to collapse, the momentum starts to accelerate. I'm struck, for instance. Those of us who lived in the 80s, we never imagined, nor did the experts, that the Berlin Wall would come down so quickly or that the Cold War would end seemingly overnight. And yet when it did. It just happened so fast that we had whiplash. Same with the end of apartheid in South Africa. It looked like that system was going to continue to last for decades. And yet when it was over, it was over overnight. So I'm very optimistic. I think that things are already starting to unravel very quickly and that the momentum is only going to accelerate. We need to be ready with something new, which is one of the reasons we're doing this series, Reimagining Our World, because if we don't have a vision of the new thing we want, we're likely to gravitate towards the old, which is based on old mindsets, old ways of thinking, and old dysfunctional habits. So we need to raise those to the light of awareness, become aware and conscious of them, and then make a choice to say, No, we don't like this anymore. We don't like the results. We need something new. Okay, someone's asking my thoughts on educating. I don't think of it so much as educating as raising consciousness amongst our friends and acquaintances who are completely motivated by party choices. I think we just start by asking questions. You know, how well has this system worked? What could we do better? What is it costing us to stay attached to this system of partisan politics? Is the cost too high? What might we do differently that would give us more of what we want with less cost. So really probing. We're not.... I don't feel it's my job to educate anyone, but I do think it's my responsibility as a citizen of the world to have these conversations and to raise questions. Questions are often far more powerful than telling people what they should and shouldn't do. And it also doesn't put up barriers, to people saying, well, who do you think you are? Who knows better? What I find interesting apropos of partisan politics, is that there've been some really interesting articles and a lot of interesting work done about maybe the time has come to do away with political parties, because they're leading to tribalism, increased polarization, and it's rending our societies apart. And if you tear apart the social fabric, you've got nothing to work with. And of course, President Washington, the first president of the United States, he warned this country against having political parties. Because, he said, you will end up in a position where you will basically divide the country badly. So we need to start being imaginative. Look, if we can go to the moon and go to Mars and have shuttle trips and do all these amazing things and produce a vaccine in 10 or 11 months, surely we can come up with a new system of governance and elections. So that's what I would do. I would ask a lot of questions. Yes, Pete Baldwin, let's make justice go viral now. Yes, justice is a really important principle. We talked in one of the previous episodes about the importance of identifying a set of global ethics that we can all achieve consensus around, that form the foundations of the institutional structures and that are also independently used as tools to meet the challenges of our time. And justice is one of those. Oneness is really the foundation. Oneness. Once we understand that we are actually one, we will understand far more easily that we need to apply equity and justice. I love this question, David Landesman. I'm gonna put it up. Is compromise good or bad in politics? This is something that I was actually going to deal with next week, but I'm glad you've raised it. One of the habits that we have fallen into is that we end up compromising, first of all, on principle. We can never compromise on principle. We discussed this, I think it was in the last session or two sessions ago. When it comes to matters of principle, we cannot compromise. The other unfortunate habit is even when it comes to discerning between facts and opinion, we tend to compromise. For instance, I think about the quandary we're in with climate change, with so many people just in this country alone, the United States, not believing that climate change is real. I lay part of the blame at the foot of the media who had these panels in which half the people on the panel were people who believed in climate change. The other half didn't, and they had half time. It made people think that this was a 50 50 proposition, that the facts were, well, you know, the jury's out. We're not really sure that A, climate change is man made or human made, and secondly, that it's real. Whereas 99 percent of scientists were agreed and knew that climate change was real, that it was man made, and there was just 1 percent who were a bit skeptical, not so much about the fact of climate change, but about the timeline, how soon it was going to affect us all. And yet the media made it sound as though this was a compromise you know, you can take your pick. Those of you who are listening, Oh, well compromise. Hmm, maybe we don't need to do so much. So compromise in politics, if it comes to compromising principle, it's a no, no, it gets us into hot water. And we also have to start learning to distinguish between, between opinion and fact. Apart from that, working together and coming along together, which is kind of a little different from compromise, maybe going a little more slowly towards a common vision that we manage to craft across parties or across whatever we choose to come up with. That I think is important and okay. Yes, the importance of abandoning materialism if we're not to make the same mistakes again. And that is, I think, one of the big lessons of COVID 19 across the world. You know, one of the interesting things is that we've started to question our values. As I was preparing for today, I was thinking, gosh, We didn't used to recognize the importance of our people who are in agriculture, our farmers, our teachers, our health workers. We live in a society where the people who make the most money are celebrities. I mean, it's wonderful. They sing well and they're pretty and they act, some not so well, some better, but really to pay them the millions of dollars, or people who are in sports. I mean, sports is wonderful. It keeps us distracted from a lot of other things that we need to be doing, but to pay those people so much more than we pay our teachers and our health workers and our farmers is living in a topsy turvy world. I think that's something we really need to start: reassessing our focus on the material aspects of life. Somebody says this needs time, god's good time. Yes, and. As we discussed, human beings have been given by our creator, I believe. And for those who don't believe in a creator, we know that we have free will choice. We need to take responsibility for exercising that free will choice. It's not sufficient to say, Oh, this is just in God's hands. God has given us common sense, the tools, everything that we need to make good choices. We can delay the time when we make these shifts that we need towards a better future and a more compelling future. We can delay it by continuing to make poor choices or we can hasten the day where we have a peaceful, secure world in which the principles of oneness and justice reign. So it's really on us. And so I generally, for myself, don't say, oh, it'll happen in good time, because we are one of the factors that determines what that good time is. Okay, I think I've covered most of the questions. There are other comments. For those of you who want to read them, please go on. People have views about things we can do, and it's wonderful. This is the purpose of the series: to get us engaged, to start a dialogue, and to start us reflecting on really important fundamental questions that will determine the kind of world that we have in the future and the kind of world that we leave to our children and grandchildren. Yes. Envisioning a world in which we don't have political parties. No campaigning, no canvassing, no nominations, secret ballot and so on. Yes. These are all wonderful and important ideas and very worthy of consideration and we need to start having these conversations. So one of the things that y'all can do that some folks have been writing into me telling me that they're doing, and you might want to do this, is to take each of these episodes, and have a show party with your friends and then follow it with a conversation amongst your own colleagues and family and friends to see what new ideas you can come up with, because that's what we need to change thinking at the grassroots. Because it's only once we've changed our mindset at the grassroots that we will then elect the kinds of leaders that we want and need to give us the world that we deserve. Okay, thank you all for your patience. It's been a pleasure to spend this time with you. Thank you for your time, and thank you for being so generous with your comments and questions. That's all for this episode of Reimagining Our World. I'll see you back here next month. If you liked this episode, please help us to get the word out by rating us and subscribing to the program on your favorite podcast platform. This series is also available in video on the YouTube channel of the Center for Peace and Global Governance, CPGG.