Who Do We Choose to Be?, Second Edition: Facing Reality, Claiming Leadership, Restoring Sanity

by Margaret J. Wheatley

This is the Age of Threat, when everything we encounter intensifies fear and anger. In survival mode, we flee from one another, abandon values that held us together, withdraw from ideas and practices that encouraged inclusion and created trust in leaders. And, most harmfully, we stop believing in one another.

Sane leadership is the unshakable confidence that people can be generous, creative, and kind. The leader’s work is to create the conditions for those capacities to manifest in meaningful work.

The role of identity in present-day culture can be easily plotted against Glubb’s Six Ages of Collapse. In the first age, the Pioneers, identities form from a sense of honor and commitment to a cause. Sacrifice and service are the guiding values. Midway, all civilizations evolve into the Age of Commerce, where money and wealth organize identities and behaviors. Service gives way to getting rich. In the final stage, the Age of Decadence, celebrities—athletes, musicians, and actors—are revered and people lose themselves in wanton pleasures while demanding ever-increasing entitlements. (Since 2016, the majority of Presidential Medals of Freedom have been awarded to athletes, musicians, and actors.) People also retreat into distraction and withdrawal, threatened by all that is collapsing.

information is deliberately distorted to control and manipulate. Misinformation and disinformation are used as weapons of war or to gain advantage in political campaigns. No longer is information a source of order; it is used intentionally to create disorder to benefit those in power. Information has been weaponized as an instrument of control and disruption. And social media and marketing campaigns use information to mold us into craving consumers, hungry performers, and protesting citizens.

The majority of people have withdrawn in self-defense. They will protect their threatened sense of self by finding those who are just like them. When I find “my peeps,” “my tribe,” “my kindreds,” confusion is replaced by certainty. My perceptions and feelings are shared by others, so they must be right. Certainty is a comforting feeling and, as we enjoy being certain together, we discover true companions. Whatever our purpose or cause, we feel stronger because we have come together.

Fear so easily binds people together in their constructed reality of what’s true and what’s fake. And science—a source of real reality—suffers irreparable damage that continues to cause great harm to people and planet. People easily dismiss scientific research as bias, opinion, fake news, just like everything else. When science contradicts their certainty, in a great twist of logic, that proves it must be fake. Any valid scientific research can be casually labeled as conspiracy; someone somewhere (the powerful) are out to get us and take away our freedoms. But something far more dangerous and sinister has been going on for years: Several corporations have actively promoted science denial to further their short-term profits. We were aware of this with tobacco companies decades ago, but during that same decade, campaigns were launched by oil companies to discredit science and deliberately confuse people and policy makers. Tobacco use was a personal health issue, but fossil fuel companies have knowingly created existential threats to our collective existence. In 1977, Esso (now Exxon) was told about the impacts of burning fossil fuels on global temperature rise from carbon emissions. At that time, they funded genuine scientific studies that confirmed this dire threat. But then, corporate self-interest kicked in and they initiated campaigns and coalitions to protect their business by sowing doubt and distrust. One memo to the coalition of fossil fuel companies defined victory ...

Wherever you live, you have probably experienced at least some of these: record-breaking heat, violent storms, wildfires, drought, floods, lost food crops—all caused by the volume of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. And carbon emissions continue to increase. In 2022 oil and gas companies still were making plans for expansion and were at the height of market profitability.6 The Secretary-General of the UN, Antonio Guterres, said: “Simply put, they are lying, and the results will be catastrophic. Investing in new fossil fuels infrastructure is moral and economic madness.”

If global leaders were committed to preparing people rather than confusing us about climate catastrophes that already are directly impacting us, if they used their power and influence for the public good, not for personal gain, they would engage us in mitigation efforts to prepare for what is happening as climate tipping points continue tipping. They would abandon the senseless boundaries of nation-states, they would see the insanity of grasping for personal profits. As true leaders, they would engage with one another and engage with us citizens—we caring and creative human beings—in mitigation efforts to prepare for this undeniable future. But these global leaders, as in every collapsing civilization, will continue to battle desperately for their own needs and safety instead of noticing the destructive forces already wreaking havoc in their nations. We cannot expect them to change, or for mitigation efforts to happen at the global level. We have to commit to understanding what’s happening, to use the lens of science, to strengthen our faith in people’s capacity to rise to the challenge, and proceed to do what we can, where we are, with what we have.

In the early 1980s, Operation INFEKTION deliberately set out to cause confusion and social mayhem in the United States.16 Their activities were named “Active Measures” intended to create ideological subversion. A member of the KGB who defected years ago knew it well and defined its purpose: “To change the perception of reality of every American to such an extent that, despite the abundance of information, no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interest of defending themselves, their families, their community and their country.”17 ____ If you’re feeling confused about what you hear and read, if you don’t know who to believe, if you’ve given up trying to make sense of what’s going on, if you’ve withdrawn from the news and those you disagree with, there’s an explanation and a cause for why you feel this way. The Russians won. For decades, Russia has flooded all available channels of information with lies and falsehoods, using information as a most powerful weapon of war. Operation INFEKTION specialized in planting false stories and forged documents; KGB agents were tasked with spending up to a quarter of their time to develop stories that could cause social unrest in the United States. It was well funded, purportedly spending $3 billion a year on active measures; it employed fifteen thousand people in full-time work both inside and outside the Soviet Union.

Today these campaigns (organized by the Russian State and the Internet Research Agency led by a close ally of Putin) use all available internet and media channels to create a “firehose of falsehood.”21 Russian web brigades create tsunamis of blogs, bots, opinion columns, spokespeople, and trolls in a deliberate campaign to overwhelm all available media. These firehoses of falsehoods are deliberately set to be rapid, continuous, and repetitive, with no commitment to objective reality or consistency of message. They demonstrate “a shameless willingness to disseminate partial truths or outright fictions. In the words of one observer, ‘new Russian propaganda entertains, confuses and overwhelms the audience.’”22 The Russian origins of these internet disinformation campaigns were confirmed by noting that the bulk of their activities happened during Russian working hours and fell off during weekends and Russian holidays!

We’ve witnessed the same skilled distribution of misinformation and disinformation in the Ukraine war and with Covid, and it will only get worse. Professionalized trolling remains a force in domestic and international Russian propaganda efforts and continues to adapt across platforms. In Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa distorted messages have increased divisions and distrust of the United States and Europe, creating opportunities for China and Russia to solidify their influence in the Global South.

We are in a war that was declared decades ago and continually refined to achieve its goal of disrupting and destroying the United States. Currently there is no solution. While we can hold Big Tech accountable for better methods of monitoring and censoring, no one can stop the torrent of misinformation and disinformation, or how it is interpreted and made meaningful by distracted, fearful people.

The antidote to misinformation and confusion is personal, face-to-face, slowed communication. If we create the right conditions, either in person or online, people can experience being with another human, sensitive to all the sensory impressions easily extinguished by rapid internet exchanges. It’s not just the information, it’s the person communicating the information that we respond to. With the right conditions, we slow down, calm down, and enjoy the benefits of our glorious human brains engaged at full capacity, our beautiful human hearts opening with curiosity and compassion.

A recipe for creating mind change has three basic ingredients: a relationship of mutual respect; genuine curiosity about one another; and a process that requires good listening.

We can’t change one another’s minds, but we can create the conditions to wake up our better angels.

We’ve come to a very strange place in American democracy where there’s an assault on some of the features of reality that one would have thought, just a couple years ago, were beyond debate, discussion, or argument.46 —Brian Greene, physicist

everyone is making their own sense from the assault of terrifying news. Many are in denial, focused on building entertainment bubbles for constant distraction. Others find like-minded people on social media and devolve into conspiracy fears. Others see what’s going on and collapse in despair and hopelessness.

We live in a time when lying and dishonesty have been normalized—we expect that anything we hear or read will be filled with lies and, as a result, we don’t believe anything. This was the goal of corporate executives and Russian disinformation campaigns and they’ve succeeded. We live in a culture of deliberate manipulation of information intended to confuse and tear us apart. Truth still exists, but it takes a lot of work to find it. Excellent journalism still exists, but it takes time to read it.

On a day-to-day level we witness constant lying from leaders, celebrities, and other public figures. Politicians feel free to make a statement that is recorded on video, then several months later say the direct opposite and deny there’s any contradiction. When it’s pointed out to them, they insist that either they never said the earlier statement or that there’s no conflict between the two. It’s our problem if we think there’s a problem. Any questioning is evidence that we’re out to get them. They’re the victims, not the liars. And anyway, it’s all fake news.

Merriam-Webster.com named “gaslighting” the word of the year because 1,740 people searched for its definition in 2022. Gaslighting is broadly defined as deliberately misleading someone to gain personal advantage over them, making them doubt themselves and their perceptions of what’s real. This now normal behavior was first portrayed in the 1944 movie Gaslight.