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

by Margaret J. Wheatley

What This World Needs This world does not need more entrepreneurs. This world does not need more technology breakthroughs. This world needs leaders.

We need leaders who put service over self, who can be steadfast through crises and failures, who want to stay present and make a difference to the people, situations, and causes they care about. We need leaders who are committed to serving people, who recognize what is being lost in the haste to dominate, ignore, and abuse the human spirit. We need leaders because leadership has been debased as those who take things to scale or are first to market or dominate the competition or develop killer apps. Or hold onto power by constantly tightening their stranglehold of fear until people are left lifeless and cowering. We need leaders now because we have failed to implement what was known to work, what would have prevented or mitigated the rise of hatred, violence, poverty, and ecological destruction. We have not failed from a lack of ideas and technologies. We have failed from a lack of will. The solutions we needed were already here. Now it is too late. We cannot solve these global issues globally. We can see them clearly. We can understand their root causes. We have evidence of solutions that would have solved them. But we refused to compromise, to collaborate, to persevere in resolving them as an intelligent, creative species living on one precious planet. Now it’s up to us, not as global leaders but as local leaders. We can lead people to create positive changes locally that make life easier and more sustainable, that create possibility in the midst of global decline. Let us...

It is possible, in this time of profound disruption, for leadership to be a noble profession that contributes to the common good. It is possible, as we face the fearful complexity of life-destroying problems, to experience recurring moments of grace and joy. It is possible, as leaders of organizations, communities, and families, to discover deep and abiding satisfaction in our work if we choose not to flee or withdraw from reality. It is possible to find a path of contribution and meaning if we turn our attention away from issues beyond our control and focus on the people around us who are yearning for good leadership and engage them in work that is within reach. It is possible to use our influence and power to create islands of sanity in the midst of a raging destructive sea.

We enter the path by bravely facing reality, willing to see with clarity and discernment where we are and how we got here. We seek to understand the forces at work that created this present world, not the one we have spent long years laboring to create, but a world that increasingly harms most and benefits scant few, a world stubbornly spiraling toward self-destruction.

Many of us feel that we have no choice but to protect ourselves from the increasing harshness and horrors of this world by withdrawing, staying busy with minor tasks, suppressing emotions of despair, grief, powerlessness. Some seek comfort by denial, creating personal bubbles to shut the world out. But the desperate effort that goes into withdrawal, suppression, and denial robs us of the very energy we need to be good leaders. The energy now spent on self-protection can be converted into positive energy if we’re willing to encounter reality and see it clearly. Facing reality is an empowering act—it can liberate our mind and heart to discern how best to use our power and influence in service for this time.

It is accurate to label this time as uncertain and chaotic, spinning wildly out of control.2 Every day we experience disruption, swerves in direction, short-term decisions that undo the future, propaganda, slander, lies, blame, denial, violence. Communities and nations are disrupted by terrorist acts, cumbersome bureaucracies block services, people retreat in self-protection and lash out in fear, angry people strike back at their governments, leaders stridently promise security and outcomes that we know can’t be true, tensions between people reach hateful proportions, and confusion and exhaustion sink us into despair and cynicism. This is the age of retreat: from one another, from values that held us together, from ideas and practices that encouraged inclusion, from faith in leaders, from belief in basic human goodness.

Chaos can be a generative force for change, or a cause for disintegration and death. Either way, it requires a descent into chaos, when everything falls apart. It is this part of the cycle that we need to prepare for.

So there is a slight basis for those who welcome in this time of disruption and chaos as the means to create healthier, more humane and life-affirming ways of living on this planet, for as long as the planet will have us. But we can’t get there from here without traversing through the falling apart stage. We cannot simply leap to new ways of being; first we must prepare for disintegration and collapse.

Systems that are failing now will continue to deteriorate. Uncertainty, confusion, and fear will continue to predominate. People will withdraw further into self-protection and strike out at those different from themselves. Corrupt leaders will intensify their false promises, and people will subjugate themselves to their control. The chaos cycle predicts this has to happen, that things must fall apart. And human history documents in astonishingly clear detail the pattern of collapse that all civilizations go through.

I know it is possible for leaders to use their power and influence, their insight and compassion, to lead people back to an understanding of who we are as human beings, to create the conditions for our basic human qualities of generosity, contribution, community, and love to be evoked no matter what. I know it is possible to experience grace and joy in the midst of tragedy and loss. I know it is possible to create islands of sanity in the midst of wildly disruptive seas. I know it is possible because I have worked with leaders over many years in places that knew chaos and breakdown long before this moment. And I have studied enough history to know that such leaders always arise when they are most needed.

This needs to be stated clearly at the outset: we can no longer solve the global problems of this time at large-scale levels: poverty, economics, climate change, violence, dehumanization.3 Even though the solutions have been available for a very long time, they require conditions to implement them that are not available: political courage, collaboration across national boundaries, compassion that supersedes self-interest and greed. These are not only the failings of our specific time in history; they occur in all civilizations at the end of their life cycle. This is a bitter pill for activists and all people with discerning, open hearts. We understand the complexity of global problems, we have thought systemically to define root causes, we have proposed meaningful solutions, but we are impotent to influence those in power who ignore our efforts.

Who do you choose to be for this time? Are you willing to use whatever power and influence you have to create islands of sanity that evoke and rely on our best human qualities to create, produce, and persevere?

Still, it was astonishing to read of a ninth-century Arab moralist’s lament about the celebrity pop singers who flooded the capital city in great numbers singing erotic songs, using obscene language, whose influence on young people degraded their morality and normalized vulgar. Or to read that in the eleventh century, education in the Arab empire changed from learning to technical training for high-paying jobs. There is nothing new under the sun.

Our constantly expanding technologies and innovations may appear to be adaptive responses to the environment. But this is not true. Quite the opposite: for the first time in history, humans are changing the global environment rather than adapting to it.

We are ignoring scientific laws, acting as Masters of the Universe, asserting we can invent anything we want to suit ourselves, including artificial life. This is not the behavior of a living system interacting skillfully with its environment. This is hubris of ahistorical proportions and we are failing miserably, as you may have noted.

Those who have studied the pattern of collapse always conclude their analyses with an urgent plea that we take notice, that we wake up to where we are in order to positively change where we are. The natural march of time toward disorder can be counteracted and even reversed by awareness and learning. Blind reactivity and fear are not the answer. Self-protection is not the answer. Denial is not the answer. Sane leadership is.

What is sane leadership? It is the unshakable faith in people’s capacity to be generous, creative and kind. It is the commitment to create the conditions for these capacities to blossom, protected from the external environment. It is the deep knowing that, even in the most dire circumstances, more becomes possible as people engage together with compassion and discernment, self-determining their best way forward.

The pattern of the decline and fall of these superpowers was startlingly clear. It didn’t matter where they were or what technology they had or how they exercised power. They all declined in the same stages and it always took ten generations, about 250 years. The logic of this is very clear: Each generation matures in better socioeconomic circumstances created by the preceding generation; thus, there is always a march to increasing materialism. In every generation, youth will have higher expectations for comfort than their parents. Improved material conditions create attitudinal changes that insist on still more material changes; and, predictably, because of its wealth and erosion of morality, the civilization declines into decadence.

Yes, these are terrifying times if we open our eyes. Yes, our heart aches for all the needless suffering and destruction. And yes, maintaining a sense of humor gives us the capacity to observe the suffering and failures with enough distance that we can see it all more clearly. Irony and humor (not sarcasm) are critical skills to wise discernment. In order to laugh, we have to take in a lot of information and see things from a different perspective. Sarcasm, on the other hand, is just observing from a distance through the eyes of cynicism. It does not connect us in any way. It does not enable action or relationship. And it is growing exponentially in this culture. Even my very young grandchildren are skilled at sarcasm. I should like to think that prehistoric man’s first invention, the first condition for his survival, was a sense of humor.

Global culture has taken hold, a new reality easy to identify in the things we share at the consumer level in music, movies, fashion, food, products, technology. And at the personal level in alienation, addiction, violence, and suicide. The premise of this culture is personal freedom, the right to create yourself in any way you want, unhampered by the past, free to fly without any need for ground. If you are born in the right place, you are free to dream, to follow your passion, to redefine yourself whenever and however you choose. If you are born anywhere else, you watch this display of freedom with envy and resentment that can erupt in fury. Those who fly free in self-absorption fail to see those taking aim at them from below.

A culture focused on individual freedom can only result in narcissism, polarization, conflict, estrangement, and loneliness.

In the Age of Decadence that Glubb describes, everyone is focused on their self-interest. Elites protect their wealth, leaders protect their power, and the masses clamor for entertainment. We worship actors, musicians, and athletes. We are bought off with food and grand spectacles; we become obsessed with sports. And we grow more and more demanding; we feel entitled not because we’ve earned it, but just because we can demand it. And leaders respond because they want to keep us quiet.

(because we didn’t).

We could have been anything we wanted, yet our free-floating individualism has taken us far from community, contribution or connection, the very things that truly give life meaning and purpose.

More speed, new apps, artificial intelligence, more connectivity through technology is not the answer. Sane leadership is.

How is it possible for a person to kill colleagues at an office Christmas party? How is it possible to deliberately target children or to be a child who commits these actions?

If you’re not at the table, you’re probably on the menu.

There is an unavoidable consequence when people from the margins organize.9 The burden of change and the restoration of national values get placed on them. If you want equal rights, it’s your job to fight for them. If you demand equal pay, convince us. If you want to be included at the table, prove yourself. The very values that defined who we wanted to be as a nation are no longer defended by the nation. Instead, those who are marginalized must speak loud enough to get our attention. It’s no wonder that they end up screaming. And when they finally do get our attention, more often than not we blame them for raising the issue. Either we’re doing fine, or it’s their fault that we failed. Anger intensifies on both sides, polarization increases, and any ideal of national identity is trampled beyond recognition. Such civil divisions are predictable in a declining civilization. Instead of uniting in common cause to protect the nation from real threats, we take ourselves down by ever more hateful exchanges.

We are not protesting. We are protecting.

Ethics are rules for how to live together. Moral principles mediate our interactions by establishing expectations of how to behave. All spiritual traditions have a clear code of ethics so that people can grow and prosper as a community, restrain individual impulses, and together withstand challenges great and small. This is always the role of ethics, to bind together individuals in trustworthy relationships so we can stay together through the vicissitudes of life.

Ethics are designed to serve us in community; they have no relevance to individuals who live in isolation or self-absorption, where there is no concern for others. Without ethics, there is no social coherence, no community resilience. Without ethics, it becomes a dog-eat-dog world. Such as many of us are now experiencing in this popularity culture.

We didn’t lose our ability to discern and respond intelligently—we still do have brains. We forfeited these to machines that do it faster, with more hype, more allure, more seductions. We stopped being sense-making beings and succumbed to being senseless, distracted, not-quite-recognizable versions of what a human being is.