House of Eratosthenes

Something has happened relatively recently with the concept of leadership, and it isn’t good. It might have started with the pandemic, or maybe a little bit before that with the Disney Star Wars movies. Someone takes over something; they announce with great fanfare their guiding principles, which may be “woke,” but there may be something else wrong with them. And right off the bat they have their critics and they have their defenders, with most of the earnest enthusiasm “enjoyed” by the former as it’s already easy to see what’s going to go wrong.

There’s lots of bluster about “I’m large and in charge” or whatever, but no responsibility taken for bad results. The response to the criticism that should be expected, is a gritty determination to keep on making the same mistakes — and there’s nothing you can do about it! And, to call the critics sexists or racists. Name-calling and intransigence. That’s the rebuttal to the criticism, any & all criticism.

It’s as if the entire “civilized” world woke up one morning and decided: Leadership is nothing but being obstinate and pushy.

Meanwhile, the despair felt far and wide, from having someone “in charge” who won’t listen to anybody else, won’t self-correct or learn from mistakes, and won’t take responsibility for the mistakes made — is palpable. It thickens month by month, year by year, to the point you can almost cut it with the metaphorical knife. It metastasizes into a depression, which the “leadership” notices, and usually blames on someone else.

It wasn’t like this just a short time ago. What happened? How do we fix it?

Maybe we can hold a contest. They do seem to be competing with each other to see who can come up with the worst ideas, the fastest, or implement them with the most intense of misplaced enthusiasm, or show the greatest agility in dodging responsibility. Or, to display the most intractable resolve to maintain the bad policy in response to reasoned criticism.

Within arts and fiction, the clear winner would be Kathleen Kennedy. Whoever is the runner-up, isn’t worth mentioning because the gap between the two is so broad, it isn’t even close. It’s just embarrassing to listen to her anymore. People have entirely given up on her company, and on the industry as a whole. She’s literally destroyed movies.

Out here in the real world of public policy, it might be Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, maybe Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan. This weird new brand of leadership that consists of just being stubborn, learning nothing, regretting nothing, conceding no points to their opposition no matter how valid the criticism may be, is commonly illustrated to us as women finally finding their voice. This is unfair to women, for it isn’t only women doing this. Gavin Newsom of California has come up with just as many bad ideas as anybody, done at least as much damage as anyone else, and certainly takes the cake in avoiding responsibility. Or, responding to valid criticism with that now-familiar gritty determination to change exactly nothing and keep-on keeping-on. Should I list examples? It’s hard to know where to begin. Criminal justice reform, battling the “homeless” problem, taxation, environmental — he sucks at all of it and will admit to no errors, concede no points to his critics, change nothing.

It’s like the public at large is a wild animal, and “leadership” in both arts and politics is engaged in a long, drawn out maneuver that does nothing but wound and then corner the animal, giving it nowhere to go. This doesn’t seem smart, to me anyway. Looks like just asking for something bad to happen.
It wasn’t always like this. Leadership used to listen. Maybe show a bit of lethargy in admitting to mistakes, I guess that’s to be expected. But time was, they’d eventually either admit to the mistakes, or quietly change strategy.

I guess, now that we have “social media,” the spoken word enjoys greater currency and greater agility. The criticism flows easily, but the rebuttal to the criticism flows even more easily. The rebuttal, unlike the criticism, doesn’t have to make sense. Just a theory I have to explain it. I’m not sure.
But it’s obvious, lately, when there is valid criticism and then rebuttal to the criticism, the rebuttal consistently wins. Someone is expecting it to go that way. And, it is going that way.

This does not portend good things. We know smaller problems that ought to get fixed, today, and don’t get fixed, grow into larger problems that arise tomorrow. We know cornering a wounded beast is never a smart idea.

And it’s been awhile by now since I’ve seen quality leadership. By which I mean, don’t make good decisions all the time necessarily, but at least admit it and change things in the aftermath of having made some bad ones. I haven’t seen that in a very long time. We seem to be getting quite comfortable with bad leaders making bad decisions and then showing a bad intransigence in keepin’-on the same way. It’s quickly becoming the default strategy of leadership, and everywhere. I’m really not sure what we can do about this.

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On LeadershipThursday, October 31st, 2024

On Leadership
Thursday, October 31st, 2024