Leaders and heroes: New meanings for old words

When I was very young, words like truth, honor, hero, and leader had meaning. When someone used one of these words, the way he or she used it matched a meaning that I understood. As I have gotten older, the meanings of these words have changed, and each year their new meaning seems to have gotten farther away from the old meanings.

Let's think about the word "truth." I remember reciting as a child when I believed that truth existed, "I take these truths to be self-evident....that all men are created equal...born with certain unalienable rights." Science now tells us that we cannot prove an hypothesis; we can, however, disprove or at least try to disprove or falsify it. We can find support for a hypothesis, but we cannot prove it. There is, in other words, untruth, but truth is not to be found, at least using science. I am, of course, assuming that even the laws of science will eventually come to be seen as incorrect or as only part of a solution. The idea that there is a truth, bigger than any of us, bigger than history, bigger than actual life -- that all of us, even those who are starving, dying, fighting, crying, suffering, neglected - are born with inalienable rights is, of course, the ideal. It is what we would like to be true. It used to be what we encouraged. Now we seem to encourage greed and self-indulgence to the point of being willing to soil even our own nest, the earth, to get a new babble to adorn our tiny fleeting corner of it.

It was startling when I discovered that the word "hero" no longer referred to someone, who undaunted, faced incredible odds and although perhaps losing in the end, never gave up trying to protect the vulnerable, to accomplish a deed that was basically altruistic. Hero today is often used to refer to someone in finds him or herself in a bad situation, but who died before he/she could make a choice of any course of action. Does just being in a dangerous situation mean we are a hero? I am sure that we, if we listen carefully, we would hear even hear the most superficial and vacuous of movie stars referred to as being called heroic, even when every action they have ever taken has had a self-absorbed end.

Today, and yesterday during the debate, we heard that a certain presidential candidate showed leadership. What I observed in that debate in particular, but also at other times, was not a leader, but a bully. How on earth is it possible to confuse bullying with leadership or presidential stature?

A democracy, my friend (friend,as this candidate likes to say), depends upon an educated electorate, a thoughtful voter. A bully, my friends, is not a leader. A bully is not presidential. A bully has a temper, a bully does not care for the vulnerable, in fact a bully looks for vulnerabilites and attacks them. Can we survive more years of yet another bully president?

In my book, I argued that there are two basic forms of leadership. There is hierarchical leadership, which is a type of servant leadership in which the powerful serves the powerless. It is a parental/maternal type role. Certainly, it must be true that mothers were the first hierarchs; the mother-child relationship was the first ranked relationship. Then, I argued, there are pecking orders. In a pecking order the one at the top is autonomous. He has no responsibilities to the weak. He has no responsibilities to those he "serves" other than the most mundane -- perhaps, like Peron, he need only look dignified in some odd sort of way.

I would go on forever about this, but it is pretty sad when our electorate is so easily duped, deluded, fooled into thinking that pretense, that bullying is a sign of dignity and leadership. One does have to question the success of our education system.