Link: Kinnon TV: Why do we allow toxic leaders

http://www.kinnon.tv/2011/03/why-do-we-allow-toxic-leaders.html


Bill Kinnon puts some things better than I could ever manage to do.


Hero worship will always be with us and toxic leaders stay in power because, well, they're heroes to somebody. A hero is someone who by dint of accomplishment, charisma, and power attains glory. The hero is valuable to us because in exchange for service and loyalty the hero promises explicitly or tacitly to share some of his glory with us. Now we can tell ourselves, "Oh, I would never fall for that." We do, all the time. I've fallen for the sales pitch in numerous ways.

The thing is the appeal of the hero and his/her glory works because we need it. We tell ourselves otherwise but usually all this means is we think other people have picked heroes who aren't glorious enough. A fan of Ayn Rand will admire her and look down on those who admire communists. The same hero worship process for Rand is at work in the worship of Mao or, let's just say it, Jesus. Let's consider that Richard Dawkins has been busy declaring religion to be positively harmful and superstition is bad and we'd all be better off and there'd be less war without any relgion. None of that is provably true.

What is arguably provable is that even an atheist like Richard Dawkins promotes a form of hero worship. How? Simple, he minted the term "brights". "Atheist" is accurate but seems too negative. Dawkins came up with "bright" as a way for atheists to self-identify in a self-affirming way. You see, there it is. A hero becomes a hero by dint of great accomplishment, renown, and by making an offer of loyalty and allegiance to his cause in exchange for sharing in his glory. Even atheists do this while detesting that religious people do this with their gods. Christopher Hitchens is perfectly willing to invoke a moral connection between himself as a dissident and a dissident like Solzhenitsyn or maybe even a Bonhoeffer. When unbelievers are willing to assimilate people of faith into their lexicon of heroes (even if these men and women of faith don't pass muster with American conservative evangelicals) they show that the impulse to hero worship is irresistable even among those who claim they are too sophisticated to be duped by old-fashioned heroism.

So whether we ally ourselves to healthy leadership or toxic leadership the dynamic of hero worship and its process is fairly steady. As a Christian, of course, I must continually remind myself that my hero is Yahweh, revealed as Father, Son and Spirit. There are other heroes and scripture urges us to consider the saints of the land to be heroes worth emulating. That many toxic leaders abuse this does not mean that 1) we should never admire heroes or still less 2) that we won't have them anyway.

One of the things that may help, that I try to keep in mind is that Jesus said of teachers "By their fruit you will know them." This doesn't seem to refer to how many seats they can fill in a stadium, though wisdom will be justified by her children, I suppose. It seems to refer to the character of the teacher himself and of his disciples. There may well be many more evangelists and "apostles" than there are teachers who make disciples. We need evangelists and those who continue the work of the apostles but shepherds are also needed. I have found it useful to keep in mind an observation made by one of my pastors, that the measure of a shepherd is how he deals with the sheep he can't get anything out of. The difference between a shepherd and a hired hand is that the shepherd will care even for the sheep that isn't useful to him.

That was an epiphany for me when I heard it because, frankly, I feel like I have seen a few pastors who are shepherds in title but hired hands in heart or, at least (to avoid speaking too confidently) in their actions. We can be convinced of the rightness of our motives but God looks upon our heart, the heart that is a secret even from ourselves. I hope I have no illusions about whether or not I am a good man or a good Christian, neither is true but my hope is that Christ's goodness is more than sufficient.

Even if we speak about the dangers of toxic leaders let's not forget that the capacity to be a toxic leader or follower resides within us. A friend of mine recently joked that it is easy to be a dissident in Seattle. If you don't know what I mean just roll with me on this one. When you're in a town as left/liberal as Seattle being a dissident requires nothing of you, not even actually being a dissident. It's merely enough to strike the pose and words of a dissident to convince yourself you're not the same kind of consumeristic materialist as the rest of the allegedly benighted middle America idiots in red states. Well, that's not the same thing as being an actual dissident in the Soviet Union, is it" A dissident who isn't imperiled by dissidence isn't dissenting so much as conforming through a different means.

We need to be cautious, careful, and considerate. Not for nothing does the scripture tell us to beware lest we ourselves should fail. I could write more about toxic leaders but I believe it's enough to say that our thirst for glory that we can share with someone who has glory, however we define it, is why we must continually renounce the things we secretly and not-so-secretly take glory in our hope for and remind ourselves that Jesus is better than those, better than them, better than these. Whether our hero is toxic or not won't matter if our hero isn't Christ, will it? A toxic fan can corrupt even a righteous hero if the hero gets wind of their hero worship.