"News that's not known, or not known enough."
Helen & Harry Highwater's cranky weblog of news and opinion.
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"News that's not known, or not known enough." Helen & Harry Highwater's cranky weblog of news and opinion. |
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Suffering may not be necessary for growth, but struggle apparently is. Achieving a fuller humanity seems to require struggle, much as a butterfly must struggle to free itself from a cocoon or a chick from its egg, and if struggle and sacrifice are seen by one's peers as inappropriate to the status to which they aspire, mediocrity, immaturity and shallowness become the caste stigmata of privilege. Entitled leadership is not really leadership at all, if we hue to the intuitive sense that true leaders chart a course toward betterment. If entitled leadership can only lead us to destruction can it qualify as leadership? Entitled leadership turns out to be an oxymoron of sorts. An unvarnished assessment of the reality of increasingly rigid class structures in our society, underpinned by credentialing by elite educational institutions such as Yale and Harvard, reveals that this is a path to social failure. More important to society than the obvious sorts of mistreatment of the lower classes inherent in such rigidly class structured, this systemic, privilege driven failure of effective leadership is a slow poison for the entire society as it gradually looses its bearings and wanders off into silly excesses and internal rot. Rigid class structure represents the senescence of a society, but those who are lucky enough to enjoy a high class status are the ones least able to see clearly the path of destruction before them. If you have been told all your life that you are superior and beyond error, little surprise that you can commit the most egregious errors with supreme confidence. History tends to show that societies begin with the energy of rural virtues and relative egalitarianism, pass through a middle age of great achievement, and then pass into a delusional period of senescence that squanders the capital of previous generations on the silly preoccupations of an effete elite. We in the US are just now experiencing the transition to cultural dotage. All historical experience seems to indicate that the process of decay and death is inevitable, and that may be the truth, but I like to think that a people made aware of the dangers of hereditary class could re-educate themselves and choose a different, rejuvenating path. One equally dangerous path is to seek to enforce homogeneity and uniformity of thought whether that is brought about by socialist dictatorship, theocratic oppression or a mindless mass media. That is just a different form of rigor mortis. A better path is one that creates diversity and accomplishment by seeking for each and every child the opportunity for optimal health and growth. Just as all seeds do not produce a strong plant, opportunity for all children will not produce uniform success. The process of nurturing all children to achieve as much as they can in life can transform a selfish and self-centered society into one of superior graces and such edifying accomplishments as peace, prosperity and creative imagination. Sustainable cultures place the needs of children before those of adults. Self-seeking by strong adults at the expense of the young is a recipe for disaster. So the choice is ours. Do we continue down the path of ever more rigid class distinctions and succumb to continued rapid decay, or do we pull ourselves together enough to realize that constant striving for material success and class status is a deadly poison? If we rededicate ourselves to the task of nurturing the best in every child we will need to reorient ourselves away from the distractions of celebrity and the wastefulness of grand schemes and spectacles. We will need to make a radical course change away from militarism and materialism and toward nurturance and simplicity. To see these changes as impossible, to willingly succumb to the narcotic effect of cultural momentum, is to embrace a cultural death wish. But that is the dilemma of every life, be it an individual one or the life of a society. At same time we wish both for the excitement of growth and for the comfort of repose that is represented, in the extreme, by the endless sleep of death. We are about to go through a very harrowing period of social and economic disruption, brought about by the failure of a self appointed leadership childishly focused on their personal power and privilege. In the pain and tumult of these times we will be given perhaps a last opportunity, as a society, to radically reorient ourselves toward a project centered on the development of the human potential of all our citizens and away from domination and exploitation of the weak. If we don't grab this brass ring we will no longer be able to ride the carousel and our society, like so many energetic societies in the past, will fail and pass into history as another grand failure. It is a choice we best consider carefully. © by the author.
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