Why ‘Leaders’ Can’t Help Us

The best thing about the job I just retired from has been the opportunity to speak with some of Canada’s business leaders, specifically about sustainability. While I don’t expect them to be far enough ahead in their thinking to recognize the imminence of civilizational collapse, I do expect them to be informed about how the world really works — the current state of our political, economic, technological, educational, social, and environmental systems and the prognosis for the future — since this has profound implications for their organizations.

I find them to be, generally, better informed than the average Canadian, and, mostly, very uneasy about the future. I also find them to be disturbingly short-term focused and in profound denial about the implications of what they know to be true for the future of the planet, and hence for their organizations.

A year ago I co-wrote a paper on business risk and sustainability that was presented at the Prince’s Trust forum in London, England. The three principal theses of the paper were that:

1. ecological sustainability and business sustainability are co-dependent (can’t have one without the other),
2. the primary objective of any business (analogously to the primary objective of any organic creature) is to sustain itself — to “stay in business”, and
3. nothing can exist independently of the complex environment in which it ‘lives’ and of which it is a part.

These are obvious, even tautological, to anyone who understands the basics of business and of how complex adaptive systems operate. But if you accept them, it follows that it is in everyone’s interest that we optimize the health and well-being of our entire interdependent planetary environment and all of the creatures in it. The idea of ruthless “crush the enemy” competition, and of “externalizing” costs to another country or to the “external” environment or to a future generation, in the interest of maximizing short-term profit growth, in this context, is absurd.

Yet we go on doing it. And political, business and religious ‘leaders’ encourage us to compete, to crush the competition, to externalize our costs to ‘others’, and to relentlessly and exponentially grow by every measure of growth. Why?

Perhaps it’s for the same reason we go on eating meat, or at least eggs and dairy products, long after and despite knowing the cruelty it inflicts on trillions of sentient creatures, year after year, and depite knowing that it is environmentally wasteful and irresponsible on a massive scale, especially the way it has come to be managed by the horrific industral agriculture oligopoly.

We call the people we think foolish or ideologically misguided or just pathological (like the industrial agriculture oligopoly I just referred to in the last sentence) “them”, to distinguish “them” from “us” who presumably are doing the right things, doing our best, willing to help solve the problems if only the ‘leaders’ would tell us what to do, and ‘lead’ us.

So we have this disconnect between what we know and what we do (which gets worse as we become ‘leaders’ and come to know more), and this dysfunctional and paralyzing co-dependence between ‘leaders’ and ‘followers’, neither of whom are taking responsibility to act sustainably.

The mainstream media are blandly and uncritically documenting this absurdity to the point that, for most of us who all of this is dawning on, these media have become unbearable, terrible reminders of this collective dysfunction, creative inertia, destructive momentum and pathology with which we are all, if we were to be honest, complicit. The ‘news’ of the mainstream media, as a result, is oversimplified, sensationalized, self-censored to omit any information that cannot be dumbed down to a one-sentence headline, and unactionable. It’s grating, worthless, and disgraceful.

What’s going on here?

Well, first, we have political ‘leaders’ preoccupied with doing what will get them re-elected in 1-5 years. Their objective is to be seen to be doing something effective, not to actually do anything (doing something costs money and incurs risk). Because of the execrable media, their actions and propaganda (advertising and press releases) are focused on posturing and trying to make potential opponents look more incompetent and dangerous than they are. Their funding, generally, depends on campaign contributions from large corporations which expect regulations and subsidies that favour them, and deregulation of anything that interferes with their untramelled pursuit of limitless growth and profitability. These ‘leaders’ inevitably are cynics, do-nothings, alarmists, and corporatist toadies — anyone else thinking of playing a political leadership role is quickly discouraged or crushed by moneyed interests. There is only one notable remaining exception in the US, Dennis Kucinich, and he is systematically ridiculed in the mainstream media.

Then, we have business ‘leaders’ preoccupied with doing what will achieve double-digit annualized profit growth every quarter for the next year or two. They cannot afford to look further than that. Whatever they may care about sustainability (and in my experience most do care about and worry about this) is pushed to the background. Shareholders will simply not tolerate long-term thinking that jeopardizes short-term profits, because most shareholders are only investing for short-term gains.

Third, we have an institutional education system that discourages independent thinking, and prepares young people for a life of learned helplessness, wage slavery, mindless consumption, escapism, absurd oversimplification of how the world works, and obedience to ‘leaders’. Once the school system is finished with them, the media take over, delivering identical messages of the only acceptable ways to think, live and behave. They all do this because they believe that this is the best way to create ‘productive’ citizens, and, because this is the way they were brought up. They lack the imagination to conceive of any other way of informing people.

It’s all self-perpetuating. ‘Leaders’ who know better (or should), doing what they must do in their own short-term self-interest, instead of acting sustainably and responsibly. Educators and media lying (mostly by omission) about what is really happening in the world because it’s too difficult, and because most of the rest of us, citizens and ‘followers’, either haven’t the capacity to understand or don’t care to understand.

Those of us fortunate enough to have learned what is really going on are stymied by massively complex and opaque political and economic systems that provide no simple means of acting sustainably and responsibly, of becoming part of the solution instead of part of the problem. We essentially have no choice but to be complicit. Couple that with the fact that most people are incapable of discussing the complex issues of the day intelligently, and it’s not surprising that most of us start to wonder:

• Is it just me? Is this terrible knowledge that I’ve acquired actually true, even though most people either don’t know it or don’t believe it? 
• What can I do that will actually make a difference, when all the choices I have either make an insignificant difference or make matters even worse? 
• Why are the ‘leaders’ doing, essentially, nothing, except making the situation worse by claiming, absurdly, that what is needed is a return to economic growth? 

It’s easy to blame ‘them’, the ‘leaders’ who are doing nothing or worse, and the soporific and infantile media. But (with the exception of a few wingnut ideologues) ‘they’ are just as caught up in this massive and self-perpetuating dysfunction as the rest of us. The bloated, corrupt corporatist economic and political oligopolies show this dysfunction at its ugliest, cruelest, most dishonest and exploitative and self-serving, but we are all complicit, and ridding the system of all the corporatists, even if that were possible, would probably not significantly improve matters. These systems are bigger than all of us, no one controls them, and they have an unstoppable momentum.

We do what we must, and until there is absolutely no alternative to change, we cannot and will not change — not enough to ‘reform’ our industrial growth society and ‘save’ civilization anyway. The power of our ‘leaders’ is a myth — they too do what they must, in their short-term personal interest, and in fact they can’t do very much anyway.

My friend Ivor thinks it’s like a war, and that you have to be psychopathic or inured to the terrible violence of the world to be a party to it. His answer is that it has to be made personal, that if both ‘leaders’ and ‘followers’ could really see the consequences of their behaviour and inaction, they would quickly change.

I don’t think so. I am of course angry at “them”, the real psychopaths, like the people who run ExxonMobil, Monsanto, Koch Industries, Dow Chemical and other megapolluters, the ADM/Cargill/ConAgra Industrial Agriculture oligopoly, the military/industrial complex, the Tar Sands conglomerate, the climate change deniers and their cynical funders, the right-wing political reactionaries and the religious wingnuts. But they are the minority of ‘leaders’, and if we think they are the difference between changing the Industrial Growth society and being run over by it, we give them far too much credit.

We are not going to be ‘saved’ by ‘leaders’, any more than we are going to be saved by human ingenuity, technology, market forces, a sudden global consciousness-raising, or the Rapture. We are all complicit, but we can’t ‘save the world’ either. As John Gray says in Straw Dogs, we humans have not changed and cannot change what we are, what we do, how we behave or what we value. We are doomed by the coding in our DNA to continue along our inexorable path of self-destruction, and to inflict large-scale but ultimately transitory damage on our planet in the process. He concludes:

There is not much point, then, in getting angry at the psychopaths, or being disappointed in or infuriated by our ‘leaders’. We had best come to grips with our grief, get on with our astonishing lives, and do what we can to make the world better in small, personal, collective, local ways. I have already written about what I intend to do, since I have the rare luxury of knowledge and time to do more than most. I will do what I can, working with others, to end factory farming and the devastation of the Tar Sands, to create some models of better ways for the survivors to live, free of the systems and scourges we struggle with.
I am moving past grief and anger and helplessness, and am happier and more connected and full of love than I have ever been. And I would encourage you to appreciate what can be done, that it’s not just you feeling this sorrow and rage and sense of futility, and that most people, despite their ignorance and incapacity and imaginative poverty, are trying to do their best.

And I’d encourage you as well to get away from the noise and madness of our civilization and explore, gently, with those you love, wild and natural places that will help you reconnect with your emotions and instincts and all-life-on-Earth, and realize who you really are, and what you’re meant to do. No leaders needed.