To Be A Leader Means To Know When To Stop

Posting unsubstantiated one-sided opinion is freedom of speech. Fact-checking is freedom of speech. Expressing both love and hate is freedom of speech. Public disagreement with the authority’s policies is freedom of speech. Where is the fine line between the use and abuse of the freedom of speech for one’s benefit, then?

Today, the First Amendment of the United States Constitution is tested as it has never been before during my generation. Between the Trump vs Twitter battle and the deadly riots in honor of George Floyd, we witness the crumble of the core axiom on which the mighty empire of the XX-th century, the home of the free people, has been perked up for so many years. But this conflict is bigger, than America. It’s a shattering of the American dream for a vast number of struggling individuals around the world who blindly and desperately yearned for a place where equality among peers, regardless of race, color, or religion, is possible. It’s a spit in the face of democracy and an epic crash of ideology for the masses within and outside of the US borders. The illustration below represents the collapse of the shrine, which is burning inside, observed by the people in the square. The duality of this picture is the following: are the people standing outside because they have just been evacuated and their lives have been saved, or have they set the shrine on fire themselves? Also, people in the drawing don’t have faces and can be mistaken for the shadows or ghosts. Are we saving the ghosts, or have the ghosts put the shrine of the American dream in flames, or has it burned itself?

Many of us are gradually climbing out of the external caves and internal holes, embracing new normality. However, coronavirus became a sad preamble to this new chapter of our existence. This chapter, or a set of chapters, will be about the warfare between the experts and governmental authorities and the free-thinking individuals, utilizing physical power, various weapons, and psychological pressure. There is a twist, though. The free-thinkers lose their freedom the moment they want public power and recognition. At that moment, they become experts and government officials, thus shift their position in this war to the opposite side.

Historically, the authority was assigned to the people with age and experience, which required respect and obedience as a sign of its recognition. They might have started out with good intentions for a common benefit, however, the moment they felt the surge of power, they didn’t know when and how to stop. I have questioned the authority in a non-violent way for as long as I can remember myself. I believe that respect must be earned in a specific situation with specific people every single time. Moreover, I believe that everything in life has an expiration date, including leadership.

For me, respect means accepting the reliability, truth, and capability of an individual in his or her actions, mistakes, and opinions, following up with the proof. In other words, I can trust you unconditionally in the beginning, but you can’t earn my respect without the proof. In this sense, fact-checking resonates with me entirely. Of course, the proof can be manipulated, forged or unintentionally misrepresented, but at that point, it is my job to either get to the bottom of the proof or to embrace the limitations in it, for the sake of the relationship or personal sanity.

One of the key qualities, that I respect more and more in leaders on an individual or a public level lately is the ability to stop, say “enough is enough”, and step down from the situation, if necessary. Unfortunately, from divorces and custody fights to the riots and rupture of diplomatic agreements, it is extremely difficult to retrieve from the blind invincible desire to establish justice at a hefty cost of mental, emotional, and physical wounds of the related individuals. The violent way includes lawsuits, quarantines, executive orders, and riots. But there is a non-violent way: collaborative negotiation with the value creation resulting in the benefit (or reduced costs) for both sides, without any physical enforcements. This, however, requires emotional intelligence, self-filtering, and a step back from a perpetual power struggle and a complete desire to say more, not less.

Part of me wants to erase the word “power”, and all of its derivatives, from the dictionary and see how this would affect our wellbeing. I am not sure if we are ready for this as a society, though. I have read somewhere a religious anecdote that God gives a human a limited amount of words for his life, and once these words run out, the individual dies. If we adopted this philosophy, how would it change our behavior, I wonder?