Grace Under Pressure - World Class Leadership Course

“There are no bad regiments in the French Army -- although some regiments fail because they are commanded by bad colonels.”

Napoleon Bonaparte -- Maxims Of War

Wild Ducks

Some years ago I heard what was soon to become the death rattle of a great industrial civilization. I heard it in the angry voices of two factory owners who were at their wits end. In Sydney, Australia, one furious executive shouted that the only way to restore employee commitment would be to line his striking workers against a wall and shoot every third one.

His American counterpart in Minneapolis wasn’t so bloody minded but he was no less frustrated by his failure to win the commitment of his workers. He yearned for a major economic depression to return them to their senses so they would never again challenge his decisions. His business would suffer and his earnings decline, he admitted, but he felt it would be worth it emotionally to get the labor issue settled once and for all. He may have had his wish granted, since his company is now working at half capacity and is struggling to survive as his sons now compete with products coming from China, Japan, India, Brazil and even from an awakened and ambitious Vietnam. For we are no longer competing with ourselves -- with firms who are making the same fundamental mistakes inherent in a lockstep approach, but with hungry achievers who are coming on line abundant resources and deeply committed people.

I took neither man seriously, since they were both half out of their minds with frustration and were obviously venting their fears and frustrations -- but as they blustered, it became painfully obvious that neither executive understood the challenge nor had the wisdom and the grace to cope with the events occurring across Western Civilization. Neither owner had a sound vision for ending the crippling adversary relationships that make many American, Australasian and British businesses more and more vulnerable. Too few men and women in leadership positions have captured a vision of what a committed community of achievers can accomplish. A great many companies remain trapped in an antiquated philosophy of leadership that depends on interpersonal power and rigid control and when that fails, they become vulnerable because of increasing world competition.

We, in the Western World, still suffer greatly from the massive leadership failure documented in Harvard Business Review some years past. Of course it is ironic that more recent Harvard researchers criticized the tightly scripted industrial engineering approach to management that their predecessors in the Harvard Business School invented a generation or so ago. The fill in the blanks -- connect the dots, Harvard engineering and re-engineering approach used managers and workers as if they were emotionless robots. Workers were paid the absolute survival minimum and worked relentlessly until they malfunctioned. The so called rational approach that ignored emotions and ethics and excluded morality from a nihilistic philosophy of business, consumed people who were then replaced as if tools of production that failed.

It seemed cost effective to use up workers and to replace those who faltered with machines that never argue or want more money. Actually, dealing successfully with ego-centric humans is a challenging business that bad managers and executives strive desperately to avoid at all costs.

The Harvard approach trained plug-in executives who could shift effortlessly from one product or service to another as the best possible approach to fast stock market profits -- whether manufacturing hair driers, paint or canning peaches. The Harvard approach was always about winning on Wall Street with swift stock market killings and never about producing great products or valuable services and letting a company’s excellence persuade investors to stay committed over the long term. Many executives lose their jobs because the company suffered a bad year on Wall Street but few if any have ruined their careers by producing second or third rate products. This nihilistic philosophy of service to society worked reasonably well for dysfunctional organizations that produced shoddy goods and services. The managers could follow the lock step procedures laid down by ideological professors who never met a payroll or walked a production floor and the cash cow would give milk and cream forever. Unfortunately, the old girl grew weary and gave up the ghost when a host of international players appeared on stage and elbowed their day into the chow line. Until now, General Motors automobiles and vans suffer as many failures after three years on the road as Toyotas and Hondas have during their seventh year of service. More and more companies have become wholesalers who produce nothing of their own but pass foreign goods off to the public with their own brand names pasted on. Chrysler has managed to survive by teaming up with Mercedes while General Motors is considering a consortium with European and Asian firms in order to remain viable in the world market. Or possibly Ford and G M may combine forces in order to survive by cutting design and production costs significantly. Everything is still about the all crucial quarterly report in order to placate institutional shareholders. Very little is about manufacturing excellence although no one wants to make shoddy goods. It is just that when push comes to shove financially, the accountants on the top floor go for the stock market fast buck every time.

The computerized re-engineering approach became an item of faith, was the standard ideology revered by many who lacked the vision that sophisticated leaders apply to create effective communities of achievers. It seemed good enough to break every task down to its mind-numbing elementals, to pay the peons just enough to keep them from starving and to follow the industrial engineering lock steps to mediocrity on the world’s stage when our competitors are offering increasing excellence through their products and services.

There certainly has been no great desire to follow the wild ducks who ride the cold north wind of commerce to great heights with their organizations. These swift birds of passage upset domesticated barnyard fowl terribly with their fierce passions. Lee Iacocca carried his youthful fascination with speed to fruition when he saved an even then struggling Ford Motor Company with the original Mustang sports car. He mass produced a twenty-nine hundred dollar low tech donkey that could blow off forty thousand dollar Porsche thoroughbreds on any race track in America. He build them in several variants -- from six cylinder butterflies for elderly ladies who wanted a town coupe -- to fire-breathing dragons for white knuckle racing. I know, I bought one of the four speed, over-carburated, disc braked beasts that was sprung like a British ox cart for my wife Roberta on her thirtieth birthday. We made swift passages along the back roads through the Rocky Mountains and around the Great Lakes for years in bellowing glory. Thank you Lee Iacocca for many glorious memories imprinted on our psyches while in four wheel drifts near the limit of adhesion!

Then, there was Mary Kay with her cosmetics empire who developed an entirely new way of transforming fifty cents worth of simple ingredients into glamorous lipsticks and rouges and she did it with flair and great fun -- with girls-only house parties and gifts of flamingo pink Cadillac's for her committed achievers. Mary Kay was a sophisticated leader who really understood the social and sensual interests of women who party together, recapture a bit of romance at home and buy more of her cosmetics line than they had planned!

Dutch Kindleberger transcended the law of gravity by first designing and building the world class B - 25 bombers that James Doolittle’s boys flew to Tokyo and the evergreen P - 51 fighter from scratch on clean sheets of engineering paper. You could see the fighter parked on a tarmac at dawn and know that it was the best of the breed. That was for practice -- Dutch then went on to jets such as the F - 86 and the F - 100 and to create earth shaking rocket engines that could power towering space ships to escape velocity at his Rocket dyne Division of North American Aviation. He literally made the mountains quake! Dutch loved aircraft and he loved men and women who were thrilled by his Mad Max vision of powering Americans to the moon. Dutch would salivate at nights over his drawing board. I know -- I did quality assurance on his X - 15 and the air breathing Navajo scram jet for two summers when I was teaching science at Cincinnati’s Sayler Park School. For years I treasured a small medallion which included aluminum taken from the Eagle that Neil Armstrong had landed on the moon. Walking upright through the massive ram jet engines of the Navajo was never just a summer job for this former science instructor who sent ten times as many kids into science and technical careers as his predecessor.

And don’t forget Willy Davidson who quipped that a fellow who has only one motorcycle couldn’t consider himself much of a biker. Willy knew what his customers wanted and served them so well with his rumbling 1915 technology Hogs, that Harley Davidson is now worth more on the stock market than General Motors. I doubt that the Harvard gurus ever pondered why the Dupont executives who destroyed the Indian Motorcycle Company, failed so miserably with their plug-in management approach. The executives made bad financial decisions and a series of bad motorcycles that few riders would buy. Willy and his posse didn’t survive with clever Wall Street scams after Indian collapsed -- they did it the old fashioned way -- they earned it after Willy and other motorcycle enthusiasts snatched Harley Davidson back from the Brunswick executives who were following the Dupont crew to disaster by building bad machines. You might say that both companies were saddled with bad colonels, but Willy and his guys rescued his namesake.

Those were committed people, who multiplied their passions through their people and not one of the wild ducks, who rode the cold north wind ahead of their flocks, would have been worth a hill of beans at making clothespins or peddling sugar water to teenagers. All of them were passionate achievers who had the dual leadership ability to manage resources and relationship well.

Unfortunately, our deepening American leadership failure has included a greedy loss of vision of what creative men and women of passion and a commitment to greatness can achieve when they become committed leaders.

It is well past time to put that failure behind us, to harness the human element understood by successful leaders, by embracing and capitalizing on the universal desire of men and women to find meaning for themselves and to make their lives count in purposeful activities with their resources and through their relationships. Fortunately, I am finding signs that more perceptive Western managers are beginning to understand how commitment and excellence can be jump-started in our organizations. I surely do see it emerging from the women entrepreneurs now taking significant roles in our society. Most men have traditionally followed the Harvard paint-by-the-numbers approach, using a universal system for earning money but not especially caring whether they are working with garbage, grain, coal or with the American banking system’s money -- so long as the monthly report is good. On the other hand, most women going into business for themselves, choose areas of service where they feel a sense of meaning and purpose that lifts them beyond a satisfactory bank account in return for their accomplishments. When they reach home and family at the end of the work week, many more women than men want to feel they have contributed to society in some significant manner in addition to creating their own wealth.

For years I taught courses about the need to harness commitment and creativity, to manage resources and relationships -- to the budding executives in the Executive Development Conference at the University of Arizona at Tucson. I acknowledged the need for greater government cooperation, for improved technology, for lower interest rates, and for freedom from the tyranny of the monthly report. I then insisted that a new philosophy of leadership is needed to better utilize the reservoir of often untapped human ability that exists in every organization. In my courses, I told each group of two dozen or so fast-track executives from Saudi Arabia, France, Latin America, Australia, England, Brazil and the United States, that we must turn our organizations into surrogate communities in which people invest the very stuff of their lives at tasks or in relationships that are meaningful to them personally. I concluded by saying that in no other way could an executive or manager further a career effectively.

There is a point to this, and I cannot help but recall it every time I hear managers and executives talking about the lack of commitment offered them by their employees:

Because men and women almost always continue holding the attitudes and completing the activities that reward them personally, while avoiding the attitudes and ending the activities that devalue or deprive them of benefits, every management team receives the level of performance from the employees that the leadership group consistently reinforces in some tangible or intangible manner.

Unfortunately, in our American and European nations, frequently the level of commitment is neither what the leadership wanted nor expected.

There are no bad regiments: There are only bad colonels!

This course is about becoming a more successful leader by harnessing what we now know about effectiveness and efficiency. The research is in -- any group that becomes what I call a community of achievers can maintain its level of productivity with a significant reduction in labor costs, in floor space, and with in inventory. Any manager who cannot build a career on that improvement probably has no business cluttering the territory!

SELF-FOCUS SAMPLE
Tell what you think the author means when he writes that every management team receives the level of commitment that the leaders consistently reward.

In the physical or resource aspects of leadership.

In the psychological or relational aspects of leadership

Does your group receive the degree of commitment expected from the use of a sound quid pro quo?

If you answer yes, why does your reward system succeed?

If your answer is no, why does your reward system fail?

Dangerous Narcissism - Wisdom From The Fulfillment Forum

In this era of increasing complexity and deepening confusion, triggered by our self-defeating choices and compounded by the existential frustrations coming from a fast changing, emotionally unstable life-style, most persons are tempted to seek simplistic solutions to their psychospiritual challenges. We all want to live well, but usually on the cheap, forgetting that H L Mencken said, “Simple and neat solutions for complex problems are usually simple, neat and wrong.”


ACTORS ALL - I MYSELF - ALONE
When life fails to bring us consistent satisfaction, when our weaknesses withhold from us the ego satisfaction we crave, most persons create fantasies that ease the pain caused by the near universal life-style dilemma of uncertainty. This allows each fearful person to protect his or her precious soul from suffering without exercising a great deal of effort. Some people cling to self-defeating attitudes, activities and relationships that offer short-term gains, while sacrificing the long range benefits only a maturing life-style provides. Our self imposed repressions and denials keep us from learning what we really need in order to live a consistently liberating life.

Spiritually minded adults who are maturing beyond their anxieties and self-deceptions have learned from our terrible 20th century disasters that existence is seldom simple. Unfortunately, psychospiritually immature persons avoid that reality of life like the plague, fervently hoping that denying everything unpleasant will deliver them from their problems. Winston Churchill, England’s great war time prime minister, muttered in disgust when he was trying desperately to get his people to prepare for the attack by Adolph Hitler’s Germany:

The average man simply cannot tolerate the truth. And should he inadvertently stumble over it, he immediately hurries away lest it force him to discard the delusions with which he comforts himself.

Around 1910, Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries I enjoyed so much as a boy, was also the author of several serious historical papers. He reported that the European nations had become so civilized they would never again resort to war to solve their differences. He really believed with most Victorian and Edwardian Britons that humans are rational beings who automatically make the most responsible choices for themselves and for society. It was this naive belief in rationality that helped cause such a negative reaction to Freud and his followers who demonstrated beyond dispute that a great many persons across Europe were simmering kettles of irrationality, yearning to fall violently on one another personally and nationally. Most physicians, ministers and philosophers considered the early psychologists lunatics to even hint that rational Europeans carried within themselves disastrous anxieties, hatreds and ambitions they keep hidden from consciousness. As Kipling would say, perhaps strangers such as Chinese, Americans and Frenchmen might be neurotic, but never proper English gentlemen! Actually Doyle’s Edwardian England was a hotbed of neuroticism and psychosis. And Continental Europe was even worse.

Freud was right, of course, for within forty years after Doyle’s prediction, his rational, responsible world had fought World War I and World War II, endured the Holocaust and begun a half century long financially and spiritually devastating Cold War. As usual, there was little ordinary men and women could do to keep their commercial, political and military abusers from slaughtering a hundred million persons across the twentieth century. Unfortunately, few of us made a serious effort to stop them - which for me verifies the fact that we do indeed contain within our hearts and minds the narcissistic seeds of greed and violence we deny through the ultimate lie. This lie is the myth that men and women are mostly cool and calm persons who would live at peace were it not for a few wicked abusers who disturb the peace. We, the citizens of Western Civilization, failed miserably to behave responsibly as we followed ruthless manipulators who promised us revenge on and loot from those evil savages who competed with us from across first the Rhine and later the Vistula Rivers. Look, the most vicious abusers always find some enemy through which they harness many naïve cultural neurotics to do their bidding, to slaughter one another for the benefit of some ruthless and egoistic aristocracy.

J. R. R. Tolkien, the eccentric Oxford University don ended his magnificent LORD OF THE RINGS saga with some sound advice for humans troubled by wounded egos. He had Gandalf the wizard admonish the hobbits Pippin and Merry to be modest when they return home as national heroes. After many adventures they’d met with fortitude and courage, in which the peaceful little shire-folk defeated the overwhelming forces of Sauron, their wise old comrade told them to remain modest. They must remember, he said, they are after all only very small chaps in a vast and dangerous Middle Earth. Pippin and Merry laughed from the depths of their earthy hobbit souls and agreed with Gandalf. One hobbit said not to worry, he became heroic and bold only under protest, only when forced into battle by desperate circumstances. Actually, he’d rather be home writing books on family history than treading the paths of glory which he’d found led many comrades to the grave. The other hobbit sighed and said;

Alas, we Tooks and Brandybucks cannot live comfortably on the heights with the kings and nobles of Middle Earth.

They quickly tired of fame’s limelight; both wanted to go home and operate their farms in the lush green fields of the Shire with their loved ones. Hobbits have always shown excellent judgment; they spend most of their time growing and consuming as much good food as possible.

We are all beset by challenges that frustrate us consistently in an age when an act as simple as driving on a freeway requires a life or death decision every sixty seconds. Politicians are ruthlessly destroying our beloved Republic, creating a wicked American Empire in which one percent of our citizens control ninety percent of the nation’s wealth. Corporations destroy three million American careers every year through downsizing and out sourcing, dishonesty abounds in many places, millions of Americans are addicted to narcotics and terrorism is on the increase. We have only recently come through the Cold War with the threat of mass annihilation waved constantly as a red flag by politicians to manipulate us. Millions of Americans can remember crouching under their school desks, fearful that each alert would bring a nuclear holocaust. Teachers and principals everywhere were in turmoil. I was teaching science while in graduate school at the University of Cincinnati and we teachers were powerless to change anything the Military/Industrial Complex and its political lackeys saddled us with in order to stop the spread of collective ownership of the world‘s resources.

Unfortunately, all humans are self-centered to a greater or a lesser degree. I can think of no more striking example of narcissistic selfishness than the problems Mr. Clinton brought on himself, his family and his government through sexual encounters with women drawn like moths to the flame by his power and prestige. Even after his public relations disasters with Gennifer Flowers and Paula Jones, he used Monica Lewinsky for his own ego satisfaction. How egoistic he was! What on earth made him think a twenty-two year old girl would keep secret a sexual relationship with the world’s most powerful man? Didn’t he realize his political enemies understood his sexual compulsions well enough to anticipate another fall from grace they could exploit? In the book HUNTING THE PRESIDENT the author reveals Clinton’s enemies had already financed Paula Jones’ lawsuit and chosen Kenneth Starr, a rabid Clinton hater for his defeating the first President Bush, as special prosecutor to attack him and still Mr. Clinton considered himself invulnerable. The egoistic use of power often overwhelms our judgment and causes us many problems. Gennifer Flowers quipped, That boy just doesn’t learn! Actually, he’s quite like many men and women who are narcissistic in their outlook. Gary Hart, a Colorado senator aspiring to the presidency, challenged the media to catch him with a woman beside his wife if they could. Unfortunately for his ambition, some reporters could and did, taking photos of him with Donna Rice on his lap while cruising aboard the launch Monkey Business and he had to drop out of the campaign and leave politics. A little modesty about one’s power can go a long ways toward survival in our relationships. Martha Stewart was egoistic and proud enough to assume she was above the law and paid a steep ego and financial price.

We bring many problems on ourselves through our selfishness. Humans are so narcissistic that we give ourselves the benefit of every doubt, thinking ourselves superior and deserving more privileges than the common folk. The world revolves around I - MYSELF ALONE! And then we repress and deny everything that causes problems and pain. Gandalf’s advice is good for us also. At best, we are temporal creatures who live briefly on the bubble of existence, although we normally ignore our vulnerability so long as health and wealth lasts. We remain only actors, Shakespeare said, pretending and strutting on the stage, speaking our few lines and vanishing into the wings as understudies take over our precious roles. Nevertheless, despite our limitations, each person whether woman or man, instinctively and automatically feels like the protagonist in the play - the central character around whom the action swirls, who deserves the lion’s share of the applause. All those lesser characters at the edges of the drama really should defer to us. That seems only right, for we can stand on life’s stage, swing our eyes around and see that I - MYSELF ALONE appears to be the only person in the midst of the action. We want to believe, if we will honestly admit it, that we are at the center of the Cosmos with everyone else waiting at the edges. And herein comes one great persisting tragedy for individuals, families, communities and entire cultures.

Very little about women and men is painted in pure black and white colors. A great many aspects of life come in shades of gray, somewhere between holy sainthood and ruthless deviltry. Humans should try to get along with a modicum of decency and satisfaction, at least until we are frustrated to distraction, frightened badly and feel we must fight to preserve our self-esteem, our possessions, our pleasure or our power to function without domination by another person.

Therefore, while I write about narcissism and self-esteem, about our desire to win respect from our peers, to become someone of significance, that also comes in many shades of gray. You may yearn to become the very best, most loving and competent nurse in Cook County Hospital. That is a noble ambition while also assuring us of continuing respect from friends and esteem about ones self. We all need to receive esteem, even if it’s only as the best neighborhood Martian slayer on the latest video game, so we almost all try to make ourselves look somewhat better than we really are. This is as normal as human narcissism gets. On the other hand, the Mafia don who wants the most respect within his “family” - which is another way of saying he demands fear from his subordinates - or a ruthless business manager who will cheat employees, suppliers and contractors to promote his or her wealth, is searching for dominance rather than esteem. This is certain to create distrust, resentment and attempts by others to restore some balance of power. But nothing is simple!


NATURE’S NASTY TWIST
Narcissism, when it gets out of hand. is an example homosapien selfishness, is usually dangerous and often fatal, leading us to lust inordinately for power, prestige, possessions and pleasure. Sigmund Freud who wrote long after Jesus’ time, reorganized the Biblical concept of mammon in classic terms. Freud used the ancient Greek myth of Narcissus, who was so enamored with his own beauty that he died while admiring it, to explain our often overwhelming fixation with ourselves and our schemes. He coined the phrase narcissism to identify this condition that causes such devastation at so many times and places where humans interact.

Our virtually universal narcissistic drive to be superior - to appear more important than anyone else, to seize possessions and power and prestige over others, is arguably the major cause of human conflicts and most crippling disasters that follow. Massive human problems come from our yearning to make everyone else subservient to egoistic I - MYSELF ALONE. This lusting after possessions, power, prestige and pleasure, when it gets out of hand, is at the root of almost all individual, group and national conflicts.

This universal craving for existential significance became embedded in our psyches as a survival element during our primordial ancestors’ struggles as fangless little hominids who made convenient meals for the big carnivores on the wild African savannah. Because they could neither run fast nor fight fiercely, those with the greatest narcissism were more likely to survive and pass their genes on to a family group that carried them eventually to us. Those that didn’t run and grasp and hoard what they needed, who didn’t become paranoid enough to sacrifice their peers so they could escape, were less likely to survive. Their genes were lost to us. Now, a few million years later, each of us is still determined not to be ignored, devalued or deprived of our right to self-esteem, our right to dominate those lesser creature-selves around us.

From that egoistic lust for superiority, arises the bloody history of our violent race. Disaster comes often because the people and societies we yearn to dominate feel precisely the same way about us. As in the endless Balkan and African conflicts, people are almost always on a collision course with persons, organizations and nations that are equally willing to use others for their own benefit. Of course, each group rationalizes its violence as being caused by those evil strangers across the valley who threaten their own righteous and holy way of life. Obviously, we humans virtually always deny bringing conflicts down on ourselves. We are always tempted to blame others for our problems so we can justify our attacks, can feel good about sacrificing our young people to teach the enemy of the decade a lesson about challenging us. George W. Bush never makes a speech without praising the young American fighting men and women while ruthlessly cutting the Veteran’s Affairs budget just as the flood of casualties from his wars need the most help. He also constantly condemns the ruthless villains who attack and frustrate the good and righteous American way of dominating the world. After all, most humans feel that I MYSELF - ALONE absolutely do deserve the best in life. This narcissistic fantasy that each of us is superior to the rest of humankind and more deserving is buried deep in our unconscious from where it oozes out in crucial times and places. This nasty twist of human nature has complicated life more and more for us.

I realize that in order to cope with 21st century challenges, humans must become bold and courageous. We need to be brave in the presence of adversity - to live as strong men and women when most ordinary souls like Tolkien’s hobbits wanted only to be left alone to make a living and rear a family. The human experience has never been easy, in fact it is always fatal eventually. Unfortunately, reactionary persons, those with too strong a defense system who cling to the past, always feel that society is at a crossroads, that nations can be saved only through a rebirth of the heroic self-sufficiency their ancestors supposedly nurtured. I challenge that simplistic assumption for one major reason.

The so called lost Golden Age of America, from just after our Civil War until the Vietnamese War, was golden mostly for affluent white males. Everyone else had to take what the powerful robber barons didn’t want. Unfortunately financial abusers are like the Wyoming Rancher during the range wars who said he only wanted what was his - and what was next to it! With one or two percent of contemporary Americans owning some ninety percent of the nation’s wealth, they pretty much have it all! In my youth, multitudes of families lived in abject poverty as the novels GRAPES OF WRATH and GOD’S LITTLE ACRE revealed so poignantly. I know, I was there at the time, so don’t try to fool me with half truths and ruthless ideologies. I remember the ragged, barefoot kids in school, the fights with the greedy aristocracy who opposed school lunch programs, free books and school buses as communistic in nature. I remember President Hoover sending the U. S. cavalry against fathers pleading for food for their children. And the glee of the generals who were laughing and joking when they were ordered to attack the rabble. A huge percentage of families endured severe hardships while trying to survive. And regardless of the myths many reactionary preachers and primitive politicians concoct, in order to frighten people into pulling their chestnuts from the fire, life really became much better for many persons. Only now, those benefits are being taken away by a wicked consortium of financial neo-fascists, reactionary political neo-cons and fundamental religious neo-zealots who are moving heaven and earth to crush everything decent and to deliver the nation back into the ruthless hands of the robber barons who have arisen again through Global Capitalism and the outright bribery of our politicians.

Many more persons of both genders and families of all creeds and races did better financially than at any previous time in American history. The rascals who deny this are either idiots or are yearning for a return to a white, male dominated society. Even the radical preachers protesting loudest about our liberal society, who keep trying to recreate that white, male controlled culture of the past because they are selfish white men, are fixated almost exclusively on material things. They hate sharing their power, prestige and possessions with women of all races and with men of color. To state it bluntly, the blatant narcissists want to steal everything they can haul away. That is the way their mind-sets operate, this is where their core values lead them, although they use clever propaganda to persuade the naive with their own clamoring anxieties, that they are working for patriotic or spiritual reasons when they are working for I MYSELF -- ALONE.

Nevertheless, going through the challenge of earning an education, building a career, nurturing a marriage and rearing a family while maturing, does require strength and courage. I know of no easy way to become a maturing person. I believe it is this reality that led early psychologist William James to call for human heroism on our often dangerous pilgrimage through life, for we are all bedeviled by selfish yearnings. Most of the scholars I draw from agree that many humans are frequently crippled by our universally self-centered traits that get out of control.

When it is uncontrolled, narcissism keeps every community and civilization boiling with frustration and aggression. Two cultures demonstrated this quite clearly. Our anti-bellum southern aristocratic men wore their egos on their sleeves, quarreling and dueling at the drop of a perceived insult. Imperial Germany and Spain were even worse - the haughty posturing of men and women is very obvious in old black and white photographs from the era. They struggled to win heroic significance for themselves and their social classes.

What do we yearn for and whom shall we sacrifice to get it? How powerful are the motives that flog us onward in our desire to become significant? How completely do the aristocrats in our communities shape our opportunities - with their wealth being used to control politicians and the criminal justice establishment and to finance the propaganda systems that stack the deck for themselves? How can we save the American Republic?

We all try to conceal our character flaws by finding clever ways to justify them. Not long ago my wife and I were waiting in a checkout line that had stalled when an elderly woman needed to exchange a purchase and several twenty year old youths successively paid their bills by writing checks for under three dollars. I started muttering and Roberta poked me. Take a walk before you embarrass me, she whispered.. I left and when she came out a few minutes later, she was laughing. We’ve been married half a century and she still has the ability to surprise and delight me. Naturally, she can see right through my facades - but she loves me anyway! I sometimes wonder why. She told me in her unique fashion;

It was your old egoistic need for existential significance acting up again. You just couldn’t stand having a line of simple folk slow down a world-class antique motorcycle restorer and community theater actor could you?

Not a word about my books because she fights fair. I grinned wryly in agreement but protested to protect my ego.

Well, I am not alone -- I have plenty of company out here.

Indeed I do and while I know these concepts well enough to write about them, I too have a need for esteem within my soul. I would even appreciate a little cosmic worth from time to time. And so would you! So does everyone and that yearning sometimes runs wild in every society. Few events demonstrate this narcissistic selfishness in action more clearly than the constant battling in Serbia, Indonesia and among many African tribes.

In his book MEIN KAMPF, the arch-villain Adolph Hitler described very well the frustrated narcissism gnawing at Germany’s resentful people after that nation’s defeat in World War I. After a century as Europe’s bully boy, Germany was reduced to poverty and hunger, even eating their cats and dogs to survive, calling the cats roof rabbits. Europe’s aristocrats would have done well to learn from him rather than dismiss Hitler as an ignorant rabble-rouser who deserved their contempt. They’d always issued orders and docile corporals saluted and said: By your leave, Sir. Some of Europe’s powerful died on meat hooks and in gas chambers because they failed to see that Hitler’s lust for power and prestige was every bit as great as their own. However, the slain aristocratic elite were a minority. They always are as narcissism often triumphs over ethics, morality and spirituality.

Many more, like most French, Lithuanian, Belgium, Swiss and Italian aristocrats, sold their souls to retain their possessions, power and prestige. The French House of Deputies enacted every cruel law Germany wanted, betraying their Jewish citizens to Gestapo death squads who were enthusiastically supported by the local police. The French government deliberately delivered their own demobilized soldiers into four years of slave labor in Nazi factories and sold working class girls as prostitutes in German troop brothels. Not their own children, of course, who avoided the terror by hanging out on the Cote d’ Azure during the war years, but the sons and daughters of the working families over whom they had power. Then, when France and the other nations were delivered from German tyranny, the politicians immediately repressed everything evil they’d done. To this day the ruthless abusers of France and Belgium have seldom been brought to justice - the entire French government repressed its cooperation with the Germans. Everyone pretended he or she had fought in the resistance when only a very few ordinary men and women actively opposed the Germans.

Only late in 1999 did the French government pass laws that would return confiscated Jewish property to the children and grandchildren of the original owners. The guilt of being traitors to French civilization was hidden so deep within their collective unconscious for decades that France officially insisted there was no stolen property to return. Few of the European aristocrats and their police enforcers were like the brave people of Denmark and Bulgaria who held steady to their values to battle the Germans. The Danish and the Bulgarian police were the only European cops who collectively chose to support their own people rather than betray them. They organized the resistance underground, saving virtually all Danish and Bulgarian Jews and freezing in place two Wermacht heavy weapons infantry divisions needed badly by the Germans in Normandy on D-Day. It is quite likely that those twenty-five thousand additional troops on the bluffs over Omaha Beach would have swept the D-Day invasion force of Britons and Americans into the sea and left Europe under the conqueror’s heel.

In other words --

While all humans are genetically and emotionally tempted to be selfish and narcissistic enough to cause conflicts and wars, if we live with ethical virtues and spiritual values, of the kind that Moses, Jesus, Buddha and Mohammed taught, if we lay aside our contrived self-deceptions, we can live far more peacefully within ourselves and among others. We can enjoy meaningful activities in places of the heart where we belong with the people with whom we share love and acceptance.


Author:
Jard DeVille has published more than a score of psychology books, seminars and psychological assessment instruments. His book NICE GUYS FINISH FIRST was a powerful best seller. THE PSYCHOLOGY OF LEADERSHIP was New American Library's offering in their Executive Development Series. Visit http://www.fulfillmentforum.com for Free Ebooks and Ebiz tools.