Not long ago, I posted an essay, Is Power for the Sake of Power the Same as Power Earned by Productive Achievements? where I responded to a study which found:
[T]hat individuals in roles that possess power but lack status have a tendency to engage in activities that demean others. According to the study, “The Destructive Nature of Power without Status,” the combination of some authority and little perceived status can be a toxic combination.
At the end of the essay, I posted the following suggestion:
[P]ower tends strongly to corrupt when it is gained by the struggle to gain power and may not tend so strongly to corrupt when it comes as a result of productive achievements.
Now, I’d like to consider the study underlying an article, Who’s the Best Leader: The Saint or the Scrooge?, which actually deals with a different question: When nastiness threatens, do human beings prefer to be led by men of moral integrity or ruthless and unscrupulous competitors? As usual, I’m addressing a study under the assumption it’s set in the framework of what I consider an inadequate view of our world, a world which is showing itself to be greatly more complex, very much richer, than that inadequate view can allow for. I’m heading toward a richer and more complex way of speaking about our world, especially our human communities, but that way is itself built upon a foundation of a richer and more complex and more complete understanding of created being.
In fact, the title of this essay reveals I’m making no unique claims so far as a basic understanding of the facts goes. Novels such as 1984 and Fahrenheit 451, serious history books about Stalinist Russia, or journalistic history works about the United States since World War II can tell us a lot about the manipulation of fear levels by leaders wishing to guide a human herd into wars or into persecution of some alleged internal enemy. A serious reading of some good general history books will reveal some fuzzy patterns of history. I’d recommend Jacques Barzun’s From Dawn to Decadence or the works of John Dahlberg, Lord Acton. Start with books by or about such serious thinkers and follow the trail of references as suits your tastes and interests. We shape our minds by such active responses rather than becoming “invincibly ignorant” by adopting a “perverse literacy” in which we accept mainstream accounts of reality and never strive for a different or deeper understanding. (The quoted terms are those used by Thomas Jefferson to describe a problem he already saw developing in the American mind during his lifetime.)
Let me make a claim which will allow me to pull some of these ideas into a greater coherence. The common traits of systems labeled as ‘fascist’ by knowledgeable commentators are the schematic and artificial nature of the authority structures and the way in which authority is imposed from above, imposed by those who wish to hold power. If we live in a dynamic world, a world in which family-lines of organisms and family-lines of systems evolve, a world in which individual organisms and individual systems develop over their lifetimes, then we should be patient, holding mostly to behaviors and attitudes which overlap those of libertarianism and even anarchism. We should be unwilling to hand family authority to any governments, reluctant to hand local authority to centralized governments, inclined strongly to local agricultural and manufacturing enterprises while engaging selectively in larger-scale and wider-scale enterprises when appropriate. We should always be ready to trade with other local regions and to engage in fairly open cross-financing with other local regions, biasing such activities to nearby regions.
We should invest in and participate in activities which we can understand and which are likely to serve the purposes of our local citizenry in living good lives, morally and socially well-ordered lives. We shouldn’t be oblivious to the needs of those farther from us but we should be humble about any assumptions we can help them to live better lives because such thoughts usually have led us to forcing others to live like us. We should refuse to become human materiel for the great plans or simply the grasping ambitions of those men who seek power for its own sake and wealth for its own sake rather than accepting them when they come and using them to serve moral human purposes.
Speaking more directly to the referenced article, we should place our faith in God or at least in some system of virtue and we should refuse to fear that which our masters or would-be masters would have us fear. In this refusal and in our positive behaviors and attitudes which serve nobler human purposes, we gain our liberty and cast off our chains. Even if we are conquered and have chains put on us by forcible means, we can remain true men while our acceptance of the fears nurtured by central powers make us the most despicable of creatures: man-like but spineless critters seeking the safety allegedly found when we accept the rule of men whose only right to rule comes from their ambition and their greed.
In any case, God is moving His story forward. No one can stop the formation of the Body of Christ but we can find ourselves being crushed and pulverized by the forces of history when we refuse to try to understand them and to move with them. Sometimes we can find ourselves being crushed and pulverized even if we understand and try to cooperate with God’s story. We should learn how to think about history, about human communities and their relationships to Creation and its Creator, from the prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah.