A friend of mine told me a story about a man who was a manager at a factory. One day, out of anger, he completely trashed one of his direct reports. He used a superior tone of voice, completely disparaging the dignity of his employee. The manager went home that day, calmed down, and regretted his outburst. Even if he was right about the content of what he said, the disrespect he showed to his colleague was not warranted. He found excuses for himself, however, thinking that his behavior was understandable because of the high emotions he experienced, which clouded his judgment.
The second day at work, he went to his direct report and apologized. He used the same excuse, that he was angry, and that due to this he could not contain his emotions.
The employee seemed very sad. He replied, “I understand, Mr. Director, but you would not have done it if I were your peer or your superior.”
The director did not know what to say. But he went home and told this story to his children, so that they learn to never excuse their inexcusable behavior by appealing to anger or any other strong emotion.
The lesson the director gave to his children is opposite to what we usually believe. The idea that emotions justify behaviors is so engrained in us that, in antiquity, there were legal systems that allowed for certain levels of clemency in cases of murders out of “justified” anger. Heraclitus says that passion gets whatever it wishes at the expense of the soul; when strong feelings occupy your being, your rationality diminishes. The words of the abused man in the story, though, show that, at least in most cases and clearly in the majority of the cases in which we justify unacceptable behavior by claiming that we were angry, we are capable to act properly if we see that it is in our interest to do so. We may boil with anger, but we will not trash our interlocutor if our livelihood depends on him.
Is self-interest the only motive that can stop us from acting out of emotions? Perhaps. I believe there is one other. When you acknowledge that your act out of anger, regardless of how much your anger is justified, leads to an ugly environment for the people around you, you may avoid allowing yourself to act inappropriately for the sake of the beauty of the world to which you already belong. But much has to happen for this. The first thing is a realization that this world is a hospital in which we all manifest some sort of disease. But we are humans, so we most often do not realize that if the hospital is stinky, it is because we are in it. This is why hospitals need doctors and nurses, to remind us of why we are there and to show us the path outside. The man’s employee in the story was a patient who, one day, raised up to the level of doctor, by reminding the director of what he needs to do to respect the dignity of any other human being.
“Peace is four times more important than justice.” I heard these words from the late Fr. Arsenie Papacioc. During his life, he suffered injustices. When he spoke about peace, he didn’t do it like someone who likes to utter beautiful phrases without ever having been tried by them.
Similar phrases are often used by marriage counselors; you can also find them all over the internet, in shorts where the influencers of the day ask you, “do you want to be right or happy?”
I want to be both, I’d like to answer. I also like to have both peace and justice. But this seems to be possible only when all actors of a given situation follow goodness, in an integrative unity, as some philosophers call it, that makes it so that individual goods are in agreement with the Good itself: the consequence is that my good will never take away from your good, and so there’s no need for fight over justice. In the world in which we live, though, individual interests are most of the time in conflict. People also have different abilities and powers, which lead to some overwhelming others.
Suppose that Fr. Arsenie’s words are true: since peace and justice cannot be achieved at the same time, one needs to focus on peace. This would mean to accept injustices for the sake of peace. But if this is true, one can say this only to oneself, not to others. Tell others to give up their justice for the sake of peace, and it seems that the abuse is double: after being destroyed by their usurper, the abused suffer the injustice of not being heard. What you’re asking of them is to give up themself for your peace, not theirs.
Peace is four times more important than justice. Another truth that can be said to oneself only. Or perhaps during counseling, when the advice is sought after. Transform it into an obligation for anyone else, and you have already canceled the possibility of peace.
One of the notions that appear in Nicolae Steinhardt’s diary, both directly and indirectly, is truth. In a world in which falsity is the norm, as the 1950 Romania was, the question of truth has its own flavors. There are moments when the spirit of arithmetic is required. When the world around you makes no sense, when people claim that obviously false ideas are truth, when your brethren are murdered in the name of these ideas, then it is right to say that 2 + 2 = 4. Steinhardt says that this is “because the affirmation of eternal truths is always welcome, it is always healthy and useful to know that two and two is four. (Two and two is four represents the formula of common sense, of natural rights, of unbreakable axioms.)” When truth is forbidden, the truth of arithmetic is the only thing that one can utter. This can take place in different ways, as Nicolae Steinhardt says, depending on the lie of the regime that you live in. “Each time, the general algebraic equation should be arithmetized—that is, embodied in that particular truth which is hidden and condemned by the tyrant in power.” Thus, “when people are being sawn in two right next to you, announcing that two and two is four means that you must scream at the top of your lungs: it is an injustice crying out to heaven that people should be sawn in two.”
Claiming that the spirit of arithmetic is required in a totalitarian regime sounds strange because it seems to imply that arithmetic is uninteresting in other contexts, in freedom, and you can say in such contexts anything you want. Why would “2 + 2 = 4” be important only when people deny it? Perhaps because claiming any propositional truth, including that of arithmetic, when nobody asks you about it, may constitute the germs of oppression that you yourself are the agent for.
When there is no tyranny, and you find yourself doing arithmetics and believing that you thus explain the world, you may have to be careful not to find yourself alone, separated from all human beings, and thinking that one or another life is worth nothing. So it seems that arithmetic has two edges. One can affirm life; the other can kill it.
There seem to be two kinds of truth in Nicolae Stenhardt’s diary. They also appear in the writings of a writer that Steinhardt often cites. Inevitably, since both these writers approach life, these two truths appear in our daily lives. They can be called the truth of arithmetic and the truth of personhood. I will speak about them in the context of confession and investigation. Confession and investigation are presupposed to find out the truth about the person who is submitted to them. The former has life as end; the latter ends in death.
In a note from 1964, Steinhardt writes, “I fait to find anything outside of or above the ‘creed’ that Dostoevsky formulated for himself and which he presents as very simple: I believe there is nothing more beautiful, deeper, more inviting, more reasonable, more manly, and more perfect than Christ; what’s more, if someone proved to me that Christ is outside of the truth and that the truth is in fact outside of Christ, I’d be better off staying with Christ than with the truth.”
Dostoevsky first wrote these words in a personal letter to Natalya Fonvizina, in February 1854, just released from prison camp. Rowan William says that Dostoevsky’s confession “whatever exactly it meant to him at the time of writing, comes to mean something like this. ‘Truth’, as the ensemble of sustainable propositions about the world, does not compel adherence to any one policy of living rather than another; if faith’s claims about Christ do not stand within that ensemble of propositions, that is not a problem. It means that they cannot be confused with any worldly power that might assume the right to dictate a policy for living or impose a reconciliation upon unwilling humanity” (25). I would like to propose something complimentary, that is revealed in Steinhardt’s writings: Dostoevsky doesn’t write merely about the claims of faith, but about Christ himself being outside of propositional truth.
The second time Dostoevsky wrote these words is in a novel, Demons. The Demons portrays the moralist movement that Dostoevsky himself was part of, which responded to the depravation of Russian society at the end of the 19th century by bringing to the frontpage the moralist ideas of socialism. By the time he writes Demons, after his let’s call it spiritual conversion post the Siberia period, Dostoevsky already perceives the intrinsic quality of any moralist movement: they are murderous because they cannot accept the reality of the world as it is given to them, and they want to transform it according to their own ideas of beauty. The Bolsheviks and the Fascists murdered millions in the name of their own beauty. They wanted to destroy all institutions, and they wanted to create a new world, free of the “elements” that did not belong to their imagined beauty. Those who belong to the old world are defined as evil, and they are supposed to be eliminated. In an accurate, to my mind, description of the phenomenon, Roger Scruton says, “totalitarian ideologies invariably divide human beings into innocent and guilty groups. Behind the impassioned rhetoric of the Communist Manifesto, behind the pseudo-science of the labour theory of value, and behind the class analysis against human history, lies a single emotional source—resentment of those who are comfortable with the ordinary world of human compromise, the world of the ‘we’, which stands in the way of the transcendental ‘I’ of the revolution.” All historical tragedies have as source the belief in moral superiority of one or another, which gives them moral justification for their crimes.
The idea of being comfortable with the ordinary world of human compromise bothers some ears. I know it bothers the idealists and the young, who believe that they can transform society or the world around them into paradise. They begin with an ideal, a fixed ideal, that has definition because it is substantial, and they do not stop until this ideal is achieved. But the problem is that a defined ideal, one that is fixed into a definition, is dead. It has no life in it. It is the truth of arithmetics which, when it is not used to reveal falsity, murders.
Let me go back to Steinhardt and see how this truth of arithmetic appears in different ways.
“Did you break a glass?” This is how the investigation begins for Nicolae Steinhardt.
“At the end of the day,” Steinhardt writes, “I don’t really know whether I broke it or not. […] If I admit I broke it, I tell the truth (the objective truth [the truth of arithmetic, I would say]), and, as soon as I’ve spoken the truth, I have to go on and admit that Nego spoke in a hostile way.” Nego is a reference to a Romanian poet and literary critic, Ion Negoitescu, who was imprisoned by the communist regime.
The truth of arithmetic is merciless: it eliminates individuals, because it considers the world from the outside and it judges its value depending on whether certain members deserve or not to belong to it. It also establishes a tyranny of exactness, and the spirit of this tyranny does not accept the freedom of truth. The exactness of calculations based on numbers shows the murderous nature of totalitarian regimes.
The difference between the truth of arithmetic and the truth of personhood is not based on morality, and so it does not distinguish between wrong and right approaches. In and of themselves, the two “truths” have no moral features. Eliminating one of them from the way in which we approach the world or using them in inappropriate contexts may, however, say something about ourselves or about the status of humanity in a particular age. Constantin Noica wrote about the spirit of exactness that took over humanity in the 20th century. He writes,
this is how the world today feels everywhere. And the world is in prison. It no longer has heavens and relatives in heavens, it no longer has nature and divinities of nature around it, but it is alone, in a cosmic captivity, attempting to evade from Terra or at least to communicate with a neighbor in the cosmos, whom it cannot find. It has given up myths a long time ago, be they religious, philosophical, or uncontrolled dogmas of tradition. Instead, it has so many small local truths that it feels as chaos. And so it wants exactness.
Noica shows that the world needs exactness for escaping chaos. A world without clarity is difficult to process: it is difficult to understand a heaven that contains people like Marmeladov, who drink away the last money of his daughter while she becomes a prostitute to provide for her family. The brother of the prodigal son who remained home wants exactness: for him, it is difficult to put together the dissolute life his brother lived and his father’s welcoming him with a party. Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov does not understand a good creation that contains such worthless humans as Alaina Ivanovna: it doesn’t compute. Simplifying the world, which is manifested in applying exactness to it, allows us to live in it simply, without complications. It also shows that we have lost our wonder. It was not always like this, as Noica continues.
Up to a certain moment in the past, cultures were only of Truth, not of exactness also. They placed man in a state of drunkenness, in a sacred ecstasy. Not only the mythic and religious cults were this way, but also the profane orientations. Pythagorianism is a form of sacred delirium; the pre-Socratic thinkers are as in a trance when they say that all things are water, all are air, or all are fire; and Plato requires enthusiasm for Ideas, which you recover now because “you have contemplated them in another existence.” Everything is ecstatic under the magic of truth — until Aristotle, who is the first thinker who is awake, sober, oriented toward exactness, in the European culture.
Noica separates exactness from truth because the exact description of an event does not equate the understanding of that event fully. The description of the murder with which I began this section is exact; nevertheless, it does not reach truth. Truth is understood only in contexts of values. This is why Noica ends his speech with the following words, “One cannot live without values and without an idea of truth. But people nowadays no longer want to get drunk. Or, if you want, they are also drunk: with lucidity. Let us pray for them.”
Truth is not merely about discovering facts. Facts are meaningless without narratives and values. If we remain in the realm of arithmetic, we will determine facts. But regardless of whether we want it or not, this arithmetic is influenced by our worldviews. Within the worldview in which humans are subjects that can study the world as an object, the best we can produce are various narratives, more or less close to truth. To reach genuine understanding, one can do so only within the truth of personhood. In this realm, one can understand oneself and everything else in connection because one allows divine light to reveal where we stand. One also understands oneself as part of the world, having in his body the same pains the entire world has. Thus, to remain with Christ, in truth, one must, Steinhardt suggests, shout out at times that 2+2 = 4. At other times, that he did not break a glass, even if he did so.
To bring all this together, arithmetic truth can lead to evil in the most banal way: with the intellectual discovery that you are right. In fact, you may be right; the problem is that you intellectually discovered it. At that moment, you no longer need to live in the light; you see yourself as part of the light. Writers like Steinhardt call us, I believe, to vigilance; but it is not vigilance against immorality, but against our own hearts, which always want to bring others in light forgetting to live ourselves in it. One question may help us be vigilant against our own heart, when our desires to be morally superior or our desires to belong to groups make us be silent when we face silently the suffering of others. This question is, “Am I ready to sacrifice my own morality for Christ?” This question does not replace a morality with another one. It should never be translated to, “am I ready to sacrifice my morality to follow what God asks of me.” And it should always be uttered in first person, not to others. The question asks me whether I am ready to be with all other people, refusing separation, regardless of the reasons I may have to accept separation. For Christ (who is Truth, truth as person) is with the ones in prison, with the adulterer, but also with the poor, the rich, and the in-between.
Summer of 2012. I was in my birth country, Romania, and I was angry. The TV was on at all times, and various political debates were taking hold of my soul. I was on one side of each debate, and I could not understand how one of my best friends was on the other. I was filled with passion, always ready to criticize or show others how wrong they were.
At the end of that summer, I returned to the US. The political climate was similar: two opposed sides, with a complete inability to listen to each other; only the details were different. The country was going through the presidential election period, which would result in the second term of President Obama. I had no stake in it: I still had a few years before becoming a citizen, and I did not get emotionally involved in the conflicts brewing all around me. Friends giving up life-long friendships, families not being able to have dinner together. And it dawned on me that the problem was not connected with being right or wrong, with being moral or immoral. These people who were unable to understand each other were mirroring me, the one who could not get out of my dark passions when they were triggered because of my emotional connection with my history. They gave me the chance to see myself from the outside, and I did not like what I saw: my humanity disappearing under dark passions.
In a recent article in New York Times, David Brooks talks about these dark passions. He says, “Dark passions are part of our nature, like keys on a piano. If we’re bombarded with speech that presses the dark keys, antipathy will rise. When people consume communication that demonstrates respect, curiosity, communion and hope, antipathy falls. The problem is that dark passions are imperial. Once they get in your body, they tend to spread. Dark passions drive out the good ones.”
In that autumn of 2012, I didn’t have a name for what I perceived to be dark forces around us. The dark passions were mine, but was there a force to bring them to life? In his new book, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity, Paul Kingsnorth gives it a name: it is the Machine, with its imperial desire of homogenizing the world, of making it a desert of the same, replacing nature and the sacred with the technical and the profane. The Machine is “a tendency within us, made concrete by power and circumstance, which coalesces in a huge agglomeration of power, control and ambition.” It is the transformation that Mircea Eliade alluded to in his The Sacred and the Profane, in which he showed how the homo religiosus was slowly (perhaps nor so slowly) replaced with the man of modernity, who forgets about the possibility of poetry, of mystery, and of the transcendental. The problem is that our era has become the priest of the Machine, having as final project replacing nature with technology. This is seen, Kingsnorth claims, in human relations, in the way in which we approach the body, and in the pervasive technology that will soon replace us. But don’t think that the result is merely our mutation from the villages of the past to the large cities of today; it is much more radical than this, Kingsnorth believes: human beings themselves become machines, as part of the larger Machine. We communicate with others through screen mediators only; we enter into dialogue as proponents of ideologies, and not as persons in search of truth; we describe each other purely in terms of political categories to which we think we belong. Even more, we cannot even think separately from the ideologies that we have embraced.
The Machine does not belong to a political side only. The Machine, Kingsnorth says, has already pervaded our way of thinking and approaching the world. We are in a culture “with no sacred order,” for we ourselves rejected our own foundations. Voids need to be replaced, and the Machine, the mechanistical view of life and of humans, has already done so. But this brought upon us a consequence: in the absence of the sacred, or of a metaphysical foundation that can provide meaning, we no longer find meaning, and all our interactions take place on the horizontal line of the desert, in which there only seem to be differences, but there are no such things.
To be sure, Kingsnorth calls for the creation of small places where we can encounter each other and ourselves. “People, place, prayer, the past. Human community, roots in nature, connection to God, memories passed down and on. These are the eternal things.” He calls for participating according to our possibilities, in the simple life that is offered to us by the earth, a place that is filled with life, Kingsnorth says, and which we treat as if it were a dead machine. We are to say no to progress. This is because progress wants us to live by immanence alone. But Man, Kingsnorth says, is not made to live that way. Progress wants the uprooting of everything; do so, Kingsnorth warns, and you will realize that your life is depleted of meaning.
Is fighting against the Machine a solution? Yes and no. Kingsnorth is right is his poetical conclusion: “Raindance to call down the Spirit upon them and us. Raindance to defy the Machine. Raindance to remember our ancestors. Raindance to offer prayers to your home. Raindance to the forest and the prairie and the meadow. Raindance to reclaim your stories. Raindance to discover where you are and where you come from. Raindance on top of your smartphone until it is nothing but splinters. Raindance against th myths of the age. Raindance against the false gods. Raindance with a smile on your face.”
Yes, Raindance. But if this raindance is against the Machine, this can only lead to more Machine. If you oppose something, you communicate with it and you place yourself on the same plan of existence. You give it being. But there is a different path, which one can witness throughout Kingsnorth book. On that path, you don’t bring back what was lost, because you do not define life by any of the features that can fix a culture or an era into a dead thing, defined without possibility of change. Instead of fighting back the machine, with the purpose of winning against it, you fight for life. Instead of fighting against something, you fight for something, for the joy and beauty of the raindance. By this, Kingsnorth’s approach is resurrectional. “Only birth can conquer death.” But to do so, we are to be crucified first.
The warriors against the Machine do not fight other people’s demons, but rather the demons left by the Machine in themselves. “The right kind of warrior takes on his own internal demons before he sails out to take on those of others. He takes his stand, and stands his ground, without giving in to the nihil of the age. He cleaves to what he believes in without falling into the traps laid by partisanship, anger and self-righteousness.” This fight, that Kingsnorth describes so well, ends in kenosis, self-emptying of the ego. “His war is against the worst of himself and for the best of the world, and what he is fighting for is the love he so often fails at. His most effective weapon is sacrifice.”
If he remains the right kind of warrior, he will never get to sailing against the demons of others, for he will spend his life fighting against his own internal ones. By doing so he will take on others’ demons in the most paradoxical way, by becoming an oasis for them in “the desert of the real.” He is someone who has an orientation (truth), but in whom others can rest without being judged, so they get renewed for their own fights.
This is because goodness does not contradict evil. Only evil contradicts goodness. We are accustomed to thing in dualism, to believe that if X is against Y, then Y is against X. But there is also another contradiction, which Constantin Noica calls the unilateral contradiction. In his Becoming Within Being, he says, “Only evil contradicts good, but not the other way around.” Becoming contradicts being; being, however, can assume becoming instead of opposing it. In the same way, the Machine contradicts nature, culture, and God. But they do not contradict the Machine; they do not give it being. So, once again, raindance. But not against the Machine or false gods, but for life and beauty.
Kingsnorth’s book is not about worshiping nature instead of technology. It is not even about fighting against the Machine. It is rather a call for all of us to remember to be human. Yes, this means to be crucified, or to live at the same time on two dimensions, both horizontal and vertical. Even if he dislikes seeing cell phones on Mount Athos, the sacred mountain filled with Orthodox monasteries in Greece, I think Kingsnorth also senses that fighting the Machine is not merely rejecting it. It is to become oases of rest for all those who need you, all those who are overtaken by the Machine, and who can be awakened by a smile and a good word. Not by a word that tells them that they are lost to the Machine, that they have become identical individuals no longer able to see themselves and others as persons. But by a smile and an embrace. Kingsnorth is right: that embrace can only come from the cross of our existence, remaining rooted in values with an orientation toward life and beauty (the vertical) but being mixed in the life that is given to us (the horizontal).
In Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, the first major novel of the renowned Russian writer, a poor student has done the unthinkable: murder. By all accounts, he is guilty, not only juridically , but also morally. By killing, he has separated himself from society, and the society has the right to punish him.
Raskolnikov is surrounded by people. His friend, his mother, and his sister have a certain reverence toward him. Dunya, his sister, seems to believe that he is able to become an accomplished human being. Regardless of the others’ regard of him, Raskolnikov can no longer have any connection with them. By murder, he has achieved what he desired, to be separated from the common man, but not in the way in which he may have thought: he is not beyond them, in an amoral, superior realm, but beneath them, no longer having access to humanity because he can no longer be a part of it as what he has become. He cannot be genuine with them because he is completely detached from this image, and he knows that he cannot bring them into the hell in which he is.
But someone else appears in his life. Sonya is a young woman who is engaged in prostitution, and who gives no justification for her actions. Of course, there is an explanation: her father is a drunk; he ends up drinking even the money his daughter brings in through prostitution, and the young children need something to eat. This is an explanation, but Sonya never justifies her actions with it. She never falls into victimhood.
Sonya knows who Raskolnikov is; she goes into the depth of his soul, into the hell of his soul, and she is able to dwell there. She has no expectations of him: she doesn’t believe he has abilities that would make him a great man; she doesn’t expect him to accomplish his great potential. Sonya’s power is to be able to stand with Raskolnikov when no one else is capable of it; to face his darkness and not run away.
This does not mean that Sonya accepts Raskolnikov the way he is. She doesn’t tell him that everyone can decide on his or her morality, that whatever works for him is good enough for her. Sonya remains with him in his hell regardless of his hell and not because of his hell, but because the light cannot be extinguished even in the darkness of dungeons. Sonya does not deny the absurd. She does not even fight the absurd. She remains there, within the absurd, on the strength of the fact that all things are possible with love, to paraphrase Kierkegaard. She knows Raskolnikov is in hell; his presence is repulsive to all, for it contradicts their morality. But not to her, because she does not focus on morality, but on life. On being dead, but able to be alive again.
Dostoevsky shows that there is a different way, Sonya’s way. She does not begin by judging the individual, even if she is personal. She begins by apprehending the world to which she and the others belong to. And she apprehends the person only in this context. When she finds out that Raskolnikov has committed murder, she encourages him to return to the earth, the one from which he has departed and has thus desecrated, to confess before the earth that he has done murder, and the earth, the world, will accept him again; it will take him out of the hell of solitude.
Sonya is the model for all who fight darkness, evil, dictators, and hell itself. Don’t fight them, unless you want to become like them. Just dwell in them, hoping against all evidence that light is victorious. Go to the depth of hell in love for another, and hell itself will not be able to contain you.
Here’s a dialogue with Adrian Guiu that took place at the Seminary Co-Op bookstore in Chicago. We talked about personhood, missed encounters, Dostoevsky, and the possibility of radical diversity as it appears in C.S. Lewis’ encouragement to read old books.
It is a book in which the human condition of being immigrant is revealed: constantly applying for visas in the souls of other human beings, while at the same time giving visas to others in one’s own soul. Caryl Emerson’s description has touched me the most: “These are fragments, perhaps even of a Romantic-era type, but more disciplined, more spiritual and scriptural, with an overlay of awe and its unexpected renewability.”
The cover features a photo by Raffaella Folle.
The little volume is itself an application for visas into people’s souls. Of course, it is upon its readers whether this visa is granted or not.
Someone recently asked me a seemingly simple question: “Have you considered the effects on your team’s members when you present yourself as a reluctant leader?”
The question didn’t challenge the authenticity of the approach. It was expressed rather in this context: yes, you are a reluctant leader, but how might this be perceived by your colleagues? What is the price of your authenticity? It was not even a personal price, but rather a price that the group as a whole and every member of the group individually pay for this action.
Of course, it may seem as if the question emphasizes the conflict between the authenticity of an action and the consequences it provokes. Thus, one may wonder why it is important to consider consequences as long as you act authentically. Since consequences are unreliable, you need to always follow the starry heavens above you and the moral law within you, as Immanuel Kant may say (Critique of Practical Reason).
The problems of reluctant leadership are obvious: team members lose orientation, having no idea who to follow. They have no trust in the capacity of their leaders. At the same time, they experience a void of leadership that invites a competition among team members for succession. Reluctant leadership is uncomfortable even for the person to whom a reluctant leader reports. It can raise questions of commitment and trust, and it can even make the leader of the reluctant leader feel as if the former forces the latter into something that the latter profoundly dislikes.
There are also plenty of reasons for someone to be a reluctant leader. Some may fear what power can do to their souls: perhaps Aragorn, from the Lord of the Rings is such leader (although he takes on leadership, as only a reluctant leader can do: “I gave Hope to the Dúnedain, I have kept no hope for myself”). Others may simply want to protect themselves from the stress that comes with leadership. Regardless of the reason why it appears, reluctant leadership is usually the expression of an authentic belief about the self and about one’s values.
It may seem, then, that keeping authenticity is harming one’s team. One more aspect that shows how leadership and authenticity are not compatible, some may say.
But this conclusion is erroneous because it constructs the question above in an irrelevant framework. The person who asked me this question did not mean it from a consequentialist or Kantian perspectives, but she rather started from responsibility. What is your responsibility toward your people, and how do you attend to it when you let it be seen that you’re a reluctant leader? In other words, have you forgotten that your primary responsibility is for your team? If you begin with your responsibility to the needs of your people and of the organization to which you belong, authenticity has no relevance. This is not in the sense that you must present yourself as someone else, but rather that the way you see yourself and the feelings you may have regarding your role matter not. Within a group, you are already a part of a constellation, and your authenticity can only be understood in relation to the group to which you already belong.
Should you then present yourself as someone else, one may ask, so that your self-image doesn’t harm the group? Once again, the question makes no sense. No one says you should not distrust power or have no hope for yourself but only for your people, as Aragorn says. But this is for you. The need to present yourself as such can only be a manifestation of egoism and of the need to have other people know something about you, regardless of how that might influence others and the group.
Allow me to emphasize one more aspect: it’s not about lying to others to serve your own interests. If you avoid saying that you’re a reluctant leader for your own purposes, you remain the center of your preoccupations. Instead, you focus on your responsibility that stems from the role you temporary play: the good of your people and of your organization comes first. It’s not about your power, your identity, or your authenticity. Paradoxically, if you are genuinely a reluctant leader, presenting yourself as such to others becomes utterly unimportant. You would realize it has never been about you, regardless of your beliefs about yourself.
Immigrant on Earth 
