OK, I expect this article will be controversial. Please understand I love Americans, I just hate your leaders.
And I am very sympathetic with the plight of politically, socially and
economically disenfranchised Americans, and this article is an
expression of my sympathy and feelings of solidarity with you.
Conservatives will call it anti-American; it is not.
One
thing that seems to differentiate US culture from that of any other
affluent country is the cult status of its leaders -- especially
political and business leaders. Unlike in Canada or Europe,
disagreement or criticism of one's boss in the US is treated as
sacrilege -- a career-limiting move. And while Canadian and European
television programs and cartoonists savagely ridicule and caricature
their political leaders, and Canadian and European media go out of
their way to unnerve and challenge these leaders, their US counterparts
seem to treat their 'leaders' with deference bordering on hero-worship.
While Tony Blair is portrayed in the British press as an inept and
clueless Bush lapdog (and worse), the mainstream US media seem
unwilling to portray Bush as a spoiled, psychopathic illiterate coddled
and protected from real facts by his secretive and fanatical neocon
'managers' (despite overwhelming evidence that that's what he is).
American
business leaders are treated with similar deference and wild adulation,
as if they were direct descendants from God. Autobiographical business
books ghost-written for insanely overpaid CEOs, pontificating on how to
be a successful leader, sell like hotcakes. Case in point: The
platitudinous blatherings of Rudolph Giuliani in his book Leadership,
featuring chapters on The Importance of the Morning Meeting, Preparing
Relentlessly, Making Everyone Accountable, Surrounding Yourself with
Great People, Reflecting, then Deciding and on and on. Common sense
that any five-year-old would know, sold with enormous success for
$25.95 a copy.
Many studies have shown that leadership has
little to do with organizational success -- successful leaders, for the
most part, just happened to be in the right place at the right time
with a good group of people already working 'for' them (and when they
move on to their next overpaid position, usually fail dismally to live
up to expectations). No matter -- with a high 7-figure annual income,
they can retire after one serendipitous success and spare themselves
and their adulators the embarrassment of their inability to repeat
their divine performance.
Arrogant rock stars who write warmed
over nursery rhymes, drug-addled sports celebrities pushing $200
sneakers made in Asian sweatshops, no-talent actors and actresses
brainwashed by lunatic cults -- whole programs
are devoted to following the every move of these pathetic and
egomaniacal clowns. MTV reportedly even has a program that just lists
new celebrity endorsements.
One of the newest terms in rap culture is 'cross-dressing', meaning the
scandal of wearing more than one cult hero's endorsed brand names at a
time.
Why do Americans, uniquely, worship their leaders this way?
Peter Block, one of the founders of Organizational Development, thinks that, in business at least, it's absurd:
“Leadership”
is a well-developed misconception. The dominant belief is that the task
of leadership is to set a vision, enroll others in it and hold people
accountable through measurements and rewards. It’s a patriarchal system
used to create high performance through centralization of power. Most
leadership training focuses on how to be a good parent. We teach how to
“develop” people, as if they were ours to develop. We do a lot to
create the notion that bosses are responsible for their people. All
that parenting has the unintended side effect of creating deep
entitlement and having employees stay frozen in their own development.
Most management techniques are ways of controlling people so they feel
good about being controlled.
These are the most common questions
I get from my clients. “How do I get people to …” and you can fill in
the blank after that. My favorite is, “How do I get people on board
with my ideas/visions/whatever.” My response is, “How do you know
you’re in the boat?” These are the wrong questions. They’re the
questions of a parent about recalcitrant children. As soon as
you
start the sentence, you’re acting as a sovereign. All of these are
components of the patriarchal way of thinking that dominates our
culture. Put this in boldface: They are not your children. Once you realize that, real engagement is possible.
Block understands the essence of complex systems: No one is in control. What gets done (for better or worse) gets done as a result of the staggeringly complex interactions and personal decisions of everyone.
Even in the most hierarchical organizations, far more energy is
expended finding workarounds for incompetent management decisions and
policies (without offending management, of course) than is spent
implementing the odd intelligent insight that management, with all the
resources at its disposal, 'manages' to come up with. Employees, and
customers (who are often treated only slightly less paternalistically
than employees), actually have almost all the good ideas that would be
needed to make any organization much more successful, but it is taboo
to listen to them, to even be accessible to them. That would make the
leaders look weak, as if perhaps they don't have all the answers. And that, of course, is unthinkable.
The
same thing applies in the political and entertainment arenas.
Politicians want you to believe they are in control, that they have all
the answers, that you needn't worry your pretty little head about
anything. When something like Katrina or Iraq blows up in their face,
and shows this to be a farce, they will immediately assign blame to someone else (ideally another leader).
And the media, which make their living propagating these lies, working
in close partnership with political leaders (who regulate their
business) and business leaders (who pay their salaries with their ads),
are not about to blow the whistle on the whole fraud. So whatever
moronic gang of gangsters is sponsored by one of the big sportswear
companies to grunt their juvenile drivel to the top of the charts, gets
treated like royalty, interviewed and promoted as if they were leaders
of their whole generation, even asked for their opinion on current events.
Sports
stars who are, briefly, marginally better than their peers in one
specific sport get paid thousands of times what those peers are paid
and fawned over by the media as if they were the Second Coming. A tiny
handful of actors who are bought starring roles by their rich parents
or who serendipitously catch the eye of some movie mogul get paid
thousands of times what their peers (and betters) are paid for 'supporting' roles, independent productions, and for providing the real talent -- writing the words that the 'stars' merely spout (often amateurishly). Americans adulate newscasters, mouthpieces who don't even have to act!
The
conspiracy between absurdly overvalued, overrated and overcompensated
'leaders' and their masses of fawning followers, in business, in
politics, in sports and entertainment (what used to be called 'the
arts') just keeps rolling on with the media helping it along and
keeping score.
This conspiracy could not continue without the
complicity of the American people. Why do they put up with it?
Americans are not stupid and, until recently, were no less informed
than people in other affluent nations. Complexity is all about
emergence, and about complicity, and as tempting as it may be there is
no root cause, no group 'to blame' for what has led to this unwarranted
gross inequality. And Americans have a history of skepticism. So what
can account for this needless and unwarranted resignation of so many to
low-class status in their own country?
My theory is that Americans (and perhaps the people of some struggling nations, like Iraq) have been domesticated.
The word domesticated means, literally, 'made property of the house'.
The dogs that we (mostly) love today were domesticated over thousands
of years from wolves. Anthropologists tell us that, in the early days
of civilization, when people began settling in villages, wolves were
attracted by the smell of their food, and started hovering around (the
same thing is occurring today with polar bears). At first, villagers
would drive them off with stones (or, presumably, kill them for food or
fur). But the villagers had a soft spot for the young pups, and didn't
kill them (at least until they got older and had already bred).
Evolution thus bred a successful offshoot of the wolf -- the dog, which
looked and acted eternally young and helpless, and so lived on at the
pleasure of civilized humans, to the point now that there are too many
dogs, and a scarcity of wolves, on our planet. Even old dogs have
mostly floppy ears and a placid disposition, unlike their wolf
contemporaries.
Many dogs, even in America, are, of course,
mistreated (though much less so than in struggling nations like China
where they are still semi-wild, eaten and killed for their fur in the
millions -- if that faux fur you bought comes from China, chances are
the fur isn't faux, at least not in the way you thought -- don't click this link
if you're squeamish). So what happens if a domestic dog, for whatever
reason, rational to us or not, decides it doesn't want to be 'property
of the house'? If it bites back, or flees, it is probably doomed to die
-- domestication was a one-way trip for dogs. There are some places
where feral, 'un-domesticated' dogs exist, but it is a constant
struggle against humans determined to exterminate them. The same is
true for wild pigs and other once-domesticated feral creatures.
A
notable exception, an animal that is domesticated and yet still wild,
is the cat. Feral cats fare much better in the wild than most other
domesticated creatures that have lost their independence from humans.
It is not clear why the evolutionary path for cats left open a return
to the wild. It may be that cats never really trusted humans in the
first place (and those that did died young) so that the knack and the
drive to return to the wild and keep the instincts and capabilities of
independence alive was selected for.
Although the analogy is a
bit tenuous, it seems to me that Americans are more trusting of their
leaders, of those (way) higher up than they are in the pecking order,
and hence, like the domestic dog, have given up much of their
independence of thought and action for the creature comforts of the
American Dream. This is more than a little ironic, of course, given the
way in which the American republic began (with the leader-endorsed
slaughter of the natives and then a revolutionary war against the
leaders of the day). But for the last two centuries or more
paternalistic leadership has been the American norm. They are, after
all, called the founding fathers, and despite their propensity for slave ownership and other evils, are revered by most Americans to almost religious levels.
Why
haven't Europeans and Canadians become similarly domesticated? Perhaps
because they have more recently had reason to distrust their 'leaders'.
Brutal despotism and imperialistic tendencies have a much longer and
much more recent history in Europe than in America. Much of European
history is the story of uprisings against arrogant, overprivileged and
tyrannical 'leaders', and that continued in the 20th century.
Canadians
have a much more peaceful history, but we have been threatened many
times (and are threatened again today) by our mighty, arrogant,
imperialistic neighbour to the South. We look at their
leaders with great distrust. Our Canadian leaders, if we were to be
honest, don't matter much -- if the US wants our resources and our
people, they will just take them, and we haven't the capacity to resist
(though we might well try). Many Canadians have also witnessed the
arrogance of American bosses who are worshiped in the US, who clearly
see their Canadian 'property' as nothing more than a cheap way to
generate profits for repatriation to the American fatherland, and who
treat their more independent-minded Canadian staff as ill-mannered
children. So as a result, I think, Canadians tend towards more of a
European, skeptical attitude towards 'leaders'.
Canadians and
Europeans are a bit more like cats, then, and Americans a bit more like
dogs, in the continuum of human domesticity. The constant undercurrent
of separatism in Europe and Canada is a constant reminder that, for the
most part, we don't like or trust those in charge. The cute fridge
magnet reminds us of the difference: Dogs have masters, cats have staff. We are still 'wild' enough to believe our leaders work for us.
So
what is a patriotic American to do, when if he leaves because he no
longer wants to live as property of the privileged class he is called a
traitor, a coward. If you don't like it, change it, don't run away, he's told. It's easy for a cat to tell a dog to stop putting up with abuse from its 'owner', to just leave.
The poor dog no longer has it in his genes to be feral. He has trusted
the master too much, and for too long, to change now. He must respect and obey his 'leaders'. That is the only life he knows.
Charts adapted from Fire & Ice: The US, Canada and the
Myth of Converging Values, by Michael Adams |
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
