ICYMI: Leadership based on the Culture of Simulation is ultimately unsustainable
Leadership and The Culture of Simulation Series Part Three
Published June 10, 2022.
Understanding The Culture of Simulation
The Culture of Simulation is the media context of the modern world. Watch YouTube and TikTok videos and you see simulated lives. We know they are simulated because they are both unreal and seductive. They want us to believe that lies and infidelity are not real. That cheating is normal and should be not only ignored but encouraged. Why? Because the purpose of the simulation is to convince us that our own pleasure and significance are more important than any person or social value. Not only that, but they want us to believe that there is no consequence to adopting the Culture of Simulation. This is the culture of leadership that has invaded many institutions in our society.
It is one thing to adopt this culture in our relationships with people. It is another when institutions do this. When institutions do this, they are not interested in the person, but rather in the collective hive mind. It is where everyone thinks the same way. It is a pattern of behavior that you can identify by the similarity of the words and the thoughts that are expressed. People who are not part of that hive mind are treated as a danger to society. It just goes to show the fragility of the Culture of Simulation that afflicts people and institutions today.
The Culture of Simulation is not benign. It exploits the will of individuals by neutralizing independence of choice. It is a form of mass hypnosis where the seductive power of suggestion programs how people are to respond. You can see it in every communication vehicle. Its purpose is to convince people that compliance is a form of independence. In reality, this culture of seduction has produced a cult-like religious consciousness. It makes it easier to control people.
Leadership and the Concept of the Person
The issue here is fundamental to the nature of leadership. If leaders use seduction as a vehicle for leading, then, whether intentionally or not, they believe that people do not have the capacity to make the right choices. This is how the Culture of Simulation corrupts society and its institutions.
As Harry Frankfurt describes in his essay Freedom of the Will and The Concept of the Person.
“It is my view that one essential difference between persons and other creatures is to be found in the structure of a person’s will. … It seems to be peculiarly characteristic of humans, however, that they are able to form what I shall call “second-order desires”… Because wanting and choosing and being moved to do this or that, men may also want to have (or not to have) certain desires and motives. They are capable of wanting to be different, in their preferences and their purposes, from what they are. Many animals appear to have the capacity for what I shall call “first-order desires” … which are simply desires to do or not to do one thing or another. No animal other than man, however, appears to have the capacity for reflective self-evaluation that is manifested in the formation of second-order desires.”
The Culture of Simulation shows me that human will is not fixed or set at birth, but capable of being nurtured to goodness or evil. This malleability makes it possible to create great works of art, invent life-changing devices, discover new worlds, and build authoritarian regimes to exploit humanity and the planet. It is this capacity for reflective self-evaluation that is both our strength and our weakness. It is not just the freedom to choose but the freedom to choose badly with consequences that are harmful to multitudes of people that we must acknowledge.
My First Notion That Something Was A Miss
Growing up, we had dinner as a family every night. My father was a corporate HR director. He would talk about his day at work. For a period of time, he always had something negative to say about his boss. In retrospect, I am convinced that this is why I did not choose to study business and work in business after college. Ironically, it was the distinctions in the nature of leadership that my father was unknowingly teaching me that ultimately led me into the field of leadership.
When I did begin to study it, I rejected the conception that I found in much of the literature. This concept was that leadership was a role and a title in an organization. The difference can be seen from this quote from Peter Drucker’s early book, Concept of the Corporation.
“No institution can possibly survive if it needs geniuses or supermen to manage it. It must be organized in such a way as to be able to get along under a leadership composed of average human beings. No institution can endure if it is under one-man rule. … these twin dangers, that of depending on the “indispensable “ leader, and the danger of depending on one-man rule, follows first a demand for a constitution under which there is legitimate rule and legitimate and quasi-automatic succession to the rule. … the institution must be able to arouse the loyalty of its members. To produce leaders an institution must have an esprit de corps which induces its members to put the welfare of the institution above their own and to model themselves upon an institutional idea of conduct.”
I believe what we now see is the reverse of Drucker’s perspective. Instead, we see the leadership elite treating their position in society as a carte blanche to do whatever they believe is right.
As I wrote in my essay, As The Center Does Not Hold, the Periphery Grows about how society is made up of a center and a periphery.
It is “one of integration and wholeness. The center is like a magnet drawing the periphery into a more connected relationship. In modern society, the Center consists principally of the institutions of the State collaborating with large technology and media companies, global corporations, and other society institutions. At the Center resides the power to dictate how society is ordered and functions.
The Periphery consists of people, families, local institutions, and the personal relationships that we have with people. The power that resides here is personal, not institutional. As a result, the periphery is subject to the power of the center.”
When the Center no longer represents the Periphery, or has chosen to exploit it for its own reasons the following happens.
“If the Center abandons the belief system of society in favor of more subsidiary or contrary beliefs, the Periphery will begin to abandon respect for the Center. … When the Center cannot hold the Periphery, it either dissolves or becomes authoritarian. … When the Center no longer supports the Periphery, the Periphery must turn to its own resources. As a result, multiple smaller Centers form. These new Centers learn to exist more independently of the traditional Center.”
Drucker’s perspective on leadership informed how I began to form my own model of leadership. In particular, I saw that genuine leadership first is the product of personal initiative to create impact. And it secondly builds an institutional culture marked by respect, trust, and mutual accountability between the Center and the Periphery.
Where leaders do the opposite they must foster a culture of simulation in order to disguise what is taking place.
In 2020, I wrote two short books, Seeing Below the Surface of Things and Where Did Trust Go? focused on the brokenness and corruption in organizations. I principally saw the problem as the separation of authority from accountability. Today, we tend to look at the ballot box and the investment markets as to how leaders are held accountable. The problem is that both means of accountability are subject to manipulation. It points to the inadequacy of how we measure leadership and the functioning of society’s institutions. If you are not happy with how the world is functioning today, you now have a way to look at why it is.
What Does Leadership Look Like?
My first reaction to theories of leadership was that it didn’t describe the leaders who I had known over the first three decades of my life. The most influential were in positions of authority, but it was not their institutional authority that produced their leadership impact. Instead, it was the character of their performance in the role that their title defined.
All of this came back to me as I read David Gelles's New York Times article based on his book on Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric. The promoters of Welch-style leadership point to the financial success of GE under his twenty-year tenure as the validation of his genius. From Gelles’ article,
“David Zaslav, the C.E.O. of Warner Bros. Discovery and a Welch discipline remembered him as a godlike figure. “Jack set the path. He saw the whole world. He was about the whole world … What he created at G.E. became the way companies now operate.”
Was this the concept of leadership that I was reacting to in the mid-1980s? In part, yes, and in other ways no. I say this because our family and later myself were beneficiaries of Welch’s leadership as GE stockholders. However, the short-sightedness of Welch and his style of leadership also left his successors an unsustainable company. From Gelles’ article again.
“Almost immediately after Mr. Welch retired in September 2001 with $417 million serverance package, G.E. went into a tailspin from which it would never recover. His pupils, though, went on to run dozens of other major companies, including Home Depot, Albertson’s, Chrysler, and Boeing. Most of them failed. And in the decades since Mr. Welch assumed power the economy at large has come to resemble his skewed priorities. Wages stagnated and jobs move overseas. C.E.O. pay went stratospheric and buybacks and dividends boomed. Factories closed and companies found ways to pay fewer taxes.”
Of course, few would think of Welch’s leadership as short-sighted. Gelles in his article presents the two sides to Jack Welch’s legacy: In sum, financial success built on an unsustainable platform. Welch is an easy target for criticism. Two decades after his retirement and two years after his death, we can look at his record as less exceptional than it appeared during his time as CEO. This is the nature of the Culture of Simulation. It functions at the moment. Historical reflection tends not to be kind to those who base their leadership style on the Culture of Simulation.
I doubt if Jack Welch ever used the term “simulation”. Yet, Welch was not alone in exploiting the world of the 1980s and 1990s. The Culture of Simulation commodifies into different enterprises like politics, the mainstreaming of sexual pornography, the spectacle of professional sports, and the use of social media to build a compliance consciousness in society. This hyper-reality culture has been the vehicle for wealth generation, power acquisition, and the garnering of celebrity status.
The question before us now is two-fold.
Where does this lead us?
What are we to do?
I’ll pick up on these questions in the next column in this series.
References
* Harry Frankfurt, Freedom of the Will and The Concept of the Person
** Peter Drucker, Concept of the Corporation, Transaction Publishers, 1946.
*** Jack Welch – New York Times articles
“If the Center abandons the belief system of society in favor of more subsidiary or contrary beliefs, the Periphery will begin to abandon respect for the Center. … When the Center cannot hold the Periphery, it either dissolves or becomes authoritarian. … When the Center no longer supports the Periphery, the Periphery must turn to its own resources. As a result, multiple smaller Centers form. These new Centers learn to exist more independently of the traditional Center.”
I think this observation of yours describes ideological intellectualism in general. And the inevitable reaction to the relentless attempts to mould people into conforming to 'elite' belief sets. Bravo.