Who are my heroes?
I
sit here typing this article in my parent?s lounge room, about to see the
premiere of the Heroes TV series, and with a game CD of X-Men?: The Official
Game, in the CD-Rom drive of my laptop. My concept of heroes was strongly shaped
by the Marvel collectors? cards and books that were all the rage in 1982 when I
was in year two. Heroes were those who answered the call for help when they were
the only ones who were able to render that assistance due to some superhuman
powers. There were only a few who were gifted (or burdened?) with such
superpowers. Some chose to misuse their powers and became the ultimate villains,
but the goodies were always better because everyone knows the good guys always
win, never go bad and have no faults.
Playground arguments were about who
was going to be Spiderman, Superman and Batman, and who had the best powers.
Either way it was always little boys playing games, with no understanding of the
violence involved: BANG, POW, PAFF, YOW, OOF! I recently came across a website
which listed all of the Marvel superheroes and their stories. It also had a list
of the best superpowers. I think I liked Wolverine's healing powers the best of
all. The way he could keep taking a whipping and still just stand up, crick his
neck, take a deep breath and keep going struck a stoic chord in me.
Superheroes gave every little boy
hope that one day they would be special enough to make a difference to the world
around them. Later as we grew up, we found that we weren't 'blessed' with
superpowers, and were relieved that we didn't have to do anything to fix the
world: that's someone else's job, someone with powers. One day I'll be
important and be somebody's hero. What a disappointing dream, casting our
importance away somewhere into the future. 
As I've thought about this topic over the past few weeks, I've come to the understanding that heroes humanise people, whereas villains de-humanise people. With this in mind, we enact heroism or villainy in our everyday life. I remember hearing Dave Andrews speaking a couple of years ago about this sort of thing. (I hope I've got it mostly right): He had an opportunity to go to the Middle East and be involved with the official peace process, as someone had finished their term, or retired, or something. He thought 'ooh goody, now's the time for me to shine and make a name for myself. I can be somebody. Headline: Dave saves the Middle East'. His all-wise wife Ange responded by asking him who would look after the people in the Brisbane church that they are involved in, a church that is welcoming to people with mental illness, and to people from lower socio-economic areas. She added that there would always be a queue of people lining up to try brokering peace in the Middle East, but who would come and do this local hard work' Huh! How about that!?! Maybe heroism is not about the big things, but about how we treat the little things.
I'll finish with something I came across a couple of years ago. I love Michael Leunig's work because it always challenges me. He did a drawing of some people on top of a lonely hill, at what looks like a war monument, which has an inscription on the side. It says: 'To the memory of those who faced their inner demons in the great struggle for freedom and peace.' Who are our real heroes' In the words of the song: We could be heroes.
Tyson Menck is studying a Masters in IT & Sustainabilty at Murdoch Uni, Perth, and is the ASCM's new Men's Officer.
Distinguishing heroes, leaders, tyrants and villains
I?ve been studying for an MBA (Masters of Business Administration) for the last two years, and something incredible related to heroes and leaders struck me in my first year. There we were, a group of articulate, intelligent and experienced MBA students (supposedly!), having a vigorous classroom discussion with our lecturer about leadership, but when it came to trying to distinguish between the sort of leadership embodied by Hitler as opposed to Gandhi we were unable to come up with a robust distinction to separate the two. Everything we proposed could be applied equally as validly to Hitler as to Gandhi: commitment, communication, vision, courage, the desire to make a difference and so on. About the best we could do was to say that one of them was bad and the other good, in a moral sense. Hence their goals, bad in one case and good in the other, were innately the reason for the difference in the quality of their leadership, or their right to be considered a hero. The dissatisfying thing about that approach to what separates desirable from undesirable leaders, and by extension makes one a hero and the other a villain, is the circularity and relativism of using notions of morality to define the realm of leadership.
This debate should be familiar to nearly everyone. The Hitler vs Gandhi thing comes up time and again, yet how much progress do we make towards articulating why one is ?bad? and the other ?good?? Circularity arises if reference is made to good and bad as distinguishers because we start from the assumption that a hero is good and a villain bad, so all we are doing is reinforcing that first assumption, not actually explaining what it is about the two approaches to leadership that make one of them ?bad? and the other ?good?. It is like saying that you must stop at a red traffic light because it is red, and you are allowed to proceed through a green traffic light because it is green. In fact, the reason why you must stop at a red traffic light is not because it is red, but because it relates to right of way: others are relying on you to stop since that is the rules of the traffic light game; if you do not stop, you may cause an accident by breaching those rules. That is the real reason why you must stop at a red traffic light, not because (somewhat arbitrarily) red ended up being the signifier of that particular rule about who has right of way. In the same way, saying that Gandhi is a hero (a good leader) because he is good and Hitler a villain (a bad leader) because he is bad is to apply labels without identifying what is signified underneath those labels. So how do we get beyond this circularity problem? First we also need to clarify the issue of relativism.
The relativism problem is summed up by the expression, ?One person?s terrorist is another person?s freedom fighter?. I do not truly believe that this statement is in itself a valid assertion on which to base a consideration of moral action, but philosophically it is a perfectly valid assertion about the names we assign to phenomena in the world. A person who happens to lead a group of terrorists, or fascists, could well be a leader, and may be considered a hero. In like manner, a group of freedom fighters, or civil rights activists, could be led by a leader/hero, because the moral frames of reference for each group, and for outside observers, will determine who is considered a terrorist and who a freedom fighter. However, this does not help us get beyond those very frames of reference.
What further distinctions could be made about leader/heroes to create space between the goodies and the baddies, given that the frame of reference may change? Had I been a black South African in the 1970s or 1980s, my frame of reference could have been vastly different from that of a white South African, or even a white female British prime minister. Can we ever get beyond frames of reference and break out of the circularity problem?
Two considerations may help us define the desirable leadership of a hero from the undesirable leadership of a tyrant. The first is whether the leader offers an inclusive vision or an exclusive one. The second is from what level of being the person is operating: the level of self, or the level of the universal.
Let?s take each consideration in turn. Firstly: vision. People consistently rate vision as a hallmark of a leader. Leaders have vision. Leaders successfully share that vision with others. Leaders inspire others to transform that vision into reality. They do so using vastly different styles of leadership. All of this is pretty uncontroversial, but the varying styles of leadership tend to confuse us. We find it easier to perceive the differences, than the similarities, between leaders whose styles are as different as Winston Churchill, Mahatma Gandhi, Abraham Lincoln and Jesus Christ.
The leader as hero is a figure facing great odds. Heroism is born in the crucible of hardship, but the thing which sustains the hero leader is a vision which is inclusive. The putative lone hero of romance literature can keep his white horse, his shining armour and the devotion of his maiden. Heroes who would lead others must offer a vision which is not restricted to classes, groups or cliques. Unlike the wartime trio of Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini, who cultivated favourites and deliberately set one group against another to strengthen their grip on power and to rally the worst in people?s fears and insecurities, Gandhi had a vision which was open to all and which sought to unite, not divide, peoples. Could we certainly not say the same thing of Jesus Christ, of Christ?s vision as open to all?
Secondly, there is the level at which a leader operates as a human. Knowledge of this can be accessed using a number of tools, many of them based in psychology and social theory. One useful emerging field of study in the world of management is drawn from the work of R. Barrett, who distinguishes a number of levels of individual consciousness and then applies them to corporations[1]. Cowan & Todorovic relate levels of thought, both individual and corporate, to different colours for ease of association.[2] What both of them set out is the distinction between living life at the level of self, where one?s goals, aspirations and concerns are shaped by a primary concern for the ego and ?making it? in the world of survival, and living life at a higher level, of concern for family, community, organisations, the world, and even the universe/cosmos.
Leaders who truly are heroes, and not
villains, have an inclusive vision and operate at a universal level. They
have transcended living at the level of the individual self, and instead
seek to make a contribution to the quality of life of all peoples, and
indeed to transform the quality of life itself. Many argue that Hitler did
have a grand vision that went beyond himself and involved the transformation
of the world, or at least certainly of Europe, but although the sphere of
operations Hitler conceived was larger than himself, his leadership
activities were at heart all about Hitler the man. They were about his grasp
for power, his desire to dominate, and his tyrannical choice to live out a
life based on the gratification, enlargement and fulfilment of his self
using an exclusive approach, not the transformation of the quality of life
for all peoples inclusively. If you doubt that, just ask a Jew, a gypsy, a
communist, a homosexual or any one of many other groups of persecuted people
what they think about it.
[1] Barrett, R. 1998, ?Seven levels of organizational consciousness?, in Liberating the Corporate Soul: Building a Visionary Organization. Butterworth-Heinemann, Boston, pp. 55-72.
[2]
Cowan, C. &
Todorovic, N. 2000, ?Spiral dynamics: the layers of human values in
strategy?,
Strategy & Leadership, vol. 28, no. 1, pp. 4-11.
David Pearson (SCM WA, now in VIc) has recently completed his MBA and is preparing to move to the UK
