In Lewis Carrollâs novel Aliceâs Adventures in Wonderland , Alice is lazing in the grass on a warm summerâs day when she sees a White Rabbit hurrying past, wearing a waistcoat and consulting his pocket watch. Intrigued, she follows the rabbit and falls down a long burrow. She finds herself in a strange and surreal place called Wonderland, where she encounters mysterious talking animals (including a hookah-smoking caterpillar), magical food, and a delusional royal court. One of the stranger creatures Alice encounters during her adventures is the grinning Cheshire cat that can appear and disappear at will, leaving only its smile behind. On the catâs advice, Alice visits the March Hare, who spends his days at a never-ending tea party with a Dormouse and a Mad Hatter. Eventually, she meets the Queen of Hearts, the mad tyrant who rules Wonderland. At the end of the story, the Knave of Hearts (one of the Queen of Heartsâ guards) is charged with stealing some tarts. A trial is held and Alice is called as a witness. She ridicules the trial and the furious Queen orders âOff with her head!â Alice dismisses the entire court as ânothing but a pack of cardsâ and wakes up to realise she has been dreaming.
Aliceâs Adventures in Wonderland has been a much-loved novel since its publication in 1865, its fantasy and nonsense popular with children and adults alike. However, there is more to the story than we might initially think. Falling down the rabbit hole can be interpreted as a metaphor for entry into the unknown. The events that occur in the story correlate with the steps in a childâs progression through childhood, adolescence, to adulthood. In more than one way, Aliceâs exploits are a timeless tale of a journey into the unconscious with its many perils, pleasant surprises, adventures, animal guides, and ideally, a corresponding increase in consciousness. During her journey, she tries to understand the ways of the world, authority relationships, the power games people play (how to make sense of seemingly arbitrary rules), the ambivalence of time, and the inevitability of death. At the same time, Wonderland represents a place of madness â a transitional space where the normal rules of behavior are no longer valid. As the Cheshire cat says, âWeâre all mad here.â Life is full of riddles, or to quote William Blake , âthis lifeâs a fiction and is made up of contradiction.â
In the last book in this series,1 I observed the experiences of leaders on a rollercoaster ride through their professional and personal life. In this companion book, I follow them down the rabbit hole into the unknown, where, like Lewis Carrollâs Alice, they find a dystopian Wonderland in which everyone seems to have gone mad and life functions according to its own crazy logic, throwing up all kinds of obstacles in the search for truth. Tumbling down the rabbit hole â in spite of all the nonsensical things that come about â is a metaphor for our efforts to become enlightened, to find the truth, to understand what is happening around us.
Understanding what is happening around us has become more difficult than ever in the Age of Trump. What reassurance do we get from his declaration that his presidency is going to be âa beautiful thingâ? Donât imperatives like âBuild that wallâ or âLock her upâ sound very much like âOff with her headâ? Unfortunately, and unlike Alice, we are not going to wake up from a bad dream and discover that todayâs authority figures are ânothing but a pack of cards.â
These essays are a personal effort at sense-making and spring from my current concern about the state of the world. The first part of this book looks at the psychodynamics of leadership in both a business and a political context. The ability of people in powerful positions to project and displace their personal neuroses into the public sphere has always been my major interest. The essays in Part I address contemporary issues. Weâre not exactly living in a universal âhappy hour,â and many of us are less than optimistic that we are creating a better world for our children. Have the people who decided to elect Trump as President forgotten the unspeakable darkness of World War 2, a conflict that was enabled by psychologically challenged leaders? As the philosopher George Santayana said, âThose who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.â In voting for a demagogue like Trump, people have demonstrated their ignorance of the consequence of putting their trust in perverse ideologies and autocratic leaders. Societyâs capacity to regress should never be underestimated. It is very easy to slip down the rabbit hole.
In Part II, I focus on the psychopathology of everyday life in organizations and look at the seemingly endless ways people can make a mess of things, including mega-pay packages, acting out, digital addiction, dysfunctional behavior, the darker side of human nature, and the quest for meaning.
But first, I take a brief look at two prominent themes in early twenty-first century life: the dystopian tendency and the darker side of leadership.
Dystopia
Dystopian fiction has been a recognized genre since the beginning of the twentieth century, and more recently dystopia has been the theme of an increasing number of films (Blade Runner, The Matrix), television series (The Man in the High Castle), and computer games (Call of Duty, Deus Ex). These, and novels like George Orwellâs Nineteen Eighty-Four, Aldous Huxleyâs Brave New World, and Margaret Atwoodâs A Handmaidâs Tale, do not lift the spirits. These dystopian works depict dark visions of the future, highlighting the powerlessness of the individual in the face of coercive authorities. Whatâs more, the lives of the people in these dystopian societies are characterized by endless drudgery with very little to hope for. One of the prevailing leitmotifs in these dystopian societies, preying on our somewhat paranoid psychological makeup (due to our evolutionary history), is that nobody can be trusted. Conspiracies are seen everywhere, turning these societies into living nightmares.
Ironically, the many advances in science and technology that we enjoy and take for granted today were achieved in the hope for a better future for humankind, yet what once seemed to be a prescription for progress has evolved into dystopian worries. In the pursuit of progress and knowledge, we often neglect to think through the moral, social, and environmental consequences of the actions we take.
The dystopian work that is so prevalent today can be seen as reflecting our prevailing concerns. Its paranoid, doom-ridden imagery is not being foisted on a resistant public. On the contrary, it illustrates the way cultural activity connects with current public sentiment. It is a response to the zeitgeist. What we should really be worrying about is the enthusiastic reception it receives.
The creators of these dystopian works paint Darwinian-like societies where belief in reason, human decency, equality, and sustainability is totally absent. They dramatize a realistic fear of how easily individuality could be stifled, personal freedom disappear, and political oppression enslave us. They show how ideological rigidity could imprison us, xenophobia turn to violence, and advanced technologies (such as robotization and artificial intelligence) turn on their creators. In the dystopian universe, genetic, financial, sociological, and digital engineering leads to apocalyptic consequences.
All these creative works draw on a number of our personal and social fears at an existential level: the loss of national identity, unemployment, lack of education, crime, and the (in)effectiveness of the democratic process. These fears are worsened by the awareness that we are now living in a one-percent society controlled by anonymous, fabulously wealthy, powerful oligarchies whose existence makes everyone else feel disenfranchized. Many worry that these elites have a dominant global influence, to the detriment of all othersâ well-being. It is a truism that great inequalities in wealth endanger open, democratic societies. No wonder that Donald Trumpâs campaign promise to âdrain the swampâ became so popular.
Of course dystopias are nothing new; the imagery of dysfunctional societies has been with us for a very long time. Now, however, it seems much more pervasive.
The origins of many dystopian narratives can be traced back to the post-World War II era, when people worried about the possibility of nuclear annihilation, portrayed so well in the film Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964). Anxieties about the nuclear arms race also invoked worries about the probability of the catastrophic destruction of our natural environment. With proliferation of nuclear-capable countries, these worries persist. However, they are currently outweighed by the fear that general human activities could destroy the world, considering the way we are exhausting the Earthâs resources and its ecosystem. Global warming is a growing concern. Psychologically speaking, the real danger of the consequences of global warming explains why some people so vehemently deny its existence. Unfortunately, denial is only a bromide. It doesnât change reality.
Add to these fears the dread of international terrorism, dictators that condone the killing of their own citizens, the aftershocks of financial meltdowns, rising levels of urban crime, the refugee crisis and immigrant issues, and threats of pandemic viruses and infections â all of which are trumpeted by round-the-clock news media â and it seems that what once seemed a fantasized dystopian future could easily become a terrible reality.
In our contemporary Cyber Age, the Internet â in spite of all its benefits â is increasingly being viewed with scepticism and suspicion. Many governments, helped by digital technology, seem to disregard basic human rights to privacy. The Edward Snowden saga, forcing the disclosure of numerous global surveillance programs, was a wake-up call about the exploitation of personal and official data. The safety and integrity of social media are coming under close scrutiny. We are increasingly fearful of being manipulated by forces that are beyond our awareness and control. Are the media subliminally brainwashing us, keeping us ignorant of whatâs really going on by feeding us factoids rather than facts? Have we been too complacent in using social media? Too trusting in putting so much personal information out there? Or too bamboozled by the delights of super-communication to think sensibly about the negative implications?
The Dark Side of Leadership
Itâs not hard to find examples of destructive leadership. We only have to look at what is happening in failed states such as South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Somaliland, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, or Venezuela. And if whatâs happening there is not enough, in the United States we have the emergence of President Donald Trump, whose irresponsible behavior seems to know no bounds. Thanks to Trumpâs antics, the fear of nuclear warfare has once again become a leading international preoccupation. His quixotic and contradictory interactions with the North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un are as worrying, as they are puzzling. One minute he is dissing Kim as âlittle rocket man,â the next he is cosying up to him in Singapore and apparently admiring Kimâs style of leadership: âHe speaks and his people sit up in attention. I want my people to do the same.â2 Equally disturbing is his confrontational stance toward Iran, going against the strategy of other Western nations. Itâs tempting to see his actions, like his appearance and oratory, as clownish, if not ridiculous. Most of his bizarre actions could be ignored if he were in charge of a minor country. But the United States is not a banana republic and Donald Trump is the most powerful individual in the world. His actions should be seen for what they are: extremely dangerous.
Itâs a truism to say that we get the leaders that we deserve. Looking at many of the leaders that rise to power, we could argue that the people who voted for them may have been uninformed, not realizing the consequences of their voting behavior. Often, when we select leaders, we like to see what they would like to see, rather than what is objectively most likely to happen. Although it is true to say that sometimes we need fantasy to survive reality, we should also realize that either we deal with the reality, or (like it or not) the reality will deal with us. Many people, however, prefer to hold on to delusionary fantasies rather than take a firm grip on whatâs likely to happen. Unfortunately, holding on to unrealistic fantasies about the future means being less prepared when the future arrives, and makes things more painful when they go wrong. While holding on to positive imagery may be comforting and relaxing in the short term, it will have devastating consequences in the long run.
An Outline
Keeping current global developments in mind, the first part of this book takes a macro-perspective in trying to better understand dystopian tendencies by focusing on leadership issues. And I start with Trump (or people like Trum...