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Dalton
Roberts |
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A part of our
society’s lifestyle needing attention is the questioning of our
political and business leaders. Most of the ills of the world come from
trusting leaders too much. The time for
leaders has come and gone. It is time we trusted ourselves. To save
mankind and a civilization worth saving, we must become our own leaders. Still there will
be basic leadership posts and those who offer themselves must realize
their major need is interrogation. Those they serve have the right and
responsibility to question their motives, views and personal histories.
It is the only way to clarify their fitness to serve. Any leader who
even hints it is unpatriotic to question them on any issue should be
removed as promptly as possible, The appeal to patriotism, as someone
has said, is the last refuge of the scoundrel. When I served in
an elected office and hired department heads, I told them I expected
loyalty when they could see I was right and honest questioning when they
thought I might be wrong. I said, “It will bother me more for you to
remain silent and watch me walk off the bluff than any other thing you
can possibly do. I need to be questioned. I need to be surrounded by
honest people with the guts to speak their minds.” I often laughingly
said I over-trained them. Sometimes our staff meetings more resembled a
debating society. Interrogation
assures that the deeper needs of society are brought out. Politicians
are often satisfied to make a big thing of shallow programs they see as
potentially popular. Let the people talk long enough and they will swim
out of those shallow waters and begin to structure ideas that lead to
dramatic shifts in the quality of life. A good local
example was the aquarium. I have a tape of a morning call-in show where
I was sharply criticized over my support for “that big fish tank.”
How long has it been since you heard the aquarium called that? The idea
came out of community discussions where people looked at all kinds of
potential projects to revitalize downtown. Some of our top business
leaders then generously supported it. Would the elected leadership of
the community have had the guts to support it if they had not clearly
known it spun out of the minds of our own people? Watch those old
Nazi documentaries on the History Channel and you will clearly see the
dangers of “yes men.” Once Hitler got the military under his thumb,
he tolerated no disagreement. At no time did he offer himself to his
staff or the German people for interrogation. Instead, he had the head
of any person faintly questioning anything he said or did. Hitler was not
stupid. He was mentally ill and it would have come out if the people had
been given an atmosphere and an arena to interrogate him. We see in his
story that loyalty to a leader can actually be loyalty to his personal
fantasies and paranoia. Germany was under
the boot of Hitler for less than a decade but Russia was a totalitarian
state for seven decades. No nation in history has suffered more than the
Russian people. Stalin had big social functions with his spies all over
the room reporting back to him any tiny questioning of any aspect of his
rule. Over 25 million Russians died. To blindly follow
a leader is a form of psychological impairment and social imprisonment.
To the extent that any nation practices lockstep loyalty to its leaders,
it will be an unsafe place to be. The effect of
blind loyalty on the economy is certain. Creativity – the arena of
ideas – is the real pot of gold in any society and creativity is
always stifled in a lockstep society. Creativity is thinking outside the
box and when the box is loyalty, it stifles enterprise and ideas. Nothing good
prospers in a “loyal” locked-down mind. DALTON'S WEBSITE: www.daltonroberts.com
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