The state exists to protect its citizens. The principle of of the separation of church and state keeps church and state from having undue influence over each other but no one seems to care that under current SCOTUS doctrine, this principle does not protect the citizen from the church to which he belongs.
If a citizen/church member brings suit against his church for violation of his rights the current doctrine allows the church to argue that the court has no jurisdiction over the matter because it is a purely religious matter.
A systems level discussion on Organizational Leadership and World Peace written by:
© Darius A. Lecointe, Ph.D., J.D., M.A. Join in the discussion here or through dalecointe@gmail.com
Friday, April 13, 2012
Thursday, March 29, 2012
A Fair Constitution
Now, if "We the People" can create a Constitution that mandates the Government to promote the general welfare how can we think it unconstitutional for the Government to mandate that "We the People" should contribute to the general welfare?
Wednesday, March 28, 2012
Health Care and the Individual Mandate
If Court watchers are correct, it appears that the future of the individual mandate in the Affordable Care Act may hinge on whether the Court perceives that the mandate changes the relationship between the Government and the citizen in a “fundamental way.” What, then, is that relationship?
Many people seem to view the Federal Government as a conveyance in which the citizens ride. That is not the Constitutional view, however. In the Constitution the people have vested “legislative Powers . . . in a Congress of the United States” but each citizen is a part of this conveyance. This is the only constitutional relationship between the government and the people.
The question, then, becomes whether any member of the citizenry who decides or is unable to contribute to the general Welfare has a continuing right to demand that the rest of the citizenry should provide that citizen with healthcare? Has the citizen, by opting out of the collective functioning of the government, given up his right under the protection of the Constitution to a share in the general Welfare?
In the preamble to the Constitution the people established the Constitution as the primary vehicle for promoting the general welfare. Everyone agrees that the individual mandate is the only way to ensure that individual premiums from private insurance providers are universally affordable. To declare the individual mandate to be contrary to the Constitution would interfere with the constitutional duty of Congress to promote the general welfare.
Many people seem to view the Federal Government as a conveyance in which the citizens ride. That is not the Constitutional view, however. In the Constitution the people have vested “legislative Powers . . . in a Congress of the United States” but each citizen is a part of this conveyance. This is the only constitutional relationship between the government and the people.
The question, then, becomes whether any member of the citizenry who decides or is unable to contribute to the general Welfare has a continuing right to demand that the rest of the citizenry should provide that citizen with healthcare? Has the citizen, by opting out of the collective functioning of the government, given up his right under the protection of the Constitution to a share in the general Welfare?
In the preamble to the Constitution the people established the Constitution as the primary vehicle for promoting the general welfare. Everyone agrees that the individual mandate is the only way to ensure that individual premiums from private insurance providers are universally affordable. To declare the individual mandate to be contrary to the Constitution would interfere with the constitutional duty of Congress to promote the general welfare.
Thursday, February 2, 2012
Acting out
It is almost axiomatic that our thoughts are private property. It is not as obvious, though it is easily shown, that they no longer belong to us exclusively the moment they are translated into actions or are shared with others. We may be held responsible for them but they are no longer ours exclusively. Our thoughts are self-contained within our minds, out of the range of human sensors but our actions are influenced by the nature of the relationships we have with our surroundings. Everything we do occurs within the context of those relationships. It is important to recognize that our actions are performed on behalf of one or more of these relationships.
Monday, August 22, 2011
Riots
We have been this way before. Five hundred years ago a French social reformer by the name of Auguste Comte witnessed the same conditions that trouble us on the news today. The details were different then. Very different. But the conditions were the same.
There were no rampaging hordes of youth threatening to burn a global financial center to the ground. There were no reports of multiple suicide bombings taking the lives of scores of innocent victims. There were no airplanes to be flown into buildings filled with thousands of human beings. There were no Timothy McVeigh's or Anders Behring Breivik's going on one-man campaigns to save their world.
Some details certainly were the same. Back then there were a few individuals with lots of wealth that had been accumulated on the backs of the many who remained in poverty. They also had their slums and ghettos.
Auguste Comte felt the same way we feel today. Something was wrong with society. He could tell that society was in trouble. Sociology was his academic response to the malaise he saw around him. He had seen how science had been used to transform society physically. He hoped it could be used to transform it socially.
It must be obvious to us also that society is in trouble. By our reactions to these incidents we have declared that our society is sick. But the measures we have been proposing to correct these conditions suggest that we think otherwise. It is easy for us to blame the gangs who roamed the streets of London for these four nights in August and struck fear into the hearts of its citizenry. But this is nothing more than blame-shifting. That's a bit like blaming the river for the damage caused by the flood.
It is statistically possible for a freak storm to wreak much more damage than these young people caused. It is not the damage to life and property that offends us but the fact that it was caused by our children. We cannot understand how they could do this to our peace and quiet. I cannot help but think that they are asking a similar question. "How can they do this to us? How can they take away our chances at a good education, or a job to make a living? How can they do this to us?" Whether we admit it or not, their actions are their last ditch effort to change conditions they find to be oppressive. That is what Tim McVeigh thought he was doing. That is what Anders Breivik thought he was doing. It is not a sustainable solution to do to them the same thing they did to us, neither will it help future generations if we only kick the can a little further down the road.
We ask, "Where are the parents of these children?" Good question. But, maybe they have their own question. "Where were you when we were struggling to hold down two or three jobs so we could put food on the table for these children, and have enough money left over so I could buy for them all those glamorous consumer goods the media keeps telling them they must have? Where were you then?"
We advise our children to stay away from gangs as if gangs are an alien species? These gangs are all homegrown. They did not spring up out of nothing. They did not invade our societies from outer space. We produced these gangs. We created the circumstances in which they sprout and flourish.
We have been this way before. Comte recognized that it was a problem with collective action. He recognized that was he observed among the poor of society did not only define them; it defined the entire society. The gangs are not sick. All the groups and individuals that strike fear into our hearts are not sick. We are sick. The problem is collective action. Leadership is nature's response to the need for collective action. This is what we need today. We need leadership that will correctly identify the problem we have, and then be capable and bold enough to suggest the type of corrective action that will make these recent events nonessential. If we fail to rise to the occasion we will be this way again.
There were no rampaging hordes of youth threatening to burn a global financial center to the ground. There were no reports of multiple suicide bombings taking the lives of scores of innocent victims. There were no airplanes to be flown into buildings filled with thousands of human beings. There were no Timothy McVeigh's or Anders Behring Breivik's going on one-man campaigns to save their world.
Some details certainly were the same. Back then there were a few individuals with lots of wealth that had been accumulated on the backs of the many who remained in poverty. They also had their slums and ghettos.
Auguste Comte felt the same way we feel today. Something was wrong with society. He could tell that society was in trouble. Sociology was his academic response to the malaise he saw around him. He had seen how science had been used to transform society physically. He hoped it could be used to transform it socially.
It must be obvious to us also that society is in trouble. By our reactions to these incidents we have declared that our society is sick. But the measures we have been proposing to correct these conditions suggest that we think otherwise. It is easy for us to blame the gangs who roamed the streets of London for these four nights in August and struck fear into the hearts of its citizenry. But this is nothing more than blame-shifting. That's a bit like blaming the river for the damage caused by the flood.
It is statistically possible for a freak storm to wreak much more damage than these young people caused. It is not the damage to life and property that offends us but the fact that it was caused by our children. We cannot understand how they could do this to our peace and quiet. I cannot help but think that they are asking a similar question. "How can they do this to us? How can they take away our chances at a good education, or a job to make a living? How can they do this to us?" Whether we admit it or not, their actions are their last ditch effort to change conditions they find to be oppressive. That is what Tim McVeigh thought he was doing. That is what Anders Breivik thought he was doing. It is not a sustainable solution to do to them the same thing they did to us, neither will it help future generations if we only kick the can a little further down the road.
We ask, "Where are the parents of these children?" Good question. But, maybe they have their own question. "Where were you when we were struggling to hold down two or three jobs so we could put food on the table for these children, and have enough money left over so I could buy for them all those glamorous consumer goods the media keeps telling them they must have? Where were you then?"
We advise our children to stay away from gangs as if gangs are an alien species? These gangs are all homegrown. They did not spring up out of nothing. They did not invade our societies from outer space. We produced these gangs. We created the circumstances in which they sprout and flourish.
We have been this way before. Comte recognized that it was a problem with collective action. He recognized that was he observed among the poor of society did not only define them; it defined the entire society. The gangs are not sick. All the groups and individuals that strike fear into our hearts are not sick. We are sick. The problem is collective action. Leadership is nature's response to the need for collective action. This is what we need today. We need leadership that will correctly identify the problem we have, and then be capable and bold enough to suggest the type of corrective action that will make these recent events nonessential. If we fail to rise to the occasion we will be this way again.
Sunday, August 14, 2011
Complexities
What is it that makes a good leader? Is a good leader the same thing as being a successful leader? Is there anything as a bad leader? How many times and under what circumstances is a leader allowed to fail before he can be called a failure? Those are not easy questions because we are dealing with a concept that has correctly been called “the most complex and multifaceted phenomenon to which organizational and psychological research has been applied,” (van Seters and Field, (1990). However, these are important questions for those of us living in the twenty-first century because leadership will become more and more important as society becomes more and more complex.
Our interest in leadership began by focusing on individual in world history (mostly men) whom we considered to be great. Drawing on the lives of individuals like Muhammad, Shakespeare, Luther, Rousseau, and Napoleon, Scottish writer Thomas Carlyle (1888) thought that “the history of the world is but the biography of great men.” He was joined in that view by American scholar Frederick Adams Woods (1913) whose book, The Influence of Monarchs: Steps in a New Science of History, examined 386 rulers from the 12th century till the French revolution in the late 18th century and the influence of their lives on historic events. These and other Great Man views of history were later incorporated into what has been called the Personality Era of leadership theories. They have also had an inordinate influence on our contemporary understanding of leadership itself.
It is important to note that the Personality Era in our evolution of leadership theories does not begin with the leadership histories of the great men whose lives are the focus of that era. These great men were not aware of the leadership theory with which they have been affiliated. Circumstances had prevailed upon them and they heeded the call to leadership. They were not proponents of any theory of leadership.
Neither were the historians and thinkers like Bowden (1927) and Galton (1869) who would, years later, examine their lives and their work. It is interesting that the origins of the Personality Era of leadership theory do not coincide with the period with which that theory is identified. Proponents of the academic theory did not study the conditions under which those leaders became leaders. They did not study the lives of other individuals in that period that did not go on to be leaders or why those great men did become great. They may have given more credence to the views of Spencer (The Study of Sociology, 1896) who countered Carlyle by suggesting the emergence of a great man on the stage of history “depends on the long series of complex influences which has produced the race in which he appears, and the social state into which that race has slowly grown…. Before he can remake his society, his society must make him.”
It did not take long for other academics to recognize that personality was not a sufficient explanation for the leadership prowess of these great men. If leadership was related to personality one would expect that notable leaders would have similar personalities. However, it was obvious from the lives of contemporary leaders that successful leadership is associated with a range of differing personality types. There was also a problem for practicing managers because it is extremely difficult to imitate the personality of another individual. It was necessary to sever the link between leadership and particular individuals. A new theory was proposed which focused on identifying a number of traits that one could adopt to enhance leadership skills.
As before, no effort was made to formally define leadership for research purposes. From that point onwards leadership theories have been focused on leadership styles rather than on leadership. The purpose has not been to improve leadership but to improve leadership styles. Unfortunately, many have conflated the two and have tended to confuse leadership style with leadership.
Our interest in leadership began by focusing on individual in world history (mostly men) whom we considered to be great. Drawing on the lives of individuals like Muhammad, Shakespeare, Luther, Rousseau, and Napoleon, Scottish writer Thomas Carlyle (1888) thought that “the history of the world is but the biography of great men.” He was joined in that view by American scholar Frederick Adams Woods (1913) whose book, The Influence of Monarchs: Steps in a New Science of History, examined 386 rulers from the 12th century till the French revolution in the late 18th century and the influence of their lives on historic events. These and other Great Man views of history were later incorporated into what has been called the Personality Era of leadership theories. They have also had an inordinate influence on our contemporary understanding of leadership itself.
It is important to note that the Personality Era in our evolution of leadership theories does not begin with the leadership histories of the great men whose lives are the focus of that era. These great men were not aware of the leadership theory with which they have been affiliated. Circumstances had prevailed upon them and they heeded the call to leadership. They were not proponents of any theory of leadership.
Neither were the historians and thinkers like Bowden (1927) and Galton (1869) who would, years later, examine their lives and their work. It is interesting that the origins of the Personality Era of leadership theory do not coincide with the period with which that theory is identified. Proponents of the academic theory did not study the conditions under which those leaders became leaders. They did not study the lives of other individuals in that period that did not go on to be leaders or why those great men did become great. They may have given more credence to the views of Spencer (The Study of Sociology, 1896) who countered Carlyle by suggesting the emergence of a great man on the stage of history “depends on the long series of complex influences which has produced the race in which he appears, and the social state into which that race has slowly grown…. Before he can remake his society, his society must make him.”
It did not take long for other academics to recognize that personality was not a sufficient explanation for the leadership prowess of these great men. If leadership was related to personality one would expect that notable leaders would have similar personalities. However, it was obvious from the lives of contemporary leaders that successful leadership is associated with a range of differing personality types. There was also a problem for practicing managers because it is extremely difficult to imitate the personality of another individual. It was necessary to sever the link between leadership and particular individuals. A new theory was proposed which focused on identifying a number of traits that one could adopt to enhance leadership skills.
As before, no effort was made to formally define leadership for research purposes. From that point onwards leadership theories have been focused on leadership styles rather than on leadership. The purpose has not been to improve leadership but to improve leadership styles. Unfortunately, many have conflated the two and have tended to confuse leadership style with leadership.
Monday, August 8, 2011
Psychological Biases
Modern human leadership is related to our ability to organize and is based on psychological biases that were acquired almost 2.5 million years ago (van Vugt, 2008). Out of those early evolutionary pressures emerged a form of leadership that anthropologists believe can be observed among the !Kung San people of the Kalahari Desert and the Yanomamo of the Amazon. It bears little or no resemblance to the forms of leadership studied by those being prepared for leadership in today’s world.
The differences between the egalitarian leadership style practiced by our early ancestors and the dominance hierarchies that form the basis of our current leadership model is striking. The personality and trait driven leadership models on which our current leadership models are based do not represent a natural evolution from that early model of natural leadership.
Much is made of the fact that humans are a social species but we often forget that our first permanent groups were our families. It is from these family groups that we developed our leadership psychology and the egalitarian leadership style it produced.
We must have acquired those psychological biases much closer to the beginning of the first phase of human development and we have maintained this stable and successful form of leadership for the past 2.5 million years.
Van Vugt’s account of how we developed the conditions that gave rise to our current dominance hierarchies is instructive. The development of agriculture was a natural facet of our evolutionary development, but the authoritarian leadership style that emanated was not inevitable.
If our psychological biases produced an egalitarian form of leadership, it stands to reason that our social psychology must have also been egalitarian. We must have been pre-disposed to consider any surpluses accumulated by the community as the property of the community, rather than the property of the one who happened to be in charge at the moment.
Use of communal property to create cultural elites was an unfortunate turn of events. But the evolution of our leadership styles to the quasi-egalitarian Transformational Era is an indication that the evolutionary processes that gave rise to our first and lasting form of leadership have not been successfully overcome.
The answer is not to abandon all vestiges of individual ownership and return to communal ownership. The genie is already out of the bottle.
If we desire to make the transition to the form of global leadership that nature prescribes we must find a way to bridge the gap between the two.
The effects go beyond our formal organizations. In a weird twist of fate family life is now infested with the same authoritarian approach to leadership. We have turned back on ourselves. An egalitarian family structure produced reinforced psychological biases that gave rise to egalitarian organizational structures. Now, our formalized and authoritarian leadership styles have produced the same approaches in the family unit.
At the same time that we continue to improve our current forms of leadership in our business, social and cultural organizations we must find the common thread between our current leadership style and the leadership that was practiced by our ancestors. That will be the subject of the next blog.
The differences between the egalitarian leadership style practiced by our early ancestors and the dominance hierarchies that form the basis of our current leadership model is striking. The personality and trait driven leadership models on which our current leadership models are based do not represent a natural evolution from that early model of natural leadership.
Much is made of the fact that humans are a social species but we often forget that our first permanent groups were our families. It is from these family groups that we developed our leadership psychology and the egalitarian leadership style it produced.
We must have acquired those psychological biases much closer to the beginning of the first phase of human development and we have maintained this stable and successful form of leadership for the past 2.5 million years.
Van Vugt’s account of how we developed the conditions that gave rise to our current dominance hierarchies is instructive. The development of agriculture was a natural facet of our evolutionary development, but the authoritarian leadership style that emanated was not inevitable.
If our psychological biases produced an egalitarian form of leadership, it stands to reason that our social psychology must have also been egalitarian. We must have been pre-disposed to consider any surpluses accumulated by the community as the property of the community, rather than the property of the one who happened to be in charge at the moment.
Use of communal property to create cultural elites was an unfortunate turn of events. But the evolution of our leadership styles to the quasi-egalitarian Transformational Era is an indication that the evolutionary processes that gave rise to our first and lasting form of leadership have not been successfully overcome.
The answer is not to abandon all vestiges of individual ownership and return to communal ownership. The genie is already out of the bottle.
If we desire to make the transition to the form of global leadership that nature prescribes we must find a way to bridge the gap between the two.
The effects go beyond our formal organizations. In a weird twist of fate family life is now infested with the same authoritarian approach to leadership. We have turned back on ourselves. An egalitarian family structure produced reinforced psychological biases that gave rise to egalitarian organizational structures. Now, our formalized and authoritarian leadership styles have produced the same approaches in the family unit.
At the same time that we continue to improve our current forms of leadership in our business, social and cultural organizations we must find the common thread between our current leadership style and the leadership that was practiced by our ancestors. That will be the subject of the next blog.
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