to create, we might be on the edge of a quantum leap in our development — if only we would stop underestimating and overestimating ourselves and embrace our true collective potential?
In the days following the tragedy, local and national news reporters joined countless Internet bloggers and rabid radio callers in debating whether our society was becoming more violent. Every special-interest group seemed to have a different reason to stir up shame, fear, and self-righteousness. Advocates for and against gun control joined a much wider chorus of discussions on free speech, responsible journalism, and political rhetoric. As time went on, the anger and panic wandered further off topic with Christian televangelists waving the book of Revelation in concert (though certainly not intentionally) with psychics and spiritualists citing Nostradamus’s prediction and Mayan calendar interpretations that the earth would experience some sort of savage devastation and divine reorganization in 2012.
If you happened to be researching human history from a cathedral-thinking point of view, however, you might be surprised, as I was, to find good reason to be optimistic. While we may never be able to eradicate isolated incidents of violence by people suffering from mental illness, we do have the tools to dramatically reduce trauma, terror, hate, arrogance, shame, and blame, grossly destructive by-products of civilization’s dominance-submission stage of social development.
And we can learn to work together as equal, authentic, empowered beings — not by treating this ambitious task as a vague, hit-or-miss, extracredit project, but through a thoughtful, widespread educational movement to help humanity master the emotional and social intelligence, verbal and nonverbal communication, leadership, and visionary skills that will, finally, allow us to function effectively as free men and women.
Hidden Bias
Critics of our current system often talk about a “glass ceiling” preventing women and minorities from rising to significant leadership positions, an invisible yet palpable obstruction through which the next level of advancement can be seen but not reached. “I know there are still barriers and biases out there, often unconscious,” New York senator Hillary Clinton said as she officially withdrew from the Democratic presidential primary in June 2008. Her loyal supporters were profoundly disappointed, but they eventually took her lead in moving forward constructively with a realistic appreciation for all she had, in fact, achieved. “And although we weren’t able to shatter that highest, hardest glass ceiling,” she emphasized, “this time, thanks to you, it’s got about 18 million cracks in it.”
Shortly after Clinton’s concession speech, Barack Obama issued a statement praising his rival’s “valiant and historic campaign” for helping his own daughters and “women everywhere” realize “there are no limits to their dreams.” And he thanked Clinton for preparing him to break a similar barrier as he became the first African American to win the Democratic nomination. “Our party and our country are stronger because of the work [Clinton] has done throughout her life,” he noted, “and I’m a better candidate for having had the privilege of competing with her in this campaign.”
But there was another glass ceiling no one was paying attention to, one so high most people didn’t know it existed, a hidden, evolutionary bias that the most ruthless alpha males had been bumping up against for centuries without so much as making a dent in the damn, confounding thing. In the fall of 2008, when a bunch of Wall Street executives, financial “geniuses,” and real estate speculators hit this silent, unconscious barrier all at once, they bounced back to the ground so fast the seesaw effect catapulted a man of mixed race and unconventional background right smack into the presidency.
Barack Obama has been mitigating the fallout from this strange turn of events ever since, and, no, even at the start of his second presidential term he doesn’t quite yet have the tools to succeed. No one does — mostly because our twittering, technically advanced, emotionally adolescent minds haven’t fully grasped the core challenge underneath all the political rhetoric, free-floating fear, toxic frustration, and frantic cultural static.
The Higher You Go. . .
In the bestselling leadership book What Got You Here Won’t Get You There, executive coach Marshall Goldsmith outlines twenty common yet troublesome habits that prevent successful people from becoming more successful. These career-stifling pitfalls have nothing to do with intelligence, technical skill, wealth, talent, education, or courage. They have to do with attitudes, interpersonal-communication difficulties, and personality quirks endemic to an incredibly inefficient, grossly outdated dominance-submission system. Quite simply, Goldsmith reveals, “The higher you go, the more your problems are behavioral.”
In reading over the list, I couldn’t help but notice that many of the behaviors in question are blatantly predatory, including the number one challenge: winning too much, which, according to the author, stems “from needlessly trying to be the alpha male (or female) in any situation.” The vast majority of the remaining nineteen habits are related to the first, which he describes as “the need to win at all costs and in all situations — when it matters, when it doesn’t, and when it’s beside the point.” Goldsmith emphasizes that our “obsession with winning rears its noisome head across the spectrum of human endeavor, not just among senior executives,” culminating in a desire to win “even when the issue is clearly to our disadvantage.” The amount of time, talent, and money wasted on this particularly insidious addiction is most obvious in our current political system, though it wreaks havoc in our churches, schools, humanitarian efforts, and family life whenever the need to “be right” is more important than being effective, let alone innovative, in solving the myriad challenges we face.
Humanity is evolving psychologically and socially through a process known as “civilization,” and we’ve reached a collective impasse. What got us here won’t get us there. Like the Fortune 500 executives that Goldsmith coaches, we need to look at our behavior, and we need to embrace some new skills. We are an incredibly powerful, successful species — with the ability to bankrupt the entire planet. Luckily we have some avatars to call upon, historically significant trailblazers who explored new territory while expending no small amount of blood, sweat, and tears. Several of these visionaries went on to become major religious figures (which I’ll get to later). But we do have at least one thoroughly human innovator to consider. And he may very well be the best model to follow at this stage in our development.
Yes, you guessed it; I’m talking about George Washington. Like the well-intentioned general fumbling around the American outback with a ragtag group of ill-equipped troops, we need to reassess our concepts of power, develop fierce sensitivity, exercise emotional heroism, experience the frightening, confusing, thoroughly disorganized death of the old, and have faith that we are capable, simultaneously, of creating something new. Evolution and what Washington called “Divine Providence” appear to be on our side. An impenetrable glass ceiling on unchecked predatory behavior offers consistent historical evidence that some higher intelligence and/or process of natural selection is actively preventing us from moving forward until we can let go of our adolescent dominance fantasies and embrace a more mature form of social organization.
The turning point involves an unwieldy combination of humility, intelligence, empathy, courage, and transformation. Remember that while standing up to the British, the most powerful military force in the world, Washington had to concede that he would never be able to fight that juggernaut on its own terms. He had to try something new, incorporating, as it turns out, something very, very old: a long-forgotten, incredibly agile, nonpredatory wisdom to enhance the conviction, focus, and endurance he already had in spades.
In the twenty-first century, we are, once again, battling a force that threatens our freedom and survival, one that, unfortunately, has already proven much more powerful and insidious than King George’s arrogant nobles and exquisitely trained soldiers. And yet I believe we’ve reached the point in our collective evolution where we can win this psychological war of independence with compassion,
