POLITICS, NONSENSE, AND THE TASK OF A LEADER

[Note by JW:  TTP is pleased to follow the advice of Joe Katzman and Skye in requesting Yasuhiko Kimura’s Forum post as a TTP article.  As Joe comments: “This is, by far, the best and most consequential thing you [Yasuhiko] have ever posted here. TTPers need to read this over a couple of times, and consider how absolutely pervasive its implications are. It destroys the standard conservative notion of politics, and replaces it with a truthful construct that is of actual use in navigating modern politics.]

Looking at the human nature and the political games the humans play, we can observe the following:

1. Human beings are status-seeking beings. Ergo, most humans seek to achieve as high a social status as possible.
2. In order to achieve and maintain the highest social status possible for themselves, most humans would willingly sacrifice personal comfort, happiness, enjoyment—that is, they would willingly endure suffering.
3. Correlatively, human beings are power-seeking beings. Power is centripetal. Power tends to become concentric and concentrated. Ergo, power holders seek to concentrate power unto themselves.
4. Power holders seek to attract and then keep subordinates not on the basis of competency but on the basis of (blind) loyalty in order to maintain and concentrate power.
5. They entice people to be loyal by way of providing them with a higher social status which would be impossible for them to achieve otherwise.
6. Nonsense is a more effective loyalty-generating and group-organizing tool than that which makes sense or the truth, because any rational person can believe in what makes sense, but to believe in nonsense requires blind loyalty above rationality.
7. Ergo, believing in nonsense is an unforgeable demonstration of (blind) loyalty.
8. A belief in nonsense serves as a political uniform. And if you have a uniform, you have an army.
9. Believing in nonsense debilitates the individuals’ rational sense-making ability by corrupting their intellectual integrity and honesty, concomitant with the corruption of moral integrity and honesty.

A leader needs to recognize this aspect of the human nature and to discipline himself or herself not to use power politically. Instead, the leader needs to learn to use his or her power:

1. To empower others so that the power is optimally distributed—that is, to make power radiational and centrifugal, instead of gravitational and centripetal.
2. To attract and keep colleagues and subordinates not on the basis of blind loyalty but of professional competency.
3. To engender true loyalty on the basis of alignment in mission and value, and of mutual respect, trust, and enjoyment.

To use power in this way requires wisdom. To develop networks of wise leaders on a planetary scale is the path to take that will save humanity from self-destruction caused by the environmental pollution of proliferating political nonsense.

The TTPN Community already is one such network of wise leaders but can be explicitly developed further.

Yasuhiko Genku Kimura is a philosopher, Zen Buddhist priest and scholar, now working as a consultant to corporate CEOs and their companies.  He is the author of several books in English, including The Book of Balance, Think Kosmically Act Globally, and Zen Mind, Business Mind.”