Hark! Our Better Angels Sing: The Greatest Gift A Leader Can Give
[Milky Way over Great Rift Valley. Credit Bob King]
By Ginny Whitelaw
Originally published on Forbes.com on December 1st, 2021.
In Lincoln’s first inaugural address, he appealed to the nation’s “better angels,” meaning the better aspects of our character, such as good sense and virtue. Seven score and sixteen years later, in the thick of the Trump presidency, historian Jon Meacham spoke to the battle for our better angels in The Soul of America. He recounts the disparities and triumphs of a nation founded on the declaration that all people are created equal and its unequal efforts to live up to that mighty truth. He recognized the power of leadership and the Presidency specifically to pull people up to the best within them, or down to their most angry, fear-based selves. As Meacham writes, “We are more likely to choose the right path when we are encouraged to do so from the very top.”
Conversely, when rage is encouraged from the top, it becomes unstoppable, as we witnessed in the attack on the Capitol. But this cultivation of rage is not just a political matter or something that can be amped up or down by a President. Rage sells. It gets people writing checks to political parties. It gets people buying products that promise some security or relief. It is the fastest moving, most audience-aggregating emotion on social media. It’s good for ratings, as Fox News has shown, and we’re more easily fooled when logic can’t break through strong emotion.
While much is being written about rage in America, this is not just an American phenomenon, but indeed mirrors the rise of authoritarianism around the world. Rage is incompatible with democracy, for the latter requires the better angels of good sense and virtue. It is also incompatible with well-being, happiness, love and living at the full capacity of human consciousness. While it’s certainly part of the human experience, rage is the basement level of consciousness. And it is destroying us, as we continue to vent our destructive ways on one another and the planet. The call to leaders at all levels, meaning anyone committed to making a positive difference, is to turn this around. The greatest gift a leader can give is to take away fear, by which people move up out of rage and toward their better angels.
What might this look like? Whether we think of it as better and worse angels or higher and lower levels of consciousness, there are models that can guide us in what it means to pull people up to the best within them. Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory offers a useful synthesis of many of these models that track stages in human development from I-centered to ethno-centered (i.e., my group) to world-centered (i.e., inclusive of all groups) to universally-centered or unity consciousness. Since we all grow up through the earlier stages, we can certainly regress to them. But world-centered consciousness, which is rational and inclusive, is the first level at which democracies or global organizations hold together. The first two stages, while natural as children, are fraught with difficulty if we get stuck in them as adults. A model from Buddhism that informs our work in Zen Leadership captures this well in terms of 6 realms of being, ranging from the rage of hell to the bliss of heaven. We don’t think of these as places we go after we die, but rather states we live in and move between every day. Mapped to Wilber’s four major stages, they are:
I-centered:
Hell, characterized by rage, fury and anger
Hungry ghosts, characterized by greed or an unfillable hole
I-centered or ethno-centered:
3. Animal nature, characterized by basic instincts for survival, “reptilian brain”
4. Conflict nature, characterized by fear triggers and conflict between groups
World-centered
5. Human nature, characterized by rational thought, executive functions, inclusivity
Universally-centered
6. Heavenly nature, characterized by sense of connection, love, joy, bliss, dignity of all beings
We might think of these levels as 6 floors of a building, where we generally reside on a given floor, which can go up as we grow up, but we can also ride the elevator up or down to any level. What this model highlights is that we are not operating at the level humans are capable of when we’re hanging out on the lower floors. We’re also not particularly happy or healthy. We’re not living our best life, nor offering our best to others. The irony is that while love, joy and connection feel wonderful, the lower states of rage, greed, survival and conflict rev up our economic engines. Many sectors do better as we do worse. Healthcare makes more money when we’re sick. Weapons manufacturers make more money when we’re at war or when people are worried for their own survival. Food manufacturers make more money when we eat too much. Wall Street, by its own proud measures, runs on greed and fear. And political campaigns amass wild amounts of money when people are enraged. If the climate crisis and deep social divides are showing us anything, it is that these engines are leading to our demise; running them faster is not actually in our interest.
So, it will take acts of leadership to see through this pattern to possibilities for thriving, reversing our thrusters, and lifting people up to the best within them. While this has strategic and operational implications for leaders, the place to start is in the personal and interpersonal domains. In the literal sense of “leader,” we have to go first. We have to do enough of our own inner work to be able to summon empathy or an all-embracing sense of connectedness. Fear, which plummets us down into the lower floors, feasts on isolation. End isolation with the experience of connectedness and you take away fear. Here are three practical steps for doing that.
1- Cultivate connection. Engage in practices that help you feel whole. Zen and other embodied, mindful practices are good candidates as they create conditions conducive to flow or Samadhi, dissolving the delusion of a separate self. Being out in nature is also conducive to this sense of bigness, connecting with all that is. Cultivate connection to your sense of purpose and let it guide your priorities.
2- Become the other. As you encounter people in the suffering of the lower floors, feel their reality. “Become the other” does not mean become enraged if they’re enraged or greedy if they’re greedy. It means to let their reality seep into you enough that you can sense what they’re afraid of, what’s triggering them. Basic human fears are common to all of us, and when we can feel people at that level, we quit judging them and genuine compassion can emerge. In a physical sense, as we become the other, we make a more thorough internal map of them, making it easier to communicate in a way that will resonate with them. If you find yourself getting triggered, do the best you can in the moment, but reflect on what fear is operating in you. The more clearly you can see root fears in yourself, the more you’ll be able to discern them in others and be less triggered by them.
3- Let connection do the work. Often when we encounter someone in suffering, we feel we must fix it, offer advice or take some action. But this is usually our ego trying to assuage its own sense of helplessness by doing something, anything, and rarely helps the other person. But knowing that fear feasts on isolation, all we really need to do is be present and connected. If we’re resonating with nature or purpose or ground of being and they’re resonating with us, they’re resonating with that bigness, too. Brene Brown gives a great example of letting connection do the work in distinguishing empathy from sympathy. Sympathy is finding a friend in a hole and yelling down, “At least it’s not worse.” Not helpful. Empathy, which is being present and connected is climbing down into the hole with the person and saying perhaps nothing more than, “That’s really hard, but I’m so glad you told me.” So, while we may not cure the problem, we cure the isolation, and whatever can heal in that exchange will heal. That’s taking away fear.
That’s lifting people up to their better angels. We need to do this for our companies, for our communities, and for our collective and continued well-being on this planet. Albert Einstein once observed that “issues cannot be solved at the same level of consciousness that created them.” The corollary is: they get worse when we dip to even lower levels of consciousness. The issues of our age are fueled by economic models that reflect 2nd- through 5th-floor thinking: rational actors (5th) beating competitors (4th) to stay in business (3rd) and maximize their gains (2nd). Those issues are exacerbated by the bottom floor of rage and leaders who can use rage and fear to create an authoritarian lock on power. There’s only one way that leads to a happier ending, and that is up. We need more connection, love, joy, that is, heavenly consciousness on earth. The greatest gift leaders can give is to take away fear so we can rise to it.
Ginny Whitelaw is the Founder and CEO of the Institute for Zen Leadership.
