From the moment we are born, before we can think rationally, we are exposed to multiple cultural influences and to the more developed worldviews, both positive and negative, of other people. By the time we are six years old and capable of reasoning, the foundations of our own worldview will already have been laid, through instinct, intuition, and experience, and the quality of that foundation will determine the soundness of the edifice we build through the rest of our lives.

In my own case, by age six my worldview was riven with contradictions: the virtues of love, honesty, courage, obedience and a solid work ethic were in conflict with the realities of racism, egoism, alcoholism, abuse, and violence. By the time I was old enough to ask “Why?”, I found myself having to negotiate a life that I would in later years describe as an Escher woodcut, full of bizarre traps and disturbing inconsistencies.

Any worldview not open to the ongoing search for truth and dialogue with other worldviews is not a humane worldview. Respect for truth and for the dignity of all people is essential to the choice of civilisation over barbarism.

Tampering even slightly with such respect results in determinism – nature red in tooth and claw – and in the heartless utilitarianism of the survival of the fittest. To paraphrase the inimitable Teddy Roosevelt, this world will not be a good place for any of us unless it is a good place for all of us.

Reading good books is indispensable to the tasks of developing a humane worldview and expanding one’s intellectual horizons, but what constitutes a ‘good book’ is highly controversial, and any attempt to draw up a canon of essential texts would be challenged. Nevertheless, in the process of making the case for reading as the essential activity in education, an understanding of what is meant by ‘good books’ will become clear. The historian and poet, Robert Conquest, eloquently made the point about the need to read in Reflections on a Ravaged Century:

“For people can be educated, cultured and so forth without having been to university at all – as with dozens from Franklin to Churchill, from Shakespeare to Einstein, to say nothing of the great women writers of the 19^th century. Nor is this only a matter of genius. Even erudition is possible outside academe, a point illustrated perfectly by Gibbon himself, the greatest of historians, who did indeed attend Oxford briefly when fifteen years old, from which (as he tells us) he got nothing. What all of them had was, in the first place, reading.”

Interestingly, rates of literacy in the US were higher at the end of the colonial period than they have been at any time since the advent of state schooling. Regular reading from the family Bible and the dedicated work of religious schools produced a population that was both literate and readily disposed to question government authority. Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to John Tyler, could speak confidently of the way forward for the newly established nation:

“No experiment can be more interesting than that we are now trying, and which we trust will end in establishing the fact, that man may be governed by reason and truth. Our first object should therefore be, to leave open to him all the avenues to truth. The most effectual hitherto found, is the freedom of the press.”

Freedom of the press is meaningless, however, without a literate and educated population who are aware of the possibilities and pitfalls of the human condition by virtue of their familiarity with the ideas that have shaped civilisation. Democracy itself depends on it. It was the development of the printing press and the rapid spread of literacy that made possible the gradual growth of representative government.

The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, by Professor Jonathan Rose of Drew University, provides evidence to demolish the arguments of modernists and post-modernists who attack classic literature. Speaking of the working-class autodidacts of 19^th century Britain, Rose affirms what the poet Matthew Arnold saw all too clearly:

“(Arnold) was right to suspect that individuals within that class were pursuing, in the face of intimidating obstacles, a liberal self-education much as Arnold would have understood the term. Their motives were various, but their primary objective was intellectual independence.

“For centuries autodidacts had struggled to assume direction of their own intellectual lives, to become individual agents in framing an understanding of the world. They resisted ideologies imposed from above in order to discover for themselves the word of God, standards of beauty, philosophical truth, the definition of a just society. There is nothing distinctively ‘bourgeois’ in this desire for intellectual freedom. If anything, it may have been strongest in people who had spent their lives following orders and wanted to change that. More than a few members of the educated classes supported this movement, but many others treated it as a serious threat to their own social position – which, in an important sense, it was.”

Rose makes it clear that if these self-taught working-class people had been asked for a list of great books, their answer would have been no different from that of educated people of the middle and upper classes.

He tells of the workhouse laundress, Catherine McMullen, being led from the letters of Lord Chesterfield, through Chaucer, Erasmus, Donne, and Gibbon to become the most successful novelist in Britain; as Catherine Cookson, her books sold more than one hundred million copies, and accounted at one time for a third of all books loaned by British public libraries. The Labour politician J. R. Clynes drew the inspiration that took him to deputy leadership in the House of Commons from the works of Shakespeare, and was described by a friend as: “...the only man who ever settled a trade dispute by citing Shakespeare.”

Elizabeth Bryson, raised in poverty in Dundee, was driven by the ideas and fiery prose of Thomas Carlyle to strive for a university degree, and went on to become an eminent physician in New Zealand. The examples of autodidacts in Rose’s and many other scholarly books, as well as the lives of scholars and authors such as Joseph Conrad and Pitirim Sorokin, underline that they were not confined to Britain.

Statistics provided by Rose from a 1940 survey – that is, from a time when educational reform along state school lines was already having a negative impact on Western culture — give an idea of what has been lost.

“Even more impressive is a 1940 survey of reading among pupils at non-academic high schools, where education terminated at age 14. This sample represented something less than the working-class norm: the best students had already been skimmed off and sent to academic secondary schools on scholarship. Those who remained behind were asked which books they had read over the past month, excluding required texts. Even in this below-average group, 62 percent of boys and 84 percent of girls had read some poetry: their favourites included Kipling, Longfellow, Masefield, Blake, Browning, Tennyson, and Wordsworth. 67 percent of girls and 31 percent of boys had read plays, often something by Shakespeare. All told, these students averaged six or seven books per month.

This reflection does not attempt to provide answers to the educational issues facing Western civilisation, but the nature of education and the means of furthering it are fundamental to developing leadership. What we read determines the content of our education, and until we return to the discipline of reading the books that have stood the test of time and have proved to be relevant in all times and all places, we will not emerge from the leadership crisis.

If I were asked to name just ten essential books for leaders, I would perhaps suggest:

1. The Bible

2. Plato’s Republic

3. Aristotle’s Nichomachaean Ethics

4. Homer’s Iliad

5. Livy’s Early History of Rome

6. Shakespeare’s Macbeth

7. Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina

8. Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment

9. Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago

10. Jacques Barzun’s From Dawn to Decadence

Excerpted from the book, Leaders and Misleaders, by Andre van Heerden

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“True law is right reason in agreement with Nature; it is of universal application, unchanging and everlasting; it summons to duty by its commands, and averts from wrong-doing by its prohibitions…It is a sin to try and alter this law, nor is it allowable to attempt to repeal a part of it, and it is impossible to abolish it entirely. We cannot be freed from its obligations by Senate or People, and we need not look outside ourselves for an expounder or interpreter of it. And there will not be different laws at Rome and at Athens, or different laws now and in the future, but one eternal and unchangeable law will be valid for all nations and for all times…” Roman Statesman, Cicero, in On the Republic Book III

The prime purpose of leadership is to provide justice to the people it serves. This is not an academic theory; it is an existential reality. Human beings are rational animals, and do not need to be philosophy majors to know that in order to flourish, we have to organise the way we live together according to the principles of justice.

These were lucidly expressed at the outset of western civilisation as, “living honourably, not harming others, and rendering to each his due”.

Justice implies security of person and property, political representation, equal social and economic opportunity, freedom of speech, freedom of movement and of association, access to education, employment, and healthcare, and avenues through which to oppose injustice.

Justice, and therefore leadership, are essential at all levels of society – home, workplace, community, and nation. Without justice, there can be no human flourishing, for even those who profit materially from injustice, as Plato and history itself make clear, destroy themselves.

Yet what is the status of justice in our technologically advanced world today?

We need to consider this in regard to relations between nations, but also in regard to relations between people and the governments constituted to serve them.

The January 2026 US raid on Venezuela triggered a firestorm of angry debate on social media as well as in the corridors of power. There were obviously serious questions asked:

o Did it amount to a violation of the US Constitution?

o How would China and Russia respond to the armed US intervention?

o Does it affect their respective claims on Taiwan and Ukraine?

o Have we entered a new age of imperialism?

o Do all nations now have to reconsider their international alignments

o Has the war on drugs entered a new phase? How will drug lords react?

o Was Venezuela’s active support for terrorism a valid casus belli?

o Has the link between illegal immigration and terrorism been made clear?

o Given UN impotence and corruption, does international law even exist?

o Was the incident just about securing oil for the US, and denying it to China?

There have been no definitive answers to any of those questions, and Venezuela seems to have disappeared from public consciousness, swept aside by newer, more current, and more sensational geopolitical developments. And while that is of significance to Venezuela as a member of the community of nations, what about the people of Venezuela, who have endured decades of Marxist tyranny, corruption, and mismanagement? Not to mention the impact of the devastating earthquakes in June 2026.

Are their lives better off since the US initiated coup? Maduro’s second-in-command, Delcy Rodrigues remains ostensibly as head of the government, and the restoration of justice for all Venezuelans remains an open question. What the US government has in mind for the people of Venezuela is obscure, given the stalled release of political prisoners, the hundreds of protests since the coup, and the continued presence of Marxist elements, drug cartels, international terrorist groups, and hostile neighbours.

Well may we weep for Venezuela. But sadly, Venezuela is emblematic of a world spinning wildly out of control. In the geopolitical sphere, merely call to mind Iran, Syria, Israel, Gaza, and Lebanon, Ukraine, the Horn of Africa, Sudan, Congo, the Sahel, Central and South America, North Korea, Taiwan, etc. etc.

In regard to the people of those countries, and in fact almost every country in the world of the Third Millennium, there is widespread and ongoing populist anger and resistance that has been simmering for decades, and is now coming to the boil.

The past decade has seen internal injustices on a scale not experienced in western nations since the totalitarian crises around the middle of the last century. Freedom of speech and conscience are under threat throughout the West, and illegal immigration has introduced social, political, and economic tensions and fractures that politicians seem unable or unwilling to resolve.

There are two egregious political developments – I decline to call them failures since they appear to be intentional policy – that expose the perilous reality of the West in this moment of madness. These are the refusal of the US Congress to pass the Save Act that would help ensure the free and fair elections to which all citizens are entitled, and the unconscionable, plainly treasonous, response of the British House of Commons in the face of the deluge of illegal immigrants, all men of fighting age, who are lodged in luxury hotels or foisted on unprotected communities.

Similar abuses of power on the part of the political class are becoming more brazen and more frequent in all western nations, and citizens approach elections without any hope of political leadership that will address the persistent problems and restore justice. What are they to do? It seems we are all Venezuelans now.

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‘The History of the Peloponnesian War’ remains after two and a half thousand years as one of the greatest works of history ever written. It is also an invaluable text for leadership development. The author, Thucydides, fought in the long struggle, rising to the rank of general, and he has left us a remarkable example of a classic history text written by someone who lived through the events described. In his own words, “My work is not a piece of writing designed to meet the tastes of an immediate public, but was done to last forever.”

Our understanding of ancient Greek civilisation would be impoverished without Thucydides’ great masterpiece, which has generally been accepted throughout the ages as a reliably factual account of the conflict. In this paraphrase of an excerpt from his book, he reproduces a speech by the great Athenian leader, Pericles, on the virtues of Athenian culture, and the personal character that Athens sought to cultivate in its citizens. Plenty of food for thought for us today in a civilisation that is inclined to look down its nose at people and societies in the past. Over to Pericles:

“We have a constitution which in no way tries to emulate the statutes of any other polis; we prefer to set the example rather than follow others. We call our constitution a democracy, because it is set up for the benefit of all our citizens, rather than just a few.

“When it comes to settling private disagreements, there is full equality before the law for everyone; and we choose men for public office on their merits and according to their sound reputation in a particular area. A man’s ability is what counts. Even if a man is poor, this does not disqualify him from serving the city, as long as he has the talent.

“In public life we believe in personal freedom, and when trouble arises because of one individual’s habits encroaching on others, as when our neighbour behaves selfishly in seeking his own pleasure, we don’t react angrily or with those holier-than-thou attitudes that can cause so much friction.

“In our relationships we show mutual respect, and in public interactions we are discouraged from transgressions by a spirit of high regard for our polity; we have complete respect for people in authority and the laws, especially those that protect the person and his property. We are also mindful of those unwritten laws, the violation of which brings public disgrace.

“What is more, we have all manner of recreation for the human spirit worn down by work, staging contests and celebrations throughout the year, and providing attractive commodities imported from all over the world to bring pleasure to people. We enjoy the goods of others as much as those we produce ourselves...

“We admire beauty without extravagance, and we delight in intellectual pursuits without being soft. We regard wealth as a spur to greater achievement rather than as something for ostentatious display. Poverty is seen as nothing to be ashamed of, but we do think it a disgrace when a man does nothing to improve his lot.

“All men are responsible for their own affairs as well as those of the polis, and while men make their livelihood in many different ways, they all understand the requirements of the polis. We are the only people who regard a man who refuses to participate in the affairs of the polis as worthless.

“We exercise good judgment and accurate planning in our affairs because while others see discussion as an impediment to action, we believe that it is not debating policy that leads to inaction or failure. We differ from other peoples in knowing that we must combine careful reasoning with decisive action to achieve our goals.

“In other states, courage arises from ignorance, and reasoned argument causes them to waver. People who know what is harmful and what is beneficial, and who still stand firm in the face of danger, may be said to have the finest character.

“When it comes to demonstrating good will, we are totally different to other peoples. We seek to gain friends not by accepting favours from them, but rather by performing acts of good will on their behalf. People who do good for others are much better placed to retain their good will as something of an obligation.

“On the other hand, if you are indebted to other people, any favour you may provide will merely be regarded as payment for what you owe them. We, of all people, show no hesitation in helping others, and give no thought to what we stand to gain, because we are confident in our generosity as free people.

“Taken all together then, I can confidently say that our polis provides an education for the rest of Greece, and in my opinion, every one of our citizens, in every aspect of his life, can stand proud as lord and master of his own person…”

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To lead is to create in other people a state of mind enthusiastic about and committed to the flourishing of the community of which they are part, be it a family, a school, a community, a sports team, a business, a profession, or a nation.

As human beings, each of us has the rational capacity to understand concepts, to put them into propositions, and to reason logically from given propositions to others in a process of inference. And with this intellectual capacity comes the challenge of choice or free will, making us responsible for everything we say and do.

These realities equip us to answer the questions that reveal our motivations.

· Who are you?

· What or who comes first in your life?

· What is your chief purpose in life?

· To what or whom do you owe your first allegiance?

· What does it mean to be human?

Those questions help one come to grips with reality, and realize how complex we all are as individuals. Motivating other people, like motivating oneself, is a very complex business.

Each of us is a person, with an exclusive constitution and a unique identity, based on intellect, will, and genetic make-up. Our development has been influenced by different environments, as well as a host of complex cultural realities, like education and entertainment, many of which are mutually contradictory.

Our humanity is not an irreversible fact. Inhuman acts all over the world testify to that on a daily basis. We are given the potential for complete humanity, but that potential is only fulfilled if we use it wisely in pursuit of excellence. To be human is both a task and a responsibility; our humanity is embryonic and has to be brought to perfection.

So we should all be self-motivated, but, of course, we struggle at times to move ourselves to action. What things demotivate us? Fear, failure, illness (mental or physical), poor relationships, low emotional intelligence, ignorance, cynicism, lack of confidence), lack of a sense of meaning and purpose, poor team spirit, exclusion, lack of communication, apathy, inefficiency, and poor planning and organisation.

And of course, there is the hidden pandemic of technocratic, secular society – acedia, the refusal to acknowledge one’s true nature, the denial of one’s purpose and potential in life, rejecting the demands that accompany the dignity of human nature. It is seen in the ennui, cynicism, and sloth so common in western society (see https://andrevanheerden.substack.com/p/the-hidden-drain-on-leadership).

On the other hand, what motivates us? Belief, hope, passion, loyalty, vision, purpose, wellness, success, good relationships and high emotional intelligence, knowledge, recognition, encouragement, rewards, confidence and, dare I say it, love.

The lesson to take from the failure of pop-psychology fads and the worrying limitations of the social sciences is that there is no easy way to explain what makes people do the things they do. Each of us is a mystery, even to ourselves. Fortunately, we all know more about psychology than any other science. We study psychology subconsciously in everyday life. It is the one science where we have inside knowledge, often deceptive, but still revealing.

Improving our thinking about attitudes and emotions helps enormously. Emotions are the feelings brought on by bodily reactions, like accelerated respiration and pulse, increased blood sugar and adrenalin, and papillary dilation or contraction, that drive us to act in certain ways. An attitude, by contrast, is a state of mind we adopt towards circumstances, other people, and the world around us. Emotions happen, while attitudes are chosen.

How do we distinguish between positive and negative attitudes? Attitudes either promote well-being in oneself, other people, and the world around us, or they cause harm. For example, courage, confidence, and compassion are good, while cowardice, cynicism, and cruelty are bad. And we are free to choose how we respond to our feelings.

It is in making these everyday choices that we forge our own character – for better or worse. We cultivate good attitudes by standing firm on truth and honesty, and by constantly expanding our knowledge in order to do so.

This understanding of emotions, attitudes, virtue, and character helps equip a leader with pretty clear guidelines when it comes to motivating other people.

1. Respect your people as individuals who need meaning, purpose, freedom, a sense of belonging, personal growth, and recognition.

2. Show them you are sincerely interested in their flourishing.

3. Get to know them as well as you can; talk to them one-on-one frequently.

4. Empathise – listen and put yourself in their shoes.

5. Invest, empower, encourage, support, and reward.

6. Hold them accountable for their responsibilities and conduct.

7. Set the bar high and trust them to get on with it; do not micromanage.

8. Always be just and forgiving.

9. Always ensure they have clarity about where they are and where they are going.

10. Make sure that the vision you hold aloft is a promise of fulfilment for all.

Of course, you will never inspire anyone, unless you are inspired yourself. And that is where the rich cultural heritage, all the art, architecture, music, and literature of western civilisation, is indispensable. Suffice to say, a person who knows Horatius, Antigone, Leonidas, Alexander, Scipio, Boudicca, King Arthur, Beowulf, Joan of Arc, Artemisia Gentileschi, Shakespeare, Vermeer, Mozart, Dostoevsky, and Eliot, will be more readily inspired than those who do not.

I leave the last word to the great German poet, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe:

“If you treat an individual as he is, he will remain how he is. But if you treat him as if he were what he ought to be and could be, he will become what he ought to be and could be.”

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The Siege of Malta 1565

A comment in the Free Press put the shocking event in context: “It’s arguably the most vivid illustration we’ve ever seen of the migrant crisis that has transformed the face of Europe in one decade and that continues to consume the continent’s politics…Will the brief storming of Ceuta prompt a reckoning among European elites, or will the crisis linger on, with the same denials and failed solutions from the leadership class?”

Ceuta and Melilla are not isolated occurrences. The massive surge of illegal immigrants across the southern border of the US during the Biden administration, and the almost incomprehensible smuggling by US military aircraft of thousands more from Mexico to undisclosed destinations in America, should have sparked much more decisive opposition on the part of the American people.

The flooding of European nations by primarily young male Muslim migrants that has been accompanied by skyrocketing crime rates, especially rape, has resulted in the establishment of large Islamic enclaves where Sharia law rules, and police are barred from entry.

The UK accepts boatloads of young male migrants from across the channel on a daily basis; and the government houses them in luxury hotels, or specially prepared compounds. In Ireland and Sweden, peaceful, remote villages have suddenly been burdened by an influx of foreign male migrants that outnumber and threaten the locals.

The simple and obvious fact is that western governments have for decades, and now even more brazenly, failed to meet their prime responsibility: justice for the citizens of their nation. And the central pillar of justice is the protection of person, property, and liberty for all citizens.

In 1988, in an essay titled “The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy”, pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty expressed the ideological nub of liberal democracy, viz. that humanity’s quest for truth, goodness, and beauty, by means of philosophy, should give way to a rules-based consensus on whatever citizens take to be basic and non-negotiable in terms of morality.

This deliberately vague flummery is still dished up by establishment elites to justify increasingly high-handed and often absurd policies. Sad to say, the general public continues to swallow the nonsense. Whose rules? What consensus? Aren’t all western democracies currently being torn apart by serious divisions on how we should live together?

Why does the ever-increasing tax burden never lead to improvements in education, healthcare, and infrastructure? Why are governments putting so much pressure on farmers and the food supply? How can a government committed to solar power spend millions on researching methods of blocking the sun? Is the setting up of an alien legal system within one’s border not an act of treason? Are illegal immigrants citizens? Why are they being so heavily sponsored by western governments?

These are a few of the many obvious questions that never receive even a hint of a rational response from western centrist politicians. This is what happens when “democracy” is given priority over philosophy, politics over reason, as Rorty suggested.

How can anything be basic if not philosophically grounded? And whose authority makes the rules non-negotiable if they depend on ever-drifting public opinion swayed by manipulative power elites? It is obviously a recipe for tyranny by either oligarchs or totalitarians.

Rorty, like the liberal philosopher, John Rawls, simply revived, perhaps unwittingly, a dangerously incoherent political stance as old as the western tradition in politics. When he advised partisans of liberal democracy to simply refuse to argue with those who raised rational objections, he not only echoed the cynical disdain of Stalin, but also recalled the “whatever works” rationale of Callicles in Plato’s famous dialogue, Gorgias.

In the dialogue, the Sophist, Callicles, is an advocate for the strongman, and insists that might is right, and that the commitment of Socrates to reason and ethical principles amounts to weakness. Callicles sees power as the main goal in life, and politics as the means to attaining power, through the use of rhetoric, deceitful if needs be, to keep the mob on one’s side.

In Gorgias, Socrates insists that philosophy is prior to politics because truth always has precedence over public opinion, and therefore should determine the very nature of politics, preventing it from falling prey to corruption and misleadership.

Socrates identifies two kinds of political oratory, one that is deceitful and manipulative, and the other that is truthful and edifying for the citizens, especially when it carries uncomfortable realities. The purpose of Socratic orators is “to improve their fellow-citizens as much as possible…Then the good orator, being also a man of expert knowledge, will have these ends in view in any speech or action by which he seeks to influence the souls of men…His attention will be wholly concentrated on bringing righteousness and moderation and every other virtue to birth in the souls of his fellow-citizens, and on removing their opposites, unrighteousness and excess and vice.”

In short, it is the first requirement of political leadership to inspire and ingrain in citizens the life of virtue, a sincere commitment to practical wisdom, courage, rational self-development, and justice. That is why education is so vitally important, and why the failure of state schooling has for many decades been such a travesty.

A politician’s “sole concern as a public man will be to make us who are citizens as good as possible…that is the duty of the statesman…the service which a good man owes to his country.” And only a good person will provide such leadership.

Sadly, Ceuta and Melilla provide merely the latest round of evidence that the West is shackled by embarrassingly incompetent misleadership.

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“To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognised need of the human soul. It is one of the hardest to define. A human being has roots by virtue of his real, active, and natural participation in the life of a community which preserves in living shape certain particular treasures of the past and certain particular expectations for the future. This participation is a natural one in the sense that it is automatically brought about by place, conditions of birth, profession, and social surroundings. Every human being needs to have multiple roots. It is necessary for him to draw well-nigh the whole of his moral, intellectual, and spiritual life by way of the environment of which he forms a natural part.” Simone Weil in “The Need for Roots”

Leadership has to start somewhere. And, logically, the starting point has to be in the culture of the entity to be led, specifically, in the roots of the culture, where the defining idea and its unavoidable implications are found.

In any nation, business, community, or family, roots determine the strength of the trunk, the vigour of its branches, and the richness of its foliage. So the serious leadership deficit at every level in western society should come as no surprise to anyone who has seriously studied history. Sadly, that amounts to almost no one.

The removal of history, and therefore philosophy as well, from the curriculum in state schools over the past half century has left the majority of citizens of the western democracies all but sociologically, politically, and culturally illiterate. And a person who has no knowledge of Plato, the Magna Carta, the French Revolution, or the Russian Revolution, none of which can be understood in isolation, is simply not equipped to vote responsibly in an election, or even comprehend what leadership implies. They are easily manipulated by the political class.

As Milan Kundera, the Czech author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, told us “The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will forget what it is and what it was.”

The great Roman scholar, Cicero, in On the Republic; On the Laws, held that a nation or a state is defined by a shared understanding of justice and the Common Good, and a shared commitment to that understanding. Accordingly, he was convinced that religion was a virtue essential to civilisation, that is, fulfilling our duties in justice according to our rational understanding of reality and what it means to be human.

Culture is the amalgam of ideas, beliefs, and attitudes that inform the activities and behaviour of any community, business, organisation, or nation. What meaningful common culture is possible in a society in which the members share few, if any, substantive moral, political, social, economic, and religious principles?

Multiculturalism inevitably results in conflict, as is readily demonstrated daily throughout our troubled western democracies. Can the subjugation of women be reconciled with human dignity and human rights? Can unrestricted illegal immigration be reconciled with national integrity? Can imperialism be reconciled with self-determination?

In 2016, the people of Britain shocked Europe, the rest of the world, and in particular the establishment elites, by voting for Brexit, the departure from the European Union. One man who was not shocked, the acclaimed philosopher, Roger Scruton, explained why most political commentators were caught napping:

“The British people used the referendum to express feelings that had been largely excluded from the political process. David Cameron did not at first perceive this, but, waking up to the reality of popular sentiment and attempting to secure the result on which he had staked his career, he warned of the economic catastrophe that awaits us, should we withdraw from the single market. And he produced one expert after another to prove the point. Not all the voters, however, were persuaded. The experts had a point; but they sounded like people who could settle anywhere and always be on top of things. For such people it is no great imposition to be governed from elsewhere. Elsewhere is where they always are. For many ordinary voters, however, whose networks are also neighbourhoods, the issue of who governs us, and from where, is real and urgent. For such people something was at stake that had been systematically overlooked by the politicians, and which was more important to them than all the economic and geopolitical arguments, namely the question of identity: who are we, where are we, and what holds us together in a shared political order? It is not only the British who are faced with this question: it is the political question of our time, and all across Europe people are beginning to ask it. Moreover, it is not a question that can be settled by economic arguments, since it must be answered before any economic arguments make sense.”

The lessons of Brexit must be applied everywhere by freedom-loving people. The irony is that the biggest threat comes from the misunderstanding of freedom pervading the West: that of the detached, autonomous individual, free to do as he pleases, without regard for the Common Good. We all need to be aware of the danger long ago described by Cicero:

“In communities and individuals alike, excessive freedom topples over into excessive slavery. Extreme freedom produces a tyrant, along with the extremely harsh and evil slavery that goes with him.”

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The general state of mind in the allegedly free West, with all its social dysfunction, moral confusion, and endemic acedia (see https://andrevanheerden.substack.com/p/the-hidden-drain-on-leadership) answers emphatically in the negative.

The never-ending hype about a resolute commitment to the development of critical thing in government, the corporate world, academia, state schooling, and the media, masks the pitiful reality of a civilisation that no longer understands the creative dynamism that made it great in the first place.

A recent article in the academic journal, The Chronicle of Higher Education, maintains that the crucial skill required to AI-proof students is critical thinking. To sell the idea, the author insists that critical thinking is just another name for AI literacy because the same skills are required – the ability “to ask probing questions of large language models, and weigh the answers against reality.”

The author emphasises the importance of teaching critical thinking in school and academia, but the message obviously applies in every area of our increasingly dysfunctional societies: “If we actually taught critical thinking well, you would actually be teaching AI literacy in a way that’s useful and transferable.”

But what is the correct method of teaching young people the mysteries of critical thinking? I sought to demystify the subject in an article (https://andrevanheerden.substack.com/p/think-youre-a-leader) some years back:

“To think critically means to use our intellect, to get inside things, immersing ourselves in an issue so as to understand the reality and deal with it. Critical thinking entails objective analysis, forming judgments, uncovering insights, and generating innovative possibilities. It is active, goal-oriented thinking.

“Our critical thinking faculties are intellect (conception, abstraction, and logic), free will, sense perception, instinct, language, memory, imagination, cultural literacy (a well-stocked bank of knowledge), and the emotional and attitudinal attributes of a lively curiosity, confidence, practical wisdom, courage, self-discipline, a sense of justice, and a spirit of adventure.

“Critical thinking covers all goal-oriented thinking: problem solving, decision-making, creative thinking, and employs both inductive and deductive methods of reasoning. Faddish concepts like higher-order thinking are just repackaging, as is seen by perusing Bloom’s taxonomy – memory, understanding, application, analysis, synthesis, evaluation, creation.

“But remember, you cannot understand the way you or others think unless you understand the worldview in play, the sense of ultimate purpose, the way the meaning of life is interpreted.”

Jordan Peterson long ago emphasised the need to teach people to write, because it is the best way to teach them to think. His point finds wide support in classic literature, and as Neil Postman explained, “To engage the written word means to follow a line of thought, which requires considerable powers of classifying, inference-making, and reasoning.”

Classical education was based on teaching young people to think first before going on to the big content subjects. The Trivium taught them grammar, logic, and rhetoric, disciplines that have been discarded by the modern world.

I owe an enormous debt to a dedicated English teacher who remained committed to educating young people to think for themselves. His lessons were built on the now politically incorrect methods of comprehension exercises, including grammatical analysis, copying, dictation, reading aloud, précis, paraphrase, figures of speech, and lots of memorization.

Those exercises all demanded rigorous mental effort, the rewards of which were enhanced critical thinking ability, increased facility of expression, confidence, and the leadership capability that naturally flows from those advantages.

Of course, writing well is impossible without reading, both widely and deeply. In his book Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton told us: “Thinking means connecting things, and stops if they cannot be connected.“ And obviously, the more things you have in your memory, the more fruitful connections you will make. General knowledge is the sine qua non for developing the ability to think critically.

For several decades now, most students in the West have gone to university largely unversed in history and classic literature, and with a knowledge of philosophy unlikely to fill one side of a Post-It note. During the age of discovery of their teenage years, the intellectual reservoirs of their minds, what E. D. Hirsch calls their cultural literacy, have remained empty, save for the inevitable toxic bloom of postmodern junk culture.

Before the exhilaration of adulthood has even begun, they have been deprived of the rich literary inheritance that would have helped them acquire the practical wisdom, courage, temperance in the sense of selfless self-preservation, and a strong affinity for justice essential for meaningful engagement in the world.

Unaccompanied by the stories of Joseph and Job, Achilles and Antigone, Cincinnatus and Scipio, Boudicca and Beowulf, Joan of Arc and John Sobieski, Old Hickory and Oliver Twist, and countless others, young men and women travel life’s odyssey ill-equipped for the challenges they will inevitably encounter.

Education seeks wisdom; schooling seeks control. Education, like leadership itself, encourages the questioning mind, the very basis of creativity; state schooling, like the managerial mindset, suppresses it.

The question that few people are willing to address is whether it is possible to teach critical thinking without an ethical foundation. Wisdom demands virtue; that is the inescapable reality from which the postmodern secular West recoils, kicking and screaming as it tries to hold tight to the infantile, immoral, incoherent worldview of the detached autonomous individual, which is suffocating critical thinking amid socio-political decay.

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“But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.” C. S. Lewis in An Experiment in Criticism

A 2013 article in The Economist heralded “Inward Bound” leadership courses as “an idea whose time has come”. Going beyond the relaxation and meditation techniques taught in “Mindfulness” coaching sessions, Inward Bound programs encourage business leaders to refresh their vision, insight, and perspectives by engaging in conversations about the great ideas of history, philosophy, and classic literature.

The Economist was playing catch-up. Among many others, I had been pushing the idea for years.

The only way to become a real thought leader is to ignore all the noise around leadership development, and wrestle with a few great thinkers. You will learn far more about leadership from reading Thucydides and Marcus Aurelius than you will from a thousand leadership experts. You will learn far more about doing business in China by reading Confucius and Mencius than by listening to ‘culture consultants’.

The leadership crisis will never be fixed by skills training, which merely asks: “what can you do?” It can only be resolved by education, which asks: “what sort of person will you become?”

Ancient wisdom saw that knowledge is of three kinds: knowing that (facts), knowing how (technique) and knowing what (judgment). The first two are knowledge of means, while the last is knowledge of ends, involving the consideration of truth and purpose, and judgments about right and wrong. Our age concentrates on the first two, and all but ignores the most important one — the ‘ends’ of good judgment.

Knowing what to think, feel, or do in any given set of circumstances requires understanding ourselves and our place in the world in relation to others, and a commitment to doing what we know to be right. It enables us to answer questions such as “What should I do about this manipulative team member?” “How should I handle this deceit on the part of my client?” and “What is the inspirational vision that will unite us a nation?”. Leadership is about people, not process, which is a management matter.

It does serious harm in our workplaces, and our society at large, to have people in positions of responsibility who deal with others according to mechanical, formulaic sets of guidelines garnered from some training program or the latest management best-seller. Training can only produce what it sets out to produce, namely functionaries who are there simply to ensure that the system operates smoothly, regardless of human costs.

Moreover, training works on the premise that the desired skills can be easily replicated, so that replacing managers is never a problem because any vacancy can be filled by a clone. This commitment to management by formula not only ignores the complexities of human nature and the intricate dynamics of human relationships, but it also inhibits the one thing leaders have to do every moment of every day — think for themselves.

Education, by contrast, focuses on individuals, their ideas, and their cultures, ensuring a rich reservoir of knowledge and experience that enables a leader to comprehend, at the very least, just how difficult it is to understand people. And education is only what it claims to be if it inspires and equips people to think for themselves.

As Dostoyevsky told us: “Man is a mystery. It needs to be unravelled, and if you spend your whole life unravelling it, don’t say you’ve wasted time. I am studying that mystery because I want to be a human being.”

Mortimer Adler explained this in “The Paideia Proposal”. “Knowing what”, the development of sound judgment, is only achieved through ever-growing familiarity with the great ideas of civilization. Reading history, philosophy, and classic literature is essential to this end, as are the Socratic Dialogue and the Scholastic Disputatio in discussing the texts and great works of art and music.

When we contemplate the global leadership crisis, it is not difficult to discern the root cause. T S Eliot expressed it with characteristic eloquence in Choruses from the Rock:

Where is the life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

A successful property developer who attended my workshops, told me how a group discussion we had on Gandhi’s trial for treason had helped him that very same day. In a thorny meeting with a difficult client, he remembered Gandhi’s approach, and modified his handling of the disagreement accordingly. The positive outcome encouraged him to purchase one of the books on the reading list I had provided – Dostoevsky’s “The Brothers Karamazov”.

I know scientists who revel in the classics, international cricketers who are inspired by history, and professionals from many different business categories who have learned how Aristotle’s fourfold explanation of causation helps them think with much greater depth and precision.

This message cannot be repeated often enough for corporate executives worn down by the burdens of “being the boss”, and by constantly being “distracted from distraction by distraction”. Improve your leadership by improving your mind; read classic literature.

As the esteemed contemporary agrarian philosopher, Wendell Berry, has pointed out:

“…literacy, the mastery of language & the knowledge of books, is not an ornament, but a necessity. It is impractical only by the standards of quick profit and easy power…it alone can preserve in us the possibility of an accurate judgment of ourselves and the possibilities of correction and renewal. Without it, we are adrift in the present, in the wreckage of yesterday, in the nightmare of tomorrow.”

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AI usage is rapidly on the rise, but many people are afraid of what is being undemocratically ushered into their lives. According to a 2025 poll, 44 percent of people believed AI would do more harm than good in their daily lives. That has since risen to 55 percent. The poll reported widespread concerns about how AI will affect the job market. Overall, 70 percent of Americans think AI will cause a loss in employment opportunities.

Not a single age group expected a positive impact, and the youngest age-group was the most pessimistic. Of Gen Z, born between 1997 and 2008, 81 percent believed AI would decrease job opportunities. Overall trust for AI-generated information was low among 76 percent of Generation Z.

AI is an astonishingly powerful and useful technology, providing many real benefits for humankind. Yet it also poses grave dangers, and is already being misused by corporate, academic, and political interests. It all comes down to who controls it, and the ethical standards to which they are committed.

Contrary to contemporary mythology, AI doesn’t think; it is programmed to calculate at mind-boggling speed by following algorithms. Machines merely mimic human reasoning: they are human artifacts totally lacking in consciousness. And after more than a century of relentless research, science still has no explanation for consciousness and how it came to be; the best scientific minds openly acknowledge this. Mechanical responses prompted by algorithms do not amount to thinking, however spectacular the results might be.

Computer output, like Siri talking with you, misleads uninformed people to suppose that the computer is thinking. That’s like untaught urban children believing supermarkets are the source of food. The modern consumer’s appetite for the sensational doesn’t help; headlines about robots taking control of the world, or AI as the final stage of evolution, attract millions more clicks than reports about computing speed generating options for research and policy.

Ironically, people ignore the very unhuman-like characteristics involved in AI – unbroken focus on the job at hand, photographic memory, never getting bored, being perfectly compliant, seemingly flawless execution of complex algorithms in a flash, and most importantly, never conceiving of anything new.

A machine can malfunction, but can never have a mind of its own, for the simple reason that it does not have a mind. Scientists and military leaders who are influenced by science fiction, and ignorant of the realities made plain by philosophy and history, are the real threat to civilised society. When an Armed Forces Journal can assert that the “next ethical minefield is where the intelligent machine, not the man, makes the kill decision”, you know that the thinking of some very influential people in the military is seriously compromised.

Programming, often using stolen content, determines how AI responds on questions relating to ethics, justice, metaphysics, epistemology, aesthetics, education, socio-political issues, etc. So AI is not responsible for what it does; fallible and untrustworthy human technocrats are. Obviously, AI poses massive problems for educators, and we now face an immediate risk of widespread dumbing down of the populace in all countries. As if that weren’t a serious enough problem already.

Competing systems are the reality in the AI universe, so logically there can be no mysterious, digital Big Brother controlling the future of humanity. It is the people behind the machines who are driving the developments, both good and bad. And as the entire digital world runs through a handful of platforms, cloud providers, and algorithmic gatekeepers, whoever controls those systems will have the power to furtively shape the perception of reality for billions of people.

All people who value human freedom and the responsibility that naturally entails, need to answer these questions for themselves, and make their views known:

1. What is the meaning of ethics? What is the purpose of ethics?

2. Are you aware of the moral confusion and different ethical systems in play today?

3. Which ethical system(s) Inform the answers/solutions of the different AI platforms?

4. Do you agree that standards of good and evil apply to human beings, not machines?

5. Are the excessive demands of AI on scarce water and electricity an ethical issue?

6. If autonomous AI is a threat to humanity, can its development be ethical?

7. If transhumanism is a threat to humanity, can its development be ethical?

8. Are competing AI systems not clear evidence of human oversight and control?

9. Is technology that threatens socio-political disruption and human suffering ethical?

10. Which AI system does the military use? Which ethical system informs that AI system?

11. Would it ever be ethical to leave kill decisions in armed conflict to a machine?

12. Which nations out of the US, China, Russia, Iran, Turkey, Japan, North Korea, the UK, France, and Germany can be trusted to use AI ethically? And which corporations?

The development of AI systems by corporations and politicians is driven by the age-old human lust for money, power, and prestige. The myth that machines will take over is propagated by unscrupulous elites trying to hide that obvious reality. There is no Cloud up somewhere in the ether, just massive data centres in remote areas, hidden from public awareness, and built, maintained, and further developed as technologies advance, by powerful interest groups, whose moral vision and standards are questionable, to say the least.

AI is not and never will be either omniscient or omnipotent, and will never come up with the perfect system of ethics. Even if one does not believe in God, we are all still bound by the inescapable realities of truth and the laws of nature that give rise to the Natural Law, transcendent and acknowledged by all the great civilisations, though not the various incoherent ideological aberrations of Modernity.

Don’t let unethical technocratic elites with totalitarian proclivities mislead and manipulate you with their hype; keep driving your own education by reading history, philosophy, and classic literature, and following blogs and podcasts recommended to you by people whose judgment you trust. The war for our minds has been waged for more than 200 years, but has become increasingly more perilous over the past decade.

In the final analysis, the best use of AI will be guided by human beings with a clearly defined ethical system based on a rationally ordered worldview that provides a cogent answer to the question of what it means to be a human being.

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“A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.” William James (1842 – 1910), philosopher and psychologist

The famous observation by William James is every bit as relevant today as it was when he first made it. And fewer people today stop to reflect on the profound implications than did his contemporaries. If more of us responded to the challenge, we would not be facing the leadership deficit at the root of all the instability and insecurity that afflicts our troubled world in the early decades of the third millennium.

Consider a highly-qualified doctor who grew up, was educated, and spent the early years of his professional career in apartheid South Africa, before emigrating to New Zealand soon after Mandela took office. Robert arrived with his family in their adopted country with all his prejudices intact, continuing to view his world through a lens shaped by materialist, racist, and technocratic beliefs that he had inherited and never bothered to seriously examine.

Egalitarian, multicultural New Zealand provided an uncomfortable challenge with which he never came to terms.

I once lent Robert a copy of C S Lewis’s The Abolition of Man, confident that it would at the very least persuade him to think more deeply about his beliefs and the community of which he was now a member. He never read it; here was a medical specialist who claimed he found Lewis’s text too difficult to understand. The book is a mere 78 pages. Needless to say, Robert’s prejudices persist, to the detriment of his family, friends, and the community, and the leadership a man of his status and intelligence might have provided has never emerged.

There are three simple questions any and all of us should ask ourselves in order to understand whether we are providing the leadership required of us in our families, our workplaces and schools, our communities, and our nations. The answers are not so simple, and the questions need to be revisited frequently to help maintain an intellectual equilibrium amid the emotional turmoil of our deeply troubled world.

Let us take each of the questions in turn:

The first question is: does the material world constitute the whole of reality?

Why is this an important question for leaders – in any area of life? Well, leadership can only get off the ground when there is meaning and purpose. Vision, which is central to leadership, cannot emerge in a vacuum, where there is no meaning and purpose. And if everything in the world arises from the random collisions of lifeless subatomic particles, making sense of life and the challenges it poses becomes a fool’s errand.

And as has become obvious with the steady demise of materialism through the 20^th century, there are many essential aspects of life that plainly transcend material reality. Numbers, for example, are immaterial. The word “two” or the symbol “2”, whether written in ink, sand, stone, or on a computer screen, are just symbols and not the idea or concept we have in our minds. And you won’t find the symbol “2” inscribed anywhere in our grey matter.

The same is true of abstract concepts like pig, petunia, and planet, plainly material in individual or particular instances, but immaterial in the universal idea of what it means to be each of those things. And it is obvious enough that concepts like justice, morality, and freedom are not things we can see, touch, hear, smell, or taste. But think of the meaning and purpose with which they provide us.

The second question is: do you agree with this statement from US Chief Justice Kennedy in 1992: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life”?

Most people today respond spontaneously to this question as if it were rhetorical, but the misconception lies at the heart of the problem that has assailed the modern world for at least 300 years. If Kennedy is correct, then logically, I am free to decide for myself what is good and what is evil, how I intend to conduct myself in relation to my fellow human beings, and how I choose to use or abuse my innate potential.

In that case, why is Putin wrong? Why were the Iranian atrocities wrong? Why is rape a crime? Why should we show sympathy and support for people suffering as a result of natural disasters? Why should I care about things like honesty and justice?

Man-made laws provide no answer for the simple reason that they often set up things that we all know to be evil, aberrations like slavery, apartheid, gulags, and gas chambers, etc.

Kennedy expressed an idea that went back to Hobbes and Locke, who built on Descartes’ cogito ergo sum. All the perverse political ideologies of the past 200 years arose as a result of that idea, and the universal extension of state power has been a predictable consequence.

Family, culture, religion, and tradition are essential for human flourishing, and sweeping them aside in favour of the detached autonomous individual has been a disaster for humankind. Community, relationships at all levels, and personal virtue, have all been gravely eroded, and the greatest social scourge of our time is loneliness, a prime source of mental illness and many other maladies.

The third question is: what does it mean to be a human being?

In our Woke world of today, amiably accustomed to absurdity, this question typically prompts mindless eye-rolling, but the very nature of leadership is at issue here. We are rational, relational animals, and the purpose of a rational mind is to seek truth, about the world, other people, and ourselves.

As Aristotle told us, truth is correspondence with reality, and objective moral principles can be known by all people, regardless of culture, through rational arguments built on what we all know about human nature and the world.

Sound philosophy, common sense, and science clearly specify what is good for us and what is bad. As rational, relational animals, human beings need meaning, purpose, freedom, knowledge, respect, community, work, and material sufficiency in order to flourish, and should not be deprived of them. By precise contrast, meaninglessness, futility, enslavement, ignorance, contempt, isolation, unemployment, and poverty diminish and destroy humanity.

Understanding this is foundational to one’s development as a leader.

Had the good doctor read The Abolition of Man, he may well have started to think for himself instead of merely rearranging his prejudices, and a lot of lives would have been changed for the better. Sadly, as AI and social media continue to diminish the reading of classic literature and history, the doctor’s case remains emblematic of our malaise.

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Is there one history book that could revolutionise the way people who do not know much history think about the challenges of modern life? In fact, there are many, but one in particular stands out as essential in its capacity to inspire, inform, illuminate, and instil insight, imagination, and a spirit of innovation in the reader.

Jacques Barzun (1907 –2008) was one of the great teachers and literary and cultural scholars of the past century. Born in France, he was raised and educated in America. He received a PhD from Columbia University, and taught there for many years. There are few books on education, and therefore leadership development, as insightful and illuminating as his “Begin Here” and “Teacher in America”.

Barzun’s classic, “From Dawn to Decadence”, which deals with the history of the past 500 years of western civilisation continues to enjoy widespread critical acclaim, and there is probably no better single-volume history book to provide one with such a broad understanding of the world in which we live and the vast cultural heritage that we all too often take for granted. The paraphrased excerpt below, dealing with creativity and how it flowers and flourishes, provides just a taste of Barzun’s remarkable insight and wisdom.

“The Humanist generations of the Renaissance, committed to innovation, confident that they had stores of knowledge their forbears had lacked, and convinced that they were part of a new intellectual dawn, embarked on what they saw as the re-education of the world, aided by the revolutionary technology of the printing press.

“The printers produced a never-ending deluge of treatises on every art and science, from anatomy to arithmetic, from painting to metallurgy. Significantly, Latin was used less and less, because of the fact that printers were more at home with their native tongue, and clerics were no longer the only people who were able to read.

“This is not to deny the very impressive intellectual achievements of the Middle Ages, but merely to show how diffusion had been restricted by socio-economic conditions. Guilds of artisans had protected their intellectual property in the same way corporations do today, and alchemists and astrologers had sought competitive advantage in confidentiality.

“In the late 15th century, an emerging spirit of individualism and the waning of the guilds encouraged people to put their trust in talent rather than secrecy, to promote the value of their services, and the resulting cross-pollination led to an infectious intellectual surge. Manuals publicised developments in technique in all areas.

“In Barzun’s eyes, the flood of treatises provides a telling insight into the growth of a cultural movement. People are inclined to imagine such as being made up of a small group of geniuses supported by a throng of devotees, patrons, and assistants. However, the reality is that such a movement demands a great number of talented practitioners, the mass being a critical element in fuelling the creative impetus.

“And these practitioners had to be people of ability in their own right because even if they remained lesser lights or even unknown, they contributed in significant ways to the overall intellectual development. Important original ideas and pioneering efforts were often the work of people not fully appreciated by later generations. As integral and productive members of the general movement, people like this helped maintain the spirit of innovation, and provided the on-going stimulus for the genius among them.

“This understanding helps to explain the type of conditions that produce exceptional eras in the arts in an unexpected place at an unexpected time, and for a period all too brief.

“Contrary to popular belief, it is not economic growth, generous state subsidies, or even peace and stability – Barzun cites the example of Florence in its heyday being assailed by crises from both internal and external sources. The main condition is the gathering of great minds in one place, through good fortune, rumours of exciting cultural developments, or some attractive newly-discovered technique.

“This cultural ferment can be compared with the spread of a spirit of revolution, with artistic rivalry and competition generating the wildfire of activity that results in exceptional achievements. The reality is that in order to produce a few geniuses requires the presence and contributions of hundreds of talented people. Cases of solitary genius are rare and such people are often scarred by their experience.

“In eras of genius, the concrete comes before the abstract, works before ideas, but the theories that grow out of practice are still revealing as to artistic intention and the criteria by which they should be judged.

“These conventions stood for four bountiful centuries and should not be lightly swept aside by postmodern critics whose own insidious purpose is to cynically deny purpose in art. The Renaissance treatises make it abundantly clear that in addition to a readily acknowledged moral responsibility, the artist’s express purpose was to imitate nature, in the quest for truth, goodness, and beauty.”

“From Dawn to Decadence” is a truly remarkable read, invaluable for leadership development, and hugely entertaining. It is rich in little known historical content as well as illuminating insights, as is to be expected, coming from a man recognised as one of the modern world’s greatest teachers. Barzun is always a joy to read, and every leader needs to have a copy of this instant classic close at hand.

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And yet, there are many unseen instances of inspirational leadership happening all around us. The mainstream media will never tell us about them, and all too often, people are too insular and fretful to notice the great things being achieved by human beings who remain committed to the true, the good, and the beautiful. Some spectacular examples:

Leadership is about service, not status:

In September 2024, Hurricane Helene ravaged vast areas of the eastern US, with catastrophic flooding and more than 2,000 landslides recorded in the Appalachian Mountains, especially in western North Carolina. Across that unfortunate region, more than 125,000 homes and some 822,000 acres of forest suffered damage. Floodwaters made thousands of kilometres of roads and bridges impassable. Western North Carolina suffered more than 100 fatalities.

So great was the devastation, that the recovery, hampered initially by bureaucratic inaction, still continues, and government aid to the region has been far more committed and effective since the departure of the Biden administration.

The long rebuild has revealed one of the finest examples of leadership seen anywhere in recent decades, blighted as they have been by political misleadership.

Groups of Amish volunteers mainly from Pennsylvania quietly provide their skilled labour, rebuilding homes and repairing infrastructure, working without requiring any payment. Materials are also frequently supplied free of charge. Often working in conjunction with Trust organisations and non-profits, the Amish have focussed on building small, robust homes, and restoring safe access to more remote areas.

Nearly two years after the hurricane struck, Amish volunteers continue to return in waves, to continue what was always going to be a long-term reconstruction effort. These humble and great-hearted folk avoid the limelight like the plague, and seek no recognition for what they are doing, but the impact their example must have on the communities they serve, especially the young, will shape lives for the better for a long time to come.

Leading young people to fulfilment:

An experienced clinical psychologist who regularly posts pearls of wisdom on X, relates an inspirational story about education. Six years ago, she and her husband decided to home-school their two sons, taking them out of a private school. Both were dyslexic and unable to read. Their eldest was eight, and diagnosed with autism and several learning disabilities.

The aim was to educate their boys, deepen family relationships, and teach according to the classic method. Her husband began structured phonics instruction with both of them, and they began to read and blossom now that they were free from external pressures.

When something didn’t work, the parents made adjustments, and little by little, day after day, the boys learned, they explored, they grew, and began to develop into young men of genuine character and ability. Now the family plays indoor and outdoor games together, and engages daily in spontaneous discussions about random topics like black holes and the French Revolution. They are revelling in the adventure of real education.

Their now 15-year-old son bakes tarts with brie and fruit, working from an English recipe that goes back to the 14th century. He is also learning blacksmithing and coding, and loves history. Their now 12-year-old loves technology, electronics, biology, and writing stories.

Somehow, with God’s grace and parental devotion, the two little boys have become young men who are faithful, educated, and exceptionally interesting and capable. They will become the kind of citizens all nations should cherish.

Everyone thought the parents were out of their minds to home-school two kids with learning disabilities, but the boys have surpassed all expectations. Love and individualized education can overcome any number of obstacles, proving the aptness of parenting as the ideal model for leadership.

Helping men to be men:

Craig Wilkinson is a best-selling South African author and an award-winning social entrepreneur. He left the corporate world because of a nagging conviction about the crucial contribution men and fathers have to make in the lives of young people and society at large.

Craig founded the non-profit organisation, Father A Nation, with a declared mission to restore and equip men to be great fathers, mentors, and role models, always standing strong against all and any forms of abuse.

South Africa, like many other countries, desperately needs efforts like Father A Nation. 20,000 people were murdered in South Africa in 2019, the worst statistic in Africa, and the fifth worst in the world. 98 percent of the killings were committed by men. When it comes to gender-based violence, South Africa has five times the global average – and again, 95 percent of the perpetrators are men. South Africa is widely known as the rape capital of the world.

Political corruption and corporate malfeasance are rife, and the example held aloft at the top exults in the abuse and misuse of power. Obviously, this travesty, in tandem with violent crime, costs the country billions of dollars each year, while unemployment that includes those who have stopped looking for work, stands at 43.7%.

South Africa is a nation in distress, and the root cause is men behaving badly because of an aberrant understanding of what it means to be a man, that it is all about power. This perversion of masculinity breaks down and destroys, not just family, community, and society, but the individual himself.

So it should come as no surprise that 60 percent of children in SA grow up without a father, i.e. without the love and support, and the essential role model of virtuous masculinity.

Father A Nation works to transform men in order to transform the nation. Scores of well-trained mentors are constantly at work in the most economically deprived and socially broken communities, and though the sheer scale of the problem is daunting, massive gains are being made. Simply helping to heal men’s anger and showing them how to deal with issues in a non-violent way is slowly building a foundation on which generational change will be built.

One of Father A Nation’s followers should have the last word: “I felt I had to prove I was a man by beating my wife in front of the children. I suspected that she was having an affair, and felt useless and that I did not deserve her because of my lack of income. I was then taken through the virtues booklet by a mentor, and since going through the program, I have never abused my wife and we are exploring better ways of dealing with our differences.”

Craig Wilkinson is demonstrating every day how to build leaders in a world of misleadership.

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Leadership is meant to bring people together, and is first learned in the family. That is where the virtues essential to all relationships – honesty, trust, faithfulness, compassion, forgiveness, and a natural sense of obligation to others – are best nurtured. Where those virtues are sincerely held, there can be no loneliness, and relationships will flourish. And that provides the ideal conditions for community and leadership.

Where those virtues are absent, relationships break down, and social dysfunction ensues. The reality is that our mental and physical health actually depend heavily on the quality of our relationships. Studies around the globe have shown that:

• Loneliness, or social isolation, is one of the most common causes of clinical depression

• It impacts artery erosion, blood pressure, heart disease, hypertension, and stroke risk

• Chronic loneliness is a significant factor in many cases of alcoholism

• It is closely linked with anti-social and self-destructive behaviour

• It has a negative effect on learning and memory

• It can affect sleep patterns, promoting a wide range of attendant problems

• Loneliness actually increases an individual’s mortality risk more than smoking does

• Up to 80% of people who fail at work do so because of poor relationship skills

• Emotional support has been shown to be a significant factor in healing generally.

Why are there so many lonely people? Why is it so hard to form real relationships when that is what everybody both needs and wants? Well, if the family is where the virtues essential to all relationships are best developed, then dysfunctional families and the widespread loss of family life will give rise to a dysfunctional society in which relationships fail to flourish.

And this, of course, is precisely what has happened. A psychiatrist friend recently told me that over the past 20 years, some 80 percent of her patients have come from families broken by divorce; the burgeoning mental health crisis didn’t spring from nowhere. So if the loneliness pandemic is a result of family breakdown, what is the cause of the collapse of family life?

The root cause of this social catastrophe is the modern rejection of classical virtue ethics in favour of the personal choice of the autonomous individual, igniting moral confusion everywhere. But the “Who are you to tell me what is right and wrong?” mindset has been swelled to planetary proportions by the removal of limits on humanity’s most unruly appetite.

Science and common sense agree that promiscuity, prostitution, and pornography are destructive of family life, and relationships generally. Yet the Sexual Revolution continues to be driven forward, not only by those who profit from it, but also by its victims who refuse to admit their folly. Hence the dysfunctional culture of lonely, wounded people, incapable of meaningful commitments and self-sacrifice, and the insidious mental health crisis.

Social science shows that children in fatherless families are more likely to suffer emotional and behavioural issues, physical and psychological abuse, poverty, health problems, academic failure, relationship dysfunction, and susceptibility to criminal activity. Moreover, opinion polls over the past sixty years have recorded a steady decline in female happiness.

The Sexual Revolution has been a disaster for women and children, exposing them to ever greater social and economic insecurity and unrelenting loneliness. More than sixty million abortions in the US since 1973 are a gruesome reminder of the tragedy visited upon women and children under the influence of the Sexual Revolution. And, of course, debilitating loneliness soon catches up with the men as well.

Proponents of the permissive society misguidedly argue that lust and promiscuity are natural urges, but while they might be natural in animals, they can be naturally directed by rational animals. The power of reason enables human beings to know what is good for us and what is bad for us; we have a natural capacity to control our carnal desires.

Most people associate the Sexual Revolution with a loosening of moral standards that accompanied the decline of Christian belief in the 20^th century, but the full story is more disturbing. It is well-documented how governments drove the social engineering behind the Sexual Revolution, which European psychotherapists claimed would pre-empt the rise of fascism in the US.

They saw small town America as a breeding ground for fascist attitudes, and their remedy was to “change the inner structure of the human being” to make people docile supporters of a particular political order. The National Mental Health Act of 1946 deployed hundreds of psychiatrists across the US in “Psychological Guidance Centres” to reshape the way people thought and behaved.

In 1948 Alfred Kinsey published the first of his now discredited reports on sexual practices in the US, and his bogus science claimed to link the “authoritarian personality” to people who adhered to traditional sexual morality. Kinsey saw his work as furthering the “mass psychotherapeutic function” of eradicating the sense of shame in society. The manipulation of the moral judgment of ordinary people by psychology, bore rapid results, as we see today.

It is dismaying for people in a rational society, who take it for granted that dissent, dialogue, and disagreement are good for civil society, to be confronted by angry radicals claiming to defend unsubstantiated human rights that may not be questioned. The radicals smear opponents as bigots and haters, stopping at nothing to silence them.

Docility before the deceit of the Sexual Revolution means most people do not want to address the root cause of the culture of loneliness. They naively assume that since “science” insists that humanity can achieve “happiness” by eliminating all forms of “repression,” religion and traditional ethical standards must be silenced.

When our appetites are not controlled by our minds, they enslave us, sex being the most tyrannical of all. And when individuals reject moral restraints, society slides into Hobbes’ “war of all against all”, opening the door to the abuse of power. Tyranny and sexual profligacy go hand in hand, and the egalitarian attitude typically ushers in totalitarianism.

What is a leader to do? Leadership is about promoting the common good and not self-aggrandisement. That demands honesty, trust, faithfulness, compassion, forgiveness, and a natural sense of obligation to others, all of which entail the eradication of sexual profligacy as essential to restoring relationships and community.

The Latin phrase “divide et impera”, divide and rule, expresses a political ruse as old as civilisation. Where a leader unites and inspires for the common good, a misleader divides and rules for self-interest. The lonely society only serves the agenda of the misleaders.

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Dalrymple’s central theme in Life at the Bottom is that long-term poverty and social dysfunction generally are not caused by economic policy, but by a perverse worldview that encourages self-centredness and irresponsible behaviour. The mindset is continually reinforced by establishment elites who entrench their power by patronising victimhood. This convinces members of the underclass that they are not accountable for their actions or the tragic circumstances in which they find themselves.

This deviant worldview spawns narcissism, deceit, promiscuity, jealousy, rage, sickening violence, and all manner of criminal behaviour, while the welfare state enables a life without meaning or purpose to drift toward whatever its miserable climax might be. Moral, cultural, and intellectual relativism has been disastrous for those least equipped to resist the practical consequences, but as Dalrymple points out, society at large is being adversely affected.

“Worse still, cultural relativism spreads all too easily. The tastes, conduct and mores of the underclass are seeping up the social scale with astonishing rapidity. Heroin chic is one manifestation of this, though no one with any real knowledge of heroin and its effects could find anything chic about the drug or its effects. When a member of the British royal family revealed that she had adopted one of the slum fashions and had her navel pierced, no one was in the least surprised…Never before has there been such downward cultural aspiration.”

Among scores of anecdotes, Dalrymple tells of a newly arrived doctor from Madras with whom he discussed the case of a young woman who had attempted suicide by means of a drug overdose. Mother to children from three different men and pregnant again, she was being brutalized by her latest boyfriend, who had also trashed her flat. That didn’t stop her from calling her assailant later the same day when she “felt lonely”.

The astonishment of the doctor from Madras went to another level when he learnt that the state would continue to meet its obligation to house, feed, and entertain her. He saw her problem as a refusal to accept any limits on her behaviour, feeling no fear of hunger or homelessness, nor any condemnation from family, the community, or God. The squalor the Madras doctor witnessed was not economic, but spiritual, moral, and cultural.

The response of immigrant professionals to their new country is predictable: “By the end of three months my (immigrant) doctors have, without exception, reversed their original opinion that the welfare state, as exemplified by England, represents the acme of civilization. On the contrary, they see it now as creating a miasma of subsidised apathy that blights the lives of its supposed beneficiaries. They come to realise that a system of welfare that makes no moral judgments in allocating economic rewards promotes anti-social egotism.

“The spiritual impoverishment of the population seems to them worse than anything they have ever known in their own countries. And what they see is all the worse, of course, because it should be so much better. The wealth that enables everyone effortlessly to have enough food should be liberating, not imprisoning. Instead it has created a large caste of people for whom life is, in effect a limbo in which they have nothing to hope for and nothing to fear, nothing to gain and nothing to lose. It is a life emptied of meaning.”

Dalrymple is under no illusions about the devastating contribution the Sexual Revolution has made to the social dysfunction rampant in western societies: “The heart wants contradictory, incompatible things; that social conventions arose to resolve some of the conflicts of our own impulses; that eternal frustration is an inescapable concomitant of civilization, as Freud had observed – all these recalcitrant truths fell beneath the notice of the proponents of sexual liberation, dooming their revolution to ultimate failure.

“The failure hit the underclass hardest. Not for a moment did sexual liberators stop to consider the effects on the poor of the destruction of the strong family ties that alone made emergence from poverty possible for large numbers of people.”

Educational failure obviously gets a lot of attention as well: “Middle-class friends of mine were appalled to discover that the spelling being taught to their daughter in school was frequently wrong; they were even more appalled when they drew it to the attention of the school’s head teacher and were told it did not matter, since the spelling was approximately right and everyone knew anyway what the misspelling meant.”

Reams of stories about brutal abuse and pathological self-destruction will disturb many readers, but Dalrymple insists that sensationalism has no part in his journalistic efforts:

“On being asked whether I make it all up, I reply that far from doing so, I downplay the dreadfulness of the situation and omit the worst cases that come to my attention so as not to distress the reader unduly. The reality of English lower-class life is far more terrible than I can, with propriety depict.”

Life at the Bottom is one of the most illuminating books on the human condition a leader could read – packed with riveting anecdotes, analysis, and insights that make clear how misleadership in the home, school, community, and nation, has sabotaged western society. And it’s a collection of essays, any one of which will educate and engross, and you will find that you are always drawn back to re-read the revelations about the challenges we face.

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My own research, compiled over many years in many different fields, identifies precisely the same factors in leadership derailment found in academic research: managing not leading, inadequate delegation, tolerance for under-performance, lack of feedback, lack of vision and strategy, lack of support, work overload and underload, poor communication, profit being put before people, runaway cynicism, opposition to change, and poor conflict management.

The railway metaphor is apt. After all, leadership means helping people get where they want to go, and that‘s precisely what a train is supposed to do. Progress is when the train goes towards the destination; regress is when it moves away; and derailment is a catastrophic departure from the tracks. The generally proposed causes of derailment are:

1. Driver error, negligence, or misconduct – which relates to leadership performance

2. Mechanical failure – which symbolises breakdowns in structure/systems/processes

3. Organisational malfunction or sabotage – for which, read corporate culture

4. Being on the wrong track altogether – which refers to problems with the wider culture.

Discount No.2 because it is the result of dysfunctional leadership rather than the cause. Leaders who inherit bad systems should change them. Similarly, No.3 is common – but issues like poor communication, lack of support, or office politics, are also symptoms and not causes.

No. 1 is compelling because we know what a person has to do to be an effective leader. Psychology and philosophy tell us to drive change, set aside time for reflection, develop an inspiring vision, remember that every individual is important and help people fulfil their potential, promote justice, and respond swiftly to manage conflict and under-performance, delegate efficiently, promote innovation, and ensure communication is positive and efficient.

So we know what to do, but we don‘t know why people don‘t do those things.

Vast amounts of energy, time, and money are spent trying to explain this, trying to understand what goes on in the head of the engine driver. We turn to psychology in all its different guises: behavioural psychology, biological psychology, cognitive psychology, self-psychology, evolutionary psychology, cultural psychology, psychoanalysis, experimental psychology, etc.

And now we even scan every nook and cranny in the brain to see what neurons light up when the driver harbours a negative thought.

Now I have great respect for neuroscience, and applaud all efforts to ensure that a company does not appoint an axe-murderer or a politician to any position of responsibility. However, when it comes to leadership derailment, I believe the fourth factor is the key – being on the wrong track altogether – the unacknowledged flaw of general cultural orientation.

If we consider human motivation broadly, philosophy and psychology would regard the following list of basic human needs as uncontroversial: we all need meaning, purpose, freedom, love and community, the affirmation of others, knowledge, work, security, justice, prosperity, health, and pleasure.

Yet meaning and purpose have been eroded for 500 years. What it means to be human, and the purpose of human life have given way to the idea that we all create our own meaning and purpose. Personal freedom is no longer understood as freedom for excellence, being free to make the right choices to be what one ought to be, but as a freedom of indifference, being free to do as we please unless constrained by law or force. Most relationships are undermined by rampant individualism, and sincere affirmation by others is hard to come by.

As to knowledge and truth, the words of TS Eliot still haunt us: Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? Many people today believe they can choose their own truth, but need to be asked: Do you believe in honesty? And what about trust? Relationships depend on trust, and trust depends on truth.

When it comes to the need for work, all evidence indicates an increasingly cynical attitude, and the idea of the challenge of sacrifice for great goals has faded. Moreover, our lives are ever more insecure as justice in the workplace and community gives way to self-interest.

The effect on leadership has been catastrophic: the detached, autonomous Self exults in radical individualism, and is resentful of authority. Nihilism and narcissism are social realities constantly fed by movies, TV, social media, and switch-on/switch-off relationships, and people today are mobile, unattached, objectifying other people, and driven by instant gratification.

Their relationships are contractual rather than moral, often resulting in dysfunction and loneliness. Their morality is emotivist, relying on personal feelings to justify their moral choices. They abdicate leadership in the home, community, and workplace to experts, and their infatuation with technical, quick-fix solutions means they favour skills over real education, which is vital if people are to be rational and relational.

Complexity and information-overload promote uncertainty, insecurity, and greatly reduced attention spans, while the loss of a sense of history has led to short-termism and the waning of vision and strategy in all areas of life. Unrealistic expectations and a sense of entitlement invite perpetual disappointment and cynicism.

Throw in the chokehold of political correctness which makes certain things unsayable, and you find the train you are travelling on is not just on the wrong track but on a dead-end line that can result only in derailment.

So how do we get the train back on the right track? How do we help leaders to lead? Well, go back to the elements of human motivation. We need to restore meaning and purpose in the lives of people, and promote freedom, knowledge, justice, and community.

Culture is never a straight-jacket, and while trying to change a personality is both difficult and ethically-questionable, helping people audit their worldview and build character is something we can all do. Good parents exemplify this, helping their children escape the destructive ideologies and attitudes running amok in society. I know people from more than forty different cultures who embrace the following principles:

· Uphold the dignity of every human being, built on respect, honesty, and compassion

· Recognise human reason and communication as the bridge to true community

· Emphasise the mutual dependence of personal fulfilment and communal well-being

· Promote a freedom for excellence instead of the rampant freedom of indifference

· Encourage the virtues of practical wisdom, courage, self-control, and justice

· Embrace our responsibility for a scientifically-informed stewardship of the environment

Yet the question remains – how can we be sure people will embrace those principles?

The truth is we can‘t. We can offer guidance, inspiration, and support, but each person‘s worldview is always their own sovereign choice. Each individual has to ponder for themselves the questions that Immanuel Kant posed as our existential conundrum:

“Who am I?”, “What ought I to do?” and “What may I hope?”

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“The entire object of true education is to make people not merely do the right things, but enjoy the right things; not merely industrious, but to love industry; not merely learned, but to love knowledge…not merely just, but to hunger and thirst after justice.” John Ruskin in The Crown of Wild Olive (1866)

With the global leadership deficit showing no signs of abating, one would think that the multi-billion-dollar leadership training industry would confront the reality that has been staring us in the face for more than a century: that the effects of state schooling and the loss of leadership are intimately related.

Plato presaged John Ruskin’s words in Republic: “The object of education is to teach us to love what is beautiful.” And he saw beauty as a transcendental, equated with truth and goodness. Virtue is beautiful. Justice is beautiful. Freedom is beautiful. Human flourishing is beautiful. And true art has always aimed at expressing the beautiful.

Education, properly understood, is meant to cultivate a devotion to truth, goodness, and beauty, transforming people by instilling in them the Cardinal Virtues of practical wisdom, justice, temperance, and courage. Beauty has the capacity to inspire in us the pursuit of personal and communal flourishing.

Ask any state school student, “What is the purpose of school?” and they will probably respond, “To get a good job”. This is why we should never equate state schooling with education. For millennia the purpose of education was understood to be the cultivation of virtue and the transmission of culture to the next generation, making good people so as to maintain good communities, and an honourable nation.

Class size, technology, and social environment can all be optimised, but if the purpose of education is misguided, the culture will die, and with it the nation. C.S. Lewis echoed the classical tradition in his warning that when “education is beaten by training, civilization dies.”

Consider the fact that the literacy rate in colonial America was over 90 percent, or take a few minutes to read some excerpts from The Federalist Papers or the Lincoln-Douglas debates, political discourses aimed at ordinary citizens of an agrarian society, and dismantle in your own mind the lie that we know better than our forebears.

When you are made familiar with the quality of education prior to the advent of state schooling, you realise that the high-jacking of education by the state was part of a progressive socio-political agenda aimed at social control and ideological conditioning. As has often been pointed out, in the past 100 years, we have gone from teaching Greek and Latin in high school to teaching remedial English at university.

No wonder an education revolution has arisen in the US, with classical education schools attracting ever-increasing numbers of young people whose parents choose to give them a proper education. Moreover, home-schooling in the US has grown from a fringe practice to a mainstream alternative, representing almost seven percent of U.S. K-12 students today.

Forbes and Census analyses identify Black families as the “fastest-growing demographic” in home-schooling today, mostly driven by concerns like racial bias, school-to-prison pipeline issues, and general disaffection with the quality of public schooling.

The attractions of home-schooling are compelling; Dale Stark, an American farmer, commented on X: “Our home-schoolers only do two hours a day of school-work. The rest of the time they are caring for animals, gardening, art, play, and so on. They’re testing well above grade. Makes you wonder what they’re doing in public schools all day.”

Just consider the dysfunctional system home-schoolers are trying to escape. Who are the most influential shapers of culture in our world? The decline of the family and organized religion has left the field wide open for intrusive government, state schooling, a politicised media and entertainment industry, and an ideological academic elite.

Their ideological onslaught explains why so many people today are inclined to be nihilistic, narrow-minded, self-absorbed, cynical, hedonistic, and untrustworthy. That is why the socio-political reality in the West has become so dysfunctional. The eminent writer and physician, Theodore Dalrymple, sees the dysfunction up close:

“Even those who claim to cherish their freedom are rather less enthusiastic about taking the consequences of their actions. The aim of untold millions is to be free to do exactly as they choose and for someone else to pay when things go wrong. In the past few decades, a peculiar and distinctive psychology has emerged in England. Gone are the civility, sturdy independence, and admirable stoicism that carried the English through the war. They have been replaced by a constant whine of excuses, complaint, and special pleading. The collapse of the British character has been as swift and complete as the collapse of British power.”

Education properly understood, that is, as personal development through the expansion of knowledge and the building of character, is the very essence of leadership development. It ensures that emergent leaders have not only breadth of vision and understanding, but also the requisite moral strength, and an allegiance to the common good.

The only way back for the West will be a revival of real education, based on the humanities – philosophy, history, and classic literature – in which a person’s most essential quality, the capacity for independent thought, is progressively developed. This blossoming of a person’s very humanity inevitably has even nuts and bolts utilitarian benefits.

The classic works of the humanities are themselves the best argument for their value as the foundation of a proper education. Their ideas, insights, and inspiration have a proven capacity to change one’s life for the better, expanding one’s intellectual horizons, challenging entrenched assumptions and attitudes, deepening one’s understanding and empathy, prompting sustained reflection on human potential and perversity, and providing informed responses from different times and places to perplexing situations.

G. K. Chesterton made it plain: “A man who has read 1000 books is armed for life; a man who has read none is easy prey. The man who has read 1000 books has lived 1000 lives. He has seen cities he has never visited, spoken to men who died centuries ago, and walked in worlds that no longer exist. Reading does not merely inform him; it enlarges him. It stretches the boundaries of his own experience until he becomes something more than himself.”

As Professor Joshua Hochschild of St Mary’s University must have the last word: “Liberal arts? What are you going to do with that? Um, stay sane, keep me from being owned, psychologically manipulated, politically oppressed, economically exploited, socially isolated, spiritually numbed. So basically, be human.”

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In February 2026, the artificial intelligence company, OpenAI, announced it had agreed to make changes to the “opportunistic and sloppy” deal it had previously struck with the US government concerning the use of its technology in classified military operations. Chief Executive, Sam Altman, said the company would clarify the contents of its agreement, and explicitly prohibit the use of its systems to spy on Americans.

So, who is in charge – man or machine? AI or the people behind AI? When you hear pundits fantasising about AI taking over from human beings, you can be sure that you are being manipulated by the powerful human interests that develop and control the AI phenomenon. AI provides those interests with a useful scapegoat for mistakes or immoral decisions.

Science has immense potential for good. Sadly, it also has immense potential for evil. It can be a blessing or a curse, depending on the use to which it is put. Science gave us MRI scans and nuclear weapons, cortisone and covid. And science was invented by human beings once they realised that the cosmos is rational and therefore comprehensible by rational minds.

Science, like all human activities, can be perverted. Scientists are human, subject to the same flaws and foibles as the rest of us. You find as much greed, envy, lust, dishonesty, laziness, rage, and big egos in lab-coats as you do in business suits. Science, ideally, is rigorously rational, objective, and neutral; scientists are often emotional, subjective, and biased.

Science deals with material reality, things which can be weighed and measured. But reality is not confined to the world of matter. As a quote attributed to Albert Einstein tells us, “the things that count most cannot be counted.” Science can tell us how to make a nuclear weapon, but cannot tell us whether or not we should use it.

The unwarranted materialist assumptions of many people today, including many scientists, arise from a basic error that has plagued modern philosophy for 300 years and more. That is the common predisposition to conflate percepts with concepts, and ultimately, brain with mind. Percepts are mental images of objects perceived through the senses; concepts are products of the mind or intellect – immaterial, universal, and determinate.

This basic philosophical error is behind the misconception that the brain is just a computer, with the mind being the software. The facile reduction of thinking to mere mechanical computation is now commonplace, reinforced as it is by the materialist mindset of many academics and a great number of people in society at large, influenced as they are by the science-fiction content in popular entertainment.

AI does not have intelligence, but simply does what computer architecture is designed to do, that is, simulate intelligence. It is designed to produce effects that mimic intelligence without requiring any actual intelligence from the machine. This applies to machine learning and all the latest developments of AI research, just as it did to the Turing test of yesteryear.

The philosopher, John Searle, pointed out that AI algorithms respond to the syntax of the representations they process, but not the semantics; that is, they process only physical properties, and not the meanings that those physical properties represent.

People say AI will cause a debilitation of thinking, writing, and reading, but AI is actually the technical embodiment of the decline of all of those things. It produces much more efficiently the same flawed thinking and mechanical cliches instilled in most people for generations by other human beings, who are usefully designated as manipulators.

It is incoherent to argue that putting an algorithm into a computer somehow endows it with intelligence, or that human intellect is a kind of algorithm. The roots of emotion recognition software have been traced back to dubious research funded by the US Department of Defence in the 1960s. A recent survey of more than 1,000 research papers found no evidence to suggest that a person’s emotions can be reliably inferred from facial expressions.

Emotion detection software is developed on the misguided belief that technology can answer questions about human nature that are not technical at all. After 150 years, the soft science of psychology still wrestles with controversial issues relating to belief systems, personality, emotional dynamics, human motivation, and more. Correlating images to simple, predefined, emotional states without reference to culture and context is never going to achieve a proper understanding of complex individuals whose feelings change hundreds of times each day.

Research into how AI can have harmful effects is done by people and funding from the tech industry, heavily invested in future profits from AI. Disagreements about the ethical development and application of AI, and western society’s general moral confusion obviously have a huge impact on AI research, and many questions are simply not allowed to be asked.

The narrow, obsessive focus on technical development that excludes the essential consideration of how AI systems integrate with complex and critical social institutions like justice, healthcare, and education needs urgent attention. These systems are controlled by powerful financial, political, and commercial interests representing the establishment elites.

Technology has been unleashed that is already causing widespread damage to society as we know it, and it is completely unregulated. Our troubled contemporary world is controlled by some of the biggest frauds, liars, and criminals in the history of humankind, yet people still believe that we should leave government and big business free to build and deploy ‘infallible’ truth-telling machines.

Few people are aware of the costs of AI and the inevitable impact on the lives of billions of people all around the world. Nobel Prize-winning economist Daron Acemoglu, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, maintains that AI is most unlikely to ever find a way to profitability given the mind-boggling capital required to build and maintain the required infrastructure. Data centres can cost tens of billions of dollars each. For example, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna acknowledged that building a data center that uses only 1 gigawatt will cost an estimated $80 billion.

Factor in the astonishing amounts of fresh water required for cooling in the data centres, and the massive drain on electricity supplies, and one gets the nagging suspicion that the lives of many human beings are now being deemed expendable by the establishment elites. And that brings us back to the ethical ramifications of AI development. As I wrote in an article, Artificial Leadership, a few years ago:

“What worldview defines the way the computer simulates thinking? Obviously, it is the one the programmer has put into it, whether it be his own, or that of his boss, or his boss’s boss. Does the computer’s output reflect the thinking of capitalists, socialists, secular humanists, or the establishment elites? Or an irreconcilable mishmash of all of the above? What moral universe does AI represent – natural law, virtue ethics, the Kantian categorical imperative, utilitarianism, emotivism, or the incoherent ethical hodgepodge all too common in the postmodern West?”

Complex robotic systems are typically designed with many layers of processing between detection and response. A large number of layers might conceivably make it impossible to know just how the system will respond to different developments, but that is no indication that the machine is making decisions. The robotic system will only execute the sequence of programmed steps provided by the algorithms, though the speed with which it functions will entice many to believe it is thinking. Robotic systems that cause death and destruction do so because of human agency, negligence, or error.

Consider the inescapable tsunami of propaganda to which we are all exposed every day: influencer operations, coordinated messaging, precision advertising, linked bot activity, algorithmically amplified indignation, contrived consensus, and swathes of on-line accounts promoting echo-chamber opinions. AI facilitates unprecedented levels of psychological warfare and propaganda, all designed to bury the truth.

And that is the quickest way to kill leadership.

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“The characteristic of the modern State is that those who appear to govern do not in fact govern. They are constrained by forces which they do not name, which they rarely understand, and which they cannot openly oppose. The result is that public men become timid. They avoid plain speech. They fear exposure more than injustice, and loss of position more than loss of honour. In such a condition courage disappears first, and freedom follows it.” Hilaire Belloc (1870 – 1953)

A reader recently questioned the amount of attention I give to matters political in my efforts to promote leadership development.

The answer is simple. We are in a global leadership crisis, and there is no end of leadership lessons to be learned by contemplating the lack of prudence, honesty, justice, and courage found in our political class as western civilisation stage manages its own precipitous decline. Understanding this decline, which affects every aspect of our lives, requires well-informed critical thinking, and hence, practical leadership development.

Even better, of course, when you weigh the developments against the abundant lessons from history and classic literature; Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Thucydides, for example.

All those responsible for leadership at any level of society, have a duty to have a solid grasp of the socio-political, economic, and geopolitical developments of our troubled times. The West is a once great, but now failing civilisation; we all need to know what brought us here, and how we might try to take charge of events instead of drifting with the creeping tyranny.

In a recent interview, former British Prime Minister, Liz Truss, maintained that she was forced to go along with decisions she regarded as wrong for the country, suggesting also that she was not the first Prime Minister to suffer the humiliation. She acknowledged that people in the UK are waking up to the fact that the UK is a “failed state.”

Truss suggested that only radical change will save the UK, leaving her audience in no doubt about the country’s leaders lacking independence in decision-making. “I experienced this at the highest level of government. A metaphorical gun was held to my head to stop me from pursuing certain policies“.

Liz Truss is no longer prime minister, but she is now a real leader, seeking truth and justice.

It is no longer possible for anyone to deny the socio-economic upheaval that plutocratic globalisation has produced in the western world. It has created an abyss between wealthy elites and 85 percent of the population, collapsing manufacturing in once prosperous regions in the US and Europe, and outsourcing of the production of even essential strategic items to an unpredictable and untrustworthy rival, all to cash in on cheap labour.

Government failures to protect the citizens who put them in office, as in the callous contempt shown for the people of Western North Carolina after the devastation caused by Cyclone Helene in 2024, send ominous signals. The widespread resurgence of populism in the West should not come as a surprise to anyone. And populism can be either positive or negative.

Why did so many politicians, bureaucrats, academics, and journalists refuse to acknowledge the damage being done by neoliberal elites for so long? Globalisation in some form or other has been inevitable since the first empires were set up, but in its exploitive neoliberal form, it has been ruthlessly implemented to create wealth and power for a small, narrow elite.

The architects of the New World Order now openly promote the demise of nations, population reduction and replacement, and totalitarian control mechanisms, like digital ID, 15-minute cities, and universal basic income.

In the context of these developments, the monopolisation of food production, absurd energy policies, mind-boggling levels of corruption, ongoing attacks on freedom of speech, and the long-embedded control of schools, academia, the entertainment industry, and the Internet, should be of serious concern to all free peoples.

The absurdities are everywhere. Britain’s Labour Government has banned new oil and gas licences in the North Sea, preferring instead to purchase £40 billions of North Sea oil and gas from Norway. In similar vein, they have accessed coking coal shipments valued at £7.2 million from Japan, while banning UK coal mining. A Labour government promoting unemployment?

This is the same government that allows thousands of acres of farmland to be covered with solar panels while incoherently laying out £50 million on solar dimming research. They have also given the renewable energy company, Drax, an estimated £1.8 billion in taxpayer funded subsidies over and above the £11 billion it has already received. Drax has burnt a supply of wood amounting to some 300 million trees. So much for environmental responsibility.

The same Labour government has subsidised wind power companies to the tune of £500 million in the past year to cease generating power from their wind turbines, and laid out £30 billions of taxpayers’ money on carbon capture machines at the same time as claiming to have a £22 billion financial black hole for which they are unable to account.

Governments in the UK have ignored the rape of a quarter of a million young teenage girls by unassimilated immigrants over the past two decades, failing to hold the police and the courts to account, and refusing to investigate the barbarism to which innocents have been subjected.

In the past 100 years, liberal democracy has morphed into the managerial state, no longer recognisable as democratic except by a huge majority of citizens who have been reduced to ignorance and docility by ideological conditioning in state schools, academia, and the media.

The well-known British Labour politician and activist, Tony Benn, famously posed five questions to embarrass the political class: “What power have you got? Where did you get it from? In whose interests do you exercise it? To whom are you accountable? And how can we get rid of you?”

We all need to be asking those questions of our politicians at every opportunity, acknowledging of course the obstacles posed by the mendacity of the elites and the sad reality of stolen elections. Belloc’s words from a century ago expose the lies we are living:

“The whole of the Party System is not merely controlled, but actually created by the great financial interests. The professional politician is their servant. He cannot act against them; he dare not even understand them. He mouths the phrases of popular government, but his actions are dictated by those who pay for the machine by which he lives. Parliament has thus become a place where words are free, but decisions are bound.”

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“Not everything that counts can be counted and not everything that can be counted counts.” Albert Einstein

Quo vadis? Where are you going? If we put the question to the world, there is no answer.

If we put it to the Western democracies, the answers are less than convincing given the political, socio-economic, and environmental crises facing them. And in the corporate world, endemic short-termism and greed, along with the corruption and inefficiency of government regulators, mean that the only visionary answers will come from isolated pockets of creativity and compassion.

If we don‘t know where we are going, we clearly have a crisis of leadership. In a world where misleaders appear to outnumber leaders, what is to be done? It is certainly not a matter of learning leadership skills — that is being done in every sector to no avail.

What is required is the resolution of courageous men and women to pick up the gauntlet and lead like they mean it. Where are you going? You are called to lead yourself, lead your family, and to be a leader in your workplace and the community. Only you can decide where you are going, and that is the first thing a leader would do.

Here are the guidelines:

No going back: No leader in history has succeeded in turning back the clock, and the same lesson applies in business. There are always many positive ideas we can lift from the past and apply to present exigencies, but a wholesale restoration of an allegedly perfect past never works in a world that is constantly changing. History moves on and so must we.

No easy answers: Leadership is hard, a fact often forgotten in a world addicted to the quick fix. Fool-proof formulae and template solutions stifle genuine creativity, and try to hide the truth about life being a challenge that demands self-control and sacrifice. Risk, trade-offs, and frustration attend any attempt to make things better, and courage is essential in leaders.

No place to hide: In every human endeavour the possibility of failure and of people being hurt is always there – but only the cynic says there is no hope of finding a better way forward. The human response, the leadership imperative, is to step forward, bold and resolute, seeking the best for all people.

Know where to turn: In a crisis, knowing where to turn can be a challenge, especially at a time when personal choice is the supreme value, and standing on principle is ridiculed as archaic. Yet it is to our principles that we must turn, because integrity without principle is impossible; and leadership without integrity is a lie.

Know thyself: With relentless logic, the Socratic imperative to know thyself and Kant‘s three questions are raised again. What you stand for ultimately determines who you are, and the choice is yours alone. Those foundational principles, your worldview, provide the framework that determines the form and quality of your culture – that is, the self-driven education, which determines whether you are equipped for leadership or not.

Any inadequacy or perversion sets you up for either abdication of responsibility or for misleadership. Personal integrity can only be built on solid principles.

Know reality: The trouble with reality is that there is too much to know. For all of us, especially in this age of specialisation, this means that ignorance is a large part of our lives, which is why education should continue throughout life. Knowledge helps us to overcome intolerance, prejudice, and injustice, and it presupposes an objective reality about which we can know the truth, about ourselves, other people, and the world.

Modern scepticism and relativism have undermined this common sense view of life, and trust has been eroded as a consequence. Promiscuity, family breakdown, the exploitation of innocents, political betrayal, exploitation and manipulation in business, and an epidemic of deceit are the bitter fruits of this attack on truth. No wonder relationships are under siege.

And that is all society is — a complex web of relationships. Destroy them and you destroy civil society, leaving a void that can only be filled by totalitarian tyranny or a barbarous anarchy, both of which are live possibilities today.

It goes without saying that words like ‘thinking‘, ‘future’, ‘vision‘, ‘strategy‘, and ‘freedom‘ are meaningless if there is no such thing as truth. Without truth, trust itself has no meaning. A world without trust is a world set up for misleaders, because control can then only be imposed by violence and the lie.

The choice is always the same: on the one hand, self-control; on the other, authoritarianism or anarchy. Either be motivated by love, or constrained by law. This is why the five criteria for a humane worldview and the seven virtues are indispensable. Whatever the shape of the future we wish to build, they are the conditions for mutual trust, the essential ingredients for fulfilling relationships.

Know what to do: To be a leader in a world of misleaders, you have to constantly evaluate your worldview, auditing your attitudes and cultivating the seven virtues. You have to drive your own on-going education, with truth as your criterion, and ideology a sworn enemy. And you have to be decisive and action-oriented, unleashing your own creativity and that of others. Most of all, you have to demonstrate that you want the best – for everyone, and from everyone.

Know there is hope: The acid test of leadership is hope. Where there is no hope, there is no leadership. Pick up the gauntlet, and make a difference, doing “what you can, with what you have, where you are.” In any age, it is the principled, creative action of leaders in homes, schools, communities, and workplaces, that helps the world move forward.

Of course, it‘s easy to dismiss this kind of thinking as idealistic, but what could be more practical than making a decisive change for the good of all by ordering your own life according to the principles of love and service?

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“We looked at peace and security as a problem to be solved and not as a work to be made.” Dorothy Sayers

The creativity of ancient societies is spectacularly demonstrated by magnificent building projects, like the pyramids, Stonehenge, and the Great Wall of China. But cultural break-throughs like writing, mathematics, astronomy, and agriculture, were even more significant.

The creative urge is common to all societies. From papyrus to pantomime to the Periodic Table, from Sanskrit to sonatas to skydiving, from crochet to croquet to cuisine, from iambic pentameters to impressionism to the Internet, creativity is seen in a cornucopia of cultural achievement.

Intellect, the culture-creating part of the human mind is incessantly at work. However, ingenuity, like all human attributes, is misused at least as frequently as it is deployed to do good. Directed by hubris, it is dangerous; guided by love, it becomes inspirational.

Understanding our creative ability demands a deep awareness of this dual potential. It is our great advantage in the ongoing task to procreate and prosper, yet its quality and application are inevitably determined by character and culture.

Leaders are called to ensure that creativity produces what is best for all people and the environment, while misleaders, as they have done throughout history, either repress or pervert creativity. Every nation and every organisation should ask whether their people are genuinely inspired to use their creativity to improve human well-being.

In The Mystery of Capital, Hernando De Soto exposes the quagmire choking the efforts of poor people to improve their lives. The poor in Peru, Egypt, the Philippines, Mexico, Haiti, and elsewhere, are extraordinarily inventive and thrifty. However, corrupt governments and the absence of formal property rights mean their economic assets can never be turned into capital.

It took De Soto‘s researchers six hours a day for 289 days to get certification for a small one-person business in Peru. Registration costs were $1 231. To acquire legal approval to build a house on state-owned land took the team nearly seven years, wading through over 200 administrative procedures in 52 government offices. They faced around 700 bureaucratic stages to obtain legal title for the land.

Authoritarian regimes fear poor people becoming prosperous and educated, because that spells the end of docile submission. A culture where human potential is smothered will never be creative in anything other than evading regulation. Significantly, many poor people slip into the black-market economy that sabotages the official economy, and at the same time all hope of a society built on truth and justice.

This repression of creativity is widespread. Many children worldwide enter school severely handicapped because their parents never read to them. Many give up on maths because some lazy teacher has told them they lack ability. Employees often keep ideas to themselves because of a corporate culture where people are not allowed to make mistakes. Homeowners all over the world have descended into passivity in the face of rising rates of crime and social dysfunction because of their despair over official incompetence and indifference.

These negative cultural impacts are unnecessary, as is demonstrated by the many inspiring creative responses seen in other cases.

Muhammad Yunus in Bangladesh pioneered the idea of micro-loans and founded the Grameen Bank after helping bamboo furniture makers escape the poverty trap by loaning the group just $27. Professor James Tooley has revealed how entrepreneurial, often uncertified, teachers in India are providing educational opportunities for slum children that state schooling has failed to deliver. Ricardo Semler in Brazil has demonstrated the amazing benefits of a radically democratic workplace where the creativity of all is actively encouraged.

The examples are endless.

So what is creativity? Consider these definitions:

· “An idea is a feat of association”. Poet Robert Frost

· “Thinking is connecting things, and stops if they cannot be connected.” G. K. Chesterton

· “Lateral thinking is restructuring patterns and provoking new ones.” Edward De Bono

· “Creativity is to see what everyone else has seen and to think what nobody else has thought.” Nobel Laureate Albert Szent-Gyorgyi

· “Creativeness often consists of turning up what is already there. Did you know that right and left shoes were thought up only a little more than a century ago?” Advertising guru Bernice Fitz-Gibbon

They all say essentially the same thing – creativity is taking what is there, and then reshaping and reordering to find more rewarding patterns and possibilities. Vision (seeing the potential for a better future), strategy (finding the best way to get there), and tactics (making the most of unforeseen developments) are all creative activities, calling people to look at what is given, and to imagine or conceive of something better.

Experts agree that the creative process involves identifying the challenge, absorbing all available information, then generating scores of options and possibilities through imaginative and intuitive connections and new patterns. Thereafter, letting go of the puzzle and leaving it to the subconscious usually produces the Eureka moment. Analogies, reframing the question, brainstorming, and outrageous suggestions, all help in the generation stage.

Two enemies of creativity are common in business and politics. Problem-solution thinking misleads people into seeking the quick fix, while formula or template thinking encourages a lazy reliance on a stock response. The complexities of life mean there are never simple solutions without risks involved.

Better to see challenges as adventures wherein we have the opportunity to help shape a better world. If leadership inspires people to be the best they can be in pursuit of a better life for all, then creativity is indispensable. The challenge of life is inexorable change; the required response is creative endeavour. And the criterion of creativity is respect for the dignity of all people.

G. K. Chesterton said it best when he compared art with morality, observing that both required drawing the line somewhere.

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