Ending Predatory Leadership

My primary goal is to educate people about how a small percentage of sociopaths, abusive personalities and anyone who seeks to prevail in their arena without regard for the impact upon others, have contributed to the majority of human misery in the world. At this time, my idea is to find ways to bring this subject into public dialogue and encourage brainstorming on reinventing the options people have to earn a place in positions of power and control.
 
I think this is a long term project and it is bigger than me. I do not want to own it or profit from it. I want people to gain tools and insights to protect themselves from the predatory personalities who lack conscience and empathy - a significant element in their ability to cause pain and harm to others as a byproduct of their pursuit of their goals.

 Short term, my goals are in the following order:
 
1. Enlist fellow humanitarians to help do the research and create programs for change.
 
2. Complete the website: mostpeoplearegood.com
 
3. Write a book (I'd love to have contributions from professionals in the fields of psychology, poly sci, sociology, history, etc.)
 
      3A. Create a comic book in many languages that can help spread the basic concepts around the world.
 
4. Integrate these concepts into our educational curriculum in appropriate ways. For example, I think there would be far fewer abusive marriages if Patricia Evans' book, "The Verbally Abusive Relationship" was taught nationally in junior high and high school.
 
5. Start a non-profit organization to bring in funding for promotion (speakers bureaus?) and to develop research and ideas.

Article:

Predatory Leadership: A New Buzzword for Corrupt Times
 
by Matt Kramer
 
Next to plagues and natural disasters, corrupt leaders may be the greatest contributors to past and present states of human misery. This article begins to explore the historical and current nature of predatory leadership and its impact on humanity. The first step toward creating effective change in the methods available to those who work their way into positions of leadership is to understand how such people think and act, and how they are able to attain the power they seek.
 
There was a time, in my naive youth, when I assumed that somewhere within even the most evil of us exists a spark of compassion and the possibility of reform. But now, from my perspective as an older and wiser man, I no longer believe this to be true for a specific percentage of the population.
 
In my work as both a business and family mediator, I have had cases in which one of the parties was either uninterested or too self- interested to display any commitment to sharing responsibility for the conflict on the table. Instead, they fell into one or more of these categories:
 
1. They were expertly skilled at exploiting and manipulating every opportunity to get what they want.
 
2. They were adept at confusing and camouflaging the issues to the point that a fair resolution could not be reached .
 
3. They appeared incapable of any behavior other than bullying and manipulation to the extent that the mediation ended without resolution.
 
Throughout my years in practice as a mediator I became fascinated with the ease with which these abusive, narcissistic personalities were able to control their spouses, employees, children and other primary relationships, and began to formulate my theories about "predatory leadership."
 
For the most part, I support a generalization that "most people are good." In 30 years as a business professional and world traveler, I have had, at most, two incidents in which I encountered people who intentionally wished me ill. In general I've found the vast majority of human interactions to be positive experiences fueled by healthy intentions. But what is different about the minority? According to Martha Stout (The Sociopath Next Door), 4 percent of the population has an undiagnosed (and perhaps outwardly invisible) personality disorder that combines a narcissistic obsession for self entitlement with a lack of capacity for empathy. What happens when a member of that minority attains a position of social, corporate, political or religious power?
 
There is endless research on the symptoms of sociopaths and abusive personalities, and for a quick overview, here are the primary ones, along with examples of how these traits might be present in a predatory leader (like squares and rectangles, sociopaths and abusive personalities share some common characteristics):
 
. In their minds, they are the only victims. In their public trials, Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic never acknowledged they were responsible for causing harm to others; their major focus was about how badly they were being treated.
 
. They lack the capacity for compassion, empathy, shame or guilt.
 
. They make every effort to prove their actions are the fault of somebody else.
 
. They often exhibit symptoms of narcissistic or borderline personality disorder.
 
 
Research shows that the brains of abused children and sociopaths are physiologically different from those who were raised with the nurturance each child deserves from birth. Sociopathic behavior indicates that they lack the capacity for empathy and they appear to be incapable of taking responsibility for the harm they have caused others. In my own observations, within the abuser is a mechanism that works desperately to keep him from ever acknowledging they did anything wrong. It's almost as if they feel they'll self destruct if they ever really got in touch with either the nature of their submerged shame or fully grasped the degree of pain and suffering they inflict upon others.
 
I correlate my own experience as a mediator with a quote from a review of "The Sociopath Next Door" by Martha Stout:
 
"We are accustomed to think of sociopaths as violent criminals, but in The Sociopath Next Door, Harvard psychologist Martha Stout reveals that a shocking 4 percent of ordinary people - one in twenty-five - has an often undetected mental disorder, the chief symptom of which is that that person possesses no conscience. He or she has no ability whatsoever to feel shame, guilt, or remorse. One in twenty-five everyday Americans, therefore, is secretly a sociopath. They could be your colleague, your neighbor, even family. And they can do literally anything at all and feel absolutely no guilt."
 
 
Child psychiatrist Jack Westman estimates that each typical sociopath will cost society $3 million over the course of his lifetime, but society does virtually nothing to address this condition. In connection to Westman's statment, I personally support a number of well meaning, humanitarian organizations in which sincere, motivated people rally to stop war, heal the planet, stop famine, etc. As I listen to their impassioned speeches, I'm reminded over and over again, "These folks are talking about healing huge and significant damage but nobody is talking about how to eliminate the source of problem."
 
The source is complex, insidious and in many ways, well hidden. One of the greatest challenges is to define it in a way that is accessible and interesting to people who could be motivated to effect change. The first step is to bring the discussion to the general public so that more people have the opportunity to develop and carry out solutions.
 
PREDATORY LEADERS UNMASKED
 
For examples of predatory leaders we can immediately point to obvious examples of Hitler and Stalin who used dirty tricks, propaganda, demonization of innocent people, war and assassination to achieve their goals. But more pervasive and less obvious are the millions of petty tyrants working at all levels of society, including:
 
. Government bureaucrats and corporate administrators who make life miserable for hundreds of people daily.
 
. Employers who exploit and take advantage of employees.
 
. Abusive police officers who bully their neighborhoods
 
. Abusive gang leaders who bully their neighborhoods
 
. Abusive teachers who intimidate their students; religious clergy who abuse their following
 
. Corporate decision makers who lay off their work force in exchange for using slave labor overseas.
 
. Insurgents who plant bombs and the people who recruit and train them.
 
. The domestic abuser who emotionally or physically terrorizes his/her family.
 
These are a few examples of people who decide to act -- consciously or subconsciously -- to exploit and oppress others for their own benefit. While there may be wide variations among these groups, they share a common mindset that includes an unchecked sense of entitlement coupled with a disregard for others that serves as the foundation for oppressive decisions and actions.
 
One particularly dangerous aspect of predatory leaders is that their agendas, often couched in a message that they are "helping their people," provide opportunity for sociopathic personalities with fewer leadership skills to thrive in service to their leaders. In such service, a man who would be imprisoned for rape and murder in a peaceful environment can join or form a militia where his crimes are excused, overlooked or even requested as he carries out his mission. This appears to be happening in Darfur today.
 
I will relate a brief story about a friend of mine who has the potential to be a humane, compassionate and effective political leader. He was on the ground floor of the national political arena and his friends and colleagues had high hopes for him. But in his professional environment, advancement in his field meant he had to compromise his conscience and morals so thoroughly that he chose to drop out. He would ultimately be replaced by someone who lacked similar conscience and was sufficiently self serving that he could do the dirty work necessary to move up in the organization.
 
This is one of the key reasons that we find ourselves with malevolent, exploitive and murderous people in positions of power. While they may not be proactively murderous, they are sufficiently bureaucratic in mid-level positions to move through the ranks of the regime, corporation, military unit or religious institution while serving their own narcissistic agendas. Managed health care is a current example.
 
In 1972 my friend took some time off from his studies at Harvard to work on George McGovern's presidential campaign in New Hampshire. He did so well that he was hired to run the state campaign for one of the Dakotas. He told me about how excited he was to be meeting the top players in the Democratic Party and that he could see making a career of this work. I told him I looked forward to voting for him in 30 years.
 
A year later he dropped out. It wasn't that the competition was too tough; he thrived on competition. The problem was that he was being asked to do things that were too filthy for his conscience to bear. But there were plenty of others waiting in line to do the dirty work, and they would advance as a result. In this situation a potentially great leader was marginalized while a sociopath forged ahead in the same organization.
 
Over the centuries, the nature and path to power has become so infected with the poison of sociopaths and the opportunists who gild their pockets by serving the abusers in power, that a majority of the general public accepts such abuse as inevitable and feels powerless to do anything about it. This happens not just in the corporate, government, military and political arenas, but also in educational, non- profit and religious institutions. Most average folks complacently leave leadership to others, and when this happens, ruthlessly competitive goal seekers who will do anything to achieve their goals pervade all aspects of culture and society.
 
For the sake of this discussion, from the Oxford English Dictionary, an applicable definition of leadership is "a person or thing that leads."
 
Consider the position that all individuals are leaders in their own lives by virtue of the fact that on conscious and subconscious levels, they make leadership choices about every action they take. These choices are as personal as selecting a school for their children or as far-reaching as the decision to follow a leader who preaches harm to others. How do we discern between a conscientious person who harms others because if they don't follow orders they'll suffer as a consequence (soldiers, intimidated employees or abused family members), and a sociopath who follows a murderous leader because the leader provides an opportunity for the sociopath to "legitimately" impose his will upon others without suffering any personal consequence.?
 
Look at how leadership shows up in the nuclear family. To many, an ideal family is one where mother and father share roles as parents and leaders of the family. In many families in which one parent is abusive and controls the rest of the family, there is no room for shared leadership or any independent initiative on the part of other family members. In the broad spectrum between the parental abuser and the dictator of a nation, they share a common pathological mindset. It is the lack of understanding about how these sociopathic and abusive minds function that enables such toxic entities to get into positions of power over and over again.
 
CAN PREDATORY LEADERSHIP BE HEALED?
 
With the goal of healing leadership, we can create a public dialogue, encourage research and develop ways to educate consumers, voters, corporations, families, educators and others, especially school age children, to identify abusers before they complete the path to power. With this education, bullies will have much less power in a schools, neighborhoods and offices, and adolescents will be better able to understand the difference between toxic and healthy romantic relationships. An additional benefit of such education is that people will make better choices for their marriages, there will be less divorce, less abusive behavior and children will have a better chance to grow up in healthy, non-abusive homes. A program like this, carried out on a national basis, can go a long way towards breaking the cycle of abused children growing up to be abusive parents and abusive leaders.