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SURPRISE! Ethical leadership can be easily found. Here's how
In this electronic age of indelible memories, it didn't take long for Washington Post columnist Mark Thiessen to dig up this tweet from February 2011 fired off by Nancy Pelosi:
"I stand with the students & workers of #WI; impressive show of democracy in action #solidarityWI"
So here's our question to you, Madame Speaker: if you praise union workers as patriotic when they storm and vandalize the Wisconsin state capitol to protest collective bargaining reform, how in good conscience do you condemn as insurrectionist Trump supporters when they storm and vandalize the nation's capitol to protest election results?
Don't worry. I'm not holding my breath waiting for an answer.
TWO CAN PLAY
In his book Win Bigly, Scott Adams explains the method to Donald Trump's madness that enabled him to win the 2016 election. With a relentless campaign of one outrageous act, comment, or tweet after another, Mr. Trump overwhelmed his ideological adversaries with something called outrage fatigue.
The anti-Trump camp couldn't settle on any one incendiary issue long enough to mount an effective counterattack since, before they had time to respond, that outrage had been lost in a flurry of subsequent outrages.
What goes around comes around. Whether they've taken a page from Mr. Trump's book or whether they wrote the first chapters themselves, politicians have weaponized a mutation of the same virus to deaden the national psyche to their appalling lack of intellectual integrity. The result is an epidemic of — let's call it hypocrisy fatigue.
When everything is outrageous, nothing is outrageous. When there is no commitment to honesty or even-handedness, when double talk and double standards are not only common but expected, there seems little hope for preserving a civil society.
IN OUR OWN EYES
No doubt, Nancy Pelosi would have no trouble parsing a distinction between the Wisconsin "protest" and the capitol "insurrection." And that is precisely the problem. When our ethical decision-making process gets hijacked by ideology or any other form of self-interest, we can no longer recognize the fallacies in our own thinking or the hypocrisy of our own words and actions.
This applies regardless of party affiliation or political philosophy. And Biblical history teaches that it's been going on for a very long time.
The era of the Judges witnessed a continuous vacillation between prosperity and crisis, between unity and factionalism. The prophet summed up the underlying cause of national schizophrenia with a deceptively simple critique:
In those days there was no king; every man did what was right in his own eyes.
When there is no universal respect for authority — whether through a lack of leadership or through the failure of leaders to lead — every person becomes his or her own moral authority, rationalizing the ideas and outlooks that are most comforting and convenient. And the more commonplace rationalization becomes, the less any of us hold ourselves accountable for indulging intellectual inconsistency or moral compromise.
A LITTLE LIGHT TO PIERCE THE DARKNESS
This is why the real battle for ethics begins in our own hearts and minds. It's easy to conclude that in a world where duplicity has become the standard, setting higher standards for ourselves is pointless at best and self-destructive at worst.
But if we look deep and think deeper, we can rediscover that part of ourselves that longs for what's right and recognizes virtue when we see it. In life and in culture, the darker it gets, the more difference a little light can make.
Choose to make yourself a source of ethical illumination. If you do, you will inspire others to add their light to yours. Together, we can push back the darkness of self-serving ideology and rebuild communities truly committed to the betterment of all.
Mark Twain said, "If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything." The applies not only with regard to others but regarding the truths we tell ourselves. If we commit ourselves to pure and enduring values, those values will naturally guide us as we confront the complexities of life at work, at home, and in our communities.
By demanding intellectual integrity from ourselves, we will earn respect and trust from others — even those who disagree with us. By seeking truth, we will recognize who is and is not worthy of our trust and our respect — even among those with whom we agree.
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Rabbi Yonason Goldson is director of Ethical Imperatives, LLC. He is an ethics speaker, strategic storyteller, TEDx presenter, and author. He is also a recovered hitchhiker and circumnavigator, former newspaper columnist, and retired high school teacher in St. Louis. Visit him at at http://ethicalimperatives.com.