New world order needs fearless, selfless leaders

IDENTITY politics allows the unscrupulous to become enemies of the out-groups, essentially dehumanising them with potentially catastrophic results.

Fear is never about the thing, but the feeling you associate with the thing, but because of that feeling, we kill the thing, not the feeling. The snake or the spider doesn’t have to be killed, it’s the fear that makes us do it.

It takes a fearless leader to see through this subterfuge, to recalibrate the debate. The leaders we need will fight for education, for access in healthcare, for jobs; for a better life for all, but never at the expense of other people.

We need to understand that the systems we have are the enemy, not the people. These are systems hard wired to maintain disparities and aggravate inequality. We need to fight that and narrow the Gini co-efficient — not give in to playing the person and not the ball.

We need to radically transform our economies, which means throwing out the cant of isolationism or of only giving jobs to our nearest and dearest and instead appointing people who don’t look like us, but who are undoubtedly the best qualified for the job, sacrificing the toxic recipe of tokenism and shorttermism for the longer-term purpose that, instead, lays the foundation for a world premised on prosperity not perennial profit for a diminishing elite.

But we can only do this together, as a human race, because our futures are all deeply intertwined on this planet that is already so compromised by the lifestyle choices that our generation and the generations that have gone before have made.

To do that, we have to look deeply within and get to know ourselves particularly well and that’s a journey that requires true fearlessness. Our job as educators is to create those fearless leaders, people who can begin to forge a new path towards a new economy, a more complex and multi-sectoral economy that is as diverse among its players and beneficiaries.

We certainly can’t do that with leaders who in truth are actually terrified of their own shadows.

The only question is whether we can find those leaders in time to off-set the incredible inter-generational damage that the current demagogues are sowing at the moment.

Fearless leadership is about pulling the big levers. Fearless enough to have a voice. Fearless enough to face your own ego. Fearless enough to know that you only borrow a position, not own it and one day it will go and you’ll just be you again. Fearless enough to be nothing and have little. Fearless enough to be fair, even if it means facing up to friends. It’s actually not too much to ask.