The Quintessential Leader

Among the many legacies the past 20 or so years have left us as a society with, one of the most tragic, from a quintessential leadership perspective, is the widely-accepted and heartily-embraced death of the truth.

This death has occurred everywhere in our society: in our businesses, in our homes, in our schools, in our religious organizations, and in our local, state, and national governments.

Sadly, it is a death virtually no one has noticed – because it was a slow, subtle, creeping death – and virtually no one has mourned or is mourning.

While the truth has been stealthily deep-sixed (and, yes, that is a reference to the standard depth of a grave) by the majority of humans on this planet, many of whom have embraced a pattern of dishonesty – sometimes without knowing it, but more often knowing full well what they’re doing but avoiding responsibility for it by claiming they don’t know what they’re doing – by using less than obvious lying in the form of spinning, angling, twisting, and omitting facts, every form of dishonesty has risen to take its place and become the norm.

There are too many examples around of this to choose just one. It is not obvious, apparently, to a lot of people that president-elect Donald Trump has become the epitome of a full-on, out-in-the-open, not-even-pretending-to-be-anything-else, unlike his predecessors, Liar-In-Chief.

Let me be absolutely clear. It’s not that all other politicians are not also dishonest, because they are.

You cannot be a politician – wherever in life you practice politics (it is not just in government, but in every other realm of society where the lust for power, money, and control are the driving motives for what we are doing) – and not be a liar.

The very nature of politics – promising everybody everything to get power and control, knowing that what is promised cannot and, indeed, will not be delivered – means that dishonesty is part and parcel of it.

However, for the first time in this history of the United States, we have a president-elect who doesn’t even try to hide his lies and his dishonesty and, frankly, doesn’t even care that he’s blatantly lying and being dishonest.

And, amazingly, to this quintessential leader, there are a lot of people who should be concerned with honesty and the truth who don’t care that he’s an in-your-face liar either.

A recent example of this lack of care or concern came from Gerard Baker, the editor-in-chief of the Wall Street Journal. 

Appearing on the January 1, 2017 episode of Meet the Press, Baker said that the Wall Street Journal would not call Donald Trump’s lies “lies” because it would removed the paper’s “objectively” and would assume, subjectively inferred, a “moral intent” on Trump’s part to be dishonest.

Instead, the Wall Street Journal will simply refer to Trump’s lies as “questionable” and “challengeable.”

Does not calling a lie a lie make it not a lie? Absolutely not!

Donald Trump doesn’t care about the truth or about facts: in fact, he knows he’s lying – moral intent attributed – and he’s absolutely fine with it.

For the Wall Street Journal to dress this up in the gobbledygook that Gerard Baker espoused (good luck wrapping your head around that – if we can and it makes sense to us, then I’d suggest we take some time to step back and do some reevaluation of where honesty and the truth exist – and whether they do even exist anymore – in our lives) is clear evidence of how entrenched and acceptable dishonesty and lying has become in our society.

This is just one of the innumerable ways I have observed the death of the truth for the majority of the human race. I grieve for that.

But it makes holding on to the truth, being truthful in all things, and living a completely honest and truthful life from the inside out even more important to those of us who are striving to become quintessential leaders because integrity and truthfulness are the cornerstones of becoming a quintessential leader.

Is a lie by any other name no longer a lie?

The answer we give is an accurate gauge of the genuineness and authenticity of our commitment to becoming quintessential leaders.

How are we doing?