Disir
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- Sep 30, 2011
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Nearly every day we hear politicians talk about fighting. They tell us they will “fight for” some pet issue or for some favorite group of people. Our televisions entice us with claims of “powerful dramas,” and the news reports are full of powerful leaders, powerful military, powerful ideas. So much of our media is focused on a narrative of fights and power. It’s no wonder we have so many cop shows on television, and that most of their story lines revolve around situations guided by their guns.
We tend to characterize a leader as someone who fights for a cause, but I think the best leaders are actually calm and assertive, not angry and aggressive. Such a leader is secure, able to manage existential anxiety and systemic anxiety with courage and calmness, responsive to that of God within. It begins with a pause that gives one the space to listen to the Inward Voice that can speak with nerve and peacefulness.
Life challenges us to seek the courage to live peacefully with anxiety, to risk vulnerability, and to work up the nerve to speak out when we find a new and brighter path for our communities to take.
We don’t see much calm, secure leadership today. Instead we are bombarded by what appears to be a collective obsession with fights and power—symptoms of serious insecurity. In this essay I hope to make some sense of this age of insecurity and call for a different kind of leadership.
The last century was replete with world wars, a medical revolution, liberation movements, and threat of a nuclear holocaust, and cultural analysts recognized that people were highly anxious. We were living in an age of transformation that was marked by anxiety. Of the great thinkers who would illuminate the meaning of this anxiety, the late theologian Paul Tillich gave me the most insight into anxiety in his book The Courage to Be. He taught that existential anxiety is natural to human life and is experienced in three ways:
There is anxiety of guilt and condemnation. No matter how we affirm ourselves, we will still wonder if we’ve truly been good enough, and worry about punishment in this life or an afterlife.
There is anxiety of death and finitude. No matter how unafraid of death we imagine ourselves to be, we will still be troubled about the end of things.
There is anxiety of emptiness and meaninglessness. No matter how good we feel vocationally, at times we feel empty inside and wonder if life truly has meaning and purpose.
Additionally, I think there is one more fundamental anxiety:
There is anxiety of helplessness and powerlessness. I believe this is the initial anxiety of the child, and it feeds a lifelong quest for power, whether that is power over others, the power of wisdom, or the power of transcendent spirituality. And like the other existential anxieties, we cannot rid ourselves of it, no matter what kind of power we think we possess.
Tillich suggested that there is no way around existential anxiety. We either go through it, or we create pseudo-solutions to anxiety’s sting: domination of others via dictatorial leadership and forms of rape; perfectionism and obsessive-compulsiveness; addictions to selfish pleasure like eating, drinking, drugging, or sex; rigid beliefs (fundamentalism) that deny doubt and anxiety’s questions.
These pseudo-solutions are meant to rid us of anxiety, but, instead, they make anxiety chronic, partly by replacing anxiety with fears.
As a pastoral psychotherapist, I have an instinct to look at the micro expressions of fighting and power struggles. I see this phenomenon most often in couple counseling, manifested in the loss of composure. Conflicts in marriages usually happen when one or both partners choose to respond out of their own anxiety rather than confidence and composure. Anger pushing anger normally means both get paralyzed, and they raise the volume to try to overwhelm the other and “win” the argument. As counselor and teacher Hal Runkel says, they don’t hold onto themselves. Instead of leading with peaceful strength, they anxiously jump into a power struggle that is rife with insecurity. This whole scenario is built on anxiety, and when it calcifies into a predictable and uncontrollable pattern of behavior, it creates a high level of insecurity, almost guaranteeing it will be repeated.
This Age of Insecurity - Friends Journal
This is another one of my favorite haunts.
We tend to characterize a leader as someone who fights for a cause, but I think the best leaders are actually calm and assertive, not angry and aggressive. Such a leader is secure, able to manage existential anxiety and systemic anxiety with courage and calmness, responsive to that of God within. It begins with a pause that gives one the space to listen to the Inward Voice that can speak with nerve and peacefulness.
Life challenges us to seek the courage to live peacefully with anxiety, to risk vulnerability, and to work up the nerve to speak out when we find a new and brighter path for our communities to take.
We don’t see much calm, secure leadership today. Instead we are bombarded by what appears to be a collective obsession with fights and power—symptoms of serious insecurity. In this essay I hope to make some sense of this age of insecurity and call for a different kind of leadership.
The last century was replete with world wars, a medical revolution, liberation movements, and threat of a nuclear holocaust, and cultural analysts recognized that people were highly anxious. We were living in an age of transformation that was marked by anxiety. Of the great thinkers who would illuminate the meaning of this anxiety, the late theologian Paul Tillich gave me the most insight into anxiety in his book The Courage to Be. He taught that existential anxiety is natural to human life and is experienced in three ways:
There is anxiety of guilt and condemnation. No matter how we affirm ourselves, we will still wonder if we’ve truly been good enough, and worry about punishment in this life or an afterlife.
There is anxiety of death and finitude. No matter how unafraid of death we imagine ourselves to be, we will still be troubled about the end of things.
There is anxiety of emptiness and meaninglessness. No matter how good we feel vocationally, at times we feel empty inside and wonder if life truly has meaning and purpose.
Additionally, I think there is one more fundamental anxiety:
There is anxiety of helplessness and powerlessness. I believe this is the initial anxiety of the child, and it feeds a lifelong quest for power, whether that is power over others, the power of wisdom, or the power of transcendent spirituality. And like the other existential anxieties, we cannot rid ourselves of it, no matter what kind of power we think we possess.
Tillich suggested that there is no way around existential anxiety. We either go through it, or we create pseudo-solutions to anxiety’s sting: domination of others via dictatorial leadership and forms of rape; perfectionism and obsessive-compulsiveness; addictions to selfish pleasure like eating, drinking, drugging, or sex; rigid beliefs (fundamentalism) that deny doubt and anxiety’s questions.
These pseudo-solutions are meant to rid us of anxiety, but, instead, they make anxiety chronic, partly by replacing anxiety with fears.
As a pastoral psychotherapist, I have an instinct to look at the micro expressions of fighting and power struggles. I see this phenomenon most often in couple counseling, manifested in the loss of composure. Conflicts in marriages usually happen when one or both partners choose to respond out of their own anxiety rather than confidence and composure. Anger pushing anger normally means both get paralyzed, and they raise the volume to try to overwhelm the other and “win” the argument. As counselor and teacher Hal Runkel says, they don’t hold onto themselves. Instead of leading with peaceful strength, they anxiously jump into a power struggle that is rife with insecurity. This whole scenario is built on anxiety, and when it calcifies into a predictable and uncontrollable pattern of behavior, it creates a high level of insecurity, almost guaranteeing it will be repeated.
This Age of Insecurity - Friends Journal
This is another one of my favorite haunts.
