{"id":147,"date":"2021-01-10T00:14:41","date_gmt":"2021-01-10T08:14:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.makemydayusa.glamazon.net\/?p=147"},"modified":"2021-01-10T00:14:43","modified_gmt":"2021-01-10T08:14:43","slug":"lord-of-the-flaws","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glamazon.net\/journal\/lord-of-the-flaws\/","title":{"rendered":"Lord of the Flaws"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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What’s the difference between unruly boys following a power-mad adolescent and this below?<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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The boys were shipwrecked and didn’t have social media at their disposal.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

I recently re-watched the movie version of William Golding\u2019s classic story Lord of the Flies<\/em>. It chilled me in high school. What\u2019s most disturbing is to see the story\u2019s dynamic play out over and over again all of these decades. This is especially true in politics and cultural evolution. If you\u2019ve never read Lord of the Flies<\/em> or at least watched the 1963 film, you really should.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The lesson of Golding\u2019s story is that in time of crisis, people often abandon logic and reason in favor of perceived<\/em> strength. I emphasize \u201cperceived\u201d because all too often, the person exhibiting strength is often much weaker than the fa\u00e7ade he puts out there. More importantly, they are more likely to be weak in character and ethics. And those two qualities are strengths absolutely essential to leadership. Leaders who make a huge show of \u201cstrength\u201d often have little or no sense of moral obligation to those the purport to lead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Those \u201cleaders\u201d who appeal to fears, who abandon reason and common sense, they are also likely to be make crucial mistakes. It Golding\u2019s story, the boys become so caught up in the savage games of their \u201cstrong\u201d leader, that they neglect their signal fire. They allow their rescue beacon to go out right before a search plane passes overhead. The boys were so distracted by \u201cstrength\u201d that they lost a chance to be rescued.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since Vietnam, America hasn\u2019t faced a political schism like today’s. What makes this worse is that so many people have abandoned common sense and common decency. It\u2019s a mystery why 74,000,000 people perceived a crude, cruel, schoolyard bully of a septuagenarian “reality” TV star as a good leader, but here we are.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Perhaps the extreme partisan divide that grew out of Obama\u2019s election made so many forget that\u2014while there was no shortage of political disagreement before the 2008 election\u2014at least we had a sense of decorum and manners, even among rivals. No candidate made penis references on the stage during a presidential primary debate before 2016. We acted more like grownups before that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For those who wonder what\u2019s so great about maturity, recall the reason why we don\u2019t punish teenage criminals like we do adults. It\u2019s the reason we don\u2019t let teenagers vote until 18: they aren\u2019t emotionally mature or experienced enough to sort out all the conflicting choices that a voter is presented with. Considering how many American voters have devolved into\u2014pardon me\u2014fucking children<\/em> devoid of couth and class, perhaps we should raise<\/em> the voting age. I know that will never happen, just the same way I know that we will always have grown-ups who act like children.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The real tragedy of the last five years is how many people were seduced by the headiness of acting immature, of abandoning good manners and common sense in favor of \u201cstrength.\u201d Trump is nearly gone, but Trumpism still runs strong. That spray-tanned reality TV star is no better than Golding\u2019s savage character Jack, who gains the allegiance of the other boys with promises of adventure, and whose only solution to deal with the monster on the island is to slaughter a pig and mount its head on a stake.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Aren’t we better than that?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I recently re-watched the movie version of William Golding\u2019s classic story Lord of the Flies. It chilled me in high school. What\u2019s most disturbing is to see the story\u2019s dynamic play out over and over again all of these decades. This is especially true in politics and cultural evolution. If you\u2019ve never read Lord of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-147","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mainline-journa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glamazon.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glamazon.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glamazon.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glamazon.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glamazon.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=147"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/glamazon.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":155,"href":"https:\/\/glamazon.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147\/revisions\/155"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glamazon.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=147"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glamazon.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=147"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glamazon.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=147"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}