Pants On Fire! – Why Leaders of the Future Must be Trustworthy

Without trust there is no leadership. Seems so simple, doesn’t it? However, in reality, it is not. You only need to scan the headlines to quickly understand we do NOT trust the people in charge – and for good reason. The mismanagement of the pandemic has been accompanied by another plague: false and misleading information. These falsehoods have not only come from whacky fringe-dwellers, but from our senior official authorities – both global and local – perpetuated and promoted by the mainstream mockingbird media.

The only thing politicians fear is the media. If they own the media, they have nothing to fear. Politicians have decided to witch hunt free speech on social media as an easy way to account for problems within their leadership. The solution to terrorism, civil unrest, digital monopolies, collapsing economies, medical tyranny, inconvenient historical facts, and political dissatisfaction is to introduce heavy-handed censorial legislation. These laws do not solve the moral problems of a nation or the stranglehold from Silicon Valley. Instead, the people find themselves stuck between two powerful censors, the Government and Big Tech.

History tells us that only unpopular, deeply insecure governments fear the voice of their people: questioning, learning, discovering, discerning. The western world learned long ago that the best way to maintain peace within the melting pot of civilisation is to have the incontrovertible freedom to call each other out. The freedom to speak is the freedom to think. Without free speech, our civilisation is worth nothing. As the iron fist chokes the throat of the masses, we must remember: authoritarianism never ends well. The superficial premise of short-term security and social freedoms are a masquerade for the loss of real personal security and freedom to the state. If history teaches us anything, it is that you can never be compliant enough to earn your freedom.

“It’s good to see the snakes revealing themselves. They weren’t actually hidden at all. People hide behind the masks, but eventually, you see them for who they truly are.”

― Amaka Imani Nkosazana

The Business of Honesty

When consistent inconsistencies are used to silence, coerce, and imprison people, conflict with the government of the day is inevitable. It’s not surprising to read this Gallup survey finds Americans’ trust in the media to accurately and fairly report the news has dipped to its second-lowest ever on record. And just how is our culture of half-truth, trickery, and misinformation affecting the role of honesty in business? Conscious Leaders recognise that it is honourable for a leader to admit their fears, resistance, and edge of practice. Every leader has their limit, capacity for growth, and particular path to fulfillment. However, it is dishonourable to lie to yourself or others about your real place. Pretending you are something you are not, or shying away from playing to your real edge, only demonstrates you cannot be trusted to be authentic and fully present. Where a leader’s edge is located is less important than whether they are actually living that edge in truth, rather than being lazy or deluded.

Fake it until you make it has infused our business culture and been etched into the minds of society. People think that if they don’t fake it, they won’t make it, which essentially relegates integrity to the basement. This belief basically tells you that it’s OK to lie and take shortcuts in order to succeed. It has created the delusion that somehow integrity is optional. As a leader, you are tasked with setting an example. If you allow yourself to fall into the ‘fake it’ trap, you are creating a culture of fakers. Fakery is a lie. You cannot build a sustainable business on fakery. Customers, stakeholders, and employees will figure it out, and your reputation and brand will begin to disintegrate before your eyes. What is done in the darkness always comes to light. The truth is that the truth always comes out, and when it does, you will be exposed. No one wants to do business with a liar.

“There comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but he must take it because conscience tells him it is right.”

― Martin Luther King Jr

Crisis of Conscience

Through the wonders of technology, we are witnessing modern social and political events being re-written in real-time, ‘whitewashed’ by the unanimous vote of an unelected press. What began as a plague of anonymous fact-checkers (funded by the very people we are often trying to fact check) attempting to elevate their preferred politics, has metastasised into a ‘truth’ manufacturing line with the same quality control as a Wuhan mask factory. It is heartbreaking to witness humanity allow the powerful to coerce the truth and seize control on a scaffolding of lies. You are what you stand for. It is time to recognise this pattern and choose a different outcome.

‘Trust the experts’ is simply not a good enough mantra for our so-called leaders to invoke during censorial binges, particularly when we have hard evidence that ‘experts’ often make horrific mistakes. Remember the horrors of Thalidomide? That drug was available over the counter and, thanks to an Australian doctor who discovered it helped with the symptoms of morning sickness, years passed before it was found to cause hideous birth defects. Despite mounting complaints in the public sphere, it was deemed safe across the medical spectrum. In the end, it killed two thousand children and left ten thousand with serious physical abnormalities. Without public pressure, it would have killed many more.

“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny

and obliterate their own understanding of their history.”

― George Orwell

Re-writing Historical Record

Vaccines carry similar risks. While they can save millions of lives, they can be wildly unpredictable in their medical infancy. It is imperative that the government maintains public choice and consumer transparency across social media platforms to ensure that alarm bells ring when people are being injured or dying. If anything goes wrong with a Covid-19 vaccine, don’t expect to hear about it. Who are these public health experts allowed to dominate the market of information? Absolute authority demands intense scrutiny. The global body instructing health initiatives, the World Health Organisation, has been caught editing medical advice to keep up with propaganda circulated on social media. Two prominent and alarming situations are noted by this author:

1. From No Masks to Mandatory Masks

To justify medical mandates, the ‘science’ behind mask-wearing was altered by the WHO after the political decision to enforce them had been made. Warnings printed on the boxes of these masks still contradict the WHO’s advice. Tony Fauci was even interviewed on 60 Minutes saying they do not work and has since completely changed his story.

2. Herd Immunity? (Never heard of it)

The most concerning manipulation of information by the WHO relates to the long-held definition of herd immunity. Our medical understanding of herd immunity has not changed since the arrival of Covid19. What has changed is the effectiveness of the shot in relation to the grand promises made by politicians who used its existence to initiate financially devastating lockdowns. The following releases are by the same department at the WHO:

9th June, 2020: ‘Herd Immunity is the indirect protection from an infectious disease that happens when a population is immune either through vaccination or immunity developed through previous infection. This means that even people who haven’t been infected or in whom an infection hasn’t triggered an immune response, they are protected because people around them who are immune can act as buffers between them and an infected person. The threshold for establishing herd immunity for Covid19 is not yet clear.’

13th November, 2020: ‘Herd Immunity’, also known as ‘population immunity’, is a concept used for vaccination, in which a population can be protected from a certain virus if a threshold of vaccination is reached. Herd immunity is achieved by protecting people from a virus, not exposing them to it. Read the Director-General’s 12 October media briefing speech for more detail.

The second statement from the WHO completely erased the natural phenomena of herd immunity – which remains the dominant method by which human populations overcome any disease – and replaced it with an absolute mandate to vaccinate. This is outrageous by anyone’s standards. However, the true definition of herd immunity survives with people like this author, who remembers studying it prior to the edit, and with anyone in possession of medical books that cannot be so easily manipulated. The world’s institutions in charge of ‘reality’ are headed by some of the world’s shadiest people we could imagine – and this has to change!

“We become slaves the moment we hand the keys to the definition of reality entirely over to someone else, whether it is a business, an economic theory, a political party, the White House, Newsworld or CNN.”

― B. W. Powe

The False Dichotomy of Manipulation Tactics

The kind of lying that is most destructive is withholding, or not disclosing all the information to someone we think would be affected by it. Psychological illness of the severest kind is the result of this kind of lying. Psychological healing is possible only with the freedom that comes from not hiding anymore. Keeping secrets and hiding from other people is a trap. Teenagers spend most of their time playing this kind of hide-and-seek game. The better you are at getting by with playing hide-and-seek during adolescence, the harder it is to grow up and be your true authentic self. “Important” secrets and all the plotting, mental gymnastics, and cogitation that go with them are all simply bullshit. The mind is a jail built out of this bullshit. Conscious Leaders are initiated on how the bullshit prison of the mind is built and how to escape it. Withholding from other people, and not telling them about what you feel or think, keeps you locked in the jail. The longer you remain in that jail, the faster you decline. You either escape, or you die on the inside. The way out is to get really good at telling the truth.

Understanding cutting-edge business concepts like the Long Tail and the Tipping Point and Purple Cow and the rest is worthless drivel if you don’t commit to the long game of self-awareness. Conscious Leaders are forged in the fire. They commit to the frightening work of flying blind, of taking a stand, and of making something new, complex, and vital – because they know if they don’t, nothing much happens. Cutting-edge strategies and tactics seem to promise a pain-free, quick way to achieve your goals. You can read about a new strategy, find a guaranteed, impersonal way to achieve, point the industrial machine at a new market niche and, presto! Results without pain. Ideaviruses promise to be unleashed, points will be tipped, and tails will get longer. Here’s the thing: when it comes to success, there are no shortcuts any place worth going, . You can’t cheat the grind. It knows how much you have invested. It won’t give you anything you haven’t worked for. Ideas are not enough without commitment. They’re not enough because strategy is empty without change, hollow without passion, and meaningless without people willing to confront the void.

“We can’t complain about results we aren’t getting from things we’re not doing.”

― Gina Truman

Straight Talk; No Chaser

We are so inundated with lies, half-truths, and twisted beliefs that many people don’t know what is real or true anymore. Some people may even give up and believe that nothing is real in a nihilistic sort of way. This giving up can occasionally lead someone to the real truth, but more often, it creates a constantly recycling state of depression, anxiety, or anger because deep down the person knows it’s not right, but they just can’t seem to put their finger on it. The goal is to wear you down, so you simply give in, which is why it is more important than ever before that you step up and be the leader we need to see. The new world paradigm demands complete authenticity and transparency from all of our leaders. Right now, you must start where you are with what you have and demonstrate the change you wish to see.

No one enjoys watching their house burn down. The revolution we now find ourselves in is here to disrupt the status quo, expose the cowards and liars and bring down the towers built on false foundations. Then, we will enable the impossible. New organisations and new ideas are poised to thrive. Someone is going to be leading us; someone is going to be exploring the edges; someone is going to be creating things of incalculable value… will it be you? What happened yesterday is over. Tomorrow’s door is wide open and this is your chance-in-a-lifetime to make a massive impact. We are the system; the system is not outside of us. It is our own broken relationships that need to be cured. Our relationship with ourselves, with life, with earth, with others, with our work, with the world. This is how systemic change happens. We are the system and we are the solution. Significant conversations and space for real learning cure our relationships which is why we must protect freedom of speech at all costs. In moving from disrespect to respect, from “I know better” to curiosity, from judging to understanding one another, from machine to living system, from fear to love. This is what we must now create with one another. This is the work of anyone who truly wants to build the New Earth.

“Maturity, one discovers, has everything to do with the acceptance of ‘not knowing.”

― Mark Z. Danielewski

The Only Certainty is Uncertainty.

It is becoming more obvious that we need to transform our ways of living and operating. It’s time for us to elevate above the dominant worldview and this requires YOU and all of your strength. The biggest inhibitor to our transformation is our dis-connection with life/nature. In nature everything transforms through cycles. Everything is continually transforming as one stage comes to an end another begins. Spirals of death and rebirth, of withdrawing and bursting forth – this is the way of life. Everything naturally transforms through the cycles of life – so too with human nature. We only prevent our natural, emergent transformation by dis-connecting ourselves from nature’s rhythms and wisdom. This artificial sense of separation is deeply sown within the Western scientific-philosophy of abstract rationalist reductionism.

So often we strategise, envision, innovate and explore new ways of operating in the hope that they help us transform towards a more sustainable future for society, the economy and the environment. These good intentions often originate from a disconnected perception of life, where humanity is seen as separate from nature, where object is seen as separate from subject, and where self is viewed as separate and in competition with other. In this way, we innovate our way to incomplete solutions based on incomplete understandings of life and its inherently dynamic and inclusive way.

“Success comes from the inside out. In order to change what is on the outside, you must first change what is on the inside.”

― Idowu Koyenikan

System Transformation

Transformation requires a reconnection; a reconnection with our true human nature and nature. It is that simple and yet we often grasp at ‘activity’ before undertaking this re-connection (at ‘doing’ before ‘being’). The more we see through the illusion of the world as a collection of things and see it as the inter-play of relationships and interconnecting networks it is, the easier it becomes for us to loosen the grip of our reductionist sense of scarcity and separated-ness and re-connect with the beautiful enchantment of the natural world around us and our true nature within us. The paradigm shift now upon us has to be radical – philosophically, scientifically and culturally. The system is broken. Therefore, it needs to go to the root of our corrupt engagement with reality: space-matter, content-context, human-nature, self-Self.

The first step for any authentic leader is personal integrity which comes from centering and attuning with your true Self: Self Mastery. If we are able to recognise and then tame our ego-consciousness then we can begin to untangle our true Self from our ego. Left unchecked, our ego-consciousness (hand-in-hand with our left-brain hemisphere’s rationalistic, grasping, defining, extracting and separating way of perceiving) attempts to usurp control of our way of engaging with reality… and we end up like the very tyrants attempting to control every aspect of our lives. Each moment offers us the chance to free ourselves from this self-imprisonment so we can, indeed, rise from the ashes of a world that was like a phoenix – and fly free! Together we rise.

“Opportunities to find deeper powers within ourselves come when life seems most challenging.”

― Joseph Campbell