Should leaders cry?

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Ozymandias
Posts: 108
Joined: December 5th, 2016, 1:02 am
Favorite Philosopher: Loren Eiseley

Should leaders cry?

Post by Ozymandias »

After learning a lot of good information on the social stigma of sensitivity, primarily pertaining to men, but in general (in most societies), I found myself wondering about this question. For a bit of background, here's a good ted talk, though watching it isn't necessary to understand/ discuss this topic.
[yid=]LBdnjqEoiXA[/yid]
It is becoming common knowledge that covering up emotion and being "tough", "strong", or "manly" in our personal, inter-human relationships is unwise. As humans, we thrive on emotional connection with each other, and there are countless observable problems that arise out of shutting down our emotions and/ or refusing to show them to others. I hope we can all agree that we should be emotionally open with one another in our personal relationships.

However, there are also times when emotional openness is a bad thing. Two simple examples pertain to the police and military. My father's occupation as a police officer taught him not to show emotion, and after his 30+ years in that field he has told me about the place of emotion in his line of work. The general premise is that by showing emotion on the job when dealing with criminals/ citizens, he essentially abdicates his position of authority and loses any psychological power he has as a cop. When people see a cop, or a military officer, or any authoritative figure show emotion and humanize themselves, they usually lose the fear and respect they had for that person, because it takes the authoritative figure off of their pedestal. What I mean by that: We, as humans, fear what we don't understand, and when we understand someone's emotions, we stop fearing them. A prime example of this phenomenon was shown very well in the Star Wars films IV-VI with stormtroopers. We, as well as the characters, fear them because their uniform, unhuman armored appearance takes away their humanity and makes us uncertain of their intentions, thus cautious in our interactions with them, thus giving us a respectful fear of their authority. The same thing works with the police. To maintain their position of power, and by extension to maintain order and peace in a civilization, police must maintain a level of emotional distance from their citizen and criminal counterparts.

However, when we lose our fear of someone because they have shown emotional openness, we gain something nicer- trust. When the police engage with their community (Cue image of cops playing basketball with inner city teenagers), we forge a more powerful connection with them, and we trust them as authority figures. That position may be compromised if we are in a bad situation, though, so that trust only works as an establishment of authority if we continue to have interests aligned with the police (safety in the community). If we become criminals, then we just go back to seeing their emotional openness as weakness and abdication of authority. The authority given by fearful respect is much less fragile to someone who is opposed to the authority figure's standpoint.

So my question is this- should authority figures, namely police officers, and more importantly, leaders (military COs, heads of state, politicians, coaches, CEOs, etc.) show significant emotional vulnerability to their followers? One one hand, by showing emotion, they abandon their negative, possibly abusive extrinsic authority and replace it with a fair, happy, cooperative intrinsic authority. They make their followers love and trust them. On the other hand, by doing that they make their enemies see them as weak. They lose the biggest thing that makes us instinctively separate them from the masses: power. When we connect with a leader emotionally, we may still consciously see them as a leader because we respect their judgement, but we begin to see them as an equal and thus regard our own judgement as equal or superior to their own, thus stripping away the power they have over us.
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Sy Borg
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Joined: December 16th, 2013, 9:05 pm

Re: Should leaders cry?

Post by Sy Borg »

It really depends. Let's say we agree that people in authority being vulnerable undermines their authority to some extent. If that's the case, a leader losing their cool (anger is also weak because there is lack of control) is acting sub-optimally, but that's hardly a dealbreaker. They screw up all the time. It's a hard job that seems to be beyond pretty well everyone so they pretend that they have things under control.

Ideally, a politician's policies, character and competence would be more important, but today we live in "interesting times".
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Lark_Truth
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Joined: December 24th, 2016, 11:51 am
Favorite Philosopher: Brandon Sanderson

Re: Should leaders cry?

Post by Lark_Truth »

If we want to see our leaders as human and not just figureheads, then yes, we should see some of them exhibit emotion more often.
Truth is Power. Reason is Wisdom. Intelligence is Experience. Hope is Bright!
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