Episode 5 in a short series of 6, asking what would make human beings less recruitable to war, domination, and dehumanisation.
This one is about our relationship with our leaders.
When I was eight, every Wednesday afternoon a teacher came over from a nearby school.
He was sharply dressed in a three-piece Prince of Wales check suit with a bright patterned tie.
He was a great hit with the girls, with whom he flirted.
With the boys, he delivered cruel put-downs.
I only saw a few of his lessons.
After our early encounters, I became too frightened to attend school.
Looking back, I can see he reminded me too much of a man much closer to home.
A man who made it clear he did not like me, and who seemed to take pride in his ability to hurt me.
That matters because our first leaders are usually our parents.
If early authority was cruel, frightening, shaming, intrusive, or emotionally absent, bad leadership can feel familiar before it feels clearly wrong.
And if you have only seen poor leadership, you may not even know what good leadership looks like.
Which means you are more likely to settle for too little.
After years of being led by bullying and cruel people, I eventually left and became a psychotherapist, executive coach, clinical supervisor and researcher.
These days, after years of therapy and development work, I am much less fazed by the different defences people present me with.
My job is to make friends with people, wherever they are starting from, and influence them towards the best version of themselves available to them.
That means being kind, but not naive.
Boundaried, but not cold.
Compassionate, but still reality-based.
Because good leadership is not merely having authority.
It is what you do with it.
A mature leader brings steadiness under pressure.
They help people think more clearly, not less.
They tell the truth, without humiliation.
They hold boundaries, without contempt.
They repair when they get it wrong.
They use authority in a way that leaves people more honest, more courageous, more self-trusting, and more human.
That is what good leadership does.
It does not merely extract performance.
It develops people.
So perhaps one mark of maturity is this:
we become more discerning about leadership.
We recognise poor leadership sooner.
We expect more.
We settle for less distortion.
And where possible, we do not only submit to poor leadership or complain about it.
We may sometimes be able to influence it upward.
Not always.
Some leaders are too defended, too rewarded by power, or too committed to distortion.
Wisdom includes knowing the difference.
So maturity is not only the capacity to reject bad leadership.
It is the capacity to discern when to tolerate, when to challenge, when to influence, and when to leave.
Next episode I’ll draw the series together and ask how psychologically and emotionally mature human beings become more resilient to domination without becoming less human themselves.