Do We No Longer Recognize Leadership and Stewardship?

One theme that we feel a Lighthouse evokes is that of responsibility, sacrifice and stewardship.  Perhaps you can draw the analogy that a person unanchored from the truth is cast about on troubled seas.  Truth is light for the mind when it unveils reality and leads to virtue and justice, and sometimes there are eternal verities that we either can’t or refuse to recognize.  That casts us further from truth, and like that vessel in a storm, help is needed.  Do we have a duty like the lighthouse keepers to guide others during their troubles?

While we overlook the tower in the back back drop of a photo of our loved ones, let us continue to remind ourselves of what that Lighthouse meant for many that was lost in a fog on the unsettled sea- weary of catching a glimpse of shore. Most importantly, a light house was solely a tool to illuminate the way forward. Without the obligation of a keeper on watch, we remain lost at sea, surrendered to an unknown forecast and unsettled waters.

Orange

The First Steps To Stewardship

Stewardship is not something we hear frequently enough in these times.  As with much of our vocabulary, words fall out of favor, and their meaning drift.  The biblical meaning of stewardship is fairly remote these days, for example.

Our common understanding of stewardship is that it means the job of supervising or taking care of something, such as an organization or property.  But there is a biblical meaning to stewardship that we fail to use these days to our detriment. A biblical world view of stewardship can be consciously defined as:

"Utilising and managing all resources God provides for the glory of God and the betterment of His creation."

(Charles Bugg, "Stewardship" in Holman Bible Dictionary (Holman: Tennessee, 1991), 1303-1304) 

The elements that God provides us is our responsibility to maintain, improve for his glory, and fulfilling that is to 

That can also mean that we are the stewards of ourselves, our families and our relationships.  In short, we are stewards of our lives.  Liberty is not the total expression of freedom unconstrained by responsibility, at least in a meaningful framing envisioned by the Founding Fathers.  If freedom is to be maintained meaningfully, it entails limiting our actions.  It means recognizing duty and commitment, and it also entails determining that those you surround yourself with and those you follow adhere to the same ideals of truth. For our youth, learning to recognize those qualities is one of the key steps for maintaining stewardship over their own lives.  Education is not going to produce a sound mind with healthy values.  In fact I would argue that many times it is the highly educated who fool themselves into thinking that the norms of truth and virtue can be manipulated or reinterpreted to suit their own goals and ends.  A sound mind is the result of the combination of familial values and a recognition of the mores of society.  That does require a sense of history, and an understanding of what the Founders thought would perpetuate our society. They are moral and religious concepts. It could be argued that these concepts are ethical ones, but the Founders view of Natural Law was that the Creator gave us the facilities for thinking and for freedom. They are vested onto to us by no other.

We no longer instill that knowledge today.  We know the phrase “separation of church and state” and separation of branches.  We impart a modicum of knowledge of civics, but do we teach ethics in school to the extent where the good outcomes intended by the ideals our society was built upon are emphasized, and do we instruct why must those ideals be in place in order for our society to not only function, but for us to flourish as a people?

While many regard Jefferson as originating the separation between church and state doctrine, it’s important to recognize that while he wanted to establish freedom OF religion, he was not advocating necessarily for freedom FROMreligion.  In order for religion to flourish, it was not to be hindered by favoring one form over another.  Having experienced religious discrimination by the Church of England during British sovereignty over Virginia, Jefferson wanted to eliminate the ability of government to force or favor a particular religion at the expense of others.  Our purpose here is not to debate the implications of the separation of religion and state, but to gain an understanding of what the thinking was during the time our country was founded.  Jefferson believed that pursuit of your free will was what God had intended for man in order to fulfill his role as designed.

“For the use of … reason… every one is responsible to the God who has planted it in his breast, as a light for his guidance, and that, by which alone he will be judged,” Jefferson explained.[2] 

These are not hard concepts to grasp, yet ask many today, and kids in particular, about these facets of our Founding and gauge what their response is. Can we safely assume this is included in our present curriculum as a starting point?  If not, are we as parents doing what we can to compensate?  

Eliminating individual stewardship over your own life eliminates freedom because it removes choice, as it avoids being faced with limitations that must be overcome in order to fulfill the promise of stewardship. Just as fields must be cultivated, so must integrity, virtue, honesty, candor and a sense of commitment.  As an adult this should be obvious, but to a youth who is subject to peer pressure, dealing with changing hormones and life’s growing pains, it may not be apparent at all.  Today, our institutions teach the greater good, equity, and a quasi religious responsibility to the planet to combat climate change, but it is all in the context of being congruent with collective salvation.  Stewardship is about the individual fulfilling their responsibility of employing their free will.  

Take the following statement from Jefferson’s into consideration:

[Whereas] Almighty God hath created the mind free, and manifested his supreme will that free it shall remain by making it altogether insusceptible of restraint; that all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments, or burthens, or by civil incapacitations, tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness, and are a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, who being lord both of body and mind, yet chose not to propagate it by coercions on either, as was in his Almighty power

While the language is complex, the thought is straightforward.  God gave you free will, by design, and it should remain free.  To coerce or direct thoughts is at cross purposes to God’s plan.  But the individual has the responsibility to fulfill that plan themselves.

In other words, you get the latitude to measure your own rope.

Ensuring Leadership Skills are Never Obtained

Many times we have emphasized that our cultural heritage is being occluded from us. The 20th century is a transition from people hoping to obtain achievements to seeking entertainment, and in our current time we have argued that we experience entrainment. Our colleague Kelly Trowhill wrote of this idea of the phenomenon of synchronization that takes place between members of a theater audience in her chapter “Stinking Thinking or Entertainment Entrainment” of our book Severed Conscience. 

Moods and states also show up in how our brain deals with stimulation. Recall the above photo of the limbic system. It is the alert center that helps us to know how to respond to specific stimuli regarding threat and love. 

So what is entrainment? Entrainment is how we are captivated and influenced through produced stimuli. “Entrainment is perhaps the most widely studied social motor coordination process (See Schmidt, Fitzpatrick, Caron, & Mergeche, in press). For instance, two people in rocking chairs involuntarily synchronize their rocking frequencies (See Richardson, Marsh, Isenhower, Goodman, & Schmidt, 2007), and audiences in theaters tend to clap in unison (See Neda, Ravasz, Brechte, Vicsek, & Barabasi, 2000). 

There she emphasized that our online habits are feeding our brains the addictive elements that lead to us being manipulated. Finding tribal communities online, and saturating yourself with imagery, memes, video and continually scrolling seeking new delights can implant thoughts and triggers that you may not be aware of.

If this happens with adults who have more experience with outside influences, where does that leave teens or younger children when unsupervised on social media? 

I wrote of this in Our Children’s Live, Online. We have allowed our kids to apply even more social pressure on one another, and have left them alone while doing it. This has become a trap for teens resulting in severe mental health issues.

Group acceptance is found online. Conform or be cast out. Pretty simple message that can be delivered and enforced if all your friends are online seeing your failures, seeing you get called out for not fitting in. For being too heavy. For being the wrong gender. For being afraid of sexual practices. With this fear your children are vulnerable to influences that affect them without you ever knowing. And the fear of being rejected keeps them locked into this pattern of thinking.

That’s what they are learning today, and it’s instilling self censorship as kids are terrified of being rejected. Conformance guarantees a seat at the table.

We also need to recognize that social media is an immense laboratory, where there are many influences and ways that reactions can be measured.  Every feed, timeline, click, video and emoji is sifted through, yet we do not possess the audacity to demand complete transparency from these platforms.  At a minimum we should recognize something is amiss, and simple observation can distill that the longer a child stays online, the more his or her anxiety, chance of depression and weight gain increase. 

The addictive nature of social media will consume a child’s time, and place them at the mercy of group think.  Thinking back to what we read of Jefferson’s statements regarding fulfilling your role by maximizing your freedom, are children able to do that while so ensnared in a hive mind platform, with little supervision?  And what does that do to hinder the preparation of a young mind to receive instruction?

There is another consideration here.  Let’s say that a child is not on social media.  Are our institutions at least providing them with basic instruction regarding why truth and virtue are necessary for our society to function?  As a high trust society, we must teach the next generations how we arrived at that high level of trust.  As well as how that distinguishes our society from others.  Making contrasts and comparisons are a crucial skill, but it seems that culturally we no longer have the will to perform that analysis.  Passing on the strength of our form of government and building a moral foundation is a combination of parental focus, because morality begins at home, as well as solid institutions.  But do our schools do an adequate job of picking up the baton and helping to paint a picture of why morality is foundational to our retaining our rights?

If those basic skills and rudimentary knowledge is lacking, there can be little chance of someone developing a firm foundation for judging character for leadership.  With little to compare behaviors to, and with little knowledge of what qualities virtuous society requires, it becomes easy to see how entertainment and entertainment clouds people’s radar.  Will someone be swayed by the group when a leader is well liked, will it shut down deeper questions from being considered?  Highly likely if people are unaccustomed to asserting their individual free will and fulfilling responsibilities.  And with no understanding that fulfilling your responsibility to yourself is more important than conforming to the expectations of a group, the meaning of stewardship diminishes further.

Where Is The Lighthouse In this Storm

We have the tools and guidelines in our midst.  There was no perfect time, but when you compare our behavior and reactions to prior times, you can see a perhaps a freer time.  We shouldn’t shy away from pursuing distinguishing ourselves from other cultures, or other people.  It is not to belittle others, it is meant to raise all according to their talents.  Jefferson wrote to Adams in 1813:

“natural aristocracy among men,” is grounded in superior demonstrations of virtues and intellectual talents (to John Adams, October 28, 1813). This natural aristocracy is fundamentally different from the “artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth, without either virtue or talents… 

Some may claim that this is akin to a political elite, or the Philosophy Kings. But isn’t this a preference for excellence? Jefferson also stated that we could give our minds over to authority, tyrants nor a group of elite. Quite clearly God was at his justification.

But our rulers can have authority over such natural rights only as we have submitted to them. The rights of conscience we never submitted, we could not submit. We are answerable for them to our God

We maintain a relationship with our Creator that is beyond civil government, beyond a monarchy. This is what is needed to be focused on in our schools. This is fire. This says never submit.