See the Series Introduction for Just Tao It, Part I: HERE
See the Just Tao It Series Introduction Tao/It on-ramp, PART II: HERE
See Just Tao It, Chapter 1: HERE
From my interpretation of the Tao Te Ching, Chapter 24 (Unpublished):
—
We are living through a crisis of leadership.
Not a shortage of leaders. A crisis of what kind of leadership rises to power and what kind of systems reward it.
Across democracies, corporations, institutions, media ecosystems, and movements, we increasingly reward leaders who are loud, certain, dominating, image-obsessed, allergic to criticism, and convinced that strength means never admitting error.
This is not new. Human history carries many versions of this story.
What feels different now is the scale, speed, and amplification of it all. Technology multiplies emotional contagion. Algorithms reward outrage. Performance outruns reflection. Certainty spreads faster than wisdom.
And somewhere along the way, domination started getting mistaken for competence.
I’ve spent more decades in the applied behavioral science field than I care to admit. Long enough to watch leadership theories rise and fall. Long enough to sit with organizations trying to recover from the damage caused by leaders who confused dominance with strength and performance with wisdom. Long enough to watch intelligent human beings become trapped inside systems organized more around fear, image management, and ego protection than learning, trust, accountability, or reality.
And honestly, the last decade has shaken me.
Not because one political party failed us and another succeeded. This goes deeper than partisan identity. What we’ve been living through reveals something profoundly human — and profoundly dangerous — about power, fear, and the collective shadow.
The patterns are no longer subtle.
The performance of greatness.
The addiction to attention.
The humiliation of opponents.
The inability to admit error.
The demand for loyalty over truth.
The inflation of certainty.
The treatment of expertise and institutional knowledge as threats rather than resources.
And perhaps most dangerous of all:
the growing belief that cruelty signals strength.
Behavioral science has warned about these patterns for decades. Jungian psychology warned too. What Jung called the Shadow does not disappear because people become successful, powerful, intelligent, or admired. In fact, unexamined power often feeds it.
When insecurity remains outside awareness, it often compensates through overconfidence.
The ego expands to protect itself from weakness, fear, inadequacy, or uncertainty. A public persona forms around certainty, superiority, and control. The louder the performance becomes, the more fragile something underneath may actually be.
Research on overconfidence shows remarkably consistent distortions. People overestimate their competence. They believe they are more capable, more moral, and more accurate than evidence supports. They reject feedback. They lose the capacity for self-questioning. They surround themselves with affirmation because contradiction starts feeling dangerous to identity itself.
And once enough power gathers around that dynamic, reality itself becomes difficult to hear.
The loudest voice in the room is not always the strongest.
Sometimes it is the most frightened.
This is where the Tao feels almost painfully relevant.
Those who prove how bright they glow,
cast dim illumination.
Years ago, Bert Parlee, Ann Deaton, and I wrote about Drama and Empowerment in And: Volume Two — specifically how fear-based systems pull people into reactive roles that distort perception and relationships.
Drawing from Stephen Karpman’s Drama Triangle and David Emerald’s Empowerment Dynamic, we explored how people trapped in fear often rotate through predictable patterns: Persecutor, Rescuer, and Victim.
The patterns are everywhere now.
The Persecutor attacks, blames, humiliates, and controls.
The Rescuer over-functions, creates dependence, and confuses saving others with leadership.
The Victim claims helplessness while surrendering responsibility.
And the frightening thing is this: entire organizations, political systems, and cultures can begin organizing themselves around these roles.
Fear spreads.
Projection spreads.
Distortion spreads.
Human beings stop responding to reality and start reacting to emotional threat.
That chapter argued that empowerment requires a different movement: shifting from blame toward challenge, from rescuing toward coaching, from helplessness toward responsibility and creation.
Reading it again now, I realize how deeply this connects to Confidence AND Humility.
Confidence without Humility easily slips into the Persecutor role.
Humility without Confidence can slide toward Victim patterns disguised as virtue.
And rescuing others without boundaries often becomes another form of ego attachment entirely.
We need something more developed than all three.
Jim Collins found something similar in Good to Great. After studying companies that sustained extraordinary performance over time, he discovered that the strongest leaders rarely matched the cultural stereotype of the heroic executive.
In fact, many of the most effective leaders were remarkably modest people.
Collins called this Level 5 Leadership: fierce professional will paired with deep personal humility.
They were ambitious, disciplined, and courageous. But the ambition served the mission, the organization, and the larger whole — not personal glorification.
That distinction matters.
Because our culture increasingly rewards the opposite.
We reward appearance over substance.
Performance over depth.
Certainty over reflection.
Confidence is not the same thing as self-importance.
Healthy confidence allows leaders to make difficult decisions, tolerate pressure, hold boundaries, and move toward meaningful goals without losing themselves in criticism or uncertainty.
But Confidence to the neglect of Humility eventually distorts perception itself.
Leaders stop listening.
Feedback becomes threat.
Opponents become enemies.
Reality gets filtered through ego protection.
Collins described great leaders as practicing “window and mirror” leadership. When success came, they looked out the window and credited others. When failure came, they looked in the mirror first.
That is almost the opposite of what many systems reward today.
Edgar Schein reached similar conclusions from another direction. He argued that leadership weakens when leaders become trapped in command-and-control assumptions requiring them to appear all-knowing, emotionally invulnerable, and perpetually certain.
Instead, Schein argued for humble leadership.
Not weak leadership.
Not passive leadership.
Leadership grounded in curiosity, learning, relationship, and what he called “here-and-now humility” — the recognition that other people may understand important realities better than we do.
That requires something difficult:
the willingness to not always be the smartest person in the room.
Schein called this Humble Inquiry.
The ability to ask real questions without already needing to control the answers.
That kind of leadership builds trust. It strengthens learning. It helps people speak honestly before systems move too far from reality.
And reality matters.
Especially now.
Artificial intelligence now enters this already unstable landscape as accelerant.
AI can generate the appearance of brilliance without requiring wisdom, maturity, integrity, or development underneath it.
Arguments that sound convincing.
Strategies that appear sophisticated.
Confidence that feels earned.
Certainty that sounds authoritative.
Now almost anyone can manufacture the performance of intelligence instantly.
Which means the distance between appearance and substance can become enormous.
And in a culture already rewarding performance over depth, this is gasoline near open flame.
The leader who sounds most confident may understand the least.
The most polished strategy may contain the weakest thinking.
The person willing to say “I don’t know” may now be the one closest to wisdom.
At the same time, Humility to the neglect of Confidence creates different dangers.
Necessary boundaries weaken.
Harmful behavior goes unchallenged.
People confuse self-erasure with wisdom.
Important decisions get avoided.
We need both.
The groundedness to act decisively.
And the maturity to recognize that no human being sees completely.
I’ll admit something personally.
Over the last ten years, there have been moments where I struggled to hold onto hope myself. Watching cruelty normalized. Watching basic decency weaken. Watching truth become negotiable. Watching human beings treat one another as abstractions rather than neighbors.
Reality without Hope is a dangerous place to live.
Jim Collins wrote about another essential tension: Reality AND Hope.
Real leaders confront difficult truths honestly without surrendering belief in the possibility of meaningful progress.
I need that reminder.
Because if I lose faith in humanity completely, then I’m in the wrong field. I can’t spend a lifetime believing human beings can grow, heal, learn, and lead more wisely — only to abandon that conviction when circumstances become difficult.
I think about my sister Lori often. She lives with terminal cancer and somehow still creates hope for other people facing similar suffering. She started a foundation helping people hold onto possibility under circumstances that would overwhelm many human beings.
She reminds me that courage is not denial.
Hope is not naïveté.
And humility is not weakness.
In fact, she embodies something many leaders never learn:
the capacity to face painful reality honestly while remaining committed to human dignity and possibility.
That feels important right now.
Because if I look carefully enough, I can still see islands of coherence everywhere.
Teachers protecting children.
Nurses comforting strangers.
Communities feeding families.
Scientists pursuing truth.
Journalists holding power accountable.
Parents teaching kindness in cruel times.
Human beings refusing to surrender their humanity to fear and spectacle.
They exist.
And maybe they matter more than we realize.
Maybe the future does not belong to whoever shouts loudest.
Maybe it belongs to whoever can hold both Confidence AND Humility long enough to help build something worthy of trust.
The Tao keeps returning to a difficult truth modern culture often resists:
those most desperate to appear powerful may be the least prepared to hold power wisely.
Because people who need constant admiration rarely serve anything larger than themselves for very long.
And perhaps that is one of the deepest leadership questions of our time:
Can human beings develop enough Confidence to act courageously — and enough Humility to hold power without becoming possessed by it?
Maybe our future depends on it.
Here’s a Polarity Map for Confidence AND Humility:
INVITATIONS:
To use an “AI-trained Chat w/Cliff for Step 1, Seeing” CLICK HERE.
Ready for the Polarity Advantage? Go deeper into Polarity Thinking, see our online self-directed Credentialing and Introduction to Polarity Practice or in-person training with Barry Johnson and me at Kayser Ridge by CLICKING HERE.
