On Ethical Leadership

by Anthony Underwood

Too often the idea of leadership is reduced to simply convincing others to do what someone wants or needs to be done; leadership as coercion or trickery. Our values suggest otherwise.

In defining leadership let us consider “where” exactly people should be lead. We can do so by looking at the work and life of Viktor Frankl. Born in 1905 in Vienna to a family of Jewish civil servants, Frankl would go on to found the third great school of Viennese Psychological therapy.

After completing studies in both psychiatry and neuroscience, Frankl specialized in suicide prevention, and went on to lead a suicide treatment center for women where he treated over 30,000 patients between 1933 and 1937.

In 1938 Nazi Germany annexed Austria and shortly thereafter began instituting their anti-Semitic and so-called racial purity policies. First, Frankl lost his leadership position, then the right to work at the suicide center, and then the right to work on “Aryans,” as the Nazi elite styled themselves.

In September of 1942, Frankl along with his wife and parents were sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp. Once there he and other medical professionals established a clandestine medical practice for prisoners that focused on the treatment of depression and prevention of suicide.

Instead of losing his will to live or becoming hopeless, Frankl did exactly what he knew how to do best. Even in this most grave of circumstances, this most absurd and surreal environment of pure evil, surrounded by pointless and nearly random violence and brutality, life never lost meaning. He treated patients; composed lectures, and wrote his greatest work on therapy, using only his memory and precious scraps of paper.

On April 27, 1945, Frankl was liberated by American troops. He was to learn that of all the members of his family who had been interred in Nazi concentration camps, he was the only one to survive.
One year after his rescue, he published his most famous work; Man's Search for Meaning (editions of which have been published by the UUA’s Beacon Press). As recently as 1997, the New York Times called Frankl’s work one of the 10 most influential in the U.S.

In the book, Frankl identifies what he sees as the central truth of human life. Freud had proposed that it was the “will to pleasure”; the pursuit of pleasure, avoidance of pain and the taming of that impulse. Adler suggested that the real cause behind human action was the “will to power”; that is, achievement, ambition and striving to reach the highest possible position in life, and overcoming feelings of inferiority.

Warning against "...affluence, hedonism, [and] materialism. Frankl boldly declared that the true motivational, essential drive in life, the underlying cause for all of humanities otherwise nebulous choices, is the “will to meaning”; the quest not to find the one, true meaning of life (as such didn’t exist) but to determine for yourself the meaning of your own life on an ongoing basis.

Frankl stated that his personal experience in concentration camps and in treating holocaust survivors revealed to him that:

1. Life has meaning under all circumstances, even the most miserable ones, and that therefore all human life was deserving of dignity.
2. And that we have inalienable, undeniable freedom to find that meaning.

Frankl further noted that one’s meaning cannot be can be found by isolating one’s self from the world and its experiences; that contrary to popular myth hermits gain no wisdom by isolation in a cave. Rather he held that a person’s meaning is forged:

1. by creating a work or doing a deed;
2. by experiencing something or encountering someone; or
3. By the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering.

However, it is important to realize, as did Abraham Maslow, that it is unlikely
for a person to reach the point where they can pursue their own life’s meaning if they are chronically hungry, or tormented by emotional abuse, or without shelter, or medical care or undereducated, or lacking in some other basic psychological or physical necessity.

This is where leadership exists. It is an important personal milestone to become self aware; to accept final responsibility for the course and meaning of your own life. However, it is the very essence of leadership, to work to create the environment and the opportunity for all persons to successfully navigate the journey that we all must make from the pleasure principle to narcissism to true self-awareness.

First Century Gnostic writer Valentinius wrote in the Gospel of Truth that it was the duty of spiritual leaders to “Make firm the foot of those who have stumbled, and stretch out your hand to those who are ill. Feed those who are hungry, and give rest to those who are weary. Raise up those who wish to rise and awaken those who sleep”. I believe this is the essence of all true leadership.