We have recently been watching one of the films on Netflix which takes as its background the political life of Korea. In this Korean film, the main character is a scientist who, after a terrorist attack, finds himself president of the whole country. Innocent of political life and devoid of ambition in this arena, he has to negotiate his way through the strong political forces in the country. He also needs to make the decisions which he believes to be for the good of all, rather than for his personal benefit or that of a particular political faction.
The confrontation between the rationality and objectivity of an independent technocrat and the experience of seasoned politicians, is the basic theme of the film. All the experienced politicians know that holding on to their own and their party’s power is a major part of what they do. The idea that there could be an honest broker in their midst, completely uninterested in personal power is a major challenge to the assumptions of the whole system. Serving a country in a way that meets the democratic hopes of the people is, of course, held up as the ultimate end of government, but the reward for the successful politicians is also personal and institutional power. Along the way there may have been ethical shortcuts, betrayals, dishonesty and even lying. The unspoken question of the film is whether there can ever be technologies of government, uncorrupted by political power-games. Do we always have to submit ourselves to be ruled by people who are motivated by a desire for influence and power? Can there ever be such a thing as a ‘science’ of government?
When we talk about politics, whether it be in government, the Church or in any other organisation, we are referring to that messy overlap between the hoped-for flourishing of an institution and the personal ambitions of those who pull the levers within. Politics will always be in some way linked to the process of gaining (or losing) power in an institution. Many people can be motivated by the offer of power. Many also firmly believe that they can hold it without succumbing to any of its dangerous seductions. For others, power represents the opportunity of acquiring wealth. At the national level currently in the UK, we are told that politics makes some individuals, such as Boris Johnson, poorer in the medium term. Johnson was able to make far more money writing newspaper columns than the £150K he receives as head of the country. In the longer term there are huge rewards to be obtained from book deals and speech fees, but these are not available in the here and now. The rewards of high office do not include, in most Western democracies at any rate, instant wealth. The evident corruption of former President Trump and his cronies is, hopefully, to be regarded as a rare exception to what we would like to think are the norms of political life among democracies in the West.
If instant wealth is not afforded to our rulers, we can allow that there are, in the short term, perks to be had which make up somewhat for the stresses of political responsibility. We have already alighted on the single word, power. Even without the promise of instant wealth, there are various ways of enjoying its possession. There is the simple gratification of having people around you open doors, chauffeur your car, and generally pay attention to all your domestic needs. Wherever you go, you become the centre of attention. Such attention may be enjoyable; equally it may be a burden. One thing is clear is that the experience of having this kind of power and being the centre of attention may change and corrupt the individual. The personality becomes so used to being thought of as superior or special that when this flattery is no longer available there are withdrawal symptoms, similar to the withdrawal from an addictive drug. This expectation of a constant supply of ‘feeding’ and adulation is an early indication of a narcissistic disorder.
We need to go back one stage to this phenomenon of power and think about the way that it is enjoyed by those who possess it. I find it helpful to think about power and its enjoyment along a continuum. At one end there is the completely altruistic person whose only use of power is to achieve change and subsequent flourishing for a group of people. S/He enjoys the satisfaction and pleasure of a job well-done. To serve or love so that another may flourish is close to a definition of Christian love. This was the only reward sought by the non-political leader in the Korean film. A leader who tirelessly works to take a country out of a crisis caused by war or economic collapse deserves the applause of those who benefit and the positive verdict of history. This is precisely what we would like to see in all our politicians in Church and State or wherever they hold sway. If only this were the norm.
Along the continuum are found those whose motives and actions are a mixture of altruism and selfishness. Seldom are motives ever completely pure. At the far end of the continuum of power, we see the malignant narcissist. This is the individual who seems to be ‘milking’ every occasion as an opportunity for self-aggrandisement and the humiliation and exploitation of others. In some cases, there seems to be a total absence of any concern for other people in the exercise of this power. All we see is endless self-gratification and self-inflation. To call those who operate at the exploitative end of the scale of narcissistic behaviour is to raise further issues. Are they behaving this way because they ‘need’ the gratification that power provides to protect a fragile ego? Alternatively, and more commonly, are they just enjoying the exercise of power because it is there. Are they, in other words, what I call ‘situational narcissists?’
The spectrum/continuum we have described in the way power is used/misused, is observable right across the board. We can observe both extremes in operation in places as diverse as schools, vicarages, company offices and bishops’ palaces. Individuals may sometimes be observed moving down the spectrum. From originally using power only to serve others, they may find themselves over the year approaching the other end of the spectrum. Here power is used typically to gratify the self at the expense of others. When I mentioned my sketch idea in the last blog, I should also have suggested that theological students learn to recognise the narcissistic contaminants that creep into the use of power. The question might be asked. To what extent is power operating here in a way that serves the one who has it? How should this use of power be described on a narcissistic spectrum? Obviously there will be times when motivations are not obvious. A desire to serve can be mixed up with an urge to satisfy self-needs. But it is the wrestling with these questions that is important. We repeat one issue that was mentioned last time. It will normally be almost impossible to challenge the individual in a place of narcissistic power. Alongside the power that is possessed to control an institution will be found the skilled use of tools to defend and deflect all challenges. In short, the narcissist can make life very unpleasant for those who try to stand up to him/her.
The recent book that very powerfully describes the extreme abuses of power through narcissistic processes is one by Daniel Shaw, Traumatic Narcissism. I mention this book especially to draw attention to the title. It is a work that explores how the extremes of narcissistic behaviour can do immense harm. Harm is caused by any abuser but also the hurt is enhanced by the bystander/leader with no insight into the processes at work in the abuse. The abuse we meet sometimes in church settings is traumatic, even catastrophic. There is plenty more to be explored in this area. I am setting down a few pointers here for developing a set of categories that can be used when we see dysfunctional and exploitative leadership in a church setting.
We began this blog by suggesting that politics is best thought of as the way leaders choose to deploy institutional and personal power. With this understanding we can see that politics can be a much larger concept than just that found in the seat of government. While politics and power in themselves are both neutral concepts, politicians in every setting will use power in any number of ways, depending on such things as psychological need or personal morality. Politics needs the injection of other disciplines, like philosophy, ethics and economics to evaluate its workings and interpret what is going on. These amateur attempts at analysis and commentary in this blog may help some of my readers to penetrate a little better in understanding the functioning and culture of church power. I sometimes feel we are travelling down a dark tunnel with few lights to guide our understanding of the way power is deployed and experienced. We all the time need better signposts to help us avoid completely floundering in incomprehension and confusion. That is a dangerous place to be, not only for the individual but for the whole Church.
Bad doctrine (twisting of Scriptures) traumatises anyway, promotes malignant narcissists who hurt more, and the persecuting of the traumatised (especially by delaying addressing anything), which hurts more; then because the also-rans see this as a success story it leads to more bad doctrine.
Many thanks. There has been an explosion of comment in the last few years about the violation of established ‘norms’, usually to be found in the more self-righteous sections of the commentariat. The narrative thus pedalled is that, thanks to the corrosive effect of the internet upon the print and TV (i.e., that the incomes of the commentariat have been eroded and their privileged positions as the arbiters of the conventional wisdom have been challenged) we are living in an epoch of demagogues, liars, opportunists, etc. practically unknown in the annals of human history, or at least within living memory.
I must beg to differ. If my characterisation of this narrative is accurate, I would note that – if anything – the internet and 24 hour news cycle have served largely to shorten the memories of people who ought to know better.
History, including much very recent history, is replete with fake news, demagoguery, populism, fraud (and other forms of peculation), lies and opportunism. At least the likes of Johnson are so transparently opportunistic that we can see them for what they are. Far more insidious are those politicians who pose as righteous servants of the public, and of the state (or, even worse, those who delude themselves and others into thinking that they are), yet who are really just as dishonest, ruthless and opportunistic as the next shyster chancer.
Who, really, has had the more corrosive impact upon public faith in the state over the last generation: Johnson, who has played fast and loose with the actual facts (but whose evidently sincere belief in the harm of lockdowns may or may not have been a contributing factor in the UK’s large COVID death toll), or Blair, who either dissembled about WMD or deluded himself into believing that his ‘facts’ must be retrofitted into his policy (the resulting death toll in Iraq running from 208,000 to over 1m, depending on the estimates)?
To paraphrase Acton’s advice to Creighton: all power corrupts. People who put themselves into any position of power do so because they perceive themselves as being better than the rest. Power is merely narcissism in office. Perhaps power should be given only to those individuals who do their utmost to avoid it. That, at least, would happily rule out almost the entirety of the political and administrative class.
“The confrontation between the rationality and objectivity of an independent technocrat and the experience of seasoned politicians, is the basic theme of the film.” I think that there are some grounds for arguing that technocrats are arguably worse, and often more consistently wrong (as well as blinded by their own arrogance) than most common or garden hack politicians: https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/may-2021/the-sphinx-who-reshaped-europe/. Indeed, technocrats are perhaps even more dangerous because their predicates are often [mis-]informed by some slipshod pseudo-science, like economics, dressed up as The Truth.
Beware of simplistic readings of the unreliably named Boris: I don’t want to turn this thread into an explanation of:
– virology; covid 19 is a very serious combination of long known but greatly ignored illnesses; several classes of viral illnesses mutually potentising each other; how covid 19 tends to reduce flu; false negatives
– the economics of antiviral medicines (always overly rationed) versus the economics of destroying small businesses which had a safe opening plan by this time last year (most of them)
– wrongful melodrama re. keeping company with the dying and isolating the disabled
– why the low death toll (shrewdly arrived at January 2020 information refers) is already bad
– why the covid 19 epidemics are bad
– why it is wrong to keep abolishing the 6 ft rule
– why it is bad to reward those who held a mass horse race meeting several months after these epidemics were known to be bad
– why it is bad to announce too few official symptoms of the covid 19 epidemics
– the huge numbers of chronically ill people that we are getting due to many forms of carelessness
Don’t fall for either/or dialectics. There is too much reality, and too much that’s practical, at stake.
In churches, of course blurring the “of the world” / “in the world” thing is very vivid always. Roland Barthes highlighted Loyola’s mechanising of religion (making the interloper the sole controller of course), just when portable firearms came in. The US Civil War raised all these problems to industrial level. The false reaction to covid 19 has made industry into something without any work.
My observation of the “safeguarding industry” phenomenon, partly non-C of E based, is:
– inevitably everything non-textbook gets run past safeguarders. Of course much of it may not be their pidgeon, but they MUST refer people effectively
– senior pastors no longer regard safeguarding as being part of pastoring (whatever else it has to be also), and the “industry” don’t see themselves as co-pastoring
– “submit” and “pastor” in Holy Scripture mean coordinate, they don’t mean kow tow
– bishop appointees or safeguarding officers alike, have to be not so much “pillars of the establishment” but people of Holy Spirit BELIEF
– hence independence shouldn’t mean disdain. My God has an actual HEART.
– jobsworthery (how New Reformism started) blurred into theatrical sabotaging (another R Barthes angle) (what New Reformism showcases have become)
The pincer movement now being that if we don’t like the theatrical sabotaging we ought to instead have underhand sabotaging, whether in religion, or in politics / economics. The common goal being to mentally demoralise billions. Beware when by mass narcissism (nihilism) what might have been personalities get melded into the monolith / jagganauth.
Michael, I’m afraid I think you’re mistaken in your description of covid. It’s not a combination, it’s a disease, with bunch of possible symptoms, not all of which are always present, but always caused by one kind of virus. It doesn’t tend to reduce the incidence of flu, it is the social distancing and hand sanitising that does that. Likewise with the reduction in the common cold.
I don’t see senior pastors “no longer” regarding safeguarding as their job, I see that they never have. And are not improving much.
Hand cleaning is among things the current politicians have got right. I was trying to imply better nuance around propagandistic abuse of the covid 19 situation (I don’t know why Froghole mentioned it). Blair-WMD was glaring, but then he had trouble (known by a very large number of people in huge detail at the time) getting “his side” on board.
What fool in JCB wants to rubbish their firm by having him drive through a row of boxes (i.e us) in that video? They are only hanging JCB out to dry (I was there when much the same was done more than once under different brand names).
Thus the Fletcher likes are just hanging us out to dry. In churches the musical chairs (Boris First, no, Dave First) are likewise a distraction. (The moment I heard Dave, in 2004, I shuddered to know Dave.) Thus beware the monolith behind the fashionable personalities.
In regard to the “industry” I was pointing at an increase in jobsworthery in big denominations among those not in the “industry” and in no way weakening your point: from “we don’t pastor” to “we don’t pastor because we’re not them”, who don’t either because they have copied the same antagonism to ordinary folks. Among small ones I’ve known bad and good. My prayers will follow you.
First hand experience of a pathological narcissist will tell you that, for them, you have no real existence at all. Only insofar as you feed their narcissistic demands, do you appear for them. Typically their family members will survive by fulfilling these needs.
Can these narcissists become leaders? The answer is probably no for most of them, because their poverty of personality usually becomes quickly obvious, and they are passed over for promotion.
A few, however, have that charisma of grandiosity that seems to engage the attention, interest and following of others. Being wealthy or having a flamboyant lifestyle helps in this case and followers (those who feed the narcissism) are hoping for some of the wealth and apparent success to rub off on them.
Most young children have a relatively healthy grandiosity which they quickly grow out of as they face their failures and receive reasonable parenting.
Most people training for a profession aren’t narcissists, but have perfectly normal aspirations for promotion to at least the next level based on a realistic self esteem and an accurate appraisal of their abilities.
Those who have been in positions of leadership will usually tell you how demanding it can be. For many, the demands of a long working day and tricky staff relationships can make these elevated positions less attractive after a time. They are very happy to close the door, turn off the phone and email and bury themselves in their books. Bliss.
Even on the way up the career ladder, most people having sampled management responsibilities, become ambivalent about further promotion and accept where they get to.
But we’ve all seen the few who determine that only the top job will satisfy their insatiable desire for recognition. Most in these positions are not like this, but we can likely name a few who are.
The true severe narcissist can never really bring success to the organisations they end up leading because their only concern is themselves. When you see organisational failure, take a look at the leader and see what you think.
Most children grow out of their narcissism, but when it persists, it tends to be intractable. Once in power, if they make it that far, it’s almost impossible to be successful. Thank goodness for fixed terms of office.
‘The true severe narcissist can never really bring success to the organisations they end up leading because their only concern is themselves.’
I’ve observed this in action. Narcissists don’t like to see others do well, they’re threatened by it. So of course the churches or organisations they lead don’t flourish as they might, either. When working for narcissists I’ve often wondered why they couldn’t see that if the team members were encouraged and supported to do their best, the church or business would do well and the leader would get the glory (because getting the glory mattered to these men).
I recall a member of one congregation saying to me, ‘We’ve had a lot of curates over the years. Some of them were good, and they changed. The ones that didn’t change, didn’t last.’ The vicar was pathetically threatened by successful subordinates, and set about de-skilling them. Naturally, the church didn’t grow in the way he’d set his heart on.
Similarly, a good prime minister will have a Cabinet of strong and able people. A weak and narcissistic PM will fill the Cabinet with sub-competent yes-sayers who will stroke his ego and not put him in the shade.
Narcissism will be behind at least some of the individual leadership failings in the Churches. A few at least.
A more global malaise is reflected in the Institutional Narcissism many of us are unwittingly part of in the Church of England for example. “We are us. We look to no other. We are all there is and what we are part of has inestimable value.”
This group mindset doesn’t see mistakes or even crimes committed in its midst. Only in retrospect, when everyone else has seen it and the perpetrators languishing in gaol, does the truth dawn. But the tendency then is to deflect and project “it couldn’t happen now, it couldn’t have been us”.
Voices of reality are usually in my experience unwelcome. In other fields, particularly say in sport, results lead the way and there can be less hiding behind ineffectual phantasy thinking. There’s nothing more sobering than a relegation nor more self assuring than a team trophy at the end of the season.
Back in the day, the schools/colleges HMI never looked for applications. They worked on the principle that anyone who wanted to be an inspector was automatically disqualified. Thatcher got rid of them because they were independent and disagreed with her!
When I went forward for Reader training, the Licensed Reader had gone two years before me, and someone else went the year after. What became clear was no one on the PCC remembered what you did! And the clergy didn’t know either. And no, they didn’t look it up before the meeting!
I recall the letter to the Hebrews – Let us suffer with Jesus outside the camp. Opposite of narcissism perhaps.
Agreed David. Jesus was surely the very antithesis of the narcissist. I’m sure his approach was incomprehensible to the established religious leaders of the day, whose qualities repeated today illustrate Stephen’s posts so closely.
In my experience leaders who are narcissistic are unaware of this fact and it raises the question how can this attribute ever be iradicated. They appreciate their dedicated followers who dreamily stare at the film star like vicar.
This dedication can occur with an outstanding, authentic leader, however the congregation will find Christ not a narcissist.
Most problem pastors I’ve known, and known of, are manic. With or without pills, this should be self-manageable with lots of hard work, companionship and right belief. But church bureaucracies, or those movements that substitute for bureaucracies, don’t care – they mistake it for enthusiasm.
Checking out character of appointees won’t work well until belief has been put right. “We are passionate about crafting and curating your designer outlet experience of our illusory product.” “From him who has not, let what he has be taken away from him.”
I’ve known narcissists of all shades of belief. ‘Right’ beliefs – if we could even define such – are not alone the answer.
It’s true, though, that narcissists will often tend to go before belief systems that feed their narcissism and enable them to feed off others. If this is the case, correcting the belief alone is not going to help.
Can I ask everyone for prayer, please? I’m seeing the DSO tomorrow. I’m hoping for some movement towards recognition and restitution. It will be about flippin time!
Of course. I hope it goes really well. Keep us posted!
Thoughts and prayers!
Blessings and prayers!
How does a really “nasty piece of work” end up in senior church leadership?
Those who follow this blog and other reports of serious church abuse will be in no doubt that some pretty bad people end up in charge. That this should happen in the Body of Christ seems utterly inexplicable.
I’m sure others have seen this too, but I’ve observed the curious dynamic where a timid, rather lacklustre congregation seeks change. “We need a big hitter”. So they employ a hatchet man to shift things along.
In essence if you employ someone like this you are asking, requiring them to do things you’re not prepared to do yourselves. So you get the bully to edge people off the staff, or more difficult, displace the volunteers you don’t like.
The dynamic includes most people turning a blind eye. In the end, when the distress becomes contagious and can no longer be contained, the elders make moves and the bully finds himself now being bullied out. Ugly, isn’t it?
Yes and it resolves nothing except a sick kind of “public relations”. That is why right belief has to include the existence of discernment, the continuance of actual prayer about all things, actual inference of the meanings of Holy Scripture, and actual Holy Spirit fruits / gifts / virtues like prudence and care for those around us. That way, the monolith won’t get to front themselves with alternating “softies”, hard men, gormless types according to the whims of fashion – all equally as bad when fronting the monolith.
The meeting went better than I thought, but there’s a great deal to process. She’s hoping to arrange a chat with the Bishop.
Glad it went well, and hope it develops well too.
Michael CJ. Your recent contributions to the blog are obscure and many to me are totally incomprehensible. As they appear to have little to do with the topic under discussion, I must ask you to stop raising issues of this kind. ‘Fronting the monolith’ has no meaning to me. Anything further of this kind submitted will be immediately removed.