The Heroic Leadership Imperative by Allison Scott T.;Goethals George R.;

Author:Allison, Scott T.;Goethals, George R.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
Published: 2020-06-16T00:00:00+00:00

MYTHOLOGY AS IMPERATIVE

Compared to earlier human societies, contemporary humans are far more challenged to fulfill the universal call to heroism. Friedrich Nietzsche (1872) was all too aware of the dearth of something meaningfully and mysteriously big in modern culture, something from which the average person could derive life-affirming identity and purpose. He pinpointed what was missing: A modern mythology. “Here we have our present age … bent on the extermination of myth,” wrote Nietzsche. “Man today, stripped of myth, stands famished among all his pasts and must dig frantically for roots” (p. 77). Nietzsche, along with psychoanalyst Carl Jung, recognized the negative psychological consequences of Christianity’s decline in the Western world. Neither of these scholars were fans of Christian doctrine but they valued the stories, the symbols, and the systems of meaning that Christianity and other religions offered to the masses. For example, Christianity, along with Buddhism, offers a very promising and pragmatic worldview regarding the redemptive value of suffering. Christianity’s symbol of suffering is, of course, the cross, which signifies suffering but also redemption and resurrection. Nietzsche and Jung believed that without meaningful symbols of suffering and the overcoming of it, a society is at grave risk of breaking down.

Joseph Campbell (1972) proposed that hero myths serve several different psychological functions, two of which were the mystical and cosmological functions. Hero mythology, argued Campbell, paints a big picture of the cosmos inside of which people can grow and develop meaning and purpose. Any mythical portrayal of the origins of life and of the universe is, by definition, awesome and unfathomable. Counterintuitively, perhaps, the mysterious nature of this meaningful cosmos contributes to its very power. There is an allure of mystery that triggers our curiosity and milks the most out of our deepest desires. Gestalt principles of perceptual and cognitive organization help us make sense of a universe that is designed to mislead us or deprive us of information. Franco, Blau, and Zimbardo (2011) might call this ability a heroic imagination. People use cognitive tools to resolve mystery, tools such as impressions, prototypes, archetypes, and implicit theories of leadership, heroism, and villainy. There are also key motivational forces that steer people toward desired conclusions about cosmological ambiguity. The size, scope, and mysterious nature of the mythic hero’s journey are the central sources of its power and ability to connect us to our ultimate purpose (Goethals & Allison, 2019).

To our detriment, mythic consciousness has waned since the advent of science several hundred years ago. Rohr (2010) argues that human beings lost their mythic consciousness around the time of the Enlightenment, when science and rational thought replaced nature, ritual, and mystery as the primary means of understanding the world. Two vexing problems result from this loss of mythic consciousness. First, without hero mythologies to guide us, we tend to become over-reliant on rational, dualistic modes of thought (Allison, Goethals, & Spyrou, 2020). An overdependence on thinking our way toward a meaningful life tends to silence our intuitive, creative, emotional, and spiritual sensibilities (Allison et al.

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