War and...Peace?

Edwin Friedman, Scott McKnight, and Hans Boersma

FRIDAY, girl you know it’s true, oo, oo, oo…sorry, my age is showing. Let me see if I can find seven takes to round out this autumnal week.

Photo by Humble Lamb on Unsplash

One

I’ve convinced all you sensible people out there to buy and read Edwin Friedman’s A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix. I’m going at it glacially slowly, because—well, who cares why—but every time I find a moment I’m so happy. In the little bit I’m in now Friedman is narrating how he came to develop his laws for how families and other kinds of systems work:

Soon I began to realize that cultural camouflage also obscured the universality of emotional processes in institutions. For example, frequently, the leaders of a church would come to me seeking techniques for dealing with a member of the staff or member of the congregation who was acting obstreperously, who was ornery, and who intimidated everyone with his gruffness. I might say to them, “This is not a matter of technique; it’s a matter of taking a stand, telling this person he has to shape up or he cannot continue to remain a member of the community.” And the church leaders would respond, “But that’s not the Christian thing to do.” (Synagogue leaders tolerate abusers for similar reasons.)

And this:

It may be in the ubiquitous phenomenon of t*rrorism that one can most easily see how universal emotional processes transcend the conventional categories of the social science construction of reality….

• There must be a sense that no one is in charge—in other words, the overall emotional atmosphere must convey that there is no leader with “nerve.”

• The system must be vulnerable to a hostage situation. That is, its leaders must be hamstrung by a vulnerability of their own, a vulnerability to which the t*rrorist—whether a b*mber, a client, an employee, or a child—is always exquisitely sensitive.

• There must be among both the leaders and those they lead an unreasonable faith in “being reasonable.”

For Heaven’s Sake, read the whole thing.