The Shadow Side of Youth Leadership
// July 6th, 2010 // No Comments » // Leadership Development, World Issues
A response to “Youth Leadership: the real deal or just hype?”
Given the profile of the audience and the nature of the organisation that has kindly invited me to chair this remarkable event, it might be unfair of me to speak seemingly against the concept of youth leadership. However, as I’m just under thirty and a proud alumnus of AIESEC itself, I feel I have the license to avoid the necessary “motherhood and apple-pie” statements about “free spirits” and cut to some of the serious challenges facing youth leadership. I will start by briefly highlighting two examples, one historical and one contemporary, that demonstrate some of the strikingly real dangers that youth leadership can fall to. From these, I will generalise four core obstacles that leaders must wrestle with in order to avoid such disaster. Finally, I shall describe what the world might learn from youth leaders should they master their puzzle of immaturity before the dreary and dangerous acceptance of age befalls them.
Case 1: Youth “Red Guards” in China’s Cultural Revolution
In the year that followed May 1966, a movement of students and young people would begin by denouncing the administration of their local university, grow to over ten million members drawn from almost every school in China, and just as rapidly be forcibly repressed by the national Army. In these twelve short months, a campaign of terror led by these “Red Guards” would result in hundreds of thousands dead and disabled, large swathes of political arrests from every sector of society, a large percentage of historical sites destroyed, and would firmly establish the personality cult of Mao Zedong.
Chairman Mao had quickly recognised the potential that youthful disdain for establishment, limited critical thinking and boundless ideological energy would offer his “cultural revolution”. Within days of the first Red Guard formation he and his political organs encouraged the youth to embrace their “right to rebel”, directing them to revitalize the revolutionary spirit of the Chinese Communist Party as they saw fit, and to attack the ‘Four Olds” of Chinese society (old customs, old culture, old habits and old ideas). Mao himself gave validation to the destruction stating that mass purges and all such related social and political phenomena were justified and right.
“Freed from parental and societal constraints, youths, both girls and boys, had been unleashed to perpetrate assault, battery, and murder upon their fellow citizens to the extent their barely formed consciences permitted” (Mao’s Last Revolution, Macfarquhar &Schoenhals, 2006).
Once Mao had consolidated his political power the Red Guards were viewed as a liability. They were disempowered, actively suppressed and ultimately exiled through the “Down to the Countryside” movement, in which millions of young urban Chinese were resettled in rural areas. Much of the youthful idealism turned to disillusionment, but not before it had caused massive death and untold political, economic and cultural damage.
Case 2: Julius Malema, President of the ANC Youth League
The South African revolution, in the ending of the apartheid state, is striking in what it lacked of China’s cultural revolution. There was no massive bloodletting, demagoguery or savage persecution. Instead it featured electoral participation, economic empowerment, and “truth and reconciliation”. It is hard to overstate Mandela’s role in forging this climate and the national unity necessary to complete the most painful labour of the new South African state. Forty years before Mandela became President of the ANC (African National Congress) and then of South Africa, he was founder and then President of their Youth League (ANCYL), a platform he used to revitalize and redirect the ANC itself.
Sixty years later, the current President of the ANCYL is one Julius Malema. He has been described by the current South African President Jacob Zuma as “the future leader of South Africa”, and by others as a demagogue, a reckless populist, a puppet, and puppet master. In any interpretation he is a major figure in the political landscape, and for me he embodies a great many lessons on the shadow side of youth leadership.
Even almost twenty years after Mandela’s release South Africa is a fragile society, whose tender wounds are guarded by layers of social and political of taboo around violence, race, economic disparity and class. Malema’s rhetoric has confronted them all. He has been outspoken on the nationalisation of the mining sector, declaring in Harare that “In SA we are just starting. Here in Zimbabwe you are already very far.” He complained that “minorities” (whites, Coloureds and Indians) ran what he defined as the “economic cluster” in the South African cabinet. He has suggested violent means implicitly and even explicitly as when he stated, “Let us make it clear now: we are prepared to die for (President) Zuma. Not only that, we are prepared to take up arms and kill for Zuma.”
Malema is not a man to be cowed easily. Censured by the ANC and directly critiqued by Zuma himself multiple times, he has continued unperturbed. His biographer states, “[Malema] believes that if you criticise him you are either a reactionary or a racist”, and in South Africa this is more than a politically correct riposte (The World according to Julius Malema, Max du Preez, 2010). It is difficult to convey his manner in text, but a short viewing of his April 2010 encounter with a BBC journalist provides an immediate and frightening revelation of character and judgment.
A charismatic, street-wise, young politician, Malema understands his constituency and embodies the confidence and power that a people, who have worryingly little of either, are understandably attracted to. What will result of this leadership, we shall all soon discover.
Observations and lessons drawn
The individual and collective cases, drawn from such different contexts, provide rich examples from the shadow side of youth leadership. I will focus on four key observations that I believe have clear and important application for contemporary youth leaders from all sectors of society.
Lack of critical thinking. As Voltaire put it so powerfully, “those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities”, and indeed it was a lack of critical thinking that allowed the Red Guards actions to transcend their own basic humanity and may allow Malema to transgress on his. In both examples this poverty of reason was created by three forces. First, an attachment to an overly ideological lens in which their political philosophy trumps evidence from reality. Second, a lack of appreciation of their own history, the complexity and depth of the hard fought lessons that challenge such simplistic visions. Third, poor quality education that did not give them the necessary rational skills to see through propaganda and engage in productive political dialogue.
However, this shadow side of leadership should also remind us that there is a positive that casts this shadow. Lack of critical thinking, falls as a shadow from the affinity for new modes of thought that prevails in youth. These new modes recognise that many traditional barriers and conventions are illusionary constrictions that we can overthrow at will. They can recognise valuable innovations and ideals free from the blinding curse of prejudice.
Desire for power and for impact. Malema’s behaviour and rhetoric strongly suggests one most dangerous leadership characteristic—the untempered desire for power and impact. When the true motivation is the reinforcement of one’s ego, a leader will lose sight of the original inequality that inspired their efforts and no consequence of their actions will be enough to break this well fed addiction. Hunger for power results in the belief in the leader’s absolute necessity, and with this belief leader stops serving their people and becomes their master. Furthermore, when change itself becomes the goal, either to validate one’s existence or solely to bring down some established structure, swift destruction can be done to the slow aggregate of the ages.
Desire for power and impact can conceal the positive desire to create a better world—the thirst for greater fulfilment, equity, justice, and beauty that drives much of youthful action. It is a powerful ideal that suggests that the human condition can be better, that the sufferings of the present can be alleviated in the future. Activated by the sense of individual responsibility and empowerment to make this change, young people can be undeniable force for organisational and social transformation.
Manipulation by establishment leaders. The idealism of the Red Guards was clearly manipulated for inter-factional infighting and then they were tossed aside. Similarly, Malema was encouraged to be highly outspoken, and thus influential, in the Zuma’s election and is now starting to become a liability for the establishment. Thus we see that through both empowerment and disempowerment establishment leaders often manipulate the ambitions, philosophy and constituency of youth leaders.
Nonetheless, the positive reciprocation of this deficit is equally true, youth can transform establishment institutions. Just as Mandela utilised the ANCYL as a lever to change the political establishment, youth leaders can bring their undeniable wellspring of energy, ideals and innovation to revitalise and redirect conventional organisations in remarkable ways.
Lack of empathy for those different from oneself. In both cases we see a demonization of “the other”, a view that makes our opponents fundamentally different from ourselves, and thus undeserving of human empathy. This division is nurtured by a number of traits unfortunately common in the thinking of the young; the hasty clarity of a “black and white” perspective, the “other existence” denying view of solipsism or egoism, and the inability to imagine that there are many ways to see, be, and think in this life.
This characteristic is a shadow of the youthful tendency to identify strongly with one’s community. Young people build a large part of their self-image through identifying with peer networks, social communities, and their role models. As these circles of identity expand beyond family, community, religion, and nation state, the welfare of ever expanding segments of humanity becomes important to the individual, and an expanded social consciousness results.
Conclusion
From these very different cases I’ve drawn a picture of youth leadership, which I hope is provocative, relevant to the individual readers own journey, and deeply tied to challenges in the real world. However, I’ve only drawn a few short strands from the rich web of history tied into each of these stories. I encourage the reader to look deeply into these and myriad other examples, to wrestle with the dilemmas confronted in history, and to identify these dilemmas within themselves. For it is inside each of us that the challenge of leadership must first find resolution.
In many ways the individual struggle of young people is reflected in the collective struggle of our young civilisation. Just as they need to cultivate their strengths and wrestle with their shadow sides so too does broader humanity, if it is to avoid the self-inflicted decline of all civilisations past. The only tool we have in this journey is our ability to learn, although it is frighteningly little used. We must find ways to learn the lessons of generations past and present: the history of scholars and the history continually unfolding around us. Similarly we must seek out the lessons of our own leadership as we progress, so that as our youth fades, the light that guides our way only brightens, the call of a world to be changed rings only clearer, and our work in the world falls into only greater harmony with our sense of purpose.
Youth leaders face difficult individual challenges with real world ramifications. These challenges are no lighter for youth than those faced by mature leaders. However, if one masters them in their early years then they may well number among the few who escape the pitfalls of the latter. The global problematic of our time demands no less.
- Originally submitted to “Initiate the Future“, July 10th 2010.
