Courage lights the way

Lindbergh and the Spirit of St. Louis at Roosevelt Field
Courtesy of Wikipedia.

We sure don’t live in a perfect world. Of course, there are problems, and hypocrisy seems to be a prevalent one.

I realized this more than ever the other day while visiting Penelope Trunk’s blog on a recommendation from Michelle Barry Franco.

Penelope is quite a character. Her posts are brilliant, and also fun to read. A lot of the fun comes from the peppering of her (very) personal life into whatever subject she’s writing about. Penelope tells it like it is, without holding anything back. It’s partly because of a family inherited gene anomaly, Asperger’s syndrome.

Now, I thought to myself: this is curious, why do we all live in this petty cordial hypocrisy? Could it be that Penelope is sane, and we’re not? That maybe her situation is a mutation in the right direction?

Well, I know we’re always empathizing. We’re always accommodating the truth. We don’t want to hurt the feelings of those that surround us. The closer they are, the more we are prone to tell white lies. We cowardly shy away from sincerity because we tend to avoid the pain of an ugly rejection.

So, we all walk a fine line between being brutally honest and blatantly hypocritical, in order to get along with the members of the tribe. Not too harsh, and not too insincere as to be noticed, and hence, rejected by our buddies.

I also know that those who have the courage to tell it like it is are usually favored as leaders. Take General George S. Patton, or Madonna, as probably bad examples. Jesus on the other hand was a model of courage, and still has a few followers after two thousand years… In our more mundane daily lives, we all know that the guy who can speak before a crowd has a way of leading the way.

Evidently, perceived courage attracts followers. Winston Churchill believed firmly that to become a politician, he first needed to be celebrated as a hero. He did some wild things during the First World War, —offering himself for suicide missions and exposing himself like a shooting duck in the front-lines, were a few of them.

To sum up, we live in a world where cordial hypocrisy is prevalent. On the other hand, courage is the trait that allows us to break loose from the need to empathize with those that surround us into a sick herd behavior.

I’ll leave it up to this point, serving as an introduction to how to deal with the conflict derived from mistrust, with a quote from Winston Churchill:

“Without courage all virtues lose their meaning.”