Persuasion or Manipulation: What is the difference in leadership?

I’ve uploaded a short, two-page article in .pdf format on knowing the difference between persuasion and manipulation, particularly in leadership. It is hardly necessary to highlight the importance of such an issue, given the common struggle all leaders have in this area. I certainly confess it. I have often been guilty of manipulating others, even using what I thought was love or her principles to get others to do what I wanted. In short, I’ve prostituted myself to meet my needs. How often I’ve done it in the name of God! Thank God there is hope for sinners, even those who have led others into sin. The thought that this kind of sin Christ also bore on the cross, even as the leaders of the day mocked him with it, should humble all of us who profess to be “agents of change”.

Selfishness, self-interest, even in the name of God, is ever so close to the bone in all our efforts to lead others, especially in the direction of change. An awareness of the pitfalls, a clear understanding of the dangers as well as the benefits of “persuasion” is essential if we are serious about this thing we call “truth”.

If you would prefer a Biblical study (this is a secular article), then you might examine the Pharisee’s Guide to Leadership as revealed in the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. The Old Testament narrative as well as the wisdom books of Psalms and Proverbs are also full of instruction on how power is used to supplant the loving persuasion of God. (Search on keywords such as hypocrisy, greed, violence, deceive, lie, trust, expose, hide, power, etc.) Of course, the New Testament letters are also full of instructive examples and passages along the same lines. Personally, I’ve found the opposition of the Pharisees, Sadducees, Scribes, Lawyers, and Rabbi’s to the life and work of Jesus to be the most explicit exposition of the Devil’s Guide to Power.

There you see how necessary the use of threats, secrecy, lying and deceit, peer pressure, titles, position, public posturing, reputation, humiliation, silence, money, manipulation, gossip, backbiting, and physical force (to name the obvious) are to the devil’s leadership of men and men’s domination of others. The gathering of committees to impose the will of a few on the many proved to be particularly effective against Jesus. All and more were used on nearly a daily basis to challenge and destroy Christ. At the end, it appeared as if they had been a complete success, achieving their goal of sacrificing one for the good of all. The means were justified by the end.

Such study is more necessary than ever, given the perfection of the deceptive arts today. Evil has never looked so good. Only prayerful study of the Scriptures, the Spirit’s guidance, attention to history and our own hearts, a continual willingness to repent of our abuses, and an aching dependence on Christ’s merits alone will unable us to survive the daily temptation to let the end justify the means, which is proving to be one of the truest marks of genteel evil.

Here is my site link to the article.

Update on Sunday, June 7, 2009 by Jan McKenzie

It will be obvious to the academic that I am philosophically somewhere between Virtue and Deontological Ethics, something I learned about myself in my first ethics class in the 1970’s. Though I wondered shamelessly into hedonism during my two periods of drug addiction, following a sub-category of the consequentialist, the pleasure principle, I have never defended that as the true way to walk through life and it is not my habit today.

As my above comments show, I have no room for Consequentialism and it’s associated Utilitarianism.

(It is an interesting memory that I was reading John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham, fathers as it were, of Utilitarianism, during my drug addled days, along with Jefferson, Monroe, and the Federalist Papers (on American democracy) and Shelby Foote’s and Bruce Caton’s volumes on the American Civil War. Strange bed-fellows in my depression and addiction. William Faulkner, Walker Percy, and Flannery O’Connor also kept me company in those days. I think Percy, thankfully, stays with me the most. A fine, Catholic, existentialist, Christian of the first order, doctor of life and letters. Ah, but now I am bragging. Isn’t self a slippery creature?)

Philosophically, virtue, deontological, and consequentialist ethics are the three dominant forms in Western society today.

Politics, being the art of expediency, favours Consequentialism. When this becomes the ethic of church leadership, she too takes on the characteristics of the purely political animal. Not an uncommon occurrence today. The spiritual / ethical union of church and state appears to form gradually, well before the legislative power of the state is offered to the church.

Interesting times are ahead, just around the the ethical bend, for both church and state.