Leo Kila

After reading Anthony Kila’s “The Quest for Good Leadership”, I got thinking.

In a way, it feels like this is a contest between the material existence of man as an animal, vs the elevated collective experience of man as a sentient conscious thinker, child of God or enlightenment searcher.

We are capable of existing in a spiritual, psychological, and choice-based way as humans unlike any other animals, (think of the human ability to starve to death over valued ideals and how unnatural it is to the base animal instinct of survival above all else.) This is why values and morals can be crucial to people.

But we also operate on the material level as just another animal. The great brain of a philosopher that can arrive at clarity on what’s of most importance in life (values) still needs to be fed, to deal with the waste of the body, and to have shelter from the elements.

If we allow people to have an existence perpetually coloured by their animalistic needs above all else, we will still not kill the human need for value. But maybe that is how we muddle it.

Perhaps the Usher is kept distracted from the focus needed to find one’s own direction or even identify a worthy leader. He is so distressed by the material lacking of his life that he doesn’t even feel he has space to consider what he stands by.

“I would be ashamed of myself for asking for money for achieving nothing and bringing no betterment to my society because I don’t want to take without giving. That would lead to destruction and I value creation.” Is a thought path he can’t afford perhaps. Unfortunately, it is more likely the potential brilliance of the human mind is instead preoccupied with,

“If I lose the argument about whether I deserve the money, I will starve and die. Let me say anything to win the argument so later I can afford to think of what I REALLY believe”

But later continues to be pushed further and further back as his material loop of needs is kept at a maintained level rather than progressing to no longer having as many needs to attend.

If you zoom out from the individual, it is the same reason that once human beings switched to settled agriculture instead of daily gathering and hunting, there was the first real spike of society, relationships, religion, complex art, melting metal, philosophy, only became an option when we began to create breathing space from our primal needs constantly being deprived.

So then the solution to the issue feels rooted in helping people be freed of the material trappings that keep them from even deciding their values let alone sticking to them. As well as amplifying the influence of leaders that will help people learn how to build values and how to uphold integrity.

“I’m sorry I killed your mother I was hungry and she was a baker” will elicit no sympathy and will elicit punishment.

But if we are brutally honest, the way to keep future mother’s safe is to make sure the man has bread AND has ingrained in him the value of life and therefore the peccato of sin

And I say peccato because the word Sin implies evil and moral lacking. Peccato implies the same but with the added connections of, “it’s a shame” the shame and waste of and impact of his action rather than just whether they are good or bad.