CORRUPTOCRACY - HAVEN FOR THE POWERFUL

Giant Leak of Offshore Financial Records Exposes Global Array of Crime and Corruption...

By The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists - April 03, 2016 https://panamapapers.icij.org/20160403-panama-papers-global-overview.html

An incredible array of corporate, political, business, institutional, military, sports, artists, and individual leaders from all over the world; from Chile to China, from Argentina to Azerbaijan, from United Kingdom to Ukraine, from Russia to Iceland, from USA to Zimbabwe, etc, etc, are all involved in a web of crime and corruption.

Crisis of Leadership? , Institutional Crisis?, Legal Crisis? Moral Crisis? Ethical Crisis? Spiritual Crisis?

The leadership industry (including the intercultural sector) praise themselves in promoting; Transformational, Servant, Participative, Situational, Co-worker, Nomadic, Mindful, etc, etc types of leadership.  However non of them address the fundamental issues of the very foundations of a profound historical crisis of leadership.  They continue promoting the "leadership business industry"as per usual.

This unprecedented leak of a network of investigative journalists clearly exposes a deep rooted "corrupt and criminal culture".  Once again exposes  a system that allows powerful corporate and poltical world leaders to act with impunity. 

 Allow me to established  the multiple challenges we (the people) face in the twenty-first century which are of an extraordinary scope.

• Economists consider the existing and predominant economic system (capitalism) to be all but dysfunctional, ineffective, inefficient, unjust, and unsustainable. It is a flawed system producing financial collapses and economic catastrophes.  Capitalism and entrepreneurship; is rebuilt, resetted on; (a) deregulation, (b) privatisation, and (c) low wages. A destructive system that crashes and burns time and time again, the current crisis is fundamentally a systemic historical, economic and financial crisis, (e.g. Piketty, 2014 )
• Political scientists contend that the crisis is clearly and squarely the result of the failure, decline and ultimate collapse of the “modern democratic political system”. Democracy developed from the enlightenment and the formations of the “republics”, and was adopted in both advanced western political systems and in non-western societies. According to Noam Chomsky (2011), the political system as we know it around the world is in a profound process of decay . To halt this decay, it is essential to reclaim the role of citizenship from “consumers” status it has become, and, from this focus, new social movements can replace political parties (e.g. Castells, 2012) 
• Sociologists and psychologists, emphasize, the analysis of broken societies as well as a moral, ethical and spiritual crisis of human liberalism and human co-existence. Primarily, the crisis is of a social nature: the foundations of human liberalist system is ethically, morally and spiritual broken. Our levels of extreme forms of social and economic inequalities are unacceptable (e.g. Naranjo, 2010) and can only produce new cultural/identity crisis (e.g Malaaouf, 2012) 
• Environmentalists focus on the relentless pillage, exploitation and destruction of nature and the habitat and see the crisis as a crisis of sustainability, which is leading to the “ecocide” of our planet (Shaw, 2015)
• Others see the corrupt practices of leadership and entrepreneurship as the roots behind the corruptive practices of corporate, institutions and political entities.  Leadership stories of institutional, corporate and entrepreneurial greed and corruption are exposed in the world media, from global corporations in western markets to emerging markets. These reports of greed and corruption continue unabated. (de Bruin, 2015; (Lessig, 2012); (Brooks, 2013) 

 A Systemic crisis, and interdependent interconnected crisis of human thinking, perceptions and values

These views may all effectively address the specific aspects of the current crisis, and, undoubtedly, this is a crisis that involves all of the these dimensions. Nevertheless, to perceive the outcomes of systemic failure in the light of a specific perspective and dogma is not to understand the cause at its source, nor, in fact, to understand that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. 

We face a systemic failure of the whole, a crisis of thinking, of perception and values.  A systemic view of the; energy crisis, of  environmental decay, of the  economic and financial crisis, of leadership crisis, of violence and war, tell us that all of them are interconnected and interdependent. They are part of a systemic crisis that require systemic responses, sustainable and humanzing solutions. (Capra 2014)

Specifically we must address the problems and waste that currently beset corporate cultures and leadership practices, where transactional, utilitarian and materialistic practices are unchallenged and accepted as the norm.  Current leadership practices fragment and separate nature and entrepreneurship, nature from individuals, individuals from individuals, and the mind from the body and the soul, leading inevitably to impermanent and unstable corporate/ social/ political/ economic/ cultural/ platforms, as we are increasingly witnessing around the world today. 

Leadership Less - Help Others to Lead Themselves - Build Quality Human Connections

There are solutions and this requires a fundamental shift in our thinking, our perceptions and our values.  To start we need challenge the existing practices and conceptualisation of "leadership". We cannot continue to accept that 'leadership" is a natural phenomenon, that leadership is neutral and that leadership is  ahistorical. Leadership is not neutral, it is not natural and in fact is rooted in mythology and fallacious stories.

Similarly we need to challange the practices and the view that "western democracy" is about "governance", well, it is not, "citizen democracy" is about "human co-existence", is a about a permanent conversation about human relations and about our relationship with out habitat. "Democracy" is not about legal governance which entrenches the corrupt practices and acceptance of "leadership".

Our work and endeavour is about promoting new practices of "leadership less" and "less or no leadership".  We aim at the search for a permanent process of citizen participation and accountability at work, at the enterprise level and in building quality practices of human co-existence. 

Sources:

Piketty, T. (2014) Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Roubini, N. (2010). Crisis Economics a crash course in the future of finance, Taleb Nassim N. (2008, 2007), Fooled by Randomness, The Black Swan, Stiglitz, J. (2002), Globalization and its discontents

Coggan, P, (2013) .The Last Voice, The threats to Western Democracy.

Chomsky, N. (2011). Occupy

Castells M. (2012). Networks of Outrage and Hope, Social Movements in the internet age

Naranjo, C. (2010) Healing Civilization

Maalouf, A. (2008) Euronews - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kagjl0uBxX4

Shaw, C. (2015) The Silent Ecocide, the Environmental Crisis is a Crisis of Human Consciousness

De Bruin, B. (2015) Ethics and the Global Financial Crisis: Why Incompetence is Worse than Greed (Business, Value Creation, and Society)

Lessig, L. (2012) ; Republic Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress - and a Plan to Stop It, , On Institutional Corruption Congress: The Paradigm Case, Lecture 2 of 5. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_UhsM-RVPg

Brooks, R. (2013). The Great Tax Robbery: How Britain Became a Tax Haven for Fat Cats and Big Business.

Capra, Fritjof, A System View of Life, 2014