The Ballad of Joe, Dana, and Don: How COVID-19 Has Demolished “The Rugged Individualist,” and What Comes Next in Leadership
Mass boredom, it turns out, is a great focusing lens. As our lives stumble across an endless smear of days during the coronavirus pandemic, it’s been interesting to see where our collective attention floats. Our minds are searching for anything to talk about beyond the grim death rates, economic destruction, and at least in our country, the buffoonery of the federal pandemic response. As someone who researches around the intersection of media, education, and performance, three stories of varying entertainment value have come across my screen in recent days. And given the chaos of our current moment, the uniformity of their outcomes has been remarkable, if also predictable. They give us a window into the future of leadership, and also pose a powerful question: Are we able to change after this all ends?
We’ll start with Joe “The Tiger King” Exotic, because it would be terrible if we did not. If we do get to have Halloween this year, expect many an interpretation of the murder-for-hire felon and exotic animal collector. There’s a totally separate article to be written on how Tiger King combined the archetypes and tropes of stories like Blackfish and Making a Murderer to become a runaway hit, and credit is due the filmmakers for making an addictive (if not super objective) binge watch for troubled times. The best summary I’ve heard is that it’s a “redneck Game of Thrones,” but however one describes it, Joe Exotic sits on the throne. The gay, tiger-collectin’, gun-totin’, Carole Baskin-hatin’, horse-shootin’, country song-stealin’, Libertarian candidate for president and owner of the G. W. Exotic Animal Park is the perfect character for those who think Joe Dirt was too subtle.
By any objective measure, Joe Exotic is a manipulative schemer who doesn’t seem to care all that much about the animals or people under his power. But Exotic has quickly slid into that familiar role of the harmless ne’er-do-well. “Free Joe Exotic” fans plant their tongues firmly in cheek and cheer him on as he grabs his gun and protects his property against some candy-ass like PETA or Fish & Wildlife or that moneyed, conniving, hypocrite CAROLE BASKIN!! Just as Walter White becomes a drug kingpin in the face of crippling medical bills, or Tony Montana shoots his way up from the dregs of the Cuban society to capture the American Dream or John Dillinger robs from those faceless banks during the Great Depression, the Outlaw Hero’s crimes are always minimized because he’s largely right on the values. Self-determination. Hatred of the establishment. The ambition to improve one’s lot in life. Protector of “the family” by any means necessary. The Outlaw Hero has to cut some corners, sure, but that’s only because The Man has kept him out of his rightful place in the sun. Within the space of a month, a little-known tiger breeder has been catapulted from his jail cell into mythic rarefied air, and it will be interesting to see where he goes from here. But let’s put in a pin in Joe Exotic for a second…
Taking a break from Netflix, the hottest thing going on in actual sports right now is a HORSE competition with professional basketball players. Not great. But the most compelling story is the trainwreck of the Ultimate Fighting Championship trying — and failing— to hold a live mixed martial arts event during a global shutdown. UFC President Dana White was committed to holding a pay-per-view telecast this month as every other major sports organization in the world went dark, going to the extent of buying a private island for weekly broadcasts (appropriately dubbed “Fight Island!”) and planning an April 18 event on California tribal lands. Now, it would be downright miserly to argue that White is not an extremely talented promoter or executive. The small-time boxing promoter took a $2M investment in the UFC in 2001, and shepherded that into a record-breaking $4B acquisition by talent agency WME in 2016. But once White stepped out from his perch at the top of the virtual monopoly that is MMA into the wider political climate, he was promptly put in his place by the Governor of California and big brother companies ESPN and Disney. The April 18 event was squashed, but instead of falling on his sword like most high-level executives are expected to do when they screw up, White made sure to place the blame squarely at the feet of the higher ups, and vowed to put on matches within a month.
For just about everyone else on earth, the event’s cancelation was the only obvious outcome. But spend some time on MMA Twitter or other internet hubs where people discuss the sport, and you’ll see White lionized for his bold and aggressive problem-solving, his never-say-die spirit, his positivity in the face of a global catastrophe, and his dogged determination to have the show go on. White is a Lone Man against the nay-sayers and nervous nellies (usually sports journalists, of course), and those losers will always conspire to keep “the doers” down. Once again, White is the Outlaw Hero, the brash, gritty, never-stop-stopping man waylaid by The Bureaucrats and The System. And to see this eternal drama play out on an even bigger stage, Dana’s good friend is having even bigger problems due to the pandemic…
In Media Res is a place where we study learning, media, and entrepreneurship; it’s not really a place for political analysis. But by any objective measure, the American federal response to COVID-19 has been abysmal. I’ll pull two data points from the soup. At the time of this writing, the United States has more (reported) COVID deaths than any other country, even though we had weeks of advance warning. On a comparative basis, the U.S. and South Korea reported their first corona case on the same day, and yet the smaller country much closer to the original outbreak has blown America away in term of effective response. Weeks of warnings went unheeded, the virus was downplayed as the flu over and over again, the richest nation in the history of mankind is suffering from chronic shortages in the most basic medical equipment, which is killing responders on the front lines (if you really need a breakdown of this embarrassing timeline, ex-Bush speechwriter David Frum has just what you need).
We are watching in real time how The Messiah-Leader archetype falls apart, how we move from “I alone can fix this,” to “I don’t take any responsibility at all.” And it’s not because it’s Donald Trump per se…his leadership style has always been a caricature of the Great Man of History theory. Even if he did have the faculties to respond appropriately, the only way to do so would be to utterly abandon the go-it-alone, Lone Wolf aesthetic that people associate with him. Trump, as he operates, cannot solve this, but neither could Mao solve China’s great famine nor Alexander the Great build a succession plan for his empire. Those destabilizing events undid much of the personality cults those men built. But this crisis is all of that, and more. This crisis, in the year 2020, fundamentally breaks the idea of The Hero as Leader.
The Western concepts of the individual hero and the great leader are so embedded in our consciousness because of the narratives we tell about ourselves, from the Bible to Star Wars. In the most basic of terms, a humble individual protagonist goes on a journey (against their will) and faces opposition through an antagonist. But with the help of allies, s/he completes the journey (for good or ill), and returns home a deeply changed person. This paradigm is shot through virtually every aspect of Western culture, and therefore we value the qualities that serve the paradigm. Courage, initiative, creativity, resiliency, friendship. And in America, the newer quality of rugged individualism is almost a religion unto itself. Freed from the Byzantine lineages and bloodshed of the Old World, our contribution to this formula was to lean more deeply into self. Where the past’s Homers and Quixotes were thinly observed characters who rambled across sprawling and shaggy adventures, our Ahabs and Skywalkers are deep psychological portraits, through which we understand the journey to be equally internal and external. It’s an intoxicating innovation on an old recipe — the Hero’s Journey is about uncovering my Best Self! — and has been adopted, to varying degrees, around the world.
What the 21st Century is quite loudly trying to tell us is this no longer the case. It’s not just that our enemies no longer stay in brightly colored zones on a map. Global transactions happen by the millions per second across the world. A stranger can find his way into your daughter’s bedroom from a $100 laptop. You are spending 3 hours a day on a social gaming site without realizing what it’s doing to your brain chemistry. The world routinely operates at a level beyond our natural faculties. This is relatively new: even as we innovated at breakneck speed across the 19th and 20th centuries, things like cotton gins and airplanes and nuclear bombs have a tangibility that we can access with our natural senses. Things like having 5,000 “friends” and artificial intelligence affect us in very hard-to-grasp ways. And while the 20th Century made clear that teams will solve our crises and rack up our achievements (see Wars, World I & II; moon landing, 1969), what we need to do today is reset our common values, which will then calcify into our future self-reinforcing mythologies. But to be honest, we just don’t value teamwork a whole lot. For every Apollo 13, there’s a dozen Castaways (and that’s without leaving the Hanksian oeuvre!). It’s not hard to understand why. If you think of the values that support team-based leadership, they feel kind of…lame to a rootin-tootin’ American. Collaboration, empathy, transparency, listening, patience, humility.
And yet, while they may not move the blood like our Lone Man archetype, the leadership heroes of this specific era will not be the Whites and Trumps (and certainly not the Exotics), but the Cuomos and DeWines, Breeds and Faucis. These are leaders who understand that success and failure is not a function of a personal will to overcome, but the broad coordination of elements much larger than us, pointed toward a consensus. It is 100% not about the leader. For educators to orient toward this type of leadership, as we must to grapple with the future, they’re going to have to investigate how they currently frame and portray leadership. Is it individualistic or group-based? Who is in that case study? Who is on that panel? How are we balancing the personal resiliency of a great leader against the environment she’s in? Are the decisions made framed as psychological or systematic? COVID-19 is giving us a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to rewire what we value, and that will impact our future in leadership, entrepreneurship, the law, politics, and much more. Thankfully, our future myths are happening in real time, right in front of us.
Justin Wolske runs CASEWORX, is the Co-Founder/EIR at GRID110, and teaches at Cal State LA. CASEWORX’s recent curriculum Saturn C.U.B.E. for Conflict™ with Saturn Leadership explores techniques for managing conflict and problem-solving at work.
