A Failure of Nerve -- Chapter 2
Society in Regression

Describing families, institutions, and societies in categories of data, method, structure, and production while omitting the crucial variables of the society's emotional processes can obscure as much as it can inform.

America has become so chronically anxious that our society has gone into an emotional regression that is toxic to well-defined leadership.

Five characteristics of chronically anxious personal families:

1. Reactivity
2. Herding
3. Blame displacement
4. A quick-fix mentality
5. Lack of well-differentiated leadership

Societal regression is about the perversion of progress into a counter-evolutionary mode:

• Self-regulation of instinctual drive
• Adaptation to strength rather than weakness
• A growth-producing response to challenge
• Allowing time for maturing processes to evolve
• The preservation of individuality and integrity

An entire society could lose its ability to cope with change when certain factors occur simultaneously:

1. Anxiety escalates to critically stressful, unstabilizing thresholds.
2. The institutions or individuals that a society has traditionally used to absorb or bind off its anxiety no longer are available to absorb it.

When both these factors occur at the same time, the societal leaders lose their capacity to lead.

It is only when the focus is on emotional process that the consultant's presence can be considered an important variable.

There should be a balance between togetherness and individuality.

The major regressive effects on leadership of chronic anxiety in both personal families and the Greater American Family are these:

• Leaders can't get the distance to think out their vision clearly.
• Leaders are led hither and yon by crisis after crisis.
• Leaders are reluctant to take well-defined stands, if they have any convictions at all.
• By selection, leaders that are chosen have never been able to develop enough self to deal with sabotage.
• The least mature have the best chance of being selected.

Major principles of leadership characteristic of the great Renaissance explorers:

• The capacity to separate oneself from surrounding emotional processes
• The capacity to obtain clarity about one's principles and vision
• The willingness to be exposed and be vulnerable
• Persistence in the face of inertial resistance
• Self-regulation in the face of reactive sabotage

The fact that chronically anxious families always lack well-differentiated leadership is absolutely universal.

The trick is to be both non-anxious and present simultaneously.

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Friedman, E. H.  A failure of nerve:  Leadership in the age of the quick fix.