Why was Nelson Mandela great?

Posted by: Philip Stokoe at 12:34, January 3 2014.

In his article criticising the uncritical coverage of Nelson Mandela’s death, Simon Jenkins (http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/10/mandela-coverage-banality-of-goodness) described his presidency as indifferent. According to Jenkins, “he was a worse than ordinary president. He did little to resist the drift to cronyism and corruption, was a poor executive, and never deployed his talents to tame Mugabe or ease the horrors afflicting the rest of Africa. He preferred to see out his office meeting celebrities and raising dubious money”. Although I tend to agree with his general case that the media has overindulged in an image of perfection, and I would certainly agree that De Klerk was the key figure in the Afrikaner abandonment of apartheid, much in the same way that Gorbachev was key to the changes in the USSR, I thought that Jenkins had completely missed the point that Mandela really was special and why.

I’ll begin with a quote from his (ghosted) autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom (1994). “As a leader, I have always followed the principles I first saw demonstrated by the regent at the ‘great place’, I have always endeavoured to listen to what each and every person in a discussion had to say before venturing my own opinion. Often times, my own opinion will simply represent a consensus of what I heard in the discussion.” In this remark Mandela does two things, the first is that he differentiates himself from the state of mind that contaminates most politicians, particularly when they are in power. The second is that he describes a phenomenon that is well known to many of us who study groups and organisations. When I was a young man there was a particularly powerful lobby within the social care world for an approach to the work that was described as democratic. The belief was that it should be possible to make decisions as a group rather than relying upon a decision maker. The fallacy of this idea is extremely easy to demonstrate; create two groups, give them both the same role-play (for instance a business meeting to decide which direction the company should take out of a series of choices) and give them a set time in which to carry out this task. The difference between the groups is that group A has to make a decision “democratically”, whereas group B has a designated leader who will be asked to make the decision on behalf the group. If you have any understanding of group dynamics you will predict that the outcome of this experiment is that group B (the one with the leader) will be more likely to function as if it is a democracy in the sense that all participants will feel able to contribute (partly because they are freed of the responsibility for making a decision) whereas group A will be subject to all of the defensive processes which will mean that some people will be unable to contribute to the discussion, others will be given more weight than their contribution deserves and so on. In the group with the leader, as Mandela points out, the decision becomes pretty well clear so that the job of the decision maker is not difficult. In the “democratic” group reaching a decision is often impossible.

The point is that you will discover this truth as a leader if you have the humility as well as intelligence to listen. Unfortunately most of us in positions of power, conscious of the fraught dynamics of groups, tend to move to an omnipotent position where we decide that we are the best people to make decisions, often moving to a position of not even bothering to go through the appearance of listening to our colleagues.

I don’t know whether it is really true or simply the inevitable distortion accompanying a child’s view of adult activity, but I still hold an impression in my mind of politicians who came to stand as members of Parliament following a previous career somewhere else. My impression of those people was that they considered themselves genuinely to represent the people and act on their behalf to arrange the best possible systems for which government was responsible. In other words they would be looking to appoint the right people, i.e. those with the relevant experience, to run the public services. They saw it as their job to support the professions rather than to dictate to them. The change in the view that the politician holds of himself seemed to occur during Thatcher’s period of power; it is probably material for a separate blog, so I shan’t go into detail here about why I think she was motivated to make the change that I am describing. The change that she led, however, was based in the clear belief that politics was a profession of its own with the unique quality that it provided the only foundation from which to make decisions about how public service and the professions should be run. We can see the result of this narcissistic and omnipotent delusion in the destruction of our health services, our education services, our academic institutions and our legal framework. These services have been destroyed by a combination of handing over the design and development to politicians who claim these positions on the grounds that they are the experts in the management of the marketplace. They are out of their depth, operating from simplistic sound-bites from which they tried to design complex systems and organisations. As everybody who works in these sectors knows, the result is a plethora that increases on a daily basis of rules and diktats from the government about how we should get on and do the job that we have had specialist training to do unlike those politicians who are telling us how to do it.

The point that I’m making is that, if you take up a position of authority, particularly without proper training in how to deal with that sort of role, you will invariably end up more and more isolated, feeling more and more under pressure and more and more convinced that this pressure comes from those you employ. This reinforces the delusion that you are the best judge of what to do which, of course, increases the paranoia that you are subject to.

This paranoia is an inevitable consequence of a position of power. We human beings achieve the capacity for balanced thought only as a result of significant effort; our default state of mind is that of the fundamentalist. The moment we are placed under serious pressure our way of thinking is reduced to black and white, right and wrong, good and bad with no shades of grey, no ambivalence or ambiguity and, therefore, no capacity for generosity. Descartes was completely wrong when he famously said, “cogito ergo sum” (I think therefore I am) because this suggests that the capacity to think is what makes us human. It is very clear from the psychoanalytic study of the mind that thinking is something we achieve if we are lucky enough to have the right kind of upbringing because certainty is the state we prefer. Listen to the language of politicians; they are continually telling us that this or that policy is the “right” thing for the country at the moment. Nobody seems to challenge the idea that there cannot be a “right” choice, there can only be “the best we can do at the moment” which, in a healthy person, can be reviewed over time and amended so that improvements can be made.

To get back to Mandela; writers like Simon Jenkins talk about him being flawed. Archbishop Desmond Tutu in comments that he made on the day we learnt of Mandela’s death asked whether Mandela was a saint and went on that, if a saint is flawless, then Mandela was no saint but he led a saintly life. In this fundamentalist world that we live in at the moment, a world where nobody challenges the politicians claim to be making the “right” decision, flawed must seem like a criticism. I think it is a description of true humanity. Mandela did not claim for himself, as our politicians appear to do, some sort of superman status. If you think about his famous speech at the end of the trial that led to his imprisonment, I think you will see both his greatness and his flaws. He said:

“During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”

When he says that he has dedicated himself to the struggle of the African people, dedication for which he is prepared to die, then he is putting this ideal ahead of his role as a father or husband. And it is clear that his family suffered as a result of his decision to do the best he could on behalf of his nation. He was not superman. His greatness lies in the fact that he was an ordinary man who managed to cope with enormous pressures, pressures that would make many people collapse, and yet retain the capacity to think rather than to be certain. Thinking leads to decisions that are the best one can do at the time and he who is able to think will also change those decisions in the light of experience. Mandela was able to do that. I think I’m right in saying that 10 times in six years he was offered freedom from Robben Island and turned it down because of the consequences for his own integrity. But he was able to recognise that De Klerk was offering a different kind of relationship and he moved very quickly. The capacity to lead an abused people into reconciliation and repair rather than revenge reflects this kind of state of mind in which certainty has been replaced by concern and generosity.

The greatness of Mandela was not that he was a super man walking this earth but that he was a real man showing that it was possible to be truly human whilst at the same time holding a position of great power. It is a great sadness to think that this simple truth will be so completely missed by the vast majority of politicians. It is more to be expected, although it remains sad that most of our journalists and commentators will also miss the point.