IMPLICATIONS

The future society may be just as mediocre as this one. It may be worse. And no amount of restructuring or changing the system or tearing it down in the hope that something better will grow will change this. There may be a better system than the one we now have.
It is hard to know. But, whatever it is, if the people to lead it well are not there, a better system will not produce a better society. Many people finding their wholeness through many and varied contributions make a good society. Here we are concerned with but one facet: able servants with potential to lead will lead, and, where appropriate, they will follow only servant-leaders.

Not much else counts if this does not happen. This brings us to that critical aspect of realism that confronts the servant-leader, that of order. There must be some order because we know for certain that the great majority of people will choose some kind of order over chaos even if it is delivered by a brutal non-servant and even if, in the process, they lose much of their freedom. Therefore the servant-leader will beware of pursuing an idealistic path regardless of its impact on order. The big question is: What kind of order? This is the great challenge to the emerging generation of leaders: Can they build better order? Older people who grew up in a period when values were more settled and the future seemed more secure will be disturbed by much they find today. But one firm note of hope comes through loud and clear; we are at a turn of history in which people are growing up faster and some extraordinarily able, mature, servant-disposed men and women are emerging in their early and middle twenties. The percentage may be small, and, again, it may be larger than we think. Moreover, it is not an elite; it is all sorts of exceptional people. Most of them could be ready for some large society-shaping responsibility by the time they are thirty if they are encouraged to prepare for leadership as soon as their potential as builders is identified, which is possible for many of them by age eighteen or twenty. Preparation to lead need not be at the complete expense of vocational or scholarly preparation, but it must be the first priority. And it may take some difficult bending of resources and some unusual initiatives to accomplish all that should be accomplished in these critical years and give leadership preparation first priority. But whatever it takes, it must be done. For a while at least, until a better led society is assured, some other important goals should take a subordinate place. All of this rests on the assumption that the only way to change a society (or just make it go) is to produce people, enough people, who will change it (or make it go). The urgent problems of our day the disposition to venture into immoral and senseless wars, destruction of the environment, poverty, alienation, discrimination, overpopulation are here because of human failures, individual failures, one person at a time, one action at a time failures. If we make it out of all of this (and this is written in the belief that we will make it), the “system” will be whatever works best. The builders will find the useful piece wherever they are, and invent new ones when needed, all without reference to ideological coloration. “How do we get the right things done?” will be the watchword of the day, every day. And the context of those who bring it off will be: all men and women who are touched by the effort grow taller, and become healthier, stronger, more autonomous, and more disposed to serve. Leo the servant, and the exemplar of the servant-leader, has one further portent for us. If we may assume that Hermann Hesse is the narrator in Journey to the East (not a difficult assumption to make), at the end of the story he establishes his identity. His final confrontation at the close of his initiation into the Order is with a small transparent sculpture, two figures joined together. One is Leo, the other is the narrator. The narrator notes that a movement of substance is taking place within the transparent sculpture. I perceived that my image was in the process of adding to and flowing into Leo’s, nourishing and strengthening it. It seemed that in time . . . only one would remain: Leo. He must grow, I must disappear. As I stood there and looked and tried to understand what I saw, I recalled a short conversation that I had once had with Leo during the festive days at Bremgarten. We had talked about the creations of poetry being more vivid and real than the poets themselves. What Hesse may be telling us here is that Leo is the symbolic personification of Hesse’s aspiration to serve through his literary creations, creations that are greater than Hesse himself; and that his work, for which he was but the channel, will carry on and serve and lead in a way that he, a twisted and tormented man, could not except as he created. Does not Hesse dramatize, in extreme form, the dilemma of us all? Except as we venture to create, we cannot project ourselves beyond ourselves to serve and lead.