A popular presenter, Associate Professor Jeffrey Nielsen made his third appearance with Humanists of Utah. Starting out with bit of autobiographical information, Nielsen spoke about his last semester at Weber College just before heading to Boston for law school. Needing to complete some G.E. requirements, he enrolled in an introductory class in philosophy taught by a Professor Owens, "an interesting character with a white Afro." A book he mentioned in class was Leo Tolstoy's Death of Ivan Ilych.

Unlike his students nowadays where Nielsen said he could hardly get them to do assigned reading, he'd rush out to get books his professors mentioned, and Tolstoy's novel was no exception. "It was a transformative moment for me," said Nielsen after he finished this novel. The main character was a lawyer, and he was going to be a lawyer. In his entire life, Tolstoy's lawyer was inauthentic; never once did he make a decision or choice based on his own values. Instead, he conformed to what Nietzsche referred to as "the herd mentality or the crowd mentality."

The thesis of the novel caused Nielsen to wonder how it would be to live one's entire life but to never be truly alive. "How would it be to make it through life with fake ID's and never once be your own true self?" Shocked, this realization caused him to think. Putting Tolstoy's novel together with Socrates' belief that the unexamined life is not worth living, Nielsen said he wondered why the unexamined life wasn't worth living.

According to Socrates, an unexamined life leads to mindless dogmatism and annihilation. Socratic thought is to believe in commitment to intellectual honesty and moral conscience. And for Socrates, care of the self was our highest obligation and our highest happiness. But Nielsen said that you cannot care for the self without seeking understanding. And you cannot care for the self when you're harming others. Thus the unexamined life can lead to harming others and unjust practices.

As a result of this revelatory moment, Nielsen decided against law school, and instead pursued a PhD program in Philosophy. "My wife is still not too happy about that," Nielsen joked. In his studies in philosophy, Nielsen wondered about some basic questions, such as what does it mean to exist, and what does it mean to be real. And what is reality, what is knowledge, what is truth, how should he live, and what should he do.

Such questions have shaped Nielsen to how he is as a philosopher. And to him, his job as a philosopher is to question institutions for the sake of community, to question power for the sake of justice, and to question lifestyles for the sake of happiness and meaning, all the while guided by the Socratic thought to intellectual honesty and moral conscience. Intellectual honesty is the wisdom to know what you don't know and to have openness, humility, and tolerance of others' ideas and values.

Nielsen interjected that he finished his degree, came back to Utah and taught at BYU until 2004, when the LDS church encouraged members to not support same-sex marriage. Sitting in sacrament meeting as this letter from the church presidency was read, Nielsen said it struck him that that wasn't quite right. To make a long story short, Nielsen said he wrote an opinion piece that the Salt Lake Tribune published, challenging the church's stand on same-sex marriage. Consequently, he was fired from BYU, and since has been at UVU and Westminster College.

And being here with Humanists of Utah, he said, is just a continuation of his job as a philosopher, a Socratic project of intellectual honesty and moral conscience, searching for the truth, and in the process, making sure he doesn't harm others.

With that bit of autobiography, Nielsen began to address the cynicism, apathy, and anger being played out in politics today. With Orrin Hatch and Bob Bennett in our local political scene and the national tea party movement, Nielsen is very troubled.

According to Nielsen, the Utah Institute for Public Deliberation has three points that they address:

• What it means to be a human being or a symbolic animal
• What it means to be a social animal
• What it means to be a relational or organizational animal

The symbolic animal refers to the physical needs and existential needs we have--or "Will to Meaning."

• The will to meaning means we must gain a psychological confidence of our own self-worth
• The will to meaning means we have to feel like we're making a creative contribution to life
• The will to meaning means to have a genuine connection to community

To experience a meaningful life Neilsen maintains that, we need these three conditions. When a person's will to meaning is frustrated or when one or all of the above are not met, the defense mechanism of cynicism and apathy comes into play to protect ourselves from self-destruction.

When cynicism and apathy are placed into a social context where on one hand, you have opulence and consumption, and on the other hand, you have fear, anxiety, insecurity, and growing inequality, then the frustrated will to meaning explodes into anger, public unrest, and public instability.

Displaying a book he brought along to our meeting, At the Spirit Level by Richard Wilkinson, a book about epidemiology, Nielsen cited an interesting piece of information. Thirty years of research has shown that people are happiest and healthiest when they experience the least amount of social inequality. What jumped out for Nielsen was how the book showed that since 1980, we've had growing inequality in America of our economic state, which is accompanied with a host of ills.

From that research, Nielsen said he is concerned about the clear correlation between social inequality and growing distrust. In other words, the more inequality in a society, the more distrust there is. Therefore, in America for the last 30 years with the growing inequality, there's been a growing distrust; we just don't trust one another.

Thus, cynicism and apathy is the result of frustration to our will to meaning. Nielsen said, "During hard social economic times, when that frustration gets manipulated by certain people, who shall remain unnamed, when that gets manipulated by people in the media who have self-interested motives, that can explode into anger and civil unrest."

Social animals naturally live in groups. And groups need to be organized. Groups need to be ordered, and power has to be applied to order the groups to promote cooperation and to resolve conflicts. Nielsen said he calls it political power whenever power is used to order relationships in the community, in terms of cooperation and conflict.

According to Nielsen, there are three ways that power can be ordered. These ways pertain whether in a family, religious institution, non-profit agency, work or government institution: coercively, manipulatively, or persuasively.

• Coercively means to threaten or force the person to do something against his will.
• Deceptively or manipulatively means acting under false pretenses. At this point, Nielsen tells a Santa Claus story from his own family. When his daughter was ten, she asked him if Santa Claus was for real. He knew if he "messed up," he'd be in trouble with his wife. After conferring with her, his answer to his daughter was, "No, sweetheart. There is no Santa Claus. It's your parents who bring you the presents." She started to cry, running to her room. After about 20 minutes, she came out with a picture she'd drawn. Holding up her picture for us, it is of his daughter with tears rolling down her face. At the top, she'd written: "I've been lied to all my life." The trouble with manipulation, concluded Nielsen, is that when the truth comes out, all credibility is lost.
• Persuasion uses logic and dialogue to influence people to organize cooperation and resolve conflicts. As a teacher of ethics, Nielsen has to ask himself what the ethical way to exercise power is. With few exceptions, the only moral way to exercise political power is with persuasion through reason and dialogue. To coerce or manipulate is unethical. He's confident that all of the ethical theories and models that he's aware of embodies persuasion.

Nielsen said that he sees only two ways to relate to another person, whether in an organizational context, in life, to his wife or to us. And that is a relationship of equality or of inequality. In a relationship of inequality, there tends to be coercion and manipulation whereas in a relationship of equality, there tends to be the invitation to be persuasive. Nielsen observed that relationships of inequality are rank-based whereas in relationships of equality, they are peer-based.

In which of these two contexts is a person more likely able to satisfy his basic will to meaning, that is: self-worth, creative contribution, and connection to community? Peer-based, of course, while relationships of inequality frustrate our basic will to meaning. But why is it that every relationship we have in life, in fact, every aspect in life is always organized in a line of inequality?

This is where the myth of leadership comes into play; the line of inequality is a set of assumptions that justifies the significance we place on our concept of leadership and the privileges we bestow upon our leaders, frequently to the detriment of others in our organizations--whether they be business, religious, family, or government. The myth of leadership creates the powerful belief that only a relatively few gifted individuals can be made leaders and thus, trusted to make the decisions and do the commanding and controlling of everyone else. It makes false assumptions about leaders and followers.

• The leader speaks and the followers listen
• The leader controls information and the followers can only guess
• The leader knows and the followers only have opinions
• The leader decides and the followers just do what they're told
• The leader directs resources and the followers must make do with less and less
• The leader commands and the followers obey
• The leader is superior and the followers are inferior

The implications of the peer principle require that the following values be recognized, respected, and implemented:

• Openness with information-as opposed to the secrecy allowed and considered legitimate with leaders and leadership.
• Transparency in the decision-making process, which requires greater participation of all affected parties-as opposed to the top-down and behind closed door decision-making allowed and considered legitimate with leaders and leadership.
• Cooperation and sharing of management roles and responsibilities, which requires the exercise of power-in-common-as opposed to the command and control nature of the exercise of power-over allowed and considered legitimate with leaders and leadership.
• Commitment to peer deliberation as the legitimate exercise of authority-as opposed to the rank-based exercise of coercive, manipulative, or even persuasive authority allowed and considered legitimate with leaders and leadership.

For more detailed information, check out Nielsen's fascinating book, The Myth of Leadership: creating leaderless organizations.

--Sarah Smith