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Sarah Malone of Trump International Golf Links Scotland is adopting the typical belligerent stance of her boss when threatening to take the BBC to court over the screening of Anthony Baxter’s multi-award-winning film documentary ‘You’ve Been Trumped’ on BBC2, accusing the BBC of highlighting what Ms Malone decribes as not a documentary but a piece of biased propaganda.
I find this comment hilarious coming from the mouth of an employee of an organisation which some would claim are the masters of propaganda. What are Trump’s statements about ‘the greatest golf course in the world’ and building ‘the greatest hotel Scotland has ever seen’ other than blatant propaganda?
Robert Smith
Walter Humes’ insightful piece on psychopaths (18 October) has helped me understand a phenomenon that perplexed me when I was a lecturer in organisational behaviour. Many of my part-time students, who were aspiring middle managers, seemed to be obsessed with the concept of ‘leadership’ at the expense of other abilities seemingly important to the manager, such as empathy, ability to prioritise, coping with ambiguity, and so on. And the multi-million pound leadership development industry, offering would-be senior managers training in the dark arts of becoming a ‘charismatic’ leader would seem to bear out this contemporary obsession.
Recently, I’ve been reading what Jung has to say on the subject of archetypes, personifications of narrative patterns or myths in our collective psyche.
Jung suggested that individuals or communities which lack understanding of psychic processes risk being ‘overwhelmed by archetypes’, and as a consequence behave in exaggerated or bizarre ways. Such possession by an archetype – we may describe it in more scientific terms as inability to rationalise what is happening – may, Jung suggested, turn a person into ‘a flat collective figure, a mask behind which he can no longer develop as a human being, but becomes increasingly stunted’.
The danger, Jung thought, of the archetype of charismatic leadership, or ‘mana personality’ as he termed it, was not only to the deluded followers, but to the leader him or herself. ‘Master and pupil are in the same boat in this respect’ said Jung. Walter Humes refers to the qualities which help to make the psychopathic leader’s task easier: ‘good communication skills; effective "impression management"; the ability to attract acolytes. They consolidate their position by promoting staff who will follow orders and dismissing or marginalising those who may present a challenge’.
No wonder Jung believed that ‘it is hard to see how one can escape the sovereign power of the primordial images’, but he suggested that by altering our attitude to ‘leadership’ we might save ourselves from naively falling into an archetype and being forced to act at the expense of our humanity. In this context we need more examples of the thoughtful critique of the phenomenon offered by Walter Humes.
Dr Mary Brown
I cannot be alone in finding it shocking and totally insensitive that our prime minister is allocating £50m – yes 50 million pounds – to commemorate the start of a war. And not just any war but the war that was so frightful that it was supposed to end all wars. The sum itself is large, given that the UK is more heavily indebted than it has ever been. However, what is surely repugnant is the fact that he wants to do this in 2014 and not, as it rightly should be, in 2018 when the war ended.
David Grant
It appears not to be just the D G who has memory problems. (24 October) A gushing obit (with audio) is still available from Auntie. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b016lkgq
Frank de Pellette
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