Good leaders have always been rare. In today’s world, they seem extinct. Joe Rigney’s recent book Leadership and Emotional Sabotage digs into the spiritual reasons for the leadership epidemic and recommends cures.
Rigney starts with a summary of a book by Edwin Friedman called A Failure of Nerve. Friedman’s theory is that so many would-be leaders fail to lead because they lack the will to stand against the pressure of the crowd. Basically, the person who ought to be making decisions and setting the direction for the group gets so bogged down in the emotional volatility of those he leads that he becomes paralyzed. He is too worried about upsetting people to make unpopular decisions, so the whole group is reduced to petty squabbles. If a leader wants to be effective, he must cultivate what Friedman calls “differentiation.” Here’s what Friedman means by a “well-differentiated leader”:
I mean someone who can be separate while still remaining connected and, therefore, can maintain a modifying, non-anxious, and sometimes challenging presence. I mean someone who can manage his or her own reactivity in response to the automatic reactivity of others and, therefore, be able to take stands at the risk of displeasing.1
In other words, when emotions run high, the well-differentiated leader sticks to his guns. He may be attacked from all sides, including his own, but he doesn’t let that faze him. He acts instead of reacting. Like Davy Crockett, he knows he’s right and he goes ahead.
Rigney’s book expands Friedman’s idea using biblical terms—for example, he substitutes “sober-mindedness” for “differentiation”—and urges leaders to take responsibility, think clearly, and avoid emotional sabotage. This is how people can become the leaders the world so desperately needs.
I agree with most of what Rigney says, but he glosses over one factor that makes differentiation—and therefore, leadership—particularly difficult in our age. I refer, of course, to Twitter.2 In order to be the kind of leader Rigney describes in his book, you have to stop using Twitter.3
Rigney mentions social media early in his book, acknowledging that such technologies “amplify and reinforce our spiritual and social sickness.”4 But the problem, he says, “runs deeper than Twitter, Facebook, and cable news.” He’s right that social media is not the source of our problems. Delete your account and you will still wrestle with sin. But practically speaking, using Twitter and other social media eats away at the qualities that make a person a good leader. The more time you spend on Twitter, the less sober-minded, or differentiated, you become.
Rigney lists the characteristics of differentiation as defined by Friedman, which are:
- Differentiation refers to a direction in life rather than a state of being
- Differentiation is the capacity to take a stand in an intense emotional system
- Differentiation is saying “I” when others are demanding “we”
- Differentiation is containing one’s reactivity to the reactivity of others, which includes the ability to avoid being polarized
- Differentiation is maintaining a non-anxious presence in the face of anxious others
- Differentiation is knowing where one ends and another begins
- Differentiation is being able to cease automatically being one of the system’s emotional dominoes
- Differentiation is being clear about one’s own personal values and goals
- Differentiation is taking maximum responsibility for one’s own emotional being and destiny rather than blaming others or the context.5
If you wanted to explain what Twitter is like to someone who had never used it, you could do worse than to invert this list, replacing “differentiation” with Twitter: “Using Twitter refers to a state of being rather than a direction in life”; “Using Twitter is not knowing where one ends and another begins”; “Using Twitter is taking no responsibility for one’s own emotional being and destiny and blaming others or the context.” Few activities so directly sabotage a person’s ability to think clearly.
You may have experienced something like the following: You are on Twitter, blithely scrolling, when you come across an irritating tweet. You’re tempted to respond, but you think better of it (the tweet has only three likes, after all) and keep scrolling. The content of the tweet fades from your mind as other things take its place. But the irritation it caused sticks around. After this happens several times, the irritation has coalesced into a knot of rage that sits in your gut without any discernible source or target. The more you scroll, the tighter the knot grows, until a perfectly innocuous statement (“2024 was a bad year for hurricanes”) strikes you as an idea so outrageous it needs to be immediately and forcefully squashed.
This experience is embedded in Twitter’s design. The combination of short posts and an endless timeline creates a whirlwind of announcements, statements, complaints, criticisms, and sheer outrage, all of which are entirely devoid of context. Because of the sheer volume of tweets, you can’t carefully consider each statement. If you do take the time to do so, you will be left behind because the discussion has already moved on. To keep up, Twitter users “like” or retweet statements they agree with and either scroll past or angrily reply to those they disagree with. The conversation flits from topic to topic, leaving emotion (usually, anger) as the only constant.
Like other social media, Twitter fools you into thinking you’re well informed. Words, images, videos, and hyperlinks crowd your view, which, like the reflection of city lights in a puddle, gives you the illusion that the world itself is before your eyes. The flow of things to look at never stops, which makes it hard to tell that, basically, everyone is talking about the same thing. The most active Twitter users are all remarkably homogenous and are interested in social commentary and politics. They follow each other and post for each other, and the rest of life is more or less ignored. “The amount that Twitter omits is breathtaking,” says author Robin Sloan. “More than any other social platform, it is indifferent to huge swaths of human experience and endeavor.”6 The key word here is “indifferent.” Other things do appear on Twitter—cooking videos, fine art, pictures of cats, poetry, clever wordplay—but they fade quickly because you can’t argue about them.7
When everyone in your timeline is talking about the same thing, the pressure to join in the conversation is overwhelming, especially because the rewards can be intoxicating. A clever tweet that goes even the tiniest bit viral can give you a high that lasts the rest of the day. (As every middle schooler knows, the surest way to get a laugh is to make fun of what everyone else is already mocking.) If you choose not to engage with the “outrage of the day” and instead post pictures of your cat, your contribution to Twitter will be ignored or taken as a social comment in itself. “How dare she share a cheery New Year’s photo? Doesn’t she know what happened in New Orleans?”
“But I don’t get caught up in the outrage,” you say. “I am not one of the system’s emotional dominoes. I am, in fact, a thought-leader on Twitter. My followers need me to maintain a non-anxious presence in the face of anxious others.” If that’s your response, then I’m sorry to say that you’ve fallen for the scam. You are the worst kind of fool: one that doesn’t know it.
When mass media was invented, it created what Soren Kierkegaard called the “Press” and the “Public.” The Press spread information far and wide, while the Public sat and took it in. They were detached spectators, believing that they were informed, but having no real or meaningful connection with the events they were told about.8 Now, in the age of “new media,” those spectators engage with the information, repeating it, interpreting it, even contributing to it. Because they’re so darn busy engaging that they forget they are still detached. On Twitter, even a simple retweet can feel like a brave action, like taking a stand. But it’s all hollow posturing. Your bravery is swallowed up and mixed with everything else on the platform. It is thrown far and wide, lauded by those who already agree and savaged by those who don’t, until it’s totally stripped of context and becomes yet another soundbite people use to validate their own opinions. Doug Wilson once said that pastors need to be on Twitter because that’s where the people are. The mental image is one of standing up to a mob, preaching the gospel boldly. But on Twitter, you are the mob. No matter what you say or how you say it, your words are just more fuel for the fire.
At this point, you’ve probably already hopped on Twitter to see whether “Christian Leithart” himself has an account. I admit it. I do. And I used it, mostly as a reader, for ten years. In 2020, I unfollowed everyone except my wife, an act which was the mental health equivalent of signing up for Fat Camp. Now, I use Twitter for two things: 1) checking on individual user’s timelines, such as my local weatherman’s, and 2) shameless self-promotion. I wish it weren’t true, but most people will never see an announcement unless it’s posted to social media. Maybe I’ll live to see that trend reversed. (By the way, buy my book!)
The mainstream media have been in free-fall long enough that we’re all starting to wonder if the well they toppled into is bottomless. The champions of new media are right that breaking news appears on Twitter first. Many news outlets simply parrot information they found online. So, while I would like to say that leaders should cut off social media completely, I can’t. I recommend instead that leaders unfollow everyone on social media and make it a formal policy never to engage. They should use it only to gather information from specific sources. And they should trust it about as much as they would trust a demoniac on the Gadarene shore. If you must be on Twitter, you will have to work ten times as hard to be, in Friedman’s terms, separate while still remaining connected.
Rigney is exactly right: sin is the problem, not technology. It is precisely awareness of his own sinful nature that makes a good man leave a red-light district or quit his job at a dishonest company. The kinds of sins that sabotage leaders are exacerbated by social media. For those who want to lead, it’s the worst kind of training ground.
Christian Leithart writes and teaches in Birmingham, Alabama. He is also the cofounder of Little Word.
NOTES
- Edwin Friedman, quoted in Joe Rigney, Leadership and Emotional Sabotage (Canon Press, Kindle Edition), 9. ↩︎
- I know Elon Musk has renamed his site X, but the name is dumb and using it in an essay would be confusing. ↩︎
- Really, this applies to all social media. Twitter is just the one I happen to have the most experience with. Up until about four years ago, I spent a lot of time on Twitter. Given the speed at which the internet mutates, the site may be a completely different place than it was then, but I doubt it. ↩︎
- Rigney, 12. ↩︎
- Rigney, 10. ↩︎
- Robin Sloan, “The Lost Thread” https://www.robinsloan.com/lab/lost-thread/ ↩︎
- The exception that proves the rule is the massive debate over the color of that one dress: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dress ↩︎
- See L. M. Sacasas, “To Act, or Not to Act on Social Media,” in The Frailest Thing: https://thefrailestthing.com/the-frailest-thing/ Sacasas summarizes Kierkegaard’s terms in his essay. ↩︎