Our granddaughter is studying psychology in college and, while we were discussing her interest in psychology, it refreshed my interest in the psychological personalities of people in general and more specifically in politics. It's an amazing subject.
I confess that when I was pastoring a multiple staff church that I often profiled people we were examining for leadership church positions. In particular, I was concerned about the person we hired to be our music minister. Unfortunately, I cannot really "carry a tune in a bucket," and therefore needed someone with strong musical ability to lead our music ministry. However, I quickly discovered that if I hired someone who was an extrovert with strong feelings (a profile shared by a lot of musical people) he or she would drive me crazy. They needed a little "thinking" in order to fit into the total church ministry program.
An exception to this once occurred when a search committee and I interviewed a young man for our music minister. He was smart, could lead choirs and other groups, played the piano and organ, and looked great on his ministry profile. I was the only one on the search committee who questioned hiring him, so I went along with the rest of the committee, not wanting to "rock the boat." I'm sure the members of the committee felt that I was resistant because he had a better ministry profile than I did but, in truth, he had a better ministry profile than anyone I had ever encountered. It was perfect, too perfect. And, I was right. It turned out that he had doctored his ministry profile, and was actually a closet homosexual with schizophrenic tendencies. Ouch! You may imagine where that went when he was hired to lead music and became involved with youth music.
Too many times, we either hire or elect someone to lead us without considering the psychological orientation of the individual involved and are then shocked when he or she turns out to be someone we didn't recognize. It is too easy to manipulate our public image and create the impression that we are exactly the right person for a position. People make too many decisions based upon their emotions and what someone or some issue "looks like" instead of actually examining the person or situation.
Even a cursory examination of contemporary politics affirms this conclusion. Read the biographies of presidents like Richard Nixon, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and others; and you will quickly see what I mean. With time, their personal lives reveal huge previously unknown problems; and while people want to excuse their behavior in favor of saying they did a good job of providing leadership, it doesn't excuse these issues. You may know a book by its cover, but it's what's inside that makes all of the difference.
At the risk of meddling, I have to be honest about our past president. Anyone who reads Mary Trump's book knows about the psychological issues with the Trump family. I know of people who have not read the book, thinking it is just one more effort to tear down the president but that is not quite the case. It is not by accident that we have had a powerful president who was scornful of advice, brutal in his leadership style, and narcissistic (Dictionary: "Excessive love or admiration of oneself") in putting himself above everyone else -- someone who consistently ignored democracy in favor of personal agenda and was not hesitant to destroy the careers and lives of anyone who got in his way. It is deplorable to observe the many Congressional people who apparently knew all of this and yet decided to follow him without question, even as it did serious damage to our democratic country. Mary Trump is a clinical psychiatrist, and she does an admirable job in profiling the entire Trump family.
A healthy democracy always allows for different opinions, but Americans need to recognize that the difference between having a limited democracy and an autocratic form of government, something that leads inevitably to the same kind of government exemplified by countries like Russia, China and North Korea, is dangerous. We do not need a dictator or king in our country; we need the strong voice of our citizenship standing up for the democratic process. This means we need to avoid the colorful wrappings of our public images and return to observing the psychological facts and historical backgrounds about the people we choose to lead us.
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Robert Box is the former chaplain for the Bella Vista Police Department and is currently the Fire Department chaplain. Opinions expressed are those of the author.