It’s always hard to tell how a presentation is being received in the room when presenting via Zoom but judging by the discussion in the following Q&A portion it seemed like it went over well. The crowd really seemed to respond both to the selected examples (Rogers, Aragorn, and Picard) and to the idea of looking at leaders in the light of their failure moments. This was really a result of my rejecting the notion of a “fatal flaw”. Whether they are historical or fictional, realistic characters seem to me to be more nuanced than that, but everyone experiences failure so I thought that would be a more relatable approach to the prompt.
Some interesting questions were raised by the audience about an apparent period of dormancy between failure and recovery. I didn’t think of it in the moment, but this actually resonates with one of the ideas in an earlier paper on Disappointing Dualism which Kerra and I presented in our first moot back in 2020 where was observed that recovering heroes seemed to move through a period of solitude and reflection between a fall from grace and a return to active goodness. This question has me thinking and may spawn a future line of research.
There was also a discussion later on about whether self-sacrifice was an essential trait for a heroic leader. I can think of a few examples where my three leaders put their lives on the line for others, but it seemed to me that a good leader needed to have vision to see the greater plan and understand the greater good as well as discernment to comprehend which of the many competing needs was the one to sacrifice for and when was the right time to do it. Again, this is a line of thought that merits more investigation.
