Hello. My name is Jesan Sorrells and this is
the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books podcast, episode
number 135.
There are some books that define
what it means to be a leader in ways that are
counterintuitive. And we spent a lot of time on the podcast
last year exploring some of those books and exploring
what counterintuitive thinking around leadership might look like.
All the way from looking at, how
to network via the war of 18 12, all
the way to how to think about and how to engage
against, propaganda and ideology and the power of the powerless
by Vaclav Havel. And finally, wrapping up
towards the end of the year, we looked at Huckleberry Finn and what it
means for leaders to engage with humor in a world that
might indeed be humor less or increasingly humor
less. Although, I think we're at the end of that. I think we're in a
slow healing cycle from that. Then there are
some books that challenge us in deeper kinds of ways and
combine ideas that have come from other places that we may not be
familiar with and really make them succinct. And today, we're
going to be covering one of those books.
Now I got to admit, when I first read this book, I was not convinced
that it was a leadership book, at least not by the title,
even though it has the word leadership in it. I was convinced that it was
something else because of the provenance of the book, the nature of
the publisher, Cannon Press, and the type of man who is
behind the publisher, Doug Wilson. But
we covered, in the final episode of 2024,
Doug Wilson's commentary on the book of Revelation when the man comes
around. And so I decided to start off this year, a
year where we opened up with Shop Class as Soulcraft by
Matthew b Crawford. I decided to continue that process
of noodling into what does it look like to engage with material
reality in a world of anxiety, trouble,
and strife with this book. And I'm not going to show it to
you because, guess what, I don't have a physical copy of this
book. But I do have a digital copy, and we are
going to be talking about, insights from that book, and insights
from the digital copy of that book today with
our guest cohost from the end of last year whose name and
voice you will recognize when I say it. So today, we'll be
extracting leadership lessons from what I consider to be one of the best,
probably straight leadership books of 2024,
Leadership and Emotional Sabotage, Resisting
the Anxiety That Will Wreck Your Family, Destroy Your Church, and Ruin the
World by Joe Rigney.
Leaders, here's a question for you. How do you solve a
problem like Ed Friedman?
And today, we will be joined in our conversation by our first guest cohost of
2025, who, as I've mentioned before, was our last
guest cohost to the final episode of 2024, where
we did discuss that commentary, on the book of Revelation by Doug
Wilson, when the man comes around.
We are joined today by my friend and former
pastor, who I've never really mentioned that on this show, Brian
Bagley. How are you doing, Brian? Hey, man. I'm
I'm glad to be here. Thanks for having me.
So, Brian has on his, very
snazzy vest. I have on my flannel,
which is lined with sheep's wool that I got from, that I got
for, for Christmas. My wife says that I look very
much like a farmer now. I look like a blue collar guy, which
kinda goes along, I think, a little bit with the nature of the book and
the kinds of things that, Joe is attempting to get
to here in Leadership and Emotional
Sabotage. So you'll
see that on the video. You won't hear any of that on the audio, but
you'll see that on the video. So it'll be good for you. You look great,
by the way. You look great, by the way. You know, I it's interesting. So
I was, like, I was looking at we were doing our prerecording, kinda going through
our prerecording checks with my, my, production assistant.
And I was looking at the video, and I was like, oh my god. Like,
all gray on that side. What is happening?
Well, you know It's wisdom. We
something's well, something's coming out. It might be might be that something's coming out. I
don't know about coming, you know, going in. But, let's see if we can get
to some wisdom today. So just like with most books that are new
or relatively new, we're not gonna read directly from the book today.
We're gonna comment on it, and we're gonna talk about larger themes in the book.
And we're going to I'm gonna ask Brian some questions, and we're gonna kinda walk
through some of the big chunky ideas in the book.
This book is short, and, it's only a 108 pages.
So it's easy an easy read. And I was kind of
I will admit, I was kind of perturbed when I when I figured out how
short it was because I was, like, really, how how good could it be? But
short, small books are what Canon Press is known
for. Books that distill down the BS and the
nonsense and really get into just this is what this
thing is, right, that we're talking about. And we'll talk
a little bit about Joe Rigney. And we'll talk about his
background, why he wrote this book potentially, and sort of some ideas I
have about that. So I'd like to kick off with a brief
a brief summary of the book. So what Joe Rigney is doing is
he's taking ideas that were, formerly proposed in a
book called The Failure of Nerve, by a guy named Ed Friedman,
many years ago. A book that was,
to my knowledge, never fully completed. And, he's taking these
ideas, which were written with a focus on evolutionary
biology, a focus on psychology, and a focus on secularism. And he
is applying a biblical worldview to
these ideas and placing them in a biblical context.
And Rigney, the author of Leadership and Emotional
Sabotage, picked up a few principles that Ed Friedman had
talked about. But not all of them. But he he picked up a bunch of
them. And those include ideas of emotional systems
being, around in the world. Chronic anxiety,
triangulation, a concept called herding, which we're gonna talk,
a little bit about today. What
it means to be and what it is what it means to be and and
who is a well differentiated leader.
Empathy. We're sure gonna talk a lot about empathy today,
particularly weaponized empathy. We're gonna talk a little bit about that.
And, because Joe got into a little bit of trouble talking about weaponized empathy a
few a few years ago. And this idea of
emotional sabotage, which, Friedman never really discussed
because Friedman didn't really believe, just like most secular atheists don't
believe in a fallen world. But Christians
do, and they know that we have to we know that we have to operate
within that very carefully. In chapter
1 of Leadership and Emotional Sabotage, Rigney draws on the
bible, Shakespeare, Homer. And he does all of this to
show how anxiety that's current in our society,
is not just a general crisis, but a crisis of degree. And he
he makes some distinctions with the difference in the book that I think are
important in the first few chapters.
In chapter 2, Rigney builds on that concept of a crisis of
degree, by talking about and addressing this
question, how can a leader lead through a crisis of
degree? What does that actually look like? And then in chapter 3, Ricky
describes the concept of emotional sabotage.
One of the things that's interesting to me and why I wanted to talk with
Brian about this is because, the dynamic of emotional sabotage
occurs a lot in churches, and has occurred a lot more, I
think, as the crisis of degree has increased over the course of the
last, I would say, 25 years. And it has led to church splits. It's
led to church leadership being questioned. The probably
most public example that I could think of recently that has happened that's
in the public zeitgeist is all the dynamics between Beth Moore
and anybody that you can mention in the Southern Baptist
Conference.
As growing leaders and this is from a review of Joe
Rigney's book. As growing leaders begin to exercise renewed biblical leadership, the
pushback is often negative and pronounced at first. How can a leader lead
through this? And I don't think it's just in I don't think it's just in
churches. I think as leaders and we're about to see this, I think, with the
new Trump administration, at a macro political level,
but I also think we're about to see this at a micro political level. As
corporations move away from DEI and other initiatives that they
have that they have pushed for the last
well, since that mostly peaceful summer of 2020.
What you're going to see is a lot of emotional sabotage. I'm
already starting to see the little tiny spring shoots,
the leaves coming up on the trees of that on places like LinkedIn and the
Drudge Report as the quote unquote resistance
to well, to being emotionally manipulated
really begins to kick in. And it's gonna be interesting to see how these
CEOs and these leaders respond to the pushback,
that is negative and pronounced against emotional
sabotage. So these are some of the main ideas that are at the
front of leadership emotional sabotage. And I'd like to kick off
by asking Brian Bagley,
what do you think about this? What do you think about this book? Talk about
it. I know you had mentioned when we started talking about talking about this book
that you had started it and then you put it down. Now you've gone back
into it. What do you think of this book? Yeah. No. I think it's
a I think it's a timely book. I think,
there it there's a lot of application in not just in
the church. I think it's I think your your
analysis there, you're you're drawing the line between the the
DEI, and emotional sabotage, I think
it's absolutely absolutely spot on. I think there's,
there are plenty of examples where,
people have made appeals to a motion,
that I think in a bygone era would have
just been, you know, shrugged off. You know?
In a more masculine era, there those
appeals to a motion would have just been dismissed. But we don't live in
a masculine era. We live in a feminine era. And so there's a lot
more weight being been given to emotional
appeals, whether it's through mass media,
politically, even, unfortunately,
as much as I hate to say it, theologically. And,
you know, you would you, you would hope that that theology your
theology would be, you know, theology is the is the thing that's at the the
headwaters of any society. It's their their what they think about God and
man. And so, you know, if your theology is
warped, then everything downstream of that will be as well.
And so so I think, you know, just from reading the book
and I I think Joe Rigney has
I think he's ahead of the curve with this book. I think he's got
some things he said some things that need to be said,
and I'm excited that he wrote it. I'm I'm glad that I I was able
to get through it, and, and I look forward to applying it in the coming,
months years. Well, it's interesting that you mentioned that religion
and you and I have had this discussion. Theology is or religion is
is upstream or other things. I let's frame it this way. Other things that
we value in civic and public life are downstream from
religion. And someone who is non sec who is secular
will listen to this and will say, rightly so,
they will say, well,
that may be true, but religion is just a social
construct of man. Now, we're not gonna get into the objections to that or the
the the or the ideas around that. Otherwise, we'll be here for 4 hours, and
we don't have that kind of time today. Instead, what we're going to do is
we're going to grant that argument that religion
is a social constructive man for the purpose of
talking about where that social construct sits. Right?
And religions all the way always go back to worldviews.
Right? What do you view where do you view your place in
the world? Where do you view Right. Who you are? I would
assert that worldviews go directly to and and the misorderedness
that we have in our worldviews go directly to the postmodern meeting
crisis that we've had for the last now going on 60
no. Almost 80 years, actually, in the west
overall. We've had an increasingly misordered sense of
meaning ever since, particularly in Europe, Christianity
died its last death, in the bombing of Dresden,
I would say, probably, in, in 1943, 44,
whenever that happened. I think it just it just that event
just wiped out. And it's not just that event. It was a culmination of a
lot of things, but that just sort of wiped out Christian Europe and
allowed for the rise of deconstructionism that
infected academia and other areas of our of our of American
public civic life over the course of the last 80 years or so.
Joe Rigney, I think, would probably agree with us in all this.
Just a little background on the author. He earned a bachelor of arts degree
in communication from Texas A&M University, followed by a master of arts in
biblical and pastoral studies from Bethlehem College and Seminary, and a master's
degree in classical Christian studies from New Saint Andrews. That would be
Doug Wilson's outfit in, in Idaho, and a PhD from
the University of Chester in England. He also served for
a brief time as a briefing pastor or maybe currently serves
as a preaching pastor at Cities Church in Minneapolis.
Let's talk a little bit about Joe Rigney. So
John Piper booted him from his little conclave up there in, in
Minneapolis. Can you tell the listeners why that happened and who John
Piper is? Because maybe most folks may not know. Yeah. John
Piper is a great preacher, pastor, and he's kinda he
kinda cut his teeth. He kinda became
famous in the 19 nineties for a series of,
I would say, college age,
it was a movement of of mainly college students at that time in the early
nineties. It was called the Passion Movement, and, it was
it was sort of the the awakening of this, reformed
movement among Christians, especially
younger Christians, and that gave rise to other aspects of
the reformed church planning movements such as Acts 29.
And there were some other things that kinda sprang from passion,
but but, Piper's sort of the the grandfather of
that that whole movement. But he's very it's interesting because,
reform guys tend to be more Presbyterian
ish. You know? You see you see there there are lots of reformed baptists. I'm
probably gonna get the smack down online about this, but but there are reformed
baptists, and and Piper is certainly one of them. I mean, I would say
you know? And I'm Baptist, and I I I would say I lean more towards
the reform way of thinking about things. But but bottom line
is, Piper is he's like the
granddad in in all of that. And so so,
you know, he founded Bethlehem College. He was the pastor there at
Bethlehem Baptist Church and had a very, very successful
ministry for a long time. Started, I think he was in charge. I
think it was Crossway Press. I'm not sure. Maybe it wasn't Crossway. But there's there's
some big publishing outfit. It's Crossway, I think, that he
founded, and it's huge. It's got a lot of a lot of publicity. It's a
great it they've got a lot of great resources. So Piper's been very
successful. And, and so Rigney kinda grew
up under him and and but Rigney, kinda
took a little bit of a you know, he he developed his own ideas
about some things, based on his own theology.
And, and so I think that's where you were going with that.
Right? Yeah. Yeah. And we'll get into a little bit deeper of
that or around that when we talk about sort of some flack that
Rigney has gotten. But I think, leadership and
emotional sabotage comes directly out of Rigney's
experiences defining what is going on in the
public culture in a way that goes that cuts
against the grain of the pipers or the Tim
Kellers, or even, I
would say, Alastair Beggs of the world.
And the reason why it cuts against the grain of those types of
folks is because those folks, to your
point about Piper, cut their eye teeth on building in the 19 nineties when we
lived in a much more Christian positive culture. I mean, it was still
becoming Christian negative, but it was it was nominally still Christian
positive. And now we live, I would assert, in a fully Christian
negative culture. Mhmm. You wouldn't believe the kind of pushback I
get from people when I talk about Christianity on this podcast. You wouldn't
believe the kind of pushback that I get. And
it's I'm I'm not talking about it in terms of, like, oh, I'm a martyr.
Feel sorry for me. No. Like, that's not what I'm talking about. I'm
saying there are people who genuinely just sort of skip past these topics and
go right to the other books whenever I talk about a book based in theology
or the bible. Or they'll they'll skip past because they it doesn't mean
anything to them. They're like, that doesn't mean anything to me. Christian
negative doesn't mean hostility. Christian negative can just mean passive
aggressiveness or even just, like, I'm just gonna ignore the thing
because it doesn't matter. And I think that's where we're
at as a culture in the United States. So Rigney came up,
like and I think Rigney is right around our right around my age. I'm in
my mid forties now. He came up during a time when
the transition from Christian positive to
Christian negative was almost fully complete. And he could see it in his
own peers. And so he writes from that perspective versus Piper who's
writing from the other end and leading from the other end of the telescope. The
The other thing I would say to that, if if I can jump in, is
just Yeah. There there's another there's another you're absolutely
right about that, Haysan. There's another aspect of this, and
that's the s the eschatology. So
Piper is gonna be more of a premillennialist,
and Joe Rigney is gonna be more of a postmillennialist. And so that
and the reason that gets into the the
civil sphere and Christian nationalism. K? So
so Piper and,
oh, you Tim Keller, couple of other guys that you mentioned,
premillennialists. Right? And so they take a much
more conciliatory tone with the
world. Why? Because they don't really see it as their
job to necessarily, build anything. I'm
I'm not I'm not saying they don't care about building things, you know, building a
church or or ministry. I'm not saying that. But they fundamentally
believe that that that things are gonna get worse and worse and worse, and
god's gonna Jesus is gonna come again in the second coming and just
rescue rescue the church from a really bad situation.
So they don't feel any pressure to be involved in
politics, to try to reform politics, to try to, reform
the the the public sphere in any way. Right? We're just gonna preach
Jesus and be nice and pray this
prayer, this simple prayer, and, you know, just think about keep you
know, think about your life in a Christian way and just love God and
and get along with folks and and it'll be okay in the end. And
Rigney's you know, he's not looking at it like that. He's saying, no. Christ doesn't
return until until the enemies of God are are made a
footstool under his feet. So that only happens through
the execution of the, the the gospel plan, the the
great commission, if you will. And so that means we have to go into these
spheres and, conquer them for Christ, if you will. So
that's the whole the whole point of Christian nationalism. We have 2 different ways
of thinking about how to confront a secular culture.
And the and they're they're I I wouldn't say they're diametrically opposed,
but they're they're clearly 2 different paths. And so,
so that's another thing in play. Well, in that and then you get into,
like, essentially the article. You get into, like, infant
baptism, which I'm not gonna get into. I'm just not gonna get into on this
podcast. I'm a I'm a I always say I'm a
recovering Catholic, a recovering orthodox
Catholic. And so,
maybe next time maybe sometime this year, we'll come on and we'll talk about the
intricacies of infant baptism for our audience. That'd be interesting. I
don't care. Because there's some definite, oh, let's put it this
way. We're the the orthodox and the the orthodox Catholics and
the Catholics, the western Catholics are reading the reading
the, the passages around baptism differently than the baptists are. Let's
just say that. They're just reading them differently. True statement.
So True statement. It's interesting, though. Let's let's talk about Christian
nationalism because this one's a little bit more this one actually irks
or pokes the secularist right in the right in the eye.
Particularly, the more leftist a secularist happens to be
politically oriented, the more
Christian nationalism riles them up.
And the reason why, I think, and I wanna go to a
deeper thing other than the nationalism or this weird
heuristic shorthand that's always put out thereof. Well,
we gotta separate church and state. And Christian nationalism just wants to combine churches.
We're gonna have a theocracy, Handmaid's Tale, blah blah blah blah. Then they start, like,
foaming at the mouth, and they create a golf and create make a Hulu show
or something that a bunch of people on the on the East Coast and the
West Coast watch.
Christian nationalism, I think, irks people of a political stripe
because they are of a purton they are of a particular psychological
temperament, I would assert. I think Rigney would agree with me, and I got this
from the book too. So Rigney is very
much concerned with what has happened and how to solve
it, which is great. He's describing the what. He's saying,
this is emotional sabotage. This is,
this is, weaponization of empathy.
This is, what what what what's the other things on my list? Oh, yeah. These
are the emotional systems. This is what anxiety looks like in the church. This is
what triangulation looks like. He's very much consumed with, like, this is the what,
and now let's move on to the how do we solve it, which is
great, right, for for the podcast and for where we're going this year. Great for
our show. I am, of course, a root cause
guy, which means I'm I'm very interested.
And and you can say this is for my own self referential reasons.
Sure. Okay. I'm very interested in the why
and the how. Mhmm. So
the reason why Christian nationalism hoax
people of a certain temperament, I think, is because of the
problem in our world today that if you mention it, we get you booted from
polite society. And Brian actually already mentioned it. So but boom. Brian's
already been booted from polite society, so it's fine. It's fine.
And he still eats, and somehow his kids still have clothes, so it's cool. Like,
being booted. Yeah. Boot boot boot for life is fine. This is fine.
But I think the problem is this, or the the why is
this. We have we have a dominance
or preponderance, maybe this is the best way to put it, of the
prioritization of a more feminine temperament in communication and
social situations. And that has slowly come to overwhelm
public discourse over the last 40 years. As a matter of fact,
probably the biggest example of this is the recent hearings for the
secretary of defense, Pete Heggeseth, and
just go online and search Pete Hegiseth female senators.
And you will find all kinds of memes and videos that will pop up,
in your browser. And if you are at work
in a place where HR is looking over your shoulder, you might
want to make sure to not go through the VPN at work
when you look at this. Because HR will have feminine HR will have a
conversation with you. Whether that feminine comes in the form of a man or a
woman, I do not care. It's a temperament issue. Right? That's
right. And I think that but I think that people
are searching around for why that feminine temperament has has come to so dominate
public discourse in work, in churches, in schools, in government. And I think
the why is because it's it's several factors. But I
think there's been changes in social structures and changes in
globalized communication patterns, with the advent of the commercial
Internet. I think the commerce this is one of the things that the commercial Internet
opened up. It opened the door to a
feminine temperament dominating
public discourse because the nature of
the applications built on top of the commercial Internet, most notably
social media, prioritizes
social norming, a a
tamping down of conflict,
and making sure that everybody stays in on track. And by the way,
you can see this from a masculine version of the feminine temperament, which is surveillance
and data gathering. That would be Google. And you can see this in a
more softer feminine version of
this in feminine temperament. And this would be, exemplified by
Tinder and online dating. Oh, and even, by the way, OnlyFans. Let's just
throw it out there. What the heck? Why not? And I think that
all of this has taken leaders who were raised again like Piper
and made their bones like Piper, has taken them all
completely by surprise. Because they came out of a more masculine temperament, a more
masculine way of communicating and dealing with problems. And this has
led to a failure to function in relational systems. And that's
what Rigney, I think, is trying to diagnose, but he doesn't talk about the why.
Otherwise, his book will probably be twice as long. Do you think I've hit on
anything here, or am I grasping at straws? No. I I think that's
good. I I do think you're I I I think Britney is not
concerned about why we're here. He's assuming
that you agree with him on that point, I think. Right. He's just
saying he's just saying, hey. Just look around.
There are people who, are resisting leaders
through emotional manipulation, and and I think I
don't think you you you could disagree on the
the temperament of of the, society, you know,
whether it's masculine or feminine, and know as a leader that there are people
trying to emotionally manipulate you. I mean, that
is that is happening in corporate boardrooms
and cubicles all over America. So Okay. So
so why has that worked so well in the
formerly strongly nonpolitical or conservative organization
like the church? And I mean the the the church in a western sort of
context, not necessarily a specific denomination. Yeah. Because this is this disease
is striking everywhere from the I mean, the orthodox are resisting,
but I think they're the last Yeah. Bulwark, you know, backed up
against the wall. But everything else is like even in Protestantism,
everything else has fallen to this. Why has that happened? You you you hit on
something really, really good when you were talking about it's a it's it's a matter
of temperament. Right. Right? It so when we're talking about men and women, we're not
talking about men and women, good, bad. We're talking about we're talking about men,
women the way that they are. Right. So women are
more emotional. They are, they tend to be
more nurturing. Now I everybody can sit here and think of a woman who's not
nurturing at all. Like, you you've got one in your head. Nope. She's not a
not one nurturing bone in her butt. Okay? And then we can all think of
the one guy who we know who's like, oh, he's the sweetest
little guy I've ever met. So gentle. Okay. Okay. I'm not talking about
your exceptions. I'm talking about broad categories in general.
Okay? Women tend to be more nurturing than
men in general. Okay? Men tend to be less
nurturing, more direct in general. And so I
think I I think that's what we're talking about here. We're you're talking about a,
a society that has, deferred to a
more feminine way of communication
over time. And so I think you see I think you see
that in you're talking about in churches, you know, like with Piper,
with with Tim Keller. The way that they planted those church
efforts in those big cities, they knew they
were going into negative world. New York City was already
well on its way to, to negative world. And so
rather than confront that world head on, they chose a
more winsome approach. Like, they were you know, they wanted a they wanted a
conversation. They wanted a dialogue. They wanted to, you
know, rather than come in there with a Billy Graham crusade and pray this prayer
and give your life to Christ and repent from your sins, it was like, well,
hey. Let's have a conversation with with someone who's not a Christian or
an atheist or, you know, a a seeker as it may be
called, and and let's see if we can convince them. Right?
Let's win them over, and those
and and so but in an increasingly negative world, that just doesn't work.
Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. So
We've talked a little bit about Brittany, his background,
Christian nationalism. We have not touched on infant baptism
because I'm just not gonna do that today as I already mentioned.
But both all those things kind of led him to being booted out of,
of, Piper's outfit up there in, in Minneapolis, Bethlehem
College. And, he landed on, and began to
work with Doug Wilson and created this book, Leadership and
Emotional Sabotage. And I think this is the
first book of many that's gonna come from Rigney's, Rigney's
pen. By the way, the Internet has also given us
the opportunity to publish.
And so it's taken the person who would normally have
stood on the street corner with a clapboard and said
the end is near ringing a bell. And
now that guy just goes to Idaho and blogs
all day. And, eventually, he finds people
who are doomers and gloomers. But he also
finds people, if he's really sophisticated in his communication,
who understand that if he's taking flack for saying the end
is near, he must be over the target. And so I wanna talk
a little bit about that.
One of the things that Rigney talks about in his book is courage. Right? Courage
of the world, courage of the church. Talk a little bit about that, Brian. Like,
what does it take to confront these
individuals and even systems? Because it's really systems thinking. That's the thing that attracted
me to this book. Because I'm a systems thinker. Like, I see how things click
together and that's also what makes me a root cause guy. Because if
you could figure out how the system is clicked together, then you can go you
could basically engineer reverse engineer the system Mhmm. Figure the
thing out, and go, oh, okay. That was the seed. If we just go
pluck that out, we can solve we can solve the problem. Right? Yep. So
but that takes courage. Right? And the the venture capitalist, Peter Thiel,
once infamously said the courage has always been in short brilliance is always in short
supply, but so is courage, basically. And I'm butchering that that
phrase. But it's true. Like, courage has always been in short supply.
So in a time where
and I'm not gonna talk about I mean, the easy examples to bring up are
cancel culture and things like that. Those are easy to bring up. But in a
time where we,
as leaders, have to have courage, how do we do that in the face of
weaponized empathy and in emotional sabotage? How how do you
avoid being emotionally manipulated as a leader? Yeah. I
think you have to be willing to speak to the elephant in
the room. So a lot of times, people will
know that
there's something wrong, but because
they don't want to ruffle feathers or there's some sort of
protected, I don't wanna say protected class, but like a
there's some protected idea. It could be protected class. It could be a
you know, there's just we we don't wanna acknowledge,
that this problem could be something else because of,
you know, what whatever it is that we're protecting. Right? So
it could be, sexual orientation. It could be anything. It could be a number of
things, right, that we're we're saying, oh, that's off limits for voting. Don't talk about
that. Don't address that. And then people use that to
sabotage some some effort that's being done. Okay? I'll I'll
use an example even even better than sexual orientation. We don't do any
or not any. We do very little psychological research
around IQ anymore in this country. Absolutely.
Because it's brutal. It's absolutely brutal. That's right.
Particularly, the correlations. And nobody likes to
use this term because now they think you're leaning into causation when you say
correlation. No. I'm saying correlation, and I have a relatively
high IQ. So it's okay. I've done pretty good. I know what I'm talking
about. But the correlations between IQ and ethnicity,
No one wants to do any research touching on any of that ever since Charles
Murray got slammed back in the day. Yep. And if
you don't do that kind of research Mhmm. Then
you can't solve the problem because what that what that IQ
research takes you into is a space where you
don't know what to do about IQ. Because as
a researcher with a limited number of
scientific materialistic tools at your disposal, you're now wandering
into a space where that tool those tools don't work.
And so there's to your point, there's a lack of courage around IQ. Forget it.
Answer. There's all kinds of beliefs. Yeah. There's all kinds of things that you're just
not allowed to talk about because Right. You know, well, we
don't we don't we don't wanna talk about the underlying cause. The underlying causes are
gonna cause us to confront some other truths that we don't like. Right.
So so I think when it comes to courage, it's,
you know, Elon Musk is a great example of this. I think,
you know, Elon Musk has, you know, people were
trying to bully him at Twitter, into silence
or into, you
know, like, I think it was was it him and Bob Iger? Somebody was
trying to basically deny they were gonna
punish Twitter by not they were gonna punish Elon Musk by by
saying, hey. We're not gonna give our advertising dollars to you until you can either
shut your mouth or say what we want you to say. And
and, Rogan had some or not Rogan. Musk had some choice words at that
interview that he gave. I don't know if you saw that. But, yeah, it
was but but, basically, he was saying, like, like, look.
There's there's this this whole this whole problem with free speech in
our country, and people are trying to bully me with money.
Like, like, I'm not gonna do that. Like,
agree with me or don't agree with me, but that's not like, you're not gonna
back me down on that. And and I think when it when it
comes to sort of this emotional sabotage and,
oh, you don't care about people. You you don't like this person, this this class
of people. You don't care about them. You you know? That that's that type of
emotional sabotage that I think we're Rigney is trying to
address in this in this book.
Brene Brown, the writer of Darren Greatly, talks about
courage being a heart word. And and she's coming from, again,
you know, a social work background, which is
a a field that is dominated by a feminine
temperament. And that's fine. That's that's sort of the
nature of sort of where a, where
a where a occupation is
going to go. Right? And I don't disagree with her. I do think
courage takes heart. It is a heart word. But when we
search our hearts, as it says in the bible, we find that they
are, to paraphrase from Jeremiah, deceitful above all
else. Right? Who could know them?
One of the things that the heart of man has to run up against
invariably, and we talked about this in our episode on shop class versus
shop class at Soulcraft by Matthew Crawford. Invariably,
the heart of man has to run up against the boundaries of limits of material
reality. Like, I'll give you an example.
So no matter how much Brian and I,
who are separated by a few 100 miles. Right? I'm
recording this right now. No matter how much we may want to be in the
same room physically, unless I
can manipulate my atoms
over distance to go to where Brian is, and Brian can
manipulate his atoms to come over distance to where I am, we can't
physically be in the same spot. There's a limit to that
reality that we are trying to aggregate by utilizing
this platform to have a conversation.
There are limits to the material reality of me being physically in the same space
as Brian and Brian being physically in the same space as myself. And no matter
how much fantasizing or anger or
disgust I have, no matter how many regulations I
write, no matter how many senators I buy,
there's nothing that's going to change the reality of me taking my Adams and going
them taking them over to where Brian is, and Brian taking, yeah, his Adams and
bringing them over to where I am. And by the way, the reason why I'm
using that example is because we have a lot of people who right now are
trying to defy material reality and claiming
that the virtual world defies material
reality. And if that's true,
that becomes a religion. Mhmm.
Yep. But from those headwaters come the poison fruit of emotional
sabotage. Because if I don't get my way and I run up
against the limits of material reality, I just I
already said that, like, material reality
can be abrogated. That's my religion. But
yet, the water's still wet. The wood is still
there. Something's gotta break. Either I'm gonna break or
material reality is gonna break. Talk talk to us
a little bit about or talk with us a little bit about what
leaders can do to help those people who can't because there I think
there's a lot more of these people than we think there are. Navigate the limits
of material reality. Yeah. And who and who default, by
the way, to being inside of these Internet spaces and these social media
spaces because there, they feel as though they are free. Mhmm.
Yeah. I I think just just
material the the world that we exist in is not
material. It's not merely material. There are all kinds of immaterial
things as well. There are immaterial
categories that we can't define even science acknowledges that we
can't define. There are dimensions that we don't
have access to that physicists are just saying, yeah, like, we
they exist, and there might be up to a 150 of them, and we can't
even get to them. Right. So so,
you know, even the the, the old school atheists
of, you know, the Scopes monkey trials are having a much
harder time holding to that worldview as they
get the further they get along. And, I mean
and so, anyway, I just say that to say to the to anyone
who's, you know, a hardcore materialist,
that, you are making assumptions about the
unseen world that can't be proven.
And, you know, you can't you can't prove that everything's material. You're
making that assumption. And and and that's a
and from that assumption, you're drawing metaphysical conclusions,
based on that assumption. And and that's fine,
but just know that's that's what you're doing.
The one thing that you you mentioned a little bit ago about,
empathy, one of the one of
the problems with empathy,
is there are, yeah. And
empathy is a good thing. Empathy can be can be wonderful. I mean,
there are times, like, even if you ever dealt with somebody going through grief,
the emotions that they're dealing with cannot be
explained in a material way. I mean, like, you're
you're dealing with the departure of a
human being. The grief that
you're experiencing cannot be explained
materially. I I mean, it's not just mere
chemical, reactions in your
brain. I mean, it's a it it's in your mind.
It's in your soul. It's not just your body. You do have a a
physical reaction to grief, but your your your reaction goes way
beyond mere physical. And so
so dealing with someone in grief, it
does require empathy for sure, but
you can't stop with empathy. At some point, empathy
has to give way to sympathy.
And and what's the the difference between the 2 and I
think I think where where the discussion gets lost, and and I
I I think Brene Brown's great. I think she's done some great things. I
think Brene Brown, the one thing she has missed
is is, she dismisses sympathy. And she's
even said so in some of her videos that I've watched some in her YouTube,
and she's like, sympathy is not blah blah blah blah. You I don't
care if you you have to have sympathy because,
so let's say somebody's in a you know, stuck in some quicksand. Okay?
An empathetic person says, oh, I see you stuck in that
quicksand. I'm gonna get in that quicksand with you. K. The problem
is now we're both sinking in quicksand. We're both going to die.
A sympathetic person would say, that quicksand looks
terrible. Hey. Let me hand you a stick. Let's see if I can
pull you out of there without getting in with you. Right? That's the
difference, I think, between, the the clearest difference that that you
can make between empathy and sympathy. Again, it you know, when
somebody's grieving, empathy is very, very appropriate.
But after a period of time to help that person move
on, you have to move over to sympathy at some point. I'm not
saying, you know, it's gotta be day 1 or even day
365. I'm just saying there is a difference.
Right. Well, and Joe Rigney, in his book, Leadership and
Emotional Sabotage, hits on something, I think, that is an extra
aspect of this that Brene Brown misses. The
scientific materialist mindset misses, the
political progressive mindset misses. And they miss it because when you
when you when you deconstruct God,
when you do the Nietzschean thing and deconstruct God all the way down to the
bottom, or at least you try, and you try to deconstruct the bible and
it's not really deconstructing God. It's deconstructing the bible as an avatar
or stand in for God. When you do that, you also
deconstruct evil. And
Ed Friedman, Renee Brown,
both these folks on either side of the spectrum on empathy. And I
think I think Ed Freeman would agree with you about empathy. I think he would
absolutely agree with you about the difference between empathy and sympathy. Absolutely. And Ed Freeman
was writing, you know, failure of nerve 30 years
ago now. Right? 40 years ago now.
Evil intent has to be factored
in to people's hearts.
So to your point about sitting with someone in grief, I
can absolutely sit in someone grief sit in sit with somebody who is
grieving their loved one.
The challenge for people who do not have a worldview that
includes, quite frankly, Satan or Luciferian
intent is that they don't know what the hard
limits this goes back to that idea of material reality. They don't know what the
hard limits of their empathy are because they don't have a good Richter scale
internally for when it goes from being
grief stricken, genuine remorse about something that has
happened to manipulation. And
this is the problem we're having. This is the core of the point of the
problems we're having today. And I think pastors are facing this in counseling
sessions all over the place and talking with people who are, to your
point earlier about Piper's Church, seekers. They're seeking. Well, what
they're seeking is a defined,
clear, black and white, and I know we hate black and white, but a clear,
defined black and white definition of what is good and what is evil and where
the boundaries are. And the
courage to say that in a counseling session I mean, as a former
pastor, you've been in counseling sessions before. How many people let's frame this
question this way as we begin to round the corner for our close here.
Short book, short episode. I recommend you pick up I recommend you pick up Leadership
and Emotional Sabotage. You're gonna get a lot of this from this book. But, how
many how many folks as a pastor, as a former pastor, did you sit in
rooms with where the line between what they were doing
that was good and what they were doing that was evil was very clear?
Yeah. It's not clear at first. It takes a lot of time. It takes a
lot of conversation. And and sometimes it's not even clear to the
person. That's the thing. The person who's doing the manipulating, they
don't even know they're doing it. Right. It's it's a behavior
that was learned maybe from their parents
that because their parents were good at it and they just and they that's just
the reality for them. Like, they don't know any other way to interact with someone.
Right. And, and so it takes time and
energy to work work through help them first off, they have to see
it. They have to understand what it is. The the hard
part for a materialist, someone maybe with a
Darwinian worldview, like, if if, like, if if you're the
survival of the fittest, I mean, this is just another technique, right,
to get what you want. I mean, this is a stipulation that just just gives
you an edge up on someone. Yeah. Why wouldn't you eat your neighbor?
Yeah. Right. I mean It's fine. Right? I'm trying to I mean, I'm in
it for me. And so, like, if if you're a secularist, you're
you're worried about today. That's what secular means. It's a todayist. It's a presentist.
Right? I mean, there's I don't mean to worry about the future. I'm just trying
to get what I need for the day. I mean so,
you know, I I to your point, I just I I I I
would say that that, that
empathy is is definitely a tool that a leader needs,
but you you you can stray,
and and you can be played and you can stray away from that and get
into
core leadership and be taken advantage of as a leader, and then your
business or your your people suffer because of that. And that's,
I think that's the point of the book. Yeah. I think that
one of the great things about Rigney's book for leaders
is that Rigney, in a positive way, kind of like Saul
Alinsky did in Rules for Radicals, he's provided a
book where where he understands
the rules of the system better than the participants inside
of the system do, and thus, he can take apart the system. That's what Saul
Alinsky talked about in Rules for Radicals.
And Rigney is continuing a tradition that Doug Wilson started in Rules for
Reformers where he understands the nature of the
system. And understanding the nature of the system means,
yes, making a judgment about it because you're going to you're going to examine it,
you're going to hold it in judgment. Absolutely. But it also
means that you're going to analyze it, critique it, and,
yes, I'm gonna use this term again, deconstruct it,
but for the purpose of rebuilding something else. And I think
that this book, along with the book that we covered last week and the books
that we're going to cover this year, can provide
in toto a way to
a way forward, for leaders,
inside of a world of emotional sabotage. Although,
I do think I do think that we are returning to a
public discourse, at least to a small degree,
a public discourse that is a bit more, and we've already used this
word feminine, masculine in its temperament because of the
nature of, bad orange man Donald Trump
and the way in which she communicates, which is very much a masculine temperament method
of communicating. And by the way, for those of you who don't know, that method
of communicating is you and I are gonna have an argument. We're gonna tussle it.
We're going to confront each other directly about what the issue is.
I don't really care about your feelings. You don't really
care about my feelings. Not in the
global Kantian one world, we are the world,
we are the children kind of sense. I don't care about your feelings. I care
about solving the problem. So let's solve the problem, and then we worry about our
feelings afterward. We worry about how we feel about the solution afterward.
And that is a masculine method of approaching conflict
and confrontation that, Trump does very
well, which, by the way, puts the
fear of, if I shall be so bold, god, into those
of those who have dominated the public discourse with feminine temperament
currently, which is why you see so much catterwalling about Trump.
Yeah. I think I think, you know, for for the for any leader who's listening
to this, you know, one thing I would encourage you with is, you
know, there's there's nothing wrong with acknowledging
feelings. The the thing that, as a leader, you have to do
and and lead your people to do with their feelings is understand
that, you know, feelings like, let's say
you're on a road trip. Okay, and you're you're driving a car.
You've got yourself maybe you've got your spouse in the car with you,
and you've got your kids in the car in the back. Do you have kids?
Okay? Maybe a pet, something. I don't know.
But, you would never let your kids
drive your car. K? Especially if they're, like, little kids. You would never do that.
Okay? There's gonna be 2 results. Either either,
you're gonna crash the car, it's gonna be a terrible wreck, or you're gonna get
there late. Okay? And feelings are the same way. When you let feelings
drive your life, k, when you let your feelings drive your
decision making, drive how you respond to
certain situations, you
inevitably crash your life
or you get where you need to go too late. Okay? You take a
wrong turn. You make a mistake. You end up saying
something you shouldn't have said. A whole bunch
of things. Okay? You become passive. Whatever it is.
But, and so feelings are great because they can tell us that
something is wrong, but they can't tell us what to do.
And as soon as we start letting them tell us what to do,
that's when leaders begin to fail. And so
so I think this, you know, feelings are fine. It's fine
to know them and be and acknowledge that they're there, but don't
take direction from them. And I think that's where I
hope the resurgence of this, you know, as you think of this
masculine temperament and leadership, whatever, you know, I I hope that
that's where it takes us. You know, that, because I I I don't wanna say
we, you know, completely ignore feelings. Right? They they are
helpful. They are useful. They're they're there to tell you something's wrong. They just can't
tell you what to do about it. I would add to
that. We also need to and and I've been saying this for
many years in a lot of different contexts, in leadership development work that
I've done with clients. We need to be able to
very calmly and very quietly when emotional sabotage shows
up, recognize it, call it out for what
it is. Mhmm. And then, here's a word that leaders need to have
in their quiver. No.
The word no. Now you could follow that up with
whatever you want after that. However,
no is a sentence. It has a beginning,
a middle, and an end.
It's got a subject object. Subject. Yeah. Subject and a verb. Done. Subject
subject verb. Done. Done. You yeah. It implies subject to you and then the
verb is no. No. That's right. And and
by the way, female leaders can use no. Male
leaders can use no. Oh, really? You know, people with a
feminine temperament can use no, but people with a masculine temperament can use no. Anybody
can use no. No is available to every leader out
here. And because 2 things
can be true at once, too many leaders equivocate on their nose.
They want room to negotiate later on because no, while it is also
while it was a sentence, no creates boundaries and puts
you and puts the other party sometimes in a box.
When emotional sabotage, however, has occurred, when emotional
manipulation is occurring on your team, a box is
exactly the spot where that manipulation sabotage needs to
go so that it can be exercised and, and dealt
with. I would also
say that leaders need to appeal to an objective
standard, an objective standard outside of
themselves. Now Brian and I think the Bible's pretty
good. You may not wanna bring that to work. Okay. That's fine.
You may wanna bring the Bible in your heart to work. That's fine too.
But bring an objective standard, rules, regulations,
something that exists outside of the participants in the conflict,
something that exists outside of the participants in the confrontation or the really
rough communication interaction that's occurring. An objective
standard, the word no, these are
tools that will allow you to be successful,
as a leader in the face of anxiety, which we didn't even touch
on. But the face of anxiety, the face of emotional sabotage, the face of
emotional manipulation, and, of course, weaponized empathy.
Alright. It was a short book.
I don't feel that we did it short shrift. If anybody knows Joe
Rigney, get him a get him a link to, this audio right here. I would
love to have him on the show, talking about the book. I'm sure I could
reach out to him directly. But if anybody who's listening could find him, go find
him and tell him he needs to send me an email. Otherwise,
Brian, do you have anything else to add before we close today?
No. I would just, encourage encourage your leaders to to pick
up a copy of that book. I think it's, it was very helpful. And, yeah,
Joe's a great guy. Excellent. Yep. And it's only a 100 and 8 pages. Six
chapters. It's like an hour and 12 minutes to read, something like that on,
on Audible, but it's a good, a good use of your time. Alright.
With that, well, we're out.