Leadership Lessons From The Great Books

The Earth is All That Lasts by Mark Lee Gardner w/Jesan Sorrells
---
00:00 "Leadership Lessons: Winter & Spring."
04:57 "Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull."
10:07 Mark Lee Gardner: American West Author.
12:09 Mark: Expert on the American West.
15:59 Treaties and Warrior Cultures.
21:45 "Native Tribes and European Triumph."
23:32 Tragedy, Triumph, and Human History.
28:43 Bias in War Documentation.
30:19 "Lessons from History's Tragedies."
35:55 "Why Read History Books."
38:01 "Revelations and Warrior Culture."
44:29 "Leadership Toolbox Podcast Promo."
---
Music: Peer Gynt Suite no. 1, Op. 46 - IV. In the Hall Of The Mountain King - Czech National Orchestra
---
Opening and closing themes composed by Brian Sanyshyn of Brian Sanyshyn Music.
---
---
★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★
---

Creators and Guests

Host
Jesan Sorrells
CEO of HSCT Publishing, home of Leadership ToolBox and LeadingKeys
Producer
Leadership Toolbox
The home of Leadership ToolBox, LeaderBuzz, and LeadingKeys. Leadership Lessons From The Great Books podcast link here: https://t.co/3VmtjgqTUz

What is Leadership Lessons From The Great Books?

Understanding great literature is better than trying to read and understand (yet) another business book, Leadership Lessons From The Great Books leverages insights from the GREAT BOOKS of the Western canon to explain, dissect, and analyze leadership best practices for the post-modern leader.

Because understanding great literature is better than trying to read and understand

yet another business book on the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books

Podcast, we commit to reading, dissecting, and analyzing the great

books of the Western canon. You know, those

books from Jane Austen to Shakespeare and everything else in

between that you might have fallen asleep trying to read in high

school. We do this for our listeners, the owner, the

entrepreneur, the manager, or the civic leader who doesn't have the time

to read, dissect, analyze, and leverage insights from

literature to execute leadership best practices in

the confusing and chaotic postmodern world. We all now

inhabit. Welcome to the rescuing of Western

Civilization at the intersection of literature

and leadership. Welcome to the Leadership Lessons from

the Great Books Podcast. Hello,

my name is Jesan Sorrells and this is the Leadership Lessons

from the Great Books podcast, episode number

172.

From the poet Nancy Wood comes this poem,

Many winters, published in

and I the earth is all that lasts.

The earth is what I speak to when I do not understand my life,

nor why I am not heard. The earth answers me with the

same song that it sang from my fathers when their tears

covered up the sun. The earth sings a song of

gladness, the earth sings a song of praise. The

earth rises up and laughs at me each time that I

forget how Spring begins with winter and

death begins with birth.

The themes of birth, death,

tears, praise, gladness,

life, and being heard or not

being heard buried within this poem from

Nancy Wood lie directly below, around

and cut through the history of the book

that we are going to introduce today.

History as we have covered it on this podcast is the long human

story of beginnings and, inevitably,

endings. And there are no more bitter endings in

the history of the settling of the North American continent than

the ending of the great Sioux nation that once ruled the Great Plains

of the United States until the early part of the

20th century. This history

has been documented more extensively over the last 50 years than

in the previous 100 years. As a result, we can learn

some. Important lessons from studying this history

about leadership and unveiling the

challenges that can arise as the inevitable

close of a civilization

today. On this episode of the podcast, this

introductory episode of the podcast, we will be

introducing and discussing multiple themes from

the Earth Is all that Lasts by Mark

Lee Gardner, Leaders

the earth indeed is all that lasts.

You and I and every great civilization you know

will one day pass into.

The halls of history.

Foreign.

So, as usual, when we introduce a

book and its themes, I want to talk about the Earth Is all

that Lasts by Mark Lee Gardner, and then I'm going

to discuss. We're going to get into the literary life

of Mark Lee Garner in our second section, and we

will go into some dominant themes that I see

in the third and fourth section

of our podcast today, and then we'll talk

about some conclusions towards the back end of the show.

So when you open up and I have the paperback version of the Earth is

All that Lasts, it was published in.

In 2022 and

was. The version that I have was published by Harper Collins

Books. So of course it's. It is a.

It is a copyrighted work. So we won't be reading directly from. From

the book, but Mark Lee Gardner has a

long publishing history, writing

about the history of the American

West. Now, when you open the book, you see a map

that shows all of the homeland

of Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull. By the way, the

subtitle of this book, the Earth is All that Lasts.

The subtitle is Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull in the Last Stand of the

Great Sioux Nation. When you open up the book,

you do see a map of the territories that are

covered in this book and the battles that extend from

Montana and down into Kansas and then of

course, east into. Into Minnesota, um, and

even as far as far southeast as

Missouri at Fort Leavenworth. This was

the contested territory, the Dakota Territory, the Montana Territory,

the Wyoming Territory, particularly the Montana Tour Territory,

where massive battles occurred that Sitting Bull

and Crazy Horse and the Lakota and the Sioux were involved

in the. The Battle of, of the Yellowstone in

1872, the Battle of the Tongue river in

1873, the Battle of the Powder river in

1876. Let's see the.

The Grattan fight in 1854.

Massacre. Massacre Canyon that occurred in

1818. And of course,

probably the most famous battle that the

Lakota and the Sioux were involved in in the Montana

Territory against General George Armstrong Custer.

The Battle of the Bighorn. I'm sorry,

not the Battle of Horn, but. Well, yes, the Battle of the Bighorn, but then

also the Battle of Little Bighorn in

1876. The forts

are also noted on this map. Fort Abraham Lincoln, Fort Rice,

Fort Yates, Fort Randall, Fort Leavenworth, as I already mentioned, Fort

Laramie, Fort Phil Kearny Fort

Fort Reno. And of course, a lot of the

battles focused around the. The area

in the western Montana Territory

and going into the Dakota Territory of the Black

Hills, which were considered to be a sacred area

by the Lakota. The table of contents is

organized into 14 chapters with an extensive epilogue

as well as an extensive set of acknowledgments

around the American Indian informants, the folks that he talked to in

the history that he gathered, Notes, resources, and an extensive index.

Matter of fact, the supporting information for

this book numbers at probably 200

pages. Each chapter covers different.

Covers different aspects of the interactions between the

Lakota, the Sioux and other

native American tribes, including the Oglalas, the hunk

papas, and so on and so on. The Pawnee, the

Cherokee, the Cheyenne,

though, all those folks are all covered in this. In

this book. And, and like I said, There's 14 chapters, each

one starting with a particular quote that frames the

chapter. And we open with

the idea of who Sitting bull

was, how he led the. The Lakota.

And the lakota consisted of seven

western Sioux tribes. So I already mentioned the

ogalalas and the Hunkpapas. There were the. The mini

conjos, the siya sapas, the two kettle,

sans arc and brulee. There were also

yanktonais and Santees who were a middle and

eastern sioux, and then there were the northern and southern cheyennes

who were the friends and the allies of the Lakotas.

The war chief of the

oglala was, of course, crazy horse.

And the way that the leadership was set up, and

we'll talk a little bit more about this later on today, but. But the way

that the leadership was set up was. It was basically

sitting bull was sort of the. The. The chief or the, the

head general, such as it were, of the lakota. And

crazy horse was a trusted lieutenant. Of course,

the immigrants, the white settlers coming west in

search of gold or just a new place to live

that wasn't in the east. The newspapers that report

reported on these two men and their tribes and even the

u. S. Cavalry and the u. S. Government didn't really

recognize or acknowledge the distinction between these

two men until much too late.

And that would, of course, set the table or.

Or continue. If you look at the long history of

native tribes and their interactions with the United States government,

that would either continue or set the table for future

interactions, particularly after the war

drums had stopped beating.

So let's move on and talk about the literary life of Mark Lee

Gardner, the author of the Earth is all that

lasts. A native of Missouri, Mark Lee gardner

has researched and written about the American west since he was in

high school. During his college years, he spent summers as a

seasonal park ranger at bentz old fort national historic

site, Colorado, and Harpers ferry national historical park, west

Virginia. He also spent one summer as a Mary moody

northern graduate fellow at the stonewall Jackson House in

Lexington, Virginia. Mark has

written a number of critically acclaimed and award winning books from material

culture studies such as Wagons for the Santa Fe Trade, from the University

of New Mexico Press in the year 2000 to his best selling nonfiction

titles for HarperCollins including as are listed

in the Earth Is all that Lasts to Hell on a Fast Horse the

Untold Story of Billy the Kid and Pat Garrett

Rough Riders, Theodore Roosevelt, His Cowboy Regiment and the Immortal Charge Up

San Juan Hill Wagons for the Santa Fe Trade, which we

already talked about the Mexican War Correspondence of Richard

Smith Elliot which he co wrote with Mark Simons

and brothers on the Santa Fe and Chihuahua

Trails, Edward James Glasgow and William Henry Glasgow,

1846-1840. So clearly he's written

a lot about again the American west and has a passion

for writing what fundamentally

are journalistic takes on the history

of the American West.

As an authority on the American West, Mark has frequently been

an on air expert for national broadcasts and cable

networks, public radio and of course for numerous podcasts.

No, we did not get him on the podcast for

this episode today. We just didn't have

the time. Mark's books and articles have earned him multiple

awards and recognition not only

nationally but increasingly internationally.

And in addition to his research and writing, Mark is an award winning musician

and performer specializing in the historic music of the

American West. And there's going to be more books coming from from

this man. If the Earth Is all that Lasts is any

indication of where he is going in the future and his

passion for writing, I would strongly

recommend that you pick up this book if you want to

if you want to understand and you want to get

a deeper appreciation for the history of the American

west, particularly the history of the battles between the

Native American tribes and the tribal peoples of the American west and

the US Cavalry. And if you want to get a rounder

sense of exactly what was going on during

this time historically from from a

journalistic perspective. By the way, Mark Lee

Gardner's writing follows on from the writing that we covered in

a previous episode around Sebastian Younger and his

reportage in his book War.

But he's not quite a historian. He's not quite full John

Keegan First World War, who we also covered.

Nor is he an individual who directly experienced

obviously the wars and battles and fights about which he is

passionate about writing about and I said about a lot

there in the in the late 19th century.

He's not an Ernest Hemingway who's writing A Farewell to

Arms as a veteran, you know, of the the war

that he is that he is writing about. So he,

he is a journalist in the. In the realm of

that, or he writes in a journalistic style in the realm of that. That

Sebastian Younger space. But he's chasing a

deeper truth, I believe. And that is reflected reflected in some of the

themes that are in. In this book.

So the, the major chapter themes in the Earth is All

that Lasts really focus around three

sort of central areas. So the first area is

the ways in which the

Lakota were organized, right?

The. The Western Sioux tribes, how they organized, how they fought,

how they engaged with the 7th Cavalry, the ways in which they

learned from battling not only the 7th Cavalry,

but battling the other cavalry that were sent against them, how they

perceived their American

their American counterparts, and also

how they perceived the flow of immigrants

westward. The various tribes perceive this very

differently. There's an idea in one of the

themes inside of the Earth is All that Lasts that Gardner explores

beautifully, is this idea that even among the tribes,

there were those who wanted to create treaties

with the government, the United States

government, and there were those who did not. And Sitting Bull

and Crazy Horse represented those who did not want to, who were

anti treaty. And folks like Red

Cloud and others were folks who were

pro treaty who believed, as Red Cloud says

deep into the book, that the white men were going to be coming anyway,

so it would be a good idea to do some kind of deal with

them. The other

kind of theme that jumps out from,

from the Earth is All that Lasts is the theme of a

warrior culture among the. The Lakota particular,

particularly among young male Lakotas.

And many young male Lakotas

desired yes to. To trade with.

With the. The forts that were placed on the

frontier in the west by the US Government to

protect immigrant trades and westward settlement and westward

movement. Gold prospectors, miners,

eventually later on, folks who were surveying for.

For the railroads that were going to be going through the Dakota,

Montana and Wyoming territories. But also

there were, among the young men, there were Lakotas

who sought the prestige and

the status of engaging in

warfare. And this is a major theme

throughout all of the Earth is All that Lasts.

And there's a quote at the start of chapter

seven, too Many Tongues, that sort of exemplifies this right.

That was delivered from an interpreter named Mitch Boyer,

who was a mixed blood. Santee, July 27,

1867. And I quote, he said this.

There are a number of chiefs who I believe would make peace, but

the young men won't let them. In place of chiefs

controlling the young men, the young men control

them. And this is, this is the thing

that you begin to see and this is one of the major themes, like I

said, that Garner focuses on in his, in his book

and it dominates. Oh gosh. A good, a good

two thirds of the. Of the narrative. Then

the back end of the book talks about what happens after the war is over,

right? What happened to Sitting Bull, what

happened to Crazy Horse, what, what happened

to not only the Lakota but the Cheyenne,

the Arapaho and of course as the white

soldiers were referred to, the, the blue coats, right.

And the turn of events

that occurred in order at the end of the

tribal wars that, that encouraged or not encouraged,

but that motivated Sitting Bull to go over the border into

Canada, right, And then to come back across the border

that, that caused Crazy Horse to,

to lose his life,

Right. These sort of events were precipitated

by the nature of the close of the

American west and the nature of the

acts that were created by the, the government that

created reservations and then how those acts were

gone back on and were reneged on by the US

Government. So

the Earth is All that last. Contains a lot of history about not only

the native tribes and how they interacted with each other, but, but also

how they were perceived by others, including

the general public as well as the U.S. government.

And then of course the demands that were made on them

to move from being free roaming Plains

Indians to being,

to being individuals who were bound by civilization

and being threatened, thrust into becoming

part of this newly expanding and

confident country.

So in thinking about the Earth is All that

lasts, one of the early

dominant themes that penetrates

the entire book is this idea that can be

encapsulated by a line from,

interestingly enough,

Patrick Stewart playing playing

Captain Picard in Star Trek the Next Generation.

Everything good must come to an end.

The line that separates tragedy from triumph runs

throughout human history. And I talked a little bit about this in my opening

Civilizational end is. Is always a terrible thing.

And the native tribes in the. On the

North American continent and on the South American continent had

been for better or worse tribal

civilizations at one height or another. From the

Aztecs, the Mayas and the Incas in Mexico, Central America and

South America all the way to the

Cherokee and even the well name

of the Cherokee sorry, the. All the way to

the, the tribes that were in north

eastern, the northeastern part of the United States when the,

the, the Pilgrims and the, the Puritans showed up

at Plymouth Rock or and Virginia way back

in the early part of the

17th century. Up until that

point, native peoples had been on the North American and South American

continents for about a thousand years. And they had

built civilizations such as where they had built

societies, they had built cultures with their own

customs, their own languages, and of

course their own differences, which of course led to

warfare between them

and led to other types of

problems. But when civilizations collide, and we've

talked about this before on this podcast, one civilization

is going to inevitably triumph over the

other for a whole variety of different reasons. And

you see the final triumph of European

civilization over the native tribes

in the Earth is all that lasts.

And that is the line that separates

tragedy from triumph. The fact is,

the adaptations that make some societies, cultures and peoples leap

forward and the adaptations that make some societies and cultures and

peoples fail to leap, this is all part of the tragic

nature of humanity and the tragic nature, the tragic

reading of history. This fact of history,

of course, reads as deeply unfair to our wealthy

post modern middle class ears

listening as they do from a place of post industrial material

abundance and yet deep spiritual

hollowness. As the character

Alejandro portrayed by Benicio del Toro intoned in the movie

Sicario, another movie about

apocalyptic cultural endings and their knock on effects. And I

quote, nothing will make sense to your American ears

and you will doubt everything that we do, but in the end you will understand,

close quote. Nothing about

the removal of the native

tribes, nothing about the battles between the cavalry and

the native tribes, nothing about the

reneging of Washington on,

on treaties, nothing about the treatment

of those tribes from the

17th century all the way for 300 years,

all the way to the beginning of the 20th century,

nothing about that rings as fair or

reasonable or makes any sense to our ears

now. And we

doubt everything that our predecessors did.

And even with all that doubt and lack of understanding, we still

feel guilty. And that guilt in and of

itself is tragic.

It's all tragedy at the bottom of it. And this is something

that is reflected in the Earth is all

that lasts. The warrior

culture of the tribal peoples of the North American Great Plains came

to a warrior's end. And a warrior's end

always involves violence. And this is something else

that we struggle to wrap our arms around because we

struggle to wrap our arms around the mere fact of violence

and how that is a tool that is used in order

to, well, quite frankly make people do things that

they don't want to do. As leaders,

we can little afford to to

wallow in guilt or wallow in lack

of understanding, or even turn our eyes

away from the things that we need to see in history.

Instead, we must embrace those Things

embrace the tragic view of human nature and the tragic view of

human history and figure out how to integrate that tragic

view into the realities we see in front of us, in

our families, in our communities, and even in our

workplaces today.

One of the things that you see in the Earth is All that Lasts

by Mark Lee Gardner is the

a couple of different ideas that run parallel to each other and

actually inform each other. So

Sitting Bull as a leader, was

a careful and judicious person

who, while he did act when he

was motivated to act, actually thought about his

actions and seemed to have put. Seemed to have placed a lot of

consideration and deliberation behind his actions. Whereas Crazy

Horse was much more impulsive, much more freewheeling,

and much more likely to inspire people, particularly

young Lakota warriors, to action through his

impulsivity.

These two different types of leadership obviously combined together

and made the Western Sioux

a nightmare for folks like Phil

Sheridan, William

Tecumseh Sherman, and, of course, George

Armstrong Custer. Now,

in warfare, there is an idea, and

it is an idea that does matter. And we saw this idea reflected also

in. In Sebastian Junger's book War,

also in John Keegan's book the First World

War, and any other book that we've read about War. I mean, even about Face.

We see this reflected when writing about war

and when writing about the quote, unquote, sides

in a war, there's always

more information, right? More documentation of the motives,

the thought process and the results of those

motives and thought processes on the battlefield from one side than

from another. So if we are writing about, or if we're

thinking about what happened in the Corn Valley, Coringal

Valley In Afghanistan between 2007 and

2009, the first person

reporting that Sebastian Younger did on

that is going to be reflective of him being embedded with

the US Military there, right? Is not going to be

reflective of him being embedded with the Taliban or Taliban fighters.

Thus, we will not know or we will have very little information on the ground

about what the Taliban fighters are thinking, what their motives are, or any of

that kind of information. Same thing with the Earth is all the last same thing.

When we talk about the battles between the tribal peoples of the

American west and the U.S. government, the representatives and the military

of the U.S. government, except

in this case in the Earth is all that lasts, one of the major themes

that comes out is Gardner's attempt to gather

both sides, right? To gather as much data and information

as he can and to present it in as orderly a fashion as

he can about what both sides were thinking during the course

of this war. The deeper idea

that he is seeking to expound upon, the deeper idea

that he is seeking to expound, explore, is an idea I think, that

we don't talk too much about on this show, but it is a theme that

definitely jumps out. And the theme is that the enemy

gets a vote. Too often

in warfare, when we only look at one

side, we look at the side of those that won the war

and we forget that there are people on the other

side, whatever that side may be, who also

have their own perspective on winning and

losing. And in the Earth is all that Lasts. From the

invasion of Good Horse Grass country, the chapter focused on that all the

way to the chapter focused on the acts of Thieves, Land of

Uncertainty, Soldiers coming with their heads down, which

tells about the battle of Little Bighorn and the absolute decimation

of the arrogant George Armstrong Custer, A Winter

War all the way to the end of Freedom and Ghosts.

Gardner attempts, as a main theme in his book

to weave in multiple perspectives. That way we get a more

global understanding of exactly what was

happening during this period of time in American

history.

So what are we to take as leaders from the Earth is all that

Lasts, Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, and the last stand of the Great

Sioux Nation? What are we to take from this book that

is extensively researched, lovingly written, with,

with a high attention to detail, and a fidelity

to not only the facts, but also a fidelity

to getting all the facts correct? What

are we to take if we read this book, from

that we can apply to challenges that we may be

having in our own present time? What can history

teach us? Well, I think one

of the major pieces from this book

goes back to this idea that I explored a little bit previously

about taking a tragic view of history.

Right. Everything good must come to an end.

But there also is an idea in here that

as leaders, we must not make

the mistake that a lot of leaders make

in reading the correct books,

reading the right books, but learning the wrong lessons.

So for instance, we kind of explored this a little bit when we were reading

our science fiction books. Everything from Robert Heinlein

to Philip K. Dick, Ray Bradbury to Isaac

Asimov, and one of the things that we realized, one of the things that

we explored with our co hosts when reading those books, was that

these books, the science fiction books that I mentioned in the science fiction authors,

had influenced a lot of the thinking, the

current thinking of our tech elite

in Silicon Valley, the ways in which tech bros,

quote unquote, think about artificial intelligence,

or the simulacra of social media,

the ways in which they are building our cyber driven

future and the ways in which robotics and algorithms

may show up, are currently showing up and may show up in the future

to impact our lives. The tech bros are reading these books. They

are inspired by these ideas of the future,

shiny, metallic and clean future.

But they are learning, or they have learned the wrong lessons.

From Sam Altman to Mark Andreessen, from

Mark Zuckerberg to Elon Musk.

And when they learn these wrong lessons and head out

into the world to bring to fruition, to bring to

reality the technological wizardry they read about when they were

powerless and perhaps even potentially picked upon teenagers,

they incorporate all of that

emotional nonsense into their

reading of these books and miss the larger

lessons. And so, as leaders, we don't want to fall into

that same trap when we read history.

We must learn all the correct, hard, and even

deeply unpleasant lessons that

violate our deeply held shibboleths

about how things should be or how they ought to be.

And then we must decide to accept or reject those lessons,

knowing, of course, realizing as mature

leaders, as adult leaders, as serious leaders, that

there will always be consequences for such acceptance or

rejection. And of course, understanding that

as leaders we cannot, we should not, and we will not

be able to avoid accountability.

The facts of history. And this is why we read historical books on this

podcast. The facts of history are hard taskmasters

indeed, which is why many people avoid reading history.

Not because they don't want to know information about the past that may

disrupt a myth that they may have in their head

that's too easy and too dismissive

a a prescription. I think the reason people

don't read history and the reason people struggle with

historical understanding is because it's really,

really hard to deal with

the facts of history as they were.

Because you can't go back and change them, right? You can't go back and get

a redo. For all of our human power,

for all of our technological wizardry, we still can't travel back

to the past and remake it into our vision of the current

world, which of course in the past would be a vision of the future.

We merely have to live with the idea

that people in the past made different decisions than we made

with the limited information which they thought was maximal at the time

that they had. And those decisions had

consequences. And there was accountability.

And this, this is what makes the facts of

history hard. And we can't

dismiss it. We can't refuse to incorporate the lessons from history.

Instead, we have to learn, we have to ignore. We have

to. We have to harden our minds

to embrace those hard lessons and embrace

those hard facts. That way we

can continue to make mature decisions

into a future where other people

will judge us.

Finally, as we wrap up our

podcast here today, our episode here today, our introductory episode

to to the Earth is all that Lasts by

Mark Lee Gardner. By the way, I would encourage you to check out

the next episode, episode number 173, where we talk with

my co host Tom Libby about one

of the dominant themes that is in this book,

the dominant theme of young men and what you do with their energies

in a warrior culture,

particularly when that

warrior culture is on the decline, and then how

that translates into our current postmodern

era where we have trouble

incorporating the energies of young men

into modern world, where glory,

particularly martial glory, is hard to come by. So check out

episode number 173 after

you listen to this episode. So my final thought

today is on this idea of the

Apocalypse, the

apocalypse which many of us who still

carry around the residue of the Christian worldview

that used to permeate the west through and through.

Many of us associate the word apocalypse with the book of Revelation

in that horry old book that I always talk about on this show,

the Bible, that last wild book with the

visions of John in it.

Apocalypse, though that word that

sometimes that last book of the Bible is entitled

comes from the ancient Greek word apocalypsis.

And the ancient Greek word means revelation or a

revealing. The

idea that no one really tells people

is that revelations or disclosures or revealings

are always happening. New information is

always coming to the forefront. Either new information about a

historical past or new information about a current

era, or new information that will influence decisions that are to be made

made in the future. So here's some new

information. The lessons that

leaders can glean, or one of the lessons that leaders can glean from the end

of the Sioux Nation are lessons

that reveal or disclose just how

majestic and doomed the Sioux Nation

was as a people. On

this show. I have asked the question previously with our

conversation that we also had with Tom Levy around Ernie Lapointe's book

that was basically a biography, a sourced

biography of Sitting Bull. I asked this question in this episode, in that

episode, and you should go listen. I believe it's episode number 157

about not only the Sioux Nation, but about all the tribal peoples of the

Great Plains, the upper Great Plains Plains in America. I asked

this question, could the United States have become what it is now

without the destruction of the various Native American nations and peoples in the

Midwest, and we

battered. Tom and I batted that question around in episode number

157, and we never really got to an answer to that question.

And I think that

the answer to that question is, of course, a

revealing one, a a

disclosing one, a dare I say,

apocalyptic answer

from the arrival of the first European in the

early six. Or not the early this, the later, well,

the middle part of the 16th century, all the way

to the bitter end of the

tribal wars in the 1890s,

the final depositing of the remnants of

Native American peoples onto reservations.

The bitter end of civilization to make space for

the next civilization was probably almost fait

accompli. That apocalypse,

that ending is one that should give us

pause, because leaders

understand that there are wise. Leaders

understand that there are always three parts to

every life, just like there are three parts to

a story. And civilizations follow along with these three

parts as well. There's a beginning, a birth,

a middle, and an end.

And we struggle in our society and culture

with a fear of death. We fear endings,

both secular and Christian. We

fear a climate change apocalypse in the same way that

we fear an apocalypse of Jesus

returning. And maybe this is not unique to the

West. Matter of fact, I don't think it probably is. I think that all

civilizations on the planet, all peoples at the individual

level, to some degree or another, fear death,

which is what drives us to maximize

our lives in various socially

normed and culturally bounded ways.

And leaders, leaders have to understand

that everything comes to an end.

But the end can be a revealing for a new beginning,

an apocalypse, such as it were, that will open

up new doors and create new opportunities

for the next people who follow on

when we are gone.

And well, that's it for

me for. Listening to the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books

podcast today. And now that you've made it this far,

you should subscribe to the audio version of this show on all the major

podcast players, including Apple, iTunes, Spotify,

YouTube Music and everywhere else where podcasts are available.

There's also a video version of our podcast on our YouTube

channel like and subscribe to the video version of this podcast on

the Leadership toolbox channel on YouTube. Just search for Leadership

Toolbox and hit the subscribe button there on YouTube.

And while you're doing that, leave a five star review. If you

like what we're doing here on Apple, Spotify and

YouTube, just go below the player and hit five stars.

We need those reviews to grow and it's the easiest way to help grow this

show and tell all your friends. Of course, in

leadership. By the way, if you don't like what we're doing here,

well, you can always listen to another leadership show. There are several

other good ones out there. At least that's

what I've heard. All right, well,

that's it for me.