You’re shelling out five figures for “transformative leadership” development. But what if all the coaching and retreating systematically disables your very capacity for critical self-examination? Most courses disdain philosophy as esoteric or impractical—yet remain blissfully unaware of the ethical incoherence hardwired into their own preferred gospel:
* AUTHENTIC LEADERSHIP: "Crucibles reveal your true values!" Emotivism—sincere feeling masquerades as moral authority. Cannot distinguish authentic justice from authentic genocide. When values collide, only power holds the gavel.
* POSITIVE PSYCHOLOGY: "Flourish through character!" Preference-utilitarianism cloaked in science. Virtue psychologized into traits, severed from telos. Resilience serves exploitation as readily as liberation.
* MINDFULNESS: "Lead with compassionate presence!" Buddhist practice amputated from cosmology becomes productivity tool. Mystical intuitionism eliminates capacity to critique institutional purposes. Meditation anesthetizes moral conscience.
* DIALOGIC CONSTRUCTIVISM: "Co-create emergent wisdom!" Epistemic relativism—truth by consensus. When worldviews collide, power decides dressed as "emergence." Cannot exclude fascism without contradiction.
* RELATIONAL BONDS: "Encounter the Other—I am because You are!" Levinas's responsibility sentimentalised, Buber's theology evacuated, care ethics depoliticized. Anti-foundationalist particularism sputters when adjudicating conflicting obligations or resisting domination within relationships.
* RESILIENCE AS SUPERPOWER: "Embrace adversity to become anti-fragile!" Stoic ataraxia weaponized for neoliberal governance. Responsibilizes victims, pathologizes resistance. Cannot distinguish worthy challenge from structural violence.
* SYSTEMIC REGENERATION: "Operate holistically within planetary boundaries!" Ecological limits smuggling utilitarian post-growth heterodoxy as scientific necessity. Cannot defend why boundaries constrain profit or other goods, or specify principles for just distribution.
* VOCATIONAL CALLING: "Embrace your higher purpose!" Secularized protestant theodicy meets efficient altruism—inner conviction authorizes action. Spiritualises political questions, sanctifies labour, forecloses critique.
* SENTIMENTALISM: "Consult the impartial spectator!" Smith's moral sentiments used as heuristic. Conflates social approval with morality. Norm critique absent—spectator in slaveholding tribe endorses slavery.
* APPRECIATIVE INQUIRY: "Celebrate life-giving strengths!" Social constructionism claims language transforms reality. Methodologically power-blind. Reframes oppression as growth opportunity.
Each “school” hides a contested ethic; and only philosophical analysis reveals which, and why. That may trouble the #leadership industry—or academics allergic to Kant—but without it, we may graduate, but not lead an examined life.
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