We live in an age where the greatest heresy is not proposing a NEW value—it’s insisting that any public value truly matters.

Raise your voice for justice, care, or the common good, and you’ll be dismissed as “utopian,” “fanatical,” or a “maniac” derailing progress. Why? Because our systems have perfected a subtler defense: making the very question—which good should come first?—sound illegitimate.

The ship sails on. “Economic growth” is the one and only value that needs no justification. Efficiency and self-interest masquerade as laws of nature, not contested choices. Question them, and you’re told to “get a real job,” or to stop “telling people how to live.”

But this is the ruse: instrumental rationality—maximizing means toward unexamined ends—has become hegemonic common sense. We optimize endlessly, never asking for what. We measure relentlessly, never asking what matters most. Value rationality—the explicit ordering of goods, the courage to say this matters more than that—is branded utopian, impractical, disruptive.

The result is not neutrality, but a politics of enforced silence, where consensus comforts the powerful and real questions are cast overboard. A system that cannot name its good will shamefully punish those who dare to ask what the good is.

Yet this is our freedom and our burden: to risk judgment, to name what matters, to decide explicitly which values should rule—rather than blindly following wherever “GDP growth” and “personal freedom” lead. The ultimate ethical challenge remains: not whether to have values, but which ones, and in what order.

That is the work proceduralism tried to make obsolete. That is the work leaders must reclaim.

#Leadership #Ethics #Values #Courage #SystemsThinking