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Dear Friends,
The other night I watched the first episode of HBO’s hit miniseries, Chernobyl. I know that it’s old news. I just didn’t have access to HBO when the show was released and was all the rage. Now that I’ve had a taste, I think the hype was justified. It’s a stunningly excellent production, and very instructive and enlightening.
Not because it teaches you anything you might need to know about nuclear reactors and their safety. Rather, because it teaches you much of what you need to know about authoritarian leadership groups and hierarchies. In this case, Soviet “central committees.” A close-knit band of anointed leaders with immense self-regard, all devoted to a singular cause, has a certain way of dealing with crises.
The first step is a foundational and presuppositional one: We can’t possibly have done anything wrong. The Party cannot fail; the Party can only be failed. By others. By unforeseen circumstances. Unlucky breaks. Saboteurs. Traitors. The leadership only knows the passive voice, never any active agency.
From the first moment, nobody in leadership wants to hear bad news. When they do hear it, they reflexively refuse to believe it. In the control room at Chernobyl, the lead engineer berates his staff. Why are the rods still in the core!? Why isn’t the water flowing through the core!? Get down there and do it!
“Comrade, there is no core.”
“What do you mean there is no core? Are you crazy?”
“There is no core.”
To others: “He’s delusional. Get him out of here and take him to the infirmary!”
Eventually the local central committee gathers for a briefing in an an underground bunker, and it is a masterpiece of denial, narrative spinning, and institutional protection. If facts do not fit our narrative, they are not facts. They ask an engineer what the radiation sensor was reading.
“3.6.”
“3.6? Oh, that’s not bad.”
“3.6 is the highest the sensor will read.”
“Oh, well then. It’s 3.6. Not bad.”
“Comrade, we got another sensor from a military safe. It’s goes to a thousand.”
“What does it read?”
“It melted.”
“That is just like the military! Sending us defective equipment!”
It would be hilarious if it wasn’t so tragic. The committee very conveniently decides on an easy explanation. A hydrogen tank exploded and, while the “roof” is on fire, we’ve got everything under control. Nothing to see here, folks! We must protect the people from the truth. If we don’t control the narrative, people will start talking. They will start to doubt and lose trust in the government, and they will start to sow this discontent throughout the city. We are not going to evacuate! We shall block all the exits! No one leaves!
Any hint or admission of failure on our part will derail our mission—our glorious socialist paradise. The scary thing is that it isn’t like these Soviet apparatchiks had any other real choice. This is the “New Soviet Man,” totally conditioned to deflect and obfuscate. It is a reflex, a habit, a way of being. The Dear Leader brings in record wheat harvests every year! Don’t believe your lying eyes, radiation sensors, or the piles of corpses.
And of course it is all reinforced by the insular nature of these committees. Who dares to disagree or step out of line? Especially when the grand-poobah stands up and gives a rousing speech about how we are doing this for the good of “the people”?
It was impossible for me to not think about an essay I wrote for this collected volume. It’s called “The Hand of Glory” and it is about leadership crises in the modern church. The presuppositions and tactics mentioned above are not Soviet things; they are human things.
Take any leadership crisis of recent years, whether it is Mark Driscoll and Mars Hill Church, Willow Creek, Sovereign Grace Ministries, Ravi Zacharias International Ministries, you name it. Across all of these Chernobyl-like catastrophes, you will find at root something eerily similar to that central committee meeting. Authoritarianism, narrative and (especially) information control, secrecy, and self-justification by way of the “cause” or the good things we are doing for “the people.”
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