There’s a subtle crisis—more abstract, less tangible than the overt disruption unfolding before us. Beneath the culture wars, policy debates, and political meddling, something deeper—more sacred—is eroding: our collective sense that values matter – that Character matters —not performative values, not slogans or affiliations, but the human work of living in line with our intuitive sense of what is right and what is wrong. We have been persuaded into believing that the ends justify the means—and therefore, the means (character) do not matter.
If I were to pick just three variables to define a mentally healthy person, there would surely be one related to character. A mentally healthy person is conscious of a coherent self that contains implicit values (values not governed by environmental rewards and punishments). And, that self has the emotional intelligence necessary to stay congruent or in line with those values despite the activities and suggestions of their surroundings.
Congruence with values—with morals, ethics, and purpose—is one of the most important defining variables of a mentally healthy person. This makes it incredibly important for our leaders to embody and champion character—they are the model, the symbol of our collective. They are the subtle influence over the environment’s encouragement or discouragement of living a congruent life.
Somewhere along the way, we began to believe that outcomes were all that counted. To believe that the ends justify the means. If a leader gets things done, their cruelty can be overlooked. If a movement disrupts the right systems, its internal fractures don’t matter. That power can be trusted even when the principles have gone missing.
But the truth is more straightforward and demanding: the means are not separate from the ends. They are the ends unfolding in real time. I enjoy the philosophies behind the world’s religious traditions, and on this topic, I do not believe there is much disagreement. We value the leaders of the spiritual traditions who attempted to do the impossible—to live in congruence with the intention of love—even when doing so was at the expense of their own survival.
Remembering What We Forgot
We know this intuitively in our personal lives:
- A parent who lies for your benefit still teaches you to lie.
- A partner who manipulates for love leaves you unsure of what love means.
- A teacher who shames you for excellence erodes your capacity to trust.
The leaders we follow shape not only our laws but also our emotional culture. They teach us how power should feel—whether empathic, coercive, adversarial, or honest. Over time, that feeling becomes the atmosphere of our collective. There is significant influence through the subtle channel of modeling—the impact that a leader has on another is not just in their action but also in their embodiment.
What Emotional Intelligence Offers
Emotional intelligence is not simply softness—it is not an enabling of our victim identity. It’s not passivity. It is often quite the opposite of what it is being marketed to be. Yes, it is consciousness of the impact of our actions, and yes, it is the compassion that moves us to help the helpless. It is also regulated strength, relational depth, and the ability to hold complexity without collapsing into reactivity.
It includes:
- Self-awareness without self-absorption
- Empathy without indulgence
- Accountability without shame
- And perhaps most importantly, the capacity to lead without domination
When our leaders lack these traits, we lose civility and clarity. We become reactive, fragmented, and susceptible to the emotional contagion of fear and hopelessness. We mistake outrage for agency. We start believing that the loudest voice is the most truthful one. We follow the voice of fear and lose connection to the rhythms of interconnectedness.
How We Begin Again
If we want to reclaim a politics of integrity, we have to remind ourselves of what character looks like:
- We have to stop mistaking anger for moral clarity. Mistaking confidence for competence.
- We must stop excusing lies because they’re aimed at people we disagree with.
- We must stop choosing effectiveness over ethics as if the two were separate.
Character is not charisma. It is not a rigid ideology. It is paradoxically relative and irrelative of context. It’s how we treat others when power could protect us from consequences. It is how we navigate double-binded situations with grace in the face of inevitable consequence. It is how we make choices that utilize an algorithm more complex then the addition and subtraction of tangible personal gain. Character is the means and the ends. The purpose of our culture and the government we chose to guide that culture is to steadily progress towards greater and greater congruence with a shared value system—a morality deeper and more profound than the tenets of utilitarianism. We are trying to be good; we created a culture to help support us all in actions that embody “goodness.” Therefore, you don’t bully someone for money… because then you are growing an economy of bullying…
The Means Are All We Have
There is no magical future in which good intentions wash away present harm. Trauma is the burden that both the abused and the abuser carry. There is no heaven that dissolves the shame felt from dissonant action. There is only now: how we speak, treat one another, and lead… our actions are the creators of our emotional reality.
We become the future by how we behave now. The ends do not justify the means. The means are the world we’re making—a reflection of our collective reality. Ultimately, the future, the present, and the past are all one—the ends and the means are the same, much as there is no ultimate difference between the observer and the observed.
So, let’s return to what we know beneath the noise:
- That kindness is the act of remembering our connection. Kindness saves us from loneliness, a purpose that holds value without a result.
- That clarity is finding solutions that reduce suffering
- That strength is in alignment with values, not in allowing our actions to be dominated and automated by egocentrism and fear
Let us insist—not sentimentally, but soberly—that character matters. Emotional intelligence is not optional. The work of becoming human together is the real work of leadership.
Character inspires us to act from love, to transcend our current operating system to a spiritual reality just outside the reach of our current state of consciousness. Dissonance threatens our collective sense of purpose, digresses our potential, and arrests us in an existential operating system where pleasure, dominance, and hoarding are the highest ideals. And then we are trapped in a recursive loop because perhaps the ends justify the means if the ideal “end” is simply pleasure, dominance, and hoarding… I think we are better than that … every other species on the planet is.
So what do we do? The truth is that living with a congruent character allows us to be oppressed by those who don’t. It is like playing a game in which you are following rules, and your opponent is not.
Maybe the first step is humility—to offer that I am not as congruent as I am claiming to be. I, too, have supported leaders who would sacrifice character for the end goals of my ideology. I vote ‘against’ far more than I vote ‘for.’ Our current polarization is not one-sided… we have all, to some degree, chosen to sacrifice our values for the desired ends.
We need more than dedication to do better—we will have to be better. To be the character we long to admire and to admire and support those who embody a character symbolic of our collective values.
