efficacy > importance

Let's watch ourselves...

“Most of the trouble in the world is caused by people who want to be important.”
— T.S. Eliot

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The man who brought us Cats also brought us this little nugget of wisdom. To be fair, it was Andrew Lloyd Webber, not T.S. who turned a perfectly good little book on silly cats into a Broadway spectacle.

I have known a fair number of people who wanted to be important, and frankly I’m dealing with a few of them now. They are totally unconcerned with being effective, but simply want to hold power so that they can fill some black hole in their psyche they think can’t be filled by anything else. It’s a false premise anyway, as those who seek power inevitably lose it in some manner or another. Like Brother Girolamo Savonarola.

Piazza della Signoria, Florence

Here, with two of his friends from his order, Domenico Buonvicini and Silvestro Maruffi, on the 23rd of May, 1498, due to an unjust sentence, Brother Girolamo Savonarola was hanged and burned. After four centuries this moment was placed here.

The fact that a four year-old girl was dancing on it was indicative of Savonarola’s significance 500 years later.

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Girolamo Savonarola started off as a humble preacher, preaching humble things. But as he became more popular, so grew his ego. He became ever more obsessed with wealth is a catalyst for evil. After all, the love of money was the root of it, right? Given the wealth of Florence as a whole, he had an excellent point. Medici and other bank money flowed through the streets knee-deep.

But Savonarola fell prey to his own sense of power. Under his direction, anything considered frivolous was rounded up by easily-influenced, uneducated and undisciplined teenage boys. These piagnoni assaulted people on the street who wore clothes that he considered were unpious, went going door to door, taking jewelry, clothing, and worst of all, art. He actually convinced one of the most renowned artists of the Renaissance, Botticelli, to burn his own paintings. We’ll never know what we lost. The stolen loot was burned in the same piazza where Brother G. met his, um, match.¹

Savonarola’s Bonfire of the Vanities was a real series of events, not a movie. These bonfires destroyed countless objects of wealth and prestige (it’s just stuff), and irreplaceable art (totally not okay with that). As a result of hubris, Savonarola made a lot of enemies, destroyed a lot of beauty, and what bugs me is that on top of all this, he was sanctimonious and arrogant about it.

Basically, Savonarola was a hot mess². Some historians suggest that his unctuous piety was a result of being scorned, rejected, and humiliated by a beautiful woman in his native Ferrara. I think it’s more that his parents, if alive today, would be on a daytime talk show airing their dirty laundry.

Unjustly tried and murdered? Probably a victim of political retribution, given his penchant for offending pretty much everyone for not being holy enough. He hurled invectives at the pope, a particularly nasty Spanish Borgia pope who liked his lavish (and lascivious) lifestyle. Given the temperament of the pontiff, it was a choice that I wouldn’t make.

I’m not saying Savonarola deserved what he got. Personally I think restorative justice and exile would have been punishment enough. He is, however, a cautionary tale about self-importance. From humble friar to zealot. At least he didn’t sell merch.

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Does history repeat itself? Here we are, 500 years later.

Originally sane people who become self-important zealots: check.
Senseless vandalism of things or books you don’t like: check.
People in high places incapable of true criticism: check.
People in high places incapable of false criticism: Also check.

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Self importance reveals itself in other ways. The sales reps who skip the staff, the people who potentially sell their stuff, the sales managers (the people who direct the people to potentially sell their stuff), and skip “right to the top,” i.e. me, are misguided. They somehow think that they can short-circuit the process by cutting out the people who run it. I might sign the checks, but if the salespeople doesn’t sell the product, those checks are worth as much as a Schrute Buck. In short, I’m not important in that process.

The good reps are easy to spot. They know staff by name and are respectful of their importance. Our staff are critical to their mission. Moreover, good reps actually view people as people, not as a means to an end.

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Machiavelli, the astute political commentator, asserted that Savonarola’s fall was related to him being overly zealous, mixing his version of Christianity with a political goal, but ultimately unable to hold his followers. Machiavelli recorded in his Discourses that Savonarola’s behavior was the first drop of a rainstorm that caused him to lose faith in religion as a partial form of government due to the hypocrisy of its leaders. He did not criticize Christianity, just those who used it for their political means.

The apogee of Savonarola’s decline came when he was challenged to walk through a trial by fire by a Franciscan priest. Two large fire lines were created and ignited. As the event grew closer and the crowd gathered in the piazza, both Savonarola and his challenger balked and found pretextes to hold off the show of faith. Then it rained, the crowd dispersed, and the fires went out.

So the zealot was a wimp when forced to put on his big-boy pants, and required to live up to his own precepts. This isn’t uncommon, unfortunately. A person starts off wanting to be effective and ends up wanting to be important.

That never goes well.

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So I’d like to ask the inhabitants of the world to consider this question—would you rather be effective or important?

Of course, this isn’t a simple question, as questions of ego, including my own, are never so black and white. Everyone is tempted when praise is lavished upon you, and you’re held up as some paragon of wisdom.

A friend sent me this quote of his own making, based on Philippians 2:3.

Honestly, the simple cure for self importance is humility.
Humility protects you from believing everything you think.

Good advice for me. Good advice for everyone.

1. Met his match? More like met a book of matches. Har. Har har.

2. Get it? Hot mess? I did it again. It was an accident. I swear.