MOOC: Ethical Leadership says that ethical leaders are shaped by narratives, particularly their own in conjunction with the background of the world physically, culturally, politically, economically. Those narratives shape the leader-to-be and how she presents herself outwards.
MOOC: Science of Every Day Thinking tells us that memories aren't etched in stone, that they change every time they come up. That we're not lying deliberately if we remember something incorrectly, but truly remembering with all the strength of our brain's inability to store objective truth.
How do these two lessons interact? Does reinvention of self (however unconscious it may be for the purposes of this question) remove the necessary authenticity of a Leader? If we're constantly rewriting our own stories for ourselves, whether to make ourselves more the hero or less, are we also turning a true narrative false? As far as slippery slopes go, it feels a little shaky underfoot to say it's okay for this to happen. But if it's not okay, how on earth do we fight our own internal mechanisms to keep it from happening?
EL (Tony Morrison quote) goes on to state that memory is a form of willed creation. It's not the search for the way it really was: that's research. Instead, the point is to dwell on the way it appeared and why it appeared in that particular way.
Does acknowledging the potential falseness of the memory make it less abhorrent to be false? Where does the need for honesty (to self, if not to others) as a facet of honorable behavior, fit into that concept?
To twist it to MU-focus: We save logs, both on our own and on wiki, to remember what happened as if that were the whole of the situation. But reading a log doesn't tell us what mood we were in, whether our friend was being friendly or snippy in those paged asides. Every time we go back and re-read, we do so as if the situation were happening new, with that moment's emotional weight on the text. Is there a way to use that to our benefit as a community?
ES
