How to Subdue Free and Innocent People

Innocent men and women are free, creative, and productive.

Guilty men and women are cagey, navel-gazing, and many of them are parasitical. All of them are particularly vulnerable to the perils of granting inordinate levels of loyalty to human leader figures.

What if you are a leader in any context, and the men and women you serve are innocent, free, creative, and productive? This is a dream situation for any good leader.

But what if those men and women you serve are so innocent and so free and so wonderfully productive that they refuse to stroke your ego? And what if your ego is dying to be massaged?

But for any big-headed leader, this is not a dream. It’s a nightmare!

What can you do if you are a big-headed leader with an ego that is dying to be noticed?

Since there is no way to manipulate innocent men into stoking your ego, you must first destroy their innocence. But how are you going to do that?

Don’t forget that you are a leader around here! From that little perch it’s dangerously easy to destroy the aggravating innocence of at least some of your unsuspecting subjects.

Don’t despair, you can finally get yourself some real, subservient applause, and maybe some blind loyalty too.

Ayn Rand knew how easily some innocent people can be duped into trading in their valuable, bold innocence for a comfortable supply of worthless, docile guilt. Here’s how to make them do it. From a scene in Rand’s classic on capitalism and individual freedom, Atlas Shrugged:

“One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. (…) just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted—and you create a nation of law-breakers—and then you cash in on guilt. Now that’s the system, Mr. Rearden…”

That’s the system, that’s how you do it! That’s how you destroy the innocence of your subjects and induce them to give you a little praise and subservient loyalty. Leaders in all fields face an embarrassingly high amount of pressure from the dark side to do just this sort of a thing. Admit it.

God helping us, we will refuse to capitulate to dark pressures. If He does not help us, some of us will certainly end up acting out these horrible words of Dr. Ferris, an outstandingly “strong” leader in Atlas Shrugged:

“…there is no way to disarm any man," said Dr. Ferris, "except through guilt. Through that which he himself has accepted as guilt. (…) If there’s not enough guilt in the world, we must create it. If we teach a man that it’s evil to look at spring flowers and he believes us and then does it—we’ll be able to do whatever we please with him. He won’t defend himself. He won’t feel he’s worth it. He won’t fight.”

Ayn Rand understood the destructive power of feeling guilty when you are in fact innocent. One of her goals in writing Atlas Shrugged must surely have been to warn us not to become manipulative leaders who attempt to impose false guilt on other people.

She also warns us not to capitulate to manipulative leaders who for our own good (of course) attempt to impose false guilt unto us. The imposition of false guilt is no less destructive than is the imposition of false innocence. The devil is well-practiced at both tactics. So are his agents, in all realms.

Jesus Christ, on the other hand, sets us free by (1) telling us the truth, (2) forgiving us wherein we have run afoul of truth and repent thereof, and then (3) empowering us to live the truth going forward.

Now that’s a Leader, folks! That’s a Leader! Follow Him and you will become one of those innocent men and women who are free, creative, and productive. And full of gracious, nonnegotiable loyalty to universal Truth.

All Hail to Him!