On Blatner's account of feet of clay

[Ivo Banaco]

In one of the thoughts that Adam Blatner share with us, here in Grouptalk he
said (hope not taking this out of the context, I think I'm not):

"what if our leaders have this same (really quite normal) distribution of
role skills. What do we do when we find our leader, our pioneer, our elder,
our ideal, has faults? Do we see Moreno, for example, as having feet of
clay? That metaphor implies the entire edifice of his good ideas is based on
his weaknesses, and as they are exposed, so falls the edifice. Or what if we
grant (using a different metaphor) that many if not most heroes were heroic
or genius or really pretty good in some ways and in other ways may exhibit
character flaws, inconsistencies, what we see now as hypocrisy (How could
Thomas Jefferson have kept slaves?!), etc.?"

I felt this point uncomfortable to me so I waited a while to see what was
this feeling all about. This is what I found and wanted to share with you
all.

I do think that JL Moreno and all genius for that matter have "feet of clay"
in some particular sense. What I’ m not sure is that my sense is the same
than Blatner’s used here, which I found particularly pejorative. I'll
explain:

It seems to me clear that Moreno built all his career as an antithesis (in
Hegel and Fitche sense) of the establishment of the epoch. And why?
Difficulty to adaptation? Certainly. But is that all? That is why I felt
uncomfortable about words like feet of clay, flaws, inconsistencies,
weaknesses. It brings pejorative sense of the struggle of the human being to
grow. And Growth is a main issue for human beings and, by far, the less well
understand issue for all of us. Despite all the brilliant theories,
particularly since Darwin, we simply don't know exactly how and why do we
develop as human beings, as culture and as society. Our own vulnerabilities
could be a major strength if we used them to grow, enhancing the creative
forces and reducing possible destructive forces in to play.

In some accounts of evolutionary theories it is said that Evolution itself
only occurs if necessary. For instance, the reptiles are so well adapted to
their environment that there is no significant push to evolve further. When
we think in this continuum between species, having human beings as the most
evolved specie in some consciousness taxonomy (it’s important to be aware of
the scale that we are measuring evolution), we can make speculations about
how far away we and our environment are far from some kind of adaptation
like the one showed by other animals.

OK, I am missing my point here. What I’m saying is that, in my opinion, it’s
beside the point to realize that genius have weaknesses. We don’t want to
throw our baby with the bathwater. What we must know and be conscious of is
the fact that there are no such thing as perfection and the brighter the
light the greater the shadow.

All the best,

Ivo
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