This country is suffering beneath ever-growing oppressive leaders at the state and federal level. Their grasp of what is important to this country’s success and how to achieve it is so shaky that most of them should be thrown out as incompetent. When the early colonists found themselves beneath an oppressive monarchy, they mutinied.
History records it as the American Revolution (1775-1783), also known as the American Revolutionary War and the U.S. War of Independence. Some of the events leading up to this conflict included the government’s attempt to raise revenue with taxes, the attempt to suppress a rebellious media, and the government’s attempt to take away the colonists’ ability to defend themselves (Paul Revere’s ride was to warn his fellow countrymen that the British were on their way to confiscate their guns).
The government was tone deaf to the demands of the colonists and their demands for the protection of their rights. The government even considered the colonists demands to be an affront. After all, they knew what was best for the colonies. Any of this sound familiar? Is it time to mutiny? Could mutiny be successful?
According to DePaul University professors Patrick Murphy and Ray Coye in their book Mutiny and Its Bounty, the answer to that question can be found with the people who did mutiny best: seafarers in the Age of Discovery (mid-1400s to the early 1600s). This was the time when seafarers like Vasco da Gama, Christopher Columbus, Ferdinand Magellan, and Henry Hudson undertook risky ventures at sea. Their venturing began in Portugal and Spain and went on for hundreds of years and with staggering volume.
Murphy and Coye write that mutinies were as common as the wind on Age of Discovery seafaring ventures. What’s more, the people participating in them often had very sophisticated notions of leadership and service. They also recorded firsthand much of what happened. Murphy and Coye’s analysis of records and diaries from these long enterprises shows that mutinies are successfully carried out when a few conditions are present:
Leadership is destructive.
Interestingly, we find that mutinies go differently for different kinds of bad leaders. When leaders are technically weak, for example, but well-liked, members depose them via fast, tactical mutinies. The case of Henry Hudson, set adrift on today’s Hudson Bay, is a prime example. Members depose technically brilliant but not well-liked leaders with careful, strategic mutinies. Here, a mutiny against Ferdinand Magellan on the South American coast comes to mind (although apparently it wasn’t strategic enough; Magellan viciously quashed it).
Values have been flouted.
When leader actions threaten the values that members share, an organization becomes a social powder keg. In the Age of Discovery, those shared values were centered on basic needs like the supply and quality of food, and the safety of the crew. Today, an assault on a community’s shared values more likely threatens higher-order needs for meaning and esteem. But the mechanism is identical.
Ringleaders are strong.
Because a mutiny requires coordinated, energized action, the role of the ringleader is essential. Credible, inspiring ringleaders are as vital to mutinies as founders are to entrepreneurial ventures.
The external environment is uncertain and features novel threats.
Whether it’s due to weak technical expertise or low interpersonal skill (or both), bad leaders are especially prone to poor management decisions when the environment is uncertain and unprogrammed actions are necessary. At the same time, threats and opportunities to an organization are opportunities and threats (i.e., transposed) for a mutiny inside that organization. They are important to mutiny planning and execution.
Put all this together and you have a situation where an influential member is able to make the case that the current leader can’t be trusted to deal with new threats because of their demonstrated lapse in upholding values.
When mutiny occurs, the leader involved usually sees it as a sudden flash. But the members involved in the action see it differently. Like an entrepreneurial team, they formulate a strategic plan for mutiny in secret, execute it tactically, and face the risks with a sense of justice and purpose. And here is the real surprise of Murphy and Coye’s research: Mutinies are usually for the better. Given the connotations of the term mutiny, and the images it brings to mind, few would expect that it would be an improvement. In our post-industrial age, mutiny is taboo. But the culture of the Age of Discovery assumed that members should depose a bad leader. It was understood that mutiny could save a venture or help it succeed.
Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, “Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government.”
Our founding father’s believed that we, as citizens, have a duty—a moral obligation—to depose a corrupt government. They mutinied against the British Crown and created a better nation—a nation built on life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. There are many in our current government who wish to take all this away and turn us into a socialist state where the government “owns” our children, our property, and all that we have. A government that will tell us what to eat, what to wear, and what to think. A government that will control the flow of information. A government that will indoctrinate our children.
And the first step toward all of this, just like the British who came in the middle of the night, will be to take our guns away so that we cannot defend ourselves against a corrupt government.
Is it time for mutiny?
