Werner and I were having lunch outside. It was peaceful, sunshine, the sea glittering in the distance. We were discussing about whether China would escort Iranian ships through the Strait of Hormuz, whether Trump’s blockade would collapse the ceasefire, what Israel might do next. The kind of conversation you have over a sandwich while the world falls apart around you in real time.
During coffee I scrolled through LinkedIn. The usual. Business strategy. Leadership tips. Why this model is better than that one. How to show up as a leader. The most important part of a conversation is the one you skip. Small, everyday moments.
Then one post stopped me.
Dr Klaus Bockslaff shared a video of Charlie Chaplin’s final speech from The Great Dictator, made in 1940. If you haven’t watched it recently, stop reading this and go watch it (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7GY1Xg6X20).
It occurred to me that this was the first and only post I’d seen in my professional feed that said something, anything, about what is actually happening in the world right now. The first one. In weeks. From thousands of connections.
Me included. I’m part of the silence.
As professionals, we try not to antagonise. We don’t want to polarise. We keep our opinions out of it. I understand why. But recently I started to think that this is not professional integrity, but rather cowardice dressed up as professionalism.
The well-trained non-answer
Earlier today, driving home from a walk with our dogs in the hills, I heard Guyon Espiner interview Chris Hipkins on National Radio. Espiner asked the opposition leader about the growing calls to invoke the 25th Amendment, about the US president’s erratic behaviour, about the Jesus meme Trump posted depicting himself as Christ healing the sick. Hipkins said: “I don’t want to get into a backwards and forwards on that. I think we should focus on the consequences of Donald Trump’s decisions for New Zealand.”
The interview went on. Espiner kept trying to get a normal, human answer out of him. But Hipkins is too well trained. And to be fair, I think the same question asked to Luxon or most other MPs would have produced the same careful non-answer.
I sat in traffic shaking my head, thinking: what a load of bull. Just say what you think. Say what every normal person around the dinner table is saying. Say that this is insane.
But they can’t. Because of the party, the polls, and obviously because of the next election.
I grew up in a direct democracy where seven people share the top job and citizens vote on outcomes, not parties. It’s in my DNA. And it’s why I genuinely cannot wrap my head around how a handful of people can hold the rest of us hostage.
A video I couldn’t shake
After watching Chaplin’s speech, I wanted to go back to work. I was editing the copy for our new PCM explainer videos. But I couldn’t concentrate. The video kept replaying in my head, mixing with all the frustration I’ve been carrying for months.
We are being led by people who are clearly unfit to lead anyone, let alone countries, let alone all of us.
A US president who posts AI images of himself as Jesus while threatening to annihilate a civilisation of 90 million people. An Israeli prime minister who has prosecuted a war in Gaza that has killed tens of thousands of civilians and is now bombing Lebanon and Iran, while facing corruption charges at home. A Russian president who invaded a sovereign country and has kept the war grinding for over four years because admitting failure is unthinkable. A North Korean dictator who starves his own people while testing missiles. An Iranian supreme leader, the son of the one who was assassinated, issuing statements through news anchors because he can’t show his face, vowing vengeance and threatening to close the world’s oil supply. And the commanders of Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis, each with their own populations held hostage to ideology and proxy wars.
These are the people deciding the fate of the world right now.
And then there is the much larger group around them. The politicians who stand by, evading, calculating, staying safe. Over 50 US members of Congress have called for the 25th Amendment. Even some of Trump’s own former allies have publicly called him insane. But most leaders, everywhere, just watch. Our own politicians focus on “consequences for New Zealand” and don’t want to get into a backwards and forwards.
Why is everyone so quiet?
Fear is the mechanism
As Franklin D. Roosevelt said in 1933: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” He was talking about economic paralysis, but the psychology applies precisely to what we’re seeing now.
Fear narrows your attention towards the threat and away from everything else. It helps you focus on the immediate danger, but it also makes you miss context, overestimate risk, and lose the ability to think flexibly. In strong fear, people rely more on instinct than careful reasoning. The neuroscience on this is clear. Fear literally shrinks the range of information you process.
This is exactly what we’re watching play out on the world stage. Leaders frozen in narrow, self-protective thinking. Professionals carefully curating their feeds to avoid controversy. Politicians giving scripted non-answers because they’re terrified of saying the wrong thing.
In a conversation over the weekend, a friend mentioned that in his experience, “Trump-like” behaviour has become widespread in C-suites. Everything goes. No respect, no trust, just the next deal and emotional blackmail. You’re either with me or against me. Win or lose. Nothing in between.
I wasn’t surprised. Of course it has. This stuff doesn’t stay in politics. It leaks into boardrooms, into teams, into how people talk to each other at work. When the most powerful people on the planet behave this way and face no real consequences, it normalises the behaviour everywhere. That’s how social norms work.
What I wrote seven years ago
In September 2018, I wrote a LinkedIn article called “Why Donald Trump is good for democracy and for us.” My closing paragraph said: “The Donald Trumps of this world are good for us because they make us aware of what is not acceptable. Natural selection favours the team players and not the bullies in the long run.”
Seven years later, I’m sitting in the Nelson sunshine asking myself whether I was wrong.
The principle holds, the research backs it up. Perplexity quotes: “While bullies can dominate temporarily, their success often crumbles under scrutiny – high turnover, resentment, and isolation catch up. Real strengths builds through trust, not fear, but bully tactics win where accountability is weak.”
Maybe I was wrong about something fundamental. Maybe I overestimated the accountability part. Maybe I overestimated our willingness to play it. Because natural selection only works when the environment applies pressure. And right now, the environment isn’t applying pressure because the people who should be demanding accountability, us, aren’t.
The bullies win when accountability is weak. And accountability is weak because many of us decided that silence is safer than speaking up.
The data confirms what we all feel
Gallup’s 2025 State of the World’s Emotional Health report says the world is “on an emotional edge.” In 2024, 39% of adults worldwide reported worrying a lot the previous day. 37% reported significant stress. All negative emotions are higher than they were a decade ago. Hundreds of millions more people now experience daily worry, anger, and sadness compared to ten years ago. Riots, strikes and anti-government demonstrations rose 244% between 2011 and 2019, before the pandemic even started.
The report makes a point that should stop every leadership professional in their tracks: negative emotions don’t just reflect distress. They narrow people’s focus and erode their coping capacity. When these feelings become chronic, they leave individuals and societies more vulnerable to instability. Peace, health, and emotional wellbeing rise and fall together. Leaders who ignore emotions risk missing the foundation of stability itself.
That’s not from a self-help book. That’s from 145,000 interviews across 144 countries.
And at work? Gallup’s 2026 State of the Global Workplace report shows global employee engagement has dropped for the second consecutive year, to 20%, its lowest since 2020.
Low engagement cost the world economy approximately $10 trillion in lost productivity last year. That’s 9% of global GDP.
Here’s the finding that should concern anyone who works with leaders: compared with individual contributors, leaders are substantially more likely to experience
- daily stress (+7 points),
- anger (+12 points),
- sadness (+11 points) and
- loneliness (+10 points).
Leaders have better life evaluations overall, but worse actual days. They carry more emotional weight than the people they lead, and they have fewer people to talk to about it.
The “outside” world and the “work” world aren’t separate. They never were. But we keep pretending they are because it’s more comfortable that way.
How was the Third Reich possible?
During lunch I said to Werner: I always asked myself how the Third Reich was possible. But now I’m watching the mechanics of it in real time.
I want to be very clear about what I mean. I am not comparing current events to the Holocaust or to the scale of Nazi atrocities. What I am comparing is the bystander psychology. The mechanics of silence. How ordinary, decent people stand by.
When I ask how the Third Reich prospered, the answer research provides isn’t complicated: it did not rely only on support. It relied on making bystanders feel that silence was normal, unavoidable, or prudent. It was a mix of fear, conformity, convenience, and gradual moral numbness.
Read that again. Fear. Conformity. Convenience. Gradual moral numbness.
Every time a politician gives a scripted non-answer instead of saying what they think, that’s the mechanism. I scrolled through my entire LinkedIn feed that day. Hundreds of posts about leadership, communication, trust, psychological safety. Not one mentioned the world that people actually live in right now. Not one.
Actually, that’s not true. One did. And that’s why I’m writing this.
By staying quiet, we condone.
So what do we actually do?
I’m not pretending I can change geopolitics from Nelson. But I can stop pretending that what happens out there has nothing to do with what I do in here.
If you work with leaders and teams for a living, if you care about human potential and how people treat each other, then what is happening right now is your business.
Not because you need to become a political commentator, but because you cannot credibly talk about trust, communication, leadership, and human performance while ignoring the forces that are actively destroying all of those things.
What does using your voice look like? It looks different for everyone. For me, today, it looks like writing this post instead of the safe one I had planned. It looks like naming what I see: that the professional silence of people who understand human behaviour is itself a form of complicity. It looks like refusing to treat “leadership style” as a neutral concept when what we’re actually watching is abuse of power on a global scale.
It might look like having an honest conversation with your team about what’s worrying them before you start the meeting. It might look like calling out the Trump-like behaviour when you see it in a boardroom, not with a framework, but with the word for what it is: bullying. It might look like simply saying, in a room full of careful professionals: this is not ok.
Seven years ago I believed the bullies would lose in the long run. I still believe that. But I no longer believe it happens on its own. Natural selection needs environmental pressure. It needs the rest of us to stop being bystanders.
Chaplin said it in 1940 and it’s as true today as it was then. I spent months trying to summarise what he said better than he said it. I can’t. Go watch the speech.
The quiet is the problem. And the quiet is ours to break.