In the fall of 2023, I lost two men I loved. My friend Joe Shymanski died in September. A few weeks after his memorial, I found comfort writing about one of his favorite poems, “Desiderata,” and the Multarity I heard within it. My father, Willard C. Kayser, Jr., died on November 20. I returned to writing because grief had once again made language feel like a place where I could sit with someone who was gone.
Dad had served as president of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon chapter at Indiana University. He carried a copy of John Walter Wayland’s “The True Gentleman” in his wallet, since his college days. After his death, I read the creed until its sentences began running through my mind. The card had survived years of being folded, carried, removed, and returned. Its presence told me that the words mattered to him.
The creed comes from another era and speaks in the language of “the man” and “the gentleman.” I hear its qualities as human ones. Goodwill, self-control, humility, frankness joined with sympathy, fidelity between word and deed, regard for the rights and feelings of others—these belong to leadership wherever leadership appears.
“The true gentleman is the man whose conduct proceeds from good will and an acute sense of propriety, and whose self-control is equal to all emergencies; who does not make the poor man conscious of his poverty, the obscure man of his obscurity, or any man of his inferiority or deformity; who is himself humbled if necessity compels him to humble another; who does not flatter wealth, cringe before power, or boast of his own possessions or achievements; who speaks with frankness but always with sincerity and sympathy; whose deed follows his word; who thinks of the rights and feelings of others, rather than his own; and who appears well in any company, a man with whom honor is sacred and virtue safe.”
—John Walter Wayland
A Multarity of Character
My first version of this essay translated the creed into five polarity labels and stopped there. Returning to it now, I hear a richer field. The creed describes character as a set of interdependent capacities whose value depends on relationship. Goodwill needs propriety. Confidence needs humility. Power needs restraint. Frankness needs sympathy. Words need deeds. Self-respect needs regard for others.
Masculinity can carry courage, protection, responsibility, tenderness, and disciplined strength. Toxicity enters when confidence is severed from humility, power from restraint, frankness from sympathy, or word from deed. The problem is larger than masculinity. Any leader, institution, or culture can reward the same distortions.
In Polarity Thinking, a Multarity brings several interdependent pairs into one field in service of a Greater Purpose. The Greater Purpose I hear in Wayland’s creed is leadership worthy of trust: power exercised with dignity, courage, integrity, and care for the humanity of others.
Interdependent tensions:
Contribution to trustworthy leadership
Goodwill AND Propriety
Human warmth joined with standards of conduct.
Confidence AND Humility
The capacity to stand firmly without making oneself larger by diminishing others.
Power AND Restraint
The ability to act, governed by awareness of power’s effect on other people.
Frankness AND Sympathy
Truth spoken clearly while preserving sincerity, context, and human regard.
Word AND Deed
Promises, claims, and stated values made credible through conduct.
Self-Respect AND Regard for Others
A grounded self that can protect the dignity, rights, and feelings of others.
The Leadership We Are Normalizing
My father died before Donald Trump returned to the White House. He had already seen enough of this leadership model to be appalled by it. His alarm reached deeper than party or policy. He saw conduct that inverted the standard he had carried in his wallet: humiliation performed as strength, boasting offered as evidence of worth, dominance confused with leadership, sympathy treated as weakness, and personal loyalty elevated above fidelity to truth and institution.
To my eyes, much of our current national leadership culture continues rewarding that inversion. Public insult generates attention. Cruelty signals membership. Wealth and proximity to power become claims to superiority. A leader’s word can change with the audience, the news cycle, or the needs of the moment, while followers are asked to treat inconsistency as strategy. The deed no longer follows the word because the word is expected to serve the leader.
Readers will judge policies differently. The creed asks a prior question: what kind of conduct should power amplify? A democracy needs principled disagreement, ideological difference, and leaders willing to challenge one another. It also needs boundaries around humiliation, dishonesty, dehumanization, and the use of public power for personal grievance. When those boundaries collapse, victory for one side can become damage to the conditions both sides need.
Civility AND Candor are part of this field, though the deeper pattern runs through the relationships named above: Confidence AND Humility, Power AND Restraint, and Word AND Deed.
What My Father Carried
Love allows me to honor my father’s standard without making him flawless. Like every person, he carried contradictions, blind spots, strengths, and unfinished work. The small card in his wallet was an aspiration. Perhaps that is why he kept it close.
His disgust with the leadership he was witnessing was also grief: grief for a public standard he believed men in positions of power should at least recognize, even when they failed to meet it. He understood that self-control is strength, that another person’s humiliation diminishes the one who inflicts it, and that honor becomes visible through conduct.
The creed remains gendered. Its challenge reaches far beyond gender. What would become possible if leaders across parties, institutions, businesses, communities, and families held themselves to its relationships? Goodwill AND Propriety. Confidence AND Humility. Power AND Restraint. Frankness AND Sympathy. Word AND Deed. Self-Respect AND Regard for Others.
Dad carried “The True Gentleman” in his wallet. I carry the question it leaves me: What kind of man—and what kind of leader—will I choose to be when power makes another choice easier?
For Reflection
· Which relationship in the True Gentleman Multarity is most under strain in your leadership context?
· Where are you excusing conduct from a leader because that leader advances outcomes you prefer?
· What standard of character are your own words and deeds teaching others to accept?