Some conversations make your brain work in ways you didn’t expect. My recent interview with Damien Terrence Dubose on Lens of Hopefulness with John Passadino was one of those conversations that had me pausing, rethinking, and honestly needing to study up before we even started recording.

Damien is a Washington, DC-based financial professional and author of America’s Ethical Archetype: Establishing the Psychology of Moral Authority and Correcting Our Country’s Broken Politics. And I’ll be honest with you — when I first read his book, I had to put it down a few times. Not because it wasn’t good. But because, as I told Damien, “this man has a beautiful mind.”

The book is intense. It covers psychology, philosophy, political theory, and leadership in ways that made me realize I needed to do my homework. So I did. And the conversation that followed was worth every minute of preparation.

Not Your Typical Political Conversation

Let me be clear about what this interview wasn’t. We didn’t argue about personalities. We didn’t debate who’s right and who’s wrong. We didn’t get into the usual shouting match that passes for political discourse these days.

What we did talk about was something much deeper: the psychology and philosophy of leadership itself.

I tried to frame the core of Damien’s argument early on. His book, I said, isn’t about the usual policy prescriptions — “it’s not, well, we need to impose more tariffs…or we need better unions. It’s not that.” What Damien is actually proposing is something far more foundational: a whole new approach to leadership, one that we haven’t seen in a long time, that blends psychology and philosophy.

Damien confirmed that’s exactly right.

Ayn Rand and the Individual

Now, I’ll admit — I didn’t know much about Ayn Rand before reading Damien’s book. I know her now. And I understand why she’s controversial.

Rand founded objectivism, which is rooted not in egotism in the sense of someone with a big ego, but egoism as an ethical philosophy. It’s based on the freedom and rights of the individual.

“A person’s individuality or individual character is what we should be focusing on,” Damien said. “The thing that makes them different from other people, makes them an individual, centering a view of life around that.”

When I asked for a practical example, I landed on the word that makes a lot of people uncomfortable: capitalist.

“Exactly,” Damien said. “That’s this exact frame of reference I’m thinking about.”

And right away, I knew some people’s hackles would go up. When I think of capitalism, I think of free market — versus socialism or communism at the other extreme.

My Corporate Experience and Individual Freedom

I worked for corporations my entire career — JPMorgan Chase and IBM. These companies employed a lot of people. They allowed me to retire at a relatively young age. During that time, I was all for free market and business because I wanted to stay employed. I felt like if they got tax breaks and could operate within reason — not polluting rivers and all that — they needed to grow and invest for the company to thrive. And both companies have been thriving for over 100 years.

But Damien pushed deeper than just economic outcomes.

“A lot of times people look at the outcomes of situations,” he said. “But really what’s at the root of it is: as an individual, I get the right to choose. And I’m not saying that I get the right to take your life or injure you or do anything of that nature. That’s where we get to the rational and irrational perspective. But essentially, I’m not here to make decisions only that you approve of. I’m not going to limit my life to that realm.”

How Did We Get Here? The Wisdom of the Founding Fathers

One of the most impressionable moments in the conversation came when I pointed to the opening pages of his book. The Founding Fathers, he wrote, “established the United States on the core principles that emphasize the role and rights of the individual.” America was built as a constitutional republic firmly rooted in those axioms.

So what happened?

Damien’s answer was both historical and psychological. The individualist perspective, he explained, is actually a fairly new concept in human history — only about 500 years old. Before that, we lived in collectives, tribes, castes. We didn’t see ourselves as individuals apart from our groups.

And here’s what struck me: we underestimate the wisdom of the people who built this country. “They foresaw a lot of the things that are happening today,” Damien said. “That is exactly why the system is set up the way it is today.”

I shared what I’d heard from a philosophy and rhetoric professor: that back in those early days, you had to study, you had to command the ability to communicate, you had to execute rhetoric efficiently — or you’d better know how to fight. There was no casual scrolling through a feed and forming a half-baked opinion.

The DEI Question: Imposition vs. Individual Choice

We touched on one of the most charged topics in America right now: DEI.

I tried to distill what I read in Damien’s book: “In an effort to right wrongs, so much attention has been given to balancing us that we’ve imbalanced us.” I asked Damien if I had it right.

He agreed — but pushed the argument deeper. If he believes something is imbalanced in your home, does he have the right to come in and fix it for you?

“People do also need the right to do dumb things with their life,” he said. “How else would they learn? They can’t learn if you’re always jumping in to fix everything.”

His argument isn’t that we shouldn’t help each other. His argument is about how we help. Government-imposed diversity, funded by taxpayers who have no choice in the matter, loses what makes generosity meaningful. “Own it in your community with the people you know,” Damien said. “Start with your family. Start with your community. You go to church, your church, your schools, whatever’s around you — and that way, you own that decision.”

And then I read a passage from his book:

“The beauty of America lies in how diversity and inclusion naturally emerge from competitive free markets. In a capitalist system, people choose to engage with members from diverse groups to achieve shared goals, benefiting all involved. Individuals form these relationships willingly, free from coercion. In contrast, forced relationships encourage engagement without reason. While forced diversity may increase interactions among individuals of diverse backgrounds, these interactions lack cohesiveness in the absence of shared values.”

I told him: I can’t say it any clearer than that.

The Leadership We Actually Need

What does the right kind of leader actually look like? Damien looks to Jung’s eight personality types and filters them through Rand’s philosophy to arrive at an answer. America needs what he calls a “level nine” leader — someone who can hold the full complexity of the individualist perspective, respect others’ rights while maintaining their own, and lead not from emotion or impulse but from principled analysis.

“The leaders that I’m trying to write to in this book are the leaders that won’t play into that,” he said, referring to the constant cycle of emotional politics and fickleness. “They will lead from a foundational principle perspective, but with the understanding that many people do look at things like that. So you do need to be effective. Just because you want to be principled doesn’t mean that you don’t want to be effective. You want both.”

I pushed him: where do we start? How do we actually shift this?

His answer: education. It starts there. When people know better, they do better — not because of government mandates, but inherently.

My Lens of Hopefulness

Near the end of our conversation, I got a little cynical — I’ll own that. With all the political noise since 2016, it’s hard not to. However my podcast is called Lens of Hopefulness, so I caught myself.

I said to Damien and to everyone listening: the lens of hopefulness I’d offer from this conversation is this — put yourself in a position where you’re stretching to learn, exploring ideas beyond the constant noise of “we gotta get rid of this guy, we gotta get rid of that guy.” Let’s think it through. Really think it through.

This conversation gave my brain a serious workout. As I told Damien: “My brain’s exercising. The muscles are like, woo, woo, woo.”

And that’s exactly the kind of mental workout we all need right now.

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Damien Terrence Dubose is the author of America’s Ethical Archetype: Establishing the Psychology of Moral Authority and Correcting Our Country’s Broken Politics, available on Amazon.

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