Image in the original: Danse macabre by Michael Wolgemut
I was born in Brazil. Raised across seven countries. And for most of my adult life, I’ve been trying to answer one question:
Why do some people stay clear-headed when everything falls apart — while everyone around them loses their minds?
I’ve watched it happen in boardrooms. In families. In entire societies.
And I think I finally have an answer.
But let me start in the 14th century.
It’s the 14th century. Europe is dying.
Not slowly. Not quietly.
The Black Death swept across the continent and took more than a third of the population with it.
Entire villages emptied overnight.
Priests refused to give last rites. Doctors abandoned their patients. Parents left their children.
And then something strange happened.
People started dancing.
Not out of joy. Out of madness.
Historians call it the Danse Macabre — the Dance of Death. Men and women, gripped by terror and helplessness, danced in the streets until they lost consciousness.
Art from the era depicts a skeletal figure of Death leading processions of people — kings, bishops, merchants, peasants — all marching together toward the grave.
No one was exempt. No one could think straight.
Image in the original: Agine dal libro Trionfo e Danza della Morte, o Danza Macabra a Clusone
The music never really stopped.
Look around right now.
Tensions in the Strait of Hormuz. A volatile standoff between Iran and the West. War grinding through Eastern Europe. Taiwan. The South China Sea. A global economy lurching from one shock to the next, with no clear floor in sight.
The Danse Macabre is playing at full volume — and it is designed, whether by nature or by chaos, to make us dance.
We feel it in the news we can’t stop consuming.
In the meetings that spiral into anxiety rather than action. In the decisions made at speed not because the moment demanded speed, but because stillness felt unbearable.
We saw it in concentrated form during the pandemic — neighbor reporting neighbor, executives reversing major decisions within weeks, entire organizations frozen by a fear they couldn’t name.
But that was only the most visible episode of something far more constant.
The dance never stopped. It just changes its music.
And here’s what I’ve come to believe after living across cultures for over two decades:
When humans face the uncontrollable, we don’t think. We perform anxiety.
Neuroscience confirms what history already knew. Under acute stress, the prefrontal cortex — the part of your brain responsible for rational thought, long-term planning, and sound judgment — functionally shuts down. It doesn’t matter how intelligent you are. It doesn’t matter how many years of experience you have.
The dance takes over.
But here’s what the history books leave out.
There were always people who didn’t dance.
Leaders who, in the middle of catastrophe, remained grounded.
Calm. Clear. Not because they were unafraid — but because they had something the panicking crowd didn’t.
My father’s family is from Kagoshima, the southernmost prefecture of Kyushu.
In our household growing up, there was never much debate about who the greatest Japanese figure in history was.
It was Takamori Saigo. Full stop.
Saigo was the general who helped topple the feudal shogunate and restore the Emperor during the Meiji Restoration. A warrior. A statesman. A poet.
And in a turbulent era when Japan was being torn apart by the collision of tradition and modernity, he was a man who never lost his compass.
The principle he lived by was this:
敬天愛人 — Keiten Aijin.
Revere Heaven. Love People.
Saigo left behind a body of teachings called the Nanshu-o Ikun — The Legacy of the Southern Master.
In it, he wrote:
“The path of learning has Keiten Aijin as its purpose — and in the cultivation of oneself, one must always strive to overcome the self.”
Notice what he said. The goal of all learning — all wisdom, all education — is not knowledge.
It is this: revere heaven, love people. Everything else is commentary.
When I first encountered this as a child, I immediately thought of something I’d read in the Gospel of Matthew — the passage where Jesus is asked which commandment is the greatest.
His answer:
“Love the Lord your God with all your heart.”
“Love your neighbor as yourself.”
The same two movements. Heaven and neighbor. The sacred and the human. The vertical and the horizontal.
It turned out this wasn’t a coincidence.
The educator Nakamura Masanao — a Japanese Christian scholar and leading figure during the Meiji period — had deliberately synthesized the Confucian idea of reverencing Heaven with the Christian command to love one’s neighbor.
And Saigo, and later Inamori Kazuo, the legendary founder of Kyocera who made it his company’s founding philosophy, understood something profound in this synthesis.
But it took me years to understand what that something actually was.
Keiten is not simply “let go of what you can’t control.”
I used to think it was. It’s a reasonable reading. And there’s truth in it.
But it’s not the whole picture.
To revere Heaven is something more radical than releasing control.
It is entrusting your life — your destiny, the arc of your years, the outcome of your efforts — to something larger than yourself. Not with resignation. Not with passivity. With reverence.
It is saying: I am not the author of this story. I am a participant in it. And that is enough.
Saigo believed this about his own life with a clarity that still startles me.
He wrote:
“I have been kept alive by Heaven because my mission is not yet finished. When it is, Heaven will naturally take me. Until then, I have work to do.”
That is not a man who was dancing.
That is a man who had placed the ceiling in Heaven’s hands — and was therefore free to focus entirely on the floor beneath his feet.
Which brings us to the second movement.
When you have truly released the ceiling, something unexpected happens.
The noise quiets. The spiral slows. And you become — sometimes for the first time in days — fully present.
Present to the room you are actually in. Present to the conversation that is actually happening. Present to the person who is actually in front of you.
This is Aijin. Love people. Walk the human path.
Not as a strategy. Not as a leadership technique. Not as the final step in a five-point framework.
As what naturally remains when you have stopped trying to control what was never yours to control.
Saigo put it simply:
“Heaven loves all people equally, just as it loves me.
Therefore, love others with the same heart you use to love yourself.”
There is a logic here that stops me every time.
If Heaven holds your fate — and Heaven loves all people equally — then the only rational response to being alive is to love the person in front of you. Not the market. Not the situation. Not the imagined catastrophe three steps ahead.
The person. Right now. In front of you.
A colleague who is scared and hasn’t said so. A team member waiting for someone to tell them it’s going to be okay. A partner who just needs to know you’re still thinking clearly.
This is not soft. This is not naive.
This is what kept Saigo grounded while an entire era collapsed around him.
This is what Inamori carried into every boardroom crisis Kyocera ever faced.
This is what the people who didn’t dance understood — that in the moment of greatest chaos, the most powerful thing a leader can do is become fully present to one human being.
Because calm spreads. One grounded conversation steadies a person. One steady person steadies a team. One grounded team makes better decisions than an entire panicking organization.
You don’t save a forest by trying to water every tree at once.
The Danse Macabre never fully disappears.
There will always be plagues — literal and metaphorical.
There will always be moments when the ground gives way and the old instinct rises: dance, or be left behind.
But now I understand something I didn’t before.
The people who didn’t dance weren’t calmer by nature. They weren’t braver. They weren’t more experienced or better informed.
They had simply made peace with the ceiling.
And because they had, they were free — fully, completely free — to love what was in front of them.
Revere what is above you.
Love what is in front of you.
It is the oldest leadership wisdom I know.
It has outlasted empires, pandemics, and every management theory ever published.
And what I keep coming back to — years after first encountering it at a dinner table in a Kagoshima household — is how quietly it works.
You don’t announce it. You don’t perform it.
You simply stop dancing.
And in that stillness, the people around you begin to breathe again. ■
If this resonated with you, I’d love to hear what it brought up. Reply and let me know — I read every response.
Image in the original: Takamori Saigo
First published on Substack on Mar 25, 2026 (JST). Archived here as part of the Fabio Caipirinha permanent archive (published on this site: Oct 15, 2026). Images from the original are omitted here pending rights clearance. Original: https://fabiocaipirinha.substack.com/p/how-to-think-clearly-when-the-world
Cover image: Equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius, Rome (CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons — source)
