Dermot Desmond is Celtic’s real single point of failure.

There is a great historical myth surrounding Joseph Stalin and his state of mind, and the state of mind of those around him, in the early hours of 22 June 1941 when the Germans executed Operation Barbarossa.

According to the myth, Stalin was sound asleep, crucial time was wasted because no one wanted to wake him up and tell him that all the assumptions on which they had based their security policy of the previous two years were completely wrong. There are good reasons why people believe this.

First, Stalin himself refused to believe that it was real.

He was in almost complete denial during the first meetings with his advisers, and that fed into the later perception of a Kremlin that was paralysed because, in those first few hours, Stalin himself was living in a complete bubble of unreality.

But that is not the same as saying that his senior advisers did not wake him up for fear of being subjected to consequences.

Secondly, Stalin did in fact suffer something approaching a breakdown about a week later. After grasping the scale of the catastrophe unfolding at the front, he retreated to his dacha and, when members of the Soviet leadership came to see him, he initially appears to have feared that they had come to remove him. Instead, they wanted him to take a firmer grip and rally the country behind the war effort.

His initial scepticism and his eventual collapse, when the denial could no longer hold back the truth, are two of the foundation stones of the myth.

But the myth comes from somewhere much deeper than that.

It comes from the way systems built on fear create paralysis because, even in the face of total disaster, there is a reluctance amongst the leader’s senior advisers to tell him that he is wrong, that he has been proved wrong, that circumstances have determined that his judgement was faulty and that all the time the path they were following was the wrong one.

All of us have contemplated the horrible possibility that Celtic’s own paralysis will continue as long as its current leadership does.

And this is almost certainly true, and the reason it is almost certainly true is that all of that paralysis flows from one man.

I said in the previous piece that no organisation can afford to build itself around a single point of failure, and it was only when I was writing it that I realised that all of Celtic is built around a single point of failure.

That single point of failure is Dermot Desmond himself.

The example of Stalin, and even the example of Hitler, proves that the consequences for tolerating a single point of failure can be enormous.

Now, I am not comparing Dermot Desmond to either of those two despots, nor am I comparing the grip that he has on Celtic to the grip they held on their respective countries. I am not comparing apples with apples here.

I’m saying that the systems those men built were essentially similar in one respect: every major strategic decision flowed from a single point of origin, and if that single point of origin happened to be wrong, if the individual responsible for setting strategy and policy was off in his judgement, then the entire organisation suffered as a result.

And the worst possible thing for an organisation run that way is success.

That may sound counterintuitive, but consider this: by the time he launched Barbarossa, Hitler was no longer listening to the wisdom of his generals.

Many of them had counselled against aspects of the military concept, not necessarily the invasion itself but the priorities Hitler imposed on it, including his refusal to give the drive on Moscow the overriding strategic importance that many of his generals believed it deserved.

But he had become so utterly convinced of his own military genius and of his own superiority in strategic thought that he was willing to disregard the opinions of experts, of people who had proven by their previous successes that they were the people who should have been trusted.

Hitler had already assumed that he was the indispensable spoke in the wheel. It was success that made Hitler think that way.

He certainly played a role in choosing which strategic plan to follow from those offered to him in the war in the West, recognising the brilliance of the Manstein plan and the armoured concepts advocated by men such as Guderian, and even adding a few little touches of his own.

But that success, which was largely the result of his generals and the German General Staff, fed Hitler’s megalomania and God complex to such grandiose heights that, from almost that moment on, he ceased listening to anybody but himself.

Which is why he began interfering in areas he wasn’t qualified in. It’s why he rejected the advice of those who were qualified, and he had such immense personal authority that, although he was sometimes questioned, he was never countermanded. People may have disagreed with his thinking, but they always put his ideas into practice.

Stalin had similar terrible effects on the political system around him in Moscow.

Nothing had left the Soviet Union more vulnerable to attack than the purges, but Stalin needed the purges in order to feel secure in his own position. One man’s paranoia didn’t just kill many thousands of officers and capable soldiers in the Soviet military; it jeopardised the safety of the state itself.

Well, we’re in no less weird a position than those countries found themselves in at that time. You look across the water at the United States and see people following every single Trump demand, no matter how irrational, no matter how idiotic, and you see that we haven’t changed as a species.

There is still a tendency amongst many of us to follow orders, no matter how ludicrous, no matter how dangerous, no matter how ineffectual or even damaging they might be.

When an entire organisation, institution or country is subservient to the will of one man, this is the risk you take.

The Soviet Union could have collapsed. The United States has dealt itself a phenomenal and staggering amount of long-term damage as a result of Trump’s policies. Nazi Germany collapsed within years; its country was divided, its military broken and its economy shattered, not to mention the effect its policies had on the wider world.

No man should be the fulcrum around which an entire organisation, country or whatever you want to call it pivots, because what if he’s wrong? What if he’s crazy? What if he is incapable of good judgement any more? What if he cannot differentiate between his own interests and the interests of the institution, organisation, country or whatever it is he’s governing as a whole?

What if he makes the category error of thinking that there really isn’t any fundamental difference between his own interests and those of whatever he is in charge of? That is the path to disaster.

Because what happens in those systems is that you have all these people whose job it is to actually administer things on behalf of other people, whether that’s shareholders, customers, fans or just ordinary citizens.

They know what’s in the best interests of all those people they’re supposed to represent, but the moment that comes into conflict with the wishes of the leader, it becomes unimportant. Not because it ceases to be important, but because they cease to exercise their own judgement and substitute it for the judgement of the Great Leader, whoever that might be.

And think about how toxic it has to be when you can see clearly that the policies you’re following are taking you down a dangerous, even destructive path, and you know that if you go to the man in charge and tell him that, if you try to make him see reason, there is every chance that you will be purged, fired or removed from your position of authority and replaced by someone who will blindly and subserviently serve the will of the leader.

All good judgement is then treated as if it means nothing at all.

This whole club has a single point of failure. Dermot Desmond is our most dangerous fault line because, if the policies that he decides are good for this club are wrong, there is nobody in the executive structure who will tell him that. Who will get together with the rest of the board and override his will?

And so, if he turns out to be completely wrong, the policies of this club will be completely wrong. If he decides that we are a small-c conservative club which never overreaches the boundaries in which he has forced us to live, then that will last as long as he does, because it takes men of will to stand up to someone like that.

And the first thing a leader like that does is remove anyone who might tell him he’s wrong. So, although those guys walk around with the swagger and confidence of Masters of the Universe, they’re not in those jobs on merit.

They’re in those jobs because they are the people most likely to kowtow, to bow and scrape and to tell the leader what he wants to hear.

And that’s why I have no problem accusing every single one of them of cowardice, and of themselves representing the greatest danger to the stability and the future of this club.

Because some of them have to know that a sixth consecutive Champions League qualification failure is not the mark of an organisation that is getting everything right. They have to know that our academy structure, which hasn’t produced enough first-team-capable players over the past ten years, is not a structure that is being run properly.

They have to know that the complete absence of fresh thinking, of modern thinking, in the organisation because a certain person feels threatened by all of those things is not the mark of an organisation being run optimally, if it’s even being run well.

And every single one of those people who knows this has nevertheless made a decision to carry on in roles which carry enormous responsibilities that they’re not even coming close to living up to, and not to rock the boat.

They may tell themselves, as so many of Trump’s early enablers told themselves, that they are doing a little harm to do a greater good, that in fact their presence in the room is the only thing checking the worst impulses of the Glorious Leader.

But that stuff doesn’t stand. Doing a little harm to do a greater good is a concept that does a lot of heavy lifting. It’s usually the story people tell themselves to justify the bad things they do so that they may continue doing them.

I don’t know about you, but I am sick and tired of Celtic being run on this basis, and we know that Celtic is run on this basis because we know that every major decision which involves spending over a certain amount of money or involves changing a structure in a certain way has to be run past the guy in Ireland.

He largely sets policy, and the executive board, which is supposed to serve the club, serves him instead, and that does what no organisation should ever do. It creates the single point of failure I talked about in the last piece.

Because if building the system around one individual player is damaging in all of its implications, think about how much more damaging it is to build the entire club around the judgement of one man.

Think about how much more dangerous that is.

It is exactly what the executive board of directors is supposed to be there to prevent, and if they are enabling it instead, then they are as guilty as he is of all the consequences that follow.

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