A Portrait by Suetonius

  It is odd how little has changed when it comes to the way that we want to understand power. We still crave for ‘strong’ or decisive leaders now, as we did 2,000 years ago, and sill want to have confidence that a single mind, with a strong will and lucid intellect ought to be enough to solve the world’s, or the nation’s or at least our own, problems. Why not after all? For such an individual is essentially merely a reflection of ourselves. That is, our own personal world is the product or property of a single individual - ourselves. The external good ruler then merely externalizes that unity, and turns it into a principle beyond our own identity. There exists or there ought to exist, we claim, the ability to be a great ruler; To act as the universal individual beyond all others, who manipulates the events of the world so that they appear as good as possible (or at least simple) to others.

  Leaders become then rather too easily our parents, and so touched with something divine - the quality of the ‘good leader’. As such it is a nice, comforting idea, and seems to survive the vicissitudes of time. More critically it has bizarrely survived into an age where we normally claim that both society, and the psyche are much more complex that this model can surely allow. In the former case, this worry is surely justified. It was one thing ruling societies which were relatively small scale, and low tech; it is quite another thing ruling the rather complex and defiant societies of today. It is surely simply beyond the mind of an individual to encompass all that needs to be known. As such, all ability to actually govern such a society comes in the end down to a species of chance. The ’leader’ needs to happen to know the right thing at the right time. Even the choice will be by and large blind: It will only become right or wrong as subsequent events inhabit it, and pull out consequences. In a sense this is not new (Napoleon faced the same problem), what is different however, is the speed at which the changes come and the unpredictability of what subsequently evolves. One sees this complexity in the extreme difficulty which software companies have in developing new products. Google designed a great search engine, but have cocked up designing a network site; and have run into heavy water over whether or not they can put books online. I.e., one success no longer guarantees others or configures the ability to create others. On the contrary success tends to be defined not by individuals and their great idea, so much as luck. One defines a platform to do something (like interact or want to search or listen to music), just when there are a lot of people on the web looking for something to do. One provides then a platform for them to do something, and it is great. The problem is though, that once this has been done, others, one’s competitors, really cannot effectively join the market place (eg; Microsoft attempting to compete with iTunes). Why after all, would one need two ‘Facebook’s? All they can do is restlessly innovate with new products, and hope that they invent the right one at the right time. So that the old model where one person (or a group of people) could either define a better system than the one that currently existed or else a new product that cunningly second guessed the current market, has become tricky. The market place is still being defined – it changes all the time (as people’s relationship with it changes), and it is beyond the wit of an individual to comprehend these changes. One simply cannot.

  The effect is of course that being a leader has surely seldom been so frustrating. One plans, one schemes, one thinks it is going alright, and then everything changes, and one’s best laid plans are torn asunder. The paradox is, that just at the time when being a leader has become not only increasingly difficult but also increasingly aggravating, that that is the very time the rest of the population is most desiring leadership. Hence the same forces that make leadership hard, the problems of uncertainty, and change, make others want an individual to create direction, and offer what we call ‘leadership’. We have a population who talk like medieval tenants, craving a new royal master, at a time when surely all such cravings are more out of place than ever before.  The upshot of this paradox will not be strong leaders so much as a morality play, where we watch individual’s personalities warp under too much local power (their immediate circle of subordinates will by definition be there to serve them) and not enough actual influence (they still cannot do anything). In effect therefore, we place a twentieth century mind, in an eighteenth century social situation (lord of the manor), give them twenty first century problems to face, and have Bronze Age expectations about their ability to solve them. The fact that it does not work should come as utterly no surprise. The fact that the individual in the end goes mad is clearly par for the course in such a situation.

  However before we think of ourselves as very different, this problem has happened at least once before. In the Early Roman Empire they faced a similar problem. Then, the vagaries of chance, Roman technology, and the weight of personalities had overthrown a republic and replaced it with an empire, just at the time that it became genuinely impossible for any rulers, even absolutists ones, to encompass in a single mind the complexities of the world which they ruled. The result was that the emperor was flying blind most of the time. They simply could not know really what was happening however hard they worked at it. A situation that was highly problematic, as the both the fate of the Empire and the emperor would be defined by the choices they were making in the dark. The choices then mattered, even if it were impossible to actually make them rationally.

  To be a ruler, then (and now) was then to find something big in one’s personality. One had to find an ability from what one already was, to make good the impossibility of the choices one was having to make, and whether one was a good emperor or not, became in the end about how this ability to warp one’s personality into an impossible situation, then played out across the chances of governing. The great Early Roman Empire historian Suetonius is the master of this genre. In his ‘Twelve Emperors’ he creates perfect portraits of how personalities warped under power. His argument is that the trappings of power change everything. Elements that have been harmless, become highly problematic, and vices become (in the leader) virtues (a bullying streak becoming merely a sign of strength for instance). One ends up then with leaders who have very uneven and textured temperaments; Private moments flow into public ones and vice versa in an uneven manner, creating raw patchwork souls. The souls of great Leaders have at least three critical dimensions.

  Firstly, and perhaps most importantly there is a vision thing. That is there is an idea, a desire, which a leader ought to have; and yet this is an odd desire. It ought not to be a personal one. One needs as leader then to desire what others want. Which is easy: one simply says one does and that is it. More problematically one needs to define ways in which one’s desire might be shared or at least participated in by others (with often different desires). One has then to desire other’s ability to desire. In the abstract this is easy. And yet defining what it means to help others is this way, and to do so in way that these others can comprehend (and not resent) is next to impossible. Even if one succeeds and one makes the world better, there is nothing to stop those who have been helped resenting that very help (they are likely to think their success is theirs own alone and so the leader does not get the credit). Even more likely however, it is impossible to actually quantify or not whether one has been helpful. The result is then, that leaders will need to claim success (in an often rather intrusive way), irrespective of the situation on the ground, and whether they can be of any use or not.

  Secondly a leader must have a place where they are private, mostly for reasons of sanity. If one lacks such a place (and in recent history Thatcher surely came closest to this lack), then one is liable to totally bury oneself in the part, and mistake oneself for the great leader. One then loses the actual rhyme or reason of normal life, and what others are feeling. One loses then empathy in the whiff of megalomania, and defeat, as one also loses the common touch. This last point has however created a new problem. Elections can be won or lost from this personal and supposedly private place. One needs then to also market it, and so risk actually confusing one’s private life with things public. Here however the media lobby system comes into play. The set of journalists whom sees one every day, and whom any leader needs to relate to, will have an idea of this personal side and can always be relied on to report it (well confessional journalism of this sort is easier than finding real stories). One’s private personality will then always be on display via the hints and whisperings of the lobby hacks.

  Here of course there is surely a suspicion, that one of the problems with our current democracy is that we have taken the media at face value here. It is a ‘known’ fact that elections are won from this private - but publicized - space. This fact is simply taken as self-evident (electors need to ‘get to know you’). Now it is not self-evident that one needs to like one’s ruler, but it is self-evident that the journalist’s life is made much easier (and their power is increased) if we think we do. That is if we (the voting public) are convinced that we need to ‘know’ whom we elect, then the journalists who would rather write confessionals than do research, are confirmed both in their poison and their importance. Their own affections, their ability to like or loathe politicians, becomes the make or break of British politics. At which point the ‘great leader’ spiel gets a new spin. It becomes less about leading and more about how leaders relate to journalists, or even about how who is most generous on the freebie prawn cocktail circuit.

  Thirdly it is also clear that leaders are placed in a near impossible situation. Most of their private life is in fact invaded by individuals all the time. The affairs of the state take precedent, and we simply assume that they must do (‘we matter more than them’ we cry). More than that the individuals who are responsible for this constant interruption of leader’s lives are the ones whom one shares one’s life with; (civil servants, press officers, etc.) they are in a very real sense one’s family. This group of people, this public will be all the more important as one’s grasp on the external world slips past one’s control. That is, as things become very difficult for any leader, as they have to dig around in their own personalities to make good the lack of real choice or information, then these relations are the ones that are critical. In relating to these others, in watching the way that they relate or react, minds are made up and decisions made. More than that, these others become then the clearing houses for one’s own thought and one’s own passions. Anger is easily vented. Here of course the very old fashioned nature of the system comes to the fore. We (by which I mean the general public) are simply not often placed in a situation where there are individuals all around one who are defined by their jobs, as doing one’s own will. I.e. one is not used to servants. And this matters, as it means one is not used to having to define, in relation to others (who are there to serve) what one is, and what one can or cannot say (or do). There are no clear rules here: being a servant is not like that. Leaders are meant to carry their own rules with them (and will, as Gordon Brown is, discover that they will be certainly judged by this fact). In effect this quorum of folk represents the public in a double sense. They are the individuals whom leaders, cut off from the world by the logic of impossible choices, need to sound off to or on; and yet this relationship is the one we then all want to share within. We (the public) identify with this group of individuals (or at least in the abstract feel we do), after all are we not all servants of this master? We therefore feel that if they are mistreated then this matters, for all are mistreated in this action.

  The result is of course for any such leader that the nightmare of Suetonius looms large. The Roman historian had the decency to write after the leaders were dead. We give our own leaders no such dignity. We rather lock them a box, make them make important choices - which we and they assume really matter and yet for which no one has really adequate information – and then blame (or sometimes praise) them on the outcome of these choices: While all the while we watch them in their glass box, and watch the way their personalities are warped in making the choices (a warping which we, with beautiful injustice, blame on them, merely noting that leaders do go mad eventually, as if this was a character fault). We then atomize their actions, and giggle as they go mad or titillate ourselves a in story of temper and desire. The only mystery here, is not - why do some rulers turn out to be bullies? but rather, why do they not all turn out so? And why, when all is said and done, does anyone want the job in the first place? Beyond the mysticism of power, (which we still as if we were Bronze Age farmers, indulge in) it is a singularly unattractive (not to say impossible) job. But then the beauty of our system is that we have people competing to be our and the world’s whipping boy!