the great Robert Green one said that you can tell a lot about a leader and how they respond to failure and he said you can definitely tell about narcissistic leaders he said because they react to failure to criticism with with a great rage they thirst for vengeance they have this sense of of righteousness in in today's video I I want to talk about the Perils of narcissistic leaders something that the stoics knew a lot about something that was common in ancient Rome and ancient Greece a perennial force in politics and human history and something the
stoics themselves who were in positions of leaders Marcus Aus becomes the emperor of Rome were deeply concerned with not becoming or empowering when he was 11 years old there was a a young boy adopted by the Roman Emperor and groomed for power he was made heir to the throne he would someday become the leader of an enormous Empire as often happens to people who are heirs the boy was coddled he grew up surrounded by immense privilege sure but he was also given access to the best philosophers and teachers he is taught stoic Philosophy from an
early age he's surrounded by powerful people he shown how the world works now you might be thinking I'm talking about Marcus Aurelius here but I'm not I'm actually talking about Nero one of the worst of the Roman emperors although there stories begin very similarly they diverge one is widely reviled and one is widely admired so what is the difference why does Nero go one way and Marcus Aurelius go the other you could actually argue that Nero has a better chance of succeeding than Marcus because senca is his teacher he's surrounded by one of the great
stoic philosophers actually from an earlier age than Marcus Aurelius is so what happens to Nero this is the critical question one of Nero's worst habits is his vanity he's incredibly vain he loves adoration and attention he admires Olympic athletes sees himself as being like them but he doesn't actually want to do the work to be an Olympic Athlete so he hosts the Olympics but then he rigs the Olympics so that he could win he likes to write poetry but when he hears of a more talented poet he banishes him instead of understanding that his job
demanded a lot of him he saw that his job put him in a position to make lots of Demands on other people namely attention he loved attention he was addicted to attention he could never get enough and this addiction to attention makes him incredibly vulnerable to flatterers it makes him very easily distracted epicus actually tells us a story of watching a man suck up to Nero's cobbler so he could worm his way into the good Graces of the emperor so Nero had created this court around him of people who wanted something from him people who
were dependent on him people who told him what he wanted to hear and it created a bubble of unreality as dictators and Kings so often do there's a story we have about Nero as he would race his chariots he would arrange to have slaves clap and cheer for him he wasn't always the most popular but he fixed things his vanity demanded that he always be celebrated always feel like he was loved and this mattered to him even when it was preposterously fake and untrue Nero is So Vain and and so terrified of being alone after
he murders his wife he finds a a male slave who looks like her dresses him up as her has him castrated and then basically goes on pretending like he is his wife even though he murdered her to begin with he's a crazy person and that's the problem with vanity and ego right uh they call this the dictator's trap when people are scared of a leader and that leader is incredibly fragile their ego is fragile people don't tell them what they need to hear and they live more and more in a bubble of their own reality
everyone tells them they're an amazing poet right the slaves are clapping so they think they're a great Chariot Razer everyone tells them they're doing a good job they they tell them the invasion is going well they tell them that the troops are in great shape they tell them that the finances are are are sound they lie to them because that's what the person wants to hear when in fact to be a good leader you have to know the objective facts of your situation and you have to be able to deal with unpleasant facts and resolve
them not just make them go away because they're inconvenient and look senica is not Guiltless in this he would write speeches for Nero that were designed to convince to Gaslight the Roman people that this irresponsible Manchild was qualified was not deranged in a sane political environment you know any number of these things would have been the end of Nero but it wasn't a sane environment so it just kept getting worse this is not normal people screamed I'm sure but it kept getting more and more abnormal and related to Nero's vanity was its evil twin his
ego Nero was convinced he was smarter and better and more brilliant and more loved than he actually was epicus who is a slave to one of Nero's secretaries has this great line he says remember it's impossible to learn that which you think you already know was he talking about Nero he he certainly could have been it certainly sounds like he was we know that senica writes Nero all these essays these wise philosophical treaties but clearly he didn't listen to any of them clearly he thought they didn't actually apply to him there's a famous Edwardo Baron
Gonzalez statue that shows senica and Nero interacting it's one of the I think great stoic statues you have senica who's got a scroll before him he's you know maybe it's one of these wise philosophical texts and then you have Nero just sort of sitting there suen not interested he's hooded and he's he's clearly decided that he doesn't need to listen to the philosophy teacher that his mother had assigned him anymore that he didn't need this guy who was always talking to him about self-control and virtue and selflessness and clemency that he didn't need to listen
to this guy anymore and it's very clear you can see a turn in Nero's Reign the early years which were pretty good where he listened where there were adult in the room and then as he got older when he stopped listening and that's really when the wheels began to come off as they inevitably do for narcissistic leaders the great biographer of power Robert Caro talks about how power doesn't corrupt he says that's too simple he says what it does is it reveals he says power doesn't corrupt power reveals and what we see in Nero is
not the easy Narrative of Nero is that he is corrupted as he gives power but it's it's actually more a process of the varnish coming off the real Nero emerging as Nero stops listening to his advisers as he gets rid of his mother as he dispatches anyone and everyone who could tell him what to do the real Nero comes out and it's not a competent Nero it's not a open-minded Nero it's a delusional it's a vain it's an egotistical Nero and thus his his collapse and his descent into evil was in this way inevitable one
of the things that power reveals about Nero is is is something that's very true about most egotistical people which is they're actually beneath what seems like confidence profoundly insecure and paranoid and Nero is perhaps believing somehow not legitimately the emperor perhaps knowing that he is hopelessly outmatched and unqualified for this job and then the very real dangers of of of having things that other people want Nero is paranoid that people are out to get him and slowly but surely he creates circumstances in which he's able to get rid of his enemies including his own mother
whom who he assassinates he finds her unbearable so he gets rid of her he gets rid of uh a distant cousin because you know he hears of a a meteor or a comment and he takes this as a sign that this guy's out to get him I mean he's just wildly exaggerating all these dangers and as he gets rid of potential Challengers after Challenger senica has to remind him he says you know Nero it's impossible for you to eliminate every one of your successors he was making a ultimately a very basic stoic point that we
all die eventually and someone takes our place but it's when his paranoia is empowered by his position when suddenly he has the power of life and death over people that he begins to leave this immense trail of bodies behind him because he just can't stomach the idea of any anyone uh one day replacing him even though inevitably invariably that was going to happen anyway although some Christians would later blame Nero for starting the great fire of Rome he probably didn't and he probably didn't fiddle while it burned but like all you know incompetent overmatched leaders
Nero is not able in the moment of a crisis to do the job right he's not able to properly direct fighting of the fire and then once it's done he uses this as a pretext for these enormous and vain building projects that he'd long have in mind and instead of also taking responsibility for having screwed up instead of using a tragedy to bring people together you know he he scapegoats the Christians and begins a a wave of persecutions that would last for for hundreds of years you really see as Robert Green was saying a Leader's
true character in a crisis and you see ultimately what a fragile weak weak and scared little man Nero was there is this whole group of stoics that would become known as the stoic opposition and they find nero to be repugnant although senica fancies himself the adult in the room the the moderating influence on Nero the other stoics stoics like gas ploutus thasia helvidius there's a number of stoics who just refuse to go along with Nero they defy him they are uh what you might call the resistance Nero just can't handle anyone not rubber stamping what
he is doing he can't stand that there's anyone or anything that disagrees with him that wants to challenge him and so they get locked in this cycle of conflict he doesn't like that there's a a stoic named agrippinus who has a sort of hereditary hatred of Emperors tacitus tells us he just doesn't like that that AG ginus won't come to his parties he just he can't wrap his head around people not wanting to celebrate and love him he thinks this is something he's entitled to rather than something he has to earn helvidius uh one of
the stoics is banished for having said something positively about Brutus the killer of Caesar Nero takes this somehow indirectly as a threat parano is just spitting him out of control ultimately Nero is just incompetent he just doesn't have the stuff this is the problem with hereditary rulers but he doesn't do the work to be qualified to do this job he doesn't take it seriously and as he's piling up bodies after body of critics of his regime there's a a story about one conspirator against Nero who's put to death and as he stares out into the
grave they're about to throw him in he says G this too is not up to code it was an embodiment of everything that was wrong with Nero it's not just that he was cruel it's that he was bad at being in charge Nero's greatest enemy is this stoic named thasia and basically the source of their disagreement is that thasia insists on truth and Justice and reality that he tries to be good at his job and this inevitably puts him on a collision course with Nero he's a guy that says this is not normal that there's
something wrong with this guy that this doesn't make sense and so when Nero wants to shower his new wife with honors thi doesn't want to go along with it when graia saw corruption he called it out but this was in parcel of what Nero wanted on what his regime sat on and so they were inevitably going to be enemies Nero's scopin whispered that he has to kill thasia he says the country and its eagerness for Discord is now talking of You Nero one man whispered into his ear they're talking of you and thas as at
once talked of Caesar and ko ko was a hero and and Nero couldn't handle a hero existing so he has to get rid of him Nero expresses his displeasure to thasia he expects him to throw himself at him beg to be forgiven in instead thi says if you think I'm guilty of something name your charges accuse me out in the open and ultimately they bring thasia up on these false charges and he is executed we're told that some of his last words are Nero can kill me but he cannot harm me meaning that he refused
to be corrupted by and degraded by Nero even though Nero did have the power and life of life and death over him but as it does for all gangsters and tyrants and Bullies eventually the support for Nero erodes and it erods slowly and then all at once ultimately Nero has to kill senica as well and he sends goons to to to dispatch the man who had raised him basically like a son and as everyone wept and cried in in senica's house senica stopped him and he goes why is this surprising to you he said who
knew not Nero's cruelty he said look at all the other terrible things he's done to people close to him he said what's left then for him to to take me out too it had always been there who Nero was was always there power just enabled it Nero had driven himself into a wicked downward spiral he descended into madness and eventually the stoic opposition applies enough pressure but of course even at the end Nero was a coward he couldn't take responsibility he couldn't take ownership he couldn't go out like a man one of the members of
the petorian Guard when they're watching this cowardly selfish Manchild frantically try to save himself he goes is it as awful as that to die finally even his trusted bodyguards abandoned him and facing what would have been a horrendous death sentence it would have been tied to a tree and then beaten to death with rocks and then his corpse would be thrown off a cliff this is a form of death reserved for the very worst of the Romans Nero decides finally to commit suicide he can't do it himself he's too too weak too timid finally he
has epicus his boss finish the job for him and as he shoves the knife in to end Nero's life Nero's last words are this this is loyalty it's the deranged final words of a man who prioritized the the wrong things from the get-go who didn't know it was important who wouldn't have known virtue if it staring at him in the face whose Reign was going to end no other way than in violence and shame and incompetence the stoics would say character is fate Nero had bad character of course it was going to end this way
this is what narcissistic leaders do they destabilize they jeopardize everything they touch tends to die and it's why it was such a cautionary tale for the [Music] stoics now maybe this all sounds very distant to you you know a feature of the past you've got this hereditary Emperor this totally unqualified vain egotistical delusional paranoid man in a position of power ruling over an immense Empire with you know stoic philosophers as his advisers right that's a feature of antiquity but but you could Flash Forward to 2016 Donald Trump is elected president and two of his advisers
are General James Mattis and general HR McMaster I've interviewed General McMaster on this podcast General Mattis has talked extensively about his fascination with stoic philosophy and both of them found themselves in the court in the administration of a very different type of leader who not only claimed from day one that his inauguration crowds were of unprecedented enormous size which they objectively were not but he insisted that members of his administration parot that back to him his reality was more important than actual reality he preferred his alternative facts to the actual facts we have immense amounts
of research that tell us that Donald Trump handled the presidential Daily Briefing the the president of the United States gets a classified briefing every day of a handful of pages of the greatest most expensive hard one intelligence in the world and just in the way that Nero sat hooded uninterested in the teachings and the insights and the you know news that senica brought him so we have Donald Trump asking to get on with it to to shorten it we're told that the intelligence Community had to not just shorten and shorten each of the briefings but
they wanted it as a story Trump want wanted to see his own name in it often he was uninterested in things that were complicated and things were negative when in 2020 the covid-19 virus began spreading all over the world Donald Trump blames his advisers for not having told him about it and in fact they had tried to tell him about it he just wasn't interested in it right you can't learn that which you think you already know conceit is the impediment to knowledge he was inherently suspicious of resentful of the intelligence Community for a number
of reasons mostly having to do with the Russia investigation that he just wasn't interested in hearing what they had to say and thus he misses an enormous crisis a crisis whose destruction and Devastation would dwarf even that of Nero's great fire and Trump preferred you know what he was hearing on Twitter he preferred not even cable news but cable news opinion shows where the pundits knowing he was watching would often reflect back to him things he wanted to hear and that's one of the things that McMaster told me that it took him some time to
to understand that Trump didn't want to hear things that were complicated or unpleasant he didn't actually want the truth he wanted a briefing that confirmed what he thought about things that that he wasn't really interested in analysis or deeply investigated or reported out information you know he just wanted things that confirmed his hunches or that enabled him to do what he wanted to do and and certainly he didn't want to be bored or he didn't want to be lectured in fact one of the slurs that that Trump would throw at people he would call someone
who was uh smart or you know very fact-based he' call them Professor okay Professor right there was a childlike aversion to anything resembling schoolwork or study or learning because that challenged him it made him feel small which is what all narcissistic leaders are trying to avoid that's why they want to have big parades and build big flags and see their name on things it's also what makes them susceptible to being lied to to being misled to being sucked up to you know we talk a lot about Norms KO gives his life to preserve what was
called the Moss mayorum or the old ways he was a person who deeply believed in inst institutions in the Primacy of Institutions over the individual but a narcissistic leader can't do that it can't can't comprehend this at all that the famous terrible remarks of of Donald Trump as he looked out over the the dead at Arlington National Cemetery he said I don't get it what was in it for them and I I take him at his word there that he really didn't get it he didn't understand he didn't get the idea of sacrificing for something
bigger than yourself he didn't get doing something that wasn't in your your immediate self-interest and narcissists can't cuz their whole life is themselves in Donald Trump you have someone who loves to use the bully pulpit to to be a bully to go after his enemies to respond to every criticism you can imagine it's a guy who uses Thanksgiving and Christmas and holidays to to to attack people instead of bring other people together you have Donald Trump telling people that he's you know as the greatest president there ever was that he's as good as Abraham Lincoln
you you just have almost incomprehensible vanity and delusion you have bitterness and resentment and grievance you have uh a guy who loves to retweet what other people are saying about him when it's nice you you have all the characteristics of of Nero exaggerated to an almost absurd degree and all this tees up one of the most inexcusable things that a leader certainly an American president has has ever said which Trump said at a press conference during the middle of the pandemic no I don't take responsibility at all because just you can't say that the the
job of the leader is to take responsibility you know Truman said the buck stops here a narcissistic leader though as Robert Green was talking about can't do that because to accept responsibility would mean to accept something negative about themselves they are constitutionally avver to admitting error to apologizing to understanding that the effect of something they did was negative on someone else and this is why they can't learn why they can't grow why they can't not make that mistake again both Mattis and mcmas end up kind of like senica pushed to the side at some point
because they wouldn't play ball McMaster said they had a real Frank conversation you had to go I'm I'm not your guy like I can't do this thing that you wanted he was like a a thasia if you will there there were lines he wouldn't cross there were things he wouldn't do and eventually narcissistic leaders have this magical filtration system that gets rid of people who would actually be of use to them who would actually serve them well and bring about only people who make them feel a certain way who confirm things they want and then
eventually lead them into trouble when Trump got rid of another General on his staff General John Kelly who was his chief of staff Kelly told him look you're going to replace me with someone who's going to have not as good a boundaries he's not going to be as firm with you and he said I think what's going to happen is you're going to get impeached and ultimately Trump was impeached first partly related to someone who else I've had on the podcast Colonel vinman Trump sees allies not as people you support people you work with people
who shared values but as something transactional and as he tries to extort Ukraine to dig up dirt on his political opponent right something a president should never do that call is recorded and and leaked and then ultimately leads to his impeachment and then after Trump loses the 2020 election he'd done a terrible job handling covid he had run a disorganized dysfunctional campaign that was sort of the the full height of his delusion and Insanity because all the good people had been purged he fundamentally could not accept that he had lost that election he becomes a
a modern-day Cataline we've talked a lot about the Cataline conspiracy here this is seminal moment in the lives of cisero and KO some of the earlier Roman stoics who watched as a populist demagogue loses an election he loses to Cicero and he he just can't accept this he can't imagine this upstart this representative of everything he hates and loes that is Cicero would would beat him that Cataline attempts to get this mob to overthrow the results of the election which is precisely what happened on January 6 after Endless Lies and misinformation and an attempt to
bully his vice president into not certifying the election this mob storms the capital and they stormed it wearing shirts celebrating the Holocaust waving Confederate flags macing and beating police officers killing some of them chanting hang Mike Pence it was a heinous disgusting and and dark moment in American history especially dark when you know that another American President George Washington who was so inspired by the example of K so fearful of a Cataline that Washington when he hears that a group of disgruntled soldiers who had not been paid by the Continental Congress when he hears that
they are plotting to overthrow the government Washington intervenes and he gives this speech he saves America from such a conspiracy such a mob and and on that day on January 6th Donald Trump not only encourages that mob but one it spins wildly out of control he dallies like Nero during the great fire where is Donald Trump for those hours on January 6th when he could have said something when he could have stopped something I've had two guests on this podcast I've had one of them Congressman Mike Gallagher a Marine Corps veteran talked about being trapped
in his office on January 6th and having to consider grabbing his Marine Core sword off the wall to defend his staffers he goes on live television and and tells Donald Trump to call off this mob to call off your goons Mr President you have got to stop this you are the only person who can call this off call it off but Donald Trump doesn't do that and when another guest on this podcast when congressman Adam kinzinger who sits on the January 6 commission where they hear hours and hours of testimony about how this Riot and
this mob unfolded as he's staring out over this group of heroic capito police officers he begins to tear up and and what does Donald Trump do Donald Trump calls him crying Adam he laughs at him because he can't accept the reality the responsibility for the thing that he did CPUs one of the great stoics would say if I wanted to be part of the mob I would not have become a philosopher a stoic has an aversion to demagoguery to populism to riing the people up because they're aware that once that happens it's very hard to
bring it back and can lead to dangerous destructive Terrible Things political violence was ultimately the end of the Roman Republic it didn't happen in one swoop it was a series of escalating bits of political chaos and violence and and the stoics knew that a leader who would try to incite and direct that violence could not be trusted with power and Trump like Nero was enabled senica was a contributor I mean there's a fine line between being a a moderating influence and being an enabler and you know different people have opinions on Mattis and McMaster there's
a a great line in the novel The Blood of the martyrs by Naomi mitcheson which is actually about Nero Rome and its persecution of the Christians she has senica's brother say we've spent our lives serving the kind of state no decent man ought to serve and he says and now we're old enough to see what we've done we talked about Nero and how Nero was revealed to be someone woefully unqualified for power as As Trump has as well but I said that Marcus Reus had a similar Arc that Marcus aelius is selected by the emperor
hadrien he is groomed for power he is trained to take the same job as Nero he is introduced to stoic philosophy he is taught by the greatest teachers he is given job after job position after position he becomes in incredibly famous and important and yet he is not revealed to be a narcissist he does not reveal himself to have a a a rotten core or a bad soul but it's also because he worked at it he says you have to fight to be the person that philosophy tried to make you he writes in meditations about
being careful not to be caesari not stained purple by the cloak of the emperor that's the kind of leader that we have to elect but it's also more importantly the leader we have to try to Aspire narcissism ego vanity these things will be the death of us and they will also be the the death of the institutions that we cherish and the freedoms that we so often take for granted one of Lincoln's great early speeches was against what he called the mobocratic spirit that sort of angry mob that wants to tear things down that wants
to attack people in things that that can't stand not getting its way and look today we are threatened by such a mob as Citizens as decent human beings as lovers of justice of Truth we can't accept that we can't tolerate leaders who who want to Foster that we can't accept or endorse political violence we can't cater or join the mob we have to stand apart from it as the stoic opposition did we have to demand virtue from our leaders and anyone who who is that type of leader should be exiled not should not be cancelled
they should be exiled as the Romans and Greeks did so long ago we can't accept we cannot tolerate we cannot rationalize narcissistic leaders they take us to a dark and awful place they threaten the institutions we cherish they threaten the freedoms we take for granted and more than just can't tolerate those traits in our leaders we have to Aspire to be as the stoics did real leaders that is to say servant leaders that is to say leaders of virtue leaders of courage and self-discipline and Justice and wisdom every day I send out one stoic inspired
email to hundreds of thousands of people all over the world if you want more stoic wisdom in your inbox you can sign up at Daily stoic.com it's totally free can unsubscribe at any time we'd love to have you daily stoic.com [Music]
