The Daily Stoic - Why Narcissistic Leaders Always Fail (In The End)

Episode Date: November 3, 2024

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Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to the daily Stoic early and ad free right now. Just join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcast. I've been traveling a bunch for the tour that I'm on and I brought my kids and my wife with me when I went to Australia. When I'm going to Europe in November, I'm bringing my in-laws also. So, we're not staying in a hotel. We're staying in an Airbnb. The first Airbnb I stayed in would have been in 2010, I think. I've always loved Airbnb, that flexibility, size, location. You can find something awesome. You want to stay somewhere that other guests have had a positive experience. I love the guest favorites feature that helps you narrow down your search to the most popular, coolest houses. I've been using Airbnb forever. I like it better than hotels. So I'm excited

that they're a sponsor of the show. And if you haven't used Airbnb yet, I don't know what you're doing, but you should definitely check it out for your next family trip. Welcome to the weekend edition of the daily Stoic podcast. On Sundays, we take a deeper dive into these ancient topics with excerpts from the Stoic texts. On Sundays, we take a deeper dive into these ancient topics with excerpts from the Stoic texts, audiobooks that we like here or recommend here at Daily Stoic, and other long form wisdom that you can chew on on this relaxing weekend. We hope this helps shape your understanding of this philosophy and most importantly, that you're able to apply it to your actual life. Thank you for listening.

The great Robert Green once 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 a great rage. They thirst for vengeance. They have this sense of righteousness. In today's video, 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 Aurelius becomes the emperor of Rome, were deeply concerned with not becoming or empowering. becoming or empowering. When he was 11 years old, there was 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 has taught stoic philosophy from an early age. He's surrounded by powerful people. He's 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 their 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 can actually argue that Nero has a better chance of succeeding than Marcus Aurelius because Seneca 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.

Epictetus 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 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 so terrified of being alone. After he murders his wife, he finds 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? 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 racer. Everyone tells them they're doing a good job. 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 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, Seneca is not guiltless in this. He would write speeches for Nero that were designed to convince, to gaslight the Roman

people that this irresponsible man child 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. Epictetus, 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 certainly could have been. It certainly sounds like he was. We know that Seneca 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 Eduardo Barone Gonzales statue that shows

Seneca and Nero interacting. It's one of the, I think, great stoic statues. You have Seneca 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, sullen, not interested, he's hooded. And 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 adults 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 gets power, but it's actually more a process of the varnish coming off, the real Nero emerging.

As Nero stops listening to his advisors, 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 collapse and his descent into evil was in this way inevitable.

One of the things that power reveals about Nero is something that's very true about most Eucatissical 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 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, who he assassinates. He finds her unbearable, so he gets rid of her. He gets rid of a distant cousin because he hears of a meteor or a comet,

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, Seneca has to remind him, he says, you know, Nero, it's impossible for you to eliminate every one of your successors. He was making, ultimately, very basic still at 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. He just can't stomach the idea of anyone 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 scapegoats the Christians and begins a wave of persecutions

that would last for hundreds of years. You really see, as Robert Greene was saying, a leader's true character in a crisis. And you see ultimately what a fragile, 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 Seneca fancies himself the adult in the room, the moderating influence on Nero,

the other Stoics, Stoics like Gaius Plautus, Thrasia, Helvidius. There's a number of stoics who just refuse to go along with Nero. They defy him. They are 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 stoic named Agrippinus who has a sort of hereditary hatred of emperors, Tacitus tells us. He just doesn't like that Agrippinus 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, 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. Paranoia is just spinning 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 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, 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 Thrasia. And basically the source of their disagreement is that Thrasia 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 the 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, Thrasia doesn't want to go along with it.

When Thrasia 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 sycophants whispered that he has to kill Thrasia. 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 Thrasia

has at once talked of Caesar and Cato. Cato was a hero and Nero couldn't handle a hero existing so he has to get rid of him. Nero expresses his displeasure to Thrasia. He expects him to throw himself at him, beg to be forgiven. Instead, Thrasia says, "'If you think I'm guilty of something,

"'name your charges.' "'Excuse me out in the open.'" And ultimately they bring Thrasia 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 arose. And it erodes slowly and then all at once. Ultimately, Nero has to kill Seneca as well, and he sends goons to dispatch the man who had raised him, basically like a son. And as everyone wept and cried in Seneca's house, Seneca 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 take me out to? 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 Praetorian Guard, when they're watching this cowardly, selfish man-child frantically try to save himself, he goes, "'Is it as awful as that to die?' Finally, even his trusted bodyguards abandon him. And facing what would have been a horrendous death sentence, he 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 weak, too timid. Finally, he has Epictetus' 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 wrong things from the get-go, who didn't know it was important, who wouldn't have known virtue if it's 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 Stoics.

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And as an Audible member, you choose one title a month to keep from their entire catalog. By the way, you can grab Right Thing Right Now on Audible. You can sign up right now for a free 30-day Audible trial and try your first audiobook for free. You'll get Right Thing Right Now totally for free. Visit audible.ca to sign up. Now, maybe this all sounds very distant to you, 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 advisors, right?

That's a feature of antiquity. But you could flash forward to 2016. Donald Trump is elected president and two of his advisors are General James Mattis and General H.R. 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

parrot 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 president of the United States gets a classified briefing every day of a handful of pages of the greatest, most expensive, hard-won intelligence in the world. And just in the way that Nero sat ho put it uninterested in the teachings and the insights

and the news that Seneca brought him. So we have Donald Trump asking to get on with it, 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 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 blamed his advisors 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 Russian investigation. They 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 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 he wasn't really interested in analysis or deeply investigated or reported out information. He just wanted things that confirmed his hunches or that enabled him to do what he wanted to do. And certainly he didn't want to be bored or he didn't want to be lectured. In fact, one of the slurs that Trump would throw at people, he would call someone who was smart or very fact-based,

he'd 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 wanna 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. Cato gives his life to preserve what was called the mos maorum, or the old ways. He was a person who deeply believed in 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. The, 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 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 immediate self interest. And narcissists can't because their whole life is themselves. In Donald Trump, you have someone who loves to use the bully pulpit 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 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 just have almost incomprehensible vanity and delusion. You have bitterness and resentment and grievance. You have a guy who loves to retweet what other people are saying about him when it's nice. You have all the characteristics 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 ever said, which Trump said at a press conference during the middle of the pandemic. No, I don't take responsibility at all because you just you can't say that the job of the

leader is to take responsibility. 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 averse to admitting error, to apologize, 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 McMaster end up kind of like Seneca pushed to the side at some point because they wouldn't play ball. McMaster said they had a real frank

conversation to go I'm I'm not your guy. Like I can't do this thing that you wanted. He was like a Thrasia, if you will, 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, who'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 Vindman. Trump sees allies not as people you support, people you work with, people with shared values, but as something transactional. And as he tries to extort Ukraine to dig up dirt on his political opponent, right, something that President should never do. That call is recorded 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 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 modern day Catiline. I've talked a lot about the Catiline conspiracy here. This is a seminal moment in the lives of Cicero and Cato, some of the

earlier Roman Stokes who watched as a populist demagogue loses an election, he loses to Cicero and heato, some of the earlier Roman stoics who watched as a populist demagogue, loses an election, he loses to Cicero, and he just can't accept this. He can't imagine this upstart, this representative of everything he hates and loathes, that is Cicero would beat him, that Catiline attempts to get this mob to overthrow the results of the election, which is precisely what happened on January 6th after endless lies and misinformation and an attempt to bully his vice president into not certifying the election, this mob storms the Capitol 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 dark moment in American history, especially dark when you know that another American president, George Washington, who was so inspired by the example of Cato, so fearful of a Catalanine, 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 on that day, on January 6th, Donald Trump not only encourages that mob, but once it spins wildly out of control, he dallies like Nero during the Great Fire. Where is Donald Trump for those hours on January 6 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 6 and having to consider grabbing his Marine Corps sword off the wall to defend his staffers. He goes on live television 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 6th 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 Capitol

police officers he begins to tear up 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. Chrysippus 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 riling 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 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. Seneca was a contributor. I mean, there's a fine line between being a moderating influence and being an enabler and different people have opinions on Madison McMaster.

There's a great line in the novel, The Blood of the Marguers by Naomi Mitchison, which is actually about Nero's Rome and its persecution of the Christians. She has Seneca'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 Trump has as well. But I said that Marcus Aurelius had a similar arc. That Marcus Aurelius is selected by the Emperor Hadrian. 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 incredibly famous and important. And yet he is not revealed to be a narcissist. He does not reveal himself to have 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 Caesarified, 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 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 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 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 is that type of leader should be exiled, but should not be canceled. 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.

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