For no particular reason lately, I've been thinking about mad kings. Kings whose behaviour is not insane, but which is erratic, cruel, paranoid, and capricious.
They're not strictly confined to the ranks of the monarchy.
Give someone total authority, and their worse impulses have free rein. It's a recipe for chaos and, often, for death.
The classic fictional examples of mad kings come from Shakespeare. Lear divides his kingdom and demands flattery from his daughters. When he can't stomach honesty from one of them, he begins his own downfall.
Macbeth slowly loses his mind (or is being haunted, it depends on how the play is staged) as his sins eat away at him. Towards the end of the play he seems sane again, but it's an ugly, brittle sanity, built on nihilism.
"Out, out, brief candle, life鈥檚 but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing," he says in one of the play's most significant speeches.
In real life, mad kings seldom have the dignity of a Shakespearean monologue. Even tyrants over millions of people usually display astonishing pettiness.
Consider Stalin, the worst dictator in either Russian or Soviet history (and that's saying something). He oversaw paranoid purges that saw hundreds of thousands of people executed, deported to distant regions, or thrown in gulags. But he also enjoyed toying with his own senior leadership among the Soviet Politburo 鈥� he'd insist they stay up late with him, getting stinking drunk and watching American cowboy movies.
Henry VIII, both in history and in Hilary Mantel's excellent Wolf Hall and its sequels, feels like a petulant frat boy with an executioner on speed dial. He can be flattered and influenced, but no one is safe when he decides that someone is to blame for things going wrong 鈥� and it's never him, of course.
On a much less horrifying scale, you can consider the modern wave of tech entrepreneurs. Some are simply eccentric, some are bad bosses, and some are detached from reality.
At Theranos, Elizabeth Holmes built a firm valued at up to $9 billion around a total fraud. She never had the technology she was selling to clients and shareholders. WeWork's Adam Neumann had a real business 鈥� sub-letting offices into co-working spaces 鈥� but the numbers never panned out, and he couldn't make it succeed with rousing speeches and razzle-dazzle.
What's interesting to me is the courtiers who flock around mad kings. They can be bland apparatchiks like Stalin's Politburo, a mixture of true believers and true monsters, like Lavrentiy Beria.
The landed nobles who served Henry VIII had to constantly adjust their approach 鈥� if you were too distant, you might be a traitor! But if you were too useful, too friendly, too powerful 鈥� well, you might be a traitor.
Those who surround mad kings, whether they're nobles, corporate vice presidents, or bureaucrats, are there for power too. A mad king can dole out power 鈥� or snuff out lives.
