“A young man without power or money is completely free. He has nothing, but he also has everything. He can travel, he can drift. He can make new acquaintances every day, and try to soak up the infinite variety of life. He can seduce and be seduced, start an enterprise and abandon it, join an army or flee a nation, fight to preserve an existing system or plot a revolution. He can reinvent him himself daily, according to the discoveries he makes about the world and himself.
But if he prospers through the choices he makes, if he aquires a wife, children, wealth, land, and power, his options gradually and inveitably diminish. Responsibility and commitment limit his moves. One might think that the most powerful man has the most choices, but in reality he has the fewest. Too much depends on his every move.
The tyrant’s choices are the narrowest of all. His life-the nation!-hangs in the balance. He can no longer drift or explore, join or flee. He cannot reinvent himself, because so many others depend on him-and he, in turn, must depend on so many others. He stops learning, because he is walled in by fortresses and palaces, by generals and ministers who rarely dare to tell him what he doesn’t wish to hear.
Power gradually shuts the tyrant off from the world. Everything comes to him second or thirdhand. He is deceived daily. He becomes ignorant of his land, his people, even his own family. He exists, finally, only to preserve his wealth and power, to build his legacy. Survival becomes his one overriding passion. So he regulates his diet, tests his food for poison, exercises behind well-patrolled walls, trusts no one, and tries to control everything.”
A brilliant paragraph from Mark Bowden’s ‘Tales of the Tyrant.’ an article about Saddam Hussein. Writing this good is humbling. The article appeared in The Atlantic in 2002 and the photo is from the NYT.
