Why Narcissistic Leaders Always Fail (In The End)

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1:44Welcome 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, 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.

2:23The great Robert Greene 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 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.

3:12it. 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 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.

3:53Although 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 could 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.

4:40So 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.

5:25So 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 so terrified of being alone.

6:08After 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. The slaves are clapping so they think they're a great chariot racer.

6:51Everyone 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 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.

7:33In a sane political environment, you know, any number of these things would have been the end of Nero. But it was in 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?

8:14He 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 Gonzalez 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 these, 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.

9:00That 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.

9:37The 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 an open-minded Nero.

10:18It'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 Eucatistical 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.

10:55And slowly but surely, he creates circumstances in which he's able to get rid of his enemies, including his own mother, whom 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 a very basic stoic point that we all die eventually and someone takes our place.

11:39But 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.

12:21And 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.

13:00And 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.

13:47He 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. Paradoid 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.

14:25He 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.

15:09He'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 thracia 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 thracia he says the country in its eagerness for discord is now talking of you nero one man whispered into his ear they're talking of you and thracia has at once talked of Caesar and Cato.

15:49Cato 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. Accus 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 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 erodes slowly and then all at once.

16:38Ultimately 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 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.

17:23But 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. And 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 abandoned 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.

18:00Nero decides finally to commit suicide. He can't do it himself. He's too weak, too timid. Finally, he has Epictetus's 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 of 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.

18:44This 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.

19:02We just took our kids to an outdoor performance of the Nutcracker. They had a snow cone and then they went insane in the car ride home. And one of the things I try to remind myself when that's happening is that I don't control my kids' behavior, especially when they're too far gone like that, but I do control how I respond, right? That's stoicism, but it's also what Dr. Becky talks about. Dr. Becky is a clinical psychologist and a best-selling author, and she founded Good Inside, which is there to give parents practical, actionable tools for handling those everyday challenges with confidence. My wife introduced me to Dr.

19:39Becky's books. I love them. I've recommended them a million times. I've had her on the podcast. And as it happens, Dr. Becky is hosting two live Q &A events for Good Inside members. I am one of them. She signed me up for it about a year and a half ago. I've loved it ever since. On December 1st, you can join Dr. Becky for her How Not to Raise Assholes event, which is about avoiding entitlement and raising kind, empathetic kids. And on December 15th, she's hosting her How Not to Lose It over the holidays event, which I'm sure we could all use. As I said, I'm a big fan of Dr. Becky. She's been a great influence for me as a parent and just as a human being.

20:20And Daily Stoic listeners can join for 15 % off with code STOIC15. You just got to head over to goodinside.com to catch the events.

20:38Now, 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 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 and enormous size, which they objectively were not, but he insisted that members of his administration parrot that back to him.

21:43His 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 hooded, 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.

22:31Trump 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 what 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. 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.

23:17And 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. You know, he just wanted things that confirmed his hunches or that enabled him to do what he wanted to do.

24:04And 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. 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.

24:51You know, we talk a lot about norms. Cato gives his life to preserve what was called the mas 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 comprehend this at all. the famous terrible remarks of Donald Trump as he looked out over 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.

25:28He 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.

26:10You 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.

26:29And all this tees up one of the 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 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 Greene 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.

27:10And 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. He had to go, I'm not your guy. I can't do this thing that you wanted. He was like a thracia, 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.

27:59When 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 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, something the president should never do, that call is recorded and leaked and then ultimately leads to his impeachment.

28:39And 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. We'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 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.

29:45And 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 And you know that another American president, George Washington, who was so inspired by the example of Cato, so fearful of a Catiline, 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.

30:21He 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 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 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.

31:06Mr. 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 at him. 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.

31:50A 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.

32:25And 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 Mattis and McMaster. There's a great line in the novel, The Blood of the Martyrs 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.

33:09But 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's taught by the greatest teachers. He's 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.

33:48That'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.

34:11One of Lincoln's great early speeches was against what 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.

34:56They 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 dailystoic.com email it's totally free and unsubscribe at any time we'd love to have you dailystoic.com email

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