The weakness of power

That tells us that while power is exciting, it must be also boring. If you rule a country and everything including its wealth and women are at your feet, it can create distortions in your personality. One of these distortions is excess, the profligacy of the unrestricted desire to chase one's whims. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, because more power makes that chasing even more desperate and exciting.

Bertrand Russell argues that next to enjoying ourselves, the next greatest pleasure consists in preventing others from enjoying themselves, which, more generally means acquisition of power. Power gives the mortals a smack of the divinity, the sense of control over others' lives, their freedom, choices and immunities. That explains why power has to corrupt in the end. The powerful must continuously find ways to stay ahead to keep others out of the race.

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Hence, they need their inventories of what others cannot have -- the jewels, the palaces, the concubines, the armies, the shoes, the great stockpile of aphrodisiacs, perfumes, cars, jets, clothes, etc. The Nizam of Hydrabad used a diamond on one of his shoes that cost a whopping 21 crore rupees in those days. Louis XIV of France wore a diamond-covered coat that, at the turn of the 18th century, was worth a dazzling 14 million francs.

But then power has its law of diminishing utility. Eventually, the biggest challenge after taking power is to keep and enjoy it. That is when the powerful potentates start behaving like god and their behaviours slide from the sublime to the ridicule. That is when they ask their enemies to be thrown to the tigers (Anastasia Samosa of Nicaragua), and watch it with friends and family as if attending a Puccini or Bach concert of screaming human agonies. That is when they send the Chief of Police to pick women from the street and deliver to their secret chambers (Stalin of former USSR)! That is when they send their secret police to arrest, torture and eliminate anybody, who raises voice against them (all strongmen and dictatorial Alldaddies).

If truly analysed, all autocrats eventually vegetate in three major depravities: acquisition, womanising, and persecution. They want more power and wealth, they like women and they don't want opposition. Be it Fulgenico Batista of Cuba or "Baby Doc" Duvalier of Haiti or Idi Amin Dada of Uganda, power precipitated arrogance in them that turned into perversion. They had lost their sense of proportion in the iridescent pride of their fleeting glories.

But then the powerful men become sad characters when they lose power, which had once made them interesting. The Shah of Iran and Marcos of the Philippines spent their last days searching for an exile, looking like bag ladies on the high streets of power.

And take Napoleon Bonaparte, who spent his last years in St. Helena, reminding his aide-de-camp from time to time that he once ruled 83 million human beings, more than half the population of Europe! There, this one-time great conqueror killed his time discussing women (superiority of stout over thin women, for example), cows, ages of his brothers, and other trivia.

All strongmen eventually arrive at this dead end where they no longer have any power. But power turns into a cheerless affair even long before that happens. They no longer enjoy the trappings of power unless they can do something monstrous and ludicrous.

According to the private physician of Mao Zedung, the great Chinese leader spent almost the entire of the last quarter of his life enjoying the companies of female and male consorts and contemplating how to crush his enemies who were his former comrades.

Caligula Caesar is the foremost example of how dictators and rulers become trapped inside the ennui of power. Here was an emperor who had unlimited power in his hand. He could take his army to the swamp and come back to claim that he had conquered another country. The senate of Rome never challenged anything he said. He slept with his sister and could reach for any other woman or man in the land. His subjects worshipped him as the descendant of god.

In his boredom, Caligula once disguised himself as an ordinary citizen and wanted to see how it worked. But everywhere he would be recognised as the emperor and he returned to the palace as a frustrated man. In the end, he put the wives of his senators and military commanders in a boat and opened it to the people of Rome. At last Caligula would be challenged in his authority and killed in a coup led by the senators and military commanders who were humiliated by the emperor's unpardonable indiscretion.

After 22 years in power, Mahathir Mohamad, the Prime Minister of Malaysia, is stepping down today. He turned a rubber-planting country into a modern nation, but wants to leave before "people kick you out". One of the greatest weaknesses of the powerful people is that they don't realise that power, like everything else, has an expiry date. Most of them wait until they are overthrown from power by a coup or popular uprise.

But then some are even more unfortunate. After the fall of the Iraqi monarchy in 1958, Prime Minister Nuri Said tried to flee disguised as a woman. He was caught, castrated and hacked to pieces by a crowd. The same fate came to Najibullah even though he was already deposed from the power of Afghanistan. The Talibans castrated him in 1996 before they shot and hung him, still alive, from a lamppost.

The sight of a fallen dictator has a twist of irony. It's like watching a once tough and angry father figure get wrecked by age. He looks like a pitiful relic of all his abuses, turned out to graze on nothing but memories of power he once wielded. He appears like Aladdin bereft of his magic lamp, like the archaeological site of a lost civilisation, like the stain of power after many washes.

It's indeed weakness never to have power. But it's even worse to have and lose it. Long after the lights are gone and the stage is empty, the show must go on in the mind of the once all-powerful. Because it really needs a very strong strongman not to fall before his own eyes even after he has fallen before the rest of the world.

Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is a banker.