Whoever holds power, whether as a statesman or as a leader in the senior management of organizations, does not have it easy when he or she has to make decisions that have high-impact consequences for the future of society or its stakeholders. Deciding with determination and, at the same time, with fear and trembling represents maturity of character that is unusual in ordinary mortals. Robert D. Kaplan’s book, The Tragic Mindset: On Fear, Fate, and the Heavy Burden of Power (RBA, 2023), is a reflection on the vertigo of decision-making at the top of power. Kaplan’s proposal is nourished by his experience as a reporter of war conflicts in recent decades, in such a way that the book synthesizes hours in the field and hours at the desk trying to understand this dimension of human existence.
For Kaplan, there is no political methodology that can compare with the insight of the Greeks, Shakespeare, and the great novelists. And the most powerful and profound ideas born of that insight all originated in the crucible of tragedy, where lies the key to understanding a world in turmoil in which an implacable struggle against Dionysian chaos is waged. Sophocles, Aeschylus, Euripides, Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Conrad, Solzhenitsyn, Camus speak to us about this chaos, with its tyrannies, disorders and injustices. Kaplan’s handling of this tragic aspect of literature is very well achieved, opening spaces for careful meditation.
Personal and professional experience, over the years, has achievements and failures. It is a blessing that, at the end of the biographical career, some wisdom enlightens us in such a way that humility makes way to recognize that we do not know everything, nor can we do everything. “My own moral humiliations,” Kaplan notes, “knowing that a book I wrote had the effect—unintended on my part—of delaying an American president’s reaction to the mass murders taking place in the Balkans, and that I contributed to promoting a war in Iraq that ended up causing hundreds of thousands of deaths. The two, added together, have been weighing on my conscience for decades, with devastating effects even at different moments, and they are also what have moved me to write this book.”
Tyrannies are hateful, injustices are lacerating, we know it and we suffer them. But it is not enough to overthrow tyrannies, if at the same time, we do not know how to solve what follows to avoid the emergence of anarchy. Says Kaplan, hierarchies can be unfair and oppressive, of course. But it’s dismantling also entails the responsibility of erecting new and more just ones, since the question of order is always the fundamental one. In many Greek tragedies, the plot revolves around the destruction of order due to some specific act that unleashes madness and disorder… until order is restored at the end. If this has been the pattern throughout human history, why wouldn’t it continue to be so? Albert Camus was very clear: “the rebel who questions a tyrannical State must have an alternative order of government in mind to put into practice, because, if not, his rebellion also loses legitimacy.” To solve a problem, it is not enough to dynamit the Greenwich Meridian station, as Conrad pointed out in his novel The Secret Agent.
In the world of making crucial decisions, to be constantly rationalistic is not to be realistic. “Wine comes to tell us Euripides, it is as necessary as the most arid reflection.” It is not the agent’s head who makes the decisions, it is the whole person with their biases, desires, illusions, ambitions. Desk and field of action tan the decision-maker. For this reason, Kapla recommends that a certain tragic sensitivity is advisable to realize the impact that a decision can have on the immediate and medium future of the social environment. A mixture of clairvoyance, seasoned with humility and fear so as not to fall into hubris (excess) of thinking that we are gods of Olympus: knowing that above us there is something higher and a sky that encompasses us gives us moderation and modesty
THE HEAVY BURDEN OF CAN
KNOWING THAT ABOVE US THERE IS SOMETHING HIGHER AND A
SKY THAT ENCOVERS US GIVES US MODERATION AND MODESTY
voices – Francisco Bobadilla
