THE RULER AS SURVIVOR

 
The paranoiac type of ruler may be defined as one who uses every means to keep danger away from his own person. Instead of challenging and confronting it and abiding the issue of a fight which might go against him, he seeks by circumspection and cunning to block its approach to him. He creates empty space all round him which he can survey, and he observes and assesses every sign of approaching danger. He does this on all sides, for he knows that he is dealing with many who may simultaneously advance against him, and this keeps awake in him the fear of being surrounded. Danger is everywhere, not only in front of him; it threatens especially from behind, where he might not notice it quickly enough. He has eyes all around him and not the slightest sound must escape his attention, for it might conceal a hostile intent.

The essence of all danger is naturally death and it is important to discover what is his special attitude to this. The first and decisive attribute of the autocrat is his power over life and death. No one may come near him; a messenger or anyone who has to approach him, is searched for weapons. Death is systematically kept away from him, but he himself may and must decree it. He may decree it as and when he wills and his sentence will always be executed; it is the seal of his power, and his power is only absolute so long as his right to decree death remains uncontested.

For the autocrat’s only true subject is the man who will let himself be killed by him. This is the final proof of obedience and it is always the same. His soldiers are trained in a kind of double preparedness: they are sent to kill his enemies and they are ready to die for him. But all his other subjects too, who are not soldiers, know that he can pounce on them at any time. The terror that he spreads around him is part of him; it is his right, and it is for this right that he is most honoured: in extreme cases he will be worshipped for it. God himself has suspended the sentence of death over all living men, and over all who are yet to live. When the sentence is carried out depends on his whim. No one thinks of opposing it, for this would be fruitless.

Earthly rulers, however are less fortunate than God, for they do not live forever and their subjects know that to their days, too, an end is set; and that this end, like any other, can be hastened by violence. Any man who refuses obedience to his ruler, challenges him. No ruler can be permanently certain of the obedience of his subjects. As long as they allow themselves to be killed by him he can sleep in peace, but as soon as anyone evades his sentence he is endangered.

The sense of danger is always alert in a ruler. Later, when the nature of command is discussed, it will be shown that fears must increase the more his commands are carried out. He can only calm his fears by making an example of someone. He will order an execution for its own sake, the victim’s guilt being almost irrelevant. He needs executions from time to time and, the more his fears increase, the more he needs them. His most dependable, one might say his truest, subjects are those he has sent to their deaths.

For, from every execution for which he is responsible, some strength accrues to him. It is the strength of survival which he gains from it. His victims need not actually have challenged him, but they might have, and his fear transforms them – perhaps only retrospectively – into enemies who have fought against him. He condemns them; they are struck down and he survives them. The right to pronounce sentence of death becomes in his hands a weapon like any other, only far more effective. Many barbarian and Eastern rulers have set great store on this heaping up of victims round them, where they can actually see them all the time; but even where custom has been against such accumulation, the thoughts of such rulers have been busy with it.

In order to preserve his powers of inducing growth and to keep him from harm he is hedged in by a great number of regulations and taboos.

He is visible only at certain times. He leaves his mansion only at certain times. His isolation protects him from anything which might harm him. The rarity of his appearances means that he only exists for very special purposes. An artificial distance is created between him and his subjects and is maintained by all possible means. He shows himself rarely, and his preciousness is stressed in every possible way by the rarity of his appearances. He is protected by guards who are blindly devoted to him.

All his commands must be obeyed absolutely, to disregard any of them meant only death. Here the command manifests itself in its oldest and purest form, as the death sentence with which the lion threatens all weaker animals. He orders his people about as he likes, and as long as they obey him, he grants them their lives, but as he is always essentially the lion, he strikes whenever he wants.

He has been glorified as a king, and obeyed as a ruler, but fundamentally, he is always the same. His biggest triumphs have taken place in our own time, among people who set great store by the idea of humanity. He is not yet extinct, nor ever will be until we have the strength to see him clearly, whatever disguise he assumes, and whatever his halo of glory. The survivor is mankind’s worst evil, its curse and perhaps its doom. Is it possible for us to escape him, even now at this last moment?

In the world today his activities have become so terrifying that we scarcely dare look at them; a single individual who can easily destroy a good part of mankind. To bring this about he can use technical means he does not understand; he can himself remain completely hidden; and he does not even have to run any personal risk in this process. The contrast between his singleness and the number of those he can destroy is so great that we can no longer find a meaningful image to express it.

Whether there is any way of dealing with the survivor, who has grown to such monstrous stature is the most important question for us today.

Today, the survivor is himself afraid. He has always been afraid, but with his vast new potentialities his fear has grown too. His triumph, when it comes, may last only for hours or minutes. There is nowhere in the world safe, even for him. There is nowhere the new weapons cannot reach, including whatever refuge he may make himself. His greatness and his invulnerability have become incomparable. He has overreached himself.

What is really required, however, is to deal with the survivor himself; and for this we must learn to see him for what he is, even when his activity appears most natural. The most un-questioned and therefore the most dangerous thing he does is to give commands. We have seen that the command, even in the domesticated form found in any community, is no less than a suspended death sentence; and we know that strict and effective systems of commands are in force everywhere. Anyone who works his way to the top too quickly, or by any other means, suddenly seizes control of such a system, will acquire an abnormal measure of the anxiety of command and will inevitably try to get rid of it. The threat which he uses continually, and which constitutes the real essence of the system of commands, finally turns against himself.

He feels that all those to whom he has given commands, all those he has put to death, are still alive and still remember. He is always conscious of the danger he would be in if they all united against him and this fear, which is fully justified and yet vague and inherently unlimited – for he never knows when memory will be translated into action, nor by how many – this endless torturing awareness, is what I call the anxiety of command.

It is strongest in the mightiest. The concentration of anxiety is greatest in one who is a source of commands, who creates orders and receives them from no one above him. A ruler can keep it hidden, or under control, for a long time, but in the course of a life time, it can increase until, as with certain of the Roman Emperors, it suddenly manifests itself as madness.

Whether or not he is actually in danger from enemies, he always feels himself menaced. The most dangerous threat comes from his own people, those to whom he habitually give orders, who are close to him and know him well. The ultimate means of deliverance, which he never wholly renounces (though he may hesitate to use it), is the sudden command for mass death. He starts a war and sends his people where they are supposed to kill, but if large numbers of them die there he will not regret them. However much he may dissemble, he is never free of a deep and hidden need to see the ranks of his own people thinned. To free him from the anxiety of command what is really necessary is that not only his enemies should die, but also many of those who fight for him. The forest of his fears has grown so dense that he cannot breathe and he longs for it to be thinned. If he waits too long, his vision becomes blurred and he may do something which will seriously weaken his position. The anxiety of command increases in him until it results in catastrophe. But before catastrophe overtakes him it will have engulfed innumerable others.

“Crowds and Power”
Elias Canetti