The Tragic Mind: Fear, Fate, and the Burden of Power

by Robert D. Kaplan

My interest in the ancient Greeks and their influence on Shakespeare and modern literature was kindled in Athens, from where I traveled constantly to see the very things the Greeks feared: chaos and forms of order so extreme that they were, in fact, species of chaos.

Despite all the other horrors I had experienced around the world, Saddam’s Iraq, with its massive billboard pictures of the dictator everywhere, its multiple intelligence services, its reputation for torture on almost an industrial scale, and its cowering diplomats in Western embassies who told visitors they could do nothing for them if the regime found them suspicious, registered an unequaled level of fear.

All this led me, in the wake of 9/11, to support the Iraq War, despite my worries about what could befall Iraq in a post-Saddam era. I was a journalist who had gotten too close to my story. I had let my emotions overtake dispassionate analysis.

There I experienced something far worse than even the Iraq of the 1980s: the bloody anarchy of all against all that Saddam’s regime, through the most extreme brutality, had managed to suppress. The clinical depression I suffered for years afterward because of my mistake about the Iraq War led me to write this book.

one year of anarchy is worse than a hundred years of tyranny.1

also witnessed tyranny at such extreme levels—particularly in Stalinist Romania and Baathist Iraq, where literally anyone could be arrested, tortured, or killed for no reason—that I came over time to understand it as anarchy masquerading as order.

Anarchy was the ancient Greeks’ greatest, most fundamental fear. The Greeks were too rational to ignore the power of the irrational that lay on the other side of civilization. They saw no moral equivalency between order and disorder. In Greek tragedy, an orderly universe—the opposite of chaos—is always a virtue.

Of course, once order is imposed, the task is to make it less and less tyrannical.

Wise leaders are those who know that they must think tragically in order to avoid tragedy.

Greek tragedy emerges out of the need for constructive fear, or anxious foresight, and goes on to encompass much else.

The pathos and paradox of someone in high office is that despite having authority, the options he or she possesses can be truly awful.

But when one thinks tragically from the outset, one always fears the future and is therefore aware of one’s limitations, and thus can act with more effectiveness. My aim here is to inspire, not to depress.

The tragic hero eventually finds wisdom. As the Greeks defined it, tragedy is not the triumph of evil over good but the triumph of one good over another good that causes suffering. Removing Saddam Hussein was a good thing, but it supplanted a greater good: the semblance of order.

Tragedy is the comprehension that the human order is confounded by such mysteries, and so the tragic mind deals with the contradictions of humanity’s place in nature.2 And

not mean that the Greeks championed chaos; only that they accepted it as a reality that always lay just over the horizon.

The play ends with Fortinbras moving to restore order, at the cost of a Norwegian takeover of Denmark. Yet order is paramount. It is the first step toward civilization. Only afterward can the work begin to make order less coercive.

Modernity and now postmodernity have not altered human nature as much as we think. Hitler and Stalin were creatures of industrial modernism; Twitter and Facebook mobs and Internet conspiracy theories inflame the ethnic and religious hatreds of postindustrial postmodernism.

The cultivation of insecurity requires modesty. If a person—or a policymaker—is not modest, the gods will sooner or later force modesty upon them. And if a man has to wait until personal enlightenment is forced upon him by the gods, it will come with extreme suffering.

deny the power of Dionysian chaos, rapture, and intoxication is to deny the power of the creator himself.8 Dionysus does not signify doom so much as a world filled with rapturous mystery; so that the advent of a more rational and pessimistic worldview, as represented by Euripides, ironically indicates to Nietzsche the beginning of the end of tragedy.

Only the weak and the dishonest blame fate for their misfortunes, even as fate always affects our lives and may even periodically determine it.

Dionysus represents the most terrifying aspect of fate. He embodies the life force itself: that combustible element of the natural world in all its fecundity that makes civilization so tenuous a proposition because of humankind’s basest physiological instincts, affecting personality and behavior. Dionysus is a complex figure, encompassing joy and celebration, violence and madness.13 He is in effect the enemy of wisdom and reason.

The mob in all its rage and terror—the Cossack pogrom, the Nazi mass rallies, the Serbian rape camps, the sectarian death squads—all contain elements of the fanaticism, the vitality, and the sheer deadly enthusiasm of the Bacchae.

This victory of chaos over established order shows how realism requires an appreciation for romance: stripped down to its essentials, romance is about ecstasy and irrationality; things that are part of reality. Thus to be unrelentingly rational is to be unrealistic.

And that, in turn, suggests that crises, especially political ones, deal not only with the clarity of decision-makers but also with their illusions. (Witness the neoconservative view that democracy could be imposed upon the Middle East.)

Super-storms and other catastrophes are the climatic equivalents of Dionysus. While so far it has mainly been those at the margins of economic existence, in places like Indonesia and Bangladesh, who have suffered the earth’s Dionysian wrath, we elites in our luxurious urban cocoons, made possible by delicate, critical infrastructure, should think tragically in order to prepare for a visit by the god.

Polite society has not changed and never will. It is a function of social success that one avoids discussing or even thinking about the cruelest facts of human nature and, by consequence, political existence. True, among the elite there is much virtue-signaling about the poor, and a vocal concern for human rights is a necessary tool of professional advancement in the high social echelons. A bored elite can certainly develop a brainless infatuation with radical causes. But that is not what I am talking about. I am talking about the silences inside which the future lies: the disturbing rumblings by which the working poor periodically prepare to throw bricks through the windows of the elite world, and to which the elite are blind until they are hit in the face. That is the ultimate meaning of Donald Trump’s election victory in 2016. This is another form of Dionysian wrath: something which James, pampered as he was by wealth and social status, nevertheless had the wisdom and shrewd perception to be aware of.

Thus we are back to Dostoevsky and Conrad and their closeness to the spirit of the Greeks: they both, to borrow from George Steiner, make a virtue of disorder, with calm achieved only through despair.26 Anyone who has suffered a sustained, anxiety-ridden mental collapse of any sort understands this.

third of a century after the fall of the Berlin Wall, which our elites, often with little real-life experience of their own, assured us would lead to the march of democracy and globalization, the world is in extreme disorder.

Simply because we can no longer literally imagine unrestrained war between the great powers—as the last one ended over three-quarters of a century ago—does not mean that it cannot happen, as it has happened throughout history.