In Greek mythology, Daedalus advised his son, Icarus, to be bold enough to fly. But healso warned him not to fly so high that the heat of the sun melted the wax of the wings he had made for both to escape captivity.
Icarus was carried away by the experience, power and thrill of flying. He ignored the advice of his father and plunged tohis death.
The story of Icarus is a sobering reminder of unjustified self-confidence and the abuse of power. Behaviour of this kind is often described by the Greek term “hubris”.
In modern usage it has come to refer to recklessness and over-confidence by those who wield power. Far more than simply being “pride before the fall”, hubris is the pride that causes the fall.
The hubris syndrome is characterised by exaggerated pride, overwhelming self-confidence and a contempt or disregard for others. It often involves an over-estimation of one’s own competence and capabilities, which result in a leader’s misinterpretation of reality.
This can lead to the leader making swift, unwise and risky decisions to the detriment of the people the leader is meant to serve.
Hubris is not a new phenomenon but the last decade has seen demonstrations of it on an epic scale which have directly affected the way we live today. There are lessons to be learnt for the future.
It is now unarguable that the great financial crash in 2008was caused by hubris. Bankers and financial leaders overpaid for acquisitions.
Fund managers, driven by greed and reckless overconfidence, overstepped the bounds of their mandate.
Their hubris consisted in thinking that they were indeed ‘the Masters of the Universe’, with results of unemployment, sovereign debt and political and economic instability which last to this day.
The wars waged by President George W. Bush in Iraq and Afghanistan were good examples of a political leader whose power distorted his thinking and judgement, leading to his ignoring the limits of legality, taking high risks, which eventually resulted in thousands of lives lost in unnecessary conflicts.
Tony Blair, who was elected in 1997 with one of the largest majorities in British post-war history, increasingly came to overestimate his own competence and capabilities.
After two years in government, one cannot help noticing a creeping arrogance in the exercise of power
These led him by 2002 into the ill-judged ‘War on Terror’ in alliance with George W. Bush, and the invasion of Iraq. The rash nature of that hubristic act is even more plain to see today.
There may be lessons to be learnt here for Malta, where a stunning majority for Labourin the 2013 election mustoccasionally lead Prime Minister Joseph Muscat to feel heis invincible.
After two years in government, one cannot help noticing a creeping arrogance in the exercise of power by the government which, if not curbed and reversed, will come to haunt the Prime Minister in three years’ time.
We saw what arrogance did to the Gonzi administration of 2008 to 2013.
There is now a growing body of medical opinion showing that the accumulation and exercise of power can distort thinking and create personality changes, thus affecting their decision-making.
It has been suggested that the condition comes after the acquisition of power.
The longer political leaders are in power, the more likely they are to develop the condition.
The so-called Arab Spring – the now discredited media term for the revolutionary wave of demonstrations and protests (both violent and non-violent), riots and civil wars in the Arab world that began in Tunisia in 2010 – has produced a succession of leaders who crossed the dividing line between decisive leadership on the one hand and hubristic leadership on the other, with the accompanying loss of trust of the people who elected them.
There is a dichotomy at work here. Most people agree onthe qualities that a leader should possess.
We prefer to follow people who are confident, decisive, ambitious and persuasive.
We are put off by those who are insecure, indecisive, dithering and weak.
The unfortunate internal criticism of Archbishop Emeritus Paul Cremona by a number of priests a few months ago, which led to his resignation, stemmed from this.
It is not surprising that those who possess positive leadership qualities are those who seek and achieve positions of power and influence.
The world owes a debt of gratitude to the men and women who give up so much of their lives to making it a better place.
We need leaders. And we need leaders with an appetite for leadership who get the satisfaction from wielding power.
Leadership is a very stressful and extremely lonely job. Leaders usually need to act on the basis of murky or incomplete knowledge, weighing risks and probabilities and using intuition as much as deduction.
The key is that leaders need not just intelligence, but judgement – an ability to balance confidence and realism, daring and caution, to maintain equilibrium while executing sometimes violent shifts.
They need stamina and resilience. They need patience, and they need impatience.
And they need to know when each should be applied.
A leader with little appetite for power would be a bad leader because he or she would be crushed by the responsibility, the anxiety and the loneliness.
This would make a weak leader, and weak leaders can be as big a threat to democracy and good governance as dictators.
But while we badly need leaders who can withstand the stresses of their job, medical science has shown that power is also a two-edged sword.
While it emboldens leaders and makes them smarter and more decisive, if unconstrained for too long it has been shown to lead to impaired judgement, delusions of indispensability, risk-taking and recklessness.
This is the dark side of power, which derives from its mind-changing effects on the people who hold it.
It leads to the reluctance of subordinates to criticise or question the leader’s judgement, prompting a contempt on his or her part for the viewsof others.
Successful outcomes of bold decisions cause the leaderto blur the boundaries be-tween judgement and recklessness. The leader’s personal position and status within an organisation leads him into a generalised belief in his own ‘special qualities’.
What are the tools for curbing excessive power of leaders?
The need for political leaders to have civil servants and advisers around them who are prepared to criticise and to disagree with them is crucial.
The tools and the checks and balances of democracy, such as holding free elections, limited terms in office, a free press and an independent judiciary, are the constraints on power which act like antidotes to the venom of excessive power.
But even in countries with very strong institutional constraints – such as the US and the UK – leaders have still fallen prey to the symptoms of hubris.
It was only the democratic tools of elections that forced power to be transferred tonew leaders.
This is why we need to ensure that Malta’s 50-year-old constitution and the checks and balances it contains – especially between the executive and the legislature, the powers of the Prime Minister and the possible countervailing powers of the President –are still fitfor purpose.