Maybe this is the problem:
‘Madness in great ones must not unwatched go’. So says King Claudius in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. I was reminded of the phrase when reading David Owen’s fascinating book, The Hubris Syndrome. Lord Owen was Britain’s youngest foreign secretary in the late 1970s, then leader of a new political party, the Social Democratic Party, so he has seen most of the world’s top leaders at close quarters. He was also a doctor before he became a politician, so he neatly combines medical and political insights.
His thesis, in a nutshell, is that the ‘hubris syndrome’ –over-confidence leading to self-destruction - is a particular kind of mental illness which affects not just politicians but military commanders and heads of large companies. The idea that power goes to people’s heads is not of course new. Lord Acton gave the thought classical expression when he remarked that ‘Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely’. But Owen has taken exceptional care to identify ‘patterns of behaviour’ which are evidence of the existence of this illness in leaders.
Symptoms include over-ambition; obsession with presentation and the need to occupy centre-stage; self-identification with the state; a messianic sense of mission; the belief that one is accountable only to God or history; loss of contact with reality; a tendency to allow the ‘broad vision’ to overcome practical considerations; and inattention to detail leading to incompetence in execution. Surprisingly Owen omits what I would regard as the chief symptom of a leader’s hubris: his belief in his own indispensability.
The disease grows the longer the leader stays in power. ... This excessive self-confidence leads him into misinterpreting the reality round him and into making mistakes. Eventually he gets his come pence and meets his nemesis which destroys him’.