Effective leadership is about accurately reading the room of reality to sort out what is true and lasting from what is ephemeral and passing — and acting accordingly.

It is from this perspective that Danny Hillis assesses the continuum of history’s long march by examining a host of seminal figures in his Noema essay titled “The Rise & Fall Of Petty Tyrants.” He compares the transient impact of Louis Napoleon III (“Napoleon the small” not to be confused with Napoleon Bonaparte), Mussolini and Ferdinand Marcos to the transformative accomplishments of Otto von Bismarck, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew.

“Petty tyrants are more focused on personal victories than on national priorities,” writes Hillis. “The good news is that they carry within them the seeds of their own destruction. Once we understand their common flaws, it becomes apparent why they eventually fall rapidly from power and leave few changes to government that last. Understanding this pattern can help us recognize a critical feature that distinguishes leaders who damage their nations from those who create lasting good: their relationship to truth.”

For Hillis, Louis Napoleon, Mussolini and Marcos all were big flashes in the pan, but secured no deep shifts in their societies. They ricocheted from the heights of early popularity to being widely despised as the false narrative that brought them to power unraveled in the face of realities that could no longer be spun to their advantage.

He outlines the common attributes of these leaders, uncomfortably familiar in our own day, that led to their rise and inevitable fall.

“What is the petty tyrant’s fatal flaw?” Hillis asks. “It is tempting to focus on the surface similarities: the love of headlines, the obsession with appearances, the parades and golden décor. Yet these were not causes, just symptoms. When such leaders cannot generate genuine success, they manufacture the appearance of it. The martial parades hid military weakness and the gilded displays of wealth hid economic deterioration. The real weakness of petty tyrants is that they try to deny reality, a strategy that is unsustainable.

“Once in power, every leader, good or bad, faces difficulties. The fork in the road is how they choose to handle unwelcome realities. For vain leaders, admitting difficulties would mean admitting personal failure. The psychological stakes of honest assessment are unbearable, so they take the path that avoids it.

“Setbacks are blamed on the incompetence of subordinates. Those who insist on bringing up unpleasant truths are replaced with sycophants who reinforce petty tyrants’ exaggerated sense of genius. Eventually dissenters are frightened into silence.”

This adverse trait brings to mind a conversation I once had with the Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi’s (recently assassinated) son, Saif. “The reason Israel wins all its wars against the Arab states,” he observed, “is because its generals are chosen based on their competence as military commanders. In the Arab world, only the weak and obsequious who pose no challenge to the leader are allowed to occupy such powerful posts.”

Hillis continues: “To hide the truth from the outside world, petty tyrants must deceive and distract. Detachment from reality does not require stupidity, just the willingness to choose an appealing story over obstinate facts. So energies become focused on fabricating and supporting a convenient story and demonizing scapegoats. Institutions responsible for gathering objective information that might contradict the narrative are deliberately weakened. Critics are portrayed as traitors.

“As the leaders and their associates concentrate their efforts on deceiving others, they begin to deceive themselves. To sustain the illusion, they must act as if they believe their own lies, as must those around them. Whether they actually believe becomes irrelevant. They are trapped in their own illusion.

“As appearance replaces performance and loyalty replaces competence, the system begins to reward flattery rather than governance. Insiders learn to exploit the tyrant’s vanity, not only to stay in favor, but to advance their own agendas. Corruption becomes systemic. Extraction replaces stewardship and, as parts of the system become parasitic, the deterioration accelerates.

“Once decisions are based on false premises, weaknesses are made invisible.

“As reality diverges from the fabricated narrative, the functional damages — the military defeats, the economic collapses, the institutional failures — create catastrophes that cannot be hidden. The spell is broken not by some moral awakening, but by these concrete disasters. Once a sufficient portion of the loyal supporters realize they have been duped, the leader will eventually fall.”

Undeluded Leadership

Hillis contrasts such mis-adventurous disrupters with leaders — “none of them saints” — who faced reality squarely, governed pragmatically without illusion and enduringly transformed their societies.

“Effective leadership is about accurately reading the room of reality to sort out what is true and lasting from what is ephemeral and passing — and acting accordingly.”

Otto von Bismarck, the 19th-century conservative Prussian statesman who unified Germany, has become synonymous with the term “realpolitik.” He grasped the harsh truth that Europe’s future would not be “decided by speeches and majority votes,” but instead, “by blood and iron, through action and not display.” For decades, he skillfully maneuvered to manage a balance of power in Europe that maintained order and stability.

He listened to contrary voices and spun a web of intelligence networks across the continent to ensure his diplomatic and military moves were grounded in, and guided by, reliable information.

Pragmatically departing from his own ideological predisposition, he fostered the first-ever worker’s social insurance and pension system — a pillar of all industrial societies to this day — as a way to demobilize the rising appeal of socialism. More concerned with substance than label, Bismarck said at the time, “call it socialism or whatever you like. It is the same to me.” 

FDR’s accomplishments are well known: Recovering from economic depression, creating the Social Security system as well as bank deposit insurance for ordinary savers, the regulation of Wall Street securities and waging an uncompromising war against fascism without resorting to dictatorship at home.

Roosevelt didn’t try to spin reality, but recognized challenges and constraints as they were, just as he accepted being wheelchair-bound as a condition of his own existence.

In his inaugural address, FDR declared forthrightly that “confidence thrives on honesty.” He famously established multiple channels of incoming information to avoid the monopolization of perception by his own staff. He encouraged social policy experimentation to confirm what worked in reality, and what didn’t.

As Hillis sums it up, “He built not a cult of personality but a culture of pragmatic problem-solving. Institutions over individuals. Results over rhetoric.”

The last figure in Hillis’ list is Lee Kuan Yew, the founding father and long-ruling prime minister of Singapore, whom I knew well and often met over the years at Istana, the former British governor’s residence, where he hosted guests.

Lee held an unblinking view of human nature and an abiding pragmatism in facing the cards his nation was dealt.

In the heyday of post-colonialism in 1963, Lee sought to safeguard tiny Singapore’s newfound independence from Great Britain by proposing a federation with Malaysia. Though “economics, geography and ties of kinship” logically dictated such a sensible arrangement, it came undone within two years over ethnic tensions and nationalist intrigue. In 1965, Malaysia cut its neighbor loose.

As a forlorn Lee put it after the split, Singapore would now have to figure out how to survive as “a heart without a body.” The city-state at the tip of the Malay Peninsula had few resources to prosper on its own. Literally, it had no hinterland.

Scrambling for a solution, Lee had the long-term vision to reimagine Singapore with a new metaphor: the first globalized nation. The Cambridge-trained barrister made the obstacle the way by turning the world at large into the island nation’s hinterland.

Within 30 years, he raised Singapore from a third to a first-world country through policies of open trade, investment and finance, where global companies could be assured of the rule of law and the absence of corruption. He settled ethnic tensions by ensuring rights and opportunities for all Chinese, Indians and Malays, including the provision of housing, which cemented the allegiance of diverse citizens to the system. He made English the common language, tying Singaporeans together while connecting them to a world then-dominated by Anglo-Saxon powers.

In our many discussions about “Asian values” versus the West, he displayed his unsentimental pragmatism. “I can only say that if Western values are in fact superior insofar as they bring about superior performance in a society and help it survive,” he said, “then they will prevail. If adopting Western values diminishes the prospects for survival of a society, they will be rejected.”

Sustained By Reality

Hillis concludes: “Every leader is confronted with difficulties and must face that same fork in the road. The honest leaders chose truth. The dishonest chose denial and, as a consequence, they failed.

“Petty tyrants cause real suffering and harm, but they leave few enduring legacies. The lasting institutions of effective leaders are not undermined by reality. They are sustained by it. They are copied and improved. They are strengthened by success. “Truth turns reality into a relentless ally. That gives me reason for hope.”