Good leaders and sociopaths in literature and history: Oedipus, Templeton the rat, and H.H. Holmes

Thousands of years ago, Oedipus, King of Thebes, faces a city-state devastated by a plague in Sophocles' Oedipus Rex.  The people of the city arrive in front of his palace, asking him for help. Oedipus addresses them as follows:

But the soul inside me sorrows ... for the city, and for you—all together. You are not rousing me from a deep sleep.You must know I’ve been shedding many tears and, in my wandering thoughts, exploring many pathways.

Oedipus expresses his compassion for the suffering of his people, something our great leader has yet to do. Oedipus also reveals his awareness of the plague and says he is already working on trying to solve the problem. He has sent Creon to the oracle at Delphi to find answers and expects him back at any time.

Oedipus has compassion on the suffering of his people during a plague. His worst traits--pride, arrogance, violence--would most likely be valorized as the keys to his greatness in our society but are seen as his flaws in this drama.

Oedipus' tangled past of troubles includes killing his father and marrying his mother. He did not know the man he killed was his father, but murder is nevertheless a grave problem, as the text illustrates. His moment of ruthless pride is condemned as a flaw that diseases his city, not valorized as what made him great. He also married an older woman opportunistically to help legitimize his claim to the throne, another questionable act. However, he clearly grew to love Jocasta dearly because when he finds her body hanging from committing suicide, he is grief--as well as guilt--stricken.

Despite his problems, Oedipus' handling of the plague with compassion and competent action is a model of good leadership. Further, when Oedipus realizes he is the problem and needs to go into exile for the plague to be ended, he behaves responsibly and gives up his throne. One could weep for such  leadership that puts the good of the people ahead of its own desires. Oedipus' domestic problem begin to pale in light of what a competent king he demonstrates himself to be. Further, his negative traits of pride, paranoia, and violence are not put at the center of what makes him a good leader: his compassion, competency, courage,  and responsibility are.

Templeton the rat in Charlotte's Web shows the opposite attributes because he is a sociopath. When Charlotte suggests that he be recruited to bring scraps of magazines from the dump, where he frequently forages, so that Charlotte can weave more words into her web to save Wilbur, she is warned that Templeton will not comply:

The rat had no morals, no conscience, no scruples, no consideration, no decency, no milk of rodent kindness, no compunctions, no higher feeling, no friendliness, no anything.

Today we would applaud and vote into office a being without morals, conscience, scruples, or kindness and see that as "strength," but in the world of Charlotte's Web the animals know a rat when they see one. 

True to form, when approached, Templeton says of Wilbur "let him die." It is only when the old sheep appeals to his self interest that Templeton agrees to help: The sheep reminds him that if Wilbur dies, Templeton will not be able to eat the remains of the pig's warm slops. Fortunately for Wilbur, the animals live in a society that does not look with gusto on callous indecency and does not want to put  Templeton in charge for being "strong." The moral compass in this society has not gotten confused.

 Eric Larson's The Devil in the White City tells the story of the 1893 Chicago's World Fair, but also the story of con artist and serial killer HH Holmes. A notable trait of this man was not paying his bills. We are told:

 As workers came to him for their wages, he berated them for doing shoddy work and refused to pay them, even if the work was perfect. They quit, or he fired them. He recruited others to replace them and treated these workers the same way. Construction proceeded slowly, but at a fraction of the proper cost.
....
He had no intention of paying his debts and was confident he could evade prosecution through guile and charm.

H.H. Holmes: His eyes supposedly mesmerized people

One can be a sociopathic con artist without being a serial killer--and most con artists are not serial killers.  But the traits of a sociopath are consistently the same, and the briefest foray into the books on one's shelf bring them out. I happened across these references by accident: I did not seek them out. Instead, the juxtapositions jumped out at me.

We have a leader whose qualities align far more closely with Templeton and Holmes than Oedipus. But we have to look to our larger society for answers. What we have in our leader is the rot rising to the surface of what Henry Girard calls a "culture of cruelty."

I don't have the reference and don't want to publicize this man, but I saw this in the past week on the Daily Kos: a  TV or radio shock jock  of some sort going on about how he was planning, should a food shortage and social chaos ensue from pandemic, to eat his neighbors. He went on about it at some length, with all the usual elements of a certain kind of twisted macho fantasy in place. Because he had planned his kill and had already chosen his victims, he would be able to strike first: kill rather than be killed. He had already figured out how he would handle the neighbors he planned to eat: he would hang them up, gut them, and skin them, then cook them. Key to this fantasy was protecting the vulnerable: he would do to this to save his daughters from starvation.

The man is obviously trying to keep his ratings up through shock, but he is another indication of the rot: this sociopathic derring-do no doubt garnered a great deal of approval and animated his followers by triggering their hormones, while valorizing and normalizing any barbarity as permissible for defending one's family.

I don't know who his audience voted for.

Hannah Arendt wrote of totalitarianism replacing politics with spectacle, and that is clearly a moment in which we live. Followers react to the spectacle of Trump, admiring the strong man, and feeling participatory in his so-called strength by chanting his  hypnotic three-syllable phrases: "Lock her up," "build the wall." Trump knows how to deliver the spectacle of power people crave instead of the mundane reality of politics--Noam Chomsky is right that he is a certain kind of political genius. If all politics is is never-ending spectacle, he is your man, and you can revel in the fantasy of power he projects.

The road to Trump was paved by an increasingly aggressive literature, most notably in the form of filmed media. Valorizing, as they do (the attempts to "discredit" these men within the narratives is vacuous), Tony Soprano and Walter White, along with the various murderous rampages perpetrated by sociopaths in Game of Thrones or West World, has led us to Trump. Admiring the Templetons of the world for their sociopathic traits has led to Trump.

The stories we tell are important. It is desperately important in these times to return to narratives in which the ruthless are treated not as admirable but repulsive. Sophocles and Shakespeare knew how to create spectacles, such as in Oedipus Rex and Hamlet, that maximize violence and shock, that raise emotions to a pitch and lead to vicarious emotional release, while at the stand time standing up for human decency. These two plays may not be dramas that will appeal to Trump supporters, but we can write such dramas for our times.