Assholesin History
A Comprehensive Survey of Catastrophic Leadership, Spectacular Ego, and the Recurring Human Failure to Say Temper, Temper
History has a pattern.
It runs through Rome and China and Russia and Madagascar and the Ottoman Empire and medieval England and the Mughal court and the Central African Republic. It runs through empires that lasted a thousand years and dynasties that lasted fifteen. It runs through men who declared war on the ocean and women who redirected the Imperial Navy budget to build a boat made of marble.
The pattern is not that power corrupts. That's the polite version. The accurate version is that power, in the complete absence of anyone capable of saying no, produces results that are remarkably consistent across four thousand years of recorded human behavior. The results are catastrophic. They are also, on reflection, extremely funny.
Assholes in History examines twenty-three of history's most spectacularly awful rulers — not as monsters dropped into the record from elsewhere, but as products. Of dynasties, courts, theological systems, fathers who destroyed them, empires that had no mechanism for telling the truth to power, and cultures that had decided, sometimes across generations, that a particular kind of person was exactly what they needed.
They were wrong. History kept excellent records about how wrong they were.
The USS Wisconsin, off the coast of Korea, had the misfortune of being fired upon by land-based artillery. She responded by removing the terrain feature from the map. A nearby ship radioed two words: temper, temper.
Caligula marched the greatest military force in human history to the English Channel, declared war on the ocean, sent his soldiers in with swords, collected the seashells as spoils of war, mailed them back to Rome, and demanded a triumph. The Senate, having considered its options, provided one.
Two of these stories worked out. What separated the Wisconsin from Caligula was not the audacity. It was whether anyone was capable of saying those two words.
Nobody said them to Caligula. About anything. Ever. The machinery that might have produced them — advisors with genuine authority, institutions with genuine teeth, consequences that meant something — was absent, dismantled, or too terrified to function.
This is the book's argument. The impulse is universal. The outcome is not.
Not every tyrant qualifies. Admission to this book requires passing:
Consequences proportional to the power behind them. This is not a local eccentric.
He was not confused about what he was doing. He knew. He proceeded.
The gap between the action and any reasonable human response must be large enough to constitute the joke.
The systems meant to constrain these figures produced or enabled them instead. Rome produced Caligula. The Senate watched. The machinery of the most powerful state on earth processed his instructions and executed them — including, eventually, him.
Twenty-three rulers, organized across four sections.
The Incompetent
The Cruel
The Vain
The Just Plain Weird
Suetonius meets Oscar Wilde. The narrator is never shocked. Never horrified. Merely observant. Flat affect, precise detail, humor that lives in the architecture of the sentence rather than in anything the narrator is trying to do. The cruelty and the absurdity arrive in the same administrative tone, because the historical record delivered them the same way.
The scary part is not that they were monsters. The scary part is how familiar the pattern is.
The book is not a counsel of despair. It is an observation — delivered with the composure of a man who has looked at four thousand years of recorded human behavior and found it, on balance, darkly hilarious — that the machinery that produced these people was entirely human. And that in several cases, variations of that machinery are running somewhere right now.
Forthcoming — Temper Temper Publications
Publication details to be announced.