August 28: Nero Thoughts

[kinetic_elaboration]

Perhaps this is an obvious point but I’ve been thinking about it and turning it around in my head a bit. One thing I really like about Quo Vadis is how well it illustrates that power and person are separate, or at least separable, concepts.

The obvious part is that no one can live in this world and believe that power always goes to the deserving. Way too many examples to name of when it does not: when people who are strong but morally bankrupt gain power; when people who are incompetent but lucky, usually in birth, gain power; etc. Yet I do think a lot of us, certainly me, retain this instinct to assume cause and effect wherever possible and so if we see a person with power, there’s a default assumption, no matter how much better we may know intellectually, to assume it is logical in some way.

I’m thinking of the people who are still insisting in the year 2025 that 45/47 is out here playing 4D chess and when asked to explain this shocking view, they say ‘well he won? so…he must have done something to get there?’ As if that weren’t the oversimplification of all time. Or how hard in general we have to fight back against the baked in assumptions of a meritocracy in a system that’s heavily stacked by race, gender, and class. Etc.

And the more power one amasses, the more we’d like to believe it is right, somehow. I think.

So it’s interesting seeing this depiction of Nero, because the feelings his person inspires are so completely separate from the feelings his power inspires. As a person, he’s a buffoon. He inspires contempt, even from, maybe especially from, those in his court who know him the best. It’s not even a sense that he is evil, though he is, or that he does terrible things or that he’s selfish, but just that he’s dumb and vain and predictable and malleable. There’s no fear of the fool, only derision.

But the power of the emperor is terrifying. The two are joined because this fool is so dumb and so selfish and so capricious that he is never going to use that power wisely. But it’s more than just that, I think, that creates the situation that Vinicius talks about, of living in an unbearable terror all the time: he doesn’t realize he’s living in terror until he sees how overwhelmingly Nero can control his life and shut down his choices. It’s not the arbitrary nature of his power, which he knew, but the all-encompassing nature of it, that is so awful.

It’s the sort of book I project on to–it’s very different, obviously, but it captures something of what it’s like to live with equal parts disdain and terror for that which rules over you.