In the late 4th Century BC, Athens executed its statesman and de facto ruler, Phocion. Phocion served Athens with distinction throughout his political career. His leadership was one of extreme care and justice. His was a frugal life, lived in a simple home, and he refused bribes of all sorts, no matter how grand – everything from small fortunes to his own city-state to rule as he liked he refused.

The Athenians chose him to lead them into battle 47 times as general, the most-selected general in Athenian history. Yet he was not a militaristic man – he argued vehemently against wars he thought were bad for his city-state. And he saved Athens from unwise action repeatedly, as when the Athenians wanted to war with Alexander the Great after Alexander had crushed an uprising in Thebes. “Foolhardy man,” Phocion said to Demosthenes, leader of the provocateurs, “why provoke one whose temper is already savage? Why provoke this Macedonian who is full of limitless ambition? When there is a holocaust on our borders, do you wish to spread the flames to our city as well, by provoking him further? My whole object in taking up the burdens of this office is to prevent this, and I shall not allow my fellow citizens to destroy themselves, even if they wish it.”

The Athenians eventually sent Phocion to intercede with Alexander on their behalf, after he had rebuffed all the other emissaries they sent, and he quickly became one of the men Alexander trusted and respected most, even over most Macedonians. Phocion inspired Alexander to look beyond Greece, challenging him that if his goal was to show the greatness of his armies, why not show it by the conquest of the barbarians? Phocion made necessary compromises to the Athenians’ Macedonian ruler, but he negotiated hard to keep the Athenians mostly free.

Yet, after Alexander died, against Phocion’s warnings, the Athenians rebelled against Macedon, and forced Phocion to lead their armies, contrary to his personal desires. He agreed to serve his people as they wished of him, and crafted a resounding victory against the armies of Macedon. Yet Macedonian reinforcements arrived from Asia, and the Greek army was crushed.

Phocion negotiated a lighter reprimand against the Athenians than there otherwise would have been without his intercession. However, many Athenians were still exiled, and Antipater, the new leader of Macedon, still punished the city-state. Many non-citizen Athenians blamed Phocion for their plight. And this set in motion the political intrigue the next leader of Macedon after Antipater would eventually use to have the non-citizens and exiles of Athens overwhelm the citizens and condemn Phocion to death, while the citizens looked mournfully but helplessly on.

In prison, an executioner administered poison to the accused, but ran short when it came to the last man, Phocion. The executioner then refused to prepare more poison until he was paid 12 drachmas. Phocion summoned one of his friends and asked him to settle the amount, observing that, “A man cannot even die in Athens without paying for it.” After a life spent serving Athens, those in charge of the city now ordered Phocion’s remains buried outside its limits.

I tell you this story (and will tell a few more) in the interest of a simple question I’d like to pose: is it worth it to be the good king?

Goodness Does Not Ensure Good Ends

Goodness and noble service is no guarantor of happy endings.

Thanks to the movie 300, everyone in the early 21st Century knows the Battle of Thermopylae, where King Leonidas of Sparta led a force of 300 Spartans (and 700 other Greeks not included in the movie) in holding off a Persian army of perhaps 70,000 to 300,000 Persians to buy Greece time. Fewer know the Battle of Salamis though – the true turning point of the second Persian invasion.

In Salamis, an Athenian strategoi (general) named Themistocles took charge of the allied Greek command and laid out a strategy for Greece’s naval battle against the Persian navy, which had far more numerous and far larger ships. Ensuring the Persian land forces were on the shores to watch the battle, and using deception to lure Persia in, he then led the Persian navy into a trap. The nimbler Greek ships were better able to navigate the conditions of the straits the battle occurred in, and the Greeks won what historians consider one of the most important battles in all of human history.

Fleeing Greece, its Navy destroyed, the Persian army marched toward the Hellespont, its exit from Greece. Again Themistocles overruled his countrymen, who wanted to block the Persians from leaving and trap their army in the Peloponnesus. Themistocles pointed out that such a large army running from the Greeks on its way out of Greece was a good thing; trap them in Greece, corner them, and this tremendous force might be compelled to regain its fighting spirit. So the Greeks let Xerxes and his army go, and were free of them.

For his saving of Greece, Themistocles was later (falsely) accused of being in the pocket of the Persians, and fled the Peloponnesus, with a bounty on his head, to preserve his life. He presented himself before Artaxerxes, the next king of Persia, who received him warmly and welcomed him in. Yet, according to Plutarch, when Artaxerxes asked Themistocles to lead a new army against the Greeks, faced with a choice between waging a war of conquest against the country he had saved or denying the wishes of the man who had spared him and taken him in, Themistocles took his own life. The year was 459 BC.

Several decades earlier, on a different continent, Confucius faced the realization that his efforts to rid China of corruption and bring moral leadership back to his home city-state or to another city-state was unlikely to succeed. He had gone from the ruler’s courts of one city-state to the next, in search of the ear of a leader who would take his counsel on serving the people and restoring the old traditions, only to find the leaders of every city-state were more concerned with personal profit, or unyielding obedience from their subjects, or making war on old enemies than on building a nation for the ages.

In despair, at a low point, when they found themselves in transit from one city-state (Chen) to the next (Cai), having “not eaten hot food, only a soup of goosefoot greens and not a single grain of rice” in seven days, a student of his named Yu remarked that he thought the heavens rewarded good men with good outcomes, and punished bad men with bad outcomes. How could it be that Confucius, who had spent so much time doing so much good and attempting to bring so much good about, was reduced to these poor straits of going hungry and traveling in ignominy?

Confucius’s answer was this:

“Yu, you have not remembered what I told you. Did you imagine the wise are certain to be employed? But did not Prince Bigan have his heart cut out! Did you imagine that the loyal are sure to be used? But was not Guan Longfeng [whose advice the Xia king, Jie Gui, ignored] punished? Did you imagine that those who reprove are always followed? But was not Wu Zixu [whose frank remonstrances King Fuchai rejected in 486 BC] slashed apart and put outside the eastern gates of Gusu! (...) From this it can be seen that those who have not met with the right time are legion. How am I unique in this regard?”

Confucius, Themistocles, and Phocion were hardly alone.

Alexander the Great, friend of Phocion, who showed great mercy to the peoples he conquered (to the extent of even adopting their cultures, dress, and manners) and sought to build a united world empire, died under suspicious terms, and later had his wife and son, heir to his thrown, murdered by his close friends and generals, whom he had lifted up and trusted, but who desired his empire for themselves.

And of course, one of the most famous examples of the Good King who meets a Bad End, Jesus of Nazareth – a man who spent the last three years of his life preaching love, acceptance, and forgiveness, and who found himself nailed to a cross to die by asphyxiation for his troubles.

Societies prefer to tell the narrative that good men meet good ends. Yet a quick browse through the history books finds this is far from always true.

The Wicked Do Not Always Profit Either

Yet, before you decide you ought to become a villain, the wicked don’t always profit either.

Di Xin, the last leader of the Shang Dynasty enjoyed great amounts of decadence, burning prisoners to death for fun (and for sexual arousal, apparently) by forcing them to hug a blazing metal cylinder, and crafting an indoor pool filled with wine, with an island in the middle with trees on it that had roasted meat hanging off the branches Di Xin and his friends and their concubines could row about in on canoes and pluck meat off of to eat. To pay for all his extravagances, he taxed his populace to the point of desperation. In the end, Jiang Ziya led the future Zhou Dynasty army in the defeat of the Shang Dynasty army at the Battle of Muye in 1046 BC, and Di Xin gathered his treasures around himself inside his palace, and set fire to the building to destroy them and himself.

Romulus, the legendary founder of Rome, committed numerous amoral acts in his lifetime of building his city. He murdered his brother in an argument over which hill to found Rome on. He gathered a collection of brigands, mercenaries, and other miscreants about as part of his founding population. Then, to correct the huge male-female imbalance in his new nation, he committed the Rape of the Sabine Women, where the men of Rome found themselves wives by inviting the neighboring tribes to attend a festival in Rome, and promptly carrying off all the marriageable women who attended the festival. When the aggrieved tribes formed armies to avenge their stolen women, the Romans defeated them, and Romulus personally humiliated their leaders by stripping them of their armor. Only when the Sabine women asked their fathers and brothers of the Sabine tribe, and their new husbands of Rome, to put down their arms, did the bloodshed stop.

But ultimately, Romulus’s temperament cost him his life, when around 717 BC the nobles of the city he created allegedly killed, dismembered, and buried his body on the Campus Martius, then made up a lie that he had ascended into heaven to cover the crime.

Polyperchon, the leader of Macedon who saw to it Phocion died, lost his regency and disappeared into the annals of history, dethroned and out of power. Agnonides, the Athenian who accused Phocion of treachery, was executed once the Athenian citizens regained control of Athens. Phocus, the son of Phocion, hunted down and killed two more of the conspirators who brought about his father’s death, and Phocion’s wife smuggled his remains back into Athens, to later be buried in full honors at the expense of the state.

And just as there are plenty of examples of the good and the wicked meeting unsavory ends, there are plenty of examples of the good living long, happy lives... And the wicked enjoying all the spoils and none of the costs of their actions.

And while perhaps the wicked meet horrible ends more often than the good do (and the horrible ends the wicked meet quite often are more horrible than those the good meet – see the rumored cause of death of the weak, corrupt, and vengeful Edward II of England – though the wicked’s ends are not always so awful), we can only conclude that being good makes it somewhat more likely you reach a good end than being wicked does. It’s certainly no guarantee of it.

So, in the light of all the fun there is to be had being wicked, we must ask: what’s the point of being good?

A Nation of the Wicked

How often has a nation of wicked kings – who were wicked to their own countrymen – achieved any level of prominence? This is the real question when considering good kings versus wicked kings.

Confucius notes that a people adopt the moral character of their leader. When the king is moral and good, the people themselves behave in good, moral, cohesive ways. When the king is thieving, corrupt, and selfish, the people become so themselves as well.

This makes sense, of course. A corrupt leader is not there to make his nation better. He is there for his own personal enlargement. But because he is not improving the nation, merely taking from it, his presence is one of constant subtraction from the whole. His subjects notice this, and rationally conclude that adding to a whole that the powerful simply subtract from does not make sense, and began to subtract from it themselves as well. The takers feel emboldened, and take more; the givers feel beaten, and withdraw. The nation begins to crumble and fall apart.

But a moral leader inspires; he builds and adds to the nation. The people feel inspired to contribute to something greater than themselves. The givers work harder and give more, and they shut down and restrict the takers from subtracting much from the collective for their own personal gains.

Even when we see nations that are wicked to their enemies yet successful, like the Assyrians or the Mongols, we see nations that are wicked to those on the outside, yet good to those on the inside. The Mongols treated other Mongols very well, even as Genghis Khan committed the greatest genocide in human history (around 100 million killed). Yet still, nations of the wicked do not long last; Khan’s empire fell to pieces quickly after his death, and the Assyrians never held much control of Asia Minor for long. People do not long suffer rule by those who are wicked to them.

Machiavelli argues for cleverness, concealment, and subterfuge; Sun Tzu argues to use the terrain and the enemy’s assumptions to beat him. Musashi recommends psychology as an element as essential to defeating one’s opponent as martial abilities. Even Alexander the Great sought to beat his enemies by attacking their strongest point, beating them in a way that, like Machiavelli notes, they would know they had been squarely beaten by a superior opponent and would not rebel.

But none of these things make one wicked – Machiavellian craftiness can be used in service of a good agenda and to arrive at win-win solutions, despite the negative connotation the term ‘Machiavellian’ has attached to it in our society.

Tactics and strategies are not good or wicked in and of themselves.

What determines the goodness or wickedness of something is whether it adds to the collective whole, or subtracts from it.

Further, among the successful, talk of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ seems childish. Trying to tell a successful businessman or a powerful politician to do this or that because it is what’s ‘right’, or avoid this or that because it is what’s ‘wrong’, makes one sound young and naïve. That’s because as soon as you find yourself in a position of power and influence, you discover one thing very fast:

That there are a lot of people who will come out of the woodwork to tell you what is right and wrong, yet that the thing one man tells you is right another man tells you is wrong, and the thing a third man tells you is wrong a fourth man tells you is right.

It thus becomes a question not of what is ‘right’ and what is ‘wrong’, but rather whom is this right for, and for whom is it wrong?

Because everything is right for someone, and wrong for someone else. Though some things are more right for more people or more wrong for more.

Being the ‘good’ often means making moral decisions where there is no clear right or wrong answer. For example, a man is about to go to his daughter’s first ballet performance, when he learns his mother has just been admitted to the hospital for something serious. Does he go to the performance or go to the hospital? Each man will have his own personal morality, and you will find some men who say “The performance” and other men “The hospital.”

Why There are Phocions

The wicked can’t exist for long in the spotlight. They are forced to sneak around in the shadows.

Name three famous Wall Street personalities? I can only think of Nassim Taleb, and he’s only comfortable having himself known because he actively bets against Wall Street – essentially betting that the wicked will fall. That’s not to say everyone on Wall Street is wicked. However, there is a real mentality in Wall Street of get what you can and screw anyone who can’t. The people who win on Wall Street are the big banks and the people who work for them. The people who lose are the Average Joes, who buy into the talk of day-trading and the stock ticker, trying to “beat the market” instead of listening to the Warren Buffets who tell them “buy and hold” and the boring-but-sage advice of “buy index funds – because you aren’t going to beat the institutional investors.” Too many greedy people treat the stock market as a get rich quick scheme, yet for every winner there are a few dozen (or more) suckers, no different than the odds at the craps tables in Las Vegas or Atlantic City.

When the wicked find themselves in positions of power and influence, they rarely hold onto these long. Rebellions, usurpations, and assassinations are the order of the day, and have been throughout history. The wicked survive the longest behind the scenes. But even there, they are periodically rooted out.

That’s because, as net negatives to society, the wicked can only exist in societies good men have built. A Wicked King cannot build a society, because he does not want to build a society; he wants pleasure, indulgence, and aggrandizement. His wicked subjects will be too busy cheating, stealing, and scraping to build it for him, too. He can only cobble together the greedy for personal gain (as Romulus did) or live off what others before him have built (as Di Xin).

The good exist because social cohesion is impossible without them. As the legends have it, when Rome brought in the noble Numa Pompilius as Rome’s second leader, it was as Rome was on the point of collapse. It took a Good King to remake Romulus’s band of ruffians into a genuine, stable society.

The good exist because society needs the good, and provides incentives for the good: a society run by the good and populated by them is safe, it is stable, it is successful, and it is welcoming.

I believe every man has the ability within him to become either a Phocion or a Di Xin. Some combination of the wiring in his brain and the genetics he is born with predispose him toward one path or another; his upbringing and the environment give him another shove in one direction or the next.

And it’s my personal opinion that every young man should pass through his period of being a rapscallion and knave; without this, I’m unsure it’s possible to truly appreciate real goodness, rather than simply mime it out of fear of rejection if one does not, or in search of praise because one does.

Yet ultimately, while the wicked can enjoy spoils, and do not always go punished for their subtraction from society, and while the good do not always meet good ends for their addition to society, there is no society without the good, and the path of the wicked is one of hiding in the shadows, concealing one’s nature and actions, or else knowing the sword of Damocles hangs ever above one’s head, never knowing if it will drop in one’s lifetime or on one’s reputation, legacy, or progeny after one’s life has passed.

The Good King

So what does it mean to be a Good King?

Obviously, most of you are unlikely to be heads of state. Simply by pure numbers, it will not happen, even if there are some future leaders among you

However, you will have your own dominions to rule, whether that be some smaller political body, a school board, a committee, or a sports team; you might have staff you’re responsible for in your company, or you may run your own business. You have your parents and siblings and other family members you are responsible for to one extent or another, and 89% of you will have kids at some point

If you’re young, you probably are (or if not, perhaps should be) the unmoored rogue, off on swashbuckling adventures and derring-do. But at some point, you will come into positions of responsibility, and at that point you will either be the Good King who adds to those around him and builds something with them together, or the Wicked King who subtracts from any who let him and prioritizes his personal gratification over all else.

There is no set requirement for a man to be a Good King. I have friends who are sociopaths (i.e., zero empathy individuals) who nevertheless do their best to be Good Kings, because they view it as the best path to get what they want in society. Perhaps if they ever achieved absolute power, they might become wicked, but within the constraints of society they are on better behavior.

There are different arguments for goodness, made to appeal to different kinds of men. Want to be remembered by history? The readers of history look more kindly on Numa Pompilius, the noble second king of Rome who succeeded its founder, than they do on the far more morally ambiguous Romulus. They look more kindly on the noble Phocion than they do on his grasping condemner, Agnonides, or on the ambitious architect of his betrayal, Polyperchon. Want the freedom to operate in broad daylight, rather than slither about in the shadows? The good can do this; the wicked cannot (not without making themselves the targets of the righteous anger of the good). Want the highest possible chance at a good eventual outcome? The path of the wicked is high stakes gambling: higher upside, but a much higher probability of a crash and loss, too. Want comradeship, friendship, and alliance? There is no honor among thieves, and the wicked find themselves ever locked in struggles to stab those around them in the back before those others can stab them; the good tend to build loyal friends for life.

Yet, there will always be a place in society for the wicked, or else societies would root them out entirely. Perhaps sometimes a society needs wickedness to survive; it may need a Wicked King who can turn his wickedness on the society’s enemies, or it may need the wicked to shake the good out of apathy.

And, likewise, there are no perfectly good men, just as there are no perfectly wicked ones. The good can always be better; the wicked can always be worse. Though, sometimes, you can find a man it’s hard to imagine being much better, or one it’s hard to imagine being much worse.

It’s not my place to tell you which path to travel in your own life. But I do hope that as you figure out which direction your own compass points toward, you find a way to add to whatever society you inhabit, even as you enjoy the good things it has to offer you.

So long as you can be a net positive to those whose lives you touch, even if he might not find you up to his own exacting standards, you might yet make proud the late Numa, or Confucius, or Phocion, smiling down from wherever men smile down from.