In the case of a tyrant, time to think of the soul is always used for scheming to preserve the status quo. This is so because a man in his position doesn't distinguish between the present, history, and eternity, fused into one by the state propaganda for both his and the population's convenience. He clings to power as any elderly person does to his pension or savings. What sometimes appears as a purge in the top ranks is perceived by the nation as an attempt to sustain the stability for which this nation opted in the first place by allowing the tyranny to be established.
The stability of the pyramid seldom depends on its pinnacle, and yet it is precisely the pinnacle that attracts our attention. After a while a spectator's eye gets bored with its intolerable geometrical perfection and all but demands changes. \Vhen changes come, however, they are always for the worse. To say the least, an old man fighting to avoid disgrace and discomfort, which are particularly unpleasant at his age, is quite predictable. Bloody and nasty as he may appear to be in that fight, it affects neither the pyramid's inner structure nor its external shadow. And the objects of his struggle, the rivals, fully deserve his vicious treatment, if only because of the tautology of their ambition in view of the difference in age. For politics is but geometrical purity embracing the law of the jungle.
Up there, on the head of the pin, there is room only for one, and he had better be old, since old men never pretend they are angels. The aging tyrant's sole purpose is to retain his position, and his demagoguery and hypocrisy do not tax the minds of his subjects with the necessity of belief or textual proliferation. Whereas the young upstart with his true or false zeal and dedication always ends up raising the level of public cynicism. Looking back on human history we can safely say that cynicism is the best yardstick of social progress.
For new tyrants always introduce a new blend of hypocrisy and cruelty. Some are more keen on cruelty, others on hypocrisy. Think of Lenin, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Qad- dafi, Khomeini, Amin, and so on. They always beat tlieir predecessors in more ways than one, and give a new twist to the arm of the citizen as well as to the mind of the spectator. For an anthropologist (an extremely aloof one at that) this kind of development is of great interest, for it widens one's notion of the species. It must be noted, however, that the responsibility for the aforesaid processes lies as much with technological progress and the general growth of population as with the particular wickedness of a given dictator.
Today, every new sociopolitical setup, be it a democracy or an authoritarian regime, is a further departure from the spirit of individualism toward the stampede of the masses. The idea of one's existential uniqueness gets replaced by that of one's anonymity. An individual perishes not so much by the sword as by the penis, and, however small a country is, it requires, or becomes subjected to, central planning. This sort of thing easily breeds various forms of autocracy, where tyrants themselves can be regarded as obsolete versions of computers.
But if they were only the obsolete versions of computers, it wouldn't be so bad. The problem is that a tyrant is capable of purchasing new, state-of-the-art computers and aspires to man them. Examples of obsolete forms of hardware running advanced forms are the Fiihrer resorting to the loudspeaker, or Stalin using the telephone monitoring system to eliminate his opponents in the Politburo.
People become tyrants not because they have a vocation for it, nor do they by pure ^ance either. H a man has such a vocation, he usually takes a shortcut and becomes a family tyrant, whereas real tyrants are known to be shy and not terribly interesting family men. The vehicle of a tyranny is a political party (or military ranks, which have a structure similar to that of the party), for in order to get to the top of something you need to have something that has a vertical topography.
Now, unlike a mountain or, better still, a skyscraper, a party is essentially a fictitious reality invented by the mentally or otherwise unemployed. They come to the world and find its physical reality, skyscrapers and mountains, fully occupied. Their choice,. therefore, is between waiting for an opening in the old system and creating a new, alternative one of their own. The latter strikes them as the more expedient way to proceed, if only because they can start right away. Building a party is an occupation in itself, and an absorbing one at that. It surely doesn't pay off immediately; but then again the labor isn't that hard and there is a great deal of mental comfort in the incoherence of the aspiration.
In order to conceal its purely demographic origins, a party usually develops its own ideology and mythology. In general, a new reality is always created in the image of an old one, aping the existing structures. Such a technique, while obscuring the lack of imagination, adds a certain air of authenticity to the entire enterprise. That's why, by the way, so many of these people adore realistic art. On the whole, the absence of imagination is more authentic than its presence. The droning dullness of a party program and the drab, unspectacular appearance of its leaders appeal to the masses as their own reflection. In the era of overpopulation, evil (as well as good) becomes as mediocre as its subjects. To become a tyrant, one had better be dull.
And dull they are, and so are their lives. Their only rewards are obtained while climbing: seeing rivals outdone, pushed away, demoted. At the ^ro of the century, in the heyday of political parties, there were the additional pleasures of, say, putting out a haywire pamphlet, or escaping police surveillance; of delivering a fervent oration at a clandestine congress or resting at the party's expense in the Swiss Alps or on the French Hiviera. Now all that is gone: burning issues, false beards, Marxist studies. What's left is the waiting game of promotion, endless red tape, paper work, and a search for reliable pals. There isn't even the thrill of watching your tongue, for it's surely devoid of anything worth the attention of your fully bugged walls.
What gets one to the top is the slow passage of time, whose only comfort is the sense of authenticity it gives to the undertaking: what's time-consuming is real. Even within the ranks of the opposition, party advancement is slow; as for the party in power, it has nowhere to hurry, and after half a century of domination is itself capable of distributing time. Of course, as regards ideals in the Victorian sense of the word, the one-party system isn't very different from a modem version of political pluralism. Still, to join the only existing party takes more than an average amount of dishonesty.
Nevertheless, for all your cunning, and no matter how crystal-clear your record is, you are not likely to make it to the Politburo before sixty. At this age life is absolutely irreversible, and if one grabs the reins of power, he unclenches his fists only for the last candle. A sixty-year-old man is not likely to try anything economically or politically risky. He knows that he has a decade or so to go, and his joys are mostly of a gastronomical and a technological nature: an exquisite diet, foreign cigarettes, and foreign cars. He is a status quo man, which is profitable in foreign affairs, considering his steadily growing stockpile of missiles, and intolerable inside the country, where to do nothing means to worsen the existing condition. And although his rivals may capitalize on the latter, he would rather eliminate them than introduce any changes, for one always feels a bit nostalgic toward the order that brought one to success.