Ch'in Shih Huang Ti, the first emperor of China (221-210 B.C.), was the mightiest man of his day. His empire was vaster and more powern...
Ch'in Shih Huang Ti, the first emperor of China (221-210 B.C.), was the mightiest man of his day. His empire was vaster and more powernd than that of Alexander the Great. He had conquered all of the kingdoms surrounding his own kingdom of Ch'in and unified them into one massive realm called China. But in the last years of his life, few, if anyone, saw hirn. The emperor lived in the most magnificent palace built to that date, in the capital of Hsien-yang. The palace had 270 pavilions; all of these were connected by secret underground passageways, allowing the emperor to move through the palace without anyone seeing him. He slept in a different room every night,
and anyone who inadvertently laid eyes on hirn was instantly beheaded. Only a handful of men knew his whereabouts, and if they revealed it to anyone, they, too, were put to death. The first emperor had grown so terrified of human contact that when he had to leave the palace he traveled incognito, disguising hirnself carefully. On one such trip through the provinces, he suddenly died. His body was borne back to the capital in the emperor's carriage, with a cart packed with salted fish trailing behind it to cover up the smell of the rotting corpse-no one was to know of his death.
He died alone, far from his wives, his family, his friends, and his courtiers, accompanied only by a minister and a handful of eunuchs. Interpretation Shih Huang Ti started off as the king of Ch'in, a fearless warrior of unbridled ambition. Writers of the time described hirn as a man with "a waspish nose, eyes like slits, the voice of a jackal, and the heart of a tiger or wolf." He could be merciful sometimes, but more often he "swallowed men up without a scrupIe." It was through trickery and violence that he conquered the provinces surrounding his own and created China, forging a single nation and culture out of many. He broke up the feudal system, and to keep an eye on the many members of the royal families that were scattered across the realm's various kingdoms, he moved 120,000 of them to the capital, where he housed the most important courtiers in the vast palace of Hsien-yang. He consolidated the many walls on the borders and built them into the Great Wall of China. He standardized the country's laws, its written language,
even the size of its cartwheels. As part of this process of unification, however, the first emperor outlawed the writings and teachings of Confucius, the philosopher whose ideas on the moral life had already become virtually a religion in Chinese culture. On Shih Huang Ti's order, thousands of books relating to Confucius were burned, and anyone who quoted Confucius was to be beheaded. This made many enemies for the emperor, and he grew constantly afraid, even paranoid. The executions mounted. A contemporary, the writer Hanfei-tzu, noted that "Ch'in has been victorious for four generations, yet has lived in constant terror and apprehension of destruction." As the emperor withdrew deeper and deeper into the palace to protect 1'1 1 1-: \1 1,,<')1 1·: 01 1'1 1 1'. IU .I) 1)1- 1'1'1 1
The "Red Dealh " had lung devaslated the cowllry. No pestilenee had ever heen so fälal, or so hideous. Blood was ils AVlllar and its seal-Ihe redness ami horror ofhlood. There were sharp pains. and sudden dizziness, a/l(1 then profuse hleeding al lhe pores. with dissolution .... And Ihe whole seizure. progress, and lerminatirm of Ihe discase, were the incidents of half an how: But the Prince Pro.\' pero was happy ami dauntless ami sagacious. When his duminions were halfdepopulated, he summoned to his presence a thol/sand haie and light-hearted friends from among Ihe knights and dames of his court. and with these retired to the deep scclusion of one of his castellaled ahbeys. This was an extensive lind magnificent struclure. the creation of the prince 's uwn eccenlric yet august taste. A strong and lofty wall girdled it in. Thiol' wall had gates of iron. The courtiers. havillg elliered. hrought fumaces and massy hammers and welded the bolts. They resolved to leave meall.\' neither of ingress nor ('gress to the sudden impulses of desp"ir or offren zy from within. The abbey was amply provisioned. Wilh such LAW 18 131 precautions the (ollrtiers might hid defiance 10 cOnlagion. The external world cOllld take care of itself In the meantime it was folly tu grieve, or to think. The prince had provided all the appliances uf pleasllre. There were huffoons, there were improvisatori, (here were hallet-danee", there wt're lnusician:;;, lhere was BeaUly, there was wine. A ll these am} seeurity were within. Withol/t was the "Red Death. " It was toward the c10se of the fifth or sixth month ofhis secll/sion, and while the pestilence raged most furiol/sly abroad, that the Prince Prospero entertained his thol/sand fricnds at a masked ball ofthe most unusual magnificence. It was a VOlllPtuous scene, that masquerade. ... Am} the revel went whirlingly on, until at length there commenccd the so unding of midnight IIpon the c1ock .... A mi thus too, it happened, perhaps, that hefore the last cchoc.l·
of the last ,hime had llllerly sunk into silenee, there were many individuals in the erowd who had found leisure to beeome aware of the presence of a masked figllre wh ich had arrested the attention of no single individual before. The figure was tall and gaunt, am} shrouded from head to foot in the habilimenls of the grave. The mask wh ich concealed the visage 132 LAW 18 hirnself, he slowly lost control of the realm. Eunuchs and ministers enacted political policies without his approval or even his knowledge; they also plotted against hirn. By the end, he was emperor in name only, and was so isolated that barely anyone knew he had died. He had probably been poisoned by the same scheming ministers who encouraged his isolation. That is what isolation brings:
Retreat into a fortress and you lose contact with the sources of your power. You lose your ear for what is happening around you, as weIl as a sense of proportion. Instead of being safer, you cut yourself off from the kind of knowledge on which your life depends. Never enclose yourself so far from the streets that you cannot hear what is happening around you, including the plots against you. OBSERVANCE OF THE LAW Louis XIV had the palace of Versailles built for hirn and his court in the 1660s, and it was like no other royal palace in the world. As in a beehive, everything revolved around the royal person. He lived surrounded by the nobility, who were allotted apartments nestled around his, their closeness to hirn dependent on their rank. The king's bedroom occupied the literal center of the palace and was the focus of everyone's attention. Every moming the king was greeted in this room by a ritual known as the lever. At eight A.M., the king's first valet,
who slept at the foot of the royal bed, would awaken His Majesty. Then pages would open the door and admit those who had a function in the lever. The order of their entry was precise: First came the king's illegitimate sons and his grandchildren, then the princes and princesses of the blood, and then his physician and surgeon. There followed the grand officers of the wardrobe, the king's official reader, and those in charge of entertaining the king. Next would arrive various govemment officials, in ascending order of rank. Last but not least came those attending the lever by special invitation. By the end of the ceremony, the room would be packed with weIl over a hundred royal attendants and visitors.
The day was organized so that all the palace's energy was directed at and passed through the king. Louis was constantly attended by courtiers and officials, all asking for his advice and judgment. To all their questions he usually replied, "I shall see." As Saint-Simon noted, "If he tumed to someone, asked hirn a question, made an insignificant remark, the eyes of all present were tumed on this person. It was a distinction that was talked of and increased prestige." There was no possibility of privacy in the palace, not even for the kingevery room communicated with another, and every hallway led to larger rooms where groups of nobles gathered constantly. Everyone's actions were interdependent, and nothing and no one passed unnoticed: "The king not only saw to it that all the high nobility was present at his court," wrote Saint-Simon,
"he demanded the same of the minor nobility. At his lever and coucher, at his meals, in his gardens of Versailles, he always looked about hirn, noticing everything. He was offended if the most distinguished nobles did not live permanently at court, and those who showed themselves never or hardly ever, incurred his full displeasure. If one of these desired something, the king would say proudly: 'I do not know hirn,' and the judgment was irrevocable." Interpretation Louis XIV came to power at the end of a terrible civil war, the Fronde. A principal instigator of the war had been the nobility, which deeply resented the growing power of the throne and yearned for the days of feudalism, when the lords ruled their own fiefdoms and the king had little authority over them.
The nobles had lost the civil war, but they remained a fractious, resentful lot. The construction of Versailles, then, was far more than the decadent whim of a luxury-loving king. It served a crucial function: The king could keep an eye and an ear on everyone and everything around hirn. The once proud nobility was reduced to squabbling over the right to help the king put on his robes in the morning. There was no possibility here of privacy-no possibility of isolation. Louis XIV very early grasped the truth that for a king to isolate hirnself is gravely dangerous. In his absence, conspiracies will spring up like mushrooms after rain, animosities will crystallize into factions, and rebellion will break out before he has the time to react. To combat this, sociability and openness must not only be encouraged, they must be formally organized and channeled. These conditions at Versailles lasted for Louis's entire reign, some fifty years of relative peace and tranquillity. Through it all, not a pin dropped without Louis hearing it. Solitude is dangerous to reason, without beingjavorable to virtue .... Remember that the solitary mortal is certainly luxurious, probably superstitious, and possibly mad. Dr. SamuelJohnson, 1 709-1 784 KEYS TO POWER Machiavelli makes the argument that in a strictly military sense a fortress is invariably a mistake. It becomes a symbol of power's isolation, and is an easy target for its builders' enemies. Designed to defend you, fortresses actually cut you off from help and cut into your flexibility. They may appear impregnable, but once you retire to one, everyone knows where you are; and a siege does not have to succeed to turn your fortress into a prison. With their small and confined spaces, fortresses are also extremely vulnerable to the plague and contagious diseases. In a strategic sense, the isolation of a fortress provides no protection, and actually creates more problems than it solves. was made so near/y to resemb/e the counlenanee ofa stiffened corpse Ihal Ihe closest serutiny musl have had dijficu/ty in detecting Ihe cheal. And >,cl a/l this might have heen endured, if not approved, by the mad revellers around. Bul the mummer had gone so j{lr as to assume the Iype of the Red Death. 1/ is vesture was dabbled in blood-and his hroad brow, with all the features of the face, was sprink/ed with the searlel horror .... . . . A throng 0 f the revellers at once threw themselves inlo the black apartment, amI, seizing the mummer, whose tall figure stood ereel and motion/ess wilhin the shadow of the ebony clock, gasped in unutterahle horror al jinding the grave cerements am/ eorpse-like mask, which they handled wilh so violent a mdeness, ulltenanted hy any langible form. And now was aeknowledged the presence of Ihe Red Death. He had eome like a Ihief in Ihe nighl. And one by one dropped the revellers in Ihe blood-hedewed halls of their revel,
and died each in Ihe despairing poslure of his fall. And Ihe life of Ihe ebony c!ock wellt out with that of Ihe lasl of Ihe gay. Ami Ihe flames of the tripods expired. And Darkne.\·s and Decay and Ihe Red Dealh held illimilahle dominion over all. THE MASQlJE OF TIlE RED DEATH. EDGAR ALLAN POlO. 1 809-1 849 LAW 18 1.13 134 LAW 18 Because humans are social creatures by nature, power depends on social interaction and circulation. To make yourself powerful you must place yourself at the center of things, as Louis XIV did at Versailles. All activity should revolve around you, and you should be aware of everything happening on the street, and of anyone who might be hatching plots against you. The danger for most people comes when they feel threatened. In such times they tend to retreat and elose ranks, to find security in a kind of fortress. In doing so,
however, they come to rely for information on a smaller and smaller cirele, and lose perspective on events around them. They lose maneuverability and become easy targets, and their isolation makes them paranoid. As in warfare and most games of strategy, isolation often precedes defeat and death. In moments of uncertainty and danger, you need to fight this desire to turn inward. Instead, make yourself more accessible, seek out old allies and make new ones, force yourself into more and more different cireles. This has been the trick of powerful people for centuries. The Roman statesman Cicero was born into the lower nobility, and had little chance of power unless he managed to make a place for himself among the aristocrats who controlled the city. He succeeded brilliantly, identifying everyone with influence and figuring out how they were connected to one another. He mingled everywhere, knew everyone, and had such a vast network of connections that an enemy here could easily be counterbalanced by an ally there. The French statesman Talleyrand played the game the same way. Although he came from one of the oldest aristocratic families in France, he made a point of always staying in touch with what was happening in the streets of Paris, allowing him to foresee trends and troubles. He even got a certain pleasure out of mingling with shady criminal types, who supplied him with valuable information. Every time there was a crisis, a transition of power-the end of the Directory, the fall of Napoleon, the abdication of Louis XVIII-he was able to survive and even thrive, because he never elosed himself up in a small cirele but always forged connections with the new order.
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