Powerless Power

Where, when, with whom does judgment start? As so often, it is in the company of the dead, of a particular dead. They have lived far enough behind the living as to escape some accusation of bias by virtue of being distant enough from the urgent, colorful now for evaluation, though not enough from the kinship of heritage or intellect. 

Evidence declares itself on the tombstone, where the character of both powerless and powerful is engraved. In that study one has countless inscriptions to mine for story and philosophy, and they have been told and retold. Much already has been written about the power of the small in a world of bigs. We naturally rally to the power of the powerless against the powerful, to the strength of the downtrodden against the heel. 

So it takes a sympathetic mind to archive power’s weakness. Common sense disdains this research. It is niche. More importantly, it is dangerous. Though curiosity is drawn to danger, its digging is prone to slipping and falling into a pity of power’s irresponsibility. With the new fact, intellectual compassion deceives the mind into excusing power’s sin. This is the genuine fault of not only the reporter and the historian but also and especially the leader. Always the vessel of power is tempted to justify power’s poor exercise by appealing to false necessities of its own making. Though in these traditions I make no exception for my own judgment, I try to sample in the right direction before the rule tempts me the other way.

History’ sense of dry irony has men falling over themselves to foretell the world their lot in life. In a small town square in 1838 Illinois, in front of a few dozens of Springfield’s youth, a frontier lawyer portended his measure at twenty-eight: “Towering genius disdains a beaten path…It thirsts and burns for distinction; and, if possible, it will have it, whether at the expense of emancipating slaves, or enslaving freemen.” Five years and two-ten thousand li apart, another of similar ambition, completely unaware of the other, walked over a bridge to Beijing, looked back, and composed his own epitaph:

“A true man wields the Wu hook with one hand, 

His spirit soars higher than a tower a hundred feet tall.

Who has written history for ten thousand years?

…Laughing, I point to the road by the side of the Lugou Bridge,

Someone from here will reach the Isle of Immortals.”

The path to the summit is long and uncertain; power looks too far away for him to claim through pure action alone. Even as the man chooses to climb, he peers to the side and sees the carcasses of those who strived buried in abyss. Anxious, he reacts by reaching for the light and grandeur. He rebels against history and tradition with the self-conscious declaration. Atop the shoulders of silent giants, he taunts them with the audacity only language can provide. Here I am! he shouts into the echoing canyons of time that will not speak back; I will go forth! The self of power rarely finds itself so cleanly expressed, even when it is dressed as warning to the self. Once a path to power through action emerges, the voice is silenced. Only later does it surface, and then with all the layered dirt of circumstance, with nuance, yes, but without the relative purity of youth. Its remembrance is then cast in the cause of the blood that flows from the body in the last hour—Abraham Lincoln’s for a republic, Li Hongzhang’s for an empire.

The graveyards are full of indispensable men, as a newspaper put it long ago. Why not make an example of Bonaparte over Lincoln, Bismarck over Li? Do we not prefer the Augustus, the Roosevelt, the Alexander, the so-called Great Men? Their agency always grew toward the sky, and either intertwined luckily with fate’s trellis or fell. Every challenge set forth to the Great Man is not a diktat but rather a constraint for his will to break free from—until it cannot. For most of those who reach the stratosphere of ambition do not know it exists even when it suffocates them. The very few who do perceive a truth about the nature of what they hold: power is not theirs. And here, in the narrowing of this select cast, I admit that interrogating the limit of power is not an academic exercise. Feelings played some role, and mine are roused by tragedy. It is hard to trace precisely what about tragedy makes me feel, the same way there is little science in how a reporter chooses his feature, a painter her subject, a child his hero. This is a judgment of caution, as I said before, but also of gravitational draw. What little I can say of this is some deep compulsion to bear honest witness.

Called to the stand, now those two have become seemingly nothing less than powerful: civilizational, summit people. Lincoln redeemed the republic; he died for its original sin. He is at once moral savant and wartime arbiter, a full claimant of Washington and Cincinnatus’ lineage. China remembers Li differently. The Qing’s minister is the architect of its century of humiliation—the man who signed away Taiwan, Manchuria, sovereignty, pride itself to foreign powers, he who broke the last dynasty and Chinese dignity with harsher reparations, tael for mark, than ever were imposed on Germany at Versailles. 

Thereby the identity of nations rests on their shoulders. Enormous consequence is attributed to these men, so enormous must have been their supposed power to cause effect. Here the popular account is as a ledger of outcomes, in which assets accumulate for Lincoln and liabilities accrue against Li. The interpretation of history through the great individual finds solace in this accounting. It should not. Lincoln and Li are power’s rawest entries of its powerlessness. In their late encounter with the paradox, hemispheres apart, Circumstance cruelly impressed upon them that power—nominally theirs through title, authority, and prestige—was hers alone. For the lonely act in response to the hell set forth for them, she rewarded Lincoln and punished Li.

Across Virginia, Pennsylvania, Georgia, bodies piled on steadfast lines. The months of 1864 rolled through a battlefield impasse that belied any attempt to rally the Northern war-weary to the fight. McClellan, fired and disgruntled commanding general, mounted a pro-peace campaign against his erstwhile chief. As rumors swirled, Republican allies in Congress and the Cabinet grew convinced the nation would sink in the storm.

Resigning to fate, Lincoln committed himself to the end of the Union. He wrote and had his Cabinet sign the following, blind:

“This morning, as for some days past, it seems exceedingly probable that this Administration will not be re-elected. Then it will be my duty to so co-operate with the President elect, as to save the Union between the election and the inauguration; as he will have secured his election on such ground that he can not possibly save it afterwards.”

How many thousands suffered death in vain? How many more millions would he yoke to enslavement? There was scarcely any way out, but was the way left still just? It could not be. The president lowered the Union’s head alongside his own under the guillotine, without complaint or appeal. Such stoicism is but little cold comfort. There was no other choice—there was a quality in the act—these do not deflect judgment’s morality. Lincoln forfeited first the rights of many and second his own legacy. For this provocation Justice would have put thumb on scale and drawn her blade against him, had Circumstance not robbed her of the blindfold. We, who stand in for Justice, are thus blinkered by outcome in our weighing of an act.

Our instinct does not help. We tend to color every fact of a life with the strength of its character if but the life was consequential. We argue there must be something beyond, or within, and recalibrate the scales. Thus—though Lincoln was rescued from this moment by Circumstance—by Sherman’s taking of Atlanta, by the Democrats’ publication of an anti-war platform even McClellan could not fully endorse—I still read the sealed writing with sympathy. I still resonate with a man’s values under impossible duress. I find it hard to reason against my heart that power’s terrible decision was not made more acceptable by there being no better alternative. 

In this feeling all the argument is lost in viscerality, the only arena that matters. Lincoln was assassinated while in the right. The warmth of martyrdom overwhelms.

So we look to where Justice served her execution in full, where the head that goes rolling wears the pained expression. There is, in those eyes, no thousand-yard stare. They rivet on her blade; the body stumbles toward Justice, collapses before her feet. He who would write history for ten thousand years, who spent the better part of life struggling to contend as witness, later as defendant—first the war against opium burying his countrymen’s minds, then civil war caking the plains with blood of friend and foe and twenty million dead, then war over sea against Japan, then war on land against the world’s pantheon of great powers, these wars which he did not want to wage but led and lost, these wars who demanded each their own altar upon which he would cut China’s wrist in desperate, ritual sacrifice, when no other would, when no other could. Who but Li?

September 1901 saw the foreign minister drag himself against his doctor’s orders back to the negotiating table for the last time. The prior round of war negotiations, with Japan, had earned him the public’s scorn and an assassin’s bullet to the head. Now, after the sacking of Beijing by eight nations aligned against the Boxers, he was called to do it again—to sign away China’s fate not once, but twice, and every day in between and after to prop up the only crooked stability he had ever known. Traitor, his countrymen shout then and through the decades. You have given up our pride and sovereignty, for what? You have refused revolution, for what? To pacify the West and to breathe new life into the dead lips of a dynasty that serves only the imperial court, where you enrich yourself. 

There was no comfort for Li, for he had climbed to his position within the dynasty atop a deft ability to manage court politics while staying abreast of his sovereign. He knew this well. Yet from youth he also knew the ravages of civil war. He would act to hold the country together no matter its cost to its people, its treasury, or his reputation. A little over a week before death granted freedom, the paces ran through him. Out of bed he rose and went once more to the Russian legation, to debate the terms of their influence in Manchuria. That evening he stumbled and vomited a bowl of blood into the dark. One may imagine what exhaustion had settled into Li’s bones from a tenure so long spent in service of chosen tragedy. He died in his burial clothes, eyes open and in view of his disasters stretching out before him. Four thousand years of tradition fell less than a decade later.

Yet again, I find myself tempted by the heart. Unbearably, I must reason against it. Circumstance will suffer the sensibilities of neither East nor West in the terrible decision she offers. Li earned—chose—his fate. History would not only largely forget him, but in its memory remember him as powerless, remember him as villain, remember him as the man who signed away what was not his to sign. Lincoln knew something of this. Li knew it more completely. His fate was but Lincoln’s if the sealed memorandum had been forced open. 

Towering ambition hopes it can soar with wings unclipped. But to have risen so high through decisions that so narrow its horizon, through the innumerable choices known only to God that made each the only man who could stand where he stood, is to have foreclosed all ability to escape Circumstance. The rock does not ask whether Sisyphus consents. He will, because by the time he understands what he carries, he has already climbed too far to set it down. This leader is without the happy mercy of eternity that Camus grants the myth. The rock teeters, then falls; this leader struggles in its way, for a moment, only as the vehicle of necessity, and is crushed. Tragedy is not only that Circumstance breaks power’s vessel, for so too did it break Caesar on the Ides of March and Napoleon at Waterloo, but also that the vessel knew, at some point, perhaps since youth, and climbed anyway. And what small dignity in choosing the lesser of two evils there is, there is only externally in the witness, not he who is crushed. Li has no deed to it. Neither does Lincoln. Our condition cannot fashion a peak out of every valley, nor order out of every chaos, nor agency over that which has already been determined.

In this observation I struggle with the past told through great individuals against the past told through great tectonic movements. The reading yields no comfort to the reader’s belief in agency. It cares not whether that agency is in the powerless, the powerful, or even neither at all. Our observation, though, is worth a thing. We do our duty by Justice, however unfair, and come to the jury stand. We witness neither the moral lesson nor the principle of power but rather, its condition: that to choose damnation is power’s most unsparing burden; that to own damnation is power’s scarcest quality.

Alex Qi (MBA '27) is from Irvine, California. He studied philosophy, politics, and physics at New York University. Prior to HBS, he worked in corporate strategy and M&A at Northrop Grumman in Virginia.